Mockingbird (26 page)

  "You suck," the porky girl says.

  "You don't even know me,
Fatalie
."

  "Guys, shut up!" Wren hisses. "Miriam, this is Missy. Missy, this is Miriam. Shake hands and be nice."

  Miriam sticks out her tongue, but she offers her hand just the same.

  Missy, flashlight still under her chin, goes to shake Miriam's hand–

  
The vision plays fast.

  
Missy's lost weight. No longer the pudgy girl with the Karl Malden nose, Missy has thinned out, stretched long on the antique doctor's table.

  
The song begins, "One Friday morn, Polly took ill–"

  
Burned out walls.

  
The man with the swallow tattoo and the plague mask.

  
Funeral flowers, smoldering, smoking through nose-holes.

  
The Mockingbird Killer sings.

  
Missy struggles, crying, teeth scraping against barbed wire, flakes of rust snowing on her dry tongue.

  
The axe rises.

  
The axe falls.

  
Her head does not come off entirely. The spine is severed but the rest of the meat must be cut away by wire cutter.

  
The tongue comes out. Clip clip.

  
The song ends.

  
The Mockingbird laughs. Trill, trill, warble, trill.

  –and Miriam again hip-checks the dresser as she pulls away from Missy, her hand radiating pain from the X carved there and the deeper weirder pain of knowing that all this isn't over, that Keener isn't gone and the Mockingbird lives and girls are still going to die. And it's then she sees the ghostly skulls in front of both the girls' faces before the projections dissolve away to nothing.

  "Oh, shit, shit,
shit
," Miriam mumbles, holding both fists to her face and biting her knuckle so hard she thinks she might draw blood.

  How?

  
How?

  Carl Keener. Not dead? She killed him. She didn't just kill him – she turned his throat into a sloppy hole. His body grew cold as she waited for Louis, as Annie Valentine sat trembling on the doctor's table, the wire pulled from her face, the leather straps unbound from her hands and feet.

  And yet, there he waits. In the future.

  Reborn.

  How could Keener come back to life?

  Suddenly nothing is certain. Everything is spinning like a top.

  Miriam's own life has never been rock-steady, never a solid bedrock of sanity, but the one thing she could count on was the truth of her visions. And she thought, after saving Louis, that she could save others.

  Was she wrong?

  Was that a one-and-done deal?

  Fate, it seems, has learned her tricks. It has moved to oppose her.

  Her mother's voice:
It is what it is…

  I didn't save you," Miriam says to Wren, nearly breathless.

  "She really is psycho," Missy mumbles.

  Wren punches the other girl in the arm. "Miriam. What are you talking about?"

  "I didn't stop anything. You still die. I killed Carl Keener – I really fucking killed him – but he still kills you. And I don't know how."

  
Annie Valentine with a bullet in her head.

  
The fire, burning down.

  It hits her suddenly: In all the visions, the house and the bus have been burned. As the killer went to work on the girls, he did so surrounded by the charred walls of the house or the half-melted seats of the bus. But the fire just happened.
After
Keener's death.

  Possibly as a result of it.

  Keener isn't the only killer. He can't be.

  Suddenly there's a pounding on the door.

  She hears Sims's voice from outside. "Come out, Miss Black. I know you're in there."

  
Damnit!

  Miriam snatches Missy's flashlight and points it at the window. The dark lines of iron sit beyond the glass.
Can't get out that way.

  Wren pipes up. "There's no one in here! We're trying to sleep!"

  "We have cameras. You're not fooling anyone."

  Missy buries her face in her hands. "We're so going to get kicked out."

  Wren punches her again.

  "Stand back," Miriam says to the girls. "Go! Go to the window."

  What choice does she have? She opens the door.

  Sims stands framed by the doorway. At first Miriam thinks he's got a pistol drawn but then she sees the truth: It's a Taser.

  She
hates
those things.

  "Come out of the room," he says. "Slowly."

  "Okay. Okay. I'm coming, I'm coming."

  She takes a step forward. Then flicks her gaze over his shoulder.

  "Oh, you had to call your partner? Horvath, I take it?"

  Sims looks.

  It's a lie; nobody's there.

  But it's enough.

  Miriam flings the flashlight like a fucking tomahawk – it pivots through the air and cracks Sims between the eyes. The Taser goes off but Miriam's already out of its way. She slams hard into him, knocking him into the red door across the hall.

  Then she bolts. But he's on her like flies on shit. She can feel his heavy steps shaking the whole dormitory floor. She has to escape. Has to. This is no time to be caged, no time for cops or bureaucracy or any of that.

  Because the Mockingbird still lives, and as long as he lives, Wren Martin and those other girls are sure to die.

 

It's hard not to make noise.

  The plan was to do this whole thing on the downlow, the QT, the
No, officer, I wasn't breaking into a girls' boarding school to – hey, are those handcuffs?

  But that plan flew out the fucking window.

  She rounds the corner, sees a small table with a fake Chinese cloisonné vase on it – and she pulls the whole table over with a clatter.

  Ahead is the opposite stairwell.

  She reaches the door. Throws it open, darts through it.

  Then – stops and waits, hiding behind the inwardopening door.

  When she hears Sims come careening toward it, she smashes it closed at the last minute just as his head crosses the threshold.

  The door smacks into his cue-ball skull, sending him tumbling onto his ass.

  Then she bounds down the steps, leaping the banister as soon as she can do so without breaking an ankle. Every footfall sends jolts of pain across her soles and up her legs. By now she's sure she feels blood soaking her socks from the cuts on her feet but there's no time to think, no time to stop.

  From third floor to second, down to the first – already she hears him above, heavy feet plodding
thumpthumpthumpthump
, and she knows this guy's not going to give up.

  He's full of Red Bull and steroids, this fucker, and worse, he has an axe to grind. Sims isn't going to give up this chase. And it's not like she can go toe-to-toe with this guy physically. Before, maybe, if he wasn't expecting it.

  But now? When her hands and feet are cut up? And her head's like an overinflated kickball and it feels like her brain's rattling around her skull like the dice in a Yahtzee cup? Not a snow-cone's chance in Hell.

  She has to find a place to hide.

  The door ahead is marked by a plaque engraved with: CLASSROOMS.

  Much better.

  Shoulder first, she throws herself through the door and into the classroom wing. There the darkness is lit only by red emergency lighting.

  And immediately she sees a familiar sight: the cafeteria.

  There? She doesn't know the layout. Where to hide?

  Nearby, though… the gym. A big room. Plenty of places to hide: bleachers, whiteboard, behind big-ass medicine balls. Maybe even Beck's office.

  She keeps her head low and hurries along the wall (almost cross-checking a water fountain) just as she hears Sims throw open the door not twenty feet behind her.

  A flashlight beam sweeps the halls.

  The gym doors are ahead.

  The flashlight beam roves towards her.

  Only one shot at this if she moves now.

  Miriam pops her shoes off, leaves them where they stand, and she runs on the balls of her feet –
pad pad pad pad ow ow ow
– as the beam drifts toward her–

  She reaches the double doors to the gymnasium.

  No need to fling them wide. Just open a crack. Just like before.

  Slide in. Like a shadow.

  She lets the door ease shut just as the flashlight beam finds it.

  She prays Sims didn't see that.

  Miriam darts into the wide-open dark. Again a red emergency light helps illuminate the room, and suddenly she realizes: That light is above an exit door.

  Escape.

  She reminds herself to find the resting place of the architect who built this school and lay flowers and whisky upon his grave.

  Miriam darts toward the exit, but then sees something–

  Off to the far end of the gym, another light. White light. Framing the half-open door of Beck's office.

  Huh.

  She turns back toward the exit and a shape looms – suddenly, strong hands capture both of her wrists and pin them together, and she's about to cry out, but it's then she smells him: the simple scent of soap and sweat.

  Beck Daniels.

  "Miriam?" he asks.

  "Beck. Jesus. Beck."

  "What are you doing here?"

  
Avert! Misdirect!

  "What are
you
doing here is the better question. It's like 2:00 in the morning, dude."

  "I did katas until midnight. Then I was trying to get caught up on paperwork. I thought I heard someone come in here."

  He lets go of her hands. His hands find her hips. She feels suddenly, strangely safe. Her hands find his lean, strong chest.

  Her wounded palms come away damp with his sweat. She ignores the stinging. Pain fades.

  The doors to the gym swing open behind them.

  Sims.

  Shit.

  She turns to face him just as he flips on all the lights – bright, garish overheads that rip the darkness from the room and leave Miriam feeling like she just got caught staring at the sun." to "Miriam reeling. Blinded as if staring too long at the sun.

  The rent-a-cop comes charging into the room like he's SWAT, already jacking a second cartridge into the front of the Taser. Dark spots swim in front of her eyes.

  "Back away, Daniels!" Sims shouts, face red, the veins on his forehead like exposed tree roots. "She's dangerous. She tried to hurt two girls in the dorm."

  Beck holds up his hands, bumps hard into Miriam, but then pulls away from her. She sees a flash of red as her eyes start to adjust. "Miriam. Is that true?"

  What?" she asks. He continues to back away toward Sims. She pleads with him. "No! No. I told you – I'm here to save them. For fuck's sake, Beck, you don't know me very well but you know this mall cop wannabe has it out for me. Christ, c'mon."

  Sims takes a long look at Beck. "Beck – you're hurt."

  As her eyes start to finally adjust, she sees.

  Beck's got a white T-shirt stretched taut over his chest.

  And that white T-shirt is wet with red. Blood soaking through.

  Her hands are red, too. What she felt wasn't his sweat.

  And the blood on his chest, it forms an image–

  First she thinks it's her own blood, but…

  
Oh, god.

  Becks backs up and stands behind Sims, and Miriam shakes her head, reaches out and cries, "Sims! Jesus. Get away from him!"

  But it's too late.

  Beck flicks his wrist down and reveals the blade of a knife, a spring-blade knife,
her
knife. He grabs Sims by the forehead, and in one motion draws the head back and slashes a vent in the guard's throat.

  Air and blood gurgle together, spattering on the gym floor.

  The sound echoes.

  The body drops.

  Dead by her knife. Beck must have stolen it when he bumped her.

  
But this isn't how Sims dies–

  He dies by a heart attack. At his weight bench. In eleven years.

  Everything goes topsy-turvy. Can she trust what she sees anymore?

  She can't trust her visions. Can't trust that she has the right man.

  Carl Keener wasn't the only killer.

  "The swallow," she says, her voice small – each word feeling cracked like a delicate teacup, each on the word of breaking. "On your chest."

  The red on this chest bleeds through the fabric in an all-too-familiar pattern: the razor curve of the wings, the sharp tines of the tail, the head and beak thrust upward as though in flight. Spreading bigger, wider, dripping downward.

  He lifts his shirt, smiling.

  The tattoo is fresh.
Tonight
fresh. Beads of blood rise along the margins of the tattoo and smear like the juices drawn out of a T-bone as it starts to grill, oozing across the plate.

  "You fucker," she spits.

  "Now, now. That's not very lady-like." He takes a step toward her. Drops the knife on the still-twitching body of Sims. "Neither was killing Sims. Messy business."

  "I hear there are cameras in here."

  "Who said they were on?"

  Another step closer. She retreats one step.

  The exit.

  Get to the exit.

  There: the parking lot. Louis. The great egress.

  "You're sick," she says. Another step back.

  He steps forward.

  They continue this dance. She's close now. Ten feet. No more. Maybe less.