The Raptor & the Wren by Chuck Wendig

Author:Chuck Wendig [Wendig, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saga Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

DEUTERONOMY 19:21

As Harriet goes on and on, mashing Miriam’s face to the floor, it comes up out of her like the howling wind of a coming hurricane: one moment, Harriet is ending her tale with That is how I conquer, and in the next, Miriam’s chest is tightening and a white giddy bloom is filling her mind. She laughs. No, she guffaws, breathless and constant and without restraint. Her eyes are wet with tears. The blood is sticky underneath her forehead. Miriam laughs and laughs and laughs, braying like a happy cow in defiance of the slaughter to come.

“Shut up,” Harriet seethes, tightening the blade underneath Miriam’s throat. But Miriam can’t stop. She keeps on cackling, even as the blade nicks the skin around her neck, her blood joining with that of Grosky’s.

“Can’t . . . ,” Miriam gasps. “Can’t stop. Too funny.”

“Why? Why are you laughing?” Harriet demands.

“Laughing because . . .” Miriam swallows hard, and the knot in her throat has to pass the cold steel of the machete pressed there. “Because for being so smart, you’re such a dumb, dumb cunt.”

“What?”

“You’ve been looking for me all this time and—” Miriam laughs harder. “I haven’t been hiding! My name is on police reports. I own two houses. You could’ve just Googled me, you stupid fucking bitch.” She laughs so hard she’s crying now, barely gulping air.

“Shut up,” Harriet says. But when Miriam won’t quit, she bellows it: “Shut. Up!” She pounds her fist against the baseboard of the bed, wham.

Across the room, a new sound—

A thump.

It’s enough to distract her. Harriet lifts her head over the bed to look in that direction, toward the window—

Miriam grabs the bedpost and pulls, dragging herself out from beneath Harriet and under her mother’s old bed. Into cobwebs and lint, into dust bunnies stuck to the floor in coagulating blood. Harriet grabs at her ankle, but Miriam twists and wrenches away, sliding completely under the bed. Thus begins a game that would be cartoonish were it not for the stakes—Miriam slides to one side of the bed, and when Harriet goes to that side to reach under, Miriam slides to the other side. Back and forth, back and forth, careful to keep all her parts away from Harriet’s grabbing hand and slicing machete. (Keep all limbs inside the vehicle at all times.) Finally, Harriet has had enough.

She picks a side and begins to crawl under, pawing and slashing.

Miriam goes out the other side—

And as she draws herself up and back toward her mother’s walnut dresser, she sees what caused the distracting thump in the first place:

Grosky’s head. It fell off the pillow when Harriet hit the baseboard.

Here she comes.

The venomous bulldog woman is back up over the far side of the bed, crawling across it with her normally dead-eyed face alive with hate. She’s like a rabid animal, driven by the singular urge to kill, kill, kill.

I need a weapon. I need something—

And then she has it. Miriam reaches down, grabs a

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