Mockingbird Read Free

Miriam Black isn't most people. Not anymore.
      She turns. Grabs something off an end-cap.
      A long, stainless steel, two-pronged fork.
      For barbecuing.
      She stabs it into the side of the man's neck as the gun fires.
      Walt screams and falls. A cart drifts away.
      Blood burbles up around the fork like the water in a bubbler fountain. It begins soaking the gunman's neck and T-shirt collar.
      The killer wheels on Miriam. A clumsy pirouette, the fork sticking out the side of his neck, looking like a lever you could pull to power him down.
      She finds herself staring down the barrel of the Glock.
      "You're the one always messing with things," he says, his lips wet with red. The words aren't angry. Wistful, maybe. Sad. Definitely sad.
      A flash from the muzzle. She doesn't even hear it.
      She feels it though. Her head rolls – a burning sensation in the deep of her skull like the searing gaze of Satan himself.
      The man collapses sideways into a rack of shell-jewelry, faux pirate tschotskes, and beachy snow-globes filled with swirling sand instead of snowflakes. They shatter as they hit the floor.
      Miriam tries to say something.
      Finds her mouth is no longer connected to her brain.
      For the world, that may be some kind of mercy.
      But for her, it's a certain terror.
      A deep and wretched darkness reaches for her and grabs hold.

INTERLUDE
    The Trespasser
     
    Miriam sits on the beach, her butt planted on a cheap white plastic chair, her hands steepled on a patio table made of the same, her toes burrowed into cold sand like a row of ostrich heads.
      Sitting across from her is her first boyfriend, Ben Hodges, the back of his head blown out from the shotgun he ate so long ago. Back when they were both dumb horny teenagers in high school. They fucked. She got pregnant. He killed himself. And his mother took out her lonely mother rage on Miriam with a red snow shovel.
      That day. The day Miriam was really born. The nowMiriam. The Miriam with this curse, this gift, this thing-that-she-does.
      Ben clears his throat.
      A pair of dark-winged birds – blackbirds, each with a dime-sized splash of red on each wing – picks at his exposed brain like they're looking for worms.
      The sea slides in, the sea slides out, the ineluctable susurration of the tides.
      "I knew you couldn't stay away for long," Ben says.
      Except Miriam knows this isn't Ben. Once upon a time she would have said he was a figment of her imagination, a shape-shifting tormenter of her own devising, and that may still be true. But now she's not so sure. Maybe she was never sure.
      "I am who I am."
      "That's what we're counting on."
      She unsteeples her hands and leans forward. "We. That's not the first time you've said that word."
      "We are legion. The demons in your head."
      "So this is all just a hallucination? You're just some asshole I made up?"
      Ben says nothing. His eyes flash with mischief.
      Just then, one of the blackbirds yanks its head upward, and in its beak is something that looks like a stringy tendon. Ben's left arm jerks up in the air. When the bird drops the tendon, the arm plops back at his side.
      The birds, working him like a puppet.
      Cute.
      And then a shadow passes over Miriam. She looks up, sees a Mylar balloon floating up in the sky, moving in front of the pale disc that passes for the sun here, and when she looks back at Ben he's no longer Ben. Instead, he's the gunman. The one from the store. Replete with bloody mouth and a barbecue fork sticking out of his neck.
      "So. How does it feel?"
      "How does what feel?" she says, but she knows what he's really asking.
      "Don't be coy. Your second kill." Again, mischief glimmers. "Or third, if you want to count your dead baby."
      That hits her like a fist. She tries not to show it but just the same she leans back in her chair, looks away, stares out over the gray ocean, over the