Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig Read Free Book Online Page A

ending exposed.
      "Don't you say that. Come home to me."
      "I can't. Something's wrong." Something she doesn't understand. The baby died inside her but something remained. Some little ghost, some little demon, fragile like the skeleton of a baby bird. It's changed her. Turned her very touch into a sponge, a sponge that draws poison. A sponge that soaks up death the way a gauze soaks up blood.
      She doesn't understand it: Every time someone touches her – one of the nurses, a doctor, the security guard outside the hospital – she sees the most awful things. Visions of how they die. And when. They can't be true.
      But they feel true.
      All the more proof her mind is lost. It's like a moth – touch a moth and a powder comes off the wings, and once that powder's off, the moth can no longer fly.
      The powder, she thinks, is off her wings.
      "Just tell me where you are. I'll come get you."
      "I'm leaving."
      "Please, Miriam. God will protect us. He'll help us get through this."
      "This. This? This is all proof he's just a… a bedtime story, Mother. To make you feel better about the way you are." She wants to tell her mother how horrible she is, how she's just a bitter pill, a mean little rodent, but she can't muster the words. She wants to yell about how her mother was never nice to her, not until she got pregnant – which means now that the baby's dead the old ways will return, the dismissals and the insults and God's love blinding her like the beam of a too-bright spotlight. By now, Miriam's crying again. She can't believe she has more tears, more spit, more snot, but here it comes, just as the pain of unstoppable grief is again hitting her in the chest like a sledgehammer. She doubles over. "I won't. I won't go back. I won't come back."
      "Miriam, I'll do better."
      And then she says the final words: "No. You won't. Because I won't give you the chance." She slams the phone down. With her back against the inside of the booth, she slides to the rubber mat and huddles next to the cigarette butts, the candy wrappers, the dead moths.
      It's there she stays until morning.

ELEVEN
    Summer's End
     
    The gates – iron, each spiked at the top with a fleur-de-lis – look like teeth to Miriam. A hungry mouth with black metal canines. Probably what the Gates to Hell look like. The Devil's own maw. Chompy-chompy, all you sinners, all you dirty-birdy bad girls.
      Louis pulls the truck up. A guard at the gate – an old black dude with eyes pinched tight behind rolling slugs of skin and cheeks sprouting a wan, wire-brush beard – gives a palms-out wave. "As I live and breathe. If it isn't Mister Truck Driver, tumbling in off the road after a long haul."
      "No long haul this time," Louis says, leaning out the window. "How you doing, Homer?"
      The guard gives a dismissive wave. "I could complain, but nobody'd want to listen. Who you got in there with you? Late admission?"
      Miriam scrambles up over Louis and thrusts her head out the window. "Do I look like a student to you?"
      "Shoot, I dunno."
      With one of his bear paws, Louis urges Miriam back into her seat. "This is Miriam Black. She should be on your list there. She's here to see Katherine Wiznewski."
      Homer looks over a clipboard, squinting even harder. So hard his eyes all but disappear and Miriam's not sure how he can see anything at all.
      "Uh-huh, uh-huh. Here you go. Miss Black to see Miss Wiz. You hanging around, Louis? Almost lunchtime."
      Louis shakes his head. "Just dropping her off."
      "Wait, what?" Miriam asks. This is news to her.
      He turns. "I have a job."
      "Yeah. To be here. With me."
      "A real job," he clarifies, the phrase a barb, a thorn, a needle. "You'll be fine. You're meeting Katey out back at the picnic tables. It's all set."
      "And then what? Do I go sleep in the woods? How long do you think this is going to take? I'm not harvesting corn. I touch her. I get a vision. I tell her