Vultures Viciously Attack in Excerpt from Chuck Wendig’s New Horror Crime Novel THUNDERBIRD

You may feel the need to keep one eye on the sky the next time you leave your house after reading our excerpt from Chuck Wendig's new horror crime novel, Thunderbird, the fourth entry in the Miriam Black series that's out now from Saga Press.

Check out Chapter Five of Thunderbird below, and to learn more about Wendig's new novel, visit Simon & Schuster and Amazon online.

"Thunderbird (Saga Press, February 28th) by Chuck Wendig - In the fourth installment of the Miriam Black series, Miriam heads to the southwest in search of another psychic who may be able to help her understand her curse, but instead finds a cult of domestic terrorists and the worst vision of death she’s had yet.

Miriam is becoming addicted to seeing her death visions, but she is also trying out something new: Hope. She is in search of another psychic who can help her with her curse, but instead finds a group of domestic terrorists in her deadliest vision to date.

ABOUT CHUCK WENDIG
Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. He’s the author of many published novels, including but not limited to: Blackbirds, The Blue Blazes, the YA Heartland series, and the New York Times bestselling series Star Wars: Aftermath; the third book in the trilogy, Empire’s End is out this February. He is co-writer of the short film Pandemic and the Emmy Award–nominated digital narrative Collapsus. Wendig has contributed over two million words to the game industry. His collaborative comic book project, The Sovereigns will be released from Dynamite in April. He is also well known for his profane-yet-practical advice to writers, which he dispenses at his blog, TerribleMinds.com, and through several popular ebooks, including The Kick-Ass Writer, published by Writers Digest. He currently lives in the forests of Pennsyltucky with wife, tiny human, and dog."

Excerpt

(C) 2017 Chuck Wendig, Reprinted with permission from Saga Press

Five

The Widening Gyre

Behold the black vulture.

A massive bird, the black vulture: the one in which Miriam finds herself is bigger than most, with a wingspan of five feet—like a reaper cloak cast wide—and weight coming up just shy of ten pounds. Others like it wheel about the sky, and Miriam finds her mind in those, too. Fragmented like a punched mirror—pieces of her scattered. Turning, turning.

It is believed to be a carrion bird, the black vulture. And that is true, to a point: humans are poor janitors of the world they inherited. A car strikes a deer: nobody comes along to clean its smashed skull and spackled guts off the road. Or an armadillo or a marmot. Or even just garbage tossed out a window—garbage that maybe stays where it landed, or maybe gets picked up and put in a bigger pile: a garbage dump miles away. Vultures are glad to be the janitors that humans will not be. Eating what is left. Gorging. They will even do this for human remains: the Old World vultures eat the corpses left in the sky burials of Tibet, or on the Towers of Silence in Zoroastrian practice, thus releasing the soul from the body. (The vultures care little about souls and care very much about eating.)

In fact, the black vulture’s head is featherless for just such eating. Its wrinkled, scrotum-like scalp can plunge all the more easily into a carcass with nothing to halt its entry or its exit—the bird sticks its entire head inside the animal, beak and eyes and everything, feasting on all the best bits hidden from view.

But it is a mistake to think of the black vulture as only a carrion bird.

The vulture is a bird of prey.

Cattlemen know it. They know that when a calf is pushes from its mother’s body, all knobby-kneed and snot-slick, a wake of vultures (for vultures are very social birds) will descend on the newborn calf.

They will kill it. They will peck out its eyes. They will rip off its nose or tear out its tongue. They will stab at it with their hooked beaks, tearing it, ripping it, until it goes into shock and they may feast with comfort.

They can do this with many small or newborn creatures.

Vultures will eat the dead. But they also like to kill.

Unlike turkey buzzards, the black vulture relies on sight to spot prey, and were this a wooded area, they might not be able to spot the man in desert fatigues below—but they do, because they have good eyes. He movies. The sun flashes in the flat of the scope, the bolt of the rifle.

Distantly, Miriam thinks: ten seconds.

It’s like a rope, invisible around the vulture’s neck. Yanking it downward. And when this one dives, so do the rest of the them. Wings back in a sharp V—long neck and featherless head craned forward, talons thrust down.

Wind whipping.

One vulture, then three, then seven.

Seven birds and nine seconds.

Eight.

Seven.

The man—broad-shouldered, pot-bellied, a scruff of beard on his face so patchy it might as well be half another man’s beard glued to his face, aviator sunglasses capturing light—he must hear the ripple of feathers.

He looks up. Mouth open in shock. The rifle clatters to the flat rock on which he lies, and he staggers backward, reaching for a pistol at his hip—

Another distant thought from Miriam, a grim reminder that once again, this thing she does has rules and one of the rules is that fate is elastic—it likes to snap back to its shape even when it bends and stretches, and just because the man dropped his gun that does not mean he will not again pick it up and again complete the circuit that fate has made. He can still kill Miriam. He can still kill Gracie.

Maybe even the boy.

And so, he must die.

He takes a step backward, raises the pistol—

The vulture has a peculiar defense mechanism. Miriam did not know this but now she does (she suddenly knows way more about vultures than she ever anticipated, thanks to inhabiting one): the vulture has a septic mouth, a toxic gullet, a belly full of half-digested mess that was already rotten before it entered the vulture’s body and has only stewed in the decomposition inside the cistern of the bird’s horror-show-stomach—

And it can regurgitate those contents at will.

Translation: the black vulture uses its vomit as a weapon.

Here, seven vultures do just that thing. Beaks open. Throats bulging. Hot, disgorged vulture barf—a scalding, acidic, sour gut slurry-launches forth, striking the man in the face. The pistol barks a shot. The bullet goes wide.

The first vulture, the leader of the wake, hits him like a train to the chest. Talons ripping into the buttons of his fatigues. He topples backward. His head strikes a rock. Skull breaking. A hooked beak plunges into the soft meat of his nose. More birds land upon him. Talons tearing fabric. Beaks poking in through the rent clothing, seeking skin.

His body begins to shake as it is disassembled. His foot kicks out, knocks his rifle off the rock. The pistol in his hand slides away with a clatter. Trauma rocks through his body. Death descending upon him in a rippling flurry of rot-stink wings.