Free Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig

happy. And tired. Like she's just come back from a bar. Or a party. Or a good lay. Kenny Rogers's "The Gambler" plays on the radio, and she sings along: "I met up with the gambler, we were both too tired to sleep." The car zips around curves. The buzz of the Honda's engine.
      The waitress's eyelids droop. She blinks away sleep, rubs her eyes, yawns.
      Her head dips slightly. She takes a turn too fast. Car's back wheel bumps off the road, hits gravel, can't get purchase, and the waitress is awake now. Her hands work the wheel as she gasps, and the car hops back on the road; a deep sucking relieved breath. She cranks the radio. Puts her head out the window like a dog would, just to keep herself awake.
      It doesn't help. Five minutes later, her eyelids flutter. Chin dips.
      Tire bounces into a pothole. Her eyes bolt open.
      The car is coming up on a T-intersection with a big oak tree at the end of it. The Honda's racing up too fast. White knuckles grip the wheel. Her foot pounds the brakes. Wheels squeal like they're driving over a ghost. The car's back end sways like the waitress's own wide bottom when she walks, and the car fishtails toward the tree, and then…
      The Honda stops, just inches from that big bad oak tree. The car stalls. The only sound is the cooling engine making this little tink-tink-tink noise.
      The waitress first looks like she's going to cry, but then instead, she laughs. She's alive, she's crazy, the air is warm, nobody saw what happened, and she's rubbing tears of embarrassment and joy out of her eyes, and this means she doesn't see the truck coming. Two headlights stab the darkness. A pickup truck the color of primer.
      She looks up. Sees what's coming.
      She races to undo her seatbelt. Clumsy fingers. Slow-going.
      She honks her horn. Truck keeps coming.
      Her mouth opens to yell, to scream, but by the time her brain sends the signal to her mouth to make some goddamn noise, the truck slams into her at eighty miles an hour. The door crumples up into her midsection, shattering her chest. Her head whips back under a rain of glass. The sound of the car honking, of screaming metal, of
      – fingertips. Miriam, still hearing the sound of the accident, gently pulls her hand away and clears her throat. "That's fine. Thanks."
      "Sure thing, hon."
      Miriam takes a deep breath.
      "So," Ashley asks, eager. "How does it happen?"
      "I need to go to the bathroom."
      She stands up and pushes her way through the little café. Her hand brushes a farmer's elbow –
      The old farmer's riding along in his white t-shirt with the pit stains and a green-and-yellow John Deere hat even though he's riding an orange Kubota ("Buy American," they say, but end up on a Korean tractor) and the old man's got an inner ear condition and it makes him woozy, so he tumbles off the tractor seat and into the tilled earth below, crying out only moments before the big tiller – going around for its second pass – tills right over his body, curved claws tilling his skin and muscle and bone, all that blood pushed down into the overturned earth
      – and she yanks away, but then some red-headed teen brushes up against her –
      The kid's not a kid but a thirty-year-old man and he tastes the gun oil on his tongue as the pistol's sights scrape the roof of his mouth and then comes a hot, hollow flash and the bullet plows through his brain pan
      – and she brings her hands tight to her chest, the way Mighty T-Rex might walk, and she barrels into the bathroom, leaving someone behind her asking, "Just what the heck is wrong with that girl?"
      It's a question she can't help but echo.

 
 
INTERLUDE
    The Interview
     
    "Fate's an immovable object," Miriam says, tracing her finger up the neck of the bottle. A warm haze saturates the edges; the scotch is doing its glorious, God-given duty. "The course is charted. Fate's already got everything mapped out. This conversation we're having?