What the Vultures Know

The First Time

Anthony Fillingim was six years old when he found the squirrel.

It lay beneath the big fir at the back of the yard in Hood River, Oregon, one paw curled against its chest, its tail flattened in the wet needles. A thread of ants was already working along its ribs. Anthony didn't know much about death, but he knew this wasn't sleeping.

He felt sorry for it. That was all. He knelt in the damp and laid two fingers against the fur.

The cold came at once. It ran out of the animal, up through his fingertips and into his chest, and it was heavy, as though he had swallowed a stone that had been lying at the bottom of a lake since before there were lakes. He gasped. Something ancient moved inside him, settled, and was still.

The squirrel twitched.

Its eyes opened, black and wet and confused. It rolled upright, shook itself, and tore across the yard and up the fir, and then it was gone.

Anthony stayed on his knees for a long time. The cold didn't leave. It sat under his breastbone like a second heart.

That evening, brushing his teeth, he looked out his bedroom window and saw the vulture. It was perched on the ridge of the neighbors' roof, huge and hunched, its bald red head turned toward his window. It wasn't looking at the yard or the street. It was looking at him.

"Mom," he said. "There's a bird."

She glanced up from folding laundry. "It's just a bird, Anthony."

But he knew better, the way you know a stranger in a doorway means you harm. He pulled the curtains shut. For years afterward he would remember the way that bird had looked at him, as though it knew something he didn't.

Saint James Hospital

Seventeen years later he was twenty-three, living in a one-bedroom apartment in Phoenix and working nights as a Certified Nursing Assistant at Saint James Hospital.

He had never forgotten the squirrel. There had been others over the years: a beagle struck on a county road, a sparrow stunned against a window, a rabbit flattened by a pickup on Highway 35. Each time, the same cold poured into him. Each time, the animal rose. He learned not to look for explanations. He learned to keep his hands in his pockets.

He had never tried it on a person. He told himself that was a rule.

Evelyn Mercer broke the rule. She was seventy-eight, in room 412, her body eaten hollow by pancreatic cancer that had spread everywhere it could. Anthony had been bringing her ice chips for three weeks. She called him sweetheart and told him about her late husband's terrible singing.

At 11:40 on a Tuesday night he was alone with her when her breathing stopped. The long rattle ended, and the room went quiet. The monitor drew its flat green line and began to scream.

He should have called the code. Instead, he took her hand.

The cold that entered him was nothing like the squirrel's. It was a flood. His veins felt packed with ice, his lungs locked, and the floor came up and struck him across the shoulder. The last thing he saw was the ceiling tile above the bed.

Then Evelyn gasped, a huge, ragged sucking breath, and the monitor stuttered and found a rhythm.

The code team crashed through the door and found a patient who had been dead and a CNA unconscious beside her bed. Within three days the scans came back wrong. The tumors weren't shrinking. They were simply gone, as if they had never been.

Everyone at Saint James called it a miracle. Anthony, sitting up in a bed of his own with a blanket pulled to his chin and unable to get warm, thought he knew better.

Outside the window, three vultures circled the hospital in the white Arizona sky.

The Miracle Worker

He swore he would never do it again.

Then Mr. Okafor in 309 began to die, his heart failing in slow, wet increments, and Anthony stood in the doorway for eleven minutes before he walked in. The man woke two days later asking for breakfast. Then there was a teenage girl with leukemia whose last scan showed nothing at all, and a woman declared dead on the operating table who opened her eyes in the recovery bay nine minutes later and asked what everyone was staring at.

The staff began to whisper. Nurses crossed themselves in the break room. A chaplain started stopping by Anthony's floor, looking at nothing in particular.

Anthony felt proud, and ashamed that he felt proud. For the first time in his life the cold had a purpose. He could take death out of a person and hand them back their life. What else could a gift like that be for?

But every save cost him something.

His body temperature sank until the thermometer read ninety-four, then ninety-three. Food went bad on his tongue, even bread, even water. He began waking at three each morning to the sound of people whispering his name from the dark corners of the bedroom. In the bathroom mirror, sometimes, there were shapes standing behind his shoulder. He'd turn, and the room would be empty.

And there were the vultures.

Three became six. Six became twelve. They circled Saint James in slow, patient spirals. They lined the streetlights outside his apartment complex like black fruit. When he drove across Phoenix they sat along the rooftops of the strip malls, and they were always there, and they were always waiting.

One morning in September he walked out to his car and found more than twenty of them on the surrounding buildings. They sat motionless in the early heat. Every head turned toward him at once.

Anthony stood with his keys in his hand, and the realization landed in his stomach like a dropped stone.

They weren't following the hospital.

They were following him.

What the Vultures Know

He started reading. He read about scavenger behavior, about vultures in myth and funeral rites, about near-death experiences and unexplained revivals. At three in the morning in a cold apartment, surrounded by library books, he found the name of a retired physician named Dr. Miriam Vale, who had spent a decade at Saint James studying patients who had survived clinical death.

She lived in a quiet house in Tempe with a wall of bookshelves and a cat that wouldn't look at him. She heard him out with her hands folded and her face carefully empty.

"Mr. Fillingim," she said when he finished, "I have been lied to by experts. Please don't be offended."

So, he proved it. She kept a colony of laboratory mice from an old research grant, and one of them, an old white female, was dying of a tumor the size of a grape. Anthony took it into his bare palm. The cold went through him like a spike, and the mouse shuddered, sat up, and began washing its whiskers. Anthony had to grip the edge of the counter to stay upright.

When he looked up, Miriam wasn't looking at the mouse. She was looking at the window.

Four vultures had landed on her roof. Another was settling on the fence. They watched through the glass without moving.

"Oh," she said softly. "Oh, no."

"What?"

"You aren't healing them." She spoke slowly, assembling it as she went. "You aren't even resurrecting them, not really. You're removing the death. Taking it out of them. But Anthony, death doesn't just stop existing when it's taken. It has to go somewhere."

He understood before she said it. The cold in his chest. The whispers. The shapes in the mirror.

"Into me," he said.

"Into you. The squirrel gave you almost nothing. A person gives you a great deal more. And you've taken in, what, a dozen?"

"Fifteen."

She closed her eyes.

Anthony's throat was dry. He asked the question that had been sitting in him for seventeen years. "Why are the vultures following me?"

Miriam turned back toward the window and the silent birds on her fence.

"Because they know what's inside you."

The Man Who Should Have Died

He made a vow in her kitchen, with the mouse asleep in his pocket: never again. He meant it.

Three weeks later they brought in Daniel Cross.

Daniel was thirty-five, a father of one, pulled from a wrecked Honda on I-10 after a semi had jackknifed across three lanes. The trauma team worked on him for forty minutes. Anthony stood against the wall with a stack of linens he'd forgotten to put down and watched them lose.

The doctor went out to the family. Anthony heard the sound a mother makes. He saw an eight-year-old girl in a pink coat, clutching a stuffed rabbit, understand it all at once. Her face crumpled slowly, like paper held to a flame.

Anthony could walk away. He should walk away. He knew exactly what was in him already, how full he was, how the cold had begun to feel less like a guest and more like a tenant.

He put the linens down and went into the room.

Daniel's body was still warm. Anthony laid his palm flat against the broken chest.

It hit him all at once. Not the cold this time, but the death itself: the headlights, the shriek of tearing metal, the steering column driving into his ribs, the wet crunch of bone, the lungs that wouldn't fill, the sky going gray at the edges of the windshield. He felt every second of it. He screamed, and he heard himself scream from somewhere very far away.

Under his hand, Daniel Cross opened his eyes.

Anthony went down hard. The tile rushed up. As the world dimmed, he heard the girl in the hallway shriek with disbelief and joy.

And outside, the afternoon sky went dark. A black tide of wings poured down over Saint James Hospital, hundreds of them, then more than hundreds, landing without a sound.

The Gathering

He woke in a bed with the rails up and the lights low. Something was wrong with the silence.

Nurses stood at the windows, patients in gowns beside them, a janitor with his mop forgotten. Nobody spoke. Anthony pushed himself up on an elbow and looked where they were looking.

The parking lot was black with vultures. They covered the roofs of ambulances. They lined the hospital's ledges and the light poles and the rooftops of the surrounding buildings, shoulder to shoulder, thousands of them. Above them, thousands more turned in the sky in a slow, vast wheel.

None of them attacked. None of them cried out. They simply waited.

Anthony looked down at his arms. Dark veins had risen under the skin like cracks in a frozen pond. When he pressed two fingers to his wrist, the pulse came slow and heavy, one beat and then a long, long pause. His breath, when he let it out, fogged the glass of the window in the Phoenix heat.

In the bathroom he caught himself in the mirror and then looked past himself.

They were standing behind him in a quiet row. Evelyn Mercer. Mr. Okafor. The teenage girl. Daniel Cross, with the road still on him. Every one of them he'd saved.

But they weren't really them, he saw now. Their faces were wrong, too still, too patient. They weren't the people. They were what had been taken from the people. They were their deaths, lined up and standing in him like water in a cistern.

His body was a container, and it was nearly full.

He drove to Tempe with the windows down so he could breathe. Miriam took one look at his arms and sat down heavily.

"If you keep carrying them," she said, "they'll finish what they were meant to do. All of them, all at once."

"Then how do I get rid of it?"

She took a long time to answer. "I told you it can't be destroyed. Not by anything I know."

"So, what do I do?"

"You give it somewhere else to go."

The Desert

He would not put it into another person. He knew that without needing to ask. Daniel's little girl had a stuffed rabbit and a father again, and he wasn't going to take that from some other child to buy himself time.

So, he thought instead of the things that had been following him his entire life.

He drove out of Phoenix at dusk, north and then west, past the last exit, past the last gas station, onto a road that dwindled to gravel and then to nothing. The sun went down red behind the saguaros. Behind and above him, hundreds of black shapes moved in the failing light, keeping pace.

He stopped the car. He got out and walked.

The desert was enormous and silent. The wind raised small dust devils that spun and fell apart. The birds drifted down behind him by the dozens and settled on the rocks and the cactus arms and the ground, and for the first time in seventeen years Anthony wasn't afraid of them.

He understood at last.

They had never followed him because he was dying. They had followed him because he was carrying. Everything vultures were, the whole long, strange design of them, was built around this: they were what the world sent to take death away from where it had gathered. They had been waiting his whole life for him to fill up, so that someone could finally empty him.

A single vulture landed a few feet in front of him. It was enormous, its wings half-folded, its naked red head tilted. It didn't flee. It looked at him with an old, unreadable eye.

Anthony knelt in the sand and reached out and laid his hand on its back.

Everything went out of him.

It was the reverse of the cold, a rushing, a flood, a river finding the sea. The fifteen deaths, the squirrel, the dog, the rabbit, all of it tore out of his chest and into the bird. The bird shuddered. Then the one beside it shuddered, and the next, the transfer leaping from wing to wing across the desert floor like fire through dry grass. Vultures began to drop from the sky. Dozens. Hundreds. They fell soundlessly and lay in the sand with their wings spread, and the huge wheel overhead came apart.

Anthony fell with them. The last thing he felt was the ground against his cheek, and, deep in his chest where the cold had lived, a silence so complete it was almost like music.

What Remains

He woke to dawn.

The vultures were gone. No bodies, no feathers, only the pale sand and the rising light and a dry wind that smelled of creosote. He lay there for a long time listening to his own heart, which was beating fast and strong and ordinary.

The cold was gone. For the first time since he was six years old, he felt entirely alive.

He drove home, and slept, and ate toast that tasted like toast, and cried a little over it. Weeks passed. His temperature climbed back to normal. The shapes vanished from the mirror. He went back to work at Saint James, and he kept his hands to himself. He had made the vow again, and this time it felt like it might hold.

One October afternoon he was crossing the lobby when he saw Evelyn Mercer coming out of the elevator with her family. She was pink and upright and laughing, a stranger to the woman he had known. When she saw him, her face opened up.

She crossed the lobby and hugged him hard. "You gave me my life back," she said into his shoulder.

Anthony smiled and held her. But he knew that wasn't quite true. He hadn't given her anything. He had taken her death, and there was a difference, though he'd never be able to explain it to her.

That evening he walked out through the parking lot after his shift. The light was going amber. Near his car, on the asphalt, lay a dead sparrow, small and gray and stiff.

He stopped.

For a moment he stood looking at it. He thought about kneeling. He thought about the cold, and the long years, and the birds falling like rain.

Then he remembered the vultures. He turned and walked away.

Behind him came a faint, dry sound, the flutter of small wings.

Anthony froze. He turned slowly.

The sparrow was standing. It shook out its feathers and blinked at the sky.

Anthony stared at his hands. He hadn't touched it. He hadn't come within six feet.

The bird sprang into the air and was gone over the rooftops.

He looked up. Far above Saint James Hospital, a single vulture circled in the evening light. As he watched, a second slid in beside it, and then, slowly, a third.

Anthony understood the terrible truth then, with a calm that was worse than fear. Whatever had entered him when he was six years old hadn't been a gift. And whatever he had released into the desert hadn't been death.

It had been something that controlled it.

Anthony watched the vultures circle overhead and wondered, for the first time, not what they knew, but what they were waiting for.