by Chuck Wendig
No, he kept his eye down the highway.
Because they were coming.
Sadie stood next to him, watching him as much as she watched the road, like she was trying to gauge reality through his reaction to it.
Fine, let her look.
There, down the road, around the bend of the highway, came the first sign: a cop car driving ahead at a slow crawl. He knew these sleepwalkers were framed by police escorts, both to keep the walkers contained and to keep people or traffic from getting close.
Behind the car, the sleepwalkers followed.
Benji wasn’t much for movies or TV, but he had a soft spot for zombie films—especially the ones that treated the zombie apocalypse as something more biological than supernatural. Biology had at its core a keen and singular horror that made all the bogeyman stuff as scary as a preschool playroom. Infectious diseases alone offered a host of terrors for one’s fear to endlessly feast upon.
Rabies, for instance, delivered unto Benji a perfect example of that horror: An infected patient who failed to get the proper shots endured a bad, slow death. You went mad. You became afraid of water. You hallucinated wildly. After a week or two, a coma took you as the rabies Lyssavirus swarmed the brain. Benji knew of a case where a hunter shot a raccoon, not knowing it was rabid. He dispatched it with a head shot, then discarded the body—problem was, the hunter didn’t know that a little bit of brain matter ended up on his hands. How it got in his mouth, who knows? Maybe he wiped his face or his nose. Maybe he grabbed a piece of jerky from his backpack but didn’t wash his hand. Either way, he ate a bit of the brain, and with it a bit of the virus. The virus went dormant for a couple of months—and then it rose in him, wild like a winged demon, the shadow cast over his mind long and black.
He was dead in seven days.
Before he went into the coma, he screamed about the faces he saw in the walls, faces of people he knew who’d died and “gone to hell.”
Rabies was a horror movie, but in real life.
It changed your behavior, ruined your mind, and you could catch it by eating brains—well, there was the seed of both the werewolf myth and the zombie myth.
Seeing the sleepwalkers was like that, at least a little. Benji did a quick count—they numbered a lucky thirteen. This was his first time looking upon them, and seeing their eyes—he shuddered at their flat, flinty stares. Gazing off at nothing. Or if they were looking at something (or for something), Benji couldn’t see what it was. That was left only to them to see, or to seek.
But they weren’t like the undead in ways that mattered. They walked forward with a steady step: This was no foot-dragging shamble, no scrape-and-stumble. They stood up straight. Their jaws were set tight in grim determination. A whiff of Village of the Damned crawled in: Those creepy kids had the same piercing glare, didn’t they?
I’m a doctor. I am a man of science. I shouldn’t be comparing these people to movie monsters. And that was the key, wasn’t it? These were people. At the fore of the flock, a teenage girl, then a young woman, and farther down the line: a farmer in overalls, a middle-aged woman in a business suit, a teenage boy, a paunchy man in a pink bathrobe, an older woman down to her bra and panties, a young man in headphones with the wire dragging behind him and the plug juddering on the asphalt like a hopping cricket, on and on they came, different ages, a roughly equal split between men and women, a surprising mix of skin colors for a rural part of Pennsylvania. Benji didn’t know what any of it meant.
Again he returned to the idea:
They’re walking with purpose.
But what purpose? Why? Was this a disease?
Or was it something bigger, something far stranger?
He didn’t know.
But the uncertainty punched a hole clean through him.
“You still think this is a disease?” he asked Sadie.
“I don’t think anything. I write programs, remember?”
“Black Swan seems to think it is.”
“Black Swan asked for you, but beyond that, I don’t know what it’s thinking. But it’s seen something here. And it wants to find out what it is.”
* * *
—
TOGETHER HE AND Sadie walked through the chaos to the tent. Off to the side, Robbie prepped his ORT team, getting them into their protective suits.
He recognized those faces: six people, all of whom traveled with Taylor and were instinctively loyal to him. They had been in some of the world’s most dire conflict zones together. They’d literally taken fire. Avigail Danziger, an ex–Israeli ER doctor, took a bullet in Liberia and kept on working. Remy Cordova, a former army minister (of all things), fell down a ravine in Sierra Leone, broke both ankles, and impaled himself on the branch of some brittle, dead savanna tree. He was alone. He pulled himself up off the branch (which had gone in through his side, damaging a kidney), then tried to find his way out of the ravine while, according to him, a leopard hunted him for food. He was gone for three days.
He did not die.
The others in Robbie’s team had all gone through various gauntlets: broken bones, rare diseases, animal bites, parasitic infections.
Robbie’s team: ever the lunatics and badasses. Not necessarily typical for ORT, either: Most ORT members were domestic and investigated foodborne and flu.
But Robbie’s team was both legacy and legend.
EIS, when Benji headed a team, was different. Eggheads, disease detectives, more Sherlock Holmes than Lethal Weapon.
Even now, as he stood outside the powder-blue tent, he heard the familiar voice of his protégé, Martin Vargas, prepping the team.
Benji’s team.
Once upon a time, anyway.
Quietly, he and Sadie slipped in through the back of the tent, underneath a flap. Half a dozen lab techs and CDC workers were here, standing, listening to Vargas talk.
Vargas, late thirties, had a square-jawed chin and smoldering, campfire eyes. He looked older, wiser than he was—handsomeness radiated from him in a timeless George Clooney way. When Benji left the CDC, Vargas was an eternal bachelor, going from relationship to relationship like a bee pollinating a whole meadow of flowers. Benji wondered if the promotion had changed his perspective. Would Vargas ever settle down? Or would he remain ever-fickle?
Martin was saying: “…get me information I didn’t even know that I needed. Health records, water quality, air quality, demographics, something, anything. What don’t I know about this area? Is there a factory poisoning the water table with its runoff? Any new invasive species in the area? A wildlife survey has some value, so let’s talk to local game wardens and wildlife rehabilitators, see if there’s anything there—”
“We don’t have enough people,” Cassie said, in a singsongy voice.
“We never have enough people,” Martin answered, also in song.
Cassie Tran: another EIS detective from his old team. Clad in a ratty Beastie Boys shirt, she had a rangy, long-limbed, coyote vibe. Half scavenger, half trickster, all punk. Her hair was a mermaid ombre in a waterfall down her back. Cassie had an expressive, almost elastic face. Her eye rolls were so vigorous they could knock satellites out of orbit. Her smile was sure to melt glaciers.
Martin continued: “While we’re at it, I wanna see instances of tick-borne disease in this area. Lyme and Rocky Mountain spotted fever in particular. Maybe call some exterminators, see what they have to say about mice populations. Or call some local tree people or botanists—ask about last year, see if there was an acorn mast.”
Benji nodded to himself. Smart. Ecologists and epidemiologists had recently come to realize that the number of acorns on the ground was an indicator of how severe Lyme would be in the region the following season. Some years trees produced few acorns, other years bumper crops. Big acorn deposits—a “mast year”—meant an increase in mice, and contrary to their name, deer ticks
loved mice. A single mouse could have dozens of ticks on its face and body, and the mouse could transmit Lyme to those ticks. A surge in acorns meant a surge in mice. And a surge in mice meant the Lyme numbers went up, up, up.
“I’m picking up what you’re laying down,” Cassie said. “Rocky Mountain can inflict certain sleep disorders. At acute stages in dogs, we start to see strange behaviors, too: stupor, restlessness, seizures. Some edema.” Benji suddenly wondered if fluid accumulation could lead to the…rupture, as with Blamire. Seemed like an overreach, but not enough to rule it out. Should he go to them and mention it? I’d better not…
A young man Benji didn’t know—maybe in his midtwenties—eagerly stepped up. His slicked-back raven-black hair was so shiny and so perfect it might as well have been a plastic wig like you’d snap onto a Lego figure. He was as buttoned-up as his tartan-patterned shirt. “I can check with botanists,” the young man said.
“No, Arav,” Martin answered. “I’ll need you as a liaison to Robbie Taylor’s ORT team.”
“I want to do a good job, so point me where you want me to go and I’ll go,” the young man—Arav—said. “But to remind you, I’m…not certified yet for Level A PPE suits and—”
“Shit,” Martin said. He briefly massaged his temples with his thumbs, then moved the massage down his jawline. “That’s fine. You won’t go in the field with them, then, but you will work with them here. Help them set up the mobile lab and make sure we are informed of their discoveries and they’re informed of ours. But next opportunity: Get certified. Oh, and I need you to start a list. I need to know who these sleepwalkers are. I need…everything and anything you can get, that includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers. It won’t be easy because they obviously do not speak, but see what you can do. Perhaps some of them have identification on them. Work with Robbie’s team on that one.”
Arav nodded. “You got it, but maybe I could borrow a few techs—”
“We can help with data collection.”
That voice came from someone unexpected.
It came from Sadie.
Benji shot her a look. She didn’t return it.
All eyes in the room turned toward them. All the gathered lab techs turned to see who was talking. Martin, Cassie, and Arav looked, too.
Then they saw Benji.
Cassie, for her part, looked delighted. A big Pac-Man smile cut her face in half, and she threw up a pair of devil’s horns. She mouthed his name—Benji!—and winked.
Martin did not share in her delight.
“Doctor Ray,” Martin said. “And…whoever you are.”
“Sadie Emeka,” she said. “We’re here on behalf of Benex-Voyager, ready to assist with data collection and analysis. The Black Swan module—”
“Get out,” Martin said.
“Come on,” Benji said quietly to Sadie. “We should go.”
“No,” she protested. Raising her voice louder, she said: “We can help you. You need help. This is something you don’t understand. Something new. You need all the help you can get and—”
“I said, get out.”
“Right.” She stiffened. “Okay, then.”
She and Benji left the tent.
* * *
—
BY NOW THE sleepwalkers had already passed—though Benji could still see them, and the police cruiser that followed them, a quarter mile or more down Route 443, disappearing between a gauntlet of dead or dying ash trees. Ash borer, Benji thought idly. An invasive bug. Killing wide swaths of ash trees here in the Northeast.
“That fucking prick,” Sadie seethed.
“It’s all right, Sadie.” He’d expected anger, or shame, or some caustic mix of the two. But suddenly, those were gone. He felt eerily alone, yes, but also at peace with it. “What I did, I did. I’m just not welcome.”
“You bloody well should be. You’re an expert. Probably more of an expert than any of them. They don’t want our help, we’ll commit to our own investigation, we’ll use Black Swan and—”
The tent flap ruffled behind them. In a flash of movement, Cassie stormed out and made a bullet’s line toward Benji. She swept upon him and wrapped her long arms around him in the manner of a face-hugger Xenomorph baby from Alien. “Dude, it is fucking awesome to see you again,” she said, still squeezing him. Finally releasing him from the hug, she asked: “The hell are you doing here? Did Loretta the Unswerving, the Unyielding, the Ever-Stubborn actually…ask for your help?”
“Ennnh,” he said, waving the flat of his hand back and forth. “Not…so much, no. We’re here on our own.”
Mischievous madness flashed in Cassie’s eyes. “Gone rogue. Couldn’t stay away. I like it. I like it. C’mon.” She hooked her hand around his elbow, and started dragging him toward a car.
“I’m sorry, where are we going?” he asked.
“I’ve got to interview the Exploding Man’s wife and you’re coming with me. You, though—” Cassie spun, pointing her index and pinkie fingers in a pair of bull horns at Sadie. “—can stay here. I’ll bring him back, don’t worry, lady.”
Sadie started to protest, but Benji held out a surrendering hand. “Sadie, it’s all right. Cassie is a bit…territorial.”
“Like a fucking wolverine,” the tall woman said, baring her teeth.
“I’ll…work on some data collection,” Sadie said, not without some resentment and suspicion.
He mouthed thank you to her, and then was again swept up in Cassie’s tornado as they crossed the parking lot. “Did Martin tell you to bring me?”
“Nope,” she said.
“Gone rogue.” He grinned. “I like it.”
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JUNE 4
Maker’s Bell, Pennsylvania
SAYING THAT CASSIE TRAN HAD a coffee habit was like saying fish had a water habit. Here in the rental car, Benji saw the artifacts of half a dozen coffees lying about: Dunkin’ cups, La Colombe draft lattes, an Aeropress, a bag of beans, and a little hand-crank grinder. And the way she spoke reflected it, too, her conversation coming so fast that words at the back of each sentence struggled to get ahead of the words at the front.
“I’m thinking it’s not infectious. I mean—” She made a Vanna White prize-reveal gesture toward the windshield and, by proxy, the world. “Better safe than sorry, obviously. But looking at the reports, these people are…‘catching’ the disease in their own homes. Pretty erratic transmission pattern and nothing on the books looks like this. Nothing! It’s too measured, too pretty, and as you well know, disease is not pretty. It’s just chaos. Chaos with rules, but chaos just the same.” She gunned the Hyundai Sonata down the back roads like scissors slicing ribbon.
“I agree. It’s environmental, I’d guess. In the water table, maybe, or some…shared product use between houses.”
“That’s what we’ll find out when you interview Blamire’s wife.”
“When I interview her?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Cassie, I’ll observe, nothing more.”
“Pssh, you know me. I’m just Missy Mouthfart over here. This lady’s husband just died. He died because he fucking exploded like an egg in the microwave. I come out of veterinary, man. I have the bedside manner of a weed-whacker.” Benji had to admit her point. Though Martin Vargas came out of diagnostic medicine at U Penn, Cassie was an Atlanta-area veterinary specialist and virologist who before joining EIS did a stint with Merck as part of their animal health division. She was damn good at he
r job, as long as her job didn’t include talking to other humans. She was as ungentle as a castration band.
“Don’t tell Martin,” he said.
“I promise not to tell Martin.”
* * *
—
BENJI AND CASSIE sat across the table from Mark Blamire’s wife, Nancy. Nance, she said, doing that thing grieving people do sometimes: She laughed a little, a reflex reaction that felt hollow because it was her mind trying to force her to be normal, to pretend that her husband was not dead in bizarre, uncertain circumstances. Benji saw it at funerals: a grieving spouse washing the dishes, a child playing on the swing set outside, a brother pausing to turn on the TV to get the score for a game. Some thought it rude, and in some cases, that’s what it was: shitty people being shitty. But a lot of the time, it was a defense mechanism. The act of holding on tight to the staircase railing as a tornado ripped your house apart.
Nancy—Nance—was barely holding it together.
She was also, to Benji’s shock, pregnant.
About six months, by the look of her. One hand rested atop her belly as she sat across from him at their breakfast nook. Wraiths of steam rose from a cup of tea curled in the curve of her other hand, though she hadn’t yet taken a sip. Benji had a cup of his own. Chamomile.
“I need you to tell me what happened,” Benji said. “How it began.”
“I…” Nance started, her mouth working soundlessly to summon the memory and to find the words that would explain it. Her gaze was not unlike that of the sleepwalkers: She looked through them, through the wall, through all of space and time and corporeal matter, to a place beyond it all.