by Chuck Wendig
He returned the embrace.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Anything for my girls.”
The hug lasted for a while and it felt nice. Even so, she pulled away and arched an eyebrow. “Hey, uh, where’d you get an RV?”
“I bought it.”
Oh no.
“With…what money?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“The farm—”
“Will be fine. Will and Essie’s son, Jessie, is home from college for the summer—he’s going to help out.”
“He doesn’t know how to make the cheese—”
“But Essie does, so.”
“Dad, I—” And then, in that moment, she decided to stow it. It didn’t matter. It was his farm, not hers. His life, not hers. His money, not hers. Further, she was glad he was here no matter what that meant in the long run. Sometimes what happened now was more important to her than what would happen later, so to hell with it. “Okay. I trust you.”
She didn’t, not really. But that had to be okay.
For now.
“I’m still not real clear why you bought an RV,” she said.
“I always talked about getting one for family vacations and who knows how long you’ll be at home before you strike out on your own. I figure in the meantime, we can use it as we…follow your sister to wherever it is she and the others are going. You can’t walk forever with her. Your legs will give out. Maybe hers will, too. And when that happens, you’ll need a bed. The RV has one bed and a pullout couch, so.”
“I like it.” She didn’t, not really—it was ugly as a flabby butt, and it was in dire need of some air freshener. But she liked the idea of it, and that was enough. “I guess this is home for the next however many days.”
“It’ll be nice spending some time with you. Even under these…circumstances.”
“Nessie will be all right,” she said, repeating to her father Arav’s lie.
But she and her father both needed the lie right now.
Later, when her father took her up to the cockpit (as he called it) and showed her how to start it up, they saw a ghostly shape walking alone out of the woods: a woman, pale and thin and almost diaphanous, in a sundress that rolled in the wind. Her stare was empty. Her face devoid of emotion. She fell in line behind the rest of the flock.
Gabchain Forum Post
Anon ID Bzwwxtypol June 5th No. 14098790 Replies: >>ID 19248
> fuck this shit, it’s aliens
> mark my words this is aliens coming down, and they’re taking control, in our stories we always thought they’d invade themselves in their ships, but what if they’re using *us* to invade?
> those zombies are their puppets
> they’re going SOMEWHERE, I wanna know where
Dude, they’re not aliens, they’re not possessed by aliens. It’s the Russians. They’ve hacked everything else: our elections, our power grid, our social media. Now they’re hacking PEOPLE.
JUNE 5
Tall Cedars Motel, Three Corners, Pennsylvania
JUST PAST MIDNIGHT IN NOWHERESVILLE, Pennsylvania.
His body was tired even as his mind raced, and Benji wanted nothing more than to go back to his room and sleep for eight, ten, maybe twelve hours.
But instead, he was here. Watching Martin Vargas pace.
The motel wasn’t much to look at. Wood paneling, water stains, a carpet that was as much a sediment of dust mite husks as it was an aggregate of fibers and glue. The TV was an old CRT. The bed had a dip in the middle that looked like it once cradled a baby elephant.
He and Cassie had come here after trying—and failing—to procure security footage from the hospital. They had nothing. They said their systems had been hacked and the images erased. So for a time, he did what he always did: He relied on his faith in the numbers. Numbers did not lie. Oh, you could lie using numbers (to which Benji could personally attest), but the numbers themselves were inert, unbiased, and pure.
At the end of yesterday, the sleepwalkers numbered ten—though it would have been eleven with Blamire. And now at the end of the second day, the number stood at twenty-two.
The flock walked three miles an hour.
They had not yet stopped for sleep—it was as if they were already sleeping. That meant they traveled around sixty miles in a twenty-four-hour period. That couldn’t last forever, of course—their minds, like his, might be racing, but eventually their bodies would give out. Wouldn’t they?
If they traveled three miles in an hour, then they’d be walking past this motel in…just around five hours, prior to sunrise.
By then they’d likely have more of their own.
More sleepwalkers. One seemed to join every two hours.
How long did this go? How far would they—could they—walk?
While he worried at all of this, Cassie stood off to the side, arms crossed, also watching Vargas pace the worn carpet in this dank, musty room. Sadie was—well, Benji didn’t know where. All he knew was what he got from her last text: Found something out, omw.
Watching Vargas pace was like watching a panther walk the margins of its cage. He fumed, fists at his sides. He wound his way past the artifacts of the investigation: papers spread out across the dresser, across the bed, pinned to a corkboard on an easel. Vargas had found out that Benji was still on the case thanks to the news, which got to Loretta, who ended up in a call to Martin, which led Martin to summon them. It was a good two minutes before he finally spoke.
“I can’t fucking believe it” was what he said.
“I’m sorry, Martin—” Benji began.
“No, you don’t get to be sorry. Sorry only counts when you back that shit up, Benjamin. When you learn from your mistakes. But here you are. Poisoning the well yet again. And you—” Martin halted his march and thrust an accusing finger toward Cassie. “You were an accomplice to this.”
Cassie shrugged. “Maybe you want to relax a little, dude. Benji’s good people. Benji’s our people.”
“Oh? Is he? Our people are scientists. We have no agenda but truth. Data. What we feel? What we want? It doesn’t enter into the goddamn equation. What he did—” Martin turned to Benji. “What you did, it poisoned us. Munchausen by proxy: You poisoned us just enough so you could make your point and get your glory. You hurt us to help yourself.”
“No,” Benji said with some firmness. “I saw something at Longacre and thought that if there was a way to get ahead of my prediction—”
“Your prediction. Listen to you. You and that fucking machine, Black Swan, a pair of Amazing Kreskins. We’re scientists, not psychics.”
“It was a onetime mistake, I own that. I’m not here to hamper this investigation, I’m here—”
“Why? You’re here why? Just to piss in my Cheerios? Or maybe you want to do what you did with Longacre? Pick and choose some data from Column A, slap together with some samples from Column Z, and stick them together to see what damage you can do? What lies you can concoct—”
Cassie stepped forward, both hands out. “I think you’re pushing it, Martin. Benji knows he fucked up, that’s not why he’s here.”
But Martin pushed past her, getting right up in Benji’s face. “If it’s not that, then what? What is it?”
“I’m here to help.”
“You’re here to take over.” He narrowed his gaze to arrow-slits. Suspicion came off him in hot waves. In a low, dark voice he said: “You don’t think I can do this.”
“Don’t be paranoid, Martin. We’re all tired, it’s been a long day—”
“I want to know,” Martin said, leaning in. “Do you think you’re better than me? A better leader? A sharper mind?”
All it took was a little hesitation.
Benji should’ve answered quickly, he should’ve—
We
ll, he should’ve lied.
Whap.
It happened fast. Martin grunted and clubbed Benji in the mouth with an open hand, staggering him before slamming him up against the wall. Stars spangled the black flag behind Benji’s eyes as the wind blasted from his lungs. The other man held him there, and Cassie intervened quickly, working to wrestle Martin off him—but Benji shook his head.
“It’s fine, Cass,” Benji said, wincing, tasting blood. His lip was split. It throbbed. It would be big as a night crawler soon enough. “We’re okay.”
She backed off.
He saw something now on Martin’s face. Something that transcended anger. It was pain. Betrayal. Sadness, even.
“You could’ve told us what you were doing,” Martin said. “With Longacre? You should’ve said what you had seen. We could’ve figured something out together. But you had to take that ego of yours and go off—you had to do this stupid thing. You don’t betray the data.” But Benji heard something else in there: You don’t betray your team. “I lost faith in you. Because you lost faith in us.”
“No! No. That’s not it, I swear, Martin.” He shook his head as blood trickled from his lip to his chin and hung there. “I kept my faith in you. I kept my faith in God. I didn’t lose faith in myself. I just…lost faith in the system. The prediction I made that day wasn’t just about some superbug or a new flu pandemic—I predicted how the system would fail us right then and there. I’d make my warning. I’d show the data—the real data. And then what? The system would protect itself. It wouldn’t protect people. It would protect money and the people who make it. Nothing would change. Nobody’s out there making a universal flu vaccine because the money doesn’t support it. Nobody’s making new antibiotics because—again? No money in a cheap pill with a short prescription life. And here? The money was epic. It would protect itself. It would protect the system. And in that moment…I wanted to do something about that.”
Martin let him go. The fight had gone out of him. Out of both of them.
“Christ, Benji. You really should’ve talked to us.”
“I know. I should’ve. I just want you to know, it wasn’t a picnic for me, either. After it happened, even before I got caught—I felt like I was losing my mind. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, other times I slept so hard I thought I was dying. I actually started to worry I had some kind of…strange sleep disorder or sickness and—”
There.
Between them passed a flare of recognition. Inspiration, even.
“Sleeping sickness,” Martin said.
“Trypanosoma,” Benji said.
They talked it out.
It didn’t make perfect sense.
But it made…some sense, didn’t it?
A protozoan like that affected behavior in strange ways—no, this didn’t look like Zika, or tularemia, or Lyme, or Rocky Mountain. Nothing looked like this except maybe, maybe, a parasitic infection. Toxoplasma gondii, the feline parasite, could alter a human host’s brain chemistry and behaviors—some even felt it was one potential cause of schizophrenia. Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba, chowed down on actual brain tissue, driving a person into rampant incoherency and eventually, death.
Then there was Trypanosoma.
Those little unicellular monsters arrived in a human’s bloodstream via an insect bite, like the tsetse fly. Then the protozoans hunkered down, breeding in the blood until it was time to pierce the blood–brain barrier. When that happened, the patient’s behavior was altered in ways subtle enough that their friends and family might miss the shift: indolence and depression, neither of which was particularly strange.
Further, it often caused sleep disorders: Deep in the throes of the disease, the host might wake at night and sleep during the day. Then came confusion and anxiety. After that: aggressive behavior coupled with psychosis. And often, tremors or seizures. Untreated, the body fell into disrepair. Organs broke down. Bodily function ceased as neurological function dwindled. The host would enter a coma and soon die.
That was just from one of the dozens of Trypanosoma varieties.
And though the symptoms of African sleeping sickness did not precisely match what they were seeing with the sleepwalkers…
There remained troubling connections.
Sleep disorder? Seizures? Neurological changes?
What if this was similar? What if these people were all marching toward their deaths? Were their minds breaking down with every step they took? Would they soon begin falling to the ground even as others joined the herd? Their blood, brimming with little protozoans, their organs failing as their brains died? He shuddered at the thought. Trypanosoma was an adaptable sonofabitch. It evolved to find new life in new hosts.
Maybe it had done that, here.
The way you tested for Trypanosoma, of course, was a blood panel.
Which they could not get.
The inside-the-cheek idea that Martin had was a good one; it also didn’t work. Tomorrow Benji hoped those start-ups he’d recommended would agree to send prototypes.
Their inability to pierce the skin and get a blood sample was just one head on this mysterious hydra. Other bizarre questions rose to taunt them: Why didn’t the walkers need food or water? So far, none had stopped. And so far, none had urinated or defecated, either. Nothing in, nothing out. And yet something must have been in there already—several of the families reported that the patients ate meals at various periods before entering the sleepwalking phase. The inability to vacate one’s bowels or bladder was, seeming silliness aside, another killer. The bowels could burst. The kidneys could go south, which would in turn poison the body.
Already the three of them had hunkered down in front of an iPad on a metal Compass stand, flicking through pages of data. Talking it out as they did. “Chagas disease,” Cassie said. “No cases here in PA, but they have the kissing bug. They’re a known vector for the parasite—a triatomine bug that drinks blood from mammals, including humans. Often the face, hence: kissing. After they feed, they shit, and the protozoan gets in the blood.”
“Chagas doesn’t match well,” Martin said.
“So,” Benji countered, “probably not T. cruzi but rather, T. brucei—sleeping sickness.”
Cassie’s mouth puckered and her lips popped as she thought. “I can see it. Though worth noting: It’s never been seen here in North America.”
“No, but there was an instance in London a few years ago. And diseases like SARS and West Nile have both shown a propensity to hop borders. And the protozoan has shown an inclination toward evolution.”
“What’s the vector?”
“I don’t know.”
“In Africa, it’s the tsetse.”
“Some species transmit, yes. They drink their bloodmeal and pass along the parasite. Others pick it up again and…well.”
“Sharing is caring,” Cassie said. “Still doesn’t explain how we’re going to get a blood panel test for this shit—”
Just then, a knock at the door. Benji’s phone dinged:
A message from Sadie: It’s me.
He said as much, then stood to answer the door. She stepped in, then did a double take as she saw the line of crusted blood down Benji’s chin. “You’re bleeding!”
“Martin punched me.”
“I slapped you,” Martin said, “and you deserved it.”
Benji gave a smirk and a shrug. “He’s not wrong. Come on in. We’re looking at a new possibility for the disease—Trypanosoma. Parasitic protozoan. A real pain.”
“I’ve got something, too.”
With that, out came her phone.
Wait—Benji had seen her phone before. This wasn’t that. This was something different: a smartphone still, by the look of it, but one that was all screen and beveled corners. As she palmed the device, turning it around, Benji saw that each edge had a small, barely noticeable lens.
No, not a lens—a projector.
His suspicion was immediately confirmed as, sure enough, a beam of light projected out from the top edge of the phone, bright enough that Sadie didn’t even have to turn the lights down.
What played in the projection was a brief video.
The camera looked upon what seemed to be a hospital morgue. And now Benji realized what Sadie had brought them: security camera footage from the hospital. Where two bodies had gone missing.
In the room, he saw morgue drawers against the back wall. In the foreground were six tables, two occupied—one with a sheet covering an entire corpse, the second also with the sheets pulled up, except this time they did not cover anything necessarily human-shaped, but rather, hills and mounds of…something.
One minute, the bodies (or what was left of them) were present. And then the video fritzed out. The black-and-white footage turned into a glitchy rainbow, broken video artifacts that seemed to melt and resolve into one another. Then the screen went black for one, two, three seconds—
When it came back, the camera feed had returned.
But both tables were empty.
“Shit,” Cassie said.
Sadie answered: “Wait for it. There’s more.”
That video ended and another began.
It overlooked a parking lot in what appeared to be the back of the hospital, near to where they discarded everything from sharps, to radioactive waste, to chemo drugs, to spent or harmful pharmaceutical remainders. Plus blood, infectious material, contaminated equipment. All of it sat separated out by dumpsters divided by color. The back doors to the hospital opened. Someone, a man by the look of it, tall and thin and in hospital blues—with a mask over his mouth—exited wheeling a single stretcher. The stretcher sat mounded with what looked like more than one body. Only problem was: The camera recording this was not as close in proximity as the one in the morgue. It must sit higher up, Benji thought. On a pole or post—probably sitting under a streetlight.
As the man wheeled the stretcher down the ramp toward the dumpsters, Benji found himself offering a small prayer to the heavens: Please, let whoever this is dispose of the bodies in there. If they’re in there, we can still recover something. Please.