Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

“You shoulda told me about the damn bats.”

  “We told you.”

  “Not in a memo! To my face! To my face.”

  “I told you, Jerry, you have to read the memos.”

  “You fuckin’—” Jerry stiffened. “Go sit somewhere else.”

  “All right, Jerry.”

  “But get me a—” He was about to say gin and tonic, but then he sneezed so hard, he thought his brain might come out of his head. Then again, achoo. Eyes watering. Nose running. “Get me some tissues, then get me a gin and tonic.”

  And then go sit somewhere else, you smug little know-it-all.

  Three months ago, in Raleigh, North Carolina:

  JERRY BLEW HIS NOSE. “THIS damn cold.”

  Vic stood by his desk. “Go to the doctor.”

  “I’m not going to that doctor.”

  “You’re not going because he’s going to tell you that you need all the maintenance—the physical, the prostate exam, the colonoscopy.”

  He thought but did not say, Like I’m going to let them stick things up my ass. Not a finger, not a tube. Exit door only. “I’m fine. Just a cold.”

  “A cold that’s hung on for a month. Might be allergies. He’ll tell you to get on Claritin, end of story. Here, come on, stand up. You need to do your physical therapy.” Vic reached for his hand. Jerry thought idly to swipe at it, but he grumbled and gave in.

  With his attaché’s help, Jerry stood up from his desk, gingerly putting pressure on his leg—the pins came out and the cast came off five days ago. It felt good to walk on it, but the muscles on that leg had gone to pudding. They told him he needed to exercise it—even just a lap around his desk a few times a day would be something.

  “Tell me,” he said, grunting and oofing as he hobbled around the desk, “about Chengdu.”

  “The permits still aren’t in.”

  “We need to break ground on that. Soon. Now.”

  “You need to start seriously considering the possibility that Chengdu isn’t going to happen, Jerry.”

  Upper lip curled back in a feral sneer, Jerry said, “That’s not an option. China is a huge market. A necessary market. We score this, it gives us inroads with film—China’s outpacing Hollywood as a global film market, and we’re behind that eight ball, Vic. Get it done.”

  “I can’t get it done. China’s not a maître d’ at a booked-up restaurant. I can’t flash a palm of cash and get you a table. We have to be patient—we’ll make inroads there. In the meantime, make them jealous—consider Tokyo again as an option to—”

  “No!” he bellowed, stopping to lean against the desk. “Tokyo sets us back. All the Garlin Gardens need to open up in the same year. That’s the deal. That’s how we sell this. It’s how the dream works, Victor. I’m not going to be thwarted by the…fucking Yellow Curtain of China. Hunt, that bitch president, it’s her, isn’t it? Her fault. She should be opening up trade instead of introducing new tariffs—it’s looking like Creel is going to tidy up the GOP nomination, and he will sign off on the TAP—”

  “Creel doesn’t support the Trans-Asia Partnership.” Vic gave him a look like, What kind of an asshole are you? Same look Dirk used to give him. “President Hunt signed the TAP. But getting in bed with China means a long dance first, and a slow seduction—”

  Jerry sneezed again. His eyes felt thick in their sockets. His sinuses felt like concrete. “You can’t get it done, I’ll find someone who will.”

  “Jerry, I’m your go-to guy, but I’m not magic.”

  Cool as a cucumber, that Vic.

  Well, fuck him.

  “You’re fired.”

  Vic laughed. “Let’s get you some lunch—”

  “Fuck lunch and fuck you, you’re fucking fired.”

  The man paused. Like he was taking a moment to register the reality of this, that it wasn’t just some joke. Vic had been with him for—well, Jerry couldn’t remember how long now, whatever—but he just wasn’t cutting it anymore. And Jerry didn’t like the way Vic spoke down to him. What had Vic ever done? What had he ever accomplished? What had he made?

  “Jerry. Think about this.”

  “I thought about it. I don’t like you. Think you’re so smart all the time. Correcting my words. Looking at me like you think I’m some entitled titty-baby.”

  “That cold is going to your head. Maybe take a day, go relax. Hit the links—the caddie will drive you around and it’ll be good for your legs and it’ll let you clear your head a little—”

  Jerry got up in his face. “You’re not my daddy. I’m your daddy and I’m kicking you out of the house, boy.”

  “Okay.” Vic’s face was a mask of restrained anger. “If you say so.”

  “Tell you what, you want your severance package, do something for me on the way out—call Kevin, get him in here.”

  Vic raised an eyebrow. “Kevin who? Mahoney?”

  “No not—who the fuck is Kevin Mahoney?”

  “Kevin Mahoney, of Lighthouse Pictures—”

  “No, I don’t—” Jerry was pissed now. Magma coursing through his veins. He wanted to grab Vic, choke him until his tongue turned blue and his eyes popped like grapes. “Kevin, send in Kevin.”

  “Who is Kevin?”

  “My goddamn son-in-law.”

  Vic paused. Like he’d been slapped.

  “What?” Jerry asked.

  “Your son-in-law’s name is Kenneth.”

  “Well.” Jerry felt suddenly flustered. Was that right? That couldn’t be right. Frothing, he roared: “Send him in! Kevin. Or Kenneth! Shit! And then get the fuck out!”

  Two months ago, in Raleigh, North Carolina:

  JERRY WAS AT HOME, SIPPING bourbon on the back deck of his plantation-style house, when Vic showed up. The sun was shining. A breeze blowing. Down at the edges of the estate and around the pond, all the daffodils and hyacinths had sprung up, a panoply of color. When Vic came up behind him, Jerry wouldn’t look his way.

  “Who let you in?” he asked, droll and pretending not to care.

  Vic said, “Susan did, Jerry.”

  Susan. Jerry’s wife. “Bullshit. I told you to give me your key.”

  “I did give you my key.”

  “You made a copy, then.”

  “Jerry, your behavior has been erratic.”

  “Viiiiic,” Jerry said, affecting a whiny, mocking voice. “You were fired. You need to get your ass off my property before I call the police.”

  “You call the police a lot these days.”

  Jerry lowered his voice. “I’ve had…intruders.”

  “Have you? They didn’t find anybody.”

  “Maybe it was you,” Jerry sneered.

  “If you say so, Jerry. Listen, the BOD hired me—”

  The board of directors saddled up with this cocky prick? Figures, Jerry thought. They were all a bunch of quislings. That was one of his father’s words. Quislings. Meant traitor or some such. “Tell them not to worry. I’ve got this. Garlin Gardens is all moving ahead.”

  “It is, no thanks to you. You missed the planning meeting in Somerville. You showed up at Berlin, then wandered out halfway through, saying you were—what was it? ‘Bored.’ You don’t answer calls, but call people in the middle of the night. You email all these wild political conspiracy theories—”

  “Those aren’t just theories. The Dems are hiding kid-touchers in plain sight, Vic, in plain fucking sight. You listen to that Hiram Golden show and, and—”

  “You need a doctor. You might be experiencing early-onset dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s—something’s up.”

  Jerry lifted his chin and scowled.

  “I’m doing fine. The company is doing fine. Get out.”

  “The board is letting you go.”

  On this, he spun around, glass held so tight
in his hand he was surprised it didn’t pop. “You listen to me, you little shit. I founded this company, they can’t—”

  “Your father founded it. You inherited it.”

  “They can’t fire me.”

  “They can. With a vote.”

  “I am a majority shareholder.”

  “And they will graciously be buying you out.”

  He seethed. “That isn’t their choice. It’s mine, and I say no.”

  “It is their choice,” Vic said. “You can thank your father for that. Part of the deal of you inheriting those shares was that, should the BOD find you lacking in some way, they would be able to wrest control painlessly.”

  Jerry stood, now. His chest heaved like a storm-tossed sea. “Oh, it won’t be painlessly. I’ll make it hurt. I’ll make them bleed.”

  “Whatever you say. Jerry, I have to tell you: It has not been a pleasure. Your father, Dirk, was a man of ideas, but you were just a man who had Dirk’s ideas, and even then you couldn’t do much with them.”

  And with that, Vic turned to leave.

  “Get out!” Jerry said.

  “Go to a doctor,” Vic called over his shoulder.

  Jerry flung the bourbon glass at him. It missed, hitting the side of the house. The glass shattered, left a ding in the house’s stone exterior. Bourbon drooled down the wall, and the ice landed in the flower beds.

  Vic was gone.

  One month ago, in Garlin Gardens Park, Raleigh, North Carolina:

  PARK SECURITY CAUGHT HIM OUTSIDE the Treasure Town “haunted” roller coaster in the Mysterious Island part of the park. Jerry, wearing a rumpled suit even in the growing heat, pounded and kicked on a hidden door in the fake mountain that supported the ride as the animatronic skeletons and pirates (and yes, skeleton-pirates) leered above him, swishing their mugs of grog and swiping at their bony parrots.

  Jerry did not look good. His face was red and raw. Around his nose were rings of a crusty white rime. Half-moons of that same crusty-yet-somehow-moist muck hung at the bottoms of his swollen eyes, with little boulders of the stuff gathering at the corners. His lips were dry. His tongue was pale.

  Park security knew him, of course. Not individually, for it had been over a decade now since Jerry had aped the actions of his father and come to visit all the staff at the park. But they were aware of him, and looked kindly on someone whom they felt had contributed to the legacy of this place.

  As such, they let him go without calling the police.

  They did, however, advise Jerry to go to the doctor.

  Jerry told them to go to hell. And on the way out, he bellowed at them, “And you tell my father to go to hell, too! Next time I knock on his office door, you tell him to open right up.” The security staff looked to one another with puzzled expressions, none of them aware that, thirty years ago, the park administration building was still onsite. It moved in later years to make way for more attractions—such as, of course, the Treasure Town roller coaster. Dirk Garlin’s office was famously on the ground floor—so it was accessible to everyone, he said, so that he could hear their dreams if they cared to share them. The door leading into the operational bowels of the Treasure Town ride was roughly in the same spot.

  Today, in the Everglades:

  THE MAN WANDERED THE EVERGLADES.

  Some memory eluded him—a fishing cabin, Chokoloskee, a bottle of bourbon. Another memory chased that one: a gun, a foot through the glass, a man in a bathtub, and then bang. All that blood.

  Now, though, whoever he was, he had more pressing concerns.

  He was chasing his father, who was in turn chasing a dog. The dog was sometimes a cartoon: big goofy paws, a comical red nose, a pink tongue that sometimes unrolled like a necktie. Sometimes the dog was a dog that he remembered, a real dog, a dog from when he was just a kid. Dimwit, they called the dog. His father would doodle that dog in the margins of his invoices, just a few circles and lines—swish-slash-swish.

  The dog was lost, and now so was his father.

  I’ll come for you, Daddy. I’ll save you.

  Ahead, his father wound through the cypress and the mangrove, staggering through ruts of water and over clumps of mounding grass. The man pushed on after. His father looked over his shoulder, and now he was wearing a mask: the comical gray mask of Shirley Squirrel, what with her button nose and pink cheeks and those fuzzy, fuzzy ears. The mask looked real, until it didn’t, and then it just looked like cheap rubber.

  The man felt sick and had to stop. He pawed at his face. His hand came away smeared with greasy white. Everything itched. He wanted to lie down and sleep for a while and forget this nonsense, but his father kept running and running, and who would catch him? But when he looked up again, he found he didn’t have to. Because there his father stood. Hands on hips. Disapproving stare on his face. “I was a man of ideas,” Dirk said, if that was his name. “But you’re just a man of my ideas.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man, who could not remember his own name, said.

  Then his father was gone.

  And the name of his father was gone, too.

  The man sat down on a tree. He looked in his hand and found a gun there—a boxy, engraved Colt Defender .45 with white ivory grips. It was flecked with rust. No, not rust. Blood. Same blood that sat on the back of the man’s hands in dark-brown dots. A name floated through his mind: Vic. And then the gun was gone again, a phantom. Had it ever existed? And who, exactly, was Vic?

  Then, like everything else, it was gone, too.

  The man sneezed. What came out of his nose and mouth was not mucus, not really. It was just more of that greasy white powder, like oiled cornstarch. It almost seemed to glow with a faint white light. I am incandescent, he thought. I shine, like the sun itself. Well, buh-buh-buh-golly, fuh-folks, I shuh-sure don’t fuh-feel too guh-good. His lips felt tacky, glued together. He sneezed again. More of the same came out of him.

  The dog was gone. He couldn’t see him anymore.

  His father—gone, too.

  He felt tired. Just a minute, now. They will wait for me. Then he’d sneak up on them when they got comfortable. He’d creep through the brush and find them there, and he’d jump out, boo.

  “The best gift you can give somebody is a surprise…” he mumbled, cackling as he said it, strings of sticky saliva connecting his lower lip to his upper. He could barely get the rest out, he was laughing so hard now, his eyes watering, his nose running. The words came out a bubbling gush, a mushy hot mess of slur and slush: “…because they never forget it.”

  He collapsed, face forward.

  He fell into a slumber, which gave way to a coma.

  He did not wake.

  Jerry Garlin’s body wouldn’t be discovered for two more weeks. And by then, it would be far too late for him—and for everyone else.

  The number is 232.

  @WalkerCountBot

  14 replies 121 RTs 47 likes

  JUNE 19

  God’s Light Church, Burnsville, Indiana

  THE CHURCH WASN’T MUCH TO look at. If you didn’t look at the little graveyard framed in by a chain-link fence or the cross hanging on the scant red brick by the door, or at the sign with the block letters that read IF YOU’RE ALMOST SAVED YOU’RE ALL THE WAY LOST, then you might’ve thought it was just a house. White clapboard siding. Dirt-and-gravel driveway up the side. Windows with patched screens. Gutters hanging low like the broken branches on a dying tree. In the back, the church proper stood with a low steeple looking out over a muddy grass field.

  Matthew Bird, pastor of God’s Light Church, didn’t mind that it looked like a house. He wanted it to feel like home. In part because it was a home: It was his home, it was home to those practitioners who sometimes needed a place to stay (like the Geringers, who lost their house to a small tornado two years back), and of course, to Christ Himself. />
  God lives here, Matthew was wont to say. But then he also would tap his chest and the chest of whoever he was talking to. But He’s in here, too.

  Still, the church needed some attention. With summer about to start, he hoped he could count on some local students to help out.

  Hope, though, didn’t get the job done. And he quietly suspected that he would be the one out there, doing the work, the lone soldier. God may live here, and Jesus might’ve been the son of a carpenter, but neither was likely to show up with a hammer and some nails.

  That work fell to men.

  Today, though, the work was different. Matthew stood on the front porch and said goodbye to those who had come for the meeting of the Graceful Shift recovery program—a Christ-centered approach to conquering addiction, any addiction, from alcohol to drugs to sex to online gaming and gambling.

  He shook hands and gave hugs to those who walked out. He said goodbye to Dave Mercer, who was addicted to opiate pills after a tractor accident. He gave a long and lingering hug to Colleen Hugh, who found herself in thrall to alcohol after working as a bar waitress for too many years. He whispered a few encouraging words into the ear of Fred Dinsdale, a nice fella coming up on sixty who, in the wake of his wife’s passing from breast cancer last year, found himself unable to pull away from internet pornography and eventually, prostitutes. All good people. All people from the community he knew that he cared about, and that he had faith would eventually transcend the burdens put upon them.

  Before he passed, Fred leaned in close with his droopy hound-dog face and asked: “Can we talk about it now?”

  Matthew smiled when he answered: “If you’d like, Fred. I just didn’t want the topic to get in the way of the meeting.” Even though he could tell they were all straining to talk about it, like dogs pulling hard on the leash. Everyone was, these days. “We have greater concerns than what’s on TV.”

  “What do you think they are?” Fred asked, almost conspiratorially.

  “People,” Matthew said. “They’re just people.”

  “But something isn’t right. They’re taken over by something—the CDC is there with them, but so far they haven’t found anything. I heard Homeland Security has been called in. There’re five hundred of them now—”