Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  They were headed right for the trailer.

  Benji thought, They’re going to walk right into it. It would be like a wall—they’d crush against it, going no farther. He had a sudden vision of a fire at a concert hall, or a riot at a soccer game: a mob mashing up against a fence, one by one, not going anywhere, except this time it wasn’t just soccer fans or concertgoers, it was people who were literal bombs of blood and bone. His heart seized in his chest.

  We’ve just killed them all.

  And maybe us, too.

  He started to tell the others, “Get down, get down,” and into the walkie-talkie he said: “Extract! Extract. Get Avigail to the truck, we’ll need to move the trailer, we’ll need—”

  The lead walker, the young girl, Nessie Stewart, was at the window now. Not stopping. Not slowing. The others gathered behind her, pressing forward—Benji felt himself shaking, felt sweat dripping, his mouth dry.

  She reached toward the trailer, hands out, palms forward.

  That, the first movement they’d seen that wasn’t their feet carrying them forward. Had their arms ever moved? He did not think so. And here the girl was, reaching out with both arms—

  She touched the trailer. Gently. The barest sound: fump.

  And then she began to climb.

  It was fast. Too fast—eerily so. Up she went, and suddenly they heard the thump-and-tumble of her atop the trailer. The other walkers, too, were joining her—they did not come one by one, but rather, as the flock. They walked up, reached out, and began climbing over together, three at a time, four, five. The roof of the trailer bowed inward like a big soda can in a too-firm grip. Benji hurried to the other side of the trailer and looked out—a blur of movement passed the window as the girl Nessie, jumping from the top, hit the ground in a clumsy stagger.

  And onward she went.

  By now the trailer was gently rocking back and forth like a boat at sea as the walkers ascended the side of the trailer en masse, moving up and over the obstacle. Arav and Cassie both stood, wide-eyed, and Benji was certain his face displayed the same fearful wonder.

  The radio crackled. Robbie, again. “Guys, you seeing this?”

  “Seeing it? We’re feeling it,” Benji radioed back.

  “But you need to see it. They’re not—Jesus, Benji, they’re not grabbing onto anything. Their hands are flat against the side of the trailer. It’s like they’re a bunch of Spider-Mans. Spider-Men. Whatever. Shit.”

  The trailer wobbled back and forth as the flock went up and over—the roof bending in but never staying bent—and then, like that, the last of them came and went.

  The walkers walked, always and forever.

  Cassie said, “I guess we have a new data point to consider.”

  “The storm comes first. We can worry about the data in the morning.” He radioed to the others outside, told them to get the Ford on the road, pulling the trailer behind the flock. He hoped like hell they didn’t intersect with that storm.

  Because if they did, he had no idea what happened next.

  Behold, the tempest of the LORD! Wrath has gone forth, A sweeping tempest; It will burst on the head of the wicked.

  —Jeremiah 30:23

  JUNE 19

  Burnsville, Indiana

  MATTHEW WAS PLANNING ON MAKING a call on behalf of DeCarlo, but instead he sat there, phone in hand, just turning his conversation with Ozark Stover over and over again. His mind was like a rabbit trapped in a briar. Even still, hours later, he didn’t know quite what to make of it. Stover never came by the church or the house. And then, today, there he was. Larger than life, practically prehistoric in his size and his demeanor. Matthew wanted to judge the man, because in his heart, that’s what he did—often without meaning to, but it was part and parcel of his job. Though God was the ultimate judge, Matthew was a facilitator of His judgment, wasn’t he? Matthew measured people up, to see who they were, who they could be—how were they failing themselves (and by proxy, failing God), and how could they be made to succeed. What would bring them to the light? To the glory of the Kingdom? That was how Matthew helped people.

  Stover, though, was a puzzle. The man was wild, unkempt. Practically feral. He ran a junkyard. Wasn’t religious, far as Matthew knew. He was a businessman, though, in good enough standing with the community—wasn’t a criminal, wasn’t a drunk. (And if he was, Matthew figured he’d know. People in this town, and maybe all towns, were incorrigible gossips. Especially when it came to pastors and reverends—people confessed not only their own sins, but the sins of everyone around them.)

  He thought suddenly, Well, who better to ask?

  He walked to his son’s room.

  Bo’s room, as always, was a mire. Half lit by a single desk lamp. Clothes on the floor. Posters on the wall of NASCAR racers and bands he’d never heard of, either hung crooked or starting to peel off. And the moment Matthew stepped in he was punched in the face by a mealy, swampy funk: From others he talked to, it was the trademark odor of many teenage boys, but to him it smelled like…

  Well, it smelled like gym socks and crotch. And he wasn’t sure what was worse: this smell, or the smell that Bo used to try to combat it—a venomous body spray that smelled not entirely unlike wasp spray. And you’d think his armpits were hornet’s nests the way he fogged himself in it.

  Inside the bedroom, the boy lay sloppily across his bed, a set of earbuds in his ears barely containing some kind of…heavy metal music.

  Was he asleep? Matthew couldn’t tell. “Bo,” he said. “Son.”

  Nothing.

  He went over, jostled the boy’s shoulders. Bo startled awake, ripping the earbuds out of his ears.

  “What?” he asked, irritated.

  “Hey, sorry, just wanted to ask you a question.”

  “Now?”

  “Well, yes, obviously, now.”

  “Ugh. What.”

  “I wanted to ask about your friend.”

  Bo made a face approximately the shape of a scrunched-up pile of dirty boxers on his floor. “What friend?”

  Kind of a sad question, Matthew realized, as his son regrettably did not have many friends. The few he had, they forbid him from seeing—Lee Bodrick was a little dirtbag drug dealer who got expelled first semester, and the Blevins boy was fond of cherry bombs in toilets (Matthew had to explain to Bo, “Those aren’t funny, those go off and shatter porcelain, the shards could kill someone”). And Bo wasn’t on any teams or in any clubs.

  “I mean Mister Stover.”

  “He’s not my friend, he’s my boss.”

  “You get along with him, though.”

  Bo hesitated, like he was under the thumb of the Inquisition. “Yeah.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Why?”

  “He stayed around and we talked today.”

  “Good for you. Maybe he’ll be your friend.” Bo started to put the earbuds back in.

  Matthew held up both hands. “Hey, I surrender. I’m not trying to attack you—there’s no accusation here. He just seemed like an interesting man, is all. You like him?”

  The earbuds hung about an inch from going back in Bo’s ears. He retreated further against the wall. Finally, he mumbled: “I like him a lot. He’s good to me. He’s nice to me. Pays okay, job is cool. We go fishing sometimes. We shoot cans with his .22 rifle and this little, y’know, this squirrel gun shotgun he has.”

  “You shoot guns with him?”

  Now Bo must’ve sensed that Matthew didn’t like that, because he said: “I don’t know.”

  “You just said you—”

  From down the hall, Matthew heard his wife’s voice:

  “Oh my God.”

  Matthew and Bo shared a look.

  Then it came again:

  “Oh my God!”

  Matthew turned tai
l and hurried down, following the voice to their bedroom. There he found his wife on the edge of their bed, watching the little flat-screen TV they had propped up on their dressers. He’d never wanted a TV in their room, but she insisted and, well, Autumn was—true to her name—a real force of nature sometimes when she wanted something.

  On the TV were a couple of talking heads.

  The news again, he thought. Poisoning her brain. The rot of current affairs. When Autumn wasn’t watching TV, she was on her phone, too, scrolling through the bad news like it was an apocalyptic stock ticker.

  “Honey, I—”

  “Shh,” she said. “Watch.”

  They cut to something, a replay of some kind. He saw a rainy road, and the chyron below read NEW DEVELOPMENT IN SLEEPWALKER FLOCK, TEN MILES FROM WALDRON, INDIANA.

  Matthew felt something bump into him, and he found his son standing next to him. All eyes now glued to the TV, to his chagrin.

  Onscreen, he saw a road. A trailer. Gray skies and rain—the rain hadn’t started here, not yet, but he knew it was coming, because outside the skies looked the color of cold charcoal briquettes. The trailer looked like it was sideways across the road, set up like a blockade. He realized he knew the spot—it was on Poldark Road, just by that little access road that led up to Highway 74. A few miles down Poldark were a couple of farms, and he knew some of the folks that lived there. The Wylies, the Heacocks, the Bermans.

  “They blocked the road,” Autumn explained animatedly, like this excited her as much as it upset her. “They wanted to make the walkers change course. Like a detour. It didn’t work.”

  “Why not?” Bo asked.

  “Just watch.”

  They watched.

  They watched as a couple of people—a man and a woman—tried waving the walkers away. They watched as the walkers went right up to that trailer.

  And then Matthew watched, transfixed, as the sleepwalkers went up and over it. They did it with ease. Hands flat against the wet trailer, the sleepwalkers clambered up to the roof—the first one was a little girl with soggy hair pressed against her pale cheeks—and the others followed fast behind.

  Later, after he’d watched the madness replayed again and again, he went to the nightstand, pulled out his Bible.

  Then he went down to the front porch. His phone call for DeCarlo would have to wait. He opened his book to its last chapter: the Revelation to John. He read it end-to-end not once, but twice. And then to God he prayed.

  I know your secrets

  And I know your plight!

  Into the sea you

  Go without a fight!

  The night is deep

  The night is long

  You’re far from home

  You have no song!

  But in daylight

  You know better.

  —Gumdropper, “Storm of the Century,”

  off The Beggar and the Diamond album (2000)

  JUNE 19

  Six miles outside Waldron, Indiana

  THE STORM LASHED THE ROAD and fields like a cat-o’-nine-tails. The rain punished the windshield of Mia’s Bronco as it sat parked in the loose stone driveway of a farm.

  “I can’t even see them,” Shana said, panicked. She leaned over Mia and stared out the driver’s-side window. The walkers were on their way—Mia had pulled them ahead and sat them here. They might not even be far, now, but it was too hard to tell: The skies were so dark, the rain so relentless, it was like trying to look through closed curtains at the world outside. “I’m going.”

  “Don’t,” Mia said. “It’s just a storm. They’ll be okay.”

  “You don’t know. Your brother is out there.”

  Mia snapped, “You don’t have to tell me that! I know that. But I can’t fucking help him right now, okay?” She waited a beat and then added, “You saw the way they went over that trailer.”

  Shana had seen. She’d watched her sister march right up to it, reach out her hands as if in a healing gesture, and then somehow climb up and over. And then the others followed. It reminded her of a time when her sister, still little, took Shana out into the yard to show her a trail of little black ants leading to a dead grasshopper that they were neatly dissecting. Nessie said, “Watch,” and put a twig in front of them. The ants streamed over it. She put a rock down, and the ants went over that, too.

  “I saw,” Shana said.

  “Maybe…I dunno, maybe they have like, powers.”

  “Powers.”

  “Like, superpowers.”

  “They don’t have superpowers, Mia. They’re just…sleepwalkers. And if a flash flood comes, or a tornado, or—”

  Pak!

  Something hit the glass of the windshield, like a flung marble.

  Then more:

  Pok. Pak pak pok.

  White round shapes.

  “It’s hailing,” Mia said.

  “Hail could mean a—”

  In the distance, a tornado siren sounded.

  * * *

  —

  A BANSHEE WAILED, and at first Benji thought it might just be the wind, but it wasn’t, was it? As hail pelted the trailer, Benji turned to the others: Cassie, Arav, Martin, and Robbie. Avigail was driving the truck that pulled the trailer, with Remy riding shotgun. “That’s the tornado siren, isn’t it?”

  Robbie nodded. “I just hope our trailer lands on an evil witch.”

  “I looked it up,” Arav said, “and the sirens don’t go off necessarily for tornadoes—it could mean there’s potential, even if one hasn’t been spotted.”

  “Still,” Benji said. “Think. What can we do? If a tornado drops down and sweeps across them, how do we save them?”

  Behind the trailer, the walkers continued, compulsorily rallying into the heart of the storm. From here, he couldn’t even see their faces: The rain, and now the hail, obscured them. He could only see their shapes, their margins, their muted, storm-soaked colors as they marched on.

  He knew the answer to his question, though no one would speak it.

  We can’t save them.

  “We can’t detain them,” Cassie said.

  Robbie jumped in with, “And we damn sure can’t divert them.”

  Martin fumed. “We don’t have time to dig a ditch, we don’t have any way to stop a tornado, we can’t put anything over them—”

  “Maybe we ask it politely,” Robbie said.

  Arav had out his phone. “I don’t have service. I’d look up information on how to stay safe in a tornado, but—”

  “Wait.” Benji pulled out Black Swan. It pulsed green in greeting, and then he set the projector to the wall above the bank of computers. “Black Swan is a satphone. I still have signal. Black Swan, it’s Benji. I need advice on how to stay safe from a tornado outdoors.”

  It projected FEMA guidelines:

  If possible, get inside a building.

  “That’s helpful,” Cassie said. “Maybe they’re like vampires, and we can just invite them inside.”

  Next, it projected:

  If shelter is not available or there is no time to get indoors, lie in a ditch or low-lying area or crouch near a strong building. Look out for floodwaters, which may also fill low areas.

  And:

  Use your arms to protect head and neck.

  “That’s it?”

  The phone pulsed green.

  “You know,” Robbie said, “if a funnel cloud really does bear down on us, then we’re going to need to follow that advice. We might all be ass-up in a ditch in the next couple minutes.”

  The trailer rocked, buffeted by heavy winds. The sound of the hail was like marbles on metal: a mighty, rattling din. But over it…

  Benji swore he heard something.

  A voice. Or voices.

&
nbsp; “Does Black Swan have weather data?” Arav asked. “It could update us with real-time data and—”

  But Benji held up a finger, shushing him. He did that thing where you look up at nothing, trying to focus your ears on something.

  “Do you hear that?” he asked.

  “I hear a screaming siren,” Robbie said. “I hear an apocalypse of hail—is that the collective noun for hail? School of fish, bunch of grapes, flock of sleepwalkers, apocalypse of hail—”

  “No, no, shh. I hear voices.”

  “You’ve been talking to Black Swan too much, Benj.”

  “Wait,” Cassie said. “I hear it, too.”

  For a moment, the hail slowed and the wind died back—

  And then, out there, amid the clamor of the tempest, he heard it again. Distinctly.

  “Someone yelling,” Cassie said.

  She was right. Someone was yelling. But who? Where? Already a scenario began to unfold in his head—someone, maybe a shepherd, maybe someone from the media, was stuck or scared or yelling for help. Everything is complicated. So many moving parts. He ran to the window again to look out. It was like looking into a washing machine: the splashing rain, the churn, the froth. To Arav he said, “Hand me Remy’s camera.”

  Arav handed the FLIR camera over. Benji switched it to thermal.

  In the storm, it was the easiest way to see the flock: The walkers each had a lower average body temperature than non-walkers, around 96.5 degrees Fahrenheit, so the colors coming off them were duller and faded. Now those colors were in a glowing, amorphous blob heading closer to the trailer. Nothing stood out to him. He could see the colors of shepherds in their cars, pulled off to the side—he wished like hell they all had gone to safety so he didn’t have to worry about them, too, but they were adults with their own destinies well in hand. The walkers, on the other hand, seemed to be in thrall to a destiny outside themselves.

  Just the same, the blob of colors that was the flock continued gently throbbing forward.

  Wait. There it came again—

  Voices.

  From farther down. From where the walkers were headed.