Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

“Yeah,” Shana said. “It’s fine.”

  “That’s Donna Dutton, she’s like that. Don’t talk to nobody but her kid, Maureen.”

  “She could be a little nicer,” Shana said.

  “No shit. Then again, times are fucked up. Not like niceness ever got anybody anything.” But Mia must’ve seen that Shana was upset. Which meant Shana wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “I said, I’m fine,” she snapped.

  “Shit, okay, never mind. Maybe you could be a little nicer, too.”

  And with that, Mia went back to be with her brother.

  * * *

  —

  VBBT, VBBT.

  A deep and dreamless sleep—

  Vbbt, vbbt.

  —suddenly interrupted.

  Vbbt, vbbt.

  Benji clawed his way through the comfort of those slumbering depths, back up to the light of the morning. An arm that was not his own sat draped across his chest. A moment of bewilderment fled at the sight of Sadie there next to him, facedown into a hotel pillow, breathing deep as her naked back rose and fell.

  Did last night really happen? he wondered.

  Sadie was here. Next to him. Without clothes.

  It really happened.

  Vbbt, vbbt.

  He groaned and grabbed for his phone.

  His phone was not lit up. It was not vibrating.

  Vbbt, vbbt.

  Wait.

  There, on the console by the television.

  The sound came from the Black Swan satphone.

  Now Sadie found her own way through the maze of sleep and lifted herself off the pillow. She rolled over. “That sound. It’s like, a bee. Inside my head. Is there a bee inside my head? Tell me there’s not.”

  “There’s not. It’s Black Swan.”

  She sat up. One eyebrow arched so high it might as well have been hovering above her head like in a cartoon. “What?”

  The screen pulsed—not green, not red.

  But white.

  Again and again.

  Each time, vibrating as it did.

  “It wants to talk,” she said.

  “That’s what this is?”

  “I think so.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It is a machine intelligence, Benji. We have not answered all its mysteries, nor have we charted all its behaviors.”

  He turned the phone on. “Black Swan, it’s Benji. Is something up?”

  One green pulse. Then another.

  Then three more after it. Quite the confirmation.

  The phone’s projector came on of its own volition. Which, honestly, Benji found a touch disconcerting—but as Sadie said, it was a machine intelligence. It had behaviors. Therefore, it was…behaving.

  He turned the phone toward the wall.

  And in a burst, it showed an image.

  The image was a map.

  At first, just pixels, but already he could see it was the shape of North America. It began to zoom in, increasing magnification—with each increase, a new spray of pixels that resolved anew.

  Florida. The Everglades.

  It zeroed in closer, closer…

  Now: A small island called Chokoloskee near Chokoloskee Bay. Near Dismal Key, not far from the Ten Thousand Islands.

  “Why there?” Sadie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Benji said.

  “If Black Swan is showing this to us, it must be important.”

  The screen pulsed green once, twice, then again and again, a strobing pulse of light. A seemingly endless, insistent series of affirmations.

  “I guess I have to send someone to Florida,” he said.

  The only question was: Why?

  What did Black Swan see there?

  JUNE 23

  The Gulf Coast, Florida

  AS SHE WAITED TO PICK up her rental car at the southwest Florida airport, Cassie watched the news. CNN. It showed the flock—now pushing into Illinois. Even during her flight, the flock’s numbers had grown again, steadily. Underneath the footage of the flock, the chyron read: GOP NOMINEE ED CREEL CLAIMS PRESIDENT HUNT IS “CHINA’S ALLY, NOT AMERICA’S.”

  “Unbelievable, right?” said the man behind the counter. Young guy. Latino, maybe. Crisp button-down, hair shellacked back.

  She realized that the customers in line before her had gone on to get their cars. She stepped up to the counter and said: “I’m sorry, wha?”

  “Those people. It was the comet, right?”

  “The what? No,” she groused. “It wasn’t the comet.”

  “Coulda been.”

  “No, not ‘coulda been.’ Comets aren’t magic. They’re not prophetic, they’re not flying overhead, sprinkling us with fairy dust.”

  He blinked. “But the Bible says—”

  “Can I have my car?” she asked, slapping down her driver’s license. “And no I don’t want your extra insurance because your extra insurance is bullshit and I have my own, so let’s just hustle it along.”

  He gulped. “You got it, lady.”

  * * *

  —

  NIGHT OF THE Comet.

  Cassie remembered that movie from the 1980s. She loved horror movies…and sci-fi…and fantasy. All that good genre stuff. Fuck any artsy-pants indie fare, give her Hobbits and Cenobites and Cyborgs (oh my).

  As she drove south toward the Everglades—air-conditioning on full polar ice blast because the outside air was so hot and so humid it felt like you were the meat in a sandwich whose bread was the Devil’s moist thighs—she replayed that movie in her head.

  In the film, a comet passed overhead. The earth went through its tail, and this…red dust rained down over everything. Everyone it touched turned into zombies, and two sisters, Reggie and Sam, fought to survive in this comet-born zombie apocalypse. Eventually they ran into scientists and of course the scientists turned out to be bad guys (a trope Cassie hated)—the scientists were sickened by the red dust, too, but figured out a way to stave off the effects by harvesting the blood of the untouched.

  More fucking zombies.

  She used to love zombie movies. Now, not so much.

  She couldn’t think of the flock like that. Wasn’t the comet. They weren’t zombies. End of story, full-stop, shut the fuck up, Guy-at-the-Rental-Car-Counter.

  The zombies in that movie were not like the sleepwalkers. No zombies were, really, but Cassie saw the comparison even though she would never say it out loud—a horde of people walking, seemingly indestructible, responding not at all to stimuli? Okay, fine, yeah, the flock seemed a little zombie-esque. But they weren’t violent, even if they did expire violently. The walkers, along with whatever disease had taken them, were on a mission. Driven in a way that zombies were not. Cassie had taken to thinking of them less as a flock needing to be shepherded and more like people on a pilgrimage. Walking toward some sacred, unknowable destination.

  (Of course, she’d heard them called the Devil’s Pilgrims, too—some dickhead evangelical with a podcast came up with that name, and it had started to stick. Those people were the worst. Hypocrites of the highest order.)

  Did the flock have purpose? She didn’t know. She imagined so, but in the way toxoplasmosis had a purpose, in the way an ant colony had a purpose—something primal, something fundamental. Some small and simple biological urge. No greater agenda. Nothing supernatural. Cassie did not believe in God like Benji did.

  No, whatever was happening here was something they just didn’t understand, yet.

  The question now was, Why had Black Swan sent her here?

  Would she find an explanation here in the Glades?

  Or would she find only new questions?

  * * *r />
  —

  FIRST A RENTAL car, now an airboat.

  The boat’s massive fan thrummed at her back as the watercraft whipped down the mangrove channels and twisting turns of Crooked Creek, through coastal swamp and the gator-fed mire.

  It was a police boat, driven by an Everglades City officer—Officer Tabes, a hard-edged woman, jaw like an excavator bucket. Didn’t say much except to let Cassie know that they didn’t know what they were dealing with. The boat sped along, and it put Cassie’s stomach in her throat—in her own car she liked to drive fast. She had a Dodge Challenger, liked to open it up whenever she could. But she liked being in control, not being controlled, and here, in this boat, everything felt wildly and woefully out of control.

  * * *

  —

  THEY MET TWO men on a chickee hut.

  Cassie was unfamiliar with chickee huts, so it had to be explained to her. Tabes said it was an “Injun” thing, and yes she really said the word Injun like she was some kind of fucking cowgirl. “Seminoles used ’em. Basically just four posts out of the water, a platform on top, and a thatched roof on top of that.” Said that people like the two men ahead—Dave Hutchins and J. C. Perry, both from Gainesville—used them for camping and fishing since dry land was not as common out here.

  The two men stood on one chickee hut platform, a kayak lashed up to the side and camping provisions spread throughout. A couple of fishing rods crisscrossed each other on the far side.

  Hutchins was a roly-poly hillbilly-looking type—the camo hat with the fishing license dangling from it, a neckbeard colonizing his throat and his jawline, a belly straining at what she assumed was an ironic T-shirt: PADDLE FASTER, I HEAR BANJO MUSIC.

  The other one, Perry, was cleaner-cut, like an aging frat boy playing at being a fisherman: He wore a nice white polo and a black baseball hat with checkered flags on it and a logo that said PFIZER RACING TEAM. He was blond, athletic, tan.

  Turned out, the two of them were friends since they were kids, and best as she could tell, their lives had diverged pretty considerably since then, but they made time once a year to come out here, go fishing. They arrived a few days ago, and took the kayak up Crooked Creek a little ways till they found some solid ground—having had little luck with fish, they were planning on doing some python hunting. The snakes were invasive here, and you could hunt them freely at any time.

  They did not find any snakes.

  What they found was a dead body.

  * * *

  —

  THIS WAS WHAT they said about it:

  HUTCHINS: We were out there near a little island called Horses Key looking for pythons—there’s no bag limit or nothing, and you can dispatch ’em however you like, traps or machete or shit—

  PERRY: We have a gun, though. A shotgun, a .410—

  HUTCHINS: It’s like a squirrel gun, just a little popper. Lets you hit the snake in the head but keep the skin, because people buy those. Not the meat though, ’cause the damn snakes are loaded up with mercury—

  PERRY: Not that we need the money.

  HUTCHINS: Right, no, I look like a proper redneck and I come from that backcountry stock but I own a Ski-Doo dealership—

  PERRY: And I work sales for Pfizer.

  HUTCHINS: Anyway, we weren’t finding shit, and it was hot, and then we caught a whiff of something—

  PERRY: Not the smell like you’d think. Not a dead smell, exactly—a sourdough smell with a pickling brine.

  HUTCHINS: Still nasty, though, in its way. Real strong. We thought maybe it was an animal or something, sometimes feral hogs have a stink like you wouldn’t believe. So we went looking out—

  PERRY, AFTER A DEEP BREATH: That’s when we found the body.

  HUTCHINS: But it weren’t like no body you’ve seen.

  PERRY: It didn’t even look like a body. It was just this…white mound, this hump there tucked away under the roots of a cypress tree, and I thought, shit, okay—

  HUTCHINS: Tell you what it reminded me of—when I was a kid we had goats, because you could rent the goats out to rich folks to eat the poison ivy and sumac and stuff off their property, and the goats always attracted a shit-ton of flies, right? Some horseflies, too, big as buttons, and sometimes those flies would get stuck to the flypaper we hung up around the little goat barn. If it was really wet out, though, those flies on the flypaper would get moldy. Whole paper would—shoot, maybe it was the glue they used. But the flies would mound together and the mold, the fungus, would cover them in this powdery business and break them down—you’d see the legs folded in and the eyes broken out of their buggy heads, the wings would either be falling off or be mashed down in with the rest of the moldy mess.

  PERRY: The big difference here was that this…pile had something growing up and out of it.

  HUTCHINS: Like mushrooms. Weird ones you find in bad mulch.

  PERRY: To me they looked like—you ever see crab eyes? Eyestalks, I think they call them.

  HUTCHINS: Yeah, that’s right, these were like that. Except…popped at the end. Like zits you squeezed open.

  PERRY: Like something had come out of them.

  * * *

  —

  TABES AND CASSIE got into PPE suits and headed off to see the body.

  There it sat under a cypress. A round, human shape under siege by a mound of fungus. She could see clothing under there. Features, ghostly behind the rime of mold. The shape of the person was one of penitence: a man or woman kneeling in supplication. The wet, loamy ground underneath the body had a starburst pattern of striated white mold that had crept out underneath, like it was looking for a new home.

  Meaning, a new host.

  As the men had said, tubules stood at odd angles, thrust up from the moldering mound—some tall, some not. They looked like ascomata, or fruiting bodies. Sessile, like barnacles. Fleshy, like fingers without bones. Likely as a way to disperse its load of spores in order to spread itself: a common way for fungus to reach new areas. Something had come out of them, Perry said.

  That looked to be accurate.

  Already Cassie began to construct the order of events: Someone came out here and died for reasons unknown. Overdose, heart attack, heatstroke, snakebite. And the corpse sat in an area known for being hot and moist, a perfect cauldron for fungal growth. And so, fungus grew.

  Cassie was not a forensic pathologist, but she knew well enough that an unattended body began to break down easily under the onslaught of insects, bacteria, and mold. But this was something beyond that—a veritable fungal metropolis. She idly wondered:

  Could the man have died from a fungal infection, and what was growing out of him was just more of the same?

  No way to know, yet. She wasn’t trained to perform an autopsy. Martin was, but Martin was in a hospital bed.

  Still, this guy probably died of normal, natural causes.

  End of story, right?

  So why was she here?

  Who was this person and why did it matter?

  “We’re going to need to extract the body,” Cassie said to Tabes. “You’ll need officers trained in PPE. Just in case there’s some nasty bug in there we don’t know about. Which also means the two men who found the body should be taken into quarantine and given a once-over. I don’t expect anything, as they didn’t touch the body, but just the same, we can’t be too cautious. And I don’t know if you’ve got anywhere to relocate the body, but we’ll need cold storage—”

  “We have cold storage at the ranger station,” Tabes said.

  Under her suit’s mask, Cassie arched an eyebrow. “Why would you need that?”

  Tabes explained: “About a hundred NPS sites—National Park Service—got cold storage freezers. Mostly for film and photograph preservation. The film degrades, especially in hot or humid areas. But we sometimes use them for
other things, too—if we want to preserve an animal carcass, for instance, if we suspect rabies or something.”

  “Fine. We’ll need it. You got people trained on protection suits, yes or no?”

  “I’m trained, and I can get some folks from Naples, couple hours away. That okay?”

  “It’ll do.”

  * * *

  —

  HOURS LATER, THE sun at its peak, Tabes took Cassie to the ranger station up north, in Ochopee. The ground was dry here—they were able to take a small ruggedized golf cart from the waterway a mile south. The station sat under hanging moss, and out back was a little overgrown airfield carved out of the marsh. The body had been brought back here by officers trained in PPE suits, bringing the corpse back to cold storage until Cassie could figure out where it had to go from here.

  Cassie got out another disposable PPE suit and climbed into it, taking extra time to check for gaps and breaches. She didn’t expect she’d need it—this wasn’t Ebola, for fuck’s sake—but something about all this bothered her. Better to be safe.

  The cold storage was not inside the ranger station, but rather built as a steel shed outside. Tabes, also in a suit, unlocked the freezer, and a rush of cold steam released as they stepped into the half dark. The small room thrummed with the freezer mechanism that kept it below freezing. (To Cassie it felt like a precious escape: She had never wanted to be a Popsicle so badly, before, until she stepped into the fetid sweatbox that was the Florida Fucking Everglades.) Tabes turned on the lights. Fluorescents buzz-clicked to life.

  There, on a table, sat what was once a human body.

  Male, by the look. Older. Maybe fifties, sixties, though what had happened to the body maybe distorted her perceptions on that.

  The body lay facedown on the table. What looked like arms and legs sat folded up underneath. The man’s head, too, was bent downward, crumpled under in a way that didn’t even seem possible. The dead body reminded her of that. An origami boulder: a piece of paper mashed into a crumpled ball. Taken from its place in the swamp, the body had lost its penitence and was now just a confused, collapsed pile.