by Chuck Wendig
Behind the corpse, on the metal shelves, Cassie saw plastic bags, like freezer storage bags. Ziploc or a comparable brand. (She also spied two tubs of generic grocery store ice cream and a couple boxes of actual Popsicles—proving that the rangers here were using the cold storage for more than just film preservation and carcass storage.) Cassie took a pair of small scissors from her kit and snipped off the fungal stalks, placing them in bags. She took swabs, stains, and other samples.
(And now she shuddered at Benji’s onetime idea that the sleepwalkers were given over to some kind of cordyceps infection. Ants that fell to cordyceps did not look altogether unlike this man’s body. Dead, encased by mold, polyps rising out of the carcass and meant to spread its spores so it could live and conquer anew. Was that why Black Swan sent her here? Was this related, somehow? Or stranger still, was it something new? Worse, thinking about cordyceps put her back in the mind of zombies…they did call it the zombie fungus, after all.)
Cassie took DNA samples, blood samples—the blood was just a black, boggy molasses at this point, which was strange, to say the least. All the while, Tabes stood by the door, staring on in relative horror.
“I bet you’ve seen some shit,” Cassie said as she worked. “Ever seen anything like this?”
“I’ve seen my share of unpleasant things out here—I once saw a gator eating a feral pig, and a snake eating the gator. Once found a fawn—a white-tailed deer baby—nailed to a tree, disemboweled, its legs perfectly sawed off. Ants had found it. And we find bodies, too, sometimes. Airboat deaths, gator attacks, the occasional suicide.”
“Any of the bodies look like this?”
Tabes shook her head. “Hell no.”
* * *
—
CASSIE WAS OUT there for a couple of days. She headed back to the spot where they’d found the body, took some more swabs.
She took a trip to Everglades City for dinner, waiting to hear back on some results. She messily ate stone crab claws. Something satisfying, visceral and prehistoric, about cracking open something’s carapace to get at its meat inside. Her phone rang, and she pressed it between her shoulder and jaw as she worked at the claws. “Go.”
It was Benji.
“Cass, we have some preliminary findings.”
“Hit me, boss.”
“We know who the deceased is.”
Is? she thought. Or was? Did you lose your identity upon dying, or was who you were bound up with the meat sack you inhabited?
That was a philosophical conversation for another time.
“Whozit?” she asked.
“It belongs to Jerry Garlin.”
“Garlin.” That name. Familiar. Wait. “Like, of Garlin Gardens? Heir to the Garlin amusement empire?”
“The very same.”
“Why would a millionaire—”
“Billionaire.”
“Why would a billionaire be out here, dead in the Everglades?”
Benji sighed. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Does the FBI know anything? Their guess should probably be better than mine.”
“If they knew, they weren’t telling. There’s something else.”
“I never like the sound of that. ‘There’s something else.’ That’s foreboding language, Benji, you’re scaring me.”
“The fungus,” he said. “It’s something new.”
“New. Like Candida auris?” A few years back they’d found a drug-resistant strain of Candida. Came out of Southeast Asia. Nothing would touch it. Rare, but deadly.
“Not yeast, but…yes, something new.”
“Is it what killed our mill—sorry, billionaire?”
“Too early to say.”
“How does this figure into the flock?” she asked.
“I don’t know that it does. It may be something different. Unrelated. Black Swan isn’t here to show us connections, necessarily—each thing it shows us needn’t be related to the last thing.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Come back to the flock,” he said. “I need you here. If Loretta deems this important, she’ll put somebody on it.”
“You got it,” Cassie said.
But a feeling deep in her gut told her: This was all far from over.
* * *
—
ONCE AGAIN, AN airport. Cassie leaned back in her seat at the gate, her headphones on—a pricey set of noise-canceling Sennheisers because goddamnit, if music didn’t matter then nothing mattered. The latest and last Tribe Called Quest bounced and bounded and flowed in her ears.
Her mind worked alongside the music.
She continued worrying at the question of what was happening. Both here in Florida and with the flock. Did what happened here connect with what was happening with the sleepwalkers? As Benji noted, it could be separate. Black Swan’s predictions were not on a single axis. Just the same, the whole thing unnerved her—a man dead under a carpet of fruiting fungus, an ever-growing flock of sleepwalkers, a gunman in Indiana, a president who seemed unsure what to do with the walker flock. Even now, on the TV in the lounge, Cassie could see President Hunt giving another press conference, and again the leader of the free world seemed bound by indecision paralysis. Would she protect them? Would she attempt another forced—and surely failed—quarantine? Or would she continue on with this half-assed vigorous-shrug policy of watchful vigilance?
In her ears, Q-Tip moved into the hook of “Whateva Will Be.”
It felt like rope was sliding through their hands.
She wondered what happened when they ran out of rope.
And yet the world went on. Baseball and music and summer school, pickpockets and border disputes and budget discussions in Congress.
Whateva will be.
Just the same, her mind went back to that movie. Cassie remembered how Night of the Comet ended: The rain washed away the red comet dust and the world was over, left only to the few survivors and to the comet zombies.
“The fucked-up thing is, we weren’t originally called Gumdropper. We were Glimdropper,” Evil Elvis explained. “We named the band after a con, a confidence game. A Glim-Dropper is a fiddle scheme, right? A scam over a glim: a fake eye pretending to be lost, there’s a reward—blah blah blah. So. Why name the band after a scheme? Because music is the biggest con game of them all. Every record deal is a fucking scam. And every one of us musicians are con artists, too—Christ, have you met Pete [Corley]? He’ll rob you blind and sing about it later, and you’ll thank him for the privilege. As to why we’re now Gumdropper, instead? Because on the first poster advertising our first show, someone fucked up the ahh, whaddyacallit, the kerning on the letters spelling out our name, so it looked like Gumdropper, instead of Glimdropper. Pete said we stick with it, so we stuck with it, and now here we are. Just another con game, another wonderful rock-and-roll fuckup.”
—from “Behind the Music: Gumdropper,” in Spin magazine,
by Argus Roiland, 1994
JULY 1
Chelsea, New York City
IT’S A FUCKING CONSPIRACY AGAINST sleep. Pete Corley thought that as he lay there, sheets tangled around his ankles. The conspirators were many: the sounds of TV news, of the city outside, of a failing air conditioner, and the heat breathing its dragonsbreath past the A/C. Those only weakened him for the true conspirator: his own treasonous mind. Because now, oh ho ho, now he had thoughts, thoughts that ran around his head like dogs chasing cats chasing mice, all of them on a sweet cocktail of cocaine and shame, all to the tune of that God-fucked internet-spawned earworm: Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The antithesis to rock-and-roll. The song that was the beginning of the end.
But Jesus fuck, Astley still looked good these days, didn’t he? Meanwhile, Corley looked like he’d hit the wall going sixty miles an hour—his face had so many
lines he felt like a broken mirror.
Then he sat up.
“Shit goddamnit shit,” he said, his voice froggy. Though the proper Irish had long gone from his voice, there was a ghost of the lilt in words like shit, which threatened to become shite any minute now, thank you.
“Shh,” Landry said, chastising him from the end of the bed. The young black man—with shoulders broad as the side of a billboard and a waist that fit perfectly in Corley’s spidery long-fingered hands—stared ahead at the flat-screen.
Corley winced and on the screen could see the blurry shapes of what he expected to see: people walking. Hundreds of them. He pinched the sleep boogers out of his eyes. Clarity resumed with a few more blinks. Now he noticed: It’s not just dozens. It’s more than that. Way more.
It’s as if Landry anticipated the thought. He said, “They just hit three hundred.”
“Miles per hour?”
“Shut up, no,” Landry said, laughing a little. “Smart-ass. Three hundred walkers.” Then he added: “Some people are calling them pilgrims, now.”
“Pilgrims.” Corley snorted. “That’s rich.”
He felt around for his vaporizer—there it was, on the nightstand. Next to his phone. Which showed, of course, a screen full of text messages. Mostly from his wife. Some from his kids. Shit goddamnit shit. He turned the phone over (I don’t want to look at you right now), then grabbed the vaporizer and moved to bring it to his lips—
“No, uh-uh, put that nasty thing away,” Landry said, arching an eyebrow. “Not in here.”
“It’s safe.”
“I don’t care. No smoking in here.”
“It smells like cotton candy,” Corley said sweetly, showing a big, toothy-ass smile.
“Ooh yeah, that’s real manly. Next thing I know, we’ll be having elementary school kids knocking on my door thinking my apartment is a fuckin’ carnival. Mm-mm. No thank you.”
Corley grunted and reluctantly placed the vaporizer back on the nightstand. He leaned back against the headboard, his ribs standing out like the bars of a xylophone. “Now, now, you can’t leverage me with your toxic masculinity,” he said with some cheek.
Landry Pierce looked over his shoulder with a dubious face. “Uh-huh. I’m just saying, I don’t want you sucking Tron’s dick and filling my apartment with candy smells.”
“I could suck your dick.”
“You did enough of that last night. I’m watching this.”
Corley scowled and looked down. His own cock was hard as a tent stake. Hm. Damnit. “You don’t have to watch that. It’s on all the damn time.”
“Because people are interested. Because this is interesting.”
“Pilgrims,” Corley said again. “Everyone’s always got to make it religious. As if God would sanction any of this.”
“Maybe it is. Maybe they’re all walking toward something.”
“A cliff.” Just like the rest of us.
“Don’t be cynical. This could be something…meaningful.”
“And how do you figure that? That, ahh, that reverend or preacher from the radio, he said they’re, ahh, what did he call it? The Devil’s puppets. Something like that? The comet came and blah-blah-blah Revelation, Wormwood, the seven seals are opening—” He barked like a seal now, slapped the backs of his hands together. “Probably something-something punishment for all the faggots like us in the world.”
“Nobody knows you’re gay, and don’t say the f-word, it’s rude.”
“Yeah, well, I’m rude. And not nobody. You know.”
“Your wife doesn’t know.”
And there it was. His dick went slowly, surely soft. Talking about Lena was like an iceberg—and as such, his cock sank like the Titanic. “My wife has enough trouble. She doesn’t need me doing that to her.” He smacked his lips together. His mouth tasted musky. “And my kids, jeez.” The kids, Connor and Siobhan.
Landry stood up then. His body language told the story: arms crossed in front of him, jaw tight, the tendons in his neck standing out like the strings on an upright bass. Landry was mad.
(Landry was hot when he was mad.)
“No, you don’t need your career taking that hit.”
“Well, yeah. That’s a thing I’ve got to consider, innit? What? It is. The world wasn’t ready back when we were getting airplay, and it isn’t ready now. I mean, look at all this shit.”
Landry narrowed his eyes. “The world was ready for Bowie.”
“Bowie may have fucked Jagger, but he married Iman.”
“Freddie Mercury, then.”
“Freddie was bi, too, and besides, he was a genius. He was good enough that he could’ve come out and said he fucked houseplants or goats and—y’know, c’mon. That four-octave range? Men and women and all the people of all the genders melted into puddles of pure bubbly sex juice when they heard that voice.”
“Judas Priest, then. That man’s gay.”
“Rob Halford, yeah. Came out in…what, 1998?” He pretended like he didn’t know, but oh, he knew. Pete remembered that interview intimately. Halford saw a moment and seized it. A moment of freedom and escape as he didn’t so much come out of the closet as he kicked the door down and stomped out, screaming a rough rendition of “Breaking the Law,” or maybe “You’ve Got Another Thing Coming.” At the time, he thought, Maybe I can do that one day. But then he didn’t. He stayed in the darkness and the comfort of the closet. Then he got married. Then he had kids—and boy, that was a trick, wasn’t it. As time went on, the lie grew deeper, like a pit of quicksand. Farther he sank, harder it was to get out.
He knew Halford, not well. Corley’s band, Gumdropper, came up a decade later than Judas Priest did, and they weren’t really in the same circles—Priest was straight-up heavy metal, and Gumdropper threaded the sometimes uncomfortable needle between hard rock and pop-punk. A Rolling Stone reviewer in ’84 said of their debut, Imagine if Led Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols had an orgy, and the baby that resulted from it was then adopted by Steven Tyler and Joey Ramone, and that’s maybe, maybe what Gumdropper sounds like.
Corley always wanted to talk to Halford about it. The gay thing, not the music thing—really, musicians talking music was about the most insufferable, self-referential horse-cock you could get. His kingdom to talk about anything else with anyone else.
“See, Halford did it,” Landry said.
“Halford also found God and got sober, so that shows you how piss-poor his judgment is, yeah?”
“You’re a coward is what you are.” Landry waved that accusation around with an eyebrow waggle and a twist of his mouth.
“What? Pshh. Shut up. Come sit down. Watch your show.”
Landry moped but did as suggested.
Corley said, “So where’s this at, then? The walkers.” He gestured to the screen half-assedly, gesticulating with a crooked finger. On the TV, an aerial shot showed the herd of freaks moving through wide-open nothing. Fields of soybeans on one side, field of corn on the other.
“Iowa. About sixty miles outside Iowa City.”
“You think you could do that?”
“What, be one of them walkers? They don’t have a choice far as anybody can tell.”
Pete clucked his tongue. “Nah, nah, I mean, be one of them shepherd types. The people who go along with it. Just give everything up to go follow this flock-of-seagulls like they’re groupies following the Dead. Or worse, Phish.” He made a face. Phish. Jam-bands were a virus. “Could you do it?”
“If I had a loved one there, I would.”
“You would? Just throw it all away to walk and walk and walk.”
“They drive, too.”
“I know. A caravan of hopeless optimists.”
Landry sniffed. “You wouldn’t do it.”
“Join these shepherds? Nah. I don’t need to escape my life. It’s
a fair bit all right, this life. Nice house. Nice bank account. Nice you.”
“Nice wife, nice kids.”
“Lan, c’mon.”
“We could get married. It’s legal now.”
“Well. It shouldn’t be. They should’ve gone the other way with it. Made it illegal for heteros to get hitched, too. It’d be like—” He made an explosion sound with his mouth, brought his hands together as if to demonstrate the big bang of his mind exploding. “Boom. American utopia.”
“I might need to consider other options.”
“Lan, we have a good thing going here. Don’t piss all over it.”
Landry stared holes right into him. “Good thing? Yeah. Okay. It’s good. It’s real good. It’s also limited as fuck. You leave the safe little suburbs and roll up here in the big bad city like it’s Times Square in the 1970s and then you tell your wife you’re at band practice—”
“We are practicing. For the reunion!”
“—and instead you show up here and we screw like two ferrets in a sock for one night, maybe two. We don’t get dinner, but you tell me you love me. We don’t go out to a show or a movie or anything, but you lie to me and talk about how great I am for you and your music—”
“Oh, c’mon. We get takeout. And we watch movies. And you asshole, you are good for me. But I want to talk about our present, not our future.” The future is a sinkhole, anyway. That cliff…
Landry said abruptly, “You should go.”
“I don’t wanna fuckin’ go. I’m comfy.”
“And I got shopping to do.”
“Don’t lie. I’ll go and you’re gonna stay here and keep on watching this…fucking flock-of-freakshows shit-parade.” Anger burned in him suddenly and he knew it was childish but the desire to lash out at Landry was a stoked coal. “You know what this is? The walkers? It’s some kind of plague. A disease. You watch. Worse, it’s gonna be like, some terrorist bullshit. A bioweapon cooked up by mullahs in their cave labs—or stolen from one of our labs because I’m sure those aren’t locked down like they should be. You know it’s true, don’t give me that look. What happens when you try to stop those walkers, your so-called pilgrims? Right. They fucking detonate like bombs. That’s some terrorist business right there. It’s not the Apocalypse. It’s an attack.”