Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  It was then that Roger stepped in. “If I may? Say something, I mean.”

  Stover nodded. Matthew did, too.

  “Pastor Matt, you’re not a hunter, I take it.”

  “No. I’ve never been.”

  “But surely you know some who do hunt. In your congregation?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Me, I came up hunting. It’s a venerable tradition where I’m from—I grew up closer to Wabash, you see. And we always hunted, even from an early age. Me, my brother Merle, my sister May. And we did it not for the trophies, but for the meat, the skins, the tallow—shit, my grandmother used to make blood sausages from the deer blood, and Daddy, well, he set up a nice cool part of our cellar where he could age venison, and oh, man-oh-man—” Roger kissed his fingers. “It was sublime. Best steaks you ever had—now, something like that would go for twice what you’d pay for beef.”

  “Sounds like you had something special growing up.”

  “I did, I really did. Now, I take your point about all this. With all the news of school shootings and the like—and then Ozzy here brings out not just a nice hunting rifle but something that looks like you’d see it in a soldier’s hand out there in Afghanistan or some other hellhole country, I see your problem. And I’m with you, a little. I don’t take to these black rifles. You give me a good Remington 700 and I don’t need a clip of fifty rounds to take out a buck or knock the shit out of a feral pig. Some of these ammosexuals—no offense, Ozzy—” And here the big man just shrugged it off, showing just how much leeway Roger had to say these things. “—these ammosexuals will blow two hundred rounds on target practice like they’re eating popcorn, and I see that looking a little strange to you.”

  “You’re…not wrong,” Matthew said, still feeling the unmerciful stares of Hiram, Danny, and Ozark Stover, all of whom he felt closing in on him like they were a pack of wolves. Meanwhile, Bo stood off to the side, looking confused and angry.

  “Here’s what I’ll offer you—I’ll take you and Bo out, we’ll do some proper hunter safety, maybe get both of you a license at the end of it. I’ll get you feeling more comfortable with a gun, and get you feeling more comfortable seeing him with a gun, too. Until then, he’ll stay away from firearms. How’s that sound?”

  “That sounds just fine,” Matthew said. He wasn’t sure that it did or didn’t, but he knew a compromise when he heard one. A small voice inside him asked why he was considering compromising on the parenting of his child, but at the same time, it was hard to deny Roger’s reasoning and offer. “I’ll take you up on that.”

  “Dad,” Bo said angrily, storming down. “You can’t do this, I don’t wanna wait—”

  “Hey,” Stover said. Voice going off like dynamite down in a mine. Bo froze up. “Your daddy decided what’s what. Now you wanna keep coming back here and working for me, you listen to him. Go on. Take the cart back.”

  The boy had nothing else to say.

  “Go on,” Matthew said, but his son was already walking away. Everyone stayed silent as they watched the boy mount the cart and take it back up through the woods.

  With that, Stover snarled a happy chuckle. “Gentlemen, let’s shoot.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY GAVE HIM ear protectors. Matthew stared down the barrel as the gun rest cradled the front end of the Skirmish rifle. No scope on this one—they said to just use the front sights. So he did, staring down that long steel channel, blinking away sweat. And then—

  He pulled the trigger and expected it to kick like a horse, but Stover was right—it felt like a soft push. With every trigger pull, the gun tugged and sent another injection of lead toward the target. Pop, pop, pop, pop. One round after the next, bullets kicking off, the air stung with the scent of what smelled like burning balloons. Stover told him it was a thirty-round magazine, and after every shot they applauded him louder, and he could hear the big man bellowing, “Keep going, empty it, goddamnit!” And so Matthew kept pulling that trigger, pop, pop, pop, until on the thirty-first pull the trigger just went click.

  When he was done, Stover and Hiram were whooping with laughter and applause—they pulled the rifle out of his hand and mussed his hair. Stover clapped him so hard on the back he thought some of his teeth might be knocked out. Hiram sidled up to him and said in his ear, “Cherry popped. Feels like nothing else, a gun like that in your hand. That power? Mercy.”

  Ozark told Danny to go get the target, see how they did.

  The tall man walked off—loping like a lazy hound—and snatched the target with a swiping arm spring-loaded with impatience, and then he made the long and lazy journey back. Stover harangued him, “Faster, Danny, come on, put a little mustard on those dogs.”

  Finally, he brought the target back.

  Matthew saw now—the target itself was just a black outline, but at the head, someone had printed out a black-and-white photo.

  It was the face of President Nora Hunt.

  The target was riddled with holes.

  About fifteen of them.

  All outside the actual outline of the target itself.

  “Looks like you missed the bitch,” Stover said, clucking his tongue. “Oh well, we’ll get her next time.”

  I’m not comfortable with this, Matthew thought. A special kind of shame picked at him—the pinching feeling inside him made all the worse by the fact he not only didn’t hit a darn thing, but most of his shots didn’t even hit the paper.

  Then Hiram said, “Ah-ah-ah. Looky here.”

  He lifted the paper and got behind it, poking his pinkie through. It emerged like an earthworm from dirt—

  Right through President Hunt’s ear.

  Wiggle, wiggle.

  “Hell, Preacher,” Stover said. “You hit her after all! Look at that. Only took off her ear, sure, but maybe that’ll make her stand up and listen harder with the other one.” He winked.

  Matthew in a low voice asked:

  “This is all just fun and games, right?”

  “Of course it is, Preacher. Of course it is. Come on, let’s go pull the pig out of the ground. Time to eat.”

  They tried everything to move those walkers, they tried

  Blockades, fire, loud noises, digging trenches and shit

  @RandomPedo88

  [threaded tweets]

  But you know what they haven’t tried yet?

  ME with a bumpstock AR-15 going POP POP POP like Call of Duty

  Put them bitches down or walk them into an oven

  @RandomPedo88

  [threaded tweets]

  Kill them or they kill us

  That’s how it always is

  @RandomPedo88

  3127 replies 4298 RTs 9788 likes

  JULY 3

  Lone Tree, Iowa

  THE FLOCK MARCHED THROUGH FIELDS of corn and soy, past ambling cows and massive circular bales of hay that looked like they could be used to seal up some strange Midwest Messiah’s tomb.

  By now, the flock—the walkers themselves—numbered 325. With them came the shepherds, over a hundred. And with them came more state troopers—who traded off to new troopers every time they crossed the border to a different state—and a brand-new presence in the form of Homeland Security. That was hard to avoid, now. The theft of the human remains and the discovery of the package that had been sent to Nessie Stewart made it clear that this was at least in part a problem for law enforcement. The FBI conducted their investigation outside the flock, and with the flock—

  Well, that meant HomeSec.

  * * *

  —

  MEETING TIME. ANOTHER wheel-spinning meeting where they would attempt to figure out how to move forward, but where no progress was made as everyone jockeyed for position. In the CDC trailer sat: Benji, Sadie, Cassie Tran, and an iPad on a metal C
ompass stand that featured Loretta Shustack, conferencing in on video.

  Sitting there, too, was the man who HomeSec brought on to oversee the agency’s dealings—a “liaison” named Dale Weyland. Weyland looked like an aging quarterback, his body in the midst of that all-too-easy transition from hard muscle to marshmallowy fat. They called him The Warden, the way he attended to the whole group like they were all his prisoners.

  Weyland sat in his chair like a man comfortable in his discomfort—he eased backward, arms folded across his chest, eyeing up everyone who sat literally across from him at the table. Benji thought of him as the enemy, though maybe that wasn’t fair. It was biased and unhelpful. Just the same, he assumed Weyland thought of them the very same way.

  “I’m just gonna put this out there,” Weyland said, “before we get into some long-winded discussion like we do here day after day after day. It’s over. Or will be, soon.”

  Benji and the others shared a look.

  Loretta said nothing. And that was as telling as anything.

  “I don’t follow,” Benji said, gritting his teeth. Even though he feared he followed it quite well. “What is over, exactly?”

  Weyland sighed in a way that said, Do I really have to do this song and dance? “This. You. The CDC’s EIS control over this operation.”

  “It’s not an operation,” Cassie hissed. “It’s a disease.”

  “Is it? Doesn’t seem that way to me, Miss Tran. To me, this looks like an attack on American people, on American soil. There are no other flocks, globally. It’s just us, here, those people, and those people out there are weapons. Human bombs.”

  Benji stiffened. “We know what you think, and it matters little how it looks to you, Dale. It matters how it looks to science—”

  “No, it matters how it looks to the people, and how they look to the president. And bad news, Banjo—” That was what Weyland called him sometimes. Banjo. The nerve of that prick. “She’s right now signing off on HomeSec control of this operation.”

  A chill passed among them. Sadie said: “Why?”

  Even before Weyland explained it, Benji already knew what he was going to say, and so he said it first.

  “Because she’s under siege,” Benji answered.

  Weyland nodded. “Yeppers. Politically, Creel is snapping at her heels. This…flock, as you call it, is a political weak point. It’s a fucking liability and Creel is going to keep sticking his spear right in that tender spot, again and again. She’s bleeding her poll numbers.”

  “Ed Creel is a capitalist maniac,” Benji said.

  “That’s your opinion, one not necessarily shared by voters. He’s starting to sway the American people. You see his latest ad?”

  Benji nodded. In that advertisement, Creel appeared before a shitty American flag graphic, and along the Stars and Stripes someone had animated people walking in a straight line—a crude summation of the walking flock. As Creel went on and on about dangers to America “both foreign and domestic,” the walkers exploded one by one, leaving ragged holes vented in the fabric of the flag. Until there was nothing left but threads. Creel never even mentioned the walkers. He didn’t have to. “He was on CNN this morning, kept hitting Hunt on her—his words, though I don’t disagree with them—‘halfhearted, half-assed, half-a-brain policy regarding the sleepwalkers.’ He went on to say if he was elected he’d force a mandatory quarantine of the flock, and if that didn’t work, he’d drive them all into the ocean, and I quote, ‘like pigs.’ ”

  Like pigs. A not-too-subtle nod to the evangelicals, Benji suspected. Creel was by all evidence no kind of Christian, though he played at being one to get votes and campaign contributions. Here it seemed he was leaning on the story in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus exorcised a legion of demons and cast their bodies into pigs—and then the pigs rushed into the water of a nearby lake, drowning themselves.

  “A quarantine won’t work,” Cassie stressed.

  “And nobody cares,” Weyland countered. “C’mon. People don’t care about workable solutions. Ultimately, they just want someone with an answer. Right now, Creel has an answer, as brutal and as impossible as it is. Hunt looks like she has no answer—she’s been sitting on her hands. Is that because she’s playing politics? Maybe. Is it because this is a complicated situation that requires careful strategizing? Maybe. Maybe it’s both those things. Does it fucking matter? Not really.”

  “So politics is what this is all about?” Benji asked. “It’s the day before Independence Day. You’re going to pull political chicanery on a holiday?”

  “Chicanery, listen to you. Doctor Ray, forgive me, but politics is what it’s always about. You can’t be this naïve. Politics drives the bus. Tells the bus where to go, who to pick up, whether or not it should run over a line of kids crossing the road. And tomorrow being the holiday means we hit the news cycle tonight, leave people feeling a little better during their day off. Give them some comfort as they shovel hot dogs and dump beer into their mouths. That’s part of the political job. To give comfort.”

  Not to do the right thing, Benji thought, but to give comfort. Even when it wasn’t appropriate to do so. The way the man spoke about Americans with such disregard rankled Benji. Shovel hot dogs. Dump beer. He really did see them as animals to be led around by the nose.

  Again Benji’s faith in the system shuddered and seized.

  “What now?” Cassie said.

  Weyland finally sat up, leaning forward. “Time is it? Noon? I’m guessing we’ll see her announcement to time out with the afternoon news cycle. She’s meeting with Flores and Soules at this very moment to hash out the details.” Soules being Walter Soules, head of Homeland Security. “My understanding—and my recommendation—is that EIS will be taken off.”

  Loretta objected: “We at least want ORT back. Robbie Taylor is in Africa, but we can have him back—”

  “The CDC had its shot,” Weyland said. “I’m not inclined to give you another. You can take that up with someone else, but it won’t be part of my recommendation.”

  Loretta looked pissed. Benji wanted her to growl, get mad, swing for the fences—be the Immovable Object she had always been. But immovable as her reputation was, it didn’t change the fact she had a job to do, and that job was at the mercy of superiors who did not always share her expertise in matters.

  “Best deal I’ll cut,” Weyland continued, “is that we will consult with you about new quarantine procedures. Otherwise, the presence that will accompany the flock will be purely military—National Guard or army—and the shepherds will be ejected and kept away, as they’re a destabilizing presence of protest—”

  “Why military?” Sadie asked. “Why not police? We already have some state trooper presence—”

  “Because the flock constantly crosses state lines,” Benji said, explaining it before Dale could. “Am I right?”

  Dale nodded. “Bingo, Banjo. Besides, you want soldiers on this. Cops are…listen, we work with cops, but a lot of those guys are a little trigger-happy these days. Military guys are rock-solid. They’re pros. These are guys who have been to Fallujah, Kandahar. They can hack this.”

  “This is a mistake,” Benji protested. “It’s setting a dangerous precedent as to how we handle future epidemics and outbreaks—”

  “We’re lucky this doesn’t seem to be an outbreak. That were the case, Hunt’s laxity on asserting our authority here would mean we’d all have whatever diarrhea plague or monkey flu was in play.” Weyland sighed. “I get it. You think I’m the bad guy here. I appreciate that. Nobody wants to be me. Nobody wants to be the asshole who has to make the hard decisions.”

  Benji wasn’t so sure about that. Weyland seemed all too comfortable in his position. The man was glad to be the particular asshole he was.

  Dale continued: “Look at it this way. Every one of us is a hammer in search of a nail. We each have
our jobs, our organizations, our skill sets—you find and investigate disease, so to you, this is a disease. But my job is to protect the homeland from threats inside and out. And those walkers? They’re a threat. Maybe they don’t mean to be. Maybe they do. But each one of them is gone, whoosh, wiped.” He passed the flat of his hand in front of his eyes like he was blanking a slate. “They’re not in there anymore. And what’s replaced them is something we don’t understand. Something that can’t be cut, that won’t bleed. Something that pops like a cork soon as you apply a little pressure. What happens if they all go off at once? And how big will the flock get before that happens? Day by day, you get another dozen mummies joining the mummy parade—how long will that go, you figure? Another hundred? Three? Five? A thousand? Maybe it keeps going and going until we got a small city’s worth of walkers gumming up everything, blocking roads, ready to blow, like a bunker-buster bomb of human meat. People want something done. So finally, Hunt’s doing something.”

  “They’re not weapons,” Benji asserted. “They are people.”

  “Terrorists are people, too. Dictators and despots and enemy soldiers, they’re all people, pal. And they’re still dangerous as hell.”

  “You’re out of line.”

  “And you’re out of a job. Or will be soon enough.”

  “Loretta,” Benji said, turning his plea to the video screen.

  “This is what it is,” she said, her voice stern. “I’ve done what I can and I will continue to push. But we continue to search for evidence of a pathogen and find nothing. At the base level that means our role here is increasingly in question, and this continues to look more and more like a situation of national security. Though the origin of this may be political, that doesn’t change our overall ineffectiveness to understand this phenomenon—or to put a halt to it.” Finally she said, “I’m sorry, Benjamin.”