Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “What happens to you?”

  “I guess I go. I guess we all do.”

  She shook her head. “No way. Fuck that. I won’t go. I won’t leave my sister. I won’t leave Nessie behind. I made her that promise and I’m sticking to it.”

  “We’ll figure it out. We’ll find a way.”

  Even the hot summer sun couldn’t stop the chill that ran through her. She’d tear it all down if they tried to take her from her sister. Suddenly, not only did her camera feel heavy…

  …but so did the handgun in her backpack. The one Zig gave her. She still had it. Loaded and ready to go.

  “I’m sure they won’t do it today,” Arav said, sounding to her like he was trying to force a chipper attitude. “It’s the holiday. Or almost.”

  “Tomorrow is the Fourth of July?”

  He nodded. “It is.”

  “So today’s the third.”

  “That’s usually how the calendar works.”

  “Smart-ass,” she said (with the hint of a smile). “Then assuming that linear time is still in working order, looks like I have made another journey around the angry ball of fire in the sky.”

  “What?”

  “I’m eighteen, dude. It is my birthday.”

  “Happy birthday!” His face brightened for a moment before darkening anew as he looked down at her iced tea. “Iced tea is not a good present.”

  “It’s great, I love—” In the distance, something caught her eye. Movement by the front of the flock. By her sister. “Goddamnit.”

  “What?” Arav asked.

  There, she saw that woman, the one with the buzz-sawn haircut and the scars on her head and the lumberjack body. The one who supposedly took down that gun-wielding crackpot back in Indiana—that bitch was there by her sister, running a brush through Nessie’s hair as they walked together.

  “No, oh hell no,” Shana said, forcefully foisting the iced tea off on Arav before breaking into a run. She bolted toward her sister and as she got closer to the flock, she started yelling to the woman, “Hey! Hey. Get away from my sister!”

  The woman’s head jerked up.

  Shana skidded to a halt about five feet away. She moved herself in parallel to her sister, all the while snatching the hairbrush out of the other woman’s hand.

  “You leave her alone.”

  “I was just brushing her hair, Shana.”

  “Who told you my name?”

  “You did.”

  “I did not.” She felt suddenly flustered. “And if I did that doesn’t mean you have permission to use it.”

  “But it’s your name.” The woman held up both hands. “I’m sorry. I saw you hadn’t been out to your sister yet today, I know you like taking photos and being with that young buck from the CDC, so I thought I’d help—”

  “Ew, are you some kind of stalker? I was just…busy, okay? I was busy taking pictures and—and I would’ve gotten to brushing her hair and everything, all right?” She really hadn’t been out to see her sister yet today. This was the first day in weeks she hadn’t made it part of her routine. Why? Because she wanted to go take photos? Stupid! “It’s none of your business. You leave us alone.”

  Now Arav caught up, panting as he did. And here came Mia, too, trailed by a few other shepherds—Aliya among them. Suddenly, their voices rose in a cacophony against the woman—what was her name again? Marcy. Marcy Reyes.

  “Marcy, you can’t be coming up in here messing with one of the walkers,” Mia said. “Not Nessie, not any of them.”

  “It’s a family thing,” Aliya argued. “A bonding thing.”

  A shepherd in the back, might have been Lucy Chao, said, “Did she say bondage?”

  “Bonding,” someone else corrected.

  Marcy offered a sad smile. She held up both hands as if pleading. “It’s just, the glow is strongest here at the front. Your sister burns bright, like a…like a star going supernova. I can hear it, too, like an angel’s song.”

  “Okay, Missus Cray-Cray,” Mia said, stepping between Marcy and Nessie. “Time for you to go take a walk, you cuckoo bitch.”

  “I’m not crazy,” Marcy said. “I don’t think I’m a bitch, I mean, I guess I might be sometimes—”

  “Shoo. Get out of here. Go bother somebody else. You ain’t got nobody here and nobody here got you.”

  With that, Marcy nodded and walked off, finding her way to the shoulder of the road and standing there as the flock and the shepherds passed her by. Shana watched her go.

  * * *

  —

  FACT: MARCY REYES was weird.

  Okay, maybe that wasn’t a fact-fact, but it sure felt like a fact to Shana. Yes, the lady maybe saved them by finding that redneck chode and making him shoot himself in the ass, but that didn’t earn her a place here. The shepherds didn’t have a code, exactly, but thing of it was, you were expected to be here for a reason. And that reason was: You had a person on the inside, someone who walked with the flock. A sister, a mother, a little brother, a best friend, jeez, even a neighbor. Someone! Anyone.

  But Marcy didn’t have anyone.

  She was just here.

  Because, she said, they all glowed.

  Which, again, was fucking weird.

  Didn’t help that she said it with this kind of culty gleam in her eye, this crazypants reverence. She said the walkers were angels. Shana knew they weren’t angels. Angels weren’t real. What was real was her sister and all the others, and making them angels made them not people, and to hell with all that.

  They were people.

  Not glowy angels, not weapons, not part of some political agenda, not victims of some terrorist plot. They were people. Why they were walking, she didn’t know. How they got this way, she didn’t know. And at this point, Shana didn’t much care. She cared about her sister. That was it.

  So to hell with Marcy Reyes.

  Even though, yeah, okay, sometimes Shana felt bad for her. Because she didn’t have anybody meant, well, she didn’t have anybody. Nobody was on her side because they all agreed she was…kinda weird. Marcy slept in the backs of people’s pickup trucks at night or during the day when they let her—she paid her way in gas, so people said. There were other stories, too. Like the ones that said before this, she was a shell of a person, one who got beaten half to death by some gangbangers who jumped her. They pulped her skull but she didn’t die. So they had to…rebuild her head.

  Hence the scarring.

  But that didn’t explain why right now she felt fine.

  Again, story went that Marcy said it was the walkers. The “glowing angels” made her feel better. Which admittedly wasn’t the weirdest thing ever—no, that would be the walkers themselves—but it still made Nessie and the others seem inhuman, like they were magic or some shit.

  They weren’t magic.

  They weren’t anything.

  They were just people.

  Weren’t they?

  * * *

  —

  MOST OF THE crowd had died back, leaving Shana with her sister—and with Arav and Mia, who remained. Shana brushed her sister’s hair, admittedly a little too roughly, but she couldn’t help it.

  (And a darker voice inside her said: Not like Nessie can complain anyway. Accompanying that was a sudden surge of anger about her sister where Shana screamed inside her own head, Wake up, wake up, wake up. That anger did not come alone, of course; it came accompanied by what was now the third wave of guilt.)

  (Then, hey, why not more anger? Anger at her father for not getting out of that damn RV to brush Nessie’s hair, anger at Marcy for stirring this pot, anger at Dale Weyland for making her feel anxious that she might be taken from her sister, and for the kicker, anger at herself for everything under the sun.)

  (Shit!)

  “Where’d she go?” Arav asked
, talking about Marcy.

  “Who cares,” Mia said. “Good riddance. Lady’s kind of a freakshow.”

  “Maybe she can’t help it,” Shana said.

  “What, you’re defending her now?”

  “No! No. She can go eat dirt for all I care. I’m just saying—she seems kinda, I dunno, fucked up. Crazy people don’t mean to be crazy.”

  Mia waved it off. “Whatever. She seems in control of her faculties and whatever to me. Besides, whether she controls it or not, I don’t wanna be around it, and you don’t mess with another shepherd’s walker.”

  “They’re not property,” Arav said.

  That earned him a sharp look from Mia. And a curious one from Shana. Where’s he going with this?

  “Nobody said they’re our property,” Shana said.

  “Yeah, Ravi,” Mia snapped. “I’m just saying, family is family, people you love are people you love. Marcy has no one here and shouldn’t…like, grab on like she’s a fucking fangirl or some shit.”

  “Maybe,” Arav said, “she’s just trying to find her people.”

  Mia sniffed. “Go find them somewhere else, I say.”

  “I don’t have people here, not really. Do I not belong?”

  Shana reached out to Arav. “That’s not what she means, and you know it.” Her hand sought out his, but he pulled away.

  “I’m a brown-skinned man in America, I know what it’s like not to belong. Maybe cut her a little slack, huh?” Suddenly, he bristled. “It doesn’t matter. Who knows how long we’ll be here, anyway.” With that, he turned heel and headed off in the opposite direction from Marcy Reyes.

  “The hell was that about?” Mia asked.

  “I dunno. It’s nothing.”

  “You two having a spat?”

  “We’re not—it’s not a spat—and we’re not ‘we two.’ He’s him and I’m me and that’s that.”

  “Oh, pshh. C’mon, girl. You and he been all hand-holdy and shit.” She fluttered her lids and lashes. “Oh, Arav. Oh, Shana. Let’s hold hands. Should we kiss? No, no, we mustn’t. I’m too young. You’re too old. It’s like some real Romeo and Juliet business, except like, if Romeo and Juliet sucked really really bad.”

  “Nice.”

  Mia blew her a kiss.

  Shana was about to explain that she and Arav were from two different worlds anyway, and he wasn’t even really a shepherd, and by the way she was now eighteen years old so how old she was didn’t matter anyway, thank you very much, and maybe just once Mia could take her nosy-nose and stick it up her own ass for once instead of up everybody else’s.

  But she didn’t get to say it.

  The sound of an engine cut her off.

  It was distant, at first, the sound of a dragon rumbling awake. It growled through the ground, up through her feet and into her teeth.

  “What’s that shit?” Mia asked, raising her voice to be heard.

  Shana didn’t answer, just gave a bewildered shrug.

  Louder and louder it came. Now she could pinpoint from where—behind them. Coming up fast, too. She could feel it in her chest.

  And then, like that, here came a motorcycle. A Harley Fat Boy, cherry red with fire-eyed skulls painted on the side. On it sat a bony Jack-Skellington-looking dude, arms out, head back, mirrorshades reflecting the acid-washed sky. An acoustic guitar hung from a strap on his back, and lashed to the seat behind him was a black leather duffel.

  The dude drove up to the head of the flock, pulled the motorcycle over, dropped the kickstand, and hopped off. Fetching his bag, he gave the bike a grumpy kick and it fell over with a bang. The look on his face was one of churlish pride—the pride of a child who just took a hunk of dump from his diaper and gleefully painted the wall with it.

  “That guy looks familiar,” Shana said.

  “He should,” Mia said.

  “Why?”

  “That’s Pete Corley.”

  “Who?”

  Mia just shook her head. “Shit, now you makin’ me feel old.”

  * * *

  —

  WEYLAND WAS HOVERING. Benji sat inside the trailer, and Sadie was outside, supposedly on the phone with Firesight. Weyland was in here like a test proctor monitoring students for cheating. It made it hard for Benji to continue digging into his nanotechnology theory. He was tempted to throw caution to the wind and continue to do the research full-facedly in front of Dale Weyland, believing wholly that the man was too much an ape to suss out what Benji was looking at. But he also knew it would be a mistake to underestimate him.

  So instead he continued to look over Clade Berman’s scans—the eruptive, concussive tears in so many of his cells.

  He used the Black Swan satphone to do it—not using the projectors, but keeping the images on the screen.

  Weyland said, “That the device?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Black Swan. That your access point to it?”

  Benji hesitated. “It is.”

  “So it’s not bullshit? It really works?”

  Before Benji could answer, the phone pulsed green, answering Weyland’s question. “It does, yes.”

  “HomeSec should have access.”

  “You do. Through the CDC.” Did the man really not know this? “Black Swan has already enabled the FBI and Homeland Security to intercept a handful of crises.”

  “We should have direct access. Onsite.”

  “Okay, if you say so.”

  Weyland sauntered over. Chest puffed out. Chin up, looking down the barrel of his nose. “Lemme see this,” he said, reaching down and grabbing the Black Swan phone out of Benji’s hand. Benji didn’t resist; though he knew the phone was made of nigh-unbreakable glass, just the same he didn’t want to get into some preschooler pissing match with this oaf, the kind that might cause the phone to be dropped or damaged. Let him look at it.

  “You can just ask me next time,” Benji said.

  “Ask? Ask. Huh. And here I thought you belonged to the Do-Whatever-the-Fuck-I-Want Club. You know. Longacre.”

  “I take your meaning, yes.”

  “You know, I’m gonna relish kicking your ass offsite. I don’t like you. I damn sure don’t trust you. You want real talk? You’re just like Hunt. A prevaricating agenda-hound. She’s a politician’s politician—she’ll say what she wants and do what she wants to maximize her advantage. Just like you with Longacre. Doesn’t matter what’s true, long as you keep playing your game.” He leaned in closer and affected a low, threatening voice. “In Creel’s America, won’t be room for people like you. Just loyalists. Truth-tellers.”

  Benji shrugged. “I suppose I’m not surprised you’re a Creel supporter. I am a little surprised you knew the word prevaricating, though.”

  Weyland’s hand shot out and grabbed Benji by the jaw. His grip was tight and the man’s face contorted into a rictus of anger.

  Dale snarled, “You motherf—”

  With that, a beam of light emitted from the Black Swan phone, striking him right in the eye. He cried out, blinking, the phone fumbling from his hand and into Benji’s lap.

  “Fucking fuck,” Weyland said, swiping at the air in front of him as if he were blinded by particulate matter and not a beam of powerful light.

  “It’s still a little buggy,” Benji said. “Sorry about that.”

  Weyland stood his ground, blinking. When his eyes seemed to adjust again he thrust a finger at Benji. “You’re an asshole.”

  All Benji offered in retort was an amused shrug.

  The trailer door opened behind Dale Weyland. In it stood Cassie, who waved Benji outside. He stood, casually, and walked past Weyland and said, in his own low voice: “If you ever touch me like that again, I’ll press charges. Because, thanks to Black Swan, I have our entire exchange recorded and saved. You do your job, I’ll do
mine.”

  He wasn’t sure that what he promised there was true—he had no evidence that Black Swan was recording all that it saw, though it was clearly listening to everything, and spatially aware. Certainly the fact that the machine intelligence seemed to come to his defense there indicated not merely that Black Swan was intelligent, but also that it had a personality.

  But that was a problem for another time.

  Now he was about to have a whole different problem.

  Once they were outside, away from the trailer, she said, “What was going on in there? Weyland giving you shit?”

  “As Weyland is wont to do. What’s up?”

  “I just spoke to Temson in Florida.”

  Harvey Temson: the chief pathologist working on the Garlin case. Florida required a local pathologist do autopsies, but Temson was working with the CDC on it. Benji knew him a little; met him at a couple of conferences. Good guy, if a little…antisocial.

  “Please tell me someone didn’t steal the body.”

  “No,” she said. “No, it’s his brain.”

  “Garlin’s brain? What about it?”

  “The fungus. It’s…in there. Like tree roots pushing through soft dirt.”

  He sighed, looking out over the walkers moving toward them on the horizon. “I suppose that’s to be expected. Soft tissue that’s accessible through outside cavities could play host to fungal colonization—”

  She pulled the image on her phone, and showed him. “This isn’t that.”

  He took a long look. She was right. He pinched and zoomed in, saw that the threads of the infection penetrated deep—like the roots of a plant, yes, like a kind of circulatory system. He pointed to the swollen, turgid tissue around those mycelial threads: “This looks like inflammation.”

  “Yeah, it created an intense inflammatory response. And scarring.”

  And that would only happen if Garlin were alive. Meaning, it did not happen postmortem. This was officially a fungal infection.

  “I think Garlin was infected for months,” she said.

  “Go on.”

  When she spoke, he could hear her voice trembling. Cassie was tough, she’d seen it all—so if something was scaring her, it was scaring him, too.