by Chuck Wendig
“Not Pete Corley famous,” Marcy said.
Sadie smirked. “Not many are.”
“Why did you want to talk to me? Did Doctor Ray send you?”
“Benji?” She laughed a little—if Marcy didn’t know better, she’d say it was a nervous laugh. But Sadie and Benjamin were…together, weren’t they? Far as Marcy had observed, they were. Which wasn’t unusual. Shepherds did a lot of hooking up out here. “No, I’m not here on his behalf, but here because of something he said to me.”
“Oh?”
“He said you experience the flock as a kind of…glow.”
Marcy kicked at some grass. “That’s right.”
“I’m just trying to figure out why.”
“I’ve thought a lot about that.”
“And what answer have you come to?”
“That it doesn’t matter.” Marcy saw that the other woman didn’t like that answer, so she explained: “I mean, it could be that I’m just delusional, right? Some whackadoo. Could be that my head got busted up so bad, I see things and hear things that aren’t there. Could be that they’re angels or spirits sent by God, or a god, or a whole pantheon of gods. I guess I settle on that one most, maybe because it makes me feel good, to think there’s something…out there. Something that isn’t me, watching over us.”
“Tell me about the glow. What does it look like?”
“It’s a…a bright, shining light around them. Like a halo, but not like you think about, not the Frisbee above their heads, but a proper…” She used her hands to demonstrate a whole-body radiance, to shape it like you would clay. “Glow.” She stiffened. “I’m not making much sense. I don’t have great words. I’m not a big talker, I know.”
A young man, a shepherd, buzzed by on a little moped, a couple of bags stuffed in the back basket. He waved as he passed, even though Marcy didn’t know his name. The shepherds now had a life of their own like that. An economy, an ecosystem, buzzing around like the bees on the flowers.
Sadie switched gears, pointing to her own face, but in a way to indicate Marcy’s—as if to say, You have some food schmutz here. “Mind if I ask what happened?”
She meant the scarring, obviously—the puckered fissure that ran across Marcy’s scalp, around her ear, to the top of her jaw.
“Got beaten up. Head pulped like a weeks-old Halloween pumpkin.” She sighed. The memory didn’t trigger anything in her, didn’t upset her. It felt more like an ugly burden than anything else—so she hauled that heavy suitcase out and dumped its contents as quickly and mercilessly as possible. “I was chasing down a couple tweakers who had stolen a bike. They weren’t local, I didn’t know them. White boys. Fake-Nazi-types. I was clumsy, too eager, I barged ahead. One was waiting in the shadows behind a Chinese restaurant dumpster, took me down with a bat. One hit to the head dropped me. Then he went at me with his boot, stomping down a few times.”
“God, I’m so sorry, Marcy.”
“I had severe brain bleeding so they had to…do some kind of cranial skull flap and release the pressure while also trying to reconstruct the skull. Almost lost my eye, too. That meant a cranioplasty with a titanium mesh-plate and some screws to hold it all together. Plus bone grafts. It was a long recovery. Got a couple infections, had to go back to the hospital. Was pretty brutal.”
Intense curiosity dawned on Sadie’s face. “The plate. Is it all…titanium?”
“No. It’s plastic, too, and—honestly, I forget what it’s called, but it’s some kind of mix of metals. Something and titanium. Flexible, they said.”
“Nitinol, maybe? Nickel and titanium?”
That sounded right, and Marcy said so.
“And the implant—you almost lost an eye, so some of it sits behind your eye, is that right? In and around the socket?”
Marcy tapped above her right eye. “Here. Above the bone. They said the implant was real close to my optic nerve, tried to tell me that’s why I was having such bad migraines. But I don’t have them anymore.”
“Why is that? Did they fix it?”
“No,” Marcy said, a big smile beaming bright. “I came here. I walked with the walkers. And the glow made it all better.”
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, BENJI could barely sleep. He was in yet another motel—this one, the Sunset Motel. The outside smelled like cheap beer. The inside smelled like mildew. Sadie had her own room and was in it now—though they’d been bunking up together more and more.
Sadie was, in fact, why he was presently plagued into restlessness.
Earlier, while talking to her, he’d had this…insane feeling about her. Something bubbled up inside him, effervescent and mad, and he wanted to tell her right then and there, I love you.
But he didn’t.
Because she said it first.
“I love you,” she said, unbidden. As if keyed into the way he was feeling. Maybe it was how he was looking at her. Maybe it was just some kind of…pure, soul-mingling serendipity, if such a thing existed.
“I…” He laughed, and he realized that was the wrong noise to make with his stupid mouth, so he quickly backpedaled over it. “I’m laughing because I wanted to say it, too, and wasn’t sure I should.”
“You should. You always should.” She paused. “Life is short, not long, Benjamin Ray. We should endeavor to say what we mean, always.”
“I love you, too,” he said, before she went back to her room.
That new love between them was a good thing. A nice thing.
A pure thing in all of this.
And that’s what bothered him. The world was…well, to be charitable, it was looking more and more like a shitshow. The fight between Hunt and Creel was nasty, with each of them bruising and bloodying the other in the press. China and Russia had begun rattling the sabers, specifically over America’s treatment of the flock—there were renewed talks of quarantining the country, stopping Americans from traveling overseas lest they bring this sleepwalker contagion to them. Worse, North Korea had begun frothing at the mouth, casually suggesting that the best way to handle the sleepwalker flock was for them to lob a couple of nuclear missiles at the United States. Which was likely impossible—that country couldn’t feed its citizens much less put together a cogent nuclear weapons program. But it still dialed up his worry. Tensions were high everywhere. People were anxious.
And in all of that, there was the flock. And the way Jerry Garlin died. Things were thrown into disarray, chaos, imbalance, and was that really a good time to fall in love? Benji told himself that certainly there existed no good time to fall in love, and certainly this time in history was better than, say, World War II, or World War I, or the Civil War, or the Dark Ages, or, or, or—and people then fell in love, didn’t they?
Still, it made him feel selfish.
And restless.
And alone.
Needing to occupy himself, he lurched up out of bed, grabbed the Black Swan phone, and in the dark pointed it at the wall. He told himself it was to go back to the investigation, to attempt to crack it, but in reality he knew it was because he felt very alone. Cassie had gone, now officiating the Garlin investigation. Sadie was in her room.
She’d failed to make any headway with Firesight. The nanotechnology company, owned by Benex-Voyager, did a lot of work for the Defense Department. Apparently, once they realized they were being drawn into a conversation surrounding the flock phenomenon, they threw up a wall of ice that wouldn’t melt. They refused to meet. Which made Benji suspicious. Could they have been involved? That seemed ludicrous. More likely they were seeking a way out of the conversation, hoping not to be tied to anything related to the sleepwalkers, praying they didn’t have to divulge any kind of classified technology. The walker flock was crawling with reporters; any sight of one of their executives meeting here could tank stock prices.
B
enji sat in the dark, reckoning with this surge of frustration and loneliness.
All he had was Black Swan.
So he sat with the phone in the flat of his hand and decided to again go through the sleepwalker numbers. The total number itself had changed, obviously—by now they were up to 423 in the flock. They arrived in a more sporadic pattern now, and had ever since they crossed into Iowa and then Nebraska. Whenever they neared a population center, the new walkers arrived more swiftly—sometimes two or three at a time, meeting them on the road, or even crossing through a cornfield to join the flock.
The overall ratios were not dissimilar, though, to what they had been since the earliest days of the phenomenon. The flock remained curiously diverse in everything from racial or ethnic background to age to sexual orientation to gender. Black Swan confimed again and again that the two common elements remained common elements: first, that the group seemed to consist of above-average intelligence, as far as that metric took them; second, that they were all of above-average health. Thank God one thing was consistent, he thought.
Wait. God.
That was something he hadn’t considered.
On a lark, Benji asked: “Black Swan, what about religious affiliation?”
There, another surprise awaited.
Over 40 percent of the flock identified as atheist, agnostic, or otherwise unaffiliated. The remaining 60 percent was broken up somewhat evenly across those who identified as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. Drilling down further, the Christians were not uniform, either, the population cast across the denominations, from Baptist to Catholic to Lutheran and so on. That deviated from the population, too. Well over half the country identified as Christian, but the flock’s ratio did not match, not at all.
Which seemed strange if it was a random disease.
Less strange, however, if this was curated.
Meaning, what if these people were chosen?
Chosen as part of what, though? An attack?
He imagined suddenly each of them swarming with tiny machines—sleepwalker blood teeming with microscopic devices. It seemed impossible. And yet it explained some of what they were facing.
It even explained the shimmer, didn’t it? The one he saw when Clade Berman went pop. A rush of heat, rising up, defying the elements…
Once again, the image of tiny invaders, too small for the eye to see individually, mobbing the body—not to force it to walk, but to drive it mad, to kill it. Would that be the purview of the CDC? A disease was a disease, no matter if it was human-made or organic. He wished he could talk to Cassie right now. She had a way of grounding him. But with her on the Garlin investigation…
He reminded himself to check with her. So far, the media hadn’t grabbed that story. The media was too focused on the election. And the flock. And North Korea. Hopefully the fungal infection had died with those it killed.
Still. If it was contained, why did Black Swan have an interest in it? An isolated outbreak like that wasn’t something they could control or get ahead of.
Why were they set on that path? What was the intersection with Garlin’s death?
With Black Swan in his hand, he asked it a question he’d asked many times before, one that always yielded a negative:
“Black Swan, is there any new connection between the sleepwalker phenomenon and the white-nose fungus that killed Jerry Garlin? Anything we haven’t seen yet?”
Pause.
Seconds passed.
Black Swan was not answering.
He opened his mouth to ask it again—had it not heard him?—when suddenly it gave an answer.
One green pulse.
One red pulse.
Meaning, what? Maybe? Kinda, sorta? Half-and-half?
“Black Swan, I don’t understand what that means.”
It gave no answer.
“I need answers,” he said, hearing the frustration in his voice mounting. “You have them. Surely you do.”
Still nothing.
He grabbed the phone and yelled into it: “Do something! Anything! Put two and two together! You’re the smartest damn computer in the whole world, so put all your ones and zeros together and get me some answers!”
Someone next door pounded on the wall, yelling: “Shut up!”
Benji was left panting. The rage fled.
He felt stupid.
He dropped back down onto the edge of the bed, sitting there in the dark. Wondering where this was all headed.
And then Black Swan glowed white.
Two voices emerged from its speakers. Crackling with light static.
One of those voices he recognized instantly: Sadie.
“…she’s a receiver.” That, Sadie’s voice.
The other voice, also a woman’s. Gruffer. Blunter. The hint of a…Mid-Atlantic accent. Not quite New York or Jersey.
“…what do you mean?”
SADIE: I mean she’s picking up the signal from the machines.
OTHER WOMAN: How?
SADIE: I don’t know. Something to do with the plate in her head. It’s serving as a receiver. The nanoradio—
OTHER WOMAN, SIGHING: If she can detect it—
SADIE: Then eventually someone else will detect it, too.
OTHER WOMAN: Ray figure it out yet?
Ray. She meant him, didn’t she? Benji stiffened. He dared not move or say a word, just in case they could hear him. Was this happening now? A recording? He wasn’t sure. Why was Black Swan giving this to him?
SADIE: No, but he’ll…figure it out soon enough. He’s already on the trail.
OTHER WOMAN: You sure you didn’t push him? You’ve been champing at the bit to bring him into this.
SADIE: No, of course not. I tried to convince him it couldn’t be possible. But he’s pushing for the Firesight interview. We can’t hold him off forever, Moira. I can’t stonewall him for long. And he may be able to help us better if he knew.
MOIRA: Keep stonewalling him. If he finds out—Sadie, the man is unpredictable. Who knows what he does with this? He could spill the whole thing. If he knew what we knew—
SADIE: We can trust him. Black Swan trusts him.
MOIRA: What matters is that he trusts you. Keep that up.
A pause.
SADIE: Of course.
MOIRA: We’re entangled together in this, Sadie. Everything is at stake. Everything. Don’t. Fuck. This. Up.
And then the call was over. Black Swan was silent again.
Benji was left in the dark to reckon with something far worse than frustration and loneliness: betrayal.
Über allen Gipfeln
Above all summits
Ist Ruh.
it is calm.
In allen Wipfeln
In all the treetops
Spürest du
you feel
Kaum einen Hauch;
scarcely a breath:
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
the birds in the forest are silent.
Warte nur, balde
Just wait, soon
Ruhest du auch.
you will rest as well.
—Goethe, “Wanderer’s Nightsong II”
JULY 12
Burnsville, Indiana
MATTHEW SAT AT HIS LAPTOP in the rectory office of the church, headphones on, doing another radio show. He’d done a lot of these over the last week since Hunt made her decision to pull back on Homeland Security’s control of the slee
pwalker flock. He’d been on terrestrial radio (AM/FM), on satellite, on podcasts. All from the comfort of his own church and home.
He’d been on a few where they tried to trap him—trying to get him to say stupid stuff or tie him in rhetorical knots. But he sussed those out pretty quick and got off the line.
The others ran the gamut: religious shows, conservative shows, some libertarian outlets. Even a few conspiracy nut shows, which he didn’t much care for, either. Matthew told himself that the fringe on either side was a problem: He’d always believed that the political spectrum was a snake biting its own tail, and ultimately both ends met at the same point.
Still, these shows always seemed to go the same way.
Right now, he was on Right Coast with Bruce Bachelor, a conservative talk-show host out of Baltimore on the AM band, WCBM. Like a lot of these shows, it was one recommended to him by Hiram Golden, whom Matthew spoke to every couple of days—Hiram referred to himself as a sort of unpaid mentor or manager to Matthew.
Matthew’d been on the line for about thirty minutes, talking about the flock and President Hunt and all that, when the conversation—as they often did—swerved into the topic they always seemed to collide with.
“Tell me, Pastor Matt,” Bruce said, his voice deep and resonant, with a hint of that Ballmer accent. “Is this the Apocalypse? This what we’re looking at here with the flock phenomenon?”
Matthew laughed, as he always tried to do when someone brought this up. It’s what they always wanted to talk about and it was always what he didn’t want to talk about. He tried to swerve the conversation away from the topic. Sometimes it worked. He figured he’d try.
“I don’t focus on that,” he said. “That’s a tomorrow problem, or the next day—we’re all going to end up on the same side of the ground, which is, you know, underneath it in our grave, and so the goal for me is to focus on finding a way to be a good person in God’s light and—”