Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “Right, of course, obviously, I just mean: What’s it going to be like? The Apocalypse, the End Times, Armageddon.”

  “Ahhh. You know, I don’t know—”

  “Revelation has some thoughts, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. But—”

  “And you say that the comet that passed overhead is similar to the comet Wormwood, and that these flocking freaks are maybe a symbol of the New World Order, which to me is a Devil thing, an Antichrist thing. You think maybe President Hunt is the Antichrist?”

  “I try not to be too literal with that.”

  “But figuratively, she’s an Antichrist-like figure,” Bruce said.

  “I suppose you could go there—”

  “You go there in your sermons.”

  “Yes, again, figuratively.”

  “So, okay, okay, it’s not that she’s necessarily the legitimate for-real Antichrist, but she represents that—and we could be looking at something Apocalypse-like, if you go by Revelation, so tell me, in theory, what would the Apocalypse be like?”

  He tried to mask his sigh. On the one hand, he felt he should cut this off. You chum the water, you get the sharks. On the other hand…donations to the church were up. And if this was the gateway to more people finding the path of the light…

  “In theory,” Matthew began, “you’d see followers of the Antichrist rise up, claiming to be on the side of good. You’d see an uptick in war or violence, maybe famine, definitely pestilence—by pestilence I mean disease, some kind of epidemic or pandemic? I confess I don’t precisely know the difference between the two.”

  “AIDS was a pandemic, right?”

  “I suppose so.” He felt an internal twitch. He knew that AIDS was associated largely with the homosexual community, and he didn’t want to associate homosexuality with any kind of devilry. The Bible condemned it, sure, but the Bible also condemned divorce and shellfish. He tried to segue away from that into more fantastical imagery, again to emphasize that this was all mostly fantasy. “You’d see fire in the skies, angels descending to earth, maybe the Four Horsemen, maybe some kind of monster—a dragon in the sky, a Leviathan under the sea—”

  “And if we are invaded by the Devil’s children, by the armies as it were of the Antichrist, it would be our Christian duty to fight back?”

  “Of course.”

  “You heard it righteous and true, folks. It is our solemn duty not to let the monsters take our country from us. Get your torches lit, your knives sharp, and maybe clean and oil your guns just in case.” Bruce laughed, like that was somehow funny.

  Matthew wanted to push back, wanted to say something about how he meant more fighting back with the spirit, with the light of God’s Word, but Bachelor didn’t give him the chance.

  “Pastor Matt, I understand you’re going to be at Ed Creel’s rally on the night of the fourteenth, that right?”

  “Ah, yes, it is, it is—but I also wanted to say—”

  “Pastor Matt, I’m afraid we’re out of time. Folks, if you want to see Pastor Matthew Bird of God’s Light Church out of Burnsville, Indiana, speak about the sleepwalker army and God’s plans for us, show up, bend your ear, and don’t forget to maybe toss some chits and ducats into Creel’s bucket. Thanks, Pastor. And now some words from our sponsors.”

  Everything’s connected now. It’s not just phones and tablets and cameras. It’s doorbells. It’s refrigerators. It’s sex toys! Sex toys are talking to each other! Shit, I know a fella has a trailcam, you know, for hunting? That talks to the web via a cellular signal. The Internet of Things, hell, more like the Internet of Big Brother. The goddamn Panopticon. You can be sure Hunt and her lib-witches are watching us all. Maybe even controlling us. These things talk to each other and they use them to control us. Like fluoride in the water, chemtrails in the air, we’re getting it coming and going. Next thing you know they’ll stick probes up our ass to report our rectal temperatures to some…some artificial intelligence. Anyway, coming up we got a brand-new muscle-building cleanse product, gonna really blow your fucking gourd how ripped you get from this…

  —Ander Davies, The Endgame Truthcast on SiriusXM Satellite Radio

  JULY 13

  Rosebud, Nebraska

  A WEEK IN, THE SHINE started to wear off the fucking apple.

  Pete Corley didn’t let them know that, of course—to the shepherds of the flock and to the media onlookers, he was the presence among them, the star on the stage, the sun around which they orbited. At least, that was the lie he told himself. Already he could feel them becoming inured to him, like he’d become normalized, “just another part of the gang.” He didn’t want to be another part of the gang. He wanted to be the gang leader. Or their gang god. Did gangs have gods? Wouldn’t that be something, each gang with its own gang god? He shook his head.

  He did his best, of course, to keep attention on him. Couple days ago, he paid Charlie Stewart to go to a music store in Omaha to pick up a couple portable Marshall MS-4 mini-stack amps and the best electric guitar they had on the racks: in this case, a shiny black Gretsch Electromatic hollowbody. Not his first choice, but fuck it, it was what it was.

  He strung the amps together, plugged in the guitar, then stood atop Charlie’s RV like a guitar god astride his chariot. He led sing-alongs and did guitar solos and, obviously, ran through some of Gumdropper’s biggest hits—“Full Steam Ahead,” “Rickety-Clack Down the Tracks,” “Cupid’s Quiver,” “Hot Dog Woman” (easily the most willfully phallic song in all of rock-and-roll, and that’s saying something), and some lesser B-sides, too.

  Even still, his ability with the guitar was fine—but he wasn’t Evil Elvis. Pete was backup. Rhythm guitar only. Elvis was lead, always lead, and that shitty shit wanker could tease a sound out of any guitar like he was the world’s greatest lover and the guitar was his latest sexual conquest. And Pete felt frustrated pushing up against the limits of his own ability—not that these rubes knew anything about the true talent, they probably didn’t give a thimble of jackrabbit jizz, but he knew, and maybe instinctively they knew, too.

  Because though the crowd was big when he started playing atop the RV, it had thinned an hour later. And it thinned even more after that.

  He got some of them back when he started playing sermons from some Indiana pastor—some podcasting, radio-broadcasting snake-in-the-grass named Matthew Bird (fake name, Pete guessed, and Pete knew fake names because rock was rife with them). Bird was some soft-spoken yokel who went on and on about how the flock were the Devil’s Pilgrims and all that—and like so many of these fake Christian arseholes, they made it sound like they were all compassionate about the world’s many boo-boos but then they condemned anyone and everyone for showing a whiff of real empathy, real compassion, so Bird was an easy target. Corley put the hypocritical shit on blast, and would turn it down from time to time to let the crowd boo—Pete would jeer the fucking prick, too, saying things like, “So much for Christian tolerance, eh?” or “Sounds like somebody needs a good whap upside the head with the King James,” or even, simply, “This fucking wanker, am I right?”

  That worked for a while. He knew they’d already been passing Bird’s sermons around, so he was able to stoke those coals for a while.

  But it didn’t last. They still…dwindled away.

  Less impressed by him.

  Less angered by Bird.

  Less everything.

  He told himself it was because they had things to do. They had to go groom their walkers. They had to drink water, eat sandwiches, cool off. Their muscles ached. They were tired and bored. Wait, no, he was tired and bored because good goddamn the middle of the country was boring. At least in New York you could look at stuff. You could see two guys yelling at each other over produce, you could smell the halal carts, you could also smell the weaponized piss stink that came hissing up out of the vents, you could wat
ch a rat fight a dog for a bagel. (Spoiler: The rat would win because New York rats were unfuckwithable.)

  Here, though, what was there to look at?

  Grass. Wheat. Corn. Soy. Out here it was like some lazy fuck graphic designer just copy-pasted the same terrain over and over and over again. Click, click, click. Its redundancy was oppressive to him. He felt trapped, suddenly. Like he couldn’t breathe.

  In this wide-open space he felt like he was inside a shrinking box.

  Like in a closet? a small voice said.

  A stupid voice that he quickly crushed like a cigarette underfoot. Giving it an extra mental twist of the heel, just for good measure.

  He stood off to the side now, pacing, giving little waves and throwing up the devil’s horns to those who passed by. He had his phone against his ear, listening to it ring, and he felt simultaneously irritated and depressed by those who walked by him—irritated that they wouldn’t give him his privacy on this call and depressed because they weren’t mobbing him like they should. He’d become an expected fixture.

  A personality, not the personality.

  Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

  Finally, someone answered. His wife, Lena.

  “Let me guess,” she said first thing, “you’re finally coming home.”

  “What?” he said, acting aghast. “What do you mean, woman?”

  “I mean that I know how this goes. You went for the attention, you got your attention, and now the attention is waning and you’re looking for a way out, and you’re wondering if I’ll leave a light on for you or I’ve tossed all your shit out the window onto Fifth Avenue again.”

  “That’s fucking nonsense is what it is,” he blustered.

  “It was like this when you went to India to become a, what was it, a Yogi? And then again when you tried Australian walkabout.” He hears the crispy sizzle and puckered suck of her taking a drag off a cigarette. “And then again when you went down to Florida to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. How long did you stay there, two days?”

  “Three. I built a house.”

  “You did not build a house.”

  “I built a staircase.”

  “You installed three stairs in a staircase.”

  “And I did so for free, when my hourly cost is in the tens of thousands, I’ll remind you. I got them considerable press.”

  “You got pissed because not only did you have to do manual labor, but they saw through your fake-ass charitable ruse—people doing real work to build houses for the needy did not see you as their savior, so you—”

  “This is really bad, how you’re treating me right now.”

  “So you bailed on them—”

  “This is—this is revisionist history, I brought more attention to their little group than anybody had, it was good for them, better for them than it was for me, if we’re being honest—”

  “And you ran home. You ran to them to get away from us, then you ran to us to get away from them.”

  “Rude, rude, and very fucking wrong, I’ll tell you that.” He nibbled at a thumbnail. “I’ll tell you what, this is wrong, you’re so wrong, I’m not calling to come home, not at all.” I was totally calling to come home, but I’m certainly not going to tell you that now. “I’m calling to talk to the kids.”

  “The kids are out. Connor’s at drum practice.” Ugh, drums, such a caveman instrument, he thought. Connor was that way, though. “And Siobhan is off to dressage camp.”

  “The fuck is dressage?” It sounded French. Dress-aaahhhhhj.

  “It’s…I dunno, Pete, it’s horses dancing.”

  “Dancing horses.”

  “Horses dancing. There’s a difference.”

  “You know, maybe I should come home, now that you mention it.” The shepherds and flock passed and he gave them all a fake little toodle-oo wave. “I should come home and straighten everybody out. Get Connor playing the guitar—a gentleman’s instrument, I’ll have you fucking know—and tell Siobhan that horse dancing is not a thing that people do, it’s just some shit that rich people made up. A con. Probably a pyramid scheme, like alpacas. I’ll pack my things—”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, you’re not coming home.”

  “I am if I want.”

  “I’ll change the locks. I’ll change the alarm code. If I have to, I will throw your shit onto Fifth Avenue, or I’ll give it to the nearest homeless shelter. I don’t give a shit, Pete. You ran away from us, you ran away from the Gumdropper reunion—don’t think I don’t know that’s what this is about, by the way—and I’m tired of it. You’re there, so stick it out. Those people are glad to have you, and right now we don’t want you.”

  “You’re divorcing me.”

  “No, but consider this a temporary separation. I don’t want you back here until you do your time there and figure out who you are, what you want, and why you keep running away.”

  “You’re kind of a bitch,” he said.

  Another crispy drag off her cigarette. “Takes a bitch to know a bitch. Love you, baby. Hope your cracked skull is healing up okay.” He heard her fake a couple of kisses, mwah, mwah, before she hung up.

  That cooze. That hooker. That glorious, damnable woman.

  He wanted to call her back and tell her everything. I love you but I’m not in love with you, I love men, I love cock, I have a lad on the side named Landry, I gave you two children but to do so I had to be high on a couple different drugs, also Evil Elvis is a piece-of-shit and I’m scared of success or ruining my success or gods, I don’t even fucking know.

  Pete gritted his teeth.

  He dialed a number on the phone.

  Landry answered. “It’s you.”

  It’s me.

  “I needed to hear your voice,” Pete said, trying not to sound desperate and totally, totally failing.

  * * *

  —

  SHANA HAD TAKEN up with Arav. Every night, he had a hotel or motel room somewhere along with the other CDC workers—those that remained, anyway, since the ranks of technicians and lab workers had been seriously cut down. He caught a ride with the others and she caught a ride, too, which was more than a little awkward as she earned stares and silence. Once in a while, Doctor Ray tried striking up a conversation, and she gave a one- or two-word answer, and that ended it. They hadn’t seen him or Sadie so far this morning, though. The two of them waited in the parking lot, where they always did. It was nice, though, being away from the flock. Shana didn’t want to admit that out loud, but it was true: Out here she felt free in a way she didn’t with the flock. There it felt like her only identity was as a shepherd—someone attending to someone else. Nessie.

  Here, though, with the wide-open road and nothing to do…

  She felt like she could do anything. Be anyone.

  And that feeling was compounded by the new camera hanging at her side in its bag.

  The camera was a Canon 5D, procured with the wad of cash Corley gave her four days ago. She had enough money to buy an additional lens, too—outside of the kit lens, she bought a zoom lens. What she really wanted was a macro lens, but with the flock that didn’t seem like a thing she could make much use of. Zooming in, though? That was useful. Made her feel like a proper little spy. Watching people from afar…

  She turned and snapped a quick pic of Arav. The long motor lodge stood behind him, a decrepit artifact of a bygone era. The sun was just coming up over it, casting shafts of light and blobby motes into the image. As she took more photos, Arav faked being coy, trying to hide from the lens. In a droll voice he said, “Oh no, the paparazzi. I’m just trying to get my…non-fat macchiato and my avocado toast, but these paparazzi won’t stop following me around. Oh no, the life of a millennial celebrity such as me.”

  “Who are you supposed to be, Pete Corley?” she snarked
at him, still snapping pics. Click, click, click.

  “I wish. I’d be rich.”

  “He’s not happy. Money didn’t fix whatever’s broken inside him.”

  Arav offered a dubious chuckle. “Yeah…I dunno, he seems pretty happy to me?”

  “Don’t confuse loudness with happiness. He’s got the volume all the way up, but that’s just to cover up the gaping hole inside. Here, look.” She pulled up the pics she’d taken of the rock star, flicking through the photos on the little camera screen. She’d captured these with the zoom lens—Corley away from the flock, sometimes standing off to the side, or behind the RV, or in the corn. Sneaking a smoke from his vape wand or just…staring out at nothing. In a couple his face was twisted up. When his mask fell, woe and worry seemed to pain him.

  “Oh, wow,” Arav said. “He actually looks…sad? Mad? Both?”

  “Yeah, that’s not the face of someone who’s got his shit together.”

  “These days, I dunno if anybody has their shit together.”

  “Word to that.” She bit her lip. Danced around a thing she didn’t want to say, but then stepped right on it and said it: “You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “What?”

  “I just mean—I know Cassie left. And that other guy, the one with the concussion, he’s gone, too—”

  “Martin.”

  “Yeah. I just worry that they’ll send you away.”

  “I don’t want that. But I feel like I’ve been pushed to the margins a little.” He looked around suspiciously, probably for Benji or Sadie—neither of whom had come out, yet. “I think they’re keeping something from me.”

  “Like what?”

  Exasperated, he answered, “I dunno! I just…I just get that feeling. Like they know something but I’m not clued in. Which is fine, I’m pretty low on the totem pole, I just thought I was part of the team. But it’s fine,” he said suddenly, even though it wasn’t. He smiled and leaned his head on her shoulder as they walked. “I get to spend more time with you.”