by Chuck Wendig
“I know this already,” Benji said. “It’s contained.”
The video disappeared. The map flipped back in front of them.
“Is it?” Moira’s face was an implacable slate.
Just then, lines fled San Antonio, leading to four dots elsewhere in the country: two elsewhere in Texas (Austin, Dallas), one on the East Coast (Richmond, Virginia), and one on the West Coast (San Diego).
Benji remembered that Cassie said there were three others infected. He asked. “Are these the other three infected?”
“They are,” Sadie said.
“It’s the dot in San Diego you should watch,” Moira said.
And he did. From San Diego, new lines drew and the image pulled farther out to a global map. To Berlin. To Beijing. Then Boston, San Diego, and onward to Florida. Naples. Near the Everglades.
“That dot. It’s Garlin,” Benji said.
“Correct,” Bill Craddock answered.
“Those are his travels over the course of a few months,” Moira explained. “Garlin, you see, left San Antonio that day and then traveled around the world. Not once, but many times. West Coast. East Coast. Germany. China. Florida. Texas. And the people he met were world travelers themselves—executives, investors, tourism directors, architects. All shaking hands, sharing meals, breathing the same air. Now. Black Swan, show us the second wave.”
A new scattering of dots appeared. At a quick count, several dozen, maybe fifty or more. All clustered around either the places where Garlin went—or where the other three infected men had settled.
Oh no.
Not just three infected.
Three other vectors for infection. That’s what this was, wasn’t it? It’s not contained at all.
It was Arav who asked, in worried tones: “I see fifty-two other dots. Are those all…people infected with the pathogen? The same one that killed Garlin?”
“That is correct,” Bill answered.
“God help us,” Benji said.
In Benji’s mind, he saw it—like a puddle where one raindrop fell, making ripples. Then others fell, two, then four, then ten, all making their own ripples, too. And soon it was a downpour, ripples upon ripples, until the calm waters of the puddle were disturbed so greatly, it was only noise and chaos. The hissing din of falling rain. A puddle so full it spilled over, became a pond, a lake, an ocean in which everyone would drown.
“The groundbreaking was six, seven months ago,” Benji said in horror. “If it’s spreadable at all…if it’s contagious, then it’s got a long time line—”
“A long incubation period,” Arav said.
“Three to six months,” Bill said.
Three to six months. That meant it could hide. It wasn’t that it wasn’t communicable. It was that, when passed along, it waited. It hid. Like other slower, nastier viruses: HIV or rabies. It would lie in wait, not sleeping, but not coming out to play yet, either. Latent. But if it was still communicable in that time, while it lurked in the shadows…
Again, water drops forming ponds, lakes, oceans.
Snowflakes making an avalanche.
Four infected individuals forming a pandemic.
An apocalypse.
Moira continued: “From the point of contact, three to six months is how long you have. Jerry Garlin died six months after his contact with the bats in San Antonio. His symptoms first manifested a full month after that contact—appearing only as a minor cold. A stubborn cold, but easy to dismiss. Once those symptoms appear, the disease becomes contagious. For Garlin, that cold lasted for two months. And that’s when the dementia began. Not enough to be a warning, not then. Easily viewable as a symptom of stress, or age, or simple forgetfulness. But over the final months, the dementia worsens considerably as the mycelial threads plunge deeper into the brain. Like worms slithering through dirt. Your nose, eyes, mouth begin to show a white rime, just as the bats do on their muzzles. But humans do not experience sores or lesions—no, the damage is nearly all internal, in the brain. The resultant dementia becomes so bad that you lose yourself to it. Death is a product less of the infection and more the breakdown of your ability to live, your ability to summon simple survivable common sense. Madness sets in. Amnesia. Think of what Alzheimer’s patients go through—turning on the stove, then walking away. Getting in a car and driving it into a crosswalk full of children. Nonsensical grief and rage take over. The mind breaks down as the brain sickens. The body follows, because how could it not?”
Benji sat with this for a few moments. His mind, reeling. He wanted to throw up. He looked over at Arav, whose face was ashen.
“I’d say he gets it,” Bill said.
Benji did get it. This was the worst-case scenario. It was not enough that it was a deadly disease, no. It was a slow disease. It was steady and it was, as Moira put it, patient. Most pathogens were greedy and gluttonous: They moved fast, desperate to conquer, urging their king and queen out on the chessboard with grave impatience, making them especially vulnerable. If this one took its time…how much could it have spread? How many might be infected without them knowing?
He tried to summon the time line for white-nose syndrome in bats. Discovered, when? Early 2006, Howes Cave near Albany, New York. A year later, all the bats in the area were acting strange—out during the day, in winter, flying around, as if lost. By the end of that year, most of the bats in the region had died. That was the start. At this point, six million bats had perished in the United States, and the disease was in Europe now, too.
The good news for the bats was that they did not necessarily intermingle—some species and colonies remained isolated from the others. They were social animals, but only within their individual colonies. Mixing was not common, and so the spread of the disease was limited.
Humans, on the other hand, were not only social—
They intermingled. Constantly.
And they traveled. Planes, trains, automobiles.
Walking through cities, malls, airports.
It was summer now. That meant, what? Picnics. Sports games. Summer camps. But some diseases didn’t do well in summer. Flu and colds, for instance. Maybe that was good, too…
“How do you know all this?” Benji asked. Maybe they were lying. Maybe this was a ruse. “If it’s this far, you should’ve warned us. You had a responsibility—”
“There’s a CDC report with Cassie Tran’s name on it,” Moira explained. “And even if there wasn’t…”
“We have Black Swan,” Sadie said.
Benji met her stare. He was angry at her for keeping this from him. And he was confused, too—how did this fit into the flock? The nanotech? Marcy’s so-called signal? “I want to know about the flock,” he said. “I want to know why I’m here, what this has to do with nanoradio, or Marcy Reyes, or, or, why someone like Clade Berman goes off like a Roman candle—”
“Black Swan,” Moira said. “Pull up Document Ninety-Nine.”
And with that, the map disappeared entirely, and several pages of a document shuffled across the projection on the wall ahead. Six pages, three across the top of the wall, three across the bottom.
The pages contained hundreds and hundreds of numbers in rows, one after the next, like black ants crawling forward in a column.
Code of some kind.
“What do you see?” Sadie asked.
“I don’t know. It’s—it’s gibberish.”
“Look closer. You’re trained to see patterns.”
Frustration mounted. “In disease, yes. Not this—I don’t know what this is.” It was all alphanumeric. Lines of it, a giant block of code. He was about to tell her again that he saw nothing, no pattern—
And then, he did. It wasn’t dramatic. This was no magic-eye painting that resolved into a dragon or a sailboat, but he did see something.
A repetition of two numbers. Dozens of reit
erations.
052017.
122422.
Arav must’ve seen it, too. He pointed out those numbers.
Were those dates? They looked to be in date format.
Each paired with another number. 0830, 0930, 1330, 1930, and on.
Time stamps?
But that didn’t make sense, did it?
“They look like dates,” Benji said. “But they can’t be. The first would be May twentieth, 2017. But the latter isn’t possibly a date.”
“And why not?” Moira asked, needling him.
“Because it hasn’t happened yet. Christmas Eve, 2022? That’s the future.” He looked to Sadie with an incredulous huff and—
Sadie said nothing. Her face was an expectant mask. The look of a parent who has cornered their child into admitting some kind of realization, some wrongdoing—Oh, now I see why I shouldn’t swing the Wiffle ball bat in the house, near the TV.
He almost wanted to laugh. “You’re saying this date has happened.”
“No,” Sadie said. “You’re right, Benji. It hasn’t. It’s the future. And yet that’s the date.”
“The date of what, exactly?”
“The date Black Swan sent itself a message.”
Well, all animals, and plants for that matter, tend to reach evolutionary climax and occupy a niche and stabilize in that niche. Cockroaches, ants achieved this hundreds of millions of years ago, and have not changed greatly since. Most of biology is this iterative occupation of a climax niche. Very little of biology is the pushing forward into radical new forms, new species, still rare, new genera. For that, there has to be disruption of some sort, of the environment and it can be the meandering of a river, or an asteroid strike, the retreat of a glacier, something which creates open land.
—Terence McKenna
JULY 13
Rosebud, Nebraska
SHANA SAT ON THE GROUND, looking through the photos she’d taken of the shepherds and the flock when the RV—the Beast—came rolling up into the Sunset Motel parking lot. It rattled and banged and rocked back and forth as it drove, and Shana wondered how many more miles that thing could drive—it looked like it would shake itself to pieces before too long.
The door popped open.
Pete Corley looked out, leaning on the frame like a scarecrow whose wooden propping post had started to fall over.
“Hello, hello,” he said, grinning with those fucked-up teeth.
“You?”
“It’s me, doll. What happened to your ride?”
“They had…things to do.” Shana didn’t know what was going on, but Benji, Sadie, and Arav came out of their room looking—well, honestly, they all looked kinda pissed off? And maybe sad, too? They said they had to deal with something. Arav didn’t even apologize. They just took off. So she called her father to come pick her ass up and now—Pete Corley? “Where’s my father?” Hope bloomed in her. Was he with Nessie? Finally?
“He’s in the back, having a nap. Hop in. Let’s ride, baby, ride.”
“Don’t call me baby,” she said, reluctantly stepping into the Beast. It smelled weird. A little like weed, a bit like beer, and the telltale stink of man-scent, which hovered between too much cologne and farts, easily the two worst candles in the Yankee Candle repository.
Sure enough, her father lay in the back, facedown, snoring.
Great. Hero of the people. What a role model.
“You don’t like him very much,” Corley said, plopping down in the driver’s seat like a stack of thrown bones. He made a sneering face as he got the RV into gear. “Do you?”
“I love him, I just don’t like him very much right now.”
“Fair enough. My kids probably feel that way about me, too.”
“You know how to drive this thing?”
“Sure I do. Used to get high and drive the tour bus when the rest of the band was asleep. I figured it out.”
“Are you high right now?”
“Only a little.”
“Fine.” She shrugged and sat down next to him, making sure to buckle herself in, just in case he drove them into a fucking cornfield or something.
“You don’t like me, either, do you?”
“Not so much.”
“I bought you a camera.”
“Good job.”
“Do you like anyone?”
She sighed. “Not right now. Well. My sister.”
“How about that nerdy-looking chap. Arav, is it?”
As the RV eased out of the lot, rocking back and forth like a doghouse strapped to the back of a canyon donkey, she made a face. “I’m not talking about my love life with you, dude. Anyway, he like, suddenly left me here so I’m kinda salty about it. But it’s my fault because I told him to go and get involved with his boss and—again I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Because this is a confessional booth, dearest Shana. Unburden your soul. Relieve the clog in your spiritual pipes.”
“You make it sound like a toilet. Come to think of it, kinda smells like a toilet in here a little.”
“Psycho-emotional cleansing is messy business.”
“Whatever.”
She could feel his frowny-face aimed at her. “How is the camera?” he said in a singsongy voice.
“It’s nice.”
“I think you mean, It’s nice, thank you, Mister Rockstar.”
“You are in love with yourself, aren’t you?”
He hmphed. “Someone has to be.”
“Ooh, did that hit a nerve? Is that your issue with me? I don’t immediately fall to the ground to worship you?” She watched his face—no, that wasn’t it, was it? “Huh. Wait. It’s bigger than that. It’s someone in your life. Someone you love. Your family.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Who is it? Wife? Kids?” She leaned in, affected a sinister whisper. “Someone else? Got a side-bitch?”
“Shut your mouth, I do not.”
“You do, don’t you.”
He sighed. “Yeah, fine, there’s…someone else.”
“Ah-ha. I knew it. I could smell it on you, that cheatery butt-stink.”
“You know what, don’t think I don’t see your little…judo move reversal. Here I think I’m going to get you to confess to me, but then you whip it around and make me confess to you. I see it. I don’t like it.”
“Truth is, you need someone like me,” she said, leaning back, kicking her feet out the window.
“How’s that, exactly?”
“You’re surrounded by people who either love you, or are supposed to love you but don’t. Me, I’m neither of those things. I don’t like you, and I’m not supposed to.”
His eyebrow arched so high, it might crash into the moon. “Still…not…following.”
“You can actually be yourself with me.”
He narrowed his gaze.
“That does sound good.”
“Yeah. No shit. You can tell me the truth, and the truth, Mister Rockstar, is a helluva drug.”
Americans have the opportunity today to elect a candidate who will bring real, moral change to America! No more dead babies, no more terrorism, no more trannies raping our baby girls in bathrooms. My vote goes to Ed Creel! Time to get the politicians out of politics!
SATAN, LEERING: IF HUNT WINS, I WIN
JESUS, POINTING PISTOL AT DEVIL: NOT IF I CAN HELP IT!
—post on Facebook group The Jesus Army, flagged as Russian
propaganda after it had been shared over 400,000 times
JULY 14
Phoenix, Arizona
A SIGN HUNG ON THE wall backstage, a white sign in bold red text:
NO POLITICIANS.
That was part of the so-called Creel Creed, and he said
it often enough at rallies like these: “I want to get politicians out of politics.” His core message was that politicians ruined government, and that they needed fresh blood in the White House. Politicians, he said, were greedy, glad-handing con artists—they’d shake your hand and pick your pocket in one smooth movement.
And that, then, was his repeated line of attack on President Hunt—that she was a practiced, consummate politician. A liar’s liar, the Devil in a pantsuit. She went where the wind blew her, he said. A fact proven, Creel claimed, by how she handled the sleepwalker flock—first she gave in to public pressure to bring in Homeland Security, and then she bowed to celebrity pressure just hours later. A trick he pulled at some rallies now was to put up a cardboard cutout of her and hurl things at it that symbolized what he decided were her failures as a president. In this case, he would knock her over by pitching actual flip-flop sandals at her head.
A few weeks before that, he knocked the cutout over with a baguette, wielding it like a samurai sword and actually breaking the head off at the neck. That, because Creel said she had kissed up to France and supported their new, supposedly socialist president.
Weeks before that, he threw at her a series of eyeless baby dolls, painted red. Symbolizing her defense of women’s rights—meaning, Planned Parenthood, meaning, abortion. (Even though abortion counted for less than 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s function, Creel said it was “more like 95 percent of what they did, killing good American babies.”)
Pastor Matthew did not know what was coming tonight, but he knew that the cutout was on stage. A tease to the audience of what was to come.
Hiram sidled up next to him. “You good?”
“I’m great,” Matthew said, forcing a smile.
“You look nervous.”
“Just a little.”
“Your first political rally?”
He nodded stiffly. “It is.”
“I know, it’s a bit overwhelming, but those people out there—some of them are evangelicals, some of them are just blue-collar folks who maybe don’t go to church as often as you like. They all need your guidance. They don’t trust politicians or the piss-stream media, they don’t trust that science has their best interests at heart or that the government isn’t trying to sell them up a damn river into slavery. But they trust people like you and me. Truth-tellers. You’ll be all right.”