Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

Matthew took a few steps backward. “I’m not a part of this. Not a part of…whatever it is you want to do.”

  Ozark took one big step forward.

  Stover said, “What I want to do is to fix things. Something I’ve always told people, and sometimes they believe me, and sometimes they don’t, is that if you really want to fix something, first you have to break it. Gotta take it apart, otherwise all you’re doing is puttin’ a patch on it. Got an underbite? To fix that shit, they gotta break the whole jaw to get your smile straight. Got cancer? Gonna cut that limb off, chop-fucking-chop. Got termites? Burn the whole damn house down and rebuild something better in the ashes.”

  “You’re a sick man.”

  “It’s a sick world.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Your wife probably tried to kill herself.”

  Matthew froze. “What?”

  “Sure, maybe she overdosed on accident. But think about it. She’s a depressed woman, Matthew, married to a man who won’t reach out a hand to help her. You don’t give a damn about her and she knew it. Is it so strange to think she was looking for a way out? A way to get away from you, her husband who—”

  It happened like that. Matthew’s fist, coiled tight and clutching all the fear and rage that had been building up in him, struck out.

  Ozark’s head snapped back. His nose collapsed soft under Matthew’s knuckles. The pastor pulled his throbbing hand back, and he watched as two worms of raw, red blood crawled forth from each of Ozark Stover’s nostrils. Fresh crimson wetted the man’s mustache and beard.

  A strange giddy surge of triumph arose in Matthew.

  He did it. He defended himself. His wife. His everything. He wasn’t a victim. Matthew stood up to a bully, and that’s what Ozark Stover was: a bully, a bad man, an evil man with lies dancing on his tongue.

  Then a club hit Matthew in the side of his head.

  No. Not a club. Ozark’s fist. The big man swung his arm like it was a bat swinging at a softball, and it whomped Matthew right in the temple. His head rang and he collapsed against the side of one of the reloading benches—he barely held himself up, propped there by his elbow. His arm knocked over a few brass casings that tinked as they hit the floor and rolled across the polished cement. A canister of gun oil dropped, too, with a half-hollow kathunk. He tried to pull himself back up to standing, but his head was dizzy, and his legs wouldn’t comply.

  “That was a good punch, Preacher. I’m honestly surprised. You didn’t telegraph it or nothing. Still, I got bad news. You’re not leaving me,” Ozark said, lording over him. He wiped blood from his nose with the back of his prodigious hand. “I put time into you. Money, too. You’re an investment and I’m not ready to liquidate.”

  “Just let me go,” Matthew said. But the words came out gummy, mushy. Jush leh meh go.

  “No, Preacher, I don’t much care for that idea.”

  Matthew tried pulling away, but Ozark was big and fast. He grabbed a hank of the pastor’s hair and threw him to the ground. His forehead struck the cement. Strobing pulses popped across his vision and wouldn’t stop.

  “You’re a liar,” Matthew gabbled. “A bad man, not a godly man—”

  “True enough, I suppose,” Ozark said, straddling him and grabbing one of his wrists. Matthew flailed, tried to strike out with the other one, but he was slow and facedown and ended up swinging at open air. “I’m a bad sonofabitch. I might be the fucking Devil, way I see it, but that’s all right. The Devil was a rebel, too. I lie to get things done. I do bad to make good. I do wrong to make all the broken stuff right.”

  Something cold touched his wrist. Hard plastic edge. Ozark wrangled his other wrist, too, pinning both against his tailbone.

  The sound came of a zip-tie closing—vviiip.

  And then his hands were bound. Blood swam in his fingertips. Each pulsed like a little drum being struck, lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.

  No, no, no, what’s happening.

  Another sound, then: snick.

  Something tugged at the hem of his pants. Ozark made a grunt of frustration, then yanked hard on Matthew’s belt, pulling with such force it lifted the pastor’s hips, almost turning him over. But then the belt was free and the big man tossed it aside.

  “What are you doing,” Matthew said, his words babbled and sticky with spit connecting his lips. “No, no, no, you stop, this isn’t funny, this has gone too far—”

  “I like your family. Your wife, she hasn’t been happy in a while. So I helped to make her happy. All her sadness is gone, now. And your son…” Ozark made a scoffing sound. Pfeh. “Kid hates you, Preacher. Which is a shame, really, and at first I said, that’s not right, boy, you get right with your daddy. But more he talked about you, more I thought you were a soft touch, like a willow tree blowing this way and that way—you never plant a willow tree, Matthew. They look nice, but they don’t live long, and any storm might break them. Shit, now look at you. A pathetic little fuck. You’re no man. I’ll be your son’s daddy, it’s all right. Maybe I’ll take your wife as my own when she wakes up. If she wakes up. Shit, Preacher—maybe I’ll take you as my wife, or just some temporary trash bitch…”

  Again Matthew’s pants tugged hard—and something began cutting through them. Sawing back and forth. A tearing, ripping sound arose. The tip of a penknife sliced into the skin at his tailbone, just a little.

  Blood welled and trickled down as his pants were pulled away. His underwear, then, too. “You’re bleeding,” Ozark said. “Sorry about that.”

  “No, no, no, you stop, you stop, I’ll call the police, I’ll tell them—”

  “I own them. Not much of an option.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want then, just leave me alone, leave my family alone, this has to stop—” His words were barely comprehensible now, some of them howled instead of spoken. But Ozark just laughed.

  Then the weight of the man was gone.

  Matthew heard the sound of a button being undone. Then a zipper.

  “I don’t want to go in dry,” Ozark said. “You’ll never heal up from that, won’t be any use to me, and I’m gonna need you sitting on your ass a week from now, doing what I tell you to do. Let’s see. You’re bleeding—but blood, and I speak from experience on this, makes for a poor lubricant. Oh. There we go.” Matthew rolled over, facing up as he saw Ozark grab for something on the floor: the gun oil container. A metal canister with a plastic tip. The man stood there, his cock out. He splashed gun oil onto his callused hands like it was cologne, then ran those hands up and down the length of his dick.

  “Please, stop. No. No no no no—”

  “Too late for no, Preacher. Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, because we’re about to go for a ride.”

  What happened next would be a thing Matthew would always remember, even as he tried desperately to forget it. The way his underwear was ripped away. The way Ozark flipped him back over, slapped his ass hard, leaving his hind end stung and swollen. The big man got on top of him and told him it was okay to scream, nobody would hear, and Matthew did as he was told: He screamed until his vocal cords were raw and cut up like grated carrots. He tensed everything, trying to shrink in on himself like a collapsing star, but then Ozark punched him in the back of the head and commanded him to relax and enjoy it. He felt Ozark pushing inside him and pain ran roughshod through him, ragged and mad, the pain of a brush burn and fire-ant bites going all through his middle. The brassy, grease-slick stink of gun oil filled his nose and he wanted to throw up but couldn’t. The man pounded away at him five, maybe six times, then finished. Ozark pulled out and left him there on the cement, hot and cold, shivering and bleeding, whimpering and panting past the pain that still haunted him like a ghost.

  “I own you,” Ozark said. “Not God. Me.”

  And Matthew feared he was right.

  …Roberts and his graduat
e students have painstakingly coaxed thousands of bacteria samples through the successive rounds of incubation. Out of all those, hundreds have secreted compounds that killed at least one test bacterium, and a few killed a fungus—potentially precious finds, because antifungal drugs are in even shorter supply than antibiotics.

  —Maryn McKenna, “Hunting for Antibiotics in

  the World’s Dirtiest Places,” The Atlantic

  JULY 15

  Potterstown, Nebraska

  THE FLOCK HAD NO SINGLE gathering spot. They couldn’t; the sleepwalkers were closing in on five hundred now, and they did as they always did, moving forward, ineluctably carving a swath through the world as if on a mission known only to them. The shepherds moved with the flock, giving the illusion that they were cowboys driving cattle, when really, the opposite was true: The flock was in control.

  Without a single spot to gather, the press conference that President Hunt gave was not viewed by the group in one place on one screen but rather, consumed in the way media often was: across multiple places, seen on a panoply of devices. Pockets of shepherds gathered around phones and tablets as they walked. Others parked off to the side, and those who had satellite internet or mobile hotspots watched the conference on their laptops. Some even used old-school antennae on their RVs to get a signal.

  Shana watched it on her phone as she walked alongside her sister. Marcy gathered near, as did Mia, each one looking over her shoulder as she held the phone in front of her, each of them shuffling along slowly. Shana tried to maneuver her shadow against the phone so that the sun glare didn’t wash out what was on the screen.

  President Hunt did not speak for long. She gave only a small introduction of the facts that they knew, her face more stern than usual, her brow stitched tight with worry.

  “White-nose syndrome, as some of you may know, is a fungal disease that has been attacking the bat population of the United States since 2007, peaking in 2012, but the disease remained limited to bats only.

  “Now it seems as if a similar disease has found a way to infect human beings. As of this moment, we have one hundred thirty-seven confirmed cases of this disease in the United States, with forty-one fatalities. The World Health Organization has discovered another three hundred twelve cases globally, with eighty-one confirmed fatalities at this time.”

  Shana noted then: There were no reporters. This was not public. It was just Hunt in front of a podium, with cameras pointed.

  Hunt continued to speak.

  “I cannot speak to the severity of this disease, as I am certainly no expert on pathology, but I am confident that as Americans we will see our way through this. And furthermore, I am confident that our people across the Centers for Disease Control as well as in the medical and pharmaceutical industry will fast find a remedy to halt the progression of this disorder.”

  But there. The look on her face betrayed the words she spoke. Shana could see that, plain as the shine on a brand-new nickel.

  Hunt was visibly shaken.

  “Now I’ll defer to proper experts, and I’d like to introduce Cassandra Tran from the CDC and Geert Bakker from the World Health Organization to give you more details, and to inform you on what to look for regarding this, ahh, this strange new disease we face…”

  Briefly, Hunt paused to give a nod to the two who approached, and Shana felt a small spike of pride and joy in seeing Cassie there. She didn’t know Cassie well, but liked her a lot. And though it seemed strange, Cassie felt like one of theirs. Home-team pride.

  The other, Geert Bakker, was a small, pale man with red hair and a red beard and glasses whose eyeglass frames were as ghostly as his face.

  Hunt said a few words privately to them.

  “Jesus God,” Mia said. “Something else now? Like all this”—she swept a hand out to indicate the flock—“wasn’t enough?”

  Marcy just stared off, haunted. Like she was shell-shocked by the news in some way. Or stranger still, like it made sense to her, somehow.

  Shana said: “It’ll be fine. Probably just being cautious. We have the flock to worry about, not…this.”

  Even still, she felt suddenly unsettled.

  Cassie and the man from WHO, Bakker, were up, finally, and started talking about when to see a doctor and what to look out for—signs of a cold or allergy that persists coupled with uncharacteristic symptoms of dementia. She and Mia looked to each other, and then to the shepherds all around them. Had any of them had a cold recently? Sniffles here, a cough there? She suddenly felt paranoid about everyone she was with. If they were sick, couldn’t she get sick, too? What about Nessie? What about all of them? A low frequency of worry grew in volume.

  Then Mia tugged on her elbow and pointed. “Hey. Look.” Ahead of the flock rose a modern-era ghost town: the bones of an old factory, the shell of some strip malls, the gutted husk of a bunch of warehouses and storage units. A car sat parked in the distance, and someone stood by that car.

  But someone else was walking toward the flock, around the bend of the road, past the peacock tail of red feathery grasses poking up through broken cement.

  “Arav,” Shana said, and raced to meet him. She realized half a second later that she’d stolen the phone—meaning, she’d stolen the briefing—from the others, so she quick spun on her heel and called out to Marcy and tossed her the phone. She didn’t even look to see if Marcy caught it. Shana just kept running toward Arav. He’d been keeping away from her since he disappeared with Benji, but here he was, walking right toward her…

  When he saw her, his face brightened. He smiled.

  And though it only registered with her later, his eyes did not smile with his mouth. His eyes looked grim. His gaze looked sad.

  Still, for now, she crashed into him and wrapped her arms around him. Her lips met his. She held the hug for a while as the flock-and-shepherds moved to pass them. RVs rumbling on. Trucks. People on bikes. Dogs chasing dogs. A few kids, even. Arav looked over. “What’s going on? Everyone’s facedown in a screen.”

  “There’s a press conference.”

  “Oh,” he said, understanding. “The pathogen.”

  “What?”

  “The fungus. The disease. Is that—?”

  “It is.” She looked him over, felt his worry. “That’s what it was, wasn’t it. That’s why you and the others left the motel the other day. Is that why you had to go?”

  He offered a reticent nod.

  “It’s going to be okay, isn’t it?” she asked.

  He smiled and said it would.

  But she noticed half a second later when he almost shook his head. Just the start of it—a lift to the chin, a momentary frown, a pinch to the eyes. Same as she saw worry on Hunt’s face: a motion where it looked like he had thought one thing, then said another. It was nothing, she thought. Just her imagination. Everything, she was sure, would be just fine. She had him back, after all. Nothing else mattered.

  JULY 20

  Horse Creek, Wyoming

  EARLY MORNING, A SEARING LINE of light burns the edges of rolling hills. A sign hangs over a winding driveway, BENT CROSS RANCH. The metal-riveted and welded sign is displayed over a wooden archway lined with old elk and mule deer antlers. The bottom of the driveway sits grated with a metal cattle guard. A fence winds around the ranch property, ringed with new razor wire. At the entrance stand three men, all in fatigues, two in NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) masks, one with just a red paisley handkerchief over his face. All three hold rifles. One has his hand frozen in a move-along wave. Another stands still, watching the flock pass. The last is pointing a rifle at the camera—more a threat than a promise, for now.

  JULY 31

  Greybull, Wyoming

  A GENERAL STORE: Big Horn Trading Post. Out front stands a woman straddling a dirt bike, one foot in the dirt-swept street, the other on the broken curb behind. Chestnut hair
in a ponytail hangs out the back of her helmet, draped down her back. She is not alone on the bike: A young boy sits behind her, no helmet, just a medical mask on his face, his eyes rimmed red maybe from tears, maybe from illness, maybe both. He holds her tight around the waist, pressing his cheek hard into her back even as she watches the flock pass through the small town. The store’s windows can no longer be seen through because of all the signs hung up inside: LOCALS ONLY NO TOURISTS; SICKIES GO HOME; SNOTTY NOSE, GO BLOW; IF COUGH, THEN FUCK OFF; GOD BLESS AMERICA.

  AUGUST 4

  Red Lodge, Montana

  A TWILIGHT SKY brindled with bands of brown clouds and pale lavender sky. In the distance stand the peaks of the Castle Mountains. In the foreground, a field of pale sagebrush, and in that field people roam and rove, dance and flail, caught as they are in the midst of wild gesticulations. Men and women. Cultlike. Many are naked, some stripped down to their underwear. Some draped in American flags. Others hold crosses aloft to the sky, kneeling, beseeching whoever or whatever is up there. None are in sync. Some spin. Some weep. Others are totally still, arms up and out in a Y-shape. One stands nearer to the camera—a man in his thirties, gaunt, ribs showing. His jawline shows a scraggly beard above a mad grin. Dark eyes stare, unfocused, over a cliffside nose. He holds an American flag. The stars on the flag have been replaced with little white crosses. The bottom right corner of the flag is empurpled with dark blood. His blood, maybe, given the poorly healed gashes along his inner thigh, leading up to the small coin purse of his cock and balls hanging between birdlike thighs.

  AUGUST 9

  Wise River, Montana

  THE TREE THE human corpse hangs from is bare and brutish, a dark and skeletal hand reaching toward a wide sky choked with the smoke of distant wildfires. The corpse belonged to a man, once, his age indeterminable. The skin and the clothes are colonized with white fuzz that looks not unlike a mass of pale caterpillars. Seven tubules have emerged from his mold-claimed flesh, each snaking up toward the sky, bulging at the end like a pimple straining to be popped by impatient fingers. He hanged himself from a thick branch, and a sign dangles presently from his neck. It reads: DONT COME NEAR in big bold letters, and in smaller letters underneath: I LOVE YOU SHAUN DONNIE AND HELEN. His is the first dead body they have seen. It will not be the last.