Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  AUGUST 14

  Potlatch, Idaho

  PETE CORLEY, SELF-PROCLAIMED rock god, leans up against an old dead train car. The camera has zoomed in on him, seizing a moment in time between the sleepwalkers walking—they, in the foreground, are blurry, but he is in crystal focus. A phone is pressed against his ear. He is listening, for once, not talking. His mouth sits twisted in a troubled scowl. He’s crying, wet tears on his cheeks catching light from the fading sun. He has just received bad news: His wife and his two children are going upstate to stay with her parents to “ride out” the coming epidemic. They have a mansion. It’s gated. Big property. Pete isn’t welcome. Her parents believe the flock is somehow responsible for the disease, and so he is himself diseased, too.

  AUGUST 19

  Sagemoor, Washington

  A CLOSE-UP OF one of the shepherds: Stephen Harper. He joined the flock only three weeks prior. His partner, Isobela Gonsales, is a mixed media artist who came to them in Wyoming, leaving her potter’s wheel, hands still stained with clay. He is saying goodbye to her now. His face looks sick and pale. His nose is ringed with a white, oily crust. The corners of his eyes and mouth are similarly colonized. The shepherds around him wear medical masks. He is holding his partner’s hand as he says goodbye. He knows he’s sick. The day prior he wandered away from the flock, into a vineyard, and was nearly shot by the vineyard owner. Stephen did not remember the incident. White Mask has him. He is going home to be with the rest of his family in the hope that they find a cure in time to save him.

  AUGUST 20

  Snoqualmie Pass, Washington

  THE CASCADE RANGE looms large. At the tops of the peaks is the faintest dusting of snow: an early hint of a strange winter. The mountains look like peace. The highway ahead is the opposite: Chaos has set in as a traffic pileup of twenty or thirty cars has blocked the highway on both sides. The accident happened when the driver of a tractor trailer suddenly believed he was in bed instead of driving his rig. He “got out of bed” by opening the door of his truck and trying to step out. The seatbelt prevented him, but it did not force him to keep his hands on the wheel. His hip and elbow turned the wheel and the truck jackknifed before the trailer overturned. Cars slammed into it, and cars slammed into those cars, the crash aided by an already wet road from a passing Pacific Northwest shower. The flock of walkers has no problem with any of this. They stream around the accident. They move over it. It is no obstacle to them, in the same way that a rock is no obstacle for a column of crawling ants. This, even as the shepherds have an impossible task moving their own fleet of vehicles through the jammed-up highway. There are now 666 walkers.

  AUGUST 25

  Castle Rock, Washington

  A SHOT TAKEN from a bridge over the Cowlitz River. In the distance, a cemetery sits on a grassy berm under trees. The cemetery is home to the dead, as is its role, but here the dead have seemingly escaped the comfort of the grave. Bodies are piled high. A truck is near and workers in white hazmat-style suits pull more bodies out of the truck. Soon they will begin to burn them, as has been advised, because if left alone, the fungus will fruit—tubules will grow and rupture and more of the spore will take to the wind and, as it is saprophytic, find the soil and live there, lurking. Burning the bodies seems to kill the pathogen. Soon the smoke will drift over the river, and with it, the shepherds’ first exposure to that smell: a smell like sick pork cooked slow, a smell that some would describe as having a taste, too, one that lingered in the back of the nose, at the base of the tongue, a taste not unlike licking a very old library book.

  AUGUST 29

  Tierra Del Mar, Oregon

  THE UNSPOILED OREGONIAN coastline. It is empty but for one man in a red helmet on a red Jet Ski, carving surf and kicking spray. It remains unknown why he’s out there. Is his mind lost to the fungus, and this seems like a rational response to what’s going on? Is he blissfully ignorant to the goings-on in the world? Or is he choosing instead to find some kind of bliss in the face of it, saying fuck it to the thousands dead, to the unstoppable march of time and disease, to what’s likely to come for him or someone he knows? Is this act an act of dementia, defiance, or ignorance? Or perhaps it’s suicide. He’ll run the Jet Ski until it has no gas, and then he will sink into the ocean, filling his lungs with churning brine. And then he’ll be gone and the coastline will be once more without anybody in it or upon it. A glimpse of a world without humans to wander its margins.

  AUGUST 31

  Pistol River, Oregon

  THIS, A MORE intimate photo. It is a shot of the top of a picnic table off a closed-down rest stop a day’s walk from the Oregon-California border. The wood of the table has faded to gray. Various names and messages are carved into it in expressions of love, hate, profanity, absurdity. CAITLYN LOVES JEN. FUCK YOU, STEVE. A carved doodle of a dick and balls with complementary little jizz-hyphens shooting from the tip. A poop emoji. A phone number. But those are not the focus of the photo. The focus of the photo is Shana Stewart’s left hand. It’s open like a blooming flower, and in the center of her palm sits a pregnancy test. A plus indicates it’s positive.

  It is now Ten Seconds to Midnight.

  @DoomsdayClockBot

  19 replies 32.7k RTs 10.1k likes

  SEPTEMBER 5

  Bodega Bay, California

  THE WIND ON THE COAST was cold and vengeful, strong enough to pick someone up and fling them into the sea with a callous toss. Benji huddled up in his windbreaker, shivering. The sun filtered silver through heavy cloud cover. A mist filled the air, saturating everything.

  He stood up high, on a cliff. A bent and broken guardrail separated the land from the air—where it was broken, it looked as if it had been torn into shrapnel. Someone had strung up a shallow swatch of yellow tape, as if that would be enough to protect anyone. It was as prophylactic as a condom made of Kleenex.

  Behind him sat the ghost of an old roadside farm stand. Seagulls nested atop it. Some waddled out, gargling and barking at him.

  He waited.

  He glanced at his watch.

  She’s late.

  Then, as if on cue, a Ford Bronco pulled in, parking next to his rental hatchback—a rental that he didn’t think the CDC was paying for anymore, and perhaps a rental that the rental car company didn’t even care about now. Maybe one day he’d get a bill.

  You can nail it to my casket, he thought, grimly.

  The Bronco parked.

  Cassie Tran stepped out.

  She wore jeans and a Thunderpussy band T-shirt. She rubbed her arms as she approached—he hurried to meet her, and they melted into a hug.

  “Dude,” she said, breathless in the surprising cold. “Seriously, you couldn’t have picked a warmer place than on top of a cliff?”

  He smiled at her. “I missed you, Cassie.” He’d spoken to her since, but it hadn’t been since Atlanta that he’d seen her face-to-face.

  The gulls warbled and complained. At that, Cassie startled. “Okay, they’re a little on-the-nose, though, man.”

  He gave her a quizzical look.

  “Hitchcock’s The Birds was filmed here in Bodega Bay,” she explained. “You didn’t know that?”

  “I am about as pop-culture-savvy as the average grandmother.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes. “I almost forgot. So. How’re things?”

  Even she couldn’t contain it. Her question was ironic, tinged with a bitterness he wasn’t used to from Cassie. She also wasn’t given over to sentimentality, but now he saw the tension of grief in her face: the tightness at the corners of her mouth like she was trying to convince herself to smile, the cinching up of her jaw like she was hoping to hold something, anything, everything back. Benji felt it, too. Sad. Unmoored. He wanted to throw up. He was scared.

  The questions percolated anytime his mind went quiet and had no immediate task on which to concentrate:

 
What if they were right?

  What if Moira and Bill—

  (and Sadie)

  —were right?

  What if this was the end? For him? For Cassie? For everyone?

  The day of the CDC meeting in Atlanta, he would’ve said, No way, no how. Humanity would persevere. It would survive. Humanity was a most excellent pest and adapted quickly to all efforts to exterminate it.

  And yet, in recent days…

  “What are the numbers?” he asked her, jumping straight into it. Talking numbers and data distracted him and afforded the both of them the chance to talk about this like it was an abstract—just points of information on a graph or in a spreadsheet, not names and faces, not people with lives and loved ones. “The real numbers since the news, I bet, is behind?”

  “They are.”

  “Where are we at?”

  “Domestically?”

  “Globally.”

  “Talked to WHO today. Seems that yesterday was our milestone. A hundred thousand. We did not throw a party, in case you’re wondering.”

  “A hundred thousand infected. Jesus.” He tracked that jump—in July, the number was, what, a dozen? First day of August, the number was already up to five hundred. And now, two hundred times that amount. If it kept up at that (admittedly oversimplified) geometric progression, then in the first week of October that number would be twenty million.

  November, four billion.

  By December—

  “You’re running the numbers,” she said. “I see the mental calculator behind your eyes adding it all up.”

  “I am.”

  “Don’t. Nothing good there.”

  “I know.”

  She rubbed her arms again, and he took off his windbreaker and offered it to her. Cassie shook her head at first but he insisted, and she finally took it. As she put it on, she said, “We’re making some progress, Benji. All the Big Pharma companies have turned on a dime and are working night and day on this as a priority. We’ve got new antifungal volatiles taken from the chitin of marine waste, anti-parasitic plant defensins, koumiss—”

  “Koumiss?”

  “Fermented horse milk.”

  “Yum.”

  She smirked: a flash of the old Cassie, the Devil dancing in her eyes. “Hey, someone comes up to you and tells you rotten mare’s milk will cure what ails you, I think you’d drink it. John Wayne said it best: Get off your horse and drink your milk.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he meant, but I’ll take it. Though I never took you for a John Wayne fan.”

  “My dad was. He studied John Wayne because John Wayne was like, pure, unrefined America. Like smoking patriotism through an unfiltered cigarette rolled from an American flag. We had to stop Dad from calling everybody pilgrim, though, because that got hella fuckin’ annoying.” She sighed. The memory, like the sun, passed, gone again under dark clouds. “How are your numbers? The flock, the shepherds, all that.”

  “The flock has grown at…roughly the same rate. Some days see bigger jumps in those who join us, others fewer. When I left this morning we were at eight hundred thirteen sleepwalkers. The shepherds are a different story. Those numbers have dwindled, even with the continued growth of the flock. Some have gotten sick, others had to go home to their families, some are just…they’re scared. Some even believe the bullshit myth that somehow it’s the flock making all this happen, like they’re a parade of Patient Zeros. So, the shepherds are down in number. Only a couple hundred of us at this point.”

  “Us. Listen to you. You’re a shepherd, now.”

  “Well. I’m hardly EIS. Or even CDC.”

  “About that—”

  “I’m not coming back with you.”

  “Benji…”

  “My place is with the flock. I was given this role and I aim to keep it. I’m sure Loretta asked you to talk to me—”

  “Loretta has it. White Mask. She’s sick.”

  He shuddered, chilled by something deeper than the cold of the wind.

  “Oh,” he said, his voice small. Loretta, The Immovable Object. Even in her short stature she loomed large in his mind. She seemed a titan, not…a human being. Not someone who could fall prey to something so crass and profane as a disease. Certainly getting sick was a genuine hazard of being in the CDC. But this was different. “How far—” He had to swallow a hard lump. “How far along is it?”

  “Cursory signs of early dementia. Flu-like symptoms. She’s still…working a little, from home, but Director Monroe has stepped into the role more completely. She’s the one who asked me to talk to you.”

  “Sarah Monroe is good. Though she’s not Loretta.”

  “No, but it is what it is. Martin’s still healthy. Robbie…”

  Her voice trailed off. “What?”

  “Robbie’s…we don’t know. He was still in Africa—there was a new Ebola outbreak in Liberia and they’re suffering from White Mask, too, so he thought, you know, two birds with one stone. But White Mask…the people there, they think it’s witchcraft. They think…Americans caused it. He was with a WHO convoy and they got ambushed. We lost track of them after that but…”

  There’s a good bet he’s dead, Benji thought.

  “Fucking hell,” he said. He blinked back tears.

  “Yeah.”

  Cassie seemed like she was summoning some courage. He watched her muster it—it always came when she was about to challenge him on something. Benji liked that. He needed people willing to challenge him. Her face screwed up and then she let it out:

  “What if you’re making a mistake? I mean, lemme restate the question: What if you’re being a fucking idiot? You’re one of the finest minds we have, Benji—Loretta should’ve never sidelined you after Longacre, I know. That was unacceptable. We need you. I need you.”

  “You’re better than me. And you have Martin, now.” Vargas, who’d stayed on with Cassie at Benji’s recommendation. “I’m staying.”

  “Why?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Anger flared in her eyes. “So make me understand.”

  “The flock,” he said. “They don’t get sick.”

  “What?” She didn’t understand, until she did. He literally watched it dawn on her. “It won’t affect them. Will it? The pathogen. Holy shit.”

  “So far, that holds true. The White Mask has no effect on them.”

  The wind swept in again. Gulls took flight, circling overhead once before hurrying out to sea in search of seafood bounty.

  “I’m going to tell you something now,” he said. “I hope you keep it to yourself but if you don’t, that’s your call. But you might as well know and I’m tired of being burdened with the knowledge.” He took a deep breath. “The flock was designed, Cass. These people were chosen and purposefully infected by a…a nanoparticle: an infinitesimal swarm of machines that grants their hosts a kind of…limited invulnerability. Which means—”

  “They might survive this.”

  “Yes. There’s a distinct possibility that they might become the only survivors.”

  She took a step back, like she needed the space just to take it all in. Cassie looked lost, all of a sudden—a look he’d seen on some White Mask sufferers as the delirium took hold. But this, it seemed, was not that. She was literally reeling from the idea. And trying to catch up to it, trying to process the hows and whys of it. “Wait,” she said. “Hold up. Why aren’t there more? Why not just…make more nanomachines to protect us?”

  He told her what they had told him: “Production of the nanomachines requires a considerable amount of rare earth resources in manufacturing. Resources that, sadly, are no longer available. And no synthetic substitutes exist.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yes. Fuck.”

  “They’re a fail-safe,” she said.
>
  “Something like that.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Black Swan did.” He hesitated. He wasn’t sure how much of this he should even be sharing, but he had to tell someone, and Cassie, especially, was a close friend and confidante. He hated already that he hadn’t told her. “Black Swan controls the nanomachine swarm, meaning…Black Swan controls the flock.”

  “That means Sadie knows.”

  “Knew. She always knew.”

  “And that’s why she’s not with the shepherds anymore.”

  He sighed. “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you two were a thing, kinda.”

  Forcing a smile, he said, “There are greater things to worry about than my troubled romantic entanglements.”

  The wind ruffled her hair, blew it into her face—Cassie ran her hands through it and tugged it into a ponytail.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Same as before. You keep working on a cure. I keep watching the flock. And we hope that, come Christmas, this was all just a temporary nightmare and we all get drunk on rum-spiked eggnog and wait for the next disease to hop from a bat or a rat, or the next pathogen to wake from a melting permafrost, or some med-resistant bacteria to take us all down. We do what we always do. We go to work.”

  “All right.” She smiled and took his hand, giving it a squeeze. “Then in that spirit, come see what I’ve brought you.”

  That was, after all, the purpose of this meeting.

  * * *

  —

  SHE WAS GONE again, and Benji was left as the mist turned to a spitting rain, loading the boxes into the trunk of his car. Cassie had left him with several presents: First were several gallon-sized plastic baggies full of sterilized testing swabs, each operating like a flu swab for rapid diagnosis of the presence of R. destructans. It was enough to test the shepherds and flock.