by Chuck Wendig
Second was a case of antifungal meds. Triaconozole—a new concoction by an upstart pharma company, Dawson-Hearne, out of Chicago. It was no cure, Cassie said, but it provided some prophylaxis against the onset of White Mask by delaying the progress of the filaments that moved to penetrate the brain. She told him, “This isn’t for public knowledge. We don’t have a lot of this. One person needs to take two pills a day for it to be effective, and this is two hundred pills. I’ll try to get you more. In the meantime, dole them out how you see fit, but it’s really meant for necessary personnel, okay? The president is on it, all her staff, all the CDC, and down the line. People find out we’re keeping this secret, there will be hell to pay.”
As if there wasn’t already hell to pay, he thought.
“There’s another thing,” she said. “If dementia sets in, standard meds don’t fix it. But there’s one thing that…helps.”
Then she gave him a shitload of Ritalin.
Ritalin: a serious stimulant. Sometimes it was used to counteract narcolepsy as well as ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, particularly in teens. (Teens who, historically, often sold it to friends anyway.) There’d been talk in recent years of it serving as a countermeasure for Alzheimer’s, but no one had managed a serious study on it, yet.
“I’m not sure what’s worse,” he told her, “a world dying by losing itself to delirium, or a dying world jacked up on Ritalin.”
She shrugged that off and said that other stimulants might help, as well, though that was only a guess. He told her thanks, and took the crate of Ritalin—easily two thousand pills’ worth—with him.
Now he closed the trunk. The gulls returned from their sea voyage, circling the old closed-down farm stand and settling again on its roof. Squawking and hollering. Benji said goodbye to the birds, and wondered aloud if seagulls would be better stewards of the earth than humans had been. As he backed the car toward the road, he had an idle moment when he looked again at the gap in the barrier head—the gap that led off a cliff and to the craggy rocks and crashing surf below. He contemplated for half a second slamming his foot against the gas and driving toward it at top speed, launching himself into the air—for a moment, he’d fly, and that struck him as funny, suddenly. Thirty years ago anyone pontificating on the future forever ended up on the subject of flying cars, and now the only way he could seize that future was by driving off a cliff.
He did not do those things.
Instead, he reversed onto the road, and drove back to the flock.
Back to his fellow shepherds.
Back to the people he called home.
Folks, this is my last podcast. I know, I know. You’ll miss my voice and I’ll miss your comments. But I think it’s time to be with my family and my friends, because…this thing is serious, this disease is out there, White Mask, and who knows where we’ll land? I’m worried. I think we all are. Best advice I have for you is like what Pastor Matthew Bird said in his recent podcast—now is the time to get right with God, because soon, He rides.
—Hiram Golden, The Golden Hour podcast
SEPTEMBER 6
Echo Lake, Indiana
DAY IN AND DAY OUT, Pastor Matthew Bird was reminded that he did not have the courage to die. He certainly had the option to do so: For over a month he’d been chained up in a basement underneath the shed that sat adjacent to Ozark Stover’s Morton building. The shed was built like a bomb shelter bunker, which reportedly was one of its potential functions—Stover said he had many such bunkers across his property. The room was not large, maybe 250 square feet in total, and it contained very little: a fold-out cot; a simple bathroom with toilet, sink, and shower; a small bookshelf containing only one book, a King James Bible; and a laptop computer from which Matthew recorded the podcasts and video messages that Ozark demanded from him. A manacle was tight around his right-hand wrist: a manacle that Stover had welded himself. The manacle was in turn secured to a heavy-gauge steel chain that was in turn bound to a massive steel eyebolt that had been drilled into the cold concrete.
It was just one of the ways Matthew knew that he could die.
He could choke himself with it.
He could slam his head forward onto it.
He could maybe…rig up a noose, somehow, someway.
He could try to drown himself in the sink.
He could try to break the laptop and cut his wrists with the screen or with shards of plastic…
A dozen ways to die and he chose none of them.
(If only, he thought, he had the courage that Autumn had. He had come to the conclusion that, as Ozark told him again and again and again, Autumn went into that bathtub to die, because she hated her husband and had forgotten her son. He didn’t know if she was alive any longer, or if she was in a coma, or if she had come out of it and was now kept somewhere for Ozark Stover just as Matthew was. He asked his captors about it every day, and whenever he did, they said nothing. Sometimes they looked to one another, stone-faced. Other times they laughed. But they never told him. Which was the most horrible thing of all.)
Matthew did not kill himself, no.
And it was for the worst possible reason. It was not because he sought freedom. It was not because he wanted to see Autumn again, or Bo—if Autumn were even alive, if Bo would even see him.
No, it was because he was afraid of dying.
Because Matthew was suddenly sure that the only thing that would meet him in death would be, at best, darkness. And at worst, Hell.
Perhaps they were one and the same.
He no longer was certain that his God, or anyone’s god, existed.
That was a crushing revelation, one that could’ve driven some to certain suicide but forced Matthew in the other direction. Before, death would have been…if not welcome, then at least a homecoming. A return to Heaven, a return to the God from whence he came. But now, death was a doorway into nothing. An endless void, a bottomless chasm, a meaningless eternity that gave no grace or shape to the life that he had led.
He did not have the courage to meet that darkness.
And so, here he sat, day in and day out.
Contemplating death but never meeting it.
Remembering what Stover did to him, replaying it endlessly in his own head, like a punishment levied against himself, by himself.
They brought him meals. Usually it was rangy Danny Gibbons or his buzz-cut brother, Billy, who brought him food. He didn’t eat much, so they stopped bringing him full meals. And once every few days, they told him to record a message. Always audio. Never video, because he couldn’t get it together enough for that. It was a message for the faithful—Stover or his people wrote Matthew a script and he would read it. This laptop had no internet access, as wireless signals did not seem able to penetrate the bunker walls. The scripts were him talking about the End Times, about mobilizing God’s warriors against the coming armies of Leviathan, about the left-wing conspiracies of President Hunt and her collaborators—the conspiracies that led to this moment in American history, when a new plague had risen to eliminate the nation and make way for the New World Order.
It was all weaponized horseshit. Matthew didn’t believe any of it. And he knew now that Stover didn’t believe it, either.
It didn’t matter if Stover believed it.
What mattered was that those listening believed it.
Ozark was sure that they did. Matthew thought so, too.
Anytime someone came in to hand him a new script, they told him the subscriber numbers. Ten thousand, then fifty, then a hundred thousand—not to mention the numbers of views and listens, which were ten times that. They crafted for Matthew a typically paranoid story: He was no longer at his church, he explained, because he was speaking “too much truth,” and satanic forces had overtaken the US government and would be coming for the “truth-tellers.” And so he was reporting from a
“safe location,” a “bunker where Lucifer and his minions would not find me.”
He had to do it convincingly.
Or they beat him with old phone books and had him do it again.
He threatened to kill himself. He told that to Stover—who rarely made an appearance down here anymore—and the big man just laughed, a roaring, tectonic guffaw.
“Go ahead,” Stover said. “That’ll just feed them. Just confirms our narrative. You, the good preacher, killed by the forces of darkness to stop your crusade of righteousness. Hell, maybe we’ll off you ourselves if we need to.” Then they beat him again. Ozark laughed the whole time.
So Matthew stopped resisting.
He leaned into it.
Matthew brought wide-eyed and frothy vigor to every recording. Sometimes he wept in the middle, uncontrollably so, and he was sure that he’d have to re-record. But Danny Gibbons told him Stover liked that. Said it sounded authentic to someone watching God’s Kingdom fall to Satan.
Lately, the scripts had refocused attention on the sleepwalkers, repositioning them as not only Satan’s army, but also a marching contagion: It was the flock of walkers, the scripts read, that were spreading the White Mask disease to the faithful. They, a mob of plague-bearers engineered by the government under the orders of Lucifer and Leviathan herself—
Oh, that was President Hunt. Leviathan was what they called her.
What he called her. Matthew. In his recordings.
Because the inescapable truth was, though he did not write the scripts, it was he who spoke them. He was not their origin point, but he was damn sure their delivery system. Which meant he was a contagion, too. Not of some virus or bacteria or fungus. But spreading an infection of bad ideas.
Yet onward he went.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday, someone new came into the bunker. He’d seen most of the old faces at one point or another—he’d seen Roger, he’d seen the two Gibbons brothers, and of course he’d seen Ozark. Never Hiram Golden, though that didn’t surprise him. Never Bo, either.
Bo…
Autumn…
This time, it was someone he didn’t expect. A face he initially recognized but couldn’t put a name to until the young man identified himself again: Ty Cantrell, the sandy-haired fellow, young and strong, who had once upon a time painted and fixed up Matthew’s church with Billy Gibbons.
Ty was different from the others. He was softer-spoken, nicer, a little looser. And he looked uncomfortable around Matthew, too—or, the way Matthew figured it, was uncomfortable around this situation. He seemed nervous as he brought Matthew a new script.
And that meant he was talkative.
He started off sort of…rambling about this and that. Ty went on and on about some baseball game between the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Red Sox, and then said, “I’m kinda surprised they even still have the games anymore, what with the way things are right now. But I guess people need to feel good about something.”
And that was Matthew’s window. He didn’t know much about what was going on—they kept him mostly in the dark, though he’d learned some things through the scripts. Even still, he didn’t have much to go on.
Matthew said, “How are things out there?”
“Oh, you know. People just…they keep dying. Lot of infected.”
“How many? How many are sick? Or dead?”
“I…you know, I don’t know. Lots.”
“Lots like, a million?”
“Nah, but it’s tens of thousands or something. Hundreds. I dunno, I kinda have to tune it out, I just hear things.”
“And they say it’s getting worse?” He heard his own voice trembling, because he felt scared. Not just for the world, but because he suspected he shouldn’t be talking to Ty. And Ty should not be talking to him, either. “How bad?”
“Pssh, I don’t know. They’re telling people with any kind of symptoms—a runny nose or like, you forget the name of your dog—to go get a swab to see if you got the disease. They opened up all these quarantine centers but they’re already full. And then they’re burning bodies…” He waved it off. “It’s a mess. You don’t want to hear about any of this.”
I do. I want to hear about it all. In part just to feel connected to something again. In part because he worried about his role in all of it.
He idly flipped through the two-page script he was given. This one shorter than usual. He saw the sleepwalkers mentioned again and again.
Ty said, “Well, I’m gonna go—”
“This script is heavy on the walkers again.”
“They’re spreading disease.”
So Ty wasn’t too smart. And he bought in to Stover’s bullshit.
“Sure,” Matthew said, nodding slow.
“So, they gotta go, right? I mean that’s what Stover says. Can’t abide a witch to live and all that. That part’ll be over soon enough, I guess.”
“Of course.” Matthew licked his lips, eager to pluck the truth from this poor daft man—really, a kid, only a few years older than his own son. “So he’s planning on doing something about them. The walkers.”
“It’s time.” Ty nodded. “People will understand. Hell,” he said, snort-laughing a little. “I think they’ll cheer, you ask me.”
“I bet. That Ozark is going to—I assume he’ll go big. The attack will be…it’ll be something to see.”
“I figure.”
“Me too.” He tried to keep cool, but his heart was bucking in his chest like a wild horse. He shuffled the two pages again. “So, I’ll record these and…I guess you’ll be back in an hour or so.”
“Okay.” Ty looked at him with a flash of pity and fear. Then he smiled and hurried the hell out of there, nervousness nipping at his heels.
That’s when Matthew recorded the episode.
He didn’t know who would be listening—early he knew they were checking his work, made sure he stuck to the script. Were they still? He had to assume they were. But he’d gone off-script before, mostly just rewriting the sentences in his head to sound more like how he’d really say them. And sometimes he went off on a tangent, too, talking about the march of Satan’s army and quoting different passages of Revelation.
They never said anything to him about those.
Because maybe they weren’t listening anymore.
He had to count on it.
This time, he recorded the audio.
And again he went off-script. He included a fire-and-brimstone warning to the shepherds and the flock of walkers that they were monsters, they were demons, and that they would be attacked—
“We will attack you. We will destroy you. Soon,” he said, trying to put as much madness into his voice as possible, “you will pay for your sins as slaves of Leviathan, and when that attack comes, you won’t see it coming. We’re coming for you. No warning.”
Absurd, he knew, telling them there’d be no warning—when he was explicitly trying to warn them.
But sometimes people fell for such simple chicanery. As a pastor, you sometimes had to do things to entertain the kids, and some pastors played the guitar. Matthew’s hook was magic tricks. And with stage magic, he knew the most important part was basic misdirection—the coin isn’t in this hand, one said, even as the coin was very much in that hand.
He hoped the walkers and their shepherds would see through his trick.
Later, Ty came, took the USB key on which he recorded the audio.
Then he counted the links on his chain (141, a number he knew already) and, though he had no windows, knew it was getting late in the day. His internal clock was always wildly spinning, so he checked the clock on the laptop just to feel anchored to the movement of time.
Sometime later, after he dozed off on his cot, he heard the door to his bunker rattling and unlocking. Feet banged on the metal ladde
r leading down. It wasn’t Stover, he knew that much. Stover’s footfalls were like anvils landing, whong, whong, whong. This wasn’t that.
It was Danny Gibbons. Danny walked in, barely looking over at Matthew. He had the air of someone coming to do a job: a plumber, an electrician, someone who was singularly focused on the task ahead.
Finally, he set his stare on Matthew.
“Heard your recording.”
Every part of him tightened up. All his appendages wanted to crawl inside of him. Play it cool, maybe he doesn’t know.
“Good,” Matthew said, offering an embarrassed smile. “Hope it was, ahh, hope it was okay.”
It was then that Matthew saw what hung from one of Danny’s back belt-loops. He saw it when the man grabbed for it.
A hammer.
Small. Ball-peen.
“Left hand,” Danny said.
“What?”
“Your left hand. Come over here, put it out on the desk. Not too close to the keyboard.”
“I don’t…I don’t understand.” Matthew scooted backward on his cot toward the wall. “Listen, hey, no, I don’t know what you’re doing—”
“Like I said, heard your recording. You come over here. You put your hand down. If I have to come over there, this gets worse.”
“No. I don’t—c’mon,” Matthew pleaded. “Just, just, hold on, let’s just talk this out. Is this about the improvisation? I’ve improvised before and it wasn’t an issue—hey, I’ll re-record. No big deal. I’ll stick to the script, yes, I’ll definitely stick to the script—”
“I’m gonna count to five. You’re not here at five, I come to you, and then I can’t promise what happens after that. But I do know I don’t see any gun oil around here, so don’t expect it to be as pleasurable as last time.”
A low moan arose in the back of Matthew’s throat. The mewl of a trapped creature. He flinched, pressing back into the wall further, wishing somehow that he could just merge with the concrete wall of the bunker—this prison—and disappear into the dirt forever.