by Chuck Wendig
The flock died around her. One at a time—crack, crack, crack. Bodies dropped. One fell right in front of her—a man named Vincent Garza. He was one of the walkers, a chemistry teacher from Oregon. His hair was once a high raven-black wall, but now it was red with blood and brains as the top of his skull peeled back. As he hit, Marcy saw the glow leave him: The air around him shuddered, glittering with brass and bronze, before dissipating. It was a strange thing to see: His corpse was dark-gray in a sea of golden mist. Worse, she couldn’t hear him: The absence of his song, his hum, was shocking.
It only served to stoke her rage.
She moved over his body, gently running her large hand over his wet, red forehead—a small moment of peace given to him, the only gift she had right now. Then he was behind her. And she pushed on.
Above the flock to the left and to the right she saw the golden bears standing tall on their mounts—this was the start of the bridge. From here, the road proper widened out with a shoulder and guardrails and beyond them, the dark, damp pines. Marcy used the trees as cover and leapt the guardrail.
* * *
—
WE HAVE TO do this right, Benji thought. The rear phalanx of vehicles wouldn’t be able to help, but those at the front—they had a role to play here. He led the way, hopping in the front seat of Charlie Stewart’s RV (after sweeping off broken glass) and steering it ahead, pulling it off to the right. He phoned Sadie, told her to back the truck and the CDC trailer down the length of the bridge, easing it into the space opposite the RV.
“We need to keep a narrow channel open between the vehicles,” he told her, just like he told the others. “Enough space that the walkers can come between, not so little that they go over us.” He knew from their experiments that blocking the path would just mean the walkers climbed the trailer—and once up there on the top, they’d be even easier targets.
But if they stayed on the bridge, with vehicles parked on each side of them, forming walls of a defensive gauntlet, they’d be protected.
Not all of them, though. Benji did some quick calculations as the other RVs at the front eased forward, some behind him, some lining up to accommodate the CDC trailer. Three RVs, a CDC trailer, a VW camper van. The RVs were thirty or forty feet long, the CDC trailer was fifty feet long, a Ford F-350 was twenty-some feet…
That gave them around 80 feet of defense on the western side of the Klamath River Bridge, and close to 110 feet on the eastern side.
His mind crunched more numbers—
Nine hundred sleepwalkers. A couple hundred shepherds. Some—how many, he didn’t know—now dead.
Right now, that was a mob of people running almost four hundred feet long. Roughly the total length of the bridge.
That meant they could protect a quarter of the flock.
No, less. Because now that they were creating a channel less than ten feet wide, fewer walkers and shepherds would fit between.
It wasn’t enough. It was something, but it was far from what they needed. If we can just get over the bridge, we’ll have cover again. On the far side of the bridge it was again wooded—here, though, out in the open, they were widely exposed. As Benji tried to figure out if they had any other kinds of shielding or cover they could provide, Pete paced behind him, a phone pressed to his ear.
“Nobody at nine-one-one is fucking answering,” Pete said. Then he looked past Benji, through the front of the RV. “Mate, I don’t think she’s doing too good out there.”
Benji glanced out the front of the RV.
Sadie was having a hard time backing the truck up. She was cutting the wheel left, then right, the trailer following in the opposite direction each time—like she was slaloming around invisible pylons.
He called her. She answered in a panic.
“Not now!” she said. Then he heard a rifle shot, and glass breaking. She screamed and he heard the phone thud against the floor.
No, no, no.
He called her name into the phone, but nothing.
And yet the truck kept coming. Kept slaloming. Winding its way backward in an awkward, uncontrolled path. The back tire blew as a bullet hit it. He heard her scream again over the phone.
She’s fine. She’s alive. She just doesn’t have the phone.
His heart soared at that small solace.
And then she did it—jacking the truck fast in reverse, the trailer crashing into the side of the bridge, scraping and grinding as the taillights evaporated against the bridge rail. But she did it. The truck and CDC trailer were in place, if at a slightly off-angle. Benji looked out the window at her, and she looked back. They waved to each other.
Then the mirror on the passenger side of the truck exploded. Benji hit the deck, and he yelled into the phone for Sadie to do the same.
Outside the RV, between the vehicles, the flock began to walk. Threading that needle, filtering into the protected channel.
It’s working, Benji thought.
“It’s fucking working!” Pete whooped from the floor.
Bullets thudded into the side of the RV, crossing the space above him.
* * *
—
THIS IS WHY you’re here, Marcy.
She understood this suddenly in a moment of intense clarity: The flock called to her and gave her solace from her pain so that she could do this in return. A favor for a favor, a gift for a gift.
Marcy stood amid tall pines. She breathed in the clear, evergreen scent: the smell of sap, juniper, and moss. The ground was littered with a carpet of thin brown pine needles that crackled and whispered underfoot. She stopped to listen. Not to the sounds of the forest. Not to the screams and yelps of injured shepherds.
But for the gunfire.
She tuned herself to it. When she was a cop, your ears were everything—even more important than your eyes. You walked into a dark room or stepped out onto an unlit street, your ears were your first (and sometimes last) line of defense against whatever was coming. You heard the scuff of a shoe. Or the quick intake of breath from a perp nearby. Or the faint rattle of a pistol action in a trembling hand.
So now she triangulated to the sound of a rifle firing.
Bang.
She kept low and moved through the trees, winding between their shadows as pale light shone through branches in long, stretching beams, beams that captured the particulate matter of the forest floating this way and that like a swarm of little faeries, golden and glittering. It’s the glow, she thought. They’re showing me the way.
Marcy hurried through the trees.
Faster, damnit. Every moment you delay, someone dies.
The rifle went off nearby. It split the air. Marcy quickly moved behind a tree and saw the whorls of golden mist moving serpentine toward a cluster of distant evergreens. Marcy scanned the dark nest of branches and needles—
Until she saw something that didn’t belong.
No—someone.
Someone had used the branches of the pine tree to climb up there and put in what looked like a temporary deer stand. Portable, with a sling seat you propped up against the trunk of the tree. Marcy wasn’t a hunter, but she was from Indiana—she knew their tools and their tricks.
The tree the man had chosen stood at the edge of the pines, overlooking the bend in the river. And beyond it waited the bridge.
She saw the gleam of the barrel thrust between branches.
She heard the rack-clack of a bolt being drawn back. An ejected brass casing piffed into the pine needles at the base of the tree. Dozens of other shells glittered there in the filtered forest light.
Marcy swallowed.
Arm out, gun up, she gently eased back the hammer on the little snubnose revolver. Deep breath in, then out.
He’s going to fire that rifle again.
If he does, someone else will die.
Take the shot.
The gun barked in her hand. The recoil rolled through her arm, to the shoulder, but she had braced against it.
Moments passed. Nothing happened.
I missed. Which means he’s going to track my presence and shoot.
But then movement. The branches of the pine tree crackled and shattered like snapped broomsticks as a body fell from thirty feet up to the ground below. Seconds later, a rifle fell, too, the butt of it hitting the man in the face.
There lay a corpse. A man with long, ratty hair and a patchy beard. One tooth, a canine, missing from his mouth. A scar on his chin. Tattoos on his arm, one that Marcy instantly recognized: a snake forming a serpentine circumference around a crossing sword and hammer.
His dead eyes stared up at nothing.
Marcy took the rifle and started to climb the tree.
* * *
—
BILLY GIBBONS SAT in a tall California sycamore tree east of the Klamath River Bridge, using a Remington 700 rifle to kill people.
It was not the first time he’d killed folks.
And, he wagered, it would not be the last.
He was a killer. It’s what he was. What he’d been. What he’d always be. Billy liked it. It was one of the few things he did enjoy, truth be told. Most things didn’t give him any thrill at all, but ending someone’s life—especially someone who stood in the way of Ozark Stover—gave him an electric tickle. And, just like now, a powerful erection.
He and his brother Danny had been part of Ozark Stover’s crew since the very beginning. Their time working with Stover went back twenty years, to the earliest days of Stover growing weed near Echo Lake and moving pills like Perks and Vikes through the county. Stover used his family’s junkyard as a front for the operation, and for a number of years business was good.
But times changed.
The wetbacks moved in with heroin and later, with crank. Some of the blacks came back out of the cities, too, started buying land, started opening businesses, some legit, some not. All competition.
With the times changing, so did Stover. He grew the operation, but soon he started saying, it wasn’t enough just to control product. They were being attacked. America was being attacked. Trespassers and invaders. It was whites that founded this country, he said, and whites that needed to take it back. Gibbons didn’t disagree. The day of 9/11 only confirmed what they already knew: The white Christian way of life was threatened by outsiders.
People who didn’t belong.
Billy and Danny helped Ozark clean house. They got rid of the, as Ozark put it, “impurities” in the organization—not just those with brown or black skin who had worked as part of the crew, but any who did not subscribe to helping the nation return to one that belonged only to whites. Any who did not share the vision had to go.
Sometimes with a bullet to the back of the head, or an extension cord wound tight around the neck.
Now the world was falling apart. But Ozark said that was an opportunity. “The piles of bodies will be an adequate hill to climb,” the big man growled.
He told Billy to go out with a small crew, and he and Riley Coons would take rifles up into trees—because both were masterful shots, Riley having been a sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan for Blackheart and Billy having been raised on hunting deer and squirrel—and from there, they’d take out as many of those plague zombies as they could.
Zombies, that Ozark noted, sure looked like “the United Colors of Benetton.” Billy didn’t know what that meant, so Ozark explained: The flock was a “multicultural coalition.” Translation, not that white.
“Should we not shoot the whites?” Billy asked.
“They’re corrupted. Take out whoever you can.”
That was the commandment. Billy knew how to follow orders. The only thing he bucked at was not bringing Danny along—Danny was a helluva shot. Better than Riley Coons, to be damn sure. But he also knew that Danny was smart, and he’d been Ozark’s right-hand man now for a few years. Danny would stay and Billy would go and that was the way of things.
So here he was. Riley in the other tree. Shooting those sick, diseased walkers and the so-called shepherds who guarded them.
“Guard this,” he said to no one—well, really, he said it to them, to the shepherd fuckers down there—and braced the rifle against the pale bark of the tree. He moved the scope, saw that they’d continued to move the vehicles along to form a barrier covering the first third or so of the flock. That was smart. Good for them. Still wasn’t enough, though.
Billy found one of them creepy-ass, dead-eyed walkers—couldn’t tell what race the man was, but he sure wasn’t white. Had close-cropped hair, mouth cut in an expressionless line. Nice clothes. Yuppie clothes. Somebody’s trying to dress like a white fellow, Billy thought.
He gave a gentle, intimate squeeze to the trigger—
The rifle butt punched into his shoulder as the gun went off.
The man’s head fountained red as he went down.
Billy wasn’t counting, but he figured he’d killed about forty, forty-five so far.
Riley must’ve killed the same, because they worked one after the next—Billy took a shot, then Riley took his, then Billy again. It was like a game. “Your turn,” Billy said aloud.
He waited for the next shot. Part of this fun game was scanning the crowd—the slow-walking flock or the panicked shepherds—trying to see who Riley would hit next. Sometimes, too, they took shots at the campers and cars and trucks just to let them know they weren’t safe in there.
But ten seconds passed.
Then twenty. Thirty.
A whole minute.
Riley was taking too long.
No way he was out of ammo. They had enough for twice what they’d killed already. He could radio over, but he didn’t want to spook anybody.
Instead he turned his own rifle toward Riley’s position. He tracked the river’s edge to the tree the man had climbed into.
There you are, Billy said, except—
That wasn’t Riley.
Some large-ass dude was in the tree, squished into the tree stand. Wait. That wasn’t a man. It looked like…a woman? Shit, she was big. Billy didn’t see the rifle until he realized, No, it’s there, it’s just hard to spot because it’s not pointing at the crowd—
It was pointed at him.
The bullet punched through his own scope. Backward through the glass, through his eye, into the brain and out the back of his skull. Whatever his last thought was, it ejected with the lead projectile.
He fell off the stand.
MAYA: Maybe this is something else. Maybe it’s from the Greek word for “apocalypse”—apokálypsis. An uncovering. A revealing. Revelation was read to be this terrible tumult but maybe it’s just a new awakening. Listen, it’s like the Death card in the Tarot. Movies always make it seem like the Death card is a bad thing—a literal death—but no, it’s a metaphorical death, a figurative one, and that means transformation, transition, and maybe that’s where we are now, as people, as humans. We’re on a point of revelation about ourselves and a point of transformation into something new, something better. An end from a beginning. You know?
BLUE: …
MAYA: Blue? Any thoughts to add?
BLUE: I think you’re nuts. This is nuts. I can’t keep this up. I can’t pretend it’s all okay. We’re all going to die.
[sound of fumbling with microphone as podcast ends]
—from The Maya & Blue Podcast, Episode 221,
“The End Is the Beginning”
SEPTEMBER 8
Klamath River Bridge, California
BENJI’S PHONE RANG.
It was Marcy. She said: “I got them. They’re dead. I’m coming back.”
And with that, it was over. The gunfire had stopped. The flock continued its ceaseless trek across th
e bridge, filtering through the narrow gap formed by the campers and trucks. The shepherds slowly emerged into the gray light of midday, under dour, overcast skies, and as the flock proceeded, they left in their wake a field of bodies.
Benji staggered out onto the bridge from within the RV. His knees were weak. Tinnitus droned in his ear, a high-pitched whine.
The number of corpses staggered him.
His life was numbers, and so that’s what he did—he fell to that default the way an injured man would lean on a crutch. He flicked his gaze from body to body, doing a simple count, not worrying about who was shepherd and who was flock. Ten, twenty, thirty, up went that number, sixty, seventy, eighty—someone was at his side trying to talk to him but their voice was a Charlie Brown teacher voice, womp womp wahhh. Benji counted corpses until there were no more to count.
Ninety-two corpses.
People moved around him, looking for answers.
Benji didn’t even know who was speaking.
“Nobody’s answering at nine-one-one.”
“The flock is on the move. Do we go? Do we wait?”
“Are the police coming? Is anybody coming?”
All he could do was gently shake his head. To one question, to all the questions. No. I don’t know. Leave me alone.
Blood pooled under crumpled skulls and slack faces.
By the edge of the bridge, he saw that one of the horses had fallen. Shot in the neck. The wound still pumped red, the animal’s chest rising and falling in short, hurried puffs. Maryam and Bertie McGoran sat with the animal. Maryam’s arm looked broken at a bad angle, and she held it off to the side as she stroked the animal’s mane. He saw Darryl Sweet lying on his side, the young man’s eye a wet, crimson crater—and the back of his head blown out. One of the flock’s dogs, a border collie, nosed around the head of a dead shepherd, a young Chinese woman Benji found familiar, but he could not recall her name or where she had come from or whom she was here for. He was sad to see how many of these faces he recognized, but how few he really knew. This, the curse of a man who loved his numbers.