Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  Then Matthew unstuck the knife and stabbed again.

  But this time, the knife found open air. Stover rocked his mountainous frame, letting go of Matthew and staggering backward.

  Toward the shotgun.

  He knew that soon as Stover touched that gun, it was over.

  But Ozark wasn’t moving fast. He was clumsy on his feet, one heel knocking the next. He had his right hand clamped over the wound in his neck, even as blood pushed up through the fingers and out from under the flat of his palm.

  Matthew pitched forward on his hands and knees, scrambling toward the shotgun on the ground. He landed on top of it just as Stover’s hand found the hammers, drawing them back with a meaty click. Matthew knew that overpowering Stover was not an option. The man could break him over his knee as easily as he would break open that gun.

  So he did the only thing he could do—

  He framed both legs over the shotgun, one at each side, neither in the way of the barrels, and he let the keychain drop onto the stones before stabbing his thumb into the trigger guard and giving a quick tug—

  Both barrels went off, recoiling across the stones. Choom. The sound was deafening, and Matthew’s hearing went to hell, lost beneath the gun blast.

  Stover reached for Matthew, but the pastor was quick to again scurry away, getting the ground underneath his scrabbling feet—

  Enough to stand up, at least.

  Enough to move.

  Enough to run.

  His sprint found no grace. He ran as a starving man, a desperate man, a man covered in blood not his own. His legs pinwheeled madly beneath him, guiding him with a singular command: Get away, get away at any cost, don’t stay, he’s going to kill you.

  Matthew did not look back. And he could not listen—his hearing was gone for now, maybe forever, swallowed by the roar of the gun just moments ago when it went off beneath him.

  Ahead was the Morton building. Should he hide there? To his left was the path back up toward Ozark’s mansion. Was that the way? Didn’t Hiram say he had Autumn already in the car? Matthew felt a wave of despair threatening to overtake him—where was the car? Where was Autumn? He had no idea where she was or where to go and—

  Whoom. He did not hear the sound so much as he felt its heat, the movement of the air, as pellets peppered the side of the metal building—Matthew nearly fell trying to get out of the way of it, but the shot missed. He risked a look back, and there stood Stover, framed in a wide stance. One hand held his neck. The other fumbled with the gun, trying to put two shells into it. Already his face had gone pale, a grim and bloodless mask.

  Matthew rounded the corner of the building.

  And there waited his salvation:

  Hiram Golden’s silver Lexus.

  The passenger side ratcheted open.

  Autumn, his wife, stood up behind it. “Matthew!” she called out, waving him toward her. She looked roughshod and haunted, her hair matted and oily, a harder, meaner version of the wife he’d left behind. But that meant she looked tough, too—tougher than he ever remembered her looking.

  Joy surged within him. His wife. The car. Escape.

  But then, a new, wretched realization.

  The keys.

  He’d dropped them back toward the shed.

  He’d dropped them so that he could pull the trigger of the shotgun.

  “No,” he said, stumbling toward the car. He could barely hear his own voice, like he was listening to it through layers of cement. Like he was still trapped in that bunker and he was straining to hear himself. Autumn, worried, asked him something but he couldn’t hear her. He half fell against the front of the car, saying again and again, “I don’t have the keys, I don’t have the keys. I dropped them. I dropped them—”

  Autumn hurried around the side of the car, and she grabbed his wrist and pulled it up. As if to show him something.

  As if to show him the keys.

  Which were there in his hand.

  “I don’t…” He was about to say, understand, but suddenly he did. He must have picked them up. He was dizzy, confused, scared—he must’ve picked them up without even realizing it.

  Autumn said something, and he couldn’t hear her, but he saw her lips and made out the words:

  We have to go.

  “We have to go,” he said, agreeing.

  And Matthew hurried to the driver’s side of the car. He pawed to get the door open. Time moved in erratic fits and starts. One moment he was struggling to get into the seat. The next, the car was already started and surging forward, gravel spitting beneath the back tires of the Lexus.

  The back window exploded. Matthew winced, and with his broken hand urged Autumn to get down. In the rearview he saw Ozark Stover lurching Frankenstein-like toward them, the barrel of the gun dragging behind him, drawing lines in the gravel. Matthew hit the gas, pushing the Lexus far and fast through the woods, away from the shed, away from his prison, away from the man who had put him there.

  This way to the Great Egress, he thought, and barked a wild laugh.

  The truth is, we don’t know what happens now. Our president is dead, assassinated by what police believe to be domestic terrorists. Vice President Oshiro was reportedly sworn in aboard Air Force One, but we have no video of it, no tape, and neither he nor the rest of the members of the team of succession have been seen. They are reportedly safe, but where? And when will we see them make a statement? With a world on the brink, we need leadership from our electeds, not…phantoms. But phantoms, it seems, are all we have.

  —Jake Tapper, on The Lead with Jake Tapper

  SEPTEMBER 11

  Palo Alto, California

  THE COUNTRY HAD GONE TO hell. The world, too, Benji figured, though it was harder now to see past the borders of this nation to the countries and continents beyond. Days now since the bridge attack, they learned that they were not the only attack—nor, even, the biggest one.

  President Hunt was dead. Quarantine centers had been firebombed. Places of worship had been blown sky-high. Militias, flying a banner of a serpent encircling a cross made from a sword and hammer, rose up out of the darkness of American life and swept cities and towns. They had high-end military gear. They had automatic weapons, explosives, Humvees, tanks. In some cities, the police and US military fought back. In others, like St. Louis, Phoenix, and Baltimore, the police joined the militias. So did some of the military—Sadie said that there was a fracture in the military between those loyal to the now-dead Hunt, and those loyal to the sword-and-hammer. That meant the cold war of human versus White Mask had become a hot war of American versus American. If anyone survived, if anyone was around to remember it, Benji knew they would call it a civil war, though in it, civility was lost. Men hung from bridges. People were shot in the streets. The sickness took hold, and with it came madness and violence.

  Now: Palo Alto. Benji and Sadie were separate from the flock. They drove through the small city—the birthplace of Silicon Valley—and saw that here, the chaos was at least dampened. Nearby San Francisco had not been so lucky: There, a group calling themselves the Jefferson Freedom Brigade swept the city, blocked the bridges, all in an effort to see the city “secede” from the rest of California, maybe from the US—one rumor said they were not part of the sword-and-hammer crowd, another rumor said they were, but only in secret, serving as a divide-and-conquer tactic against the so-called coastal elites of the Bay Area.

  Either way, Benji and Sadie drove far around San Francisco. Even at a distance they could hear the gunfire and the sirens. Drones hovered over the faraway city, looking like dragonflies over a foggy marsh.

  Now they couldn’t see any of that. Palo Alto was…quiet.

  They saw a lot of boarded-up windows and empty storefronts. They saw people in face masks packing up moving trucks and cars. But they also saw some signs of normalcy rem
aining: people in coffee bars, people in bar bars, a line of folks waiting at a bakery, a bike messenger zipping about, a man charging his electric car at a car-charging port. And then, interspersed through the normalcy, came absurdist moments of abnormality, like cancerous cells rebelling: an ATM ripped from its mooring, someone in a neon-green NBC suit sitting on a second-floor balcony overlooking a park, a pack of black-suited men on a street corner holding signs about the END OF DAYS while their faces were buried in VR headsets, a marijuana dispensary that had its sign covered and painted over with the words END-OF-LIFE DISPENSARY (and outside, a black slate sandwich board that read, in chalk, THIS WORLD’S FUCKED, WHY NOT MOVE ON TO THE NEXT ONE?).

  “I don’t like being apart from the flock,” Benji said.

  “I know,” Sadie answered. She drove her car. He sat in the passenger seat, looking out the window at the mad world. “But you have Arav back.”

  He did. That was true. After the attack on the bridge—after many of their shepherds had become sleepwalkers, including Shana Stewart—he needed someone he could trust. Especially since they could not find Marcy Reyes, either. He spoke to local police, but they were not only unwilling to help but also unwilling to remain in their jobs. The Crescent City sheriff he spoke to said, “Sorry, Doc, I were you, I’d ditch this shit and go be with your loved ones. It’s like a hurricane, you don’t want to ride this out hanging out in the open. Shelter in place.” He grew frustrated with her, then angry, and she apologized. “Here’s a consolation prize,” the woman said, and gave him a handgun. A pistol, a nine-millimeter something-or-other. He’d never fired one. But he kept it just the same, that and the box of ammo she gave him.

  And that was his first mission with the flock: get them armed. That ran counter to everything he felt about community and governance; he did not want violence to be their answer. But he also had to recognize that it had become the de facto answer for many, including those who would seek to do the flock harm. And if—if—the flock was truly meant to be the last of them, then survival was key. At any cost.

  Because one day soon, they’d run out of potential sleepwalkers.

  Sadie explained it to him the night after the attack, the two of them sitting in the CDC trailer, inventorying their supplies. “The number is finite, Benji. The flock can only grow to a number of one thousand twenty-four walkers.”

  “A thousand twenty-four? That’s a computational number, isn’t it?”

  She smiled gently and gave his cheek a little pinch. “Very good, young man, you always were a most excellent student.” At that, he felt a flush rise to his cheeks—a moment of pleasure swiftly drowned in a washtub once he recalled her betrayal. She continued, pulling away, seeming to sense the sudden tension. “The ah, the swarm is literally millions of nanomachines, but Black Swan can only control so many.”

  “There are limitations,” he said.

  “Sadly. Limitations in the supply of machines, limitations in control of those machines.”

  And then it dawned on him: “And limitations in people. Oh my God. We will run out of healthy people who can become sleepwalkers.”

  Her face grew grim. She knew this already. “Yes.”

  Once the disease overtook the population, the number of those not sickened by the fungus would drop precipitously. That meant there came a point—a point very soon—that losing a sleepwalker meant not being able to replace a sleepwalker. They had demand, but dwindling supply.

  They could preemptively lose the future of humankind if they weren’t careful. That, then, was when he agreed:

  “I’ll speak to Black Swan. We need information.”

  “Thank you, Benji.”

  But there was one problem:

  She did not have access to Black Swan. The machine intelligence had cut off the satellite feed beaming to her phone. That meant she needed an interface. “We can’t go to Atlanta,” he said. He’d heard reports that Atlanta was a war zone, now. And airlines weren’t flying; all air traffic was done. Airports closed. Train stations, too. Gas shortages meant driving cross-country was not doable, either. “I could call Cassie, maybe she could interface with Black Swan…”

  “No,” Sadie said, “we have a local option. Ah, well, local-ish.” That’s when she explained to him that the original development of the machine intelligence program was not done in Atlanta, but rather, in Palo Alto. Benex-Voyager had contracted her and her team out of California.

  That meant they had an access point remaining.

  And Palo Alto, heart of the Silicon Valley, still had piping-hot access to the ’net through the PAIX internet exchange.

  So here they were.

  “This is it,” Sadie said, gesturing ahead. They had a private parking lot, but the gate was blocked by a small box truck (on the side, someone had spray-painted a giant upside-down smiley face and the words, EAT A DICK, THE APOCALYPSE), so she decided to park right on the sidewalk, because, as she put it, “What does it even matter?”

  Benji had no answer for that.

  They went inside.

  Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.

  —Paul Stamets

  SEPTEMBER 11

  Innsbrook, Missouri

  MARCY TRIED TO CRY BUT her body wouldn’t even allow that. She hung, limp, her arms twisted above her head and bound with endless loops of duct tape to a spreader bar above, like the kind you’d use to hang a deer in the barn for the purposes of bleeding the animal out. Except here she wasn’t in a barn: She was in a climate-controlled cement-floor garage, home to dozens of golf carts and shelves of caddie equipment. The men who’d brought her here had taken her through a resort area, past golf courses and fancy banquet halls, through a small copse of fancy townhouses and mini mansions, past a lake and a gazebo and a nice fountain.

  But this resort area had been colonized: She saw military vehicles lining well-manicured drives, she saw men and women with high-powered rifles and military fatigues. They flew flags she recognized: that snake again, biting its own tail around an X formed from the sword and the hammer.

  This may have been a resort area once.

  Now it was a militia headquarters. A staging ground for something.

  Her feet touched the ground; they had not suspended her in the air. Even still, being away from the flock meant all the noise and clamor came back to her brain—and with it the electric pain. It crippled her. Her legs could barely support her, and sometimes they gave out.

  Sometime in the last twelve hours she’d pissed herself. She didn’t even know it happened until she looked down, saw her pants soaked through.

  Time passed. Sounds outside reached her ears: the measured gunfire of target practice, the whoops and hollers of people laughing, the growl of engines. And then the garage bay door opened, and in came a man easily as large as she was—if she was built like a redwood, he was built like a mountain. The mountain man did not come in alone: a bald, potbellied white guy with a copper-red goatee came in with him, a camo-taped AR-15 draped around his middle, dangling by an olive-drab strap.

  As the mountainous fellow stepped into the light, she saw that he did not look well: He was pale and sickly, with a swaddling of gauze looped again and again around his neck. A bandage bulged on the side.

  Because of it, she almost didn’t recognize him.

  But then she did. Could she be hallucinating? Was this really the same man from Waldron? The day the flock came walking through, her first day of freedom from the crippling pain. Before the shooter took aim, she saw the Big Man in the crowd. He’d nudged a cohort, who then threw a bottle.

  A distraction technique, she realized.

  Big Man was behind it all.

  She saw now that he recognized her, too.

  “You,” he growled.

  “Me,” she said, her voice raspy and soft.
<
br />   “I remember you. Waldron.” His voice, like hers, was hoarse and weak. Both of them were diminished, it seemed. “You took down that gunman, didn’t you.”

  “Your gunman.”

  He smiled. “You were—what, ex-cop?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Heard you took a shot to the head. Gunshot?”

  “Baseball bat.”

  “Right, right.” He stepped forward, and the man with the rifle stepped forward, too, sniffling. Half a second later the bald militiaman juggled his head back before pressing his face into the crook of his arm and sneezing.

  Moments of palpable tension stretched out.

  Took a second for the man to realize the ramifications of what had just happened. His eyes went wide. “I’m fine,” he stammered. “I’m not sick. It’s just allergies, it’s fucking ragweed time—”

  “Bless you,” said the Big Man.

  Then the Big Man drew a pistol and shot the man in the cheek.

  Blood sprayed. Brains and bone. The man toppled, fwump.

  Marcy gasped, failing to stifle the cry that rose up out of her. “You shot him, you just up and shot him. That’s murder.”

  “You must’ve been a good cop, what with all those detective skills.” He said this without humor and with considerable venom. “He was sick. You show signs, you walk or you die.”

  “You don’t look so healthy yourself.”

  “I had an…accident.” His hand moved to his neck.

  “Someone did that to you.”

  “That is correct.”

  “They should’ve kept going. Taken your whole head off your shoulders.” She summoned the strength to put some volume in her voice—not steel rebar, maybe, but some steel filings, at least. “I know you. I know your kind. You pretend like you have this…ethos, this patriotism or this nationalism. You love your white skin and pretend that it’s hard armor instead of thin, and weak, and pale—like the dime-store condom that split in half around your father’s dick when he gave it to the dumb, truck-stop janitor that was your mother. I got your number, Big Man. I know you. I know you’re weak and unwanted, so you take it out on everyone else.”