by Chuck Wendig
“It is the only idea,” Benji said, picking half the bullets out of a box of .223 shells to fit the Ruger Mini-14 rifle he barely knew how to use. “White Mask is upon us, Arav. You, now me and Sadie. We don’t have enough triaconozole. I don’t know if I can get more, but Vegas is the best bet to find a functional replacement. It’s also possible one of the drugstores carries it—the drug came to market a year ago to help combat valley fever, which is a thing out here. But that means I go where the people are, where they are likeliest to have that product or an equivalent.”
“Don’t go alone, then.”
“Look around you,” Benji said. He demonstrated what was to come down the road: the flock, yes, and the shepherds. Far fewer now than before. Many slept in the CDC trailer. Others camped in the few remaining vans, RVs, and pop-up trailers, taking shifts to watch the horizons for attack. Out here, at least, they could see the horizon, and it was quiet. If something was going to come for them, they’d know. “The shepherds number twenty-seven, now. We don’t have many sick yet, but if Sadie and I are impacted, they will be, too. It’s better that they stay here and don’t up their chances of encountering White Mask in the wild. Plus, if something happens, we need all hands on deck.” He declined to clarify what that meant: all hands on rifles and knives, ready to die for the flock. Because the flock was the future.
The flock was civilization.
That was a realization he grappled with, daily. The flock was meant to be the last vestiges of humankind. They were not aimless wanderers, lost to some disease. They were chosen. Selected to be the ones that remained.
The shepherds were here to carry the vigil for them.
To walk with them, not to guide them—
But to protect them.
What a shift that was, for him. Benji didn’t fit the role well. Should’ve been Robbie Taylor here, or Cassie—neither of whom he’d heard from in a month, now that the cell towers were down. (Yes, Benji had the Black Swan satphone, and the satellites were still up and running, but who would they call? He didn’t have any other satphone numbers.) Benji was a self-described detective. Someone who solved medical mysteries, who answered questions about vectors and pathogens. He didn’t manage survivors. He didn’t govern a defensive response. This wasn’t him.
And yet here he was.
Chosen, too. In part by Black Swan. In part by the vagaries of fate.
Maybe by God, too.
Something-something mysterious ways blah-blah-blah.
But it was true, too. Wasn’t it? God operated in ways that humans did not properly understand. That was the cause of science. To test the parameters of God’s creation. To understand its intricacy.
Hell with it. That was no longer his role.
This was his role, and he was playing to it.
“You have to be careful out there,” Arav said as Benji slung the rifle over his shoulder. “It’s quiet here, the road is desolate. But you don’t know who’s out there. Creel’s people. Or nutbags whose minds have broken down under the assault of White Mask.”
“I am a careful man, Arav. Don’t worry.”
“If it’s okay by you, I think I’m going to worry anyway.”
Benji smiled. “Yeah, me too. But I thought I’d try on a little bravado for once, see how it fit.”
“You did okay with it.”
“Thanks.”
They hugged.
And when he turned, there stood Sadie.
He could see she’d shed a few tears—her cheeks were cleaned in a few trickled tracks. She was trying to hide it, what with the cocky tilt to her hips and her arms crossed defiantly over her chest.
“You can’t go alone,” she said.
“Sadie,” he said, nearly exasperated by this conversation, “we talked about this, and Arav and I just covered similar ground—”
“Not me. Not Arav. Black Swan.”
“What?”
“Black Swan is going with you.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“As I just heard you tell Arav: It’s the only idea. I won’t have it any other way, my love.” His heart fluttered as she said those two words. My love. No matter how wrecked and wretched the world had become, those two words raised him up. “You defy me on this, and I’ll defy you, then. I’ll follow after whether you like it or not. You want me to stay? I’ll stay, but only—only—if you take Black Swan with you.”
“There’s no good reason—”
“There’re a thousand good reasons. You’ll need maps. You’ll need information. Your needs are dynamic and ongoing. Ours are…relatively static. We walk. We protect. We know our destination. The flock does not respond elastically to threats—they’re set to dance to a beat.”
He had to admit: Sadie had a point.
My love…
“Fine,” he said. He pointed at her. “You really get under my skin.”
“In only the best ways.”
She kissed him. Hard and long.
Benji said his goodbyes again, to them and to the other shepherds. He explained to them what was going on—the sickness had found them, and he hoped to find more medicine in Vegas. Then he took the Mini-14 and grabbed the keys to a mini van the shepherds had been using—not as a vehicle, but as storage dragged behind one of the RV campers thanks to a trailer hitch. They cleared some of those supplies out—and kept some in for him, too, like some bottled water and food—and then he set out.
Ahead, the highway darkened as evening bled out.
OCTOBER 14
Innsbrook, Missouri
“THIS IS A bad idea,” Matthew said. “I don’t like it.”
He looked at himself in the side mirror of the Lexus. He took more dirt in his hands, breaking it up so that it was a little wet, like paint. Then he smeared it on his cheeks and around his eyes in deliberate streaks. Like war paint. He didn’t have much real estate left on his face, though, because it was home now to a patchy growth of wiry beard.
It changed the way he looked.
Which was exactly what Autumn said he needed.
“Do you want to find Bo?” she asked. He didn’t have to answer that. “Then this is the way in. He’s our son. It’s our responsibility.”
He continued to regard himself in the mirror. The beard, the dirt. He barely recognized himself. “I don’t disagree, I just wonder if we could think of a more strategic plan.”
Autumn turned him toward her. She pinned him with her stare. “Who knows how much time there is, Matthew? Right now, Innsbrook’s resort area is bustling. If Bo is anywhere, he’s in there. I need you to get it together. I need you to make a decision here. We lived confused lives, you and I. Pointed at the wrong thing all the time. It…made us soft. But we can’t be that way anymore. If you don’t want to go in there, I will—”
“No,” he said, declaratively. “You’re right. I’ll go.”
He turned again, looked at himself in the mirror.
“I don’t know if I fit the part okay,” he said. “Hair’s a mess, patchy beard, dirt on my cheeks—I still don’t look like one of them.”
“You don’t have ink,” she said, suddenly.
“What?”
“Ink. Tattoos. All of Stover’s men, they’re marked.”
She was right. And he didn’t have that. He needed it. And there wasn’t exactly time to conjure a tattoo out of nowhere. They wouldn’t be fooled by a few swipes from a permanent marker.
Autumn had an idea.
“I’m all ears.”
Fifteen minutes later, with the gas in their little Coleman lantern burning, she came at him with a smoldering key that had been scorched and warmed in the flame. “Hold still,” she admonished him.
He winced, trying to pull away from his right arm as if he could just detach it during the process. The whole thing made him think of hi
s time in Ozark’s bunker, chained up there. Tormented and tortured. It felt claustrophobic, like he could feel the man’s weight on him, pressing down, pushing the breath out of Matthew’s chest. He told himself to keep it together, and so he stuffed it down deep, clamping his teeth to try to stop feeling what he was feeling.
It’s Autumn. She’s alive. She’s not here to torture you.
Do this to get your son back.
The brand was a brutal idea, one she would have never entertained before. One he would not have entertained before, either. It just showed how much the world had changed. And how much they had changed in response to the world. He liked this new Autumn. And he liked what she demanded of him. If only we had found each other this way in the time before…
He cried out as the scalding key-tip touched his neck. It sizzled: sssss. He smelled burning hair and then a smell not unlike scalded pork chop. She shushed him and stuck a stick in his mouth. He bit down on it so hard it broke. So Autumn found another one, and popped it in there. He tasted bark and dirt. She heated the key again. And slowly, surely, she branded him with a symbol. Clumsy, yes. Bubbled and soon probably infected, sure.
But for now, it would have to do:
The serpent, the hammer, and the sword.
The new symbol of the ARM, the American Resurrection Movement. Visible to all who would see, as long as his neck was exposed.
“Now you’re ready,” she said.
He wasn’t. But it would have to be enough.
OCTOBER 14
Monarch Pass, Colorado
“THIS IS A bad idea,” Landry said.
“Piffle,” Pete said, failing to acknowledge the white-knuckled grip he had on the steering wheel. They drove on through darkness, along the southern edge of the Colorado Rockies. Ahead, signs pointed toward something called Monarch Pass. The road grew steeper. Just a few minutes ago, they passed an uncomfortable meeting between a Honda hatchback car and a guardrail. The guardrail had nearly folded around the front end of the two-door car, holding it in place as it burned.
A man stood out by the car—he was older, with a pale naked gut hanging out over his probably-Wrangler jeans. He stood there in the fireglow as the Beast’s headlights speared him to the road. In the high beams, before Pete turned them down, it was plain to see the snowy crust on his face: the hallmark of the titular White Mask.
He stared past them as they passed.
But then Pete saw something in the mirror, a momentary flex of movement caught in the red wake of the RV’s taillights. Next thing they knew, pap, pap, a pair of low-caliber gunshots. One went who-knew-where; the next clipped the lower corner of the passenger-side mirror, the reflective glass chipping and spiderwebbing. Landry cried out.
Pete panicked; was Landry hit?
He wasn’t. Neither were.
But the whole thing prompted the comment:
“This is a bad idea.”
“It’s fine,” Pete added. “It’s just, the world’s gone to hell, and we’re driving through Satan’s lower intestine, is all.”
The man with the burning car and the gun was not their first such strange encounter out here. Far from it. They saw something every fifty miles, at least, that turned their piss cold. They saw bodies corded along the side of the road like firewood. They saw people wandering the roads and forests like ghosts—one stood up on a craggy cliff, her dress in tattered rags. In the rearview, they watched her jump. (Neither looked long enough to watch her hit.) They saw trucks overturned, their trailers torn open, the payloads gone; they heard distant screaming and gunfire; they saw military convoys driving down parallel highways, convoys that flew no flag. Once in a while, they’d see a military drone. Scanning for survivors? Hunting the sick? Or just some numbnuts drone operator out for a joyride as the world grew sick and died?
All this shit got worse the closer they came to civilization. Pete was one of those types who feared the wilderness, who got edgy soon as you left the city lights. (Hell, he got twitchy in the suburbs.) Now, though, the farther away from everything they got, the more his nerves calmed. Get near towns, you saw more people—some living, many dead, a lot sick. Most of them had guns. Many had been taken by the delirium of White Mask, spinning around in circles, or digging holes for no reason known outside their heads, or firing off rounds at invisible enemies—just like that poor fucker with his burning car back there.
Christ, not long after coming into Colorado, they passed an orchard town called Fruita—and there, by the edge of the road, some young buck was going to town on an empty mailbox. His pants were down, the mailbox was open, and he was fucking the thing like his life depended on it.
“Maybe he’s got a thing for robots,” Pete said at the time.
“You are a strange, sick man,” Landry told him.
(Pete couldn’t disagree.)
For a while, Pete was able to shrug a lot of this off—pretending, in a way, that it was happening to someone else, that it was like a movie he was watching instead of an apocalypse he was living. That’s how he lived most of his life: the joyful solipsism of a rock star, both out-of-his-head and up-his-own-ass. But now, out here, in the dark and coming up on a high-elevation mountain pass, he was starting to get genuinely scared.
“I don’t like any of this. It was a damn mistake.”
“It’s the choice we made,” Pete said. “We can’t turn around now.”
“Shit yes we could! We aren’t even halfway across this fucked-ass country, we could spin the wheel and do a U-ey right here, right now, go catch up with Benji and the Zombie Gang.”
“They’re not zombies, they’re alive in there. And we aren’t turning around. We are on a mission.”
“We aren’t the Blues Brothers, Pete Corley.”
“Great movie, though. Real shit-splash sequel, though.” Pete had to pull this out of the tailspin. As the RV carved a path through the dark, the knife-slash pine trees rising up as they climbed the mountain, he said, “Look at it this way, we are together. Spending time in the beautiful nature of Colorado, enjoying some fresh air and—”
“Snow. Look, there’s snow up ahead.” He was right. It wasn’t fresh or falling, just snow mounded up on both sides of the road. As they drove up the mountain, the air got colder. Made sense.
“Snow! See? Beautiful snow. Better than that dry sandpaper desert, right? We are out here, road-tripping, finally together—”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be together.”
“What?”
“Maybe all this is a sign that we aren’t right for each other. Goddamn, I mean, maybe this whole apocalypse is a sign: Maybe all those creepy bigoted assholes like those Westboro Baptist types were right, maybe all this is God’s payback for faggots like us breaking His dumb-ass rules.”
“You don’t really believe any of that spew, do you?”
Landry pouted. “I don’t know. No! No. I know it’s all crazy talk. I’m just feeling crazy right now.” He reached across the center dash and grabbed Pete’s wrist and gave it a comforting squeeze. Their hands met each other. “I’m happy we’re together, but boy fucking howdy, I just wish it wasn’t the end of the whole wide world, you know?”
“I do know. But maybe it’s not. The end, I mean. Maybe…maybe we’ll make it through, maybe we will meet my family and we can hunker down in whatever bunker her parents have, and this whole thing will blow over. We aren’t even sick, you and I! We are lucky fucking chuckleheads, Landry, my man. We might one day be kings of this land.”
“All right, all right, your crazy-ass optimism is working on me. Keep it up, you might get laid tonight.”
“We should find a place to park and catch some rest…”
“Yeah. Let’s do that. Let’s just get over this mountain first, it’s cold.”
“A fine idea.”
“You really think we might be okay?”
“Stranger things have happened, my love.”
And that’s when Landry sneezed.
The airports are all closed. Gas stations are running out of gas. A lot of us have the disease. Best we can do is eat, drink, fuck, and did I mention drink? Cheers, everyone.
@TheCompiler01
4 replies 7 RTs 12 likes
OCTOBER 15
Las Vegas, Nevada
THIS WAS NOT BENJI’S FIRST rodeo, as the saying went—he had been to Vegas many times before, because inevitably, year after year, some tech-bro or pharma-jerk scheduled a conference in this city. Yes, the city was ultimately convention-friendly, and made every effort to accommodate the needs of every industry that came here. But the reality was, people wanted an excuse to come to Vegas. They wanted to gamble. They wanted to drink. They wanted the pool, the miles-long buffets, the occasional tawdry dalliance with a cocktail waitress, flight attendant, or high-dollar independent escort.
Benji believed it to be the second-worst city in the nation.
(The first being also in Nevada: Reno.)
It hadn’t changed much since White Mask took over.
Yes, cast over everything was a ruinous, apocalyptic vibe—but truth be told, he’d found that to be the case before, too. Vegas always carried with it an eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-may-die energy: a city perched on the cusp of a never-ending yet never-quite-happening end. It was a city permanently stuck in the predawn hour before the hangover truly hit. Right there at the Rubicon of still having fun and about to start puking, on the line between everything is amazing and the End Times are here.
And that was the hour at which Benji arrived:
Three A.M.
He’d taken a few extra hours on the road to scout out the potential path of the flock. It would’ve been feasible to drive right here on I-15, but instead he headed straight across to the town called Searchlight, and then up north in and around Nelson, Boulder City, and Henderson. Coming closer to civilization in these places meant he was closer to the chaos of American life under White Mask: burned-out cars, boarded-up houses, dead bodies in alleys and arroyos. Las Vegas itself, though, was less of that—it was like the city had made a concerted effort to hide the worst parts of the Apocalypse, and reveal only the best: Even away from the Strip, people were in the streets wandering around with big drinks in their hands, arms around each other, sloshing about. Music blared, and as he drove through a winding line of stalled-out cars, the music morphed from the grinding guitars of Mötley Crüe to some bass-thumping hip-hop to the glitch-grinding of dubstep.