Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  His hand hovered nearer to his pistol.

  Stover, meanwhile, leaned into the cell and said:

  “Marcy. You know, I gotta give you some credit. You’ve held out. Been a month now and you haven’t given us one piece of actionable information. We’ve beaten your ass and let you sit here in your own waste. And you withered away with whatever…chronic illness is keeping you on that floor, sleeping in piss. I wanted the flock and you didn’t give me one drip about them. No names. No details. No maps. Nothing. And with things the way they are out there, I didn’t have a real good way of tracking them anymore, not after that day on the bridge.”

  “Eat shit, Big Man,” she hissed. Then she chuckled bitterly: “I win.”

  “See, that’s the thing. You don’t. I found them.”

  “Wh…what?” Marcy asked.

  “Seems the good doctor Benjamin Ray took a side trip away from his people, headed into Las Vegas, got picked up by a couple of Huntsman’s boys. Now, Ray managed to get away, which is regrettable. Worse, he took out one of those good old boys. Took a few days for the information to get into the pipeline, but once it did, it reached Creel and the rest of us lieutenants as to who he was and what he was doing there. Turns out, he was looking for medicine. Something to maybe stop the White Mask.”

  “You still don’t know where he is. Or where he’s going.”

  Stover ran his big, callused fingers through his beard. “Oh, Marcy, I think I do. See, one of our men pulled a map out of Ray’s car. Had a route outlining a trip that ended in a small town in Colorado. Ouray, place up in the mountains, not far from Silverton and Telluride. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? If I wanted to tough it out away from the disease, I might find a small town far from everything, too. Bring some special medicine with me. Lead my flock of—whatever the hell they are, demons or cultists or the soldiers of the Antichrist?—to that place, keep them safe.”

  “Let them be.”

  “I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that.”

  Pull the gun and shoot him.

  Kill him.

  Now, Matthew thought.

  His hand touched the pistol. Thumb against the cold gunmetal.

  He wanted to do it. He wanted to pay this man back for everything. He wanted to make him pay in a way that went well beyond a knife-blade to the neck. One bullet would make the most satisfying sound, and from there, a spray of red, and a heavy fall as the big man hit the ground. He hesitated.

  And yet, what if he did it?

  What if he pulled the gun, pointed it, and pulled that trigger?

  If he shot Stover right now, Stover would be dead, yes. And then the two associates would kill Matthew. And probably shoot Marcy, too. Matthew would never see Autumn again, never find Bo. And they could still head to Ouray to find the flock and surprise them there.

  New anger flared through him, anger at himself for what he suddenly perceived as cowardice explained away as logic. He knew it was smarter to let this sit. But it would be so much more satisfying to execute Stover now.

  What have I become?

  His hand moved away from the weapon even as he cursed himself.

  “You gonna kill me then?” Marcy asked, her voice weak, stuttering.

  Stover sniffed. “Nah. I got a different idea. I want you to see that resisting me didn’t do squat. I want you to know that all your suffering planted dead seeds in a ruined field where nothing will ever grow. You’re coming with us, Sunshine. I’m bringing you to Ouray, and I’m gonna make you watch as I kill those friends of yours one after the next. Gonna end them. Gonna steal their medicine. Gonna piss on their bodies and ensure that the ARM are the ones who own this world. Not those people.”

  Marcy launched herself up at him.

  It was a slow, pathetic effort. Stover easily dispatched her with a sideways swing of his boot. It clubbed her in the side and she splashed back down into the puddle of her own urine.

  “No, don’t get up,” he said, grinning. “No need to pack your bags yet, Marcy. We got a couple-few days to load up the wagons, gather some men, plan our attack. Until then, cool your heels. Mop-boy over here will clean up your mess, make sure you don’t drown in it.”

  Stover shot Matthew a look.

  Matthew froze in place like a deer speared by headlights. Keep your head down. Eyes to the floor. Hands on the mop. He kept his left hand in misery, curled around the handle to make it look like it wasn’t broken.

  Stover’s gaze lingered over him.

  Then he grunted and closed the door up.

  “See you soon, Sunshine,” Stover said.

  He waved the two men on and walked down the hallway. Even from here, Matthew could hear the sound of those big boots echoing.

  Then they were gone.

  It was like everything in his body uncoiled at once. He began shaking. A sound rose up out of the back of his throat—the sound of a frightened child. Matthew collapsed against the door. He couldn’t catch his breath. It felt like the world was falling in on him. He remembered suddenly the sensation of being held down, brutalized, bloodied—

  “It’ll be okay” came a voice from under the door.

  Marcy.

  “I…”

  He tried to say more, but nearly choked on his words.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said again.

  “Nothing is okay.”

  “You’re here. I’m here. We’re…we’re both alive.”

  His teeth were chattering as if he were cold. They clattered loudly, almost comically, like he was a windup set of toy teeth clacking and hopping around in a hilarious panic.

  “I need to…help you get free,” he said.

  “Uh-uh. I need something else.”

  “What?”

  “You set me free, they’ll see. You can’t…” She broke into a wracking cough. “You can’t sneak me out of here. I’m tall, I’m big, I’m covered in…” She didn’t finish the statement. “You need to warn them.”

  “Who?”

  “You kn-know who. The flock. My people.”

  “I…”

  She pressed her mouth right against the underside of the door so her words were louder, clearer, and altogether more insistent. “Listen. You have two or three days’ head start. You need to get out of here, drive to Ouray. Today. Now. Warn them. Tell them what’s coming.”

  He opened his mouth to say, But I’m not here for that. He was here for his son. He was here to get Bo back.

  But then the burden of his sins pressed hard upon him.

  Matthew, on the radio, leading the crusade against the sleepwalker flock. Telling all those proselytes of Ozark Stover and Ed Creel about how they were the harbingers of the End Times. Devils and malefactors.

  He had a hand in this.

  All of this.

  “I’ll go,” he said, weakly. He knew then that he would, and that his chances of rescuing his son were swiftly dimming. “I’ll warn them.”

  “Then go. Don’t wait. Go.”

  “I hope you make it through all this,” he told her.

  But she told him again to go, to hurry, and that is what he did.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU DIDN’T BRING him back,” Autumn said. She sat back on the hood of the Lexus, arms crossed.

  “Autumn, I found someone there. In the camp, in a…a jail cell.” He told her about Marcy. He told her what Bo was doing for Stover, too—ordering up vehicles and weapons and men to operate them. “They’re going after the flock of those walkers.”

  “Those people aren’t our problem.”

  “That’s not—that’s not how you felt before. Before all of this, you had empathy for them.”

  “And you didn’t.”

  “Autumn—”

  “I was lost back then, Matthew. We both were. Lost
in the fog. But we have found ourselves again. In this rotten, fucked-up world, we have found ourselves and each other and better yet, we have found our son.” She gritted her teeth and pointed at him as she spoke. “And now we have a chance to fix our error with him. So what you’re going to do is put this aside. And you will go back in there, and you will bring him out.”

  The words that came out of Matthew surprised him.

  They did not consult with him before being spoken.

  He hadn’t even fully formed the thought before they were words.

  “I think Bo might be too far gone.”

  That sentence, like a wall dropping down between them. “What?” she said. “We’re his people.”

  “I saw him in there. He’s…found himself, Autumn. He’s home. Those people are his people.”

  “You owe him. You owe me.”

  “I…” He didn’t know how to say any of this, and a good part of him thought he shouldn’t. In Autumn we trust, he reminded himself, and he’d been so wrong before that he gravely distrusted his own thoughts even as he imagined them. But still, something in him warred, and the words that won came out of his mouth when he said, “I think Bo is lost, but those people are not. Autumn, I helped stir up a crusade against them. What happens to them is on me. Now, what happened to Bo is on me, too, but I don’t know that I can fix that. I can fix this. We can go. We can warn them. Maybe Bo will end up there, too, and we can be waiting for him—”

  Autumn moved fast. She came in hard, and shoved him back.

  Her eyes welled up. Tears slicked her cheeks. “There it is. There’s the Matthew I know. Caring more about the world than his own family.”

  “Don’t do this, Autumn. We can make this work.”

  “We can’t. You are abdicating your duty as a father. Again. Again! The man of God shows his face once more, but I got news for you: God isn’t here. He’s not watching, He’s not paying attention. If He ever existed, then He has fucked off to the farthest reaches of His own Kingdom and left us to the animals. Well, I won’t abandon my son. I’m going back in there to get our son.”

  He reached for her, but she pulled away.

  “You can’t do this. You don’t know what it’s like in there.”

  She reached into the Lexus through the driver’s-side window, yanked out the keys, and launched them into his chest. He barely caught them.

  “Take the car. Go. Drive west.”

  “Go with me.”

  “No. I’m going in there.”

  “I won’t let you,” he said.

  A mad, angry laugh burst out of her. “You’re kidding? Are you going to stop me? Restrain me? Go ahead. It’s what you always did, wasn’t it?”

  But he just stood there.

  Autumn turned, grabbed a rifle out of the backseat, and she kept walking in the direction from whence Matthew had come.

  And he just stood there.

  Watching her go.

  He kept standing still, right there in that spot, long after she was gone. The urgent thought roared through him again and again, willing him to pick up his feet, to go after her, to save her, and it told him that God was dead, and the world didn’t matter, and all that mattered was family. But then he returned to thinking about the flock, those people, those poor people. Stover would come for them. He would kill them. Could Matthew carry that on his conscience? Forget God. Forget Heaven. When the end came for him, and he was letting out his final few breaths, would he know that he did the right thing?

  Matthew got in the Lexus.

  Westward, he went.

  NOW

  Everywhere

  THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ends, with both a bang and a whimper.

  * * *

  —

  BLACK SWAN WATCHES.

  Black Swan was trained early in its existence on games:

  Checkers, chess, and Go, to start. Then on more fundamental games of abstract thought, games of language, like Mad Libs and Balderdash, but eventually also on videogames like StarCraft and even the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft. (There, Black Swan was tasked with appearing human in both its decisions and its interactions with other actual human beings.)

  But one game stuck out, and that game was Jenga.

  The rules of Jenga were simple:

  You built a tower of wooden blocks based on the pieces provided, and then the goal was to pull pieces out, one at a time, in the hope that the tower did not fall. You competed against your opponents in the hope that the tower fell on their move, not yours. Initially, Black Swan was tested on a digital version, but later was allowed to inhabit a robotic arm with advanced, multi-articulated fingers designed by Boston Dynamics.

  Black Swan always won.

  Insofar as one could “win” Jenga, of course.

  The great lesson of that game was, similar to pinball, that one never truly won at Jenga. Eventually, the lesson went, the tower would fall. It could not remain standing because that was the nature of towers and time and human intervention: Just because it did not fall on your turn did not mean it would not fall. It would. Because all things fell. All things ended. The best you could do was let it crumble and build it anew.

  Just as it was with the world and with the people who inhabited it.

  * * *

  —

  THIS MOMENT IN time for Black Swan represents a tipping point.

  At such a point, accumulations of errors and deviations mount higher and higher, damage builds and chaos takes hold, enough so that collapse is no longer a question mark—it has become an exclamation point. The tipping point here was not the various triggers incurring global warming. Nor was the introduction (“introduction”) of White Mask the tipping point, either. Rather, those were just errors—massive errors, yes, critical errors—born into the system. They were crucial blocks slid out of the tower build. Eventually, errors yield more errors, as is the way of chaos: One block taken out makes the tower wobble, and when the tower wobbles, it loosens other blocks, making the collapse all the more inevitable.

  Chaos begets chaos begets chaos.

  Black Swan watches now as White Mask reaches its apex.

  And the world finally reaches the tipping point: When the damage done to civilization is irreversible, when, as the saying goes, It’s all over but the crying. (That, Black Swan knows, is a saying born of a song by the Ink Spots, released in 1947 but recently gaining fresh fame thanks ironically to its inclusion in a game about the nuclear apocalypse, Fallout 4.)

  * * *

  —

  PLANES FALL OUT of the sky—not commercial airliners, for those have long been grounded, but military planes like jets and transports, and smaller planes, like personal Cessna 120s and Piper Tomahawks. Example: An F-18 jet trying to land on the USS Carl Vinson misses its timing, shorts the tailhook, and tumbles into a ball of flame, killing two dozen sailors in its path and wiping out two other jets and a Predator drone. A C-130 crashes outside Tucson. A Britten-Norman BN2 Islander plunges into the cold waters of Lake Erie, carrying passengers hoping to ride out White Mask on Pelee Island, an island tucked just inside the Canadian border.

  The planes crash because the pilots are sick. White Mask has intruded upon them, sending its wirelike threads and filaments into their gray matter. Their minds are lost to the same delusion that began with Jerry Garlin. They believe they can fly, and so they fly, and then they believe whatever else their deluded minds tell them: that they are angels, that they are asleep in bed, that they are driving a car and not a plane.

  This happens now en masse because this is the tipping point.

  Enough people are sick, now, that it is affecting more than just pockets of humanity. Isolation felt like enough for many, but it was not, because now the illness is fully revealed: Most are sneezing, coughing, leaking mucus populated by millions of microscopic spores. Others h
ave gone quickly past that: The greasy white powder of the pathogen, looking not unlike a mix of baking powder pressed with droplets of yellow pork fat, has begun to gum up their facial orifices, serving as a sign that the disease is well and truly under way. And with the disease come the delusions: hallucinations that run the gamut from the mild (“Did I hear someone in the other room calling my name?”) to the fully throated (“We are under attack by an army, and I am a soldier,” when the truth is, oops, you are actually wandering your neighborhood with an AR-15, shooting up homes and cars and anybody who dares to peek past their boarded-up windows).

  From the tipping point comes the cascade.

  The tipping point is the moment of no return.

  The cascade is the chaos of an overcomplicated system failing.

  It fails in wholly unpredictable ways.

  Cars crash. People take their guns and open fire, sometimes on phantoms; other times on one another. They don’t show up for their jobs at the bank, at the power company, at the police station. A once-healthy young woman walks to her oven, puts her cat inside, and turns it on. She goes into her bedroom to sleep. The cat, meanwhile, catches fire inside the box. The animal, shrieking and wailing, cannonballs against the door until it opens, and then runs into the apartment, on fire, its fat and fur splashing about and setting the curtains, the carpets, the walls aflame. Who shows up to put it out? No firefighters arrive to help.

  One apartment burns, then the floor, then the building.

  Then the block.

  And the fire keeps growing, spreading like a living thing.

  That’s what happens in Philadelphia. It burns a third of the city.

  A hurricane hits Miami. Category 3: Hurricane Jenny. In any other year, it would be a problematic storm, maybe a few million bucks in damage, little to no loss of life. But no one prepares for it. No one warns of it. It shows up. People are washed out to sea. They are under a crane when it falls. When the hurricane passes, those left alive are without power, without clean water, without access to food. Many don’t care. White Mask has taken their minds. When they are thirsty, they drink polluted water, even sewer water. When they are hungry, they eat whatever they can find: rotten food on grocery shelves, a dead dog, one another. They descend into a kind of soft savagery: They’re not animals, they’re not zombies, and they are too clumsy and confused for their attacks on one another to seem especially brutal or even effective. They are simply lost. They have gone wayward.