Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  The man with the gun stood there. Only five feet away.

  The rifle pointed up in the air. Ghosts of gunsmoke, purged from the barrel in their exorcism, rising to meet the night.

  The man lowered it again, taking aim.

  Matthew’s breath caught in his throat. He quick checked himself: no blood. He wasn’t hit. No injuries. Eyes up, face down, he said: “You. You’re—you’re Benjamin Ray, right? I’m Matthew Bird.”

  “I know who you are,” Benji seethed. “Explain yourself or I put a bullet in the top of your head. I just might anyway.”

  Matthew rocked back on his heels, hands again up in the air. He stammered something that was not yet words—just a guttural utterance of sounds coughed out in steamy breath. Breath around falling snowflakes.

  “Speak!” the man with the gun barked.

  “People are coming,” Matthew blurted. “Bad people. His name is Ozark Stover. He’s part of ARM, the—the American Resurrection Movement.” The man with the gun took a step forward, the barrel aiming straight between Matthew’s eyes. “I—I saw someone, he has a friend of yours, a wo-woman named Marcy.”

  There. That landed. That connected.

  The man with the gun let his guard drop. The tension in his arms slackened, and the rifle’s barrel drifted downward, pointing at the ground.

  “Marcy,” the man said.

  “That’s right. They have her. They’re coming. And they want to kill you. They want to kill all of you.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY PUT HIM in a drunk tank cell in the county jail. His appearance had obviously stirred some attention, and now outside the room, others gathered with the armed man—a man Matthew now knew was Benjamin Ray, the doctor and investigator with the CDC. And the self-appointed head of the…shepherds, the flock, all of this. Benjamin stood out there with a small group, ill seen behind the half-closed door. Their voices came as a maddening murmur; Matthew couldn’t understand anything they were saying.

  Matthew sat there, his head leaning on the hard cinder-block wall, wishing like hell that Autumn was here.

  But she’d made her choice. And he’d made his.

  He wondered where she was. If the disease had found her yet. Or if she had found Bo. Or worse, if the ARM soldiers had found her.

  What would they do to her?

  Matthew thought he knew, and that fear threatened to crush him.

  Meanwhile, he hadn’t sneezed, coughed, or anything.

  The disease had not found him. Which felt somehow unfair, didn’t it? There was no righteousness in who lived and who died. It served only as further proof that his belief in a just God was nothing but childish folly. No just deity would sanction this.

  Not one he cared to follow, anyway.

  Everything was random. Everything was chaos.

  The door opened. Benjamin Ray led the way, flanked by a young black woman whose soft features were marked just so by the advance of White Mask—the white rime had not begun, but she looked like she had a cold. Stuffy, Kleenex-chafed nose, eyes a little bloodshot. She looked tired, too, everything rumpled and ruffled, like she’d been pulled out of bed.

  Behind her came a man with bushy eyebrows in fierce competition with his white caterpillar of a mustache. He wore a cowboy hat, and he tipped it up and back on his head as he entered, giving Matthew a hard, long look.

  Someone else stayed outside the room. Matthew had seen him earlier: After the gunshot, after he’d tried explaining to Benjamin who and what was coming, a young man came racing down the street—brown skin, maybe Indian, Pakistani, or Arab, Matthew didn’t know. He was dressed in clothes that had gone almost all the way to rags. He was filthy, and like many of the others showed the signs of White Mask—his case, the worst he’d seen here, yet. Striations of white crust snaked across the young man’s face.

  Everything is random…everything is chaos…

  Benjamin introduced the others: Sadie Emeka, Dove Hansen, and the other one outside the room was Arav Thevar. He said that the man who had been outside when Matthew drove up—a man who was not presently here—was Landry Pierce. He gave a short introduction, said this is Ouray, he was the leader of the shepherds who were protecting the sleepwalker flock. Matthew did not see the flock and had no idea where they were, but he chose to keep his mouth shut for now. It seemed the wisest choice.

  Benji said, coldly, “We have questions.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s very late. Or rather, very early. So I recognize that no one wants to be here, and nerves are certainly frayed. But this seems important.”

  “It is. Utterly so.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “I…guessed that, yeah.”

  “God’s Light. The podcast, the radio show. You spoke out against us. You called us…what, satanic, or tools of the Antichrist. Subjects of the dread comet Wormwood, which was just that, just a comet, had nothing to do with anything. It was an excuse for you. A reason to gin up hatred against the flock. Devil’s Pilgrims, my ass.”

  “That was all a mistake and—”

  “A mistake that may have cost us lives. You understand that, right? All the way from Indiana to now, we’ve had people with guns come at us.”

  “More are coming.”

  Benji regarded him suspiciously. Like he was trying to use his gaze alone to pick Matthew to pieces, see if he could suss out the truth just by looking real, real hard. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m here to warn you. Stover and his men, ARM soldiers, are coming. With trucks. Guns. I don’t know what else or how many.”

  “And why would you warn us?” Benji asked. “Getting right with God before the end?”

  “No. I’ve lost my faith in God. I am no longer a believer.”

  “Then why come? Why not find somewhere to die in peace?”

  “Because I wouldn’t be able to die in peace. This would stay with me until my last breath. And Marcy…she asked me to, and I said I would. So I’m fulfilling my debts. My earthly ones.”

  The others shared a look. The man named Dove shrugged and said to Benji, “I don’t know shit from shinola about any of this, so this is your lead, Doc. He sounds sincere, but I’m not particularly trusting these days.”

  It was Sadie who said: “Tell us everything, then. Tell us the story.”

  Matthew took a deep breath, and he did.

  He tried to keep it brief, to move quickly through the narrative—not just because expediency seemed key, but because some of it was painful, too painful, to relive. But he told them what he could. About his imprisonment, his escape, about how he and Autumn wanted to find their child and so Matthew went into the ARM camp in Missouri with a fresh brand on his neck. About how he found his son, and Marcy, and decided to help her. How that led Autumn to stay there, and how he left, and had been out on the road since then, hard-charging toward Ouray in an effort to stay ahead of Ozark and his crusade.

  “You’ve been on the road for weeks?” Benji asked. When Matthew nodded, the doctor asked: “What took you so long to drive here? A drive from Missouri to Colorado should be…what, twenty-four hours?”

  Here, Matthew couldn’t repress a laugh. He heard the rough, serrated edge in his voice when he explained: “You haven’t been out there, have you? It’s all gone to pieces. Gas is dried up. The roads are…blocked with trucks and cars, some of them crashed. Wheat fields and corn on fire. Coal mines and oil shales, too. People are losing their minds to White Mask. They’re roaming in packs. Some of them are armed with knives and guns. Others are just…wanderers. Wandering this way and that like they don’t know where to go, or why, or how. You get near the cities, it gets worse. It’s not safe. It’s slow going. I feared that Stover and his people would be here already—it’s why I came blasting into town like that. Only reason they might not be here yet
is I imagine it’s even harder bringing multiple vehicles and people across the middle of the country. I only had a few days’ head start on them. I imagine they won’t be long behind.”

  Again, the group of three gathered there all shared uncomfortable looks. It was Benji who said, “Are you sick?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You’ll submit to a swab test?”

  “I will.”

  “That’s good,” Sadie said.

  “If you are infected,” Benji said, “we know that some stimulants can help. We have a dwindling supply of Ritalin, and the nearest pharmacy is about…” He gave Dove a questioning look.

  The older man jumped in and said, “About ten miles.”

  “So eventually we’ll send people up there to see if we can find a supply of Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, Vyvanse…”

  “Strange to ask,” Dove said, “but how about the old-fashioned kind? Cigarettes and black coffee.”

  “I…honestly don’t know. That’s a good question. I expect their effects on the delirium of White Mask would be reduced given the potency of other pharmaceutical approaches, but it might have a small effect.”

  “So, it slows down the disease?” Matthew asked, a small beacon of hope lighting in the dark of his heart.

  A beacon that Benji quickly extinguished.

  “No, it just limits the mental effects. The disease will continue its progression accordingly. Eventually the brain gives up and gives out and when the body collapses, White Mask colonizes the exterior.” Benji paused, continuing his visual survey of Matthew. “Your hand looks like it was broken. It didn’t heal well, I take it.”

  Matthew held it up. The fingers trembled as he tried in vain to open and close them, but they only moved a little bit. Pain lanced through his palm and raced from his wrist to his elbow.

  “They broke it. When they had me in…” He had to stop and tamp down the rush of memories, lest they overtake him. “I don’t think it’ll ever really heal.”

  “What do we do with ’im?” Dove asked.

  “I’m inclined to be compassionate,” Benji said.

  Dove sniffed. “That’s your right as a doctor, I suppose, but as mayor, I’m accepting your people, your flock, as my people. But him? Not so much. I’m leery of the story. He had a couple of guns in the car. Hard to say what he was planning. I’d rather keep him in here a little while longer.”

  Sadie sighed. “I can get behind that.”

  “I’m no danger—” Matthew interjected.

  “Sorry,” Benji said. “I agree with the others, in retrospect. You will be fed, and this room will remain warm. Someone will make sure you get proper trips to the bathroom in the morning.”

  “You need to take my warning seriously—”

  “Good night,” Benji said, and he and the others left.

  The door closed behind with a loud click. A jangle of keys and a lock turning sealed the deal. Matthew thudded his head dully against the beige cement behind him. He thought about sleep, but gave up on the idea. The idea of sleep was a distant dream.

  NOVEMBER 2

  Ouray, Colorado

  MORNING CAME, THE SUN RISING up over the eastern peaks. The snow had left only a dusting of white behind, like the rime of the disease that had come for them all. Benji had slept, but barely. He took a shower, too, which was his first proper shower in…well over a month, now, and as all the filth that had agglomerated upon him began to run off, he started to feel human again. But the shower was all too short. He feared staying under the spray too long, because now it seemed they were on war footing, and had to be ready for whatever was to come.

  And what might come at any time.

  He grabbed his rifle, his walkie-talkie, his water.

  Then he got to work.

  * * *

  —

  “WE HAVE TO move them,” he said.

  Benji stood in the rosewood dining room of the Beaumont Hotel—a three-floor hotel that offered a heady mix of Victorian and Queen Anne furnishings. Benji was not a fan of those styles: all the noisy clashes between the fleur-de-lis carpets and densely patterned wallpapers, between the ocher yellows, the grape-crush purples, the dark wood, the leather furnishings. It conjured a vibe of a child dressing up in grown-up clothes stolen out of the attic: grandmother’s gown and mother’s makeup.

  (He’d said as much to Sadie earlier, and her response was far different: “Reminds me of a Wild West brothel.”)

  Now, though, their focus was not on furnishings or décor, but rather, the future of the swiftly dwindling human race.

  The two of them stood in the dining room, a broad window looking out upon the banded hardrock of the San Juan Mountains. On a corner of a nearby table sat the Black Swan satphone, propped up by a small stand-up napkin ring. It projected text—a little hard to read given the wash of light from the window—onto the wallpaper:

  WE CANNOT MOVE THE FLOCK.

  “We must,” Sadie said. “It’s the only sensible way.”

  Benji continued her line of thinking: “If these ARM people are coming to Ouray to hurt us, then our best bet is simply to not be here when they arrive. We can return when the danger has passed.”

  The words appeared again, this time pulsing red as they did:

  WE CANNOT MOVE THE FLOCK.

  “Why not?” Sadie asked.

  THE FLOCK IS FOLLOWING A PROGRAM.

  “But it’s a program of your design!”

  Text scrolled up the wall: THE PROGRAM IS AN ALGORITHMIC CALCULATION FACTORING IN ENERGY CONSUMPTION. THE SLEEPWALKERS ARE IN SLEEP MODE TO CONSERVE ENERGY TO POWER THEM THROUGH THE YEARS NEEDED TO SURVIVE. WAKING THEM WILL EXPEND MORE POWER THAN ALLOWED FOR IN THE CALCULATION. AT THIS POINT, SUCH EFFORT WILL BEGIN TO DRAIN FROM THE LIFE SPAN OF THE NANITE SWARM.

  “Even a small journey?” Benji asked, desperate. “Move them a short distance—the mountain is home to caves, mines, we could hide them—”

  THEIR SLEEP MODE MUST NOT BE DISTURBED.

  “It’s damn sure going to be disturbed if men with guns storm in here and wipe us all out. Then none of this will have mattered. None of us will have mattered. The journey here will have been for nothing.”

  THEIR SLEEP MODE MUST NOT BE DISTURBED.

  He reached for the phone, half intending to throw it through the goddamn window, but his hand paused and closed in on itself—a frustrated fist that he could not squeeze tight enough.

  “What if we try to physically move them ourselves?” Sadie asked. “Pick them up like rolls of carpet and…move them somewhere safe.”

  THE DEFENSE PROTOCOLS WOULD MAKE THAT UNWISE.

  To hell with your defense protocols, Benji wanted to say.

  Sadie persevered: “Can you power down the defense protocols?”

  YES.

  “Then there we go!” she said, a flurry of laughter rising up out of her.

  But Benji wasn’t sure. “Moving them would be a Sisyphean exercise. We literally have a thousand and twenty-four bodies to move, and none of them are centrally located. Some are here in the hotel, but the rest are scattered widely throughout the buildings in Ouray—we have barely begun to catalog their locations. The time it would take is epic, at best. The reality is, we’d likely be caught with our pants around our ankles—those ARM bastards will show up in the middle of our move, meaning they’ll find us dumping fish right into the barrel for them. We’d be exposing the flock, not saving them. At least now they’re scattered—dispatching them will not be easy.”

  He could see she wanted to fight it, to bite back with some snappy answer that solved his problem, but he could also see the wave of emotions crest and fall on her face. The realization hit her that he was right.

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Truly, a world of shit.”

  “Then what options do
we have?”

  Black Swan beamed a message onto the wall:

  YOU WILL HAVE TO FIGHT. AND I WILL HELP YOU.

  * * *

  —

  DOVE UNLOCKED THE metal cabinet. The door swung open, revealing a rack of five long guns—Dove said they had three rifles, two shotguns—and a single .357 Magnum revolver hanging from a holster strap on the side. He took out the holster and began to strap it around his waist.

  “Got ammo for each, though not much more than a box. Some of the residents have their own guns, but I’ll be honest, we’re not that kinda town. Other towns farther out were bigger into hunting, but Ouray has always kinda kept itself as a quaint mountain berg—you get someone field dressing an elk on his front lawn, that might bum out the tourists. You got guns, I see.”

  “We do,” Benji said. “Not many, and nothing serious. Four rifles, two shotguns, four pistols or revolvers—is there a difference between the two? Pistols and revolvers, I mean.”

  “Revolvers got the spinny thing, the cylinder. Pistols don’t. Tend to use magazines, feed rounds into the chamber one after each trigger pull, makes them semi-automatic. Both fall under the category ‘handguns.’ ”

  “You a…gun person?”

  “Most everybody in Colorado is, at least a little. Especially on this side of the state. Fort Collins, Boulder, places like that, not so much, but out here, we’re all born with a bolt-action rifle in our hands.” Dove sniffed, pulling out one such bolt-action rifle. It looked freshly cleaned and well maintained, and Benji could smell the tang of the gun oil on it. “But we don’t have big boners about it, either. We treat guns like tools, like hammers or screwdrivers. Don’t see much value in forming some kind of ideological cult around ’em. Definitely don’t see why people get such a kick out of those black rifles. Your nipples get hard using one of those, I start to worry about you shooting up a school or a movie theater.”