by Chuck Wendig
He casually walked back over to Marcy.
He lifted the gun.
He put it against her middle.
“Shit,” Stover said, laughing. His men watched him with eager, angry eyes. “She’s still got a six-pack after all this time. Like poking up against a washboard. Doc, I’m gonna pull the trigger in five unless you tell me where I can find the cure for what ails me. You hear me? Let’s begin. Five—”
“Please—”
“Four.”
Marcy kept smiling.
“Three,” Stover said, pulling the hammer back on the pistol.
“It’s coming,” Marcy said in a singsongy voice.
Benji found himself floundering. Lie, he thought, just lie to him, but he figured, soon as he did that, Stover would pull the trigger anyway, wouldn’t he? But maybe it would work—
“Two—”
“It’s, it’s—” Benji stammered. “The cure are these pills, I found them in Vegas and—”
One of Stover’s men said, “Ozark. Look.”
He pointed out, down the road. Toward town.
Benji followed the man’s gesture. They all did. And sure enough, someone was there. Walking through the dark, up the road.
“Who’s there?” Ozark bellowed. To his men he snapped: “Get some lights over there, goddamnit.”
A pair of bright spotlights clicked on from each end of the bus, held by men next to their aimed pistols.
Benji gasped.
“Arav,” he said.
Marcy muttered, “Now I understand.”
* * *
—
THERE, IN THE dark of the Black Room, Shana found herself no longer alone, and once again in possession of a body.
Arav was here with her.
She held him tight and he held her. His presence was not steady like hers. She wept for him, her tears soaking his shoulder. Not real tears, she knew. And not a real shoulder. As she cried, she babbled: “I don’t know why you get to be here. I don’t know if I should be mad at this…thing, this place, or mad at you, or what. But I love you and I’m sorry and I wish you wouldn’t do this.” With each word, her voice rose in pitch, and she tried to hold on to her voice.
“I love you, too,” he said.
And then he spoke the poem of Mirabai to her again, like he had so long ago: “O my mind / Worship the lotus feet of the Indestructible One / Whatever you see between earth and sky / Will perish.”
She kissed his cheek and said, “We’ll all be okay, even as we’re not okay. Isn’t that what you told me?”
“It is,” he said. “We keep going around and around. We get to come back. We get to do it over.”
* * *
—
IT WAS ARAV.
But also, it wasn’t.
His eyes were glassy and dead. He walked with a steady step and an icy posture. Gone was his humanity. Gone was the madness of White Mask. Unless, Benji thought, this was White Mask, somehow? Some strange evolution of the disease he hadn’t yet seen, mirroring the way the sleepwalkers walked…
“Light him up,” Stover said.
Benji cried out. Gunfire filled the air on all sides as Stover’s men whooped and hollered, pointing their guns at Arav Thevar. Bullets stitched across him, and he dropped to his knees, falling face-forward. And still the men kept firing, his body twitching and dancing as they unloaded their weapons—and there, in the beams of the spotlights, in the shine of the dark, Benji saw the air above Arav shimmer. As if someone had cast a ground-up dust of silver into the sky. It was there for a moment, then it was gone.
And, like Marcy, he understood.
The swarm.
The man closest to the front of the bus suddenly stiffened, as if possessed—his arms and legs went straight as boards. The rifle he had been holding clattered to the asphalt. He instantly began to shake, a wailing scream rising up out of his throat as his body bulged and swelled—
“What the f—” Stover started to say.
Then the man exploded. A red gush of blood. White spears of bone—some sticking into the metal of the bus itself, there in the splashing blood.
The air shimmered again—
The next man began to shake. Benji launched himself to his feet, but the man holding him there clocked him in the head with the flat of the pistol. He went down, starbursts popping behind his eyes, his ears ringing—he rolled over and found that man pointing the gun at his head. That man was screaming something, keeping his eyes both on Benji and toward the second man who was now screaming and swelling up. The man’s finger coiled around the trigger.
From behind, far up on the ridgeline, a flash of light.
The sound of a rifle shot rang out.
The man in front of Benji fell, the back of his head blown out.
It was time to move. Because now Benji understood what was happening. Arav was a carrier—not of any pathogen, not of White Mask, but of Black Swan in the form of a nanoscale swarm of robots, who were now using their defense mechanism as an offensive one. They were entering into each of these terrible men, causing him to swiftly boil and erupt, then moving on to the next. And the next after that. And on and on.
He did not want to be in the radius of blood and bone when it happened. The focus of Stover’s men was on the third of their own who was shaking, heels juddering against the road as the skin bloated and bubbled. Benji grabbed Marcy and Matthew and dragged them toward the bus door. One of Stover’s men came at them, gun up, ready to fire—
But another distant rifle crack from the ridgeline punched a hole in their attacker’s chest. He spun like a top and went down.
“The door,” Benji said.
Marcy grunted, and shouldered it open.
They headed inside the bus as men around them began to explode. Blood splashed up against the windows and the mirrors. Glass shattered. Bone peppered the side of the bus like birdshot. Screams were cut short in gargling deliquescence.
Benji and the others got down between the seats. They covered their heads. “Where’s Stover?” Marcy asked. But the big man was nowhere to be found.
NOVEMBER 5
Just outside Ouray, Colorado
OZARK STOVER RAN.
He was not good at running. He was simply too big to do it efficiently or swiftly—and, he now realized, he was getting old, too. And sick. Though he did not want to admit that he had become weak with the disease, he had.
Still, what was happening back there—he didn’t even understand it. He, too, saw the shimmer of the air settle upon his men. It was undeniable that they were each blowing up like water balloons and popping. Wasn’t that what they said happened to those in that goddamn flock? He should’ve been more prepared. Part of him thought, Take care of this now, finish it. Turn around and get the rocket launcher. Get in the tank. Blow this town to cinder and ash. Fuck these fucking freaks.
His heavy boots carried him forward, thudding dully on the asphalt. Despite his desire to turn around, he didn’t. Now he told himself, You can finish the job later. Run now. Hide. You can go into the trees, up in the mountains, and there you can wait. You can rain hell down on them all from above, delivering the penance those traitors and heathens deserve.
Or maybe he would go to find Creel. Last he’d heard, the man had settled safe and sound into a bunker somewhere in the Midwest. One of those billionaire bunkers. They’d let him in. Surely they would. He was loyal. He was strong. He was smarter than even they were.
Yes. That seemed wise. Get away now. Go get President Ed Creel. Go get more men. He would come back. He would kill all these people.
From behind him, he heard the sounds of his men screaming and erupting. The clatter of their bones. The splash of blood.
Then: gunfire. Someone was shooting at him. Bullets zipped past, going vvvvipp against the asphalt, crac
kling through the trees, snapping branches left and right. Ahead, the road bent just a little, and he knew once he rounded that bend, he would be okay. They couldn’t hit him there—
Something pushed him from behind, and he staggered. His shoulder felt wet. Then the pain hit, lighting him up from the inside. I’m hit. Fuck.
Just keep running, Ozark. Just keep on going.
Around the bend he went.
Until he saw the headlights.
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.
—John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecelia’s Day”
NOVEMBER 5
Just outside Ouray, Colorado
WILLIE NELSON WAS ON THE radio.
And Pete Corley was, admittedly, a little drunk.
Just a little. And sure, okay, yes, no, you should not drink and drive. He knew that. Implicitly. And he never did! Really. But now, you know, the world had completely shit its fucking britches at this point, and it’s not like he was knock-down soggy. He wasn’t blacking out. He’d just had three shots of cheap highway tequila to keep things interesting out here on the lonely road. During the Apocalypse, a man deserved a little drink.
Back to Willie Nelson.
Now, Willie Nelson was not rock-and-roll. Pete Corley knew that was technically true—Willie Nelson was one of the country greats, hands down. Just the same, that old stoner fuck damn well deserved to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because he embodied the spirit of rock, if not precisely its music. Maybe not as much as Johnny Cash, no, but the spirit was there just the same. And now that he was thinking about it, honestly, wasn’t Willie just a different side of the same coin as Johnny? Cash was a dark, vengeful angel. Nelson was a happy-go-lucky stoner spirit. Both entities from beyond the pale, like Prince, like Bowie. Willie and Johnny were country stars who still shone bright with the fuck-you-this-is-who-I-am spirit of rock-and-motherfucking-roll. I mean, if Tupac Shakur and Joan Baez were in the museum, so Willie Nelson should be. Pete told himself, “Soon as the world settles down, I’m going to go to that damn museum and put up a Willie exhibit. Just you see, universe. Just you see.”
Then he sang along with “On the Road Again.”
Except he made up his own lyrics, screaming them as he drove the Beast down these dark Colorado roads:
“On the road again! Shitting in a bucket, I’m on the road again. I ain’t got my family, fuck it, here’s the road again. Something-something-something I need me my special friend…”
On a lark, he reached over, used four fingers to tug the map closer. He flicked on the cabin light. How close was he now, to Ouray? Didn’t he pass an OURAY 10 MI sign like, half an hour ago? Impatience throttled him. And of course, he was a widdle-tiddle-bit drunk…
He glanced at the map, realizing full well that it wasn’t helping him, because a paper map was not a GPS. It wasn’t like he could follow the bouncing ball that tracked the precise location of his car along the route. He could be anywhere in this fucking atlas. Maybe he was in Arizona now, he had no damn idea. Last time he was out this way he didn’t come down this far, since he dropped Landry off up in Ridgway.
Landry…
“You better be alive and still sexy as hell,” he growled, tapping the town of Ouray on the map. “Because I’m coming for you.”
He looked up from the seat and back out the window—
Just in time to see a Yeti stagger out in front of the RV.
No—not a Yeti. A person. A big-ass motherfucker of a person.
Pete screamed, slamming on the brakes. The Beast, though, she was slow to respond, and she groaned and lurched, the half-bald tires skidding on the back road. The headlights illuminated a man, massive in size in every direction, his face frozen in white panic by the glow. Then the front end of the Beast clipped him hard, and he went down. The front tire rolled over him, wha-dump, and then the second tire, wha-dump.
Finally, the Beast stopped.
Pete panted.
“What the bloody fucking fuck was that,” he said. Maybe it wasn’t a man. Maybe it was a Yeti, or some angry forest spirit. He stabbed a finger out and turned off the RV’s tape deck. The only sound he heard now was the tink-tink-tink of the RV’s engine.
He threw open the door and staggered out.
There, behind the RV, was a man. Both legs broken. His arms were shaking, hands pawing at the ground. He was moaning and crying out, a madman’s blubber. Blood spread out from underneath him. “Jesus Christ,” Pete said.
And then, suddenly, he was no longer alone with this strange, dying man.
Someone walked up alongside him, pistol in hand. He didn’t know this man with the one arthritic hand and the scratchy beard.
And he didn’t much care to say boo to him, either. Because he looked pissed. The man walked up to the large man on the ground and pointed the pistol. Pete thought to intervene, but honestly, he was more comfortable keeping his mouth shut. He’d seen some shit out here on the road and found no good justification to intervene.
The man on the ground begged.
“No, no, no, please—Matthew, no. Don’t do this.”
The other man, this “Matthew” character, he shook his head.
Then he said:
“Too late for no, Stover. Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle, because we’re about to go for a ride.”
He pulled the trigger and shot the man six times. Four in the chest. Two in the head. The air stank of brains and shit and gunpowder.
Pete blinked. Holy shit. Did that just happen? What the fuck just happened? He looked around, half expecting to be on some kind of prank show. He kept his yap shut and took a few gentle steps back toward the RV. It was just him and this freakshow with a pistol and—
The man turned and walked into the woods. Just like that. Like, Fuck it, fuck this shit, I just shot a guy, gotta go on walkabout now. Pete watched him go, descending into the darkness. Pistol still in hand.
Pete swallowed hard, heard new footsteps approaching. And there, in the dark, a new face appeared. A face he recognized.
“Pete?” she asked, gasping for breath.
“Marcy!?”
“Where did you come from?” she asked him.
“Where did you come from? Who are these people? Am I dead? Or really drunk? Where’s Landry? Who’s the dead guy? The fuck is happening?”
He would have to wait a while for his questions to be answered. But answered they would be, in time.
For now, Marcy rushed up on him, a singular stampede, and once upon him, she gave him a bone-crushing, teeth-rattling, heart-pulping hug.
Which Pete needed very, very badly.
NOW AND THEN
The Ouray Simulation
TIME, AS HAD BEEN NOTED, was off-kilter here. Nessie could not say exactly how much time had passed since the attack on Ouray—at some points it felt like days, others weeks or months, and in certain terrible moments it felt like it was happening all over again, right now. Watching friends disappear from the streets. Listening to those left behind call their names, not yet realizing what had happened—that those who were gone were now dead in their beds or their chairs, bleeding out in the real Ouray as the swarm of nanobots connecting them to this place gently fled.
They had funerals and memorials. They held wakes. All around town hung photos of those who were now gone.
Nessie hadn’t yet hung Shana’s photo up. Her big sister had gone missing that day and never returned, which was unusual, given that the rest of the Beaumont flock—those who slept there—survived the attack. But Shana, apparently, did not. She was gone like so many were gone.
And it was time to hang her p
hoto.
Nessie went to her sister’s room, now empty, and took a photo of her—a photo conjured by Black Swan, since all that they did here was captured in the machine intelligence’s memory the same way a novel is captured in a Word document or doodles are saved in MS Paint—and she pinned that photo to her door.
She leaned forward and kissed the photo and tried not to cry, but she cried anyway. Then she headed downstairs, having said goodbye to her sister, and met her mother in the lobby.
Her mother hugged her.
“You could’ve come up,” Nessie said.
“I don’t think Shana would have wanted me to.”
“You don’t know that. She was just…upset. That you left us once. And I don’t think she really believed that you were really you.”
Her mother sighed. “Sometimes I think Shana was like me. Troubled, in her own way. I’m sad she’s gone but I’m glad you’re here.”
Mom kissed her brow.
Nessie leaned into it.
“Shall we go to Black Swan now?” Mom asked.
Nessie nodded, and off they went.
NOVEMBER 7
Ouray, Colorado
BENJI STOOD AT THE SINK of his room at the Beaumont Hotel, the door closed. Through it, he could hear Sadie humming just so.
His life had long been about numbers. Not math, necessarily, though that factored into it, too—but simply, numbers. Data. Statistics. Through the EIS at the CDC, he was constantly checking the numbers on every case he worked. Who was sick and how many? How many others could have been infected? How many were sick, how many were not? How many could become sickened by this or that pathogen?
Who was alive, and who was dead?
With Ouray, it was much the same. The accounting was due and still unfolding. The numbers were still coming in. The bodies still being counted.
Now, though, he focused on a simpler calculus.