Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  He had half a dozen swabs left.

  And he had only three more antifungal pills left.

  Benji knew that he had been lucky. So far, the disease in him had not yet manifested in an external way. He wasn’t stuffy. He wasn’t sneezing. Was nary an itch or a tickle deep in his sinuses. But that made him feel guilty, too—because Sadie was progressing. Arav had gone so far along the disease he was losing his mind—and even now Benji wasn’t sure if his final sacrifice, brilliant and heroic as it had been, was the product of a moment of lucidity or a car crash of White Mask delirium.

  Benji, regardless, had shown no signs of sickness beyond the one day when he tested Sadie and himself out in the desert. The day the swab glowed blue and he knew he had only a few more pages of the calendar left.

  Now, though, he wondered—

  Did the antifungals do more?

  Was Ozark Stover’s paranoid belief about him actually, inadvertently accurate? Was there truth in that monster’s paranoia?

  Could it have cured him?

  Only one way to know.

  The swab and the light.

  Benji winced, accidentally winking at himself as he took one of the last Sporafluor swabs and jammed it up into his nose. It tickled his brain (or felt like it) as he twirled it around up there. Then out it came.

  He set it on the sink.

  He took out the black light.

  But he hesitated. What would he do if the disease was gone in him? Already it was likely too late to do anything about it. It would be a grotesque revelation, one rich with dramatic irony and tragedy—it would mean they had the tools to save humanity, if only they had more time. Or maybe if he hadn’t spent so much time with the flock and instead worked tirelessly on seeking pharmaceutical solutions.

  He clicked the light on.

  The swab glowed.

  White Mask was still within him.

  The antifungals seemed to do in him as he had hoped: They slowed its progress and left him physically and mentally fit for the journey.

  And now the journey was done. He took one of his last pills and washed it down with a bit of water from the sink—the water here still worked, and would as long as they had electricity. (There would come a point when some fail-safe would trip and the hydroelectric power here would cease to be. At which point, he had no way of knowing how to get it back online, though certainly he would try.)

  He opened the door, forcing a smile. Sadie was on the edge of the bed.

  “Ready to head out?” he asked. There was cleanup to do. And, for him, more of an accounting to be made to give them a clearer picture of what had happened that night—and, as a result, what would come.

  Sadie did not get up, though. She sat on the end of the bed and took his hands in hers. “You take a pill?”

  “I did. You take yours? It’s almost done. We’re almost out. I’ve only got three—well, two now—left.”

  He saw her visibly swallow. She looked…some curious mix of pleased with herself and anxious about something.

  “I told you the night of the attack, there’s something I had to tell you. And I never told you. Now…is probably the time for that conversation.” Before he could object, she added: “I know I wasn’t to keep things from you but there’s one last thing and it’s time you knew.”

  “Sadie, whatever it is—”

  “I never took my pills.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “The antifungal meds? Never took one.” His blood went cold as she continued on: “Neither did Arav.”

  “I…don’t understand, that’s insanity, Sadie—”

  “Shh. Arav and I decided together that you were a very important part of this equation. And he pointed out, quite reasonably, that when they used the Rhodococcus rhodochrous on bats to inhibit the growth of white-nose, it took…time. High exposure over a few days coupled with the average hibernation period of winter months. Arav suggested, and I agreed, that if White Mask was to be soundly trounced—inhibited long enough so that your immune system could fight it—it would take three months at least. Maybe more. And even if it didn’t—”

  “Sadie, please don’t tell me this—”

  “Even if it didn’t cure you, then at least you could be given more time with more pills. So we willfully neglected to take ours.”

  He took a step backward, literally staggered by this news. Sadie, meanwhile, leaned over and reached on the far side of the bed, sliding her hand between the mattress and the box spring. From there she withdrew a plastic baggie featuring a supply of antifungal meds.

  “See?”

  “Sadie, you’ve…what have you done?”

  “I’ve given you time. You could say thank you.” Her eyes twinkled.

  “We both could’ve had time.”

  “No, we couldn’t, because we didn’t have enough pills.”

  “Arav could’ve given up his, just his, and…”

  She stood up and reached for him. He fell against her, weeping. It wasn’t that anything had changed with her—yesterday, he knew her time was limited, and today it was no different. What had changed was that now there was a very strong chance he would have to go on without her, and die alone, and that frightened him more than White Mask, more than Ozark Stover, more than anything in the world ever had.

  * * *

  —

  “GET THESE FUCKING handcuffs offa me.”

  Matthew sat outside the cell. His son, Bo, was inside it, struggling against the handcuffs. Now that he was safely inside, he directed the boy to turn around and push his hands through so he could unlock them.

  Bo resisted at first, but he wanted the cuffs off, so eventually he relented. The cuffs dropped away, and Matthew took them.

  “I want out of this cell,” Bo growled.

  “No, I’m afraid they said you’re going to have to stay in here a while,” Matthew said, sadly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Always doing what someone else tells you.”

  “I have chosen many of the wrong voices to listen to over the years,” Matthew conceded to his son, “but this time, the decision is mine. I don’t think we can trust you, yet.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Matthew sighed.

  “I failed you, Bo.”

  His son looked at him with hate, real hate, in his eyes. “Go to hell.”

  “I was not a good father to you. I was too concerned with…I don’t know, our spiritual health, and I never really paid much attention to our actual family. But—”

  The boy suddenly sneezed. A blast of snot came out of his nose, ropy and thick, shellacking both lips all the way down to his chin.

  Matthew paused, and took out a handkerchief and wiped it. Even here he could see the telltale signs of White Mask in it—veins of white threaded through the gobs of green. “You’re sick,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “You forgot to say bless you.”

  That felt somehow strange to say, so instead he said, “Gesundheit.”

  “Fuck you.”

  This wasn’t working. None of this was. He wanted to cry. He wanted to throttle his son. He wanted to throttle himself. On the one hand, he was happy to see his boy again. That night, the night Matthew shot Ozark Stover and ended the man’s reign once and for all, he knew he was leaving his son behind, likely to die. Stover’s men were erupting, and leaving Bo behind meant consigning the boy to that fate. He knew it. He understood it. He found no comfort there, but also knew he couldn’t change it now. On the other hand, seeing the boy alive after all that…

  He wished maybe Bo had died. That was the worst feeling of them all. Because it would have been easier for both of them had it gone that way.

  “You hate me,” Matthew said. “You’ve always hated me. I understand that. I don’t blame you. But I also believe you love your mother
very much, despite how you feel about me. Is that true? That you love her, no matter what?”

  Reluctantly, Bo nodded.

  “Did she…find you?” Matthew asked.

  Bo looked confused. Which was all the answer Matthew needed.

  Autumn never found her son, it seemed. Maybe she went into that camp. Maybe they discovered her. Bo didn’t know. Matthew didn’t know.

  Maybe he never would.

  It was the one little thing Matthew had been holding on to, and now it was a rope gone to fray, starting to snap even as he was climbing up it.

  “I’m sorry,” Matthew said.

  “You’re just going to keep me in a fuckin’ cell every day?”

  “For now. Until someone makes another decision.”

  “Let me out. Let me out!”

  Bo slammed up against the bars like an enraged beast.

  “You became…radicalized, you came to worship a man who worshipped nothing but his own power. I can’t have you here in town hurting people. Because I think you might.”

  His son leered, defiant. “I killed people out there. Not just sick people. I killed whoever Ozark told me to kill. That’s who I am, Dad. I liked it.”

  It was Matthew’s turn to summon defiance.

  “So? I killed him. I killed Ozark. I shot him and he is dead. I shot him because of what he did to me, what he did to you, what he did to your mother. He died a weak and sick man.” This wasn’t going how he wanted it to. None of this was. “You were going to kill me, weren’t you? When you found me freeing Marcy. You were about to shoot.”

  “I was.”

  “Would you do it again?”

  Bo sneered. “I would.”

  “Jesus, Bo.”

  “Bet you think I’m going to go to Hell for all this, huh?”

  Matthew sighed. He felt like crying but he could summon no tears. “I don’t think that. I just think…you’re sad and you’re broken and that’s maybe my fault. But I don’t know how to put you back together again, and our time is short. Too short.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes so hard he saw streaks of jagged light. His son was sick. He wouldn’t live.

  None of them would, really. Would they?

  He told his son that he’d have someone bring food.

  And then he left, the boy’s mournful wails and rage-fueled screams loud in his ears long after he went upstairs and outside.

  * * *

  —

  “OH SHIT, I forgot to tell you about this epiphany I had,” Pete said, reclining back on the chaise in the Beaumont lobby, with Landry reclining back on him. “So, get this: I think Willie Nelson is rock-and-roll.”

  “What the fuck are you going on about?” Landry asked.

  “Willie Nelson. He should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”

  Landry leaned back and looked up at Pete, scowling. “Willie Nelson? Like, that bearded-ass hippie-ass dude who’s so high all the time that when he dies you could cremate him and smoke his ashes?”

  “Yes, that one. And, oh gods, do you think he’s dead? He’s probably dead. I like to think he isn’t, though. I can’t abide the thought of losing him. It was hard enough to lose Bowie and Prince. When they died, everything went to hot shit, didn’t it? For the record, I blame their deaths for all of this.”

  Marcy watched the two of them. She sat in the lobby with them, leaning forward, elbows on her knees. She had just come from working out—was a place just north of here called the Ouray Hot Springs Pool and Fitness Center, and in the basement she found a small boxing gym, so she went a few rounds with the speed bag and the heavy bag, just to keep on top of things. After that, she had a soak in the hot spring, then came here to find these two canoodling in the lobby like a pair of snuggly lorikeets.

  It made her happy. She had no one to call her own, but she’d never really wanted that from life. Other people’s happiness pleased her. And it felt good to be surrounded again by the warm glow of the flock—diminished though it had been by Ozark Stover and his band of white supremacist lunatics.

  “You ever meet him?” she asked Pete. “Willie?”

  “I did. But one of my greatest regrets is that I never got high with him. Which is like—” He looked suddenly wrecked, like all the hope and optimism had been ripped out of him. “Oof, what heinous fuckery to have missed that opportunity. I think he grows his own stuff down in Hawaii or something. God, you think maybe Hawaii is still okay?” To Landry he said: “We could go there. Somehow.”

  “What, just hop in a washtub and float our asses to Maui?”

  “Seems as good a plan as any.”

  Landry tapped his bandaged head. “Might I remind you, Rockgod, that those bigoted bitches clocked me in the head with a baton or some shit, and my fragile concussed skull isn’t going to hop in some bathtub boat just so you can smoke up with Willie Fucking Nelson.”

  “Fine. You need time to recover. I get that.”

  “Just kiss my boo-boo and shut up.”

  Pete bent down and kissed his head.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your family,” Marcy said.

  When Pete looked up, he looked startled by it.

  “Oh. Yes. A shame, I know. They just…weren’t home. They’d moved on. I went out there for nothing, it seems.”

  He had a sad look on his face when he said it. But there was something else there, too.

  Marcy believed he was lying.

  What that meant, she didn’t know, and wouldn’t ask. It wasn’t her business, really. Whether that meant he’d gone out there and found them sick or dead, she couldn’t say. Or maybe he’d found them and they didn’t want him. Or they didn’t like what he had to tell them. Whatever the case, the story he was selling was that he got there and the bunker had been abandoned. End of story, too bad, oh well. He was always hasty to change the subject, too—another sign that he wasn’t being truthful.

  It was what it was.

  Landry leaned up, blew his nose, then sneezed, then coughed. Pete didn’t seem to have any symptoms, as yet. Neither, Marcy noted, did she.

  She wondered what that meant.

  * * *

  —

  “ALL RIGHT, DOC, give it to me straight. All the news that’s fit to print, come on, chop-chop.”

  Dove Hansen sat up in his bed. His own bed, in his own big house sitting off 6th Street, tucked back into the pines near Portland Creek at the southeast corner of town. Benji had just finished changing the wrappings on both his head and his torso. Turned out, the man who attacked him had in fact been using birdshot—which is good for taking down pheasants, less so for killing a person. Especially when that person had a thick heavy-fabric jacket to slow the pellets. The pellets went in, and Benji was able to get most of them out—the rest he could feel, still, but they were too slippery and tricky to remove. Just the same, not a single one had gone deep enough to perforate an organ.

  It was Dove who provided cover fire for them up there in the mountains. He killed the two men who came to investigate the gunshots up there, and then—after a period of some unconsciousness—crawled to the ridgeline with the rifle and started, in his words, “killing the king hell out of some bad guys.”

  Benji liked Dove.

  Matthew, who was also here in the room, sitting on the chair next to the bed, Benji wasn’t so sure about. The man seemed pensive. His wife was missing. And his son was sick, too—both of the body and the soul, it seemed. It wasn’t that Benji didn’t trust Matthew, it was just…he was still a stranger, an outsider, and he still heaped some of the burden of what had happened on the man’s shoulders. It wasn’t fair, and he thought he’d put it behind him—but the attack reopened the wound. And it didn’t help that being so wrapped up with his own family made Matthew more distant and unable to help the town in other ways.

  “Spill it,” Dove
said, urging him to talk.

  “I don’t know that now is the time,” Benji said. “We’re still figuring it all out, and…you’re still recovering.”

  “I’m recovering fine. I got my—” He thumbed a gesture toward the two pill bottles. “My fish pox and you to take care of me. I’ll be fine. I’m a tough old strip of leather with a very handsome mustache.”

  “Fish mox,” Benji corrected, “not fish pox. And fish pen, too. Short for amoxicillin and penicillin.” Maryam, bless her heart, went out and took a dirt bike she found in an abandoned garage up to Ridgway. She got the pills from a pet store, and did some other recon for survivors and supplies, too—couldn’t bring much back on the bike, but she found some stuff she marked to haul back with a truck later on. No survivors, though. Everyone had cleared out, it seemed. Must’ve been hard for her, since she lost Bertie that night of the attack. Shot by one of Ozark’s men.

  “Well, whatever,” Dove said. “Long as the fish pills don’t give me gills, I’ll be fine.” He narrowed his eyes. “They won’t give me gills, will they, Doc?”

  “I’m afraid they will. You’ll be a salmon by the end of the week.”

  “Shit. All that upstream swimming. Lotta work.”

  “Considerable effort.”

  “Good, now that we’ve bantered properly and I have hopefully convinced you of my mental and emotional fitness…” He lowered his voice. “I want to know how it all shook out.”

  Benji shared a look with Matthew. The ex-pastor shrugged.

  “All right,” Benji said. He exhaled, preparing himself. “As I said, we don’t know everything. These are just…estimates. But we lost a hundred thirty-seven of our flock that night. We would’ve lost more, of course, if your townsfolk and our shepherds hadn’t stood in the way. Some of them…many of them lost their lives in defense of the sleepwalkers.”

  Dove’s face turned grim as a broken stone. “Tell me.”

  “Twenty of your people are dead. We lost Bertie McGoran, Kenny Barnes, Hayley Levine, and…of course, we lost Arav. Which you saw.”

  Dove used his tongue to fidget with his dentures. “Helluva thing that boy did. Even from up on the ridgeline…I never saw anything like it.”