Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  JUNE 3

  Near Granger, Pennsylvania

  SHANA SAT IN THE BACK of the ambulance. One of the two paramedics sat with her—a broad-shouldered white woman with a crooked nose and kind eyes. The woman introduced herself as Heather Burns. The other paramedic was Brian McGinty: a soft-spoken string bean with a pale beard. Also Caucasian. He stood outside the ambulance, speaking to her father. Shana couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  “Your sister,” Paramedic Heather said. “She was the first?”

  “Yeah. Yes.” Shana felt her hands shaking, though she didn’t know why. Over the paramedic’s shoulder she caught a glimpse of the rickety wooden bus shelter where they’d found her sister two years ago after their mother left.

  “And the other two?”

  “Mister Blamire, the math teacher, he showed up…um, I dunno, over an hour ago, down on Orchard—no! No, uh, Mine Hill. And that third person, I don’t know who she is, I’m sorry.”

  “But she just showed up?”

  “Just before you guys got here, yeah.”

  The third person looked young, but not as young as her sister. Maybe midtwenties. Looked Hispanic. Or was it Latina? Shit. There was a difference, she was sure of it, but she couldn’t think of what it was. Long hair down over her shoulders to the middle of her back. Wide hips but narrow shoulders. The woman wasn’t wearing shoes, but was wearing socks. Pink socks, already looking red on the bottom from being wet and muddy.

  She came up right after they turned onto Granger Road off Mine Hill. Shana watched this young woman walk out the door of a little garage apartment and make a beeline for Nessie and Mister Blamire. The woman had those same dead-nail eyes.

  The woman joined the other two.

  And then there were three.

  Sleepwalkers, Shana thought. Three sleepwalkers.

  She couldn’t repress the cold feeling that swept over her. Nobody home in there, she thought. A strange vacancy. A small, troubling voice inside warned her: This is the start of something, we just don’t know what, yet.

  “Are they sick?” Shana asked the paramedic.

  “I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”

  “Oh. Right.” She blinked. “They seem like they’re sleepwalking.”

  “That’s a good way to describe it.” Heather nodded and smiled—it gave Shana some small comfort, that smile. “Okay, before those three—the sleepwalkers—get too far ahead, I’m going to explain real quick what we want to do. We’re going to inject a sedative, one at a time, in each—”

  “Don’t you need like, a vein for that? They won’t stay still long enough for you to tap a vein or whatever—”

  “This is Haldol. Goes right in the buttock.”

  “Oh. Okay. And if they fall over?”

  “It doesn’t necessarily sedate to unconsciousness—it’s good for calming down agitated, even violent patients. But just in case, I’ll do the injection, and I’ll be behind the patient in case they fall backward. Brian will stay at the front in case it goes the other way.”

  Shana nodded. “You’re starting with Nessie first?”

  “Brian is securing your father’s permission right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Vanessa, to your knowledge, doesn’t use drugs?”

  At that, Shana had to laugh. “Drugs, no, God. Nessie is straight-edge all the way.” She remembered one time she tried to get her little sister to taste a beer—Nessie made a puckered face at her like a juiced lemon and wouldn’t even take a sip. Shana tried to literally press the beer to her lips, and at the last minute Nessie blew out, spraying beer foam all over Shana’s face.

  God, was Shana pissed. It seemed so stupid now.

  “All right.” Heather looked out at the other paramedic, who gave her a gentle nod. “Looks like we’re all clear.”

  “I’d like to be close by.”

  “Of course. It’ll be quick and painless and then maybe we can calm your sister down and get her and the others to the emergency room. Just to see what else is going on—if anything. Which it’s probably not. Probably just a…strange moon or something.”

  Heather helped Shana hop down out of the back of the ambulance. Ahead, the three walkers were already down the road by a quarter mile. They walked in a staggered pattern—first Nessie, then Blamire was a couple of steps ahead in the middle, and then the new walker was last in line, and lagging behind by a few steps.

  The paramedics took point and had to affect a gentle jog to catch up. Shana looked to her father with worry hanging heavy on her brow.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said.

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “They know what they’re doing.”

  “I know.” She thought but did not say: But something else is wrong. She could feel it, the way you could feel a storm coming sometimes. A buzz in the air, a tension between molecules. She kept that fear to herself, though.

  The paramedics arranged themselves—Brian stepping ahead of the three walkers, keeping pace with them while walking backward. Heather had a needle, which she plunged into a little bottle of clear liquid. The needle drank from the glass and emerged, sated.

  The noonday light gleamed in the needle’s tip.

  Heather gave Shana one last smile, then hurried up behind her sister—

  And fast as lightning, she stabbed the needle in.

  Or rather, tried to stab the needle.

  Tried, and failed.

  “It didn’t go in,” the paramedic said. She offered an awkward, maybe even embarrassed smile. “Let’s try this again.”

  And again she caught up to Nessie, and again she thrust the needle toward the girl’s butt cheek, and—

  Once more, nothing. It was like the paramedic was poking a leather couch with a dull fork—it just wouldn’t go in.

  Shana tried to think of how one day this would make a hilarious story she’d tell her sister:

  So while you were spacing out like a total fucking spaz, the paramedic tried again and again to prick your butt with the needle but she couldn’t get it to work. Ha ha, get it? A prick in your butt? Oh shut up, don’t make that face. Be proud. You’ve got glutes of steel, little sister. They should make a comic about you and your superpower—we’ll call you Bulletproof Booty Girl.

  Heather looked up, her cheeks flushed. “I swear,” she joked, “I am a professional.”

  The other paramedic, Brian, looked over and said in a low, frustrated voice: “Want me to try or what?”

  “Brian. I got this. Third time’s a charm and all that. I want you to grab her, though, around the middle—real gentle, hold her still for me—”

  “No,” Shana said, storming over. Her father reached for her but she twisted out of his grip. “Wait, just stop. No! No, I told you what happens when you hold them still. No, no, no—”

  “Problem is, Shana, I think it’s her moving that’s the issue. Vanessa’s getting away from me even as I’m going in with the needle, so.”

  “Please. Don’t.”

  Heather looked at Shana and in her calm way said: “You told me it was, what, five, six, maybe even seven seconds before you really became alarmed by the girl’s seizure? This’ll be for one second. Maybe half that. Isn’t that right, Brian?”

  “Absolutely. And like she said, I’ll be gentle.”

  Shana felt her father behind her. “Honey,” he said. “Let them try.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “Shana.” Gently, he pulled her back. “These are medical professionals. You know that.”

  “She’ll shake. When she does, it’ll be hard for them to stick her—”

  “I won’t miss,” Heather said. “I promise.”

  Reluctantly, Shana nodded.

  “Okay. Okay.”

  Heather and Brian caught up once more to the girl
. “You grab her on three,” she said. “One…”

  Please be okay, Nessie.

  “Two…”

  I don’t know what this is but I need you to get better.

  “Three!”

  Brian grabbed her. Nessie shook. The girl cried out, that otherworldly wail rising up out of her throat and mouth.

  Heather went in with the needle, jabbing hard—

  Something fell against the asphalt. A tick-tack sound.

  Whatever it was gleamed in the emerging sun.

  Nessie’s whole body shook harder and harder, heels juddering against the road, so hard that Shana was sure her feet would be cut up. That sound rose louder and louder, and Shana yelled at them to let her go, please, God, fucking let her go—even as the other two sleepwalkers walked onward.

  “The needle broke,” Heather said. “Let her go!”

  Brian’s arms sprang open. The girl squirmed free, then shouldered past him with urgency in her step allowing her to join the other two.

  The two paramedics appeared shaken. Brian most of all. “That was bad.”

  “It was just a seizure,” Heather said.

  “That wasn’t just a seizure.”

  “What’s going on?” Shana’s father asked.

  “I couldn’t…” Heather drew a deep breath. “I couldn’t get the needle in. She doesn’t have anything in her pockets…? A wallet or…or something tough? The needle broke and needles don’t usually break unless—”

  “She’s wearing pajamas,” Shana snapped.

  That drove them all to a stretch of awkward silence as they all looked to one another for answers and reassurance—none of which would come.

  “I think we need to call somebody,” Brian said.

  “Who?” Dad asked.

  “The police,” Heather said. “They’ll know what to do.”

  * * *

  —

  IT TOOK AN hour. By then, they’d followed the three sleepwalkers into Granger proper, which wasn’t much of a town, really: a single road, all stop signs and no stoplights, one bar, two gas stations, three antiques stores, and an old wig store that had closed down a few years back but still had all its signage. Their procession was a strange one: an ambulance creeping along behind three people walking, and Shana and her father in the pickup. Whenever cars backed up behind them, they waved them around. Whenever the cars came the other way, they slowly figured out to maneuver around the people and the two vehicles. The walkers never seemed to take notice. Nothing altered their path. Nothing drew their gaze.

  They didn’t twitch or flinch or change their gait, not once.

  Shana drove. She and her father didn’t say much to each other along the way. It was mostly just him trying hard, too hard, to reassure her: “It’ll be fine. Your sister is fine. You just wait and see.”

  Shana knew in her blood that it was bullshit.

  * * *

  —

  THE COP THAT showed up was a stocky sort: short, but looked like a real gym rat. Wasn’t just arms and legs; his neck had muscles. The cop, bald as a lightbulb, pulled them over and got the lowdown from the two paramedics before turning to Shana and her father.

  “My name’s Officer Chris Kyle. Young girl is your daughter?” he asked, and her father confirmed. He took a few more details: Nessie’s age, any health issues they knew about, any drug issues. The paramedics briefed him on the seizures. Heather explained: “Contact seems to be the cause of the seizures.”

  Shana thought: It’s not just contact, though. It’s what happens when you try to stop them.

  By now the three walkers were already halfway through town. Some folks had gathered to see. A few faces poked out of upstairs apartment windows to goggle. A couple of day-drinkers stood in the doorway of the bar, Glinchey’s. A woman at the Mobil station stopped filling her car and stood at the pump, looking back and forth between the walkers and the cop and the ambulance. The cop kept a wandering eye ahead, then called the paramedics over.

  “Goal is what?” he asked them.

  “Hospital,” Heather answered.

  “And are they dangerous?”

  “No,” Brian said. “Not that we can see.”

  “They’re sleepwalking,” Shana said, even though her diagnosis was nowhere near scientific. Still, nobody corrected her.

  “All right. Let’s get ’em to the hospital,” the cop said.

  The officer cracked his knuckles, rolled his head on his neck like he was about to deadlift a fallen log, then got back in his car. He pulled it up ahead of the three walkers, parked it off to the side about a hundred yards past the gas station. He popped one of the back doors, then made his approach. As he did, Shana couldn’t help but notice how the cop had this walk, a cocky rooster strut that looked like he had shit his pants at some point but was too proud to admit it or change his drawers. He stopped twenty feet ahead of the walkers, held up a hand, told them in a clear, loud voice:

  “Halt.”

  They continued walking.

  The cop scowled. “I said, stop there. Wake up. Slow your roll.”

  Brian, the paramedic, yelled over: “They don’t…they can’t hear you.”

  The cop gave a curt, irritated nod.

  What happened next, happened fast. Chris reached to his belt, and drew a pistol, pointing it at the center of the trio. At Blamire.

  By the time they were all yelling and running toward him—

  He aimed and pulled the trigger.

  A neural network invents new desserts:

  Shady Tough Crust

  Caramelized Pecan Boffins

  Bottled Chocolate

  Dreamberry Pie

  Tartless Fish Prongs

  Cakey Cake

  Butterscotch Chiffonade Yard Muffin

  Unicorn Poo Cake

  —as seen on the US of AI blog, US-of-AI.com

  JUNE 3

  Decatur, Georgia

  MAKER’S BELL WAS NOT MUCH of a town worth talking about.

  Sadie told him that was the place—the one Black Swan identified as a point-of-outbreak. So Benji pulled his laptop out of his travel bag, spun it around on the counter, and with her looked up Maker’s Bell.

  As he was fond of saying when an investigation yielded nothing:

  There’s no there there.

  Maker’s Bell sat on the map northwest of Allentown by about fifty miles—used to be a coal town, but that ship had long sailed. Not just for Maker’s Bell, but for most of the country. (Politicians were always keen to try to “bring back coal,” but you might as well try to bring back the buggy whip. Talking about coal was never about coal, though: It was always code for making promises to blue-collar America about their blue-collar ways of life.)

  These days, Maker’s Bell was home to 4,925 people. Looked mostly like a white immigrant community—the mine barons exploited populations of Irish and Eastern Europeans in the anthracite mines. They seemed to love something called kielbasy, or kielbasa? Some kind of Polish sausage. And that was about as notable as it got. Not much in the way of news: high school football scores, a sale at the new Toyota dealership, the occasional shoplifter. He scrolled deeper, found that they’d had a string of racial incidents a couple of years back: The town had seen an influx of non-white immigrants from Guatemala, some white folks got pissed, beat a couple of them up, a few vigilantes—a teen girl, of all people, among them—responded, but that simmering pot never boiled over—at least not into the news.

  Of course, Benji knew from his own experiences as a black man in America that racism like that never really went away. Racism reminded him of Lyme, a tick-borne disease. A deer tick would bite a person, passing along a little bugger named Borrelia burgdorferi—the nasty bacterium that caused the disease. When you contracted it, it might look like a case of the flu. Then
it could go dormant for weeks, months, sometimes even years—and then when it came back, it manifested ten times worse than it began. And it looked a little different every time: attacking different organs, the heart, the brain, the spine; affecting different limbs; conjuring unique symptoms, like facial paralysis.

  Racism was a little like that. Sometimes the initial symptoms were small: microaggressions here, simmering resentment there. If you dealt with it head-on, maybe you could keep it contained. If you didn’t deal with it, though, it came back with a vengeance: just like that little bacterium. Came back worse. Entrenched. So entrenched, in fact, the longer you let it go, the harder it was to control, and soon everything started to break down.

  Now Benji had his mind on those two axes: racism and disease. Could that be what Black Swan was trying to show them about Maker’s Bell? He said as much to Sadie: “What if it’s not identifying an outbreak of disease? Does Black Swan differentiate between that and, say, an outbreak of terrorism? A school shooting? Because if it’s that, you shouldn’t be talking to me. You can find far smarter minds than mine on those subjects.”

  “Black Swan asked for you. Sorry, burden’s still on your shoulders, mate.”

  He scratched the space between his eyes, above his nose: a nervous tic for when he was deep in thought. Maybe his line of thinking was right. Could it be Lyme? Climate change meant a swelling tick population. “Maybe it’s tick-borne. Or mosquito. Or…” He sighed as options unspooled. “They eat sausage there. Worth a look at butchers. Been a while since trichinosis made the papers.”

  “Trick-a-what?”

  “Trichinosis. A parasitic roundworm infection in meat. Severe cases are fatal. Common in pork. Found in unclean pig farms and butchers.”

  He felt her eyes burning holes in him. Wait for it, he thought. Waaaait for it. And sure enough, she said suddenly: