Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  That did not happen.

  Instead an ambulance wheeled into the frame, reversing to the bottom of the ramp. Someone still inside the ambulance opened a door—all that could be seen of them was an arm, the hand in a latex glove.

  The tall man wheeled the stretcher into the ambulance.

  And then it was gone, driving out of view of the camera.

  Someone stole two bodies, Benji thought.

  They stole evidence.

  Nausea swirled at the bottom of his stomach like foul water circling a drain. Someone knew what they were looking for. Someone stole those bodies, that evidence. They edited or hacked the hospital cameras. That indicated they knew more about all of this than Benji knew even now.

  They’re hiding something.

  Who are they? And why?

  The worst answer surfaced:

  Because someone did this.

  All of it.

  Call it bioterror. Call it an attack. Call it whatever—it suggested that there was intentionality behind it at the worst. At the best, it meant someone created this problem accidentally—

  And now was struggling to hide the evidence.

  Martin said it first:

  “The game just changed.”

  Six months ago, in San Antonio, Texas:

  THE CROWD DIDN’T KNOW WHAT was coming.

  Jerry Garlin did. Or at least, he thought he did. This was his moment. His time to shine, incandescent like the sun itself. No longer did he need to live in his father’s shadow. Dirk Garlin, may he rest in peace, the so-called architect of dreams, the mastermind of the country’s second-largest theme park wonderland—Garlin Gardens in Raleigh, North Carolina—cast a long shadow, indeed. Jerry had lived in that shadow for fifty goddamn years.

  But now, Jerry would not merely step out of that shadow—

  Why, he would obliterate it.

  He stood out there on the makeshift stage, the late-day sky behind him big and blue, speakers nestled among the little scrubby pines. All around had gathered friends and family—and, of course, the media, who drooled like a dog at a T-bone steak when he dangled the choice tidbit in front of them that he might, might just be planning on expanding the Garlin Gardens legacy. Hundreds had gathered. Cameras sat pointed at the podium on the dais. His podium. His dais.

  Jerry’s right-hand man, his go-to guy, Vic McCaffrey, stood up there pumping the crowd, getting them wet and juicy for what was to come—then Vic invited up the mayor of San Antonio and then the governor of Texas, both of whom spoke at length (too great a length, Jerry thought with some impatience) about the vital American legacy of Dirk Garlin and the Garlin Gardens theme park—and TV channel and animation studio and toy manufacturer and restaurants and, and, and.

  And then it was time for Jerry.

  He rubbed his hands together. Buttoned the buttons on his blue suit. (Need to lose a little weight, he thought. But all his upcoming travel might afford him that chance—so much to do!) Then up he went, and the crowd applauded—a mild applause, he thought, but that was okay he told himself. Not like he was some kind of pop musician or A-list actor. But after today, he would secure his place amid that panoply of stars, maybe even be deserving of his own goddamn constellation, by God and by glory.

  He began his pitch.

  He wasn’t like his father in this regard—Dirk Garlin was an old-school pitchman. In the early days of his career, that man sold everything from soap to sodas to hunting rifles, all on the road, hand to hand, word of mouth. The old man was like a carnival barker or circus ringleader in the Barnum way: Step right up, folks, right this way to the great egress. Except his circus was capitalism: the buying and selling of goods.

  And later, the buying and selling of fun. And dreams. And, some might say, America its own-damn-self.

  No, Jerry was not that, not exactly. His father could sell ice to an Eskimo (or as his father was wont to put it, Boy, I could sell binoculars to a blind man), but he could be persuasive when the need arose.

  Jerry reminded himself to smile.

  He tried very hard not to sweat.

  And then he began.

  He said, his voice big and loud and proud: “Garlin Gardens is a place of America—not just in it, but of it, a part of the American heart and the American spirit. Ask a sixty-five-year-old or a five-year-old if they know who Gary Gopher or Shirley Squirrel is—or Lady Beetle or Dimwit Dog or Princess Flutterby—and they’ll not only tell you who they are, they’ll tell you their favorite movie starring them, they’ll tell you about a beloved stuffed animal or snow globe—hell, they’ll even do the voices for you.”

  And here he affected his best Dimwit Dog stutter:

  “Well buh-buh-buh-golly fuh-folks.” The crowd didn’t react too well, but that was just as Vic said it would be—and more important, had to be (even if it rankled Jerry just a little), because it let him sell the next joke. Under his breath he then said: “Guess I shouldn’t quit my day job, should I?”

  It was a mediocre joke, but it worked. They laughed. They applauded. Vic at the time of crafting the speech said, Never underestimate the power of a bad joke, and better yet one that pokes fun at yourself.

  God bless Vic, that clever bastard. Knew people better than people knew themselves.

  Jerry continued on: “Even more so, the elderly person or that young child would also go on to tell you about that summer their family took them down to Garlin Gardens. And maybe not just one summer, but three summers, or summer after summer—or maybe they saw the Christmas Whamboree, or the fireworks on Imagination Day. Garlin Gardens has long been imprinted into the minds of Americans, but there comes a time when a garden gets too big—it strains at its margins, trying to grow over the fences and around the gates like a dream that doesn’t want to stay a dream anymore. And the only thing you can do is grow that garden.”

  There. Out there, in their eyes, a flash of something. Curiosity. Hope. Wonder. They knew something was coming. Not just because he’d promised an announcement, but it had been so long since the Garlin Company had revealed any new major initiatives. They all eased forward, almost imperceptibly, and Jerry almost imagined that he could hear it—the squeak of shoe soles, the creak of knees, the slight intake of breath through the nose.

  “And so today, we grow that garden.”

  He held, like Vic told him to hold.

  Waiting for gasps.

  Waiting for all of them waiting to hear what he meant.

  Vic said, Sell the next line big, hoss.

  So sell it, he did. Big voice, big smile, two big thumbs-up.

  “I’d like to announce that behind me is the site of the second official Garlin Gardens: Garlin Gardens, San Antonio!”

  And big applause. Both the mayor and the governor led the way, standing up and applauding, shaking each other’s hands, then turning to him and applauding in his general direction. (And boy did that feel good.)

  Still, he wasn’t done. Not by a long shot.

  “And now I’m here to tell you that this is just the first. We will simultaneously open five new Garlin Gardens parks, with San Antonio being the flagship—” Not really true, but he wanted them to feel special. “And the others being Sacramento, California; Boston, Massachusetts; Berlin, Germany; and finally, Chengdu, China!”

  Now it was rip-roaring applause. He shot a glance at Vic—his attaché stood there, a knowing smirk on his pretty-boy face, not clapping, no. Just nodding. Nodding because they did it. They did it.

  And still, he wasn’t done.

  Vic told him, Don’t wait, don’t let the applause ride out. Jump the gun. They don’t know what’s coming, and you don’t want to give them the chance to anticipate anything. So that’s what Jerry did.

  He started speaking over them, louder than their applause: “Folks, folks, the first thing you do on a garden, folks, before i
t’s even a garden is—what?” He lifted his hands and gave them a comical shrug. “Why, that’s right, you have to get your shovel and you gotta break ground.”

  Jerry turned his shrug into two fists raised in the air—

  And with that—

  Boom.

  Behind him, the pyrotechnics went off—the ground shook as gouts of smoke and stone erupted miles behind him. The audience took a collective gasp and a half step back—the looks of wonder on their faces registered shock and concern, now. But that was okay. A reaction was a reaction, his father always said. The best punctuation in the English language, according to Dirk, was the exclamation point followed by the question mark. “No periods,” he would say, “and no commas. Question marks and exclamation points are the best tools in your toolbox—use ’em and get that reaction.”

  So Jerry just smiled and spread his arms wide. “That’s us breaking ground on the new Garlin Gardens, folks, and I leave you now with a quote from my father, Dirk Garlin—he always said, The best gift you can give somebody is a surprise, because they never—”

  The last words of that were forget it.

  But Jerry did not get the chance to say them.

  First, he saw the eyes of the audience disconnect from him all at once—their gaze turned away, looking not at him but rather, behind him.

  Then he heard the sound. A susurrus, a rush, a flurry.

  “What the—” he said into the mic, then turned around.

  The blue sky was punctuated with black. Slashes and vees, rising together like little dark pen-marks etched across the expanse. They moved nearly as one, joining up into a single dark mass, and he thought, Birds, they’re birds, like something out of Hitchcock, and he willed himself to think it was fine, just fine, nothing serious, because birds were birds and Hitchcock’s movie was just that: a movie, a fiction, some made-up bogeyman bullshit.

  Then he realized—once he heard the chittering and the screeching—

  Those are not birds.

  They’re bats.

  They swept up across him en masse—a sky-darkening swarm skimming over the trees and straight across the stage. He cried out, swatting his arms as they brushed against his cheeks, his hair, as one got caught up in his clothing and tried to get out through the armpit. Jerry yelped like a kicked dog, pirouetting drunkenly as one of his feet left the stage without him meaning to—and then he fell, landing three feet down on the other ankle as bats swarmed him and the ankle bone broke like a broomstick—

  Five months ago, in the sky above the Atlantic Ocean:

  THE CAST ITCHED. THE TWO pins itched. Jerry Garlin struggled in his seat to get comfortable, grousing under his breath as he did.

  Vic, sitting across from him, said: “Four more weeks.” He meant until they got the pins out and the cast off.

  “Four weeks too goddamn many.”

  His attaché leaned backward in the seat of the private jet, relaxed as he always was. If stress was a bullet, Vic McCaffrey was bulletproof glass.

  “Don’t focus on the leg. Don’t focus on that day. Things are good.”

  “They ain’t that good.” There in the well of Jerry’s voice rose the banjo twang of a Kentucky upbringing. He kept it down most days—nobody wanted a business run by someone who sounded like some hicky rube—but when he was pissed off or worried, it tended to creep out. “They aren’t good. Not as good as I want ’em to be, Vic.”

  “Berlin went well.”

  “And Chengdu didn’t.”

  “The Chinese market is a tough one. We’re strangers in a strange land there—they’ll come around. Tensions are strained right now between them and us, too.” China said the US was a currency manipulator. The US said China was the manipulator. More talk of tariffs and trade wars. “It’s a tiff, but it’ll end.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He grunted again as he strained to find a position that didn’t cause pain to shoot up from his broken ankle—the misery was like lightning striking from the heel of his foot all the way up to his hip. “I’m looking for a couple-few days at home. Peace and quiet.” His daughter Mary and his son-in-law Kenneth were coming to their Florida house to stay with Jerry and his wife, Susan.

  “Don’t get too comfy, I got you an interview.”

  Jerry pouted. “Interview with who?”

  “With whom,” Vic corrected, and Jerry hated when Vic did that. The man knew a lot. Maybe knew everything. But it still rankled. Nobody liked being told they weren’t speaking right. But he let it slide, because Vic was so essential, he’d saved Jerry’s bacon from the fire again and again. “Interview’s with Newsweek. They’ll send a reporter—a good one, probably Dave Jacobs or Samantha Brower—on Saturday.”

  “Newsweek, c’mon. I don’t need that.”

  “Newsweek is venerable.”

  “Newsweek had, what, a peak circulation of two, three million? They shut down print a few years ago because they dipped under 100k. I’m told that magazines are a dead format, Vic.”

  Vic leaned forward. “Dead in print, but not online. People click.”

  “Get me on Fox. They like me.” And they should. Jerry was a big donor to the Republican party—and the Republicans basically ran Fox News these days. “You know what this Newsweek fiasco is gonna be? It’s gonna be like that goddamn Boston Globe interview. Some…fuckin’ gotcha interview. They’ll ask me about San Antonio. They’ll ask about the video.”

  The video. That still burned his ass like a bundle of kindling. Day after the San Antonio groundbreaking, a YouTube video surfaced of him being swarmed by bats—the news footage cut away and missed his fall, but some yahoo out there had his phone on and the camera rolling. It captured everything, his speech, the dramatic gesture, the big boom—

  Then the bats.

  And his squeals.

  And his fall.

  Jerry had watched that video more times than he could count, though he’d never tell Vic or even his own family that. Though his views on that video were a drop in the bucket compared with how many had watched it. Last he checked (two hours ago), the view count on that video was up over three million. The future wasn’t Newsweek. It was fucking YouTube.

  And that sucked. Because YouTube—the whole damn internet—was the antithesis of Garlin Gardens. It wasn’t fun and whimsical. Dreams were not made on the internet; they were killed there. By mean, nasty little shits who were all looking to one-up each other.

  Like crayfish in a bucket, all trying to climb over one another to get to the top.

  “They won’t ask about the video,” Vic assured him. “I have their promise.”

  “That fella from The Boston Globe did. Then he asked about the remix videos. And the remixes of the remixes. They’re calling me Batman, now, you know that? And not in a serious way. A funny, ha ha, laugh-at-the-man kinda way. It isn’t right, Vic. Isn’t. Right.”

  “They won’t ask about the video.” Vic shrugged. The next thing he said, he said it like it was no big deal, but to Jerry it was a helluva big deal. “They might ask about that day, though.”

  “No. Hell no.”

  “Jerry, you should talk about it. Like I said, being self-aware, being a little self-deprecating—laughing about this kind of thing—it has value. Makes you look confident, like everything will bounce off you.”

  “I’m not you.”

  “I know you’re not me. You’re a whole lot richer.”

  “Now, don’t overstep, Vic. You sound sour.”

  “I’m not sour. Just truthful. You inherited a company, one of the biggest. Your father was immeasurably wealthy—you’re one of the hundred richest people in the country. Your family has a legacy mine will never have.”

  “You ain’t—you aren’t exactly poor.”

  “Didn’t say I was. I’m standing on a ladder, no doubt. But you’re on top of a skyscraper like King Kong. Embra
ce it. Enjoy it.”

  Jerry crossed his arms and leered. He didn’t like this kind of talk. Made it sound like he didn’t deserve what he got, like he was just sitting here on his laurels—like he wasn’t the one who came up with the new Garlin Gardens plan. Like he didn’t work his ass off to get here. Okay, no, maybe up until now he wasn’t exactly the Idea Man, but he did his time. He had to appease his father, for one thing—oh sure, Dirk could be all smiles. With everyone else, he felt like their best friend or funny uncle. But to Jerry, Dirk would be cold and mean. Always in his eyes was that dull finish of disappointment, looking down at his son like he was lesser, like, Oh, this is who will inherit the earth after I’m gone? Well, shit.

  Vic pushed past that, started to say, “We have a lot of good stuff to talk about—hit the high points of the Garlin Gardens plan. Remind them that, unlike with Disney, we won’t have duplicated rides. Each park will be its own unique entity, giving people a reason to visit not just one park, but each of them, and we’ll have packages that—”

  “I know the fuckin’ talking points, Vic!” he snapped. “Here, let me ask you a question: Why didn’t you tell me about the bats?”

  “We did tell you.”

  “No, no, you told me it was a conservation area back there, and that’s why we had to hire security to remove those protesters—”

  “And I also gave you a legal document to sign that indicated very clearly that the conservation area bordered Bracken Cave, and Bracken Cave is one of the biggest bat colonies in the country. We’re lucky we only disturbed the one type of bat—in the main part of the cave, the Mexican bats number in the millions, Jerry. The millions.”

  Mexican bats. That figured.

  “Those bats were all over me. I got scratches. Bites.”

  “They weren’t serious.”

  “The rabies shots sure as shit were serious. That shit hurts, Vic. Five doses of those meds—”

  “Four. It was four shots.”