Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “What I did was not courageous.”

  “It was.” Arav said it again, this time with greater emphasis, a zeal, an ardor. “It was. Maybe not…the best way to exhibit that courage. But it took some real guts to do what you did. To try to make a difference.”

  Benji nodded awkwardly and smiled an uncomfortable smile. “That’s kind. Next time I find such courage I can only hope it is backed up by the wisdom to express it more effectively. If you’ll excuse me—”

  At that, the door to the trailer opened. Cassie poked her head in. “Hey, you’re both needed out here. Martin’s about to talk.”

  Benji shook his head. “I don’t think I’m invited to these powwows.”

  “This one’s for everyone, dude. All the shepherds, too. It’s not about the disease—a storm’s coming. We have to get people moving.”

  Outside, as if to punctuate, the sky rumbled with faraway thunder.

  “I’ll be right out,” he told her.

  Once she was gone, Arav leaned in and said:

  “We’ll find a way forward. On this. I know we’ve hit a wall. It’s not Trypanosoma, it’s not flu, it’s not anything. I trust this team. We’ll find a breakthrough very soon, Doctor Ray.”

  They had no idea how true that was.

  * * *

  —

  THE CROWD GATHERED off the road, at the edge of a cornfield—the corn right now only a couple of feet high, in rows that stretched on and on toward oblivion. Shana and Mia stood with the other shepherds—those who left their vehicles and could spare the time and distance from their walkers. Maybe fifty or sixty of them stood around, each of them mired in impatience. On the other side, like it was some kind of turf war, stood the CDC workers, the HomeSec guys, a couple cops, a couple FBI. The third “gang,” the media, stood away from both groups, interviewing a few shepherds on camera, live.

  Meanwhile, the walker flock kept on walking past them on the road, their feet forming a dull, steady drumbeat.

  “Fuck is taking so long?” Mia asked. She popped a couple Chiclets before offering a few to Shana. Shana took some.

  “I dunno.” She spied some of the CDC people going into the long lab trailer—the one pulled off to the side. Arav was among them.

  Mia must’ve followed her gaze. “You still hot for the Pakistani kid?”

  “I think he’s Indian.”

  “Whatev. He’s cute.”

  “He’s like, twenty-five.”

  “And you’re almost eighteen. I like to date older guys. Know why?”

  Shana asked why.

  “Because guys are immature little shits. You know how you know a guy’s mental and emotional age? Cut his real age in half, that’s how old he is. Means older guys are more mature.”

  “Do you date like, fifty-year-old dudes?”

  “No, ew, stop.”

  “But if you date a thirty-year-old guy it means you’re mentally dating a fifteen-year-old.”

  “You’re making this really weird, Shana. I’m not hot for teenagers. I just mean—older guys are wiser. Better in bed, too, because they know what’s up.” She winked. Then she shot Shana a suspicious look. “You have slept with guys, right?”

  “Lost my virginity at sixteen in the back of a Subaru Forester, like the proper daughter of a privileged American liberal.”

  “Whew, good. Was it good, your first time? It wasn’t, was it? First time is never, ever good.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, it was pretty bad. Billy Coyne was editor of the lit mag. I submitted a poem—some dumb thing about death and little white pebbles and how they look like gravestones. He offered to workshop it for me, but he really just wanted to workshop my panties off. And I fell for it.” She made a face. “He screwed like a poodle humping a couch pillow.”

  “See, what’d I tell you? Older guys are practiced. Like, that one CDC guy? Vargas?” She kissed her fingers. “I would mount him like a piece of taxidermy. I would climb him like a lighthouse. I would—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it.”

  “Oh, speaking of older guys, there’s yours.” Back out of the trailer came Arav and the other two CDC people: Cassie Tran, who’d interviewed Shana back when all this began, and who kinda surprised her because she was Vietnamese but had a southern accent and wore weird band shirts, and now Shana was pretty sure that thought made her racist. The other one was the head of this operation, or at least co-operator. His name was Benji, which was not a name that Shana associated with anybody in charge of anything, ever. Ben, maybe. Benjamin, okay. But wasn’t Benji a dog? Was Benji a basenji? Why wasn’t Benji a basenji? Better question: Why was she thinking about this shit at all? The three of them stood off to the side as Martin Vargas—he whom Mia apparently wanted to fuck—got up and spoke.

  “Before anyone asks,” Vargas said, “I don’t have any new information for you about your friends and family members.”

  Anger ran through Shana.

  People were supposed to have answers.

  Experts were supposed to know shit.

  And they didn’t know anything.

  This anger in her cascaded and multiplied, like lava pouring over rock and turning that rock to more lava—parents were supposed to be people you trusted, your little sister wasn’t supposed to suddenly get sick with some strange new sleepwalking plague and walk out of her head and out of your life, none of this should be happening, not one stupid ounce of it. Shana knew this angst over the fact life is super unfair, wah, was hyper-fucking-cliché of her, but it was what it was, and she felt what she felt.

  Things, she thought, were supposed to be better than they were.

  Everyone around her must’ve felt the same righteous, irrelevant anger. Before Vargas could say more, the crowd got rowdy. Murmurs of disgust fast became a dull, raging roar, with some voices rising above:

  “We need answers!” shouted Carl Hartkorn, whose son, Bradley—a quarterback for a school in Ohio—was among the walkers. “The hell are we paying you for? Our kids, our families—”

  Another voice arose, this from Dina Wiznewski, a single mother of fifty whose thirty-year-old daughter, Elise, was among the walkers. (Dina followed the flock in an old Chevy Malibu. She slept in it.) Dina joined Carl’s tirade, interrupting him:

  “We pay taxes!”

  A small roar of agreement arose.

  Now a dissenter: Lonnie Sweet, Darryl Sweet’s father. Lonnie, with his big barrel-rolling voice, said, “Hey, now—ease up.” As voices threatened to drown him out, he just got louder: “Ease up! Doctor Vargas and the nice people from the CDC aren’t the enemy here.”

  A voice—Shana didn’t recognize it—shouted from the back of the crowd somewhere: “Terrorists!” As if to explain who their enemy truly was.

  Vargas put some boom into his voice, trying to talk over them: “People. People. I appreciate your frustration and I will attempt to address it but right now—” As if on cue, thunder tumbled across the open distance like the rumbling steps of some faraway beast. “Right now, we have some weather to worry about. Okay? This supercell system may bring hail, heavy rain, and possibly even tornadoes—”

  A voice, maybe Carl Hartkorn again, Shana wasn’t sure: “We can’t protect them.” Them. The walkers.

  Shana’s blood went cold.

  Hartkorn was right. They couldn’t. A tornado could cut across the road and rip through the flock like they were just action figures on the carpet kicked by some shitty kid in a fit of anger.

  “What we will do,” Vargas continued, yelling over not only the throng, but now also the wind that picked up, “is try to divert the walkers. My cohort, Doctor Robbie Taylor”—next to Benji, Shana spied the man with the unruly sideburns who had helped her two weeks ago with the cop who tackled her—“has a plan to take our lab trailer and park it perpendicular across the road two miles up. If all goes acc
ording to that plan, the walkers will turn away from this road and onto the highway north, headed toward Indianapolis. On this path, we should intersect the weather system in about thirty minutes—but if we divert, it might just miss us.”

  Mia leaned over and said in a low voice: “A whole lotta fuckin’ shoulds and mights and according to plans in there. I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither.”

  Then again, what else could they do? Restrain them and they went boom. Let them wander and maybe a tornado would flick them into the air like God’s finger.

  Shana’s entire body tightened as thunder rumbled anew. Her stomach sank into a pit of nausea, like she might barf.

  Storm’s coming.

  Please, Nessie, be all right.

  * * *

  —

  A MILE AHEAD, at the juncture of roads, Benji stood next to Robbie Taylor as one of Taylor’s team—Avigail Danziger, the Israeli—deftly pulled the Ford F-350 off the road in the process of backing the lab trailer up so that it blocked the road. It needed to be at just the right angle, giving the walkers a new avenue of travel: a small access road that would take them toward Highway 74 north, toward Indianapolis. Not an ideal path, no, but one that might just move them out of the way of the storm.

  Already the sky was darkening here. The wind picking up.

  No rain, yet.

  “How you holding up?” Robbie asked.

  Benji shrugged. “The flock grows every day. We have no answers. Eventually Homeland Security is going to take over, assuming we don’t all die as the result of a storm system likely to spawn one or several tornadoes.”

  “I like your optimism.” Robbie clapped him on the back, then turned to all the gathered field officers and lab techs. “All right, folks. Core teams only. Everyone else, head to the hotel.” They’d rented rooms for the night at a nearby Holiday Inn. “If we don’t end up punted to fucking Oz, we’ll meet you there when the storm has passed.”

  With that, the CDC people dispersed.

  Martin and Cassie came up, Arav trailing.

  “Should I stay?” Arav asked.

  “Go if you want,” Vargas said. “Unless you have a weather-changing superpower, there is not much you can do here, Arav.”

  “I think I’ll stay,” Arav said. “If that’s all right.”

  It was.

  There, Benji thought, was a glimpse of that courage. Question remained: Was his courage smart? Was there wisdom behind it, or just a fool’s eagerness to sacrifice himself? (Like, Benji thought, my own.) Still, Arav reminded him of some earlier, more optimistic version of himself.

  The wind settled for a second. Robbie said suddenly, with no preamble: “Might as well put some more bad news on top of things. Loretta’s going to send us home.”

  “What?” Martin asked, shocked. “We’re not done here.”

  “Not you. Not recalling EIS, not yet. But ORT.”

  “Bullshit. My team cannot manage this. It’s not in our wheelhouse—we’re already overwhelmed. We should be doing more data collection, more detective work, but all this on-the-ground…juggling, it’s not our role.”

  Robbie held up both hands. “Hey, I agree with you, Marty, and if you wanna see if you can go two-for-two with The Immovable Object, I’ll back your play. But she’s putting us on something else.”

  “Dare I ask?” Benji asked.

  “Abuja. Nigeria.”

  “Ebola?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. So. We’re out tomorrow—again, provided we don’t all get butt-fucked by this supercell storm. We’ll be in Nigeria just to provide support for WHO, so maybe that takes us a week or two—if this whole parade thing is still going on, I’ll see if Loretta will bring us back.”

  “Thanks, Robbie,” Vargas said.

  Benji felt the bottom dropping out from under them. With Robbie gone, that put more pressure on EIS not only to control this situation, but to answer for it, as well. Worse, it meant a greater likelihood that they just couldn’t hack it—and the moment that happened, the moment they made one slip-up, that would give Homeland Security an opening to take over the whole show. They were already itching for it. What if they considered these people a threat? Benji could not imagine he lived in a country that would up and execute these people.

  Still…

  History had too many cruel examples of this very thing happening. Worse was: Would people even flinch? Would Americans quietly look away? Or would they rise up in defense of the flock?

  He feared he knew that answer.

  But this, he decided, was a problem for Future Benji.

  And just like that, the rain started to fall. Just a spitting rain—cold flecks of it on his face, his arms. The pickup truck window rolled down, and Avigail looked out and offered a half shrug. “Are we good?”

  They took a look at the trailer. It neatly crossed both lanes of the road and onto each shoulder. Further, each side of the road featured a sunken drainage ditch—and beyond that, fields of corn. All of that added up to a series of obstacles for the sleepwalkers. The easiest path for them was just to take the access road. He hoped the flock did it.

  Robbie gave a thumbs-up. “Good as we’re gonna get.”

  They’d find out soon enough, because here they came. Like livestock marching up a ribbon of long road, the walkers wandered ineluctably forward, still about a quarter mile out. Some shepherds had left at Benji’s request—not only were they also in danger in a bad storm, but worse, their vehicles made for aggregate damage. A broken window meant glass on the road—and high winds meant glass in the air. That convinced at least half of them to turn around and head toward safer ground for now. But many remained. They, and the walkers they watched over, would be here very soon.

  * * *

  —

  “I’M NOT GOING,” Shana said.

  Her father pointed at her, then pointed at the passenger-side seat. “Sit down, Shana. Let’s go.”

  “I’m staying. Someone needs to stay.”

  He wanted to take the Beast and head for safer, drier ground. She wanted to tell him he was being a fucking coward. “Dad—”

  Then Mia, who stood behind Shana in the RV, said: “Mister Stewart, I’m staying a little bit longer, just long enough to see what happens when they get to the trailer. I got my Bronco, soon as we see that Nessie and Mateo and the others took the detour, we’ll come, okay?”

  “You promise?” her father asked, looking at Shana.

  “Promise,” she lied.

  * * *

  —

  BENJI WENT INTO the trailer with Cassie and Arav. Robbie, Avigail, and Martin stood outside in the spitting rain, about fifty feet out from the trailer—Robbie thought there might be value in trying to convince the walkers to change course by yelling at them, by trying to wave them off. Even though the walkers up until this point had not responded to external stimuli, Benji thought, what harm could it do? At worst, the sleepwalkers would fail to register what was said to them.

  “Here they come,” Cassie said.

  A hundred feet, now. A mob of them. The shepherds who remained hung back—some walked alongside the flock, while those in vehicles pulled off and waited behind the state trooper police cruisers. Off to the side he spied Remy, one of Robbie’s guys, with a FLIR imaging camera, letting them record thermal and infrared, as well as in night vision. The media, too, gathered at the margins—he saw their cameras pointing at the flock, filming through the needles of rain. At least they were staying back. For now.

  The walkers closed the gap.

  Benji could feel their collective footsteps in his feet.

  A scene from a movie pinged his memory: Jurassic Park, with the glass of water rippling as the T. rex came closer and closer. But the walkers were not a lone creature, hungry and dist
urbed. They were a horde, increasingly faceless, marching not exactly in lockstep, but together—like a flock of birds, or a swarm of locusts.

  Something tickled at the back of his brain, then.

  Something about how birds flocked and how locusts swarmed, about army ants teeming across a jungle floor…

  He put a mental pin in that for later.

  Now Robbie and Avigail began waving their hands—and again came a flash of Jurassic Park: Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, waving the flare to distract the tyrannosaur. From inside, they heard the muted yells of the two ORT members, exhorting the walkers to change course, that a storm was coming, that they were in danger.

  The flock kept walking forward.

  “You think they’ll listen?” Arav asked.

  “I don’t know,” Benji said.

  “Watching them come at us like this,” Cassie said, “I can’t lie, it’s a little fuckin’ freaky.”

  Cassie’s walkie-talkie crackled. She grabbed it. “Go ahead.”

  Outside, they saw Robbie speaking into his, and the voice came through inside the trailer. “They’re not stopping, guys.”

  He was right. The walkers simply flowed past Robbie and Avigail the way a stream flows past a rock.

  “Shit,” Cassie said.

  Martin spoke: “Cassie, ask Benji for his opinion: Any value in intercepting?”

  She gave him a look. Reluctantly, Benji took the radio.

  “I don’t know,” Benji said into the walkie. “I’d say not to impede. Maybe they’ll turn. If not…we don’t want to risk detonation.”

  Even now, that idea had not become normal to him:

  Detonation.

  Ten feet, now.

  “What if this doesn’t work?” Arav asked in a quiet voice.

  “Then,” Benji said, “we hope the storm will be kind.”

  Five feet.

  The walkers weren’t stopping.