Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “Was there? Did you find anything like that?” What an absurd question he had to ask. Unnatural circumstances, he reminded himself.

  “No. No foreign bodies, no artificial limbs that could be a concern, no pacemaker, nothing in the stomach that I could tell—no chemical burns, zip, nada, bubkes. Health reports on the guy said he was pretty healthy outside of a busted knee a few years back. No health insurance, though, which is increasingly unsurprising given the cost of health insurance. So? Nothing of note. Except…”

  “Except what?” Benji asked.

  “Thing is, when you drill down to the microscopic examination, that’s where things get…fucking goofy.”

  He said this last word as if it was not precisely the word he wanted, but the only one he could find. “How so?” Benji asked.

  “I took organ samples, skin samples, muscles, vertebrae, brain. At the cellular level…I saw a lot of damage, okay?”

  “Damage?” Martin asked. “Necrosis of the cells?”

  “Total. Similar to caseous necrosis.” By caseous necrosis, he meant the manner of cell death one might find in some fungal diseases or from mycobacteria—but also from other foreign invaders. It referred to a cell that had erupted, leaving detritus all around. “But also, not that. Caseous necrosis is slow, and this…wasn’t. No byproducts present. This was fast, by the look of it. The cells were a microcosm of the man: Ten percent of them just detonated.”

  Ten percent was enough, it seemed.

  Robbie handed over his phone. Benji took it to Martin, and the two huddled together to peer at the screen. On it, a series of crude photos from the microscope.

  Benji saw what Robbie meant—the cells were broken open out of the side, all the organelles either similarly ruptured or spilled out. It was as if a BB had shot its way out of a blueberry—not through it, but out from the inside of it. And that pinged something at the back of his brain.

  He felt like he’d seen this before.

  But where?

  His jaw clenched as he grappled with the memory.

  “What could’ve done this?” Martin asked.

  “Not typical of a virus,” Benji said. “Fungus, maybe.”

  A parasitic fungus made some sense, didn’t it? Mycoses, or fungal diseases, could feature insidious microsporidia. Some would fuse cells together, making them easier to infect. Valley fever—spores carried on the wind in the Southwest of this country—was a systemic, opportunistic disease that caused caseous necrosis of cells, though slowly. In terms of changing behavior, one had to look no further than the so-called zombie fungus, cordyceps, which literally seized control of an insect. An infected ant first suffered convulsions as the fungus broke through the exoskeleton—then the fungus took control of the ant’s movements, driving it up the stem of a plant, where it would attach itself and explode. Thus releasing the spore onto more ants below.

  Could this be that? Certainly cordyceps did a number on the cells of an ant, albeit slowly—threads of microsporidia destroyed organelles in the cells, including mitochondria. Benji’s mind spun with the possibilities. If the fungus inhabited the epidermis, would it be strong enough to make the skin impenetrable to needle and knife? That seemed impossible.

  “Did you find any evidence of fungal infection?” Benji asked.

  “Nothing. It was clean.”

  Martin asked: “Are you thinking cordyceps?”

  “I don’t know.” Benji thought: We don’t know anything, do we? “It makes more sense than anything else, but at the same time…it still doesn’t make enough sense. More information hasn’t made this more clear.”

  “I’m going to make this considerably less clear, then,” Martin said.

  Robbie: “Oh shit.”

  “Might as well tell us,” Benji said.

  “I don’t have to tell you. I can show you.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE WAY back toward the flock, they passed through Waldron, a small town whose Main Street didn’t have any streetlights or even any lines painted on it. Shana saw a garage on one corner, and across it, a small lot for school bus parking (where it looked like a graveyard of buses gone dead). They passed a little diner, a dinky grocery store, a gas station, and a few row homes and duplex houses so run-down they looked ready to sink back toward the earth and take a dirt-nap until total decay.

  But as they headed south through town, they saw something else: news vans. And outside of them: reporters and camerapeople, setting up for shots. Clearly they knew that the walkers were coming this way.

  “Like vultures,” Shana said.

  Mia shrugged. “They’re just doing their job.”

  “Yeah, but their job is screwing up our job.”

  “We don’t have a job, girl. Nobody’s paying us. I’m damn near dead broke. I’m gonna have to have Mama wire me some money so I can pick it up at the post office or something. Shit.”

  “Hey, what’d you do before this? For work, I mean.”

  “Last job? Waitress. At this shitty gastropub in Cleveland, Barn and Burger. Always had to serve a bunch of drunk preppy hipster assholes who thought they were all progressive and shit but were basically just the larval stage to misogynist conservative crybabies. Blah-blah-blah craft beers, blah-blah-blah third-party candidate, blah-blah-blah, Abercrombie and Fitch, bitch. I’m happy not to be there.” She screwed up her face into an acidy pout. “I’m not happy about not getting paid, though.”

  Out of town, now, Mia pressed the accelerator. The Bronco leapt forward like it got a shot in the ass. They passed fields swamped with water. Saw a couple of downed trees. Shana looked in the back of the Bronco, saw the red stains. She could smell the smell, too—a faint mineral tang. Like the smell of a dead calf. “You’re gonna need to clean out the Bronco,” Shana said. “From, uh, last night.”

  “Shit. I didn’t think about that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Maybe I’ll just burn it.”

  South of town, a few miles out, they started to see more vehicles. Some of them were media vehicles from local TV stations. Others looked unfamiliar—cars and trucks they didn’t recognize. They were just people, it seemed, standing out of their cars, watching, waiting.

  Mia said, “Did that guy have a cooler in the back of his truck?”

  “I saw some lady sitting in a lawn chair.”

  “Like fucking tailgaters.”

  “Like fucking tourists.”

  The Bronco rounded a bend, dipping its rear tire in a tooth-cracking pothole—and soon as it did, Shana saw the flock ahead. There, now, were the shepherds she recognized: not just the cop cars and the CDC trailer, but the pickups and RVs and pop-ups. She saw the Beast, too, pulling up the rear. Even still, the media was thicker here, now, too—cameras everywhere, microphones up in people’s faces.

  Last night changed things, Shana thought.

  That meant the media knew what had happened. That someone had told them about the poor man who popped like a cork—though maybe it wasn’t just that. Maybe they filmed it. Maybe they filmed the whole thing: the walkers going up over the trailer—her sister leading the way. Maybe they filmed that man walking down his driveway, his family struggling to stop him. Maybe millions of Americans last night watched a video of a man blowing up like a balloon filled with blood and guts—which meant they could’ve seen her, too, running through the storm to grab that boy. Suddenly, all these people felt like trespassers. Intruding upon their, what was it that Mia called it? Their sacred mission.

  Truth was, Shana didn’t know if she really believed that, but she damn sure felt it in the space between her heart and her stomach. “Pull over, I need to see my sister.” That was another thing she felt, now—the need to go back to Nessie, just to see if she was okay. Mia nodded, pulling off to the side about a tenth of a mile ahead of the walkers.

  Shan
a threw open the passenger-side door, pushed past all the fatigue she felt, and wore a long stride as she marched toward the walkers.

  She saw her sister leading the flock. Arms at her side. Hair still a little wet, hanging stringy by her pale, freckle-dotted cheeks. Shana thought, She needs a shampoo, I’ll tell Dad to go get some. As she stormed forward, she heard someone say:

  “Is that her?”

  And then, “It is her.”

  Next thing she knew, she had microphones all up in her face. A woman with helmet hair started to say, “Last night, you were the one who saved that boy—”

  A man with hair so closely cropped to his scalp he was a whisper from being proper bald interjected: “What’s it like to watch a man explode?”

  Another word—“Hero—”

  Another—“Savior—”

  A third—“Infected—”

  Shana swiped at the microphones and pushed past the cameras. “Go away,” she spat. “I just wanna see my sister. I just want to see Nessie.”

  Questions trailed her:

  “Wasn’t your sister the first of the sleepwalkers?”

  “What do you think about being called a shepherd?”

  “What do you think is happening here? Shana? Shana?”

  But she ignored them. She tightened her jaw, bit on her own tongue, and strode ahead to meet Nessie.

  My little sister.

  The girl stared ahead, her pupils dilated to big black buttons. Her mouth stayed closed in that flat, familiar line. No smile, no frown. Shana hurried alongside her, matching Nessie’s stride. She stroked her hair. Kissed her cheek. Tried like hell not to cry, but she cried a little anyway. Then she said to Nessie, “I’m sorry for leaving you last night, but I had something to do.”

  Then she told Nessie the story.

  All while the cameras rolled.

  * * *

  —

  MARTIN HAD BENJI grab his laptop off the side table, where it was charging. With that, Martin hauled his bag off the floor, unspooling a cord and hooking it up to something Benji immediately recognized—

  The FLIR thermal camera.

  That, he began to connect to the computer.

  “I dropped that,” Benji said.

  “You did. Tsk-tsk, very expensive camera to drop in a thunderstorm.”

  “I was a bit busy.”

  “I’ve done worse,” Martin said, powering on the camera. “I once misplaced a vial of Brucella—”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Blood under the bridge. I was young and dumb and—ah. Here it is.”

  Robbie stood behind them as they watched. The laptop screen flickered over from its desktop to a recording from the camera. The image onscreen was thermal: midnight blue but for the blobby pulses of color, like something out of a psychedelic lava lamp. The gradations of color revealed the heat maps of what was onscreen. In this case, it showed the two normal temperatures of the wife and the child, and the escalating temperature of the father—a walker held captive.

  That’s when the camera dropped—clattering to its side. Benji—or rather, his ankle—remembered that moment all too well.

  “It’s still recording.” Benji almost laughed. Though the image was now tilted on its side—just as the camera was—it kept going.

  “It is. Tough camera.”

  A new person ran into view—Shana. Again, Benji was reminded of the girl’s absurd bravery. She had nothing to gain here. The man, Clade Berman, was nowhere near her own sister. He presented no danger to anyone but his own family. That marked her as either someone who had a lot of untapped courage—there was that word again, echoing the conversation with Arav—or someone who cared little for herself or her own life.

  (He wondered idly, How often do those two things intertwine?)

  The heat map over Clade Berman brightened from orange to red and all the way to the highest indicator of temperature—white. That happened just as the thermal blur that was Shana Stewart raced past, grabbing the boy and dragging him away from his father.

  And it was here that those blobs of colors in the shape of Clade Berman became blobs of colors in the shape of a man about to expire—without the visual noise of rain and darkness, it was almost cartoonishly easy to see him bloat and split and rupture. It’s like he’s boiling. His shape continued to distort, bulging in pockets like bladders of gas and blood inflating internally—

  Then, like that, he detonated.

  A balloon, gone pop.

  A human balloon, Benji thought.

  Martin said, “This is where it gets interesting.”

  He clicked back several frames to where Berman was still just swelling up—then Martin advanced the frame one click at a time.

  Click, click, click.

  In the replay, Clade Berman detonated.

  Click, click, click.

  And then Benji saw it: Above what-was-once-Berman were signs of heat. Almost like a particulate spray—a small cloud, like a sprinkling of thermal spikes speckling the air above his erupting form.

  “Notice anything?” Martin said.

  “I do. Surely it’s just…blood. He seems to have boiled—if the spray is of a significant enough temperature, then…”

  “And does that make sense to you?”

  It struck him. “No, not really.” His voice felt small and faraway as he realized it out loud: “The rain is torrential. The wind is gale-force. And yet—”

  “And yet,” Martin said, nodding, “this spray, as you call it, it goes straight up. Despite the rain.”

  “Despite the wind.”

  Martin advanced again.

  Click, click, click.

  The mist did not merge with the wind.

  It did not rise and then fall, beaten down by rain.

  It kept going. Up and up and up. Till it was gone, out of frame.

  Like a ghost. A fleeing spirit, an ejected soul.

  Benji hurried over to the camera and switched it from the thermal recording to the standard digital video—the camera recorded across that spectrum, and what it recorded could be flipped from one view to another with just a spin of a thumb-wheel.

  “What are you looking for?” Martin asked.

  “I don’t know. Something, anything to make sense of this.”

  He moved the video back to when Berman detonated—not a vision he wished to replay in any format, but one he must, for again, he was a doctor and a scientist and this man’s death was a data point. Onscreen now, the recording was muddy and nearly meaningless—yes, it was possible to see Berman’s family, it was possible to see the blur of the teenage girl grabbing the young boy, but the act of detonation remained unclear. Rain obscured it. The darkness did, too. Out there in the murk, Benji could see the motion of the detonation—the air disturbed, a sudden discoloration of dark rusty red—but not the details of it. Just the same, even as he clicked the frames forward one by one by one, he stared deeper at the space above the exploding man.

  Then—

  The faintest shimmer.

  He stabbed the screen with his index finger, thud. “There! See that?”

  Martin leaned in. Benji moved the frames back and forth, three at a time back, then three at a time forward. Hovering over a moment in time.

  In that moment, in the darkness and the rain, came the faintest ripple above Berman’s detonating body. Like a camera flash illuminating a cloud of dust. “Maybe something from the storm,” Martin started to say, “maybe lightning or…ball lightning is an unexplored phenomenon,” but his words died out as Benji flicked back to the thermal imaging.

  The images matched. The shimmer paralleled the heat map of the disobedient particulate spray. The shimmer itself did not last as long as the thermal image’s register of it.

  But its presence, and its match, was undeniable.


  Benji leaned back in the chair.

  He tried to take it all in. To let the moment wash over him and maybe grant him some moment of clarity, some sudden revelation.

  But none came. This led to the deepening of a mystery, not to its resolution. Robbie gave voice to it, muttering, “What the fuck was that.”

  “No answers,” Benji said. “Only more questions.”

  Martin hesitated. The man’s chiseled, handsome face screwed up into something almost comical.

  “What?” Benji asked. “What is it?”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “My God, what now?”

  “I want you to take over the EIS investigation, Benji.”

  Oh.

  The rattlesnake became an American symbol around the time of the original thirteen colonies, who saw the snake often on their lands, and who began to associate it—alongside the eagle—with liberty from British oppression. Its most common appearance is in the yellow Gadsden flag, where the coiled snake sits over the phrase, “Don’t Tread on Me.” John Proctor’s regiment flag in PA also had a coiled rattlesnake, as did the Culpeper Minutemen of Virginia, who also utilized the phrase, “Liberty or Death.” In recent years, the rattlesnake has seen a reemergence in the symbology of American white supremacists, often paired with other icons of white supremacy such as the hammer, the fist, the Confederate flag, the Iron Cross, the sword, and so forth.

  —from the League of Americans Against Hate (LoAAH)

  Annual Hate Symbol Index Report, 2017

  JUNE 20

  God’s Light Church, Burnsville, Indiana

  SLEEP WAS A DREAM UNFULFILLED, gone and lost to Matthew. He stayed awake all night, poring through not just Revelation, but also the works of other prophets like Ezekiel and Daniel, and through the Gospels of Mark and John. Came a point that he thought he would rest his head and get some sleep before tomorrow’s sermon, but when he went into the bedroom, Autumn sat there, TV still on. And what he saw on the news…