Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “That’s mine,” she grunted, and moved toward Max.

  But then her skull betrayed her. As it always did. Pain lanced through the middle of her brain like lightning—fzzt. Instinctively her hands went to the space behind her ear. There, underneath the fuzzy close-shorn hair, she could feel the sunken space—her fingers traveled the contours up the back of her head to the top of her skull, where she found the little manhole cover under her hair and her skin.

  “Nngh,” she said.

  “Shut up,” Max said. “I’m eating your shit, deal with it.”

  She took another step. More pain.

  “Man, you’re a fucking mess again. Least you didn’t piss yourself this time.” He shoved another mouthful of cold spaghetti into his mouth—the dumb-ass had a plate in his hand, but then had the Tupperware container on the plate, open, with a fork dipping in and out to capture noodles. “Though it still smells a little like it in here. Jesus. You gonna watch the parade?”

  “Parade. What?”

  His mouth babbled words that ran together in her ears, slushy and wet: piss parade, spaghetti, fuckmess, and then the words garbled further to the point it wasn’t words at all, just fizz fush jashy frall, all gibberish.

  She winced, forced her mind to recalibrate.

  It obeyed. For now.

  His words roved back into sense from nonsense: “—those fucking sleepwalking freaks are coming through town, be here real soon now, figure you can watch your fellow freakshows come marching and shit.”

  “My spaghetti,” she said, because it was.

  “My spaghetti.” He winked. His eye fell out. Worms squirmed in the dark hole it left behind. He laughed and it sounded like glass breaking.

  She charged him then, ready to club him into tomato paste, but by the time she commanded her body to move, she was grabbing for empty space. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t here at all.

  Maybe he never was.

  But then a sound behind her—a scuff, and his foot found her tailbone, pushing her forward into the galley kitchen. She reached out, tried to catch herself on the cabinets, but her hands wouldn’t comply fast enough. Marcy hit the ground. She caught her bladder about to empty, and she tightened everything up, cinching it hard so she didn’t piss herself again in front of this little druggie fucker, Please, don’t you goddamn do it, Marcy, c’mon—

  It held. The floodgates stayed closed.

  Max laughed, though. “You’re so fucking sad.” He sighed. “I’m done with this.” He took the plate and container of spaghetti, then chucked it onto her couch. It wasn’t a nice couch. It was scratchy like stubble and uglier than a secret, but it was her couch and it was clean.

  And now it wasn’t.

  She wobbled, struggling to stand. Even though her legs were thick like tree trunks, they felt weak like sand-stuffed socks.

  Marcy went over to the couch on her hands and knees, then, started plucking noodles and sauce glops off it, putting them back in the bowl even as her head felt like a wasp’s nest being sprayed by a garden hose.

  Then, outside: the woop-woop of a nearby siren.

  “Shit, they’re almost here,” Max said. He opened her window and leaned out. Her greatest desire was to reach out, grab his ankle, and flip him out the goddamn window—but she wouldn’t be fast enough, or strong enough. “You should see this, you fucking turd-plop. It’s something. Whole street, lined with people. Like it really is a parade instead of a river of sickness. Jesus. Got cop cars at the front, plus cops along the road and shit. This is really something. Something not-good, I mean. I heard people saying this might be like, end-of-the-world kinda shit. Like, a disease that just keeps going and going, taking us one by one till we’re all zombies. Not zombies like in the movies but zombies like these fucks—still alive, but dead inside.”

  Marcy finished getting the noodles back into the container. It put her out of breath, just that simple action. Now the noodles looked like earthworms squirming. She blinked and they were noodles again.

  Max sat down on the couch, nearly kneeing her in the face.

  “You’re like them,” Max said. “Still alive, but dead inside.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She went to stand, but Max put his ankles on her shoulder like she wasn’t anything more than a coffee table. Maybe I’m not. She was just furniture now.

  “Sorta fucked up how I could do anything I want to you. I don’t mean like, fucking fuck you or anything, because God, fuck, look at you. I got standards. But I could like, light a smoke and stub it out on your arm. I could piss in your ear. You can’t go on like this, Marce.” He pushed down with his ankles, and pain flashed inside her head—it was all fireworks and muzzleloaders going off, pop, pop, boom, kssh, kaboom. “I’d tell you to kill yourself, but I dunno if you’d even have the strength to do that.”

  She bit back the words: I’ve thought about it, you little punk fuck.

  And then, a curious thing. Marcy saw something. A light, a glow, emanating from the window that Max had been standing at just moments before. She knew it was yet again a hallucination, a sign of her reality breaking apart—or at least a sign of her broken brain betraying her once again.

  “Fuck are you looking at?” he asked. He chuckled.

  She could barely hear him.

  All she could do was watch the glow wash into the room, brighter and brighter.

  It was like—

  It was like tuning a radio from static to music.

  Suddenly, what had been there was gone. All the noise, all the pain, it receded—almost as if it were sucked away into that warm glow, the way doctors once vacuumed blood out of her broken head. All the nastiness drained away. The clamor and misery fled.

  Clarity and peace filled the space.

  Well.

  Not peace, not exactly. A peace of mind—

  If not of temperament.

  Max gave her a look like, Whuh?

  And then she pistoned a fist into his balls.

  He doubled over, wheezing and coughing.

  Marcy looked at her fist. It was fully formed. The fingers neatly tucked into her palm, the flats of her fingers forming a battering-ram wall. She hadn’t formed a tight fist like that in…well, not since the hospital. Not since a year ago. Not since that fucko with the bat took everything from her.

  Regaining some semblance of his senses, Max swatted at her. She took the hit in the shoulder. Normally, her body these days was sensitive, like a spider’s web—every vibration set her teeth on edge, sent all the mind-spiders scrabbling in panic and hunger.

  But this time, it didn’t do shit.

  Again, she looked to the window.

  The warm glow. Pulsing there.

  She grabbed Max by a hank of his greasy hair, and she dragged him off the couch and down to the floor with her. Marcy climbed atop him as he squealed and thrashed. “It’s almost like I could do anything I want to you,” she said, grabbing a hank of spaghetti and mashing it into his face. She slapped the pasta into his cheeks, his mouth, his nose: Whap! Whap! Though she’d once desired eating this pasta and savoring it even if her hands trembled, now this, this was so much fucking better, wasn’t it?

  Marcy got off him, then—standing up, easily, without pain!—and he scurried toward the door, bits of red pasta dropping from his face. He scrambled up to the doorknob, flung it open, and ran away.

  She took the moment to bask.

  I feel clear as a cloudless sky.

  The window still radiated warmth. More now than before.

  Marcy went to it, and she saw why.

  The sleepwalkers. They were coming.

  And they were glowing.

  MAYA: The Comet Sakamoto are really Rahu and Ketu, okay? Do you know that story?

  BLUE: Oh! No, I don’t, do tell.

  MAYA: They were
once one being, a dragon who tried to pretend to be a god, a dragon who was cut in half for that, ahh, what’s the word?

  BLUE: Their crime? Sin? Slight?

  MAYA: Slight! Yes. So, Rahu and Ketu are two halves of one comet, sometimes called the King of Comets or the King of Meteors in, ahhh, in Hindu texts, okay? The head of the comet is the Rahu and the tail is Ketu, and when that passed over us, it cast a dark shadow on the world. It split us, I think, don’t you? It split us all down the middle, sure as that dragon did. And those walkers—

  BLUE: They’re really the Children of the Comet, aren’t they?

  MAYA: I think they are. I really think they are.

  —from The Maya & Blue Podcast, Episode 204,

  “Insights from the Goddess Collective”

  JUNE 20

  Waldron, Indiana

  BENJI FELT WOEFULLY ALONE AS he drove the rental car toward Waldron. Robbie was gone, along with the rest of ORT. And Martin was in the hospital, recovering from the head injury incurred by the storm.

  The flock would be in Waldron soon enough, and Benji had to be present. ORT was done containing the situation, and EIS was the only oversight the CDC had over local law enforcement to keep it all together.

  And Benji was now in charge of the EIS investigation.

  That boggled the mind, didn’t it? After Longacre. After everything.

  I need someone I can trust to lead the investigation, Martin said.

  You don’t trust me, so call Cassie, Benji told him.

  I asked her already, she said to give it to you. Then Martin explained: Despite Longacre, they did trust him. Benji was the smartest guy in the room when it came to this stuff. Cassie’s knowledge was deep, but only in a single direction, with an expertise on the zoonotic. But Benji had led a team before. He’d led their team before. And this was no time to deepen the bench. It was time to put their star hitter, disgraced as he may be, back at the plate because they either got a home-run grand slam, or they lost everything.

  (Martin was fond of baseball.)

  Loretta will never let you, Benji said.

  Loretta already signed off, Martin said with a mischievous smile.

  The Immovable Object? Had been moved.

  How, exactly? Martin said she was under crushing, claustrophobic pressure to get something done with these walkers. As Martin put it, They’re already so far down her throat they might as well be up her ass. They were willing to scrub Benji’s sins from records both official and unofficial. They just wanted something done. Loretta wanted answers and, according to Martin, believed that Benji Ray was their best chance at getting them. Benji knew there might be a secondary truth to that, too: If something went wrong, it would be his head that rolled, not hers.

  Because the pressure Loretta felt? Benji felt it now, too. Like being at the bottom of the ocean, deep in a dark fissure, all the weight of all the water pushing in on all sides.

  He told himself, You can do this. You’ve done this before.

  But part of him thought…Forget it. Get in the car. Go to the airport. His ejection from EIS was one of shame, yes, but it also gave him freedom. Now he was able to travel the world, giving talks, advising small farms on best practices. To those people he was something of a hero. It brought in money. He once again had purpose. And to go back to all this…it undid some of that, didn’t it? It locked him back up.

  And yet this mystery was so strange, so enduring. To be at the forefront of it was both a problem and an opportunity. He felt like he had answers just out of sight. This puzzle demanded he solve it.

  So he told Martin yes. I’ll take over for you, and thank you for your trust, Martin. It means a lot to me. Truly.

  He called Sadie, who remained back in Atlanta. “Sadie,” he said with a sigh, hands on the wheel. A sign on the side of the road said WALDRON, 2 MI. “I’ve got some…news.”

  “You’re back at EIS,” she said, quite chipper.

  “What? How’d you know?”

  “Benji, I’m in Atlanta right now. I’m in the building. News travels faster than electricity in this place. I’m happy for you.”

  “It compromises our dealings, I fear.”

  She made a dismissive sound over the phone. “Pssh. It does no such thing, Doctor Ray. Hm.” She paused. “Has anyone ever told you that sounds like a superhero name? Never mind. Point is, you’re still there, still overseeing this, still holding Black Swan in your pocket. Nothing has changed except your position on the chessboard.”

  Chessboard. Quite a metaphor, wasn’t it?

  One that did not make him entirely comfortable.

  Ahead, the town of Waldron revealed itself.

  Benji had reports from the police that Waldron was a sleepy, pass-through no-nothingsburg. One of those towns where the country had moved on but this place stayed behind, as if it had found grim comfort in the fact it would never grow up, would never get better, and it was what it was from here until it was gone.

  Less than a thousand people lived here. Mostly farmers or other working-class folks. Benji had hoped that the passage of the walkers through town—as it increasingly looked like they’d come right down Main Street—would be uneventful.

  That was not looking to be the case.

  He eased the car off to the side of the street, blocking a small alley—because he had nowhere else to park. He had intended to drive through Waldron, mapping the flock’s path through.

  But he wouldn’t make it. The way was blocked.

  “Benji, there’s something we need to talk about,” Sadie was saying. “About Pennsylvania. We found something at the Stewarts’—”

  “It’ll have to wait,” he said.

  “Why? Is something wrong?”

  Benji knew they’d have some media here, some gawkers and rubberneckers, but this…

  This was not that. This was much, much worse.

  With the phone still in hand, he stared down a gauntlet of people, a sea of heads, hats, faces. Protest signs, too, stuck up like gravestones out of ground made from human beings.

  At first, it seemed an absurd thought: because what the hell could they possibly be protesting? But it was like with Ebola. In Sierra Leone, in Liberia, anywhere that disease touched, they saw protests. Guideless, aimless—some wanted a kinder government response, others a more severe one, others just wanted to know what was being done. They wanted answers and were…angry that they had none. Protest, he thought, was sometimes targeted, yes. A singular message put out against bad men and worse behavior. Other times, it served as a wordless, senseless exhortation—an expression of a problem that was not yet fully understood. This, he knew, was likely that. But he was trying to figure out, Why here? Why now? Then it hit him: “Waldron was all on the news last night, wasn’t it?”

  “I confess, I don’t know,” Sadie said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “I have to go, Sadie. This is a powder keg. I don’t like this at all.” His guts churned. This, of all the days, to lose the backing of ORT. Robbie’s expertise in crowd control, in maintaining some order in the wake of disease, was critical. And now they didn’t have it.

  He hung up with Sadie and called Cass.

  “Hey, boss,” she said. “Missed you.”

  “Where are you?” he asked her.

  “South of town. I’m driving the lab truck now that ORT vacated. Shitty timing on that, huh?”

  “The shittiest.”

  “Where are you?”

  “North end. Looking at all…this.” He sighed. “We made the news, didn’t we?”

  “In a big way. Not just the walkers going over the trailer but…”

  “Clade Berman.”

  “Yeah.” Benji had hoped that with the storm, the news wouldn’t have caught up to the events that had transpired last night as yet—but they clearly had. Wors
e, Cassie said, “They have footage of it. Not good footage, but it’s there. The media is all over this thing. We’re getting calls from—shit, everyone and everywhere?”

  “How far out are you?” he asked.

  “Not quite two miles.”

  Soon.

  “Are we expecting violence?”

  Cassie hesitated. “I…cops say no, they say this is a peaceful town, but I’m watching footage on the news. These people aren’t happy.”

  “It’s one mile through town,” he said. “We can do this.”

  “One mile, boss.”

  One mile.

  * * *

  —

  SHANA RODE THE razor’s edge between total exasperated exhaustion and paranoid anxiety. Because here she was, a shepherd, walking her flock through a territory of wolves.

  On each side of the street, protesters gestured with signs. They chanted and shouted about how they wanted answers, how President Hunt needed to be accountable, how the CDC was some kind of government conspiracy. She saw people in medical face masks waving signs like I DID NOT CONSENT TO THIS and STOP POISONING OUR CHILDREN and DANGER: VACCINES ARE TOXIC WASTE. That last one sent her for a loop: She was just tired enough and frayed enough that the thought stuck with her, What if it is vaccines, what if this is something we’re doing to ourselves. That was dumb as hell, though, she knew that it was garbage nonsense—but when you were ready to fall over and beset on all sides by nutballs, nonsense started to make a certain kind of sense, didn’t it?

  But it wasn’t the protesters that scared her. It was the other ones. The ones without signs.

  Truth was, Shana was a bit of a hick. She knew it. Her family lived in Middle of Fuck-I-Dunno, Pennsylvania, and she was the daughter of a dairy farmer. She didn’t mind the smell of cowshit. She knew how to milk a goat. She was the product of poison ivy rashes and bee stings and stepping on rusty nails in the old barn (three times, now, oops). People made fun of her sometimes because she often had dirt under her fingernails, but she figured those idiots didn’t know how good a green bean tasted when you popped it off the vine and right into your mouth, dirt and bugs and all.