Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  Still, hick as she was, they weren’t trash.

  Trash, well, she knew some real fucking trash. Like the Cosner brothers up on Bellberry Road, with their drunk dad and their penchant for putting arrows through ducks and frogs. Or those creepy dickheads down in the valley—Ronnie Peffer and his rotating crew of shit-wits who manned the couches in his double-wide, the ones that were always popping off their black rifles, selling pills, hanging Confederate flags all over their property. Trash like them had washing machines on their lawn and hate in their hearts.

  And it was trash she saw here today.

  It wasn’t just the camo pants and the trucker hats. It wasn’t just the long hair, the mullets, the scraggly beards. Those she knew. She had her own camo pants back at the house. Had a trucker hat, too (admittedly, one that said BOOB INSPECTOR, a hat her dad hated but she thought was funny as hell). Guys like that could be hipster weirdos making their own kombucha or whatever. No, with these creeps it was more and worse: It was their HUNT THE CUNT T-shirts, their shit-kicker boots, their bright-white CREED SAVES AMERICA baseball hats. It was their eyes, too. Mean eyes, angry eyes, eyes that had nothing but suspicion flashing in them like light off spent bullet casings.

  They lined the street, too, in little pockets and cabals. They watched. Didn’t chant anything. Didn’t have signs. Sometimes they said things to one another—small asides while never taking their eyes off the sleepwalkers.

  Her phone pinged.

  Her father. Again.

  Shana where are you?

  She hit him back: Walking.

  Her father: Come back to the RV pls.

  She repeated what she typed, in all caps this time: WALKING.

  And then she turned her sound off and stuffed the phone in her pocket.

  She knew he’d be worried but he’d have to deal. I’m an adult. Mostly.

  Her neck prickled. Ahead, as they came up on some old shut-down textiles factory, the street had a concentration of trash-men. She spied a swastika tattoo, because of course she did. A Confederate flag arm patch.

  Next to her, Nessie kept on.

  “We’ll be okay, Ness,” she said. “They won’t hurt you.”

  But she wasn’t sure how true that was.

  * * *

  —

  THE DOOR OPENED, and like that, Marcy was out on the street among the crowds. For the first time in a long time, she felt connected to her body—but not anchored by it. She felt no pain. The world was clear. Everything felt crystalline and perfect, and Marcy was able now to focus on tiny, insignificant details: a dandelion seed on the breeze before her, the way a cloud was shaped like a rabbit, the way most people used masking tape on their protest signs but some used duct tape or staples or even electrical tape.

  She waded out to the curb. Marcy did not push or shove her way—she was a big woman, tall and muscular in the way a refrigerator is tall and muscular. People naturally accommodated her physical presence.

  On the street, it washed over her.

  The glow.

  The sleepwalkers were no more than a quarter mile down the road, and even from here she could see the light emanating from them. The light radiated and shifted, a living thing. It wasn’t just something she could see. She could feel it. Taste it. She breathed the light in and out. It warmed her ears and sang a barely perceptible song, like wind chimes, or rain on leaves.

  A woman near to her held up a sign: WE WANT THE TRUTH.

  Marcy leaned over and said, “Do you see the glow?”

  The face the woman gave her told her no, she most certainly did not see the glow. That look! What an ungrateful bitch.

  Well, I can see the glow, and to hell with you if you can’t.

  Marcy decided she needed to be closer to the walkers.

  So closer she went.

  * * *

  —

  BENJI SAID INTO the phone, to Cassie: “I can’t just sit here and wait. I’m going out there.”

  “Uh, to do what?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Be careful, Benji.”

  “You too.”

  And then he waded into the crowd.

  * * *

  —

  SHANA FELT THE dude’s presence before she saw him. He was more mountain than man. He had long hair pulled back and the kind of beard an owl might nest in. His shoulders were broad, but his middle was even broader, and he stood rooted to the ground, arms crossed over that landslide chest.

  The look on his face was one of wary curiosity.

  But nothing so intellectual as curiosity crossed the faces of the human trash that gathered around him. What Shana saw there was nothing but a kind of unquiet rage. Horses champing at bits, teeth gnashing, ready to stomp their hooves down. Ready to run, rock, and trample.

  Here she saw a new tattoo—not on the big man, no, but on those around him. Looked like two swords crossing, surrounded by…what was that? A serpent of some kind? She squinted and saw that no, it wasn’t two swords—it was a sword and a hammer. Some wore it on the backs of their hands, others on biceps, even necks.

  “Do you see the glow?”

  Shana startled at the voice. She turned to see that as she was looking the one direction, a woman came up on the other—right behind Nessie.

  This woman was big, too—not like the bearded mountain man, no. She was not exactly tall, but bristling with muscle and a bit of fat. Her buzz cut only accentuated her cinder-block head. A head that looked to be broken: The cinder block was cracked, like her skull wasn’t the shape it was supposed to be, not exactly.

  She asked the question again: “The glow. Do you see it?”

  Shana felt alarm—who was this crazy-ass lady?

  “No, I don’t—” She looked back over her shoulder, saw other shepherds walking back there: Lonnie Sweet, gawky Kenny Barnes, Aliya, even Mia—but they all had their eyes on the flock or on the crowd. Shana felt like you did sometimes in a dream: like she wanted to wave to them, call out, but somehow she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or didn’t think it would matter.

  “You gotta watch these people,” the woman said.

  “What…what people?”

  “Them.” She did not point, but she stared out at the crowd ahead.

  “Oh.”

  “Some shit’s about to go down.” The way the square-headed lady said it sounded almost like the thought excited her.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  But then someone came up behind them—it was Mia. “Hey, is everything okay?” Shana turned to her, then back to the lady—

  The lady who was already leaving, heading back to the crowd.

  “That was weird,” Shana said.

  “What’d she say?”

  “I…something about a glow. Something about how shit was about to go down. We should get somebody.”

  “Get somebody who?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody!”

  But it was too late.

  * * *

  —

  BENJI PUSHED HIS way forward. He got looks aimed at his presupposed rudeness—but he didn’t have time to care about that. Something about this crowd felt untrustworthy. The air contained something in it: a buzz, a threat, a mad frequency—it was like in the storm the night prior, but this was a whole different kind of weather.

  He stepped to the corner of a run-down hardware store.

  And that’s when he saw something fly up in an arc over the crowd—

  A glass bottle.

  * * *

  —

  FOR MARCY IT almost seemed to happen in slow motion.

  Not literally, no, but she felt so hyperaware, now, so back in her own goddamn head that every little moment and motion was a revelation—one captured by her eyes and her mind as it happened.

  She went
into the crowd of the walkers, suffusing herself in the glow.

  She spoke to a girl, a young woman, whatever—another person who did not seem to see or appreciate the glow.

  Marcy warned the girl:

  Shit’s gonna go down.

  Because it was. From the middle of the street, it was easy to see—you didn’t have to be a psychic, you just had to be an ex-cop who was coming down off a year of having a broken brain, an ex-cop and ex-boxer who found herself emerging from a valley of fog to a peak of clarity.

  She saw the tattoos, the shirts, the white supremacist fuckos with their 88 tattoos and their Iron and Celtic crosses—and she saw another bit of ink, one she didn’t recognize: a sword and a hammer encircled by a snake. She didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but it was probably more Nazi white-guy shit, because it was always Nazi white-guy shit.

  Over there, across the street, there was a big fucko, too—a massive wall of a man, mean and icy. Marcy watched him, and here was where it got interesting—he stopped paying attention to the walkers. He moved his attention to the crowd.

  He gave an elbow to someone next to him—a ratty, rangy length of rope with pinch-shut nostrils and greasy blond hair curled behind his crooked ears. Ratty-Rope left the side of Big Man and waded farther south, heading the opposite way of the sleepwalkers.

  Then, then, Big Man looked across the street.

  And he gave someone a subtle nod.

  And someone—a little fire hydrant of a man with camo pants, tan shirt, camo hat—gave a nod back.

  That’s the one, Marcy thought, and she headed toward him.

  * * *

  —

  IT CAME FROM somewhere behind her—Shana was looking forward, then she heard gasps behind her. She and Mia turned to see a bottle arcing through the air about thirty feet back. It spun through the air, swish-whish, and then it crashed down on the head of one of the sleepwalkers, the paunchy guy in his wife’s pink bathrobe—Shana thought his name was Arlen or something like that, and though his wife visited early on, she stopped coming a week into their walk.

  The bottle crashed against his head.

  People gasped and yelled, pointing—Shana saw a man running through the crowd as two cops broke position, hard-charging toward him to intersect. “Jesus,” Mia said.

  Meanwhile, the paunchy dude, the walker, Arlen—

  He just kept walking.

  Glass stuck to him, but then fell away.

  Didn’t break the skin. Didn’t break his stride.

  No blood, no nothing.

  Then Shana had a strange and terrible thought:

  What if the bottle was just a distraction?

  * * *

  —

  IT’S A DISTRACTION, he realized. While everyone else was looking at the bottle, Benji saw the gun. The man drawing the pistol was a small guy, thick, camo pants, a camo hat. The weapon looked like a boxy pistol, a Glock, maybe. The attacker drew it from the back of his pants, concealed there under shirt and waistband.

  He’s going to try to kill these people.

  Benji limped his way through the crowd, pushing himself as fast as he could go, ignoring the pain. Someone’s elbow clipped him in the chest, pushing him back—it was like fighting against the tide.

  Someone screamed. They must’ve seen the gun.

  He cried out, shoving his way forward, fearing now that he was late, too late, that the guy would aim and the gun would go off—and who would catch that bullet? One of the walkers? One of the shepherds? One of his own?

  There. He surfaced again through the crowd and saw the man backing up, raising the pistol toward the walkers—

  A shape came out of nowhere. Like a bull, charging, except it was a person. And this person, a woman, slammed into the gunman like she was all arm and all fist. It wasn’t just a brute attack, either; she hit him, then spun him around like a top.

  And that was when the gun went off.

  * * *

  —

  HE’S TRYING TO kill the glow.

  This man was an enemy of the angels—that’s what they were, Marcy realized that now in an epiphany that felt to her mind like the warm, tickling waters of a bubble bath, they were angels—

  Which put him squarely on the side of evil.

  She charged him, slammed into him, whipped him around like he was a scarecrow on a loose pole. Her hand reached out, trapping his wrist against the small of his back. He tried to squirm away, grunting in protest, but Marcy was strong, so strong, and she summoned all the strength she damn near forgot she had—

  She slid her hand over his.

  Dumb bunny didn’t know shit about trigger discipline. He’d drawn the pistol with his finger on the trigger.

  Which was a good way to shoot yourself, it turned out.

  Her finger landed over his, gave it a tug.

  Bang.

  The gun went off and his leg went limp as the bullet dug deep into the meat of his left buttock, down toward and into the back of his thigh. He collapsed and she let the gun clatter atop him. He screamed. The crowd screamed, too, and surged. Panic seized the crowd and she wanted to wave her arms and yell to them, No, no, it’s okay, I fixed it, the angels are safe, now. But nobody would listen, because none of these poor fools saw the glow anyway. Someone, a cop, slammed into her, and her head hit the concrete and she thought, Please don’t break me further, please—

  Then she tasted her own blood and everything went dark.

  Only the glow kept her company there in the black.

  So many things I want to be. I want to do it all and see it all! Dad says I have to pick one thing and concentrate on it. Shana says I’m lucky I have options because she doesn’t have any options (but that’s not true and she knows it, and in case she’s reading this—HI, SIS, STOP READING MY JOURNAL, JERK). But I want to do it all. Scuba! Brain surgery! Watercolor painting! I want to be a sommelier and a marine biologist and a senator and ugh I can’t choose any one thing why do I have to live only one life and be resigned to doing one thing? STUPID STUPID STUPID <3

  —from the journal of Nessie Stewart, age 15

  JUNE 20

  Waldron, Indiana

  THE POLICE STATION WASN’T MUCH to look at. Cinder-block walls, a couple of metal desks, a receptionist’s area. Benji stood off to the side with Chief Linzer, whose dust-brush mustache was white as fresh snow.

  “So she’s not a danger to us?” Benji asked, his eyes never leaving the woman sitting across the room at one of the detective desks. The woman sat there scowling, looking out through half-lidded eyes. Even from here, Benji could see the rough-hewn topography of her broken skull under the buzz cut.

  “Danger? No. I can’t imagine. Marcella Reyes probably saved some folks with what she did. Wasn’t her gun, it belonged to the fella she grabbed—according to her story, she saw him through the crowd, didn’t have time to confront him or call anybody. When the gun came out, she acted. Grabbed his wrist. The man—name of Hal Henry—shot himself in the ass. Bullet went down through his cheek and into his leg. Severed his femoral artery. He’s in critical condition now.”

  Benji rubbed his eyes. He was tired. So damn tired. “The man—Henry—I’m told he’s part of some…local militia.”

  The chief bristled. “Don’t go painting with too broad a brush, Mister Ray—”

  “Doctor.”

  “Doctor. The militia boys are just patriots. Man like Henry was on his own—just a lone-wolf, grade-A piece-of-shit with delusions in his head.”

  “So you’re suggesting that the thrown bottle was not connected in any way to the shooting?”

  Linzer was silent for a moment. Then, icily, he said: “You let us do our job and we’ll be content to let you do yours.”

  Benji felt suddenly both weary and wary—he knew full well what it was to be a black man
in America dealing with white police. Nothing was ever about race to them, until it was. Then it meant assuming the worst of someone with brown skin. Harassing them, arresting them, maybe even putting a bullet in their back. Yes, maybe Linzer was right, maybe the man operated on his own. But he seemed to discard any alternative notion quickly, too quickly. Hadn’t he read a report in recent years from the FBI that said white supremacists were infiltrating law enforcement? Would it really be that much of a surprise to learn that Linzer was part of the local militia and not just the chief of police in this flyspeck Indiana town?

  At the end of the day, though, what was the point? Benji was not going to defeat systemic racism on this day (or any day), and he had a job to do. The flock had gone on without him hours ago, and thankfully the panic here in town did not yield catastrophe. With the gunshot, there was a stampede away from the flock, and a few people got hurt, but no serious injuries as people ran for cover. The shepherds, to their credit, stayed with the flock—many, he learned later, standing in front of the sleepwalkers, as if to take any bullets meant for them.

  Shepherds defending their flock from wolves…

  “Miss Reyes was a police officer here?”

  “No, no, she was up in Indianapolis.”

  Just then, a text pinged his phone. From Sadie:

  Hope you’re all right. Saw Waldron.

  He quick tapped a reply: Am OK. Will call soon.

  “What happened to her?” Benji asked. “The injury, I mean.”

  “Her head? She got jumped. Maybe didn’t check her corners or her doors, I don’t know. As she was dealing with one perp, another came up behind her, got her in the skull with a Louisville Slugger. Once she was down, the fucker—goofy on meth, if I heard it right—just kept whacking at her.”