Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  Benji winced. “That’s terrible.” Another text from Sadie came in:

  Need you to visit the Stewart family ASAP. Have info.

  Uh-oh. What was that about?

  He continued with Linzer, looking up from his phone: “Can I go speak to Miss Reyes?”

  “Have at it, Mister Ray.”

  “Thank you, Mister Linzer.”

  If the cop wouldn’t call him doctor, he wouldn’t call him chief. Respect, Benji decided, had to be a two-way street.

  He said no more to the chief and wound his way through the handful of desks scattered in the middle of the room. Benji pulled up a chair next to the one at which Marcella Reyes sat. She lifted her head off her folded arms to stare at him through bleary, weary eyes.

  “Who are you?” she asked, her voice a stone-grinding groan.

  “My name is Doctor Benji Ray. I’m with the CDC.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t seem well. I’m told you have a…plate in your head, titanium. Correct?”

  “Two connected plates. Top of the head and then down behind my right ear. I had, ahhh. I had brain bleeding after the attack. Listen, I just…” Her nostrils flared. “I just want to get out of here.”

  “Are you injured? I could call for an ambulance—”

  “No. This is just…” She grunted as she sat up. “Me.”

  “Then you’re free to go, I think.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  He looked around. “With me where?”

  She adjusted herself, looking to be in grave discomfort. Marcy wore a face that was as serious as a sniper’s bullet. Through a clenched jaw she said, “With you. With the angels. The glowing angels.”

  He feared, suddenly, that despite what the chief had told him, this woman was a danger. Was there a schizophrenic element at play? Had that bat broken her brain?

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “They glow,” she said, and as she did, her eyes shone with the threat of tears. “I can feel it coming off them. Warm and soft. Like angels.”

  “You believe in God? Are you a Christian?”

  “No. Not really. Agnostic. I guess.”

  “But you believe the flock of sleepwalkers are truly angels?”

  She swallowed hard. “Don’t see any better explanation for it.”

  “They’re not angels,” he said. “They’re just people. People affected by…something, I don’t know what. They did not fall from the heavens, Marcella, they came out of their own homes. They came from work, from vacation, from the park, from all over. They are not celestial beings.” Already he’d heard some talk about this being related to the Great Comet that had passed overhead a month before—Comet Sakamoto. “They’re just like you and me. We’re trying to help them, to understand what’s doing this to them.”

  “So you’re not a believer?”

  “I am a Christian man.”

  “But you’re also a scientist. A doctor.”

  “I don’t find those two things mutually exclusive.”

  She watched him, guarded and wary. “But you don’t believe these…walkers…could be something else. Angels or something.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  And yet what were they? Nothing they knew added up. Benji was a believer in larger, stranger things than science was able to explain. He did believe in God; in that, his faith had never wavered.

  A little voice inside him asked: What if she’s right?

  She leaned forward with the certainty of a drunk at the bar about to tell you he just ran over Bigfoot with his pickup truck. “Here’s what I know: I know that those walkers glow like molten gold, and I know that when I’m near them, everything goes clear. And I know that being farther away from them means the pain is coming back. The headache is like a noise in my head, like a radio turned to a dead station, the volume cranked way up. I gotta be with them, Doctor Ray. Every minute I’m gone, I feel…like I’m being washed back out to sea, farther and farther from shore. Soon enough, I’ll start hallucinating. I’ll lose myself again. Let me come along. I can help. I have a cop’s instincts. I have a good eye for things.”

  Her voice contained a ragged, broken desperation—the desperation of a dying woman, not a living one. On the one hand, that troubled him. It suggested she might present a danger to herself or to others. On the other hand, she had saved the flock and the shepherds. And it was not exactly his purview to decide who could or could not come along as a shepherd.

  “They call the ones who follow shepherds,” he said.

  “Then I wanna be a shepherd.”

  He hesitated. “All right,” he said finally. “I can give you a ride.”

  Through the pain on her face, a big smile broke out. She took his hand—her grip was weak, her fingers trembling—and she gave it a small shake. “Thanks, Doctor Ray. You won’t regret it.”

  * * *

  —

  AN HOUR LATER, he dropped Marcy off with the flock—and marveled at the change that came over her the closer they got. She sat up straighter. Her eyes became clearer. She no longer looked to be someone trapped under the weight of persistent pain.

  “Thank you again, Marcy. I believe you saved some lives, so consider me in your debt. If you need anything—”

  She cut him off, beaming. “Being here is repayment enough.”

  And with that, she was out of the rental car, wandering toward the flock. He half expected her to run, like a puppy meeting its new family for the first time, but her approach was reticent and circumspect.

  He didn’t understand why proximity to the flock would engender such a change in her physical state. The only thing he could conclude was that she suffered no such physical state, that it was purely psychological.

  It would have to be a question for another time.

  Now he called Sadie.

  What she told him confirmed his worst fears.

  Immediately, he contacted law enforcement to demand that Charlie Stewart pull over his RV.

  * * *

  —

  THE RV WAS a rough and rickety thing. It sat off in a small gravel pull-over as the flock moved on. Two cop cars framed it in a trap. It couldn’t go anywhere. A trio of officers stood near, at the ready.

  “You want me to go in with you?” Cassie asked.

  “No,” Benji said. “And I’m leaving the officers out here, for now.”

  “It could be dangerous.”

  “I…don’t think so. At least, I hope not.”

  “He could be involved.”

  “We will just have to see.”

  And with that, Benji went to the door of the RV, gave a gentle knock. A man answered—Charlie Stewart, father to the walker Nessie and another heroic shepherd, Shana. Charlie had kind of an aw-shucks vibe about him, with round sun-freckled cheeks and dusty blond hair poking out from under his baseball cap like scarecrow straw.

  “Come on in,” Charlie said, eyeing up the police officers. He gave a small, nervous nod to them.

  Inside, Shana was sitting up, tangled in a mess of clumsy bedsheets—it was obvious she’d been trying to nap. It was a nap she deserved, Benji thought, but presently he needed her attention.

  “Honey,” Charlie said, “why don’t you lie back down, get some more rest, me and the police officers can talk outside—”

  “We can do this in here,” Benji said. “For privacy. And I’m afraid Shana should be here, in case she can offer information.”

  Charlie paused, as if he were chewing on that. A protective energy came off him, and Benji wondered what must be going through his head. Maybe he could not articulate it, but surely he held some blame for them through all of this—some sense that the CDC could be doing more, that maybe they were part of a government that somehow caused this, that at the very least they co
uld’ve prevented this or helped the Stewart family understand what had happened to their daughter Vanessa. Nessie. But they didn’t. He resented them, Benji suspected.

  That, or he knew more than he was letting on.

  “Dad, it’s fine,” Shana said, coming closer. Her arms were crossed, forming a defensive posture.

  Her father gave an uncertain nod, then he took a seat at the little nook table. “Go on, then. Sit. You had me pull over here—we want to be back with my daughter soon as we can be. Especially after today.”

  “I’m going to introduce a colleague of mine,” Benji said, putting out his phone. He dialed up Sadie, put her on speakerphone.

  Shana and her father shared a look.

  Once on the line, Sadie introduced herself and asked Benji to take out the Black Swan phone, too, for its projector use. He did, pointing it at the inside of the RV’s door—and immediately a beam of light speared the air, capturing motes of dust drifting through the old recreational vehicle.

  An image resolved from a pixelated spray.

  It was a laptop in a clear plastic bag sitting on a table.

  Sadie asked: “Mister Stewart, do you recognize that laptop?”

  But it was Shana who spoke. She answered: “That’s Nessie’s.” Way she said it was protective, too, like she wasn’t sure they should have that.

  Benji said, “Investigators found something on it.”

  “On her laptop,” Charlie repeated.

  “Correct.”

  “I dunno if you should be poking around the laptop of a fifteen-year-old girl, there are privacy issues and—” the father started to say, but Benji cut him off as gently as he could:

  “We found a secret email account. She had a separate email browser located in a hidden folder. In it she communicated with one person only.”

  “Who?”

  “Daria Price, married name, Daria Stewart.”

  Charlie’s eyes went wide.

  “Mom,” Shana said.

  “That’s not,” Charlie said, half choking on the words. “That’s not possible. She walked out. We haven’t heard from her—”

  “Your daughter Vanessa did,” Sadie said. “One email three months ago in her primary inbox, recovered from trash. She responded and set up a secondary email account at Price’s request. They communicated six times after that, albeit in fairly short bursts and terse emails.”

  “That’s not possible,” Shana said.

  “Daria could be that way,” Charlie said. “Cold, sometimes.”

  Shana seemed to bristle at that. “Not to me, not to Nessie, she wasn’t. It was just to you, Dad.” The indictment born of that statement hung over both of them like a sword dangling by a meager thread.

  “I want to see those emails,” her father said.

  Benji nodded. “Of course, we’ll accommodate. We can send them as a digital package or—”

  “Print them out, please.”

  Sadie again: “Before that happens, we need to discuss their last communication.”

  “Daria promised to send something to Nessie,” Benji said.

  Charlie’s eyes flashed with fear. “Send something? Like what?”

  “We don’t know. She just said it was…a package.”

  “A care package,” Sadie corrected.

  “Do you recall any kind of delivery…” And here, Benji’s words faded as he saw the recognition on Charlie Stewart’s face. He did recall.

  He nodded like his memory was just catching up. “Oh. God. Yeah. I…remember that a guy came by to deliver a package. Like, a…a courier.”

  “A courier. As in, UPS? FedEx?”

  “No, that was the weird thing, it was an unregistered truck. Like a moving truck, a rental.”

  Benji jumped in and said: “Sometimes FedEx has been known to rent additional non-labeled trucks when one truck goes out of service or if delivery demand is high, particularly during the holidays.”

  “Maybe, but the guy didn’t have the uniform. Or any uniform.” Charlie stared off at the middle distance—staring, Benji suspected, into his own memories. “He wore a, uh…basic black polo, khaki pants.”

  “You took the package?”

  “I…did, but Nessie was right up behind me. She snatched it out of my hands and said It’s for me before charging up to her room. I yelled after her to ask her what it was, and she just yelled back she’d ordered some supplies.”

  “That didn’t strike you as strange?”

  Shana laughed—though it wasn’t exactly a happy sound. More an ironic one. “Nessie was always ordering stuff online. Weird shit. Like…a praying mantis egg case or stones to polish in her rock tumbler or like, I dunno, science stuff. Crystals and chemicals and microscope slides. Sometimes art stuff, too, because Nessie couldn’t just do one thing—”

  Her father finished the statement: “She wanted to do everything.”

  “Do you remember anything about that package?” What Benji was not-yet-saying-aloud was this: There existed the very real possibility that her mother, or something pretending to be her mother, sent Nessie a package. And that package might have been the inception that led to the sleepwalker epidemic, be it bacterial or viral or fungal. It was a common low-key, low-cost method of causing chaos through biowarfare: send along an envelope of anthrax spores, and who knows who gets infected? If someone had engineered something far stranger and more sinister and sent it to a young, vulnerable girl willing to accept any package from a missing mother…the scenario, however disturbed and implausible, wrote itself. “Anything at all, Charlie. Did you see inside it?”

  “No.”

  Shana hesitated. Like she had something to say.

  “Shana?” Benji asked.

  “Uh.”

  “Did you see the package?”

  “Uhhhh.”

  “You did. You saw it.”

  “I was there when she opened it. The cardboard box wasn’t big, it was, you know, no bigger than a lunch box. She opened it and it was like something out of Harry Potter—all this fog started coming out as she pulled out two sets of Styrofoam, and she pulled them apart and…”

  “And what?”

  “It was totally anticlimactic. All that dry ice and all she got out of it was this…little test tube.”

  A test tube.

  “What…was in it?”

  “I couldn’t see. It wasn’t full—maybe halfway. To me it just looked like gray dust. I asked her what it was and she got kinda defensive. She said, It’s for an experiment. Then kicked me out.”

  The delivery agent. Benji knew that’s what it was. It had to be.

  “Do you know where the test tube is now?”

  Charlie said, “I would’ve thrown it out. Or put it in with her stuff. Nessie’s room could be cluttered. Mind of a little genius and all that.”

  “The FBI searched the house, didn’t find anything,” Sadie said.

  Benji’s heart sank.

  But then:

  Shana winced.

  “Uhh.”

  She knows.

  “Shana…” Benji said.

  And that’s when the most surprising thing of all happened. She reached across from her, grabbing her backpack off the table. Shana unzipped it, reached inside it—

  In her hand was a test tube.

  And it looked like it contained—

  “Is that weed?” Charlie asked.

  Shana gave an awkward shrug. “Sorry?”

  DON DAYTON: Last question, and then we’ll let you get back to the campaign trail. What do you think about these sleepwalkers?

  ED CREEL: What do I think about them? I think they’re a message.

  DD: A message. Sent by who?

  EC: We don’t know yet, but I’d bet maybe ISIS. Maybe China. Maybe someone internal—some t
raitor inside Hunt’s camp, or some NSA business. Maybe the Devil himself, who knows? But trust me, they’re a message, no doubt about that.

  DD: What, then, is the message?

  EC: Something’s coming. Something real bad. And if we don’t deal with it, if we don’t round these [bleeped] up, we’re going to find out real soon just how bad it can get.

  —from The Don Dayton Show, Fox Business Network

  JUNE 21

  Shelbyville, Indiana

  “YOU SHOULD BE ASLEEP.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Shana said, but who she said it to was not her father.

  Rather, it was Arav.

  She sat on a stump watching the walkers go by. At night, it was a surreal experience—the way the headlights from the rear guard illuminated them from behind, giving each sleepwalker a long shadow that fed into those walking ahead. (It gave her the somewhat chilling sensation of looking at gravestones, though she could not precisely say why. She snapped a few photos of it, and the grainy wash of it only confirmed that image.) Dad was up ahead again in the Beast—he’d taken a detour earlier, getting ahead of the walkers and dumping their sewage at a local campground before getting ahead of the flock. All around, the walkers walked and the shepherds followed—though this late, past midnight, a lot of the shepherds had found places to sleep for the night. Either in their own RVs or cars, or at motels, hotels, campgrounds, the couches of friends and family or other kind Samaritans.

  The people from the CDC had mostly gone on their own way, too. Some, she knew, slept in that big trailer. They had a few cots in there, including a couple above the gooseneck in a claustrophobic “loft” area.

  Arav, though, remained—though she didn’t know that until this very moment, when he came walking up. In his hand he had two cups. Steam danced above each. And as he came closer, a smell hit her—

  A salty, umami tang.

  Intimately familiar. She knew it instantly.