Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “Raaaaamen,” she said, the word taking on almost spiritual power.

  “You’ve got talent,” he said. “You should be a police dog or something.” At that, he winced. “Wait. Sorry. I did not mean to infer that you were, or are, a dog.”

  “You can apologize to me by giving me one of those.”

  “That’s why I brought it out.” He handed her one, and the steam wreathed her face. Ahhh. “It’s not exciting or anything, but I saw you out here and after the last couple days…” Did he know about her mom? The package? Shit. “I figured you could use it. And the air’s getting a little chilly. Sorry it’s just the microwave stuff.”

  “Dude, the microwave stuff is my jam.” She took the cup and sipped at it. A little too hot, but she didn’t care. “In junior high I had like, massive anxiety. Every morning I didn’t want to go to school. And it’s not like school was really that bad but I had a couple girl-bullies who made fun of my hair and also I didn’t like shaving my legs and—you know, I dunno, it was junior high. It sucked. So in the morning I always felt mega-queasy, right? I didn’t want to eat anything. Not eggs, not cereal, blech, it all made me worse. But my mother had this idea—in part I think because she was just frustrated, and maybe she said it as a joke, but she said, Fine, I’ll make you ramen if you’ll eat that. And she did, and I ate it. I felt a little better. So that was my breakfast every school-day morning for three years.” She slurped up some noodles. “Oh God, marry me.”

  “Me, or the noodles?”

  “Both of you. We can have like, an open marriage or whatever they call it.” She sat on the stump, but it was a big stump—some massive oak had been chopped down here at some point. She scooched over and gestured to the stump. “Sit?”

  He shrugged and sat. The night air was cooling down, but his hip next to hers was warm.

  Together they ate their Cup Noodles, the only sound between them the slurping of ramen and the supping of broth. The only sound around them was the dull, ground-drum plodding of the walker parade.

  “You were pretty badass the other night,” Arav said.

  “Huh?”

  “You saving that little boy.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That.” Sure didn’t feel like she saved him. The little boy was alive, yeah. But what life would he lead now? Not that she felt comfortable saying he’d be better off dead but…the kid had nothing, now. That stupid wife, not letting go of her husband. Even though he was shaking so bad in the storm…Shana shook it off. Even replaying that in her head almost put her off the ramen and that would be unforgivable. “Not as badass as that beefy lady taking down that dude in the crowd. God, that fucking guy had a gun. They say he was going to shoot at the walkers.”

  “She was a monster, that lady. She’s around now, you know. I guess she’s cool. Used to be a cop or something?” Arav wiped some dots of dribbled broth off his chin with the back of a hand. “They say the gunman was a lone wolf, but I’m not sure. Guys like that are never really lone wolves, you know? They’re always worried about how us brown people are getting radicalized, but nobody talks about how it happens to white people more than it happens to us. It’s really crazy.”

  “No kidding. Some people are just trash, and they find other trash and start to form a landfill. The internet makes it easier.”

  More slurping and sipping. Shana quickly finished her noodles.

  By now the sleepwalker flock was halfway past them. Already after today the number was up by another dozen. Day after day, more added themselves to the ranks. Some with shepherds coming along, others all alone. The CDC had people—Arav, sometimes—cataloging them.

  “The other thing,” Arav said suddenly, “is what happens if you shoot one of them? Not that I want to find out—but we can’t stick needles in. We can’t cut them with knives. What would a bullet do?”

  “I didn’t think about that. You figure they’re bulletproof?”

  He made a face and shrugged. “No? But I only say no because nobody is bulletproof. That’s not…that’s not a thing. Then again, what’s also not a thing is that people’s skin prevents you from poking them with needles. That’s off-the-charts weird. All of this is. None of it adds up. We’ve got theories but nothing to validate the theories.”

  She was still stuck on the first part, though.

  “Okay, but that’s twisted if they might be bulletproof.”

  “But they might not. Reminds me a little of non-Newtonian fluids. Let’s say you make a slurry with cornstarch and water, two-to-one ratio. It makes this wet goop, but the thing is, it’s liquid, but behaves like solid matter in certain instances. If you slap it, it’s like slapping, I don’t know, a leather car seat or a trampoline. If you poke it, or press on it slowly, it becomes liquid—your finger or hand sinks into it. Their skin is clearly not that, I don’t mean to suggest that it is. But it calls into question—is the bullet fast enough to penetrate, or would that only cause the skin to reject it more easily? We don’t know. And that is one test we are not willing to try.”

  “This is all pretty fucked up.”

  “It makes me anxious,” he said earnestly. “I feel like I’m getting eaten up inside by all of it.”

  She let out a breath. “Damn, me too.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your mom.”

  “Yeah. I just hate that Nessie is the start of it. People think it’s our fault. Have to keep telling the newspeople we don’t want to talk to them. But people online already started their conspiracy theories. I can’t even look at social media. Idiots on Fox News call us terrorists. I dunno. It sucks. Everything sucks.”

  “I try to concentrate on the day-to-day. To control what I can control. To let the rest go. And to give myself moments like this.”

  “It is nice.”

  And then she did something she knew she shouldn’t do.

  She set the empty ramen cup down.

  She reached out with her hand.

  She took his hand in hers.

  And she just held it.

  “I’m older than you,” he said.

  “I’m eighteen in a couple weeks. And we’re in Indiana, where I’m sure the age of consent is like, twelve or something barbaric.” She cleared her throat. “Er, not that I’m trying to fuckin’ like, have sex with you or anything.”

  “Okay, good, because—you know. Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  Moments of silence stretched like strange taffy. He blurted out, “Not that I wouldn’t want to—I don’t mean that, I just mean, I’m twenty-five—”

  “Yeah, no, I know, right.”

  “Right.”

  “Good.”

  Gulp. More silence filled the spaces.

  “I see you taking photos sometimes,” Arav said.

  As a response, she turned toward him with her phone, took a shot. The flash was off—she didn’t like the flash, it was too garish, too bold—and what resulted of him in the photo was this half-dark shadow. But it showed his shape, and she liked that. A silhouette she enjoyed.

  “It’s just a dumb thing,” she said.

  “Is it the thing you want to be doing?”

  “I don’t know the thing I want to be doing. I just like taking photos.”

  “Then maybe that is the thing you want to be doing.” He gave a small squeeze to her hand. “You should take more photos. Might be nice. Might help you feel better. I dunno. What we’re seeing here, Shana—I don’t know what it is, but I know that it is extraordinary. Someone besides the TV media should be documenting it.”

  “You think I should do that?”

  “I do.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  —

  WHAT A WHIRLWIND day. The sermon in the morning led to the podcast interview with Hiram Golden, and turned out the man cut those things together lick
ety-split. It ended up online within two hours, and by then Matthew was getting calls from other media outlets: They wanted to talk to him about his take on the walkers, from the comet to Revelation to what the Bible says about eschatology and so on and so forth. By the afternoon they had him down at the Fox 59 studio in Indianapolis, where they recorded him for the evening news.

  Thing was, Matthew felt at home during all of it, like all his training as a pastor had informed him and energized him. He knew he was reaching so many more people than he would have if it was just him in his little church.

  He reminded himself: Thank Ozark Stover for this.

  And, of course, God.

  (He chided himself momentarily for making God an afterthought, but he told himself that it was simply because the Holy Father was so clearly the first to thank in all things that it didn’t even need to be spoken.)

  At night, he met back up with Hiram Golden, who offered to take Matthew out to dinner. They went to one of the best—and oldest—steak houses in the country, St. Elmo’s. Usually, that was the place Matthew and Autumn went for their anniversary every year, so already the dinner carried with it the whiff and aura of a special occasion, and boy, was it.

  He and Golden talked for hours. They drank good wine and talked about all the troubles the country was facing—of course, Hiram Golden was an unabashed supporter of Ed Creel for president, and he started to sell Matthew on it, at least a little bit. Matthew had figured Creel for a wolf in sheep’s clothing, someone who wore the mantle of a good Christian just to get the good Christian vote, but Golden explained that Creed was a charitable man. He just wasn’t a braggart about it—he did a lot of it in secret, on the hush-hush, to make sure he didn’t grandstand.

  As Hiram took out his little keychain penknife and speared a piece of cheese off a cutting board, he said, “Creel attends church every week in Nashville, where he lives now. He’s a God-loving and a God-fearing man.”

  Matthew said he worried the man was too Big Business, and Hiram’s counterpoint to that was, “Only thing more corrupt than business is politics, Matthew. You ask me, big business is a step up from big government. It’s self-correcting. It allows room for God’s hand to…deliver prosperity to those who help themselves.” And with a couple-few glasses of wine soaking through him, it all started to make a certain kind of sense. By the end of the night, Matthew agreed to come on the show again in a few days, and maybe even make an appearance at one of the Creel fundraising events as he passed through the state next week.

  So, home he went.

  Late, too late. But that was okay. Monday morning was light for him.

  He crawled into bed and settled under the covers as quiet and as gentle as he could—he didn’t want to wake Autumn, after all.

  Turned out, though, she was already awake.

  “You should’ve called,” she said.

  Her voice wasn’t bleary or sluggish. He hadn’t woken her—she was awake this whole time. Waiting for him. “I’m sorry, I assumed you were asleep, Autumn.”

  “I worry.”

  “I know you do.”

  She sat up and turned the lamp on. He shielded his eyes.

  Way she stared at him was like she was pointing two rifles at his head. “That wasn’t you today.”

  “What?”

  “In the sermon, that wasn’t you.”

  “Autumn, of course it was me.” He put his hand on her knee, and she tensed up. “What, you think a demon jumped into my skin? Made me summon those words?” He laughed, but she wasn’t having it.

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “Wine, a little.”

  “How much is a little?”

  He puffed out his cheeks, trying to remember. He couldn’t. (Honestly, he still felt a bit fuzzy. It had been a while since he drank much of anything.) “I could do without the Spanish Inquisition, Autumn. It’s late.”

  “Do you really believe those things you said this morning?”

  “What things?”

  “You said…those people, the sleepwalkers, that they could be Pilgrims of the Devil, that they could be some kind of sign of the End Times.”

  “I…it’s a bit rhetorical, but at the root of it there’s some truth, some metaphorical truth—”

  “No. No! Not everyone is going to take this metaphorically, Matthew. They’ll believe it. They’ll believe it snout-to-tail. To some people, there is no separation between…between the story you’re telling and their belief in it as fact.”

  He prickled at that. “I have more optimism than you do. I have hope in people. Faith that they’re smart enough to know what I’m saying and why I would be saying it.”

  “A man pulled a gun today. Not far from here.”

  “I know. I heard about Waldron this afternoon when I was at the studio. They asked me about it.”

  “And what did you say?”

  He scoffed. “What do you think I said? I condemned it. Violence is never the answer.”

  “To some people, it is.”

  “Not to me.”

  “It is in the Bible.”

  “Autumn, c’mon, it’s late—”

  “Stonings and battles and dismemberment. God commanding Saul to wipe out the Amalekites, the bowls of wrath in Revelation—”

  “I know, I’ve struggled with the violence in there, but it’s a book. Modern Christianity does not subscribe to that kind of…aberrant behavior.”

  “But some do. Some believe it’s the way. The only way—”

  “Sociopaths, maybe.”

  “Not all zealots are sociopaths. Some don’t know any better. You have a responsibility, Matthew. That man today with the gun—”

  He thrust an angry finger at her. “That man is not a parishioner here.”

  “But he might be one of Ozark’s men.”

  “He was a lone wolf. News said it, cops said it.”

  “He still could’ve heard that podcast. Or your sermon somehow. You don’t know he didn’t.”

  “And you don’t know he did! Can’t prove a negative, Autumn.”

  Matthew launched himself out of bed, gathering up his pillow and then a throw blanket that sat on a corner chair in their bedroom.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away from this conversation. I need some sleep.”

  But she started to follow after him, persistent. When Autumn got something in her head, she wouldn’t just let it go. “Those walkers. What if you’re wrong? What if they’re God’s chosen people? What if they’re not demons, but need to be protected from demons? Or what if God has nothing to do with any of it?”

  Matthew wheeled on her. He hated the anger he felt for her right now, and he told himself in part It’s the wine, it’s just the wine. He tried to control the volume of his voice when he said:

  “I had a good day. A good day, Autumn. This is an opportunity for us, for the church, to make a difference, to see our voice and the word of God be carried farther than I had ever anticipated. So don’t you dare try to rob that from me.” He stared at her, his chest heaving. “I’m going to the living room to sleep on the couch.”

  Autumn said no more. She did not return the anger he poured upon her. Mostly, she just stood in it, watching him with sad eyes. With a look on her face like she didn’t recognize him at all.

  She returned to her room and let him be.

  * * *

  —

  ONCE AGAIN, BENJI found himself awake at midnight.

  Once again, he ruminated on patterns, on numbers.

  Earlier, around midday, the walkers turned onto a road—E350, no other designation that Benji could find, as out here the roads were farmland and on the grid pattern—and continued westward, south of Indianapolis. So far, in the two weeks, the flock had missed major metropolitan areas, and further had eschewed all major
highways. That pattern continued now.

  What other patterns were at play here?

  The flock was driven, seemingly directed. It was measured, purposeful. Benji felt increasingly sure of that, even though it made little sense—no disease of which he was aware followed a pattern as precise (or at least as persnickety) as this. He felt mad even considering it, but at the same time, he refused to discard it out of hand. Admittedly, it was just as likely he was seeing patterns where there were none—that was a decidedly human trait, was it not? Apophenia, they called it. An epiphany was a useful revelation about the world around you; an apophany was a revelation, too, but wrong in that you had incorrectly discerned a pattern where none had existed, taking enlightenment from an untrue thing. It was the human way—seeing truth in the storm of darkness and noise. Faces in clouds, ghosts on video, Jesus on a piece of damn toast.

  (Angels glowing in a crowd of disease.)

  Once again, he paced the floor. This time, in a Holiday Inn Express about three miles from where the flock was walking.

  And once again, he did what gave him comfort:

  He brought out both of his phones.

  On the one, he opened Black Swan.

  On the other, he called Sadie.

  He bypassed all small talk. “I’m lost here,” he said. “There are patterns just out of sight. Rules I can’t see. Finding out this may have purposeful—the Stewarts receiving a package, bodies gone missing—I worry that someone has engineered something so far beyond our understanding that I’ll be too slow to see it, Sadie.”

  “I trust you to see what’s right,” she said.

  “You? Or Black Swan?”

  “Me. I trust you.” She paused. He heard her breathing on the other end. It gave him strange comfort. “I’ve found myself thinking about you quite a lot. You’re brave and smart and kind and I’d be a fool not to trust you. I’m glad to have listened to Black Swan.”

  Suddenly, the Black Swan phone projected a pulse of green on the wall. Not one, but three pulses.

  “I think Black Swan likes that you listened to me,” he said. “It just pulsed green.”

  “Black Swan has impeccable taste. Better question is, how do you feel about me finding you on Black Swan’s suggestion?”