Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  And that, it seemed, was that.

  * * *

  —

  BENJI WAS NAÏVE. He knew that. Despite years of swimming upstream against the political current, he believed ultimately in progress, in science, in forward momentum even if it was gained by battling for inches rather than running for miles—every foodborne pathogen, every theoretical outbreak, every time there was the fear of a zoonotic jump, that meant once more navigating the serpent-filled waters of government and bureaucracy. No company wanted to be investigated for accidentally infecting its customers. No county or town wanted the misfortune of being labeled as the place Ebola showed up, or Zika, or dengue. But ultimately, always and forever, the alternative was worse; so the bureaucracy inevitably yielded. The briar of red tape burned away and Benji was allowed to do his job.

  But that had changed. Hadn’t it? Is that why he did what he did at Longacre? Because he saw that change coming? (Or was he just telling himself that to make himself feel better?)

  Whatever the case was, Loretta and Dale Weyland were not entirely incorrect in their assessments. They had no information except the kind that suggested something larger and more sinister was ongoing. They had little evidence of a pathogen. They had no guarantee that the CDC’s place here, their purpose, was even earned.

  Outside the trailer now, Benji said as much to Sadie and Cassie as they stared out toward the coming flock. “Maybe they’re right,” he said. “We don’t know anything.”

  Cassie scowled. “Fuck that noise, dude. I believe that what we’re looking at here is ours to own and ours to solve. Men with guns won’t solve it. Men with guns don’t solve shit.”

  “Tell that to the men with guns,” Benji said.

  “We need proof,” Sadie said. “Swiftly. Something that will change the game, that will show the president that you must be kept on with the flock. If all is as you say that it is—and I believe you—then there has to be some way forward we haven’t yet thought of.”

  “We have explored and expended our tools, sadly.”

  “So we look outside the toolbox, so to speak.”

  “If I knew of another tool set, I would explore it.”

  Cassie said, “Well, what’s on the fringes right now? Is there some hot new technology we haven’t yet looked to? There must be something we aren’t seeing. Some diagnostic tool, some genius with a Kickstarter, some bleeding-edge tech you hear about in Wired—”

  “That’s it,” Sadie said, suddenly. “Benex-Voyager is the parent company to Firesight: It’s a nanotechnology firm, fairly boutique, but they have found ways of using nanoparticles and nanodevices to diagnose certain cancers, brain diseases, and gastrointestinal disorders. I’m not precisely familiar with the details, but what if…”

  She kept talking.

  But Benji stopped hearing her.

  His knees nearly buckled as the realization hit him. Back when Robbie showed him what had happened to the cells inside Clade Berman’s body—it reminded him of something. He just couldn’t pinpoint what it was.

  Now he knew.

  He interrupted Sadie, apologizing for doing so, and then asked them to join him back in the trailer. Weyland had already gone, but the techs had not yet returned (having cleared out for the meeting). Benji took out the black phone and summoned Black Swan with a command of his voice.

  Pointing the projector at the wall, he asked Black Swan:

  “Black Swan. I’d like to see images from IBM research archives, probably from, let’s see, 2011, maybe 2012. They did a joint study with the Institute of Bioengineering out of Singapore on defeating MRSA—Staphylococcus aureus.” Over the last decade, the number of antibiotic-resistant infections had gone up considerably, over 300 percent by this point. They were at the end of new antibiotics, and worse, the pharmaceutical industry did not consider antibiotic treatment to be particularly profitable—certainly not as profitable as cancer treatments, antidepressants, or pills to counter erectile dysfunction. So the search for new antibiotics had stalled, leaving room for new companies to find inventive ways of defeating bacteria that had become effectively “bulletproof” when it came to the usual antibiotics.

  Black Swan projected an image.

  There, on the wall, was a photo of a slide magnified to one hundred nanometers. In it, a series of MRSA bacteria floated around the edges like black, blood-filled balloons. But the ones closer to the middle were not like that—they had been damaged, ruptured from the inside, their contents spilling out.

  “That looks like Clade Berman’s cells,” Cassie said.

  “It’s MRSA,” Benji explained. “Destroyed from within by nanoparticles. Each one like a little bullet. Summoned to its target by precise coding—the micro-machines knew what to look for given each bacteria’s particular electron charge.”

  “Like homing missiles,” Sadie said.

  “Yes. Just like.”

  It was Cassie who caught up first. “You’re not talking about using these nanoparticles to understand the walker phenomenon. You’re saying—”

  Swallowing hard, Benji shook his head. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow?” Sadie said.

  Cassie answered: “Benji thinks that this is not a phenomenon to be fixed by nanoparticles but rather—”

  “Caused by them,” he said.

  “You’re saying that these walkers are…infected with nanotech?”

  “It’s not impossible. We have long accepted nanotechnology as a potential fix for disease—to counter cancer, to help temper the coming post-antibiotic age. But what if it went the other way? What if someone used them to design a…new disease?”

  “A pathogen that is a machine,” Cassie said, mouth agape.

  “That sounds utterly barking mad,” Sadie said.

  “Maybe it is. But it is an option we have to consider. Those destroyed MRSA bacteria perfectly mirror the destruction of Clade Berman’s cells.”

  “Except,” Sadie said, “the focus of the nanoparticles you’re talking about was narrow—a single bacteria type. In Berman, and presumably the other walkers, the particles would affect a much broader range.”

  “Precisely. Imagine a million little nanobullets ripping through every conceivable type of cell in the human body all at once.” Benji brought both his hands together and then exploded them out, mimicking one of the walkers detonating like an exploding melon. “Each cell going off like dynamite.”

  “But does it explain all the other…bizarre behavior? Their inability to be hurt, their tireless march, the fact they don’t eat or shit or urinate—”

  “I don’t know. This is not a realm I understand well.”

  Sadie said, “Then we’d better understand it quickly if we’re going to use it to reassert control away from Homeland Security.”

  “Regrettably, I don’t think this helps us at all in that regard.”

  “What? Are you serious?”

  “Deadly so. Listen, if this is true—and God, I hope it’s not—then this isn’t just some fluke of nature. It’s not a mutation of some known disease or some pathogen that jumped from birds or a heretofore unknown parasite. This is something someone would have designed. It would be exactly as HomeSec claims: an attack on us by an enemy, an intruder. And it would make the walkers intruders, too, in a way. And it’s not like the CDC is equipped to understand this—we are behind the curve when it comes to this kind of technology.”

  Cassie leaned in. “So do we tell them?”

  Benji hesitated. He felt their eyes on him. The responsible thing would be to share this theory—cuckoo as it sounded—with Loretta, with Weyland, so that they knew what they might be up against. Just the same, it was still only a theory, and one that he was not yet willing to stake his professional reputation on. Further, with Sadie by his side—and perhaps some introduction to Firesight, this company
owned by Benex-Voyager—maybe he had an opportunity to make headway on it where others would not. Most important, he was not yet willing to label the walkers as what Weyland believed them to be: weapons, enemies, monsters.

  “No,” he declared, finally. “Not yet. Not until we have something solid.” A little voice whispered: But by then, could it be too late? “We don’t tell them, and we don’t tell anyone. This stays among the three of us.”

  “What about Arav?” she asked.

  “Keep him out of it for now. He’s young and…if we’re wrong, this will impact our careers. His might still remain intact.”

  The other two nodded.

  “Good. Now let’s figure out how we prove or disprove this thesis.” He told Sadie to put in a call to Firesight. Because they didn’t have a lot of time.

  Glory Tobin. Pronoun: she/her. Age: 32. Mixed media artist and gallery owner from Naperville, IL. Traveling with shepherd Brody Tobin, her brother. Brody said, “Glory is a gifted artist and I hope one day we’ll find out this is all one really big, really weird flash mob.” #PeopleoftheFlock

  @FlockTrakr42

  57 replies 122 RTs 147 likes

  JULY 3

  Lone Tree, Iowa

  THE CAMERAPHONE FELT HEAVY IN Shana’s hand.

  Thing was, though, the device had never felt heavy before. It always felt light, airy, like it was a limb, as natural as all the others.

  It did not feel light today.

  But they were just doing what they did every day—she and the other shepherds marched with the flock. The flock grew daily. So did the shepherds. Some had taken to calling them all—the flock and the shepherds—pilgrims, sometimes in a mean way, sometimes not, but always as if they were on a proper spiritual journey. But Shana hated that idea. She didn’t like that it made them sound religious or something. It also suggested that they were going somewhere, when clearly, out here in the corn and the soy and the waving wheat, they were going nowhere.

  She pointed the cameraphone, let it drift across the marching souls. The heaviness of it, she decided, was emotional weight. Every day now she snapped maybe five, ten, fifteen shots. More if she could manage it. And after her encounter with Donna Dutton, she never did them up close, not anymore.

  It felt like every photo added tangible weight to the camera. Like she was capturing something important, or maybe something she wasn’t supposed to capture. It wasn’t that the photos were great or anything—Shana figured she was a middling talent, at best. But all the faces, all the places, all the clouds and the roads and the trees. All the people waiting with signs, all the news choppers that sometimes flew overhead.

  To her it felt important. It felt heavy.

  Not like she was the only one capturing this stuff, though. Everyone had out their phones, now, taking Instagrams or posting them to social media sites like Twitter (provided they could get a signal). The hashtag #PeopleoftheFlock was big, and so was #sleepwalkers. Shana didn’t look at them much. She was here. Worse, people online were generally shitty, and the hashtags just attracted trolls and haters and bots: people who wanted to see the walkers quarantined or dissected or just shot in the head and dropped in a mass grave.

  She asked her father to drive her up ahead a little bit so she could take some shots from the front, which was trickier now that they had so many other shepherds in play. A dozen vehicles at the front, another dozen at the back. But he managed to get the Beast up along the side of the road so she could stand ahead of the flock.

  Dad said at the time, “Maybe you’ll be a photojournalist one day.”

  “I dunno,” she said.

  “That’s practically what you’re doing now.”

  “Maybe,” she said. She didn’t want to think that far ahead, though. It just made the camera feel even clumsier, somehow. She feared the attention. Or maybe she feared wanting the attention. Dad started to say that maybe she could turn this into a book someday and she just barked at him: “I don’t want to talk about this, so just leave me alone and let me do my thing, okay?”

  He nodded and smiled and went back into the Beast and it eased ahead at the slow, slow crawl that all these vehicles managed. Soon he’d leave the pack to go on a food run—that’s usually how they did it, one group would take a vehicle and drive on ahead to the nearest town to stock up on provisions. It had gotten strange out there, though: People in towns weren’t happy to see the shepherds anymore. Some got into fights. Or threw things. Yesterday a group tried to buy supplies and found themselves run out of the store, chased by an old woman with a baseball bat. She tried to clip one of them, too, but missed and knocked over a rack of Coca-Cola, leaving some cans popping and fizzing as the woman yelled.

  So as her father pulled the Beast ahead, Shana remained there on the side of the road. Feet planted in broken asphalt. Camera up. Panic kept at the margins.

  Shana watched the world through her screen.

  The sky was the color of fading denim. Wind rustled the corn and the soy. It moved the hair of the walkers, too. It made them look a little like a field of grass, almost; a small tinge of chaos allowed to a group forced into the same posture, the same steady gait, the same dead-nail stare.

  The walkers numbered over 300 now, closer to 350, she’d heard, though the flock itself looked much bigger given the presence of the other shepherds. Shepherds wove in and out of the flock, tending to their people. And others still traveled alongside the flock, on the edges of the road. Not unlike real shepherds moving their flock of sheep or herd of cattle, she imagined.

  She pinched to zoom.

  She saw Mia combing Mateo’s hair, a cigarette hanging so precariously out of her mouth it looked stuck to the bottom of her lip.

  Click.

  She saw a big-thighed black guy on a rat-trap bicycle pedaling up alongside the shepherds. He was sweating, handing out iced teas and sodas and even some ice cream sandwiches (that were starting to melt). He rang the bell as he went, da-ding, ka-ching. She knew his first name only: Tibor, she thought it was. Tibor or maybe Timor. Shit.

  Click.

  She saw a pair of dogs chasing each other—a springer spaniel and a pit bull. The spaniel’s name was Bucko, the pittie’s was Egghead (the rings around his eyes looked like dorky eyeglasses), and the two of them chased each other with delight, clashing like Godzilla wrestling with King Kong, crash, bash, drool, smash. Bucko belonged to Sandy Rosenstein, whose engineer husband was in the flock, and Egghead belonged to the Brewer family, who were here shepherding their mother, Bella. They were the first of the flock’s dogs, but she felt they wouldn’t be the last.

  Click.

  She saw the sun gone liquid in the windshield of a GMC Yukon driving forward slowly with the rest of the pack, and as the vehicle eased forward, the glare on the glass deadened and she could see a couple in the front—that was Carl and Marie Carter, two shepherds whose daughter Elsa, a midtwenties pharmaceutical rep out of Indiana, walked with the flock. Carl and Marie were fighting right now—Shana couldn’t tell about what, it was all just wide eyes and serious brows, all yelling mouths and angry gesticulations. Those two didn’t fight at first—they seemed sad about their daughter but happy to be here with her, to be with the other walkers. But time was not kind, Shana knew. The fear, the pressure, it was all serious shit, and some people just couldn’t hack it. Those two couldn’t. They fought all the time now. One would leave soon, Shana guessed. Maybe both would, and they’d abandon their daughter because it was easier on them to do so. People did that, and Shana understood it. She hated them for it, though, too, because how could you? How could you leave your family?

  Click.

  She saw someone walking toward her, now.

  Arav.

  He had an iced tea in his hand. She focused on it with the phone screen, saw the condensation gleaming there. Dripping down the side of his hand, slicking the palm and
his pinkie—which he held out like he was a fancy dude drinking fancy tea. As he closed in, he went out of focus—

  Click.

  “Hey,” he said, getting closer.

  “Hey,” she said as he came near. She tucked the camera into the pocket of her jeans.

  His hand reached out, found hers. Their fingers hooked around each other’s, pinkies around pinkies, thumbs around thumbs.

  This was all they did. They hadn’t done anything else yet. No kissing. No anything else.

  He handed her the iced tea. Lipton.

  “I brought you this.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Share it?”

  “No, all for you.”

  Her only regret was that they had to unbraid their fingers for her to take the drink. But take it, she did. It was cold and invigorating.

  “I like seeing you with your camera out,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Just taking your advice, dude.”

  “I also like seeing you in general.”

  A faint blush rose to her cheeks; she fought against it and lost. “What are you up to? Shouldn’t you be off solving all the mysteries?”

  “I dunno.” He sighed. “We’re in a holding pattern, I guess. Something’s going on, though. Doctor Ray, ahh, Benji went into a meeting with that HomeSec guy—”

  “Weyland.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hate him.”

  “I’m not a fan, either.”

  It wasn’t that Weyland did much. Mostly he just wandered the flock like he was in charge. Eyeing them all up like a grumpy Walmart manager. But also like he hated them, all of them, shepherds and flock alike. He wore his disdain for them like a uniform. Shana knew through Arav that Homeland Security was looking to take over the flock and boot the CDC investigators.

  She asked him, “You think they’re ready to take over?”

  “Maybe. I hope not.”

  New panic seethed inside her. “If that’s the deal, what happens to us? To the shepherds?”

  Arav could only shrug. “Wish I knew.”