Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  JULY 3

  Lone Tree, Iowa

  “I THINK YOU SHOULD GO,” Arav said.

  Shana watched the flock walk, oblivious to everything. The shepherds, though, weren’t oblivious. They were just paying attention to the wrong thing. They were crawling up the ass of Pete Corley when they should’ve been freaked out because the military was mounting up the troops some ten miles away.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, her jaw set, fists firm.

  “This could get bad.”

  “Nessie’s here. So I’m here.”

  “Shana, I’m just concerned—”

  “Go do your job, Arav, and I’ll do mine.”

  He chewed a lip. “You’re mad at me.”

  “Maybe you’re mad at me.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Look around you, Arav, nothing makes sense. Why start now? Go. Be with your team. You have work to do, so go do it, dude.”

  She stormed off to catch up to her sister.

  * * *

  —

  “I CAN’T DO it,” Loretta said.

  Benji paced at the back of the CDC trailer. The team listened to the call on speakerphone. Arav, Cassie, and Sadie were an audience to the call. “Loretta, with all due respect, if this thing with Garlin is connected, then we need time, we have to try—”

  “I’m to understand that Madam President is already on her way to the press conference. These horses won’t go back in the barn.” She paused. “Not today. I can put your recommendation into the pipeline, and maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week, EIS will be back onsite.”

  “With Homeland gone? With the soldiers shipped away?”

  “I can’t speak to that.”

  He wanted to throw the phone. “Loretta, listen to me. Homeland Security is a blunt object—” Even the name galled him. Homeland Security. Everyone had gotten so adapted to it, they forgot that it sounded like something out of 1984. Motherland, Fatherland, Homeland—these were, to him, implicitly un-American ideas, words antithetical to the mishmash hodgepodge of humanity that made up the citizenry of these United States. “Loretta, these people, the shepherds, they are devoted, they don’t deserve to be sent away. And neither do we.”

  “I said I’ll put it in the pipeline.” At the other end of the line she gave an exasperated sigh. “Benjamin, I respect your work on this. You’ve done well despite my…better judgment. But it may be time to come back to Atlanta. The invitation is open if you want to remain with EIS.”

  “Loretta—”

  “The connection with the fungus—I understand you want to see that connection but I’m not convinced of it. And honestly, you’re smart enough I suspect you’re not convinced, either, and you’re just trying to stall. I’ve recommended that Cassie head up the EIS investigation studying the Garlin case. Vargas has another couple of weeks of recovery and then will head back out into the field with Arav Thevar and a new team.”

  “And me?”

  “You’ll come home and work with Black Swan. We have decided your work there is exemplary, and we require a liaison to bridge the efforts of Benex-Voyager with the needs of CDC—”

  “I’m not hearing this, Loretta. What’s going on here is bigger than all of that, you know it and I know it.”

  “Don’t try to move me from this, Benjamin.”

  The Immovable Object has spoken, he half expected her to say.

  “Just put this in the pipeline, please,” he said. “Then we’ll see.”

  “Yes, we will.”

  The call ended.

  The team sat there, watching him. They’d all been listening. Benji chewed a fingernail. They watched him, silent in the shadow of his near-palpable frustration. To Sadie, he said:

  “Did you talk to Firesight?”

  “I did. They intend to send someone down tomorrow.”

  “We won’t be here tomorrow.” He heard the edge in his voice and struggled to soften it. He bit a piece of fingernail off, and it pulled into a hangnail. A little red blob of blood inflated at the site and he quickly sucked it away. “I don’t know what to do. We’re DOA here.” Arav showed them the news on his phone. Already he knew the troops were mounting. How soon would they be here? Too soon.

  Cassie sighed. “I don’t want to be reassigned.”

  “The Garlin case deserves due attention,” Benji said. “Loretta is right. And you’re the best to head up that investigation.”

  “We may need to evacuate the shepherds,” Arav said. “Might be better to start now rather than…” But nobody was listening to him. He noticed it. “Hello, is anybody—”

  But then Arav’s voice trailed off because he heard it, too.

  Outside, Benji heard the murmur of the crowd and the strumming of a guitar. It was a familiar song—one of Gumdropper’s early hits, maybe. But he couldn’t place it. Idly, he asked: “What song is that?”

  They turned to listen.

  Arav said, “Is it Guns N’ Roses?”

  Cassie hissed at him. “No. This is not GnR, kid.”

  “It’s Gumdropper,” Sadie said, quite definitively. “In fact, it’s ‘Full Steam Ahead’ off the album Engineer Without Forms. Two bits of trivia, first that it was a concept album from 1989 based off The Gunslinger by Stephen King—featuring songs like ‘Different Seasons’ and ‘Mohaine Desert.’ Second that this version we’re hearing is not the version from the album but rather, the more uptempo version that Gumdropper played at stadium shows and that showed up on the BBC Live recording. They had a second King tribute album in 2000, their last full studio album, but it kinda sucked—”

  “You’re a Gumdropper fan?” Benji asked.

  “Like you would not believe.” She leaned in. “I have a small steamer trunk full of Gumdropper bootlegs. Is he really out there? Pete Corley? The Pete Bloody Hell Motherfucker Corley?”

  “He is.”

  Manic glee flashed in her eyes. “I’d love to meet him.”

  “Yes, well,” and he was about to say That’s not really our priority, but then he realized maybe, just maybe, it was. He turned to Arav. “Arav…”

  “Doctor Ray. Ah, Benji.”

  “Do me a favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Go and bring him in.”

  “Who? Pete Corley?”

  “Yes, Arav, Pete Corley.”

  “You…you’re sure?”

  He thought about it. “I am.”

  * * *

  —

  CORLEY SAT AT one end of their small conference table, Benji Ray at the other. Everyone else—Cassie, Arav, Sadie—stayed off to the sides. They had to draw the shades to stop shepherds and the media from looking in.

  The rock star leaned back, feet on the table. He pulled out something that looked like a robot’s idea of a magic wand. “May I?”

  “May you what?” Benji asked.

  “Smoke. Not that it’s smoke. It’s vapor.” When Benji didn’t respond, Corley waggled his fingers. “Ooh, vapor. Science.” He regarded Benji’s stone-faced glare, then petulantly put the vaporizer away. “Guess not, then.”

  “It’s not healthy, you know. Vaping.”

  “Healthier than smoking.”

  “Shooting yourself in the leg is healthier than in the heart, too. Doesn’t mean I would recommend doing it.”

  Corley sniffed. “So, that what this is? Checkup with my doctor? Want me to put my balls in your hand, turn my head, give a cough?”

  In his voice, Benji could hear that Irish lilt, the one that lifted his voice in ways and places Americans and even Brits didn’t. “No.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is. You’re the big man in charge here. The big boss with the red-hot sauce. You don’t like me being here, I’m an irritation, a—what’s the John McClane line? A fly in the ointme
nt, Hans? A monkey in the wrench? I don’t need your permission to be here, though, do I?”

  Benji leaned forward, drumming his fingers on the table. “I don’t like celebrities. They tend to be narcissists created by and reinforcing a whole system of narcissism: self-reward and solipsism, all the way down.”

  “Ennnhhh,” Corley said, like he was thinking about it. “Big words, big words. But I’ll cop to that, Doc.” He smiled big and bright, even with that mouthful of slightly fucked-up teeth. “I do love being me.”

  “And I suppose it was inevitable that one of you would see the sleepwalkers as an opportunity—a spotlight that had dared turn toward something that wasn’t you, God forbid. Natural then that you would come here to extend your life cycle of fame—or perhaps you’re here running from something, I don’t know.”

  Corley’s smile soured to a frown. “So now this is therapy, is it?”

  “No. Against all my instincts, against every bone in my body, it is me asking you for a favor.”

  “Mm, okay, I’ll allow it.”

  “You say I’m the man in charge, but that’s not necessarily true. And after tonight, it won’t be true at all. Right now, as you and I speak, President Hunt is preparing to go on television and announce that what’s going on outside this trailer will be under the boot of Homeland Security. The CDC will be summarily removed. Soldiers—army men and women that are again right now gathering less than ten miles from here—will swarm this site and attempt to boot all of us. Politely at first, by force thereafter, I would guess.”

  Corley swallowed hard and sat forward.

  “There it is,” Benji said, snapping his fingers. “The realization is hitting you, now, isn’t it? Whatever opportunity you thought you saw here is going to go to—well, to vapor. Poof. Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Here’s where the favor comes in.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m listening.”

  “You go out there and stand with those shepherds. Claim solidarity. Fake it if you must. Get yourself all up in those camera lenses and tell them what’s coming—soldiers, forced ejection, brutality. Blood on concrete and heads knocked in and all that nasty business. But tell them you’ll stand with them. You demand President Hunt rescind her order and grant protection to the good shepherds of this flock and to the CDC who has governed here.”

  “You’re deranged.” Moments of silence stretched out. Then Corley’s face stretched into a jack-o’-lantern smile. “And I like it.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “First, what do I get out of it?”

  “You get to stay. This train keeps on rolling…full steam ahead.”

  “I see what you did there, Doc. And I approve of anything that stokes the fire of my, as you say, narcissistic tendencies. All right! I’ll do it. You want me to go out there now? Bring the ruckus, as it were?”

  “Now, yes.”

  Pete Corley stood up—which was like watching a closet full of broomsticks animating all at once under a sorcerer’s spell. “Done and done.”

  With that, he headed for the door, guitar in hand.

  Grinning like a jackal.

  After he left, Sadie said: “I think I’m pregnant with his baby.”

  Benji gave her an amused, if worried, look.

  “You owe me,” Cassie said. “It took every urge in my body not to ask him about Gumdropper trivia. It hurt me. It hurt me in my soul, Benji.”

  “Thank you, Cass.”

  “Think it’ll work?” Arav asked.

  “I have no idea,” Benji said. “Probably not. But when you’re about to go off a cliff, you grab hold of whatever you can to keep from falling.”

  New Monmouth University public poll: 63% in favor of Homeland Security taking over flock operation, 27% against, 10% undecided

  @AP_Politics

  12 replies 712 RTs 341 likes

  JULY 3

  Echo Lake, Indiana

  JUST AS THE PARTY COLLECTIVELY watched Fox News showing off the troop carriers miles out from the sleepwalkers, they also paused to watch President Hunt make her statement.

  She was a severe-looking woman, Matthew found. Her penny-red hair was cut short. She wore little makeup. The lines around her eyes looked carved there, as if by an X-Acto knife.

  When she ran the first time, she attempted to walk that line between being feminine and masculine—feminine enough to seem motherly or sisterly, masculine enough to convince the country she was tough enough to handle what came at her. But since then, she’d become harder. Sharper. Maybe the presidency did that to you, Matthew thought. Whittled you like a stick. Sometimes to the point of being cut to splinters.

  When she came on the TV, most of the party guests at Ozark Stover’s house booed. Soon they started a chant: Punt the cunt, punt the cunt.

  Matthew did not join in. He tried to excuse it—they were drunk, it was a party, partisan politics were what they were.

  When she finally spoke, they quieted down to hear.

  Her speech was simple enough.

  “I have chosen to take the advice of those closest to me—meaning, not just my advisers, but you, the American people—and institute Homeland Security control over the unfolding sleepwalker crisis.”

  That was good, Matthew thought—though the thought came to him more slowly given that it had to push first through the bourbon brine that was presently pickling his brain. But he appreciated first the political move of pretending that the American people were her closest advisers, and second that she had changed her language, subtly. Before today, it was the “sleepwalker flock” or the “sleepwalker phenomenon.” Now it was a “crisis.” What was it that Ozark said? It’s all about messaging.

  She went on to say that she gave everyone “my greatest assurance that the sleepwalkers—who are our fellow Americans, each undergoing something we could not possibly understand—will remain safe.”

  The switchover from the CDC to Homeland Security, she said, would begin promptly at 5 P.M., Central Daylight Time.

  It was now 4:56 P.M.

  She took no questions.

  JAKE TAPPER: Some actors and directors have come out hard against you in recent days, lining up behind President Hunt despite their earlier criticisms of her presidency. What do you say to that?

  ED CREEL: I say it’s time everyday Americans stop lining up behind those Hollywood elites. I represent them, not her.

  JT: And what do you say to those who suggest you’re a Hollywood elite, sir? After all, in the 1990s you produced a number of films and often pal around with producers and film financiers, not to mention your net worth is in the billions, not millions, which I have to tell you, seems pretty “elite”—

  EC: To them, and to you, Jake, I say [bleep] off. I’ve been insulted by better men than you. This interview is over.

  —from The Lead with Jake Tapper, CNN

  JULY 3

  Lone Tree, Iowa

  HE WAS STONED.

  Nobody knew that but him. But Pete Corley was definitely stoned.

  Like, not gonzo stoned—he didn’t eat a fistful of mushrooms, he didn’t hoover up rails of coke off the small of a young man’s back, he didn’t lick the poisonous underbelly of some Peruvian toad to go on a journey of self-enlightenment where he had to fight a Jaguar King whose face fell off and really it was Pete’s face underneath. (True story, that last bit happened to him a decade ago when he was in the Amazon rain forest and got fucked up on DMT with, of all things, a Brazilian boy band. No toads, but he did fight a Jaguar version of himself. He lost, for whatever that meant. Also he puked a lot. Literal gallons.)

  No, Pete had just smoked a little weed.

  A little weed a lot of times.

  Aaaaand he had some drinks.

  Zimas, which he did not know still existed but apparen
tly did out here in the Midwest. Was this the Midwest? Whatever.

  Point was, nobody knew he had a little wacky tobacky and nobody knew that he had pounded a six-pack of Zimas over the last six hours because he was very, very good at doing exactly this. This is not my first rodeo, you insipid motherfuckers. I am a performer. I am a rock god.

  A rock god on the run.

  That last part was not a part he cared to admit. He cared so little to admit it, in fact, that as soon as the thought entered his head, he chased it back out with a skull full of music. The moment he had images in his mind of Landry, or his wife Lena, or the kids Connor and Siobhan, he pumped his own brain full of grinding guitar and driving drums and his own screaming voice. He envisioned himself, Mad Max–style, riding atop a flaming eighteen-wheeler, shrieking a song like “Full Steam Ahead” and chasing all the bad brain mutants back to the shadows from whence they came. He’d always been that way—music a constant background noise that he learned to bring into the foreground to shut out anything else that bothered him. A wall he built, a door he could slam. It was also his weapon, as it would be today. Blade, chain saw, Gatling gun. Slice, chew, rat-a-tat-tat.

  Pete emerged from the CDC trailer invigorated anew, and marched back to the heart of the crowd. He cared very little for the pilgrims or sleepwalkers or whatever it was they would be called in a week—I mean, yes, abstractly he cared, oh ho ho, those poor soggy sods, but he wasn’t here for them. Benji Ray had his number on that one.

  He wasn’t here for the walkers.

  He wasn’t here for their shepherds.

  He was here for the media, for the attention, for the bright and shining eyes, all on him. He was here to once again be at the center of things.

  On his own terms. Not Gumdropper’s. Certainly not Elvis’s, that fucker.