by Chuck Wendig
“Are we going to be okay?” she asked Arav.
“You and me?”
“No, I think we’re gonna be just fine.” She made a happy sound and slid her hand up under his shirt, across the flat expanse of his stomach. “I mean like, all of us. This whole group. The flock, the shepherds, all of us. The whole damn world, I dunno.”
“Yeah. I do.”
She heard no doubt in his voice that time. It gave her sudden, inexorable comfort. A warmth of hope bloomed inside her. “Good.”
She kissed his cheek.
He kissed her lips.
Overhead, the sky slowly went from dark to dim as the sun sent ahead the promise—or the threat—of a new day.
TWO YEARS AGO
Giant Eagle grocery store, Maker’s Bell, Pennsylvania
DARIA STEWART HAD A BOTTLE of pills and a phone and was hiding near a decommissioned meat freezer. They were doing work on the grocery store, upgrading it—putting in new freezers, new flooring, new self-checkouts, anything to get them up to last century’s standards if not those of the current era. Nobody was here in this part. It was empty. The cameras couldn’t see her, either, she was pretty sure.
She was alone and on the phone.
It rang. She waited, staring down at the pills. The bottle said Ambien, and it was, but it also had other pills in there: trazodone, Advil, Zantac. Ambien alone was not enough to shoulder the burden of killing her, but throw in the others, it was possible. Maybe. A real party, she thought, grimly.
Not that she was going to do it.
Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. This moment came once every few months, and the fulcrum always swung the other way. The living way, the persevering way. The surviving way.
With every ring of the phone, a new thought perforated the silence in her mind: I want to die. I’m a bad mom. I’m a bad wife. I want to die. Even now, her husband and her children were in the store. They thought she was off looking for—what did she tell them? Yogurts. The ones she liked so much. Noosa brand. Soon they’d figure it out. And they’d come looking.
As it always did, her brain replayed all her poor choices and all her wasted potential. Could’ve been a singer, wasn’t. Could’ve been a model, wasn’t. Could’ve been a better wife, or not Charlie’s wife at all, but here she was. Remember that time she got drunk at a firehouse wedding reception and told the bride that the bridesmaids’ dresses made the bridesmaids all look like boiled hot dogs? She remembered. The bride probably didn’t, and if she did, the woman probably chalked it up as a funny story she could tell. But Daria was haunted by it. Every day she thought about it. That and all the other stupid things she had said and done just by being her.
I want to die.
I don’t want to die.
Ring, ring, ring.
Finally, someone answered. A man with a soft, kind voice.
“Hello, how may I help you?”
They never started off with, This is the suicide prevention hotline. She liked that they didn’t. It made her feel like she was calling an old friend, a friend who had forgotten her, someone who would be her compass while sailing on this mad storm-swept sea of her own utterly fucked emotions.
“I’m in a grocery store and I have a bottle of—” she started to say, but then the line clicked a few times. Loud clicks, not like something tapping against the phone but something deeper. Something in the phone system.
A different voice, a woman’s voice said:
“Hello, how may I help you?”
Daria flinched. Even this tiny fluctuation made her feel altogether more fragile—like she could feel the cracks spreading across her porcelain.
Persevere, she told herself.
Impatient this time, she hurriedly said: “I’m in a store with a bottle of pills and I’m thinking of swallowing them all.”
A pause.
“You would qualify yourself as suicidal?” the woman asked.
That wasn’t the script. Daria knew the script. She’d spoken to the hotline dozens of times, now. They were always gentler, teasing out the problem, giving Daria a reason to talk it out before finally making referrals, recommendations, and affirmations.
This was different. More forthright.
She didn’t hate it.
“I would,” Daria said, her voice trembling. Her hand shook, too, and the pills danced against one another and their bottle.
“Is this an isolated incident or a persistent one?”
She almost lied and said isolated. But truth won out.
“Persistent.”
“We can help you,” the woman said.
“How?”
“We have a location near you.”
She hesitated. “How do you know where I am?”
“You’re at the Giant Eagle grocery store on Old Bethlehem Road.”
“I didn’t tell you that.”
Pause. “We can help you. If you want it.”
Daria swallowed a hard lump in her throat. She looked at the pills, then up around the edge of the freezer case. She saw the grocery store employee walking past, about ten feet away. The man, doughy around the middle and bald on top, froze when he saw her. Keep walking, keep walking, keep walking, just leave me to this call, leave me to die. He must’ve heard the thoughts in her head, because all he did was give her a nervous smile and then walk on.
“You’re not the suicide prevention line,” she said.
“No,” the woman answered. Plainly spoken, clear as a fork tapping against a Champagne glass. “This is not that. But we can help you.”
Daria blinked. She pocketed the pills.
“Just tell me where to go.”
The woman on the other line gave her an address.
That’s when Daria Stewart stood up and walked out through the store, praying the whole time that Charlie and the girls didn’t see her leaving.
She walked a mile, down to the bank, then called a cab.
* * *
—
CAB TOOK AN hour to show. That, the price of living in a small town. She sat on a bench near the ATM, under a sad little oak tree whose roots were prying apart the curb.
The address was farther away than they made it out to be: an address in Bloomsburg, north of the university. An hour’s drive. The cabbie, a skinny white guy with meth sores on his cheeks like potholes in a bad road, bristled at having to take her that far, but she told him the tip would be good, and it was, because in an uncharacteristic fit of hope, she said, “Here’s your tip,” and gave him the whole bottle of pills she’d been carrying.
The address was a small, nondescript office building.
No signs except for FOR RENT on a couple windows.
Dandelions grew up through broken sidewalks. Poison ivy snaked up the building in the slow-motion process of pulling the building apart.
She pressed a button by the door.
Someone buzzed her inside.
* * *
—
TWO PEOPLE, ONE man and one woman, sat across from her at a folding table. The rest of the office was empty. No desks, no chairs, no computers. No cubicles stood erected, though the carpets showed their imprints—the ghost of cubicles past.
The woman there wore copper hair, cherry lipstick, a red pantsuit. Like if the Devil sold Mary Kay, choosing to go with blood red instead of berry pink. The man was far more muted: a humble gray suit, a modest blue tie. A well-trimmed mustache hung out underneath a nose whose nostril hairs were not well trimmed. He was older. The woman was younger. He said his name was Bill. She said her name was Moira.
Both watched Daria sign paper after paper.
Papers that she chose not to read.
Why bother?
As she signed the last, she gave them a hasty straightening before sliding them back across. “I still don’t unders
tand what this is,” she said.
“And yet,” the woman answered, “you still signed.”
“I need help.” At any cost, she thought. If she didn’t get help somehow, her own children would find her dead in a bathtub one of these days. Or dead at the grocery store. Cleanup on Aisle Six.
The woman was cold. The man, less so. He had warm eyes and she half expected his mustache to waggle back and forth on its own, like it was a puppet that danced on his lip. “As Moira here said to you on the phone, we’re here to help. But you need to understand, this is experimental.”
“This doesn’t seem legal.”
“Does that bother you?” Moira asked.
“I guess.”
“And yet you signed the papers,” Moira said again.
“No one is helping me. I have to try something, because I don’t know how long…” She shook her head suddenly, as if to disagree with herself. “I’m wrong. Not no one. Not exactly. I have meds, but they’re not enough. My husband is…he wants to help but doesn’t understand. My children…” Are kept at a distance so they don’t catch whatever it is I have. Even though she knew what she had was depression and it was not something you “caught,” it still felt…toxic. Like she was coated in a poison and anytime she hugged them it might get on them. “I want to be better for them.”
“You should want to be better for yourself, too,” Bill said. “And maybe we can make you better. Better in a lot of ways.”
“I don’t follow.”
Bill reached down under the table and pulled up a most unexpected item: It was a drinking cup. Styrofoam. A bendy-straw stuck out the top of it like the periscope of a submarine.
“We’re going to want you to drink this,” he said.
“What is it?”
It was Moira who said, “That is proprietary information.”
“Who are you guys?” Daria asked. “Those papers said Firesight, but I don’t know who or what that is. Are you a pharmaceutical company?”
“Medtech. Medical technology,” Bill said, smiling.
“What’s in the drink?”
“It’s a shake. Like a milkshake. This one is chocolate-flavored.”
“Is it medicine? Like…one of those barium drinks?”
Moira again: “We can’t tell you that.”
“What will it do to me?”
“In a general sense,” Bill answered, “it will improve you.”
“Improve me how?”
“We can’t tell you that,” Moira repeated, more firmly this time. As if a warning.
“I…” Daria felt a sudden lightning storm of anxiety roll through her. This was bad news. She knew it in her bones. That was the bite in the ass about being so depressed you wanted to die: Your judgment went so far out the window, it was already pancaked on the pavement. She stood up, almost knocking the chair over behind her. “I don’t feel right about any of this. I’m going to go home now. Thank you for your time.”
She marched toward the door.
Behind her, the two remained seated.
Moira called after in a raised voice: “You came. You signed the papers. You’re desperate for a change, Daria.”
Bill, in a softer, more fatherly tone, spoke, and when he did, Daria paused at the door, hand out, never quite opening it: “Mrs. Stewart. You seem a woman at a crossroads. One way goes back to where you came from, and it seems to me where you came from was not an ideal place. It is a place where you will find yourself truly dead or just dead inside. The other way leads to something, something that is surely better. It’s experimental, this treatment, but we’re optimistic. What we have is not medicine, not precisely, but just the same we view disease and disability not as a thing of shame, but simply an error to fix. Not an error that’s your fault, it’s just that you were born ten feet behind the starting line. We want to help change that. We want to repair your errors. We want to help you live longer, be happier, become the best version of yourself that exists. We think that best version of you is inside right now. Waiting to come out. We want to help it come out. Will you let us?”
“You signed the papers,” Moira said again.
Daria reached for the doorknob.
It was cool in her hand. She pressed her head against the metal windowless door. In her mind she pictured Nessie, Shana, even Charlie.
“Okay,” she said.
She turned around, walked back, and reached for the drink.
Bill pulled it away. “Not yet, Mrs. Stewart. We have a room set up for you. If you’ll come this way?”
The number is 423.
@WalkerCountBot
78 replies 303 RTs 505 likes
JULY 11
Outside Broken Bow, Nebraska
IT’S FLAT OUT HERE, MARCY thought. The hills didn’t look like hills—they looked like slightly disturbed bedsheets. The horizon was a flat line and the road that took them to it was a long straight farm road, barely paved. In the distance, tall white turbines chopped the wind for electricity.
A moment came in which she was thankful she could even parse this information without the pain of migraines starting in her skull and shooting through her body like miserable lightning. Being with the flock had changed her. Clarified her. Her freedom from that anguish had not yet grown old, and she suspected it never would.
The walkers were now over four hundred strong, Marcy had heard—they picked up more than usual as they passed by Iowa City, Des Moines, and Omaha. As if something was compensating.
Maybe God. Maybe the angels. Or whatever sacred, special force governed the flock. Marcy believed they were different, that they were in fact sanctified by some outside cosmic presence. Her relationship with the flock had only deepened, though nobody else really knew that, obviously. She could not only see the glow of the sleepwalkers but hear it, too—sometimes it manifested as some strange song like the distant tink-tink-tink of wind chimes. Other times she could hear the individual walkers themselves: Just this morning, she heard the voice of Steve Schwartz, once an orthopedic surgeon out of Cedar Rapids, now one of the sleepwalkers. Though his face was flat and his eyes were lifeless, she heard him thinking very clearly, for one moment, about cheeseburgers, of all things. He wanted a cheeseburger at 9 A.M.
And as a result, so did she.
So she planted that bug in the ear of one of the runners. The shepherds had a pretty good system going now, assigning runners daily to go pick up meals and other essentials a few times a day—they went in shifts, having to get enough food for the swelling ranks of shepherds, who now numbered as many as the walkers, maybe more. It was a challenge to make sure everyone was covered, of course, and some shepherds didn’t want or need to be a part of the daily pickups and were happily self-sufficient in one of the few dozen recreational vehicles that rumbled along the front and back of the flock like sleepy buffalo. Up until a week ago, too, it was difficult to get money for everything—a lot of shepherds were now out of work, so they’d lost their income. Some had savings to drain, but a lot of them were like most Americans, with little to no money saved.
With the arrival of the rock star and after the clash with the army, though, things really changed. Someone started a GoFundMe page for the shepherds, which gave a steady flow of cash. Others, too, would deliver donations to the front of the flock—snacks, meals, clothing, toys for some of the shepherd children, dog food for the shepherd pack, and so on.
American sentiment had turned regarding the sleepwalkers. At least, for some. The walkers were a cause to support, an underdog, a mass of victims whose very presence created more victims—and heroes—in the shepherds themselves. Thing was, in politics, every movement had an equal and opposite movement, didn’t it? Others dug their feet in harder, demanding justice and retribution for whoever “attacked” America—some far-right bastards wanted the walkers rounded up. One of Ed Creel’s ca
ndidacy advisers reportedly said, “Put ’em in camps, march them into cages or holes dug in the ground, and if they pop like zits, they pop like zits. And if any of those so-called shepherds steps in our way, we’ll shoot ’em like dogs.”
Initially, when called on it, he denied it.
Until someone produced the tape. Then the adviser owned it.
Ed Creel’s poll numbers went up among Republicans, after that.
It made her worry. Marcy wasn’t one for politics—she was that most lamentable of creatures, a political moderate. But she could smell the fire on the wind. Something was coming. A sickened part of her wondered if the flock itself was a dividing line, one that would mark the territory between two sides in a civil war. That, surely, was just a paranoid fantasy.
Wasn’t it?
She just wanted to bask in the glow of the flock.
And in her own freedom from pain.
Even with her eyes closed, she could feel it. The throb-and-release of the glow. The warm sound. The tide of light.
When she opened her eyes again, someone was standing in front of her. It was the woman, Sadie Something-or-Other. She wore a puzzled expression—whatever the puzzle was that plagued her, it was not a frustration, exactly, but the look on her face belied a kind of intense curiosity. “Marcy Reyes?” Sadie asked.
“That’s me,” Marcy said, somewhat warily.
“Can we go somewhere?” Sadie asked. “To talk.”
“You’re not going to send me away, are you?”
In a chipper tone, Sadie said: “I’d do no such thing.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart, needle in my eye, all that.”
“Okay,” Marcy said.
* * *
—
“YOU’RE A LITTLE famous,” Sadie said.
The two of them walked ahead of the flock, off the road, in the grass. Honeybees buzzed between meager patches of wildflowers. In the distance, those wind turbines chopped air with a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.
Marcy was careful that they were still near the glow. But even here, this far away from it, she could feel a…twinge. Like a thinning tether—the farther she went, the thinner it got, stretched like a piece of gum until it about snapped. And when it snapped, she feared her pain and confusion would return with a vengeance.
