Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “I’m cool with that, I am, but dude, you’re not one of us.”

  At that, he lifted his head. “What?”

  “Aw, don’t get it twisted, it’s a compliment. These people? Us shepherds? We’re like…flotsam and jetsam. Little paper boats in that river made of people. You’re not one of us. You’re one of them. The solvers, the helpers, the scientists. The smarty-pants.”

  “I can still be one of you.”

  “I don’t want you to be. I want you to be one of them. You want to do right by me, that means figuring out how I get my sister back.”

  He seemed to consider this. Then he gave a stiff nod.

  “You’re right. I’ve…been complacent.”

  “You gotta get your groove back.”

  “My groove,” he repeated, nodding. “Yes. Yeah. I need to groove.”

  “Okay, the way you say it sounds dorky, this isn’t the dance floor. I’m just saying—go up there, right now. Go to Benji’s room. Tell him what you’re thinking. Tell him you’re recommitted to the mission or whatever, and you want in.”

  He turned to her, panic and excitement in his eyes. “Are you sure?”

  “You don’t need my permission. Go and save the world, dude.”

  Arav darted off.

  Then he darted back, kissed her, and darted off again.

  * * *

  —

  SLEEP EVADED HIM, ducking and feinting and dodging all night. Worry did not. Paranoia found Benji, trapped him, pinned him to the bed. Soaked him in sweat, tangled him in the sheets. The hours passed as insomnia held court. And now, morning had arrived. His consciousness was serrated like a steak knife. He felt raw, inside and out. Sadie knocked on his door, ready to pile in the car with Shana and Arav and head to the flock, and when he opened it, he knew it was time to decide what he was going to do.

  The easiest thing would be to pretend that nothing was wrong.

  Maybe he’d misunderstood what Black Swan had let him hear. Perhaps it was a delusion, or a dream. A mad moment of sleep paralysis that yielded a stress-based hypnagogic hallucination.

  Maybe Black Swan concocted it. That was a thing, now, was it not? Artificial intelligence being able to fake photos, videos, voices. It was easier and easier.

  Maybe it was real, and maybe his best move was to play the spy—he could sit back, warily, keeping a distrustful and vigilant eye.

  But that wasn’t who he was.

  Benji had to confront this now, or it would destroy him, he decided. (And a small voice questioned: Was that why he did what he did with Longacre? Because to continue to sit idly by would have crushed him?)

  Sadie stepped into the room, and she must’ve seen his face. He could only speculate how he looked by how he felt: He felt ragged and rough, like a piece of fabric cut with rusty, chipped shears.

  “You look, if you don’t mind me saying so, like something my old bichon frise yakked up onto the carpet.”

  “I need to know what you know,” he said, his voice grim.

  “About…my beesh? Ah. Well. Her name was Gizzy and—”

  “About the nanomachines. About nanoradio. About…Moira, whoever that is, about Marcy Reyes and the signal and, and—”

  Now it was Sadie’s turn to look like cut, ragged cloth. Her face went ashen. “I…Benji…”

  It was confirmation enough. What he’d experienced was no delusion, no hallucination, no paranoia-fed dream. He held up the Black Swan satphone. “If you want to know how I know, thank your creation. You betrayed me. Black Swan betrayed you. It played part of a conversation you were having with this Moira person. Was it last night? Or a recording from an earlier day?”

  Sadie swallowed visibly. “It was last night.”

  “That’s why you never came to my room. You were talking.”

  A pause.

  “Yes.”

  “Sadie, I…I don’t even know where to begin.” In the deep of his ears he heard the rush of blood in an uneven susurrus. “The flock. They are…infected, somehow? With what, nanoparticles?”

  “Machines,” she said, her voice nearly breaking.

  “And you’re responsible.”

  “No. Not…it’s not like that.”

  “But you knew.”

  “Yes, I knew—”

  “Firesight, then, are they responsible?”

  “Yes, but—it’s not so easy to explain—”

  “Sadie,” he said, lurching to his feet, his voice a dark shout. “You betrayed the CDC. You betrayed me. The flock. The country. Everyone! This…you’ll go to jail for this. We have to go to the FBI. You have to come clean.”

  “I need you to trust me,” she said, her voice dire. She clasped her hands together, as if to pray for his mercy. “It’s not all as it seems. You can come with me. We’ll go to Atlanta. I can show you things. I can—”

  “Show me what? Was this some side project of yours? What are these things? What is their purpose?” He felt nauseated. Everything had gone topsy-turvy, like a nightmare that followed him out of sleep and into reality. “And how does Marcy Reyes factor into it? She’s a receiver? You said something about a, a, a signal—”

  Someone knocked at the door.

  Sadie and Benji stood silently, staring at each other.

  “It’s probably Arav,” she said stiffly.

  “Shit. Yes.” Benji moved past her and opened the door. She was correct—standing there, wide-eyed, was Arav. “Arav, now is not the time, we will come down when we’re ready—”

  “Signal?” Arav asked. “What signal?”

  Seven Dead in Portland-Area School Shooting

  By Maggie Townshend, Washington Post

  Four students and three teachers were killed today in Clackamas Creek Middle School, shot by former student Timothy Grosser, who died on the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. School principal Desiree Osgood said that Grosser was a troubled student who was expelled for spray-painting white supremacist symbols on lockers and for making threats against marginalized students. GOP presidential nominee Ed Creel offered his thoughts at a rally on Tuesday, saying, “It’s these walkers. We’ve lost our way and we’re cheerleading a pack of terroristic sinners. Tensions are high and so we should expect more violence like this, not less.”

  JULY 13

  Burnsville, Indiana

  THE RADIO INTERVIEW TROUBLED HIM. Worry clung to Matthew like a strange smell. He wanted to get the word out, but he wanted to be careful how he positioned his message. A message of love and hope was always better than one of punishment and judgment. But then again, you couldn’t extricate those things from the Word of God, could you? The Almighty was a loving father, yes, but every father had to deliver tough love sometimes.

  For now, a simpler problem presented itself:

  Matthew needed a shirt.

  Something simple, a nice button-down, but short-sleeved, too, since it was so damn hot. (Even with the air-conditioning on, he still felt sweat slicking the back of his neck, oozing down his spine.) He had a meeting in an hour with Hiram Golden—Hiram was proposing to become Matthew’s speaking agent, and so they were going to formalize that deal. The one thing he wasn’t sure about was that Hiram wanted him to pull away from the church for a little while—not close up shop, exactly, but walk away for a few weeks, concentrate solely on media events and speaking gigs. “It’s good money,” Hiram said.

  “I can’t close the church,” Matthew told him. “It’d be like asking my heart to stop beating.”

  At that, Hiram chuckled and said, “We’ll see. Everything’s a negotiation, Matthew. I’ll show you the light, friend.”

  They were grabbing lunch today, so he went through his closet looking for a shirt, but Matthew found none there. Not a one.

  He called after Autumn. No answer. She wasn’t home again. She’d bee
n going out. A lot. Shopping (now that they had some money) or to the park (“Just to walk and enjoy God’s world,” she told him). To her credit, she’d been a lot happier these days—her eyes were a little sleepy, but she smiled and laughed and had a breezy air about her that reminded him of when they first met. That air, that spark, had been gone for a long time, and he admitted he was glad to see it come back.

  Just the same, he knew it was the pills reigniting that spark. It wasn’t God. It wasn’t prayer. It was her little pill bottle of happiness.

  Given to her by Ozark Stover.

  He gritted his teeth, putting it out of his mind.

  One of the problems with her being on those pills, though, and being happier-and-go-luckier, was that she was missing things. Like a transmission slipping gears. Yesterday she forgot to empty the dishwasher. Three days ago she’d been out and forgot to fill up the gas tank in the car, so she had to call Triple A and have them bring her some gas. How embarrassing.

  So he went into the laundry room, popped open the dryer—

  And sure enough, a mound of clothes was wadded up inside.

  He spied plaid. “My shirts,” he said. “Damnit, Autumn.”

  Like Atlas hulking the whole of the earth, Matthew took the entire wad of clothes out at one time and waddle-walked it to their bedroom. He dumped it all on the (unmade) bed.

  Something rolled away, clattering on the floor.

  Two somethings, in fact.

  Matthew bent down and found a pair of shotgun shells.

  They weren’t big—they were narrow green plastic tubes, no thicker than his index finger. One crimped and ready to fire, the other blown open. Like from a little bird gun.

  He looked to the clothing, saw that some of Bo’s clothes were mixed in with his. The shells didn’t come from Matthew.

  So that meant they came from Bo.

  And that meant the boy was still handling firearms when Matthew told him explicitly not to. They hadn’t had time to meet with Roger yet to learn the ins and outs of guns, so that meant Bo was betraying his order.

  Did it mean that Ozark had betrayed that, too?

  Matthew told himself, no, that couldn’t be. Ozark was respectful. It was all on the up-and-up. More likely Bo had gone out with friends and done it. But then that nagging question: What friends?

  He hummed discontentedly to himself, then took a brief expedition into the boy’s room. Again that teen-boy funk hit him in the face like a sweaty shovel. He winced, wading deeper through the clothes and the mess. He peeked under the bed. (There he found a Tupperware container that had once contained chili, moldering.) He looked in the closet, found mostly black T-shirts and jeans, not hanging up, no, but piled at the bottom. Then he went to the dresser in the corner, went through it drawer by drawer.

  In the second drawer from the bottom, he found porn.

  Porn magazines, to be specific, which honestly, he didn’t even know was a thing anymore. Didn’t most people get their pornography from the internet? Matthew was good, he did not partake in it because, plainly, that was a sin. Those girls and women were not objects to be ogled, they were creatures of God, same as he was. He would not reward a system that abused them, nor would he reward those women for those very bad, very sinful choices. (Yes, he’d heard that some women chose that life, but he honestly could not believe that.)

  These magazines looked pretty beat-up. Couple Penthouses and a Hustler, all from about ten years ago. Then a trio of Easyriders magazine—these from the 1980s, featuring biker mamas dressed like it was the ’70s, all huge hair and big pubic tangles. Matthew found his pulse quicken looking at them, and so he quickly threw them back in the drawer and slammed it shut.

  That was a conversation he’d have with Bo on another day.

  He opened the last drawer.

  Jeans, sweatpants, shorts. He put his hands in there—

  And found something hard and boxy under the fabric.

  He moved the clothes aside and discovered a box of ammunition. Shotgun shells bigger than the ones he’d found in the laundry. These for a 20-gauge shotgun.

  But where was the gun?

  The future is a door. Two forces—forces that we drive like horses and chariots, whips to their backs, wheels in ruts, great froth and furious vigor—race to that door. The first force is evolution. Humanity changing, growing, becoming better than it was. The second force is ruination. Humanity making its best effort to demonstrate its worst tendencies. A march toward self-destruction. The future is a door that can accommodate only one of those two competing forces. Will humanity evolve and become something better? Or will we cut our own throats with the knives we made?

  —futurist Hannah Stander in her lecture to students at

  Penn State University: “Apocalypse Versus Apotheosis:

  What Does the Future Hold?”

  JULY 13

  Valentine, Nebraska

  THE THREE OF THEM PULLED up outside a run-down storage unit facility south of the small town of Valentine, about five miles from the flock’s current position, and seven miles from the motel. Gravel popped like popcorn under the rental tires.

  Benji looked over to Sadie in the passenger seat.

  She offered a small smile. He did not return it.

  “I still don’t understand what’s happening,” Arav said from the backseat.

  “You will,” Sadie answered, and got out to meet the unit attendant—a pear-shaped man with pockmarked cheeks and a Kubota trucker hat. He walked over with an easy bounce, handed Sadie a clipboard. From inside the car, Benji and Arav watched her sign it. He handed her a key.

  “What is going on?” Arav asked. “Doctor Ray, Benji, I—”

  “I don’t know,” Benji said. And it was true. He didn’t.

  Sadie waved them forward as the chain-link gate slid open automatically with a rattle-bang. Benji urged the car forward.

  They went to her newly rented storage unit, 42-D.

  * * *

  —

  BENJI HAD ASKED her, WHY here? Why a storage unit?

  He had already told her they weren’t flying off on a whim to Atlanta. Whatever she had to tell him, she could tell him here, so he could remain near the flock. She said fine, and called ahead to rent this storage unit.

  As to why:

  Because she wanted four unobstructed walls for Black Swan’s projections. And she wanted somewhere away from prying ears and eyes, and storage units were, on the whole, fairly private, unmonitored affairs. The lots were often under surveillance; the units themselves, not. This was close to the motel, so she made the call, and so they went. As they got out, Benji looked all around. Paranoia gnawed at him. He half expected to hear a shot ring out, or to see someone in a black mask driving toward him. (Or an ambulance, he thought, like the one that stole the bodily remains back in Pennsylvania.) But there was only the dead silence of the wide-open Midwest.

  Sadie unlocked the padlock at the unit, opened the shutter bay door. Then, from the trunk, she wheeled in her suitcase—another mystery Benji had not yet figured out, but when the answer came, it was so mundane, so simple, he was surprised he hadn’t guessed it:

  She used the suitcase to prop up the Black Swan device.

  They had no table, no chair—the storage unit was empty.

  The suitcase made for a makeshift platform.

  With that, she pulled down the shutter door with a rattle-bang. The light dimmed and they descended into darkness. From within the void, she said:

  “Black Swan, it’s me, Sadie.”

  It throbbed with white light on all sides. The room seemed to swell with it. Benji felt like he was once again back in Atlanta, in the so-called Lair of the machine intelligence at the CDC building.

  “Please dial in Moira and Bill,” she said.

  To the left, a woman appeared, an
d to the right, a man. The woman looked younger, maybe Benji’s age—copper-red hair, white suit. The man was older, maybe in his fifties or sixties, with a trim, flattop haircut—he wore a sour, dour face, and his lips and jaw moved like he was trying to work a seed out from between his teeth. Neither was projected as they would be in any other videoconferencing call—Skype, FaceTime, et cetera—as a set of shoulders, a head, a face. Instead it was their full bodies standing there flat against the wall. Not a hologram, not three-dimensional, but eerily lifelike.

  The woman spoke first:

  “I’m Moira Simone, and this is William Craddock.”

  “Bill,” the projection of the man said.

  “What is this?” Benji asked, suddenly furious. “You’ve got explaining to do. I suspect you’ve committed a grave and serious crime against the people of the flock, their families, their friends—this country—”

  “You have no idea,” Moira said, snapping at him.

  “Moira,” Sadie cautioned.

  But the red-haired woman continued: “If you want to go running off to the FBI after this, that is your prerogative. But we have built something here that is very fragile, Doctor Ray, and I want you to understand that before we begin.”

  Bill Craddock: “It’s of considerable consequence.”

  Benji and Arav shared a look. The younger man looked confused, not to mention scared out of his wits.

  “Go on,” Benji said.

  Moira nodded. “Black Swan. Show him the map.”

  With that, a simple red map of the United States appeared.

  Then, a pulse of yellow light as a dot appeared over Texas.

  “San Antonio,” Bill said.

  The map flipped to the wall behind them—a disorienting maneuver, making Benji feel like he was on an amusement-park ride—and was replaced with a video. It was a video he’d seen: the events at the Garlin Gardens groundbreaking ceremony. Jerry Garlin there on stage, flailing as bats whipped around him. People screaming and fleeing. Bats just doing what bats do when disturbed: restlessly seeking somewhere to settle.