Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  Right now, on stage, Creel was introducing the next speaker. Creel ran these things a little like a sideshow, introducing speakers but not speaking himself until what he termed the final act. Now he was talking up Skylar Ellis, the ex-CEO of the June Bug cosmetics company and now the chief spokesperson for the NRA. She was in all pink, and hauled on stage with her an AR-15 rifle. The place went nuts as she talked.

  And then, like that, there he was—

  Ed Creel, the man himself.

  Matthew had not met him yet. But he was about to. Creel made a beeline for him—the man had a hard-charging walk, like he wanted to bowl everything and everyone in his way over. Handlers trailed him like bridesmaids chasing the bride to make sure her veil didn’t drag through any mud. As he walked up to Matthew, Creel adjusted his suit, gave a smile, and put out his hand.

  “Pastor Matthew Bird,” Ed Creel said. “It is a real pleasure.”

  His handshake was a knuckle-cracker. Matthew winced.

  “The pleasure is mine,” Matthew said. “I just appreciate you giving me a chance to spread the Word and give a little of the Lord’s grace to your audience—I think we’re all in need of it.”

  “Sure, sure, absolutely.” Creel nodded, but there was an emptiness to his face—he was looking at Matthew but staring past him at the same time. Not even past him. Through him. Like he was a window. When Creel spoke, there was that brash Boston accent in there, rough and ready. “I’m a big churchgoer, big believer in what you’re saying, Matthew, and thanks for getting out there and saying it.”

  “Do you have a favorite book of the Bible that comforts you in difficult times?” Matthew asked. The question came out of him, uninvited—it was a test, he told himself, one he knew the man before him would pass.

  “Sure, of course,” Creel said. “All of them. But the gospel is good.”

  Matthew was about to ask, which gospel, but then Creel shook his hand again, clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re on next. I’ll intro you, then come out, say your bit, you got five minutes. Good to meet you.”

  And with that, Creel and his handlers were off.

  Hiram filled the vacuum. “He’s really something,” he said.

  Matthew, his voice low, said, “I don’t think that man reads the Bible.”

  “Matthew, come on. You know as well as I do it’s not about the academics of it—it’s not about knowing the Bible up here.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s about knowing it here.” Then Hiram touched his chest.

  “I don’t know if that’s exactly right.”

  “Like the saying goes, the Devil knows how to quote scripture.”

  “But the Devil at least knows there are multiple gospel accounts.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hiram, I dunno—”

  “Creel knows the Good Book, he does, he’s just—he’s busy, look around you. This is a circus and he’s the ringleader. A lot on his plate. Forgive him, yeah?”

  “Yes, yeah, of course.” Matthew forced a smile and nodded.

  He turned back toward the stage and peered out from behind the curtain at Skylar Ellis—who, presently, was going on about how President Hunt wanted to take away their guns under the guise of so-called commonsense regulations.

  “Is it common sense to leave you without being able to protect yourself?” she asked.

  The crowd chanted No!

  “Is it common sense to take your guns so you can’t fight back against an abusive government?”

  Another chant: No!

  Then she repeated another of Creel’s lines:

  “A little revolution—”

  She paused, letting the crowd finish the statement with her:

  “Goes a long way.”

  And then the audience broke into a refrain:

  “Hunt the cunt! Hunt the cunt! Hunt the cunt!”

  They got louder and louder as Ellis lifted up her rifle in a performative gesture—holding it aloft before lowering it and cycling the bolt before pointing it at the cutout of President Hunt at the other end of the stage.

  To Hiram, Matthew said, “She’s not really going to—”

  Bang. The sound of the rifle going off split his ears, left them ringing. He peered out through the curtain, saw that the cutout had a hole right in the woman’s cheek. Still smoking.

  The crowd went nuts. Cheering and chanting. Someone held up a sign that said KILL THE BITCH. Ellis shrugged, and when she had a chance to speak over the din, she said: “Not a bad shot. It’ll do.”

  More applause. Ellis found the expended brass bullet casing by her feet and spun it off the stage with a swift kick from her pink high heels. It landed among the crowd, and people fought to grab the souvenir.

  Creel was heading back out on stage, now. “Wasn’t that something?” he was saying, again like he was as much a carnival barker as a businessman running for president.

  Matthew swallowed a hard lump.

  He felt woozy.

  “I have to run to the bathroom real quick.”

  “You’re about to go on,” Hiram whispered.

  “He’ll talk for a couple minutes. He always does.” An odd moment of anger flashed through his mind and he thought, The guy can’t shut up. “I just need…I need a moment. I’ll be back…”

  He turned tail and headed around the corner, down the hall behind the stage, where they told him the bathroom was. Matthew found the men’s room by the tangle of pipes back here in the bowels of the convention center. And then he found his legs carrying him past it, past the women’s room, past all of it until he found a sign marked EXIT and a doorway out. He opened it up and then he was gone.

  There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

  —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

  JULY 14

  Valentine, Nebraska

  THE DAY WAS HOT. BENJI leaned forward on the car, hands flat against the hood. He doubled over, retching. Nothing came up. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, hadn’t had coffee. He dry-heaved a rope of stringy saliva into the gravel outside the storage unit.

  His ears felt hot. They rang and buzzed. He made a sound in the back of his throat.

  None of this was real.

  It couldn’t be. Again, just a delusion, an illusion, a hypnagogic hallucination as he lay restive on his motel bed.

  Benji, the world is ending…

  Sadie’s voice, floating up out of the ether in the back of his mind, singsongy. Benji…the world…is ending…

  Footsteps nearby. Benji craned his head to see, a string of spit dangling from his lower lip that he hastily spat against the ground. He wiped his mouth. It was Arav. Arav, who looked just as shell-shocked. Trauma-bombed.

  “I…don’t understand, Doctor Ray,” Arav said, his voice small.

  “It can’t be true,” Benji said with a grunt, forcing himself upright. He again wiped more from his lip.

  “This isn’t possible. The things they said…”

  And yet Benji feared that it was all true.

  * * *

  —

  “HAVE YOU EVER heard of quantum entanglement?” Sadie had asked them when they were still back in that storage unit.

  “I have,” Benji said, feeling more and more like this was some lunatic dream from which he could not awaken. “Though I possess only an amateur’s understanding of the concept.”

  “I’ll keep it simple in the interest of time. Two particles entangled with each other will mirror each other. Something done to one particle will be done to the other particle, no matter how much distance separates them, a principle called spooky interaction. Some
particles can be born like this; others have to be forced to act that way. Black Swan was designed as a quantum computer, with the qubits—the building blocks of computational information—given entangled partners in order to ensure swift communication, backup, and processing. This entanglement allows Black Swan to think more quickly and, most important, gives us a way to duplicate its ‘brain’ for redundancies. But it had an unexpected effect.”

  Benji suddenly understood, though it was madness to consider—he was no physicist, but this seemed impossible. “The quantum entanglement transcended physical distance and incorporated temporal distance. In short, a limited kind of time travel.”

  She nodded. “I knew you’d get it.”

  “That’s not possible. Surely.”

  “We believe it is. Black Swan communicated with itself from the future.”

  He shook his head. “No. No. You’re being played. Either by them—” He gestured toward Moira and Bill. “Or by Black Swan itself. It is cunning. It exposed you. Black Swan has hesitated in the past, and maybe it’s even lied. It’s truly intelligent, and intelligence means deception is possible.”

  “Perhaps. But what it told us has come true.”

  “I…can’t believe any of this, Sadie. It’s madness.”

  “You believe in God but you can’t believe in this?”

  “God…” He took a deep breath. He was not interested in or expecting a theological discussion today, though he supposed it was the least troubling aspect of the last however-many hours. “The universe makes sense. Everything interlocks neatly. Biology balances. Ecosystems balance. The natural world evolves not in thrall to some kind of intelligent design, but certainly to me as a reflection of there being an order to things. God is not separate from science but rather, is its driver. All things make sense when you see His fingerprints there. But this is not that. I don’t see any God here. Except maybe for a machine intelligence that sees itself as divine.”

  “Black Swan has never demanded worship.”

  “And yet we give it a great deal of power by asking it to predict what is to come. Further, now you’re saying it truly has. That somehow, against all understanding, this machine has corresponded with itself in the future. And what, exactly, did it tell you, Sadie? What was its message?”

  “The message of all gods and all mythology,” she said.

  And that’s when she said it.

  Benji, the world is ending.

  * * *

  —

  THE STORY WAS this:

  The fungal pathogen was real. The CDC was aware of fifty-two new infections, but that was just the top quarter inch of a massive iceberg still submerged and unseen. The disease would advance over the next six months—really, it had already advanced, already infected so many, it just hadn’t been seen yet. The pathogen was hiding in plain sight. And by the start of the new year the majority of humankind would be dead or dying. Civilization would have already fallen.

  It was a mass extinction event.

  Already they’d known about other species—there were drastic reductions in flying insects, in bats, in snakes, in plants. Over 40 percent of all animals globally had experienced precipitous losses. And now it was humanity’s time in the winnowing pit. Whittled down to splinters and sawdust. Maybe soon to nothing.

  Benji told them, that’s not possible, an extinction is something that unfolds slowly, over the course of a century or a millennium—it’s not fast, like in the movies. A tipping point was one thing, but something this swift, this merciless? It was unprecedented.

  Ah, but then Moira said:

  “What about the Third Extinction?”

  The Permian-Triassic event. The so-called Great Dying. The majority of all species perished. And that happened very fast, didn’t it?

  She was right. It was a confluence of events—a volcano, a comet, a release of methane into the atmosphere. Global warming on fast-forward. It still took a long time for the total number of species to die off, but what was clear in the fossil record was that some species vanished—almost overnight.

  “What if that happened today?” Sadie had asked. “A comet—”

  A comet passing overhead, he thought. Wormwood. He knew his Book of Revelation. He knew that the preachers and far-right cultists were speaking in those terms even now. It was absurd; the comet didn’t do this. Just the same, the coincidence kinked his bowels and turned his blood to ice water.

  He demanded Sadie stop.

  “Or a nuclear blast,” she continued. “A meteor, a super-volcano, or even some kind of pandemic—”

  “Stop!”

  It was then that he had to go. He threw open the shuttered door of the unit, staggering out across the parking lot—and by the time he reached the car, he was already bent over, his body trying to puke as if it could somehow purge what he had just learned. Now Arav was here, standing with him. Looking just as haunted. Maybe worse.

  Sadie followed them out. She looked calm. That angered him.

  “We’re all going to die, is what you’re saying,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s more, isn’t there? The flock. They’ll survive.”

  At that, Arav perked up. He hadn’t gotten there yet. Benji could see the wheels and gears spinning in the younger man’s eyes as Arav considered the strange ramifications.

  “I wondered when you’d understand,” she said.

  “The same protections that allow the flock immunity against weather, against needles, against the broken glass and jagged asphalt…they also protect against the pathogen.”

  “Oh my God,” Arav said. He just sat down on the ground, gutted.

  Sadie nodded. “You’ve got the right of it, Benji.”

  “That’s why you deployed them,” he said. “That’s why you sent a vial to Nessie Stewart. That’s why most of them have two things in common: They are of reasonable intelligence and they are of exceptional health. They are meant to survive us.”

  “The sleepwalkers, as you call them, are chosen to be the survival of the human species, yes. The last of us. But we did not deploy the nanodevices. Firesight designed them in an attempt to extend the human life span, perhaps create functional immortality—but they were repurposed to this task. Stolen, in a way, without our explicit permission.”

  “Who?”

  But then he had an educated guess.

  “Black Swan.”

  Sadie nodded. “One might say that in a job interview, Black Swan could describe itself as a real self-starter.”

  “This isn’t a time for jokes,” Benji said.

  “Why not? If I can’t laugh, then I’ll cry.”

  “Fuck you, Sadie.”

  She flinched, as if struck. “I’m sorry.”

  “What do you want from us?” Benji asked.

  “We want you to stay with the flock.”

  “That is not my decision. We go where we are assigned. You know that better than most, Sadie. And now with this…”

  “But you have influence. Loretta listens to you.”

  “Hardly. I’m disgraced. But fine. Let’s say she listens. Then what?”

  “Then you stay. You watch over the flock. That’s it.”

  “I’m not a shepherd. I’m a doctor. And they’ll need me with the team, tackling the pathogen—”

  “That’s old thinking,” she said. “It’s too late for that. Already the pathogen is widespread; it just hasn’t shown itself yet. It’s the flock that needs you. You’ve done well by the flock so far. And you’re better than law enforcement. The DHS especially.” She touched his arm gently, and he pulled away. “One day soon, the public is going to know about White Mask. They may not see where it’s going, not at first, but the breakdown will be faster than people expect. And that will put the sleepwalkers in danger, because they’ll be the only stable el
ement in a world gone mad. They must survive. They need smart people, sane people, like you there.”

  “White Mask,” he said. “Is that its name? The disease?”

  “Yes. It’s what they’ll call it.”

  “Christ.” Suddenly he said, “We’re leaving. Arav and I. You can…stay here. You take that fucking phone, your Black Swan, and you pray to it for wisdom.” As if on cue, he took his own satphone and flung it toward her. It clattered against the ground. “See if that monster intelligence can call you a cab. Come on, Arav. We have work to do.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE DRIVE back, he and Arav didn’t say a thing to each other. He kept his eyes on the road, though at times he felt the younger man’s stare boring through him like a pair of power drills.

  (He could practically hear the whir.)

  They turned the corner past tall wind turbines chopping air, and finally he opened his mouth to say something, anything—

  And his phone rang. His real phone.

  He looked at it.

  Loretta.

  “Loretta,” he said, answering it. Trying to keep his voice girded, because he wasn’t yet sure what he was planning to do with what Sadie had told him—about Firesight, about the flock, about the disease—

  What did she call it?

  White Mask.

  “I need you in Atlanta,” she said.

  He suspected he knew why.

  She continued: “It’s a meeting. Not a permanent reassignment. I booked you a flight out late tonight. Meeting’s in the morning.”

  “Loretta, I—”

  “Benji, this is all hands on deck.”

  They’d started to figure it out. Not the nature of the flock, no, maybe not. But the fungal pathogen. White Mask.