Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “Of course,” he said. His voice sounded hollow, faraway. He put a hand on the younger man’s knee and said he had a flight to catch, and Arav would stay behind to watch the flock. “Can you handle that?” he asked.

  Arav nodded, even as a chasm stretched between them.

  Weirdest thing? Okay so I’m an outfitter here in Ouray, CO—meaning, we take people out on hunts, usually for mule deer or elk. I was out alone a few months ago, still a bit of snow up there up above Box Canyon Falls. It was morning. And I got the feeling I was being followed. I kept turning around, looking down through the pines, and…didn’t see squat. Then I looked back and something zipped through the brush ahead, crackling through the understory. I thought, the hell was that? A deer? A bear? I unslung my 12-gauge—and that’s when they appeared in the air in front of me. Three drones. Like, fancy ones, eight little rotor blades, a big camera hanging from each belly. Black like a widow spider. They hovered in formation in front of me and I swear they were watching me. Scanning me. I took a shot at one but it had…predicted my movement and zipped off along with the other two. Some other townsfolk saw them, too, hovering over the streets of town before going to God Knows Where. You ask me, they were scouting for something. But for what?

  —user Huntsman99 at r/AskReddit, answering the question,

  “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen while alone?”

  JULY 14

  CDC Headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia

  ON THE PLANE RIDE OUT, questions plagued him.

  Why now?

  Where did the pathogen come from? Perhaps it had evolved. Perhaps it was released. Did Black Swan know? If what it said was true, then maybe it did, and a little part of him cursed himself for throwing away his access to it. But also, he couldn’t trust it. It was smart. He thought of the way it had hesitated to give him information. Or how it clearly bypassed Sadie’s wishes to share with him her phone call with Moira.

  And that was a whole other question:

  Why him?

  They wanted him on their side. Why? Surely it couldn’t just be to lead the flock as a venerable shepherd. Others could do that job just fine.

  Black Swan trusts you, Sadie had said.

  “Sadie,” he said aloud, in the plane.

  The man next to him—portly guy in a suit, a nose like a trio of cherry tomatoes, one big, two little—turned to him and said, “Huh? I’m Steve.”

  “Sorry,” Benji said.

  * * *

  —

  THE CDC BUILDING. Benji sat in the conference room outside Loretta’s office. Cassie led the meeting. Robbie Taylor was here, too, and he gave Benji a hug. Vargas, to his surprise, made an appearance. Gone was any sign of a head injury, and he explained that the docs said he probably shouldn’t be doing this, and he probably told them to go fuck themselves. Loretta said nothing. She stood in the corner, like a sentinel.

  Benji, all the while, made the motions and said the words, but he felt like he was floating, untethered. Like he was somehow out of sync with the rest of them. A time traveler who had come from the future but refused to warn those in the past of what was to come. That was to say, if the prophecy of Black Swan held true…

  Cassie began the meeting.

  “The pathogen that killed Jerry Garlin has proven itself patient and aggressive,” she said. Then, direly: “It’s a lot worse than we imagined.”

  “Shit,” Robbie said.

  Cassie said, “It’s called Rhizopus destructans, or R. destructans. That based off the similarities between it and Pseudogymnoascus destructans, the fungus that decimated bat populations. R. destructans did not affect the bats, but did affect the people the bats touched.”

  Cassie continued, talking about the fifty-two infected they had already identified, including another dozen dead—including one of Jerry Garlin’s advisers, a man named Vic McCaffrey. She showed them a grim image of the man, found dead in his bathtub, his arthritic hands overgrown with a wispy white fuzz of fungus. Already little wormlike tubules had begun to grow up from his flesh, each a reproductive structure eager to release and disperse the ballistospores that R. destructans had produced. It had fed off him, robbing his energy to grow deep into his brain, his sinuses, and once the madness had taken hold and claimed him, over the rest of his body, too.

  Benji spied another object in the photo—easy to miss given the carpet of white, woolly mold, but there on the side of the tub sat what looked to be a .45 ACP pistol. White grips. Benji wondered if the madness that overtook him included a heavy dose of paranoia. Then he wondered: What would that look like writ large? What would that be like across the stage of the United States? Europe? Africa, China, the whole of the globe?

  Not just sickness, but lunacy. Paranoia and confusion working hand in hand. Seven billion people going collectively mad before dying. His mind played it out: Would there be wars? A launch of nuclear weapons? Would humanity be able to summon that kind of strategy, or would it just be chaos? A riot of dementia patients clashing in the streets? Or would they go more quietly, locked in routines they didn’t understand, looking for relatives who had already died, meandering out into the world with no sense in their heads—the same way Jerry Garlin did, running off into a swamp for reasons that would never become clear to anyone now that he was gone.

  Was any of this even real? Was Black Swan telling the truth?

  As Cassie spoke, talking about mucormycosis—the infection of the brain and sinuses by a fungus, usually found only in those whose immune systems were suppressed in some way—Benji looked around the room. They all sat, rapt. Worried, yes, but fascinated. How could they not be? Again, the curse of a doctor in the medical profession—to see beyond people, to look deeper to the condition as a whole. They were already coming to respect and fear the pathogen. Its elegance. Its design.

  Benji wondered again about God.

  If this was real, if this was true, could he still hold God in his heart? He wasn’t sure that he could. Yes, he knew that the Bible spoke of a Lord who was willing to drown the world in a deluge to punish its sin, but he always took that to be metaphorical—or perhaps true on a small scale, a flood that kept itself to a small region that was, to the acolytes who lived there, their whole world and so it was to them the whole world that drowned.

  Perhaps God would save them.

  Perhaps, instead, it would have to be the CDC.

  It couldn’t be Firesight. It couldn’t be the flock. Humankind would not go out so easily, so completely. They would survive, somehow.

  Like that quote from Jurassic Park:

  Life finds a way.

  Benji spoke out, interrupting Cassie. He didn’t mean to—he had hardly realized she was speaking. Usually, he was sensitive to letting any speaker say their piece. But that propriety had fallen away, stripped by the anxiety of the moment.

  “How bad will this be?” he asked. “Worst-case scenario.” And before she could answer he said: “I know I’m interrupting you, and I apologize, honestly—I have all the faith you would answer this by the end but I’m afraid I’m too eager, and I admit scared, to learn the answer.”

  All eyes turned to him.

  And then back to her.

  Cassie wore a tough mask most days. Like she gave zero fucks—maybe one fuck, at best. Now, though, the color drained.

  She looked haunted by the answer to his question.

  “R. destructans is slow and effective. It’s both saprophytic and thermotolerant.” Meaning, it could survive in the soil and was tolerant of temperature variations, unlike other fungal pathogens, which tended to have a narrow window of heat or cold in which they survived. “This little bastard is hearty. It’s a survivor. Tenacious and stubborn. Though we have only a small sample size, at present it’s…” And here, Benji knew what was coming, even as the others didn’t. “It’s one hundred percent fatal. As I said, w
e have identified fifty-two others currently infected, diagnosed through MRI, and we expect that number to jump…significantly.”

  The faces around the room wore shock and horror.

  Robbie said, “Hold up, maybe it’s not people-to-people. Maybe it’s like valley fever—something in the soil.” Valley fever was endemic in the Southwest, a spore that lived in the dirt. When wind swept across flat areas, it picked up the spore and carried it for miles. People breathed it in all the time, but most didn’t get sick from it.

  Cassie shook her head and said what Benji already knew, thanks to Black Swan. “All the patients of the pathogen are clustered around points where Garlin and the others traveled. It’s not environmental.”

  “Then we’re fucked. We’ve all seen potential outbreak models,” Robbie said. “We can’t keep our heads in the sand on this. If the pathogen is slow to manifest symptoms but communicable nearly immediately, we have to imagine that there are considerable numbers of infected already out there. Walking around. Unaware of what’s inside them or how easily they might be spreading it. Getting on planes. Philly to Cleveland. LA to Tokyo. New York to Amsterdam to Johannesburg to Dubai. We don’t have easy detection, not yet. We don’t have a viable drug. We don’t have shit.”

  Benji nodded. “We could have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of infected out there right now. Think of the Brockmann models—” He referred to the work of a physicist named Dirk Brockmann, who came up with a physical model of a rolling outbreak based on common aviation hubs. It wasn’t just that airports were massive snarls of human traffic; it was that the humans were then boarding planes that took them hundreds, even thousands of miles away. Like internet data, airport traffic moved swiftly and globally—the internet carried information, and the airlines carried contagion. “Think of how fast airports will have already moved this thing around the globe. Think of how fast cholera spread in Yemen, or how quickly H1N1 moved around the globe. Bat populations have been rent asunder, and now snakes…” Worldwide extinction, he thought, but did not say. “Even if this thing takes down one percent of the global population—that’s seventy million people. On par with the Spanish flu of 1918. It’d be like the entire population of the United Kingdom thrown into a mass grave. Loretta, we need to go public with this. Immediately. Today. Yesterday.”

  Loretta said with a sigh, “Benjamin, that will be an option for Flores and Hunt to discuss. It’s up to us to present them with the data.”

  “Yes, and they’ll want to play it slow, they’ll want to be cautious, because of politics. And we don’t have time for that.”

  “It’s not up to us.”

  “It should be!” He heard his voice—it was louder than he intended, but he didn’t seem to be able to quiet it. In fact, it seemed to feed on itself and grow bigger. “We studied the models of outbreaks. Not just the outbreaks but the responses to them. We know what’s coming. We need to be on the red phone right now—” He stabbed the table with an insistent finger. “And if they won’t listen then we need to call the media. Find someone reputable at The Washington Post and—”

  “This isn’t Longacre. We don’t leak. We follow protocol.”

  “By the time we follow protocol we could all be dead!”

  His voice echoed through the room. It sounded like the ravings of a loon: a madman on a street corner predicting death for all, doom to the world. He had internalized what Sadie and the others had told them, and it had gotten in him as easily as a virus—or a fungal pathogen—could.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and then he left the room.

  * * *

  —

  HE WANTED A cigarette.

  Benji hadn’t smoked a cigarette since med school, and he hadn’t thought about a cigarette in…months? A year? But now the urge had him like a hand around his throat.

  Out here in the parking lot, the night was thick with the hot, sticky air left in the wake of the storm. He felt covered by it.

  Eventually, he heard footsteps behind him. He turned.

  Cassie.

  He exhaled, wishing it were cigarette smoke he was pushing out of his lungs. And when he inhaled, shame filled him back up. “Cassie,” he started, “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to step all over you like that.”

  “No,” she said, waving it off. “It’s cool.” It wasn’t cool, and he heard in her voice that it bothered her. Just the same, she knew that wasn’t like him, and so—he hoped—she was giving him the benefit of the doubt. They stood together for a little while—elbow-to-elbow. She didn’t look at him when she said, finally, “I’m heading up the task force to study R. destructans. But it should be you.”

  “No,” he said. “It should be you. You earned this. You’re good. Better than I am.” He smirked. “Any chance I had of taking it on evaporated with that outburst. Or maybe it evaporated with Longacre. I don’t know.”

  “You’re tired. You’ve been with the sleepwalkers. I’m just glad you’re here. Frayed nerves or no.”

  He kicked at a puddle of water.

  “What about antifungal drugs?” he asked her.

  “Blood–brain barrier could be a problem,” Cassie said.

  Benji wanted to yell in protest, but curse her, she was right. Antifungals didn’t do well for fungal infections of the brain—which this was. “Though, hold on—there’s caspofungin and micafungin—” Those were two drugs that had had success with fungal infections of the brain.

  “Effective on aspergillus and candida infections only.”

  An idea hit him out of the blue. “Hold on, what about Rhodococcus rhodochrous—”

  There! That was a notable success story, one based off simplicity and inventiveness. It was a bacterium used to delay ripening in bananas. Turned out, it also inhibited the growth of white-nose in bats—it didn’t “cure” it, no, but it slowed growth long enough to allow a bat’s immune system to catch up and beat it.

  Cassie shrugged. “Won’t kill the fungus…but could buy time.”

  “Time is what we’ll need.” He rocked his head back on his shoulders, felt the cavitation of his neck—the Rice Krispies crackle of tired, tense bones. “You weren’t with the CDC yet for SARS, were you?” he asked.

  “No. But I studied it.”

  “Over three months, hundreds fell ill to it. Zoonotic in origin—civet cats sold illegally as food. China kept a lid on it. By February, someone leaked a video online, showed someone with the illness. The system moved fast to catch up. By that point, WHO and the CDC had identified Patients A through J, looking at networks of how it would travel. By the end of March, a hundred cases became fifteen hundred, some in Canada. Early April, less than a week later: twenty-five hundred cases across sixteen countries. By end of April, it doubled again—five thousand cases, twenty-six countries. By July, it had slowed—because we had gotten ahead of it. And then, like that, it was gone. We beat it.”

  “Case study in disease detectives,” she said.

  “That’s true, that’s right. Yes. It was the old ways that beat it. Detection, investigation, isolation.”

  She looked suddenly exasperated with him. “And it showed how closely we were linked to the veterinary health of animals. The SARS case inspired me to be who I am. It’s why I’m standing here right now, Benji.”

  “I’m sorry. You already know all this.”

  “The kids call it mansplaining, dude. But I get it. SARS, though—this isn’t that. SARS was a day at the beach. The fatality rate of the SARS pneumonia was like, fifteen percent. The death toll never cracked eight hundred—a shit number, of course, any loss of life sucks. But compared with the Spanish flu, or the black plague—”

  “Millions dead,” he said. “Tens of millions. Yes.”

  “Around five percent of the world’s population, gone from the Spanish flu.” She clapped her hands together. “Ten percent mortality among
most, double that in young adults. Bubonic plague, fifty percent mortality. Septicemic plague, seventy-five percent, and pneumonic plague—the Mother of All Plagues, the Black Death herself—is what? One hundred percent death if untreated, and those treated aren’t necessarily cured?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And it’s why we need to act. Now. Not later. We’re so behind. We saw the walkers—the sleepwalkers were showy, obvious, strange. But that was the sideshow. A distraction. We didn’t see this other thing and now it’s on us. We’ve gone through Patients A through Z already and we are just scraping the paint off this thing.”

  “It’s slow. Which is bad. But that’s also good. It gives us time.”

  “Maybe.” He nodded. “That is a good point. It moves slowly, so that gives it a chance to stay in the game longer—but it also gives us a shot of coming up with something to cure it before it’s too late. We have to move fast, though. We’re going to need WHO on this, every pharmaceutical company, we’re going to need to find a swab detection method and an antifungal that hits this thing across the blood–brain barrier—”

  “I know all this,” she said, again. Less gently this time.

  “I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Telling you how to do your job.”

  “You are.”

  “Ah. Right. Sorry, Cassie. It’s been…a rough few days.”

  Flashes from him in a storage unit. Being told that the world was ending. That an artificial intelligence had sent its own discoveries back in time to be discovered by, well, itself. That somehow there was a flock of people designated to be survivors, protected by a swarm of nanobots…

  It was deranged.

  “We’ll get ahead of it,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder.

  Not if what they told me is true, he thought. But they couldn’t be right. Black Swan was wrong. He knew it. They’d fight this. They’d win.

  “I hope so,” he said. “If anybody can do it, you can. I’ll be around to help in any way you so require, all hours of the day.”