Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  But he was alone.

  Alone, at least, in this bunker. Above him, he heard sounds: motion and movement, the rumblings of engines, the murmur of men yelling indistinctly. The gruff wha wha wha of someone laughing. The banging of a truck gate. Tires growling over loose stone. It was in all directions—above him, north of him, south of him. A lot of vehicles. A lot of men.

  But what did it mean?

  RACHEL MADDOW: Let me ask you, Chris, before we begin. Will there even be an election in November?

  CHRIS HAYES: The bigger question is, will there even be an America in November?

  —The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Transcript 9/7

  SEPTEMBER 8

  Klamath River Bridge, California

  BENJI BREATHED IN DEEP. THE air was clear. No burning smell. The river babbled its susurrus beneath the bridge.

  The walkers were about an hour out. He’d taken to scouting ahead, which brought him here, to this bridge. He found a few car wrecks along the way. But nothing more severe than that.

  The bridge stretched out and back over the Klamath River. On each side were forested hills, the dark pines pointing toward the slate-gray sky. At each end of the bridge were two golden bears: statues mounted, guardians standing vigil over the bridge on both sides. Benji was sure there was a story there and so he decided to look it up, if only because he needed the distraction.

  His phone had service here. Slow, but able. (And here a dark thought cut through his curiosity: If humankind dies, how long will our cell signal go on? Will the internet remain even as we cease to populate it? Will our satellites keep spinning up there, networks reaching out to a population that has long gone dead and rotten?) He shook that off, opened his web browser, and discovered that sure enough, there was an apocryphal story about those golden bears:

  The bears—installed there in the 1950s—were not originally gold, it seemed. One morning, residents driving over the bridge found that the bears were painted gold. The highway patrol came and scrubbed the paint off with turpentine, but the next morning, what had happened? The bears were gold once again. This cycle repeated itself again and again, week in, week out: They’d remove the gold, and then the gold would return. They’d watch the bears but soon as the patrolmen fell asleep or went on their way, the bears were once again a shining, burnished gold.

  Finally, they gave up. And the bears remained gold.

  Years later it came out that it was nothing supernatural, nor was it the work of one person—rather, it was the Golden Bear Club, a group of men and women who sought not only to clean up their town and perform secret favors for people, but also to paint those bears gold again and again and again. Their only rules were, there were no rules. Happy anarchy. Delightful disobedience. Making the world better for no reason except to do it.

  Benji liked that story.

  But it made him sad, too. It seemed to him suddenly that it was easy to dismiss people as ultimately a negative force—a terrible influence upon the world and upon one another. Evil lived in the world. Wars and terror. Torture and assault. But he also knew that, statistically, the worst among them were a small percentage of the whole—it just felt like a lot more because that’s how it went. Same way one mean comment could spoil a beautiful day, or how a single mouse turd would ruin even the most perfect meal.

  Ultimately, Benji thought, people were good.

  Lazy, sometimes. Maybe ignorant, maybe willfully unaware.

  But they were good more than they were bad.

  And that meant they didn’t deserve any of this. He hadn’t even looked at the news this morning but it was easy to know that the numbers of the dead were mounting. He’d been standing on this bridge for ten minutes already and hadn’t seen one car coming or going. People were staying home. He’d passed houses with the windows boarded up behind plywood and new fences roughly hewn or cobbled together. Spray-painted signs said to GO AWAY OR DIE. Sometimes he saw other people milling about, like they were lost. Some of them had the telltale signs of White Mask: lips, nostrils, and eyes encrusted in the greasy powder of the pathogen, a wet white substance.

  Soon, violence would start.

  Already he’d heard tell of it: Last night on talk radio he heard the tale of a woman who found an intruder in her house and beat him to death with a nine-iron. Turned out, that intruder was the woman’s own husband. She woke up next to him, certain he was a robber or a rapist. Turned his head into a bloody paste. And then, the kicker?

  She went right back to bed.

  It was only in the morning that sense returned to her. She realized what she’d done and turned herself in.

  That was just on a small scale. Bigger would come, Benji feared. Bigger and worse. How could it not? In places like Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, aid workers and doctors coming to treat Ebola were thought of as harbingers and carriers of the disease rather than as saviors. Benji remembered being among a coalition of doctors, nurses, journalists, and aid workers in Monrovia—one night he was out with them, drinking local Club Beer, and next thing he knew they were having a friendly game of poker (a game at which Benji was never very good because, according to Robbie Taylor, he had about “four hundred and fifty-eight tells”). Come morning, he woke to learn that four of the people he had met the night prior were dragged out of their rooms. Their throats were slit. They were left in drainage ditches nearby.

  Disease caused chaos. Strife was born in its wake. It conjured fear and paranoia, and those things internally led to localized violence, then rioting, then civil wars. And that was something Benji had only seen on a local scale, mostly in Africa. But White Mask was more than just localized pockets of Ebola. It was a global pandemic. A hundred thousand dead days ago. Double that now, probably. It was moving faster than people could keep up.

  It wasn’t just the dead. It was the fact so many of the living were infected—many that wouldn’t know it yet for a month or more.

  What would happen then?

  Yes, people would die. But the end of civilization was a whole other thing; people could escalate that outcome, couldn’t they?

  Benji imagined Russia or Pakistan firing off nuclear weapons in an attempt to hit population centers with the most afflicted. Would those nations—the United States surely included—hit back? Or would we all be too far gone, by then, to remember the nuclear codes? Maybe White Mask’s delirium was a small blessing: no way to launch planet-killing weapons if you couldn’t remember how to launch the planet-killing weapons.

  But there existed plenty of weapons that did not require much in the way of mental faculties to use. The pull of a trigger needed only a tiny electrical pulse from the deepest parts of one’s reptilian brain.

  Benji shook his head, as if that could somehow clear the bad thoughts out. Here I was, enjoying the story of the golden bears, and now this.

  People were good, he reminded himself.

  They deserved to survive.

  He would do whatever it took to help that happen.

  Even if it meant that the flock of walkers were truly the last of humankind: the final ones, the survivors, the remnant.

  And then, a car.

  It came from the south.

  A red sedan. Compact. Benji felt himself tense up. The car was coming fast—faster than he’d like. All his hackles rose, goosebump soldiers marching across his arms and his neck. He’d driven the CDC trailer down this far, and he felt suddenly, woefully alone.

  And alone meant vulnerable.

  The truck and trailer were off far enough that the car should have been able to pass easily. And yet it veered in his direction, him just standing there—

  Then it began to slow down.

  Benji saw the driver, and his heart did this thing in his chest: something between an airy flip and a hard smacking belly-flop.

  “Sadie,” he said, his voice small as she pulled
the car in behind the trailer.

  * * *

  —

  “IT’S NICE HAVING you as my copilot again,” Charlie Stewart said.

  Shana, sitting there in the passenger seat of the RV, watched the road ahead as her dad eased the vehicle along. She peeped at the side mirror, saw in its tall glass the reflection of the flock behind them. It had been a while since she sat in this chair, and looking back over how the flock had grown—they were closing in on nine hundred, now, a massive human tide—was strange. It wasn’t the same as being down among them. This, sitting here, just above and ahead, gave her distance and perspective. Especially now that Marcy had told them that the sleepwalkers weren’t zombies—they were still in there.

  Somewhere.

  “I like it, too,” she said, and she did. But sadness dogged her just the same. She thought of Arav, out there somewhere. If he was sick, then he was dying. And that meant she didn’t have him anymore. And this baby of hers had no father. The thought of it all threatened to drag her down into despair’s bottomless depths…

  It was like her own dad picked up her brain waves:

  “We’ll figure it all out,” her father said. He reached across and held her hand. She’d told him last night that she was pregnant, and he said to her then the same thing. We’ll figure it out. “We’ll make it through somehow.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Suddenly, someone’s head thrust up in between the seats.

  It was, of course, Pete Corley. “Hey, don’t forget me. I’m your fuckin’ copilot, too, Charlie, by gods, I won’t be written out of this narrative so easily. Remember the good times, eh, Charlie?”

  “Ugh.” Shana gave her father a look. “Still thrills you, doesn’t it?”

  Glee danced in his eyes like fireflies. “You have no idea.”

  Pete had “upgraded” the RV, of course—while the Beast was still the same old knock-down, drag-out piece-of-shit, he had brought in piles of snacks and beanbag chairs and a fancy-as-hell espresso machine. Plus, the small amp, the electric guitar. It was a cluttered mess. She slept on the second pullout bed last night—Corley, to his credit, let her have it without a fight—and nearly broke her ankle getting there.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” she said.

  “Name it,” Pete said, his head still thrust up between them like a gopher popping out of a hole.

  “I’m talking to my dad.”

  “I don’t recall fathering you,” Pete said, “so, fine, whatever.”

  He disappeared back into the RV.

  “Name it,” Charlie said.

  “Let Pete drive. Come out. Walk with me. Walk with Nessie.”

  “Shana, I—”

  “Why don’t you want to? Why won’t you be near her? You hide in this thing and…” She steadied herself against the dashboard as the RV hit a pothole. “I don’t want to fight. Please just come out.”

  He sucked in a deep breath. “Okay, Shana. Let’s do it.” Then he yelled to Pete: “All right, Rockstar. Time to take the wheel.”

  * * *

  —

  SADIE CUT THE engine and got out of the car. Wind juggled an old fast-food cup in front of her. Benji felt dizzyingly lovesick—but still, to his surprise, angry, too.

  The two of them stood apart. A distance the length of the truck and trailer separated them. Neither came any closer yet.

  “What are you doing here?” he called to her. “Go home.”

  “I don’t have a home. Not really.”

  “I don’t care.” It was a cold thing to say—worse, a petulant, child’s thing. “Just go.”

  She seemed to rally some courage, and then walked toward him.

  He felt the feeling of being on the upward climb of a roller coaster.

  She kept walking until she was close. Uncomfortably so—uncomfortable precisely because once upon a time, it was very comfortable. Sharing space with her, being intimate, it felt like home.

  But he reminded himself that, as the saying went, you can’t go home again.

  “Why are you here?” he asked her again.

  “Everything is going off the rails.”

  “All according to plan, then, isn’t it?” he said, acid in his voice.

  “Not my plan. And not Black Swan’s, if that’s what you’re inferring.”

  “I don’t know what I’m inferring. I’m just…” He breathed out angrily from his nose, his nostrils flaring. “You’re done with me. Aren’t you? You got what you wanted from me. I’m here. I’m scouting for the flock. I’ve…bought in to whatever reality you’re selling.” As predicted, Black Swan has become my god. I have accepted its prophecy, like Saul becoming Paul on the Road to Damascus.

  She chewed on her lip. “Bill Craddock killed himself yesterday. Took a gun out of his desk and put it under his chin. He left no note and gave no warning. He hadn’t lost himself, not yet, but he was…forgetting things. He set off a security system because he forgot the code. He couldn’t find his car keys when they were there in his hand. Moira is alive. No signs of sickness in her, yet, I don’t think.”

  “And…are you…okay?” He tried very hard to make it seem like he didn’t care. But that was an epic task—one suited for a hero far greater than he.

  “Would you want me to be sick?”

  “I don’t want anyone to be sick.”

  “Yes, but how about me? You’re angry with me. Which,” she said, throwing up her hands, “I can’t blame you for. You should be angry with me. I lied to you. I manipulated you. I had Black Swan track your phone—which, by the way, is how I knew exactly how to find you.”

  He sighed. That explained that.

  “So,” she continued, “I would understand if you hated me. If some part of you, some small but significant sector of your heart, wanted me dead. Wished me to suffer in some way.”

  “I don’t want that. No part of me wants that. I loved you.”

  “Loved? Past tense. We could tell this story in the present tense, you know. Not, I loved you, but I love you.” She reached for his hand but he pulled away. “I want you to imagine something,” she continued. “Imagine that you create this thing, this quantum computer mind, and you begin to train it, and you realize that it has a mind of its own. And then, one day, it tells you something: It has been speaking to itself in the future, and it believes that civilization will one day end. That most humans will die from a disease called White Mask. That’s barmy. It’s joking, right? Or lying. Or it’s glitching badly, a bug buried deep in its nigh-infinite code.

  “The machine must be shut down, you think, but before you can do so, your creation says that it knew you wouldn’t believe it, and so it gives you a few pieces of information—predictions, not just the kind like it’s meant to do, but very precise predictions, a sports score, a news story, a lottery winner. And within the next few days, they all come true.

  “And now you’re left to wonder, have you gone mad, because you’re starting to believe this thing might actually know something you don’t. Even with it you think, Well, what can I do? Send out a warning? Is this a future that can be stopped? But before you know it, the machine has been quite proactive. It’s hacked into one of the companies owned by Benex-Voyager—a company whose swarm of nanoscale machines has failed to cure disease but has instead created a prophylactic and somnambulist effect. It has taken the swarm. It has started the sleepwalker flock. It is out of your control—you could attempt to shut it down, but then what? It has made its predictions. It has proven to you, within the best of its ability, what it can do and that what it is saying will come true. It still could be a ruse. But what if it isn’t? Now you’re left with a deep and unswerving belief that the world you know is coming to an end. Sooner than you’d like.”

  Benji stiffened. “I don’t know the point of you telling me all this…”

  “I’m t
elling you because I did come to believe it. I had faith in my creation. And when it named you, I had faith in that, too, and now I wonder if it put me with you…not just because you are the best for this job but also because you’re the best for me. I love you now, Benji. I love you today, and I love you in the future tense: I will love you, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that until there are no more days left for us.”

  “If you loved—love—me, you wouldn’t have lied to me.”

  “Regrettably, Benjamin, those two things are not mutually exclusive.” With the back of her thumb, she wiped her eye. “But that’s fair. I can’t expect you to forgive me. Or believe me. Or love me still. You don’t even have to talk to me. Which, by the way, would put you in rather estimable company.”

  “Somebody else you lied to?”

  “No, but perhaps someone else who feels betrayed by me. Or at least, has no more use of me.”

  “Who?”

  “Who else, silly? Black Swan.”

  * * *

  —

  SHANA WATCHED HER father carefully. He did not approach Nessie as a father to a daughter, but more as a father to his daughter’s grave—his steps were tentative, hesitant, like getting close to her somehow made her condition real. This, Shana realized, was the first time he’d truly been close to her in three months. Three months watching her at a distance. Now, up close, maybe Shana understood why he stayed away.

  He couldn’t hack it.

  The fractured look on his face, the way his hands trembled…Seeing her father fragile like that was difficult and comforting at the same time: crushing to see him be just another person, but nice to see that she wasn’t alone, either. None of us know how to handle this, she thought.

  “She’s barely changed,” he said with a hoarse voice. He licked a thumb and wiped a smudge of road-dirt off Nessie’s cheek. “Hey, Nessie. Hey, sweetheart. It’s me. It’s your dad.”

  Nessie, of course, failed to register anything. Neither his touch, nor his words. Onward she went. Onward they all went—she at the fore of the flock, hundreds of sleepwalkers marching out-of-step behind her. Shepherds walked interspersed, as they always did, though many stayed at the edges—two women rode their horses nearby, Maryam McGoran and her wife, Bertie. Both self-proclaimed cowgirls from Wyoming. The hoofsteps from their two horses were lost in the din of the moving flock.