Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  Charlie Stewart said, “And you say she’s still in there?”

  “Not me that says it,” Shana said. “Marcy.”

  She gave a look to Marcy, some twenty feet away at the side of the road. Marcy nodded and came over, seeing the moment for what it was: an exciting one, yes, but one that deserved delicate handling.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Marcy said, the caution evident in her voice.

  “Oh,” he said, surprised. Startled from his reverie. “Hiya, Marcy.”

  “We don’t know each other well.”

  “No, I suppose we don’t. I’ve…I’ve kept to the RV. I…maybe shouldn’t have.” He swallowed a visible lump. “You say my girl is still in there? Nessie’s not…gone?”

  “I don’t think so. I can…feel her. Hear her a little.”

  “What’s she saying?”

  Marcy looked sheepish when she shrugged. “She’s not saying anything specific right now. But the glow is strong around her. And I get the sense she’s…happy.”

  “Maybe she knows I’m here.”

  “Could be, Charlie. Could be.”

  * * *

  —

  BENJI BLINKED. HE wanted to laugh. “Excuse me? I don’t understand.”

  “Black Swan will no longer take my calls, so to speak.”

  “But you designed it.”

  “I was head of the design team, yes. The only one who remains attached to it. And that still does not change the fact that Black Swan won’t talk to me. It won’t respond to my questions. It will not acknowledge my presence. If you say that Black Swan is a god, then I am in that god’s shadow where the deity chooses not to see me.”

  “In traditional theology, that puts you in Hell.”

  She smiled a little. “The only Hell I know is the one without you.”

  “You’re pushing your luck.”

  “Too cheesy?”

  “Too…something.”

  “I mean it, though. Cheesy and cheeky as it sounds. I miss you. It fucking hurts to have hurt you. I think I loved you from the get-go, Benji. I came to admire you, too. Black Swan was right to have chosen you because…well, look. Look at the flock. Look at you here. This is all because of you.”

  “Sadie, please…”

  “I want to understand what happens now. I don’t know where this is going or when it ends, but I think it ends sooner than I’d like. I think we’re in danger. I think Black Swan is in danger. Will you help me?”

  He sighed. “No.”

  She opened her mouth, then seemed to reconsider what she was going to say. “Okay. I understand.” Sadie touched him on the arm—a gentle touch, one from which he did not recoil. Then she pointed past him. “Looks like your flock is here. I’ll wait till they pass, then I’ll go.”

  “Of course.”

  And then they stood there in silence as, on the other side of the bridge, the walkers emerged from around the bend and headed toward the first pair of golden bears marking the start of the Klamath River Bridge.

  * * *

  —

  THE THREE RVS passed and the flock stepped onto the bridge, past the two statuary bears. Shana’s father had taken to brushing Nessie’s hair—one of Shana’s daily chores, one she always wished her father would help her do. Or even that he’d just come be with her as she did it. It was a chore that she did some nights back when…

  Well, when things were normal.

  As they passed the two shining bears, her father looked up. “We had a bear show up at our house once.”

  “What?” Shana asked, half laughing. “Nuh-uh. Liar, I don’t remember that.”

  “We did, really. You don’t remember it because we didn’t tell you.”

  “What? When?”

  “Your sister wasn’t even two, so you were, what, like—”

  “Five.”

  “Yeah, five, just started kindergarten. It was autumn, the leaves had just started to fall, and it was evening—the air getting chilly, the sky going purple like it does on its way to darkness. We heard a clanging sound down by the road and—”

  “Wait, I remember this. You said it was raccoons.”

  “We thought it was raccoons. Messing with the trash cans again. Your mother said she’d go out and chase them away, so she took a broom and walked out of the house toward where we kept the cans then, which was right by the well-pump building next to the stable.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.”

  “Right, we tore it down only a couple years after when we had to move the well. Anyway, so she goes out and I don’t think much of it until—I hear her scream like she’s being murdered out there somewhere, so I don’t know what to do, and I don’t think to grab a knife or a gun but I’d been working on dinner, making spaghetti because that was one of the only things you’d ever eat—”

  “Omigod I remember that you guys used to baby-talk to me and would call it pasketti—”

  “Like some little kids do,” Marcy said.

  “She’d correct us!” Charlie said to Marcy. “She’d say—”

  “I’d say,” Shana explained, “Dad, it’s spa-gett-ee, not pa-skett-ee.”

  “Then she’d get this scrunched-up look on her face, all her features balling up tight, and she’d say in a low, forbidding voice, like a growl: Get it right.”

  Marcy whooped with laughter. They all did.

  “Anyway, anyway, hold on,” Charlie said, gesturing with the hairbrush to get everyone to shush. “The bear! So, I was making spaghetti and I had a baguette or whatever it was, a long piece of French bread, that I was gonna put in the oven, and so I grabbed that and ran out.”

  Marcy snorted. “A baguette? You were gonna fight off a bear with a baguette?”

  “I didn’t know it was a bear.”

  “Okay, okay, but now I’m picturing you looking like some kind of Baguette Samurai—”

  Shana’s father was laughing now, and she was, too, because they were all picturing it. He went on: “So I go outside, my bread sword at the ready, and I see your mom hunkering down behind the trash cans, and I’m at this point thinking she saw a garter snake or one of those big-ass garden spiders, the ones with the bright-yellow butts, because they liked to weave webs right over the can to catch flies. That kind of stuff freaked your mom out, she wasn’t from Pennsyltucky like we are, she’s a city girl.

  “So I go out, shaking my head, calling over to her, thinking she’s just being—you know, city girl, and I throw up my hands and say why’d you scream? And she looks at me, eyes wide, and wordlessly she just points. And where she’s pointing is right behind me. I’m still not thinking anything is wrong, so I turn around fast like, What the hell am I going to see here, and next thing I know—”

  The sound registered in Shana’s ear only later: a distant pop half a second before her father’s head jerked, as if slapped.

  He blinked, as if bewildered.

  His words dissolved into sounds: mushy, surprised sounds.

  A gassy gurgle.

  His jaw was gone.

  One second, it was there. The next, all that was left was a hole once closed by his lower jaw. His tongue remained, flapping around, tasting the open air. His eyes went wider and wider and then a gargled scream forced its way out of him. Blood began soaking his shirt as his hands went to paw fruitlessly at the space where half his face once was.

  * * *

  —

  BENJI HEARD THE shot.

  He wanted to believe that’s not what it was—

  But then he saw, at the other end of the bridge, a hundred yards off, the red mask that once was Charlie Stewart’s lower jaw.

  He turned to Sadie, and said: “Get in the trailer. Now.”

  Then Benji turned and ran toward the flock, across the bridge.

  * * *

  —r />
  SHANA DIDN’T UNDERSTAND.

  Dad.

  Marcy yelled, “Get down!” and grabbed her shoulder and dragged her to the pavement. Through Nessie’s legs she saw Doctor Ray down at the other end of the bridge, his arms waving as he ran furiously.

  Another crack of distant thunder.

  One of the walkers nearby, Dolores Hanrahan, the old woman in her bra-and-panties—her head snapped to the side. A mist of blood spraying out. A shimmer flashed the air around her and then she was down.

  Then Hell opened up.

  Firecracker thunder split the sky, and bullets cut through open air, most of them ably finding targets. Walkers and shepherds fell to the asphalt, one by one. Somewhere Shana heard a horse neigh. Dogs barked. RV and truck horns bleated between gunshots. Her head found the cool road and her pulse beat jackhammered in her neck, her wrist, her chest. Panic pressed her to the ground. From down here it was easy to see who were walkers and who were shepherds—the walkers kept walking in their straight line, inevitably forward, while the shepherds were in chaos. Scrambling this way and that or hitting the ground.

  Nessie was walking. Forward across the bridge. Leading the way without knowing she was leading the way.

  Right into the cross fire.

  Someone is shooting at us, Shana realized.

  They shot my father. Her father, who was on the ground now, his heels juddering against the asphalt as a sound arose from his throat like a howling wind from inside a deep and awful pit. Shana scrambled over to him even as Marcy wound the length of her hoodie sweatshirt around his face—a mask that quickly turned into a blood sponge. Crimson and dripping.

  They’re going to kill Nessie, too.

  Her breath in ragged jets, Shana unslung her backpack and reached into it and pulled out the handgun that Zig had given her so long ago.

  * * *

  —

  PETE DROVE THE RV forward at a slow crawl, which was surprisingly difficult—keeping up a pace of five miles an hour was considerably harder than just putting pedal to the metal and forcing the Beast to a froth. But he kept it easy. A gentle urge on the accelerator kept the RV caterpillar-crawling along. All the while, Pete thought about Landry as he listened to Uriah Heep B-sides from the re-cut and re-released album, Return to Fantasy. People didn’t appreciate Uriah Heep these days. Led Zep, sure. Pink Floyd, duh. Aerosmith, okay, yeah, Tyler’s trademark screamy scat-man vibe (ooh-ack-ack-ack-ack-owww!). But Heep? People didn’t even remember Heep, even though “The Wizard” was like if the Who fucked Led Zeppelin and Blue Öyster Cult at an orgy after an opium-laden game of Dungeons & Dragons. And by the gods, don’t even get him started on “Traveller in Time”…

  Headphones on, Pete’s mind wandered to Landry—a romantic night of the two of them walking behind the walkers became the two of them wandering off into the dark of the pines and fucking like squirrels. Then he thought of his wife and his son and his daughter and well shit if guilt and shame were not certified erection-softeners. If self-disgust could only be sold in pill form it would be a perfect countermeasure against those (frankly lucky) sods who ended up with rebar boners lasting more than four hours.

  And then, he saw ahead—

  Benji Ray running out across the bridge. Waving his arms like a swarm of fucking bees was around his head. Then someone staggered out off to the right of the Beast—one of the shepherds, Pete thought, maybe Lonnie Sweet. Was that—was the man bleeding? Blood pumping from his neck. What the hell had happened to him? Idly, Pete threw a glance into one of the side mirrors since the RV had no rearview and—

  Chaos.

  Walkers walking. Shepherds fleeing. Pete scrambled to fling the headphones off his head, the din of Uriah Heep’s “Time Will Come” suddenly lost beneath the sound of gunfire and screaming.

  “Jesus tits on a fucking banshee,” Pete hissed. Ahead, Benji was now halfway across the bridge—

  Something kicked up near Benji’s feet. A cough of gravel and dust.

  A bullet.

  “Ah, shit. Blood fucking shit bollocks.”

  Pete slammed the accelerator and whipped the Beast to run.

  * * *

  —

  THE GUN FELT heavy in her hand. Shana didn’t know what she was going to do with it, not exactly—but she knew it was all she had to defend her sister. Her father couldn’t do it now. He’ll be okay, she told herself. He will make it through this. You’re what’s left. Snap to it.

  But then Marcy was on her, wrenching the gun out of her hand.

  “No,” Marcy seethed. “No.”

  “I need it!” Shana said, reaching to swipe the gun back. But Marcy held her at length.

  “You have no trigger discipline. No tactical strategy. Look.” She pointed to bodies already on the ground of walker and shepherd alike. “They’re facing different directions. We don’t have one shooter, we have two.” Shana hadn’t even noticed that—she was too shell-shocked by everything to even get a sense of what was happening. “Maybe there are more, I don’t know. But they’re probably in those hills. I’m going.”

  “What, no, no, I’m coming with you—”

  “You stay here. Your dad needs you. Get him to one of the RVs.”

  “But Nessie—”

  “Nessie will have to be on her own. You can’t stop her or she’ll pop. You can’t block a bullet. Get your dad outta here.”

  Shana offered a nervous, frightened nod. “Okay. Okay.”

  And with that, Marcy stood, ducking as she did, and hurried backward through the flock, Shana’s gun looking small in her massive hand.

  * * *

  —

  FOOT ON THE gas, then foot on the brake. The Beast leapt forward and then, fast as it rumble-grumbled to life, it skidded on the asphalt only ten feet in front of Benji Ray. Pete yelled at him through the windshield, “Come on! Come on, you fucker, get in here!”

  Pop. The passenger-side window spiderwebbed around a center hole—Pete felt the bullet more than he saw it, the way you feel a wasp zipping past your head. The inside of the driver’s-side door shuddered as the projectile cut into it. “Jesus fucking fuck,” he said, backpedaling out of the cab of the RV and into the room, nearly tripping on the electrical cable running to the little amp he’d bought in order to charge it.

  Behind him, the door flew open and Benji dove in, scrambling to clumsily kick it shut behind him. Pete stood to help him in, but Benji instead used his weight to pull Pete down. “Get down.”

  “Fuck is going on?” Pete asked.

  “Someone is shooting at us,” Benji hissed.

  “Well, I know that. Who?”

  “Well, I don’t know that. How the hell would I?”

  Another bullet thunked into the side of the RV. Pete cried out wordlessly, a guttural bark of fear, as it hit. “The hell are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. We need to think. Think.”

  “The flock. They’re not protected,” Pete said, and honestly, he was surprised as anyone that he was thinking about someone that was not himself. At this very moment, he knew he could—should!—be in the driver’s seat of this ugly-ass turdmobile, pounding the pedal and driving down to San Diego for some fish tacos and hydroponic weed while the world died. And yet here he was. In the cross fire. Thinking about saving other people, ugh. “What are the—what are the other vehicles doing?”

  Pete knew they’d lost a number of drive-alongs along the way—in the front guard it was Charlie’s Beast RV and another two campers, plus a VW camper van. In the rear guard it was a couple of trucks, a couple of cars, and another three campers, right? One not an RV, but an old metal Airstream.

  “That’s it,” Benji said, breathlessly. He fumbled with his pant pocket, pulling out his phone. “We’re going to use the others. The other vehicles. We can form a wall—a corridor. We can protect them.”
r />   “Not all of them,” Pete said.

  But Benji was already on the phone.

  * * *

  —

  THE MARCH WAS anguish. Shana, her jaw stiff and her muscles tight just so she didn’t break down weeping, dragged her father’s injured body slowly through the walkers. She bent down, using the flock as cover as she slowly pulled him along the road. Some small part of her knew that this was not how to do it—she was probably giving him brush burn, road rash, probably slowly abrading his skin along the surface of the cracked asphalt. But she did not have the strength to pick him up. Did not have the strength to carry him forward. Nor could she move faster than the flock—stepping out ahead would be the worst action she could take, exposing her to the snipers that must be out there.

  Not that she could even gather that kind of speed.

  Onward she dragged him. He stared up at her. His eyes rotating in their sockets. He tried to speak but the sounds were just mewling, confused moans.

  Eventually he stopped making any sounds at all.

  Eventually he stopped looking at her and stared only at the sky.

  Shana kept going. With the flock. Toward the Beast. Toward Nessie.

  Because what else could she do?

  * * *

  —

  MARCY, ON THE other hand, moved backward through the flock. She kept low, gun in her hand, as a rifle shot went off every five, maybe ten seconds. Her blood boiled inside her. This flock was her home. They were her angels. The shepherds gave her solace.

  This trespass would not stand.