Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  It was a mad, bizarre thought, straddling the line between fear and fantasy. Whenever Matthew slept, he dreamed of that sort of thing. Nightmares of Stover holding him down and forcing his mouth open, ripping his pants off. Dreams of Matthew going after that big monster with all manner of implements: a screwdriver, a bolt cutter, a brûlée torch, a mallet and chisel hammered under an exposed kneecap…

  Focus, he told himself. You’re here for a reason.

  “See him?” Autumn asked. She sat on the ground behind him, hunkered there under some understory shrub, the trees above blotting out the sky with an autumnal canopy of reds and yellows.

  Matthew lay there on his belly, the rifle barrel the only thing emerging from the brush. He shook his head. “No.”

  “I’ll take a shift. Let me.”

  “I can keep looking.”

  “You’re tired. You’ve been at this for an hour.”

  So that was how long. God didn’t know. Autumn did. Since their escape from Stover’s compound that day, they’d found…well, he didn’t know what to call it, precisely. Common ground, maybe. A place where the past didn’t matter. She got clean off drugs. He got clean off religion. Neither asked the other about what went on there, and neither told the other a damn thing, either, unless it related to their son. Because Bo was why they were here. They needed their son back.

  “Your hand,” she said. “Is it okay?”

  “It hurts.” And it did. Matthew’s left hand was a useless claw. His fingers tucked into the palm. He could move them, but not without considerable misery. The whole hand was an antenna receiving signals of pain. Even a cool breeze summoned needles of agony.

  He set the rifle down, easing it into the brush against the carpet of dead leaves underneath. He eased back, wincing. She helped him.

  “Bo isn’t there,” he said. “We’ve been watching this spot for a week, and he’s just not…with those kids.” He scooched his butt backward through the crunching leaves to be next to his wife. “We have to find another way.”

  “Do you think he’s even in there?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. Not to sleep. Just to shut out the world. Behind his eyes, the dappled forest light formed tortoiseshell patterns. “I don’t know, Autumn. Honestly, I don’t. He was close with Ozark. Maybe he still is.”

  “I have faith we’ll find him.”

  “Faith. Okay.” He heard the disdain in his own voice and instantly regretted it. But he didn’t walk it back, either. He was too tired for that.

  “We’ll find him, and we’ll save him,” she said.

  And he believed her.

  Because though he had lost his faith in God, he had given it to Autumn. In Autumn, I trust.

  Back when they’d come roaring out of Stover’s compound in Hiram Golden’s Lexus, Autumn was kind enough to give him a couple of days to recover. They didn’t go home; they were afraid Ozark would find them there. Instead, they holed up in various motels, paying in cash, driving through a world then that looked on the brink, but that hadn’t yet fallen over the edge. The lights were still on. Life looked normal at a distance, even though when you looked close you could see the panic and the chaos setting in.

  And then one night, Autumn said to him:

  “We’re going to go get Bo.”

  And he said, “Let’s say we find him. Then what? You need to deal with the reality that maybe our son isn’t the boy we wanted him to be. That maybe we failed him in some very crucial, very fundamental ways.”

  “We loved him.”

  “Love sometimes isn’t enough.”

  “Love has to be enough.”

  Then she said: “You’re right that we failed him. I wasn’t there for him because I was lost to something that you wouldn’t help with. And you were lost to something, too—lost to your church, to your faith. But we aren’t lost anymore. We’re out here. Stripped down, cut to the bone, in a world that’s going fast to hell, but we’re together, and our son is out there, and we owe him the best we have now. You were not a great husband. You were not a great father. But you’re going to be now. Everything else is coming apart, but we are going to do the opposite. We are going to come together.”

  Then she asked him: “Do you understand?”

  And he did, and he said as much.

  Now here they were.

  Sometimes, he had doubts. The world was…sick. And dying. There was no America anymore. Listen to the radio—one of the only ways to get news, now—and you’d hear that the rest of the world had lost its damn mind—warlords in Africa taking over, the Chinese government locking people up in case they were sick, and Russia just straight up executing them in the streets. They’d met people on the road who were fleeing toward Canada. Crossing the border and heading north to hide. He and Autumn were healthy and at one point he thought to ask her if they should do that, too, but then he stopped himself. She had her resolve. Her mission.

  It was his mission, now, too. For too long he’d set the story of their family and their household, and he’d screwed it all up.

  In Autumn, I trust.

  God would not save them or their boy.

  So they had to.

  Matthew pulled the rifle closer to him.

  “I think I have an idea,” he said.

  Tumblr: Deathstar_Runner.tumblr.com

  Is anyone even out there anymore? It’s weird that the internet has gone quiet. I mean, I know some of you are out there because you’re reblogging this and whatever but it’s like, I dunno. Not as many as before. I’m still fine. Not sick. My mom isn’t sick either and my dad got sick years ago with cancer so he ducked out early, lol. We mostly just hide here in our house. Everything locked up. I hear gunshots a lot. I’m still gonna run the fanfic archive long as I can because if all we have until the lights go out is our fics then that’s what we have and that’s okay by me. Love you all.

  Source: deathstar-runner.tumblr.com

  1,400 notes

  OCTOBER 14

  Halloran Springs, California

  ACCIDENTS HAPPENED HERE WITH GREATER frequency than anywhere else they’d seen on this highway. It was plain enough to see: At this spot, I-15 bent just so, more the gentle bend of a crooked arm than a hard angle, but it must’ve been enough. Because at that gentle bend sat over a dozen makeshift memorials: some in Spanish, others in English, wreaths of plastic carnations and crosses made of wood, red candles melted to the mouths and necks of green beer bottles. The names of the dead came with earnest, honest messages: WE MISS YOU, BILLY; I LOVE YOU, BABY DOLL; EN MEMORIA DE NUESTRA QUERIDA TIO, QEPD; WHY’D YOU FUCKIN DIE ON US, EARL???; and on, and on. Grief and anger at the loss.

  Sadie was the one who figured it out. “It’s about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Leave Vegas late, still drunk, and in the half dark even a small turn in the road becomes something you miss—instead of following it, you drive off the road. Probably into an arroyo or into a massive saguaro cactus.” The guardrail that was here was erupted, torn asunder—Benji thought idly that it reminded him of the cell walls he’d found in Clade Berman’s remains. From when the itty-bitty little machines fired out of his body like microscopic howitzer rounds.

  Benji nodded and smiled, the plastic baggie in his hand shifting and crinkling as he turned it over and over again. “That makes sense. You have a keenly analytical mind. And I’m supposed to be the detective.”

  “You would’ve figured it out,” she said, false cheer in her voice. “You and I are different, I think. You’ve got your mind on other things. Meanwhile, I’ll do anything—anything at all!—to not think about those other things. You’re a laser focus. I’m a laser light show, more like.”

  “Laser light shows are dazzling,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I’m dazzled, not dazzling.” She did a game-show-hostess reveal of her body, covered in the red du
st of the desert. Her hair was untamed, somehow both frizzy and flat in the dry air. A sweatshirt gathered around her waist in a clumsy sleeve-knot. Cargo pants held pockets that, she joked, were finally in use for the first time in human history, keeping all manner of supplies stuffed into them, from tools to snack packets to flat packs of cheap fruit juice (“high-fructose corn syrup, really,” she said).

  The urge hit him to disagree, to argue, even, about how she was dazzling—beautiful despite the dust, gorgeous no matter the bulging cargo pants. But that wasn’t who they were anymore, so he shoved the urge away.

  Above, vultures wheeled in the sky.

  Like they were waiting for something, impatient and expectant.

  Waiting for us to just give up and die, he thought.

  Together Sadie and Benji stood temporarily alone. The flock was about a mile up the road. They’d catch up.

  But first came their ritual.

  They did this once a week. Together they found a spot away from the other shepherds, away from the walkers.

  Sometimes at night, so it was dark.

  Today they would perform this ritual in the morning. Above the horizon, the sun hid behind flat, saucer-shaped clouds. A lavender gleam glinted off them like the shine of polished nickel, serving only to further that UFO look. It gave the sense that an invasion was unfolding.

  Maybe, Benji thought, it is.

  Behind him stood an abandoned building: Above it towered a skeletal arrow-shaped sign that red NED’S GAS, and underneath it in rusted red: GIFTS, 24-HR TOWING, EAT. The arrow pointed to the building, which was once a gas station, a convenience store, a restaurant, and a garage.

  This place died long before White Mask came to America. It was at least ten years dead. Maybe twenty.

  “Ready?” Benji asked.

  Sadie forced a smile. “Ready as Betty and Freddy going steady.”

  Benji gave her a curious look. She shrugged.

  And in they went.

  * * *

  —

  TIME HAD PRESERVED the inside of the building better than he had expected. Yes, it was dust-swept and wind-worn, the windows long broken, the chrome of stools and tables and counters gone to rust. But otherwise it felt eerily preserved. Nothing inside was broken. The linoleum wasn’t ripped up, nor were the walls. Benji half expected graffiti everywhere, and drug needles on the ground next to old, desiccated condoms. But no—the place was largely untouched. A soda counter, store, and restaurant still serving the Mojave ghosts. Travelers traversing the highways and byways of the dead.

  Like us, maybe.

  “Over here?” Sadie asked, pulling a stool away from the counter. “It’s flat, at least. Or we could find a booth—”

  “No,” he said abruptly, too abruptly. We’re not on a date, he told himself. “The counter is fine.” He sidled up next to her and sat.

  There he saw that the counter was once marked up by those who visited the place—whether as patrons or after the place had been abandoned, he didn’t know. He saw names and phone numbers, expressions of love and lust. LOVE YOU, LADYBIRD. And REESE LOVES JERICHO. And MIRIAM <3 GABBY. He took out a key and carved into the wood:

  BENJI AND SADIE.

  Sadie eyed him up, smirking a little. “Posterity?”

  “A memory of us that will outlast us. At least by a little.”

  Then he turned his hand and let the baggie slide out.

  In the baggie were two Sporafluor swabs. Always two, one for him, one for her.

  Benji looked around, found a diner menu—the kind that wasn’t a book, but rather, a plastic-sheathed placemat. From his pocket he produced a handkerchief and used it to wipe the greasy dust off it. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t sterile. Certainly not a laboratory environment.

  But it should do.

  He peeled apart the bag, noting that Sadie was studying his movements carefully. Benji surmised it wasn’t because of anything he was doing, but because of the two swabs, and the gravity that surrounded them. If they were objects whose physical weight matched their emotional weight, they’d collapse the counter and drop clean through the mantle of the earth.

  Deep breath. He turned the mouth of the baggie toward her.

  “What a gentleman,” she said, again trying to be cheery.

  “Of course.” He willed a smile to his face, false as it was.

  Benji removed his own swab.

  “Shall we?”

  “This is very strange foreplay,” she said.

  He felt a flush rise to his cheeks. Instead of responding to that, he said, inexplicably, embarrassingly, “Bottoms up.” Then he shoved the swab up his nose. It had to go up pretty far, same as a flu swab would. It conjured a pressure behind his eye as he turned it around up there. The act summoned a tear in that eye—a lone drop that rolled down his cheek.

  Then it was out.

  Sadie was wrestling with hers, nose wrinkled up, lip in an awkward sneer as she roto-rooted her own nostril with the cotton swab.

  “I could do it,” he said, tasting for a moment the dry cottony paper taste in the back of his throat. “I could help.” The first few weeks they did this ritual, he did hers. But she said she wanted to learn to do it herself.

  “No, no,” she said, her voice nasal. “I think I’ve got it. Mwaaa. Ahhh.” She plucked it out, frowning distastefully at the mucus-slick swab. “I think I got a little brain matter on there, actually. I suspect I lost a few phone numbers on that one, and I may no longer know how to tie my own shoes.”

  He set his swab down on the placemat.

  She set hers down next to his, gently. Careful to keep them separate.

  Then, from her cargo pants, she produced for him the black light. This one, just a small flashlight, not part of an elaborate setup. This one she’d picked up at a mostly gutted Walmart north of San Francisco.

  “Who will do the honors?” she asked.

  “I can. Ah, if you want me to?”

  “I do.”

  She handed him the light, and as she did, she touched his wrist. “We do this every week, and we never really…say anything. Do you have…anything to say? To me? About…anything?”

  He had a thousand things to say. A million. A trillion.

  “No,” he lied.

  “I do.”

  “Oh. Well. I—”

  Her resolve was suddenly shaken. Waving him off, she said: “No, you know, it can wait? It can wait. Definitely.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He wanted to ask her.

  He wanted to tell her.

  Something, anything, everything.

  Instead, he turned the black light to the first swab.

  His swab.

  There, the cotton glittered just so, a fiber-optic brightness —he felt suddenly as if he were riding an elevator that had begun to plummet, its cable cut. Wooziness descended and he almost fell off his stool.

  He met her eyes.

  “I have to get away from you,” he said.

  “No,” she answered, reaching for his hand again. This time, she gently took his wrist and pivoted it just so.

  That way, the beam left his swab and fell to hers.

  Once again, the glittery glow of the stained swab showing fungal contamination. R. destructans. White Mask.

  Her breath pulled into her lungs in a short little gasp.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “We—ahh.” He tried to steady his breath. His heart was ricocheting around the inside of his chest. The words began to spill out of him, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t clamp his jaws shut to stem the verbal tide. “This does not have to be a terminal diagnosis, maybe—maybe my theory is right, maybe it’ll be like with white-nose syndrome in bats, if we can use the antifungals to delay the disease long enough, o
ur immune systems will kick in and develop a proper immunological defense response. Though there’s a problem because we don’t have enough antifungals, not here, not with us, and the country has gone to chaos: Where will we find some? That’s the next problem, but I’m confident we can do it. It looks dire—more dire than dire, it looks like a death sentence—but it doesn’t have to be, we have to have hope and—”

  Sadie reached forward, lacing her fingers behind his head. Her touch was soft, slow, but somehow urgent at the same time. Her gaze met his, and that shut him up. Her gaze was alive and manic, dancing like a torch in hurricane winds. He opened his mouth to say something—

  She pressed her lips against his. Her tongue slid into his mouth. He stood, suddenly, never breaking the kiss—he moved around her, then over her, and pulled her on top of him as he sat down hard onto one of the stools. Her hands fumbled with the buttons and zipper at his pants as he did the same to hers. His shirt went up over his head. Hers followed. Then his boxers. Then her panties. Both meeting the pool of discarded clothing on the floor. Again she climbed on top, him sinking deep into her—he buried his face in her neck, the scent of fresh sweat mixing with the odor of desert road. She took him in deep, deeper, her chin lifting, a small moan leaving her lips and riding up to the ceiling. The two of them rocked together in an erratic, potent arrhythmia—in them and between them flourished the heat of life, the madness of love, and the sudden absolute certainty of the end of all that they knew.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER.

  There wasn’t anywhere to lie down, not really, so Benji leaned back in one of the booths, melting into it. Sadie laid herself atop him, the back of her head falling to the cradle of his collarbone. It shouldn’t have been comfortable but somehow, it was. Truthfully, nothing should’ve felt good right now—they were dying, the world was ending, and the both of them were naked in an abandoned building where the only thing left for sale was a guaranteed case of tetanus. And yet there they were. Comfortable despite the comfort. Happy despite the Apocalypse unfolding all around them.