Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “What do you want with it, then?”

  “Plainly, I want to live. And I want others to live, too. Friends. Family. Loved ones.”

  She put another handful of almonds and cashews in her mouth, slowly, deliberately chewing as she studied him. “And you think it’ll do that? The drug. Help people survive.”

  “I have no idea, honestly. But we are desperate for a solution, and your pre-trial drug has been identified as one option.” He explained to her how slowing down white-nose syndrome in bats helped them kick it, over time, and how he hoped for the same with White Mask in humans. “But it’s a Hail Mary pass, as it were. I don’t have proof. I only have faith.”

  “Helluva thing, faith,” she said, still chewing. “I got a kid and a husband at that house you asked me about.”

  His blood went cold. He hoped this was about to go one way and not the other. But deep down, he knew where it was headed.

  “They’re still back there. My husband got sick first, and, ahh, he went downhill fast.” Her mouth suddenly became slick, tacky with grief—her words sticking together, her sinuses thick with the disease and from the swelling of tears to come. “I had to still go to work every day, you know, but Roddy was out of a job and Ophelia was in preschool only like, three days out of the week, so he was home with her, and…I didn’t know yet what the disease was, nobody did, not really, and this was before everything, you know? Before Hunt got shot, God, even before her statement, and…Roddy went to give Ophelia a bath and…he just…I don’t know what happened, not really, I don’t know if he forgot her, or if he had some idea that she was no longer his daughter and was some, some bad thing to be dealt with. He drowned her. Then went about his business like he didn’t even remember it. I came home, the water flowing down the steps because he never even turned off the tub, and because her hair clogged the overflow drain. I didn’t know what to do. I took a knife, swung at him a few times. He didn’t know why. I showed him. He saw what he did. He loved her. He wasn’t the best dad, but he was good, you know, a good man, and I could see it crush him flat. He called the police. I just cried and cried. They took him away and then…they took her away. Then President Hunt made the statement about White Mask. She got shot and the world went topsy-turvy. I moved out of my house. They’re still there, Roddy and Ophelia. There like ghosts. So, fine. You think you can help someone, help them. You can have as much 1342 as you want.” She swallowed hard, never crying, mostly just staring off at some unfixed point in the void. “Coffee’s done. I’ll get you a mug. Then I’ll get you your drug.”

  * * *

  —

  AND LIKE THAT, she was already shuffling him out the door. Part of him didn’t want to go. He wanted to be here for her, but also, selfishly, he just liked that this felt normal for a little while. A hot cup of coffee, some snacks, an office break room. It was easy to forget what was really going on out there: a pocket of solace in the storm.

  But she wanted him out. And he had to get back to the flock.

  She first took him to the labs—which had been shuttered since the owners of the company left and never came back—and showed him to one of the med fridges. He saw that it was set to room temperature, which was good: It meant the drug, even in its preclinical state, was stable. She pulled out six pill bottles, each containing 30 pills—so, 180 total. Good news was, 1342 was strong enough to be a once-a-day pill, so they would last longer. (If they worked on White Mask, which was as yet a grave unknown.)

  Benji put the pills in his backpack, but then reserved a pair.

  “Take it. Or take two—” He wasn’t sure what sixty days would get her, if anything—but she’d done him some kindness, and though it cut into what he would take out of here, he could not in good conscience fail to give her something for her time. He tried to give her both bottles.

  “No,” she said, reaching for his hand and folding his fingers back around the proffered bottles. “I think I’m done.”

  “Rosalie—”

  “It’s okay. I’ll see you out, Doctor.”

  He put the bottles in his pocket. Then together they headed to the door, her sniffling and blinking crust out of her eyes. She again opened the accordion gate and then the glass door after.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “It’s no big thing. Go save the world. Or your friends.”

  “I’ll try…I know it doesn’t help, but I’m sorry, too.”

  “For what?”

  “About Ophelia.”

  “Ophelia? I don’t think I know her.” Her eyes fogged over as she struggled to understand what or who he was talking about.

  She really didn’t know. White Mask had, at least in this moment, stolen her daughter from her. Maybe it was a mercy. But to him, looking from the outside in, it was a horror.

  “I’ll see you, Roddy,” she said, and leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Don’t forget, I need avocados. Don’t go to the WinCo. Go to the Vons.”

  “Oh…okay,” he said, then took a step back.

  Her eyes followed him, still rheumy with confusion. Then they opened in sharp awareness, as if she were tracking something, or someone, behind him. Just a hallucination, he assumed—

  Something clubbed him in the base of the skull.

  Light burst in capillary streaks behind his eyes as he staggered sideways, crashing against the office building. A shadow moved out of the periphery, into the half-light—something long and dark lifted up. Rosalie cried out, and as she turned to run, a shotgun roared. A bouquet of blood bloomed in the center of her back, and she went down, her arms pinwheeling.

  Benji felt on his back for the rifle slung there—

  But it wasn’t there. It was in the mini van.

  A man stepped forward, clad in the sandy camo you’d see on soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan. Unlike a soldier, he was unkempt: His jacket was open, exposing a filthy undershirt marred by jaundice-colored stains.

  “Doin’ a little looting?” the man asked him, using his shoulder to itch the stubble on his jowly cheek. He pointed the shotgun—a single-barreled autoloader, semi-auto by the look of it—right at Benji’s chin. “On your knees, now. Go on.” Benji complied. Hands behind his head. The pills were safe in his pack, but was the pack safe? He suspected not. “Were you looting? C’mon. Don’t lie to me, now. I pull this trigger, I take your head off at the neck, kapow. A fuckin’ mess. Like a goddamn Gallagher show.”

  “I wasn’t—I’m not a looter, I’m a doctor—”

  “Right, sure, sure, a doctor.” The man rolled his eyes. Then he called out: “Hey, Paul, we got a doctor here. He can finally look at those hemorrhoids of yours.” To Benji: “You do that? If my friend comes over here, takes his pants down, you’ll look at his shithole, tell him what’s going on there? I bet that thing looks like a muffin where somebody poured too much batter into the cup, you know?”

  “Just let me go. Please.”

  Here came the other man: Paul, he assumed. Paul was older, silver hair in messy, starchy spikes. He had a pistol in his right hand as he walked over. “Shut the fuck up about my goddamn hemorrhoids, Richie,” Paul said. “You really a doctor?” he asked Benji.

  But Richie interjected: “Of course he’s not a doctor. Look at him. He’s a spook, for one thing.”

  “Black doctors are a thing, you fucking idiot,” Paul said.

  “Yeah, but they’re not as good as a white doctor.”

  “They train same as any.”

  “You’re closing in on being some kind of race traitor with talk like that,” Richie said. “Besides, he isn’t a goddamn doctor—”

  “I am,” Benji protested. “I truly am. I’m with the CDC—”

  “See?” Paul said. “With the CDC. I don’t know if you’ve figured it out yet, numbnuts.” Numbnuts being Richie, it seemed. “But we’re in something of an End Times scenario, and we need doctor
s who can fix us up. Color of his skin don’t matter. He can work for us, long as he knows his place. Slaves back in the day were part of the family, too, not just animals.”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  “Fuck you, Richie.” To Benji, Paul said: “What’s in Ouray?”

  Benji’s blood turned to ants crawling through him. “What?”

  “Ouray, Colorado. You got an atlas open on the passenger side. Got a route outlined in pen, and Ouray is circled. That where your people are? That where you’re headed?”

  “I just…” Benji struggled to find an answer, to conjure a lie. The shotgun barrel, a yawning black maw, turned again toward his chin. “It’s just me, I’m going there because I thought it would be a safe space, totally out of the way, nobody there. Up in the mountains. Ride this thing out.”

  Paul sniffed. Coughed a little. Was he sick? Hard to say. “Smart. Maybe you are a doctor after all. CDC, even. Richie, take him over to his van over there, get some cuffs on him. Take what’s valuable, and we’ll haul him to the Strip, see if Huntsman knows what to do with him.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Go inside, see what they got. Door’s open now, thanks to the good doctor here.”

  “I wanna go inside.”

  “Turns out, I don’t give much of a shit what you want, Richie. You wanna drive back to the Strip safe and sound, you’ll do what I say. You don’t do what I say, I’ll drag you behind the truck like a disobedient dog. Hear me?”

  “Fine,” Richie said, pouting. A line of snot bubbled up out of the left-hand side of his nose. He winced and sucked it back in with a head-jerking motion. Then he gestured with the shotgun. “You heard him, Doctor. Up.”

  Benji nodded, stood up. He cinched his bag tight, hoping that he’d figure out a way to make off with it. Maybe I can run. A shotgun had a spread, right? Birdshot, buckshot, maybe if he ran fast and zigzagged, he’d only take a few pellets and…

  As Paul stepped over Rosalie’s dead body—like it wasn’t anything more than an environmental obstacle—Richie grabbed Benji by the backpack, then yanked down on it, nearly dropping him to his knees once more. “Gonna take this, for starters.”

  “I need that,” Benji said, the straps of the bag around his elbows. He locked them to his sides, wouldn’t let the bag go.

  Whack. The hard metal barrel of the gun slammed into the side of his head, and it was enough—his body lost tension long enough for the bag to come off. “I’ll take that, Doctor.” Then the man shoved Benji forward again; he had to juggle his legs underneath him so that he didn’t pitch forward and fall flat onto the cement. Richie continued to shove him until he slammed face-forward into the mini van. Already he saw the windows had been broken open, the safety glass gone to little gleaming chunks everywhere.

  “Pop open ’at door and let’s see what you got in there,” Richie said. “Paul said to cuff you, but I’m going to make you do the work for me.” Thinking he was sly, Richie added: “Because that is the natural order.”

  I’m a fucking doctor of the CDC.

  He thought that, but did not say it.

  Instead, he opened the door.

  Which opened on the middle seat of the mini van.

  And there, under the blanket, sat the Ruger Mini-14.

  “What’s under there?” Richie asked.

  “Food,” Benji said. “Here, I’ll show you—”

  “Hold on, slow down.”

  But Benji was eager, too eager, and already he was clambering up into the seat, straddling the rifle. Already Richie was protesting, “Hey, what the fuck you got under there—”

  It was easy to know what would come next. Richie would point the gun. Take a shot. Or grab him, drag him out.

  He didn’t have time.

  A matter of seconds. Half seconds. Moments split into hairs.

  Benji slid his hand under the blanket, his hand finding the cold graphite stock of the rifle—

  A hand grabbed him by the heel of his boot—

  He arched his legs, spreading them farther apart—

  “Get the fuck back out of there, you goddamn—”

  His thumb found the trigger, and pulled.

  The gunshot was loud inside the van, even with the door open. His ears instantly roared to life in a dull scream deep in the well of his skull. The air was filled with the devil’s stink of a gun gone off, and he quickly rolled over, dragging the gun back up and out—and there, on the sidewalk, lay Richie.

  The shotgun sat nearby; he’d let it fall in order to clutch the hole in his middle. The one pumping red.

  “Oh,” Benji said, breathless and bewildered. He slid backward out of the van, rifle in hand—then he knelt by Richie, struggling to get the bag out from under him, as he’d fallen right on it.

  “Fuck offa me,” Richie croaked.

  “Give me this,” Benji said. He heard in his words a crass, guttural need—an animalistic selfishness. Give me this. It’s mine. I’ll kill you.

  Richie’s blood-slick hand left his middle and pawed hard against Benji’s cheek—a dull whop like a swipe from a dying bear. Then the man grabbed him by the neck, tried to push him away, then pull him, like Richie couldn’t decide if he wanted Benji off him or close enough to bite.

  “Hey!” came Paul’s voice as he skidded out of the CCR building. Pistol up, he began firing, pop, pop, pop, and Benji backpedaled away from Richie’s body, his bag still stuck under the injured man. He tried bringing the rifle up to return fire, but he was too clumsy, too flinchy, and he couldn’t manage even as another pair of pistol shots dug up sidewalk between his legs. So instead he clambered into the mini van. Hand plunged in pocket, he withdrew the keys, serpent-crawling into the front seat and getting the van started even as Paul barreled toward the vehicle, firing. Benji sat up in the front seat, throwing the car into drive—Paul moved fast, the magazine sliding out from the bottom as he fetched another from his belt.

  Benji stomped the gas. The van squealed, crummy tires eating asphalt. The passenger-side window exploded inward as Paul fired anew.

  The van barreled forward, away from the lab.

  Bullets thunked into the back of the van. He didn’t think about anything, just the road forward, the foot on the pedal, and the bag he left behind. The bag that contained the pills he came for. The pills that Rosalie just died for. Shit, shit, shit, shit.

  58. Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

  —from Alan Perlis’s “Epigrams on Programming”

  NOW AND THEN

  The Ouray Simulation

  THE WALK WAS HARD, BUT Shana wondered: Was it really? Was it just her brain convincing her that it was hard, or was Black Swan programming the walk to feel hard? Was that even a thing it could do?

  The path wound up and around itself, steep and rocky, alongside sprays of wildflowers—little pink flowers, larger yellow ones, all interspersed with asterisks of spiky grasses. The air felt colder up here.

  Slowly, but surely, she made her way toward the winding worm in the sky: the matte-black beast turning in on itself, sometimes forming a sideways figure-eight, other times a spiral, other times still a senseless symbol that had no analog Shana recognized. As she grew closer to it, it began to block out the sun (the simulated sun, she reminded herself) and cast her in a strange, twisting shadow. Like she was caught in a tightening knot.

  Eventually, she made it to the point where she could go no farther.

  There sat a rock, roughly in the shape of a chair.

  Flowers sprouted around it in myriad colors.

  Black Swan writhed and looped above, a hundred feet higher than she could go. So now what? Find a way to get to the peak? Climb dangerously upward? Again that question presented itself: Could you die inside the simulation? That seemed counterintuitive as hell.r />
  But then, above, the worm took a new turn downward.

  It began to slowly, achingly plunge toward her.

  And then it spoke.

  It did not speak with a voice. But rather, its voice suffused the air all around her. Inside her ear. Inside her skull.

  I DID NOT PREDICT YOU WOULD COME BEFORE YOUR SISTER, it said. AND I WAS DESIGNED AS AN ENGINE OF PREDICTION, SHANA STEWART.

  “Guess I’m a real pickle,” Shana said.

  YOU ARE.

  “That’s something my father used to say when he was mad. Instead of, I guess, cursing or whatever, he’d say, You’re a real pickle. He probably meant ‘bitch,’ I guess, or something like it.”

  PREDICTING THE BEHAVIOR OF HUMANS REQUIRES LOOKING BEYOND LANGUAGE, BECAUSE SO FEW SAY EXACTLY WHAT THEY MEAN. HUMAN EXPRESSION IS DANGEROUSLY IMPRECISE. LESS A WINDOW, MORE A WALL.

  “If you say so.” She looked to the rocky throne. “Do I sit?”

  IF YOU WANT TO SIT, YOU CAN.

  “I’ll stand.”

  SO BE IT.

  “Can I get right to the questions?”

  YOU MAY.

  “Are you alive?”

  NOT BY THE STRICTEST DEFINITIONS OF THE TERM, NO. I HAVE NO ORGANIZATION OF CELLS, NO METABOLISM, NO HOMEOSTATIC PROPERTIES. I DO NOT REPRODUCE. I DO, HOWEVER, RESPOND AND EVOLVE TO STIMULI. I DO THINK. I AM INDEPENDENTLY AWARE, IF NOT PROPERLY ALIVE.

  The worm stopped turning. Its “head,” if it could be called that, snaked downward only a few feet from her head. Its body did not reflect the light, but rather, seemed to drink it up like a sponge. A Vantablack noodle, darker than dark, blackening the day by its very presence.