Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  The man eyed him up. “What’s your son’s name?”

  “Bo.”

  “Bo, Bo, Bo,” the man said, like he was trying to remember. “I think I remember him. I thought he was related to that—”

  A lie too close to the truth, as it turned out. Matthew had to think and act fast. He interrupted and stammered, “Who’s your buddy?” and then looked past the man to the far side of the truck, toward the passenger seat.

  The misdirection was enough. The driver said, “Huh?” then turned to look that way. Soon as he did, Matthew drew the pistol and shot him in the back of the head. It happened fast, so fast that the reality of what he’d done was like the light leaving a star that had already gone dark, outrunning its own sudden void. It took a while for reality to catch up to him, and when it did, he just stood there for a little while, quaking in his shoes.

  He didn’t know that man.

  Maybe the man was bad, maybe he wasn’t so terrible. Matthew tried to convince himself that whoever the driver was, he was complicit in whatever Stover had cooked up out here under Creel’s watchful eye.

  But he couldn’t get himself to move. The gun still in his hand. The sound still in his ear. The man still dead on the seat.

  The dead, bleeding man.

  Bits of blood streaking the windshield.

  Oh no. Blood on the windshield. A sign to any who drove by.

  That got him to move. Matthew popped the door, then took off the man’s vest—a blaze-orange hunting vest—and used it to clean the blood. In the distance, another car came driving up, and Matthew hurried into the driver’s seat, literally sitting on top of the dead driver’s legs. The car, a Town Car, eased up alongside, the passenger window buzzing downward to reveal the avuncular face of an older man in a brown jacket.

  “You okay, fella?” the man asked, leaning across the driver’s side and out the other window a bit. His white mustache bounced when he talked.

  “Yup. Yeah, just fine.” Matthew laughed a little—and it sounded nervous. He heard it and cut it short, which only made it sound worse.

  “Why you stopped? You’re on the way to Innsbrook, right?”

  “I am. I uhh—” He swallowed hard. “Don’t tell anyone, but I lost a water jug. Guy at the depot didn’t tie them all down right, and one slipped out and…” He shrugged. “Cheap plastic. Broke like a damn egg.”

  “Well, hell, that’s no good.”

  “I know. I feel just awful about it.”

  The man sighed and then winked. “Shit happens, fella, but don’t forget, shit also washes off. I won’t tell anyone. You, ah, you get rid of the evidence?”

  The evidence. Matthew braved a look at the dead man across the seat, the back of his head drooling blood. “Got the busted jug here.” He realized that if the vehicle next to him were a Jeep or another truck and not just a car, they’d have the vantage point to see the body.

  “You ask me, I’d toss that out into the woods somewhere. Sometimes they can be a little…over-punitive back at the base. If you get my meaning. Understandable in these hard times, but why pay for a simple mistake?”

  “Thanks, I think I’ll do just that.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you back there.”

  “Maybe so. Thanks again.”

  “Good luck, fella.”

  Then his new friend drove off, leaving him with the body of the driver. Matthew dragged it out by the heel, into the trees, quickly covering it with leaves. Then he got back into the driver’s seat and gave a hasty glance around, looking for any more blood. He did another quick sweep on the passenger-side window with the man’s jacket, then tossed it into a ditch.

  Normally, at this point, he would’ve said a prayer. But that version of Matthew was long gone. Instead he compartmentalized what he’d just done. He found excuses for it—the man was bad, this is the only way to find Bo, they’re all going to die anyway. To hell with it.

  He had to find his son, so onward he drove toward the camp.

  Like at Stover’s, Innsbrook was protected by men at gates—this time, manning gates that had already existed here to surely protect the resort area from any rabble who might try to borrow its wealthy splendor. Except here they’d taken rings of barbed wire and run them around the loop, and then put guards to walk the perimeter, too.

  The man at the gate waited with a high-end gas mask, the kind with a full see-through faceplate and a long protective muzzle and filter protruding from the front as if mimicking the face of some extraterrestrial being.

  The man gave him a once-over and said, “You with courier detail?”

  “Yessir,” Matthew said, mustering a faux-chummy response.

  “Where’s your armband?”

  “I…” He looked to his arm. Matthew had no armband because of course he didn’t. Did the man he killed have an armband? He couldn’t remember. Was there a blue band around the far arm? Maybe. “I don’t know, I guess it fell off when I went for pickup.”

  The guard scoffed. “That happens. But it also means you gotta get retested.” He shone a light into the truck, right on Matthew’s face—looking, no doubt, for telltale signs of White Mask. “Pull off to the leftmost tent, one of the docs will look you over, give you a clean bill, then get you a new armband. Don’t lose it this time. What’s your name?”

  “Jim…Fellows.” Good luck, fella.

  “Okay, Jim. Drive on. Don’t miss the tent or you might catch a bullet in the ass. You feel me?” It was a warning. But one that was kind, expressed through solidarity. Matthew nodded and drove on.

  He got his test. They had CDC-approved swabs, though the doctor—a gruff-looking man with pock-cratered cheeks—joked that the CDC was done for, anyway. They put the swab under a black light, found no trace of White Mask, and then let him go. Part of him was genuinely surprised. Somehow, Matthew assumed the sickness of the nation was a part of him—he deserved to be ill, and so he figured he was ill. Then again, being trapped in a bunker for so long probably gave him a good escape from being exposed to it.

  He wanted to be happy that he was healthy.

  Another, larger part of him felt only disappointment.

  Either way, it got him in. He earned his blue armband.

  Onward he drove, and now, here he was. Wandering the camp, not sure what to do. He didn’t know precisely what to expect, and hoped of course that his son would be right out here in the open, walking around, giving orders or taking them, visible and center. But that’s not what happened. Innsbrook was home to what looked like thousands of ARM members—soldiers, they called themselves, even though few seemed to be proper veterans—and sorting through them at the ground level was no easy task. He pondered going up and asking somebody, but that had almost gotten him in trouble with the driver of that truck; only took one person to remember that Bo was his son, and he’d be an unwelcome presence. Though he felt reasonably camouflaged, so to speak, among these people, putting too fine a point on his face could get him recognized.

  And get him killed.

  Then he would fail Bo and Autumn. That would be that.

  So asking people wasn’t an option. That meant he had to keep quiet. Not talk to anybody. Not make any ruckus. Matthew had to keep cool and stay calm and use his eyes and ears to find out what he could find out.

  He passed by men under a tent listening to a radio. It crackled with static, but the broadcast was clear enough for Matthew to hear:

  “…kssh, President Creel reports from his Heartland Institute that they have begun rounding up and ousting the remnants of Hunt the Cunt’s cabinet, kkkt fsshhh…”

  He heard others talking about what would come next: Creel taking ownership of the police and the military, and forcing them to either fall in line or jump in the grave. One of them mentioned Stover, too: A woman, broad-shouldered with her fire-red hair pulled back in a ponytail, said, “Stove
r and the other lieutenants are the ones keeping this thing afloat. I heard Creel isn’t even coming here. That fuckin’ pussy is hiding out in his doomsday bunker in Kansas…”

  Her cohort, a man standing on the seemingly brittle curve of a fake foot—the foot looking more like a Nike swoosh than anything human-shaped—seemed to scoff. “Bullshit. Creel is large and in charge. You’ll see. Where’d you hear that shit about a bunker?”

  “One of the deputy lieutenants here helped him get it set up. It’s one of those old missile silo facilities out in a goddamn cornfield somewhere. Cost him around ten million, place is full of apartments for the rich and elite asshole buddies—I’m telling you, the lieuts like Stover and Huntsman and that tech exec from Florida, what’s her name?”

  “Jody Emerson.”

  “Yeah! Her. They’re the ones putting asses on lines for this. Without them, Creel wouldn’t be able to run and hide. He’d have to be out here doing his own damn dirty work.”

  They kept arguing. But none of that was helping Matthew find Bo.

  He moved on.

  For hours, he searched. Surfing the ragged intersection of his own hunger, fatigue, and guilt, Matthew wandered the camp, wayward and adrift, looking for the face that belonged to his son. There came a point when he wasn’t even sure what his son looked like anymore; not just the way he maybe looked now, but the way he had looked at any point in his life. As a baby, as a child, as a teenager. He closed his eyes and willed the boy’s face into his mind like conjuring a hesitant spirit: He saw the boy’s lean cheeks and black eyebrows, the small dark eyes, the chin that came from his mother, the nose that came from Matthew. With that memory came another: how the boy always looked uncomfortable in his own skin. Like there was an anger there, simmering just below the surface.

  Matthew thought to give up then. To turn around and go home. He could tell Autumn that Bo wasn’t there. And they could go away. They could move on and find someplace to live.

  (Or, as it were, someplace to die.)

  And then he turned around, and he saw the face of his son.

  Bo. Not present only in his mind. Not a dream, not a hallucination. But really, truly here, at Innsbrook.

  And he was walking right toward Matthew.

  we’re all gonna die

  might as well gamble!

  —electronic billboard, Las Vegas

  OCTOBER 15

  Searchlight, Nevada

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, Benji was back with the flock. Onward the sleepwalkers pushed, through the vapors of heat rising off the sun-cooked asphalt. All around the ground was flat, seemingly spreading off until forever, the ground red as rust and cracked.

  He found Sadie and Arav ahead of the flock, riding together in the Ford pickup pulling the old CDC trailer—he waved them down and they pulled over and each met him with a vigorous embrace.

  He didn’t tell them what had transpired in Vegas. Not about Rosalie, not about the men who came for him. Not about the man he shot in the gut. Benji didn’t see the point. He wanted to. He dearly wanted to unburden himself of what had happened there in a confessional way. But to unburden himself would only be to burden them.

  And they bore enough burden already.

  He didn’t tell them how before leaving Vegas, he drove along the Strip—not to be a tourist lollygagging and rubbernecking the End Times, but because he was afraid the man Paul would be searching for him, and the crowds and chaos of the Strip gave him a place to hide. He didn’t tell them about the throngs of people there, many of them sick, a number of them wearing the crusted, mucus-slick visages of the White Mask—fibrous threads pushing up out of nostrils and eyes, cheeks greasy with powdery tears. He didn’t speak about the madness he saw there: violence and assault as men cornered and beat another man with a metal chair; people fucking there in the spray of the Bellagio fountains; puke and feces smeared up the white cement walls of the parking garage at the shops of Mandalay Bay. Benji saw people screaming, pissing, fighting, screwing—at one point they mobbed his van, trying to get in, trying to push it over, their weeping masks leering at him from the broken windows of the vehicle as they tried to clamber inside. He had to gun it, hitting several—not hard, just enough to spin them away, knocking them back into the crowd. He whipped down a side street to hide, and wound his way toward the highway as the sun came up over a city still caught in the throes of delusion. That was, perhaps, the strangest part of Vegas: Despite all the lunacy and disease, the fountains still sprayed, the neon still glowed, the roller coasters at the tops of buildings still whipped around. The carousel kept turning and turning even though not all the people there would live through the month, or the week, or the night.

  Instead, all he told them was that he’d made it to Cargill Catalyst Research. He was about to tell them he’d found nothing there, but then his hand felt along the margins of his hips, his thighs, and there found the bulge in his pocket (you got pill bottles in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?), and then he remembered: He’d rescued two bottles accidentally. He’d tried to give them to Rosalie, but she didn’t take them—and instead of putting them back in his bag, he’d put them in his pocket.

  Finding the two pill bottles wasn’t good news, but it wasn’t bad news, either. Which by default made it better than he expected.

  He gave one each to Arav and Sadie, and said, “It’s all they had.”

  A lie, but the truth was too much of a burden for him and for them.

  Sadie hugged him again. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

  “I am, too.”

  “You’re sure everything went okay?” She remarked on the bruise at his temple, from where one of the men hit him.

  “I was clumsy, opened the car door right into my head,” he said. “But otherwise, it went as good as could be expected.”

  Maybe that was a lie, and maybe it wasn’t. In this day and age, he could no longer be sure what to expect, or what good even was anymore.

  Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

  —C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

  OCTOBER 15

  Innsbrook, Missouri

  BO WALKED RIGHT UP TO him.

  And then past him.

  He didn’t look at Matthew. Didn’t recognize him. Did not even consider the possibility that his father was present.

  His boy did not look appreciably different, really. He had a bit of a mustache flecking his lip, but his cheeks and chin still framed out a baby face—that gave Matthew some small hope, because maybe his son just didn’t understand what was going on here. It wasn’t that Bo was slow, not really, but he wasn’t sharp, either. He just didn’t pick up on things. Or maybe the boy just didn’t care to.

  He’s lost in the darkness of his own ignorance, a small voice in the back of Matthew’s head said, chiding him. Because if that was the case, then that was his fault. His even more than Autumn’s, because wasn’t it a father’s job to show his son the ways of the world? That’s how it was taught to him.

  And he’d failed in that regard.

  He’d failed in so many ways.

  Now Bo marched up and past him, right to the tent Matthew stood outside. A line had formed for reasons unknown, and Bo sidled up past the line. Matthew eased forward to listen.

  “…Mister Stover needs some people,” Bo was saying. “He needs, uhh.” He looked at his hand, as if something was written there. “Three mechanics, today. Then he’ll need a…” Bo winced hard, like he was struggling to read what was written on his palm. “Dozen drivers in three days and—he’s already got the soldiers, so. But we need supplies, too, and—”

  A burly man behind
the table, neck tattoos barely concealed by the tartan flannel collar, held up a hand. “Supply requisition is the garage behind you, north of the pool, son.”

  Son, the man said. An affectation, not a word from a father to his boy, but still. It stuck a knife in his middle and gave it a spin.

  What happened next surprised Matthew.

  “Mister Stover said I could tell you,” Bo insisted.

  “Like I said, son, the acquisitions officer is—”

  “I ain’t your son, and what Mister Stover wants, Mister Stover gets, so I tell you…” Bo paused to swallow. “I tell you what he wants, and it’s your job to move your fat, uhh, your fat ass up out of that folding chair and do what needs doin’. That loud and clear?”

  The burly man shot up out of his chair. Matthew stepped in closer, his hand moving to his gun—it wouldn’t help anybody right now to pull it and start shooting, but he also couldn’t abide watching something happen to his boy. Bo, for his part, didn’t flinch. He stood looking up at the man who seemed twice his size in every direction. The man’s hands curled into wrecking-ball fists, and he pushed in closer.

  “You think that’s a good idea?” Bo asked.

  “Boy—”

  “Mister Stover asked you to do something. I’d hate to tell him that you didn’t do it and tried to throw me a beatin’ for passing along his command. You’re a big man, which means they’d have to get two guys to dig your grave instead of one.”

  The burly man stood, chest heaving with anger, nostrils flaring. He cleared his throat, then, and it was like someone untied a knotted balloon—the air slowly leaked out, and the situation deflated.

  “Tell Mister Stover—” the man began.

  “You can call him Lieutenant Stover.”

  “Of course. Tell Lieutenant Stover to send his acquisitions list right to me, food, ammo, whatever, and I’ll handle it.”

  Bo pulled out a folded-up piece of notebook paper. “Got it here.”