Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  He pushed it hard against the man’s chest. It crinkled as it mashed into his breastbone. The man took it.

  Then Bo turned heel and walked out of the tent.

  Again he moved right toward Matthew. And again he did not recognize his father, nor cast a look in his direction.

  Matthew’s own heart was still horse-kicking in his chest. That was close. Close in a lot of ways. And now Bo was walking in the other direction, his head held high. That alone filled Matthew with the warring feelings of pride and worry. Pride that his son had stood up for himself, and worry that he wasn’t really standing up for himself, but rather, for Ozark Stover. Matthew’s captor and torturer. And then a third feeling came: shame that Bo’s confidence came not from his father but from a vile man like Ozark.

  He wanted to follow his son.

  But his feet remained fixed to the ground.

  Follow him! Go after him. Tell him you’re here, tell him it’s time to go, that your mother is safe and together you can be a family again.

  And yet he didn’t budge. Fear fixed him to that point. It was fear that Bo wouldn’t care, wouldn’t go. Worse, fear that Bo would turn him in, have him executed, maybe even kill Matthew himself. On the other hand, what if Bo acquiesced? What if they decided to go? Matthew suddenly realized his plan was all hat and no cattle:

  Where would they go? How would they get out?

  Matthew hadn’t thought this through.

  I need more time.

  And then, time presented itself.

  Someone urged him forward—the line in this tent moved him along. He watched his son disappear into the crowd. Gone once again. And before he knew it, he was moved up and up again, until he was standing before the burly sort behind the folding table. The one Bo had threatened.

  “Name?” the man asked.

  “I…” Matthew felt lost.

  The man asked again, irritated.

  “Jim Fellows,” Matthew said, abruptly.

  “You new?”

  Unsure what the best answer was, he said, “Yes.”

  “That hand of yours, it looks a little fucked up.”

  “I…injured it.”

  “All right. Congrats, Jimbo, you’re on cleaning-up-shit duty. Don’t worry, God starts us all in janitorial. You can head up to the main office, they’ll get you set up with your rounds, plus a mop and a bucket and whatever else you need. How new are you? You bunked up yet?”

  “N…um, ah, no.”

  “They can set you up there, too.”

  “Okay.”

  The man stared daggers at him. “Get the fuck out of here, Jimbo.”

  “Sure, okay. Thanks.”

  “Uh-huh. Next.”

  * * *

  —

  THREE DAYS PASSED. October 18, now.

  Matthew found himself feeling like the hand of a clock: part of the mechanism, just doing his job, turning ’round and ’round. He slept at night in a cabin crammed with too many of ARM’s soldiers, in this case all men. Most of them stinking to high heaven, burping, farting, telling racist and sexist jokes like they were all on a hunting trip together—and in a sense, it seemed like they were. The men stayed up late, talking almost blissfully about the world to come, believing somehow that they would escape the fate that was befalling everyone else. There seemed to be the sense of divine providence at play, as if God had literally chosen them—white people, and white men in particular—to survive the ordeal. One soldier, an older man named Bernard, even joked that the disease was called White Mask as a sign that it was their ally, not their enemy.

  Matthew did not partake or engage. As a result, they treated him like the outcast he was made to be. Nobody got aggressive with him directly—but he heard them calling him names under their breath. One called him gimp because of the way his hand looked, all bent up and arthritic. He heard someone say he was a faggot, and that began an under-the-breath but still-too-loud discussion as to what that would mean here, because okay, Innsbrook was whites-only, but they didn’t say you had to be straight? Then the other guy clarified, “I don’t mean he’s a faggot-faggot, you can be a cocksucker without sucking cocks,” as if that cleared it up.

  For his part, Matthew just went on. He felt like he could settle into this, because routine—no matter how terrible—felt normal. It felt easy enough to just close your eyes and pretend this is life now, and knowing what today had in store was better than being scared of what tomorrow would bring.

  Just the same, he knew that was a bad way to be.

  He had a role here.

  He had a quest. Autumn had given it to him. She was his light, now, his directional star. Gone was God. In Autumn we trust.

  He just had to figure out how to finish this quest.

  Matthew needed to find a way to get close to Bo, but to do so out of the public eye. Right now, they had him set up cleaning all manner of things: motor oil at the garages, trash from the golf courses, and of course cleaning the restrooms and helping load up the Porta-Johns. Eventually, that meant he could get up and get assigned to the main office and house, a sprawling mansionlike complex that overlooked most of Innsbrook. That was where Stover and his people stayed. Including his son.

  Getting close to Bo also meant getting close to Stover.

  And Matthew wasn’t sure what would happen then.

  Still, if he could just sit down with Bo—away from everything and everyone—then maybe he could make his case.

  One problem was that Autumn was still out there, outside the town. Alone, now. She was tougher than he was, but being alone out in this changed world was a damn dangerous proposition. Matthew knew to meet her back where they’d separated, at the campsite across the lake, but just the same he feared for what would come if she was out there too long. On the surface, he just wanted her safe. But a deeper fear was that she would eventually give up on him, figuring him for a loss. That was more an indictment of Matthew than of her: She had faith now, but if Matthew didn’t earn it, that faith might dwindle. And when that happened, she’d come into camp.

  She’d try to do the job herself.

  That’s who she was, now.

  Maybe it’s who she always was, and Matthew had helped to crush that in her. Long had she told him who she was and what she needed, and he, the fool, felt he knew better.

  He wanted to do right by her, and he didn’t want her in here.

  So that meant he had to somehow figure this out fast.

  His third morning in Innsbrook came and he headed out to the main office, where he got his scheduled rounds for the day. A few drones—real drones, military drones, bigger than vultures—buzzed overhead. He tried not to look at the soldiers in gas masks dragging a dead man away, his face swaddled in a plastic bag. That, Matthew knew, was how they did you in once they found out you had White Mask. They came up on you, put a bag over your head until you quit kicking. That kept the spores inside. If you fought too much, they put bullets in your knees, then moved you.

  The dead man they dragged now must’ve gone quietly, because he did not seem perforated anywhere. No blood. Just the dead, mucus-shellacked face smeary behind a clear plastic freezer bag.

  His heels carved ruts in the dirt as they pulled him away.

  Matthew knew this kind of thing was not sustainable. They pretended this was an efficient way to deal with the problem, but it wasn’t. Not simply because it was violent, either, but because the way he heard it, a lot of people were already infected with the disease and just didn’t know it. All it took was one cough or sneeze, one wiped booger or spit-talking fool, and then it was over and done with. These people were all dead.

  They just didn’t know it, yet.

  At least, that’s what Matthew liked to believe. It was a grim, un-Christian thought, but these days, he was a grim, un-Christian man.

  Into the main o
ffice he went, and the woman handing out the schedules waved him up. Peggy was her name. Peggy had big orange-dyed hair and a pair of pink-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses sitting on her Karl Malden nose. He gave her his name and her fingers danced along the handwritten list on a clipboard; she hummed Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” as those fingers toodled.

  “There we go, sugar-pop,” she said. “Jim Fellows. Oh.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, honey. You’re on Dungeon Detail today.”

  “Dungeon Detail?”

  She nodded warily. “Dungeon Detail.”

  * * *

  —

  UNSURPRISINGLY, INNSBROOK HAD prisoners.

  Matthew figured, had he remained in Stover’s care long enough, this was where he would’ve ended up. (Here or in a ditch.)

  He discovered, thanks to Peggy, that Innsbrook had a subterranean level to it. Most of the main buildings were connected by a series of tunnels—some of these were purely maintenance, but others had a bit of luxury in their utility, acting as wine cellars or game rooms or, as she put it, “rooms where sometimes the wealthiest guests would take their mistresses.” That she said with a little salacious sparkle in her eyes, like it was something out of the pages of a romance book she was reading.

  She pointed Matthew to a door here in the main building, past a kitchen and supply closet. Down the steps he went.

  It was colder down here. Concrete floor and cement-block walls, like something in a prison—or, as he remembered it, a high school. Peggy told him to take two rights, then a left, and that would move him past the boiler room, the old coal room, and toward the cells. These were literal jail cells meant to be a place that the resort—once upon a time, when this sort of thing was legal-ish—could lock up guests that got too drunk or too rowdy for the night. Let them cool their heels till morning.

  Now it had become something similar, so they told him: Soldiers here tended to get a little rammy (Peggy said they were like yellowjackets before winter, acting “hangry” before the cold weather “snapped”), and when they got out of hand, they ended up down here for a night or three.

  She said Matthew was not to clean inside the occupied cells, just the doors that were open. Plus, sometimes the soldiers urinated, defecated, or vomited, and when that happened, it tended to leak out from under the door.

  But he wondered: Could this be an opportunity?

  Not the human-waste part, obviously, but here he was, working the main house. Or at least a series of tunnels underneath it. If he could figure out how to come up near Bo, that could be the chance he needed.

  He needed to think it through. In the meantime, he hauled his mop bucket along. Murky water slopped over the side.

  Matthew began to mop.

  Most of the cells were unoccupied. Those that were contained men who either slept or leered out through the wire-frame window in each door. They yelled at him through the glass. Profanities that made him uncomfortable, even still. Though Matthew knew profanity was not strictly against God, back when he still believed he maintained that they were words that did no honor to the Lord; those who uttered such vulgarity did no favors to the Kingdom of Heaven and the grace that had been afforded to man.

  Now he knew that was all bullshit. But the words still bothered him.

  He kept his head down. And his mop down, too.

  Slop, slop, slush, splash.

  Then he got to the last door.

  A set of four fingers emerged from underneath the door. A puddle of what seemed to be urine (by color and by smell) spread around them.

  The fingers twitched and wiggled a little.

  Matthew pushed at those fingers with the mop, urging them to move.

  They didn’t.

  He shouldered into the door and said, “Move your fingers, please.”

  Underneath, a voice: “No.”

  It was a woman’s voice.

  He peered in but couldn’t get a great vantage point to see. Best he could tell was that a woman—a large woman, tall and broad, not obese exactly but with a lot of flesh bulging under her clothes—was lying there on the floor, one arm spread out, her hand just under the door.

  “You okay?” he asked her.

  One word again in response:

  “No.”

  “Sorry,” he said, then started to push on, mopping past her fingers.

  “I’m not gonna answer…your questions.” The words themselves were defiant, but her tone was defeated. Like they took precious, miserable effort to say. Which was, he supposed, its own kind of defiance.

  “I don’t have questions for you.”

  “Are you real?”

  A strange question; he felt unsure of his answer when he said, “Yes.”

  “You here to finally kill me then?”

  “No, just mopping up.”

  “My piss. You can say it. It’s piss.”

  “I…” He felt an itchy blush rise to his necks and cheek. He felt shame and sadness. Enough to almost flatten him. “Yes, I’m sorry.”

  “No apologies. You chose this life.”

  I didn’t choose it. I just want my son back.

  “I can get you a new bucket—”

  “They don’t…they don’t give me a bucket, new guy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh.” She mocked him in that word. “Just kill me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m not going to answer shit about my people.”

  “Your people?”

  She groaned under the door. He realized he could hear her better than the other jailed men because she was—inadvertently—speaking to him right underneath the door. “The shepherds. The flock.”

  “You were with the…walkers?”

  “That’s right. And they’re something special. Something…” She grunted, as if pushing past pain. “Something your evil can’t touch.”

  “I don’t know who you are, but—”

  “I’m Marcy. You ffff—you fuck. My name is Marcella Reyes.”

  “I’m not evil, you know. I’m not the one doing this to you.”

  She whimpered, and for a moment he thought she had no retort, but then she hissed: “Good for you. You’re so virtuous. You didn’t put me here, and you mopped up my pee, so count yourself a hero. You’re…” She coughed hard. “Basically Mighty Mouse, Superman, and Jesus Christ Himself all wrapped up in the noblest package known to man.”

  He turned away from the door.

  She wasn’t his problem.

  But in his mind, dominoes fell.

  All the things he’d said about the flock.

  All his radio appearances.

  His support of Stover, of Creel, his opposition to Hunt.

  All that talk of the End Times, Wormwood, the rise of the righteous.

  And then, the other morning, a bullet he put in the back of a man’s head.

  Matthew wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t even the bare minimum of slightly, vaguely virtuous. He was a bad person. In the parlance of his old life, he was a sinner. Now, though, he knew that there was no accounting for sin in any life that came after. You either balanced the books in life, or you died with everything out of whack and that was that.

  He turned back to the door. “I’ll get you free.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “W…why?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  She snorted. Almost a laugh. “How do you intend to get me out?”

  “I…” Don’t actually know. But then he had a plan. “I can find one of the guards, or I’ll go to Peggy. I’ll tell her I need to clean up an empty cell and I need a key. They’ll give it to me. They won’t ask questions.”

  “Good luck with that, hero…”

  She bubb
led into a kind of unhappy laughter. He heard the exhaled air of that mad giggle bubble in the wetness of her own urine.

  He said, “You’ll see.”

  Then he turned to head back down the hall. He’d go to Peggy. Get a key.

  This is dumb, he told himself. It’s not why you’re here.

  He walked ten feet and then, just ahead of him, a door opened with a clang and a bang. Every part of him lit up with panic. Turn back the other way, he thought, but he was too slow, and it was too late. They came up on him fast, walking quickly.

  Someone called to him: “Better move that bucket, mopmonkey. I get piss-water wettin’ my socks, I’ll break your goddamn neck.”

  That voice.

  The deep, tractor growl of it. Rheumy and wetter than he remembered, but it was plain just the same: Ozark Stover was coming toward him.

  He knew running off wouldn’t do him any good. It would look suspicious. So instead he swallowed hard and put his chin to his chest, averting his gaze. Don’t recognize me, don’t recognize me, please…

  Stover wasn’t alone. He was flanked by a pair of men in black leather boots. One had a long barn jacket on, the other just a white V-neck T-shirt. Neither were his usual cohorts. No Danny or Billy Gibbons.

  The big man filled the tight hallway like a dam blocking a river. He stood at Marcy’s door, just ten feet away, and signaled for one of the men to unlock it.

  “You sure?” the man in the barn jacket said.

  “I’m sure, Vic. This big bitch has been trying to keep herself fit, but three or four push-ups a day won’t do it. She’s been spayed and gutted.” The man, Vic, opened the door and stepped back. Stover stepped into the doorframe, bracing himself with a subtle but noticeable grunt.

  A grunt of weakness, Matthew believed. And now, as Stover craned his head forward, Matthew could see the ill-healed injury there.

  The one he’d given him with a knife to the neck.

  And it occurred to him, suddenly:

  I could finish the job.

  Right here, right now.

  He had a gun. They’d never taken it away. Open carry was the name of the game here at Innsbrook. Everyone had a gun. Stover, his two guards, everybody locked and loaded for a fight. All he had to do was draw it, point it, pull the trigger. It would be fast. They weren’t even watching him.