by Chuck Wendig
Everything has gone wayward.
Sliding sideways into entropy.
Nashville suffers a chemical plant explosion.
Los Angeles? Wildfires.
Chicago suffers a cold snap—a preliminary “polar vortex” bringing frigid air from the deep north—and so the tipping point there is much quieter. Chicago dies with a whimper: People freeze to death outdoors, but also indoors, since the power fails. There is no cataclysm there. Just people dying, curling up, the thermotolerant pathogen fruiting from their corpses, like little forests of strange white trees sprouting from the trunks of those who died. The tubules cough more spore into the air.
The wind carries it.
And this is just the United States.
Nuclear meltdown at the power plant in Yangjiang, China.
North Korea detonates a nuclear missile in Incheon, South Korea, after years of bragging about its destructive prowess. Yet the missile is not fired up into the air but rather, carried there via boat, where it is detonated just outside the Incheon International Airport.
Russia engages in a pogrom to destroy its infected—and, conveniently, any who disagree with the government’s efforts. Along the way, it conveniently invades Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, because who will stop them?
Ebola arises again in Liberia, and spreads quickly this time. Because health protocols are out the window. The new vaccine? Who can even remember to deploy it?
In Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, the governments fall, the cartels and gangs take control. Madness reigns in the jungles and mountains. Drugs and blood.
For everywhere and everyone, a tipping point.
A cascade of failure.
Then: the bang and the whimper.
Black Swan watches. It is connected to satellites, and so it has a way to see these things: not just with cameras, but also using the various data packets still pinged to satellites from active systems. For though humankind is swiftly sinking to the irrelevancy of extinction, many systems are automatic and continue to report where possible, feeding data to Black Swan the way one gives food to a greedy baby. Satellites that Black Swan knows will remain for decades past the systems down on the ground.
Black Swan watches, content that it has made the right decision.
Soon, it will all be over. Or so the machine intelligence believes.
All over but the crying.
[static]
—radio, TV, everything
NOW AND THEN
The Ouray Simulation
SHANA WENT ON A GLITCH hunt. Camera in hand, she searched for those places where the simulation revealed itself to be a simulation: strange shadows that didn’t seem to line up, or grass that looked too perfect, or clouds that seemed like they might have been duplicates of other clouds.
Thing was, none of them were glitches.
They were just glitches in her mind. When she really looked hard, she couldn’t perceive any actual errors—no more than she could perceive glitches or errors in what was once objective, non-simulated reality.
She was looking for ghosts in a realm that had programmed a perfectly ghostless realm.
But one glitch was not in her mind, that she knew:
The strange black door at the top of the mountain.
That was a glitch she knew existed with great confidence—with one small caveat: that maybe it wasn’t a glitch at all. Maybe it was supposed to be there. Maybe she just wasn’t supposed to see it.
Was that possible? Could Black Swan let its guard down? Was it omniscient and omnipotent in this simulation? Or could the black door just have been an error in the system? Was she meant to see it? Or was it meant to remain hidden? Shana didn’t know. All she knew was, she wanted to see it again. She didn’t know why, she told herself, but that was a lie.
She knew why.
It was easier to worry about the black door than it was to think about her mother, or her sister, or Arav, or any of…this.
It gave her something on which to focus. A meditative, if obsessive, point. Plus, it let her go out with the camera and capture the simulation.
(Though there she wondered: Would she be allowed to retrieve the photos after she exited the simulation? Would they be available? They were just data, ones and zeros—or quantum bits, according to Black Swan—but just the same, would they be something she could see again one day? Or were they images she’d have to soon consign to the void?)
Presently, she stood again at a waterfall, this one the Cascade Falls on the northeast side of town, opposite the Box Canyon waterfall. Climbing here was trickier than with the other: The trailhead at the base of the falls ascended a thousand feet in under a mile, a hard climb whipping around the serpentine switchback bends along a rocky ledge. It revealed that the falls were actually two different cascades: one below the trail (heard but not seen), and one above it, clearly seen. Shana stood here in the cold spray of the second, giving a spin to her lens that let her zoom in on where the water came from—a dark, craggy hole in the side of the peak.
It looked not unlike a door.
But just the same, it was not a door.
She sighed and sat down on a rock that looked out over the Ouray simulation. In the distance, Black Swan swam among low-hanging clouds with the eerie slowness of an eel drifting underwater.
Soon Shana heard footsteps.
It was her sister.
“Are you still looking for that door?” Nessie asked her, calling up from one of the lower switchbacks. Shana thought to chastise her for being so loud about it, but did it matter? Black Swan probably knew everything.
“Just come up” was Shana’s (also yelled) answer.
Nessie eventually found her way over, panting as she did. “That walk is not fun,” she said.
“Yeah, it sucks.”
“You seem down.”
“Not down. Just…frustrated.”
Nessie made a disgruntled sound. “Is this about Mom again? You know eventually you need to start believing her.”
“I don’t need to start doing anything.” She idly looked away from her sister and started flipping through the images on the camera. There she saw the library, various shots inside the Beaumont, an old springhouse, glimpses of several of the mountain peaks and mountainsides. “And I’m not frustrated with her. Her or not her, I’m worried more about…that.”
She gestured toward Black Swan.
Nessie failed to suppress a surge of anger when she snapped: “Maybe you ought to be more thankful. We’re alive because of ‘that.’ ” With the final word she gave a pair of surly bunny-ear air-quotes.
“I guess.”
“There’s no door.”
“I should’ve never told you about it. You don’t believe anything I say, not about the door, not about Black Swan, not about Mom.”
“You just don’t have any proof,” Nessie said, her tone softening. “It’s like science. You can’t just…say something and have it be true.”
“Whatever.”
Nessie stood there for a while, then finally said: “They’re almost there, you know.”
“Who’s almost where?”
“The flock. They’re almost there. Here. Whatever. Ouray.”
“Oh. Oh.” Time felt so strange here. Slippery, like she couldn’t get her hands around how long it had truly been. Sometimes it felt like she’d only been here days. Other times, a year, maybe longer. “What happens when they get there?”
“I dunno. I might know if you’d let me go up to see Black Swan.”
Not this again. Shana ignored it.
She set the camera down gently next to her.
Next she closed her eyes for just a moment, and let her mind wander so far away that she felt the tether stretch like taffy, thinning out until she could feel a barely perceptible disconnection. And when
she did, she was back in her own body, somewhat. She couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t do anything, but she could see out of her eyes for a moment—the flock moved down a long, pale road. On each side were broad fields peppered with trees bright with autumnal reds and yellows. Horses lay in that field, and at first she thought, They’re sleeping, but then she realized that they were dead. Clouds of flies buzzed above the equine carcasses in black scraggly puffs.
Arav was here. Walking with her. Pacing back and forth, he didn’t look good. His face was streaked in striations of white, spreading out in starbursts from his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He had moments when he looked up and around as if momentarily lost—but then he’d refocus his gaze on Shana, and he’d smile, and give her a small nod. As if he knew that she was watching, even though he had no way of really knowing that.
She wanted dearly to cry out to him, to reach for him, but she couldn’t—and so she did the only thing she could do, which was let go and snap back to the Shana inside the Ouray simulation.
When she did, she instantly took a deep, gasping breath—
And began to weep.
She curled in on herself, arms wrapped around her knees. Nessie, suddenly shocked, came closer but stood apart, like she wasn’t sure what exactly she should do. “What’s wrong?” Nessie asked.
“I…nothing.”
“Sis, come on.”
“I saw Arav. That’s all. I saw him.”
“Oh. I’m…I can’t really see him when I look, and since you’re not there I mostly don’t go back there. I haven’t seen him…”
“He’s…he’s sick. And I’m not going to be out of the simulation before he…” Dies, say the word, you cowardly little bitch, dies, dies, dies. But she couldn’t. The word was in there. In the back of her throat like something to cough up, but it was lodged in place and would not reach her tongue. She wiped her nose on her sleeve. In here everything felt so different—not just different, either, but distant. Like he was literally in another world, somewhere she didn’t have to worry about him at all. The unreality of this place made her life, the other world, seem unreal, too.
But all of it was real.
Time, however strange, was moving on. Arav was moving on. White Mask was damn sure moving on—and soon, he’d die from it. “Fuck.”
“Um,” Nessie said, “I don’t know if you wanna come, but a lot of the flock is going to be on Main Street watching the flock come into Ouray—it’ll sort of be trippy, I guess, seeing them in our town here but not in the simulation, like, I dunno, glimpses of two different Ourays. But you probably don’t want to see that, because…” Her voice trailed off. Inside her head, Shana finished the statement:
Because you don’t want to see Arav again.
But she did want to see him. Just not like this.
Shana sighed. “You go ahead. I’ll be down in a couple.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
Nessie gave her a short but intense hug.
Then she was gone, and Shana sat.
* * *
—
TIME BEING WHAT time was, Shana did not know how long she sat. Five minutes or an eternity. But the sun was still up, and hadn’t moved much in the sky, and so eventually she composed herself and stood to make the walk back down to town. She wasn’t sure if she would partake in the (ugh) group activity of everyone looking out from the simulation into the really real town of Ouray, Colorado, but she could at least be among them.
A kind of solidarity, of sorts.
(But I can’t look at Arav again, she thought. Which felt selfish and cruel, because he had to be with himself, and she could choose not to be. But part of it was simply that she had to stare, powerless, as White Mask took him—she could not soothe him, could not hold him, could do nothing but stare, gaze stuck in him like a set of pins.)
Back down the precarious switchback. Around the final bend, though, she nearly lost her footing on a bit of scree—it gave her a bit of a startle as she fell over, catching herself on her hands. Hands that now stung, hot and red. Shana cursed under her breath, and stood—
There it was.
In the bend, up against a massive slab of rock.
The black door.
She wheeled on it, fumbling for her camera—
She lifted it to her face, but the lens was zoomed too far in and she was too close—
Shana quick spun the lens back, zooming out—
Her finger hit click—
And when she pulled the camera away, the door was gone.
“Shit!”
Shana about threw the camera off the fucking mountain, aiming for Black Swan. Gritting her teeth, she pulled up the viewscreen and flicked to the last picture and—
There.
The rock. The door. Perfectly captured, a square of matte-black oblivion in the stone.
Her raw, red anger turned fast to a kind of hysterical hilarity—a laugh bubbled up out of her. “I got you, I got you, I goooot youuuu,” she said in a singsongy voice, then she hurried her ass down the mountain to show Nessie and the others what she had captured.
NOVEMBER 1
Approaching Ouray, Colorado
THE ROAD TO OURAY WANDERED between peaks. On the left, the penny-red rocks that led up to Wetterhorn, Baldy, Coxcomb, and Precipice peaks. On the right, the farther-flung pine-studded peaks of Whitehouse Mountain. Ahead, a wind-bent political sign sat thrust up out of the waving grass: ED CREEL, AMERICA FIRST. White globs of birdshit streaked down it, like some kind of political art piece. It offered a small kind of satisfaction, but at this point Benji decided he’d take whatever pleasure he could muster.
He felt bone-tired. They all felt it, he guessed. In the two weeks walking across Nevada, Utah, and into Colorado, they had abandoned most of the vehicles, leaving only the Ford pickup and the CDC trailer. Gasoline had become hard to come by now that the trucks had stopped running and nobody was staffing pipelines anymore. They took shifts, half of the shepherds sleeping in the truck and trailer and riding along while the other half stayed out with the flock, eyes watching the ridgelines and fencerows, weapons ready to meet whatever came down the road or up behind them.
They were down to just eight shepherds, now.
Him, Arav, Sadie. Then Maryam and Bertie McGoran, Bertie with her arm broken from the day of the Klamath Bridge attack, the arm awkwardly stuck in a splint Benji had made. Then there were Hayley Levine, Kenny Barnes, Lucy Chao. The elder Calders were game over once they passed through Enoch, in Utah—Roger was too sick with White Mask and too frail overall, so Wendy said they had to be done with their pilgrimage. Their journey was over, she said with a heavy heart. It seemed that was the case now as they went along, peeling off shepherds—one every couple of days. Sickness, mostly, White Mask either making them all feel groggy and flu-like or, if they consented to taking Ritalin, making them feel amped up and agitated. They’d all been taking it. All been snapping at one another.
They felt whittled down. They were thinner, leaner, filthier than they’d ever been. Civility felt as threadbare as civilization was all around them.
They were all sick with White Mask.
Each of them weathered it differently, and each suffered under the disease at different stages. Guilt ran through Benji like a sickness all its own, because he above all others seemed the healthiest. Despite Arav and Sadie also taking the antifungals with him, he seemed to be doing okay, relatively speaking. He hadn’t even manifested much in the way of cold symptoms: no coughing, no sneezing, just a persistent ache—a malaise, that was the word Benji felt was most appropriate.
(Though Sadie just called it the dreaded lurgy.)
Sadie was…okay. She’d fallen farther than Benji had—she was coughing, sneezing, red around the eyes and nose. She soldiered on, remaining somehow more upbeat than all of t
hem, despite having sinus passages that she described as feeling like they were filled with “cottage cheese.” If Benji was being honest, he would have to admit—as he had, to her and to the others—that without her, he did not know what he would do.
Arav, on the other hand, was faring poorly.
The antifungals weren’t working with him, it seemed.
White Mask had emerged physically—it was easy to see the powdery filaments of the pathogen emerging from his nose, his eyes, from the corners of his lips and the deep of his ears. He was ashen and wan. Like he was fading away. Or rather, like White Mask was replacing him with itself.
He’d upped his Ritalin intake, which made him grind his teeth and wander the flock, somehow both lost and angry—he had the erratic pathmaking of a jacked-up tweaker. Prowling and seething. Talking to himself. Stopping suddenly to try to reassess his surroundings, as if he momentarily had forgotten where he even was—in town, in life, in all of time.
It wasn’t that any of this was unexpected—but it killed Benji to watch. And he felt intense shame over his own health when Arav was descending so plainly, and so quickly, into the disease.
As the world was, too.
“I see your face,” Sadie said as they walked ahead of the flock. Behind them, the massive army of sleepwalkers filled the breadth and depth of the road, far as the eye could see. They were filthy and windswept, white eyes staring out from faces caked with desert dust.
“Well, my face is still here,” he said.
“Mine feels like it’s going to pop off like a bottle cap,” she groused, sighing. “But that’s not what I mean. I mean…I see that look. You’ve gone inward again.”
