Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  That phrase, gone inward. She was fond of it now, and he couldn’t dispel the notion. It was an apt idea, that he was falling more and more into the pit of his own mind lately. Stewing. Or worse, brooding. He felt a darkness not so much falling upon him like a shadow as rising up within him.

  In a sense, it felt like depression, but depression carried with it the connotation of a chemical imbalance. But could this be that? The world of humanity was literally a dying one. His friends were dying. The woman he loved was dying. He was bloody well dying—and not in the way that, oh ho ho, we all begin dying the moment we start living, but in a proper, active, begin-making-the-arrangements way. How the hell could you not feel depressed?

  Sadie served as a good example of how to do better.

  She elbowed him in the ribs, smiling up at him.

  “I’m fine,” he said, obviously lying.

  “You’re obviously lying,” she said, obviously figuring out how obviously he was lying.

  “You’re right.”

  “I know I’m right. It is my nature.” She snuggled in close to him as they walked. She’d been like this, especially since coming into Colorado—here, the weather balanced out a little. The air was cool during the day, cold at night, far saner than the extremes felt in Nevada and Utah, where the contrast between day and night sapped their will. As such, Sadie had been far more physical with him. A celebration of life before its end, she told him. “What do you think will happen? I’d say we should be in town in about…an hour, maybe less. What then?”

  He’d asked Black Swan this very question earlier, using the satphone (which he’d kept charged using the Ford pickup’s cigarette lighter and a USB adapter). The machine intelligence responded with:

  WE WILL BE HOME.

  To that, Benji said: “Yes, but what does that mean specifically?”

  The enigmatic reply?

  I DO NOT WANT TO RUIN THE SURPRISE.

  A troubling response. And Benji said as much, furious.

  Black Swan said: WORRY NOT. I SIMPLY AIM TO PRESERVE ONE OF THE FEW MOMENTS OF REVELATION WE HAVE LEFT. CONSIDER IT AS A WARNING FROM A STORYTELLER TO THE AUDIENCE, AS IN THE DAYS OF THE INTERNET: “NO SPOILERS.”

  Ugh. Self-aware machine intelligences gave him considerable agita.

  “I don’t know,” he said to Sadie. “Your Frankenstein monster was not exactly obliging. But its response does indicate a…change, somehow.”

  “They won’t wake up, will they?”

  “I can’t imagine. The world is not safe for them.”

  She sighed. “Do you think Ouray will be safe? Through everything that’s to come, even? This seems…far away. Isolated.”

  “I would guess that’s the point. Ouray could be a successful place to…well, for lack of a better term, restart humanity. I’ve thought it through. Look at it this way: The power grid here is isolated, and based on hydroelectric power, so it would be easy to get running again, and easy to maintain. The town has only two roads in, one north, one south, both through mountain passes: They’re easy to monitor, easy to guard. It has water access from multiple sources: the Uncompahgre, if I’m saying that right, the Cascade, from Box Canyon, too. Plentiful snowfall means the water will be there, but being at such an elevation also suggests flooding isn’t a primary problem. And there are natural hot springs, which serve not only as an energy source but, well, as a source for heat during cold winters. The one tricky thing is food—Ouray itself is in such a pocket with a narrow growing season. But! All around in Ouray County, farmland and ranchland is plentiful. So, still better than most out-of-the-way places, I think.”

  “So you think we’ll be all right?”

  “No,” he said. “But I hope they will be.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST SIGNS of Ouray proper were a few scattered houses: cabins and A-frame chalets, like you’d find nestled up against ski resort areas like this one. The houses looked vacant, windows like the eyes of the sleepwalkers—dead and gazing ever-outward—but they didn’t look damaged or boarded up. Perhaps they were the houses of snowbirds who had already left for the season. The air already had a crisp chill to it, and he knew people in towns like this sometimes left for the winter—off to warmer climes, like Arizona or California.

  After the houses came a gas station off to the right: shut down, with plywood boards lashed to the pumps: signs onto which someone had spray-painted: NO GAS, GO HOME. That phrase, repeated on every board.

  Then the road broke off—Highway 550 split, with Route 17 going right alongside the slow-moving Uncompahgre River. Having memorized the map as best as he could, Benji knew both ultimately went into town. Black Swan kept the flock on the current path, 550 down to town, where the highway became Main Street.

  Next, a small motel: the Hot Springs Inn. Desolate, empty, but again, still together, not damaged. No broken windows, no forced-open motel room doors. Benji felt a spark of hope: Maybe most of the people here had left already, leaving the town in good condition. Some would’ve left for the winter, others might have left for a proper hospital—either Mountain Medical Center in Ridgway to the north, or Telluride Medical Center to the southwest. The steady population of a town like Ouray was about a thousand, which mapped well to the flock. That bit of hope inside him grew, fostered like a kindling flame into a proper campfire.

  But soon they found the bus.

  It was an old school bus. Someone had parked it all the way across the road. They’d hung a sheet along the side, the corners of the sheet held fast by bus windows pinched shut over the fabric.

  The sign on the sheet read: THIS IS A DEAD TOWN. TURN BACK.

  A dead town, Benji thought. What could that mean?

  Arav gave voice: “Maybe they’re all dead.” His words were ragged, and each syllable had a quavering edge—it was the Ritalin, gilding his words with frenzy and tension. Then Arav said: “That’s good.”

  It was Sadie who asked: “Why is that good?”

  “Because if they’re already dead,” Arav explained, “that means we don’t have to kill them.”

  Benji stared at him. “Arav, we won’t have to kill anybody. If they’re sick, they’re sick, and they deserve kindness. That’s the creed. That’s how we treat the ill. With compassion.”

  Arav’s eyes flashed.

  “And if they want to kill us first?”

  “Why would they want that?”

  “We’re invading their town. We’re barbarians at the gates. The walkers aren’t going to be welcomed. People hate them. They probably still think they caused all of this. If anybody is still alive, they’re not just going to let us…take their land, their homes. And when you get this inside your head—” Arav tapped the center of his forehead so hard it left a red mark. “—White Mask, it scrambles everything up here. It makes you feel loose, like all your pieces don’t fit together. I’m tired but I can’t sleep. My mind wanders like it does just before you go to sleep at night, almost like I’m pre-dreaming. And I’m probably better than some of the people we’re going to meet. You think about that. And you think about what you’re willing to do to protect the flock. I’ll do anything. Anything.”

  Benji knew it wasn’t about the flock, not really. It was about Shana. Arav’s mind hadn’t lost her. If anything, it had sharpened his love for her to an obsessive point. Benji nodded. “We’ll make it work, Arav. Just…don’t do anything rash. Consult with me first, okay?”

  Arav didn’t say anything. He offered a curt nod, though, and then waded backward once more to join with the flock. To be with Shana.

  * * *

  —

  THE FLOCK DID not find the school bus to be an impediment. Some streamed past it. Others climbed over it as they had every other obstacle in their path.

  Onward they went.

  Past a visitor center, beyond a sign for vacation
rentals (OURAY SERENITY: MOUNTAIN PARADISE TOWNHOMES!), the highway bent, just a little—and beyond that, they could see the town of Ouray. Just a glimpse of it, really, like the face of an old friend seen in a crowd of strangers. Rooftops poked up through pine trees and the blush of autumnal colors, all emerging in the valley between massive, snow-topped peaks.

  As they rounded that bend and came closer and closer to town, a cold wind kicked up, and brought with it the smell of burning wood—and something else, too, the sickly sweet tang of roasting corpses.

  This is a dead town…

  Turn back…

  Maybe, Benji thought, the smell wasn’t from Ouray proper. Could be that the wind carried the odor through the mountain passes.

  But he didn’t think that likely.

  The flock showed no signs of caring, or detecting that scent, even as the shepherds shared looks. They’d become uncomfortably familiar with that smell over the last couple of months. They knew too that, when you got closer to it, the smell would have a deeper scent to it, complex like a perfume turned bad—therein would be a mustier, funkier odor, like what you imagined it would smell like to burn a pile of moldy-oldy library books.

  That, Benji knew, was the stink of White Mask being burned. The smell of mold and spore set aflame.

  But there was no stopping, now.

  They came closer to town, and soon the open road thickened up quick with buildings: homes, motels, hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, storefronts, and cafés, all of it adding together to an odd off-kilter vibe that put Ouray somewhere between an Old West mining settlement and a Swiss vacation town. That, plus the shadow of apocalyptic end-of-the-worldism cast over everything: windows boarded up, trash blowing in the streets, some doors shut, other doors blown open (the wind thudding them dully against their frames, the hinges screeching like nightbirds offended by the sunlight). Plus, a distant column of smoke snaked into the sky from somewhere on the far side of town, toward where the highway would head south away from Ouray, up the switchbacks and toward Telluride.

  Most eerily of all: The whole town was silent. No voices. No bodies. No sound but for the cacophony of the marching feet of the approaching flock.

  And then, like that, it happened.

  What Benji and the others had been waiting for came to be: the moment when everything changed. The status quo of the flock and their seemingly perpetual forward momentum was broken suddenly in a single moment—like watching a murmuration of starlings suddenly break up, the black cloud of birds dispersing. Because that is what the flock did.

  They dispersed.

  The cohesion of the flock, wandering for so long in a straight, road-filling line, now broke. They streamed away from one another, some moving ahead, some winding toward side streets, others drifting toward open doorways. They seemed to maintain their purpose, driven forth without hesitation. But what that purpose was, Benji did not know.

  Not, at least, until Sadie understood.

  “They’re going home,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Maryam asked.

  “Sadie is right,” Benji said. “Look. They’re…finding doorways. Some here, along Main Street; others are finding houses down these side streets.” All of them let their gaze drift among the sleepwalkers, who were doing exactly as Sadie had seen and Benji had described: They were entering buildings—houses, stores, hotels, and motels. The flock streamed outward, forming lines. Bertie gave voice to what she thought they looked like:

  “It’s like ants,” she said, cradling her splinted arm. “Ants splitting up, trying to find food. Or a new home, maybe. You see it sometimes in the start of summer, especially with carpenter ants.”

  “Bertie’s spot-on,” Maryam said. And she put her arm around her wife and held her close. Arav did not stop to watch. He gave a look to Benji, a desperate, pleading glare, and Benji gave a subtle nod: It contained permission for him to go, to be with Shana wherever she went. He worried at that, a little: Arav seemed ready on a hair trigger to commit untoward acts to protect her, but Benji simply had to trust it would be all right. Others, too, went with their people: Kenny and Lucy fled with the broken flock. Maryam and Bertie remained here, for they had no people: They were simply here, like Pete Corley had been, to give themselves to the flock as shepherds. Hayley Levine stayed, too, but she looked nervous as she watched her cousin, Jamie-Beth, push onward. It was Sadie who said to her, “Go on. Be with her. You don’t want to lose her—once you find where she’s going, we’ll meet back here. Okay?”

  Hayley’s eyes shone with tears, though Benji was not sure if they were tears of happiness, or sadness, or simple fatigue and confusion over a journey that seemed finally at an end. Hayley nodded and hurried after her cousin on fleet feet. Sadie started to say something—

  But Benji held up a finger to silence her.

  Because across the street, in an upper window, he saw a curtain move.

  “I don’t think we’re alone,” he said.

  He unslung the rifle from his shoulder, thumbing the safety off. The others followed, too, and he told Sadie what he saw. “Upper window.” The building looked like a liquor store, abandoned, and he said as much. Benji then turned his gaze to the horizon, to the distant trees and along the rooftops, looking for someone, anyone, who might be intending them harm. Though it felt like a lifetime ago, the shooting on Klamath Bridge wasn’t even two months ago, and would it really be a surprise to see that same strategy played out here? Snipers lying in wait, locked and loaded? Now he was cursing himself for not riding ahead to scout out the town.

  “There,” Maryam said, pointing. More movement in a window, but in a different building. A hair salon in an old Victorian house. “And there, too.” She gestured toward a little café called Mag’s Kitchen—and this time, there was no hiding. A man stared out from behind the glass. No mistaking that.

  Benji raised the Ruger rifle, pressing the scope against his eye.

  He held the rifle aloft, trying to find the same window in the crosshairs—but he wasn’t good at this, not at all, and it took him a second to find the right window, a second that he feared was far too long…

  But there. The face. A man, older, ruddy-cheeked, a forehead lined with washboard wrinkles. Benji’s finger snaked toward the trigger, dreading now that this was an ambush. “We could be under attack—” he started to say, but then a voice in the distance interrupted him.

  “Benjamin Ray!”

  A loud, booming voice. Theatrical.

  Someone was up ahead, coming down the street—moving opposite to the flock.

  He turned the rifle in that direction—

  And a face zoomed into view. A face he recognized.

  “Don’t shoot!” Landry Pierce said, waving his hands.

  “It’s Landry,” he said, breathless, lowering the rifle. “It’s Landry.”

  NOW

  The Ouray Simulation

  THEY ALL STARED UPWARD. IT was the look of a crowd watching fireworks, except their eyes stared off at nothing—as the street full of people slipped their awareness from the world of the simulation to the real world, to their real eyes, their necks went lazy, their heads lolled back, and they stared upward at literally a whole separate reality.

  Honestly, it reminded Shana of being back there again, wandering among the sleepwalkers. Those faces wearing expressions of eerie placidity. At first, she didn’t know what to do. She wanted to wake them up, shake them, show them the door. Another part of her thought to join them: Why not again close her eyes and see what the flock was seeing? She wasn’t really here. She was, however, really there.

  Why not be present for the moment.

  (Arav…)

  She waited. She hesitated. Shana found Nessie, sitting there on a bench, her eyes empty like all the others. Shana knew that above all others, her sister likely had the best view of everything: As the first of the
walkers, she saw everything first. All that was to come.

  Then, a sea change. Carl Carter, with his big-jaw underbite and those tortoiseshell glasses, suddenly shuddered and blinked, returning to the world. He announced, to himself, to everyone, maybe to no one: “It’s happening. It’s happening!” Then he adjusted his glasses and slipped back into the other world—the real one. His neck went slack as his head dipped backward, his mouth drifting open.

  Mary-Louise Hinton gasped like she was coming up out of cold water and babbled with laughter. “I think…I think we’re going to our homes.”

  Another voice—Shana didn’t remember the young woman’s name, Carla or Cory or something—chimed in from somewhere: “The flock is breaking up. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  Then they were quiet again. Some mumbling and murmuring. Some twitching as if truly asleep.

  “They call them myoclonic twitches,” a voice said. Shana turned: It was the brain surgeon lady, Julie Barden. The one who gave the so-called orientation with Xander Percy. Julie wasn’t alone.

  Shana’s mother stood with her.

  The two walked right up to her, forming the only trio—at least, the only one visible—not joining in the strange reverie.

  Julie continued: “The kind of myoclonus they’re experiencing is the most common, at least, I expect. It’s the kind you feel when you’re about to fall asleep and your limbs suddenly—” She snapped her fingers. “—shake and shudder. They call that a hypnic jerk.”

  Oh yeah well you’re a hypnic jerk, Shana thought, but thankfully did not actually say. Instead she sniffed and said: “What are you two doing? Not joining the tune-in-drop-out-trip-balls party?”

  Her mother smiled. “We’re with The Twelve. We don’t have our bodies there in Ouray.”

  “Oh. Right.” Shana stiffened, feeling embarrassed. “I didn’t know you were one of The Twelve, Julie.”