Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

“I am,” Julie said. “When I stop and look through my true eyes, I only see a lit room with a cement floor and a Plexiglas enclosure. It’s very…Hannibal Lecter, I must confess.”

  Shana wanted to ask her exactly why a woman of her stature and profession—the lady was a brain surgeon, for fuck’s sake—would ever submit to a process like that. But then she wondered: What if her fear about her mother was also true about Julie? And the others in The Twelve (most of whom she had never even met)? What if they were fake? Just part of the program? A human stack of bits and bytes toodling around, pretending to be a person instead of the Living Matrix there under that skin mask?

  The thought, absurd as it was, made her suddenly mad. She shook her camera at them in a kind of defiance. “I saw it.”

  “What did you see?” Julie asked.

  But it was Daria who answered: “Shana thinks she’s seen a…gateway or some kind of portal—”

  “A black door,” Shana corrected.

  Julie hmmed. “And what do you think that it is?”

  “I don’t know. But Black Swan doesn’t want me to see it.”

  “You think it’s proof of something?”

  “Proof your…god up there isn’t some benevolent thing. That snaky douchebag up there is hiding something.”

  Julie seemed to consider this, a slight smirk on her face.

  “Let’s see your proof, then.”

  Shana grinned evilly, turning on the camera and using the button to flip through photos—cycling until she got to the end.

  “No,” she said. The world shook, or so she thought. But it didn’t, not really. It was she who shook. Wobbling as if faint.

  “I don’t see anything,” Julie said.

  Because there was nothing to see. There was an image of the rock wall in the bend of the switchback, but the black door was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t like it was glitched out or anything—it simply didn’t exist. The mountainous façade remained without any blemishes or errors. No holes, no caves, no Vantablack squares leading into nowhere.

  “It was there,” she protested.

  “Possibly just your mind playing tricks on you, sweetie,” her mother said, reaching for her, as if in comfort. Shana pulled away.

  “Get off. My mind wasn’t playing tricks. Is that even possible in here?” She felt suddenly dizzy and anxious. Maybe it was possible. If she could be dizzy and anxious, couldn’t she also imagine things? But fresh rage rode through her, and without a second thought she smashed the camera down against the ground. It shattered to pieces—she hoped that it would make a more dramatic display, with sparks or snaps of electricity, but mostly it just broke into black plastic shards. She cursed and stalked away, through her fellow sleepwalkers.

  NOVEMBER 1

  Ouray, Colorado

  THE BUILDING AT 320 6TH Avenue in Ouray was a building of many purposes: It was the Walsh Library, it was city hall, and it served as the community center. (And strange enough, it looked a helluva lot like Independence Hall in Philly. Benji reminded himself to try to suss out the story behind that.) Just up the road was another building that served a bunch of functions: The courthouse was also the historical society and the sheriff’s office and the city jail. Small towns, Benji thought. Big difference from his time in Atlanta.

  Inside city hall, it looked like you split off to check out a book or visit with the county clerk or head downstairs for a potluck in the community center. In this case, they ended up downstairs, in the community center room, which was decorated sparsely for some clumsy holiday mashup of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Tinsel, blinky lights, a cartoon turkey, a couple of ceramic jack-o’-lanterns. It struck Benji full force that the day prior was Halloween: It had come and gone without recognition. No fanfare, no candy. That, at least, until the man named Dove Hansen thrust a bowl of Halloween candy at him.

  Landry introduced them. “Benji, this is Dove Hansen. Dove, this is Doctor Benjamin Ray. He’s with the CDC.”

  Dove was a man with round cheeks and warm, kind eyes hiding under eyebrows so gray and so thick, you could probably use them to scrape mud off your boots. They were like miniature versions of the horseshoe mustache that framed his mouth.

  Dove stuck out a hand, and Benji took it.

  “What Landry fails to mention is that I am the mayor of this town, or what’s left of it,” Dove said. “Here, take some candy.” He shook the bowl.

  Benji wasn’t much of a candy-eater. He cared little for sweet things, with the occasional exception of some very fine, very bitter dark chocolate. But now he felt like a kid getting the keys to the Wonka factory. His hand plunged into the bowl, fetching a half-sized Snickers bar. “Thank you,” he said, unwrapping it and taking a bite. The sheer pleasure from eating the candy bar could not be overestimated. He had to work extra hard not to make happy moaning sounds. Sadie watched him, fascinated, and then took her own.

  “Isn’t it supposed to be ladies first?” she asked, delicately unpeeling a Kit Kat.

  Benji apologized around a mouthful of Snickers. “Shorry.”

  She winked, then bit the Kit Kat in half, vertically. Crunch.

  Dove took a piece himself, a little Krackel bar. He ate it in one bite and said, “Landry?” But the other man shook his head.

  “I’m trying to keep my weight down.”

  “World’s dying anyway,” Dove said. “You sure?”

  “Even if it dies tomorrow, I’d rather look good when it happens.”

  “Fair enough. Anyway. Doctor Ray—”

  “Benji, please.”

  “All right. Benji, Landry here prepped us somewhat for your…visit. Though to see it in person—the flock I mean—is really something. If you wanna sit down, I can tell you the state of the town and then give you a little news, then we can…figure out what’s next. How’d that be?”

  Benji looked to Sadie, who nodded.

  “I think that’d be fine,” he answered.

  They sat at a long cafeteria-style table. Metal folding chairs all around. This looked like a room intended for broad utility purposes: might house local weddings, beef-and-beers, voting, charity events, and so on.

  “Dove’s an interesting name,” Benji said as he sat.

  “My mother would tell you it’s because my father was one-third Ute, but you ask me, that’s some happy horseshit right there. He loved the mystique of cowboys and Indians and, well, here I am with Dove as a name. It’s a nice name, though, I don’t mind it. Point of fact: This town, Ouray, was named after Chief Ouray, a leader of the Uncompahgre band of the Utes. Of course, our town here is less than one percent Native, so I suppose it ends up sadly a name like my own: based more in the idea of native culture than actual Native culture. So it goes.” He cleared his throat, then idly played with a set of dentures in his mouth—his tongue dropped them down and the dentures waggled, moistly clicking between his existing teeth. “Before you tell me your story, I can give you the local lowdown, if that works.”

  “That would be fine.”

  Dove leaned forward, rescuing another candy from the depths of the candy bowl. This one, a peanut butter cup, but he didn’t unpeel it so much as he fidgeted with it for a while, the wrapper crinkling in his hand.

  “Ouray is a town of about a thousand, but that’s a little bit misleading,” Dove began. “That includes folks who have homes here but who generally only live in town for about six months, usually from late spring to sometime in the fall. May to October is standard, because after that, winter sets in, and winter here can be a brutal sonofabitch.”

  “How brutal, exactly?” Sadie asked.

  “Hard to say. Modern conveniences can dampen its impact—most days are sunny and snowy, so you get a four-wheeler with a plow on it and you’re in pretty okay shape.”

  “We can’t count on modern conveniences anymore.”

  �
�That is correct. Plus, sometimes big storms come through, really dump it on us—the average winter brings about eleven feet of the white stuff.”

  “Eleven feet?” Benji asked, eyes wide.

  “Sorry, hoss, it’s the mountains. We’re not a ski area proper, but we’re surrounded by ’em, so the white stuff is part of the package. If you can handle the cold and the snow, then this town is pretty as they come. Some towns in the winter go gray and dead, but not us. We’re white and bright with skies as big and blue as God’s own eye.”

  Benji privately worried about what a rough winter would mean for everyone. The shepherds were less a concern—because, truthfully, White Mask would be far worse for them than the white snow. But would Black Swan protect them from the winter? And when they emerged from their…slumber, what then? How to survive up here? Would they move on? Perhaps he was putting the cart miles before the horse.

  Dove continued. “We’re a skeleton crew, I guess. Some of our folks started to leave after Labor Day, which is par for the course around here. More went on in September, October. But the sickness sent others packing, either to be with loved ones elsewhere or to be near a bigger hospital, whether in Telluride or north to Montrose or even Grand Junction.”

  “And I presume the sickness took its toll in other ways.”

  Dove again moved the dentures around his mouth. Click-clack. “People are dead, if that’s what you’re asking. More than I’d like to count.”

  “I’m afraid numbers are a necessary part of my job,” Benji clarified. “Do you know how many? Have you counted?”

  “I can’t speak for those who have left, but those who stayed, we’ve lost a hundred thirty-seven people. Which may not sound like a lot, but it’s about thirty percent of our year-to-year folk, the permanent residents.”

  “What do you do with the bodies?”

  “The, uhh. Yeah. Those.” This conversation was troubling him, Benji could see that. The man’s face creased with worry. And he understood it. Experiencing something was one thing—you could compartmentalize even as you were experiencing it. But talking about it meant thinking about it. It meant opening the compartment and sorting through its contents, no matter how hideous. “We have a mass grave. South of town, up the Million Dollar Highway. It’s a mine, a mineral farm, not subsurface, just a surface mine. A pit, basically. We put the—” His voice broke suddenly. “I can’t call them bodies. I just can’t. They’re people, you understand that? People I know. Most I like, some I didn’t, some I loved like brothers and sisters. George Cartwright, Sissy Tompkins, Dan Lee, Lora King, on and on, people I grew up with, people I…”

  His eyes shone with sudden sadness.

  “It’s okay,” Sadie said, taking his hand. He flinched away from it—not aggressively, but as if jostled free from his memory of those named.

  He took a deep breath and puffed out his chest. A certain stoicism returned as he straightened his back. “We take the dead up to the mine. In a perfect world we’d bury them in the cemeteries where they’ve purchased plots—either Colona toward Montrose or Cedar Hill, which is a little closer. But this ain’t a perfect world, so we take them to the mine. We burn them there. I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do, but story goes that you leave the bodies around, then White Mask starts…pushing out of them like tubers out of a goddamn potato. Burning them seems to stop that, though you’re free to tell me I’m making a bad call there, Benji.”

  “I cannot say,” Benji said. “We never had time to do tests. But speaking of potatoes—burning affected vines and roots has shown to curtail the spread of potato blight and wilt. Though at this point, given the state of the world—”

  “It’s too late to say you’re sorry,” Dove said.

  “What?” Benji asked.

  “It’s something my wife—my ex-wife—used to say. Sherry was very clear on that point: Sometimes it’s too late to say you’re sorry. Too late to change course, to fix the damage. I was a bad drinker once upon a time, when I was young. Wasn’t abusive or nothing like that, but I slept around, lied a lot. I ended up doing exactly what Sherry warned me about. Couldn’t fix it with sorry.”

  “You say you’ve got only a skeleton crew. How many are left?” Sadie asked, wisely refocusing the conversation. Benji gave her a look that said Thank you.

  “Last count, thirty-seven of us. A mix of old-timers like me, and some younger folk who had homes and businesses here. Jenny Whelan, owns Jenny’s Café. Gil Fernandez, owns the little Mexican joint across from the Beaumont. The two hippies who own the bookstore in the Beaumont, Jasmeen Emerson and her husband, Carney Baur, good couple, nice couple. Think they had it in mind to open up one of them weed dispensaries up here now that it’s legal—kind of a Come to Colorado, get really high message because we’re at a higher elevation than most? Guess it won’t take off now, though.”

  “How many are sick?”

  “That I don’t know, exactly. I stopped nosing around that number once I realized it didn’t really matter.”

  “You don’t seem to have symptoms,” Sadie said.

  “I don’t. Not a one. I was a sickly child, if we’re being honest, but somehow my adult life has gone the other way. I’ve got some weight around my middle and my doc said I got bad triglycerides, but otherwise I’m healthy as a young ox. Must be that clean Ouray air.”

  Benji offered: “We could test you. I have some of the swabs—”

  “No,” Dove said, sharply. “I don’t need to know. I already have a good idea how this goes. I’m no dumb-ass. White Mask will get me. Probably already has me and just hasn’t shown its face yet.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “It’s my turn now to put you in the hot seat. Landry here showed up, told me what’s what and who was coming, and I didn’t know how to take it then, and don’t know how to take it now.”

  Benji thought about how to dance around the subject, how to ease Dove Hansen into the reality of what they were dealing with—was he a man of God? Of science? Would he need to be convinced or…?

  But Sadie didn’t mess around with any of that.

  “We are the shepherds of a flock of people chosen by a machine intelligence to survive the epidemic of White Mask and continue human civilization. They are protected by that intelligence via the means of a nanoscale swarm: basically, microscopic robots that have taken over the bodies of the chosen and put them into a kind of somnambulist coma, a ‘walking stasis,’ if you will, until the time comes that White Mask is gone from the earth and they can be reawakened. The machine intelligence, known as Black Swan, has chosen Ouray, your town, as something of a perfect point for the flock’s incubation. They will remain here as long as they are able in order to weather the end of the world.”

  Benji didn’t know yet how much Landry had told him, but it certainly wasn’t all that.

  Dove, to his credit, did not fall backward out of his chair.

  Instead he sat there, tongue pushing his dentures up and down like a fishing bobber in the water. He leaned back. He crossed his arms, then uncrossed them. His brow tightened into deep lines.

  “All right, then,” he said. “The remaining folk here are going to have some questions and I’d like you to answer them.”

  Benji and Sadie shared an affirmative look.

  “Of course,” Benji said. “When?”

  “I’d say now is about right.”

  “Can you give me an hour? I’d like to talk to the other shepherds. I need them to start identifying where the sleepwalkers went. We need also to start taking inventory of the town’s supplies, and get a general lay of the land—though that can come after, certainly.”

  Dove nodded. “A fair deal.”

  “Thank you,” Benji said.

  Dove finally unwrapped the peanut butter cup he’d been messing with. Before he popped the whole thing in his mouth he said, “You’re welcome
. Just don’t do me dirty, Doc. This town means the world to me, and these people have been through enough already. I find you’re lying to me or bringing danger to my door, you’ll not find me so kind.”

  NOVEMBER 1

  Ouray, Colorado

  ALMOST MIDNIGHT NOW IN THE Ouray township building. The questions from the day prior still raced through Benji’s head: How long will you be here? Are you going to save us? One of your…“people” is in my kitchen, sitting there at the kitchen table, can you get her out? The answers were not easy to give. He explained to them that yes, the flock was here for the duration. That no, he was not here to save them, and though he wished he could, that was just plain beyond his power at this point. And then he had to explain to people what he himself did not really understand: The flock had entered buildings, some businesses, a lot of homes, and it was there that they seemed to…remain. They knelt, or sat, or lay on beds, and just…went to sleep. Their eyes closed. Their bodies remained tense. Their chests rose and fell with shallow breaths. They were home, now.

  And their homes were sometimes other people’s homes.

  Their eyes were haunted with confusion and anger as he told them, no, he wouldn’t endeavor to move anyone. He watched their eyes shift to fear as he explained why: “Because I’m afraid that moving them will trigger their…defense mechanisms.” Sadie jumped in to explain in the most chipper, yet grisly way imaginable:

  “They first begin to increase rapidly in temperature as the machines inside them stir to a panicked state. If allowed to continue, the body pushes forward into a default state where the machines eject forcibly from the body, racing out of the cells to which they have bonded. As a result, the individuals detonate—except there is no fire, only a tide of scalding blood and liquefied organs. And bone shrapnel, of course.”

  Their eyes went big. Even Benji found the description jarring. (Though, also, correct.)

  That took three hours while the other shepherds went through town, cataloging the locations of the sleepwalkers. They only got through around 35 percent of them, and would continue that list tomorrow. They slept.