Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  “Or forming a white supremacist militia.”

  “That, too, Benji, that too.”

  Benji, always a fan of the numbers, ran them.

  Thirty-seven townsfolk, plus seven shepherds, and now the ex-pastor Matthew Bird. With what the pastor had in his car, that meant they had a total of seven rifles, four shotguns, and five handguns. Totaled up, that meant sixteen guns for forty-five people. Roughly a box of ammo for each, though it occurred to him that this might be inaccurate: Some of the ammo for one firearm might need to be used for another, too. He reminded himself to check the calibers of each and literally count the bullets. That kind of inventory would matter here, grim as it was.

  He told Dove his calculations and added: “I don’t know how many men this Ozark Stover is bringing to our doorstep, but I imagine it’s at least equal to what we have here.”

  “These people aren’t soldiers, Benji. Like I said, a number of them aren’t even hunters. So understand that. They might stand and fight, I dunno, but I can’t promise they won’t be a danger to themselves, too.”

  “And some of them are sick.”

  “Yes, they are. We don’t have many lost to the—as you put it, delirium of the disease yet, but White Mask is here. And the ones who do have the delirium—well, I don’t want to hand a gun to them.”

  “A fine point.” He drew a deep breath and looked at his watch. It was 10 A.M. now. Sadie was out with the other shepherds, Arav included, gathering up their guns and ammunition. Landry was stocking a few locations with food: high points that Black Swan indicated would be good lookout spots. That meant the top floor of the courthouse, the attic here at the Beaumont, and potentially a lookout at the southwest corner of town. There, three waterways converged: the Uncompahgre, Oak Creek, and Canyon Creek, all fed by the Cascade Falls. A series of trails and bridges crisscrossed up there, and—according to Black Swan, who was the architect of this portion of the plan—provided a lookout over the whole town and valley. Benji worried it was too far away to get a meaningful look, especially at nighttime, but he planned on going up there later with Landry to see.

  But first—

  “So,” he said to Dove. “The dynamite?”

  “Okay. The dynamite.”

  * * *

  —

  “THERE YOU GO,” Dove said. “Whole box of stump suppositories.”

  Benji looked down at the wooden crate sitting exposed in the bottom of an old bedroom closet. A mounded ring of clothes—clothes used apparently to hide this box from prying eyes—surrounded it.

  Behind them, one of the walkers, a young woman named Marissa Chen, was on the bed. Facing up, perfectly still. Like a mannequin someone had placed there. Benji had to try very hard not to look at her.

  So instead, he focused on the crate. It sat closed.

  “ ‘Stump suppositories’?” he asked Dove.

  “Yup. Fella who these belonged to used them mostly to clear stumps. Drill a hole, drop a quarter stick in, run some detcord to it, put an electric charge through the detcord with a battery or some such, then—bzzt.” He clapped his hands together to make a hollow sound. “Boom. Stump gone.”

  “Stumps that much of a problem around here?”

  “Turns out, they are. Got a bug problem here, little bastard called the fir engraver beetle. Eats up the white fir trees all around us, leaves them dead. They fall or get cut down, and then the stumps gotta go. Can’t leave them around because they become fuel for forest fires. Dale—Dale’s the fella who lived here, once—got paid good money to help us out.”

  Benji knelt and tried opening the box, but the lid was nailed down. Dove offered him a long-bladed penknife with a handle of what looked to be some kind of antler. Benji took it, slid the blade under the lid, used a little leverage, and—

  Pop.

  Dy-no-mite.

  Half a crate of sticks as red as a Christmas candle.

  “I assume it’s not safe to jostle,” Benji asked. “Old dynamite starts to sweat out the—”

  “Nitroglycerin, I know. This isn’t old. It’s new.”

  “And you knew about this?”

  “Sure did.”

  “But it’s not legal.”

  Dove scoffed. “Sure it is. Dale had his FEL.”

  “FEL?”

  “Federal explosives license. Long as you’re not a fugitive or an ex-con, it’s the same process as getting a federal firearms license to buy and sell guns. Though I guess none of that matters much now.”

  Benji lifted the box. “The world was an odder place than I knew.”

  “Shit, Benji. Have you met America?”

  * * *

  —

  AHEAD, A ROCK wall of about thirty feet, or so Benji guessed aloud.

  Black Swan clarified: IT IS FORTY-TWO FEET IN HEIGHT.

  Benji stood in the middle of the road and Dove gave him an arched eyebrow as he consulted with the phone. “That’s the…robot?”

  “No, it’s a phone that provides access to the machine intelligence that inhabits the robot swarms inside the sleepwalkers.” When he said it out loud like that, it never got any less bizarre. “I ask it for advice sometimes.”

  That sounded even more bizarre.

  “Well, it’s got the right idea,” Dove said. “This should actually work.” Currently the two of them stood on the asphalt of the Million Dollar Highway, a set of switchbacks that climbed south out of town. The road here was carved right out of the mountain, looking down on Ouray. “Coming from the north, you can’t block the road this way, because the mountains are too far off—and where they get close, you can just take Oak Street along the river. But here…” He sucked at his dentures. “It’ll work.”

  The plan was, drill a succession of holes, then use the detcord-and-charge to detonate the dynamite that they used to plug those holes.

  Then rocks would fall.

  Hopefully nobody died.

  Ideally, it would blast enough rock down onto the road to block it from any vehicles that wanted to come through here. Meaning they could effectively close off one point of access to the town, at least to vehicles. Men on foot could still make it here—or could come through other, wilder avenues. At the north end of town, Arav was (Benji hoped) helping some of the shepherds and townsfolk park cars perpendicular across the roadways, as had been done with the bus when they first got here.

  Any obstacles they could put in the way of ARM had to help, right?

  Dove handed over a roll of red cable. Then used his foot to pull closer another spool of yellow wire. Benji looked at him. “Why the two spools? I thought we could just run the red to the charge and—”

  “Oh hell no. This is detcord. It’s by itself explosive—and because of that you don’t need blasting caps. Just plug this stuff right into the tips of each dynamite stick and then clip it—then you bridge it to proper wire, set a charge through it, and hope you’re nowhere near it.”

  “You know a lot about explosives, Dove.”

  “I know a lotta shit about a lotta shit. This is just because I watched Dale do it, though, not because I’m the fucking Unabomber, all right?”

  “Didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

  “All that being said, some folks around here have been known to fish with quarter sticks of dynamite…”

  “That doesn’t sound fair to the fish.”

  “Oh, it’s not.” He laughed. “It’s really not.”

  “Shall we do this?” Benji asked.

  “Let’s make some noise, Doctor Ray.”

  * * *

  —

  THE SIGHT OF all the blood around surprised Benji—even as the detonation was still fresh in his mind, every part of him vibrating, he turned to see Dove there on the ground, screaming and rolling around. The older man had his hands around his head. Blood was pooling benea
th him, running through his fingers, gushing from some injury Benji couldn’t see.

  He moved fast, hunkering down next to Dove and urging him to pull his hands away from his face.

  There, he saw the injury—

  A hard, ragged line cut across the side of his forehead to his temple.

  A stone sat there on the ground. Blood shining upon it. Bits of skin bundled up in its cracks. It was then that Benji understood. Though they’d gone to what they thought was a safe distance—over a hundred yards away and off to the side of the switchback, just up a bit of a hill—a stone must’ve blasted free like a bullet. He’d heard something just after explosion: a whistling sound, a fast whip-crackle of brush. Must’ve been this.

  Dove had now stopped screaming and instead was saying proper words, all of them profanities: “Shit, cocksucker, fuck, goddamnit fuck shit.”

  “Stay still,” Benji urged him. He knew the injury could be serious. A hard impact like that could be devastating—a concussion, a fractured skull, bleeding on the brain, or even just a garden-variety infection.

  “Lot of fucking blood,” Dove said through gritted teeth.

  “That’s normal with lacerations to the head and face. A wealth of little blood vessels in there.” He took his bottle of water and splashed a bit onto the injury. Dove growled and tensed up so hard, Benji thought the man might grind his teeth into a wet paste. The water, though, cleared away some of the blood for a moment. He did not see bone beneath. The cut, it seemed, was significant in its length but not its depth. “It needs stitches. And antibiotics. You might also have a mild concussion—time will tell on that. Here, come on, let’s see if you can stand.”

  He offered Dove a hand. The older man grumpily stood up. Fresh blood ran down his face, over his wincing eye. Even his white mustache was wet with red—like a tract of snow where a wolf had made a kill.

  “We need to get you back to town, I’ll stitch you up.”

  “Hell with that. How’d we do?”

  “What?”

  “The rocks, Doc. How’d we do?”

  Benji had put that out of his mind. He turned to see, now that the smoke was swept away by the mountain wind.

  The dynamite had carved a series of craters in the side of the mountain, littering the road with impassable boulders.

  “It worked,” Benji said, breathless at even this small success.

  “Then at least my blood spilled was blood earned. My mother always used to say that. I’d come up to her, bleeding from some fool thing I did, and she’d ask, Did you at least get something for it? Like the blood was a way to pay in, to pay a price to accomplish a goal. If I did, she’d say, Good, blood spilled, but blood earned, and leave it at that.”

  They started to walk out of the brush, down the hill and back to the road. “And if you didn’t get anything for your spilled blood?”

  “Then she’d laugh at me, call me a dumb-ass, tell me to make sure that next time I got something for my time and injuries.”

  “Your mother sounds like a hard woman.”

  “Hard as a hammer’s cheek, Benji.”

  Together the two of them admired their work one last time—the rain of rock and stone really would make the road impassable to all vehicles. Even a motorbike would have a helluva time navigating this field of broken mountain. Then they started walking back to town. Dove’s face was a half mask of already drying blood. “We shoulda been back farther,” he said.

  “I think that much is obv—”

  Benji’s radio crackled.

  It was Maryam McGoran’s voice.

  “Benji. Come quick. We got a problem, north end of town. Over.”

  Dove sighed. “Fun never ends, does it?”

  “Apparently not.”

  * * *

  —

  ARAV HELD THE shotgun up to his shoulder—a Remington 870 pump-action 12-gauge, a weapon loaded with buckshot and featuring enough oomph to perforate most major organs with one hasty pull of the trigger. He was twitchy, and Benji could see that he was lost in his own mind. The young man pointed the gun back and forth, moving the barrel from one target to the next: each of them townspeople or shepherds.

  Benji approached, hands up. Ahead, Arav spun around to face him, putting the people at his back. Behind them was a school bus—the same one that had blocked the northern road when the flock and shepherds came into town a few days ago. Already behind it the townsfolk had parked a number of cars, stacking them deep and at off-angles to make sure no one could easily pass.

  Though it looked like they were having some success here, that was severely undercut by Arav, who now thrust the gun toward Benji.

  A hundred feet separated them.

  Arav was sweating, even in the cold. His breath popped in short, despairing puffs. The gun rattled just slightly as his hands shook.

  “Arav,” Benji said.

  “You back up. You back away.”

  Benji did not back up, but he did cease his advance.

  He gave a short look behind him, saw that Dove had moved a hand to hover over the holster he had at his waist. Ahead, too, he saw Maryam at the far end, just at the back bumper of the bus. She had a lever-action rifle hanging at her side, the barrel down to the ground. But already Benji could see her easing it up, up, up. This is going to turn into a shootout.

  “Nobody is going to hurt you,” Benji said, feeling the weight of his own rifle slung over his shoulder. He didn’t want to have to use it. He told himself he wouldn’t use it. Arav had been through enough already. Arav was a shepherd. They had to protect their own, even in a situation like this.

  But a small voice wondered:

  What if he had no choice? Arav was sick already. And as with Alzheimer’s, there could come a point when the mind was truly lost—the pathways once established in the brain toward rational thought and discourse became an unsolvable labyrinth.

  “Back away. Back away.”

  “Do you know who I am?” Benji asked calmly, quietly.

  “I…you’re…” It was plain to see the struggle on his face. He was warring with his own memories. Trying to sort through them. Arav was on Ritalin, Benji knew, but had it failed finally? Was its utility used up?

  He took a step forward.

  Arav pressed the shotgun hard into his own shoulder, staring down the vented rib of the black barrel.

  Dove drew his pistol. “Don’t, boy.”

  Arav pointed the gun at Dove, now. His eyes went wide and unblinking. Sweat ran into them and he flinched. Benji felt his heart stop for a moment—even the smallest flinch could make Arav pull the trigger. If he’d already pumped a shell into the chamber, that trigger wouldn’t take much to send a blast of lead shot into him or Dove.

  “Dove,” Benji urged, “it’s fine, put the gun down.”

  “Inclined not to,” Dove said, low and slow.

  “This isn’t the Wild West.”

  “And if he’s sick, like an animal, maybe he needs to be put down.”

  Is that what Dove did here? Did he put down his own townspeople? That was a grotesque act, if so. And yet…

  He cleared his head. None of that was important right now.

  Maryam on the other side gently raised her rifle.

  “No!” he barked. Loud, too loud, enough to draw Arav’s attention anew. The barrel snapped back toward him and he could hear the gun go off, could feel its cold blast hit him square in the chest, whoom—

  Just my imagination. That didn’t happen. He was still standing. Still whole and in one piece. The gun did not go off.

  “Arav, you may not remember me, but you remember Shana?”

  There. A flicker of awareness in Arav’s eye. He hesitated. The gun barrel lowered—just a little.

  Maybe his mind was not an unsolvable labyrinth, yet. Benji had little experience with Alzh
eimer’s directly, but he knew that caregivers had ways to reach their patients suffering under the disease. Sometimes it was music, sometimes artwork (making it or beholding it), sometimes it meant having contact with a beloved pet. Other times it simply meant finding something—or someone—that they loved and invoking that emotional pathway.

  “Shana,” Arav said, his voice suddenly small.

  “You’re just protecting Shana, aren’t you?” Benji asked.

  Maryam stared down the sights of her rifle.

  Dove held his pistol aloft, watching through one open eye, the other shut with a crust of his own blood.

  “I am,” Arav admitted.

  “We are, too. I’m Benji. Doctor Benjamin Ray. We worked together at the CDC.” When the CDC still existed. “Right now, we’re trying to defend this town from some bad men. You were in the process of helping these nice people set up a blockade against those men. I am not one of the bad men. I am your friend. We’re all your friends here, Arav.”

  “Arav…” He spoke his own name, like he hadn’t heard it before. But then he said it again, like he recognized it: “Arav. Arav Arav Arav.” Then, finally: “Benji.”

  It was like watching fog roll out to sea, once more revealing the shoreline, and the moon, and the stars. Clarity came to Arav. He looked suddenly to the shotgun in his hand and quickly lifted the barrel to the sky, his other hand letting go of the stock and also rising in surrender.

  Benji moved toward him with an urgency to his step, quickly moving to disarm Arav. The young man, his friend, let him. It was over.

  Except really, it wasn’t over. Not for any of them.

  Night in Ouray

  NO ATTACK CAME. THE TOWN was quiet. The lights were out, mostly, except for a few windows burning effulgent in the blue-black of the mountainous dark. Benji sat in his room at the Beaumont, looking out over Main Street. Sadie lay on the bed, on her side, resting. He knew he should do the same, but he felt worn out, worn down, like all of his protections and defenses had been sandblasted away.