by Chuck Wendig
Questions hounded him. How long would the power stay on here? How long before Ozark Stover and his men came? How long would Arav remain able to come back from the brink—and how long would it be before Sadie fell to the delirium of the disease? How long before he himself fell prey to it? He had few symptoms, as yet, but Sadie was progressing steadily, if not swiftly.
He had no good answers. Only terrifying questions.
Awake, he took the Black Swan phone and headed out of his room and down the stairs. Already he could see someone else in the lobby.
It was Arav.
He, too, looked like he was worn out and worn down. His edge had gone. The young man sat on a chair in the lobby, looking for half a moment as if he were someone in another, normal life just chilling out in a perfectly average hotel lobby—seeking restitution from customer service, perhaps, or waiting for an Uber to come and pick him up, or even just hoping to meet a friend for coffee.
Arav saw him approach. He pointed toward a door off to the side. “That’s the bookstore. Did you know that?”
“I did not,” Benji answered, and it was true.
“The bookstore next door has an entrance here in the lobby,” Arav said, sounding the most like himself Benji had heard in a long while. “That’s like, the perfect hotel to me. A hotel with a connected bookstore. It’s almost like Heaven. Maybe this is Heaven.”
Benji sat down in a chair next to him, then gave it a second thought—he stood up again, and moved the chair so he could face Arav, instead. “This is a very nice town. I wish I had visited it under different circumstances.”
“Yeah. Seriously.” Arav idly picked at his thumbnails. Pick, tick, pick. “Dove okay? I…heard what happened to him.”
“I think so. I stitched him up. No antibiotics, though, yet—best we have is some ointment. Neosporin. It’ll have to do for a couple of days.” He reminded himself to check pet stores when they had some time: Pet stores sometimes sold antibiotics for fish and other smaller animals without a prescription, and a lot of people didn’t know they could use them. (He’d heard tell of a growing subculture of folks who’d learned from the internet to buy fish antibiotics from Amazon and other sources when their own healthcare costs became too high.) “Soon as we get clear of this ARM threat, Maryam said she wants to head out, look for horses in surrounding ranches, because in the face of a flagging gas crisis, we might need them. When she does, I’ll have her look for meds.”
“I’m sorry, Benji.”
“Don’t be, Arav.”
“I am. I have to be. I…don’t even remember all that happening. It was like…” He seemed again like he was having a hard time conjuring memories or clear thoughts. “When I was a kid, a teenager, I went in to get my wisdom teeth taken out. They put me under for it, and I guess when I came out I was seemingly awake and aware? I was up and walking around, but I was saying just…nonsense? Words, real words, but nothing that really made much sense. I did that the whole ride home. But all I remember is suddenly ‘waking up’ while walking up the steps to the front stoop of our townhouse. It was like—” He snapped his fingers. “One minute I was gone, the next I was there, and this felt like that. I woke up to people pointing guns at me—and me pointing that gun at you.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s White Mask. It’s what it does.”
“I know. I get that. But…maybe I shouldn’t be here anymore.”
“Arav—”
“Listen, like before, I was going to go away to get away from the flock, and I did. I’m glad I came back. But now it’s maybe gone too far. I could be a danger to all of us. What if one day I decide that the flock are…demons or something?”
“We’ll make sure you don’t have any firearms.”
“I could take a knife—”
“The flock can’t be harmed by knives.”
“But you can. And can fire kill them? Maybe it can. We don’t know, and even me having that thought in my head means maybe someday White Mask will convince me it’s the right thought, not the wrong one.”
Benji reached out, put a steadying hand on the young man’s knee. “We’ll get through this. We all know to keep a sharper eye on you.”
“You didn’t even know I was down here. I could’ve been down here starting a fire to burn the whole hotel to the ground.” Arav’s face softened. “I don’t mean that as a condemnation, Benji, I know you’re busy, stretched beyond your…” He seemed suddenly at a loss for the word until it struck him: “Capacilities. You’re human. I just mean—”
“No, you’re right. I didn’t know. We will do better. We’ll keep a sharper eye on you, have someone with you.”
“I’m going to leave.”
“I’ve had this conversation too many times, Arav. You’re not.”
Arav looked to the floor and began what was obviously a prepared lecture: “When a member of a wolf pack gets old or sick—”
“No.” Benji shook his head. “I’m going to stop you right there. What you’re about to tell me is a myth, not fact. Old wolves still lead their packs and teach them their ways. Sick wolves do not limp off in faux-nobility to die away from their family. Wolves are intensely social creatures, like people. And like people, they take care of their sick. They keep them. They help them. As we will do with you, as you have already done with us. You’re not going anywhere. Okay?”
Arav searched his eyes. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. We need you. You’re family. We’re shepherds.”
“Thank you, Benji.”
“Here’s what we’ll do. You’ll go upstairs to my room. There’s a small couch—a fainting couch, I think they’re called, like a chaise—you can sleep on, or if you’d rather be more isolated, the bathroom has a large clawfoot tub, porcelain. Not the most comfortable place, but with some blankets and pillows, it’ll be okay to sleep in and will give you a bit of distance.”
Arav nodded and agreed, and headed upstairs.
What he told Arav about wolves was correct, but he also recalled a different story he’d read about a year or so ago. It was the story of the resurgent wolves of Yellowstone, and about how one alpha became old and ultimately, sick. Not ill of the body, but ill in the mind. He became rangy and mad. Eventually the pack ran him out, and he followed behind, trying again and again to poach one of the young female wolves for mating purposes—and one day, the old alpha was successful at exactly that. He and his new mate found a cave. She grew pregnant. But his first pack would not have it. They came out of the woods one night and slaughtered the female wolf, and then hunted the old alpha, too, through the forest, until he was tired and could go no farther. Then they tore him to pieces in the snow, assured that he would trouble them no longer, and that his treachery was truly paid.
NOVEMBER 5
Ouray, Colorado
MATTHEW’S FAVORITE BIBLE STORY WAS the conversion of Paul.
Paul, originally named Saul, walked on the road to Damascus and was shown a vision from God of the resplendent Christ. But the vision was too powerful, and lickety-split it struck Saul blind. He still stumbled his way blindly to Damascus, where he refused to eat or drink anything, until a disciple named Ananias showed up and told him that God would return to him his sight. And his sight was returned, and he became Paul, a believer. Paul went on to author more than half of the books of the New Testament. And lo it was written and lo it was good, blah-blah-blah.
It was his favorite story once, but it also made him angry.
He never spoke this anger to another person, not even to Autumn, but only to God the Father in moments of despair and doubt. The story stuck in him like the tip of a thorn just under the skin. It bothered him because it was the classic, canonical version of conversion. You were struck with the force of the truth of God, and it rendered you bereft of mortal sight until God Himself restored it. It was perfectly emblematic of the shock and a
we of Heaven itself.
It also never happened to him.
His conversion was less a thunderclap of truth and more the water a fish one day realizes he’s swimming in, breathing in, shitting in—the gradual acceptance of, This is what I was taught, and this is what I believe. The Bible hinged a great many of its stories on revelation, but the truth was, Matthew was never born again.
He was simply born, and into this life he came.
Now the story stuck in him even worse as he paced the jail cell. The Bible offered an unfair expectation of one’s interactions with God—a dynamic, living deity who responded with equal parts vengeance and compassion. But that word, responded, it wasn’t true, was it? Matthew had never heard from God, not really. It was easy enough to then say, Well, the responses of God are in the world around us, but looking to that was a fool’s crusade. Was no logic in the world. Wasn’t any sense. It was just madness. The reality was that no God responded to your prayers. The vengeance and compassion of the universe were imagined—people looking at them and seeing something that wasn’t there. Seeing Jesus in a stain on the wall.
Yes, yes, he knew the Bible was metaphorical. He’d preached that himself time and again. But that logic only went so far before you began to see the whole thing as only metaphor, and once it became only that, then that meant—like all metaphor—it was a giant goddamn lie. (And hadn’t Ozark Stover chided him on exactly that point? Not that Stover was a believer, either. He was just another user claiming the mantle of a “Good Christian.” Like so many of the world’s bullies and abusers, choosing to find shelter in the faith—using their religiosity as both shield and sword.)
The Saul-to-Paul story was not merely a bald-faced lie, it was almost like it was made to rub salt in the wound: This, the story said, is how conversion truly feels, and if you have not felt it, if you have not been both wounded and healed by God, then you are not truly a believer.
“Fuck you,” Matthew said to God.
“What?”
He startled.
Benji stood there. Arms crossed.
“Oh,” Matthew said. “It’s you.”
“Hello,” Benji said. “Talking to God?”
Matthew laughed a little. “That transparent?”
“Just seems a good time to catch up with the Almighty, is all. I’ve had my own frustrated conversations with Him.”
“May I ask why you’re here?”
“I figure you could stretch your legs. I’ll let you out, we can take a walk, you can tell me all you know about Ozark Stover and his men.”
“That puts a lot of faith in me.”
“Faith is all we have at this point. You should understand that.”
“I have no faith anymore, Doctor.”
Benji stiffened, as if not prepared for this kind of conversation. To his credit, he did not back away from it, but rather, leaned in—not in an aggressive way, not as if he wanted to enter anyone’s personal space. But it had a sense of intimacy to it. A confidentiality that Matthew found unusually comforting, all of a sudden. It occurred to him that Benjamin Ray would, in a different life, have made a helluva pastor.
Then, Benji unlocked the door.
Matthew stared at it, wary at first. Last time he was freed from a jail cell, Ozark Stover was waiting with the twin barrels of a 12-gauge.
He gingerly claimed his freedom and muttered, “Thank you.”
Together they walked upstairs, and outside into the Ouray evening.
“How is it,” Benji asked, “that a pastor has come to have no faith?”
“Are you telling me that you, the man of science, carry the faith?”
“I do.”
“How? Look around you. Most of mankind is…well, who knows? Dead or dying at best guess. Do you see God in that?”
“I can and I do. The world didn’t get bad overnight, Matthew. It was bad long before us. We’ve long endured wars and plagues. And I assume you kept your faith despite those things.”
Matthew felt a rush of anger rise to his cheeks. “And that’s the problem, isn’t it? We keep lying to ourselves that those things are normal, natural, like they’re part of God’s grand design. And it lets us excuse those things. It lets us look to the next world instead of this one. We get away with it because, oh right, it’s all part of ‘God’s plan.’ All part of the design.”
The man standing opposite him seemed to take this in. He paused, reflective, hmming as he did. He spoke with measured words that featured none of the anger in Matthew’s comment: “You’re right that some use their faith as a crutch. Others use it as an excuse. You did, I think. You gave it too much power, ceded too much of yourself to it. And I’m sure I have, too, without ever meaning to. But God was never about power over us. It was about the power we possessed to either be good and in His graces, or be selfish and wretched in His shadow. So to speak. Hell is being in that shadow. It’s not in the next world, but this one, right now, anytime you choose not to do the right thing. As long as we’re still here, not merely surviving but trying to do right by one another, then I believe that the heritage of God’s light is still in us. Maybe not as the Bible would have us believe, maybe not as preachers such as yourself would have told us, but…there just the same.” He shrugged. “Then again, maybe it is an excuse. Maybe it is a crutch. But it’s what keeps me going.”
“Shouldn’t it be your fellow humans that keep you going?”
Benji smiled. “It is my fellow humans. Each of them carrying a bit of God in them, even now. Even you.” He patted Matthew on the chest—not an aggressive movement, but again a move that was somehow reassuring. Chummy, even. “I’m sorry about your wife, by the way. It must be hard to lose her out there.” But Benji, it seemed, no longer had the patience to hear Matthew’s side of that tale, for he hurried right into:
“Now tell me all you can about Ozark Stover.”
* * *
—
TOGETHER, THEY WALKED to the community center. Went downstairs, had some hot tea. Matthew told Benji everything he knew. All the ordnance he’d seen, a rough count of Stover’s men, what kinds of vehicles Ozark had requested.
But then they heard it—
A muffled sound. In better days, he would’ve thought it was fireworks. But now, he knew. It was a gunshot. Not far away.
What he told Benji wouldn’t matter now.
It was too late.
It had begun.
NOW AND THEN
The Ouray Simulation
SHANA KNEW NOW THAT SHE did not belong here. She sat on a bench on Main Street, outside Duckett’s Market, across from the post office and, of all the things, a jerky store. (She wasn’t sure if the jerky store existed in the real world or if this was just Black Swan’s artificial idea of what a small mountain town was like. She had not yet ventured in to try any of it.)
She sat, watching the townsfolk pass.
Eating ice cream.
Or hot dogs.
Or gnawing on jerky like weirdos.
They talked and laughed. They gardened. They looked at art or painted it themselves. This digital utopia was like somebody’s curious idea of Heaven. The people here were in a kind of interstitial bliss. She understood now the weird allure of the Matrix in that old movie from the ’90s. This place was bliss. If you could live in a simulated village of pure happiness, why would you ever leave, even if your body was being used as a battery for some robot revolution—or, say, hypothetically, if your body was held in stasis while the world went to diseased shit.
Sometimes Shana had to remind herself that the people here were exactly that: They were the flock, the sleepwalkers, the survivors chosen by Black Swan to repopulate the earth or whatever.
And Shana did not feel a part of them.
She felt like a voyeur. A witness. Sitting here, nobody looked at her. Nobody gave her any thought
at all. Nobody wanted to acknowledge that she was here, and that she didn’t belong.
(A small part of her wondered, though, did she really not belong? Or had she chosen not to belong?)
Nessie hadn’t yet gone to see Black Swan, but Shana knew that one day soon her sister would. Her mother and the others had been goading her like a bunch of fucking oracles. The rest of these assholes, too, were content to be a part of this grand experiment, maybe not realizing what they’d given up to be here. No one seemed to be dubious. No one seemed to be pushing back. No one but her. At first she thought, well, maybe it was because she came late to the party. She wasn’t part of the chosen-one plan, right? The shooting on Klamath Bridge had Black Swan reaching out in some desperation, and it chose her and a handful of the other shepherds.
Thing was, though, none of them seemed to have a problem with it. They did at first. But Mia was just happy to be with Mateo. Aliya had been crushed for a few days without Tasha here, but eventually assimilated in with the rest of them. (And now Shana was kicking herself for not glomming hard onto Aliya from the moment they came into this place. Maybe she would’ve found a friend who would be sitting with her now, on this bench, instead of…doing who-knew-what. Probably painting a waterfall or listening to music or eating ice cream. All these assholes loved ice cream now that they could have it whenever. Did they not eat ice cream in real life? Were they all lactose-intolerant, suddenly free from the chains of gastrointestinal distress? Another day, another asshole with an ice cream cone in hand. Great, now Shana wanted ice cream.)
So Shana felt spectacularly alone. Not just alone—separate.
It was, she feared, her fixation on the black door.
Nobody else had seen it.
Nobody else cared.
She tried to tell them but…
