Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  Maybe it was worse than that.

  “All right,” Dove said. “Come on.”

  Into the dark, Dove went. And Matthew followed, half blind.

  * * *

  —

  “I SHOULD GO out there,” Benji said, pacing the floor of the community center lobby. Dove had his rifle, now, and suddenly he wished like hell that he had it back. Once he’d reviled guns, but now that he needed one to survive, it felt like the world’s creepiest security blanket.

  Sporadic gunfire punctured the night outside the building—coming from different directions, too. He felt wearily lost, because he had no idea what was happening: Who was shooting at who? Was it Ozark Stover’s men killing the flock, one by one? Were the shepherds returning fire?

  No one was talking to him on the walkie-talkie.

  Nobody.

  “It’s fine,” Sadie said.

  “It’s obviously the very other end of fine,” he countered.

  “The plan is the plan.”

  “Yes. You’re right.”

  Just then, a bell rang. A clear sound, clanging over the town. Benji knew what it was: the bell at the inn where Landry was holed up. It meant he was in trouble.

  Benji flashed a look to Sadie.

  “No,” she said. “You’re not.”

  “I have to.”

  “You can’t go out there.”

  “Sadie, Landry is in trouble. He needs backup. He’s watching over way too many of the flock there.”

  “You’re too important.”

  “They’re important. The sleepwalkers.” It felt strange calling them that, now—they weren’t walking, not anymore.

  “There’s something I need to tell you—”

  “Then I will endeavor to make it back so you can tell me. For now, I need your gun. The Glock has more rounds in it than this—” He held up the revolver, which felt like a brick in his hand. “Trade you?”

  “This thing is as big as my head.”

  But she handed it over.

  “Thank you, Sadie.”

  Her eyes shone with tears. “Don’t die.”

  He thought, but did not say, Death is coming for us all. Can’t stop it now. Might as well do something worthwhile with the time I have.

  Instead, all he said was, “I won’t.”

  That promise was a lie, because by now he’d learned one thing very, very well: Death was a greedy pig, and if it came for him, there was little Benji could do to stop it from gobbling him right up.

  * * *

  —

  BY NOW DOVE was creeping on hands and knees along the trail, his jacket brushing up against brittle shrubs and old sage. He hissed a shushing sound back at Matthew and then pointed to his ear.

  “Hear that?” he whispered.

  It took a moment, but Matthew did, indeed hear.

  Voices.

  They floated up from ahead and below—

  Though he could not understand the words, one voice stood out among others: the gruff, mudslide rumble of Ozark Stover. The sound of that voice even now threatened to paralyze him there on the trail. All parts of him tightened up. His heart raced. Sweat beaded on his brow despite the cold. Get it together, he told himself. Bo might be down there.

  Dove turned around, brought his forehead close to Matthew’s. “Here’s what we’re gonna do, Matthew. We’re gonna get a little cover ahead from a couple of big fir trees, okay? We’ll sneak past them, then I’m going to get back down on my belly and set up a shot. I’ll give you a chance to look, see if you can see your kid down there, all right?”

  “Yeah. O…okay.”

  “You with me?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “When I set up my shot, I want you to watch my back. Got that pistol of yours?”

  Matthew did, indeed, have the pistol. He nodded.

  “Then let’s do this. Nice and easy.”

  Dove continued crawling along the ridgeline until, sure enough, Matthew saw two fir trees ahead—tall and bushy, the dark green of their needled boughs merging perfectly with the night-dark. Soon as Dove got to one of those, he stood back up. Matthew walked about ten feet behind.

  Dove whispered: “See that rock formation?”

  Pale rocks rose like the teeth in the lower jaw of a dragon’s mouth. Matthew nodded.

  “We’re gonna go just to the far side of them and set up. This is just like hunting a big ol’ caribou, okay? We’ll take it nice and slow, real easy, real calm. You good with that?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Come on, then.”

  Dove turned to walk forward.

  Matthew heard a twig snap.

  By the time he realized it wasn’t Dove’s foot that made the sound, the darkness lit up with the light from a flashlight. Any adjustments Matthew’s eyes had made were now gone as his pupils shrank to pinpoints in order to accommodate the brightness. He was blind to the world, all of it washed out in a wave of white—

  Dove cried out, and then the roar of a gun filled the air.

  The old man staggered backward, his rifle clattering to the ground—

  Matthew heard, through the screeching din of his ears, the sound of a pump-action being rattled—cha-chak—

  Someone said something. He couldn’t make out what.

  He reacted, fast as he could.

  Gun up, he pointed it, winced, and fired.

  The gun bucked in his hand and he nearly lost it.

  And then the night was still once more.

  He raised the pistol and marched forward, trying to blink away the orbs of light that whirled in his vision. The beam of light was no longer pointing at him; it was now on the ground, pointing into the brush. Matthew didn’t know what to do, so he stomped on it. Must’ve been plastic, because it cracked under his sneaker and the light went out.

  As his eyes adjusted, he saw the two bodies.

  The light of the sickle moon shone in blood.

  Dove lay about ten feet away, clutching his middle, which looked to be a red, glistening mess.

  And another body was nearly at Matthew’s feet, reclining back against a round berm of rock.

  “You” was the word that gurgled up from that body. And a sudden fear struck Matthew, Oh God, it’s him, it’s Bo, it’s my son—

  As his eyes adjusted, he realized that his fear was misplaced.

  It wasn’t Bo.

  It was Danny Gibbons. His long greasy hair splayed out behind him. A single hole bled out from just above his right lung, soaking through the brown barn jacket.

  “Danny,” Matthew said.

  “Preacher.”

  Matthew shot him in the head.

  The man’s brains slid out along his long, oily hair. And then all was still. Matthew flinched almost comically late, as if just hearing the shot and feeling the gun shake in his hand. Then he turned to Dove.

  “Shit,” Dove said, putting his chin to his chest and looking down at the red mess of his middle. “Fucking jerkoff got me with a shotgun.”

  “You’re going to be okay. Come on. I’ll get you back to town.”

  “That’s a damn lie. Hit me with…I dunno, birdshot or buckshot, and that’s gone right through me. You know what happens if you hit a deer in the guts? It runs. But you’ve sprung a leak inside it.” He coughed. “All the poisonous shit in its bowels and liver and other organs gets into the blood. Sepsis kicks in. Deer eventually gets sick and falls over. Meat spoiled.”

  “Dove—”

  “My meat is spoiled, Matthew.”

  “Benji is a doctor.”

  “At this point I’d need a—” Another wracking cough. “Witch doctor.”

  “Get your arm around my shoulders.”

  “I said no.” His voice was surprisingly firm given the injury
. “Listen up. People might’ve heard these shots. They will be coming. Go. Now. But not the way we were headed. Take my rifle—”

  “I can’t use it. My one hand is…it’s not…”

  “Then take your pistol. Go straight left here, right through these trees. They’re gonna come up the trail, so you—” He grunted in pain. “You leave the trail and make a slow descent through the rocks. There’s a second, lower ridgeline below. Use it. It’s not a proper trail, but it’ll do.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Same thing you do when you meet a bear: play dead. And then, after that, probably die for real.”

  “I’m sorry, Dove.”

  “Go get your son, Matthew.”

  Off in the distance, he heard voices. Still a way off but coming closer, like from the trail.

  “Go!” Dove spat at him.

  Matthew did as he was told.

  * * *

  —

  THE OURAY CHALET Inn was a classic L-frame motel with its parking lot walled in with well-maintained white brick. It was two floors, with all the room doors opening outward to walkways framed by wooden railings. The whole thing was framed by the dark shape of the mountains and pines behind it. The motel would be the kind of place a family could come during the summer or during ski season and feel cozy and comfortable without spending a lot of money. Now, though, in the dark, with gunfire punctuating the air in different directions, it felt sinister and surreal: like the two legs of the L-shape would suddenly snap shut on Benji, crushing him in a trap.

  Ahead, movement. He tried to adjust his eyes to see—was it Landry? Where had Landry set up shop? The lobby, he thought.

  He hurried along toward the lobby, again seeing movement—

  Someone rearing back with a boot and kicking forward.

  The door splintered open. The man grunted. That wasn’t Landry.

  Benji kept close to the wall, gun up, heading toward the open room as fast and as quiet as he could manage. Soon as he got there, Room 18, he stepped into the doorframe—

  Just in time to see a big man, fat around the middle, raise a pistol up and fire two shots into one of the sleepers on the bed. Pop, pop. The body shook, and the air, for a moment, shimmered.

  He turned to the second bed—

  Benji took aim and fired.

  The Glock shook in his grip as the man woozily, lazily spun around and fell to the floor like a drunken ape. Dead, he thought.

  A voice behind Benji said: “Jackson?”

  He whirled. A scruffy-looking man stood there, head-to-toe in fatigues, a ballistic vest thick over his chest. “You’re not Jackson.” He had a black rifle in his hand, maybe an AR-15. He brought it to his shoulder with a grunt. “You’re just some nig—”

  Benji shot him in the mouth.

  Blood spattered out the back of him and he fell backward onto his ass, the rifle falling next to him. He sat there for a moment, a wet, sputtering gurgle gargling out of his ruined face. Then he slumped forward, red stuff spilling out of him like slop out of a broken bucket.

  * * *

  —

  VOICES RODE THE ridgeline above him. Murmurs of alarm and panic. Matthew kept to the second, lower ridge, creeping along on ground that was explicitly not a trail for people. Deer, maybe, or elk. It was narrow and slick, and lined with roots and rocks. Soon as he heard the voices, he froze.

  Above, the voices wandered past.

  And then, gunfire above. A couple of shotgun blasts in quick succession, boom, boom, and then they were done.

  His heart broke. Dove, he feared, was with this world no longer. And here Matthew had the instinct to do something, to say something over this man’s life—a prayer of sorts, an entreaty to the God he once believed in to take Dove Hansen into His Kingdom and treat him well. But he didn’t, because all of that was just ash on the wind.

  Instead, he kept moving.

  Behind him he heard the wartime crackle of gunfire from the town itself. Matthew did not know what was happening back there, but it sounded like some kind of siege: People were dying. He suspected it was the good people who were dying. The flock he had once poisoned with his words were suffering the throes of that poison here, now, tonight. Again Matthew was reminded that he helped make this happen.

  Ahead, down below, he saw the school bus blocking the road loom into view: He had come here via a side road, and had missed this one. Shepherds had fortified this blockade, stacking other vehicles behind it—and then, behind those, Matthew spied a small army of vehicles. Humvees and pickup trucks. Stover’s men milling about.

  The big man’s voice rose through the dark like tectonic rumbles.

  “…fuck is Danny at? I had him scout that ridge twenty minutes ago.”

  Someone offered a response, but Matthew couldn’t make it out. Something about sending more men up there. Those must’ve been the voices he heard. The ones who got Dove.

  “Fine, we’ll wait, see what they find up there.” Then: “Well, now, what’s this?”

  Matthew’s heart jumped. Have they found me?

  But his gaze followed a new sound—coming down around the bend of the road, past the Ouray Hot Springs Park, he saw someone walking away from town toward Stover. No, not someone, someones—two people, carrying a third. Just below him now, Stover came out to meet them.

  “The hell’s going on?”

  “Found this one guarding the motel. Had a walkie-talkie on him.” One of the men dressed in militia fatigues handed over the walkie. “Neal and I figured you might wanna talk to him.”

  Matthew peered down through the dark. As he saw the men shift and move, who they carried became visible.

  It was Landry Pierce.

  Oh no.

  Others, too, started coming out from behind the bus. None of them were Matthew’s son, far as he could see—

  But while they were out here, that meant these men were distracted.

  Which gave Matthew an opportunity. Quiet as a church mouse, he crept farther along the ridgeline. He’d go behind the bus and drop down, hoping like hell he’d find his son there.

  * * *

  —

  BENJI BURST BACK into the community center.

  A dead body rested facedown on the floor. Blood forming a black pool around the head. For half a second he thought, Sadie, but it wasn’t her—it was a bony man, bald, dressed in the requisite ARM camouflage. A swastika tattoo sat bold and black on the back of his crooked neck.

  The library door flung open, and Sadie came out, gun up—

  “No no no!” Benji cried, holding his pistol up in surrender.

  “Benji,” she gasped, and ran to him. “I…did that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. Fuck him.” She spat on the body. She was angry. Her face twisted up like a wrung-out washrag. “He deserved what he got.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, looking over herself as if to make sure. “Landry? Is he all right? The motel…”

  “I…stopped two of Stover’s men. But I didn’t find Landry.”

  “Oh no. I hope he’s—”

  The walkie-talkie on the front desk crackled to life.

  “Hello, out there.”

  The voice that came over the radio was a bear’s growl. Rheumy and rich, with a coffee grinder timbre to it. Ozark Stover, Benji thought.

  “My name is Ozark Stover. Whoever out there is in charge of this town and your creepy fucking mummies, I ask you come pay me a visit at the north end of town. I’ll halt the assault on your nice little mountain village, long as you give me a moment to say my piece. We’re all here at the end of the world together, no reason we can’t have a nice chat.”

  Sadie and Benji looked at each other, unsure what any of this meant. “Why would he do that?” she ask
ed in a low voice, as if somehow the man could hear her speak. Benji had no answer for her.

  Stover continued:

  “Couple incentives for you. First, I got one of your people here. Black fella. Wouldn’t tell me his name—rude sonofabitch—but I got him from the motel. Second, I don’t see someone here in ten minutes, we’re gonna light this place up. Just so we’re clear, I got rocket-propelled grenades, I got white phosphorus rounds—which will burn up some of the town, and God help those who are hit by them, it’ll burn them up, too—and also? I got a tank. It was a bear to get here, so I’ll be honest, I’m itching to use it. But I am nothing if not a man of some restraint. Now, you might be asking yourself, what is it I want, exactly?”

  Over the walkie, it was easy to hear him take a long, languid breath.

  And then, a phlegmy sniff.

  He’s sick, Benji thought.

  Stover’s voice filled the room once more.

  “One of you is a CDC man. Benjamin Ray, I think the name was. Couple of ARM soldiers found you in Vegas, but you slippery prick, you got away. I’m hearing tell you might have a cure for White Mask. I expect that’s why you’ve holed up here with all your sleeping freaks and vampires, thinking you can be safe. Tell you what, you come to me, tell me about this cure, and I’ll consider letting some of you live. We can discuss percentages. Some are better than none, remember. You got ten minutes. Clock starts ticking riiiiight—now. See you soon, Doctor.”

  And then the radio went quiet.

  “You can’t go,” Sadie said.

  “I have to,” he objected.

  “Are you fucking barmy batshit nuts? Because that man on the radio is nuts, and if you want to go talk to him, you’re as crazy as he is.” She stiffened. “Why the hell does he think you have a cure?”

  “I don’t know. I was…ambushed in Vegas. I think I killed one. I told them I was with the CDC, and they caught me at the pharma office—word got back, I suppose, to Creel or Stover, and in true whisper-down-the-lane style they must have put two and two together and gotten twenty-two.” It hit him, suddenly: “That’s how they know about Ouray. That’s how they knew we’re here. Damnit. This is all my fault.”