Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

“Let me go! Get your stupid fuckin’ hands offa me.”

She getting on my nerves

An absurd thought did a fast lap around her head: The gun. Reach into

So make it worse ? Oh ok

“Tell your thugs to lay off my little sister.”

She makes me wanna dnf. Shes so selfish

They had not yet stopped for sleep—it was as if they were already sleeping. That meant they traveled around sixty miles in a twenty-four-hour period. That couldn’t last forever, of course—their minds, like his, might be racing, but eventually their bodies would give out. Wouldn’t they?

“Why? You’re here why? Just to piss in my Cheerios? Or maybe you want to do what you did with Longacre? Pick and choose some data from Column A, slap together with some samples from Column Z, and stick them together to see what damage you can do? What lies you can concoct—”

They treat him like dog shit and it pisses me off

“I think you’re pushing it, Martin. Benji knows he fucked up, that’s not why he’s here.”

“You could’ve told us what you were doing,” Martin said. “With Longacre? You should’ve said what you had seen. We could’ve figured something out together. But you had to take that ego of yours and go off—you had to do this stupid thing. You don’t betray the data.” But Benji heard something else in there: You don’t betray your team. “I lost faith in you. Because you lost faith in us.”

Still holding a stupid grudge cwhile other shit going on

Their inability to pierce the skin and get a blood sample was just one head on this mysterious hydra. Other bizarre questions rose to taunt them: Why didn’t the walkers need

food or water? So far, none had stopped. And so far, none had urinated or defecated, either. Nothing in, nothing out. And

“No, but there was an instance in London a few years ago. And diseases like SARS and West Nile have both shown a propensity to hop borders. And the protozoan has shown an inclination toward evolution.”

‘Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.’ ”

It was in a field, burned to a crisp. No bodies. And no recoverable evidence. Whoever did the job did it well enough. It was intentional. A cover-up.

saying that Benex-Voyager had sovereignty when it came to hiring and firing and how they chose to utilize Black Swan in what she termed “a live-action beta test” of its field capabilities.

What if it’s intentional? What if it’s willful, somehow?

“I’m staying. Someone needs to stay.” He wanted to take the Beast and head for safer, drier ground. She wanted to tell him he was being a fucking coward. “Dad—”

She need an ass whipping how u gonenhelp her ijf u dead

Something about how birds flocked and how locusts swarmed, about army ants teeming across a jungle floor… He put a mental pin in that for later.

“But you need to see it. They’re not—Jesus, Benji, they’re not grabbing onto anything. Their hands are flat against the side of the trailer. It’s like they’re a bunch of Spider-Mans. Spider-Men. Whatever. Shit.”

He opened his book to its last chapter: the Revelation to John. He read it end-to-end not once, but twice. And then to God he prayed.

“Don’t,” Mia said. “It’s just a storm. They’ll be okay.” “You don’t know. Your brother is out there.” Mia snapped, “You don’t have to tell me that! I know that. But I can’t fucking help him right now, okay?” She waited a beat and then added, “You saw the way they went over that trailer.”

E X A C T L Y Mia

don’t care about your truck, I care about the sleepwalkers,

So ungrateful how u gone get round without her

That was just the first of many sounds that would haunt her later. As her eyes squeezed shut, she heard the boy’s father not explode but pop—the sound of skin splitting followed by the wet splash of all that was inside him.

Some people are just trash, and they find other trash and start to form a landfill. The internet makes it easier.”

“The other thing,” Arav said suddenly, “is what happens if you shoot one of them? Not that I want to find out—but we can’t stick needles in. We can’t cut them with knives. What would a bullet do?”

“Then maybe that is the thing you want to be doing.” He gave a small squeeze to her hand. “You should take more photos. Might be nice. Might help you feel better. I dunno. What we’re seeing here, Shana—I don’t know what it is, but I know that it is extraordinary. Someone besides the TV media should be documenting it.”

“Only thing more corrupt than business is politics, Matthew. You ask me, big business is a step up from big government. It’s self-correcting. It allows room for God’s hand to…deliver prosperity to those who help themselves.”

They’ll believe it snout-to-tail. To some people, there is no separation between…between the story you’re telling and their belief in it as fact.” He prickled at that. “I have more optimism than you do. I have hope in people. Faith that they’re smart enough to know what I’m saying and why I would be saying it.” “A man pulled a gun today. Not far from here.”

damp. Am I getting sick? No, he realized, it wasn’t that at all. It had been so long since he’d been in any kind of a relationship, since he’d had anyone attracted to him—or been attracted to anyone in turn—that this feeling was almost extraterrestrial. Was that it? Was he attracted to Sadie?

“It’s fine, you can tell me.” Pause. “I like the sound of your voice.” I like the sound of yours, he thought, but did not say.

Benji felt his face stretching with his own grin. “I…I don’t even—” She waggled her phone at him. “Told you. A treat.” And now, in that deeper voice she was faking: “To help you relax.” “Sadie, I—” “Shut up and let me in.”

Here’s how we do things in America: We identify a problem, then we promptly ignore it until it’s not just biting our ass, but it’s already eaten the right cheek and has started on the left.

Could the man have died from a fungal infection, and what was growing out of him was just more of the same?

This gotta be jerry body

Male, by the look. Older. Maybe fifties, sixties, though what had happened to the body maybe distorted her perceptions on

she thought. Or was? Did you lose your identity upon dying, or was who you were bound up with the meat sack you inhabited?

“It belongs to Jerry Garlin.”

Landry stared holes right into him. “Good thing? Yeah. Okay. It’s good. It’s real good. It’s also limited as fuck. You leave the safe little suburbs and roll up here in the big bad city like it’s Times Square in the 1970s and then you tell your wife you’re at band practice—”

—and instead you show up here and we screw like two ferrets in a sock for one night, maybe two. We don’t get dinner, but you tell me you love me. We don’t go out to a show or a movie or anything, but you lie to me and talk about how great I am for you and your music—”

“Oh, c’mon. We get takeout. And we watch movies. And you asshole, you are good for me. But I want to talk about our present, not our future.” The future is a sinkhole, anyway. That cliff…

HELL WITH THE DOG, BEWARE OF OWNER.

but he surely did not anticipate sheriffs, state senators, local

CEOs and CFOs, journalists, even a few local celebrities like race car drivers and news personalities. Matthew was over the moon meeting all these people—doubly so because they seemed to be over the moon meeting him.

“Preacher, we could all be better men.”

His knees nearly buckled as the realization hit him. Back when Robbie showed him what had happened to the cells inside Clade Berman’s body—it reminded him of something. He just couldn’t pinpoint what it was. Now he knew.

“No,” she said. “No, it’s his brain.” “Garlin’s brain? What about it?” “The fungus. It’s…in there. Like tree roots pushing through soft dirt.”

roots of a plant, yes, like a kind of circulatory system. He pointed to the swollen, turgid tissue around those mycelial threads: “This looks like inflammation.” “Yeah, it created an intense inflammatory response. And scarring.” And that would only happen if Garlin were alive. Meaning, it did not happen postmortem. This was officially a fungal infection. “I think Garlin was infected for months,” she said.

he’d been acting real fucking squirrelly. Symptoms of dementia. Erratic behavior physically, mentally, emotionally. He also suffered cold symptoms—normal cold virus, not necessarily influenza or pneumonia or anything more serious. More like a proper cold, or maybe an allergic response, and given the inflammation in the brain and elsewhere in his body, that tracks.”

His heart began to do double time. She meant, respectively, that the infection that had affected and maybe killed Jerry Garlin was alarmingly similar to the fungus behind white-nose syndrome in bats, and snake fungal disease in, well, snakes. Both of which were dread killers of both bats and serpents nationwide—the fungus was opportunistic, savaging the bodies of the animals it infected.

“We found three others who have died.”

“Jessie Arvax, Greg Rooney, and Tim Bauer were not only present but also confirmed to have had contact with the bats. Two of them had rabies shots as a precaution.”

Rooney, divorced, was not found for days, and by that time his body had already been colonized by a white, fuzzy fungus…

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I…really am.” He smiled and squeezed her arm. “I’d expect so. The others all were when they woke.” “The others?” “Yes,” he said. “You are the last of the sleepers to wake. The others woke up months ago.”