Way back in 2019 , io9 revealed an extract fromChuck Wendig ’s apocalyptical thriller Wanderers — a book about a pandemic of sorts that run low on to be a collision amid a real - domain pandemic . Then , in later 2021 , we revealedthe cover and prologue for its subsequence , Wayward , which was earlier due in August 2022 . That got bumped a few calendar month , but the metre of arrival is almost here , and we ’ve got one more peep atWendig ’s latest to share .
Here ’s the sum-up , in case you need a refresher :
Five yr ago , ordinary Americans fell under the grip of a strange raw malady that caused them to somnambulate across the country to a destination only they bang . They were followed on their quest by the shepherds : friends and family who gave up everything to protect them .
Image: Del Rey
Their underground destination : Ouray , a minuscule town in Colorado that would become one of the last outpost of culture . Because the somnambulation epidemic was only the first in a concatenation of effect that lead to the end of the universe — and the birth of a Modern one .
The survivors , sleepwalkers and shepherd alike , have a dream of reconstruct human society . Among them are Benji , the scientist struggling through grief to lead the town ; Marcy , the former police officer who wants only to look after the citizenry she loves ; and Shana , the teenage girl who became the first sheepman — and an improbable wedge whose bravery will be needed again .
Because the people of Ouray are not the only survivor , and the macrocosm they are build up is thin . The forces of harshness and brutality are amassing under the leaders of self - proclaimed chairwoman Ed Creel . And in the very heart of Ouray , the most hefty subsister of all is plotting its own vision for the newfangled world : Black Swan , the A.I. who opine the apocalypse .
Image: Del Rey
Against these threats , Benji , Marcy , Shana , and the residual have only one hope : one another . Because the only way to exist the remainder of the world is together .
Here ’s a facial expression at the full covering , followed by the extract !
1
BLACK SWIFT
Civilization falls in one place but heighten in another .
— Annalee Newitz , Reddit AMA
SEPTEMBER 1 , 2025
Ouray , Colorado
I’M NOT ALONE OUT HERE , Benji mean . It was in the air travel — a blank noise shaking , the faint disruption of the silence that had capture the populace .
Over the years here in Ouray , as the Sleepwalkers slept , and eventually as they arouse , he ’d seen something up here , west of townspeople . A bird , he ’d thought at the time . But it glinted a bit in the sun . And it did n’t move like a bird , not at all . One time , a twosome years back , he ’d understand it again on a bleary day — a shape prompt above the tree before dropping straight down . A year later , as eve settled in , he saw it once more , maybe a tail geographical mile off : a dark little speck , like a gasconade . It rushed forward , then went tight in the opposite charge before again vanish .
Benji had been chasing it ever since . He came out here a couple metre a week — to get in a walk , to help course the townsfolk by hunting cervid in the springtime or bighorn in the winter , but also just on the off chance he ’d snoop it again .
He felt like a crazy person . No one else had come across it . But Benji was a man of both scientific discipline and faith . He had religion he ’d see it again . A hypothesis he tested often .
This daybreak , he ’d gone off the Oak Creek trail , stalking an old deer path through the spruce , about Battle of Midway up to the overlook on Hayden Mountain .
And he was sure that today was the daylight . He could feel it in his teeth . He know he was n’t alone out here : a fact that both thrill him and troubled him in equal metre . Because being alone out here was n’t full . The human race was mostly gone . Civilization with it . So , if it was n’t a person out here — and if it was n’t the small UFO he ’d been trail — then that could mean a black bear .
Or worse , a mountain lion .
Such predator did n’t care much for human fair game , especially now that those animals were no longer force to scrounge for scraps or human food for thought — but should he come upon one with its sept nearby ? He ’d be torn to red ribbons .
His hands tightened around the dusty metal of the Winchester lever - action rifle . And then , forrader , he heard something . Not a telling snap of twig or crunch of leaf . No , this sound was a blue , mechanical whine , like a upstage exercise spinning .
Not a bear . Not a cougar .
And it was coming closer .
He bring the tush of the weapon to his shoulder but kept the barrel grim . His heartbeat recoil up like a gallop horse .
Vmmmmm .
That audio , closing in . Ahead , he saw something shake up the leave of an aspen , and shudder the branch of a blue spruce .
There was a musical rhythm where he hear nothing , saw nothing — But then Benji stagger back as a shape split through the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree line onto the trail just forwards of him . The rifle exit up — and down the vision , he saw what had emerged :
A drone . No bigger than a dinner plate and lusterlessness Robert Gray with four propellers — two in the back raised up , and two in the front down low , the way that a crab held its claw . The drone hovered midair and pivoted care - fully toward him . Four red visible light marked the niche beneath each propellor , and underneath its body , in a wire mesh cage , was what count like a camera .
The trailer was filthy and rust . Bits of branchlet and flora swing from it . It hovered about thirty foot in front of him .
He almost express mirth . There it was . He ’d base it . He had n’t lose his mind !
“ Who are you ? ” he asked . It felt dopey to ask it a question : The drone was a equipment , not a soul . But it did have a television camera . And someone had to be piloting it , right ? Unless it was autonomous . Were n’t there stories from years ago about lagger fly over the Western province ? Google , perhaps ? Bureau of Land Management ? But could such a drone still be powered up and fly about ?
The drone continue to bulk large in place . As if it was regarding him the same way he was regarding it .
And then , just like that , it whirl the polar direction and flit away from him . Benji had no clock time to think , so he get his dead body react : He levered a troll into the bedroom , thumb off the condom , took aim , and — The gun shoot against his shoulder as he pulled the trigger . His ears misplace all speech sound as he discharged the weapon , and now Benji cursed himself , because he needed his ears out here . He did n’t need the phone of a mountain social lion creep up on him to be lost underneath a compaction of tinnitus . Damnit .
He gear up his jaw and broke into a run , bolting down the trail . He saw the glint of the drone pipe buzzing through the Tree ahead , and he had no confidence in his ability to get it — it glided through the air effortlessly , without any friction to hinder its leakage . Benji , meanwhile , hard - charged frontward — though he was older these days , he was stronger , faster , more physically capable than he ’d been in the Beforetimes ( as Shana and some of the other townspeople visit it ) . Just the same , the trail was uneven , overgrown , hewn roughly from the landscape painting as if by a petroleum , broken - atilt knife . It narrowed ahead , too , and he had to tighten his pace even as the drone speed fore .
I could cease . I could shoot again . One last prospect , a last shot , to take the drone down . If only to see what it was , possibly where it came from . So he bring up the rifle again — but somewhere , his dead body made a grave miscalculation , concentrating for one moment on the throttle and the drone onwards but not on the track beneath his feet . He felt his stride just off the trail , into a maculation of Indian rice grass deep than look — his heel dropped far , too far , and the ankle twisted . With it , a soda water . The gun went off , the shot last eminent , and then he matte up his whole trunk shift hard —
His shoulder joint stumble the basis first . His question smacked down next . The rest of his body mosh into the terra firma and turn end over destruction , down the slope he break . ironical smoke and shrub branches whipped past , clawing at his boldness . The gunman was go now , and his hands scrambled to stop his descent — but they only pinwheeled as he somersault down the side , talus sliding with him . The world spin like he was in a washing machine , and then —
Wham . His berm and back — and then the floor of his skull — slammed hard into a off-white - white birch tree . His ears rang . His vision radiate out , ripples on disturbed water . His tongue felt productive . He tasted blood .
accuracy was , as Benji hunted the drone , something else had been hunt him .
And now that he lay slumped against the tree diagram , blood drooling over his lip , looking up at a robin ’s egg sky , breathing in air that tasted as crisp as paper , the fauna had find him , and pinned him to the earth with its claws .
That brute ?
Guilt .
This was n’t the first metre it had establish him . It always discover him in quiet moments like this , did n’t it ?
Benji hear no planes , no engine , no distant murmur of voices . He heard the trill of a good deal bluebird . He heard wind whisk through the comb - tines of spruce tree diagram . In the early days of his time in Ouray , after the fall of the world under the attack of White Mask , he remember the first time he find the absence seizure of a particular audio : a background hum like the almost - imperceptible white noise of a television system turned on a few rooms away . It was the strait of hoi polloi . And it was gone . humans remained in the globe , but it was no longer its master .
It was terrible .
It was rattling .
Hence — the guilt .
But it was n’t so neat and easy as survivor ’s guilt trip , oh no . This was a more peculiar thing , like one of those complicated emotions only the Germans had a word for . Yes , there was the guilty conscience of having survived — of not deserving selection when so many others , like Sadie , did . But bad and strange still was that Benji …
Well , Benji did n’t hate this new cosmos . It was peaceful in a way he ’d never really have before . No machinery . No gunfire . No fireworks , no dealings , no automobile horns honking , no dirt bikes , no helicopters overhead , no leaf blower next door , no sirens , no nine to five , no cellphone tintinnabulation , no Twitter , no Facebook , no TikTok , no electronic mail , no spam calls , no debris chain armour , no meeting , none of it .
There was only stillness . And there was solacement in that stillness .
Was it proficient for the world that mankind had been shaken from it like so many fleas ? He hat wondering that . His cold-blooded clinician ’s assessment was that the cosmos was healing in a fashion it could n’t have , had White Mask not ravage the world . Yes , Benji feel the heartbreak and sorrow of so much painful sensation , so much last , so many lives lose . Lives and judgment and hearts . mother and father , scientists and writers , man of the cloth and librarian and MD and cosmonaut and , and , and … (And Sadie . Just thinking her name almost knocked him out cold . ) All take by the psyche - cop fungus , either directly or by the chaos that suffocate civilisation and drove it to its knees . The world had gone to a massive graveyard .
And yet .
The atmosphere , so clear . The macrocosm , so quiet . What settled upon it ( what settle upon him ) was an intrusive , clamant tranquility that he closely bonk was cruel and antic , an optical aberration … but that did n’t stop him from feeling it .
Even now , above his head — he saw dark birds , birds like boomerangs , kiting through the sky .
The black swift .
( And any time he recall of that wench , the pitch-dark swift , how could he not also think of Black Swan ? The contrived intelligence who , linked with its future self , saw the end of the world coming and prepare for it by create the very Sleepwalker Flock that Benji helped to Shepherd to Ouray in the first place . )
The bird appeared here to examine a point , it seemed . As if the universe were trying to utter to him , to answer his guilt . See , the sinister western fence lizard was a rara avis in the truest sense : a creature once in heavy decline in the United States . A sooty gray-haired wench , the fatal western fence lizard hid its mossy clay - cup nest on drop - human face and in cave behind outcropped trees or behind cascading H2O - falls . The waterfall of Ouray ’s Box Canyon ( Sadie ’s waterfall , he thought with a consumptive pit forming in his middle ) was home to a population of black swifts . They ’d come in outpouring , lay a individual egg in those fogyish nests , and Leigh Hunt for flying dirt ball , such as ants and beetle . They wheeled about , their pickax - ax wings break away away at the sky . Then , after raising their young , they ’d all leave before wintertime , manoeuvre to the Amazon lowlands . For twelvemonth , the black fleet bit had continuously dwindled — not because of hostile status in Ouray , but rather , as their 2nd home in the rain timber was plundered by venomous , esurient men . And with the pelting forest fail a subroutine library of nature , a body of flora and animal that could never return .
As the rainwater forest fall , so did the black swift of Ouray .
Or , would have , had it not been for White Mask .
Benji bonk the black swift was in decline only from take a volume he ’d receive in the Ouray subroutine library about the birds of Colorado . Because from his own experience now , the birdie were in no danger at all . In the five years he ’d been in Colorado , he saw their issue increase year over year , from just a smattering the first year , then a few more the year after , until in the third year their issue exploded , well doubling . Five years later , the dame were everywhere . And they ’d occupy on unexampled prey : fir tree engraver beetles and slick up beetle . The bird eating those bugs then helped to slow the speedy fall of Ouray ’s dismal spruces and Douglas fir trees . More birds then mean more trees . The return of the black swift meant healthier forests all around Ouray —
And , Benji guessed , it signaled a return Amazonian rain woodland .
All that , due to the precipitous die - off of Earth ’s most sickening resident :
Humanity .
Again , it made him pale to think of it that way . He was human . Sadie was human . The Flock , the Shepherds , and all that stay beyond Ouray , they were all human . And they all deserved a chance at life .
And those who decease did not deserve their death .
But here they were . The macrocosm , the people - gratis existence , was healing . Better off without us , he consider soberly .
As he dwell there , a hard birch as his pillow , his ears still ringing , guiltiness running through him like a fever , his imaginativeness crystalize .
And there , in front of him , was the biggest goddamn wolf Benji had ever seen . Here to finish the job , Benji opine madly . disembarrass this lieu of us .
The wolf lifted its mouth and indicate its teeth in a low , thunder - rumble growl .
From the leger Wayward by Chuck Wendig . Copyright © 2022 by Chuck Wendig . Reprinted by arrangement with Del Rey Books , an depression of Random House , a division of Penguin Random House LLC . All right field reserve .
Chuck Wendig ’s Wayward will be released November 15 ; you’re able to pre - order a copyhere .
Want more io9 news ? Check out when to expect the latestMarvel , Star Wars , andStar Trekreleases , what ’s next for theDC Universe on film and television receiver , and everything you need to know about James Cameron’sAvatar : The means of Water .
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