Twenty Four

Wendigo was an oddly apt name for what stalked the forest. According to Algonquian legend, the Wendigo was the embodiment of famine, greed, and desperation. It took the form of a gaunt creature that scoured the forest in search of human flesh. Once it found a victim and feasted upon it, it would grow in proportion to its meal. This meant that the Wendigo was never full. It is on an endless quest to sate an insatiable hunger.
In our case the Wendigo took the form of a pervasive dust that covered the Waste. This dust was driven by its internal programming and constantly sought sustenance. It found this sustenance in the form of plastic and plastic adjacent things.
Just before the Wendigo was released into the world, humanity was at the peak of its technological trajectory. Plastic was a cheap and ubiquitous material that was readily available. It was an abundant resource, almost daring any takers to take advantage of it. The Wendigo used it to scream from where they were birthed like a swarm of locusts. They used fiber optic lines coated in convenient flexible polyvinyl chloride to hopscotch between large metropolitan areas decimating everything that they touched.
Communication, the backbone of the modern world fell asunder before the growing mass of voracious dust. Every ton it consumed would become another ton of tiny hungry little mouths. Food spoiled in supermarkets left naked to the air without its carapace of hermetically sealed highly engineered plastic. Everything plastic just disappeared within a couple of days. Solar panels, keyboards, computers, cars, airplanes, buildings, you name it. They all were rendered unusable without that one crucial ingredient that humanity had so unwisely used in absolutely everything that they made.
They had come to rely on it so much, that when it disappeared pretty much everyone died within a month or two. Only the hearty, clever, lucky and ruthless survived. It had to be all of those things in varying combinations to come out the other side.
Fyndraxis, now that he had paid a bit of attention to his radio, was trying to think of some combination of clever, hearty, lucky and ruthless he had to be to get what he now was quickly realizing were his friends out of this situation. He thought he might be Wendigo proof, or at least made of stuff that wasn’t that interesting to them. Teeroy and Bird on the other hand might be on the menu if Teeroy’s tale about Bird’s parents were to be believed.
The pod fire had seemed like a really good idea at the time, but looking back on it, perhaps it was a bit misguided. The smell was a dead give away. All those petrochemicals that had been molded into ergonomic cases and blister packs for their medical convenience, had turned into a highway of smoke through the air that the Wendigo could cruise down like a biker gang on their way to a dive bar.
Time froze as the Daemon retreated to his sanctum, or workshop, he was still debating on which to call it. He plopped himself down in front of his terminal and called up a file that he used to cache recent radio traffic. He was able to funnel some relevant data into a handy network analyzer that was part of the wealth of code and programs that Terra had gifted to him after their meeting.
The Wendigo were using a standard network protocol called TCP/IP. This had been a standard network protocol since computer networks had taken their first shaky steps to interconnectivity. The traffic over this protocol was far from standard stuff though. Like Terra said, it was encrypted to an absolutely ludicrous degree. Like, far past military grade and straight into diagnosably paranoid kind of stuff. Not that your typical military wasn’t diagnosably paranoid, this just made them look like kids playing with decoder rings. For the quick and dirty thing Fyndraxis was thinking of doing, their level of encryption wouldn’t really matter.
The Wendigo network was made up of a bunch of little bugs with radios in them. These radios were very small by definition. They are also extremely low powered with limited range. They must have been setting up a mesh network to talk to each other. What that meant was every little bug was its own little network router that not only sends and receives information for itself, but also acted like a repeater and helped send along messages for the network as a whole.
Fyndraxis was an enormous radio compared to an individual Wendigo. If he could turn up his broadcast power as high as it could go and broadcast random bullshit out into the universe on the same frequency that the Wendigo were using, he might be able to effectively jam them for a little while. While they were busy trying to figure out what was going on, he and his new friends could slip off into the night and find someplace with less abundant plastic resources.
“Teeroy,” Fyndraxis announced after returning to their shared reality, “I have a little bit of bad news.” Teeroy had dozed off for a minute, his head snapped up and he shook himself awake.
“What’s that?” He yawned.
“I think the Wendigo came to our little bonfire,” Fyndraxis said, trying to remain as calm as he could.
“Shit,” Teeroy looked over at Bird.
“I think we should get the fuck out of here,” Fyndraxis suggested, in a dizzying feat of logic.
“Yeah, no shit. I’m gonna have to figure out a way to carry Bird. I don’t think she is up for a hike yet,” Teeroy mentioned, while he was taking an inventory of Bird’s cabin.
“Maybe a couple of sticks with some cloth in between them? Like a litter?” Fyndraxis was trying to search his empty mind for useful scraps of boy scout knowledge.
“Well, all the sticks are out by the fuckin’ Wendigo. I could go ask ‘em for a couple,” Teeroy, it seemed, came equipped with a fully functional set of gallows humor that Fyndraxis was starting to get a little jealous of.
“Maybe just the blanket then, like a piggy back,” Fyndraxis remembered the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle, which was not necessarily boy scout stuff, but a pretty decent way to operate in an emergency.
Teeroy seemed to be mentally weighing Bird. He was a rather burly man, and Bird was probably half of his weight.
“Yeah, that’ll work,” he finally said, “You got a plan?”
“Pretty much. I’ll distract them and we run for it,” as far as a plan went, this was about as KISS as it got.
“With what?” He asked, reasonably.
“You know that radio thing I was talking about earlier?” Fyndraxis explained, quickly, “the Wendigo use it to talk to each other. I’ll distract them with that.”
“Alright, where are we gonna go? I’m sure as hell not goin’ back to town. If I lead the Wendigo there it’d be a disaster. The only other place ‘round here is the Waste… Shit,” He said shit just as he realized that the only real course of action would be to go into the Waste and hope for the best.
“Well,” he continued, “from what Bird tells me, there’s an old trail that runs ‘long the peaks of the mountains. If we follow that north for a while we can dip down into the Gulf.”
“What’s the Gulf?” Fyndraxis asked.
“Super narrow valley north of town where the rivers ‘round here come from. One flows south to us here, and the other flows north,” he recounted.
“Why’s it called the Gulf?” Fyndraxis asked, following his inherent instinct to get distracted.
“Everyone just calls it that. No idea why,” Teeroy saw this possible distraction, and quickly nipped it in the bud.
With that, he started making arrangements to flee north. He grabbed Bird’s stash of food from her trapdoor and threw it in a rucksack like object that Bird had lying around. He then tried to wake up Bird to no avail. She was unresponsive, but looking a lot better than she had a few hours ago. He pulled the blanket off of her and sat her up on the bed with her back to the wall. He put the blanket down next to her and scooched her onto it. Sitting down in her lap, he got her legs wrapped around him and tied the blanket she was on around his waist.
He spent a couple of minutes trying to get the other end of the blanket up to where he could grab it. When he had succeeded, he had made Bird into a rather tidy backpack. After some struggling he managed to get the bag with all of her food onto one of her arms. With that he seemed like he was ready to go.
“Alright, ready?” Fyndraxis asked, after preparations had been made, “hold me up ahead of you and I’ll make some light if we need it. Whatever you do, don’t draw me. That would be bad.”
He took the sword and held it aloft like it had asked. They made their way slowly into the night. The evening was another clear one and the moon was another hour or so from setting so Fyndraxis didn’t have to act as a torch just yet. In the distance where the pod fire had been, they could just make out the Wendigo.
It was tough to see in the moonlight, but what could be seen was truly awful. In the roughly two hundred and fifty years that it had been on the scene, it seemed that the Wendigo had found interesting and novel forms other than dust in which to manifest. This evening, it took the form of a tangled mass of worms about fifteen feet high. Each worm in this mass was roughly the width of a man’s arm. It was focusing its efforts on attacking the ground where the pod fire was. Great whips of worms braided about each other and beat themselves into the dirt throwing up whole clods of sod and rocks. Teeroy could feel these impacts in his chest, along with the hammering of his own heart. In stark contrast to this violence, the mint from Bird’s yard could be smelled in the evening air, putting both the man and the sword on edge.
Teeroy quietly backed away from this novel horror, trying not to attract any attention. Stealth didn’t seem to make any sort of difference, as the mass of Wendigo worms started barreling right for them. It clawed into the ground for purchase and gave chase as Teeroy turned and ran for his life.
“Fyn! Do that frickin’ radio thing!” Teeroy yelled as Fyndraxis was putting his radio thing plan into motion. This worked immediately and far better than he thought it was going to. The Wendigo were rendered back into dust. This dust was still carrying all of the momentum of the enormous worm creature, so as it exploded into the moonlight, it also knocked the entire party on its ass and covered it in a fine powder of nano bugs.
“Holy Fuck!” Teeroy whispered, “you saved us Fyn.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Fyndraxis answered, glossing over the fact that if he wasn’t here none of this would have happened.
Fyndraxis kept up his radio noise in pulses about every second or so to keep the Wendigo sufficiently confused. In the silence between pulses he listened. During his radio silence they would be trying to reestablish their network. This bootstrapping procedure might give him some precious information about the architecture of their network so he recorded it all, saving it for further scrutiny.
“Teeroy,” Fyndraxis started, after Teeroy had gotten himself together a bit, “you should try to get all the dust off of us. Maybe we should all go down to the river for a quick dip. But before you do, I would like you to take some and put it in my sheath.”
“What for? Isn’t this shit dangerous?” Teeroy asked, in a tone bordering on skepticism.
“Yes, but I need a sample of it for my friend in the sky,” Fyndraxis reassured him.
“Won’t they just talk to the other Wendigo on the radio and come and get us?” Teeroy was a practical man and this was an astute observation.
“I can control the radio stuff that happens in my sheath,” and he was pretty sure that he could.
Teeroy took a pinch of the Wendigo dust and drew the Daemon Sword just enough to sprinkle some in. He closed the sword quickly, and they went down to the river for a bracing evening dip.