Author Chuck Wendig is a favourite right here at io9; we’ve featured excerpts from his books earlier than, together with his 2019 sci-fi smash hit Wanderers. Today we’re thrilled to be debuting the duvet and first excerpt from its follow-up, Wayward, which will likely be out subsequent summer season.

Here’s a synopsis of the e-book for starters:

Five years in the past, strange Americans fell underneath the grip of an odd new illness that brought about them to sleepwalk throughout the nation to a vacation spot solely they knew. They had been adopted on their quest by the shepherds: family and friends who gave up every little thing to guard them.

Their secret vacation spot: Ouray, a small city in Colorado that will turn out to be one of many final outposts of civilization. Because the sleepwalking epidemic was solely the primary in a series of occasions that led to the top of the world—and the beginning of a brand new one.

The survivors, sleepwalkers and shepherds alike, have a dream of rebuilding human society. Among them are Benji, the scientist struggling by means of grief to guide the city; Marcy, the previous police officer who desires solely to take care of the folks she loves; and Shana, the teenage lady who grew to become the primary shepherd—and an unlikely hero whose braveness will likely be wanted once more.

Because the folks of Ouray aren’t the one survivors, and the world they’re constructing is fragile. The forces of cruelty and brutality are amassing underneath the management of self-proclaimed president Ed Creel. And within the very coronary heart of Ouray, probably the most highly effective survivor of all is plotting its personal imaginative and prescient for the brand new world: Black Swan, the A.I. who imagined the apocalypse.

Against these threats, Benji, Marcy, Shana, and the remainder have just one hope: each other. Because the one technique to survive the top of the world is collectively.

Here’s the complete cowl; the duvet design is by Carlos Beltrán and David Stevenson, and the duvet artwork is by Michael Bryan. After that, maintain studying for the prologue to Wayward!

Prologue: The Resolute Desk

Atlas Haven

America City, Kansas

Now.

The President of the United States of America sat at his desk in a dim, octagonal room lit by lights within the ground. His desk was spare. It contained no books, for he was not a curious man. It contained no papers as a result of what may he presumably should signal now, after every little thing? There was a pen holder, a flat piece of wooden with a mushy trench the place a single pen may neatly relaxation. A plaque detailed its historical past: the holder was a present from British Prime Minister Declan Halvey and had been taken from the hull of the HMS Gannet, an anti-slaver ship from the British Navy.

In this manner, the article matched the desk itself—often called the Resolute Desk, its personal plaque defined some, if not all, of its historical past:

“H.M.S. ‘Resolute’, forming part of the expedition sent in search of Sir John Franklin in 1852, was abandoned in Latitude 74º 41′ N. Longitude 101º 22′ W. on 15th May 1854. She was discovered and extricated in September 1855, in Latitude 67º N. by Captain Buddington of the United States Whaler ‘George Henry’. The ship was purchased, fitted out and sent to England, as a gift to Her Majesty Queen Victoria by the President and People of the United States, as a token of goodwill & friendship. This table was made from her timbers when she was broken up, and is presented by the Queen of Great Britain & Ireland, to the President of the United States, as a memorial of the courtesy and loving kindness which dictated the offer of the gift of the ‘Resolute’.”

Parts of that historical past had been lacking, in fact. Like how the ship had initially got down to uncover the whereabouts of a complete lacking Arctic expedition underneath the aforementioned Sir John Franklin, whose two ships had been the aptly-named Erebus and the Terror. Or how the Resolute, together with three different vessels, grew to become icebound themselves in that search, and that Sir Edward Belcher (a much-loathed particular person with zero expertise in Arctic expeditions) commanded the captains of these ships to desert their vessels despite the fact that a coming thaw would’ve allowed these vessels to maneuver once more earlier than too lengthy. The embarrassment was heightened by the truth that, alongside dropping their very own ships, they failed to search out the misplaced expedition. The plaque additionally didn’t point out how Captain Buddington had taken the ship underneath the rights of salvage, however the U.S. authorities intervened and used it as a goodwill gesture to appease troubled relations with England.

And lastly, it failed to say that the Franklin expedition was present in 2014—however neither by England nor the United States. It was in actual fact a Canadian effort that uncovered the lacking sailors. They additional found that the lads underneath Franklin’s command suffered demise by quite a lot of deficiencies and illnesses—to not point out psychological breakdowns, hypothermia, and in the end, the eating-of-one-another. (Some of the lads’s chilly, mummified stays confirmed knife wounds and chew marks according to cannibalism.)

History was a series, and most of the hyperlinks had been moist with blood.

As for the desk itself, effectively—

It had been moved out and in of elements of the White House. Some presidents favored its presence within the Oval; others relegated it to out-of-the-way rooms, both as a vacationer attraction or a hidden curiosity. Some presidents modified it (Roosevelt added a panel to cover his braced legs from the world). Some presidents forgot about it, and others rediscovered it—although it was Jackie Kennedy, not John, who discovered the desk hidden in storage. Eisenhower used it for his radio broadcasts to the nation. Johnson didn’t look after it. Reagan reportedly adored it, and a reproduction sits in his presidential library. The first Bush stored it within the Oval for a handful of months, then retired it. But after that, it was utilized by each president since together with Nora Hunt earlier than she was assassinated throughout the White Mask pandemic of 2020.

The desk had turn out to be an important emblem of the historical past and dignity of the workplace.

The man presently sitting on the desk didn’t give a shit about dignity. Dignity was all effectively and good, however what did it get you? Dignity was another person’s thought of what you ought to be doing, how you ought to be appearing. And historical past, in his view, was merely the street behind. Why look again? America was a sequence of errors cascading by means of its political machine, and learning these errors was each silly and boring. Those errors weren’t Creel’s fault. Why scrutinize or apologize for them? Then you took possession of these errors. And it was not on Creel to take accountability for another person’s fuck-ups.

When you walked up a set of steps, you didn’t flip round to have a look at the steps behind you. You had been in your manner up, not down. Those coming behind you didn’t deserve the assistance. If they wished to be on the high of the steps, then it was on them to run, to climb, to ascend.

That’s what Creel did, each second of every single day.

He knew the way in which was to step up, up, up. On each step. On each head, on each again, and on everybody who provided to make themselves a plank for his ascent. Upward and onward. All within the identify of energy.

What mattered when he demanded this desk be introduced from the White House right here to Atlas Haven (what he jokingly known as the Nuclear Winter White House to his interior circle) was not the desk’s historical past, however its current. Its current was as a image of his victory. Ed Creel had gained. He had dominated the world. He had eradicated his rival, Hunt. He deserved this, and if now, on the finish of the world, he couldn’t occupy the true White House, he would take part of it as a trophy.

The Resolute Desk was that trophy.

(Not that it mattered, now.)

Above the president, the air scrubbers made their air scrubber sound—a chatter, after which a hiss, a chatter, after which a hiss. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-tsssss. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-tsssss. His proper hand lay flat in opposition to the desk and traced a curious pooling stain—a blood stain whose crimson wash made this a part of the desk seem like cherrywood and never the oak timbers of an outdated British ship.

Just then, the door to his “office” opened with a clang—the door was steel and thick, and a terrific wheel needed to be operated to open it up. As the door drifted open, the person who entered turned to face the wall and put the flat of his broad, bratwurst-fingered hand in opposition to a panel. The room instantly brightened because the octagonal partitions erupted in gentle—every was an LED display screen that linked to the opposite, displaying a single wrap-around vista of the Aquinnah Cliffs Overlook on Martha’s Vineyard—the sun-warmed blushing cliffs in a single route, the wind-churned Atlantic within the different.

But the phantasm was corrupt: some pixels blinked, others had been black and useless. One total wall behind the desk had blue-screened, displaying an error code so long as the Declaration of Independence. Even because the screens got here on, they buzzed and clicked, as if digital termites had been chewing by means of digital partitions.

“What do you want?” President Creel croaked.

The older man stepped ahead—he was in a luxurious terrycloth gown, filthy on the edges. His cheeks had been like boar jowls, his eyes set deep within the cranium. This was Honus Clines. Vice President Honus Clines. Clines grinned—an enormous smile with small tooth in puffy pencil eraser gums. From behind his again he produced a Reebok shoebox wrapped with a easy purple bow. “Go on,” he mentioned, his mushy Virginia accent evident in even these two small phrases. “Open it.”

Creel wished to buck on the command, as a result of even inside he roared, I don’t take instructions, not from my subordinates. And everybody was subordinate to him, so he didn’t take orders from anybody. Or so he instructed himself. It was a lie that echoed round his head so typically and so loudly he nearly believed it.

With a trembling hand, he undid the bow.

The ribbon fell away like a useless factor.

He stared on the field’s lid. And then at its margins. The backside nook of the field was blackened with dry blood.

“Here, let me,” Clines mentioned, and he popped the highest of the field.

President Creel appeared inside, and noticed the block of clear epoxy, and in its middle, a leering, jeering eyeball. Frozen in its loyal stare.

And at that, President Creel started to chortle—a small chortle at first that Clines felt compelled to affix together with his personal shoulder-juggling chortles, however quickly that chortle grew to become an enormous stomach chortle, a goddamn guffaw, and people heaving guffaws gave technique to a sequence of arduous coughs, and people arduous coughs made Creel’s eyes moist with tears.

Or, not less than, one in all his eyes. The different would stay dry endlessly, it appeared, there in that field.

From the e-book Wayward by Chuck Wendig. Copyright © 2022 by Chuck Wendig. 
Reprinted by association with Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Chuck Wendig’s Wayward will likely be launched August 2, 2022; you possibly can pre-order a replica here.

Wondering the place our RSS feed went? You can decide the brand new up one right here.