I sighed.

  As I moved on, he said, loud enough for people to hear, “You find any hope out here, brother, you come let me know.”

  A bunch of the guys laughed. Most pretended not to hear. It was too true to be funny, too sad to have to keep in your head while you ate.

  I thanked him and moved on. You always thank the food guys, because they’ll do stuff to your food if you don’t. Even the shit they serve out can actually get worse.

  Ruiz followed me and we found a spot in the shade of a billboard where we could see the valley. On this side of the fence, everything was either picked clean or torn down. Every house behind him had been searched and marked with codes like they used after Katrina and Ike. X for checked and a number for how many bodies. Black letters for dead and decaying. Red letters for dead and walking around. Not that we needed to be told. We were in the lines right behind the clean-up teams. We’d hear the shots; we’d see them carrying out the bodies. Anything that came out wrapped in plastic with yellow police tape around it was infected. We’d been seeing this house by house since we started building the fence, and the sound of earthmovers and front-end loaders digging burial pits was 24/7.

  I thought about that and wondered if it was true.

  “Dude,” I said, nudging Ruiz with my elbow.

  He was poking at a lump of meat. “Yeah?” he said without looking up.

  “When’s the last time you heard quiet?”

  “What d’you mean? Like no one screaming?”

  “No, I mean quiet. No guns, no heavy equipment, no noise at all. Just quiet.”

  I didn’t mention the moans, but he knew what I meant. No one ever had to say it; everybody knew.

  Ruiz flicked a glance at me like the question disturbed him. He ate the meat, winced at the taste, forced it down. “I don’t know, man. Why worry about that shit? It’s cool. We’re cool.”

  “It’s not cool. Once we’re done with the fence, then what? We sit behind the wall and do what? There won’t be any work, and without work why would they feed us?”

  “America’s a big place,” he said. “Fence is a long way from done.”

  “We’re not going to fence the whole place,” I said.

  Ruiz brightened. “The hell we’re not. You got no faith, man. You think we’re going to be done when we fence the peninsula?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  He laughed, almost snorting out the greasy broth. “You’re a gloomy fuck, Tony, you know that? Is that the kind of shit you think about when you’re swinging the sledge? Look around, man. Sure, things are in the shitter now, but we’re making a stand. We’re taking back our own.”

  “Taking what back?”

  “The world, man.”

  “Christ on a stick, I never thought you were that naïve, Ruiz. We lost the world,” I snapped. “We own a piece of shit real estate that we wouldn’t even have if it hadn’t been for lucky breaks with natural rivers and those wildfires. What ‘world’ do you think we’re going to take back? Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say … that there are a couple dozen other teams like ours, and that we’re all going to meet somewhere up north when all of the fences intersect and we’ll all celebrate with a big old American circle jerk somewhere in, like, Mississippi or some shit.”

  “It’s possible,” he said, but his grin was gone.

  “No, it’s not.” I ate two more forkfuls. “First off, there isn’t enough material to build fences like that everywhere. We got one factory turning out fencing material and cinderblock. We have no working oilrigs, no refineries, and pretty soon we’re going to run out of gas. When’s the last time you saw a helicopter or a tank? They’re done, dry, useless. We’re always short on food because we haven’t had time to replant the lands we’ve taken back and we got shit for livestock. Half of what the scouts bring in have bites, and you can’t breed that stuff, and you sure as hell can’t eat them.” I stabbed a piece of meat and wiggled it at him. “We’re eating God knows what, and I don’t know about you, man, but I don’t know how many more months of this shit I can take. The only thing I got to spark my interest each day is trying to predict whether I’ll have constipation or the runs.”

  He said nothing.

  “So, what I’m saying, Ruiz, is we won’t last long enough—people, resources, the whole shebang—we won’t last long enough to rebuild, even if we could somehow take it back. Why do you think that guy went apeshit on-line just now? He got that. He knows. He understood what the wind is saying.”

  Ruiz cut me a sharp look. “The wind? What are you talking about?”

  I hesitated. “Forget it. It’s all bullshit.”

  “No, man, what did you mean?”

  “It’s nothing, it’s … Ah, it’s just some shit that guy Preach said once.”

  “The one you used to bunk with? What’d he say? What about the wind?”

  I didn’t want to tell him. I was surprised that it was that close to the tip of my tongue that it spilled out like that, but Ruiz kept pushing me. So, I told him.

  “The moans,” I began slowly. “Preach said he knew what they were.”

  “What?”

  “The … um … wind from Hell.”

  Ruiz blinked.

  “That’s what he said. He told me that people were right about what they said. That when there was no more room in Hell …”

  “… yeah, the dead would walk the earth. Fuck. You think that’s what this is? Hell itself on the other side of the fence. Is that what you think?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do you?”

  “Just drop it,” I muttered, turning away, but Ruiz caught my arm.

  “Is that what you think?” he asked, spacing the words out, slow and heavy with a need to understand.

  I licked my lips. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  He let me go and leaned back. “Christ, man. What kind of shit is that?”

  “I told you, it’s just something that Preach told me. I told him to shut up, that I didn’t need to hear that kind of stuff.”

  Ruiz gave me a funny look. “You told him, huh? When’d you tell him?”

  I didn’t answer. That was a downhill slope covered in moss and loose rocks. No way I was going to let myself get pushed down there.

  After a while Ruiz said, “Fuck.”

  We sat in silence for a while, me looking at Ruiz, and Ruiz staring down into his bowl. After a while he closed his eyes.

  “God,” he said softly.

  I turned away. I was sorry I said anything.

  -3-

  That night even the booze wouldn’t put me out.

  I lay on my cot, too tired to swat mosquitos. Feeling sick, feeling like shit. After lunch we’d gone back to work, and Ruiz didn’t say a single word to me all day. Wouldn’t meet my eyes, didn’t sit with me at dinner. I felt bad about it, and that surprised me. I didn’t think I could feel worse than I did. I didn’t think I much cared about anyone else, or about what they felt.

  Fucking Ruiz.

  But I did feel bad.

  Some of the guys sat by the campfire and swapped lies about what they did when the world was the world. Ruiz sat nearby, the firelight painting his face in hellfire shades, but his eyes were dark and distant, and he didn’t look at me. He stared through the flames into a deep pit of his own thoughts.

  I went to my tent, chased the palmetto bugs out from under the blanket, and lay down. Someone was playing a guitar on the other side of the camp. Some Cuban song I didn’t know. I didn’t like the song, but I wished it was louder. It wasn’t, though. It couldn’t be loud enough.

  The dead moaned.

  The wind from Hell breathed out through the mouths of the hungry dead.

  Fuck me.

  I closed my eyes and tried not to hear it. Tried to sleep. Drifted in and out.

  It wasn’t Ruiz’s whispered voice that woke me. It was the feel of his callused hands closing around my throat.

  I woke up thrashing.

  I tried to cry out.

  I had no voice; the air was trapped in my lungs.

  Ruiz was a strong kid. Bigger than most of the other men; less wasted by the months on the fence. Made stronger by the sledge than I ever was. His hands closed tight and he leaned in close, his face invisible in the darkness, his breath hot and filled with spit against my ear.

  “Say you’re wrong,” he growled. “Say you’re wrong.”

  I tried to. I wanted to take it back. I wanted to take it all back. What Preach had said. What I’d said. I wanted to unsay it.

  I really wanted to.

  I could feel the bones in my throat grind and crack. Ruiz was a strong kid. I thrashed around, but he swung a leg over and sat down on my chest, crashing me down, bending the aluminum legs of the cot, pinning me to the ground.

  The breath died in my lungs. It used itself up, burned to nothing.

  “Say you were fucking lying!” His voice was quiet, but loud in my ear.

  And, just for a moment, the sound of it blocked out the moans of the dead; for a cracked fragment of a second, it silenced the wind from Hell.

  “Say it,” Ruiz begged, and the words disintegrated into tears. He sagged back, his hands going slack as he caved in to his own grief.

  I tried to say it. With the burned-up air in my lungs I wanted to say it, just take back those last words. But my throat was all wrong. It was junk. The air found only a tiny, convoluted hole in the debris. I could hear the hiss of it. A faint ghost of a sound; a wind from my own Hell.

  Ruiz was crying openly now, his sobs louder than anything in the world. In my world.

  I’m sorry, I said. Or thought I said. I take it back.

  Ruiz didn’t hear me. All he could hear was the moan of the dead.

  But me?

  I couldn’t hear it.

  Not anymore.

  Like the previous tale and the earlier “Chokepoint,” this one is set in a bleak version of the post-zombie-apocalypse future. Unlike the previous one, though, this has a smidge of optimism. Not a dollop, mind you … but definitely a smidge.

  Jingo and the Hammerman

  -1-

  Kind of hard to find yourself when everything’s turned to shit.

  Kind of hard, but when it happens … kind of cool.

  That’s what Jingo was trying to explain to Moose Peters during their lunch break. Moose liked Jingo, but he wasn’t buying.

  “You are out of your fucking mind,” said Moose. “Batshit, dipso, gone-round-the-twist, monkeybat crazy.”

  “‘Monkeybat’?” asked Jingo. “The hell’s a—”

  “I just made it up, but it fits. If you think we’re anything but ass deep in shit, then you’re off your rocker.”

  “No, man,” said Jingo, stabbing the air with a pigeon leg to emphasize his point, “your problem is that you don’t know a good thing when you see it.”

  Moose took a long pull on his canteen, using that to give himself a second to study his friend. He lowered the canteen and wiped his mouth with a cloth he kept in a plastic Ziploc bag in an inner pocket of his shirt. He was careful to not dab his mouth with the back of his hand or blot it on his shirt.

  Jingo handed him a squeeze bottle of Purell.

  “Thanks,” said Moose in his soft rumble of a voice. The two of them watched each other sanitize their hands, nodded agreement that it had been done, and Jingo took the bottle back. Moose stretched his massive shoulders, sighed, shook his head. “Not sure I get the ‘good’ part of things, man.”

  Jingo, who was nearly a foot shorter than Moose, and weighed less than half as much, got to his feet and pointed to the crowd of people on the far side of the chain link fence. “Well, first,” he said, “we could be over there. I don’t have a college degree like you, and I haven’t read all those books, but I’m smart enough to know that they got the shit end of the stick. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Moose shook his head. “Okay, sure, they’re all fucked. Everyone knows they’re all fucked. Fucked as fucked will ever get, I suppose.”

  “Right.”

  “But,” said Moose, “I’m not sure that sells your argument that we have it good.”

  “I—”

  “Just because we’re on this side of the fence doesn’t sell that to me at all, and here’s why. Those poor dumb bastards are fucked, we agree on that, but they don’t know they’re fucked. At worst, they’re brain-dead meat driven by the last misfiring neurons in their motor cortex. At best—at absolute best—they’re vectors for a parasite. Like those ants and grasshoppers, with larvae in their brains or some shit. I read about that stuff in Nat Geo. Either way, the people who used to hold the pink slips on all those bodies have gone bye-byes. Lights are on but no one’s home.”

  “You going somewhere with that?” asked Jingo as he rummaged in his knapsack for his bottle of cow urine.

  “What I’m saying,” continued Moose, “is that although they’re fucked, they are beyond knowing about it and beyond caring. They’re gone, for all intents and purposes. So how can you compare us to them?”

  Jingo found the small spray bottle, uncapped it, and began spritzing his pants and shirtsleeves. The stuff had been fermenting for days now and even through his own body odor and the pervasive stench of rot that filled every hour of every day, the stink was impressive. Moose’s eyes watered.

  “We’re alive, for a start,” Jingo said, handing the bottle to Moose.

  The big man shook his head. “Not enough. Give me a better reason than us still sucking air.”

  “A better reason than being alive? How much better a reason do we need?”

  Moose waggled the little bottle. “We’re spraying cow piss on our clothes because it keeps dead people from biting us. I don’t know, Jingo, maybe I’m being a snob here, but I’m not sure this qualifies as quality of life. If I’m wrong, then go ahead and lay it out for me.”

  They stood up and looked down the hill to the fence. It stretched for miles upon miles, cutting this part of Virginia in half. Their settlement was built hard against the muddy banks of Leesville Lake, with a dozen other survivor camps strung out along the Roanoke River. On their side of the fence were hundreds of men and women, all of them thinner than they should be, filthy, wrapped in leather and rags and pieces of armor that were either scavenged from sporting goods stores or homemade. Dozens of tractors, earthmovers, frontend loaders and bulldozers dotted the landscape, but most of them were near the end of their usefulness. Replacement parts were hard to find. Going into the big towns to shop was totally out of the question. Flatbeds sat in rows, each laden with bundles of metal poles and spools of chain link fencing.

  On the other side of the fence, stretching backward like a fetid tide, were the dead. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every race, every age, every type of person. A melting pot of the American population united now only in their lack of humanity and their shared, ravenous, unassuageable hunger. Here and there, stacked within easy walk of the fence, were the mounds of bodies. Fifty-eight mounds that Moose and Jingo could count from the hill on which they’d sat to eat lunch. Hill seventeen was theirs. Six hundred and fifteen bodies contributed to the composition of that hill. Parts of that many people. Though, to be accurate, there were not that many whole people even if all the parts were reassembled. Many of them had already been missing limbs before Jingo and Moose went to work on them. And before the cutters did their part. Blowflies swarmed in their millions above the field, and far above the vultures circled and circled.

  Moose shook his head. “If I’m missing anything at all, then please tell me, ’cause I’m happy to be wrong.”

  -2-

  As they began prepping for the afternoon shift, Jingo tried to make his case. Moose actually wanted to hear it. Jingo was always trying to paint pretty colors on shit, but lately he’d become a borderline evangelist for this new viewpoint.

  “Okay, okay,” Jingo said as he wrapped the strips of carpet around his forearms and anchored them with Velcro, “so life in the moment is less than ideal.”

  “‘Less than ideal,’” echoed Moose, smiling at the phrase. “Christ, kid, no wonder you get laid so often. You could charm a nun out of her granny panties. If there were any nuns left.”

  Quick off the mark, Jingo said, “What’s the only flesh a zombie priest will eat?”

  “Nun. Yeah, yeah. It’s an old joke, man, and it’s sick.”

  “Sick funny, though.”

  Moose shook his head and began winding the carpet extensions over the gap between his heavy gloves and leather jacket. It was nearly impossible to bite through carpet, and certainly not quickly. Everyone wore scraps of it over their leather and limb pads.

  “Okay, okay,” conceded Jingo. “So that’s an old joke. What was I saying?”

  “You were talking about how life sucks in the moment, which I’ll agree about.”

  “No, that was me getting to my point. Life sucks right now because we’re all in a transitional point.”

  “‘Transitional’?”

  “Sure, we’re in the process of an important change that will shift the paradigm—”

  Moose narrowed his eyes. “Where’s this bullshit coming from?”

  Jingo grinned without shame. “Books, man. You’re always on me to read, so I’ve been reading.”

  “I gave you a couple of Faulkner novels and that John Sandford mystery.”

  “Sure, and I finished them. They were okay, but they didn’t exactly speak to me, man. What’s Faulkner got to say about living through a global pandemic? Nah, man, I needed something relevant.”

  “Uh huh. So … who’ve you been reading?”

  The little man’s grin got brighter. “Empowerment stuff. Dr. Phil, Esther Hicks, Don Miguel Ruiz, but mostly Tony Robbins. He’s the shit, man. He’s the total shit. He had it all wired right, and he knew what was fucking what.”

  “Tony Robbins?”

  “You know, that motivational—”

  “I know who he is. Or was. But, c’mon, he was all about business and taking charge of your career. Not sure what we do qualifies as a ‘career.’ I mean, I could build a stronger case for this being all of us working off our sins in purgatory. If I believed in that sort of thing, which I don’t. Neither do you. So, tell me exactly how Tony Robbins’ books—or any empowerment books—are useful for anything except toilet paper?”