“You say stuff like that because you haven’t read them,” said Jingo. “Empowerment is what it’s all about. Look, history goes through good and bad moments. Transitional moments, you dig? Going from what was to what will be.”

  “I understand the concept of transition,” said Moose, reaching for his reinforced cervical collar.

  “Right, so that’s what this is.” Jingo gestured widely to include everything around them.

  “A transitional period?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s how you’re seeing this?” Moose asked.

  “It’s what it is. The world as we knew it is gone. We know that. We all know that. The plague was too big and it spread too far. Too much of the systems we needed—what do you call that stuff? Hospitals and emergency services and shit? People we’re used to being able to call—?”

  “Infrastructure,” supplied Moose.

  “Right. The infrastructure’s gone, and that means the world we knew is gone. And it’s so totally gone, so completely fucked in the bunghole that we can’t put it back together the way it was.”

  “Is that a Tony Robbins quote?”

  “You know what I mean.” Jingo picked up the two football helmets and handed one to Moose. “Everything that was is for shit. Right now, things are for shit, too, but in a different way.”

  Moose hooked the chinstrap in place and adjusted his helmet. The visor was scratched and stained, but he could see through it. “Not in any version of a good way.”

  “No, but that’s what I mean by transitional.” He picked up the sledgehammer, grunting with its weight and handed it to Moose. “The world’s still changing.”

  “Changing into what?”

  Jingo pulled his machete from the tree stump where he’d chunked it before lunch. He slid it into the canvas scabbard on his belt.

  “Into something better.”

  “Better?” Moose snorted. “Look around, brother, ’cause that’s setting the bar pretty low.”

  “Sure, but that means that things can only keep getting better.”

  “Jesus.”

  The shift whistle blew, and they began walking down the hill toward the gate.

  -3-

  Because neither of them had premium skills, they worked cleanup. Before the plague, Jingo—born James Go—had been a third-generation Chinese American who mostly fucked around on trust money left to him by his software developer dad. He had some school, even a degree, but not a lot of what he’d studied had stuck. It was only when the trust was beginning to dry up that Jingo had started reading self-help and empowerment books to try and grab the future by the horns. The apocalypse had mostly, but not entirely, short-circuited that process. He knew that he would never be a great man or a great doer of things, but he had plans.

  Michael “Moose” Peters was different. He’d been a high school football coach and health-ed teacher. A college graduate with a degree in education, a constant reader and small-scale social activist in his community. Unlike Jingo, Moose had been a family man, but his wife and two sons were long gone. Taken by the first wave of the plague as it swept through Bordentown, a narrow spot on the map in Western Pennsylvania. Bordentown was notable only for being next door to Stebbins, where the plague began. Some of the guys working the fence thought that was kind of cool, and it gave him low-wattage celebrity. A few of the men, though, seemed to hold it against him, as if proximity to the outbreak somehow made him part of the problem.

  Neither of their skill sets were of prime use. They weren’t doctors, scientists, military, police, EMTs, or construction workers. Neither of them could cook, sew, hunt, or survey the landscape. Nobody was playing football anymore, and Moose didn’t think it would make a comeback. It was as extinct as accounting, software development, infomercials, TV producing, the real estate industry, reality show competitions, taxi service, pizza delivery, cosmetic surgery, valet parking, car detailing, investigative journalism, secret shoppers, and ten thousand other things Moose could name. Putting together a list of useful skills was easier and quicker. A lot of people, including movie actors, famous models, politicians, CPAs, advertising executives, pet therapists, comic book writers, professional athletes, lawyers, and many, many more were now part of a mass of unskilled labor. Some were so unsuited to the survival of the collective that they were quietly shoved out of the gate at night. Those who made the cut, like Jingo and Moose, survived because they had—if nothing else—muscle.

  Both men were fit. Jingo was small and fast and had good stamina. Moose was huge and strong and could work all day. Neither of them complained. Neither was overtly insane, at least not in any way that made them a security risk or a danger to their co-workers.

  They worked support for the fence project. More highly -skilled men built the fence. Less skilled men washed dishes and clothes. Those without even those basic skills threw parts on the mounds. Everyone worked. Idlers were starved out or pushed through the fence. Same for thieves, especially food thieves. Steal someone’s meal and you become a meal for the dead beyond the fence. Courts and lawyers had all died off, too.

  Jingo and Moose worked as a team. Jingo was a cutter and Moose was the hammerman.

  As they passed through the fence, they nodded to each other and set right to work. The process was simple. First came the cover-men, who were the most heavily armored. They worked in teams of two, with each team holding a folding table in front of them like a wide shield. Five sets of cover-men pushed out into the crowd of the dead to create a kill-zone. Then Jingo and Moose, along with two other two-man teams, worked the cleared area. The shield opened and closed, opened and closed, allowing a few of the dead in at a time. The cutters of each team went in low and fast, cutting hands off at the wrists with their machetes and then chopping the outside of one leg to make the infected fall. The hammermen followed, swinging sledgehammers down on the dead skulls. Even though Moose and the others who wielded hammers were big, they used the lightest-weight sledges—for speed and to keep from fatiguing.

  The dead never learned from the deaths of their fellows, so it was all rinse and repeat.

  Stackers then dragged the corpses—whole and in parts—off the kill zone and began a mound. When the mound became too big for the shield wall to contain it, they pushed forward to occupy a new plot of land.

  Working in teams like his, two dozen men could take down five hundred of the dead per shift. There were forty shield walls running at any time, round the clock, every day. The landscape was littered with thousands upon thousands of mounds from Taylor Ford Road all the way to Slush Branch. It never stopped.

  Rest only came when there was such heavy rain that floodwaters made it impossible for the clumsy dead to approach the chain link fence. And if they hit a zone where the dead were so densely packed that the fence itself was in danger of being overwhelmed, the shift foreman would call all the teams inside and send the bulldozers out. Twenty dozers could clear pure hell out of a field.

  But that was hard on the machines. The pulped flesh clogged worse than mud, and it meant having each dozer stripped and cleaned. That would take them out of commission for days. The risk reward ratio meant that it was usually men out there doing the job.

  Men like Jingo and Moose.

  “Let’s rock and roll,” said Jingo. He said it every single time they went out, and every time he made it sound like they were about to do something fun. It amazed Moose. He wondered, though, if his friend’s happy-puppy enthusiasm was a front. There were guys like that, people who relied on the fake-it-’til-you-make-it approach to handling life. The let-a-smile-be-your-umbrella crowd. Moose knew several guys like that, and he’d seen what happened when the rain came down so hard that their umbrellas collapsed. Behind some of those smiles was a mask of shrieking terror. Once their illusion was shattered, they were left in pieces. Suicides were not uncommon. There was even one smiling, happy guy who went so far off the rails that he took a sledge and smashed the shackles on a forty-yard-wide section of fence before the guards cut him down. By then a wave of the dead had swarmed into camp, and when all the shooting and cutting was over the collective was down fifty-six workers.

  Not that Moose feared Jingo would go out that way if something ever wiped the smile off his face. But he’d break. They all broke.

  At times Moose wanted to shake the little guy, or maybe slap some sense into him. Get him to stop daydreaming about how good things were going to be. But what would be the benefit of that? Even Moose had to admit that Jingo’s optimism made their life easier. It was a skill set more important than his ability to swing a machete.

  He’d break, though. In the end they all broke. Moose had left his own optimism behind in a lovely little cottage in Bordentown, behind doors that were stained with the blood of everyone he ever truly loved.

  A transitional period? No, as he saw it, the global paradigm had already shifted and it had stripped the clutch, blown out the tires, and was rusting in the sun. Dead and unfixable.

  “Yeah,” he said to Jingo, “let’s boogie-woogie.”

  The shield teams pushed out, and Jingo raced behind them to claim his spot. He was a lefty, and he liked the club-and-cut method of using his padded right forearm to parry the grabbing hands of the dead and then a waist-twisting cut to “blunt” the arms. That was easiest to do if he took up station on the left-hand side of the opening. He won his spot, chopped and earned a double as both of a dead woman’s hands flew off with one cut, then he pivoted and put a little pizzazz into a squatting leg cut that he’d labeled his “Crouching Tiger” move. Moose had his sledge in a rising arc before the infected was even falling, and so the ten-pound weight followed her down and stroked the top of the skull.

  The trick was not to make the rookie move of burying the mallet in the skull. Hard as hell to pull out. All that suction from the brain. A deep grazing hit along the top of the head worked well, and it did enough damage to the motor cortex that it shorted them out nicely. Moose seldom had to swing twice on the same target. Not more than two or three times in a shift, and usually only when he was getting tired.

  Jingo was good, too. Months and months of practice had honed his skills so that more often than not he got his doubles, and sometimes caught the angle just right to cleave completely through the knee joint. If he hit the sweet spot the knee fell apart. Hit it wrong and the wide, flat machete blade got stuck in bone. Jingo always carried a back-up cutter and several short spikes for emergencies, but he seldom had to use them.

  They worked the pattern in silence for a while, but soon the moans of the dead got to them and Jingo picked up the thread of their earlier conversation.

  “Sooner or later, we’re going to run out of zombies,” he said.

  “How do you figure that, genius? Last I heard there were something just shy of seven billion of our life-impaired fellow citizens.”

  Jingo laughed at that even though it wasn’t the first time Moose had made the joke. “Sure, sure, but they’re spread all over the world. Big damn planet.”

  “Got our fair share here.”

  Jingo cut the hands off a man in an Armani hoodie and dropped him in front of Moose. “Right, but look how many we’re taking off the board. I heard the guys working the fence in North Carolina are taking down fifty thousand a day. A day.”

  “First off, that’s horse shit.”

  “No, I heard it from—”

  “And second, there were three hundred and twenty million people infected in these United States. There’s, what, thirty thousand of us working the fences? Maybe less. Call it twenty-five thousand and change.”

  “So?”

  Moose smashed a head and paused to blink sweat from his eyes. He had grease around his eyes to prevent sweat from pooling, but it happened. Couldn’t wipe it away because he had black blood and bits of infected meat clinging to his clothes, from fingertips to shoulders. They’d all seen what happened to guys who made those kinds of mistakes. Some of them were out here among the moaning crowds.

  “So, it’s going to take just shy of forever to clear out the dead.”

  “Well, in his book, Tony said that solving small problems results in small personal gains. It’s only when you conquer your greatest challenge that you achieve your greatest potential.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Absolutely,” said Jingo, cutting a corpse down without even looking at it.

  He was very good at that. They all were. Peripheral vision and muscle memory were their chief skills. Jingo sometimes joked that he could do the job blindfolded. Between the rot of undead flesh and the constant moans they made, you’d have to be an idiot to have one sneak up you. A lot of people agreed with that, including Moose, though Moose never took his eyes off the infected. Never. He looked at the face of everyone who came through the shield wall. Even the ones he didn’t finish himself. It was part of his personal ritual and he never shared the meaning of it with anyone. For him, though, it was crucial to his own spiritual survival to see each face and recognize—however fleetingly—that the infected were people, to never lose sight of the respect owed to the fallen. They had each died in pain and fear. Each of them had been part of a family, a household, a community. Each of them had expected to have futures and lives and love. Each of them had been unfairly abused by the plague. It had stolen their lives from them, and it had turned them into monsters.

  Moose could not and would not accept that as the final definition of what each of these people were. They would always be people to him. Dead, sure. Infected, yes. Dangerous, of course. But still people.

  Jingo was different. Maybe it was part of his faux optimism, but he rarely looked at any face, and like a lot of the guys in the collective, Jingo tended to refer to the infected as zombies, zoms, stinkers, rotters, grays, walkers, stenches, fly-bait, wormers, and any of the other epithets common since the plague. Moose had long ago decided that Jingo was afraid to do what Moose had to do—which was connect with the humanity, however lapsed, of those they killed. Jingo couldn’t afford that kind of cost. And Moose knew that if his friend ever spent that coin, it would break him.

  That thought saddened him. Jingo was a bit of an idiot at times, and he was far from the sharpest tool in the woodshed, but he had light. The kid definitely had light, and the world had become so goddamn dark.

  So, as they worked through the afternoon, Moose encouraged Jingo to talk, to expostulate and expand on his new theory. To elaborate on his latest theory about what would be his ticket out of the hell they were in now, and into a brighter future. However fictional or improbable it might be. So, what if the kid had become a post-apocalyptic Professor Pangloss? Who knows, maybe this was the best of all possible worlds, with a promise of greater possibilities tomorrow.

  Skewed logic, sure, but Moose figured, what the fuck. Listening to Jingo was a crap-ton better than listening to his own moody and nihilistic thoughts. Maybe the kid was saving them both from that fractured moment when they’d lose their shit, cover themselves with steak sauce, and go skipping tra-la out among the hungry dead.

  “It all comes down to what we believe,” said Jingo as he chopped down two more of the dead. Hands flew into the air and legs buckled on severed tendons, dropping them right in Moose’s path. Whack, chop, fall, smash. Rinse and repeat. “That’s what Tony Robbins wrote about. I mean … what’s a belief anyway? I’ll tell you, man, it’s a feeling of certainty about what something means. What we need to do is make sure that we shift what we believe to align with what we want to happen.”

  “Okay,” said Moose, playing along, “and how do we do that?”

  “Well … I’m just reading those chapters now, but from what I’ve read so far, it’s all about taking an idea you have to find things that support it. That gives the idea what he calls stability. Once an idea is stable like that, then you can go from just thinking about it to believing in it.”

  Moose saw Jingo’s blade flash out and take the delicate hands from the slender wrists of what must have once been a truly beautiful woman. Even withered he could see that she had been gorgeous, with a full figure and masses of golden hair. The blade swept down and cleaved through a leg that had slipped out through a long slit in a silvery gown. Moose swung his sledge at her head and silently said what he always said.

  I’m sorry.

  “So, Tony said that the past doesn’t equal the future, and I figure that our present doesn’t either. We know things have to change. Either we’re going to wipe out the rotters and rebuild, or we won’t. I’m thinking we will because even though they outnumber us, we’re smarter and we can work together. Once we finish the fences, we’re going to start planting crops. This time next year we’ll be eating fresh veggies, and maybe even steak.”

  Moose almost made a comment about the challenge of finding useful seed that wasn’t the GMO stuff that grew into plants that wouldn’t breed. They’d have to find seeds that had never been genetically modified, and how would they know? How would they test that stuff?

  He almost said it, but didn’t.

  Whack and chop, fall and smash.

  Jingo said, “Tony wrote a lot about how there’s no such thing as failures, only outcomes. So, we shouldn’t look at all this as us having fucked up. It happened, so we need to sack up and deal and move past it. We need to make the future we want rather than moan and cry about the way it is.”

  His face was alight with the promise of what he was saying, but Moose wasn’t fooled. He could see the doubt, and the panic it ignited, right behind the sheen of those bright eyes.

  “Okay,” Moose said, keeping the kid on track, “tell me how we go about getting to this shiny new future? ’Cause personally I’d love to get there.”