The Wind Through the Fence

— 2-

My arms ached from the sledgehammer. As I swung at the post I tried to remember a time when they didn't hurt. I couldn't. Not really.

Swinging the hammer was mostly everything that filled my memories.

Six days a week, going on eighteen months now.

The first week I thought I'd die. The second week I wished I would. One of the guys--a shift supervisor who used to work cattle in central Florida--started taking bets on how long I'd last. The first pool gave me ten days. Then it was two weeks. A month. Until Christmas. Each time the pools got smaller because I kept not falling down. I kept not dying. I won't say that I kept alive. It didn't feel like that then and doesn't feel like that now. I didn't die. I lasted longer than the shift supervisor said I might.

On the other hand, outlasting the supervisor's last prediction of "Four months and you'll be swallowing broken glass to get out of this gig" was not the victory I expected. Each new day felt like a defeat, or at best a confirmation that escape was one klick farther down the road than yesterday.

Some of the guys seemed to thrive on it. Fuck 'em. Some guys in prison thrived on being turned into fish. That wouldn't be me. Not that I ever did anything to warrant it, but when I watched prison flicks or read about it in books, I knew that I couldn't have survived it. Maybe I could take the privations, the beatings and all of that, but I couldn't take being somebody's bitch. And yet, even the worst prison from before would be better, cleaner and less terrifying than my current nine-to-five.

I stood on the soup line, waiting my turn for a quart of hot water with some mystery meat and vegetables that tasted like they've been boiling since before the Fall. I looked over at a guy sitting on the tailgate of an old F-150. The man was holding a piece of meat and staring at it, crying with big silent sobs, snot running into the corners of his mouth. Nobody else was looking at him, so I looked away, too. I was four back from the soup and my soup bowl — a big plastic jug with a handle that had graduated marks on it like it was used to measure something once upon a time--hung from the crook of my right index finger. I looked down at it and saw that some of yesterday's stew was caked onto the side. I didn't know what was in that, either.

I closed my eyes and dragged a forearm across my face. Even doing that hurt. Little firecrackers popped in my biceps and I could feel every single nerve in my lower and mid-back. They were all screaming at me, sending me hate mail.

The line shuffled a step forward and now I was even with the crying guy. I recognized him--one of the schlubs who were too useless even to swing a sledge so they had him working clean-up in the kitchen trucks. I tried to stare at the back of a big Latino kid in the line in front of me, but his eyes kept sneaking over to steal covert looks. The man was still staring at the piece of meat.

Christ, I thought, what did he think it was?

Worst case scenario was that they were going to be eating dog, or maybe cat. Cat wasn't too bad. One of the guys I currently shared a tent with had a good recipe for cat. Cat and tomatoes with bay leaves. Cheap stuff, but it tasted okay. Since the Fall I'd had a lot worse. Hell, I'd had worse before that, especially at that sushi place near Washington Square. The stuff they served there tasted like cat shit.

I caught some movement and turned. The guy had dropped the chunk of meat and had climbed up onto the tailgate.

The Latino kid, Ruiz, turned to me. "Bet you a smoke that he's just seen God and wants to tell us about it."

"Sucker's bet," I said. But I had an extra smoke and shook one out of the pack for the kid. The kid nodded and we both looked at the man on the tailgate.

"It's not right!" the crying man shouted in a voice that was phlegmy with snot and tears. "We know it's not right."

"No shit," someone yelled and there was a little ripple of laughter up and down the line.

"This isn't what we're here for!" screamed the man. "This isn't why God put us here--"

"Fucking told you," said Ruiz. "It's always God."

"Sometimes it's the voices in their heads," I suggested.

"Put there by God."

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

The screaming man ranted. A couple security guards wormed their way through the crowd, moving up quiet so as not to spook him. Last week a screamer went apeshit and knocked over the serving table. Everyone went hungry until quitting time. But this guy wasn't going anywhere. His diatribe wasn't well thought out and it spiraled down into sobs. I didn't get in the way or say shit when the guards pulled him down and dragged him away.

We watched the toes of his shoes cut furrows in the mud. Maybe it was because the guy didn't fight that the chatter and chuckles died down among the men on the food line. We all watched the guards take the guy into the blue trailer at the end of the row. I didn't know what went on in there and I didn't care. The guy wouldn't be seen again, and life here at the fence would go on like it had last week and last month and last year. It was always like that now. You worked, you ate, you slept like the dead, you jerked off in the dark when you thought no one was looking, you tried not to hear the moans, you drank as much as you could, you slept some more, you got up, you worked. And sometimes God shouts through your mouth and they take you to the Blue Trailer.

And sometimes in the night you listen to the wind from Hell blow through the mouths of the dead and nothing--not booze or a pillow wrapped around your head--will keep that sound out.

For eighteen months that had been the pattern of my life and my world.

I was pretty sure that it was the pattern all up and down the fence line, from Kenneth City to Feather Sound, following a crooked link of chain link that we erected between us and the end of the world. Crews like mine, three, four thousand men, working in the no man's land while a line of bulldozers with triple-wide blades held the dead back. Every day was a race. Every day some of the dead got through and you heard shotguns or the soft thunk of axes as the Safety Teams cut them down. We were the lowest of the low, guys who don't have a place in the world anymore. I used to broker corporate real estate. Malls, airports, shit like that. Back land was something you could own rather than try to steal it back. Closest thing to a blue collar job I ever worked was managing a Taco Bell franchise for an uncle of mine while I was in college. I used call it honest work.

Some guys still throw the phrase around. Guys standing ankle deep in Florida mud, trying not to get carried away by mosquitoes, swinging a sledge-hammer to build a fence. Honest work.

What the hell does that even mean? Guys like me were about the lowest thing on the food chain. Well…convicts were. Guys who stole food or left gates open. They had to dig latrines and hunt for scraps in the garbage. I heard stories that in some camps food thieves were shoved outside the fence line with their hands tied behind their back. Never saw it happen, but I knows guys who said they had.

Not how I felt about it, though. If I saw it, I mean. Would I give a flying shit? With my stomach grinding on empty almost all the time, how much compassion could I ladle out for a heartless fuck who stole food so that we'd all have less.

I might actually watch. A lot of the guys would.

It's what we'd have since we don't have TV.

I chewed on that while I stood in line waiting for food.

I watched the real swinging dicks go to work. The construction crews who came in once we had the double rows of chain-link fence in place, using the last of the working cranes to fill the gap between the two fences with cars. A wall of Chevys and Toyotas and Fords and fucking SUVs, six cars high and two cars deep. Maybe a million of them so far, and no shortage of raw materials rusting away waiting for the crews to take them from wherever they stopped. Or crashed.

I wondered where my cars were. The Mercedes-Benz CLS I used to drive back and forth to the train and the gas-sucking Escalade that I used as a deliberate fuck-you to the oil shortage.

The guy on the soup line grunted at me and I held out my plastic jug and watched dispassionately as the gray meat was sloshed in. "Bread or crackers?"

"Bread," I said. "Got any butter? Any jelly?"

"You making a fucking joke?"

I shrugged. "Hey, there's always hope."

The guy chewed his toothpick for a second. He gave me a funny look and handed over a bread roll that looked like a dog turd and smelled faintly of kerosene. "Get the fuck out of here before I beat the shit out of you."

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 town. 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 and we wouldn't even have that if it hadn't been for lucky breaks with natural rivers and those wild fires. 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 oil rigs, 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 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 lose 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.