The Wind Through the Fence

— 1-

The fucking thing was heavy. Sixteen pounds of metal on a two pound piece of ash. Eighteen pounds. Already heavy when the foreman handed it down from the truck ten minutes after dawn held a match to the morning sky; by nine o'clock it weighed a god damned ton. By noon my arms were on fire and by quitting time I couldn't feel where the pain ended and I began. I'd eat too little, drink too much, throw up and shamble off to bed, praying that I'd die in my sleep rather than hear that bugle.

The bugle, man. You couldn't stop it. Only one thing in the world more relentless than that motherfucking bugle, and they were the reason the bugle got us up. To build the fence. To fix the fence. To extend the fence. To maintain the fence.

The fence, the fence, the god damned fence.

We talked about the fence. Nobody talked about what was on the other side of it.

Each and every morning the bugle scream would tear me out of the darkness and kick me thrashing back into the world. Almost every morning. They gave us fence guys Sunday off. We were supposed to use the day praying.

Not sure exactly what we were praying for. Suicides were highest on Sundays, so hang any meaning on that you want. Me? I used Sundays to get drunk and try to catch up on sleep. Yeah, I know that drunk sleep doesn't do shit for the body, but who do you know that can sleep without booze? Maybe some of those lucky fucks who scavenged good headphones from a store, or the ones who popped their own eardrums. No one else can get to sleep with that noise. The moaning.

Even after the fear of it wore off, and that was a long damn time ago, when you lie there in the dark and hear the moaning it makes you think. It makes you wonder.

Why? Are they in pain?

Is it some kind of weird-ass hunting cry?

Are they trying to communicate in the only way they know how?

I shared a tent for two weeks with a guy who was always trying to philosophize about it. Not sure what his deal was. Some kind of half-assed philosopher. Probably a poet or writer back when that mattered. Some shit like that. Everybody called him Preach. He'd lay there on his cot, fingers laced behind his head, staring up at the darkness as the dead moaned and moaned, and he'd tell me different ideas he had about it. Theories. He'd number them, too. Most nights he had two or three stupid theories. Demons speaking with dead tongues--that was a favorite of his. That was Theory #51. He came back to that one a lot. Demons. Motherfucker, please.

The last theory I heard from him was #77.

"You want to hear it?" Preach asked.

The camp lights were out except for the torches on the fence, and we didn't bunk near the fence. That night we were hammering posts in for a new extension that would allow us to extend the safe zone all the way north. Some genius decided to reclaim arable land along Route 60, and the plan was to run west from Old Tampa Bay straight through to Clearwater. They moved a lot of us in wagons from the fence we'd been building just above Route 93 by the Saint Petersburg-Clearwater airport. I pitched my tent on a mound where I could catch a breeze. I was half in the bag on moonshine that was part grain alcohol and part battery acid. No joke.

I said, "No."

"You sure?" asked Preach.

"I'm trying to sleep."

Preach was quiet for a while, and then he started talking as if I'd said, sure, tell me your fucking Theory #77.

"It's the wind up from hell."

I frowned into my pillow. -At first I thought he was talking about the hot wind out of the southwest. But that wasn't what he was saying.

"You know that line? The one everybody used to say right around the time this thing really got started."

I knew what he was talking about. Everyone knew it, but I didn't answer. Maybe he'd think I drifted off.

But he said, "You know the one. When there's no more room in hell…? That one?"

I said nothing.

"I think they were right," he persisted. "I think that's exactly what it is."

"Bullshit," I mumbled, and he caught it.

"No, really, Tony. I think that's what that sound is."

We both said nothing for a minute while we listened. The breeze was coming at us across re-claimed lands all the way from the Gulf of Mexico, and it kept the sound damped down a bit. Not all the way, though. Never all the way. It was there, under the sound of trees and kudzu swaying in the breeze; under the whistle of wind through chain links of the fence. The moan. Sounding low and quiet, but I knew it was loud. It was always loud. A rhythm without rhythm, that's how I thought of it. The dead, who didn't need to breathe, taking in ragged chestfuls of air just so they could cry out with that moan. Day and night, week after week, month after month. It never stopped.

"That's exactly what that is," said Preach. "That's the wind straight from hell itself, boiled up in the Pit and exhaled at us by all the dead. Seven billion dead and damned souls crying out, breathing the wind from hell right in our faces."

"No," I said.

"Listen to it. It can't be anything else. The breath of Hell blowing hot and hungry in our faces."

"Shut the fuck up."

He chuckled in the dark, and for a moment that sound was louder and more horrible than the moans. "People aren't just throwing words around when they called this an 'apocalypse'. It is. It is the Apocalypse; the absolute end of all things. Wind of hell, man. Wind of hell."

They gave me a bonus next day at mess call. Anyone who finds a zom in camp and puts his lights out gets a bottle of booze. A real bottle, one from a warehouse. I got a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey.

They opened the fence long enough to throw Preach's body into the mud on the other side. No one asked me how he died. As a society, we were kind of past that point. What mattered is that when Preach died unexpectedly in his sleep I was on my pins enough to take a shovel to him and cut his head off.

That night I drank myself to sleep early. I used to think Canadian Club was a short step down from dog piss, but it was the best booze I'd had in six months, and it knocked me right on my ass.

I didn't sleep well, though. I dreamed of Preach. Of the way he thrashed, the way he beat against my arms and tore at my hands, the way he tried to fight, tried to cling to life.

I woke up crying an hour before dawn and was still crying when the bugle screamed.