by Joe McKinney
The idea of a wall to protect one society from another is an old one. Ancient China tried it. The Communists tried it. The U.S. tried it along the Mexican border. But none of those historical precedents were entirely effective. They all came with a great cost in human life and a lot of insane politics. Political borders, after all, rarely coincide with societal borders. To think otherwise is just plain stupid. Fences may make good neighbors, but walls do not keep countries safe.
That is, until the zombies rose from the flooded ruins of Houston. The military was able to contain the outbreak by constructing a wall that stretches from Gulfport, Mississippi to Brownsville, Texas. Imagine the scope of that project. That’s 1,100 miles of cement, chain link fencing and endless spools of concertina wire, all of it constructed in the span of a month and a half. Many have claimed it is one of the modern wonders of the world, while the critics maintain it’s a wonder it doesn’t have more holes in it than a fish net. But according to the government, and several independent quality control groups and news outlets, it doesn’t. The wall is sound. It’s the truth Free America entrusts its safety to, and its impermeability is, to most Americans anyway, a lock-step guarantee.
But Jessica and her group didn’t believe it. Lots of people break through every month, she assured me. And I could tell she honestly believed it.
Yet when I pressed her, she didn’t seem to have much of a plan.
“We want to get across somewhere between Flatonia and Weimar,” she said.
I waited for more. But after a moment, I realized there wasn’t more.
“That’s it? You don’t know where? I mean, exactly? That seems like an important detail to me.”
“How can I know something like that? That’s up to the coyotes, isn’t it?”
“I guess so,” I said doubtfully. It seemed like an awful lot to take on faith, though. After all, to trust your life like that to a total stranger seemed crazy. But I answered myself with the same mental breath: Wasn’t that exactly what I was doing here with Jessica?
“How much do they charge?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Nobody in the Zone has any money.”
“Well, how then?”
She glanced around to make sure no one was looking, then showed me a handful of jewelry. They were nice, but nothing special, a few necklaces and charm bracelets, probably worth a couple hundred dollars at most.
“Is that how most people pay, with jewelry?”
“Mostly, yeah. It’s the easiest way. But I’ve heard people paying with all kinds of stuff. Gas they’ve siphoned off old cars. Drugs they found in pharmacies. Liquor. Anything people want you can usually trade with.”
This was insane, I thought. I guess it showed on my face.
“What?” she said. She was amused by my distress, I could tell. She was almost laughing.
“I just don’t see how you can be so blase about it. Where exactly you’re gonna cross; how much it’s gonna cost; those things seem like a big deal to me. I mean, right? You see that? They’re important. It scares me you’re not more worried about it.”
The bemused smile went away from her face, replaced by a bitter seriousness. “There’s always a way for a woman to pay her way,” she said.
“Jessica, I...”
She didn’t flinch. “I won’t go on living this way. Not in the Zone like this.” She gestured to the soiled rags that passed for her clothes, at her emaciated body that barely hinted at a woman’s natural curves any more. “Tell me, what would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
When I went on with my questions, I was more subdued. I’d been humbled.
“What do you plan to do when you get to Free America?” I asked.
“I taught Fourth and Fifth Grade before the wall went up. I thought maybe I could do that again.”
“What about friends, family? They could help you get back on your feet.”
“Maybe. I hope so. I had a boyfriend, you know. His name was Robert. He did IT stuff for an oil company. Made pretty good money. He was smart. We were living in an apartment together down in Corpus, but he left for a job in Oklahoma about a month before Mardell hit.” She ran her left hand down the length of her right arm, fingers touching the cuts and scars and fresh bruises there. “I guess there probably isn’t much chance of picking that up again.”
“You never know,” I said, in what I hoped was an encouraging tone.
She gave me a weak smile. “I won’t kid myself. That old life is gone. It’d be like that Tom Hanks movie. Remember the one, he’s on that island...”
“Joe vs. the Volcano?”
She grinned. “The other one. The deserted island one. Remember? His plane crashes?”
“Castaway.”
“That’s the one. I was thinking of the end, after he gets rescued. Remember that? He goes home and his wife...what’s her name?”
“Helen Hunt.”
“Helen Hunt, that’s it. Remember what happens when he tries to go home? Helen Hunt’s character has remarried and they have that awkward moment on the doorstep. Life has passed him by, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”
I nodded. “You can’t go home again.”
“I remember hearing that. Was that from the movie?”
“No,” I said. “Thomas Wolfe.”
“Ah.”
We talked about the movies. We liked a lot of the same shows - French Kiss; Sleepless in Seattle; While You Were Sleeping; anything starring Molly Ringwald - and that was nice. But it didn’t last. It couldn’t last. The movies are the movies, and real life is something else entirely. Jessica had changed too much. This world, this awful place, had changed her, and we both knew it. Soon she grew sullen and morose again.
I couldn’t blame her.
FOUR
When we left the shack, we left the bodies of Jessica’s friends where they lay. Nobody buries the dead in the Zone.
We walked the rest of the day, and around dusk we came upon a group of people headed toward a place off the main road. They said there was sort of a compound there, an old ranch house, and that we could get some fresh water there and probably something to eat, too.
But it was dark by the time we arrived and they were all out of food. They didn’t have any room left inside the house, either, so we couldn’t even sleep where it was warm. It’s easy to forget, while you’re walking all day in the Texas sun, how cold the desert gets at night. The best we could do was to huddle beneath a vent that carried some of the hot air from inside. We spent the rest of the night in each other’s arms, trying to stay warm.
The next morning we woke to gunshots.
“What was that?” I asked.
We had both flinched awake. We stared around in panic. Jessica said nothing. Then we heard some men talking. Jessica and I traded a look. The men didn’t seem excited at all, just talking.
“What’s going on?” I whispered. Guns weren’t all that common in the Zone. There were still a few around, of course, but not that many. That seemed odd to me, at first. This used to be Texas, after all. I had expected there to be guns everywhere. When I asked Jessica about this she said most had been confiscated by homegrown militias in the early days of the Outbreak. Where those guns had gone to she didn’t know.
“Jessica, what do we do?”
“Let’s go see what they’re doing.”
“Let’s go...?” I didn’t get a chance to finish. She was already moving.
I followed her around to the front of the house and got my first look at the place in daylight. It was dilapidated, of course, but still large and impressive, and I could see that it must have been something rather special before the wall went up. There were several large, fenced off areas that looked like they had once been horse pastures but were now being used for crops. Enormous Spanish Oaks, rising like green skyscrapers over the flat, grassy landscape, dotted the countryside. Until the shooting started again, it was quite beautiful.
The men we’d heard talking were standing in
the middle of a wide circular drive. Beyond that was a long, straight driveway that led out to the county road. A large hurricane fence, topped with razor wire, surrounded the property, and a wrought iron gate that I didn’t remember seeing the night before stood boldly at the entrance.
The shooting came from a pair of men in camouflage hunting outfits up in a deer blind near the gate. Their target was a knot of zombies that had gathered just outside the fence. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry to do much killing though, only taking a shot when it suited them, and one of the men standing nearby remarked on that.
“Don’t matter,” one of the other men said. “They got three good ones.”
“No fast ones, though.” The man sounded sullen, like a pouting kid.
“They’re good enough for the likes of Barry.”
The men turned away from the drive and walked around to the east side of the house.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“No idea.”
A crowd gathered around the east side of the house, so we went that way.
One of the horse pastures had been sectioned off with hurricane fencing. In the middle of the small enclosure was a man chained to a metal pole. He was sitting down, his back against the pole, knees pulled up to his chest, refusing to look at the people who had gathered around the fence. A few people were chatting, but most seemed to be just milling around, waiting.
We weren’t there long when the two men in camouflage who had been shooting from the deer blind trotted over to a horse trailer attached to the fence. One of them got up on top of the trailer and used a broom handle to pry open the door latch. Nothing happened. The door stayed close.
“Hit it,” somebody yelled.
“Yeah, yeah,” the man on top of the trailer said. He slapped the door with the broom handle and the door swung open. Three zombies piled out, staggering into the sunlight. They looked confused and lost. But then they saw the man chained to the pole, and as soon as that happened, the zombies staggered toward him, hands raised and clutching at the air.
“They’re gonna kill him.”
Jessica gestured for me to be quiet.
I watched the man chained to the pole, and I thought for sure I was going to throw up.
The man climbed to his feet, backing away to the length the chain clasped to his neck would allow. He watched the zombies advancing on him, his eyes bulged in panic, lips trembling. He looked pathetic tugging on the chain.
But he didn’t lose all self control. When the lead zombie got in close he made his move. Holding the chain out in front of him he sprinted to one side, catching the lead zombie just under the knees and sweeping it off its feet. The zombie pitched over, landing face-first in the dirt, then slowly climbed to its feet again.
I kept waiting for a bunch of redneck hooting and hollering from the assembled crowd, but hardly anybody spoke, much less yelled. One man, drunk already, though the day had hardly started, made a feeble attempt to stoke the crowd by yelling at the condemned man, but everybody ignored him and eventually he too fell into a sort of sullen, bored silence.
It was ennui, I realized then, that was the root cause of misery in the Zone. There were no prospects, no way to improve one’s life, save through savagery and the debasement of others. Whatever the man had done wasn’t enough to overcome the feelings of emptiness and bootless rage that afflicted these people. They watched him scramble around that enclosure, and even when he made a narrow escape, it wasn’t enough to change the exhausted listlessness in their expressions. It was like all the life had been bled from them.
Then, he got lucky. One of the zombies was a man in the remnants of an orange t-shirt and jeans. The zombie slipped and went down to one knee. The chained man got behind him, looped the chain around his neck, pushed him face down in the dirt, and stood on the back of his neck. I saw the zombie’s expression change as he struggled against the weight holding him down. I don’t know if it was muscle memory or some atavistic fear surfacing in its ruined mind, but I swear, for a moment, I thought I saw fear in its eyes.
The crowd grew interested too. They murmured. One man even chuckled. Most just leaned forward, hoping for something to break the boredom.
Meanwhile, the chained man was pivoting around, making sure to keep the other two in sight. They were closing on him, but he didn’t seem willing to quit with the zombie in the orange shirt until he was dead.
One of the zombies reached for him, but the chained man was faster and kicked the zombie legs out from under it. More people were getting interested now. The man who chuckled just a few moments before was nodding now. He shucked his shoulders from side to side, the way my dad used to when he watched the fights on TV.
The zombie in the orange shirt and jeans stopped fighting. It looked dead to me. It wasn’t even twitching. The chained man tugged on the chain, pulling the zombie away from the other two, and then started unraveling the chain from the dead man’s neck.
He’d almost freed himself when the zombie reached out and grabbed the hem of his pants. The chained flinched. He kicked the zombie in the face, but he wouldn’t let go. Unable to pull himself free, the man lost his footing, and the other two fell on him. The man screamed horribly, but those were choked off soon enough, and just like that it was over.
The zombies began to feed, and people started wandering off in groups of two or three, nobody speaking, their expressions inscrutable.
As we walked away one of the men in charge of the place asked us if we were hungry and we told him we were. He said we could have a can of pork and beans to split if we were willing to clean some clothes first. We said that’d be alright. He showed us where we’d be working and we got busy on three big piles of laundry, chatting about nothing in particular as we cleaned.
We were finished by midday and collected our food, then went out back to cook it over a fire pit they had there.
I took a few bites of my pork and beans and gave the rest to Jessica.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“I know.”
She pushed it back at me. “No, I mean you really don’t have to do that. I’ve been hungry before. I don’t need charity.”
I felt a flush of embarrassment rise in my cheeks. “It’s not charity,” I said. “I can’t eat. Not after what we just saw. Please take it.”
She nodded and took it.
“Why would they do that to that man?”
“Who knows?” she said through a mouthful of beans. “He probably stole something. That’s about the only thing that gets people upset enough to put a man to death that way.”
Most of the work had stopped for the midday meal, and people milled about in the grass with paper plates topped with whatever they could scrounge. If it weren’t for the rags they wore and their unkempt hair and the sour smell of unwashed bodies you could almost make yourself believe it was a good old fashioned backyard barbeque. Almost.
I found it hard to marry the sight of so many people enjoying such a commonplace thing with the realization that we’d all just watched a man die.
“I guess a lot of people stay in places like these,” I said, nodding toward a group of men lounging in the grass.
“They won’t be staying here,” she said. “This is just a quick meal. Most of them will probably be trying to get to Free America sometime tomorrow.”
“Are we that close to the wall? I didn’t realize.”
She nodded. “Twenty or thirty miles.”
“And these men” – for they were almost entirely men – “they all want to cross.”
She nodded again. “See the way they’re dressed? The extra shirts, multiple pairs of pants? They don’t dress that way because it’s cold. That’s everything they own.”
She was right, of course. These men were hard-looking fellows, weathered faces, starvation in their eyes. A few had improvised sacks with them, but most had nothing but the clothes on their backs and heavy sticks to use against any zombies they happened to
encounter.
“This worries me, Jessica. With all these men trying to cross, aren’t we drawing a lot of unwanted attention to ourselves.
“I doubt it. There’s a lot of land out here. There are many places to - ”
She broke off mid-sentence as a large man in a red Coca-Cola t-shirt sat down next to us. He leered at us both, exposing a mouth full of black teeth and a tongue that wouldn’t stop moving, like he was chewing on it.
“Where are you ladies headed?” he asked, and when he spoke, I could smell booze on his breath.
“Nowhere,” Jessica said.
He turned my way and looked me up and down, eye-fucking me like I was some whore he’d already bought and paid for.
“Well,” he said, “if you’re gonna be hanging around here for a couple of days, let me know if you meet anyone interested in getting across to Free America. Me and my buddies know how to get them there. It’s what we do.”
My pulse quickened. Jessica had told me that it would probably happen like this, a quick, unexpected encounter, and while I wanted to catch every nuance of this exchange, I still found it hard to believe that this man was a coyote. In my mind I had formed a picture of what such a man was supposed to look like. He’d be shifty, mean-looking, the kind of man men fear. But above all, the man I pictured in my imagination would actually look like he could do the job. This man, this boozy, greasy, black-toothed redneck, looked like a caricature of himself.
Jessica didn’t shrink away like I did, but I did see her gaze sink to the grass. I didn’t know it at the time, but Jessica was trying to save us both from looking too eager. This man was a coyote, true, and he seemed sure enough of himself that he could get us into Free America, but there was a certain etiquette to these things of which I was wholly unaware. Men like our thoroughly stewed companion in the red Coca-Cola shirt were, above all else, dangerous. They were opportunists. No doubt they provided the service they claimed, but appearing too eager, jumping right into the conversation, meant that you had something valuable to barter, and for that you were practically begging to get robbed. Or worse.
