Death, Be Not Proud

by Jonathan Maberry

  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 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 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 interested 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 near 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 was I 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 me 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 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 into his own grief.

  I tried to say it. With the burned-up air in my lungs I wanted to say it, just to 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.

  * * *

  Jonathan Maberry is a NY Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and Marvel Comics writer. His novels include the Pine Deep Trilogy—Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man’s Song and Bad Moon Rising; the Joe Ledger thriller series—Patient Zero, The Dragon Factory, The King of Plagues, and Assassin’s Code; the Benny Imura Young Adult dystopian series—Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay, and Flesh & Bone; the film adaptation of The Wolfman and the standalone horror thriller–Dead of Night. His nonfiction books include the international bestseller Zombie CSU, The Cryptopedia, They Bite, Vampire Universe and Wanted Undead of Alive. He has sold over 1200 feature articles, thousands of columns, two plays, greeting cards, technical manuals, how-to books, and many short stories. His comics for Marvel include Marvel Universe vs the Wolverine, Marvel Universe vs the Punisher, DoomWar, Black Panther and Captain America: Hail Hydra. He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founder of The Liars Club; and is a frequent keynote speaker and guest of honor at conferences including BackSpace, Dragon*Con, ZombCon, PennWriters, The Write Stuff, Central Coast Writers, Necon, Killer Con, Liberty States, and many others. In 2004 Jonathan was inducted into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame, due in part to his extensive writing on martial arts and self-defense.

  Visit him online at:

  www.jonathanmaberry.com, www.twitter.com/jonathanmaberry and www.facebook.com/jonathanmaberry