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.