The dead never learned from the deaths of their fellows, so it was all rinse and repeat.
Stackers then dragged the corpses — in whole and in parts — off the kill zone and began a mound. When the mound became too big for the shield wall to contain it, they pushed forward to occupy a new plot of land.
Working in teams like his, two-dozen men could take down five hundred of the dead per shift. There were forty shield walls running at any time, round the clock, every day. The landscape was littered with thousands upon thousands of mounds from Taylor Ford Road all the way to Slush Branch. It never stopped.
Rest only came when there was such heavy rain that floodwaters made it impossible for the clumsy dead to approach the chain link fence. And if they hit a zone where the dead were so densely packed that the fence itself was in danger of being overwhelmed, the shift foreman would call all the teams inside and send the bulldozers out. Twenty dozers could clear pure hell out of a field.
But that was hard on the machines. The pulped flesh clogged worse than mud, and it meant having each dozer stripped and cleaned. That would take them out of commission for days. The risk reward ratio meant that it was usually men out there doing the job.
Men like Jingo and Moose.
“Let’s rock and roll,” said Jingo. He said it every single time they went out, and every time he made it sound like they were about to do something fun. It amazed Moose. He wondered, though, if his friend’s happy-puppy enthusiasm was a front. There were guys like that, people who relied on the fake-it-til-you-make-it approach to handling life. The let-a-smile-be-your-umbrella crowd. Moose knew several guys like that, and he’d seen what happens when the rain came down so hard that their umbrellas collapsed. Behind some of those smiles was a mask of shrieking terror. Once their illusion was shattered they were left in pieces. Suicides were not uncommon. There was even one smiling, happy guy who went so far off the rails that he took a sledge and smashed the shackles on a forty-yard wide section of fence before the guards cut him down. By then a wave of the dead had swarmed into camp, and when all the shooting and cutting was over the collective was down fifty-six workers.
Not that Moose feared Jingo would go out that way if something ever wiped the smile off his face. But he’d break. They all broke.
At times Moose wanted to shake the little guy, or maybe slap some sense into him. Get him to stop daydreaming about how good things were going to be. But what would be the benefit of that? Even Moose had to admit that Jingo’s optimism made their life easier. It was a skill set more important than his ability to swing a machete.
He’d break, though. In the end they all broke. Moose had left his own optimism behind in a lovely little cottage in Bordentown, behind doors that were stained with the blood of everyone he ever truly loved.
A transitional period? No, as he saw it, the global paradigm had already shifted and it had stripped the clutch, blown out the tires, and was rusting in the sun. Dead and unfixable.
“Yeah,” he said to Jingo, “let’s boogie-woogie.”
The shield teams pushed out, and Jingo raced behind them to claim his spot. He was a lefty and he liked the club-and-cut method of using his padded right forearm to parry the grabbing hands of the dead and then a waist-twisting cut to “blunt” the arms. That was easiest to do if he took up station on the left-hand side of the opening. He won his spot, chopped and won a double as both of a dead woman’s hands flew off with one cut, then he pivoted and put a little pizzazz into a squatting leg cut that he’d labeled his “Crouching Tiger” move. Moose had his sledge in a rising arc before the infected was even falling, and so the ten-pound weight followed her down and stroked the top of the skull.
The trick was not to make the rookie move of burying the mallet in the skull. Hard as hell to pull out. All that suction from the brain. A deep grazing hit along the top of the head worked well, and it did enough damage to the motor cortex that it shorted them out nicely. Moose seldom had to swing twice on the same target. Not more than two or three times in a shift, and usually only when he was getting tired.
Jingo was good, too. Months and months of practice had honed his skills so that more often than not he got his doubles, and sometimes caught the angle just right to cleave completely through the knee joint. If he hit the sweet spot the knee fell apart. Hit it wrong and the wide, flat machete blade got stuck in bone. Jingo always carried a back-up cutter and several short spikes for emergencies, but he seldom had to use them.
They worked the pattern in silence for a while, but soon the moans of the dead got to them and Jingo picked up the thread of their earlier conversation.
“Sooner or later we’re going to run out of zombies,” he said.
“How do you figure that, genius? Last I heard there were something just shy of seven billion of our life-impaired fellow citizens.”
Jingo laughed at that even though it wasn’t the first time Moose had made the joke. “Sure, sure, but they’re spread all over the world. Big damn planet.”
“Got our fair share here.”
Jingo cut the hands off a man in an Armani hoodie and dropped him in front of Moose. “Right, but look how many we’re taking off the board. I heard the guys working the fence in North Carolina are taking down fifty thousand a day. A day.”
“First off, that’s horse shit.”
“No, I heard it from —”
“And second, there were three hundred and twenty million people infected. There’s, what, thirty thousand of us working the fences? Maybe less. Call it twenty-five thousand and change.”
“So?”
Moose smashed a head and paused to blink sweat from his eyes. He had grease around his eyes to prevent sweat from pooling, but it happened. Couldn’t wipe it away because he had black blood and bits of infected meat clinging to his clothes, from fingertips to shoulders. They’d all seen what happened to guys who made those kinds of mistakes. Some of them were out here among the moaning crowds.
“So, it’s going to take just shy of forever to clear out the dead.”
“Well, in his book, Tony said that solving small problems results in small personal gains. It’s only when you conquer your greatest challenge that you achieve your greatest potential.”
“Uh huh.”
“Absolutely,” said Jingo, cutting a corpse down without even looking at it.
He was very good at that. They all were. Peripheral vision and muscle memory were their chief skills. Jingo sometimes joked that he could do the job blindfolded. Between the rot of undead flesh and the constant moans they made, you’d have to be an idiot to have one sneak up you. A lot of people agreed with that, including Moose, though Moose never took his eyes off the infected. Never. He looked at the face of everyone who came through the shield wall. Even the ones he didn’t finish himself. It was part of his personal ritual and he never shared the meaning of it with anyone. For him, though, it was crucial to his own spiritual survival to see each face and recognize — however fleetingly — that the infected were people, to never lose sight of the respect owed to the fallen. They had each died in pain and fear. Each of them had been part of a family, a household, a community. Each of them had expected to have futures and lives and love. Each of them had been unfairly abused by the plague. It had stolen their lives from them and it had turned them into monsters.