A Broken World

Seventy

Morning crawled in thin and gray, the kind of light that makes concrete look like old skin. The prison sounded like a sick animal—low coughs, the fence complaining in metal groans, the far-off shuffle of the dead pushing at chain link because that’s what they do. I hadn’t slept. The night had been one long blink and a bucket of bleach.

Hershel was still in D-Block when I came by. He had that steady doctor’s calm on—mask on his face, goggles fogged at the edges, voice low enough to be a lullaby if you didn’t hear the words. Glenn’s chest rose and fell under the hand-bulb respirator Hershel had rigged from a cut bottle; Maggie timed the squeezes with her breath like she could trick Glenn’s lungs into copying her. Sasha slept sitting up, a wet rattle in and out. The boy at the end lay too still. A sheet covered the still part.

“Pills in two hours,” Hershel said without looking up. Translation: go run, go watch, go do anything that keeps the next two hours from killing us.

I did the laundry corridor first.

The ash we dusted on the storage box had new smudges. Small. Smears like the heel of a palm, not a boot. The bell string was quiet. The door hadn’t shifted since sometime before dawn. Whoever had fed the fence wasn’t back yet. They would be. The knowing sat between my shoulder blades.

I left it and headed for the yard.

Daryl had a length of angle iron on his shoulder and sweat already working into the neck of his shirt. The southwest corner bowed like a tired back; the braces we’d welded screamed softly when the herd leaned. Rick and Carl were on the catwalk with binoculars, their silhouettes a matched set until Carl turned and remembered to be smaller.

“Stackers are back,” Daryl said, nodding toward the fence. “We pull them with the truck, we buy a day, maybe two.”

“Or we build another fence ten feet past the first,” I said.

“Outta fences,” he said.

Rick came down the stairs two at a time. He’d slept some; the bruise on his cheek had gone from ugly to technical. He took in the corner with one long look and nodded like he was agreeing with an argument he’d been having with himself all night.

“We split it,” he said. “Noise pull, then brace. Carl—post up above C-Block with the .223. If the line gives, you cover our retreat to the inner yard.”

Carl’s mouth pressed thin. He nodded. He was good at Yes, sir when it counted.

We had a plan. I hate plans because they make the world feel like a thing you can hold. You can’t. But we still made them, because pretending you can pick your way through chaos on purpose is the only way to keep your feet moving.

We worked. The truck coughed alive. Rick drove slow along the fence, horn in short bursts. The dead peeled away in a wave, faces twisting toward sound like flowers finding sun, if flowers were disgusting and wanted to eat your face. Daryl and I threw braces at the bowed sections, elbows deep in rust and spite, bolting steel to steel while the wire sang under our hands.

“Two more and we breathe,” Daryl grunted.

“Careful with the jinx,” I said.

“Don’t say jinx,” he said.

“Then hallucinate we’re safe.”

He huffed something like a laugh and set the next brace with a clang.

We’d almost got the worst of it shored when the sound changed.

You can hear a fence fail before you see it. The moan in the wire hits a pitch your bones know. The posts creak like old trees. The top rail pops once—a gunshot with no bullet—then again, then—