The Wind Through the Fence

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 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.

The End