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1,100 miles to patrol. The wall stretches from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Brownsville, Texas, paralleling the freeway system wherever possible to aid in the supply and reinforcement of problem areas. The GRQA keeps this stretch of metal fencing and sentry towers and barbed wire secure with just over 10,000 agents, most of them former CBP and National Guardsmen and cops. They are aided at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and in Mexico by federal troops.
    Yet despite their numerical advantage over the old U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, their job is infinitely harder. Nobody in the old CBP thought too much of it that a steady stream of illegals got through the border every day. They just shrugged and went on with life. But the GRQA can’t afford to let even a single zombie through its line. That would spell disaster. The pressure is high; the price of failure is apocalyptic.
    Their job terrifies me. These guys are frequently posted outside of major metropolitan areas where the zombie populations are thickest. Day and night, they have to listen to that constant moaning. They have to stand by and listen to the plaintive cries for help from the Unincorporated Civilian Casualties, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority’s official designation for the people who were unable to make it out of the quarantine zone before the walls were put up and were sealed inside with the zombies. Hearing all that noise for just a few weeks is demoralizing. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hear it every single day for months and years at a time.
    Even worse, I can’t imagine what it would be like to grow used to hearing it.
    It is little wonder that so many of the GRQA go AWOL at least once or twice a year. Or that they are never punished for it when they do. Most don’t even get their pay docked.
    And it’s no wonder that the leading cause of death among GRQA agents is suicide.
    Actually, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often than it does…
    From the copilot’s chair of a Schweizer 300 helicopter, Ben Richardson looked out across the flooded ruins of southeast Houston. They were at two hundred feet, skimming over what had once been wide-open cattle-grazing land. It was under twenty feet of water these days. Here and there, he could see the top of an oil derrick just below the surface. Dead trees poked skeletal fingers up through the water. Every once in a while, they’d pass over a perfectly round metal island, the remains of oil tanks. Dawn was spreading over the flooded landscape, dappling the water with reds and yellows and liquid pools of copper.
    “Looks pretty, don’t it?” Michael Barnes said.
    “Amazing,” Richardson said. They were talking through the intercom system built into their flight helmets, but even then they had to nearly yell at each other to hear over the noise the little helicopter made.
    “All those colors you see…”
    “Yeah?”
    “That’s oil in the water. Most of this area is so thick with it you’ll be able to see a film over the water come midday.”
    Nice, Richardson thought.
    This area had once been the hub of the oil and gas industry in the United States. Now, all of it was gone. It was no wonder that gas had gone to more than twelve dollars a gallon in the last two years.
    “You see many people down in this area?” Richardson asked.
    “You talking about uncles or zombies?”
    “Either.”
    “You see dead bodies every once in a while. You know, floaters. Hardly ever seen anybody alive, though. The water’s too deep.”
    Richardson stole a sideways glance at Michael Barnes, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority pilot who had been assigned to fly him around for the next two weeks. Barnes was a former Houston Police officer, and he still looked the part. He wore a blue flight suit with a black tactical vest over that, his sidearm worn in a jackass rig under his left armpit. He was thirty-eight, tall, lean. He never seemed to smile.
    Richardson had a knack for understanding