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I read a story once about a man who stood on a rock in the middle of the ocean. All around him the angry sea rolled and crashed against his rock. He could not move. A step in any direction meant falling off the security of his rock and plunging into the darkest depths of the water. The point of the story was to allow the reader to ask, as the man of the rock did, if such a situation was life? Was living desirable if it meant not being allowed to move?

Such were the questions and comparisons I drew of The Wall. It was my salvation and my sin, my paradise and prison. Each day I climbed to its top and looked out at the world we all fought so hard to keep out. Up there I was the man on that rock without the ability to move, and faced with the question of merely surviving inside, or dying outside. Was this really life? I knew no other.

When alone I think such things, but those times are not often. Since returning from my punishment over the girl and her baby I have noticed a lack of living people running to our Wall. There are only the dead, yet even they have grown few. Both living and dead beyond The Wall know that what they seek lies elsewhere. For the dead there is no one worth eating, and for the living no one worth knowing. Our humanity runs just as low as our resources for survival.

It is during these weeks I have taken an apprentice under my care. Andy is curious and filled with a lot of questions. Some of the answers I leave for him to discover on his own...they are too depressing to share. He comes up every morning with his gun strapped to his shoulder. I check the safety and note that it is off as usual.

"Sorry" he says to me.

I nod and return to my post.

"I wish I could remember everything you tell me Jack" he scratches his head.

"It's okay", I return, "As long as you remember the important things like keeping your safety on so you don't kill yourself or anyone up here you'll do just fine."

Andy puts his shooting glove over his hand. He blows a gust of warm air from his mouth onto his gloved hands.

"Brr, I hate winter" he says. "They don't come around so much in the winter."

"Maybe they hibernate" I added.

I don't know", he says, "but I'm glad the lottery is today. I know that brings out at least two or three, and I haven't shot my gun in a while."

I looked to Andy as he methodically cleaned his gun. The growing anticipation in his eyes was frighteningly sincere.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"You heard me."

I was growing angry at his insensitivity.

"Why the hell would you be glad about the lottery being today. You know what happens to people who get picked don't you?"

"Sure" he returned, "but you know that the less people there are in here, the more food and ammo we have, and the longer we get to live."

"How do you know that they won't call your name next?"

Andy looked at me arrogantly. He patted me on the shoulder and laughed.

"Come on Jack, you know Wall officials don't ever get called. Only those idiots down there who think the whole thing is done fairly do, and the troublemakers of course."

He shook his head and let out a slight chuckle and returned to cleaning his gun.

"Besides" he continued, "when the big guys sound that alarm to call all the people out to the square that's like ringing a dinner bell to the freaks out there."

In his barbaric simplicity Andy was right. The ringing of the alarm was one of the things about The Wall I elected not to share.

The lottery system was enacted shortly before I spent time away for my treason. When the powers in charge realized we had reached and surpassed capacity they needed a way to cut down on the numbers. The lottery was proposed where the names of each person within The Wall were placed in a drawing. The drawing itself was suspiciously done away from the eyes of the public. A member of the ruling body would sound an old air raid alarm in the center of town and announce the names of those selected over the loudspeaker. As guards it was our job to escort those selected to a staging area near an exit. After receiving a cyanide pill (it used to be a small pistol with only one shot, but ammunition concerns brought rise to other methods) they were thrown from The Wall to face the mercy of the undead hoards outside. As Andy mentioned the alarm was our way of conditioning the zombies to move toward The Wall because there was food there. Once atop The Wall again we were ordered not to shoot zombies...in fact the opposite. It was our responsibility to shoot our own exiles. The people below on our side of The Wall were told that we were clearing a path for the lottery exiles to flee away in safety, but this was not so. The exiles did not run. Many of them have never seen the outside, only the sky floating above the 21 foot walls that surrounded them. Upon their ejection they would frantically bang and claw at The Wall begging to be let back in. Some never turned around as the zombies moved closer and began tearing the flesh from their backs. Each time it was like this. The people did little to fend off the hoards of undead slashing at them, in fact they fought harder to push the concrete doors down. Soon the air would fill with screams of people we once protected, eventually they would cease to scream and the only noise was the sickening sound of human flesh being gnawed and pulled from bones.

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