Life Sentence (11 page)

Again, I didn’t understand in what way Lucy and I
weren’t “real,” but there was hardly a way for me to pursue the
issue. “So I’m trying to say that maybe you two aren’t so bad, and
I can take you out sometimes to see other stuff. Would you like
that?”

As happy, indeed idyllic, as things were here with
Lucy, I had been thinking that eventually we would want to go out
and see what else there was, once I got over my fear of wild
animals, violent people, and other dangers. From what I had just
seen, few people could be more dangerous than Will, so it might be
useful if he came along with us. Lucy still seemed sullen and
aggressive, but I could tell she’d been thinking along similar
lines. We both looked back to Will and I nodded.

Will nodded as well and holstered his gun. He looked
more closely at me. “You remind me of someone. I think it was my
fifth grade social studies teacher. He was my teacher that last
year, when we still had a real school and subjects and books.” He
shook his head. “Social studies? What the hell is that, now? Things
that don’t exist.” He looked like Lucy, almost snarling. Then he
relaxed a little. “But he seemed nice, is what I’m trying to say.
You look a lot like him.” He looked even more intently at me,
squinting his eyes. “No, couldn’t be, that would be too much of a
coincidence. Do you remember who you were?”

I took a very slow step towards him as I reached in
my pocket and offered him the identification card from Stony Ridge
College. He took it and glanced at it, and looked more closely at
me, then handed the card back to me. “Yup, that’s you. The people
who raised me after my real parents died, the man used to be a
college professor. He’s nice too. But it’s not like having your
real parents.” He shook his head. “Well, Truman, I hope we can be
friends. Does she have a name?”

I wasn’t about to mangle Lucy’s name with my voice,
and even if I did, she’d never heard herself called by that name
anyway. It applied to her only in my dim mind. Still holding her, I
pointed to her eye with my other hand.

“What?” Will asked. “One Eye is her name?”

I shook my head.

He looked at her more closely. “What? Blue Eye? Yes,
it is unusual, not like the eyes you all usually have. So, lady
zombie, may I call you Blue Eye?”

Lucy nodded slightly. I think she even smiled a
little, and coyly.

“Thanks. The next time I come back, we’ll go
somewhere. I’ll check a map. It’ll be fun for a change.”

He went back to the gate that was holding the others
back. He unlocked the chain he had put through, yanked it off, and
ran back towards us. He tossed the chain over the fence, then he
was up and over it before the other people could even get the gate
open. I watched him walk away and wondered what I had gotten us
into.

I led Lucy by the hand back to the sofa and we sat
down. I felt so drained from the intense and conflicted feelings of
fear and devotion I’d felt when Will had drawn his gun. But at the
same time, I knew I owed him a debt of gratitude. Because as I
gazed down into Lucy’s perfect eye, I could see she knew my
feelings and commitment better than I ever could’ve explained them
to her on my own. We leaned against each other and I felt closer to
her than I ever thought I could feel towards anyone ever again.

Finally, the day arrived when I would take my first
vows. I dressed in the plain grey pants and sleeveless shirt that
Mom had sewn for me. I spent most of the day alone, away from
others, according to the custom. I had read up on rites of passage
enough to know it was standard to separate the inductee from the
community before she is reintegrated with her new status. The
intellectual understanding of it from books and the real experience
of it were as different as reading a cookbook and eating, for
throughout the day I could feel how inappropriate it would be for
me to be around others right then. I didn’t just understand the
necessity of my being alone, I craved the loneliness as much as I
both craved and feared the rites I knew would come at the end of
it.

During these hours alone, I fasted and tried to
prepare myself mentally for the commitment and devotion necessary.
I had also read enough to know that my time alone and my attempts
to contact the higher, non-physical or metaphysical powers of the
world would have been called “prayer” in the old world. It was
still a fair enough label, if one could subtract all the trappings
of organized religion—which I knew about only from the books I had
read, and a few scattered comments from older people, who seemed
ambivalent about it, overall. Organized religion was as alien to
our life as were the concepts of state and government and money.
But just as we retained the need and desire to be in a community
with others, so also we yearned to commune and unite with something
more than our own weak, mortal selves, even if every creed and sect
that had ever promised such a union were now dead, so far as we
knew. And on the day of my vows, this longing was acute, filling
and stretching me much more than the physical hunger compressed and
tightened my small body.

As I prayed, I asked no questions, made no requests,
but only felt the deepest gratitude and vulnerability before the
world. And from somewhere both within and beyond me, I felt the
certainty that those feelings were directed towards something that
would never ignore, scorn, or abuse them. Such feelings have filled
many of my days before and since, but I remember vividly that it
was on that day I first became fully aware of them.

Finally, a couple hours before sunset, my parents
came and we climbed into the big SUV Dad used for longer, special
trips, when fuel conservation was not an issue. As we drove away,
people lined the streets and waved, sending us off. The guards at
the gate ushered us through the two bay doors, and then we were on
our way into the countryside. Dad and Roger were up front. Mom sat
in the back with me, and she’d squeezed my hand when we first got
in, but then she’d retreated slightly to the other side of the
vehicle, and we were all quiet for the trip. As Mom had said on our
bicycle trip, we covered a lot of land quickly with the truck,
reaching the very edge of our domain in far less time than Mom and
I had taken for a much shorter trip on our bikes. We arrived at a
grove of trees on one side of the road, with two other vehicles
parked under them, and some people standing and sitting around. Dad
pulled up beside them and turned off the truck.

We got out as Milton, in his “dress” white robe,
strode up to us. It was always amazing to me, how much energy he
still had at his age, and living the life he did, out among the
dead most of the time, living off the land. The other people there
included two sets of the guards that patrolled the outer fence;
this far out, and expecting to stay after dark, extra precautions
were always in force. There were also two families with children
who would be up to take their vows next year; Max and his parents
were one of these families.

Milton smiled at me and laid his hand on my left
shoulder. “Welcome, Zoey. Please be at ease as much as you can.” He
turned to the other families to include them also. “That goes for
you other children as well. Nothing here is meant to frighten or
upset you. It is only meant to teach you of the world we live in,
and our responsibilities in it, and to do so in a reverential
way—for of all feelings, reverence is the one most appropriate and
necessary in our world. And now, everyone, please follow me.”

We all followed him into the woods a little ways, my
mom and I at the front of the group behind Milton. My dad had taken
his MP5 submachine gun out of the back of our truck; it was a
small, nasty, indiscriminate weapon that I’d never trained with,
but like every weapon, I knew its use and capabilities—in this
case, throwing lots of slugs around in a short amount of time at
close quarters. Dad slung it over his shoulder. The other men were
similarly armed with submachine guns or assault rifles, the kinds
of weapons one wanted when near so many of the dead bunched up in a
group.

The steps of the ceremony had been explained to me,
and last year I had attended one as preparation. I felt a freezing
stab to my heart when the moaning began off to our right, though I
didn’t miss a stride or flinch. Neither did my mom, so far as I
could tell, watching her out of the corner of my eye.

As we walked on, the moaning did not crescendo, but
stayed steady; it was a rather subdued and calm sound. Slowly the
chill released my heart and I could begin to feel what Milton had
described—reverence, not fear. Stepping slowly and deliberately, I
could tell clearly that if anything demanded reverence for its
power and ubiquity, it was death, which was calling to us that warm
summer night—constantly and incessantly, with neither malice nor
love, but only with complete and patient inevitability.

We stopped in a small clearing in which there was a
large, flat rock, about the size of a small, low table. Some of the
other men handed out and lit torches. Dusk was rising around us.
With every passing minute, the trees closed in nearer and nearer to
the clearing we were in. I sat down on the rock, with my mom
standing behind me, facing in the direction of the moaning. At
first, I could almost think I saw shapes moving in that direction,
but in just a few moments, no matter how hard I strained to see,
there was only darkness there among the trees.

Milton now stood before me and addressed us briefly
before the actual rites began. “At one time, when I was much
younger, in a different world, when people thought of rituals or
religion, they most often thought of something called faith or
piety. I’m not sure I can tell you so much about those virtues in
our world today, for we who have seen so much have little inkling
or desire for things that are unseen, and we have little to put our
trust in, little to believe is steadfast and reliable.”

He looked right at me, and I felt as if he could see
the things I’d been thinking during the day when I was alone.
“Zoey, if any among us have faith, it might be you, I think, as I
look at you now. But if you do have this mysterious, precious
quality, then all the rest of us can do is look upon you with awe
and rejoice for your wonderful and unknowable gift.” He returned to
looking at the others, but the memory of his gaze and the strength
it gave me lingered. “But I can say that tonight we celebrate two
other virtues that I know all of us can share with Zoey—hope and
love. To me, she has always embodied these, as a sign of hope and
love’s triumph over despair and wickedness. So Zoey and Sarah, if
you are ready, we will begin.”

Milton handed my mom a pair of hair clippers—old
manual ones, not electric, so they would still work. As he handed
these over, he spoke the first words of the ceremony proper: “Hope
for the future often requires a sacrifice in the present.”

I felt the cold metal touch my scalp as my mom
intoned, “And love for others always requires a sacrifice of
oneself.” I felt the slight motions as she started to shave my
head. I stared straight ahead, all my muscles tense, too tense.
This, too, I knew from my reading, was a pretty standard part of
initiation rites, marking the inductee as physically different from
the rest of the group, with strange markings or clothing. It also
tended to erase gender distinctions and put the inductee in a
threshold state outside of normal social conventions.

Again, the experience was quite a bit more vivid and
consuming than the theory. With each motion of the clippers and
each tickling tumble of my hair down my neck, I felt colder and
more alone and vulnerable. And with the first pinch, followed by
the moist warmth of blood on my head, there was considerable
discomfort to the operation, which I countered by biting my lower
lip and gripping my knees with my hands as hard as I could. I knew
it was a tradition that the rite was considered especially
auspicious if the shaving were done without a drop of blood being
shed, or with a lot of blood. Therefore, after the first nick, the
person clipping felt a strong temptation to make more “mistakes.” I
knew my mom would do anything to avoid hurting me, and I knew that
both she and my dad were especially practical and non-superstitious
people, but I also knew—and more importantly, I respected—that
tradition drives much more of what we do than many of us would like
to admit. So once I felt the first accidental cut, I expected—even
craved—more. And I was not disappointed.

With my head bloody and bare, I sat as Milton and my
mom gathered up as much hair as they could from the rock and the
surrounding ground. Again, from a purely objective, intellectual
perspective, I was sure that drawing some blood was intended to
help with the next part of the ceremony, but at the time, gripping
my knees and trying not to shake or cry, the only thing I felt was
the most intense hope that my hair and some of the blood on it
would work and the rite would continue well.

Milton, holding the pile of hair in a fold of his
robe, walked off into the darkness in the direction of the moaning.
The sound diminished slightly for a few moments, then it rose to a
shriek and a howl. I relaxed my grip on my knees and nearly wept at
the sound; it was the first positive accomplishment in the rite,
meaning that my offering was acceptable.

Though it was too dark to see, I knew Milton had
gone to the fence behind which the dead of our community were kept,
unable to hurt us or be hurt by us. The area had, appropriately,
been a small cemetery with a high, wrought-iron fence around it.
This fence had been reinforced with more bars, so the smaller among
the dead couldn’t squeeze through. On a night of first vows, Milton
would cast the initiate’s hair in with the dead. Their reaction to
the touch and smell of something that had so recently been in
contact with warm, living flesh was usually wild and enthusiastic,
as it was that night. We had no way of knowing whether this was
only their ravenous, physical hunger for our bodies, or some
residual longing and remembrance of what it had been like to be
near us and touch us in less animal and destructive ways; the
latter seemed too sentimental for the horrible reality of undeath,
the former too cold and objective to grasp. Whatever it was that
drove them, it was a connection they craved, and we owed it to
them.