Life Sentence (25 page)

I stepped towards where Mr. Caine had been. I
couldn’t see my dad now, either. I had been holding the flashlight
under my arm when we were looking at the dresses; with my free
hand, I racked the gun’s slide, then took the flashlight in my
right hand to see better. There was a large, jagged hole in the
floor. It must’ve collapsed and Mr. Caine had fallen through. A
huge cloud of dust had shot up and filled the upper room now,
making me cough. In the beam of my flashlight, the tiny particles
swirled up and around in a graceful dance.

I stepped closer to the hole and shined my
flashlight into it. Both men were down there. I don’t know if Dad
had slipped into the hole by accident, or if he had just
immediately jumped in to help Mr. Caine. They were both covered in
dust and up to their knees in debris. Both were trying to get up
and get a firmer footing.

My back and neck went cold and prickly when the
moaning started.

As the sun rose, Will climbed down from the
billboard and we followed the tire tracks again. After walking for
some ways, I noticed there were more buildings and more empty
vehicles on the road. It seemed we were moving into the ruins of a
city. Eventually it became impossible for Will to detect the tire
tracks, since the roads were not as overgrown here. The men who had
attacked Will’s friends must’ve come from somewhere in this city,
but now we couldn’t be sure where. We sat on the bumper of an old
car and Will thought about what to do.

“This is about as far as I’ve ever been,” he said as
he looked around. “I know Milton tried to clear the city even
farther, but no one besides him has been out here, since there are
still a lot of you people around. And he hasn’t been over this way
lately. I know there’s a big river if you keep going east, so let’s
head that way. Maybe we’ll see something.”

We made our way through the city. It was terribly
eerie being among so many empty buildings, with almost no sounds
and absolutely no one around. There must’ve been so many people
here before, and now they were all gone. I suppose most of them
were dead, while a very few were in Will’s community, some of them
were in the prisons where Milton had led them, and some were just
standing around, as I had been doing before Milton found me. So now
all of these buildings and things just sat here—dead, decaying,
disappearing.

I wondered at all the things that must be inside the
buildings—the remnants of people’s lives, dying slightly slower
deaths than their owners, lingering longer and even more pitifully.
It was much worse than when Will had led us through the town near
our home and I had seen some of the collapsed buildings there. In
this city there were thousands of them, and even more vehicles
lying around, broken and useless. There was a slight whistling
sound as the wind cut through the streets and around the buildings,
almost like breathing, though this was irregular, labored, and
spasmodic.

The only really tall buildings were in a cluster off
to our left; we were moving through a neighborhood of smaller
buildings. Will extended his arm to make us stop walking, and he
crouched behind the cab of a cement mixer. Lucy and I followed him.
“There’s one of those flags up ahead,” he whispered. “In front of a
building.”

I peeked around the side of the cement mixer. The
flag was identical to the one on the men’s truck—two wavy blue
lines, a red handprint, and a red sun. This time it was on a
flagpole. The wrecked vehicles in the street prevented me from
seeing what else there was around there.

I looked to Will and saw that he was obviously
considering what to do next. He looked up at the truck we were
hiding behind, then climbed up on the running board to look inside.
He opened the door and I watched him as he rummaged around inside
the truck. He climbed down and was holding two hard hats, the kind
construction workers wear. “It’s not much, but maybe it’ll give you
some protection,” he said as he put one on my head, one on Lucy’s.
“I shouldn’t have brought you along, but I didn’t want to detour
back to your place. I wanted to catch up with these guys so badly
after what they did. I’m sorry to put you all in danger.”

I looked over at Lucy. We both appeared ridiculous,
of course, wearing the battered, old hard hats. Her look was more
sinister, however, her chin still stained and streaked with pink.
Even if the hat precariously bobbed above her small, delicate face,
there was still the hint of savagery and violence about her. It
always frightened me. But her eye was as serene as ever, and I took
heart. We both nodded at Will.

“All right,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what’s
going to happen. I’m going to get closer to the building. There are
plenty of vehicles in the street for me to hide behind. You two
stay here. If I don’t come back, then please, just go back along
this street. Follow it out of the city. Don’t go near anyone or
they’ll probably try to kill you. And try not to get hit in the
head, okay? I’d feel so bad if you two got hurt.”

As usual, I thought he was being so nice to us. We
really owed all our freedom to him, so why would we blame him for
anything? We could’ve been killed many times before he even found
us, and at least he’d given us a chance to learn who we were, and
also a chance to make ourselves useful and help people. It would be
absurdly ungrateful for us to feel ill-used or mistreated by him at
this point.

I watched Will make his way quickly between the
vehicles till he was out of sight. Then I just stood by the cement
mixer with Lucy and waited. Although I wasn’t mad at Will for what
had happened, or what was happening now, I did find myself longing
for the safety of my little cubicle with Lucy, to hear her violin
and read my books and just rest beside her. I was thinking how at
least we seemed safe for the moment, when, without warning, a man
came around the side of the cement mixer. He must have been
treading quietly, or perhaps my hearing was not well-attuned, or
maybe I had been too distracted with my apprehensive thoughts,
because I never heard his steps until he was right on top of
us.

The man was dressed much like Will was, his jacket
and pants made of a patchwork of fabric and reinforced with bits of
metal. He carried a rifle. Actually, I don’t know anything about
guns—it might have been a shotgun. What I mean is that it wasn’t a
handgun, but a gun with a long barrel that you carry with both
hands.

He looked as shocked as I felt when he first saw us.
He immediately raised the barrel of the gun towards Lucy’s face. I
was between them, and much as I had the day before, I didn’t think,
I just reacted. I grabbed the barrel and pushed it away. He fired,
and the bullet hit the pavement beside Lucy.

Still holding the gun with my right hand, I clawed
at his face with my left. He gave a cry of pain and staggered back,
letting go of the gun. He tripped over some debris and fell
backwards. I found myself holding this ugly, unfamiliar thing in my
right hand. I flipped the gun around, so I was holding it by the
stock instead of the barrel. The wooden stock felt somewhat better,
more natural than the smooth, metal barrel, but to me it still felt
like some venomous, malignant thing.

Lucy had taken a step forward. I thought she meant
to attack the man as she had done in the woods, for I saw she had
snatched up a metal bar from the ground. This time, I was afraid
and didn’t want her to; I didn’t think it was right in this case—we
had no idea, really, if this man had done anything wrong, even
though Will clearly thought these people in the city were allied
with the men who had attacked the women the day before. So I
extended my right arm, still holding the gun, to block Lucy’s
progress. She looked over at me and growled, but stayed where she
was. Her mouth always looked so hideous and inhuman at these
moments; it was only her eye that gave me any confidence or
hope.

The man on the ground was moving away from us,
backwards, on his back, like a crab. He looked astonished at how
Lucy and I were behaving. I suppose he expected us to fall on him,
tearing and biting, the way people so often expect us to do, but we
just stood there for a moment.

I heard several shots off in the direction Will had
gone. This seemed to make the man on the ground decide on more
violence, so he reached for a pistol that was in a holster on his
belt. Lucy and I were not quick enough to dodge or run for cover,
so again I didn’t think, I just reacted. I pointed the gun and
pulled the trigger.

I had no idea if I was aiming it the right way, but
I was very close to the man, so I thought I might hit something.
The sound of the gun was terribly loud. Of all the things that had
happened to me, that deafening blast pushing back on my face was
the only thing that I remember distinctly as pain—and as guilt,
sharp and penetrating as the retort or the bullet.

Above the elbow, the man’s arm exploded into bloody
flesh and fabric, and he let out a howl. He clutched at the wound
with his other hand, which was instantly covered with blood that
oozed between his fingers. He fell back on the pavement.

He had already gotten the gun out of the holster
with his right hand, but he couldn’t seem to raise it with his
wounded arm. I walked over to him. Lucy was at my side, and I again
barred her with my right arm, holding the gun. I think the sight of
the blood stirred up her unholy appetites, and I didn’t want to see
that again. She turned slightly away from me and growled, but she
seemed to master herself, or at least tolerate my restraint. I took
another step and pressed my foot onto the man’s wounded arm. He
writhed and howled again, and finally dropped the pistol. I kicked
the handgun under the cement mixer. Then I stepped back with
Lucy.

I didn’t know what had happened to Will, and I
didn’t know if we should leave as he had instructed, or try to help
him somehow. I feared the worst, but unlike when it happened in the
heat of battle, making such tactical decisions was beyond me, once
there was the possibility for consideration; I became totally
paralyzed.

The wounded man watched us. You could see how scared
he was, but even through his obvious pain, the main thing I
detected was shock and wonder at how Lucy and I were acting. He was
breathing hard, and seemed to be in disbelief at how we just stood
there.

Fortunately, after a few moments of this standoff,
Will came running back. He also looked surprised at what he saw,
looking from the wounded man, to the gun, to me, to Lucy, and back
to the man. Unlike me, he paused only for a minute. His gun was
already out and aimed at the other man. I grabbed Will’s arm. He
looked at me and I shook my head.

He looked back to the man. “All right, let’s go.” He
pushed Lucy and me down the street, back in the direction we had
come.

Will kept looking over his shoulder, and we
deliberately cut over one street, rather than continue on the
street we had been on. In a few minutes, we were entering the less
densely built-up part of the city, and there was still no sign of
pursuit or attack. Will pulled us under a tattered awning, into a
doorway, and let us rest for a minute.

“What happened, Truman?” he asked. He immediately
realized the futility of asking this way. “That guy must’ve been a
guard on patrol. He found you, somehow you got his gun, and you
shot him. Is that what happened?”

I nodded, realizing I still carried the gun in my
right hand. I was still revolted by it but now also fascinated. I
held it by the stock, pointing down, and offered it to Will. He
took it from me slowly, carefully.

“It’s all right, Truman. You were only defending
yourself. You did the right thing. I found their little
headquarters or base or whatever it was. They had another truck out
in front of it. This one was a Humvee, more military-looking and
well-kept. I punctured the tires on the one side, but then the
guards there heard your shots, and they spotted me too. We both
started shooting. I think I hit two of them. But they probably
think they’re being attacked by more than just the three of us, and
they’re not coming out. That’s good. We should be able to get back
to the fence and warn everyone that those guys who attacked Fran
and the kids came from some base out here and we need to get ready
for more attacks and fighting.”

I nodded. I was just glad to be away from that dead
and frightening city.

“But what am I going to do with you two?” Will
wondered out loud. “I don’t want to take you back to the storage
place, even if I had time to make that detour. If there are other
people out here, especially if we’re at war with them, then I don’t
know what they’d do if they found a bunch of zombies just fenced in
and defenseless. They’d probably burn the whole place down and kill
you all. You’ll have to come with me and I’ll explain it as best I
can. Zoey can tell them how you helped save her. They’ve got to
understand.”

We kept moving along the street into an area where
the buildings and vehicles were much more sparse. Soon we’d be back
where at least Will was relatively safe, and I hoped Lucy and I
would be too.

Then I heard a loud roar ahead of us. It went on
uninterrupted for several seconds. Unlike the previous day, I knew
immediately that it was gunfire. And this time there were many more
than just three shots.

Will quickened his pace, and I wondered if these
strange, powerful people ever stopped shooting at each other, ever
stopped bleeding and cursing and dying.

The sound was loud and sudden, like something angry
being awakened. There were several pitches and tones, and it seemed
to come from all over, down in the hole Dad and Mr. Caine had
fallen into. I raised the 9mm and the flashlight until the beam
found my dad. Grey, ghostly hands were grabbing at him.