Life Sentence (8 page)

I scanned the rest of her shamelessly, I admit, and
it all was as perfect as her one eye. She was slight, like most of
us, of course. But the swell of her remaining breast and her hips
still looked completely feminine and graceful. Her legs were far
too thin now, but instead of detracting from her beauty, they made
it poignant and fragile and utterly irresistible. When I first
looked up at her, the sun was gushing about her from behind,
setting her alight, igniting her golden hair into a crown around
her half-face with its bone-white skin. She reminded me of the
stars I’d seen the other night, before my thoughts turned lonely,
when I had seen them as perfect needles of light in the cold dark
of the sky. She was the most beautiful thing I think I’d ever
seen.

I finally shook myself loose from all this rude
staring and brought my gaze back up to hers. I stood up, but then I
made an awful mistake. I just couldn’t help myself, and I raised my
right hand to pull back her bloody hair. She growled and bared her
teeth as she pulled back from me and batted my arm away. I quickly
withdrew my hand. I was aghast at my own behavior, and how she
might not trust me now. I thought I needed to make some kind of
amends, so I pushed the box of clothes towards her with my foot.
She looked at it quizzically and suspiciously. Then she tried to
reach down to it, but her joints seemed stiff and she let out a
pained moan as she first tried to bend at the waist. Then she tried
to kneel, and the sound this time was a horrible squeal. She could
accomplish neither of these movements and both seemed to cause her
pain—I suspected not only from physical discomfort, but from the
indignity and shame of not being able to make her body do what she
wanted, what she needed it to do. I could see her clench her fists
and start to shake.

I knew just how she felt, so I reached over to her
and—being very careful to put my hands on her arm and shoulder and
not bring them near her face—I helped her sit on the sofa. Then I
picked up the box off the floor—causing some significant pain to
myself—and set it next to her, so she could go through it without
moving around. She eyed me first, and I felt myself melt again
under the gaze of that one tiny, perfect globe. She nodded to me
slightly, and I was glad; it seemed I had made up for my terrible
indiscretion before.

She went through the box much more carefully than
the others had, even perhaps more carefully than I had, pausing
over several items and not just immediately picking the first
things that might fit her. She was small all over, and for some
reason I estimated she was a size four, though I again had no idea
from where such knowledge came. Now that she was seated, her
movements were very smooth and fluid, not jerky and halting like
those of the rest of us, and not pained, as her movements had been
when she was standing. Her hands were tiny, and of the same
exquisite hue as her face—a pure, guileless white like unfired
porcelain. She could use her hands much better than I could,
grasping things with just her thumb and index finger, while I had
to sort of scoop them up with my whole hand. She made a pile of
clothes in her lap, then went through this pile and returned most
of the things to the box.

She tried to stand, but again she had difficulty. I
thought she was getting up to go somewhere else to put the clothes
on, and I knew there were other people now wandering all over, so I
didn’t think she’d find much privacy. I also didn’t think she could
manage to change clothes while standing up. So I stood up and waved
at her to stay on the sofa. She stopped trying to rise, but still
looked at me plaintively, not knowing what to do. I went outside
the storage cubicle and slid the door down till the bottom of it
was about two feet from the ground. I thought she’d still have
enough light to see that way. I heard a wheezing sound that seemed
affirmative from her, and I waited there. I could hear her moving
around and moaning—some motions obviously still caused her pain. I
heard the affirmative wheeze again, and I slid the door all the way
open, though slowly, in case I was wrong and she hadn’t finished
yet.

She had managed to stand up on her own. I can’t say
she had chosen the things I would have picked for her to wear, but
I’m sure she had her own desires and judgments of what would be
comfortable or attractive. She had pulled on what looked like
pajama bottoms—baggy, blue, plaid pants. On top she had a loose,
black, cowl-neck sweater. I looked down and saw that, unlike me,
she hadn’t chosen shoes that just slipped on, but had sneakers on
and had actually tied their laces. In her left hand she held a
long, silky scarf of yellow and orange. I was in awe of her.
Everything was too big and graceless for her delicate, beautiful
form, but again, it seemed to make her happy, and that was all that
mattered.

I stepped around her to a closed box where I had put
the breakable things, and I got out a mirror. I held it up for her.
She nodded. Then she raised the scarf she had been holding and
wrapped it around her head, diagonally, to cover the left side of
her face. She tied it and looked from the mirror to me. Again, it
wouldn’t have been my choice to cover her this way, but maybe she
was self-conscious about her left eye. There was enough of her
beautiful hair still spilling out from under the scarf that I
didn’t mind it too much. And the scarf didn’t look bad, either, for
it added some color to the otherwise dark clothes she’d picked
out.

I nodded back at her and we sat on the sofa
together. I offered her books, but she didn’t seem interested in
those, so we just sat. It was getting too dark to read, anyway. I
wasn’t even sure how many other people could read, but I was sure
there was something special about her, judging by how she looked
and moved. She would be one of the good and beautiful things I
could find out about now. And now I wouldn’t be lonely. I hoped she
would be happy now, too.

I got up and with some difficulty I slid the
sofa—with her on it—slightly outside the opening of the storage
unit, so we could sit together under the stars. I wished I knew her
name, but didn’t see how that would be possible. Asking was out of
the question. I thought of my cards and how I’d found out my name,
but I remembered women usually carried such things in a purse, and
she hadn’t had one when I met her. Knowing of how captivating her
eye was, I decided I would call her Lucy, for I suddenly
remembered—from nowhere, as usual, with no indication of where the
information came from—the story of the saint and how beautiful her
eyes were and how holy she was.

We sat there throughout the night—with me gazing at
Lucy, and her looking up at the stars. Now things really were the
way they should be.

A few days later, I went out with my mom to a
smaller river nearby, partly to collect some early strawberries
from the fields there, but mostly just to take a break from the
normal routine. Dad was going out with Roger to hunt, so my mom
wanted to do something with me. We packed a picnic and headed out
in the morning, not quite as early as the men, but still pretty
early.

We left our house on our bicycles and started
pedaling south. We were going farther than Dad and I had the other
day, so the bicycles were the best transportation. We had several
cars in front of our house—most people did, since there were
literally thousands of them just lying around, abandoned, and only
a few hundred people in our community. Many had been wrecked when
all the people had died, but most were still usable; almost all
were at least salvageable for parts. But we only used them for
important errands, as fuel was still at a premium, especially the
real gasoline and diesel. I could remember when we began producing
bio-diesel, but it still was unusable during the winter months, and
we weren’t able to divert enough of our food production to make the
fuel in sufficient quantities. So for now, fuel was conserved,
usually for driving the trucks that would gather more
resources—tank trucks to gather fuel from faraway gas stations, or
large flat-bed trucks if we were going to cut down trees for
firewood and lumber.

Mom and I went through the old part of the city, the
part that Milton first cleared of zombies when I was too small to
remember. All the streets here had been cleared of abandoned
vehicles—mostly by just pushing them to the side, not actually
taking them away—so bicycling was easy and pleasant here, though
eerie, going past so many empty cars and buildings. The streets
that weren’t regularly used were being reclaimed by plants growing
up through the pavement. Most of the buildings were tagged with
warnings, as they were unstable and would probably have to be torn
down and rebuilt before people could use them. If there were ever
that many people again.

We first went south because in our part of the
settlement there wasn’t a gate in the main security barrier. We
lived in a part of the city where the people had built walls
connecting a number of abandoned warehouses and other buildings,
then boarded up the buildings, tagged all of them with warning
signs to keep people away, and now the walls and buildings together
acted as the northern border of the central city, the live zone.
Guards patrolled this barrier regularly, several times a day.

Beyond this was land, like the field Dad and I had
gone to, and the one Mom and I were headed to now. Milton had
cleared out the dead, and then a fence had been put around it,
enclosing miles and miles of empty space that now served as our
source of food—by farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering. These
lands were sparsely populated, and the outer fence wasn’t checked
as often, so these weren’t considered completely safe.

Teams took turns going around it in circuits that
took a couple days to complete. They often found small groups of
the dead gathered, pushing against the fence, and they waited while
Milton was called to round them up. They also sometimes found holes
in the fence. Some of these were from burrowing animals, but some
meant worse problems and dangers. Beyond the outer fence were only
the dead, so far as any of us knew, and Milton was rounding up
those close to our outer fence and was putting them in enclosures
outside of our lands. We only went into these wild, dead areas in
well-planned incursions to gather supplies, not pleasant outings on
bicycles.

Mom and I got to the main street and turned east.
This took us past the museum, where life as we knew it started with
a few people barricaded in against the dead. Although our limits
were much wider than the few hundred square feet they had had, life
was more or less the same as it had been, and a quantum leap away
from the kind of life depicted in the museum exhibits. For us, the
airplanes and satellites in the museum were as removed from our
daily lives as the cave drawings of far older tribes; if anything,
the last technological achievements of humanity were far more alien
and mysterious than the bows and spears of some of the museum’s
dioramas and display cases. In a way, though, the museum was the
center of our community, its touchstone with the past, and the
symbol of its survival.

We waved to some older people who were there,
trimming the grass around the wall. Through the open gate I could
see the helicopter on the ground among the big, abstract
sculptures. The chopper was still maintained for emergencies,
though its fuel was even rarer and more precious than regular
gasoline.

Just past the museum was one of the guarded gates
out of the live zone. As in our part of town, the buildings on
either side of the street were boarded up, and they formed part of
the barricade. Across the street a brick wall had been built,
connecting to the walls of the buildings on either side. The
building to the right had been a warehouse with loading bays. To
exit our city, one of the guards would open a loading bay on this
side, and the people or vehicle would enter the building, then exit
though another loading bay on the other side of the wall. It meant
the wall could be made stronger and permanently anchored to the
buildings and the pavement, rather than being a metal gate that had
to be hinged or drawn back.

A guard was on the roof of the one building, and
another was on the street, holding the leash of a big dog, a
Rottweiler, black and sullen-looking. The guards often used them
when patrolling, and although the dog didn’t make any aggressive
move or bark, I still shivered a little at the sight of it. I’d
always been afraid of dogs. Something about them seemed wrong, like
they knew too much and too little at the same time. I didn’t know
how to express it, but I knew the effect they always had on me, as
useful as they were.

Both men smiled and greeted us. The whole
arrangement was a necessary precaution, but it was hardly run like
a military operation. Dad sometimes said it was more like a
neighborhood watch. “Hi Sarah… Zoey,” the man at the wall said.
“Where you headed?”

“The South Fork, past the bridge. We’ll be back late
in the afternoon,” Mom answered.

“Great.” He wrote down our information on a
clipboard, so if we didn’t come back, someone would know to come
looking for us. He eyed me warily and didn’t ask how I was doing.
His son, Max, was a year younger than me, but he’d been known to
jump in and call me names back when I was Zombie Girl and some of
the bigger kids were picking on me; I don’t think he ever had the
nerve to hit me, though it was hard to remember some of the times I
was doubled-up or on the ground. That summer I was old enough that
I wouldn’t necessarily have begrudged him the pleasure: if it
earned him points with the other kids and kept him from being
picked on, if I was going to take a beating anyway, what did it
matter if he had gotten some licks in? Maybe my pain would’ve at
least served some small, good purpose.