Life Sentence (16 page)

I finally got close enough to grab his flailing
right arm, and I pulled on it with all of my weight; he tumbled
over on top of the crowd.

Will threw the girl over the fence. She was smaller
than the boy, and she got farther over before her pants snagged on
the barbed wire. It only took a slight tug on her arm to bring her
all the way over to our side.

Will walked over and sat under a tree. He finally
looked shaken and exhausted. “Truman, we’re going to have to be
more careful,” he called to me. “You two aren’t the only smart
zombies in there. And Blue Eye,” he called louder, “I can’t see
you, but I’m sorry I scared you. I don’t want to hurt you all. We
take a vow not to, unless you’re going to kill one of us. I hope
you’ll trust me now. Thank you both for your help.”

And with that, he rose and left again. The crowd
dispersed.

I found the typewriter and the books; nothing was
badly damaged. Lucy and I went back to our sofa and sat there as
night came on. I looked once more into her eye, and I was as
captivated as before, but there was deeper meaning, complexity, and
regret to my feelings. I could see the terrible truth Milton had
spoken: we needed to be locked up. Even someone as good and
beautiful as Lucy, or as seemingly innocent as the two children,
could be willing, even desirous, to hurt and kill another. I
remembered the word “bloodlust,” and thought painfully that it was
more like a blood-need: it wasn’t a lustful urge that overwhelmed
us and then abated. It was more like a dull, hungry ache, conniving
and malicious.

It was then that I resolved to type up everything
that happened, as fully and honestly as I could. If, as Will had
described it, the people on the outside looked upon us just as
animals to be put down, I should describe how things were
different, more complicated. Of course, part of the complication
was created by confusing, frightening scenes such as today at the
gate—where hunger, anger, and fear had been almost too powerfully
arrayed against a new and fragile trust.

I wished that evening Lucy would play her violin and
remind me of gentler, lovelier things, but I was almost glad she
didn’t, for that would make it too easy to forget the bad events.
Instead, I just gazed at her and knew I could—I
would—
love
her regardless, in spite of the imperfections I now knew were in
all of us, and not just in me and our uncommunicative neighbors,
but even in her.

As we sat there, even without the violin, I became
convinced—I hope because of Lucy’s love for me, but perhaps only
because of my own love for her—that she really had been trying to
protect me and the two children, not just trying to hurt Will. As
with my thoughts the other night about my former job, it was only a
hope. But such a hope was as persistent a need, deep inside me, as
the bloody hunger and violence I had just witnessed. And once
again, such a hope seemed enough.

It was funny how things went on pretty much as
normal, both after my vows and after the death of Ms. Dresden’s
baby. I always wonder if it’s a resilience or sturdiness that we
all have, or the kind of hope that Milton talked about, or just
stubbornness. Sometimes I think it’s more a kind of inertia of
living matter—a gross, wet weightiness that keeps life flowing or
rolling forward like a flood or a glacier, depending on the
situation. The living stay alive; they even keep living after
they’ve died. It’s not good or bad, it’s just the way it is, and
you have to plan on it and work around it.

So we kept going as we had, through the mundane but
sometimes pleasant activities of our lives. School was done for the
summer, but I had one more ballet lesson with Ms. Wright. On my way
to class, I walked by Mr. Enders at his little desk. He had dozed
off on this hot, sultry day, leaning against the cool, plaster wall
with his eyes closed and his mouth open. I went past him quietly,
since there was no need to bother him.

I joined Ms. Wright, Vera, and the other girls in
the classroom. “Hi, Zoey,” Ms. Wright said. She was much more stern
and intimidating than her husband, Mr. Caine, but I still liked
her. She always looked comfortable in her body, which was the
opposite of how I felt that year. Her skin was a very dark brown,
rich and mysterious. Like my mom, her black hair had some grey in
it, but unlike my mom, she kept it closely trimmed. Her body was
muscled in the way a dancer’s is—an average or even slender torso
with powerful, toned legs.

Besides her skin, her big, brown eyes were the most
strikingly beautiful thing about her—they were large, open and
frank, but always a little serious. Not sad, but keen and hardened,
like they had seen and absorbed far too much of the world’s mystery
and pain.

“Hello, Ms. Wright,” I said as I set down my gym
bag.

“You okay?” She touched my shoulder and looked at my
blackened left eye.

“Yeah, I’m okay.” Bald, pale, with a purple-yellow
bruise around one eye—it was everything I could do to go out in
public at all.

She gave a hint of a smile. More of her seriousness,
I thought, that she seldom smiled and never laughed. “You did good,
Zoey. You always do. I hope you know that.”

The room we used for dance had windows along one
side, so it was brightly lit now in the afternoon, and with the
windows open it remained comfortably cool. Most of the tables had
been moved to other classrooms, but a few were left under the
windows. Sometimes we’d use them as props when we practiced
scenes.

On the wall opposite the windows, there were two
doors—one near the front of the room, one near the back. They were
old-fashioned, with a smoked-glass window on the top half, and wood
on the bottom half. For some reason, no one had scraped off the
names painted on the glass parts of the school doors, so we could
tell that twelve years before, this had been Ms. Thele’s fifth
grade class.

One day when I was younger, I’d been allowed to
rummage around in the cabinets in the back of the classroom. Among
other things, I’d found pictures of Ms. Thele and her classes over
the years. Through the pictures I could even watch her age from a
very young woman, to one in early middle age. In two of the
pictures, I thought she looked bigger. Pregnant twice. At least two
children of her own. Hundreds of students. It was unnerving, not
just because every one of them was almost certainly dead, but
because they had almost certainly killed many others after they
died. Their classroom was a better tribute to them than their
actual physical selves had been.

After some talking amongst the girls, Ms. Wright
began the class. As we practiced our steps, all of them with French
names, I again found myself wondering whether there were any people
left who spoke French. The repetitive motions of the dance
drills—long since trained and pressed into my muscles—gave my mind
the freedom to wander into such abstract, non-practical
speculations. It was one of the things I always liked about
dancing—the mental freedom of practice, as well as the physical
beauty of performance. I thought of France, of the maps I’d seen
and the descriptions I had read in books, and I couldn’t see how
anyone could have survived there. Too crowded and not enough guns.
Same for all of Europe. Gone. I’d read about the Louvre,
Versailles, and the Vatican. A few of the older people had visited
these places and said how strange and lovely they were, the same
way Mom had reminisced about all the people and their foreign,
exotic picnics. All gone.

Even if there were other people left somewhere and
all our little cities grew and grew until one day our descendants
walked across Europe again, they would only find ruins, things for
archaeologists to dig up and decipher. We’d have better copies of
the Louvre’s artwork in our books than the rotten tatters they’d
find in the original museum.

I remembered some Caribbean islands had been French
colonies, and I thought they had a better chance of harboring
survivors. I didn’t know if the survivors I imagined would be doing
ballet, though, and that made me think of something else I’d read,
of how there’d been this ancient form of dance in Cambodia (another
place I thought had a better chance of surviving than Europe), and
then some people there had killed all the dancers. They thought
that kind of dancing represented the aristocracy. (Here again were
some of those concepts of society and government that were very
hard for me to grasp—the idea that one group would think itself
superior to another, or that one group would try to murder another
group because of this misguided belief.) And since they didn’t like
the aristocracy, they thought they needed to get rid of the
dancing, and therefore the dancers. The living dead had probably
been more thorough in wiping out all kinds of human things, but it
didn’t seem as bad as the tragedy in Cambodia. I thought, not for
the first time, how zombies made more sense than people, some of
the time.

As we went through our steps, the window on the door
at the back of the room exploded inward, the glass flying in and
shattering on the floor. Two fists crashed down through some shards
at the top of the window, this time flinging thick splotches of
blood on the shattered glass all over the floor. Mr. Enders leaned
through the window, his dead eyes seeking us out.

The broken glass had cut several long gashes in his
skinny arms. He snuffed the air and licked his lips slowly, his
grey tongue snaking around. I froze for just a second and imagined
how he might have already been dead when I walked by him in the
hall, how his cold hand could have shot out and grabbed me.

But then, as when Mom and I had been attacked a few
days before, I just started doing everything automatically. Most of
the other girls were younger, and some understandably had let out a
shriek when they first saw the dead man. The older girls, who had
taken their vows, began to herd the smaller ones toward the front
of the room.

“All of you, out the front door and down the hall,”
Ms. Wright said loudly, but matter-of-factly. “Get outside and get
help.”

She went for her gym bag. I had already reached
mine, and we both pulled our handguns out at the same time. Then we
started rummaging for the magazines. We loaded our guns and racked
the slides at almost the same moment.

I was closer to Mr. Enders, who was still half-in
and half-out of the room, fumbling with the handle on the inside of
the door. This was one of those bizarre moments of the undead mind
at work: the door wasn’t locked, so why hadn’t he just turned the
handle on the outside? And if he didn’t remember how door handles
worked at all and had smashed through the glass in blind,
uncomprehending rage and hunger, why was he trying to open the door
from the inside? I could again see how zombies usually made much
less sense than people.

I knew not to stand in Ms. Wright’s line of fire, so
I took two steps back. We both had our guns pointed at the floor.
“Zoey, leave,” she said quietly as she raised her pistol. It was a
Glock, and I remember thinking it was way too big for my hands, as
useless as such an observation was right then. “I know you took
your vows and you want to help, but you don’t need to see this.
Believe me.”

“We don’t need to shoot, Ms. Wright,” I said
quietly. “It isn’t what we’re supposed to do.”

Mr. Enders figured out how to turn the handle, and
the door opened unexpectedly. He stumbled and fell forward,
supported only by his arms through the window as his feet slid on
the floor, trying to get purchase, like he was drunk, or like when
I’d first tried to ice skate and my feet had slid all over till I
fell on my butt. But Mr. Enders wasn’t drunk, and he would never
try anything new or fun again; he was just dead.

“I heard you put one down the other day,” Ms. Wright
said, still aiming her Glock. “This needs to be done.”

Mr. Enders stood up and dragged his arms out through
the broken glass at the edge of the window frame, opening up more
red, flowing furrows in his flesh. His left arm flopped down to his
side and dripped blood from his fingertips. He moaned and lurched
toward us. You could distinctly see the blood pour into his palm,
then down to his fingertips, where it dripped onto the floor.

“Mom and I were alone,” I said quickly. “There was
no one around for miles. I guess one of us could’ve stayed and kept
an eye on it while the other one went to get help, but it was
dangerous. And it wasn’t Mr. Enders that day. You know it’s not
right to shoot now.”

She looked at me, back to Mr. Enders, then over to
the windows and the tables under them. “All right,” she finally
agreed. “Keep your gun on him. And careful, because I’ll be in the
way. Just be sure you aim high. I trust you, Zoey.”

I raised the pistol and kept Mr. Enders’ forehead in
my sights as it bobbed from side to side. Ms. Wright hauled one of
the tables away from the wall and slid it across the floor.

Mr. Enders, who had been focused on me, stopped and
wavered, confused, growling slightly, and then he turned towards
Ms. Wright. She ran forward, gaining more speed, and shoved the
table into him, hitting him right in the middle. He bent over the
tabletop and could almost reach her, but not quite. He wasn’t a big
man, and he had no coordination or leverage now. Ms. Wright pinned
him against the wall with the table. He flailed about, though only
his right arm seemed to have any controlled motion. I found myself
wondering uselessly whether he had died of a stroke.

“Go, Zoey,” Ms. Wright rasped, “get the restraints
and the gloves out of his desk and bring them back here.
Hurry.”

I ran out the door at the front of the room and went
to Mr. Enders’ desk down the hall. I pulled open the drawers until
I found what Ms. Wright had asked for—a muzzle, metal handcuffs,
and two pairs of heavy, leather gloves that could not be bitten
through easily. They were standard equipment in any public
building, the way I’m told fire extinguishers used to be.