Life Sentence (21 page)

I hadn’t remembered such blood and fleshly
destruction since the woman we had attacked in the city years ago.
I wondered why other people like me didn’t bleed so much, and I
could only stare in wonder as this man’s life eased out onto the
dirt. I could never have imagined anything so wondrous, like I was
staring at the deepest mystery in the world, laid bare even as it
was rendered useless and irrelevant. Maybe it wasn’t the ability to
speak that made these people so different and more powerful than
us, and that gave them the ability or the right to lock us up.
Perhaps it was because they had this ability to bleed and suffer,
and to make others suffer in such exquisite and horrible ways. Even
though I had just heard the men saying such terrible, evil things,
I could feel no joy or satisfaction at what I saw.

The man with the gun and his friend ran away from
Will in different directions, the former towards the woods where we
were, the latter towards the truck. Will fired again and the man
running toward the truck fell, the blood spreading out beneath his
motionless body. The gunman pulled the bald girl up by her shoulder
and dragged her into the trees and bushes right by me. Will fired
at him but missed.

I didn’t think. I’m sure if I had, I wouldn’t have
done anything but stand and watch. I suppose I just reacted. I
lunged at the man, seizing his left arm. He was startled at first,
and let go of the girl. She scrambled off to my right as he and I
struggled. He was much quicker than me, and I thought for sure I
was going to die. He brought his gun up, and I grabbed at it before
he could fire. The man clutched my neck, but I had both my hands on
his gun hand, so I was able to hold on to it, even though he seemed
stronger than I was.

From out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lucy move up
slowly and deliberately on my left. She was still so graceful,
gliding into view as she raised her tiny hand above her head. The
man saw her and released his hold on my neck to pull away from me,
but I was still holding his arm.

Lucy hit him in the head with a large rock, one a
little bigger than my fist. He dropped his gun and staggered to the
side as I let go of him. Lucy stepped in front of me without a
sound and hit him again. He turned, fell on his face, and she
immediately dropped onto his back and kept bringing the rock down,
flinging blood onto the bushes next to her with each upstroke. She
continued until the rock came up with dirt on it, as well as blood,
and the man’s head was an unrecognizable pile.

The girl watched us from a few feet away. She looked
more surprised than scared, but she also looked ready to run if
Lucy or I made the slightest movement towards her.

Will came through the trees and bushes. He backed
slightly away from Lucy and got between her and the girl. “It’s
okay now,” he said. “It’s okay, Zoey.”

The girl stood up. “They killed him. But then they
just stopped and stared at me. What’s wrong with them, Will?”

“Some of them are smarter than others,” he said.
“These two are especially smart, and they don’t want to eat
people.”

Lucy cast aside the bloody rock. She reached into
the remains of the dead man’s skull and came out with a long, wet
mass that she raised and stretched till it snapped off in her
hands. She seemed nearly oblivious to the rest of us now.

“Well, not so much, at least,” Will said. “She’s
much more coordinated than other zombies, but I guess she still
likes to eat some of the time. He doesn’t eat at all and he can
even read. They understand you when you talk. I think they
understood what these guys were going to do and they wanted to stop
them. And, well, now she’s a little distracted with eating him. I
mean, it’s not like they’re perfect.”

Lucy had her face in her hands, chewing at the wet,
spongy mass.

The girl watched her for a moment, frowning. “Not
perfect? Will, she’s eating a guy’s brain right in front of
me.”

“Yeah, but he deserved it.”

The girl paused, then nodded. “All right. You have a
point.”

I bent down and picked up the dead man’s gun. I was
afraid of it because I didn’t have Lucy’s dexterity, so I scooped
it into my palm, the barrel pointing off to the right. I stepped
around Lucy, who had reached in for more to eat, and very carefully
presented the gun to the girl. She watched me intently the whole
time I was moving.

“Thank you,” she said as she took it from me. “Thank
you for saving me, too. You could’ve been killed. Well, you
could’ve been shot, at least. That was very brave of you.”

I nodded. It felt good to be called brave, even if I
didn’t think I deserved it. I wondered if I’d ever been called that
before, when I was a professor. I doubted it.

“You two stay here,” Will said to me. “I’ll come
back for you.” To the girl, he said, “I’d appreciate it if you
didn’t tell the others about these two. I don’t know if people
would like having them out of their holding area.”

“Sure,” she replied as they walked back out to help
the others. She kept watching me as they left.

They got the other girl off the ground, then went
and untied the woman. I could see them getting stuff out of the
back of the truck. Then they all walked to the front of the house,
where I could hear their conversation, and see that they had
retrieved a lot of guns from the vehicle.

“It was total chance I found you guys,” Will was
explaining. “I was out past the fence and saw the tire tracks and I
didn’t think it was right, so I followed them here.” They paused to
survey the carnage. “Awful.” He looked over at the big truck.
“What’s that flag?”

The woman looked over at the truck too. “I don’t
know. They weren’t much for conversation about themselves, just
talking about what they were going to do to us, the sick bastards.
Maybe it’s the flag of their group or tribe or whatever the hell
these animals were a part of.” She nudged a body with her foot.

“Yeah. Well, you didn’t see what they did to the
fence. Not just a hole to drive their truck through, but they
deliberately tore up a huge section of it. You all should go to the
next farm and send for a crew to fix the fence as quickly as
possible, or we won’t know how many zombies have gotten in and this
whole area will be dangerous. I’ll burn the bodies and then I’ll
double back to the hole in the fence and try to round up any
zombies that have wandered through. Zoey, could you take this for
me? I want to travel light and I don’t want to lose this out
there.” Will handed the girl the little pack with the books we’d
gathered from my college. It all seemed so long ago and unimportant
now.

“It’s a good enough plan, Will,” the woman agreed.
“What a mess. Come on, girls.”

She led the girls away. The older one, who had seen
us, looked back toward me. I thought she looked like a very kind,
and most of all, very intelligent person. I was again in awe of
Will and his friends, that they could all be such fine and virtuous
people. But the dead men had also been able to talk—and bleed—and
they seemed the absolute opposite of fine or virtuous. There was
something more to their differences that I still couldn’t figure
out. I don’t know if I ever will.

I touched Lucy on the shoulder and she finally
looked up from her monstrous feast. Her mouth and chin were covered
with blood. Stringy bits were stuck between her teeth. I helped her
stand up, then bent down to tear off some of the dead man’s
clothes; I cleaned off her chin with the pieces of cloth. The blood
was still hot and wet, so it came off pretty well. I couldn’t do it
perfectly, but it definitely looked better. I supposed Lucy hadn’t
been able to help herself, and it was a little enough of a
weakness; as Will had said, we were no more perfect than the other
people. It had been fortunate indeed that Lucy had acted so
decisively against the man, as I don’t think I would’ve been able
to do much against him by myself. But I was glad she was done
feeding and back to normal. I could never understand why living—any
kind of living, even the most regular and necessary of tasks, like
eating—had to be so ugly.

Will dragged the bodies into a pile in front of the
house. The woman and the girls had walked out of sight, so I
dragged the gunman’s body out to the pile as well. As soon as Lucy
saw what I was doing, she lent a hand.

I looked down at the dead bodies as Will splashed
fuel all over them. Now they didn’t seem so wondrous or revealing,
just embarrassing, like they should be put out of sight as quickly
as possible; all their mystery was gone and replaced with
disappointment and meaninglessness and ugliness.

Will had us step back, knowing our fear of fire. I
watched impassively as the flames reached into the bright, sunny
sky and smeared it with a greasy, foul smoke, an offering of
something worthless to something inscrutable and unknown.

After we left Will and his zombie friends—if that’s
the right word for them—the three of us walked down the road to the
nearest farm. It was a couple miles, so they might have heard the
shots, but they might have thought we were shooting some animal—a
coyote or fox that was attacking our livestock, or a deer for food.
Guns were so much a part of our lives it wouldn’t necessarily have
set off any alarms. We walked for a while in silence, but
eventually we needed to talk.

Fran looked down at me. She knew I was always
thinking about something, and at a time like this more than ever.
“You okay?” she asked. “They didn’t hit you too much. You either,
Vera.”

“No, they didn’t hit me too much,” I said. Vera
agreed. I looked up at Fran. Both her eyes were blackened. Some
blood had dried at the corners of her mouth and under her nose. She
walked kind of slow, like something hurt inside—probably a bruised
or broken rib. It probably wasn’t worse than that—if the rib had
punctured something, she wouldn’t be walking at all. “They hurt you
a lot worse.”

She shrugged. “Not too bad.”

“I think he didn’t want to hit me in the face too
much before he… you know. Before he did what he was going to do.” I
could use the word “rape” when I thought it to myself, but saying
it out loud wasn’t possible yet, especially in front of Vera.

Fran looked at me again. “That might have been what
he was thinking, yes. Sometimes there’s no telling what people like
that are thinking, or if they think. Most days I’ve hoped that we
were rid of all that. I’m sorry you had to see it at all. You kids
see so much violence and death already. That kind of shit should
just be over and in the past. You shouldn’t have to live with that,
on top of everything else.”

“It was lucky Will showed up when he did,” I said.
It was what we were really thinking—not what had happened, but what
could have happened.

“Sure was.” Fran could be more laconic than my
dad.

“And what if he hadn’t?”

We walked for several steps without an answer. “I
remember the first time I saw you, Zoey. Me and Jack and Jonah—we
got there in time to save you. But later, we didn’t get there in
time to save your dad. I don’t know why. I remember when I was
little, my mom told me everything happened for a reason. And I try
to still believe that. But I don’t know what that reason could be
when I think of things like what happened to your dad, or what
almost happened to us.”

“I guess all you can do is be grateful when the
person does show up in time.”

“Yeah, I guess. Will’s always been a brave kid. It
helps when someone knows what it’s like to suffer; it makes them
more compassionate, I think. Those pieces of shit back there didn’t
know what it’s like to suffer. Or maybe they did, and it just made
them meaner, made them want to hurt people more. I don’t know. I
don’t give a shit. Some people aren’t worth it. I would’ve made
them suffer worse than a bullet through the head if I
could’ve.”

We walked on. It was an eminently practical
solution—to just not care, to accept things as they had happened,
or even to rejoice at the suffering of the wicked. I felt fairly
sure, however, that I would never have the kind of stoic outlook
that would make the first reaction available for me, and I just
didn’t have the visceral emotion that would make the second one
possible. There was too much wonder and terror in the world for
either response. The pull of those two qualities—wonder and
terror—in such seemingly opposite directions made any other
response seem extremely difficult or dishonest.

We got to the nearest farm, and the people there
washed our wounds and gave us food and water. One of the adults
left on a bicycle to tell the people in the city what had happened,
so workers could be sent to repair the fence and to search for
intruders, living or dead. By sunset, I could hear vehicles pulling
up outside the cabin. I went outside, and my mom and dad took me in
their arms, as Vera’s parents hugged her. Mom cried a little and
fussed over my new black eye—the earlier one from Ms. Dresden was
barely noticeable—but when they saw I was okay, they calmed
down.

My dad and the other adults discussed what to do at
that point. Fran described the men and their vehicle, but couldn’t
give any information on where they came from or whether there might
be more. She did say they seemed afraid of more people showing up,
and were planning on leaving as soon as possible, so it seemed they
were alone and not part of some larger group. (Fran left out what
they had planned to do with us before leaving, to spare our parents
as much as us, I’m sure, even if everyone could fill in the details
on their own.) The flag did make everyone wonder, though, if they
had come from some sort of “community.” She said the men hadn’t
used a radio to communicate with anyone else, at least not since
they broke into our house. She also told my dad that Will had gone
back to the breach in the fence to see what was happening there,
and no more gunshots had been heard.