Life Sentence (24 page)

In parts the cars were packed so tightly it didn’t
look like we could get the truck close enough to retrieve the
supplies from the store, but with some judicious ramming—the truck
had an extra bumper welded to the front for just such a maneuver—we
got right up to the building.

We got out and Dad gave us flashlights. Rechargeable
batteries were at a premium, but we’d need to use them today. Dad
surveyed the building. Past a ruined fence there was a big door
into the main building. It had been glass and was smashed open.
“All right. Zoey, I can’t have you going in dark places like this.
This is past the fence. There are real monsters here. Stay put. I
mean it.” His tone dropped enough to express the necessary
sternness and seriousness. “We’ll get the stuff and you can help
load it on the truck.”

Dad and Mr. Caine disappeared into the store. Some
holes in the roof let in a little light, so it wasn’t completely
dark, and I could watch their flashlights move through the shadowy
space, sometimes scanning up and around, trying to catch sight of
what we needed. They stopped, and there was some clanging and
banging. Then the flashlights moved back towards the door, until I
could see the two of them pushing a big, flat cart piled with metal
poles and rolls of fencing. “It’s lucky, the stuff we need isn’t
far inside,” my dad explained. He looked between us and the truck.
He seemed to think for a minute before he decided it was safe.
“We’ll go back and get some more. It’ll only take us a couple
minutes for each cart load. You wheel it over to the truck and
start loading it on, Zoey.”

I walked over to the truck as they went back into
the building. I raised the truck’s back door, and set the M16 and
the flashlight on the edge of the truck’s rear loading area. My 9mm
was in its holster on my belt.

There were no cars or other hiding places between
the cart and the truck, so I relaxed a little. I pushed the cart
slowly to the back of the truck. The rolls of fencing were too
heavy for me to lift. The poles I’d be able to get on the back of
the truck with some difficulty, but it made more sense to wait for
help. I decided I could at least get the poles and the fencing off
the cart, so Dad and Mr. Caine could use it on the next trip. I
moved the stuff down onto the cracked pavement and rolled the cart
back to the door, almost at the same time as my dad and Mr. Caine
emerged with another load of supplies.

They took the empty cart while I wheeled the full
one over to the truck. We repeated this process several times, then
all three of us got the stuff into the back of the truck. The
loading made a lot more noise, and I could see Dad looking around,
worried that we’d attract attention. The parking lot still looked
deserted, and all we heard when we were done clanging around was
the buzz of insects and the faint rustling of wind.

We were all a little tired after working in the hot,
midday sun. My dad wiped the sweat from his brow and looked around
the parking lot and shopping center, always on the lookout either
for danger, or for something useful. The neighboring store had a
sign that read “Argento’s Formal Wear.” I didn’t understand the
phrase. I mean, I knew what the words meant individually, but I
didn’t understand what kinds of clothes could be described that
way. “What’s that?” I asked.

Both the men looked. “Formal wear?” My dad thought
for a second how to explain it. “You know—fancy clothes, for
special occasions.”

I tried to put it in a category I understood. “Like
the grey clothes we wear for vows? Or the plain white ones people
wear for weddings?”

“Well, yes, sort of. I mean, yes, you used to get
formal wear for weddings. But no, it wasn’t like ours. And those
weren’t the only occasions you’d go and get formal wear. Not just
rituals.”

Mr. Caine chuckled a little, as he pushed the stuff
farther into the truck compartment and jumped down. “Those are
ceremonies, Jack, not rituals. You only do them once, so they’re
ceremonies.”

Dad rolled his eyes. “Okay. But other things, too.
Dances. Parties. Things like that.”

“We just wear regular clothes to our dances and
parties now,” I objected. I know I was being a bit of a brat, but I
also really wanted to understand these things and not just ignore
them, or dismiss them as oddities. As I said, memory is important,
way more important than people think.

“Well, yes,” my dad said, faltering for the right
explanation. Like any kid, I loved to make adults flustered with
questions. If it weren’t for the seriousness and dangerousness of
the previous day, I would’ve been nearly cackling and dancing by
this point, and Roger definitely would’ve joined me, if he were
there. “But back then there’d be this really big dance the last
year you were in high school. It was called the prom and you’d get
really fancy clothes that you wore just for it. Gals would get big,
beautiful dresses, and guys would get tuxedoes.”

I scowled. “There were whole stores that sold
clothes you’d only wear once?”

“Well, yes. Or you’d just rent them.”

“You mean, you’d pay money—this thing, money, that
older people always complain about, even now—just to borrow
clothes? For one day?”

“Yes. They were pretty expensive, too.”

“What on earth for?” I didn’t even mean it as
sarcasm or criticism at this point. I just couldn’t imagine this
strange, other world the older people longed for and missed so
much, with all its excesses and waste and nonsense. The huge
building supply store made sense to me, because I could understand
how it would be good and useful to have so many supplies and tools
to do work. I’d seen the ruins of food stores and gas stations
before, and those made sense, too. The food stores even made me a
little curious, with the descriptions I’d heard of things like
chocolate and candy and spices—strange, unknown things I’d never
eaten. Even playgrounds and carnival rides made sense, and we had a
few small examples of similar things in our struggling little city.
But what they were describing now was incomprehensible. I would’ve
thought they were making it up, to kid me, but Dad’s consternation
at trying to explain it seemed real.

Mr. Caine kept chuckling as he patted me on the
back—affectionately, not condescendingly. “Jack, the kids don’t
understand what we’re talking about when we get hammered at a
picnic and start talking about the good old days and singing Bruce
Springsteen, and they don’t understand things like this. Let’s just
go over there and see if there’s anything left. Maybe that’d help
explain it. We got the building stuff quickly enough. They won’t
have finished with what they were working on before we get
back.”

Dad looked around. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” He
rubbed my head playfully. “Darn kids think they know everything.
Let’s show her.” He picked up the M16 and stowed it in the truck’s
cab while I picked up my flashlight, and then we walked towards the
wreck of the store.

The door and window were gone, as was much of the
roof near the front of the building. We made our way in, Dad in
front, with me in between him and Mr. Caine. Without the shelter of
the roof, the clothes we first found had been reduced to piles of
rags on the floor or tatters still hanging from hangers. Mice and
rats scurried across the floor and among the rags, and some birds
fluttered up through the roof when our shoes crunched the broken
glass that covered the floor.

I tried to imagine the place and its contents. It
had obviously been a large store, so my difficulty with picturing
this many unnecessary, impractical clothes for sale—many of them
for one-time use—still persisted, or was even compounded. Whatever
clothes or pieces of clothing that were lying around had been
weathered down to an even, lifeless grey, like fading smoke or
useless, dead ash. I was still fascinated by the place; at once it
exuded the hopelessness of a cemetery and the promise of a lost,
ruined paradise.

“What colors were these clothes?” I asked softly.
The place seemed to call for a certain reverence, not like the loud
clanging and crashing we had just been making in the building
supply store. “Were there certain colors people wore to this ‘prom’
thing?”

We were shining our flashlights into the few
remaining corners of darkness, surprising a few more rodents, but
nothing more threatening.

“They could be any color, especially the girls’
dresses,” Mr. Caine ventured. “But the boys’ tuxedoes were almost
always black, and most of the girls’ dresses were white.”

I kept moving the beam of my flashlight around,
examining the wreckage for anything recognizable. “Why would boys
and girls wear opposite colors?” Again, in all my reading, I had
come across plenty of descriptions of men and women wearing quite
different clothing to the same event, but it was still jarringly
different from most of our practices, where clothes were functional
and mostly unisex.

We moved slowly and cautiously into the store, but
still found nothing other than grey rags and rodent droppings.
“White always means innocence and purity, I suppose,” Mr. Caine
speculated. “And prom always took place in the spring, so there
were probably some resonances with springtime festivals of rebirth
and courtship.”

“But then why black for the boys? It sounds like
mourning or something bad.” I knew I was nitpicking, but it really
was making so little sense to me I had to pursue it.

“Opposites attract,” my dad offered. “I don’t think
that’s changed too much.”

“I guess not.” It was a piece of folk wisdom I had
heard before, but at that point it was still part of the mystery of
boys. Having just seen the ugly, brutal version of masculinity the
day before, I didn’t want to consider their oppositeness too much,
so I filed it away for future reference.

We had made it far enough into the store that we
were now under the remnants of the roof, and the clothes there had
been protected from at least some of the elements. Here they were
recognizable as black pants and jackets, with white shirts, though
they were utterly ruined by bugs and other small animals making
their homes in them. “Who’d you go to prom with, Jonah?” my dad
asked as we inched forward.

“Carrie Talbot,” Mr. Caine answered.

I was a little surprised he hadn’t paused at all to
remember something that had happened so long ago. My dad snickered.
“Wow, must’ve made an impression on you. You didn’t have to think
one second to remember her name.”

“I certainly didn’t, because I think of her often,
though I doubt the thoughts are reciprocated at this point.” His
sense of humor was always a little weird, bordering and frequently
stepping over into the absurd, irreverent, and macabre, but once
you got used to it, it made the oddness and frustrations of life a
little more tolerable.

Dad laughed a little louder. “Well, maybe back
before she was a zombie it was mutual.”

“I doubt it, but you never know. It never hurts to
hope.”

“Was she pretty?” I asked.

“I liked her, so I thought she was very pretty,
Zoey. That’s what you think of someone when you like them.”

He’d phrased it oddly, I thought at the time, though
now it seems quite obvious to me, as an adult. “You thought she was
pretty because you liked her?”

“Of course. That’s how it works.” This was a novel
and interesting interpretation to me and I filed it away as
well.

Our flashlights glinted off something glass in front
of us. We stepped closer and saw that at the end of one long rack
against the right hand wall, an area had been separated by a glass
wall. This glass wall appeared intact. Behind it was a compartment,
like a big closet that we could see into. I got up close to it and
looked at the contents. The flashlight beams fingered across white
dresses behind the glass. Locked in their big, glass box, the
dresses were undamaged, the purest white, and not only were they
the color of snow, but most of them even sparkled like it.

I let out a low exclamation of amazement as I
realized what some of the fuss had been about. “Wow. They are
beautiful. How do they sparkle like that?”

“Sequins,” Mr. Caine explained. “There are tiny
plastic disks sewn onto the fabric and they catch the light. It
looks even better on a woman, as she moves and they twinkle.”

“I bet.” I studied the dresses. Even as breathtaking
as they were, there was something tragic about them, trapped in
there for so long, never fulfilling their purpose, always waiting,
like cocoons that never opened. Stillborn, I thought bitterly—the
whole world stillborn. How many buildings and closets were there
like this, packed with the frozen hopes of an entire world? I
understood a little bit better what the older people felt as I
gazed into that little glass sepulcher.

My dad found the glass door to the compartment and
opened it. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take some. It’ll be fun.”
Dad’s thoughts on the dresses didn’t seem as morose as mine, but I
could see where he had a point, and it would be fun to retrieve
something beautiful from this decaying wreck. He and I stepped into
the glass closet and started going through them. There wasn’t room
in there for three people, so Mr. Caine stayed out in the main part
of the store. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his
flashlight scanning the walls and racks, and it moved a little
away, as he took a couple steps. Nearer the back of the store,
there were more holes in the roof, and he moved towards the swaths
of sunlight let in by those.

As Dad and I started taking down the dresses, there
was a very loud tearing, crashing sound out where Mr. Caine was.
The beam of his flashlight was gone.

My dad shoved me to the side as he ran out of the
glass compartment. “Jonah!” he shouted.

I got out of the glass compartment and drew my
9mm.