Life Sentence (3 page)

Will shrugged. “All right.”

And so we marched on. It took us a couple days. At
night some of the people would wander away, and Milton would bring
them back in the morning. But they couldn’t get far in the dark,
and mostly we sat down at night and didn’t move. Will would climb a
tree or something else, like a billboard or an electrical tower, in
order to sleep and to keep away from us.

By the time we got to our destination, the men and
the dogs had separated us into two groups of about ten each. I
hoped, given Milton’s description, that my group wasn’t going into
the prison. Some of the other people had already hit and growled at
me when we were walking before. We got to a gate in a huge fence
that ran for what seemed like miles around a big building. I
guessed this was the prison. The area behind the fence seemed to
hold thousands of people like me who couldn’t talk. They pressed up
against the fence, or milled about, or sat on the ground. The man
called Milton unlocked the gate and the other group of ten filed
through. Milton relocked the gate, and he turned to our group and
led us away.

We walked again, across a highway with many empty
cars and trucks on it, across fields, and we eventually came to
another high fence. Milton unlocked the gate in this fence, let us
enter, and locked it behind us. At first we tried to push against
the fence, but that didn’t make much sense to me after a short
while. It was nicer here than at the prison, as it wasn’t crowded.
But I still didn’t like being locked in. I wondered if it was just
a nicer prison, since I hadn’t attacked and eaten as many people as
some of the others.

Mostly, I just wanted something to do, so I went
looking around the little buildings inside the fence. The buildings
were low and narrow, and they had these doors that slid up, like a
garage door, only there were lots of doors down each long side of
each little building. When we first got here, the big sign above
the buildings read “MINI STORAGE,” but it blew down in a storm
after that. The sliding doors were all locked. I think I lost track
of which ones I’d tried and which I hadn’t, but I’m pretty sure
after a couple days that I’d tried every door. I had hoped there
was something inside the buildings, even though I didn’t know what
to expect or what I really wanted. I just knew I wanted something
to do besides sit there with the others, and I had hoped the doors
into the buildings would provide something.

And I remember very distinctly, on that day when I
knew I was stuck there and none of the doors would open, that it
was raining. I sat under the little overhang by one of the sliding
doors. Though I don’t exactly mind being wet, I vaguely remember
that it’s something I’m not supposed to like. “Vaguely remember”? I
usually think that’s the only kind of remembering I do now, but I
suddenly had a very vivid memory of something called crying, and it
was what I wanted to do then. But I knew as soon as I thought of it
that it was even more lost to me than speech was, so I just sighed
and sat there as it got dark and cold and the rain kept on through
the night.

The next day the sun rose on a beautiful, clear,
warm morning. I got up and started trying the doors again, in case
I had missed one, but mostly just to have something to do. I heard
a sound behind me, and I turned to see that it was the younger man,
Will. He was watching me. I pulled on the door handle as I looked
at him, trying to make him understand I wanted to open it.

He shook his head and smiled grimly. “Nobody in
there to eat, fella, just somebody’s old stuff. Sit down and
relax.”

I shook my head as I looked at him. The others
inside with me went to the fence near him and pressed against it,
so he had to run to one side of them to see me again. “Did you
shake your head at me?” he shouted, before running back to the
other side of the little crowd as it shuffled over and blocked his
view of me again. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I pulled on the door and in my mind I said, “Why,
yes, I do, and could you please open this door?” but all that came
out was a pained roar, so then I nodded instead.

He looked very surprised, and he stepped back and
sat away from the fence until Milton joined him. I could hear them
talking again. I envied them, that they could talk so easily to one
another, make themselves understood by another person, rather than
being trapped, alone, in their own minds. “I think one of them
understands what I say!” Will said.

Milton stepped towards the fence, and the others on
my side of the barrier shuffled away from him. Milton looked
surprised, though pleased in a way. “Really? Which one?”

Will pointed to me. “That one, the guy wearing the
suit with his guts all ripped out, sitting by the door to one of
the storage units. I just was playing with him, and I said there
wasn’t anyone in there to eat, he should leave the door alone, and
he shook his head, like he understood. Then I asked him if he
understood, and he nodded!”

Milton now looked at me. “And just as importantly,
Will, it sounds like he didn’t want to open the door just to find
someone to eat! This was another thing I dared hope for—that if we
got the less aggressive ones alone, they might be able to remember
more and think more clearly.”

Milton smiled at me, and I knew he was even kinder
than I had thought before. I tried to smile back, but judging by
how they both grimaced, I thought it was probably another one of
the things I had forgotten to do the right way.

Most days that spring I spent a lot of time with my
dad. As a twelve-year-old, it was my time to take my first vows of
service to our community. Milton, Mr. Caine, my mom, and all the
adults would teach me, give me advice, help me adjust to new
expectations and new responsibilities. But, of course, the bulk of
the responsibility for my training fell on my dad. He relished it,
I know, as he would in a couple years when he had to train my
younger brother, Roger. My dad has always loved teaching and
helping people, and the fact that we were family made it all the
sweeter to him. It helped that most of the training was “guy
stuff,” as he put it, and he was proficient in those kinds of
activities. He’d laugh and say that even in the “regular” world—his
world, the old world—he probably would’ve tried to make his
daughter into a “tomboy” (another of his archaic phrases), but now
the community expected him to do so. It was as if that made it okay
and he didn’t need to feel bad about it.

And of course he wasn’t the only one who enjoyed it.
We both did. We were together and in the outdoors and having
fun—hunting, fishing, tracking. If most of the time the world could
seem desolate and abandoned and lonely, at least for part of that
spring we could feel like there was the right number of people in
it—namely, two—safe, alive, and devoted to one another. On those
days I didn’t mind how my dad looked at me differently; that gaze
drew out something strong, harsh, and unforgiving from deep inside
me. I didn’t feel his expectation like a burden or an imposition,
but like how I think he’s always meant it—as the deepest expression
of his love, as his admiration and hope for me. And like every
girl, whatever her situation and whatever her dad’s expectations,
all I wanted to do was please him—again, even if I didn’t fully
understand or appreciate it at the time.

But it was hard on my mom, seeing me gravitate to my
dad so much. She also taught me a lot of the things that needed to
be done for us to survive—sewing, weaving, gardening, gathering
fruits and nuts and herbs in the summer, then canning, drying, and
smoking all the food we’d need for winter. She was one of the few
people with any medical training, and it had to double for both
people and animals, so as the numbers of both people and livestock
grew, she’d take me around to help with all the various births. I’d
seen more than my share of human and animal babies born by the time
I was twelve, and many more since. Like everyone, my mom had
adjusted to this new life and had found strengths and skills she
never knew she had.

Life was harder on her than it was on my dad. It was
hard on people like Mr. Caine and Milton, too. Mr. Caine had been a
professor and Milton had been a scientist, and now they lived in a
world where those skill sets weren’t in demand, and they’d had to
retool in middle age.

But for Mr. Caine or my dad or many of the other
people, even the older people, life without the things they’d been
used to had some small benefits, even though everyone was always
quick to add that they weren’t worth the awful price in blood. Our
world was far more dangerous and uncomfortable, but it was also
more free, less hectic, in many ways less anxious or burdensome
than the one they’d lived in. Mr. Caine and my dad and others would
sometimes laugh at a lot of obsolete things I had very little
understanding of—student loans, credit cards, mortgages, car
payments—all of which, apparently, had made their former lives
often unpleasant, and which had magically disappeared twelve years
ago. In fact, I am told they had all disappeared the day before I
was born.

My mom seemed to have less vivid or numerous
memories of the bad parts of the old world, and less appreciation
for any of the good points of the new. She’s always loved me and my
dad and my brother—I’m not saying she doesn’t, or that it’s any
less than we feel—but more of her had shut down the day her world
died, and she’d always have more regrets than other people. She
held on to old customs more than most people. She wore her hair
long, for example, while most everyone else kept their hair short,
just for comfort and convenience and hygiene. She kept me in
frilly, girly clothes way longer than most moms did, if they even
bothered to do so at all when their girls were very young. And once
the city around the museum was cleared and we went looking for a
home, I know she picked the one she did because it had a piano in
it, even though she came up with other reasons.

A few people knew how to play more practical
instruments, like guitars—instruments that you could carry around
easily, and fix and tune on your own. A piano was probably not the
best choice for an instrument with a future in our world, but Mom
remembered how to play, and she wanted one. Roger and I both
learned how to play, along with some other kids whose parents made
them come over for lessons, and maybe now there will be pianos and
piano-players in the next generation. But all her gestures, as
beautiful and true as they were, always had that touch of the
poignant, the nostalgic, the sunset rather than the sunrise.

Learning to play the piano had some other collateral
benefits for me. The other kids started calling me “Piano Girl,”
which may not sound like much of a nickname, but I was so relieved
to get it after spending my first years being called “Zombie Girl.”
I don’t think a five-year-old girl ever got in as many fights as I
did.

I was always kind of tall and gawky, and my black
hair and pale skin didn’t help, but worst of all I was adopted, and
the identity of my biological parents was a matter of dark, morbid,
sinister speculation. After I would have a fight with other kids,
Mom and Dad would talk to the other kids’ parents, of course, but
it didn’t make any difference. They might take a day off, but then
they’d be back at it, saying my real mom was a zombie and my real
dad was crazy, and I’d start punching kids till they beat me down,
then I’d come home and say I’d fallen and refuse to identify who
did it.

Given what I’ve heard and read since, it looks like
some things didn’t change so much between the old world and the
new, but unfortunately, it seemed to be some of the ugly parts that
stayed the same. So by teaching me piano, my mom indirectly helped
me to get picked on less, and Dad helped more directly by teaching
me how to fight, no matter how often he protested in front of my
mom that I was supposed to “just walk away.” When I was ten, I got
taller and bigger than most of the other kids my age, especially
the boys, so Piano Girl was getting along a lot better and more
peacefully than Zombie Girl had.

Teaching me to fight led naturally into training me
for my first vows to the community. I remember one day shortly
before my vows—which were scheduled, as was tradition, to take
place on the summer solstice. Dad and I went out to the big field
to practice. It was an oddly beautiful place for the kind of
practicing we had been doing there since I was little, and which
we’d increased now with my vows approaching. It was an idyllic
place, with butterflies flitting about and the steady drone of
grasshoppers. It was much like the field where I thought I
remembered being attacked, though it wasn’t the same one. The grass
was only just above my knees now. This one had no woods nearby, at
least not big ones, but just scraggly little trees scattered in
clumps. One big hickory tree stood in the middle of the field; in
the fall, we would gather its nuts, and among the smaller trees
there were lots of blackberry bushes that we’d pick later in the
summer. Neither of the field’s offerings was in season that day,
however, and it was not a day for such peaceful pursuits.

We found our spot with the grass still matted down
and brass casings all over the ground. It was about thirty yards
from the big hickory, from which my dad had hung an old, cast iron
frying pan years ago. We faced the big tree as we got our stuff
out. There was a light breeze and it wouldn’t be too hot today,
though it had warmed up enough for me to take off the coarse woolen
jacket made by my mom. About thirty yards to our right was an old
wooden fence, and my dad and I had set four coffee cans on top of
it as we’d walked into the field. The same distance to our left was
the rusted hulk of a tractor. My dad took four more coffee cans and
handed them to me. I walked over to the tractor and set those cans
on top of it.