Life Sentence

by Kim Paffenroth

  As I was reading, I noticed someone from the new batch of people had approached my cubicle. At first I kept reading, as the other people had always just shuffled by without really noticing or trying to interact with me. But this person stood near me, swaying slightly and looking at me, so I put the book down, so as not to be rude, and because now I was curious about this new neighbor.

  I don't suppose staring at her was any less rude, but I didn't know what else to do at first. I already knew speaking was out of the question. Smiling hadn't seemed to work properly with Milton and Will, and motions of my head or shrugging could only work if she asked me something, which seemed highly unlikely. So I sat just observing her.

  She was in a summer dress, faded to a grey with darker splotches so you couldn't tell what the pattern or color had been. Her left side was terribly mangled, a stretch of bloody cloth mixed with torn flesh from her neck to her abdomen. Her left breast might have been in there somewhere, but it was indistinguishable. On top of this mess, her head tilted to the left side and slightly forward. Her blond hair was pulled down on that side and was stuck to her left eye and to her neck with dried blood. Her right eye was a brilliant blue. It didn't sparkle, of course-none of our eyes do since we don't have tears to moisten them, which was something else I envied the people who can speak-but it was a couple shades darker than the sky on a sunny day. It was how I imagined an uncut and unpolished sapphire would look, though I had to admit I only remembered the word "sapphire" and that it was a kind of bright, blue jewel; I did not recollect actually seeing one myself. And this one tiny disk of perfect, living blue around a black pinprick was now fixed on me, and I could feel its intensity and vitality filling me up.

  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.

  Chapter 7

  A few days later, I went out with my mom to a s
maller 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.

  I wasn't sure if Mom and Dad had ever talked to Max's parents, so I wasn't totally sure what his dad's aloofness towards me meant. I always wondered how much the parents went along with their kids' ideas of who was a weird or undesirable member of the group. I mostly looked at my bike as he opened the door to the warehouse and escorted us through.

  "Have fun. Be careful," he said as he opened the other door to let us out.

  We got back on our bikes and pedaled away as the big door clattered closed behind us. I looked over my shoulder, back at the brick wall. There were eight small, dull-green rectangles on this side of the wall-four on the ground, and four on brick shelves built into the wall about five feet up. I couldn't read the writing from this distance, but I knew what it said on each of them-"FRONT TOWARD ENEMY." Claymores. Not the sword-though I'd seen one of those at the museum, and not even my dad was strong enough to run around swinging that as a weapon. These were M18A1 anti-personnel mines. One and a half pounds of C-4 and seven hundred tiny steel balls behind a plastic casing. They were set to be triggered by the roof guard, rather than with anything as dangerous and indiscriminate as tripwires-or what the manual termed "Victim Initiated Detonation." Apparently, in the old days, such mines were just left lying around, ready for a victim-like a child-to detonate them. Even with the mindless dead wandering around, I couldn't imagine being that callous and brutal. Dad, of course, had pointed all this out to me; he made me read the operations manuals for nearly every weapon we owned
, and for many we didn't. As with learning to fight with sticks, my knowledge of lethal-or even just harmful-things extended far beyond what was only useful against the walking dead.

  Pedaling between the two buildings, for the next few seconds Mom and I would be in this gate's kill zone, or what the manual termed "the area of optimal lethality and coverage." If everything-and I mean absolutely everything-fell apart and there was a real horde of thousands bearing down on us, the guards were supposed to try and lure them into this area between the two buildings and in front of the wall, rather than let them bang away on the softer targets of the building walls, which even undead hands could probably break through pretty easily at this point, given the inevitable rust and rot from twelve years of lowered maintenance. Considering how the dead herded together, this would pack a few hundred walking bodies into a rectangular area that would then have thousands of little steel balls flying through the length of it at very high velocity. No guaranteeing how many would hit heads, but definitely some, and enough of the rest would just ruin someone's day, as my dad would put it. I was proud to know all this, and glad to have it here, just in case, but I was also really glad when Mom and I cleared the edge of the buildings and were in a land of less lethal constructions and more living sights.

  The roads out here weren't completely cleared of wrecks, so we slowly weaved between them as we pedaled down the road. Plants grew up through the pavement everywhere. The decaying suburbs and industrial parks around the perimeter of the city trailed off into farmland and countryside, dotted with partly collapsed hulks of buildings being reclaimed by the land. Some of the fields here were cultivated, corn mostly, with some wheat and a little bit of cotton, and some fields were left to grow as grass for livestock. On the right the rows of an orchard stood out. The grass between the trees had been kept down, and there were even rows of smaller trees, planted recently to replace the old ones as they gave out. Butterflies and moths flittered everywhere, and a few cows and sheep grazed in one field, but we didn't see or hear any people.