Life Sentence

by Kim Paffenroth

  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.

  Chapter 13

  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 bel
ief.) 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.

  Back in the classroom everything was as I had left it-Mr. Enders struggling weakly, Ms. Wright pushing against the table to keep him contained.

  She told me to set the muzzle and cuffs down, which I did, and she braced the table with her hip as I helped her put on the gloves. I put my pair on as well, and she looked around to figure out how best to contain Mr. Enders.

  "All right, Zoey. Stand back and be ready with the muzzle and cuffs. This isn't going to be pretty, so just be ready for that."

  She let go of the pressure on the table. Mr. Enders started to push it back, but he was slow and he was only working with his right arm. Ms. Wright stepped around quickly and shoved the table out of the way with her left foot, tipping it over. Then with a snarl she smashed him in the side of the face with her fist. It wasn't a jab, but a powerful roundhouse, her whole body uncoiling deliberately since there was little chance of a zombie blocking a punch. It took me by surprise-how fast, strong, and savage a blow she could deliver. As dangerous as Mr. Enders now was, it was pathetic and brutalizing to see him beaten to the ground. Worse still, in a way, was how gracefully and beautifully Ms. Wright attacked, little different in form, if not intent, from the dances we had been practicing. I suppose that's one of the things I learned that afternoon-that life is not just heavy inertia, but equally the mesmerizing, beautiful dance of violence.

  The first blow knocked Mr. Enders off balance, and Ms. Wright followed up with another roundhouse as she stepped forward and tripped him up with her leg.

  He landed facedown on the floor, and she straddled his back, looking to me for the restraints. She grabbed his writhing right arm and pushed her knee against his right leg, so he couldn't get the leverage to roll over.

  I quickly stepped over to them. As I knelt in front of Mr. Enders, his clouded eyes seemed pleading, but the snarl that he now gave was only bestial rage.

  The muzzle was simple-a sack made of heavy cloth. I forced it over his head and tied the bag's drawstring tightly. Ms. Wright handcuffed him, binding his hands behind his back. I was glad the whole thing was over quickly.

  We stood Mr. Enders up and dragged him into the hall. I tossed the couple of mops and brooms out of a janitor's closet, and we were shoving him in there when more people finally showed up. They barricaded the closet door and set a guard on it till final arrangements could be made.

  Two days later, much of the community gathered at the cemetery where I had taken my vows. Mr. Enders and Ms. Dresden's baby were taken in a special truck for safety reasons, and we drove Ms. Dresden. I saw many people in the crowd I had not seen in a while, including Will. It was nice of them to show their respect, though I suspected most of them were there because of the kindly, harmless Mr. Enders, and not for the scandalous Rachel and her illegitimate child. I tried to tamp down my anger as useless, misspent energy.

  The ceremony was not nearly as involved as my vows ceremony had been. Most of
the preparations or ways that we eased the transition from life to death seemed futile and ineffective, especially for those still alive; they had to work through the grief on their own, and in their own way, for a long time after the actual funeral. And we had to admit, I think, that our situation took a lot of the mystery out of death. It was hard to imagine the elaborate rituals or speeches at funerals that I had read about in books, when our funerals include the dead person, thrashing against his bonds and trying to kill us. In our world, the dead demand some respect and attention on their own; we've tried to find a way to give them that, without causing more pain and killing. Whatever we did seemed far preferable to killing them outright once they were restrained, which sounded utterly monstrous and inhuman to me.

  Milton ushered the dead away from the cemetery gate. Dad and another armed guard led the restrained Mr. Enders into the graveyard, removed the muzzle and handcuffs, and let him take his place with the others, as he fled into the crowd to get away from Milton.

  The interment of dead children was trickier. It had to be done quickly and carefully, but the parents were allowed to set the child down among the dead themselves. My dad handed Ms. Dresden her baby, wrapped just with a towel and not taped up like a mummy. With my dad and the other guard flanking her, Ms. Dresden quickly moved into the enclosure behind Milton. They led her to a small mausoleum near the entrance, where she could lay her baby at the door, under the stone overhang. Milton had made a little bed or nest out of leaves and flowers to make it as gentle and easy as possible on the mother, even if there was little reason to think it mattered to the baby. Though there was no telling what would happen to the creature in its new home, the dead were unlikely to hurt one another, and the ones herding away from Milton were fairly careful, if clumsy, around the smaller ones among them. Ms. Dresden bent down, kissed the middle and forefinger of her right hand, and pressed them to the baby's forehead. The men led her out of the cemetery and locked it up.