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.
I stepped towards where Mr. Caine had been. I couldn't see my dad now, either. I had been holding the flashlight under my arm when we were looking at the dresses; with my free hand, I racked the gun's slide, then took the flashlight in my right hand to see better. There was a large, jagged hole in the floor. It must've collapsed and Mr. Caine had fallen through. A huge cloud of dust had shot up and filled the upper room now, making me cough. In the beam of my flashlight, the tiny particles swirled up and around in a graceful dance.
I stepped closer to the hole and shined my flashlight into it. Both men were down there. I don't know if Dad had slipped into the hole by accident, or if he had just immediately jumped in to help Mr. Caine. They were both covered in dust and up to their knees in debris. Both were trying to get up and get a firmer footing.
My back and neck went cold and prickly when the moaning started.
Chapter 20
As the sun rose, Will climbed down from the billboard and we followed the tire tracks again. After walking for some ways, I noticed there were more buildings and more empty vehicles on the road. It seemed we were moving into the ruins of a city. Eventually it became impossible for Will to detect the tire tracks, since the roads were not as overgrown here. The men who had attacked Will's friends must've come from somewhere in this city, but now we couldn't be sure where. We sat on the bumper of an old car and Will thought about what to do.
"This is about as far as I've ever been," he said as he looked around. "I know Milton tried to clear the city even farther, but no one besides him has been out here, since there are still a lot of you people around. And he hasn't been over this way lately. I know there's a big river if you keep going east, so let's head that way. Maybe we'll see something."
We made our way through the city. It was terribly eerie being among so many empty buildings, with almost no sounds and absolutely no one around. There must've been so many people here before, and now they were all gone. I suppose most of them were dead, while a very few were in Will's community, some of them were in the prisons where Milton had led them, and some were just standing around, as I had been doing before Milton found me. So now all of these buildings and things just sat here-dead, decaying, disappearing.
I wondered at all the things that must be inside the buildings-the remnants of people's lives, dying slightly slower deaths than their owners, lingering longer and even more pitifully. It was much worse than when Will had led us through the town near our home and I had seen some of the collapsed buildings there. In this city there were thousands of them, and even more vehicles lying around, broken and useless. There was a slight whistling sound as the wind cut through the streets and around the buildings, almost like breathing, though this was irregular, labored, and spasmodic.
The only really tall buildings were in a cluster off to our left; we were moving through a neighborhood of smaller buildings. Will extended his arm to make us stop walking, and he crouched behind the cab of a cement mixer. Lucy and I followed him. "There's one of those flags up ahead," he whispered. "In front of a building."
I peeked around the side of the cement mixer. The flag was identical to the one on the men's truck-two wavy blue lines, a red handprint, and a red sun. This time it was on a flagpole. The wrecked vehicles in the street prevented me from seeing what else there was around there.
I looked to Will and saw that he was obviously considering what to do next. He looked up at the truck we were hiding behind, then climbed up on the running board to look inside. He opened the door and I watched him as he rummaged around inside the truck. He climbed down and was holding two hard hats, the kind construction workers wear. "It's not much, but maybe it'll give you some protection," he said as he put one on my head, one on Lucy's. "I shouldn't have brought you along, but I didn't want to detour back to your place. I wanted to catch up with these guys so badly after what they did. I'm sorry to put you all in danger."
I looked over at Lucy. We both appeared ridiculous, of course, wearing the battered, old hard hats. Her look was more sinister, however, her chin still stained and streaked with pink. Even if the hat precariously bobbed above her small, delicate face, there was still the hint of savagery and violence about her. It always frightened me. But her eye was as serene as ever, and I took heart. We both nodded at Will.
"All right," he said. "I don't know exactly what's going to happen. I'm going to get closer to the building. There are plenty of vehicles in the street for me to hide behind. You two stay here. If I don't come back, then please, just go back along this street. Follow it out of the city. Don't go near anyone or they'll probably try to kill you. And try not to get hit in the head, okay? I'd feel so bad if you two got hurt."
As usual, I thought he was being so nice to us. We really owed all our freedom to him, so why would we blame him for anything? We could've been killed many times before he even found us, and at least he'd given us a chance to learn who we were, and also a chance to make ourselves useful and help people. It would be absurdly ungrateful for us to feel ill-used or mistreated by him at this point.
I watched Will make his way quickly between the vehicles till he was out of sight. Then I just stood by the cement mixer with Lucy and waited. Although I wasn't mad at Will for what ha
d happened, or what was happening now, I did find myself longing for the safety of my little cubicle with Lucy, to hear her violin and read my books and just rest beside her. I was thinking how at least we seemed safe for the moment, when, without warning, a man came around the side of the cement mixer. He must have been treading quietly, or perhaps my hearing was not well-attuned, or maybe I had been too distracted with my apprehensive thoughts, because I never heard his steps until he was right on top of us.
The man was dressed much like Will was, his jacket and pants made of a patchwork of fabric and reinforced with bits of metal. He carried a rifle. Actually, I don't know anything about guns-it might have been a shotgun. What I mean is that it wasn't a handgun, but a gun with a long barrel that you carry with both hands.
He looked as shocked as I felt when he first saw us. He immediately raised the barrel of the gun towards Lucy's face. I was between them, and much as I had the day before, I didn't think, I just reacted. I grabbed the barrel and pushed it away. He fired, and the bullet hit the pavement beside Lucy.
Still holding the gun with my right hand, I clawed at his face with my left. He gave a cry of pain and staggered back, letting go of the gun. He tripped over some debris and fell backwards. I found myself holding this ugly, unfamiliar thing in my right hand. I flipped the gun around, so I was holding it by the stock instead of the barrel. The wooden stock felt somewhat better, more natural than the smooth, metal barrel, but to me it still felt like some venomous, malignant thing.
Lucy had taken a step forward. I thought she meant to attack the man as she had done in the woods, for I saw she had snatched up a metal bar from the ground. This time, I was afraid and didn't want her to; I didn't think it was right in this case-we had no idea, really, if this man had done anything wrong, even though Will clearly thought these people in the city were allied with the men who had attacked the women the day before. So I extended my right arm, still holding the gun, to block Lucy's progress. She looked over at me and growled, but stayed where she was. Her mouth always looked so hideous and inhuman at these moments; it was only her eye that gave me any confidence or hope.
Life Sentence Page 18