Life Sentence (26 page)

“Daddy!” Nothing in the cabin had given me such
uncontrollable, unrestrained panic and terror. It was the only time
I got close to losing it, and I’ve often thought since then how it
was way too close for all of us. I shouldn’t have done that, but
there was no way not to, I think.

You always hear how in those situations, it’s as
though things happen in slow motion. I don’t really remember it
that way, but it’s possible, I guess. As I’ve said, memory is
funny. I mostly remember, after my initial shriek, that things
appeared so clear and precise, even though the room was still full
of swirling dust that was making my eyes and throat burn. My dad
and Mr. Caine were trying to stand up amidst the wreckage. Both
were also trying to draw their weapons. But there were two hands on
Dad’s right arm, and because of his uneven footing in the debris,
he was having trouble drawing his gun, or breaking away from the
groping hands.

I moved my beam slightly to the right and found the
head that was guiding the two hands. Hairless, sexless, faded—it
looked more like a ghost than a zombie. But there are no ghosts.
There are only our monsters, and they’re human, in their own way.
They’re not wisps that come through walls—they’re completely solid
and human. And when you shine a light in the eyes of someone who’s
been in a basement for twelve years, they have to falter for a
second. No fear in those lifeless eyes, but for a moment, surprise
and blindness.

I squeezed the trigger. More grey, faded matter shot
out the back of its head and it fell away from my dad. I felt none
of the visceral, savage satisfaction I had gotten the previous day
when I saw those evil men killed, but only the most intense
relief.

My dad and Mr. Caine freed both their weapons from
their holsters. I swept my flashlight around to the right, where
I’d shot the one zombie, and there didn’t seem to be any more on
that side. Dad and Mr. Caine pointed their flashlights to the left
and opened fire. It was one long roar for several seconds. Then it
stopped. No more moaning, just the small, animal pant of the
living. Then a slight scraping sound, and a rasping.

“You missed one,” my dad said to Mr. Caine. He held
up his gun. “I’m out.”

Mr. Caine trained his flashlight on a hand that was
moving slightly, then slid the beam up and over to the head. There
was one more shot, and everything was silent again.

My dad slid another magazine into his gun. “You
okay?” he asked Mr. Caine.

“Yeah,” Mr. Caine said, also reloading.

“Haven’t done that in a long time. Kind of lets you
know you’re alive, having to shoot the place up.”

Mr. Caine holstered his reloaded weapon. “Yeah, I
know what you mean. But I think I could tolerate a more boring,
less invigorating life, if it meant not having to go through
that.”

Dad nodded. “Yeah.” He looked up at me. “You
okay?”

I kept my own weapon out, pointed down. I could feel
myself losing it again. “I don’t know. Just get out of there.”

“Sure thing, kiddo,” Dad said as he reached up. I
holstered my gun so I could take his hand and help him out of the
hole. He then helped Mr. Caine climb out.

I threw my arms around my dad, letting myself lose
control for just a second. “I thought for sure you were going to
die,” I sobbed into his chest. “I couldn’t stand it.”

He ran his big, calloused hand over my head, and
made those shushing noises people do when someone else is crying. I
had made them the other night with Ms. Dresden. They seemed
universal, and while not wholly adequate to the situation, they
were usually enough to nudge the person back to normalcy and calm.
“It’s okay,” he said between shushing.

It only took me a second to regain control.
Something inside me eased, the tension and pain fell below some
threshold, and I knew I had cried the right amount and should stop
now. I stepped back from my dad and shined my flashlight into the
hole, running it across the tangle of limbs, then up the walls to
where their brains were now glistening, lumpy stains. I brought it
back down and let it settle on the one I had shot. It had been a
man, and the impact had sent him crumpling to his side, almost in a
fetal position.

“They sat down there for twelve years,” I said very
softly. “How could anyone do that, just sit there? In the dark. I’d
go crazy.”

“Anyone would,” Mr. Caine offered, as both he and my
dad rubbed my back and shoulders. “Maybe they did, too. We don’t
know.”

“To sit there, for twelve years, and then to just
have your head blown off.” I was biting my lower lip. It was an old
nervous habit I’d mostly gotten rid of. “It doesn’t make any sense.
If they were just going to die anyway, why have them sit there, why
not have them just die back when it first started?”

My feelings were vague and hard to put into words,
but I think my dad and Mr. Caine felt the unfairness and absurdity
just as much as I did. Indeed, Mr. Caine was the main person who
had taught me to have such a keen eye for those qualities in the
world. “I know, Zoey,” Mr. Caine said very quietly, almost in a
whisper. “It was their special torment—their fate, I guess people
would say. We don’t know why. I’m fairly sure they didn’t know why,
either. Maybe it was better that they didn’t know.”

“But there was a reason?”

I wished I could see his eyes and his smile, but it
was too dark and dusty in there. Mr. Caine’s expression always made
me feel more confident when he posed these questions in class, the
way I was posing them that day. “I hope so, Zoey. No one can decide
that for you. But I’ve always thought you knew much more about
these things than other people do. And I don’t know the reason for
that, either. I just know it when I look at you.”

I nodded. I remembered what Milton had said on the
night of my vows, how maybe it would be possible for me to have
faith. I also remembered how before my vows, I had felt I was in
the presence of something just as mysterious and powerful as it was
familiar and trustworthy. I didn’t feel that way now, but the
memory gave me some confidence and comfort. I took my flashlight
off the dead man. “I feel so sorry for them. But I had to save
you.”

My dad hugged me again. “I know, honey. You did what
you had to.” It was funny, always doing what you have to. I
wondered if people ever got to do just what they wanted to do.

We started to move back out of the store. My dad
steered me toward the glass compartment again. “I know it’s not as
nice now, but maybe we should get some of the stuff anyway,” he
said meekly. He was right—he had incredibly bad timing, but he was
as practical and right as he always was. Rescuing something
beautiful from this slaughterhouse and tomb was even more important
and significant than it had been before. Not that we thought pretty
dresses could make up for or offset the ugliness, but just that
they might keep the brutality from overwhelming us completely.

Oddly, I remembered a song my mom had sung to me
when I was a baby: it said something about how you should
“accentuate the positive,” except some of the syllables were
stretched out to fit the tune and it made them sound funny.

Each of us took as many dresses as we could carry
and loaded them in the back of the truck. They looked funny, draped
over the dull metal poles and fencing. As Dad pulled down the truck
door, a voice called out to us from the parking lot. “You three,
lay down your weapons!”

My dad instantly shoved me and Mr. Caine around to
the right side of the truck, which was facing the building. Shots
exploded around us, ricocheting off the pavement and tearing into
the side of the truck.

Mr. Caine drew his gun and stood by the back right
wheel, while my dad pushed me to a crouch behind the front wheel,
behind the protection of the engine block. If the shooters were
using rifles, the thin metal skin of the rest of the truck wouldn’t
offer any real cover.

My dad pressed against my shoulders as he leaned
down and looked me in the eyes. “This is bad,” he said quickly,
evenly. He was scared, the way I had been for him back in the
store. “People with guns are much worse than zombies. I love you,
Zoey. You do whatever it takes to stay alive, you hear me?”

I nodded. He let go of me and I drew my 9mm again.
It was hard to tell if we were in worse danger now than we had been
in the store, but since my dad was right next to me and not in a
hole full of dead people, it certainly didn’t seem as bad.

My dad opened the door to the cab of the truck and
leaned inside. I heard more shots as the windshield and the
driver’s side window exploded, but my dad emerged with the M16. It
had a long, forty-round magazine in it, and another one taped to
the first magazine. My dad closed the truck door and nodded
slightly at me. There were no more shots for a few seconds.

“Hey,” my dad shouted, “didn’t you have enough
yesterday? Why do you want to mess with us again? And this time
it’s not just a woman and two girls. So why don’t you all just back
up and let us go about our business?”

There was a long pause. Then a man shouted, “What
are you talking about? We were attacked a couple days ago, and we
just heard that we were attacked again this morning. You people
need to throw your weapons out. We should’ve just shot you, but we
saw the little girl.”

“We’ll be keeping our weapons,” my dad shouted back,
“so it looks like we have a problem.”

Another pause, though not as long as the first. “We
don’t know who you are. And we’ve been attacked twice, with people
hurt and killed. So I say you need to throw down your weapons.”

“Well, we were attacked yesterday, and I don’t know
who you are, so I’m damn sure not giving up my weapon,” Dad
replied. “And I will cut down any of you who tries to come closer.
We can wait, and more of our people will come looking for us, and
then you’ll have a real war on.”

“No one wants that,” came the reply. “Can one of you
come out to talk? The others can stay behind the truck, with their
weapons.”

My dad looked over to Mr. Caine, then down at me.
“That’s probably as good an offer as we’re going to get,” he said
to me quietly. He tilted his head back and shouted, “All right.
I’ll come out and talk.”

My dad handed me the M16, bent down and kissed my
head. “Don’t do anything crazy to try and protect me,” he said.
“Just stay put. But anyone comes around this truck but me, shoot
them in the face.”

He walked to the back of the truck and handed his
Beretta to Mr. Caine. They spoke in low tones, but I could hear
them. “It’s like déjà vu from eleven years ago, fighting to keep
this kid alive and get her home,” my dad said. He glanced back at
me. “Always good to have something worth fighting for. I know
you’ll do whatever you have to, Jonah, just like you did then. I’m
sorry I got you and her in this mess.”

“Not your fault, Jack,” Mr. Caine responded. “Just
talk some sense into them if you can. Maybe they’re not the ones
who attacked Fran and the kids. There’s no point anybody dying here
today.”

I watched my dad walk around the side of the truck,
then I just listened. It sounded like Dad was talking to a man
close by.

“Who are you people?” the other man asked.

“We’re from a nearby city. We’ve been barricaded in
there since the outbreak. We haven’t seen other people from outside
our community for years, until yesterday, when some men broke
through our fence and attacked us. We killed them, then we came
here, looking for more supplies to repair the fence. Then you
started shooting at us.”

“These men who attacked you, did they have a
vehicle?”

“Yes, a dump truck. There were six of them. They had
a flag, with wavy lines, a handprint, and a sun.”

“Those sound like the men who attacked one of our
outposts. A child escaped from that massacre and described them.
That’s our flag that you described. They took it as a trophy when
they attacked our people.”

“And who, exactly, are you people?”

“We are from the River Nation. We’ve lived on
islands up and down the river since the day the dead rose.
Gradually, the people got more organized, came together as a group
to defend ourselves and find more supplies. And recently, we’ve
been able to move about a little on the mainland. There seem to be
less of the dead in this area lately, and we thought it was safe to
establish villages here, until we were attacked.”

“Yes, there are fewer dead around because we’ve been
rounding them up, to make the area safer.”

“You round the dead up? So you can dispose of
them?”

“Well, no, we’ve found places to lock them up, keep
them contained so they can’t attack us.”

There was a longer pause in the conversation at that
point. “You keep the living dead around? You don’t destroy
them?”

“Not if we can help it.”

Another pause. “That’s very strange. We’re not
sure—the report just came in and it was very confused—but someone
said that in the attack today, the man who shot at our people was
seen with two zombies. The zombies attacked one of our men, but
they didn’t attack the stranger. They ran off with him. That’s who
we were looking for when we found you. Is this some plan of yours,
to train and lead zombies to attack other people?”

“No, of course not. We didn’t know there were other
people until yesterday. And we don’t train zombies. We just put
them somewhere and lock them up, so we don’t have to kill them.
Those assholes in the dump truck attacked you people, then they
attacked us, and we killed them.”

“And what about today’s attack?”

“That I know nothing about,” my dad answered
truthfully. “I think we just need to calm down and stop pointing
guns.”

Knowing of Will and his zombie friends, I had to say
something. “Dad?” I called out over the hood of the truck, but
without coming out from cover.