by Chris Pasley
Conyers raised an eyebrow. "Didn't I?"
"N - No. You didn't."
The Principal thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Let's let you in the classroom then, why don't we?" He gestured for his guards to cover me and he fished a ring of keys any janitor you've ever met would be jealous of out of his pocket and, without looking, selected the proper key for the door."Code Authorization A76549B. Princpal Conyers."
The door creaked open and the teacher backed even further away. "You vouch for this kid, Principal?"
Conyers gestured for me to come forward, but when I made to push past him he gave a quick signal and there was an MP5 in my face. "I told you not to touch me again," Conyers growled low. "You need to learn the value of private space, son."
He turned to the teacher. "Mr. Jarvis. I apologize; we must definitely do all we can to ensure that in the future, should young Mr....Crafty need an exception Code Authorization, he will actually see fit to remember it."
The teacher nodded. "We absolutely must."
I stood there agape. "But you never - "
"Go on then, find a seat," Conyers barked.
Under the stare of every student in the room I slunk to the back where one broken desk sat, its writing surface split in half and missing. I sank into it, praying that the class could continue now.
"Kiss-ass," I heard one kid mutter.
It may be hard to fathom why I held that first day in such high regard. To fully grasp it, you need to understand my parents and what sort of screwups they were. So here come the vacation slides.
My father, Abraham Crafty, was a part time handyman, part time repo man, part time visionary. He also liked to sneak into garages around town and tinker under the hoods of waiting cars, sowing as he called it "a little chaotic discord." He would cut belts, rip hoses and snip wiring and to this day I think there are lawsuits pending against each of those car shops by their customers, their vehicles emerging in worse shape than when they went in.
He hated his jobs, but the best thing about being multi-jobnal, he said, was that he could always wish he was doing the other whenever the one he actually was doing got him down. He and I were never particularly good friends, but he had been with James, with whom I was very close. In some ways I feel like I got the best parts of him, distilled through the filter of my brother. He was prone to long malaises, staring off into space or saying cryptic things with gruff foreboding like “The oil’s off the rudder. Gonna be helluva job to turn it.” These fortune cookie quips were never explained and never repeated. My father was never mean to me, never hit me or scolded me too hard, but I saw him pop James once in the nose. Why, I never learned, but James had been forced to pull me back, my brother’s face still bloody and dripping on my shirt. I had been going for my father’s throat.
My dad had just cackled at me in the way he had of reminding me whose property I was. "Now now, Sammy. You're not man enough to take me on yet. But one day! One day we'll get to see if you're a man or a beast." He leaned down with his rough sneer. "My money's on beast."
That was also the only time I ever saw James clock my dad one, right in the jaw.
Later that night it fell on my mother to explain to me what my dad meant. It's hard to imagine that parents used to think the "Sex Talk" was the biggie after the "Beast Talk" became a necessity. My mother’s name was Janice and she was a full fledged physician, a medical doctor specializing in gastronomy. She was petite, pale, with thick horn-rimmed glasses that made her look as if she had been snatched from a fifties sitcom, but the blue tattoos running down her back would convince you otherwise. How someone like her ended up with my dad is something it took me years to understand, but I supposed at the time a lot of stuff made sense during the Outbreak that seemed puzzling afterward.
She was as crazy as he was. She dissected the family hamster when I was four after I asked how food turns into poop. She made me recite and point out to her the different parts of the intestinal system when all I could do was look at my pet's cold black eyes and cry. Hammy's death was my fault and I learned my lesson. Don't ask questions. The information you need will be provided for you when it is appropriate, when she said it was. I never asked my mom another question I was not expected to ask. She had looked at my snotty, tear-streaked face and laughed. "You don't know what sorrow is, boy."
After my brother knocked my dad unconscious I was careful not to ask the question, but James had told her what happened. Evidently now was the appropriate time for me to know this bit of information. I was nine.
"There’s at least a ten percent chance that you won't survive past eighteen, Sammy. Probably a lot higher." We were seated across the kitchen table. "It's important that you understand that fact and make peace with it."
Asking the question was difficult, given the hamster lesson, but this seemed an important enough topic to risk it and she seemed to be waiting for me to respond. "Am I sick?"
My mom had smiled then, and on any other dainty mother in thick glasses it would have been reassuring. "Yes, darling. You are. You all are."
I stewed on that for a moment. This was a minefield. Questions had been approved, but I got the feeling only the right questions would be acceptable. "What sort of sickness is it? Is there a cure?"
My mother frowned at the double question but answered anyway. "The only cure is surviving, I'm afraid. It's...very different than any other disease in the world. Worse than the flu."
I gasped. I'd had the flu a year before, and it had been the worst experience of my young life. My mother had spent a day denying me water to show me how my fever rose on the thermometer. "What...what are the symptoms?" Symptoms was a new word for me, one my mother had taught me when she had hay fever only two months ago.
She beamed at my use of new vocabulary. "Sam, we've tried not to talk too much about it. It's a difficult part of our lives to think about. But twenty-two years ago there was something called the Outbreak."
That I had heard of. You could get the TV to show little else than Outbreak movies I wasn't allowed to watch.
"The Outbreak was like a story out of our worst nightmares, Sam. People had imagined the very event, made movies about it, written about it. But then it actually happened." She stared at me, her hazel eyes made huge by the glasses. "The dead walked."
I had an image of my hamster crawling across the back yard where he was buried, trailing neatly labeled guts.
My mom's voice trailed off then and she stopped looking at me. "Oh, Sammy, it was havoc. They weren't...friendly. They came after you. They wanted to bite you, to spread the parasite. They moved like schools of fish, all going where one smelled fresh blood. My own....there were familes torn apart. Children forced to kill parents, siblings forced to kill siblings."
"Like the Civil War?"
"No, not at all like that. We lost a lot of people, the world did. But we finally got it under control once we realized how the disease was spreading." She took her glasses off and looked at me bare. This had never happened before. "It was the Beasts."
Okay, that was what my father was talking about. I thought I was starting to put the pieces together.
"The zombie parasite was spread by these sort of super-carriers. Kids are immune. You get bit by the undead or even by a Beast, you're fine if you're still in one piece. But if a Beast bites an adult they die slowly, agonizingly, until there's nothing left but the will to feed. Adult Bitten can spread the parasite, but it's the Beasts that start the chain." She sighed deeply. "It's teenagers, Sam. We stopped the Outbreak, but we still carry the larvae for the parasite in our blood. It can incubate for around eighteen years, but if the larvae haven't hatched by then they die. But they can hatch. They hatch in ten percent of the teenagers in the world. The chemicals you generate once you reach puberty get them ready. It would take very little to activate them, I imagine, some random factor introduced..." She trailed off and for a second I was sure that once I hit puberty I would take Hammy's place on the dissection table.
She
snapped back into reality. "Get up. Pull down your pants."
I cried then, I think, but a quick spanking had me pulling my jeans down, boiling in horrified embarrassment as my mom examined me. This wasn't like when my mom walked in on me taking a bath and told me to use the delousing shampoo. That was the first time I ever really felt that a sense of privacy was important, and that mine had been violated.
"You ever find hair down here," she growled at me, "or if your voice ever breaks, you come tell me right away. If you're at school you tell a teacher. Do you understand?"
I nodded.
"Sing a two octave scale."
I did. My mom was an accomplished pianist and my dad a steel guitar enthusiast. Both James and I knew our music.
She nodded, seeming less than satisfied. "Okay now. Go play. Go."
I shuffled out of the dining room, snot crusting on my upper lip, my pants around my ankles. Then, as I touched the doorknob to my room, I realized what my dad had meant. With all the wrath a nine year old can muster (quite a lot more than you think) I shouted "Son of a bitch!"
So you can see why the first day of my long-awaited emancipation from them was the happiest day of my life. And why, as I sat in Mr. Jarvis's class, learning about the poetical connection between the moon and virginity in Romeo's balcony speech, I still had a stupid grin on my face.
"A-hole," someone said, shooting a spitball at my head.
Classes followed a strict routine. An hour each behind a locked iron door, each teacher packing some sort of heat. My science professor had at least three pistols secured to his person, though he may have had more hidden. Every four hours a class roster was printed and given to each teacher, so that they knew which students were out, which transferred, which in the infirmary or in solitary. In between classes we had fifteen minutes to mill around in the halls to socialize (key to a growing teen's development, which he or she would need if they manage to survive the more terrifying possibilities of their development). Some people tried to start up conversations with me, but it all boiled down to hey, finally hit puberty, huh and fell apart from there. It was difficult to act naturally when motorized cameras followed your every move and men with body armor and machine guns blocked off either side of the hall.
Then the bell rang, really just a series of pleasant tones piped through the intercom, and we all slouched off like apathetic trains on set tracks towards our next stop. Lunch was much the same, except we were marched to a larger room identical to the classrooms, except with long foldable tables, that I was told was the cafeteria. No one my table said a single word for the whole half-hour. They just sat there, absently eating whatever was in front of them, masticating like cattle.
"Jeez," I announced. "You don't have to worry about the walking dead. They're already here and they're boring."
I decided then and there this place needed a little color, and that I was just the man for the job.
After classes were done we could choose an after-school club activity, an intramural sport, or we could just go back to our bunks. As I had yet to unpack I chose the latter. The dormitories were built above the gymnasium, on the far side of the school from the administrative hubs, cleanly separated by several layers of cage doors I had to be buzzed through before I was granted admittance. The guard on duty stared daggers at me; you weren't forced to do an after-school activity, but you had damn well better. I merely smiled, waved and moved on.
Dorm rooms were tiny closets with two sets of bunk-beds each. Conyers had given me a room number and a key, which opened yet another heavy door into what would be my new home for the next five years. One bed was empty, surprisingly a top bunk. I’d have thought the kids here would have jumped at moving to a top bunk when one became available. My two packs, tough military rucksacks, had been tossed lazily in the middle of the concrete floor. There were four large lockers on the far wall and one had no padlock on it. I shoved my bags in there as best I could, stopping only to fish out my portable music player. The rest of my surprise tricks could wait.
I vaulted into my bed, tested the firmness, and found it surprisingly adequate. Then I jammed the headphones in my ears, powered up the player and switched on the AM reciever. Thunderous crackles of static had me frantically dialing down the volume, but after a moment of tuning the signal, the first of the gifts my brother had presented me for my days in Quarantine burst to life.
"-don't have enough teachers, Dan." That voice I didn't know. But the man who answered was definitely Conyers.
"Of course we don't! It's suicide."
I grinned, utterly and thourougly pleased with myself. The little sticky bug I had placed under Wilson's desk was working like a charm. “Thank you, James,” I prayed, and turned up the volume.
"That's not it, and you know it. We're dying out.All that's left is the old guard, the pre-Outbreakers. And now even those of us who were young back then are getting to retirement age. Those that survive..."
Conyers sighed. "Recruitment still down?"
"Very few people who spent their youth in Quarantine have any desire to come back. We've got teachers, but they're college professors or K-8th. I mean Jesus, Dan, Jesus - "
"Get ahold of yourself, Mike, for God's sake."
"I'm sorry, but....think about it. Think about what we've become. Humanity scared to death of its own children."
Conyers snorted. "Same as it ever was, Mike. Only this time we get to shoot them."
I turned the radio off.
Chapter Two
My first act of subversion was done on behalf of a kid I never even met.
I was in my bunk, reading a comic I had brought - Damph the Beasthunter - when the heavy door unlocked with a tectonic groan and swung wide open. Three boys filed in, each jumping in turn when they saw me. The last, a lanky dark-haired kid with sunken eyes and skin that shrank deep into his cheeks, just glared at me as the other two started changing out of their sweat-stained gym clothes.
James had warned me. Quarantine isn't prison, he said. You don't survive by breaking heads. No matter where you end up, you're going to be invading someone else's space and they won't like you for it. You have to find a way to make them like you or no one will ever have your back. "Is there something wrong with this bunk?" I asked, lifting myself up off the mattress. "What, did one of you guys pee in it or something? Is that why nobody took it?"
The dark-haired kid shook his head. "The only thing wrong with that bunk is the fact that you're in it."
Another of the boys, a sandy-haired kid who looked younger than me shook his head. "You're in Jeremy's bunk."
I swung down off the bed and landed on my feet. "They put five kids in this room? Where the hell am I supposed to sleep?"
"Only four kids," the dark one said. "But you're still in Jeremy's bunk."
The third, a lean, athletic kid with a buzz cut closed his locker loudly. "He's as frosh as they get ain't he? Never seen a Beast. Never seen a Beast put down. Probably got five pubes and thinks he's a grown-up."
"What is this?" The dark one snatched my Damph comic off the bunk. "You think this is funny? Laying there in Jeremy's bed reading this crap?" He ripped the comic in two.
My brother warned me about breaking heads, but damn it, nobody messes with my stuff. I swung hard at the dark-haired kid's face. I had gotten into my share of fights in middle school, and while I was smaller than most of the bullies I was fierce enough to make up for it. I gave one kid scars, long scratches down his face. For all my quickness, though, the dark-haired kid just ignored my flying fist and pushed me to the floor with one hand before it had a chance to connect. He jumped on top of me, pinning my arms.
"You bring shit like that into Quarantine, asshole?" He leaned down, his lips almost touching my ear. "You've got no idea how the world works, kid. Look at this. Look!" He let go of one arm and fished behind him for the remnants of the comic. I flailed my left arm, now free, but he ignored it. He held up the lower half of Beasthunter issue #112. Damph had been ripped away on t
he top half. All you could see now was the Beast he was fighting. "This is you. Shut up, look. This is you. This is me. This is everybody." He got off me, shooting me a warning look to stay back. I struggled to my feet.
He found the second half of the comic and started flipping through it awkwardly. "Kid, does the Beast ever win in these books?"
I only glared at him.
"Well, he ought to. He should take Damph's head off, just one bite, claw that big dumb steroid body to streds." The kid threw the remnants of the comic at me. "Just remember that when you're sleeping in Jeremy's bed." He stormed out, slamming the heavy door open.
The athlete snorted. "That's just how Remi is. But if you want my advice, kid, you'll stay out of his way for the first few days."
I balled the comic up and threw it in the recycle bin. "I have no idea what's going on!"
The athlete shook his head. He looked at least fifteen. "Let's let your innocent mind stay unblemished for one more night, kiddo. You should go to sleep thinking that the world's alright and your mom'll bring you candy next time she comes to visit." He offered his hand as he passed by me towards the door. "I'm Dave. Coming to dinner?"
"Look, just tell me what the hell is going on.This is childish!"
Dave sighed. "It's anything but childish. I just don't want to talk about it, okay? I promise, we'll tell you...it's just too soon." Then he was gone, his hand still unshaken.
The last of the three, the blond kid, closed his locker carefully and smoothed out the wrinkles in his polo shirt. I grabbed his arm as he tried to walk by. "Come on. Tell me what just happened."
There was panic in this kid's eyes and I knew I had made a mistake. This was a kid who was used to being picked on. A kid like that has two views of humanity at large: People who will hurt him, and people who won't. I had started off as the wrong one. I let his arm go quickly and held my hands up, trying to indicate that I didn't mean anything by it.
The kid sniffed cautiously, then rolled his eyes. "Are you thick? Until last week, that bunk belonged to a kid named Jeremy Emmet. He's no longer in that bunk. You figure it out."