Cages

by Chris Pasley

  "No," I said, pushing his arm away. "We leave the guards alone."

  Chapter Three

  Remi grew up in the Non-Quarantine Zone, out in the midwest where the Outbreak reduced the population to almost zero. The people who lived in Non-Quarantine zones then were the backpackers, the roughhousers, the salt-of-the earth isolationists and the hippies. Remi's parents were no exception.

  "They tried to kill me in the womb," Remi said. How he knew that, I have no idea, but from some of the things he said, I think his aunt may have told him. Remi claimed his father had helped his mother mix ipecac into her coffee every morning for two weeks. In spite of fourteen days of heaving, Remi's mother was still pregnant. "'Bastard's in there good,'" Remi said, imitating his father with a strong hick accent. They decided then and there that if the kid wanted to stick around that badly they might as well oblige.

  "I had a brother that went Beast, they tell me, and they didn't want to have to deal with it again. Bull!" Remi said. "They just didn't want the responsibility. That's why they spent their time foraging supermarkets for old tinned meat. Couldn't handle doing anything for real."

  Remi's family were nomads, wandering from place to place, never wanting for an abandoned house to stay in. They avoided the bigger midwestern cities, as there were rumors the Bitten might still be found there, but instead kept to the small towns and back country roads that littered the heartland countryside. They didn't exactly view the Outbreak as a religious experience, but they approached the event as something akin to providence. Remi's father used to take him aside and show him the fields of wild corn, green shoots slowly piercing the asphalt road. They used to call this God's Country, he told Remi often. Well, now God's given it to us.

  "Parasites," Remi spat.

  Remi never had any formal education until the age of eight, when suddenly his mother realized that little Remi couldn't read. They had just forgotten that he didn't already know. "Pot was another thing they always seemed to find plenty of," Remi explained. So his aunt, who used to be a middle school substitute teacher, took on the task. She found Remi to be a quick study, hungry as he was for things outside of God's Country. He learned his letters from decades-old tabloids and faded newspapers, from fashion magazines to flimsy liberal rags. Where, he used to ask, where are all the people in these books? For all their wandering, they only rarely ever met anyone else. Dead honey, they're all dead.

  Math was a matter of pharmacy. Walgreens were raided for drugs both medicinal and recreational; the handling and measuring of delicate substances was a matter of intense study for Remi. Get the mix wrong and instead of a heady hit of meth, grandma got her face blown off. He never once got it wrong. Of all the subjects his aunt would sort-of teach him, Remi had found his true love in chemistry. While the rest of his family was raiding Safeways Remi would often set off on his own in search of schools or bookstores that might have texts about the subject. Often he would have to return the next day to find other books to explain some of the things in the chemistry texts, but as his aunt had already discovered, Remi was a quick study. He checked the pH balance of small puddles on the road between towns, learned how to test alkalinity in boxed lemonade, and after some intense study and many failed attempts, made a small amount of nitroglycerin.

  The family never forgave him for destroying their wagon, which was a cored-out VW bug attached to a bicycle - and the steadiest thing at waist level to mix chemicals on. Resentful of their resentment, Remi started looking more at the world his family had turned their backs on, from sources outside of magazine glossies. Old graffiti declaring "Atlanta is a Quarantine zone." Whispered conversations with fellow nomads they met once or twice a year. He discovered that the great civilization of the past was not dead. It was just different. And most definitely not in the midwest anymore. So on the night of his twelfth birthday, Remi ran away from his nomad family.

  "It's not as unbelievable as you coasters think," Remi said. "I mean, there was no one out there, and the Bitten had swarmed most of the wildlife. Some of it was coming back, but nothing that could be a threat. Plus I had my map and a bicycle."

  He traveled for two solid weeks before he saw his first Bitten.

  "He had been clawing at the butcher's locker at a supermarket I went in," Remi recalled. "I don't know why, there can't have been any meat in there, but maybe he remembered that there was supposed to be. His hands were gone to the wrist-bones. I was terrified at first, just bolted out of there, but after I got out to the sidewalk I noticed he wasn't chasing me. So I went back in. He was kinda humping his way across the floor towards me - his legs had rotted away. And then, finally, I got it."

  "Got what?" I asked dumbly, but Dave quickly shushed me.

  "This is what all the adults are afraid of. Not Beasts. Not us. They're afraid of turning into that thing I saw in the supermarket. Brainless, moaning, their bodies falling apart and their teeth rotting, just shuffling along, craving the sweet taste of life. Have you seen a Beast in person, Sam?"

  I shook my head.

  "They're terrifying, but not the way the Bitten was terrifying. Even though I've seen a Beast kill kids I know, I can't help put look at them and think - my God, look at that power. That energy! That...potency!" Remi's eyes were burning, his voice echoing loudly in the concrete dorm room.

  "Remi thinks Beasts are a natural stage of evolution," Dave explained.

  "Of course they are!" Remi grinned, pumping his fist wildly. "Do you know why Homo Habilis died and Homo Sapiens went on to rule the earth? Because Homo Sapiens killed the Habilis off, or hunted better, or were just better survivors. And here we have a clearly superior evolutionary species being hunted and killed by the weaker species. It's unnatural."

  Ben mumbled something, but Remi ignored him.

  "So...you want to be a Beast?" I asked.

  Remi snapped his fingers. "Absolutely. I've been thinking, meditating, preparing my mind so that when the change comes I'll retain my faculties. I'll escape from this dump. Then we'll see which is the superior species!"

  Remi had killed the Bitten himself with a tire iron from the auto repair aisle, but his unbridled hatred for adults did not really manifest until he reached the populated zones. No one had told him about Quarantine. The only saving grace in this prison, he claimed, was that they had a fairly good chemistry class. And he proposed putting it to work.

  He wanted to build a dirty bomb.

  Of all my classes I enjoyed Mr. Jarvis's best, in spite of the indignity of that first day. He was old, a bit past middle age, but he taught like I imagined someone would have taught before the Outbreak. Sometimes he would get so excited about the things he was saying that he would be all grins and actually engage the students at their level, coming close and sitting down eye-to-eye like none of the other professors dared do. He was a small man who enjoyed fulfilling old professorial stereotypes about tweed jackets and glasses, but there was often a self-mocking twinkle in his eye that said I think we've got 'em fooled. I thought there was more to him than a shuffling Quarantine teacher.

  Literature had always been my favorite subject; of all my mother's sins, forcing me to read far beyond my level was the one I most easily forgave. I think she was desperate to see me into adulthood and tried to force me there as fast as she could, before Quarantine ended me early. So while Mr. Jarvis taught things I had read long ago, I hadn't looked at these books and stories the way he was making me look at them. From what my mother said, literature was about pattern recognition more than anything else, and Jarvis seemed to ignore the obvious connections my mother had made. Instead, he focused on emotional impact and a shallow web of allusions that revealed deeper meaning. One day I stayed after class and told him as much.

  "You're a bright kid, Sam," Jarvis said. "But from what you've told me, your mother was a deconstructionist. Scum of the earth, deconstructionists."

  Did he just call my mother scum? I wondered for a second, then remembered that I wouldn't really have cared if he did. "What do
you mean?"

  "I'll cover deconstructionism next week, just for you. How's that?" Jarvis said, clapping me on the shoulder.

  Outside the halls were lined with the cool kids and filled with the offal. Remi was waiting for me there. We had Geometry together and he was helping me study. I didn't need his help - my mom used to say my first word was "Euclid," but only when she was making me study math in the hours after normal school let out. Other times it was "Socrates" or "Einstein." I asked my Dad once and he said my first word was "ball." In any case, Remi liked to help me and I didn't want to burst his bubble. It didn't do to get on Remi's bad side.

  As we walked through the barricades between the English hall and the Math hall, Alan Tallart stopped us. Alan was a star on the basketball team, not because he was very good, but mainly because he acted like one. He was far bigger and at least three years older than either Remi or I. "Remi. I need some of your stuff."

  "I'm not doing that anymore," Remi said, attempting to push past.

  "No. I need it." Alan's hand gripped tight on Remi's. His eyes were dark and dangerous.

  Remi stared right back, but he looked up to see two guards paying careful attention to the encounter. He shrugged Alan's hand off. "Fine. Not here. After intramurals, Blind Hall."

  Alan grinned and punched Remi on the arm.

  The hierarchy of Quarantine deserves its own study, an ecosystem as complex and illogical as the most hidden parts of the Amazon or the Everglades. By necessity, any ecosystem is a pyramid. There must be more at the bottom than at the top. That model as applied to social situations is an odd tradition I've never understood. Alan and his ilk were the "popular" kids. But why? Why were they popular? Not because they had a lot of friends. Dave was just as much an outsider as Remi and he had at least as many friends as Alan. What was even stranger was that the kids at the bottom seemed to respect the truth of the pyramid, that Alan was indeed on top and for the most part deserved his elevation. They admired him and tried to be like him, to date the cheerleaders who shared the cultural throne, to somehow earn the purple letter jackets that served as the tribal markings of the modern warrior elite. I put a lot of thought into it, but the only cause I could think of was TV.

  TV had told these kids all their lives that the values the popular kids had were values to be admired. The jocks always got the girl, and even in the movies where the odd kid out bucks tradition and nabs himself a cheerleader, that is an established truth wherein the exception proves the rule. They are told that sports heroes are the pillars of community. That friendship is more important than good grades. That creativity isn't as much a turn-on as the ability to throw a forty-yard pass. On one hand, it's not even the networks' fault. It's a hold-over from the early days of the medium, the ideal the producers of chipper family sitcoms pushed into living rooms across the country. The fervor which those early TV shows engendered in the American people was almost Aryan; this is perfection. This is what you should be. White picket fences. A healthy love of the outdoors. Excel in life, as long as you fit in the mold prepared for you.

  Well, Alan at least had bought into TV's lie. He knew he was at the top of the food chain, the feudal lord ruling his subjects with a benevolent smile and an okay three-pointer. And when he asked something of Remi, he expected to get it.

  "What did he want?" I whispered to Remi as we walked away.

  "Yes, Remi, what?" A face was suddenly there beside Remi's, leering. Conyers. "Tell Sam what it is that you do here. What you spent three weeks in solitary for? Do you remember that, Remi? Do you remember what I said would happen the next time you plyed your little trade among my students?"

  Remi scowled, looking Conyers right in the eye. "I haven't done anything, Conyers."

  "Principal Conyers. So when I play back the tape of this hallway, I won't be able to hear you promising to deliver something to Mr. Tallart, in clear violation of our little agreement?" Conyers's jaw twitched, as if he were restraining himself from biting. Carnivore was the word that came to mind.

  Remi sighed. "I know you watch Blind Hall, even though you try to make us think you don't."

  Conyers laughed, waving his stump as if passing his arm in front of his face. "I don't see anything, Mr. Remi."

  Remi snorted. "Well, Principal Conyers, if you hear what's on that tape, then I guess you know where to find me after intramurals. Wait until you see what I have to give him before you decide my punishment."

  "Fair enough." Conyers tussled Remi's hair. The boy tried to bat Conyers's hand away, carefully avoided making contact. Apparently he and I had been taught the same lesson about touching Conyers. "Say, Sam, do you know how Remi came to be with us?"

  Remi hefted his bookbag and gestured to me with his head. "Come on, Sam. We're gonna be late."

  "Oh, don't worry about that, Remi. I'm the Principal. You can be late all day if I say so." Conyers took his glasses off and put them in his shirt pocket. "Well, you know Remi's a Bite Country baby, don't you? When he was thirteen years old it seems that our boy here pedals into town past the Barricades on this clunker of a bike. I mean, the thing's fifty years old if it's a day, and it sure is a day. Well, he takes in the atmosphere, all the people, and boy, does he like it. He decides right then and there that he's never going back."

  "I'm not going to stand here and listen to this." Remi tried to walk away.

  "You stay right where you are, boy." Conyers's voice was coarse and commanding. "I'm just helping you get more aquainted with your friend here. Everyone knows how shy you are, so by my reckoning I'm doing you a favor. See, the first thing Remi does here is go into a supermarket and walk out with a dozen bananas. He'd never actually had fresh fruit before and those retards he calls parents never told him that you actually had to pay for things. So when a security guard starts chasing him, he assumes that the guy's a Bitten after some young blood. So he goes screaming down the street, hollering that there's a Bitten after him. Sure enough, he gets away in the panic, but now he's in a quandry. Whatever will he do now? His family was so stupid, they never taught him about school, about Quarantine, about anything resembling civilization. But our boy Remi's quicker than most Bite Country hicks and he figures out a money-based economy in a day or two. He falls in with a bit of the wrong crowd, living on the streets as he did, and they found in him a marketable skill."

  Remi glared at Conyers, hate evident on his face.

  Conyers chuckled. "Most kids Remi's age are just mules, but nobody the pushers ever met knew chemicals like this kid. In just a couple of days he had them churning out custom drugs faster than you can say 'what a retard.' Kept them in good money another solid year. It was about a year, right, Remi? Then it gets to be that time in a young man's life where he gets the urge to tear people's throats out, and his drug buddies dumped him on our door." He clucked his tongue at the dark-haired boy. "So sad. You want to tell us the things you told me when you first got here? Oh, you should have heard him, Sam! 'I thought they were my friends! How could they leave me here?' You would have laughed."

  "Screw this," Remi swore and pushed away. Conyers nodded to the barricade guards to let him through, chuckling the whole time.

  "Jesus," I spat. "What is wrong with you?"

  Conyers's smile faded. "Make no mistake, Sam. Remi's a bad kid. Grade-A Beast material."

  "No one can tell –”

  "I can." Conyers breathed in deep. "I can smell it on him. In some kids it just takes a single nudge to make them go over the edge. And Remi's just that sort."

  I snorted. "And what about me?"

  Conyers squinted at me, looking me dead in the eye, studying. "I don't know yet. But I'm watching. Mind what company you keep and you may stay off my list."

  The bell rang. Conyers nodded his head that I should go. "But I'm late. You need to check me in or –”

  Conyers laughed again. "It's your own responsibility to get to your classes on time, Sam."

  "Don't trust them." Remi fumed as he limped down the hall, sweaty from his voll
eyball intramural. "No matter what they say, or who they are, they are not on your side."

  "Conyers certainly isn't," I agreed. "Did you really tell him all that stuff?"

  Remi rolled his eyes. "Of course I did. I was stupid. I actually thought that he was here to help. Remember, this is the first 'school' of any kind I've ever been to. I didn't learn the lessons everyone else did when they were young. Yeah, lessons. Think back on it and I bet you can think of the first time you realized that the adults around you didn't have your best interests at heart."

  Hamster echoed in my head, but I ignored it. "If you were so buddy-buddy with Conyers, what happened?"

  "I just didn't know." We reached our dorm cell and I unlatched the lock. "People in my family used drugs all the time. I had a cousin who was smoking dope when he was nine. When I got here I had no friends, no one to watch my back. So I decided to make some, by giving them the best thing I knew how to make."

  "You dealt drugs in here?"

  "Not dealt. Gave. It wasn't until Conyers put me in solitary that I found out everyone thinks drugs are bad." He stripped off his sweaty T-shirt and threw it in his locker.

  "So when Alan stopped you in the hall..."

  "He wants something, probably meth. Easy to find the chemicals, not entirely safe to make. He was one of my biggest customers. I think that was the thing that sent Conyers over the edge. Didn't want the basketball team to lose because of me." Remi found a new shirt and slipped it on, a bright-red Quarantine-issue.

  "So now you're about to go and - "

  "I'm going to go see Alan." Remi gestured. "You coming?"

  I chewed my lip. "Maybe we should wait for Dave and Ben."

  He shook his head. "Gotta go now. I'm late as it is."