Cages

by Chris Pasley

  "Okay. Fine, okay."

  Remi nodded and unlatched the dorm door. Then he paused. "Sam...have you thought any more about my proposal?"

  I licked my lips. "I don't think it's a good idea, Remi. Signs are one thing, and I got a few more tricks in mind, but a bomb...a bomb's a little hardcore, don't you think?"

  Remi snorted. "Wait until you see your first Beast killing. That's hardcore."

  If you walked south through the back hallway of the gymnasium you would pass the locker rooms, the equipment rooms and the janitor’s lockup before it terminated into the combination woodshop/mechanics room. That room was locked up tight every day in rigid fashion; I imagined Conyers’s limb-losing experience played a large part in that diligence, and no one would think it wise to give students easy access to power tools outside normal class time. The door to the shop was chipped and scarred, but sturdy. It was there that a student body already separated by social pressures was further divided – a student on the Vocational track spent a great deal more of his time there than a College Prep one ever would. By thirteen you were supposed to know if you wanted to spend your life an engineer or a carpenter. Clearly a man or woman who had decided to spend their life under a blue collar had no need to delve deeper into the perils of the human condition, or know how to solve complex proofs. On the broad spectrum of the track of human civilization, the Vocationals were shuffled off to the side to be little more than servitors and enablers of their betters, who might actually one day make a significant contribution to the world. How anyone could choose a dumbing down of their education was beyond me.

  Of course, the Vocationals did rule the Blind Hall.

  To the left of the shop door was a set of double doors, one of which was missing its iron handlebar. Remi and I pushed into them and the world changed.

  The Blind Hall was most active at night, when students could sneak down into the Hall from their dorm rooms above the gym. Undoubtedly the guards knew, but as long as they saw no one and could deny their knowledge, they really didn’t give a crap. The dorm barracks were sealed, and so were the gym hallways. If a kid were to go Beast, lockdown would still be ninety-five percent effective. In the late afternoon most kids had made their way to the cafeteria for some food after their intramurals, so at the moment the Blind Hall was empty.

  The hall originally started as a simple corridor from the gym hallway to a planned swimming pool area, but two hundred thousand dollars into the project the security team had declared an open pool too much of a security risk and it was shut down - after certain officials and administrators had lined their pockets. The end result was the Blind Hall, a corridor to nowhere. The red light district of the Quarantine. Rumor said it was the one place in all of Dekalb Quarantine #4 the eyes of the administration weren't watching. I saw none of the cameras that were the omnipresent parrots on our shoulders, ready to squawk out even our smallest misdeeds. This was where the students stopped being perfect, stopped trying to pretend like they were good kids and model students. This was the one place in the entire Quarantine where you could let loose without holding back for fear of a teacher. The way I heard it the worst of practices went on here. Drugs, obviously. Fights. Prostitution. As long as it happened on the Blind Hall, it was fair game. Lord of the Flies, meet Dekalb Quarantine #4.

  "Don't be fooled," Remi muttered.

  I wasn't. There were cameras here. We just couldn't see them. I made a note to try to spot them all the same. I knew some tricks for spotting camera lenses but I didn't have the materials nor the complete darkness it required, so I would have to rely completely on what I could observe. That the Blind Hall was not the unmoderated sanctuary it was promised to be would be valuable information I could use later.

  Pipes lined the hallways, intended to be water and drainage conduits, but served now as benches, tables and stripper poles. Graffiti was caked on the wide brick walls so thick it had texture Da Vinci might have envied. Every now and then a tag of true talent could be seen, but mostly it was juvenile slogans and messages revealing at which cell you could expect to find a good time. (These were mostly guys mocking their friends, I assumed.) The lights were halogens like the rest of the Quarantine, but someone had applied a thin layer of red paint to the glass, so it had the feel of a submarine on high alert. The floors were disturbingly sticky.

  Alan was waiting at the end of the hall, leaning on the steel barricade that had been erected to seal off the hallway once it was determined doors were no longer necessary. Flanking him were two of his basketball buddies, Abe Hunning and Jim Lee. Abe was a toady through and through; he basked in the wake of Alan's turbulence and seemed more than happy just to be on the winning side. He was tall but a bit pudgy for a second-string point guard.Jim Lee was some mix of Caucasian and Asian he had never revealed, but he liked to pretend he knew kung fu and often jumped out at some of the younger kids, shrieking and waving his arms like Bruce Lee. He was short but quick. Remi took in the scene, rubbed his chin and walked forward.

  "Remi?" I whispered. "Why are you limping?"

  "Old injury," Remi grunted back.

  "Never seen you limping before. Did something happen?"

  He grinned. "Not yet."

  "Remi!" Alan called, his arms open wide.

  "Look at him," Remi whispered. "Do you realize that right now, right at this moment, he honestly thinks he's my friend? I feel sorry for the poor idiot sometimes."

  "You got the stuff?" Abe shouted.

  "If course I do." Remi stopped three feet in front of them, hands in the pockets of his loose, gray corduroys. "But hey, Alan, do you remember when the baseball team won regional?"

  Alan frowned. "What?"

  "Oh, it's nothing. Just wanted to tell my new friend here a story and wondered if you perhaps remembered the incident I was talking about. This is Sam, by the way. Say hi."

  "Bite me, Sam."

  "Very pleasant, Jim. Anyway, Sam, our baseball team was really good last year. I mean really good. We won regionals and were gonna sweep the local series, no problem. But something happened that changed all that. Tell Sam what that was, Alan."

  Alan snorted. "The pitcher broke his hand."

  Remi nodded. "Indeed he did."

  Alan shook his head. "I don't get you sometimes, man. What is your damage?"

  "Oh, nothing. Never mind. I'll get your stuff." Remi dug deep in his left pocket, but couldn't seem to find anything, so he reached down in there with his right hand and gave a shrug that said sorry, deep pockets. His pants were bordering on ludicrously baggy. "Sam, did I tell you how good our basketball team is this year? Unstoppable, they're saying."

  "No, you didn't –” My words trailed off as Remi slid a long wooden pole from inside his pocket. He must have cut a hole in his pants and tucked the end of the stick in his shoe. I guess I wasn't as observant as I thought because it was a total surprise to me, and an even bigger one when he swung the pole hard at Alan's knee.

  Alan saw it coming and managed to fall back so that the wood only tagged the meaty part of his leg above the knee, but instantly Remi swung it back for another strike. By then Abe and Jim were on him, Abe slamming a fist into Remi's gut and Jim getting him in a headlock. Alan wrestled for control of the stick and finally wrenched it away from Remi. "You bastard," Alan swore, slamming the stick into Remi's arm.

  "Hey, stop –”

  Alan pointed the stick at me. "You want to start trouble, new kid? Keep hanging around this guy. He's nothing but."

  I watched them haul Remi away, out of Blind Hall and into the gym hallway I didn't follow, but I could hear the cries as they beat and kicked him on the hallway floor. I didn't understand why they'd want to drag Remi out of Blind Hall to do their beating until I finally heard the noise stop, and I finally made my way towards where they had taken him. There was Conyers standing over a bruised and bloody Remi, who answered his questions with only a silent flip-off. Alan showed him the bruise that was purpling above his knee.

  "Solitary," Conyers d
eclared. "Two months."

  I watched as one of the guards helped Remi to his feet and started to drag him towards the Bell. As he went past I looked at the obviously beaten Remi and back to Conyers. Recrimination must have been plain on my face. The principal shrugged. "We've got a good team this year."

  "You just wait until I get out, Conyers." Remi spat on the floor, a disgusting puddle of blood and phlegm. "Me and Sam here are gonna do so much worse."

  They may have dragged Remi away, but from the moment he heard that announcement, Conyers's eyes never left me. His eyes were locked onto my face, his mouth twisted into what looked like lust. If I could have read his mind at that moment as he looked at me, I think the only thing echoing around that balding skull of his would have been bring it on, boy. All thanks to Remi, whose undying loyalty and affection I had worked hard to buy, himself beaten bloody from a fight he had started but never had any hope of winning, one man against three.

  I was starting to think I had made a terrible mistake.

  Chapter Four

  The Quarantine basketball court was a cage. Thirty feet tall, double the length of the court long. The sport is a sweaty, fluid affair when played correctly, and for all their personal flaws, the Dekalb Quarantine #4 team did indeed play it correctly. The bleachers were cordoned off into zones, smaller cages breaking the student body into groups so that, should a teen go Beast, most would be protected. As for those unlucky enough to be in the same cages...well, there were losses and then there were losses. The visiting team was allowed to bring no audience with them, so today the Douglas Quarantine #2 Panthers bore the brunt of an entirely hostile crowd. The score was 56 - 62 in the third quarter.

  It seems appropriate at this point to talk about death for a minute. Every child learns before the age of ten that they're going to die. Every child learns by at least the age of eleven that, for them, it may be sooner rather than later. Death means different things when it happens to different people. I had no aunts - very few people did anymore - but my mother had a close friend of hers who had survived the Outbreak with her and my father. She lived just four houses down the street. One day she slipped on a wet washcloth she had thrown on her bathroom floor and cracked her head on the sink. She bled to death, mainly because my mother was mad at her at the time and didn't come visit. Her funeral was a cacophony of wailing women and somberly crying men who shook each other's hands as if they didn't live right next to each other. She had been a hero of the Outbreak, the priest said over the coffin. We were all diminished for her light having gone out of the world.

  Contrast that with my friend Hap Johnson's sister's funeral. She had died in Quarantine. It was impossible to tell if she had been a Beast or simply the victim of one, as the bodies of the Quarantine dead were burned within the hour of death, to prevent any potential airborne infection, though no such thing had ever been reported. There were dry eyes on every face except her mother's. The priest muttered something about God and a lamb, but everyone could tell his heart really wasn't in it. I wanted to ask my mother why but I refused to hazard a question, and James was at college, so I asked my dad. I was ten years old at the time, so I knew about Beasts and the Bitten already, but it seemed to me that a death was a death, and people should be equally sad at either.

  "That's a very interesting point you raise, slick," he drawled as he tinkered under the hood of our '04 Civic. He frowned as he nearly cut the spark plug wires absently, forgetting it was his own car he was working on. "Why is the death of a fifty year old woman more traumatic than the death of a teenager? You know, it used to be the other way around. You'd mourn for all that lost potential...but now, secretly? People are glad."

  I can't say I ever understood what he was saying until that basketball game.

  Our team, the Wild Dogs, were winning pretty easily. The coach had his third string guys in there and they still managed to dominate. The third string happened to include Dave, my athletic roommate, so for his sake I cheered all the harder. Even Ben got in the spirit, calling "shoot it, shoot it!" when Dave had the ball. He saw us and waved.

  The game was fun. Our middle school games didn't come with nearly this much ceremony and spectacle, and the energy of the crowd was exhilarating. I even saw Conyers, flanked as he always was by two burly guards, smiling and clapping against his leg. In that moment even I was mad at Remi. Who would want to spoil this?

  Ben nudged my leg. "Panthers, #25."

  I looked. He was slow, dragging terribly, barely making it up and down the court in time to run back. "Why don't they pull him?"

  "He's their best player." Ben shook his head. "No, no, no, no...."

  I looked back at #25. He was standing on the half-court line now, merely leaning one way and the other as the teams ran past. But now even the coaches stopped calling advice to him and just stared, stupefied.

  Conyers's voice rang out with all the immediacy of an air raid siren. "Clear the court!"

  Pandemonium. Players scattered to the far sides of the court cage, the ball bouncing away, forgotten. A karaoke timekeeper with no more words to cue. #25 just stood there, perfectly still. Then he began to growl.

  The students in the bleachers screamed, clawing at their cage doors, crawling over themselves to try to escape what they knew could be an impending doom. No one knew how strong these cages really were. The players on the court were begging the guards on the other side to open the doors, to let them out before it was too late, but the guards stood still as tin soldiers, their eyes fixed on #25.

  Why didn't they fire? I gripped Ben's shoulder, tight, as I searched for Dave in the crowd.

  I should have known the answer. A Beast got loose once at a minimall two counties over. I remember watching the news footage as a kid on our wood-paneled tube TV and thinking it was some sort of horror movie I wasn't supposed to be seeing. James was with me then, just coming back from the kitchen with a bottle of Coke.

  "Do you know what's going on there?" he asked, handing me the bottle.

  I shrugged. "There's a Beast killing people, looks like."

  James started to say something, but shrugged back instead. I could tell he wished I didn't know how things were, that he didn't have to face the same reality my parents faced; I was pretty likely to die soon.

  The news anchor cut in, answering the question I would later ask myself at the basketball court. "Our liason with city hall tells us that the SBBAT police groups are working to surround the Beast and keep it contained until the crowd can be dispersed from around it, to prevent further deaths. Once they start shooting, the Beast is likely to go wild, and they're hoping to minimize the damage."

  "Who do you think he was?" I asked, just now realizing that what I was seeing was real. I was glad James was with me instead of my mom, so I could feel free to ask things like that.

  James sighed. "They don't know and they don't really care."

  I frowned. "Why not?"

  My brother scratched his new beard absently. I remembered I didn't like his stubble; it made him look like someone other than James. "Because he's not a teenager anymore. Being a teenager is a sort of threshold point for how much people care about you. A kid your age or younger? Anything is a tragedy. Teenagers...people are afraid of teenagers, even the non-Beast ones, but they still feel bad when, say, a Beast goes wild in Quarantine and kills a few they know. But when they look at that Beast on the screen....even though he still looks more or less like the kid he used to be, he's not. He's a monster. They look at his eyes and they just know. And even though they know it's no one's fault, they still feel betrayed. So not only do they not care who the kid was, they're happy that they get a chance to shoot him down, for turning their backs on them."

  I shook my head. "That's never going to happen to me."

  James's face spasmed as he tried to keep an emotion in. "I hope not, kiddo. But that's not the only thing you gotta worry about in Quarantine."

  #25 began to move, and the whole court gasped, then fell into shocked silence. He
stumbled his way upcourt, falling and picking himself up repeatedly as his neurons fired spastically, trying to fight off the parasite. He fished the ball up from where it had rolled to rest, just under the home court and looked at it. I could see his face, just a blurry thumbprint from where I sat, but his red eyes stood out unmistakably. #25 then shuffled forward and held the ball up to the net in a grotesque imitation of what he used to do as a basketball player. He tried to jump, but his feet couldn't leave the ground. So instead his arms grew, lengthening and tearing away his bone and tissue as the spines poked through, claws piercing the ball so that by the time it sank through the net it landed with a dry thwack, in a puddle of rubber at #25's feet. Then he shuffled forward, picked up what was left of the ball, and did it again. He repeated the action five times before letting the ball just sit there, and then he really began to change.

  Remi had been right. I had never seen anything like this, and I suddenly realized how much of a fool I had been to take it so lightly. I stood there with four hundred other students, watching this kid none of us even knew suddenly break apart, his pale skin darkening, his legs breaking backwards. I could almost have been lured in by the horrible beauty of it in the same way people can watch nature shows dispassionately as lions rip zebras to shreds, except that up until the last minute, his face remained that of a sixteen year old boy who had just won the game for his team. Then the chain cages jangled; the guards had opened the cage doors.

  The Beast spun, looking intently at the fresh meat that was running scared for their lives out the cage doors. Four guards had been deployed inside either door and were slowly advancing, stubby shotguns in their hands. I strained my eyes but couldn't tell if one of them was Biff. They were all wearing facemasks. The Beast tensed, the guards even better prey than the running students; the adults could spread the parasite. But before the Beast could even jump, the four facing it unloaded their shotguns, then hit the floor as the four behind the Beast opened fire with their MP5s. Blood splattered everywhere, and now I saw what the facemasks were for as each of them was covered in Beast blood that could have turned them into Bitten had they internalized it.Then, when the clips ran out on the MP5s, the first four guards leapt up, each with their sword in hand, and cut the Beast limb from limb. I was stunned at their efficiency, much in the same way a young Biff must have been. They acted like a school of fish, with perfectly synced reflexes. I was glad I had declared the guards off-limits.