Cages

by Chris Pasley

  "Hey," I whispered.

  She turned to me. "What?"

  Four gunshots rang out, far away. "I wanted to know if you were going to the Homecoming dance."

  She gaped, astonished. "Why did you feel like this was a good time to ask me that?"

  I grinned, shrugging. "Well, if we're going to be stuck here, I thought I should use the time productively."

  Kate's eyes narrowed. "The Homecoming dance is mandatory.'

  "It is?"

  "They don't have enough guards to watch everyone and the dance."

  "Ah," I said, clearly thrown off. "Well. Since we're clearly both going, why don't we go together?"

  Kate slid onto her side to look me square in the face. "No."

  "Has someone already asked you?"

  "No. I just don't want to go with you."

  "And what's wrong with me?"

  Kate sniffed. "You're a rat."

  "God," I muttered. "I am not a rat."

  "Yes you are. You're a rat, through and through. And even if I were attracted to rodents, what did you think our little disagreements here were? Foreplay? You're a stubborn idiot who's read a few books. What is it in our dialog that makes you think I'd even be interested?" Kate shook her head slowly. Idiot.

  I licked my lips. "Look. If I prove I'm not a rat, will you go with me?"

  She rolled her eyes. "No."

  "Well, I'll prove it anyway."

  "How are you going to do that, then?"

  A rapid stream of gunfire, much closer. "I'll figure something out."

  That night I turned on the radio for the first time in a few weeks. It crackled, and for a moment I thought the bug had failed, but soon I could hear Conyers talking. I couldn't place the other voice.

  "Can you believe how fast she turned? My God, I've never even heard of anything like it."

  "Get ahold of yourself. They turn. We've seen it a million times. No need to hyperventilate about it."

  "But Dan, it was two minutes. Two minutes flat. Fastest recorded is what, ten? From zero to Beast, all stages? Jesus Christ, maybe Jason's right."

  Conyers's voice was tough. "What has Jason been saying?"

  "That the Outbreak's not over."

  The principal sighed. "We're in control of the situation. Every single teenager in the civilized world is under lock and key. We know what they do. We know how they think. We know what to do when they go wild. If more Beasts pop up, then we kill more Beasts."

  "It's a slippery slope. What if they all turn?"

  "That's not going to happen."

  "I'm sorry, Dan. You and I go back, but I can't do this any more. It used to be dangerous. Now it's more like suicide."

  "Spit it out, Largo."

  "I'm quitting. Right here, right now."

  "You can't quit."

  "I am."

  "You're the only really qualified chemistry teacher here. Where am I going to find another?"

  A dry laugh. "Get that kid Remi to teach it. He knows about as much as I do."

  "I'm going to pretend you didn't say that." Conyers stood, his chair rolling back loudly across the hardwood. "What if I told you I knew why Sharon Norse went Beast so quickly? If I convinced you that it was a condition that could be controlled? Would you stay?"

  "I'd say you were lying. You can't fool me, Dan, not like those gullible kids you string along. I've known you too long."

  Conyers snorted. "Sharon was pregnant."

  "What?" Largo's voice went up an octave. "How could you know that? Her body was mangled, and the Beast chemistry would override –”

  "I knew about it a week ago. Look." Conyers opened a drawer and I could hear a file being pulled out. "Look at this. A transfer form to a maternity Quarantine. Stamped it myself on Tuesday."

  There was quiet a moment as Largo read the file. "But...there's never been any study that shows pregnancy sets off the change."

  "I'm not saying it did. I'm just saying it accelerated it. That's what had you worried, isn't it? Those studies are not foolproof anyway. The sampling is so random, it's entirely possible the conditions that existed in Sharon's pregnancy to accelerate the change hadn't been observed yet. I'm sending all this to Washington tomorrow with all the data I have and the remains." I heard a soft thud, as if Conyers had planted his hand on Largo's back. "Does this soothe your nerves any?"

  "We should cancel the Homecoming dance. If we need to start preventing - "

  "It's under control. The dance isn't going to be a problem. It's where they go afterward. I've reviewed every video in this place and I never saw Sharon en coitus. They've got someplace they can hide from the cameras."

  "I thought you had cameras hidden in the Blind Hall."

  "I do, and believe me, the things I've seen in there would sell like gangbusters on the outside. If I were a less moral man...anyway, point of the matter is that I never saw Sharon there. We need to crack down on the Blind Hall and we need to find the other secret spots they have. I'll see what information I can pump out of my gullible kids." Conyers sat back down, his chair creaking.

  Largo sighed. "You swear this information is accurate?"

  "On my life, Largo."

  "Okay. Okay, I'll stay. What would you do without me anyway?"

  "I guess I'd have a teenaged chemistry teacher with anarchist tendencies. You'll tell the other teachers what I told you?"

  "Yeah. We'll all keep a lookout.”

  "Good. I'll set up a bigger policy meeting soon and we can hash out a plan of action."

  "All right. Good night, Dan." The door opened.

  "Good night, Largo."

  The locks to our dorm cell unlatched that night. The locks are loud, like the sort of latches you find on submarine doors, but whoever was opening them didn't care if we woke up. I was out of bed in an instant, reaching under Remi's bunk to pull out a dowel rod like the one he used to create his limp. I heard Ben whimpering, burying himself under his blankets, and Dave was only barely awake when the door swung wide. The light flickered on.

  "Hello Sam," Alan said, grinning wickedly.

  "I’ll break your head open, Alan."

  "Don't think so." Alan stepped back and his two cronies swarmed in. I pulled the dowel rod back to swing but Lee was faster than me and wrestled it out of my hand. Crap. I am well and truly screwed. Someone punched me in the stomach and I went down, sucking air. Someone's sneaker rammed me in the ribs.

  Alan stepped in, laughing. Dave was on his feet now, but Alan paid him no attention. He was a basketball player. On Alan's side. "You think you can play me and just walk away? Not so tough now." He kicked me again in the stomach. Tears poured like rivers out of my eyes. He chuckled. "Get his legs, fellas. This little jerk's gonna get what's coming to him."

  I could feel hands on my feet as they wrenched my legs apart, just wider than I could really spread them. Alan cackled, his eyes wide and righteous. "Eye for an eye, Sammie boy." He made a show of aiming his foot right at my groin, and doing some fake practice kicks. "One! Two! Three!"

  I clenched my teeth together, but no impact came.

  "Let him go."

  I managed to crane my head and look up. Alan had gone white. Dave was standing behind him, one arm casually draped around Alan's neck. If I'd had any air left I would have gasped; in Dave's right hand was a chrome straight razor.

  Alan could feel the blade at his throat. "What the hell are you doing, Dave?"

  "You don't barge into somebody's room at crap o'clock in the morning and do something like this. Especially when it's my room, you got me?" Dave's usually jovial face was slack, his eyes serious.

  Alan swallowed. "Yeah, yeah, I gotcha."

  Lee and Abe released my legs. They flopped like fish to the floor.

  Dave sighed. "Look, man, I'll look and see what Remi's got lying around. If I can't find anything I'll get Remi to whip you up some stuff when he gets out of the clink. But I'm only gonna do that if you leave Sam alone. Deal?"

  Greed flashed over Alan's face,
naked, hungry want. "Deal."

  "Fine." Dave pulled his arm away but didn't close the razor. "Now get out of my room."

  Lee and Abe practically bolted out, but Alan lingered. "What's the matter with you? Why are you taking up for that rat?"

  Dave grinned warningly. "My roommate's no rat.”

  Alan snorted and tried to slammed the heavy iron door on his way out, but it just squeaked lazily closed.

  Dave shook his head and offered me his hand. "What an idiot. You okay, Sam?"

  "Yeah," I coughed. Air was flowing into my lungs again. "Jesus. How did they get past the guards?"

  Dave shrugged. "They probably just told the right ones what they were planning to do."

  I laughed. "Maybe so. Ben, you okay?"

  Ben's voice drifted up from under the covers. "I'm fine."

  I breathed in deeply, savoring the return of oxygen, but winced at my bruised ribs. "Where did you get a razor?"

  Dave snapped the razor closed and palmed it. "You're not the only one around here with some tricks."

  I laughed. "Well, thank you. Seriously, thank you. You might have saved my life just now. My balls, at least."

  "No problem." Dave slid back into his bunk.

  "I thought you said I was a rat. What made you change your mind?"

  Dave brushed the question away. "I just didn't buy you as the rodent type."

  "Well, I got a way to prove I'm no rat. Kill two birds with one stone." I grinned, hopping painfully up to my bunk. "Gonna need your help, though."

  Dave snaked his foot out and snapped off the light. "Good to know my faith has been rewarded."

  Chapter Six

  Middle school dances were small, awkward affairs. Cleared-out lunchrooms and adjoining classrooms served as soulless social halls where a hollow-eyed DJ played songs from the fifties - songs so old that the teachers themselves had probably danced to them at their middle school dances. It was if at some point society had said "Stop! This is as far as officialy acceptable social events are allowed to evolve. No further!" Spectacle was low. There were some thin paper banners declaring the dance's theme, but they were tawdry, most often colored with stilted permanent marker, the final letters crunched from a miscalculation of space.

  I only ever went to middle school dances to try to disrupt the quiet social harmony, but rarely was anyone paying enough attention for anything I did to have any effect. No one ever danced and the boys and the girls segregated each other to opposite sides of the room, the dance floor a stained no-man's-land between. I remember each side glaring at the teachers, as if resentful of this attempt to force them to interact.

  The anticipation for Homecoming in Quarantine, however, was electric. It was student-run, for one thing, which removed much of the resentment we all felt towards teachers and staff for trying to fake pop culture. The people running it were not much better; carbon copies of their older counterparts, intent on creating a dance the way it was supposed to be, but at least we weren't expected to dance to "Let's Go to the Hop." It also helped that it was a chance to put death out of mind for a night and just try to be teenagers, with all its own terror and triumph.

  The theme was "There Will Be Another Sun," the title of a very popular early-post-Outbreak tune, which had turned into a soothing, sophomoric phrase people said to each other in times of stress. Cherubic yellow suns adorned every wall. Banners and streamers transformed the basketball court from a sports arena (and recent killing zone) into a dreamy world of extremely flammable tissue paper and cardboard. The Banner Society had, quite literally, outdone themselves. I didn't regret my ban; that all looked like a lot of work. But luckily, shorthanded as they were, they embraced Dave in a heartbeat.

  After all, everyone loved Dave.

  It doesn't make sense to cut out three hundred eight-inch cardboard suns and give one to every attendee, they said.

  Sure it does, Dave had said. Dave won.

  At least paint a smile on them. All our other suns are happy, they argued.

  No, smiles take too long, Dave countered. Dave won.

  At least paint them yellow! they had exhorted. Who ever heard of a silver sun?

  I think silver works, Dave reasoned. Dave won.

  They had given up even asking why each sun had a hole poked through the middle and just went with it. With all the decorations that were going up a few stupid party favors weren't going to hurt. And, you know, everyone liked Dave and didn't want to rain on his parade.

  I had taken over Dave's job of handing out the suns, which earned me glares from the Banner Society but, you know, screw them.

  Maybe someone would wonder why, out of every single resource in the entire Quarantine, I would focus my attention to exploiting the Banner Society so often. What makes them so poweful? It's because they're the propaganda team. Write a word on the wall and it's graffiti. Write a word on a banner, display it attractively, and it becomes a force in its own right. No one challenges its right to be there, its right to say whatever it says. People believe them, and tend to do what they say. In retrospect I wished I hadn't squandered my cache with the Banner Society so early, but if I hadn't I never would have won Remi, Dave and Ben over to my side in the first place. So, opportunity well spent, I supposed.

  I learned the art of breaking another man's spirit from my dad, one of the few things I can actually credit him with teaching me, and one of the most valuable things I could ever have learned. The key is not always to resort to physical violence. "The only way beating a man up works is if he's ashamed of being weak," he had said, sipping a Marietta Lite on his dusty green patio chair one afternoon. "Embarassing a man sometimes works, but only if that man has a fear of being embarassed. There are two ways to go about breaking a man right. One, find out what he's ashamed of and hit him with it like an aluminum bat. Or, if he's particularly resistant to that sort of fun, find out what he thinks his strengths are and turn them against him. Does he think being physically strong makes him better than everyone else? Find a way to make his strength shameful to him. Does he think he's smarter than everyone? Find a way to make his intellect laughable. They're both good methods, but only the second one is guarunteed to work."

  As blunt as my father was, he had been right. I saw him destroy one of his drinking buddies by turning his ability to drink anyone under the table into a sign of a pathetic alcoholic once, just because he wouldn't give back a drill he borrowed. It was stunningly effective, and my dad had his drill back before nightfall.

  Kate walked into the basketball court dressed down. Some girls wore sparkly dresses, some tight little black numbers, smuggled in by giddy moms who remembered their own Homecoming dances with nostalgia and loss. Kate wore jeans and a T-shirt, but to me that was part of her charm. I bowed slightly and handed her a silver sun.

  "What's this?" She said, looking at the cardboard disgustingly. "I didn't figure you for the party favor type."

  "Symbols are important," I said gravely. "You should know that."

  "So I guess you gave up." She shook her head.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, I didn't come here with you, as you might have noticed."

  I sighed, then flashed a grin. "But I think you'll be leaving with me."

  Kate raised her eyebrows. "You're going to do something to prove your innocence here?"

  I shrugged. "Why not take a party favor and see how it goes?"

  Kate took a silver sun and rolled her eyes. "You had better not ask me to dance."

  "I don't dance." I was disappointed. I had expected at least a little playful banter. She hadn’t even cracked a smile.

  The floor was packed with people, and I was surprised to discover the divisions that had split the middle school dances in half were completely gone. The separations were varied and more subtle now, no longer defined by the easy measure of gender. Dave was putting in face time with the jocks and the cheerleaders. Ben was nestled deep in the quietest corner of the court with six or seven other taciturn wallflowers. Kate
hove to the Literature Club, which was huddled near the concession stand. I supposed if I were to be anywhere, that should be it, but somehow I knew I wasn't welcome.

  Someone poured punch over my head, but I didn't care. Tonight I would redeem myself.

  There was a riser erected at the far end of the court and it was there that Principal Conyers walked up to the microphone that seemed to grow from it like a New Year's Christmas tree. He had on a dark blue suit jacket, with the one empty sleeve pinned up in a fold at the elbow. His two guards kept to the floor on either side of the riser, MP5s clutched warily in their hands. They eyed every student with a special brand of malice in their eyes I rarely saw from the other guards.

  He coughed once, then spread his arms out wide. "Welcome to the Homecoming Dance!"

  The kids cheered and he stood there like Eva stinking Brone, drinking it in.

  "I just want to congratulate you all on a year well done. You'll be happy to know that on average test scores are up, our wonderful basketball team is about to head to the championships in Tennessee and on average college scholarships have risen four percent. Give yourselves a hand!" Conyers was grinning like an idiot, bathed in the jubilation of kids who couldn't give a crap about test scores but were just happy to have something to cheer about. "And...what's this?" One of his guards handed him one of Dave's silver suns off the floor.

  My lips drew back in a smile.

  Conyers glanced at me, a smug little grin on his own face. "Why, you know what this looks like?" He stuck his finger through the hole and spun the sun around so that instantly there was no doubt as to what it really was. He mimicked the mock sawblade going just past the stump of his arm, mugging and laughing to the crowd.