by Chris Pasley
In walked Conyers.
I have to admit, I had stopped expecting him. In the early days I felt sure he would come into the Bell regularly just to gloat at me, but I had not seen nor heard a thing from him since the day of the dance. Seeing him now, unnacompanied by his guards, was a shock. He had the same white shirt, same red tie that he had the first day I met him.
"What do you want?" I called to him.
Conyers looked puzzled. "I just came to figure out why you haven't left yet.”
I lifted my hands up. "I don't have a clue what you're talking about."
Conyers gestured towards me. "Your door - and the main Bell door - has been unlocked for two weeks. You've been free to go all this time. Why did you stick around?"
"That's bullshit," I yelled. "Those doors have been locked the entire time."
"Really?" Conyers shrugged. "You mean you stopped trying to get out? Two weeks’ time and you never even tried? Seems that little Sam likes it in his box."
I slammed my hand against the hatch handle and the metal door swung open smoothly. I stood there, exposed to the main Bell air for the first time in three months, glaring at Conyers. "If I had known they were open I would have left."
"Play tough all you want, kid. I can't blame you. I'd be scared to come out too." Conyers laughed and turned, walking to the door. "Hope you had a pleasant stay."
I fumed, staring at the Bell door, which remained cracked. Would he slam it shut as I neared it? Was this just another way for him to humiliate me? Well, if it was, so be it. I wasn't about to pass up a chance to get out of this hellhole. I shoved everything I owned into my bag, torn from its dusty resting place under the futon, and stepped out of my cell. I thought about walking over to Susan's cell, telling her that everything would be all right and that I wouldn't forget abut her, but I had a feeling neither was true, so instead I just walked past and pushed open the Bell door.
The Social Studies hall hit me like a brick. Too much noise, too much light! There were no windows facing outward, but the afternoon burned in through the barred glass on the courtyard side and my eyes couldn't dilate fast enough, filling the hall with little more than grainy shadows. Suddenly some one shoved me, hard, and I went down, my bag spilling off my shoulder, my legs weak with disuse.
A shadow leaned over me. "Better get to your after school group, Sam. Mr. Jarvis has been missing you."
I struggled to my feet as the shadows started to focus into clearer shapes, students on their way to intramurals or after-school activities. I walked away from Conyers, too weak and disoriented to try to engage him now. I couldn't walk ten feet without someone running into me, slamming me against the wall with a rough shoulder, or stepping on my foot. I didn't protest; maybe I was walking too slowly, or veering onto the wrong side of the hall, or maybe they were just assholes. I just wanted to get to Mr. Jarvis's class and sit down.
I stumbled into the classroom just as the bell rang that sealed all the doors, the metal snapping closed behind me. For a moment I panicked - it was just like being in the Bell again, locked in! But after taking a second to breathe I found an empty desk and slid into it, shedding my bag with a greatful sigh.
"You look like shit, Crafty."
I turned my head. Ah, Kate! After my performance at Homecoming and my time as a POW, I thought I might have a shot at her. "Hey Kate."
Kate glared at me and slid her desk six inches away from mine. "Smell like shit, too."
I pawed at my shirt, still bleary. It was probably true; we had been allowed no showers in the Bell, just a bucket, a bar of soap and a towel you had to figure out a way to use in the copper sink. I realized it was probably a mistake to not just go back to my dorm cell; I should have emerged clean and triumphant, untouched by the worst Conyers could throw at me. But I hadn't, and I had to work with that. "Sorry. I came here straight from the Bell. So...wait, where's Jarvis? What are we reading?"
"He's out today," one of the other kids volunteered. "And we're not reading a goddamn thing."
I looked around. Seven kids in the Literary Society, at they were all staring at me, lips curled, glaring. Naked hate. "What? What's going on here? I get out of the Bell after pulling one over on Conyers and you all turn on me?"
Yet another kid snorted. "Jeez, he doesn't know."
"What don't I know?" I demanded. The kids just laughed harder. I pounded my fist on the desk, trying to drown out their laughter. "Tell me!"
Kate stood, rummaged through her bag, and slammed a thin bound booklet on my desk. "Here's what you don't know. You're pathetic."
I picked up the booklet numbly. The cover featured my registration photo, with the title emblazoned large above it: The Tao of Sam Crafty.
Chapter Eight
Ben Willian was not a natural-born wallflower.
Some kids are just shy. They hide their eyes from others' stares, shut themselves in their bedrooms, or find a way to shuffle out of a class if their name is called - whether in praise or anger, it doesn't matter. Ben Willian had not begun life like this. When he was much younger, Ben had been a very outgoing kid. He played Little League; maybe in the same league as Dave, neither could remember for sure. He got invited to parties. He got straight As and was proud of it. All that changed in the summer of his seventh birthday.
The car that killed his parents was going seventy-two miles an hour when it struck their old Toyota. It sheared the top of the little import and sliced both his mom and dad apart at the waist. They had been on the way to pick him up after Little League, but they had few friends and no one who knew what their schedule was, so little Ben Willian sat on the tin bleachers by the practice field alone until dawn, when a concerned state trooper asked him his name and phoned it in.
Ben had met his uncle Raymond only twice, both of these occasions on very unpleasant Christmases, but they stood together as the caksets were lowered into the ground as if they were really family. He was a thin man who wore an ugly tweed jacket on chilly days and never combed his mousy brown hair. That Christmas awkwardness followed them as they walked to Raymond's large SUV, Ben dying to say something but Raymond's blank slate face impossible to address. Raymond turned to Ben with a withering look. "You're going to live with me now. I'll be honest with you. I don't know anything about raising children. You and I will probably not like each other. But your mother was my sister and I have at least some fond memories of our childhood, so I'll do my best. Understand?"
Ben nodded.
What surprised Ben most was that Raymond didn't live that far from where he had lived with his parents, which made him wonder why Raymond had never visited, or invited them to visit. The worst part was that it was that while it was in the same county, it was in a different school district. Since Raymond certainly wasn't going to drive twenty minutes out of his way to take Ben to school, Ben would start school in the fall as a new transfer student. He was also done with Little League; Raymond couldn't be expected to humor every one of Ben's juvenile desires, could he?
Raymond's house was a two-story pre-Outbreak Victorian. Ben's bedroom was on the second floor, but Raymond hadn't had a chance to move the boxes inside; he normaly used the room for storage and he promised to make it livable by the weekend, but for now Ben would have to sleep on the couch. Inside, the house was filled wall-to-wall with U-Haul boxes, which Ben was forbidden to open. Where there was a break in the boxes you could see little signs of what might have been a normal household once. And of course, there was the Wall.
Raymond's Wall was the one thing in the house he kept meticulously clean and free from the litter of storage. It held a single picture, framed in gold, hung at exactly Raymond's eye level. The picture was of a young woman, much younger than Raymond, who was smiling at the camera, laughing prettily. Even though Raymond never spoke of it, Ben knew from his mother than she must have been his Aunt Jenny, who died in the Outbreak.
Ben's first night in Raymond's house plagued him with nightmares. He dreamed there were monsters under the couch, s
craping, moaning creatures trying to get their claws on him. He woke in the dark hours of the morning and refused to go back to sleep. The dreams didn't stop when he moved upstairs either. Always this sort of clawing and moaning. It was a common dream for Outbreak survivors, Raymond said, but Ben wasn't near old enough to have them.
Ben's first days at his new school proved disasterous, and the boy found himself lapsing into odd, taciturn silences from which no amount of prodding would coax him. He raised the ire of the school bullies, among whose number a young Alan perfected the harrasing arts, for not responding quickly to questions or being very quick with a ball in gym. "Are you slow?" They would jeer, accompanied often by a shove. "You a retard?"
Even the teachers seemed set against him. Once, on one of his good days, Ben attempted to answer a teacher's question with a clever bit of humor, only to have his jibe thrown back in his face with a hateful "That's real cute, Ben."
Raymond was no help. He worked from home, but always seemed to be working, locked in his room or in the basement, which he kept padlocked at all times. Ben became very familiar with takeout food as Raymond often forgot to make anything for dinner. After dinner Ben would excuse himself to his room and hide in a corner, blissfully absent from anyone's attention. That was how he liked it.
After three years with Raymond and for a second time, Ben's life fell apart in a single night. He was coming home late from a play rehearsal he was forced to participate in, about the Rebuilding after the Outbreak (his teacher was forever shouting at him to speak up, for God's sake) when he noticed that the house was dark. It wasn't unsual for Ben to come home to a dark house, but usually Raymond had the upstairs light on, having lost all track of time. This time, the lights in the house were all lifeless.
He pushed his way in the kitchen door and nearly slipped on something spilled on the floor. The light switch, usually easy to find by feel, seemed to elude him as an inevitable sense of dread settled in and he found himself scrabbling along the wall in the dark, his bookbag abandoned by the door. He finally found the light switch and turned it on.
Seeing the blood didn't shock him. In the moments since he slipped he'd already thought of a million things it could have been, and blood was not the most unlikely. The kitchen table was in splinters, and he could see smears of footprints in the blood that pooled in the uneven areas of the linoleum. "Uncle Raymond?" Ben whispered, not trusting himself to speak any louder.
There was movement at the dark ond of the hall. Not much, just a slight swaying, as if a breeze were blowing a curtain. Except there was no curtain and there was no breeze. He knew somehow that it was not his Uncle Raymond, but he stepped towards it anyway, even as his throat seized up in terror, breaths coming only forced and panicked. The motion stopped still as soon as he began to approach, but then it started to come toward him. He could see the lines of it as it moved where the moonlight was peeking from the clouds and through the big living room windows. It was white and naked, walking on two legs one moment, falling to four the next.
Ben flipped on the hallway light.
The creature snarled at the sudden light and clawed the light bulb out of its socket with what had looked like an awkward, casual swipe, but tore deep gouges into the cieling. Ben had never seen one - who had, since the Outbreak? - but he was sure. This was a Bitten. Its skull was hairless, skin pulled taut over the thin tissue, patchy in places so that you could see the bone beneath. There was a rancid stink, like a skunk or an animal marking and its body oozed with sores. He thought from the glance that it might be female, but emanciated as it was, flesh pooling turkey-like in joints, it was impossible to know. All that did matter was that it was a Bitten.
Ben didn't know that he was safe from the Bitten's parasite, immune until puberty, but it didn't matter. The Bitten would attack Ben for nothing more than food. He turned and ran from the house as fast as he could, sliding through the kitchen and tumbling out the door. He was a full mile down the road before he decided to look back, and he saw nothing. He had either lost it, or it had never chased him in the first place. The next house he found, he banged on the door until a man with a shotgun came out, telling him to shut the hell up and to get off his property. Ben, weeping, managed to tell his story in a convincing enough way that the neighbor called the cops, pulled Ben inside and kept a shotgun eye on the door until morning. The neighbor was clearly an Outbreak survivor.
The cops came in with a squad of BPI agents, the Bureau of Parasite Investigations, and killed the Bitten. A careful search of the house turned up no sign of Raymond, only the blood in the kitchen which they verified to be his. They put out an APB for the surrounding area to be on alert for a loose Bitten. Apparantly, as the child services agent explained, Raymond had been keeping a Bitten locked in his basement. They guessed it was most likely the re-animated corpse of his dead wife Jenny. There had beeen a lot of that sort of thing going on immediately after the Outbreak, but this was the first such case in more than six years. Jenny had been the oldest Bitten they'd ever seen.
Ben was put in foster care, starting a string of misunderstanding and abuse that pushed him further and further away from other people. Quarantine was a godsend; he would now have all the time alone he could want. Fuck the bullies and fuck the undead relatives. As long as the guys in his cell weren't total dicks he would be happy to sit quiet in his bunk and pass the time in silence.
The Tao of Sam Crafty booklet was a nightmare. I thought I was so clever. I thought I was so badass, listening in on Conyers, pulling my juvenile little pranks. Turns out he was recording our conversations, and there in my hand was the transcript of every single one. I read them with a mixture of disbelief and disgust at myself. How could I have been so naive? James had warned me and I hadn't listened. All his and Matt's teaching for nothing.
And so it went:
PRINCIPAL CONYERS
Tell me about Candy Taylor.
SAM CRAFTY
I don’t know her all that well.
PRINCIPAL CONYERS
I’m not looking for an introduction, Sam. What do you know about her?
SAM CRAFTY
She’s Jeff Schroeder’s girlfriend. She wears tight shirts –
PRINCIPAL CONYERS
Yes, we’ve all noticed her shirts.
SAM CRAFTY
…and baggy pants. Straight A marks in math, weak in science and Lit.
PRINCIPAL CONYERS
I could get that information by looking at her file, Sam. Tell me something I don’t know.
SAM CRAFTY
Well, she’s cheating on Jeff. She’s a Blind Hall regular, and he never goes. I don’t know her vice, but she doesn’t look like a junkie, so…
PRINCIPAL CONYERS
Interesting. That could be useful. Tell me about Jeff.
Conyers had used that information to great advantage. He had one of his guards attempt to rat Candy out to Jeff, only to get indifferent shrugs in return. Conyers almost reamed me, furious that I had given him bad intel, but he decided to have me look in a different direction first. His intuition was not wrong. Turned out that Jeff and Kenny Stoppard had been feuding and Jeff had been banned from the Blind Hall. Candy had been doing what she had to in order to support Jeff’s addiction to low-grade speed, even if that meant hooking up with Jeff’s worst enemy. Jeff knew all about it, but only cared about the end result: another hit. Conyers stirred the pot by having Candy quarantined for three days in the infirmary, easily letting word trickle out that she might have “a disease of a personal and…easily transmitted nature.” By the time she was released Jeff was crawling up the ceiling from withdrawal, but neither Kenny nor the other Vocational powerbrokers would touch her. Their relationship ended with an ugly bruise on Candy’s face and a week in the Bell for Jeff (before I got there.)
None of these things benefitted Conyers in any tangible way. He wasn’t trying to get people expelled to a military Quarantine or locked up in solitary. He just wanted to sow as much discord as possible. C
onyers knew the best way of maintaining control was to set his students against each other, and not let them unite under his tyranny. Something he was able to do with increasing efficiency once he had my help.
"They passed them out about a month after you went in, about the time Remi got out," Ben muttered. Remi and Dave were still at their respective after-schools and intermurals. "Anyone who didn't believe him, he took them into his office and had them listen to the tapes.They even blame you for closing the Blind Hall. Kenny Stoppard’s out for your blood."
"Fuck," I said. And there, at the end, the ultimate betrayal. The essay I had written for Jarvis, where I laid my feelings bare about the basketball Beast incident. I feel hunted, lost and scared. I think I would do anything, anything to feel safe again. There has to be someone who can keep me safe! "Jesus, Jarvis, not you too!"
"Things have been pretty bad since you went in," Ben said. I raised my eyebrow; Ben had rarely spoken so many words to me at once before voluntarily. "Like I said, he closed off the Blind Hall. Started doing bunk checks, really tightening down. No Public Displays of Affection in the halls."
"What did Remi say?" I closed the booklet, made as if to rip it apart, then thought better.
"He thinks it's a trick of yours, giving up all that information in order to somehow humiliate Conyers even more later. But he's been distracted ever since Largo left. Conyers is actually making him teach the chemistry class!"
"What?" I looked up from the booklet. Largo had joked about doing that very thing, but I couldn't believe that Conyers would take him up on it, let alone get Remi to do it. "Why in hell would Remi do that?"
Ben shrugged. "He really likes chemistry."