Cages

by Chris Pasley

  "He had to do it," my father told me once. "Too much open land, too few people. There were people who hated him for it, but it was the only way we were gonna survive."

  My father was front and center of the Outbreak, in his Raleigh jail cell. The Sheriff went out once a hale and hearty man, but he walked back through the door an animated corpse. The Bitten lawman couldn't figure out how to open the cell door, but he clawed at my father through the bars, moaning. My dad managed to rip the leg off his jail cot and club the dead sheriff over the head. After fishing the keys from the stilled body he let himself out, helped himself to the Sheriff's arsenal and tried to find somewhere safe to hole up until the whole mess blew over.

  He never told me why he was in jail in the first place. I don't think even James ever got up the courage to ask.

  My mother was an intern at the local hospital, twenty-three and engaged to be married to a slightly younger medical student named Tom. "Oh, I wonder who you would have been if Tom hadn't tried to bite my head off," she would sometimes say wistfully, tousling my hair. Needless to say, the hospital was Ground Zero - anyone scratched or bitten was taken there, if the transformation was slow enough, and it provided easy prey in the hundreds - the parasite didn't care if its host was sick or well, it drove the rotting tissue on regardless. My mother, a security guard named Previns, two patients and a cafeteria lady that would later die of a cracked skull in her own bathroom more than twenty years later were the only ones to get out of the hospital alive. The senior security guard who had rounded them all up the first place sacrificed his life to set the hospital generators ablaze, so that by the time Previns led his little group into the hospital parking lot, the building was a groaning inferno filled with moaning, sizzling shapes. They had difficulty finding transportation; the hordes of Bitten were becoming aware of them, and Previns' shotgun only had so many shells. No one could seem to remember where they left their cars.

  Enter my father, barreling through in a pickup truck, mowing down the Bitten like weeds. My mother describes that moment as a revelation. Here was this scraggly convict, one handcuff bracelet still jangling on his left wrist, complete trash, but somehow he was far more prepared than any of the brilliant minds who now shuffled burning through the hospital to deal with an earth-moving crisis. "That's why I stay with him," she explained once. "That's why I don't walk out that door and find someone with half a brain, or even some common decency. Because when it comes down to it, your father walks the walk. In this world, what he did for us that day in front of the hospital was far more valuable than any degree or social grace. He was a man of action, and I stay with him out of respect for that fact."

  Not much love in the Crafty house. That should be evident by now.

  Remi had a stain of pooling red inching across his jeans from a gaping hole in his calf muscle. One of the guards’ shots had clipped him, but he just stared at the wound, raptly watching his own blood seep out. “It’s like watching a leak in a gas tank,” he said softly. “Once it’s gone the car stops moving.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Remi.” I scooted over to him and unlaced my belt from my pants. I wrapped it above the hole and knotted it tight. Remi didn’t even flinch.

  “I was shot once before. Did I ever tell you that? When I was ten, back in God’s Country,” Remi said, looking up at the ceiling. “My cousin Paul was shooting tin cans with a forty-ought six – said he was going to hunt a deer, even though my uncle told him that was stupid. Well, I had never heard a gun before, so I didn’t know what was going on. I waded out into the middle of the target range just as Paul opened fire. I just got grazed that time, though, but Paul’s dad put a stop to the shooting after that. He always blamed me for it. Paul was sixteen, no Quarantine out there, and he could beat me up pretty easy. The bullet hurt more then, though. That seems weird.”

  “You’re probably in shock.”

  “Just disappointment, Sam.” Remi looked at me. “Ben took it from me. He knew I wanted to be a Beast and he goes and becomes the most badass Beast anyone’s ever seen. And here I am, lying in blood.”

  “It’s not all your blood,” I snarled, standing.

  Remi looked down at Dave, only feet from us. “Conyers shot Dave.”

  I hugged my knees. “He was trying to shoot me.”

  “Hero Dave, that’s him.” Remi heaved to his feet, only for the first time showing pain. He looked around the lobby, but finding no cloth, limped over to the desk printer and fished out some eight-and-a-half by eleven sheets. Grunting loudly, he managed to lower himself back to the floor next to Dave. He gently laid the sheets over Dave’s ruined face. Broken ink cartridges had rendered the paper almost soggy with black ink. The entire mass looked like an alien glommed onto Dave’s head, but at least you could no longer see the gaping wound, or his blank, innocent eyes.

  Remi sat back with a sigh, reviewing his work. “A hero deserves a better shroud that that.”

  I glared at him. He was covered in blood, some his, most Dave’s, but his eyes were bright. “You’re taking this awfully well.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been imagining all this would happen. Except usually in my imagination I was four feet taller and green.”

  I was looking at him in the same way he had looked at me when he learned I betrayed all of them to Conyers. “You imagined Dave dead?”

  He leaned back against the wooden bench. It too, had bullet holes. “I was gonna be a Beast, Sam. I was going to have to kill people to get out of here. There was a pretty high chance I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from killing all of you if I turned in the dorm cell. So yeah, I imagined it. I just never imagined I’d get left behind. Not me.” He looked at Conyers’ office door. “He promised me! That prick said he could smell it.”

  “Asshole!” I shouted. “You think Ben wanted to be a Beast? You think he’s romping around now, killing people willy-nilly, happy as a clam to be a murderous monster? Ben is dead. That’s what you would be. Dead. Ben was murdered by the parasite that lives in our blood. Some fucking parasite killed our friend and is walking around in what’s left of his body. And you’re jealous of that!”

  Remi frowned. “Let’s just say you and I look at it differently, Sam, and leave it at that. Who knows, maybe all your shouting will bring Ben back here and we can ask him.”

  God, I wanted to hit him. I wanted to tackle him, to yell in his stupid redneck ears what an arrogant prick he was, to punch him in his dark, dumb face. From day one he had been a millstone around my neck and he seemed determined to continue the tradition. But I held my rage – he might be right about The Beast that was Ben coming back. “What do you think we should do?”

  He looked back and, realizing he was leaning against the bench, pulled himself up onto it. It shifted ominously. “Honestly? I don’t really care anymore.”

  “Even if Ben…the Beast doesn’t come back, you heard the radio. They said multiple contacts. More than one Beast, at the same time.”

  Remi looked intrigued. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “No one has. You know what this could be?”

  “Another Outbreak.”

  I stood, pacing now. I was almost excited, though I couldn’t have told you why. This went far beyond anything James had ever tried to teach me. “We have to get out of this building.”

  Remi pulled his wounded leg up onto the bench. “You’re forgetting. I grew up in the Midwest. I wasn’t brought up with Outbreak survivor stories. I didn’t have a Beast boogeyman under my bed. This is evolution. I’m not interested in being a throwback. If it’s an Outbreak, then there’s no stopping it. And if I can’t be a Beast...”

  “Fucking moron.” My pacing brought me to Conyers’s door. Would I know the change if it came upon me? Would I feel it come? Or was this it, the steady building of fury and righteousness, this urgency of violence? My sneakers impacted the rigid metal door as hard as I could kick, but the hinges didn't budge. “You want to just sit around then? Wait for a Beast to come ch
omp you up? Or maybe you think you’ll kick in late, that you’ll change just like him?” I kept kicking, over and over until my foot was numb. The black skid marks drew a face on the metal. My fury nearly burned out, I rammed my whole body against the door, putting my lips to the rivets. "You had better never come out of there, you fuck. You just had better never come out."

  Nothing but silence from the other side.

  I turned to Remi, still recumbent on the bench. “Don’t you want to get out of this place? Get back to the country? No walls, no guards. No Alan, no Conyers? Free to do whatever you want.”

  He looked at me squarely. “No friends. No one who gives a damn about chemistry outside of a good buzz. I don’t much see the difference.”

  I buried my head in my hands. “You’re impossible. And for once you’re right. You just lost the only friend you had left in here.” I rubbed my eyes, still stinging with Dave’s blood, and made for the broken hallway door.

  “Wait!” Remi hobbled to his feet. “Don’t go. Wait. I’ll go with you. I will. I’m sorry; it was the loss of blood talking. Promise.” He flashed a weak smile. “You’re right. I still have a few more years of potential left. And if I get to the country I have a better shot as staying un-slain.”

  He suddenly looked so needy, a complete flip from his demeanor of just a few seconds before. Was it an act? Was he acting before? “You know – maybe we should hide out here instead.”I walked over to the shattered door and hazarded a peek outside. I had expected to see the twisted bodies of the downed guards, but all I saw was thick tracks of blood leading away down the west hallway. The two benches that had once framed Conyers's doorway were smashed and I could picture Ben stopping for a moment to shatter them, destruction as an act of play. “Hole up until help comes.”

  Remi spat. There was blood in the phlegm. “Only if you want to die more than I do. No one’s going to mount a rescue. They can't risk multiple Beasts getting out, not once they get word what's gone down here. They'll flood the place with napalm and light a match."

  "Escape, then?"

  "It’s our best bet, but it’ll be rough. I’ve been trying to plan an escape since I got here. Never found a way.”

  "There are doors. There are keys. If the guards have their hands full with the Beasts, then there's a chance we can find a set and get out of here." I set a hand on Remi's shoulder, trying to rebuild the faith he had cultivated in me. "I don't know what else to do."

  “You’re the man with the plan.”

  The air in the halls outside wasn't moving. The gentle hum of the air conditioning and filtration system had fallen silent. As Remi and I gingerly walked out into the hallway, one of his arms around my shoulders as he limped along, I could only smell blood; no artificial breeze to waft it away. Ben's tracks were cement craters dug in triangle patterns down the hall, accompanied by a steady stripe of blood that got thinner the further down the trail you looked. Conyers's office was near the end of the long hall between Mathematics and the Secure Zone, in a sectioned-off bank of administration offices. Ben's tracks went right, towards the rest of the Quarantine. We went left, towards the huge doors that cordoned off the entrance to the secure adults’ wing, where the teachers, guards and other administrators lived. It was also where the security nerve center of the building was located.

  "They're not going to let us in the Secure Wing," I said.

  Remi tried his best to shrug. "If we go right, we'll catch up to Ben. And this is the most likely place to find a set of keys."

  It was late now. I could see darkness covering the courtyard outside through the windows that were more common in this administration hall than they were elsewhere. Worse, I realized that Remi was now little more than a white blur on my arm and I could barely see more than a few feet in front of me in the dying light. There was light leaking in though the windows, from the streetlamps ringing the courtyard, but the infrequent barcodes they projected on the floor hardly illuminated the hallway. “Power’s out,” I whispered, suddenly aware of my voice bouncing off the brick and linoleum. “Not outside, though.”

  “Someone cut the main line,” Remi said, confused, and for the first time since Dave’s death, interested. “Why? The Beasts can probably see in the dark.”

  “Wait. I see the doors.”

  The doors at the end of the hall were blocked by three staggered roadside barriers, like they did on every other hall. There was a rebar cage at the end where the security desk sat, where each guard was made to check in once every thirty minutes while on shift. The worn chair behind it was empty, the cage door unlocked and swinging open. The doors themselves were featureless, disguised in an inoffensive kitchen-countertop gray. No handles. No locks.

  “What now?” I asked.

  Remi untangled himself and slumped against the desk cage, his face glowing with the light from the window. “Pound on it and ask to be let in? I dunno. This is your plan.”

  “That was before I knew the power was out. No power, no cameras, no one to see us pounding and open the door.”

  He pointed up. “Not so sure about that.”

  I squinted. There it was, enveloped by the darkness, but once I had picked it out, I was amazed I could ever have missed it. The red active light that reassured every guard that the cameras they relied on were working beamed happily down at me from the corner of the ceiling. “So the cameras are working? Then the power isn’t cut…just the lights.”

  “Even more a mystery. You pound. I’ll watch.”

  I beat on the door with the meat of my fists until my finger bones hurt. The noise was surprisingly quiet, as if to accentuate how futile my effort was. Sweat stained my T-shirt like clumsy racing stripes by the time I stopped.

  “Listen,” Remi barked.

  I closed my eyes and strained my ears. Popping. For two years when I was a child we had a Latino family living next door. The Crafties had little to do with them, besides my dad glowering at the father every day as the dark, burly man climbed into his ’02 Rambler at six thirty every morning, a toasted bagel tucked neatly in his blue shirt pocket. I used to spy on them from my second story bedroom over the wooden fence, because they were so different, even though the kids in their back yard did pretty much the same things my friends and I did. Neither opportunity nor courage ever prompted me to actually speak to the often grinning little boy, or the sullen older girl. They weren’t unpleasant neighbors, for the most part, except for their practice of lighting firecrackers for every holiday. Any holiday that warranted a day off work or school was celebrated with a picnic and a chain of gunpowder cigarettes that exploded with glorious violence. My mom began dreading every holiday – James thought they reminded her of the Outbreak somehow. We took a lot of holiday trips to stuffy restaurants during those years, the closest thing to a picnic I ever got. We never lighted fireworks, not even on the Fourth of July. That’s what this popping sound reminded me of.

  “Gunfire,” I said.

  Remi nodded. “It’s not over. There are guards still fighting the Beasts.”

  “Maybe…maybe we won’t have to escape after all.” I thought about that, but I couldn’t stomach the idea. Return to the grind, that murderer Conyers lording it over everyone?

  The other boy sighed. He looked paler than usual in the streetlight and his face was slack with weariness. “A Beast almost killed me once, did I tell you that?”

  “I don’t think so. This isn’t really the time for –”

  “It was the first time I had ever seen one. I was fourteen, not too much older than you are now. You wouldn’t have recognized me then. When I was out in the country… you had miles and miles of fields, or empty towns, or burned forest, and we would wander and wander. I used to put each foot on either side of the state lines when we found signs still standing and I would pretend I was a giant. There was foraging, going through aisles and aisles of supermarkets. Some of them had holes in the roofs and the shelves were choked with kudzu and weeds, but we plucked from those green vines precious fr
uit – canned tuna, canned beans, canned broccoli. This was normal for me, this was the way the world was. It wasn’t until I was five or six that I started to realize what the lumps wearing clothes on the concrete floors were. Little old ladies who had died of heart attacks, still wrapped in their hand-knit blue shawls, dried hands clutching metal hospital canes. Middle aged men who had rotted where they had fallen, some too mauled to turn Bitten, some shot, surgical little holes in their skulls. Smaller bundles, kids like me, tossed aside because they were useless to the forces of nature that had swept through the stores.”

  “Remi –”

  He continued on, ignoring me. “One day, when I was about eight or so, going through the pockets of a delivery man who lay broken next to shattered crates of some bottled fruit drink, I suddenly got it. Every day of my life in God’s Country I saw the evidence of it. My mom and my aunt were full of shit. Life wasn’t a cycle. It was a straight line. Babies lying dead in rotting diapers. Men mummified in their coveralls after a long day at work. Bent, tired old men sinking to the ground and grinning when death came for them, like a surfer waiting for a choice wave. I’ve never even seen the ocean.” Remi paused for a moment, suddenly wistful. Shaking it off, he continued. “Death, Sam. At every moment of every life, death. Moved down, helpless, important, or grateful. What was the point? But you know who I almost never saw dead in the supermarkets and drugstores and restaurants?”

  “Teenagers?”

  “Exactly. Exactly. Teenagers.” Remi winced as he tried to shift some weight onto his bad leg. “That’s why I took up chemistry. I wanted to be the one to figure it out.”

  I blinked. “You wanted know what triggered the change!”

  “I wanted to figure out how to make it happen. You don’t know what it’s like. Wheeling your carts from town to town…just surviving. No will to do anything but survive. It was all so unending, all so pointless. That’s why I ran away for the East Coast, the real reason. Everyone in the pictures and magazines I read seemed so much more alive than we did, shuffling along from ruin to ruin, picking over carcasses for canned scraps. There was no difference between us and the Bitten I killed on my way here. But when I got here…you have no idea the disappointment.”