by Chris Pasley
Kate had her Focus Face on. It was something I had seen often in Lit class during exams. Her eyes went level and cold. Her mouth tightened into a pink lozenge. The muscles in her cheeks often twitched with the strain. She had an objective and nothing was going to get in her way. She and I locked eyes and panic rose high in my throat. She wasn't going to open the door.
"You little shits!" Brian hollered. "Open the door or I'm going to decorate this fucking window with the brains of these fine young individuals!" His MP5 dug into my temple, its pressure forcing my right eye closed.
Guillermo said something to Kate, but she shook her head. He seemed agitated, gesturing wildly, but they spoke so low no sound reached us. Casey put her hand on Guillermo's arm, looking sad, and said something that shut him up. She threaded her fingers through his. Kate nodded, fished an MP5 off the floor and pointed it at the window. Very clearly she shook her head no.
"You assholes!" Brian shrieked. He fired a round at the glass. The sound deafened my right ear and sent tiny shards of glass burning into my cheek. Luckily the bullet itself bounced in a different direction, but when Brian replaced the muzzle against my head I screamed, the barrel blisteringly hot. "Swear to God, I'll do both of them!" Sotto voce, he turned to Johnson. "What do you think?"
Johnson shrugged, then grinned. "Let's make them make out in front of their friends. You like that, you little homos? Maybe I make you suck his cock, what do you think? If that ain't torture enough we cut an ear off. If that don't work, we try a thumb. What do you think?"
Brian barked a tight laugh. "Sounds like a Plan B to me." He raised his voice: "One last chance! You want these two dead? Or worse?"
Guillermo looked panicked again, but this time Kate took action. She stepped close to the window, so that our faces were no more than six inches apart. All I saw were her eyes, as dead and uncaring as the courtyard Bitten’s had been, before she pulled the cord, letting the blinds fall back down, shielding them from whatever horrors the guards might concoct.
"Shit!" Brian pulled the MP5 away from my face. "Your buddies sure are cold."
"Don't know why we expected anything else," Johnson agreed. "Clearly Plan A is a bust, and Plan B's a waste of time with nobody looking. Plan C?"
"Fuck. Yeah, Plan C."
"What's Plan C?" I croaked.
Brian grimaced. "We got keys to the front door. Plan C is that we pack up our shit and fight tooth and nail to get there."
I hissed as my fingers touched the perfectly round burn on my head. "What about us?"
Johnson laughed. "You're bait, chum."
Remi moaned and slid to the floor under the window, burying his head in his hands.
"Can you at least give Remi some food? He's lost a lot of blood."
Brian raised an eyebrow. "You think food will help getting shot?"
"They give you cookies at blood drives."
Johnson shrugged. "Kid's got a point."
Brian rummaged through a black backpack by the grenade launcher and tossed Remi some grain bars. Remi fumbled at catching them, moving so slowly and awkwardly that if it had been possible for a teenager I might have pegged him as a Bitten. Brian said "You got ten minutes to chow down, then we're heading out." He grabbed a few bars for himself and passed two to Johnson. Remi pressed one into my hand, but I pushed it back.
Johnson settled next to Brian, sitting on the closest concrete barrier. He took off half a grain bar in one bite and nodded towards us. "Look at 'em. It's a good thing for you boys that you're Conyers's bitches. You got strings to pull to make you dance. Some of them others...whew, might as well be animals, you know? But you two are nice and manageable, ain't you?"
Remi looked up, his dark eyes stark against his pale face. "Conyers killed my friend. Next time I see that son of a bitch I'm gonna rip his throat out."
Brian and Johnson cackled together, as if Remi were no more than an angry puppy. "You do that," Johnson snorted. "You do that. Say, Remi? You got any more of that meth you cooked up last year? That was some quality shit."
"It sold very well," Brian said, mocking a businessman's voice. "We project next year's returns to grow fifteen percent. Of course, given the current slaughter of the consumer base, those projections are only loose estimates."
Remi shook his head and chewed silently on his food.
"Why are you like this?" I asked. "It's supposed to be your job to protect us."
Brian sneered, kneeling down to our level. "You got it wrong, buddy. Our job is to kill you. Kill every last one of you mother fucking animal assholes who ever got a black thought lodged in your doe-eyed head. It's a school for chimps. One day, without fail, those chimps stop throwing feces and grow up into eight hundred fucking pound gorillas. You're each of you little bombs ticking away. Don't matter if you go off or not. What do you call an unexploded bomb, Johnson?"
"A dud."
"That's right. A dud. Can't leave an unexploded bomb lying around can you? So we do our part." Brian stood. "I was ten when the Outbreak hit. Johnson?"
"Twelve."
Brian nodded, the mirth leaving his eyes. "There may be rules we gotta follow on any other day, but on days like this, well...we don't intend to waste a good opportunity to sweep the minefield. I already got three dud disarmaments under my belt so far.”
“Four for me,” added Johnson.
Brian clapped him on the back. “And you know what? Without the computer roll sheet, nobody knew where anybody was supposed to be. But Conyers wouldn't let us just stuff people where we knew they went, no! We had to verify it manually. So when all this shit went down we had dozens of baby Beasts standing in line to get put back in their cages instead of nice and sealed up like they were supposed to be. Good fucking work, you fucking jerkoffs."
Remi moaned and it sounded a little like regret. It’s what I felt, anyway.
"Alright, get up. Johnson, gimmie a couple of those MP5s and a couple pineapples. You take the launcher."
"I still think we should've used 'em to blow the door."
"Door's too thick. Shooting the fuck out of it should have taught you that."
Johnson snorted. "Grenades ain't bullets. The man said, on your feet!"
I helped Remi up. His color was a little better, but his hands were still shaking.
"Down the hall, slow. We'll be right behind you."
"Not too close though." Laughter.
"Wait, wait. I got a great idea." Brian pulled one of the grenades from one of the pouches lining his vest and pulled a thin nylon string from another. "Johnson, check this out." He tied one end of the string to the grenade's firing pin and the other to his wrist. Then he grabbed my shirt with one hand and stuffed the explosive down my pants.
I grabbed his hand. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Watch it," he said, his eyes warning me. I let his arm go and the grenade dropped. Had I not spent three appetiteless months in the Bell, my jeans would have been too tight, but as it was the weight dropped neatly against my crotch. "You two get too far ahead and get an idea to make a break for it...boom. Ain't that clever, Johnson?"
"Damn clever. Like a tampon!" They got a hearty laugh out of that.
"Jesus Christ," I whispered.
"Go. Johnson and me got a date with the great outdoors."
Chapter Ten
Loss is a bitter spice, my dad used to say. Made it sound like a platitude from an old farmer’s almanac, right up there with “early to bed, early to rise.” He said it right before he stole the distributor cap from a 1992 Ford Taurus hoisted on a sledge at Phil Chandler’s auto shop. He leaped down off the steel plate with glee, raising his booty like a squid, sparkplugs trailing triumphant wire tentacles. "Imagine, Sam, what the loss of this distributor cap will do. The mechanic - shock! The owner - anger! But if a few days from now I put the thing back in, imagine what would happen. Both the owner and the mechanic - relief! They can both get on with their lives. As I see it, the relief outweighs the loss. Makes their lives just a bit richer."
<
br /> "So you're going to put the cap back?"
"Hell no."
Walking down the Social Studies hall, one of my friends dead, another nearly bled dry, yet another become a monster and with a grenade stuffed down my pants, I felt Dad's lesson to be an appropriate fit. Loss undone could be a sweet thing, but that was the catch. Loss was never undone. I was imagining whole new timelines in my head, new universes where Conyers didn't murder Dave. I scrubbed his life back and forth, tweaking here and there. He wouldn't have been a pro ball player. Too obvious. Lawyer either. He'd have gone to a nice college on the strength of his extracurriculars and his better than average GPA. He'd get a degree he didn't anticipate getting when he went in - something like engineering, or political science. He'd go on to a successful engineering (political) career and marry a nice woman (or a bitch he'd end up divorcing a year later), have 2 kids (or no kids).... the branches became too much to wrap my head around and they collapsed, leaving no reality but the one I knew. Dave was dead. He had no life.
Johnson growled. "You, keep your hands out of your pants."
The Social Studies Hall was still. We had progressed perhaps thirty feet in total, as Brian and Johnson took slow, careful steps, and often tugged on my string to make ours match. Our feet were the loudest sounds we could hear, and each step made me wince.
Once, Nathan Young, a third-year, had gone around to all the freshmen and asked which water fountain they thought tasted the best. Most people had an easy answer, but I had been intrigued, and asked for a rain check on my answer. I sampled every water fountain in the accessible Quarantine, those near the Blind Hall or in the Secure Wing obviously excluded. I discovered what his question had hinted at; the water did indeed taste different from fountain to fountain. Bubble gum jammed in the spigot? Rust clinging to the pipes? Was there some fundamental property to the distance water traveled that could change its chemical makeup? Remi had still been stuck in the Bell, so I couldn’t have him test samples, but Dave had an interesting theory. He thought it had to do with the number of Beast kills in a particular hall, like maybe the blood got into the fountain somehow and our inner parasites were conditioning our tongues to savor the taste. I had no way to corroborate that, as Beast records were confidential, but I entertained the morbid idea for a while. A week later I hunted Nathan Young down and told him the Social Studies hall had the best water. Uninterested, he had marked it down as a single tick in the spreadsheet he was making for a psychology paper in Advanced Science, much to my disappointment. As we tiptoed past the fountain I had marked as my favorite, I wondered if I’d ever get to drink out of it again. Or, given the blood we saw smeared on the floors as if by a wide, thick brush, if it would taste different. I nearly asked Brian and Johnson to stop to find out. This was leading me to more and more fatalistic thoughts regarding my imminent death, so I was vastly relieved when I noticed Remi trying to catch my eye.
“I didn’t want to get out,” Remi whispered.
“What?”
“I didn’t want to get out. I wanted to make sure you got out, and then stay here.”
“To die.”
“Probably. But now…” He looked back at the guards, his left eyebrow sharpening into a dangerous point. “Now I have a goal.”
In a different situation I would have smiled. Remi’s old self was bleeding through. Despair wasn’t his MO. Still, I couldn’t celebrate his renewed optimism the way I would have liked. Was everyone dead? Except for Kate, Guillermo and Casey, we had seen no other students. More perplexing, all the classroom doors swung wide open.
"That don't make any sense," Johnson said. "All the doors seal up tight during lockdown."
"Those kids in the Security Office must have unlocked them."
Johnson scratched his head. "I dunno. It don't make any sense. Why would they?"
Brian shrugged, his eyes glued to each passing room. "Who knows why they do what they do?"
Remi's eyes met mine. I had no doubt Conyers was the one responsible. A man like him wouldn't abdicate control of the school to the hired help. He'd have security controls in his safe little office. I could imagine him in there, twisting the dials and cackling like a madman as my classmates died. No such controls had been visible to me in my many office visits, nor had my eavesdropping revealed any hint of them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Conyers didn’t run the Quarantine on the brawn of his guards alone.
Down the hall, a door opened.
Brian and Johnson immediately dropped into crouches, drawing a bead on the door, a tall slab gently swinging wide. The nylon string leading to the grenade in my pants tightened alarmingly, but didn't pull the pin. I grabbed the rope with my left hand and snaked my right into my jeans, grabbing the grenade.
Remi grabbed my arm. "Sam! It's the Bell."
I whirled. "Don't shoot! It's a student!"
Brian relaxed. "Target practice, then."
"Susan!" I screamed.
A blond mop emerged gingerly, five fingers wrapping like an insect on the doorframe.
"Please don't," I muttered. "Please."
She walked like a marionette – not jumbled and clumsy, but as if her strings only stretched so far. Susan looked out at the hall as if she were stepping onto an alien planet. I could see her smile. Sleepily, she looked down the hallway at us. "Oh...Remi! Sam! Is it recess?"
Brian growled. "You two get down on your knees.”
I dove for the floor, using the movement as a way to hide the fact that I was fishing the grenade out from my crotch. Pulled the pin, held the safety lever tight. Hoped I wasn't about to kill us both.Remi stood defiant though, his color mostly returned, resolve in his eyes. Doing what he had always done. Stood up for his fellow Beasts-to-be.
"Get your ass down," Johnson said. Remi didn’t obey. Brian slightly shifted the trajectory of his MP5 and squeezed off a single round, right into Remi’s already injured leg. The boy squealed and collapsed, clawing at his chewed up tendons.
Susan jumped at the sound, and her smile faded as she saw the men behind us. Her eyes widened and her mouth stretched wider than I thought it could possibly go. A thick glottal sound choked from her throat and she backed away from the door.
Johnson leered. "Bye bye, Susan."
"Good riddance," Brian muttered. “I was getting tired of her anyway.”
I started to open my right hand, but then the Bell door slammed. The air the big slab moved slapped us in the face, it was so fast. There, behind Susan, nearly on top of her, was a Beast.
Was it Ben? It looked different than the basketball player had, bigger, lumpier. I looked for the tatters of yellow shirt that might mark him as our transformed friend, but there was nothing there. Susan turned casually and as soon as she saw the Beast, her horror melted. "Oh," she breathed. "It's you."
Before I could shout a warning, she embraced the Beast. I could see the razor spines pushing through her body, but she didn't care. She just wanted to get closer and closer, until the torn ribbons of her arms were wrapped tightly around the Beast's barrel chest. The Beast paused for a moment, then folded its arms around her. It was almost as if she were absorbed into it as the spines on its forearms shredded her to pieces, nearly liquifying her in seconds. The last I could see, she was still smiling.
"Holy shit," Johnson said. "That thing don't look normal."
Brian exhaled sharply. "Doesn't matter. Drop it."
I flattened myself on the floor and rolled to the side as bullet fire erupted over me. The Beast roared, charging. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to go cow-tipping in a friend’s pasture when I was ten, and the resulting stampede was exactly like this. Each meaty thump against the ground solid and monumental. I saw one taloned foot scythe into the concrete floor right next to my head.
They might have been psychopaths, but Brian and Johnson were stunningly good at their jobs. Brian slid forward, firing short bursts upward at the Beast while Johnson concentrated his fire at the monster's face. The two-font assault stunned the Beast and
it clawed at its face as bullets thudded heavily into its forehead. Brian completed his slide near the giant right foot and whipped out his short sword. He shouted as he drove all his power into one gruesome slash, cutting the creature's Achilles tendon. The malformed leg buckled and the Beast fell to one knee, but Brian's shout melted into a scream as the giant fingers plunged into the guard's chest and flung him past Johnson down the hall.
I rolled the grenade like a bowling ball.
The detonation was even more violent than the Beast had been.
I dreamed of Ben. He peeled off his Beast-head like a Scooby-Doo villain and held it tight under his left arm. His claws were just styrofoam and air. "We were born bad," he explained gently. "It's just like the guard told you."
"I tried to be good," I said.
"You have a dog's virtue, then. You don't know what good looks like."
"This is better?" All around me I could feel death dripping physics-free from the walls, like the blood of the famous astronauts who had killed themselves up in the space shuttle rather than come back during the Outbreak. Every elementary schooler learned their names: Commander Perry Sullivan and Lieutenant Debbie Dill. "Killing all the people around us? Mindless animals?"
Ben shrugged. "Maybe there is no universal good. Maybe there's just good for me, and good for everyone else." He plunged his claws, no longer styrofoam, into my gut. They sank like a ladle into wet spaghetti. His eyes were blazing red. "This is very, very good for me."
I tried to say something, but the claws tore through my insides like earthworms, burrowing. Reaching for my brain.
"You were so close, Sam. I could smell it on you."
Brian's breath was hot and fetid on my cheek. "Wake up, you little shit."
I started, pushing him away, seeing Ben for a brief flash in his face. Everything sounded like a towel was wrapped around my head. "What.... I thought the Beast killed you."
Brian's face was bloody and as he sat up I noticed his left arm hanging limp. "Claws didn't penetrate the vest. Your little stunt with the grenade was what did all this."