Cages

by Chris Pasley

  "Grenade?" I sat up, pain slamming into my head as blood rushed downward. "Oh, shit, is the Beast –”

  "It's dead." Brian grunted as he worked himself upright and onto his feet. "You did that, at least. I'm damn lucky I was thrown clear. Of course, you blew the fuck out of Johnson. Bet he wishes he hadn't been carrying the grenade launcher."

  I looked down the hall. The dripping death I had dreamed of was made real here. Blood running yellow with pus trickled from craters in the walls amid the tatters of motivational posters. The Beast's head lay flaccid at the end of the shell of his chest to one side of the hall, like a dropped snakeskin. There was a mass of red guts and blood further down I assumed to be Johnson. My favorite water fountain, drenched in blood and turned on its side, spraying water from ruptured hoses. "What are you going to do with me?"

  "It's just not right." Brian pulled a pistol from his vest. "Johnson, four Beasts kills on his record, done in by a kid who hadn't even turned. What fucking idiot gives a hostage a grenade? Don't worry, Sammy. I'm not going to kill you yet. Got reports of at least three more of those goddamned things in here. Front doors aren't far now, and it looks like you're all the bait I got left. "

  Had Remi gotten away in the fight? I tried to hide a grin as I imagined him scrambling away on his one good leg as the grenade blew, full of revenge for Jeremy Emmett and Ben Willian and Sharon Norse and Trisha Davenport and the Panthers #25. The cruelty of Brian and Johnson had rekindled the old Remi and I nearly chuckled, thinking about what he would do to Brian once he figured out a way to free me.

  I realized when I saw the body that I had lionized Remi just as much as he had me. He had thought me a vengeful hero, here to free his brothers and sisters from oppression. I had made of him an irrepressible magician, confident that his guile and mischief could overcome anything the staid and age-befuddled guards could devise. Now I knew what those Bolivian rebels had felt when Che Guevara died in front of their eyes. Under the bravado and the brilliance, Remi was just a boy. Now he was a dead boy.

  His thin body had been trampled by one of the Beast's talons. His entire chest was flattened, four holes piercing him at his stomach and neck. Except for the viscera pushed out to the sides of his thin frame, he could have been a cartoon character after an unfortunate steamroller accident. Language eluded me. I wasn't furious, I wasn't heartbroken. I wasn't even sad. If there's a word for epic unfairness, I could have found a good use for it then. I tried to read Remi's last look - relief at an end to his suffering, maybe, or a futile determination to live, but all I saw was pain.

  "Sorry you never got to be a Beast," I told him as I stood up on shaky legs. I had a piece of shrapnel burned into my right forearm, but it felt numb. Prodding it with my finger did nothing but well up more blood. Probably in shock, I thought, thinking back to my mother's anatomy lessons. All anyone had ever done in my life had been to prepare me for this moment, and it had done me no good.

  "Get a move on," Brian said, panting, presumably from the pain of his shattered arm. "The blast might bring them."

  The hallways seemed even darker now, the flash from the grenade having overpowered my eyes. They refused to adjust. The only thing I could pick out was the hungry red eyes of the security cameras as I walked, Brian crouched down behind me for cover. Conyers was watching, I was certain of that. Would he just let Brian kill me? Well, why not? He himself had already tried. He’d killed Dave trying. He’d obviously set the Beasts loose on the student body by opening all the doors, cutting most of the power. A feast for his fallen children. I was embarrassed to realize that I still expected to hear his unsteady voice crackle from Brian’s radio, telling him to set me free. If he did that, I would obey him. I would go back to my cell and wait, all alone, until they told me class was in session again. I’d figure out a way to rationalize all the death, all the murder, as necessary evils. Done, somehow, to protect me.

  We passed the Bell without incident, now only a slab a tad bit darker than the rest of the wall. I nearly threw up as I kicked what remained of Susan in the dark. Brian had no sympathy, punching me roughly in the back as I dry heaved. It was an eternity walking in darkness. I was starting to think I was really blind, that the grenade had done some permanent damage, when Brian yanked hard on my collar.

  “What the hell?” He whispered, breathing hard into my ear. “What in the hell could have done that?”

  “Done what?” I said, panic in my throat. Was there a Beast near?

  To my surprise Brian wrenched off the night vision glasses and jammed them on my head, stabbing me roughly in the ears. The world exploded into a brilliant pulse of green. No longer blind, I still wasn’t sure what I was seeing. “Isn’t that where the stairs should be?”

  “Yeah.” Brian took the glasses back. “Something tripped the containment.”

  Tripped it… and ripped right through it. While I’d had the glasses the enormity of what Brian found had been clear. The stairwells were choked with anti-Beast and containment devices. They could be activated to seal the stairs in lethal sections, with automated killing devices at the ready, machine guns hidden in spring-loaded murder holes, flamethrowers, pneumatic spikes. Dave had told us a harrowing story about when he and his girlfriend at the time, Jane Sonne, had accidentally been trapped in a containment cell during the four pm class intermission. He said the walls had zipped closed like the wings of a hummingbird. Jane had her ponytail caught in the wall behind them, just shy of taking her head off. It had taken a watchful guard in the Security Office sprinting to hit the abort button to stop the flamethrower that had already been deployed from the right wall. The tip had already been lit, yellow and pulsing with anticipation of the upcoming roast. Dave blamed Jane’s decision to break up with him on that incident.

  The containment walls were torn like paper all the way up the stairs. Three inches of solid steel, five times over. There was char on the walls, shattered spikes, dozens of shell casings…but no Beast.

  "Good God," Brian gasped. "What in hell are these things? No...no Beast could do that."

  I had no answer for him. “Conyers knew this was coming, you know.”

  “Shut up.”

  “He knew something was happening. Beasts turning at accelerated rates. Faster, more often. The head of the guards even said it. But he did nothing.”

  “I’m not… not like that shithead Biff,” Brian snarled. “I’m not going to be your buddy. And I’m not…going to put up with your bullshit.” He pressed the pistol against my back and barked an order to move.

  “Have you thought about what’s happening here?”

  Brian was quiet for about five steps, then answered: “Yes.”

  “Well, shouldn’t you be trying to put down some more Beasts instead of getting out?”

  "Fuck no. I could take being ripped apart, you know," Brian said, talking nervously. "Or blown up, like Johnson. Over quick. But that's not what you do to us, is it? You suck the life out of us and just leave a vicious, withered husk. A man should be able to live… with more dignity at the end."

  I looked at him. He had lost his helmet and for the first time I got a clear look in the phosphorescence of the glasses. He was in his early forties, but the years had worn him hard, his brown hair streaked with a light gray. His face was lined in cruel webs from his nose. Brian had the look of a man who had just now noticed that he wasn't as spry as he had been the day before.

  "You don't see any difference, do you? Between us and the Beasts?"

  "No...difference," Brian breathed.

  “I killed a guard you know. In the courtyard. He was Bitten.”

  “There but for the grace of God. Tell me when you bag a Beast without a grenade and I’ll be impressed.”

  Finally we reached the iron-clad trophy case that marked the end of the Social Studies hall and the beginning of the main corridor, where I had first entered the Quarantine. We had passed several staircases, but no more tripped containment cells. Light was streaming in from the barred windows a
bove the case. The moon must have finally parted the clouds. The ability to see, however dimly, was an enormous relief. I wondered if Dave had any trophies in that case, or had show dogs like Alan stolen all the glory? For the first time I wondered what happened to Alan, and all the other people I had known in the Quarantine. Alan I hoped had been taken out early, on the theory that perhaps the Beasts had an appetite for stupidity. Maybe Kenny Stoppard was old enough to be walking around brainless from a bite by now. The thought was almost cheering. I tried not to think how the scales of fairness would tumble if Alan had lived and Dave died.

  "God," Brian said numbly, looking down the barricaded corridor to the front double doors. They were swung wide open, wind rattling the chains that still hung from one door handle. It was night outside. We could feel the cold air dust in the dirt from the no-man's-land between the brick and the fence. "Someone let them out. Jesus Christ."

  "Conyers," I spat, unsure how I should feel. Had he done it to save the rest of the students? No way, I thought. He did it to save his own ass, so he could sneak out later once the building was clear. That was lower than I thought even Conyers would go. For all I knew, maybe he was already gone.

  Brian wheezed, clutching his chest with the hand that held the pistol, as if willing the bullets into his heart. "Impossible.... Conyers....can't open the front doors.... only the Security Office, or the master key. Johnson stole a copy from the state...supervisor.... he made me one....only me...only me...."

  I stepped away from him, to the other side of one of the concrete barricades corrugating the hall. Brian tried to follow but he walked straight into the barrier. He couldn’t see it. His one good arm hugged the concrete desperately. "You're Bitten."

  "Didn't get me. Didn't make it through."

  "You're Bitten," I repeated.

  He sank down to one knee. "Fuck," he said wearily. Then he looked up, his eyes intense with hate. His hair was already beginning to fall out. White flooding his eyes. Sallowness sinking his cheeks like two windless sails. "Don't think that means you get away. You don't fucking get away."

  "Why not?"

  "You’re worse than them…. you’re a Beast…every inch a Beast…. can’t let you go…just cause you look like…any other kid. Capping you… is what I do…"

  I reached across the barrier and grabbed at Brian's gun. He was too slow, the life leaving his joints faster and faster now, but he wouldn't let go. The rest of his body went limp, but he kept hold of the pistol, squeezing off two rounds past my face. I heaved as much as I could, nearly as weak as he, and levered him over the barricade. The shrapnel in my arm ripped out as one of his buckles caught it and I screamed. My vision telescoped, but I kept pulling until his face slammed into the wooden floor. Blood frothed from his mouth as his jaw ground teeth deep into his gums. I felt sure his plan had been to shoot himself after taking care of me, but at some point he must have decided that I needed to die more than he did, because he used his last concious breath trying to kill me.His wrist bent at impossible angles as he tried to get just one good shot, his pistol a harpoon and I his smug white whale.

  I pried the pistol from his fingers at last and leaped back, aiming for the head. Brian lay still, his legs astride the barricade, breath coming now in deep sinister rattles. Soon he would be walking again, looking for other life to consume and infect. "Same as it ever was," I said, my throat raspy with wear. "Except this time we get to shoot them." Two shots, point blank, and the Bitten that had been the guard Brian died.

  The breeze from outside had picked up and I took a moment to glory in it. More than half a year in this building and I had forgotten how wonderful such a thing felt, unhindered by windbreakers of the courtyard walls. Gun in hand, I walked toward the doors, threading my way through the barricades.

  What would I do when I got out? I pictured Biff out there somewhere, leading the kids like Moses out of Egypt to another Quarantine, to safety and confinement. The urge to find him was severe. He was the only one who could be trusted. But what if Biff was dead, a corpse abandoned in another hall somewhere, or a Bitten shuffling in the underbrush around the building? Panic gripped my spine and I stopped at the double doors, inches from the outside world. The chain-link door was still secure across the dirt, but the fence all around it had been sundered and left broken on the ground like the remains of junkyard chandeliers. In the distance I could see house lights past the tree line, sleepy fools who didn’t know what rough teenagers slouched towards them at that moment. Out there was danger I would have to face on my own. If I stepped outside this Quarantine the plan that had been laid out for my life would be disrupted, years of my mother’s expectations, my dad’s caustic advice, even James’s strategy for social success. I would throw their teachings by the wayside. None of it applied anymore. If I stayed inside, I could be properly harnessed and controlled, kept quiet and obedient, walls and bars and guns shielding me from danger as soon as some Proper Authority came back to claim me. Odds were high I would live.

  I looked up at the double bank of security cameras positioned at the corner of the hallway. One of the motorized eyes was trained on me and I knew secured deep in his office Conyers was looking back.

  I can help you. I can lead you. Let me fit my chains on you and you will be forever safe.

  With a single step I broke free of my cage.

  Discuss Cages with the author, as well as get all the latest info (along with some sneak peeks) on the sequel at ChrisPasley.com. There may very well be pie.

  About the Author

  Chris Pasley is a videogame director who’s written, produced or designed more than forty games for Adult Swim, Kongregate, Break Media and Majesco, including Bible Fight, Five Minutes to Kill Yourself, Sci-Fi Heroes and Legends of Loot. For some unexplained reason he only likes big forks, but little spoons. About knives he stands ambivalent. He currently lives in Boston with his wife and two-year old daughter where it is just too damn cold.