Cages (18 page)

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, scraping, 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 final
l
y 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 cou
ld
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. 
T
he 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. 
Conyers 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, h
e 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."

The latches to the door
creaked open, the metal slab swinging wide.  There on the other side stood
Remi and Dave.  Remi's face broke into an unashamed grin and he vaulted
into the room, nearly knocking me over with a hug.  "Sam, you
fucktard!  I can't believe they let you out!"

I weathered the rough hug as
best I could, keeping my eyes on Dave.  The athlete calmly walked to his
bunk and stowed his bag in his locker, not saying a word. 

Remi's smile fell. 
"Dave?  What's wrong with you?"

Dave glared at me. 
"See what he's got in his hand, Remi?  That's what's wrong with
me."

James never prepared me for
this.  My palms were sweaty.  I bit my lip.  Through trick after
trick I had lured these three boys into my confidence, following James's
roadmap for me as best I could.  His words had been a codex for me, solemn
rules to live by, but he never told me what to do upon being discovered that
you were a dirty rat.  I suppose he never thought the issue would come
up.  "No, this...this isn't..."

Even Remi fell silent as he
watched me try to bumble through an explanation.  I saw Ben's eyes on me,
the only one of the three that seemed free of
accusation
.  It seemed like this moment of weakness had
won Ben over even more
–
why,
I had no idea.  I started saying something about luring Conyers into my
confidence for the best trick, the ultimate trick, but no one believed that so
I said then that I was lying to him, that I was forced to talk but never told
the truth, but they had read the booklet and knew my falsehoods.  Finally
I broke down, far weaker than James could ever have imagined me to be, and sat
on Ben's bunk, tears welling in my eyes.