Cages (2 page)

Conyers went quiet for a
moment.  After a deep breath he asked "Have you ever actually seen a
kid go Beast?  Ever seen what happens, how it works?"

I shook my head,
enthralled.

Conyers sat forward, gesturing
expressively as if
he still retained
both hands.  "I lost my best chance to escape by being too
slow.  At first, they're just like you and me, just as
weak
, just as
slow
.  But then, once they get going, get moving,
get
motivated
...I could feel him getting stronger, ripping more and more
of my flesh.  I could see the bones of his spine sharpen through his
T-shirt, splinters digging out through his forearms.  I looked there at
poor Jacob, literally shaking with bloodlust and you know what I
did?"  He gestured me in closer."I flipped on the table saw and
beat the blade
over and over
with his skull.  He held on for a while - not only was he a bright kid he
was also stubborn as hell - but finally his body fell away and after about ten
seconds the kid's jaws loosened up."

I licked my lips. 
"Then you sawed your arm off?"

Conyers nodded, remembered
anger clear on his face.  "Then I sawed my arm off.  Total
gamble, seventy to one chance I was gonna turn like the rest of them, but I
figured what the hell.  Might as well try, see if I could stop the
parasite.  I got lucky.  And you know what I learned that day,
Sam?"

There was suddenly a small,
heavy revolver in Conyers's hand, pressed hard against my temple.  My
mouth went dry.  "I learned I can't afford to trust any of you, not
one of you.  You're all bad inside.  Maybe you're one of the lucky
ones.  Maybe you'll survive.  But you go Beast and I'll put a bullet
through your brain.  I won't let you hurt my teachers, my staff...or my
students.  Now, that also means that if someone else goes Beast in here,
I’ll
do my best not to
let them hurt you
either.  I promise you that.  You understand what I'm telling
you?"

I swallowed, desperate for
saliva.  "Yes sir."

Conyers put his revolver away
in a
brown leather
shoulder
holster I hadn't noticed before.  "Good.  Welcome to Dekalb
Quarantine #4.  You are now registered. Here's your class schedule and
your bunk assignment.  Get out of here and let these patrolmen go do their
jobs."

My first class was Freshman
Literature.  I
considered
going to my bunk first, but the screeners would still be going through my
bags (of course I had hidden several contraband items I was confident they
wouldn't find) and I was eager to dip myself head-first into Quarantine
life.  The guards left me in a great hurry after the registrar's office
was relocked to an extent that would have been comical had I not seen the
terrible scratch marks scored deep into the metal on the other side. 
Something had been trapped in there and kept from leaving.  I suddenly had
a pretty good idea what had happened to Mr. Wilson. 

My class was on the second
floor.  There was one elevator, my school map showed, but it was locked
down, staff use only.  The stairs were bent, illogical messes. 
Several
stairs were cut to different heights
than the rest,
there were
places
on the stairwell that
were
suddenly
narrower than others
,
and
broad patches of metal
hammered on the walls
as if to cover holes.  Something my brother
told me clicked.  The stairway was a
murder zone
, with locks designed to trap a roving
Beast.  The metal plates hid vicious traps, automatic guns and
flamethrowers.  In the event of an outbreak the stairs could be cut apart
and isolated, effectively locking the upper floors away from the lower.  I
wondered if they had ever been used that way.

The Quarantine was shaped like
a dog bone, two stories of twin hallways separated by a grassy sports area in
the middle and four open hubs on each corner.  My first class was on the
second floor, a Lit class in room 214.  I was astonished they allow
ed
me to roam free like this, but then I saw
the cameras placed on every corner.  The students at Dekalb Quarantine #4
were under constant surveillance.  It was going to be great fun finding
the holes in the coverage.  I had become an expert at it at the local
micromall.  I would have loved to see the spike in the shoplifting graph
that occurred the minute my parents let me out on my own at the age of
ten. 
Candy and costume jewelry had flowed from my bag into the
waiting hands of my friends like water.

The door to my class was just
like the rest, a sturdy metal grate allowing whoever was on the other side to
see through.  It was a scene like any other in the history of
public
education.  A teacher at the head of
the class in front of a large whiteboard, on which he'd written
Compare and
Constrast: "Romeo and Juliet" to "Romero's Joliet
." 
I was a little impressed a
controversial
modern epic like
Romero's Joliet
would make its way into the
classroom.  I supposed th
is
was the administration's way of recognizing
that
in such a different time kids needed something
actually
relating
to the world
in
which
they lived.
  It
was difficult to give a crap about the trials and tribulations of Ponyboy when
he didn’t have to worry about Johnny transforming into a slathering Beast every
minute.  No one taught
The Outsiders
anymore.
  I rapped hard on the door and everyone in
the class jumped.  I saw the teacher's hand go for the gun on his
hip.  "Code authorization!"  the teacher yelped, loosening
his tie.

"I'm Sam Crafty, here for
Literature.  They didn't give me a code authorization."
 The teacher, a diminutive man in a brown jacket
,
thinning black hair carefully plastered to his
skull, fished on his desk for his roll sheet, his left hand never leaving his
pistol.  He pulled the sheet up to his face.  "Ah, right. 
Sam.  The Principal didn't give you a code?"

I shook my head, which
belatedly I realized he couldn't see well through the grate and said
"No."  Which now of course sounded like a lie. 

The teacher shook his
head.  "He was supposed to give you a
n afternoon
code authorization."

I waited nearly a full minute
before realizing that the teacher wasn't going to give any ground. 
"Well...maybe he forgot.  From what I understand Mr. Wilson just...
I
mean...maybe he hasn't got the hang of
being a registrar yet, sir."

The kids in the class were
beginning to mutter.  Crap.  Drawing attention to myself
already.  Damn that Conyers. 

"I'm sorry son, I have to
call this in."The teacher pulled a handset down from the wall and dialed a
number.  After muttering into it, he replaced the phone on the wall. 
"Okay.  Principal Conyers is going to come up here and verify
you.  Wait out there in the hall until he gets here."

The hall was empty, so I
slouched down against one wall and read the motivational posters.  Swear
to God, there was one that said "Stay Human, Stay Happy!"  It
had a cartoon of two kids on geometrically awkward bicycles, smiling with teeth
too big for their faces.  The teacher had resumed his lecture, which I had
actually been interested to hear - my mom had made me read
Romero's Joliet
last year - but I couldn't make out his words.  Most teachers fall within
three or four distinct categories.  This guy was a Mumbler.

I felt a slight breeze on my
cheek and I turned to see an uncovered bullet hole.  The hole was conical,
the wide end towards me - the shooting had been from inside the room.  I
ran my finger around the edges of the hole, marvelling.  Was this from
a
bullet that had ended some teenager's
life?

"Ahem."

I turned.  There was
Principal Conyers, flanked by his two burly security guards.  "A
little morbid, don't you think, Sam?"

I flushed.  I wasn't
about to let him get the better of me.  "You were supposed to give me
a code authorization to get into class."

Conyers raised an
eyebrow.  "Didn't I?"

"N - No.  You
didn't."

The Principal thought for a
moment, then shrugged.  "Let's let you in the classroom then, why
don't we?"  He gestured for his guards to cover me and he fished
a
ring of keys any janitor you've ever
met
would be
jealous
of
out of his pocket and, without
looking, selected the proper key for the door."Code Authorization A
76549B
.  Princpal Conyers."

The door creaked open and the
teacher backed even further away.  "You vouch for this kid,
Principal?"

Conyers gestured for me to
come forward, but when I made to push past him he
gave
a quick signal and there was an MP5 in my
face.  "I told you not to touch me again," Conyers growled
low.  "You need to learn the value of private space, son." 

He turned to the
teacher.  "Mr. Jarvis.  I apologize; we must definitely do all
we can to ensure that in the future, should young Mr....
Crafty
need an
exception Code Authorization, he will actually see fit to remember it."

The teacher nodded. 
"We absolutely must."

I stood there agape. 
"But you never - "

"Go on then, find a
seat," Conyers barked. 

Under the stare of every
student in the room I slunk to the back where one broken desk sat, its writing
surface split in half and missing.  I sank into it, praying that the class
could continue now.

"Kiss-ass," I heard
one kid mutter. 

It may be hard to
fathom
why I
held that first day in such
high regard
.  To
fully
grasp it
, you need to understand my
parents and what sort of
screw
ups they were. 
So here come the vacation slides. 

My father, Abraham Crafty, was
a part time
handyman
, part
time repo man, part time visionary.  He also liked to sneak into garages
around town and tinker under the hoods of waiting cars, sowing as he called it
"a little chaotic discord."  He would cut belts, rip hoses and
snip wiring and to this day I think there are lawsuits pending against each of
those car shops
by their customers, their vehicles emerging in worse
shape than when they went in.

He hated his jobs, but the
best thing about being multi-jobnal, he said, was that he could always wish he
was doing the other whenever the one he actually was doing got him down. 
He and I were never particularly
good friends
, but he
had been
with
James, with whom I was very
close.  I
n some ways I feel
like I got the best parts
of him
, distilled through the filter of my brothe
r
. 
He was prone to long malaises,
staring off into space or saying cryptic things with gruff foreboding like “The
oil’s off the rudder.  Gonna be helluva job to turn it.” These fortune
cookie quips were never explained and never repeated. 
My father was never mean to me, never hit me or
scolded me too hard, but I saw him pop James once in the nose.  Why, I
never learned, but James had been forced to pull me
back
,
my brother’s
face still bloody and dripping on my shirt. I had
been going for
my father’s
throat.

My dad had just cackled at me
in the way he had of reminding me whose property I was.  "Now now,
Sammy.  You're not man enough to take me on yet.  But one day! 
One day we'll get to see if you're a man or a beast."  He leaned down
with his rough sneer.  "My money's on beast."

That was also the only time I
ever saw James clock my dad one, right in the jaw.

Later that night it fell on my
mother to explain to me what my dad meant.  It's hard to imagine that
parents used to think the "Sex Talk" was the biggie after the
"Beast Talk" became a necessity.  My mother
’s name was
Janice and she
was a full fledged
physician, a medical doctor specializing in gastronomy.  She was petite,
pale, with thick horn-rimmed glasses that made her look as if she had been
snatched from a fifties sitcom, but the blue tattoos running down her back
would convince you otherwise.  How someone like her ended up with my dad
is something it took me years to understand, but I supposed
at the time
a lot of stuff made sense during the
Outbreak that seemed puzzling afterw
a
rd. 

She was as crazy as he
was.  She dissected the family hamster when I was four
after
I asked how food turns into poop. 
She made me recite and point out to her the different parts of the intestinal
system when all I could do was look at my pet's cold black eyes and cry. 
Hammy's death was my fault and I learned my lesson.  Don't ask
questions.  The information you need will be provided for you when it is
appropriate, when
she
said it was.  I never asked my mom another question I was not expected to
ask.  She had looked at my snotty, tear-streaked face and laughed. 
"You don't know what sorrow is, boy."