Cages (21 page)

"You're not going to
shoot me, Conyers," I said, unable to keep my voice from shaking.

"I have to," he
breathed.  "You're a Beast, do you know that?  Just a Beast
waiting to happen.  It's my job to kill Beasts, Sam."

"Then where are your
guards?"  I challenged.  "If I'm a Beast then have them
kill me."

He spat at me.  "I
had to give them to Jason Turner.  Couldn't very well say no with the
whole place in chaos, could I? But this is a job I would want to do myself in
any case."

He stepped back, lifting the
gun back to my forehead.  "Goodbye, Sam."

That's when Dave grabbed
Conyers's arm.  The principal staggered under the unexpected assault; he never
expected Dave to be an enemy. Dave was strong, young and athletic and Conyers
only had one arm to boot, but desperation drove the middle-aged man to throw
off his younger attacker.

And fire three shots.

Dave's face blossomed into a
flower of blood.  His chest shook under the weight of the second wound and
he fell to his knees, still struggling to stay up.  The third shot missed,
but the two that had struck did their work well.  Dave fell to the carpet
and I swear to God the earth shook, as if a defeated titan had been
toppled.  Conyers backed away, staring at Dave's unmoving frame, until his
back was to the lobby door.  "His eyes were red," he said
huskily, too fast.

I was at Dave's side in an
instant, but there was nothing I could do.  This was worse than the Beast
turning I had witnessed.  Dave's life was over and for all my tricks the
blood fountaining from his face was beyond my ability to stop.  Remi was
next to me almost instantaneously and he started doing all the things he
thought you were supposed to do, ripping his shirt, trying to keep pressure on
the wounds, perform CPR.  But there was no bringing Dave Tinder back. His
heart had been torn apart by a
twenty-two caliber
bullet.  Remi was starting to call for all
sorts of chemicals that he thought might jumpstart Dave's systems when I stood
up and looked directly at Dan Conyers.

I saw the horror in his eyes,
but he shook his head anyway.  "His eyes were red," the older
man gasped, spit leaking from the corners of his mouth.  "You all saw
that.  His eyes were red."
 I continued to stare.

"His eyes were red!"

A low growl formed at the back
of my throat and I took a step forward. 

"What are you doing,
Sam?" Remi asked weakly from the floor.

I growled again, louder and
more animalistic.  I snarled and kept walking towards the cowering
principal in the corner.

"What are you
doing?" Conyers whispered, a sad repitition of Remi's plea.

"I'm a Beast, aren't
I?" I walked more quickly now.  "You said so yourself. 
Look at my eyes!  Conyers!  Look at my eyes!"

He raised the gun weakly and I
snarled, only feet from him.  "Do it," I challenged. 
"Do it."
 Conyer's face crumpled and he let the gun clatter to the linoleum floor,
burying his face in his only hand.  I stood over him a moment more,
searching myself for the resolve to bend over, pick up that gun and settle the
score.

"Sam."  Remi's
voice was tense, warning.  I turned to find him staring into the opposite
corner, his hands still wet with Dave's blood.

"What?" I asked, but
then I saw. 

Ben was standing face-first in
the corner, his arms limp at his sides.  He was breathing heavily, like a
drowning man struggling for air.  He was loosely beating his shoulders
against the walls, a gentle rocking.  "Ben?" I asked tentatively.

Just as he turned, Conyers's
office radio roared to life on the emergency channel.  "Multiple
contacts!  Multiple contacts!  Jesus Christ, they're turning so fast
–"  Screaming.  Static.

"Oh Ben," I said,
miserably as he completed his turn. 

"It should have been
me," Remi said, confused.  "Why not me?"

Conyers scrambled for his gun
as Ben turned towards us, eyes blood red, his mouth gaping wide as his skin and
clothes tore under the strain of the new thing he was becoming. 

A friend of mine sent me a
video tape of a fox decomposing midway through my sixth grade year labeled
"Fukkin Cool Death."  That's how we were then, whatever. 
All children have a fascination with death, much as parents would like to think
they don't, and I watched the video nearly a dozen times.  It showed a
dead fox lying on its side, the face neatly framed.  The video was sped up
over a number of days, an explosion of life as the worms and maggots invaded
the copper corpse and made it writhe as if resettling for a better night's sleep,
its mouth moving and opening slightly as its jaw muscles went, its body
expanding with gases and relaxing in one great final sigh of death.  I
think we were supposed to watch it and marvel at how vividly death leads to new
life, but I slowed it down and watched it at less than half speed. 
Watched that way it was a ghastly, shuffling invasion, an abomination of slick
tentacles erupting from the violated body like a twisted hentai dream.  I
preferred watching it slow.  Speed only sugarcoated things.  Anything
fast has an artificial beauty.

The basketball player had been
like that fox deteriorating in awful slow motion.

Ben was fast.  And he was
beautiful. 

His Converse burst under the
pressure of ten gnarled talons, claws thumping into the carpet like pitons. 
Muscles ribbed with rings of cartilage split his tan jeans into tatters,
ripping the outer skin bloody until it hung like the lazy strands of two beaded
curtains.  Long, yellow nails ripped through clenched fists to emerge from
the back of his hands, tearing long furrows as the bones elongated. 
Spines and reptilian quills malformed his blank yellow T-Shirt before piercing
the cloth, the barbs hugging back to the swelling chest, capturing the scraps
of cloth inside.  Wings jutted unevenly from a back that broadened with
each new added rib, thin bat wings with delicate butterfly membranes.  His
neck stretched, collars of bone layering up to a chin now two feet above his
shoulders.  His jaws ripped into mandibles and his tongue was a long,
tumorous monstrosity.Cheeks still padded with baby fat slimmed as bone slivered
from the front plane of his face to present wide plates protecting bloody-red
eyes.  Hair wafted gently to the ground along with long expanses of scalp
and unneeded skull. 

Conyers cradled the gun to his
chest, hugging it like a lifeline.  Remi stood unaffected, staring with
hate and jealousy plain on his face at the monstrosity Ben had become.  I
had slipped down to my knees at some point, so I had a level view as I saw
Ben's penis thicken and elongate before grafting itself into his bloody upper
thighs.  Tharn with horror I could do nothing but wonder why Conyers
hadn't fired, why he wouldn't just shoot that goddamned gun, but I suddenly
realized he wasn't hugging it to his chest.  He was pointing it at his
heart.  He didn't want to be a Bitten, but he didn't have the balls to
pull the trigger.

The Beast That Was Ben turned
slowly toward Conyers.  The mandibles clacked hungrily and its right talon
dug deep into the concrete floor as it pushed its weight back, preparing to
leap.  Conyers must have realized before I did that for once the lingering
desire in a turned kid's brain gelled perfectly with the Beast's lust for
blood, because he dropped the gun and started scrambling at the door locks. 
There was a beating on the other side of the door as well, guards calling in
that they had heard the shots.  The Beast stepped forward, thrumming with
muscle and malice, forgoing its leap for a purposeful, menacing stride that
tore wide gashes into the floor.  Conyers shouted for the guards to bust
down the door.

They refused.  They told
him to step back from the door and the rectangular plate of a murder hole slid
open, sprouting the stubby nose of an MP5.  Three things happened at
once:  Conyers threw himself to the right.  The Beast charged. 
The guards opened fire. 

The Beast That Was Ben
shrugged off the bullets and barreled into the door, which buckled so far that
the guard firing on the other side must have been thrown into the hallway,
because I heard the bullets continue to fire and a painful screech.  Maybe
a stray shot had caught another guard.  The Beast hammered at the door
with its fists, gouging metal and leaving smears of rheumy blood.  This
was nothing like the basketball player.  This was nothing like I had ever
heard, a Beast that shrugged off bullets and had nearly ripped a solid steel
door off its hinges with brute force.  With a freight-train roar the Beast
barreled all its considerable weight into the door again and this time it tore
to tatters, bent chunks
bursting
out on three terrified guards who immediately opened fire and started
backpedaling down the hall. 

Will all the action going on
in front of me I never noticed Conyers' absence until his office door closed
with a smug
snick
.  I gaped, bewildered.  Remi and I were left
alone in the now broken lobby with Dave's body.

Remi looked at me, then at the
shattered lobby door.  "We don't deserve to survive," he said,
his voice reverent.  "What are any of us compared to that?"

To say that nobody saw the
Outbreak coming would be to ignore the decades of movies and books that
prognosticated the contrary.  The zeitgeist of popular culture was almost
willing it to happen.  Still, it wasn't quite what they expected. 
They were promised shuffling drones, easily survived except in packs.  No
one anticipated anything like the Beasts, or the traitor that lived in their
children's blood.  A normal zombie attack they could have weathered with
determination, but the Outbreak seemed to drain the world of its spirit. 

People used to remember where
they were when Kennedy was assassinated.  Few people old enough to really
recall had survived the Outbreak, but even if they had, a single man's death
would pale in comparison to the birth of hordes of the shuffling dead and their
monster masters. My father was in a jail cell just outside of Raleigh, North
Carolina. The last thing he admitted to remembering before the news became
nothing but grainy video of Outbreak horrors was seeing a video of President Clinton
denying his affair with Monica Lewinski - something he remembered only for how
ridiculous it all was in hindsight.  After the Outbreak, no one could
imagine even being slightly troubled at the idea of the leader of the free
world giving it to an intern.  If nothing else, the horror of the event
had given the country a little perspective.  Clinton went on to serve two
more terms, additional time granted by a blood-weary Congress who were so busy
trying to rebuild their districts that no one could be bothered to hold an
election.  Not that there were Republicans and Democrats anymore. 
Taxation and the size of government weren't even concerns, especially with so
many Congressmen mourning the empty seats once filled by their Midwestern
brethren, politicians either killed in the first wave or orphaned by the
Clinton Act of '99, which formally abandoned the middle states.

"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 a
n 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."