Cages (22 page)

Not much love in the Crafty
house. That should be evident by now.
  

Remi had a stain of pooling red inching across his jeans from a gaping
hole in his calf muscle.  One of the guards’ shots had clipped him, but he
just stared at the wound, raptly watching his own blood seep out.  “It’s
like watching a leak in a gas tank,” he said softly.  “Once it’s gone the
car stops moving.”

“For Christ’s sake, Remi.”  I scooted over to him and unlaced my
belt from my pants.  I wrapped it above the hole and knotted it
tight.  Remi didn’t even flinch.

“I was shot once before.  Did I ever tell you that?  When I was
ten, back in God’s Country,” Remi said, looking up at the ceiling.  “My
cousin Paul was shooting tin cans with a forty-ought six – said he was going to
hunt a deer, even though my uncle told him that was stupid.  Well, I had
never heard a gun before, so I didn’t know what was going on.  I waded out
into the middle of the target range just as Paul opened fire.  I just got
grazed that time, though, but Paul’s dad put a stop to the shooting after
that.  He always blamed me for it.  Paul was sixteen, no Quarantine
out there, and he could beat me up pretty easy.  The bullet hurt more
then, though.  That seems weird.”

“You’re probably in shock.”

“Just disappointment, Sam.”  Remi looked at me.  “Ben took it
from me.  He knew I wanted to be a Beast and he goes and becomes the most
badass Beast anyone’s ever seen.  And here I am, lying in blood.”

“It’s not all your blood,” I snarled, standing.

Remi looked down at Dave, only feet from us.  “Conyers shot Dave.”

I hugged my knees.  “He was trying to shoot me.”

“Hero Dave, that’s him.”  Remi heaved to his feet, only for the
first time showing pain.  He looked around the lobby, but finding no
cloth, limped over to the desk printer and fished out some eight-and-a-half by
eleven sheets.  Grunting loudly, he managed to lower himself back to the
floor next to Dave.  He gently laid the sheets over Dave’s ruined
face.  Broken ink cartridges had rendered the paper almost soggy with
black ink.  The entire mass looked like an alien glommed onto Dave’s head,
but at least you could no longer see the gaping wound, or his blank, innocent
eyes. 

Remi sat back with a sigh, reviewing his work.  “A hero deserves a
better shroud that that.”

I glared at him. He was covered in blood, some his, most Dave’s, but his
eyes were bright. “You’re taking this awfully well.”

He shrugged.  “I’ve been imagining all this would happen. 
Except usually in my imagination I was four feet taller and green.”

I was looking at him in the same way he had looked at me when he learned
I betrayed all of them to Conyers.  “You imagined Dave dead?”

  He leaned back against the wooden bench.  It too, had bullet
holes.  “I was gonna be a Beast, Sam.  I was going to have to kill
people to get out of here.  There was a pretty high chance I wouldn’t be
able to stop myself from killing all of you if I turned in the dorm cell. 
So yeah, I imagined it.  I just never imagined I’d get left behind. 
Not me.”  He looked at Conyers’ office door.  “He promised me! 
That prick said he could
smell
it.”

“Asshole!” I shouted.  “You think Ben wanted to be a Beast? 
You think he’s romping around now, killing people willy-nilly, happy as a clam
to be a murderous monster?  Ben is dead.  That’s what you would
be.  Dead.  Ben was murdered by the parasite that lives in our
blood.  Some fucking parasite killed our friend and is walking around in
what’s left of his body.  And you’re jealous of that!”

Remi frowned.  “Let’s just say you and I look at it differently,
Sam, and leave it at that.  Who knows, maybe all your shouting will bring
Ben back here and we can ask him.” 

God, I wanted to hit him.  I wanted to tackle him, to yell in his
stupid redneck ears what an arrogant prick he was, to punch him in his dark,
dumb face.  From day one he had been a millstone around my neck and he
seemed determined to continue the tradition.  But I held my rage – he
might be right about The Beast that was Ben coming back.  “What do you think
we should do?”

He looked back and, realizing he was leaning against the bench, pulled
himself up onto it.  It shifted ominously.  “Honestly?  I don’t
really care anymore.”

“Even if Ben…the Beast doesn’t come back, you heard the radio.  They
said multiple contacts.  More than one Beast, at the same time.”

Remi looked intrigued.  “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“No one has.  You know what this could be?”

“Another Outbreak.”

I stood, pacing now.  I was almost excited, though I couldn’t have
told you why.  This went far beyond anything James had ever tried to teach
me.  “We have to get out of this building.”

Remi pulled his wounded leg up onto the bench.  “You’re
forgetting.  I grew up in the Midwest.  I wasn’t brought up with
Outbreak survivor stories.  I didn’t have a Beast boogeyman under my
bed.  This is evolution.  I’m not interested in being a
throwback.  If it’s an Outbreak, then there’s no stopping it.  And if
I can’t be a Beast...”

 “Fucking moron.”  My pacing brought me to Conyers’s door.
  Would I know the change if it came
upon me
?
Would I feel it
come?  Or was this it, the steady building of fury and righteousness, this
urgency of violence?  My sneakers impacted the
rigid metal
door as hard as I could kick, but the
hinges didn't budge. 
“You want to just sit around then?  Wait
for a Beast to come chomp you up?  Or maybe you think you’ll kick in late,
that you’ll change just like him?” 
I kept kicking, over and over until my
foot
was numb.  The black skid marks
drew
a
face on the metal.  My fury
nearly burned out, I
rammed my whole body
against the door, putting my lips to th
e rivets.
  "You had better never come out of
there
, you fuck
.  You
just had better never come out." 

N
othing but silence from the
other side.

 I turned to Remi, still recumbent on the bench.  “Don’t you
want to get out of this place?  Get back to the country?  No walls,
no guards.  No Alan, no Conyers?  Free to do whatever you want.”

 He looked at me squarely.  “No friends.  No one who gives
a damn about chemistry outside of a good buzz.  I don’t much see the
difference.”

 I buried my head in my hands.  “You’re impossible.  And
for once you’re right.  You just lost the only friend you had left in
here.”  I rubbed my eyes, still stinging with Dave’s blood, and made for
the broken hallway door.

 “Wait!”  Remi hobbled to his feet.  “Don’t go. 
Wait.  I’ll go with you.  I will.  I’m sorry; it was the loss of
blood talking.  Promise.”  He flashed a weak smile.  “You’re
right.  I still have a few more years of potential left.  And if I
get to the country I have a better shot as staying un-slain.”

He suddenly looked so needy, a complete flip from his demeanor of just a
few seconds before.  Was it an act?  Was he acting before?  “You
know – maybe we should hide out here instead.”
I walked over to the shattered door and hazarded a peek outside.  I
had expected to see the twisted bodies of the downed guards, but all I saw was
thick tracks of blood leading away down the west hallway.  The two benches
that had once framed Conyers's doorway were smashed and I could picture Ben
stopping for a moment to shatter them, destruction as an act of play. 
“Hole
up until help comes.”

Remi spat.  There was blood in the phlegm.  “Only if you want
to die more than I do.  No one’s
going to mount a rescue.  They can't risk multiple Beasts getting
out, not once they get word what's gone down here.  They'll flood the
place with napalm and light a match."

"Escape, then?"

"
It’s our best
bet, but it’ll be rough.  I’ve been trying to plan an escape since I got
here.  Never found a way.”

"
There
are doors.  There are keys.  If
the guards have their hands full with the Beasts, then there's a chance we can
find a set and get out of here."  I set a hand on Remi's shoulder,
trying
to rebuild the faith he had cultivated in me.  
"I don't
know what else to do
."

“You’re the man with the plan.”

The air
in the halls
outside
wasn't moving.  The
gentle hum of the air conditioning and filtration system had fallen
silent.  As Remi and I gingerly walked out into the hallway
, one of
his arms around my shoulders as he limped along,
I could only smell blood
;
no artificial breeze to waft it away.  Ben's tracks were cement
craters
dug in triangle patterns down the hall,
accompanied by a steady stripe of blood that got thinner the further down the
trail you looked.  Conyers's office was
near the end
of the long hall between
Mathematics
and the Secure Zone
, in a
sectioned-off bank of administration offices
.  Ben's tracks went right
, towards the rest of the Quarantine
.  We went left
, towards the
huge doors that cordoned off the entrance to the secure adults’ wing, where the
teachers, guards and other administrators lived
.
  It was also where the security nerve center of the building
was located.

"They're not going to let
us in the Secure Wing," I said.

Remi
tried his best to
shrug
.  "If we go right,
we'll catch up to Ben.  And this is the most likely place to find a set of
key
s
."

It was late now.  I could see darkness covering the courtyard
outside through the windows that were more common in this administration hall
than they were elsewhere.  Worse, I realized that Remi was now little more
than a white blur on my arm and I could barely see more than a few feet in
front of me in the dying light.  There was light leaking in though the
windows, from the streetlamps ringing the courtyard, but the infrequent
barcodes they projected on the floor hardly illuminated the hallway. 
“Power’s out,” I whispered, suddenly aware of my voice bouncing off the brick
and linoleum.  “Not outside, though.”

 “Someone cut the main line,” Remi said, confused, and for the first
time since Dave’s death, interested.  “Why?  The Beasts can probably
see in the dark.”

“Wait.  I see the doors.”

The doors at the end of the hall were blocked by three staggered roadside
barriers, like they did on every other hall.  There was a rebar cage at
the end where the security desk sat, where each guard was made to check in once
every thirty minutes while on shift.  The worn chair behind it was empty, the
cage door unlocked and swinging open.  The doors themselves were
featureless, disguised in an inoffensive kitchen-countertop gray.  No
handles.  No locks.

“What now?” I asked. 

Remi untangled himself and slumped against the desk cage, his face
glowing with the light from the window.  “Pound on it and ask to be let
in? I dunno.  This is your plan.”

“That was before I knew the power was out.  No power, no cameras, no
one to see us pounding and open the door.”

He pointed up.  “Not so sure about that.”

I squinted.  There it was, enveloped by the darkness, but once I had
picked it out, I was amazed I could ever have missed it.  The red active
light that reassured every guard that the cameras they relied on were working
beamed happily down at me from the corner of the ceiling.  “So the cameras
are working?  Then the power isn’t cut…just the lights.”

“Even more a mystery.  You pound.  I’ll watch.”

I beat on the door with the meat of my fists until my finger bones
hurt.  The noise was surprisingly quiet, as if to accentuate how futile my
effort was.  Sweat stained my T-shirt like clumsy racing stripes by the
time I stopped. 

“Listen,” Remi barked.

I closed my eyes and strained my ears.  Popping.  For two years
when I was a child we had a Latino family living next door.  The Crafties
had little to do with them, besides my dad glowering at the father every day as
the dark, burly man climbed into his ’02 Rambler at six thirty every morning, a
toasted bagel tucked neatly in his blue shirt pocket.  I used to spy on
them from my second story bedroom over the wooden fence, because they were so
different, even though the kids in their back yard did pretty much the same
things my friends and I did.  Neither opportunity nor courage ever
prompted me to actually speak to the often grinning little boy, or the sullen
older girl.  They weren’t unpleasant neighbors, for the most part, except
for their practice of lighting firecrackers for every holiday.  Any
holiday that warranted a day off work or school was celebrated with a picnic
and a chain of gunpowder cigarettes that exploded with glorious violence. 
My mom began dreading every holiday – James thought they reminded her of the
Outbreak somehow.  We took a lot of holiday trips to stuffy restaurants
during those years, the closest thing to a picnic I ever got.  We never
lighted fireworks, not even on the Fourth of July.  That’s what this
popping sound reminded me of.

“Gunfire,” I said.

Remi nodded.  “It’s not over.  There are guards still fighting
the Beasts.”

“Maybe…maybe we won’t have to escape after all.”  I thought about
that, but I couldn’t stomach the idea.  Return to the grind, that murderer
Conyers lording it over everyone?

The other boy sighed.  He looked paler than usual in the streetlight
and his face was slack with weariness.  “A Beast almost killed me once,
did I tell you that?”

“I don’t think so.  This isn’t really the time for –”