Cages (23 page)

“It was the first time I had ever seen one.  I was fourteen, not too
much older than you are now.  You wouldn’t have recognized me then. 
When I was out in the country… you had miles and miles of fields, or empty
towns, or burned forest, and we would wander and wander.  I used to put
each foot on either side of the state lines when we found signs still standing and
I would pretend I was a giant.  There was foraging, going through aisles
and aisles of supermarkets.  Some of them had holes in the roofs and the
shelves were choked with kudzu and weeds, but we plucked from those green vines
precious fruit – canned tuna, canned beans, canned broccoli.  This was
normal for me, this was the way the world was.  It wasn’t until I was five
or six that I started to realize what the lumps wearing clothes on the concrete
floors were.  Little old ladies who had died of heart attacks, still
wrapped in their hand-knit blue shawls, dried hands clutching metal hospital
canes.  Middle aged men who had rotted where they had fallen, some too
mauled to turn Bitten, some shot, surgical little holes in their skulls. 
Smaller bundles, kids like me, tossed aside because they were useless to the
forces of nature that had swept through the stores.”

“Remi –”

He continued on, ignoring me.  “One day, when I was about eight or
so, going through the pockets of a delivery man who lay broken next to
shattered crates of some bottled fruit drink, I suddenly got it.  Every
day of my life in God’s Country I saw the evidence of it.  My mom and my
aunt were full of shit.  Life wasn’t a cycle.  It was a straight
line.  Babies lying dead in rotting diapers.  Men mummified in their
coveralls after a long day at work.  Bent, tired old men sinking to the
ground and grinning when death came for them, like a surfer waiting for a
choice wave.  I’ve never even seen the ocean.”  Remi paused for a
moment, suddenly wistful.  Shaking it off, he continued.  “Death,
Sam.  At every moment of every life, death.  Moved down, helpless,
important, or grateful.  What was the point?  But you know who I
almost never saw dead in the supermarkets and drugstores and restaurants?”

“Teenagers?”

“Exactly.  Exactly.  Teenagers.” Remi winced as he tried to
shift some weight onto his bad leg.  “That’s why I took up
chemistry.  I wanted to be the one to figure it out.”

I blinked.  “You wanted know what triggered the change!”

“I wanted to figure out how to
make it happen
.  You don’t
know what it’s like.  Wheeling your carts from town to town…just
surviving.  No will to do anything but survive.  It was all so
unending, all so pointless.  That’s why I ran away for the East Coast, the
real reason.  Everyone in the pictures and magazines I read seemed so much
more alive than we did, shuffling along from ruin to ruin, picking over
carcasses for canned scraps.  There was no difference between us and the
Bitten I killed on my way here.  But when I got here…you have no idea the
disappointment.”

“You found out we were just as useless.”

“Yes!”  For a moment his eyes glowed and I almost saw the old
Remi.  “I even enjoyed Quarantine at first.  All the social
interactions, the grades, the science… there were new goals for me!  But I
didn’t know how it all really worked and I blew it.  Got busted for
dope.  Indulged in the Blind Hall too much, got Solitary to get
clean.  So I was sitting there in my chemistry class, stone sober for the
first time in years, miserable as fuck.  All the tests, the dances, the
sports – it’s all just bullshit they spread on things to hide the truth. 
The same pointlessness I saw in the Midwest followed me here.  But then…
Trisha Davenport changed.”

Remi closed his eyes, remembering.  “It was like nothing I had ever
seen.  She stood up in class, walked over and hugged Ivan Workley. 
He sat there, trapped in his desk, as she gripped tighter and tighter.  It
was so gentle no one realized what was happening until it was too late. 
Ivan was trapped as the spikes started to emerge, tearing through both their
bodies at once.  He screamed so loud… killed by a girl who had been too
shy to tell him she loved him.  Ivan was meat by the time she stood up
straight, full stage seven.  And she looked at me.”

He motioned me closer and his voice fell soft into a whisper. 
“There was purpose in those eyes, Sam.  No doubt.  No
uncertainty.  She knew what she was there to do and she did it. 
Killed six kids before the guards moved in.  I should have been scared,
but I was just… envious.”

I backed away.  Remi was starting to disturb me very deeply. 
“We can talk about this later.  We’ve got to get to the other Security
Wing door.  Maybe we can find a way through it, if this one’s
impassible.” 

Remi scowled, and it was obvious I had shrugged off a point that had been
very important to him.
 
“If we circle
around through the main lobby we’re bound to hit a Beast.”

“I know.  We’re going through the courtyard.” 

The Quarantine was built like a castle.  Bordered with a frame of
hallways and classrooms, the center of the entire structure was an open field
almost one hundred yards long.  It had started life as an interior
football field, but after one season the entire area was repurposed and the
teams disbanded – I guess ninety minutes of watching teenagers behaving
violently was too much for some people after the Outbreak.  Strange to
think that at one point, at least according to my dad’s stories about his
adventures as a high school quarterback, people used to actually celebrate
their children’s capacity for violence against one another.

Now the courtyard was dominated primarily by a rubber-cork track, where
the track and field team trained (far more track than field, of course,
considering there was no way any of these runners was going to see a field
before they were nineteen) and where every gym class had to beat certain
Presidential benchmarks for health in the form of cruelly short lap
times.  “I’d love to see the President do this,” the guy next to me at the
starting line complained during my short tenure in gym.  Inside the track
were two tennis courts.  I often would watch the matches through the
window during Geometry, bouncy girls in tight shorts flinging themselves every
which way, chasing after a fuzzy yellow sphere that, given their lack of skill,
never survived more than one exchange per rally.  The cafeteria jutted out
harshly into the field, creating an odd bend in the track, guarded by the
hulking steel gravestones of the humming refrigerator cooling units. Beside the
tennis courts were, oddly, a set of monkey bars.

I loved the monkey bars.  In the few times I had been allowed out
into the courtyard on my own I dominated those bars.  It was nice to feel
like a kid again, looking at the pale blue carpet of the sky while dangling
upside down by my feet, or seeing how many bars I could skip in one grab. 
You could almost imagine that the Quarantine had been a bad dream, that I was
back in middle school, the only worries on my mind being my parents and their idiocy. 
I guess that’s why the monkey bars were there in the first place.  That
was the one sanctuary the older kids allowed the freshmen.

As Remi and I forced open the door beside the Algebra classroom, the
courtyard looked anything but comforting.  The streetlights were on, but
only the ones on the Math Hall side; the far side of the courtyard was shrouded
in darkness.  There was a chill in the air and any other day my eye would
have been searching the gray clouds churning above for a hope of snow – rare
for Georgia, but not unheard of – but that night I had tunnel vision.  Had
any Beasts found their way outside?  The edges of the buildings had spiked
awnings placed at sharp angles all around the field to prevent any such
occurrence from escalating into an escape, but even though they had been the
death of dozens of tennis balls over the years, still skewered like lemon
kabobs near the courts, I had little hope that they would stop a Beast the
likes of which Ben had become.

Remi grabbed my shoulder painfully.  “A guard.  Look.”

I looked.  At first I didn’t see him, but as my eyes sharpened to
the light I could make out the humanlike shadows around his black
clothes.  He was leaning sadly against the monkey bars, his MP5 dangling
from one hand by the strap.  I remember thinking he seemed defeated,
homesick even.  An emotion I myself had been all too familiar with.

“How do we sneak past him?”

I shrugged.  “Why sneak past him?  He might be our best bet for
surviving this.”

Remi gaped.  “And just like that you go back to your old ways, huh?”

“No. I’m saying that we use him to keep us safe, then we ditch him.”

In the end it was the guard himself who made the decision for us. 
His head perked up at the sound of our voices and he began to shuffle towards
us.

“Oh,” Remi said, relief clear in his voice.  “He’s Bitten.”

Young Bitten were not too dangerous on their own.  The parasite was
still spreading inside the body, the muscles and nerves not yet completely in
its control.  The result is a slack, milky-eyed drone with a mind for
slaughter, but without much physical ability to match.  The guard inching
towards us was certainly young; the gash across his chest – sliced right
through his armor – was still seeping blood.  As he stepped into range of
the street lights his open mouth and white eyes confirmed our suspicion. 

“Well, he shouldn’t be too hard to avoid,” I said, though I was
disappointed not to be able to count on the guard’s protection. 

“Avoid?  We need to kill him.  Or more accurately, you
do.  My leg’s about to give out on me, and I’m feeling a bit too
lightheaded for it.”

“Kill him?  What for?”

“Don’t you get it, Sam?  He solves our problems!  He’s got a
key ring that will open most of the doors in this place.  Plus he’s got
that gun.  I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on that gun,” Remi said
darkly. 

I considered.  Remi was right, but I wasn’t sure I could go through
with it.  There was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I would
be in serious Trouble if I killed a guard, even a Bitten one.  Still…I
wouldn’t mind holding that gun either.  “Ok…how do I do it?  We don’t
have any weapons.”

Remi pointed.  “Steal the sword off his back.  It’ll be
easy.” 

“Easy, huh?”  I approached the Bitten guard slowly.  He was
baring his teeth and biting his own lips, so blood trickled down his chin,
sluggish, like gravy.  Nothing in his eyes suggested this was anything
other than a walking corpse.  Suddenly I realized that this was the
closest I was likely to get to an embodiment of the parasite that made all our
lives such a living hell.  Thank God it wasn’t Biff.  “Come here,
mother fucker.  Come on.”

I ran around the guard.  He turned to follow, but he was too
slow.  I put my hand on the rubber grip of the short samurai sword
strapped to his back and tugged.  The Bitten stumbled back as the blade
refused to leave its sheath, hissing like a wounded balloon animal.  I
looked at Remi in a panic.

“Unhook the safety strap!” he called.

Oh.  Right.  I struggled with the little metal toggle for just
a moment then the sword pulled free, nearly depositing me on my ass.  The
Bitten did tumble down and it lay prostrate, looking confused about what had
happened.
 
I closed my eyes and swung the
sword at its neck.

“Good job,” Remi said, and I opened my eyes.  The Bitten was clearly
dead; I hadn’t decapitated it, but its head lolled on a few strips of
meat.  The spinal cord had been severed.  The blade itself had
relatively little blood on it.  Some trickled into the grass, but for the
most part it seemed as if the blood from the Bitten had congealed
instantly.  I thought that once I had opened my eyes I would be sick at
what I had done, but I wasn’t.  I felt like my dad and, for the first
time, felt proud of it.  I had gotten the job done.

Remi hopped closer and scooped the MP5 off the ground with a grunt of
pain.  He tried to eject the clip in that cool action hero way they do in
the movies, but it took him a few minutes to figure out how to do it. 
“Fuck!” he yelled, throwing the weapon down.  “Empty.  Oh, he doesn’t
have any spare clips on him, does he?”

The dead guard’s backpack was missing, so I searched his belt. 
“Nothing.”

“Damn it.  I really wanted that gun.”

“Found some keys, though.”  I pocketed the set of twenty keys on a
bland metal key ring and stood, looking at the sword in my hand.  “And a
sword isn’t a bad find.”

“Fat lot of good it’s gonna do you against a Beast.”

The cafeteria door was standing open, leaning on one hinge, the lock
mangled.  A Beast had come out here, clearly.  It must have abandoned
the courtyard after it found no more prey.  Or, worse, it had actually
managed to escape over the roof.  I helped Remi through the door into the
cafeteria.  In darkness the giant room felt like a cave, every footstep
echoing.  I nearly skewered myself with the sword the first time I
stumbled into a row of the orange plastic chairs at the industrial picnic
tables.  Thinking better of it, I threaded the naked blade into my belt,
slicing a neat gash into my thumb for my trouble. 

The darkness scared the hell out of me.  No streetlight glow here,
nothing but the odd ray of moonlight escaping from the clouds outside. 
The hallways, windowless, would be even darker.  There could be dozens of
Bitten waiting for us at every step.  I kept my hand on the sword. 
Midway across the room I slipped and landed painfully on one knee, my other leg
slid out awkwardly in front of me. 

“Applesauce?”  Remi asked hopefully.

I smelled my hand where it had touched the substance on the floor. 
“Nope.  Blood.” 

From that point on we inched across the floor, barely able to see
anything, moving hand to hand from chair to table.  When I ran
shoulder-first into a wall it was startling, until I realized we had made it
across.  The door was only a few feet away.  From there it was only
another forty or fifty feet to the other Security Wing door.  I drew the
sword, preparing myself to do battle with any Beast or Bitten that might be
lurking around the corner.