Cages (25 page)

"A dud."

"That's right.  A
dud.  Can't leave an unexploded bomb lying around can you?  So we do
our part."  Brian stood.  "I was ten when the Outbreak
hit.  Johnson?"

"Twelve."

Brian nodded, the mirth
leaving his eyes.  "There may be rules we gotta follow on any other
day, but on days like this, well...we don't intend to waste a good opportunity
to sweep the minefield. 
I already got three dud disarmaments under
my belt so far.”

“Four for me,” added Johnson.

 Brian clapped him on the back.  “
And you know what?  Without the computer roll
sheet, nobody knew where anybody was supposed to be.  But Conyers wouldn't
let us just stuff people where we knew they went, no!  We had to verify it
manually.  So when all this shit went down we had dozens of baby Beasts
standing in line to get put back in their cages instead of nice and sealed up
like they were supposed to be.  Good fucking work, you fucking
jerkoffs."
 Remi moaned
and it sounded a little like regret.  It’s what I
felt, anyway.
 

"Alright, get up. 
Johnson, gimmie a couple of those M
P5
s and a couple pineapples.  You take the launcher."

"I still think we
should've used 'em to blow the door."

"Door's too thick. 
Shooting the fuck out of it should have taught you that."

Johnson snorted. 
"Grenades ain't bullets.  The man said, on your feet!"

I helped Remi up.  His
color was a little better, but his hands were still shaking. 

"Down the hall,
slow.  We'll be right behind you."

"Not too close
though."  Laughter. 

"Wait, wait.  I got
a great idea."  Brian pulled one of the grenades from one of the
pouches lining his vest and pulled a thin nylon
string
from another.  "Johnson, check this
out."  He tied one end of the
string
to the grenade's firing pin and the other to his
wrist.  Then he grabbed my shirt with one hand and stuffed the explosive
down my pants.

I grabbed his hand. 
"What the hell are you doing?"

"Watch it," he said,
his eyes warning me.  I let his arm go and the grenade dropped.  Had
I not spent three appetiteless months in the Bell, my jeans would have been too
tight, but as it was the weight dropped neatly against my crotch. 
"You two get too far ahead and get an idea to make a break for
it...boom.  Ain't that clever, Johnson?"

"Damn clever.
 
Like a tampon!
"
 
They got a hearty laugh out of that.

"Jesus Christ," I
whispered. 

"Go.  Johnson and me
got a date with the great outdoors."

Loss is a bitter spice, my dad
used to say. 
Made it sound like a platitude from an old farmer’s almanac,
right up there with “early to bed, early to rise.” 
He said it right before he stole the distributor
cap from a 1992 Ford Taurus hoisted on a sledge at
Phil Chandler’s auto
shop.
  He leaped down off the
 
steel plate with glee,
raising his booty like a squid, sparkplugs trailing triumphant wire tentacles.
 "Imagine, Sam, what the loss of
this distributor cap will do.  The mechanic - shock!  The owner -
anger!  But if a few days from now I put the thing back in, imagine what
would happen.  Both the owner and the mechanic - relief!  They can
both get on with their lives.  As I see it, the relief outweighs the
loss.  Makes their lives just a bit richer."

"So you're going to put
the cap back?"

"Hell no."

Walking down the
Social
Studies h
all, one of my friends
dead, another nearly bled dry, yet another become a monster and with a grenade
stuffed down my pants, I felt Dad's lesson to be an appropriate fit.  Loss
undone could be a sweet thing, but that was the catch.  Loss was never
undone.  I was imagining whole new timelines in my head, new universes
where Conyers didn't murder Dave.  I scrubbed his life back and forth,
tweaking here and there.  He wouldn't have been a pro ball player. 
Too obvious.  Lawyer either.  He'd have gone to a nice college on the
strength of his extracurriculars and his better than average GPA.  He'd
get a degree he didn't anticipate getting when he went in - something like
engineering, or political science.  He'd go on to a successful engineering
(political) career and marry a nice woman (or a bitch he'd end up divorcing a
year later), have 2 kids (or no kids).... the branches became too much to wrap
my head around and they collapsed, leaving no reality but the one I knew. 
Dave was dead.  He had no life.

Johnson growled.  "
Y
ou, keep your hands out of your
pants."

The Social Studies Hall was
still. 
We had progressed perhaps thirty feet in total, as Brian and Johnson
took slow, careful steps, and often tugged on my string to make ours
match. 
Our feet were the
loudest sounds we could hear, and each step made me wince. 

 Once, Nathan Young, a third-year, had gone around to all the
freshmen and asked which water fountain they thought tasted the best.
 Most people had an easy answer, but I had been intrigued, and asked for a
rain check on my answer.  I sampled every water fountain in the accessible
Quarantine, those near the Blind Hall or in the Secure Wing obviously
excluded.  I discovered what his question had hinted at; the water did
indeed taste different from fountain to fountain.  Bubble gum jammed in
the spigot?  Rust clinging to the pipes?  Was there some fundamental
property to the distance water traveled that could change its chemical
makeup?  Remi had still been stuck in the Bell, so I couldn’t have him
test samples, but Dave had an interesting theory.  He thought it had to do
with the number of Beast kills in a particular hall, like maybe the blood got
into the fountain somehow and our inner parasites were conditioning our tongues
to savor the taste.  I had no way to corroborate that, as Beast records
were confidential, but I entertained the morbid idea for a while.  A week
later I hunted Nathan Young down and told him the Social Studies hall had the
best water.  Uninterested, he had marked it down as a single tick in the
spreadsheet he was making for a psychology paper in Advanced Science, much to
my disappointment.  As we tiptoed past the fountain I had marked as my
favorite, I wondered if I’d ever get to drink out of it again.  Or, given
the blood we saw smeared on the floors as if by a wide, thick brush, if it
would taste different.  I nearly asked Brian and Johnson to stop to find
out.  This was leading me to more and more fatalistic thoughts regarding
my imminent death, so I was vastly relieved when I noticed Remi trying to catch
my eye. 

 “I didn’t want to get out,” Remi whispered.

 “What?”

 “I didn’t want to get out.  I wanted to make sure you got out,
and then stay here.”

 “To die.”

 “Probably.  But now…” He looked back at the guards, his left eyebrow
sharpening into a dangerous point.  “Now I have a goal.”

 In a different situation I would have smiled.  Remi’s old self
was bleeding through.  Despair wasn’t his MO.  Still, I couldn’t
celebrate his renewed optimism the way I would have liked. 
Was everyone dead?  Except for Kate,
Guillermo and Casey, we had seen no other students.  More perplexing, all
the classroom doors swung wide open.

"That don't make any
sense," Johnson said.  "All the doors seal up tight during
lockdown."

"Those kids in the Security
Office must have unlocked them."

Johnson scratched his
head.  "I dunno.  It don't make any sense.  Why would
they?"

Brian shrugged, his eyes glued
to each passing room.  "Who knows why they do what they do?"

Remi's eyes met mine.  I
had no doubt Conyers was the one responsible.  A man like him wouldn't
abdicate control of the school to the hired help.  He'd have security
controls in his safe little office.  I could imagine him in there,
twisting the dials and cackling like a madman as my classmates died.
 
No such controls had been visible to me in my many office visits, nor had my
eavesdropping revealed any hint of them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t
there.  Conyers didn’t run the Quarantine on the brawn of his guards
alone.

Down the hall, a door opened.

Brian and Johnson immediately
dropped into crouches, drawing a bead on the door, a tall slab gently swinging
wide.  The nylon
string
leading to the grenade in my pants tightened alarmingly, but didn't pull the
pin.  I grabbed the rope with my left hand and snaked my right into my
jeans, grabbing the grenade.

Remi grabbed my arm. 
"Sam!  It's the Bell."

I whirled.  "Don't
shoot!  It's a student!"

Brian relaxed. 
"Target practice, then."

"Susan!" I screamed.

A blond mop emerged gingerly,
five fingers wrapping like an insect on the doorframe.

"Please don't," I
muttered.  "Please."

She walked like a marionette
–
not jumbled and clumsy
, but
as if
her strings only stretched so
far.  Susan looked out at the hall as if she were stepping onto an alien
planet.  I could see her smile.  Sleepily, she looked down the
hallway at us.  "Oh...Remi!  Sam!  Is it recess?"

Brian growled.  "You
two get down on your knees.
”

I dove for the floor, using the movement as a way to hide the fact that I
was fishing the grenade
out from my
crotch.  Pulled the pin, held the safety lever tight.  Hoped I wasn't
about to kill us both.
Remi stood defiant though, his color mostly
returned, resolve in his eyes.  Doing what he had always done.  Stood
up for his fellow Beasts-to-be.

"Get your ass down,"
Johnson said.
  Remi didn’t obey.  Brian slightly shifted the
trajectory of his MP5 and squeezed off a single round, right into Remi’s
already injured leg.  The boy squealed and collapsed, clawing at his
chewed up tendons.

Susan
jumped at the
sound, and her
smile faded as she
saw the men behind us. 
H
er eyes widened and her mouth stretched wider than I thought it could
possibly go.  A thick glottal sound choked from her throat
and she
backed away from the door.

Johnson leered. 
"Bye bye, Susan."  

"Good riddance,"
Brian muttered.
  “I was getting tired of her anyway.”

I started to open my right
hand, but then the Bell door slammed.  The air the big slab moved
slapped
us in the face
, it was so
fast.  There, behind Susan, nearly on top of her, was a Beast.

Was it Ben?  It looked
different than the basketball player had, bigger, lumpier. 
I
looked for the tatters of yellow shirt that might mark him as our transformed
friend, but there was nothing there.  
Susan turned
casually
and
as soon as she saw the Beast, her horror melted.  "Oh," she
breathed.  "It's you."

Before I could shout a
warning, she embraced the Beast.  I could see the razor spines pushing
through her body, but she didn't care.  She just wanted to get closer and closer,
until the torn ribbons of her arms were wrapped tightly around the Beast's
barrel chest.  The Beast paused for a moment, then folded its arms around
her.  It was almost as if she were absorbed into it as the spines on its
forearms shredded her to pieces, nearly liquifying her in seconds.  The
last I could see, she was still smiling.

"Holy shit," Johnson
said.  "That thing don't look normal."

Brian exhaled sharply. 
"Doesn't matter.  Drop it."

I
flattened myself
on the floor and rolled to the side as
bullet fire erupted over me.  The Beast roared
,
charg
ing
.
  I had tried, unsuccessfully, to go cow-tipping in a friend’s
pasture when I was ten, and the resulting stampede was exactly like this. 
Each meaty thump against the ground solid and monumental.
  I saw one taloned foot scythe into the
concrete floor right next to my head. 

They might have been
psychopaths, but Brian and Johnson were stunningly good at their jobs. 
Brian slid forward, firing short bursts upward at the Beast while Johnson
concentrated his fire at the monster's face.  The two-font assault stunned
the Beast and it clawed at its face as bullets thudded heavily into its
forehead.  Brian completed his slide near the giant right foot and whipped
out his short sword.  He shouted as he drove all his power into one
gruesome slash, cutting the creature's Achilles tendon.  The malformed leg
buckled and the Beast fell to one knee, but Brian's shout melted into a scream
as the giant fingers plunged into the guard's chest and flung him past Johnson down
the hall. 

I rolled the grenade like a
bowling ball.

The detonation
was even
more violent than the Beast had been.

I dreamed of Ben.  He
peeled off his Beast-head like a Scooby-Doo villain and held it tight under his
left arm.  His claws were just styrofoam and air.  "We were born
bad," he explained gently.  "It's just like the guard told
you."