Cages (4 page)

He found the second half of
the comic and started flipping through it awkwardly.  "Kid, does the
Beast ever win in these books?"

I only glared at him. 

"Well, he ought to. 
He should take Damph's head off, just one bite, claw that big
dumb
steroid body to streds."  The
kid threw the remnants of the comic at me.  "Just remember that when
you're sleeping in Jeremy's bed."  He stormed out, slamming the heavy
door open. 
 The athlete snorted.  "That's just how Remi is.  But if
you want my advice, kid, you'll stay out of his way for the first few
days."

I balled the comic up and
threw it in the recycle bin.  "I have no idea what's going on!"

The athlete shook his head. 
He looked at least fifteen.  "Let's let your innocent mind stay
unblemished for one more night, kiddo.  You should go to sleep thinking
that the world's alright and your mom'll bring you candy next time she comes to
visit."  He offered his hand as he passed by me towards the
door.  "I'm Dave.  Coming to dinner?"

"Look, just tell me what
the hell is going on.This is childish!"

Dave sighed.  "It's
anything but childish.  I just don't want to talk about it, okay?  I
promise, we'll tell you...it's just too soon."  Then he was gone, his
hand still unshaken. 

The last of the three, the
blond kid, closed his locker carefully and smoothed out the wrinkles in his
polo shirt.  I grabbed his arm as he tried to walk by.  "Come
on.  Tell me what just happened."  

There was panic in this kid's
eyes and I knew I had made a mistake.  This was a kid who was used to
being picked on.  A kid like that has two views of humanity at large:
People who will hurt him, and people who won't.  I had started off
as
the wrong one.  I let his arm go
quickly and held my hands up, trying to indicate that I didn't mean anything by
it. 

The kid sniffed cautiously,
then rolled his eyes.  "Are you thick?  Until last week, that
bunk belonged to a kid named Jeremy Emmet.  He's no longer in that bunk. 
You figure it out."

The kid was right, I was
stupid. 

Jeremy Emmet had been fourteen
years old.  A good kid from all reports, but as I heard one teacher say
over the
bug in
the
registrar's office, you never know which kids've got the Devil inside.  After
school let out one day, all the students filed away to their respective
intramurals and after-schools, all except Jeremy Emmet, who didn't show up for
his tennis team practice. 

It's difficult to know exactly
what happened then, but scuttlebutt said Jeremy wandered into the girl's locker
room, which had been emptied only moments before as the intramurals got
underway.  I found it difficult to take a lot of this at face value;
unless the kids I heard it from actually saw the videos of Jeremy's last lonely
walk there's no way they could actually know.  They could have overheard
the teachers, I guess.  But anyway, they say that he turned on the cold
water to full and stood under the showers, still clutching his red vinyl
bookbag in one hand.

Why go to the girl's
showers?  The common belief seems the most credible.  As the
parasites devoured his brain, Jeremy's mind wandered in between fantasy and
reality, and frankly, it was one place what was left of his teenage psyche
really wanted to go.  He stayed there, trembling under the water for
twenty minutes, until the alarm sounded in light of his disappearance.  He
paid the flashing red lights and howling siren no mind, but simply stood there,
head lightly banging against the ceramic tile wall.  Four girls ran back
to the locker room to get their clothes - in spite of orders to not do
exactly
that. 

They saw him and
shrieked.  He stirred at that sound - maybe another expression of his teen
brain at work?  Actual girls in the locker room?  In any case he
raised his arm and slammed his left hand into the tile, pushing himself away
from the wall.  The tile shattered under the force.  He turned and
raised his head.

The one girl who survived said
that he was at least in stage two.  His eyes were crimson, bloodshot to an
extreme degree.  That was the first stage.  But he also had sharp
bony spines clawing from his arms and face, cruel and bloody rakes.  The
first girl he was on instantly, severing her torso from her bottom half in a
neat twist, his mouth stretched wide enough to break his own jaw as he sank his
teeth into her side.  She was still screaming.  The second girl
turned to run, only to find herself stabbed in the back with his forearm
spikes.  The last two girls made it out of the locker room, but when the
fourth girl looked back she was alone, and the Beast was loping out of the
bloody mist that had been her friend. 

She would have died the same
way if Mr. Wilson hadn't intervened.  He was on his way back to his office
from the teacher's lounge when the alarm went off and he saw the Beast that had
been Jeremy Emmet, now stage four, with the scaly skin and claw-like hands,
about to kill his fourth victim.  He emptied his sidearm revolver at
Jeremy as the girl ran past.  In spite of his training, Wilson had hit only
once, a flesh wound to the thigh.  But that had been enough to make the
Beast settle on a different prey. 

Wilson ran, but he wasn't
thinking straight.  He made a beeline for the one place he thought of as
safe: his office.  The security detail arrived only seconds after, but
Wilson was already being eviscerated by Jeremy.  The two-man security team
had been able to do nothing except hit the emergency seal on Wilson's
door.  Jeremy, sensing instantly that he was trapped, jumped all the way to
stage seven and began clawing at the doors.  Stage seven has wings and
backward-bent legs.  One guard named Biff, displaying uncommon valor and
calm, neatly pulled back the door's murder hole slit and peppered the inside of
Wilson's office with as many rounds as he could.  He then reloaded, and
did it again.

Jeremy was dead, but
unfortunately, Wilson wasn't.  Conyers had ended it himself with a
double-barrelled shotgun.

How did I get all this
information?  Well, as long as you weren't close personal friends with Jeremy
or the three murdered girls, it was good gossip.  And everyone I met at
dinner seemed to want to break my Beast cherry
, the taciturn lunch
giving way to a more relaxed atmosphere that came from the knowledge that your
time was your own for the rest of the day
. 

N
ow I had the perfect way to
ingratiate myself with my roomates.  In a week's time we'd be as thick as
Beasts in a barrow.  Odd, I never thought about what that expression meant
until now.
  

It wasn't easy finding out
which guard was Biff.  They didn't wear name tags and I suspected
"Biff" was a nickname anyway.  They were careful not to let us
get too close and would back away if we were coming towards them, or raise
their MP5s if they were pinned.  Their expression told the whole story:
I
will shoot you, kid, and you won't be the first one.
  I had been
hoping to get a look at their mysterious gear packs, black Kevlar with a cloth
tube
holding
a samurai short
sword, hoping that there would be some identification there, but none of the
guards fell for my various distractions.  They were constantly on
alert. 

From the stories I had been
told, Biff was a white guy with brown hair.  That narrowed it down to five
guards, but I was stuck there for a day or two.  There were employee
profiles in the registrar's office, but getting in there was impossible. 
I listened to my registrar bug as much as possible, but as no new kids had come
in since me, Conyers had moved back to the Principal's office, away from my
prying ears.  I made a note to do something about that, but my more
immediate task was locating Biff. 

On Wednesday I joined the
Banner Society, which was in charge of making all the homecoming and
announcement banners.  They were impressed by my Photoshop abilities
,
though how anyone did anything on the antiquated Macs they used was beyond me
.  Once I
actually joined
something
, the guards came by our
dorm less frequently
in the afternoons
. 

By Thursday, my roommates
still barely talked to me, but that was fine.  I learned the shy kid's
name was Ben. 

On Friday I discovered the
identity of the elusive Biff.

It was crude and direct, not
my style at all, but I was getting desperate.  I only had a short window
to impress my roomies, and stubbornly mysterious Biff could foul it all up by
staying anonymous.  I had to make sure I caught each of the white,
brown-haired guards on solo patrol in a hallway (this wouldn't work if a guard
heard me do it twice).  I also had to do it in between classes, so that
the crush of teens would hide me when I actually found my target.  I
merely waited until the guard was at the end of the hall, about to turn a
corner, and yelled "hey Biff!"

Of course there were serious
flaws in my plan here.  Any guard might turn to look on hearing a loud
noise, but I tried to keep the name at a level that matched the general hall
noise, so that only someone who was used to keying in to the word
"Biff" would pick it out of the static.  I got a reaction on the
third try.  The guard's ears perked up and he turned, searching for who he
knew who could be calling for him.  Then he shook his head and walked on.

I had been working on the
second step on and off for the entire first week, but locating Biff's identity
made it tons easier.  I followed him as he walked as much as I could
betwen classes and after.  He had a patrol pattern that circumnavigated
the
first
floor social
studies wing,
cut through the courtyard and
culminat
ed
in a check-in at the security desk near the Registrar's office.  A
seperate point of interest was that every single patrol route hit that desk at
some point, and I filed that info away for later shenanigans. 

One last visit to the Banner
Society and I was ready.

"Come with me," I
said firmly as the dorm door opened, my three roomies shuffling in. 
"We've only got ten minutes." 

They resisted at first, but
their own curiosity won them over.  Remi, Dave and Ben followed me back to
the social studies
hall
,
where a few clubs were just getting out of their after-school meetings, milling
around in the hall.  One of my more sizable banners blanketed the left
side of the hall, proclaiming "Homecoming Dance!  Only three weeks
left!" Remi shrugged his shoulders, clearly annoyed by what seemed to be a
waste of time.  Dave seemed interested, but confused.  Only Ben
noticed me checking my watch and reaching my hand up to the wall, where a thin
string dangled from the cieling.  I smiled as his eyes followed the string
along the hallway to terminate at the banner.

Biff turned the corner at the
far end of the hall.  He walked as he always did, with a confident
swagger, winking at the girls as he walked past.  He looked at the banner
and smiled, maybe remembering an especially good homecoming dance in his own
childhood, but kept his patrol pace steady.  As the guards went he
seemed
by far the most human.  I felt sorry
for him, but I had to do what I had to do. 

I pulled the string, hard.

The string pulled a pin loose
that sent two rocks harvested from the school track tumbling down.  I had
printed the banner twice as long as I needed it and folded it over on itself,
so that the two rocks unfurled the first image printed and landed on the floor
with a loud bang. 

Biff whirled at the loud noise
and gasped, throwing himself backwards away from the wall and bringing his MP5
to bear.  He opened fire into the banner, spraying bullets in uncontrolled
bursts, yelling at the top of his lungs.  He ended his attack by
unsheathing his short sword and spinning a devastating cut at the wall. 
The blade tumbled to the floor and he staggered back to the opposite wall,
staring in confusion at what he was seeing.

A seven foot tall printout of
the Beast scanned from what was left of my
Damph the Beasthunter
comic
drifted to the floor, now punched through with dozens of holes and sheared at
the neck by Biff's sword slice.  I could see his head turn in confusion as
he read the words painted in stencil beneath the banner.

Jeremy says hi.

Even Remi laughed.  My
roomies were jumping and giving me high-fives, and the other kids, slowly
getting over their shock at the abrupt gunfire
,
soon joined in.  Some went closer to the
banner for a better look, but Biff jumped to his feet, brandishing his
MP5.  "Get away!  All of you
,
stay away from me!"

I grinned madly as Remi hugged
me, pointing at me, declaring that this
SOB
had some balls.
  Dave punched me in
the shoulder and Ben grinned, clinging on Dave’s arm triumphantly. These kids
had so few opportunities to strike back that anyone who managed it and stayed
alive in the process would be declared a Cage Hero.

Complete success.

Of course, I wasn't going to
get out of it without catching some heat.  

Within half an hour of Biff
discharging his weapon Remi, Dave, Ben and I were rounded up and put in the
Principal's Office
l
obby by
two dour guards (not Biff) and left alone, presumably to stew in our own guilt.