Cages (5 page)

"Ever been in here
before?" I asked Ben.  He looked small and getting smaller, hunched
over in his seat, hugging his knees.

Ben shook his head, clearly
terrified.

I turned to Remi and
Dave.  "Either of you?"

Dave nodded. 
"Yeah.  Got in a fight once.  Well, started a fight. 
Basically Conyers yells at you and you get more homework
, or you get
some solitary
. 
Remi
used to just about live here. 
But..I dunno, Sam.  This is a bit beyond."

"
Freak
ing brilliant is what it was, Sam, and no
matter what that
moron
says
in there, don't you forget it," Remi declared poking his finger in my
direction.  "You can bet that
punk
guard won't forget Jeremy Emmet now. 
Inspiring, that's what you are, Sam."

I shrugged, the pleasure of
flattery silently blooming.  I turned to the silent kid to my left. 
"Don't worry, Ben.  You won't be punished.  It's all me. 
You had nothing to do with it."

"
Screw
that," Remi said, rising to his
feet.  "It's all or nothing.  None of us talks.  If we all get
off, we all get off.  If we don't, we do our time together."

Inside I was gloating. 
Perfect, this could not be more perfect.  Remi would do anything for me
now, and he was the alpha dog.  Outside I just shook my head. 
"It's no good, Remi.  They'll have me on camera hanging the
banner.  Hell, they're probably listening in on this right now.  But
thanks anyway, man."

The door to Principal
Conyers's office unsealed, four seperate deadbolts sliding open.  The door
opened outward and Conyers stepped through.  "You," he said,
pointing at me.  "In here.  Now."

I stood, made a show of
yawning and walked toward Conyers.  He stood in the doorway as if to block
me, but then moved aside.  "I'm going for some coffee," he
announced, and shoved me into the office.  The sticky bug I had palmed
jolted out of my hand and onto the floor. 
Crap!
 
Conyers nodded inside, closing the door. 
"It's not me you need to be speaking to." 

On the other side of the desk
sat a very uncomfortable-looking Biff.  He wasn't wearing his body armor,
just his black fatigues.  His helmet was gone.  The only weapon he
seemed to have on him was a pistol he clutched on top of the desk. 
"Your name's Sam, right?"

I nodded.  My mind was on
the sticky bug on the floor.  If Conyers came back in, no way he would
miss it.  I had to find a way to scoop it up and stick it under the desk
where it belonged. 
 "Sit down, Sam, please."  Biff gestured to the chair on
the other side of the desk.  His face was shiny with sweat.

I lowered myself down onto the
chair.  The bug was nine inches away from my shoe.  I could crush it,
but it was my last sticky bug.  I had to make it work, unless I could
retrieve the other from the Reigistrar's office. 

"I knew Jeremy
Emmet.  Did you know that?"

I turned my attention back to
Biff.  He wasn't yelling.  In fact, he didn't seem angry at
all.  Just...sad.

"I was in Quarantine with
his sister."  Biff tapped the butt of the gun on the desk
absently.  "He never knew it, but I tried to keep an eye on him and
some of the other kids whose families I knew one way or another."

My foot edged closer to the
bug as I slumped down in the chair, glaring at Biff.  What would Remi
say?  "I guess pumping three clips into him is your way of keeping an
eye on him, huh?"

There was a hint of anger as
Biff looked up at me then, but it quickly faded.  "I knew your
brother too.  Bet you didn't know that."

My foot stopped its inching
journey as Biff got my full attention.  "You knew James?"

"He was just getting in
as I was getting out, but he was like you.  Liked to be the center of
attention."  Biff ejected the pistol's clip and started emptying the
bullets onto the desk.  "The other guards think I'm soft. 
They're right I guess.  They're all...ex military.  Real ROTC
hard-asses.  But I'm just...Biff.  Do you want to know why I became a
Quarantine guard?"

"Okay," I said, my
foot finally touching the sticky bug. 

"When I was in
Quarantine, we had thirty-seven Beast incidents.  I saw nine of them
personally."  Biff set the gun down and began loading the clip back
up.  "The first time was the worst - first time for anything always
is - but it was the fourth time that really got me.  I was in Trig class
when I noticed my buddy, Chaz, had his head on his desk.  He was breathing
real heavy, too, like he was crying. I was this close," he held his
fingers an inch apart "this close to going over to him to see what was
wrong.  Unfortunately for her, Kerry Hew got there first."  Biff
closed his eyes for a moment, sighing deeply.  I took the moment to firmly
kick the bug off the floor and onto the side of my shoe. 

"Kerry was his
girlfriend.  They'd been going out for two or three months... well, he
took her apart.  You know what it's like from the stories, don't
you?  We all screamed and huddled in the corner, as far away as we could
get from Chaz.  The worst part... he was still in the early stages. 
I mean more or less he still
looked
like Chaz, even as he chewed through
her bones. We watched him change, more slowly than normal, thank god.  A
pair of scaled wings had unfurled just as the guard team burst through the door
hatch." Biff smiled then, shaking his head, his voice full of awe. 
"They were amazing.  One man leapt through the air, shooting an M16.
Chaz slashed at him with his claws and tore bloody strips through his body
armor.  But while he was distracted the second one pulled his blade and
cut clean through Chaz's neck, where the final bone hadn't yet hardened. 
The body flailed for a moment, but then Chaz fell."

Biff rubbed his eyes. 
"God, we cheered then, cheered like crazy.  We were just so happy to
be alive, you know?  And though he had been one of my closest friends, I
was just glad that Chaz wasn't that
thing
anymore.  But what
happened next...The first guard stood, looking down at his injuries.  It's
isn't true, you know, about the biting.  We call them the Bitten, but a
scratch does the same thing.  He turned to his partner and there, right in
front of all of us, his partner shot him down dead.

"I'll never forget what
he said.  He turned to us, still flecked with his friend's blood and said,
'we're doing this for you.  Never forget what he did for you.'  And I
knew that I wanted to be that man.  So that next time...next time maybe
Kerry Hew would live, you know?"

I crossed my legs, sliding the
foot with the sticky bug under the desk.  "Are you sure you weren't
just doing it for the cool uniform?"

Biff frowned then.  I
can't recall having seen a sadder face.  "Jeremy was my first. 
The first Beast I killed.  Back in the barracks all the other guys were slapping
me on the back, laughing, buying me drinks
from the commissary
.  I tried to enjoy it, tried to feel
like a hero, but all I could think of was that I had killed Jessica Emmet's
little brother.  I put my gun to my head, like this."  He took
the empty gun and held it to his temple.  My foot stopped moving. 
"I couldn't do it.  But I thought I should.  Sometimes think
maybe I still should."  He lowered the gun slowly, sliding the clip
back in.  "I just want to know, Sam.  Why? Why did you do
it?  You didn't even know Jeremy."

I crossed my arms, but my
Remi-like shell was cracking.  "I just wanted to impress my
roommates.  They're...still very angry about what happened."

Biff nodded.  "They
should be."  He stood then, sliding his gun back in his
holster.  "I'm going to go back out there now.  I have patrol
until ten o'clock.  And no matter what you do, if a there's a Beast, I'm
there for you, the way those two guards were there for me.  But I just
wanted you to know today....you broke my heart all over again."

I kicked the underside of the
desk and stood.  My foot came away bug-free.  "I'm sorry,
sir," I said.

He shook his head. 
"No, you're not."  He unlatched the office door and pushed it
open.  There, standing together were Remi, Dave and Ben, arms crossed,
sitting under a hastily scribbled declaration in wide felt Magic Marker. 
They were all grinning, even Ben (mostly) and Remi shot Biff the bird, and
pointed up at their graffiti.

Fuck
you, Biff.

"This is fantastic,"
Remi said
as we walked back to our dorm
, still buzzed from the day's mischief.  He grabbed all our necks in a
painful bear hug and laughed crazily.  "This is just the beginning,
ain't it, Sammy?  We're gonna give this place hell.  The Principal,
the teachers, the janitors, and especially the guards –”

"No," I said,
pushing his arm away.  "We leave the guards alone."

Remi grew up in the
Non-Quarantine Zone, out in the midwest where the Outbreak reduced the
population to almost zero.  The people who live
d
in Non-Quarantine zones
then were
the backpackers, the roughhousers, the
salt-of-the earth isolationists and the hippies.  Remi's parents were no
exception.

"
They
tried to kill me in the womb," Remi
said
.  How he knew that, I have no idea,
but from some of the things he said, I think his aunt may have told him. 
Remi claimed his father had helped his mother mix ipecac into her coffee every
morning for two weeks.  In spite of fourteen days of heaving, Remi's
mother was still pregnant.  "'Bastard's in there good,'" Remi
said, imitating his father with a strong hick accent.  They decided then
and there that if the kid wanted to stick around that badly they might as well
oblige. 

"I had a brother that
went Beast, they tell me, and they didn't want to have to deal with it
again.  Bull!"  Remi said.  "They just didn't want the
responsibility.  That's why they spent their time foraging supermarkets
for old tinned meat.  Couldn't handle doing anything for real."

Remi's family were nomads,
wandering from place to place, never wanting for an abandoned house to stay
in.  They avoided the bigger midwestern cities, as there were rumors the
Bitten might still be found there, but instead kept to the small towns and back
country roads that littered the heartland countryside.  They didn't
exactly view the Outbreak as a religious experience, but they approached the
event as something akin to providence.  Remi's father used to take him
aside and show him the fields of wild corn, green shoots slowly piercing the
asphalt road. 
They used to call this God's Country,
he
told
Remi
often
. 
Well, now God's given it to us.

"
P
arasites," Remi spat.

Remi never had any formal
education until the age of eight, when suddenly his mother realized that little
Remi couldn't read.  They had just forgotten that he didn't already
know.  "Pot was another thing they always seemed to find plenty
of," Remi explained.  So his aunt, who used to be a middle school
substitute teacher, took on the task.  She found Remi to be a quick study,
hungry as he was for things outside of God's Country.  He learned his
letters from decades-old tabloids and faded newspapers, from fashion magazines
to flimsy liberal rags.  Where, he used to ask, where are all the people
in these books?  For all their wandering, they only rarely ever met anyone
else. 
Dead honey, they're all dead.

Math was a matter of
pharmacy.  Walgreens were raided for drugs both medicinal and
recreational; the handling and measuring of delicate substances was a matter of
intense study for Remi.  Get the mix wrong and instead of a heady hit of
meth, grandma got her face blown off.  He never once got it wrong. 
Of all the subjects his aunt would sort-of teach him, Remi had found his true
love in chemistry.  While the rest of his family was raiding Safeways Remi
would often set off on his own in search of schools or bookstores that might
have texts about the subject.  Often he would have to return the next day
to find
other
books to
explain some of the things in the chemistry
texts
, but as his aunt had already discovered, Remi was
a quick study.  He checked the pH balance of small puddles on the road
between towns, learned how to test alkalinity in boxed lemonade, and after some
intense study and many failed attempts, made a small amount of nitroglycerin.  

The family never forgave him
for destroying their wagon, which was a cored-out VW bug attached to a bicycle
- and the steadiest thing at waist level to mix chemicals on.  Resentful
of their resentment, Remi started looking more at the world his family had
turned their backs on, from sources outside of magazine glossies.  Old
graffiti declaring "Atlanta is a Quarantine zone."  Whispered
conversations with fellow nomads they met once or twice a year.
 
He discovered that the great civilization
of the past was not dead.  It was just different.  And most
definitely not in the midwest anymore.  So on the night of his twelfth
birthday, Remi ran away from his nomad family. 

"It's not as unbelievable
as you coasters think," Remi
said
.  "I mean, there was no one out there, and the Bitten had
swarmed most of the wildlife.  Some of it was coming back, but nothing
that could be a threat.  Plus I had my map and a bicycle."