Cages (7 page)

"Conyers certainly
isn't," I agreed.  "Did you really tell him all that
stuff?"

Remi rolled his eyes. 
"Of course I did.  I was stupid.  I actually thought that he was
here to help.  Remember, this is the first 'school' of any kind I've ever
been to.  I didn't learn the lessons everyone else did when they were
young. Yeah, lessons.  Think back on it and I bet you can think of
the first time you realized that the adults around you didn't have your best
interests at heart."

Hamster
echoed in my head, but I ignored
it.  "If you were so buddy-buddy with Conyers, what happened?"

"I just didn't
know."  We reached our dorm cell and I unlatched the lock. 
"People in my family used drugs all the time.  I
had a cousin
who was smoking dope when he was nine
.  When I got here I had no friends, no one to watch my back.  So
I decided to make some, by giving them the best thing I knew how to make."

"You dealt drugs in
here?"

"Not dealt. 
Gave.  It wasn't until Conyers put me in solitary that I found out
everyone thinks drugs are bad."  He stripped off his sweaty T-shirt
and threw it in his locker.

"So when Alan stopped you
in the hall..."

"He wants something,
probably meth.  Easy to find the chemicals, not entirely safe to
make. 
H
e was one of my
biggest customers.  I think that was the thing that sent Conyers over the
edge.  Didn't want the basketball team to lose because of me." 
Remi found a new shirt and slipped it on, a bright-red Quarantine-issue.

"So now you're about to
go and - "

"I'm going to go see
Alan."  Remi gestured.  "You coming?"

I chewed my lip. 
"Maybe we should wait for Dave and Ben."

He shook his head. 
"Gotta go now.  I'm late as it is."

"Okay.  Fine,
okay."

Remi nodded and unlatched the
dorm door.  Then he paused.  "Sam...have you thought any more
about my proposal?"

I licked my lips. 
"I don't think it's a good idea, Remi.  Signs are one thing, and I
got a few more tricks in mind, but a bomb...a bomb's a little hardcore, don't
you think?"

Remi snorted.  "Wait
until you see your first Beast killing.  That's hardcore."

If you walked south through the back hallway of the gymnasium you would
pass the locker rooms, the equipment rooms and the janitor’s lockup before it terminated
into the combination woodshop/mechanics room.  That room was locked up
tight every day in rigid fashion; I imagined Conyers’s limb-losing experience
played a large part in that diligence, and no one would think it wise to give
students easy access to power tools outside normal class time.  The door
to the shop was chipped and scarred, but sturdy.  It was there that a
student body already separated by social pressures was further divided – a
student on the Vocational track spent a great deal more of his time there than
a College Prep one ever would.  By thirteen you were supposed to know if
you wanted to spend your life an engineer or a carpenter.  Clearly a man
or woman who had decided to spend their life under a blue collar had no need to
delve deeper into the perils of the human condition, or know how to solve
complex proofs.  On the broad spectrum of the track of human civilization,
the Vocationals were shuffled off to the side to be little more than servitors
and enablers of their betters, who might actually one day make a significant
contribution to the world.  How anyone could choose a dumbing down of
their education was beyond me.

Of course, the Vocationals did rule the Blind Hall. 

To the left of the shop door was a set of double doors, one of which was
missing its iron handlebar.  Remi and I pushed into them and the world
changed.

The Blind Hall was most active at night, when students could sneak down
into the Hall from their dorm rooms above the gym.  Undoubtedly the guards
knew, but as long as they saw no one and could deny their knowledge, they
really didn’t give a crap.  The dorm barracks were sealed, and so were the
gym hallways.  If a kid were to go Beast, lockdown would still be
ninety-five percent effective.  In the late afternoon most kids had made
their way to the cafeteria for some food after their intramurals, so at the
moment the Blind Hall was empty.

The hall originally started as a simple corridor from the gym hallway to
a planned swimming pool area, but two hundred thousand dollars into the project
the security team had declared an open pool too much of a security risk and it
was shut down - after certain officials and administrators had lined their
pockets.  The end result was the Blind Hall, a corridor to nowhere. 
T
he red light district of the
Quarantine.  Rumor said it was the one place in all of Dekalb Quarantine
#4 the eyes of the administration weren't watching.  I saw none of the
cameras that were the
omnipresent
parrots on our shoulders, ready to
squawk out
even our smallest misdeeds.  This was where
the students stopped being perfect, stopped trying to pretend like they were
good kids and model students.  This was the one place in the entire
Quarantine where you could let loose without holding back for fear of a teacher. 
The way I heard it the worst of practices went on here.  Drugs,
obviously.  Fights.  Prostitution.  As long as it happened on
the Blind Hall, it was fair game. 
Lord of the Flies
, meet Dekalb
Quarantine #4.

"Don't be fooled,"
Remi muttered.

I wasn't.  There were
cameras here.  We just couldn't see them.  I made a note to try to
spot them all the same.  I knew some tricks for spotting camera lenses but
I didn't have the materials nor the complete darkness it required, so I would
have to rely completely on what I could observe.  That the Blind Hall was
not the unmoderated sanctuary it was promised to be would be valuable
information I could use later.

Pipes lined the hallways, intended to be water and drainage conduits, but
served now as benches, tables and stripper poles.  Graffiti was caked on
the wide brick walls so thick it had texture Da Vinci might have envied. 
Every now and then a tag of true talent could be seen, but mostly it was
juvenile slogans and messages revealing at which cell you could expect to find
a good time.  (These were mostly guys mocking their friends, I assumed.)
 The lights were halogens like the rest of the Quarantine, but someone had
applied a thin layer of red paint to the glass, so it had the feel of a
submarine on high alert.  The floors were disturbingly sticky.

Alan was waiting at the end of
the hall, leaning on
the steel barricade that had been erected to seal
off the hallway once it was determined doors were no longer necessary. 
Flanking him were two of his basketball
buddies, Abe Hunning and Jim Lee.  Abe was a toady through and through; he
basked in the wake of Alan's turbulence and seemed more than happy just to be
on the winning side.  He was tall but a bit pudgy for a second-string
point guard.Jim Lee was some mix of Caucasian and Asian he had never revealed,
but he liked to pretend he knew kung fu and often jumped out at some of the
younger kids, shrieking and waving his arms like Bruce Lee.  He was short
but quick.  Remi took in the scene, rubbed his chin and walked forward.

"Remi?" I
whispered.  "Why are you limping?"

"Old injury," Remi
grunted back. 

"Never seen you limping
before.  Did something happen?"

He grinned.  "Not
yet."

"Remi!"  Alan
called, his arms open wide.

"Look at him," Remi
whispered.  "Do you realize that right now, right at this moment, he
honestly thinks he's my friend?  I feel sorry for the poor idiot
sometimes."

"You got the stuff?"
Abe shouted.

"If course I
do."  Remi stopped three feet in front of them, hands in the pockets
of his loose, gray corduroys.  "But hey, Alan, do you remember when
the baseball team won regional?"

Alan frowned. 
"What?"

"Oh, it's nothing. 
Just wanted to tell my new friend here a story and wondered if you perhaps
remembered the incident I was talking about.  This is Sam, by the
way.  Say hi."

"
Bite me
, Sam."

"Very pleasant,
Jim.  Anyway, Sam, our baseball team was really good last year.  I
mean really good.  We won regionals and were gonna sweep the local series,
no problem.  But something happened that changed all that.  Tell Sam
what that was, Alan."

Alan snorted.  "The
pitcher broke his hand."

Remi nodded. 
"Indeed he did."

Alan shook his head. 
"I don't get you sometimes, man.  What is your damage?"

"Oh, nothing.  Never
mind.  I'll get your stuff."  Remi dug deep in his left pocket,
but couldn't seem to find anything, so he reached down in there with his right
hand and gave a shrug that said
sorry, deep pockets
.  His pants
were bordering on ludicrously baggy.  "Sam, did I tell you how good
our basketball team is this year?  Unstoppable, they're
saying." 

"No,
you
didn't –” My words trailed off as Remi
slid a long wooden pole from inside his pocket.  He must have cut a hole
in his pants and tucked the end of the stick in his shoe.  I guess I
wasn't as observant as I thought because it was a total surprise to me, and an
even bigger one when he swung the pole hard at Alan's knee.

Alan saw it coming and managed
to fall back so that the wood only tagged the meaty part of his leg above the
knee, but instantly Remi swung it back for another strike.  By then Abe
and Jim were on him, Abe slamming a fist into Remi's gut and Jim getting him in
a headlock.  Alan wrestled for control of the stick and finally wrenched
it away from Remi.  "You
bastard
," Alan swore, slamming the stick into Remi's
arm.

"Hey, stop –”

Alan pointed the stick at
me.  "You want to start trouble, new kid?  Keep hanging around
this
guy
.  He's nothing
but."

I watched them haul Remi away,
out of Blind Hall and into the
gym hallway
  I didn't follow, but I could hear the cries
as they beat and kicked him on the hallway floor.  I didn't understand why
they'd want to drag Remi out of Blind Hall to do their beating until I finally
heard the noise stop, and I finally made my way towards where they had taken
him.  There was Conyers standing over a bruised and bloody Remi, who
answered his questions with only a silent flip-off.  Alan showed him the
bruise that was purpling above his knee.

"Solitary," Conyers
declared.  "Two months."

I watched as one of the guards
helped Remi to his feet and started to drag him towards the
Bell
.  As he went past I looked at the
obviously beaten Remi and back to Conyers.  Recrimination must have been
plain on my face.  The principal shrugged.  "We've got a good team
this year."

"You just wait until I
get out, Conyers."  Remi spat on the floor, a disgusting puddle of
blood and phlegm. "Me and Sam here are gonna do so much worse."

They may have dragged Remi
away, but from the moment he heard that announcement, Conyers's eyes never left
me.  His eyes were locked onto my face, his mouth twisted into what looked
like lust.  If I could have read his mind at that moment as he looked at
me, I think the only thing echoing around that balding skull of his would have
been
bring it on, boy
.  All thanks to Remi, whose undying loyalty
and affection I had worked hard to buy, himself beaten bloody from a fight he
had started but never had any hope of winning, one man against three.

I was starting to think I had
made a terrible mistake. 

The Quarantine basketball
court was a cage.  Thirty feet tall, double the length of the court
long.  The sport is a sweaty, fluid affair when played correctly, and for
all their personal flaws, the Dekalb Quarantine #4 team did indeed play it
correctly.  The bleachers were cordoned off into zones, smaller cages
breaking the student body into groups so that, should a teen go Beast, most
would be protected.  As for those unlucky enough to be in the same
cages...well, there were losses and then there were losses.  The visiting
team was allowed to bring no audience with them
,
so today the Douglas Quarantine #2 Panthers bore
the brunt of an entirely hostile crowd. The score was 56 - 62 in the third
quarter.

It seems appropriate at this
point to talk about death for a minute.  Every child learns before the age
of ten that they're going to die.  Every child learns by at least the age
of eleven that, for them, it may be sooner rather than later.  Death mean
s
different things when it happens to
different people.  I had no aunts - very few people did anymore - but my
mother had a close friend of hers who had survived the Outbreak with her and my
father.  She lived just four houses down the street.  One day she
slipped on a wet washcloth she had thrown on her bathroom floor and cracked her
head on the sink.  She bled to death, mainly because my mother was mad at
her at the time and didn't come visit.  Her funeral was a cacophony of
wailing women and somberly crying men who shook each other's hands as if they
didn't live right next to each other.  She had been a hero of the
Outbreak, the priest said over the coffin.  We were all diminished for her
light having gone out of the world.