Cages (8 page)

Contrast that with my friend
Hap Johnson's sister's funeral.  She had died in Quarantine.  It was
impossible to tell if she had been a Beast or simply the victim of one, as the
bodies of the Quarantine dead were burned within the hour of death, to prevent
any potential airborne infection
, though no such thing had ever been
reported
.  There were dry eyes
on every face except her mother's.  The priest muttered something about
God and a lamb, but everyone could te
l
l his heart really wasn't in it.  I wanted to ask my mother why but I
refused to hazard a question, and James was at college, so I asked my
dad.  I was ten years old at the time, so I knew about Beasts and the
Bitten already, but it seemed to me that a death was a death, and people should
be equally sad at either.

"That's a very
interesting point you raise, slick," he drawled as he tinkered under the
hood of our '04 Civic.  He frowned as he nearly cut the spark plug wires
absently, forgetting it was his own car he was working on.  "Why is
the death of a fifty year old woman more traumatic than the death of a teenager? 
You know, it used to be the other way around.  You'd mourn for all that
lost potential...but now, secretly?  People are glad."

I can't say I ever understood
what he was saying until that basketball game. 

Our team, the Wild Dogs, were
winning pretty easily.  The coach had his third string guys in there and
they still managed to dominate.  The third string happened to include
Dave, my athletic roommate, so for his sake I cheered all the harder. 
Even Ben got in the spirit, calling "shoot it, shoot it!" when Dave
had the ball.  He saw us and waved
.

The game was fun.  Our
middle school games didn't come with nearly this much ceremony and spectacle,
and the energy of the crowd was exhilarating.  I even saw Conyers, flanked
as he always was by two burly guards, smiling and clapping against his
leg.  In that moment even I was mad at Remi.  Who would want to spoil
this?

Ben nudged my leg. 
"Panthers, #25."

I looked.  He was slow,
dragging terribly, barely making it up and down the court in time to run back. 
"Why don't they pull him?"

"He's their best
player."  Ben shook his head.  "No, no, no, no...."

I looked back at #25.  He
was standing on the half-court line now, merely leaning one way and the other
as the teams ran past.  But now even the coaches stopped calling advice to
him and just stared, stupefied. 

Conyers's voice rang out with
all the immediacy of an air raid siren.  "Clear the court!"

Pandemonium.  Players
scattered to the far sides of the court cage, the ball bouncing away,
forgotten.  A karaoke timekeeper with no more words to cue.  #25 just
stood there, perfectly still.  Then he began to growl.

The students in the bleachers
screamed,
clawing at their cage doors,
crawling over themselves to try to escape what they knew could be an impending
doom.  No one knew how strong these cages really were.  The players
on the court were begging the guards on the other side to open the doors, to
let them out before it was too late, but the guards stood still as tin
soldiers, their eyes fixed on #25.

Why didn't they fire?  I
gripped Ben's shoulder, tight, as I searched for Dave in the crowd. 

I should have known the
answer.  A Beast got loose once at a minimall two counties over.  I
remember watching the news footage as a kid on our wood-paneled tube TV and
thinking it was some sort of horror movie I wasn't supposed to be seeing. 
James was with me then, just coming back from the kitchen with a bottle of
Coke. 

"Do you know what's going
on there?" he asked, handing me the bottle.

I shrugged. 
"There's a Beast killing people, looks like."

James started to say
something, but shrugged back instead.  I could tell he wished I didn't
know how things were, that he didn't have to face the same reality my parents
faced; I was pretty likely to die soon. 

The news anchor cut in,
answering the question I would later ask myself at the basketball court. 
"Our liason with city hall tells us that the SBBAT police groups are
working to surround the Beast and keep it contained until the crowd can be
dispersed from around it, to prevent further deaths.  Once they start
shooting, the Beast is likely to go wild, and they're hoping to minimize the
damage."

"Who do you think he
was?" I asked, just now realizing that what I was seeing was real.  I
was glad James was with me instead of my mom, so I could feel free to ask
things like that.  

James sighed.  "They
don't know and they don't really care."

I frowned.  "Why
not?"

My brother scratched his new
beard absently.  I remembered I didn't like his stubble; it made him look
like someone other than James.  "Because he's not a teenager
anymore.  Being a teenager is a sort of threshold point for how much
people care about you.  A kid your age or younger?  Anything is a
tragedy.  Teenagers...people are afraid of teenagers, even the non-Beast
ones, but they still feel bad when, say, a Beast goes wild in Quarantine and
kills a few they know.  But when they look at that Beast on the
screen....even though he still looks more or less like the kid he used to be,
he's not.  He's a monster.  They look at his eyes and they just
know.  And even though they know it's no one's fault, they still feel
betrayed.  So not only do they not care who the kid was, they're happy
that they get a chance to shoot him down, for turning their backs on them."

I shook my head. 
"That's never going to happen to me."

James's face spasmed as he
tried to keep an emotion in.  "I hope not, kiddo.  But that's
not the only thing you gotta worry about in Quarantine."

#25 began to move, and the
whole court gasped, then fell into shocked silence.  He stumbled his way
upcourt, falling and picking himself up repeatedly as his neurons fired
spastically, trying to fight off the parasite.  He fished the ball up from
where it had rolled to rest, just under the home court and looked at it. 
I could see his face, just a blurry thumbprint from where I sat, but his red
eyes stood out unmistakably.  #25 then shuffled forward and held the ball
up to the net in a grotesque imitation of what he used to do as a basketball
player.  He tried to jump, but his feet couldn't leave the ground. 
So instead his arms grew, lengthening and tearing away his bone and tissue as
the spines poked through, claws piercing the ball so that by the time it sank
through the net it landed with a dry thwack, in a puddle of rubber at #25's
feet.  Then he shuffled forward, picked up what was left of the ball, and
did it again. He repeated the action five times before letting the ball just
sit there, and then he
really
began to change.

Remi had been right.  I had
never seen anything like this, and I suddenly realized how much of a fool I had
been to take it so lightly.  I stood there with four hundred other
students, watching this kid none of us even knew suddenly break apart, his pale
skin darkening, his legs breaking backwards.  I could almost have been
lured in by the horrible beauty of it in the same way people can watch nature
shows dispassionately as lions rip zebras to shreds, except that up until the
last minute, his face remained that of a sixteen year old boy who had just won
the game for his team.  Then the chain cages jangled; the guards had
opened the cage doors. 

The Beast spun, looking
intently at the fresh meat that was running scared for
their
lives out the cage doors.  Four
guards had been deployed inside either door and were slowly advancing, stubby
shotguns in their hands.  I strained my eyes but couldn't tell if one of
them was Biff.  They were all wearing facemasks.  The Beast tensed,
the guards even better prey than the running students; the adults
could
spread the parasite
.  But
before the Beast could even jump, the four facing it unloaded their shotguns,
then hit the floor as the four behind the Beast opened fire with their
MP5s.  Blood splattered everywhere, and now I saw what the facemasks were
for as each of them was covered in Beast blood that could have turned them into
Bitten had they internalized it.Then, when the clips ran out on the MP5s, the
first four guards leapt up, each with their sword in hand, and cut the Beast
limb from limb.  I was stunned at their efficiency, much in the same wa
y
a young Biff must have been.  They
acted like a school of fish, with perfectly synced reflexes.  I was glad I
had declared the guards off-limits.

Later I heard Conyers had
demanded the score be reset to pre-Beast levels, but no one else wanted
to.  They let it be a Panthers victory, 64-62.

I made sure to listen to the
radio than night.  Dave had come into the cell and gone straight to bed,
not saying a word to either
of us
.  Ben sat quietly in his bunk below mine reading a thick Samuel
Delany novel.  Remi's bunk was empty, though his presence was never more
felt, his smug ghost gloating at me all the way from the Bell.  I turned
the volume up.

"It's happening more and
more often, Mr. Conyers."  That was the Captain of the Guards' gruff
voice.  "I need more men."

I heard the shuffling of
paper.  Clearly Conyers was ignoring him.  "You have as many as
the budget allows, Jason."

"All the kids on that
court almost died because we didn't have enough guards to go in
and
watch the ones we led out.  We were almost too late."

"But you weren't, were
you?  Your men did an outstanding job, and they'll get their bonuses, even
though eight men to kill one Beast seems like overkill to me." 
Conyers's voice held a hint of displeasure.

"You're suggesting I sent
eight men out there so that there would be more bonuses?" Jason's voice
was getting higher.  "It
is
happening more often.  And
quicker.  Used to be you had twenty minutes before they got to stage
seven, but that was barely ten."

"What's your point,
Jason?"

"My point is that it's
t
he Outbreak's not over.  I think the
parasite's adapting and soon they're –”

"Stop." 
Conyers's voice was hard, commanding.  "I will not entertain such
uninformed speculation.  The Outbreak is over, and I don't want you
causing a panic."

"It's not uninformed, Mr.
Conyers.  It. Is happening.  More.  Often!"  A fist
slammed on a desk. 

Conyers sighed. 
"And what do you want me to do?  We could just execute all of them but
that presents a bit of a problem from the survival of the species point of
view..."

"Quit talking down to
me.  I just need more men."

"No."

"At least let me start
hiring female guards.  There's a lot of them looking for work and it'll
make up for the gaps when we lose one.  They're usually cheaper,
too."

"No.  You heard what
happened in New York? That's not going to happen here."

"Oh, don't even start
that.  That was isolated, and it wasn't even a Beast problem.  It was
just some bad kids."

Conyers's chair squeaked
harshly; he'd stood up.  "Listen to me, Jason. 
They are all
bad
."

Silence for a moment. 
Then Jason, sounding more subdued, said "At least give me back the two
guards you got following you around.  They'll help fill the patrol
roster."

"No.  I need
them.  Are you done?"

Jason breathed heavily through
his nose, then opened the door.  "Yeah
.  Yeah,
I'm done."

The next day I was on pins and
needles.  In a way I had never experienced before, I was wary of every
single classmate.  I refused to talk to them, wouldn't even meet their
eyes for fear of seeing red.  I understood then why no one talked much at
lunch, why everyone was always so quiet, why it was so difficult to get close
to anyone.  And I knew that once Remi got out of solitary I would have
nothing whatsoever to do with him.  At that moment I was on Conyers's
side.  We were all bad.

The bullet holes meant
something else now.  They were comforting in a way.  I knew that
every time I passed one that a Beast had been killed there, and I felt a little
safer.  The posters on the walls were protective totems, shielding me from
whatever external influence might make me go Beast.  And they were
foreign, these parasites, even if they lived inside of me.  Surely there
was some way to kill them?  I was actually entertaining some way of
putting my hand in the school cafeteria microwave as an experiment by the time
Mr. Jarvis's class rolled around.

He was somber that day, with
none of his bouncy good mood.  Beast incidents were not uncommon, but most
people are spared seeing all of them; they're isolated across the
Quaratine.  But this had been a abomination we all had seen and shared in,
and so the pain seemed that much deeper. 
After the daily roll call
and a brief scare where one kid didn’t hear his name, h
e started to write a poem up on the whiteboard by
E.E.
C
ummings, something about the rain, but he soon stopped as his hand shook
too much to continue.

Jarvis turned to the
class.  "Nobody wants to talk about it," he said brokenly. 
"Nobody ever wants to talk about it.  It's like bad luck.  Even
in the teacher's lounge we...we talk as if nothing had happened, though it's
clear that something very definitely has.  This class is about meaning,
finding meaning in stories and events.  We should not shy away from
it.  What did this mean?  What did it mean to you?"