Cages (3 page)

After my brother knocked my
dad unconscious I was careful not to ask the question, but James had told her
what happened.  Evidently now was the appropriate time for me to know this
bit of information.  I was nine. 

"There
’s at least
a
ten percent chance that you won't
survive past eighteen, Sammy.
  Probably a lot higher.
"  We were seated across the kitchen
table.  "It's important that you understand that fact and make peace
with it."

Asking the question was
difficult, giv
en
the hamster
lesson, but this seemed an important enough topic to risk it
and she
seemed to be waiting for me to respond
.  "Am I sick?"

My mom had smiled then, and on
any other dainty mother in thick glasses it would have been reassuring. 
"Yes, darling.  You are.  You all are."

I stewed on that for a
moment.  This was a minefield.  Questions had been
approved
, but I got the feeling only the right
questions would be acceptable.  "What sort of sickness is it? 
Is there a cure?"

My mother frowned at the
double question but answered anyway.  "The only cure is surviving,
I'm afraid.  It's...very different than any other disease in the
world.  Worse than the flu."

I gasped.  I'd had the
flu a year before, and it had been the worst experience of my young life. 
My mother had spent a day denying me water to show me how my fever rose on the
thermometer.  "What...what are the symptoms?" 
Symptoms
was a new word for me, one my mother had taught me when she had hay fever only
two months ago. 

She beamed at my use of new
vocabulary.  "Sam, we've tried not to talk too much about it. 
It's a difficult part of our lives to think about.  But twenty-
two
years ago there was something called the
Outbreak."

That
I had heard of.  You could get the
TV to show little else than Outbreak movies I wasn't allowed to watch. 

"The Outbreak was like a
story out of our worst nightmares, Sam.  People had imagined the very
event, made movies about it, written about it.  But then it actually
happened."  She stared at me, her hazel eyes made huge by the
glasses.  "The dead walked."

I had an image of my hamster
crawling across the back yard where he was buried, trailing neatly labeled
guts. 

My mom's voice trailed off
then and she stopped looking at me.  "Oh, Sammy, it was havoc. 
They weren't...friendly.  They came after you.  They wanted to bite
you, to spread the parasite.  They moved like schools of fish,
all
going where one smelled fresh
blood.  My own....there were familes torn apart.  Children forced to
kill parents, siblings forced to kill siblings."

"Like the Civil
War?" 

"No, not at all like
that.  We lost a lot of people, the world did.  But we finally got i
t
under control once we realized how the
disease was spreading."  She took her glasses off and looked at me
bare.  This had never happened before.  "It was the
Beasts."

Okay, that was what my father
was talking about.  I thought I was starting to put the pieces together.

"The zombie parasite was
spread by these sort of super-carriers.  Kids are immune.  You get
bit by the undead or even by a Beast, you're fine if you're still in one
piece.  But if a Beast bites an adult they die slowly, agonizingly, until
there's nothing left but the will to feed.  Adult Bitten can spread the
parasite, but it's the Beasts that start the chain."  She sighed
deeply.  "It's teenagers, Sam.  We stopped the Outbreak, but we
still carry the larvae for the parasite in our blood.  It can incubate for
around eighteen years, but if the larvae haven't hatched by then they
die.  But they can hatch.  They hatch in ten percent of the teenagers
in the world.  The chemicals you generate once you reach puberty get them
ready.  It would take very little to activate them, I imagine, some random
factor introduced..."  She trailed off and for a second I was sure
that once I h
i
t puberty I
would take Hammy's place on the dissection table. 

She snapped back into
reality.  "Get up.  Pull down your pants."

I cried then, I think, but a
quick spanking had me pulling my jeans down, boiling in horrified embarrassment
as my mom examined me.  This wasn't like when my mom walked in on me
taking a bath and told me to use the delousing shampoo.  That was the
first time I ever really felt that a sense of privacy was important, and that
mine had been violated. 

"You ever find hair down
here," she growled at me, "or if your voice ever breaks, you come
tell me right away.  If you're at school you tell a teacher.  Do you
understand?"

I nodded.

"Sing a two octave
scale."

I did.  My mom was an
accomplished pianist and my dad a steel guitar enthusiast.  Both James and
I knew our music.

She nodded, seeming less than
satisfied.  "Okay now.  Go play.  Go."

I shuffled out of the dining
room, snot crusting on my upper lip, my pants around my ankles.  Then, as
I touched the doorknob to my room, I realized what my dad had meant.  With
all the wrath a nine year old can muster (quite a lot more than you think) I
shouted "Son of a bitch!"

So you can see why the first
day of my long-awaited emancipation from them was the happiest day of my
life.  And why, as I sat in Mr. Jarvis's class, learning about the
poetical connection between the moon and virginity in Romeo's balcony speech, I
still had a stupid grin on my face.

"
A-hole
,"
someone said, shooting a
spitball at my head.

Classes followed a strict
routine.  An hour each behind a locked iron door, each teacher packing
some sort of heat.  My science professor had at least three pistols
secured to his person, though he may have had more hidden. 
Every
four hours a class roster was printed and given to each teacher, so that they
knew which students were out, which transferred, which in the infirmary or in
solitary. 
In between classes
we had fifteen minutes to mill around in the halls to socialize (key to a
growing teen's development, which he or she would need if they manage to
survive the more terrifying possibilities of their development).  Some
people tried to start up conversations with me, but it all boiled down to
hey,
finally hit puberty, huh
and fell apart from there.  It was difficult
to act naturally when motorized cameras followed your every move and men with
body armor and machine guns blocked off either side of the hall. 

Then the bell rang, really
just a series of pleasant tones piped through the intercom, and we all slouched
off
like apathetic trains on set tracks towards our next stop. 
Lunch was much the same, except we were
marched to a larger room
identical to the classrooms, except
with
long foldable
tables
,
that I was told was the cafeteria.  No one
my table
said a single word for the whole
half-hour.  They just sat there, absently eating whatever was in front of
them
, masticating like cattle
.

"Jeez," I
announced.
  "You don't have to worry about
the walking dead.  They're already here and they're boring."

I decided then and there this
place needed a little color, and that I was just the man for the job.

After classes were done we
could choose an after-school
club
activity, an intramural sport, or we could
just
go back to our bunks.  As I had yet to unpack
I chose the latter.  The dormitories were
built above the
gymnasium,
on the far side of the
school from the administrative hubs, cleanly separated by several layers of
cage doors I had to be buzzed through before I was granted admittance. 
The guard on duty stared daggers at me; you weren't forced to do an
after-school activity, but you had damn well better.  I merely smiled,
waved and moved on.

Dorm rooms were tiny closets
with two sets of bunk-beds each.  Conyers had given me a room number and a
key, which opened yet another heavy door into what would be my new home for the
next five years.  One bed was empty, surprisingly a top bunk.  I
’d
have thought the kids here would have
jumped at moving to a top bunk when one became available.  My two packs,
tough military rucksacks, had been tossed lazily in the middle of the concrete
floor. 
T
here were four
large lockers on the far wall and one had no padlock on it.  I shoved my
bags in there as best I could, stopping only to fish out my portable music
player.  The rest of my surprise tricks could wait. 

I vaulted into my bed, tested
the firmness, and found it surprisingly adequate.  Then I jammed
the
headphones in my ears, powered up the
player and switched on the AM reciever. 
T
hunderous crackles of static had me frantically
dialing down the volume, but after a moment of tuning the signal, the first of
the gifts my brother had
presented
me for my days in Quarantine burst to life. 

"-don't have enough
teachers, Dan."  That voice I didn't know.  But the man who
answered was definitely Conyers.

"Of course we
don't!  It's suicide."

I grinned, utterly and
thourougly pleased with myself.  The little sticky bug I had placed under
Wilson's desk was working like a charm. 
“
Thank you,
James
,”
I prayed, and turned up the volume.

"That's not it, and you
know it.  We're dying out.All that's left is the old guard, the
pre-Outbreakers.  And now even those of us who were young back then are
getting to retirement age.  Those that survive..."

Conyers sighed. 
"Recruitment still down?"

"Very few people who
spent their youth in Quarantine have any desire to come back.  We've got
teachers, but they're college professors or K-8th.  I mean Jesus, Dan,
Jesus - "

"Get ahold of yourself,
Mike, for God's sake."

"I'm sorry, but....think
about it.  Think about what we've become.  Humanity scared to death
of its own children."

Conyers snorted. 
"Same as it ever was, Mike.  Only this time we get to shoot
them."

I turned the radio off.

My first act of subversion was
done on behalf of a kid I never even met
.

I
was
in my bunk, reading a comic I had brought -
Damph
the Beasthunter
- when the heavy door unlocked with a tectonic groan and
swung wide open.  Three boys filed in, each jumping in turn when they saw
me.  The last, a lanky dark-haired kid
with sunken eyes and skin
that shrank deep into his cheeks
,
just glared at me as the other two started changing out of their sweat-stained
gym clothes.

James had warned me. 
Quarantine
isn't prison,
he said. 
You don't survive by breaking heads. 
No matter where you end up, you're going to be invading someone else's space
and they won't like you for it.  You have to find a way to make them like
you or no one will ever have your back. 
"Is there something
wrong with this bunk?" I asked, lifting myself up off the mattress. 
"What, did one of you guys pee in it or something?  Is that why
nobody took it?"

The dark-haired kid shook his
head.  "The only thing wrong with that bunk is the fact that you're
in it."

Another of the boys, a
sandy-haired kid who looked younger than me shook his head.  "You're
in Jeremy's bunk."

I swung down off the bed and
landed on my feet.  "They put five kids in this room?  Where the
hell am I supposed to sleep?"

"Only four kids,"
the dark one said.  "But you're still in Jeremy's bunk."

The third, a lean, athletic
kid with
a buzz cut
closed
his locker loudly.  "He's as frosh as they get ain't he?  Never
seen a Beast.  Never seen a Beast put down.  Probably got five pubes
and thinks he's a grown-up."

"What
is
this?" The dark one snatched my
Damph comic off the bunk.  "You think this is funny?  Laying
there in Jeremy's bed reading this
crap
?"  He ripped the comic in two.

My brother warned me about
breaking heads, but damn it, nobody messes with my stuff.  I swung hard at
the dark-haired kid's face. I had gotten into my share of fights in middle
school, and while I was smaller than most of the bullies I was fierce enough to
make up for it.  I gave one kid scars, long scratches down his face. 
For all my quickness, though, the dark-haired kid just ignored my flying fist
and pushed me to the floor with one hand before it had a chance to
connect.  He jumped on top of me, pinning my arms.

"You bring shit like that
into
Quarantine
, asshole?"  He leaned down, his lips almost
touching my ear.  "You've got no idea how the world works, kid. 
Look at this.  Look!" He let go of one arm and fished behind him for
the remnants of the comic.  I flailed my left arm, now free, but he
ignored it.  He held up the lower half of
Beasthunter
issue
#112.  Damph had been ripped away on the top half.  All you could see
now was the Beast he was fighting.  "This is you.  Shut up,
look.  This is you.  This is me.  This is everybody." 
He got off me, shooting me a warning look to stay back.  I struggled to my
feet.