Cages (20 page)

"Fuck you, Jarvis,"
I said and walked out.

Remi, Dave and I sat in our
dorm cell, waiting.  Dave sat on his bunk, tossing a baseball in the air,
patiently biding his time.  Remi paced, walking the same uneven oval into
the floor that he had perfected every day in the Bell.  Ben had gotten a
deep gash on his arm from a bent nail in the boys' locker room about an hour
earlier, so he was still in the infirmary, probably getting stitches.  I
sat on my bunk in a very calming lotus position, earbuds firmly wedged in my
ears, my radio turned all the way up.

"It should have happened
by now," Remi said, grinding his teeth.  "What if I fucked up
the amount of Hydrofluoric acid?  What if –”

"Calm down," I
said.  "I'm listening."

"What'd he doing
now?" Dave asked.

"I don't know.  He's
not talking.  I just hear breathing and some papers shuffling
sometimes."

Both Remi and Dave had been
fascinated to hear about my radio and the bug I had planted in Conyers's
office.  It was only belatedly that I realized that I could well have used
that to win my friends back over, by telling them I only went to the
Principal's office to plant bugs, but it was too late.  They forced me to
recall every single conversation that had occurred in Conyers's office. 
They seemed hungry for them.  I decided that just such a story was
appropriate now, to take their minds off the waiting.

"One time," I said
in my deeper storyteller's voice, "Conyers was filling out paperwork, or
whatever the hell it is that he does, when he looked over at one of his
monitors.  I could hear him gasp, then he knocked the phone off the hook
trying to pick up the reciever, he was so agitated.  He must have been
talking to the head of Security, that Jason guy, and he must have been asleep,
because he starts yelling, like, 'wake the fuck up!  We got a Beast on the
Science Hall!'  He slams the phone down and sits there staring at the
monitor.  I could hear his foot bouncing off the floor.

“
Then the phone rings
again.  The security guy tells him it's just a garbage bag they put over
the old trophy case there where those two guys broke it, remember that? 
But Conyers, he's having none of it, he's all 'that's bullshit, I saw what I
saw and it wasn't any fucking garbage bag!  Well, eventually he's got the
whole guard force out of bed and canvassing the school until the wee hours of
the night, when he announces, get this - he thanks them for their help in this,
what was it: This Very Necessary Surprise Readiness Test."

Remi was too keyed up to
laugh, but Dave left a few chuckles loose. 

"That reminds me,"
Dave said, his laugh fading abruptly.  "When I went to the infirmary
yesterday to scope things out, I talked to the nurse there."

"There's actually a
nurse?"  I quipped.  "I thought it was just Conyers with a
pack of band-aids and a blowtorch."

"No, honest to God woman,
white nurse uniform and all.  Anyway while she was hunting in her cabinets
for antacid for me I remembered the story you told us about Sharon Norse. 
So I asked kind of casually if the nurse had known Sharon."  Dave
looked me seriously.  "She said that Sharon had come in once with a
severe sinus infection, but other than that she had never seen Sharon the
entire time she'd been there."

I shook my head.  "I
don't understand what you're...wait.  Something's happening!"  I
cupped my hands around my ears.

"Did it blow?" Remi asked,
his eyes alight with his old familiar fire, all traces of the professor
gone. 

I smiled.  "One of
Conyers's pet guards just burst in to tell him that two guards had been
assaulted and that some sort of bomb has gone off in the English Hall."

Dave and Remi whooped and gave
each other high-fives, but I crushed the headphones further into my ears. 
"He's gonna...it's...yep!  Lockdown!"

This time I joined the
celebration and we yelled our fucking throats out, dancing around the dorm cell
like idiots.  We were drunk on our own power and we starting singing a
giddy, exaggerated version of "There Will Be Another Sun," Dave
pelvic thrusting his way triumphantly through lyrics that honestly didn't
really merit it. 

It was only another twenty
minutes before the iron locks that held us locked in started to churn
open.  We swallowed our laughter and tried to look serious as the door
swung open, revealing Conyers, flanked by his guards.  We wanted to
present a stern image to the Powers That Be, but I think we all wore a
shitfaced smirk.

"Jesus Christ,
boys," Conyers rumbled.  "You have no idea how much trouble
you're in."
  

Give us some credit; we were
master strategists.  Conyers thought we were satisfied blowing shit all
over Jarivs's office?  That was just Phase 1.  Patton had nothing on
us. 

Standard Operating Procedure
in a case of a non-Beast-related incident on Quarantine grounds is full
Lockdown.  All guard and medical personnel are deployed to the scene and
since that spreads the guards thin, a lockdown seals all doors not on the
action team's route to ensure that the students are confined and cannot spread
to other parts of the Quarantine, even if they go Beast.

Unless of course, you're
already in another part of Quarantine

As it was relayed to me, Ben
poked his head out of the infirmary two minutes after the nurse hustled out the
door to deal with the lockdown.  The infirmary is rare common ground
between the students and the faculty; very few Qurantines have the budget to
afford full-time medical assistance to both, so the infirmary is located past
the barricades in the Security Wing, where the guard barracks, teacher's
quarters and the Control Center are located.  Students are only allowed
there one at a time.

The Security Wing was
empty.  The only guard not at the scene of the incident was the Control
Center operator, whose eyes never left the dozens of monitors built into the
walls.  The teachers were all in the Faculty cafeteria, eating their
dinner.  Ben walked casually through the most forbidden part of the entire
Quarantine, taking in how the other half lived in no real hurry.  He knew
he had time before anyone caught on that the bomb in Jarvis's classroom was a
diversion.  He did pick up his pace as he darted past the windowed Control
Center door, on the chance the guard there might notice the movement.

The Security Wing reminded Ben
of a doctor's office, all polyester couches and water coolers, coffee tables
and old magazines.  Non-offensive, pastoral art hung on the walls. 
He said it smelled like disinfectant.  It wasn't long before he found what
he was looking for:  the Server Room.

Remi had been in favor of
building a sizeable electromagnet and sending that in with Ben to wipe the hard
drives, but while we thought we maybe knew how to do that, the chances of
B
en making it past the barricade guards
into the infirmary
with it
were slim.  So when Ben opened the door, which was really just a large
closet housing two desktop-sized machines sitting on the floor like forgotten
slabs of marble, he took a simpler approach.  He tipped the first one over
and began stomping on it.

Biff had given me the
idea.  His insistance that the Quarantine managed to operate solely
because of their adherence to a strict routine.  During my time in the
Bell, I started thinking about the Quarantine's routines.  They were
military.  Every teacher recieved a printout each morning verifying their
class roster and if they had any extra duties that day, like having to be the
Bell teacher. 
They got another after noon. 
At the end of the day those printouts were checked
against the logs and then recycled.  Their paper records were strictly a
method of portability, not storage.  The servers held the only real record
of the Quarantine's day to day business.  Without them the effeciency Conyers
depended on to run the facility would crumble. 

Ben quickly found he wasn't
nearly strong enough to make stomping effective, so he looked for other avenues
of destruction.  Luckily, the servers came with an easy set of
screws  on the back to make an IT manager's job easier when he or she had
to dig around in the server's guts, so he simply slid the white metal covers
off.  Inside the boxes were just wires and circuits.  He could see
the hard drives, little gray boxes. 

He began stomping anew. 

Conyers's office lobby was the
same as it ever was, the same as it had been the first time we had been in
there, when we had taunted Biff.  We were smug little bastards, each
sitting there with self-satisfied little grins.  I was surprised Conyers had
put us in his office; I'd have thought he'd just toss us in the Bell and throw
away the key first thing.

"Masterful, Sam,"
Remi said, thumping me hard on the back. 

"I wonder who they'll get
to teach Chemistry now?" I said, smiling.  I was as full of
fiero
as either of my friends, but I had just gotten out of the Bell, and now that I
was face to face with another round of confinement, my self-assurance was
dropping.

"Bah, they'll probably
just cancel the class," Remi said.  "They'll realize in their
wisdom that chemistry is too dangerous a subject to teach impressionable,
destructive young minds."

"Dave, are you
okay?"  Dave had been quiet for a while now, and while he seemed as
satisfied with himself as we were, his mouth had a tight line to it I hadn't
seen before.

"What?  Oh, yeah,
I'm fine. I've just never been in
real
trouble before."  Dave frowned, a disturbed look on his
face.  "I'm glad I am; it's what I wanted, you know?  But I'm
sitting here, thinking about spending a few months or even longer in solitary,
missing the playoffs, missing all the practices and the games...and I
realize...I really do like baseball."

I wondered too about the
things I'd be missing during my time in the Bell.  Things I had already
missed.  Like Kate.  In my time in solitary I think I probably
exaggerated her in my mind; she was a goddess on a pedestal, a pining love out
of Shakespeare.  But for all the perfection I had assigned to her she had
still turned on me when Conyers released his booklet.  For all I know my
Homecoming stunt hadn't even impressed her.  Maybe she thought it was
stupid and juvenile.  Maybe she never even liked me that much
anyway.  And here I was, having bought only a prankster's respect at the
cost of several months in a tiny cell.  "It's okay," I said to
Dave.  "Baseball will still be there." 

The door flew open and a guard
roughly threw Ben inside.  "Get in there, you little fucker," he
spat, slamming the door behind him.  Ben tumbled to the ground clumsily,
as if his muscles weren't coordinated together enough to properly catch
himself.  He looked small and weak again, like he would rather just curl
into a ball than stand up.  But stand up he did, with a wide smile on his
face.

"You did it?" I
asked, my eyes open wide.

Ben chuckled, the first real
laugh I can remember from him.  "You bet your ass I did."

We all cheered again, our self
doubt and misery vaporized in a wash of triumph.  We nearly knocked the
boy out by beating on his back and hugging him, but he took it all in stride as
he described what he'd done.  By the time the guards found him the servers
had been in pieces, his tired feet still stomping as best he could.  I
beamed at him and he glowed back, a vitality there I had never seen
before.  He had been
help
less, but now he knew he was no longer
power
less.

We sat in Conyers's lobby for
eight solid hours.  Our smugness only lasted so long, and by the third
hour we were tired and hungry.  We took turns sleeping while one kept
watch; we didn't want to be ambushed.  Remi was on watch when finally,
late into the morning, the Principal of Dekalb Quarantine #4 barged into his
office.

The loud bang and Remi's
shouted warning made us jump to our feet, even as sleep gummed our eyes. 
Conyers seemed to ignore us as he shoved the key into the lock of his office
and stormed inside.  I looked at Dave and he blinked back sleepily, as
unsure of anything as I was.  Conyers wasn't gone for long; he returned
with a purpose, his silver revolver clutched tight in one hand.  Aimed
directly at me.  I looked around quickly; his guards were nowhere to be
seen.

"Conyers, I –"

"Shut up," he
growled.  Sweat beaded on his forehead and his hand shook.  "Why
do you do these things, Crafty?  Why?"

I tightened my lips and looked
anywhere but the gun.  "You started –"

"Why couldn't you just go
with the program?"  Conyers continued.  "You could have
done your time here without a peep.  But no.  You be a hero.  Be
a big fucking star and because of that you've dropped my Quarantine into
chaos."

I looked Conyers dead in his
eyes and found nothing there but hate.  I returned the sentiment,
sneering, no longer caring if he would really pull the trigger.  "You
weren't so good at running your precious Quarantine then
,
were you, if one kid could foul it up?"

"Jesus, Sam!" Remi
swore, and he was right, I was an idiot.  Conyer's eyes narrowed and he
pulled back the hammer.