Read Online Cages by Chris Pasley - Free Book Online Page A

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.