Phoenix

I awoke when I felt my cage being jerked into motion. My ears automatically detected the faraway sounds of a crowd, and I winced, knowing what was coming. The cage was rolled out of the truck, and Daniel’s tank followed me. I looked at him and saw the fear in his eyes. He may not be able to communicate, but he still knows what awaits him on that stage. He still feels fear.

“Be strong,” I said to him, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.

“You’re going to suffer tonight,” the First Guard said to me as he set my cage beside the stage.

I knew I was going to pay for what I did to the Ringmaster, but I didn’t care. It would all be worth it the day I was strong enough to break free from the braces and fly away.

Of course, my escape wouldn’t be that simple. I couldn’t leave the Mutants here. They were people, with feelings, people like me. Away from the Shows, they would be able to live without fear of torture. I had to take them with me if I ever escaped. I breathed in a deep breath.

I had always dreamed of escaping, of leaving. When I was four, I had been free. I had been happy. One day, I had been dared by one of my friends to climb the wreckage of a building from the old time. I accepted, never one to turn down a dare. I climbed it, all the way to the top, about thirty feet off the ground. High enough, that if I fell, I’d have a slim chance of living. I began to climb down, content that I had fulfilled the dare, and I fell. I knew that I could die, so I broke Mother’s most important rule: never use your wings.

I extended my wings and saved myself from hitting the ground. I flew, wind rushing through my long red hair, and I was happy. I landed gently on my feet after swooping around the wreckage twice. Of course, twenty or so schoolchildren had seen me. One boy had told his father, a Government official. The next night, the unspeakable happened.

They came in the night. They came to the door and knocked it down. Mother yelled to Father, and he grabbed the shotgun. But a single shotgun was no match for Government weapons. Especially when the men wielding the weapons were Sixth Branch. Sixth Branch was the addition the Government had added to the military after the First Riot. They were in charge of finding and taking possession of Mutants.

The Sixth Branch men shot Father. Mother had me hide behind her, and she begged for them to stop, and leave me alone. Tears stained my face, because I didn’t know what was going on. The Sixth Branch men said some things to Mother that made her yell at them, crying. They hit her, and then took me. I yelled for Mother as they pulled me away from her motionless body. Someone stuck me with a needle, and I awoke in Government Issue clothes, in a cage. The same cage I’m in now.

That’s how I became a part of the Shows.

I felt a tear escape my eye. The crowd got louder, and I opened my eyes, to see many people looking at us. We were lined up, cage beside cage. Some of the things that made us Mutants were visible. Some, like me, were not. But everyone in the crowd knew what we were. To them, we were filth, we were dirty and unclean.

“Let the Show begin,” the First Guard said to the Ringmaster, chuckling evilly.

The Ringmaster grinned, his yellowed teeth showing. He hopped up onto the stage. The Third Guard looked at me. He stood beside the cables that would release the curtain. His eyes held sadness, something I didn’t know Guards could feel. He turned back to the stage and pulled the cable.

The curtain fell, exposing the Ringmaster to the crowd. He sneered at them. “We’ve got a Show for you tonight. The freaks from around the Country!” he yelled. “Do you want to see them?”

When the crowd yelled louder, the Ringmaster grinned. “Then I’ll show you some freaks,” he shouted.

The First Guard unlocked the first cage in the row. He pulled Cathy, a girl with webbed fingers, out of the cage. She screamed, begging for him to leave her in the cage.

Her cries went unanswered as she was pulled onto the stage. The Ringmaster grabbed her by her hair and pulled her off the ground.

“Who wants to see her scream?” he asked the crowd. They cheered back and I winced, knowing that Cathy was about to endure torture.

Every night it was a different type of torture, except for Daniel. He was always electrocuted. I wonder what cruel type of pain was going to be inflicted on us tonight.

The Shows didn’t use to be like this. It just used to be Mutants simply on display, but the people grew bored of that eventually. In order to keep the people happy, the Government made the Shows become a place for torture. It was like the way gladiators in Rome had been killed publicly by animals back in the olden days. Except Mutants rarely died.

Of course, that didn’t mean they didn’t die.

The Ringmaster took a knife from his belt and raised it up to Cathy’s face. Her eyes widened in fear as he touched the tip of the knife beneath her chin. He pushed the knife into her skin and laughed as she squirmed. Trickles of blood came from where the knife entered her skin. He pulled the knife out and swept it across her cheeks. Two red lines, dripping blood now ran parallel to her jaw. Tears flowed freely from her eyes.

The crowd booed, because she wasn’t yelling. The Ringmaster glanced from Cathy to the crowd and back. He took the knife and cut across her throat. Cathy began to scream, but her voice was cut off by a horrid gurgling sound. She coughed up blood and the Ringmaster threw her to the ground. The Second Guard took her back to the cage, dragging her by her hair. Cathy made no noise or movement as she was thrown back into her cage. I was able to give her a single glance before Leslie was pulled out onto the stage.

I closed my eyes as I heard her scream. She was thrown back into her cage beside me. I opened my eyes as looked at her tear-stained face. Her arms were now crisscrossed with bleeding cuts. Blood dripped down her arm, and I could see the pain in her eyes.

The Second Guard looked at me, smiling evilly as he unlocked my cage. I thrust my fist at his face the second the cage opened. I heard a crunch as my knuckles collided with his nose. I grinned, even though it only pissed him off more.

He took my arm and twisted it, which made me almost cry out in pain, but I bit my lip keeping me from making any sound.

I struggled as he pulled me out of the cage to the stage. He and the First Guard chained me down to the stage, my back facing the crowd. They lifted up the back of my shirt and cut off the gauze from last night. The wrap that covered my chest was still intact, though. They took the braces off my wings.

I extended the wings, which were as black as the night sky above me. I beat them once before each Guard, aside from the Third, who was just watching from the side of the stage, took my wing tips and held them out.

I closed my eyes and used my hearing to see what was behind me. I heard the Ringmaster’s heavy footsteps get louder, meaning he was coming closer to me. Hearing the air slip past a metal surface, I knew he had the knife out.

I gasped in pain as the knife sliced down my back. I hissed as the Ringmaster dug the knife deep into my back.

“Bastard,” I said through clenched teeth as he continued to carve into my back with the knife.

“Bitch,” he replied, cutting into my skin again with the knife.

I really hate the Ringmaster.

After I felt like I had lost about half a pint of blood through the cuts, the Ringmaster finally decided I was done. My shirt was pulled back down to cover my back and my wings were once again pinned against my back. The Guards threw me back into my cage, laughing at my pain.

I exhaled shakily, trying to get a grip on the pain. Pain can be disconnected, if you can focus well enough. I focused on the bars of the cage, where I could see bloodstains. My blood. After over ten years living in this cage, living with injuries, I had quite a bit of dried blood spread around the cage. It wasn’t like the Guards would ever clean the cages. We got to use the bathroom thrice a day, and if we had to go any more often than that, too freaking bad. I tried lying down on my side to get some sleep, but both my sides had raw skin from the knife. Instead I just sat on the floor of my cage.

After a lot of screams of pain and sobs later, the Show was over. Our cages started to be rolled back into the truck by the Third Guard.

As he rolled my cage back, I asked him, “If it’s wrong, how can you just stand by?” I asked him, my voice cold.

He looked at me sadly. “Not yet,” he said mysteriously before moving to the next cage.

He rolled in the last cage, then looked at the figure motionless in the cage. “Oi!” he yelled.

The Second and First Guards came over to him. “What?” they asked.

“I think this one’s dead,” he said, pointing at the cage. It was Cathy.

The First Guard kicked her. She didn’t move. “Hmm, looks like we’ll have to get a replacement before the next Show,” he said.

“Yeah. We’ll stop at the Pound for one on our way,” the Second Guard said, starting to walk away.

The Third Guard frowned. “What do we do with the body?” he asked.

The Guards looked at him and shrugged. “Throw her in the ditch,” they said. Then they walked away.

The Third Guard looked outraged. “You can’t just throw a body in the ditch,” he muttered.

“What kind of Guard are you?” Leslie asked, shocked.

He looked up at her. “The usual kind,” he said, making his face go blank.

Leslie looked at him strangely before turning back to her cage. The Third Guard unlocked Cathy’s cage and picked up her bloody corpse. He carried it out, and I heard the loud thump of her body hitting the ground.

I sighed. I thought he might have been different. I closed my eyes, trying to sleep through the stinging pain on my back.

***

“Turn around, I need to bandage your back,” I heard a voice say. I jumped away.

“Whoa, little jumpy there. Chill, it’s just me,” I heard the same voice say. I opened my eyes to see the Third Guard standing in front of my cage. It was the middle of the night, and every other Mutant was sleeping.

I saw the familiar gauze in his hands and turned around. He bandaged me back quickly. “I don’t know how much longer you’ll last if he keeps doing this,” he commented, tying the gauze.

I turned around to face him. “I’ve survived for thirteen years here, I’ll be fine,” I said.

He looked at me for a minute. “Will you help me?” he asked after a moment.

“What?” I asked him, surprised.

“Will you help me?” he repeated. Noting my look of confusion, he continued. “I want to bury that girl, but we only have an hour before we leave, and I can’t dig a grave that fast.”

Still surprised that he asked, I nodded. He grabbed a manacle from the wall of the truck.

“Sorry, regulation,” he said. He clasped one of them around my wrist, then unlocked my cage. He had me walk out of the cage, then clasped the other “bracelet” around my other wrist. I followed him as we walked outside the truck, to where Cathy’s bloody body was visible from the glowing sky.

The Third Guard clasped the chain of my manacle to the truck. Then he picked up two shovels. He handed one to me, then started digging with the other.

I started to join him, but then I paused. “Why are you doing this?” I asked him.

He looked up at me. He shrugged. “Because the dead are supposed to be buried,” he said before looking back down.

I frowned, contemplating what he said. It was the truth, but why did a Government Guard care about burying a Mutant. The Government thought of us as less than people.

With my strength, we quickly dug a four foot hole. “It’s not the standard six foot hole, but it will have to do, the truck will leave soon,” he said. We picked up Cathy’s body and lowered her into the hole.

We piled the dirt over her body, packing it down. “You’re different,” I commented, looking at him as he looked at the grave. “You’re not like the other Guards.”

He looked at me. “I think that would be a good thing,” he said, frowning. He put away the shovels, then undid the chain from the truck. He led me back inside, making me go back into my cage.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Phoenix,” he said, unlocking the manacles and locking my cage.

As he started to walk away, I felt the sudden impulse to say something. “Call me Nix,” I said.

The Third Guard stopped. He turned his head to face me. “In that case, I’ll see you tomorrow, Nix.” Then he continued to walk away.

That was different. Most Guards never did anything moral, like burying the dead. But the Third Guard did. It made no sense; all my life I’d seen Guards show no remorse or compassion for what they did. But the Third Guard did. It made no sense. I closed my eyes and leaned against the back of my cage. I hissed softly as my back hit the back of my cage, but then I closed my eyes and fell asleep.