Gary Braunbeck - Keepers

Behind these bars a little boy with massive facial deformities lay on a cot, his lower body covered by a sheet. From the ceiling there extended down a pencil-thick cable that spread out at the bottom like the wires inside an umbrella, each one attached to one of the matchbox-sized rectangles implanted in his skull. The skin of his exposed scalp was crusty and red where it fused with the metal. He jerked underneath the sheet as if in the midst of a seizure, arms and legs twitching as the silver matchboxes sparked and faded in a precisely-timed sequence. His eyes were held closed by two heavy strips of medical tape and fresh, glistening stitches formed a “W” across his face from temples to cheeks, meeting above the bridge of his nose. A clear plastic tube ran from one of his nostrils into a large glass jar set on a metal table beside the cot; with each jerk, dark viscous liquid crawled through the tube and oozed into the jar. With each sequence of sparks he bit down hard on his lower lip, breaking the skin and dribbling blood down the side of his face. His skin was red and glistened with sweat and every time he convulsed, he jerked back his head to expose the pinkish-white scar across his neck.

… when there are this many, they cut out their vocal cords…

You kept moving; movement was good, movement reinforced the illusion of an assured destination and a guaranteed way out once you reached it, and you needed to believe that you were going to get out of this.

You passed beaten, bandaged dogs of every shape and size, kittens and cats who had been kicked nearly into pulp or whose fur had been doused in gasoline and set aflame; they lay very still, taking shallow breaths as tubes fed them both oxygen and liquid protein.

The monitors in the wall showed happy pictures, happy families with their happy pets having happy times.

A deep aluminum bathtub sat in the center of the next cage. The steady drip-drip-drip of water from the faucet echoed like faraway gunshots. Something splashed around, pounded one reverberating boom of thunder against the side, then rose partway above the lip; it was a woman-or had been, once-with red hair, mottled and discolored skin, and a neck that had been slashed several times in different places with a straight-edge razor; she looked at you through bulbous piscine eyes and brushed a wet strand of hair from her forehead. Then the slashes on her neck opened moistly, blowing air bubbles before contracting again.

Gills. She had gills.

You made some kind of a sound, soft and pitiful and child-like, that crawled out of your throat as if it were afraid of the light, and then you backed away, hands pushed out as if holding closed some invisible door.

Your legs felt weighted down by iron boots. You did not so much walk as shuffle along, periodically looking down at the floor to make sure the earth wasn’t about to split open and swallow you.

Next was a teenaged boy with dozens of membranous man-of-war tentacles slobbering out all over his body in phosphorescent clusters; in the cage beside him was a shaven goat whose front legs were far too thick and ended in a clump of five toes; across from the goat was a plump Down’s syndrome girl of uncertain age with a jutting facial cleft whose body was sprouting thick green feathers; in the cage beside her, a bear was grooming its fur not with claws but a model’s thin, creamy-skinned, delicate hands; then came a little boy with an impossibly thin neck who smoothly rotated his head so his too-long and thin tongue could snap at the midges swarming around the light; and, finally, a middle-aged woman who might have once been pretty, before the split lip, broken nose, and two black eyes: she squatted on sludgy, misshapen legs that bent outward at incomprehensible angles. Most of her weight seemed to rest on her gelatinous, flat webbed feet. She looked at you first with confusion, then longing, and, at last, a resigned sort of pity.

You staggered backward, pressing yourself against the bars of the cage behind you in order to keep from collapsing to the floor. You closed your eyes, shuddering, then looked farther down the corridor to where a curved brass railing disappeared into a stairway under the floor.

“You don’t want to go down there. Trust me when I say this to you.”

You spun around and saw him standing- standing! -in the middle of the cage, half-hidden in shadows. You could see his face, part of his exposed chest, and a moist, leathery-looking towel wrapped around his waist. You’d never seen him fully upright before; he seemed so tall.

“Whitey!”

“Captain Spaulding,” he replied. “Decided to do some more exploring, did you? Hooray-hoorayhooray.”

You gripped the bars. “Jesus Christ, Whitey, what the hell is this place?”

“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place-goodness gracious me, what a mess you are. Been waltzing with fresh carcasses through a slaughterhouse? I trust it was a Strauss-one should never waltz to anything but.” He blinked, then made a disapproving tsk-tsk. “You are not at all presentable, dear boy-not that you were a breathtaking heartthrob to begin with, but the importance of good grooming and careful hygiene cannot be overrated. Soap and water are our friends. You may quote me on that.”

“Whitey, for chrissakes! What is this place? ”

“Hark-what’s this I see? My goodness, the programming schedule around here never gets boring, I’ll give ’em that. You ought to take a look at the screen there, Captain. Required viewing.”

The scene on the monitor changed from the home movies of before to a close-up of an asphalt alley floor. The camera seemed to be hand-held because the image jerked and shook but, after a moment, things settled down and the camera did a slow turn to the right. The face of a border collie filled the screen. The silver tag hanging from its collar caught a glint of sunlight and threw a bright spot into the lens, but then the camera turned forward once more, catching a fast glimpse of the top of a cat’s head, tilted upward a few degrees, and focused on something in the distance.

It took a second for you to realize what you were looking at.

A man with his back to the camera was running down the alley toward another man who looked as if he were doubled over in pain or looking for something because he was kneeling. Then the running man pulled back his leg, did a half-pirouette, and kicked the kneeling man in the ribs.

You stood there outside Whitey’s cage and watched a film of yourself attacking Drop-Kick that afternoon after Dad’s funeral.

“Didn’t think you had it in you to do a Bruce Lee like that,” said Whitey. “You have good form, by the way.”

The scene had been filmed from two different angles, one from each end of the alley. What struck you as odd about it-aside from its existing in the first place-was the angle from which it had all been filmed; it was very low to the ground, as if the camera operator had been lying on their stomach so as to – no.

You remembered how the face of the collie had filled the screen. You remembered how the animals had sat so unnaturally still that afternoon. How the sunlight glittered off the tags hanging from some of their collars.

This had been filmed with the cameras held at about collar height.

“Technology’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it?” said Whitey. “A camera no bigger than a tag on a collar. Been around for a while, from what I hear. I mean, just look at that.”

The alley scene was gone, but the camera remained just as jerky as it had been before. A shadow passed over the lens, leaving a smear in its trail. This kept happening for several seconds until, at last, the blurry image of a face could be seen forming. The face bounced up and down, as if it were looking down into the lens of the camera it was carrying while trying to clean something off the lens and – “Oh, no,” you said.