by Kevin Shamel
The Opera House is located directly under Reeves Middle School on the east side of the city. The school didn’t open until 1970. It was coincidentally built over the Opera House on land that had been a forest. Because of its location, the awards are held on Sunday evenings to assure the maximum amount of secrecy. Every animal who’s any animal attends.
Stinkin’ and the crew were up for several awards. Stinkin’ Productions was truly big-time. The rat had made it. Finally.
Cage ran naked across the rubble of the demolished church. He heard music thumping, and Filthy Pig squealing above it from the open exit. He scrabbled over broken glass and concrete—pulling himself through tightly growing young trees and tripping over vines. He didn’t notice that his feet were being cut. He ran.
A bike-riding couple found the bloody nude boy staggering down the center of the highway half an hour later. They gave him some water and short shorts that the female biker had in her pack. They called the police and performed emergency first aid on his broken wrist and bleeding head. They tried to listen to Cage’s story, but he spoke disjointedly. When he started talking about being saved by zombie-cats, the girl told him to relax, and he rested his head on her chest.
The police showed up and arrested the couple for kidnapping.
It was all worked out back at the station, as possibly illegal situations usually are. The couple was released and thanked for their part in saving the boy. The girl never got her shorts back.
Cage was taken to the hospital and put under guard. The police interrogated him with the child psychiatrists and hospital clown. The clown’s professional opinion after the three-day interview was, “That kid is fucked in the head.”
The cops didn’t believe a single word of Cage’s story except about the windowless van and that he’d been held in the basement of a church.
They used dogs to track Cage’s bloody footprint trail from where the couple had found him. The dogs, being animals, would never have given away the location of any secret animal hideout. Not only that, but they loved Stinkin’ Productions films and had been to several parties at the studio. They led the cops to the Krispy Kreme-Starbucks-Drugs and Dirty Money-Hooker Emporium and that ended the trail.
The police gave up on trying to find Cage’s abductors. They told the boy to continue visiting the psychiatrist and clown to see if they could pry some information out of him in some sneaky psychiatric or clowniatric way.
Cage was reunited with his parents. They were quite happy to have him home. Cage’s father, an avid SUV driving, squirrel-fishing dog-beater, even believed his story. His mother decided to pretend Cage had been at camp, what with all the talk of rats and monkeys and such.
It took Cage six months to recover from his injuries—he’d broken every bone in his wrist several times, suffered a major concussion from literally cracking his skull and tore his feet to shreds by running with glass shards stuck in them. Even after six months, bits of glass worked their way out.
One afternoon, about the time he’d begun to recover, Cage was sitting in his room looking out his window. He never left his house. He rarely looked outside. He never looked across the street at the yard where he’d been taken by the animals. He never watched TV shows or movies with animals in them. When a trial issue of Ranger Rick fell through his mail slot one afternoon, he ran screaming into the closet and didn’t come out for a day.
Cage was afraid of animals. And rightly so.
It was a rare thing that he sat looking out his window, because birds flew past and cats circled the lawn. He feared he would be discovered.
So that afternoon, while he let the sun shine on his face, he screamed and dove beneath his bed when a Steller’s jay landed on the sill under the open window and said, “Hiya, kid!”
Cage came up on the other side of his bed raising a shotgun.
The bird pooped on the sill, jumped into the room and ran.
“It’s me! Dirty Bird!” the jay shouted, skittering under the bed.
Cage jumped up on the mattress, pointing the shotgun between his feet. “I’ll blow you the fuck away, Blue jay!”
From under the bed, Dirty yelled, “Kid! I saved you! You’d be kibble if it weren’t for me! Put the gun down and let’s talk!”
“Fuck you!”
Dirty Bird hopped up beside Cage and cocked his head at the boy.
Cage swung the shotgun.
Dirty hopped up on the barrel. He marched toward the boy’s face. “I’m serious,” he said matter-of-factly.
The boy shook the gun. The bird hung on.
“Cage!” Dirty Bird yelled, stepping up to his boy-face. “Stop it. Don’t you think if you were in any sort of danger, that it would be more than me here in the room with you? No one knows you’re alive. Only me. I’ve been watching over you, making sure.”
The shotgun wavered. “What?”
The bird said, “It’s true. I told them that the zombie-cats got you. I never wanted any of this to happen. Stinkin’ and everyone else thinks you’re dead. In fact, they’re not thinking much about you at all. Other than the fact that you’ve made them famous and well on their way to being some of the most powerful animals in the industry. The film is the most popular movie ever. But they’ve been calling you FX and robot long enough that they’re starting to believe you weren’t a real boy at all.”
“What? The film?” Cage stepped off the bed. He lowered the gun, and the bird glided off onto the dresser.
The jay said, “Yeah. In fact, that’s why I’m here. I want to tell you about the Animal Academy Awards, among other things.”
Cage put the shotgun on the bed.
Dirty pulled out his flask and settled down for a chat with the kid.
On the evening of the Animal Academy Awards, Itsy convinced Stinkin’ to do some cocaine with him in the top-level VIP bathroom of the Opera House.
After a dog-sized line, Stinkin’ leaned out of the alcove that looked down upon the seated animals and yelled, “Woooooooooooooooo! I’m a mutha fuckin’ king-ass rat! Bow down, bitches! Bow down!”
Itsy pulled the rat back into the bathroom. “Chill out,” he growled.
“Aw, fuck it, Itsy! We rule!” Stinkin’ ran a few circles and chewed on his tail.
The dog shook his head while he peed. He muttered, “Should not have given the rat coke.”
Stripey and Scaredy snickered from inside a stall.
“Is Dirty here, yet? He needs some of that coke.” Stinkin’ chewed his tail.
“He’s not, and he does not. All I need is that dumbass bird all whacked out on this shit.” Itsy finished peeing and checked himself in the mirror.
He pulled his boss over beside him, popped his tail out of his mouth and gave him some gum. “Chill out, boss. It’s your big night.”
Stinkin’ said, “It’s your big night, Itsy. After this, you’ll fuck every bitch in town, out of town and around town. You could even fuck a human!” The rat hopped up and down.
The cats laughed.
The rats laughed.
The chickens laughed through the vent between the female and male restrooms.
Itsy babysat his boss-rat during the Awards, even after doing a few more blasts of coke and six shots of tequila himself. He took care of the amped out, extra obnoxious, extra crude, extra assy rodent until the crew was called to the stage for the second time that night to receive an award—Best FX. After that, Itsy was dead.
But first he made half of a speech.
It went something like this:
“Thank you. Thank you. I want to thank my crew for their work on the FX. Without them, the movie’s realistic boy would never have walked. Or cried, or begged for mercy. I mean, those rats and chickens… Those rats…” He looked to Stinkin’, who was spacing out and trying to gain some composure.
Itsy lost focus for a moment—the audience blurring into fur and fog. He let dizziness roll and pass over him.
He continued, “I fucking hate people. I hate them! That boy. That bo
y’s parents…”
The audience started murmuring. Camera flashes winked and blared. The crew looked around at each other. Stinkin’ turned slowly to Itsy.
Itsy loomed over the microphone at the podium. He glared into the audience and spit when he began raving, “Are you all so stupid? Herd beasts! Pavlovian idiots! Robotics?! Are you serious? Do you really believe that?” His eyes bugged from his little Yorkie head. He screamed, “Cage is a real boy!”
The dog paused for the collective gasp of the crowd before he went on. “That’s not FX! I used to live with that little fucker!” Itsy foamed and ranted. “His dad beat me! Beat me every day. For no fucking reason! I ran away and lived on the street for five years. When I got a job across the street from that house, I thought it I’d take a shit on the porch, or piss on their vegetables. But then Cage came along and discovered us. We kidnapped him. I kidnapped him!”
The murmur of the audience grew rapidly to growling, cawing, hooting, snarling, yelling and demanding. Animals were on their feet. Security pigs stood on their hind hooves and waved their clubs. Cameras flashed faster than ever.
Isty kept talking while the crew tried to drag him away from the mic.
Stagehands from stage left rushed onstage.
Stinkin’ screamed, “He’s lying! It’s a joke! A JOKE!”
Itsy panted into the microphone, “He’s real! He’s! He’s—holy shit, he’s right there!” The dog—suspended in the air, holding the podium with his claws and being dragged away by Scaredy and Stripey—suddenly tore in half as a gun blast echoed through the Opera House.
Itsy yelped into the microphone, gurgled, and died.
The cats fell to the floor holding onto the bottom half of the dog. They were covered in guts and blood.
The audience screamed.
Cage appeared from stage right, hefting a sawed-off shotgun and blasting at the film crew with hate and vengeance. His father strode beside him with two pistols blazing. Each human carried multiple weapons on their person, strapped, stuffed and stuck on. Cage had a backpack packed with Molotov cocktails.
Their eyes were steel and evil.
They emptied their anger onto the animals.
Stinkin’ Rat was smeared across the stage with the second blast from Cage’s shotgun. He didn’t even have a chance to scream an obscenity. Scaredy dropped Itsy’s bloody bottom half, and hissed. Cage blew his head off and most of Stripey’s chest with the next shot.
His father was screaming. Sometimes words formed out of his punctuating shouts, but mostly they were guttural, anguished sounds that followed each report from his 9mms. When he ran out of ammo, he dropped the pistols and pulled his own shortened shotguns from his back.
Stinkin’ Productions was dead. Bodies lay across the stage. Bloody feathers floated through the spot lit air. Only Stripey still twitched, and that was an automatic response to having most of his heart removed.
A security pig jumped on the stage in front of the boy. His father put two holes in the pig’s head. Cage kicked the thrashing pig while he blasted the other two security pigs over the edge of the stage.
Cage did not say a word. He stepped methodically over dying or dead animals and shot chickens, rats, cats, squirrels, robins, voles, dogs and whatever else presented itself for shooting. The boy and his father killed the stagehands running off stage. They shot the stork camera operators, the animal press that were in the front row, the rooster MC, the squirrel dance team and the seagulls that had announced the award-winners.
Father and son walked off stage reloading and shooting animals that fled or hid. They’d already hacked up the hands, prompters and director. The humans slowly made their way toward the main exit as animals ran ahead of them. They opened doors and shot randomly into rooms. They lit fires.
Cage and his dad caught up with a large section of the audience crammed into the main foyer where the humans had entered, killed the pig guards with towel-wrapped pistols, locked the doors and built a barricade of furniture for just this occasion.
They opened fire from the top of the steps leading up to the foyer.
Cage tossed Molotov cocktails into the crowd while his dad let go with his semi-automatic rifles. Then he took out his pistols. The humans slaughtered the room of animals.
There were sounds no one has ever heard, and sounds no one ever will. There were sights that separated Cage from childhood forever. There were smells of death, barbeque and gunfire.
Cage and his father tore the remaining barricades down, unlocked the door and made their way out of the Opera House through the long twisting tunnel. They stepped into the black night behind Reeves Middle School, got into their truck and drove out of town.
The humans arrived at the former offices/studio/apartments of Stinkin’ Productions, tripped the trigger for the secret garage and pulled in behind the animals’ van.
The duo marched silently through the underground complex, straight to Stinkin’s room.
Cage’s dad pulled the rug from the floor, overturning the rat’s bed and revealing a trapdoor.
Cage slid the door aside and he and his father descended a staircase into the bomb shelter sub basement where they ransacked Stinkin’s treasure trove, taking all the original copies of A Boy Named Cage and its unedited footage. They took the footage for the zombie film, too—including the zombie-cat attack in the dining room.
Everything was just as Dirty Bird had said it would be.
The humans drove home in silence. They burned their gory clothes, took showers and went to sleep.
Cage didn’t speak for two weeks. He stayed in his room with the curtains drawn and the door closed. He spent most of his time painting forests, oceans and deserts empty of animals on the walls of his room.
The only time anyone heard his voice was when he acted out elaborate dreams while sleepwalking. The nocturnal plays mostly involved unspeakable animal acts, but sometimes they had nothing to do with the boy’s recent experiences.
A few nights, Cage spoke as if he were possessed. In fact, he told his parents that he was possessed. He claimed to be alien travelers from hundreds of thousands of light years away, projecting their consciousness across the stars to interact with fellow intelligences. The aliens only visited three times.
Their final visit ended with Cage booming in a low, unnatural voice, “You people are a bunch of inane douchebags!”
But that wasn’t the end of the dream-plays.
Cage dreamt about Courtney. He acted out dreams about driving, being a rockstar, going to school naked, catfish noodling, naked rockstar noodling, stand-up comedy (he was terrible and both of his parents heckled him), Yiffing with the Stars, climbing a spit-string onto the scabby lip of a Bangkok whore and being a mollusk.
While sleeping, Cage drove the car through the garage door one night, slammed on the brakes, honked the horn and fell out into some rat traps on the lawn. He ate a bowl of teabags. He called North Korea and pissed them all off. He invested online and lost thousands.
His mother was panicked.
His father told her not to worry. The boy would come around. He just needed time.
“We all need time,” he said, “and some new hobbies.”
Cage’s father started hunting every animal in the neighborhood. Cats, dogs, birds, hamsters, squirrels, raccoons, rats (especially rats), chickens and anything else he could find. He spent every night skulking through yards—poisoning, chopping, shooting, wringing, whatever it took.
His dad brought his prey home for food now and then. No one ate it but him.
Cage refused to eat meat.
His mother was frantic at that, having no idea what to feed the boy. She finally broke down and asked a dreadlocked person standing around in front of the Co-Op what vegetarians eat. She waited patiently for the dirty person to stop laughing and then followed his pointing finger inside. The girl in the deli was much more helpful.
But even lentils, tofu and eleventy-seven varieties of greens couldn’t make her little boy
into the glowing cherub he’d been.
Cage kept his curtains drawn. He stared at the murals on his walls. When he finally started talking, he didn’t speak to any of his friends. He barely watched TV.
His father came to his room every night with guns, knives and snacks and asked Cage if he’d accompany him on a stroll through the neighborhood. Cage refused.
Cage’s father stopped asking after a few weeks. It wasn’t that he didn’t want his son to reap a little of his own revenge. It was that the animals had started fighting back. Two pigs and a weasel attacked him as he came out the back door for one of his nightly forays. Had he not been holding his katana, he’d most likely have had his throat ripped out by that nasty weasel. As it was, the family had lots of ham.
Cage didn’t eat it.
The boy lost weight. He developed circles under his eyes. He mumbled about assassins. He made a cave out of his blankets and stayed in it.
His dad tried to tell people what had happened.
Cage’s father talked to a preacher, though he’d never been to his church. The preacher told him to pray. And to come to church. And that animals don’t talk.
He talked to veterinarians and the weird lady down the street with twenty-six cats. When they only scoffed, he started telling anyone who’d listen to him for five minutes. The police questioned him about the abnormally large number of animal disappearances and mutilations happening in his neighborhood. He convinced them that two hundred dollars a week was much better than some stinky old animals.
Cage’s father was at his wit’s end. His wife was losing her shit day by day. She cooked ham all day long and drank Wild Turkey. His son was a fucking mushroom. Animals were after them. It was only a matter of time before they got into the house. He had to act.
Finally, without his son’s permission or knowledge, Cage’s dad contacted important people. Important people in the movie business. People who could tell him what to do with the most important film in the history of films.
