“Sure, I guess.”
Satisfied, Shackleton sat back in the chair and planted his feet on the desk. He set the file folder on his thighs, licked his finger, and flipped it open. He produced a black pen and clicked it a few times while he read.
“Pretty good grades,” the man said. “You got your math and spelling. You stay out of trouble. All right. Tell me what you can do. Better yet, show me something.”
“What I can do, sir?”
“You do for me, I can do plenty for you. Take you to a special place.”
Dog glanced at the red door on the side of the room before returning his gaze to Shackleton. Even looking at it was bad luck. The red door led downstairs to a basement room called Discipline, where the problem kids went.
He’d never been inside it, but he knew the stories. All the kids knew them. Principal Willard wanted them to know. It was part of their education.
He said, “What kind of place would that be?”
“A place with lots of food and TV. A place nobody can ever bother you.”
Brain always said to play along with the normals so you didn’t get caught up in their system. They wrote the rules in such a way to trick you into Discipline. More than that, though, Dog wanted to prove himself. He wanted to be special.
“Well, I’m a real fast runner. Ask anybody.”
“That’s your special talent. You can run fast.”
“Real fast. Does that count?”
The agent smiled. “Running fast isn’t special. It isn’t special at all.”
“Ask anybody how fast I run. Ask the—”
“You’re not special. You’ll never be special, Dog.”
“I don’t know what you want from me, sir.”
Shackleton’s smile disappeared along with Dog’s file. “I want you to get the hell out of my sight. Send the next monster in on your way out.”
Pollution. Infections. Drugs. Radiation. All these things, Mr. Benson said from the chalkboard, can produce mutations in embryos.
A bacterium caused the plague generation. The other kids, the plague kids, who lived in the Homes.
Amy Green shifted in her desk chair. The top of her head was itching again. Mama said she’d worry it bald if she kept scratching at it. She settled on twirling her long, dark hair around her finger and tugging. Savored the needles of pain along her scalp.
“The plague is a sexually transmitted disease,” Mr. Benson told the class.
She already knew part of the story from American History and from what Mama told her. The plague started in 1968, two years before she was born, back when love was still free. Then the disease named teratogenesis raced around the world, and the plague children came.
One out of ten thousand babies born in 1968 were monsters, and most died. One in six in 1969, and half of these died. One in three in 1970, the year scientists came up with a test to see if you had it. Most of them lived. After a neonatal nurse got arrested for killing thirty babies in Texas, the survival rate jumped.
More than a million monster babies screaming to be fed. By then, Congress had already funded the Home system.
Fourteen years later, and still no cure. If you caught the germ, the only surefire way to stop spreading it was abstinence, which they taught right here in health class. If you got pregnant with it, abortion was mandatory.
Amy flipped her textbook open and bent to sniff its cheesy new-book smell. Books, sharpened pencils, lined paper; she associated their bitter scents with school. The page showed a drawing of a woman’s reproductive system. The baby comes out there. Sitting next to her, her boyfriend Jake glanced at the page and smiled, his face reddening. Like her, fascinated and embarrassed by it all.
In junior high, sex ed was mandatory, no ifs or buts. Amy and her friends were stumbling through puberty. Tampons, budding breasts, aching midnight thoughts, long conversations about what boys liked and what they wanted.
She already had a good idea what they wanted. Girls always complimented her about how pretty she was. Boys stared at her when she walked down the hall. Everybody so nice to her all the time. She didn’t trust any of it. When she stood naked in the mirror, she only saw flaws. Amy spotted a zit last week and stared at it for an hour, hating her ugliness. It took her over an hour every morning to get ready for school. She didn’t leave the house until she looked perfect.
She flipped the page again. A monster grinned up at her. She slammed the book shut.
Mr. Benson asked if anybody in the class had actually seen a plague child. Not on TV or in a magazine, but up close and personal.
A few kids raised their hands. Amy kept hers planted on her desk.
“I have two big goals for you kids this year,” the teacher said. “The main thing is teach you how to avoid spreading the disease. We’ll be talking a lot about safe sex and all the regulations about whether and how you do it. How to get tested and how to access a safe abortion. I also aim to help you become accustomed to the plague children already born and who are now the same age as you.”
For Amy’s entire life, the plague children had lived in group homes out in the country, away from people. One was located just eight miles from Huntsville, though it might as well have been on the moon. The monsters never came to town. Out of sight meant out of mind, though one could never entirely forget them.
“Let’s start with the plague kids,” Mr. Benson said. “What do all y’all think about them? Tell the truth.”
Rob Rowland raised his hand. “They ain’t human. They’re just animals.”
“Is that right? Would you shoot one and eat it? Mount its head on your wall?”
The kids laughed as they pictured Rob so hungry he would eat a monster. Rob was obese, smart, and sweated a lot, one of the unpopular kids.
Amy shuddered with sudden loathing. “I hate them something awful.”
The laughter died. Which was good, because the plague wasn’t funny.
The teacher crossed his arms. “Go ahead, Amy. No need to holler, though. Why do you hate them?”
“They’re monsters. I hate them because they’re monsters.”
Mr. Benson turned and hacked at the blackboard with a piece of chalk: MONSTRUM, a VIOLATION OF NATURE. From MONEO, which means TO WARN. In this case, a warning God is angry. Punishment for taboo.
“Teratogenesis is nature out of whack,” he said. “It rewrote the body. Changed the rules. Monsters, maybe. But does a monster have to be evil? Is a human being what you look like, or what you do? What makes a man a man?”
Bonnie Fields raised her hand. “I saw one once. I couldn’t even tell if it was a boy or girl. I didn’t stick around to get to know it.”
“But did you see it as evil?”
“I don’t know about that, but looking the way some of them do, I can’t imagine why the doctors let them all live. It would have been a mercy to let them die.”
“Mercy on us,” somebody behind Amy muttered.
The kids laughed again.
Sally Albod’s hand shot up. “I’m surprised at all y’all being so scared. I see the kids all the time at my daddy’s farm. They’re weird, but there ain’t nothing to them. They work hard and don’t make trouble. They’re fine.”
“That’s good, Sally,” the teacher said. “I’d like to show all y’all something.”
He opened a cabinet and pulled out a big glass jar. He set it on his desk. Inside, a baby floated in yellowish fluid. A tiny penis jutted between its legs. Its little arms grasped at nothing. It had a single slitted eye over a cleft where its nose should be.
The class sucked in its breath as one. Half the kids recoiled; the rest leaned forward for a better look. Fascination and revulsion. Amy alone didn’t move. She sat frozen, shot through with the horror of it.