Megan’s Cage
(A companion short story to The Beautiful Dead)
By Daryl Banner

Megan's Cage

I saw a man’s left eye get poked out of his face by a dead lady with no jaw. I call that an eye exam.

My hands grip the cold bars of the cage I’ve been put in. This cage … in this nest of Crypters … this twisted lair full of throaty, groaning people-things who’ve stored me away like meat until they’re ready to feed … I’m only in this cage because I couldn’t run fast enough.

I call that getting second place.

Before I ended up here, clumsy feet had carried me through camp as pots and kettles threatened to trip me. I could hear the screams of girls too dumb to hide. I refused to scream. Little girls and boys scream but I don’t, not me, not Megan. I remember still racing between tents and cooking fires long after everyone else took cover. That’s what you do when the Crypters invade; you take cover.

“Megan, you gotta hide,” my mom had urged me.

“In the empty dinner kettle, quick! Go!” cried my dad. “Throw a blanket over you!”

But I was sick of hiding. So I ran.

These cages are too small to properly fit a person, even a child my size. Wind pulls my hair in every direction like a swarm of angry thoughts. I can’t keep it out of my face, and can’t keep the thoughts from turning my glare dark, darker. Thoughts like, I should’ve listened to mom. Like, I’m so sorry dad.

I still won’t scream.

In one of my last moments at the camp, when the Crypters seemed to have gotten all they came for, I’d turned around to find a Crypter with a missing arm and gooey eyes staring at me. Love at first sight.

Dashing behind a tent, I’d stolen a long wooden spoon from the dinner kettle that dad commanded me to hide in. I couldn’t stab a potato with this, so the most I could hope to do was give the Crypter a well-earned spanking. Or snap the utensil in half and drive the pointy end through the Crypter’s left looker.

You know, an eye exam.

I’m clinging to the bars of my new cage-home, feeling the mad winds of an angry planet grab at my hair, and I can’t get the screams of the girls back at camp out of my ears. I’m so sweaty under my arms, my palms … gripping the bars so tight I can taste the metal they’re made from.

At camp, I witnessed a girl my age being patiently consumed, inch by agonizing inch, from her tiny pink toes to about her waist before the fat dead man eating her lost interest and crawled off. The last thing she said was, “Aaghhrhhgrh …” which I took to be a thank you. I call that one a buffet.


Somewhere in my mad dash away from the pursuing Crypter—the one I’m sure that caught me—I stopped hearing the girls’ screams. I guess something found them. That’s what I call a losing game of hide-and-go-seek.

This one boy in his tent who didn’t stay up past his bedtime, a Crypter ate its way in and made at the boy’s face so fast, he couldn’t even say hello.

Early morning wakeup.

I remember the wrong step I took, how my foot caught at the uneven ground, throwing me face-first into the dirt. For that instant, I wasn’t thinking about becoming Crypter feed; in fact, my first thought was, mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me.

Hide, they said. I’m sick of hiding, I said.

And now: caged.

And now: death waiting patiently.

And my parents will have to go through all the grief again because apparently I didn’t think they felt enough the first time around. What I’m saying is, when my brother was taken off not long ago (and most likely made a new home for himself in the belly of some dead man) I had to call that “relocating”. You know, because if I call it what it really is—my brother, abducted, likely eaten alive, screaming like another kid at camp—then I’ll realize I’m doomed.

Here in this cage, doomed.


This is when I finally scream.

Yes mom, yes dad, like the girls I made fun of back at camp, especially the one who lost in a game of freeze-tag with a Crypter, I scream.

The wind is loud and I am louder.

I scream because I’m alive, because I can’t call this just another game, a hide-and-go-seek, a buffet. No more lies. No more blankets over dinner kettles. No more running or hoping. I scream because this is exactly what it seems and nothing else: the end of my life. The end of hope. I scream to drown out the wind and to join the bit of humanity left, the bit with sense enough to hide, the bit who are still alive.

And then a shoe lands in my cage. Someone’s shoe. I stare at it and forget to keep screaming.

I think about the shoe on my own foot, the one by which I tripped running away from the gooey-eyed Crypter. I think about how a shoe got me here.

I study the shoe curiously. Then, I look over.

There’s a beautiful lady with long winter-white hair watching me from the cage next to mine. Her eyes are glass. Her skin is too colorless. I know what she is in an instant, a shoe missing from her dead white foot.

“Are you one of them?” I ask.

“One of who?”


“Them.” She’s dead … but she’s not one of them. I don’t need her answer. I already know: she’s different. A misfit. Prisoner, like me. She has a Crypter mom and dad and she refused to hide too. She ran. This is what I call a sister I never had. This is what I call a chance.

This is what I call: I’m still alive.

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