Freak Camp, page 21
After Jake had gone, slamming the solid iron-reinforced door on his way out, Tobias collapsed into his chair and shook.
What had he done? How had he made Jake so angry? It was just cigarette burns. He shouldn’t have flinched, that was clear, but he hadn’t expected Jake to squeeze right where the pink burns were still raw and tender. Karl had given eyes to the smile barely a day ago when Tobias’s performance had disappointed. The worst part, the absolute worst, was that he had only jumped because he had let his guard down—shit, being with Jake was the only time he allowed himself to relax, and yet when he had the most to lose—and then when it hurt, he hadn’t been able to stop the reaction.
He wanted to hear the end of the story. He wanted to keep watching Jake smile. He wanted to tell him about the last book he had been allowed to read that wasn’t about monsters. It had been about vehicles, and there had been a section about altering motorcycle engines to get the maximum speed out of the vehicle. Maybe Jake knew how the information could be applied to the Eldorado. And even if he didn’t, he would have cared.
But instead Tobias was alone in Interrogation Room Three with nothing to do but think. He had been in here when they asked him if he ever had visions, psychic projections, nightmares that became real. There had been a specialized rack, and they had pinned his arms—
Tobias jerked his mind away—interrogations weren’t that often and best forgotten as fast as possible—and focused hard on the chair Jake had knocked over on his way out. He’d been so angry, terrifyingly angry. Tobias’s neck felt strained from Jake’s shaking, and the wounds on his arm and shoulder hurt where Jake had gripped him.
Tobias didn’t dare think that was all Jake was going to do to him. He didn’t know why Jake had been angry, but there had been so much rage on his face that Tobias felt nauseated just thinking about it. Maybe he’d come back with a rod or a whip to punish Tobias for whatever it was. That would be the kind of beating that he could get any day from any guard. It wouldn’t be so bad.
But the longer Jake stayed away, the more Tobias just wanted him to come back. Bring the hot irons, the flaying knives, the boiling holy water. Bring the clamps, the flails, the tasers. Just please, don’t leave and never come back.
Maybe he had known just by looking at the smiley face what Tobias had done. Karl had said the first time, when he began the shape of the mouth, that it could either be a smiley face or a frowny face, that Tobias could either be a good boy or a bad boy. So Tobias had been good to Karl and Lonny and Dave and that hunter who had asked the questions, and Karl had kept his word.
Maybe Jake knew all that just from looking at the little smile (“You were a good boy, Pretty Freak. Just gonna mark down my smile to remind you to keep being a good boy”), and he was so disgusted he would never come back.
Tobias sat alone in the room, in the silence. He did his best not to move, not to twitch, not to show his panic or his fear. It was all he could do not to scratch at the healing burns as though if he could rip them off his arm, like a shifter, Jake would come back.
It had been at least two hours—Tobias had started counting once it was clear that Jake wasn’t coming back soon—when the door opened. Tobias had been analyzing the floor, tracing out pictures in the faded bloodstains the way Jake had taught him to do with clouds, and he looked up hopefully, but it was Victor.
Tobias swallowed and let his mind blank.
“Get up, freak.”
Tobias stood and walked to the guard. Victor snapped a flimsy leash onto his collar.
“The hunter’s gone?” Tobias asked. He’d wrestled with the risks of asking at all, but he had to know. He wasn’t stupid enough to use Jake’s name.
Victor scowled and slapped him, but not hard, not even hard enough to rattle his teeth. Weird. “Hawthorne Junior’s gone, freak. Must have decided he didn’t want your ass today.”
Tobias’s mouth went dry. Jake’s gone, Jake’s gone. He seized onto the only word that gave him even a shadow of hope. “Today, sir?”
Victor raised his club, and Tobias braced himself—Victor always hit where it would reopen his knife wounds—but after a moment’s hesitation, he lowered it.
“Fucking Hawthorne,” he muttered with venom. He tugged on Tobias’s collar with the lead line, and Tobias followed him from the room. “You better keep doing whatever the fuck you do to keep Hawthorne obsessed with your ass, freak. Because the second he’s gone, we’re going to feed you to Karl, and he’s going to take every inch of his pain out of your hide.”
Tobias knew that should probably frighten him. He didn’t know what he did that kept Jake happy, or why Karl was in pain, and uncertainties like that could get you killed in Freak Camp.
All he understood was that Jake had left, but he would be back.
It wasn’t a great day. It would have been better to be able to spend more time with Jake, but he wasn’t gone forever, so it wasn’t bad at all.
When he walked back into the yard, all the guards were acting jumpy around him, didn’t look at him long, and not one touched him. They seemed to go out of their way to avoid any contact.
And that made it a good day too.
Chapter Nine
Summer 1998
“Hey, Pretty Freak!”
Tobias closed his eyes before standing.
It had been nice to be invisible for a while. In Freak Camp, being invisible was the best a monster could ask for. But he’d known it wouldn’t last. It figured that Victor would be the first to break it. In a group of sadists, thugs, and Dixons—the last of whom didn’t like to get their hands dirty outside of Special Research—Victor was the smartest.
Victor grinned at him, watching him approach. Tobias kept his eyes lowered, shoulders down. “Sir.”
“How was dinner?”
Tobias swallowed reflexively. The mealworms had gotten into the bread again. He could tell himself all he wanted that it was extra protein, but a slice of vaguely moving bread and a cup of tepid, flavorless liquid hadn’t done anything to make him feel less like he was consuming himself instead of the food. He had hated touching the guards, but he hadn’t realized how much of his food came as a reward for what he did on his knees until it was gone. He didn’t answer.
Victor brought his billy club under Tobias’s chin, nudging his head up. Tobias kept his eyes almost shut. “I asked you a question. Still hungry?” He tapped the club against Tobias’s jaw, and Tobias flinched away. He clenched his fists, angry at his body’s betrayal at so light a move.
“Yes, sir,” he muttered, because whatever was going to happen now, it could only be worse if he lied.
The billy club fell away. “I got a nice fat sandwich back in my office. You want it?”
Tobias’s face didn’t twitch.
“Come on,” Victor wheedled. “Don’t you even want to know what I’m asking for it?”
Tobias inhaled and exhaled deeply through his nose. Might as well ask. “What’s the price, sir?”
“You on your knees in Head Alley. One-time payment.”
Not much work, usually over quickly. Yeah, it was worth it. He just had to hope Victor really did have a sandwich in his office. Tobias jerked his head in a nod.
“Did I read that right? Let’s be absolutely clear.” Victor held up his hands, open and mock-innocent. “I’m not forcing you into anything. You are voluntarily offering to blow me in exchange for something extra that monsters shouldn’t get. So don’t go running to Hawthorne with any stories when I’m doing you a favor. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you don’t want it, you can walk away right now. If you want it, you gotta tell me.”
Tobias sucked in his breath. “No, sir. I want it.”
“Good.” Turning, Victor strode away to the break room, not looking back to see if Tobias followed.
They started up again after Victor, but it was different. They didn’t just force him to his knees or wrap his hand around their cocks and hurt him until he jerked them off. There was always something—a sandwich, an apple, a blanket—after, and they always made it very clear that he had to want it. There were no interrogations at all.
Tobias figured that it was all because of Jake—he’d seen what Karl’s face looked like now, and it wasn’t pretty—and he was both grateful for the space and terrified, every day, that Jake would come back and learn what he had done, what he was doing. Jake wanted him untouched, and Tobias was anything but that.
He shared with Kayla when he had more than what he desperately needed, building up credit for when he needed something and couldn’t get it himself. They weren’t friends, but she watched his back, and it was good to have at least one monster who wouldn’t try to cut his throat for his blankets or just because he was the whore. He occasionally gave her advice, which she took. The guards called her Dream now, because after the first time Crusher fucked her, she never made a sound when they touched her.
“Carpenter’s dream,” Crusher had said, pushing her into the showers with the other monsters. “Lies still as a board, waiting to get nailed.”
Victor looked up. “Not your taste, then?”
“Boring as hell,” Crusher said.
A vamp might be Toothy because he couldn’t retract his second set of teeth, and witches were named Handy if they put out, the name traveling from one witch to the next as they died or moved on to their executions. But Tobias called the shapeshifter girl Kayla, and she called him nothing because she hadn’t spoken since the first time Crusher got her alone.
Then one day, after an assembly demonstration—one naked werewolf, caught trying to lunge through the door to Reception, now tied between the whipping posts—Tobias and Kayla found a place where they couldn’t see the bloodstained dirt. Tobias leaned against the wall, trying to think only about how it was a good temperature today (bound to get worse, but good right then), while Kayla looked at her hands.
Then he heard her voice: rough and emotionless, like the words were put together by someone with a perfect understanding of the meaning but no comprehension of the emotions involved. “I want to rip off their dicks and stuff them down their throats.”
Tobias looked at her in surprise. After a second, he licked his lips and answered the only way he could. “We don’t get to want things.”
She turned her head to look up at him, face flat and inscrutable, until she spoke with the same lack of inflection or feeling. “You want that hunter boy to come see you.”
Tobias jerked hard, twisting his head sharply away. He had reacted far less during his last beating. No wonder the guards all used that against him, if he was so transparent.
Kayla was still watching him. “Why? What does he do to you?”
He drew his arms tight around his knees, setting his chin between them. How could he possibly talk about Jake’s visits—how Jake talked to him so differently from anyone he’d ever met, how he touched him so lightly and never to hurt, how he never asked anything from him? There weren’t any words for it, none Kayla would understand nor believe. Tobias didn’t have any words for it himself.
It was beyond comprehension, the brief flashes of light that were Jake’s visits, the fact Tobias had ever been in his presence. It just was, and while he couldn’t have begun to say why Jake always returned to see him and smiled the way he did when he saw Tobias, the truth that Jake would come back (please come back, I’ll be good for you) was the only reason some days that Tobias didn’t rush the guards, hoping to get a bullet before a club.
Kayla’s gaze was still on him. After a long pause, she asked, “Does he fuck you?”
Tobias took a sharp inhale through his nose. “No.”
She leaned closer to get a better glimpse of his face. “But he’s going to, right? That’s why no one else’s fucked you. That’s what they all say.”
Jake had never said anything about it, not one comment or suggestive smirk. He’d never reached past Tobias’s hands, shoulder—occasionally his cheek, but never his lips. He’d never hurt Tobias, even that time he was so angry.
“I guess so.” He didn’t know why else Jake would be so interested in him.
“What’s he waiting for?” At last Kayla’s flat tone changed, rising on a note of incredulity.
Tobias shrugged and turned away. He wished he could answer, but he didn’t know. She had been silent long enough to understand his silence now.
Not far into Jake’s eight-week suspension, it fully sank in just how much he had fucked up.
Four years ago, Jake had promised to get Toby out. He’d never forgotten that promise, and he’d always known it would be fucking hard and take a lot of work, but it wasn’t like there was any amount of work that would stop him or make him give up. Not when it came to the most important task in his whole damn life.
But somehow it had never occurred to him that this wasn’t like any other hunt that would take research, legwork, night watches, and willingness to go mano a mano with something not yet documented, including how many limbs it had or if it might spit poison or acid. Fuck, he wished it was all those things, night after night for endless days. That, he could handle.
He had to admit he hadn’t done much research for getting Toby out yet. Maybe he’d assumed some kind of instruction manual would be handed to him when he turned eighteen and got his official license. But to snatch Toby out of Freak Camp—that would require something way worse than the dirtiest, smelliest hunt ever did.
Jake was going to have to suck up to the fucking Dixons.
In retrospect, assaulting and branding the face of a Freak Camp guard and refusing to apologize was not how one went about sucking up, even in Jake’s very limited experience. But every time he remembered those smiley-face burns on Toby’s arm, he knew he was a cowardly piece of shit. Of course he’d kiss any body part of every Dixon he could find, a thousand times over, if he could just get Toby safe.
After some research and consideration, he called his cousin Leah Dixon who worked in the D.C. office. The few times he’d needed something straightened out, she’d been a total boss at getting it done faster than a wendigo jumping a sleeping camper.
The call felt awkward and unnatural as hell, but Jake did his best to make a good impression and asked about procedures and protocols for getting a monster out of Freak Camp—and not with a short-use bait permit.
She was silent a long while on the phone, which was not a good sign. “Tell you the truth, Jake, I’m not sure. I don’t know if anyone’s ever gotten that kind of request through. I’ll ask around and let you know if I hear anything.”
Jake swallowed, resisting the urge to thud his head against the window of the Eldorado, which was where he was making the call. “Thanks, Leah. I’ll owe you everything, down to my fucking ass.”
She laughed shortly. “Don’t say that, now. You don’t know how much that could be worth here in the Beltway, let alone the paparazzi. But I’m not about to sell out family.”
Jake had never been so thankful for a Dixon to call him family.
When Jake finally got back into Freak Camp—eight fucking weeks had never felt so much like forever—he thought at first they were hassling him because of what he’d done to Karl (sonuvabitch deserved a lot worse). They took the blood tests a hell of a lot more seriously, dumped a cup of holy water over his head, and read an exorcism. They did an honest-to-God pat down when he was going through security, and for once they didn’t allow him to keep his gun or his knife when he went through. The standard-issue bayonet they gave him—loaded with a mix of blessed silver and iron buckshot, topped with a silver blade—felt like cheap shit in his hand.
They tried to give him shit about the sandwich too, but they let him pass eventually. Jake kept his opinion of their asswipery behind his teeth and did his best to smile. If it looked a little like he was baring his teeth, well, that was okay too.
Only when he stepped out into the yard—no private rooms were being issued without prior appointments, according to the new cold-eyed Dixon secretary sitting in Madison’s chair—did he realize that maybe it was about more than just him. The guards were all heavily armed and sweating under the extra weight of flak jackets. A lot fewer monsters were in the yard, and any that seemed too close to a guard got a cuff to the head or a club against the ribs. Jake saw two monsters get knocked down in the short walk from Reception to the barracks area.
When he asked where to find Toby—89UI6703, the sandy-haired guard with a scrape along his scalp told him to “find the freak yourself.”
Jake felt something in him relax, a fear that had been growing in his chest. He hadn’t seen Tobias anywhere, and there were so few monsters in the yard, and clearly, some kind of shit had gone down.
He found him eventually. Toby was huddled with a group of monsters in a narrow strip of shade between the barracks, but the second he saw Jake, his eyes widened and he scrambled up toward him, into the light.
First Jake saw Toby’s expression: massive relief washing over with happiness. Then Jake saw the damage.
The sunlight, so bright that Jake was squinting even through his sunglasses, brought into sharp relief the blue-and-purple bruise along Toby’s cheek. He was limping too. Not obviously, but Jake could tell from watching Dad—and practicing it himself often enough—that Toby was placing every step carefully to avoid showing weakness.
Jake hissed, stepping forward. “What the hell happened, Toby?” Not getting enough information last time had landed him in that eight-week shithole. This time he wasn’t going to fucking abandon Toby in some interrogation room. This time he would be calm, collected. He would gather information and be polite while filling out whatever forms it took to beat the fuck’s face in. Or at least he would wait until the guy was off work to jump him.
See, Jake Hawthorne could be rational and professional. Suck that, Matthew.
Toby stopped, and Jake got a glimpse of the smile vanishing under pure fright before Toby dropped his gaze to the ground. Immediately Jake felt like the complete ass he was. Sure, eight weeks had sucked for him. But that had been plenty of time to think of how Toby hadn’t known what the hell was going on, and Jake had just left him.
