Freak Camp, page 12
“Dammit, Roger, nothing got him. I came home, and he wasn’t here. He ran…”
Roger could not imagine Jake Hawthorne running away from his father. Sure, they were messed up in all the usual ways, and in a few that were purely Hawthorne, but he had seen how the kid always looked up to his father, followed his lead, did what he was told because he had that much trust in Leon.
The last time they had “talked,” when the guns came out, Jake had looked ready to pull his knife on Roger if he could only get a good angle. More than once, Roger had wondered if he would shoot Leon some day or if Jake would always be there to remind him that it wasn’t worth it because the obsessed jackass actually mattered to someone. He had never met Sally, but he assumed that she either had had the placidity and patience of a saint or had been woman enough to kick Leon’s ass every day and have him thank her for it. He could not imagine anyone else living with Leon for longer than a weekend.
“…he ran because I told him to, I told him to deal with it, and now I can’t find him.”
“Slow down, Hawthorne.” Roger had a hard time believing that Jake had run, but if Leon had told him to, if Jake hadn’t gotten grabbed by something nasty, then there was a good chance that Jake would just show up again, one of those wicked grins on his face, like when he had been a kindergartner and ended up under the hood of one of Roger’s old beater trucks. Roger had found the kid chewing on a sucker, covered in old engine grease. Roger had tried to give him a tongue lashing, but it had been damned hard with Jake so happy to see him. The kid had charm that made people like him and convinced them that they could trust him. “Tell me what happened. Are you hurt?”
Leon was struggling to breathe, and Roger could hear every inhale and exhale as a gasp, full of pain. “My son is gone,” he snapped. “I told him to leave and he left and now I can’t fucking find him, what do you think?”
Slowly it dawned on Roger that it might be tears in Hawthorne’s voice. Holy hell, he thought, I never thought I’d hear Leon cry. Didn’t think he could.
“Leon, take a deep breath. Jake’s smart, resourceful. He knows how to take care of himself.” He bit back more scathing words about how losing Jake was maybe what Leon deserved for the way he had raised the boy. You taught him better than anyone how to disappear. “How long’s he been gone?”
“Two weeks.”
“Fuck, Hawthorne.” Roger was expecting a few days, a week at most. “Where… what happened?” Not that he really wanted to know. He didn’t think that one antisocial hunter could solve the Hawthornes’ problems. He didn’t know if God could solve the Hawthornes’ problems.
“I was on a hunt, and he called in the middle, said that CPS was there, and I couldn’t… Dammit, Roger, he’s my son and I told him to deal with that. He’s thirteen and…”
“What happened after that?” Roger didn’t want to address Leon’s choices, and more importantly right then he had a kid to save.
“I… I came home, back to the apartment we’d been staying at, and… nothing was there, it was empty, the locks were changed. I asked around, but there was some… trouble. I tried following the trail, but it was cold, so damned cold, Roger…”
“How long between the phone call and when you got back to the apartment?”
The silence made Roger nervous.
“Leon? Leon, I can hear you breathing. You don’t remember, or…”
“It took me three days to get back,” Leon said bleakly. “I figured… Jake’s never been in a situation that he couldn’t handle, and I thought…”
You thought that you could take your time because you’re so damned used to Jake being his own damn parent. Roger didn’t say it. He had said it in the past, and he had a couple of broken knuckles to prove it. He didn’t need to say it now. His silence said enough.
He was surprised when Leon broke the silence first, and not by hanging up. “Help me, Roger. You have to help me. I can’t… I can’t go to them and say that… I can’t tell them I lost my son. I’ll lose him forever. They’ve been trying… I can’t lose Jake too.”
It took Roger a long minute to realize that Leon was asking him to use his hunter contacts, to quietly ask people to be on the lookout for Jake. Maybe even to talk to ASC, in case they had the resources to find the kid.
Roger wondered now if maybe Leon had disappeared so thoroughly off the grid because he had been afraid that the Dixons would take Jake away and make him one of their own, make him “Sally’s son” and not Leon’s at all. Roger had always thought that Leon was a little crazy, the way he disappeared, trusted no one, rarely used his own name, rarely told anyone the truth. He was a conspiracy theory nut even amid the crackpot group that Roger knew as hunters. But maybe only half of that had been because of the way Sally had died. The other half might have come from trying to keep a four-year-old and a vintage Eldorado off the radar of what had become the most powerful government agency in the country.
Roger would have liked to think that the Dixons wouldn’t have tried to take Jake away, but if he had thought about stealing the kid just so Leon would stop fucking him up with his own particular brand of crazy, there wasn’t much doubt that the Dixons would have gone after anything or anyone that they considered one of theirs. Roger had only met Elijah Dixon once or twice before he died, but Roger had always considered the man to be disciplined, intelligent, unshakable in a fight—but not nice, not an easy man to live with, not a man who would let any outsider come between him and family. And to the Dixons, Leon Hawthorne would never be family. No matter how many vamps he staked or werewolves he gave a bullet to, he would always be that damn civilian Sally married.
“Yeah,” Roger said heavily. “I’ll help you. Don’t worry, Leon. I’m here, and we’ll get him back.” He just hoped that he wasn’t lying as much as Leon lied to everyone else.
Leon finally found Jake through law enforcement gossip. In towns, he drank slowly, and nothing but beer; he was there for information, not because he wanted a goddamned blackout. Cops around him started talking about a wild kid that had turned up a state away in Jefferson, half crazy, stronger and meaner than he should have been. Kid wouldn’t say where he’d come from, how he’d been surviving on his own, but he might have been the son of some outlaw, might have been just a poor abandoned shit, or even some kind of monster. No one knew what kind—horrifying to think that monsters could look like kids too, all innocent and helpless—but anything was possible. And you should have seen what the little bastard did to one of the arresting officers! They weren’t sure how the officer’s nose would set.
It wasn’t that far a drive, but it felt like forever. It felt longer than that first night when he had carried Jake into the Eldorado after Sally’s funeral, wrapping him in a coat in the front seat even though it wasn’t as safe as the back—, Leon had been a careful man in those days, and Jake had been his baby, the only thing he still cared about—and driving, driving until he didn’t know the name of a single goddamned road. He figured that if he didn’t know where he was, then the Dixons wouldn’t be able to follow. If he didn’t have a plan, they couldn’t show up at his front door with that polite, insincere smile on their face, asking after Jake, asking if Leon was dealing okay, if maybe he would find it easier to deal with his grief without sole responsibility for an also-grieving four-year-old.
“He’s a child,” Elijah said. “Of course you can’t expect him to really understand what’s going on. We’d be happy to take him for a few days if you need a moment to yourself . . .”
“You can get off my goddamned porch,” Leon replied.
The smile dropped off Elijah’s face, and he was the same bastard Leon remembered from the days when he had been courting Sally, when Elijah had looked at him like the blue-blooded Pennsylvania gentry he thought he was and like Leon was just trash, born and raised in West Virginia. “Watch your mouth, Hawthorne. That boy is ours as much as yours.”
Leon cocked the shotgun. Elijah looked unarmed, but he didn’t believe that for a second. “Leave and don’t come back.”
Elijah stepped back. “You can’t cut us out of Jake’s life. We’ll talk later.” He turned and walked away.
Arriving at the police station was worse, because only then did Leon realize that he didn’t have a plan.
Hunting was easy. Hunting made sense. Find a monster, then shoot it. If it’s not human, if it’s hurting people, then it’s a monster, and you put it down. He’d seen how any kind of power, any kind of extra ability could turn bad, could twist a person up inside until they weren’t really human any more.
Hell, he knew he had some black spots, and those he blamed on monsters too. Even the spots that he sometimes had to admit had been there before Sally died. It was easier.
If he walked into that station and said he was there to pick up the kid, they would check his ID, and if Jake had been giving them as hard a time as he expected—that’s my boy, give ’em hell—they would be thorough enough to see through the fakes that usually worked on civilians. The civilians would accept anything he said, but these cops… They would want to know, especially given all the rumors about where Jake had come from.
Rumors that made going in and admitting that Jake was his son—he was Leon’s goddamned son, give him back right now—even worse. He would be in for neglect at least—how could you leave a thirteen-year-old alone for a week? Jesus, Leon, when did you become such a bastard?—perhaps abuse; maybe they’d even have the balls to nail him for some of the things he’d done to keep them alive, back when he would have rather spit in his own eye than accept any aid from the fucking government that employed the Dixons. Now he took the stipend, collecting through so many channels that they’d never been able to trace it, but over the years he’d done everything from small-time scams and credit card fraud to shoplifting and bash-and-grabs. Yeah, he’d done things that he wasn’t proud of, but he didn’t think about them much, and no one gave a damn when he was saving their asses from the latest poltergeist.
He’d never had to think about any of that until now, when he knew any mention of his name could land him in a jail cell across from Jake. At the very least it would send up a red flag, and a Dixon would be there within a day, maybe a few hours, and then they would take Jake away from him. He knew they could. He had seen the Dixons put away enough monsters, had seen them convince enough senators and civilians their torture camp was not only a good idea (though he had to admit, it was useful sometimes) but also a humane one, that he knew taking one thirteen-year-old away from a drunk, obsessed, criminal hunter wouldn’t be a problem for them.
But there was one way he could get Jake out with no one asking questions. Yeah, the Dixons would see, and they might suspect, and it would give them more damned ammunition to use against him if they could ever really catch him, but he and Jake would be in and out before anyone could show up here. They would hit the ground, head to Truth or Consequences, and lay low at Roger’s for a few days. Leon hated taking charity, hated bringing anyone else into their problems, but it would be good to have another head, another pair of eyes watching Jake, making sure that someone was around to protect him when Leon was being a fucking idiot.
He wouldn’t even have to say that Jake was a monster. He could just flash the ID, and no one would ask any questions, because that was how the ASC worked. They would just look in his eyes, and they would know there was a monster in their building.
Shame that they would always guess the wrong one.
Two states, ten days, two stolen cars, and three close misses—two authority figures and one pervert who hadn’t expected him to know how to break his fingers from that position—after running from the apartment, Jake got caught and was dragged kicking and screaming into the local precinct office.
After the first broken nose, they stopped treating him like a scared, misguided teen and took off the kid gloves. Jake was good, but they were full-grown adults, and there were a lot of them, forcing him into cuffs and dragging him deeper into the police station.
In the middle of trying to fight them off in an interrogation room, kicking kneecaps and calling them every dirty name he knew—and a few he made up on the spot—Jake realized that this prison, this confinement, was Tobias’s life every day. Trapped in a little box, held down, beat up just because he was considered less.
Like a shoulder popping into place, a lot of things that Jake had been feeling for a long time, maybe for years, snapped together, and he knew what he was going to do if he ever got out of there, if he ever got to walk out in the sun, burn ghosts, or just get out of the damned cell.
Right then he decided he was going to get Toby out, no matter what. No one should have to live like this, and especially not Toby.
It wasn’t a new idea. It had been brewing in his head for a while. But it crystallized the moment when his teeth sank into some asshole’s hand and an elbow slammed into his diaphragm. After that it was just Jake fighting them, fighting them with his eyes when his arms and legs were tied down, and waiting for Dad to spring him. He knew he would. Dad always came for him. He just didn’t know if it would be gunplay, or a bomb, or a kind of one-man extraction heist like in the movies.
When Dad finally came for him, it was terrifyingly easy.
Leon walked in and held up his hunter ID. The Agency for Supernatural Control ID that he never used, barely touched, wouldn’t talk about.
“You have the boy,” he said.
The cop swallowed. He looked into the man’s face and saw death. Cold, merciless, unflinching death.
“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.” He nodded at the ID. “Makes sense for him to be a monster. He put up quite a fight for a, what, fifteen-year-old? Couple of our people had to get medical attention. Guess we were lucky.”
“About what I expected,” Leon Hawthorne said, tucking the stiff, pristine, silver-edged ID back in his suit. “I need you to burn everything you have on him. Every photo, every file you put together. In fact, you should forget you ever saw him. It’s better that way. Where do you have him?”
The officer had never turned a monster over to ASC before, but he knew how it was supposed to work. No questions, no paper trail. “First door on the left, Mr. Hawthorne.”
When Jake saw his father at the door, when the cop released him from the cell—but didn’t take off the cuffs—he got up without a word and let himself be pushed through the halls with a rough hand between his shoulders. All the way to the door, he noticed how eyes skittered away from him, afraid to catch the monster’s attention.
In the car, Leon’s face was even more emotionless and cold than usual. He didn’t look at his son, even as he handed over a small key. Jake twisted off the cuffs and threw them in the back seat. “Sorry,” he said, rubbing his arms and staring at the dash. “I fucked up.”
Leon didn’t look at him. “At least you’re not dead.”
The Hawthornes didn’t talk again for the next three days.
Tobias hunched over his food, keeping an eye on the new shapeshifter. The newcomer, nicknamed Hulk, was over six feet tall with muscles bulging against the thin fabric of his camp clothes. The shape had probably seemed like a good idea while hunters were after him, but in camp it meant that he had more of a body to feed. Food and kindness were both hard to come by in Freak Camp.
Everyone here understood the need for food. But that didn’t mean they appreciated it when someone, like this asshole, decided to go after other monsters’ rations. Tobias watched the shifter’s progress through the mess hall, accompanied by the occasional fist to the face, little stifled cries of pain as those accustomed to abuse gave up their meager portions to Hulk. Those who still had enough self-preservation to notice approaching threats shoved their food into their faces, chewing furiously.
Usually, Tobias would have been among those stuffing his mouth with the dry bread and mush, but today he ate slowly, watching the shifter’s progress.
The guards, who usually would have stopped the shifter or made him be more subtle about his thievery—and whose presence would have limited Tobias’s options—were absent. Tina Dixon had been in and out of Special Research all week, and some of the newer guards had been snickering behind her back from the first moment that she stepped inside the yard. The male Dixons broke a few heads, but eventually Dave Donovan dropped a comment about her trying to make up for her lack of balls by borrowing the monsters’.
“Tina would do better to find a real man to put some steel in her spine,” he’d laughed as she walked past him.
She’d turned—the cheerful, angry look in her eyes the same one that had earned her the nickname Crazy-GDB Dixon—and smiled. “How about I break your spine and see if you’ve got any steel to spare?”
Now all the mess hall guards were outside, cheering on their favorites, betting mostly on Dixon to wipe the dirt with Donovan’s ass.
No one was watching the mess hall to make sure the monsters didn’t kill each other.
Hulk worked his way down the tables, stopping next to Tobias. Tobias kept his eyes on his plate as he carefully scraped up the last of his mush with the last of his bread. He knew he looked like an easy target, younger and smaller than most of the monsters in the camp. As far as this shapeshifter was concerned—so new that the chartreuse tag on his arm still oozed effluvium where it pierced the skin and ran between his arm bones—Tobias didn’t seem like a threat.
Hulk placed one hammy fist on Tobias’s shoulder and pulled him back from the table.
“Hey, Baby Freak,” he said, slurring his words, grinning down at Tobias in a mediocre impression of Crusher drunk on some poor bastard’s screams. “Hand over that plate. You don’t wanna get on my bad side, do you?”
The hand on Tobias’s shoulder tightened. Tobias glanced around the room, meeting eyes that were frightened or as eager as the guards to see pain.
Tobias jabbed backward with his elbow, digging right into the sensitive point of Hulk’s thigh. Gasping, the shifter loosened his grip. Tobias seized his hand, twisting it over and in front of him, forcing Hulk headfirst into the table, just as Tobias stood up to slam all his weight down through his forearm on Hulk’s elbow. The shifter screamed as his bone broke, and Tobias rolled him over on the table—he was stronger than he looked—and brought the edge of his cheap plastic plate to the bastard’s throat, just under the stiff new collar.
