Chapter 12 #3
“Yes,” Tobias answered, ignoring the distant ghost of himself that whispered sir at the end. “Jake gave me a gun, and I’m going to put you down with it.”
Crusher’s face twisted into a snarl. “I’m gonna cut your fingers off for that, freak. I’m gonna take that gun and fuck you with it and fucking blow off the roof of your mouth afterward.”
“You’re never going to fuck anything again, Crusher.” At Freak Camp, threatening a guard meant torture. Pointing a gun at one would have been death. But that Freak Camp had already started to burn. Tobias raised his gun.
Crusher brought his weapon up and got a shot off wide. He started to rush forward, and Tobias pulled the trigger.
A thousand, a million times—he’d never counted, for the same reason he tried so hard not to remember anything but Jake from his childhood—Crusher had come at him with a club, a crazy light in his eyes.
A thousand, a million times, Tobias had taken it because he was helpless, worthless, powerless.
A thousand, a million times, Tobias had taken whatever this bastard gave him because he had to, because he hadn’t believed he deserved anything more and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had.
But Tobias wasn’t that helpless monster kid anymore.
Crusher stumbled and fell, gurgling from the bullet hole in his chest. Tobias hadn’t wanted to risk missing a head shot. He walked toward him.
Crusher looked up at him, eyes widening, bloody foam bubbling at his lips. “Please,” he whispered. Even as he choked, Tobias could see him fumbling for the knife he always kept at his belt.
“We begged,” Tobias whispered. He could barely speak.
It wasn’t nausea in his throat anymore, nor fear clouding his eyes.
It was the memory of how he had felt every time Crusher had forced him to his knees, cut into him with that knife, or had someone else screaming under him.
“We begged, and it never did any damn good.” With his gloved hand he grabbed Crusher by the hair, careful to keep one eye on the hand trying for the knife.
“But you’ll never hurt anyone again.” Tobias shoved his gun against Crusher’s temple and pulled the trigger.
Crusher jerked, and Tobias let him drop. He fired two more rounds into Crusher’s chest, where the heart should have been, and then Tobias had to stop and just breathe.
For the first time, Tobias didn’t hate being inside Freak Camp, didn’t feel distant guilt gnawing at him for every human life he and Jake had taken. Monsters came in all shapes and sizes, and this, right here, was the worst one he had ever seen.
Tobias had killed monsters before, things that had destroyed families and communities and lives. Looking down at Elmer “Crusher” Sloan’s bloody, shattered corpse, Tobias remembered Marco, Kayla, himself, and dozens of nameless others. He couldn’t think that it was anything but a job well done.
Tobias met up with Jake after that, and except for a silent look and a nod between them, they didn’t discuss it.
Jake didn’t need to know why there was blood on his glove, and Tobias didn’t need to ask where Jake’s second backup bag of weapons and ammunition had gone.
He could see a handful of prisoners shooting guards instead of just ripping them apart.
Most of the ones with guns were witches missing a hand or the occasional shifter.
Tobias had a fleeting moment to wonder again if he would see Kayla among them, if she had survived, before they turned to the main building.
The basic core of their plan was guns-blazing and burn-the-walls-down, but in order to get away with it, they had to be smart too.
Alice had told them where the facility’s records and little black boxes were kept in Administration, and she stressed that if they didn’t want footage of their faces splashed across the five o’clock news, they had to make sure to reduce that particular area to rubble.
Administration was also where Director Jonah Dixon kept his office, but Tobias knew for Jake that was more a feature than a bug.
Alice hadn’t said as much, but they both assumed that the Director would be present on the day that she gave the all-clear for the attack.
Tobias entered the building a little before Jake, past the guard station that was already empty and broken before him, laying charges as he went.
He already knew where the video surveillance hub was, but he slowed down as he moved through the familiar hallways, alarms screaming in his ears and the sounds of monsters and guards in the yard fading out with distance and the thick walls.
When he came to the door he knew so damn well, he stopped.
He could keep walking, following their plan.
Jake had already stopped at the first room they’d targeted to distribute C-4 blocks.
Tobias could go on to the central hub, lay the charges, wipe the on-site servers, and assume that the Director would go down in the flames.
But he couldn’t, really. Tobias took a deep breath, then put his hand on the doorknob and pushed it open.
Tobias had known that the Director’s office was insulated for sound—there were too many private meeting rooms for visiting functionaries in the same hallway, and not all of those visitors would have wanted to know what went on in the Director’s interrogation room—but he’d never quite realized how much until he stepped from the hallway into the cool, still office.
Behind him pounded the alarm klaxons, chaos, and screams from what he and Jake had begun, but here, where Jonah Dixon waited quietly at his desk, there was only silence.
The Director looked up. He had, by all evidence, been doing paperwork. Tobias knew he hadn’t been oblivious to the invasion, he couldn’t have been, but the sight still sent shivers down his spine.
“89UI6703.” The Director’s tone was somewhere between greeting, identification, and criticism. “Shut the door.”
Tobias heard the latch click before he realized he had obeyed.
The Director’s voice was the same. Smooth and cold and implacable. “In this life, even with all I’ve been able to achieve, I always wondered if a freak would be the death of me. But I thought I’d trained you better, 89UI6703. Lock it.”
Tobias’s hands didn’t seem like they belonged to him, jerking toward the lock on the door before he stopped himself, just barely. He touched the lock but did not turn it. He was shaking like a marionette hung from a drunk’s hands. I should never have come without Jake.
Breathing desperately, Tobias turned to face this man who had made him.
The Director’s eyes were somber, almost angry, but a bitter curve to his mouth qualified as a smile. “Of course, you could kill me now. That would prove once and for all that you are exactly the monster I tried to beat out of you. What a disappointment.”
Tobias flinched in spite of everything he wanted to do, wanted to say, and dropped his eyes instinctively, no longer able to even look the Director in the face.
It took everything in him to stay where he was, keep his grip on his gun, and watch the Director’s body language for any movement to a weapon.
He tried not to listen. He couldn’t let Jonah Dixon finish destroying him now.
“More of a disappointment because even among freaks, you are particularly useless.” Jonah Dixon picked up a slim file and frowned down at the page, as though there wasn’t an armed intruder in his office. “They always suspected you were more. You were special. What shit.”
Jake didn’t even try the door when he arrived—he just kicked it in.
Tobias forced his eyes up as relief burned through him, and he caught the smile dropping from the Director’s face.
If any fear was in him, he buried it beneath ice-cold focus.
All he let through was a flash of irritation, as though Jake had arrived early to an appointment and the Director didn’t like the disruption to his schedule.
On another man it could have been harmless, but more than once Tobias had had the skin whipped off his back for disrupting this man’s schedule.
There was nothing farther from harmless, not even the wendigos.
The Director’s eyes flickered to Jake’s masked face, his gun, and then back to Tobias.
Tobias had to drop his eyes again. Even then, he could see the Director lean back in his chair, one long hand visible in Tobias’s line of vision.
“Hands where I can fucking see them,” Jake snarled.
Director Jonah Dixon slowly raised his hands and laid them on the desk, palms facing each other, rather than up or down, on the polished wood. “Cousin Jake, I presume.”
Jake’s gun never wavered from its lead on the Director’s head, but with his left hand he peeled his mask up to his forehead. His face showed fury colder than Tobias had ever seen. “You can presume that I’ll splatter your brains against that wall before you call me cousin again.”
Jake’s eyes were tracking the Director’s hands and body, watching for any signals of violence, but Tobias’s attention was immediately caught when the Director glanced toward him and smiled with the corner of his mouth. The Director flicked two fingers. Kneel.
Tobias felt his knees bend without his conscious control and had to fight a lifetime of training to straighten them again.
He shifted the gun between his hands and brought it forward.
He couldn’t quite point it at the source of his nightmares, but he knew if he couldn’t get his head in the game, neither he nor Jake would survive.
“Tobias, what did he just do?” Jake’s voice was angry, and Tobias thought distantly that neither of them were in a place where they had a hope in hell of besting the Director. “Toby!”
“Nothing,” Tobias said, soft, hollow. “I don’t kn-know, Jake, n-nothing, I don’t know w-why.”