Chapter 10
Eight months ago
Alice didn’t often go out drinking with family.
Partly it was scheduling—managing public relations for the Agency of Supernatural Control took a significant amount of time, and her hours weren’t exactly what she would call regular.
Another factor was that most Dixons were either incredibly driven, borderline alcoholics, or complete assholes.
After being surrounded by government assholes all day, she didn’t have the tolerance to deal with other types, even if they were family.
Still, sometimes a group of cousins and distant relations would show up in the D.C. area for a meeting or mission, and Alice would end up shooting the breeze and trying to find that perfect balance between enough booze to have fun but not enough to put ASC secrets at risk.
On this particular night, a group of over a dozen boiled down to just five: Alice, Matthew, Lucas, Charlie, plus Donnie Anders, who worked with Lucas at FREACS.
Alice was pleasantly buzzed, chatting with the guys in the sitting room of their hotel suite when the shop talk turned to their cousin Jonah.
“Gotta be a barrel of laughs working for that hardass, all his talk about reputation and shit.” Lucas snorted.
“I just have to keep freaks in line, and he’s all about ‘respect’ this and ‘pride in the family name’ that.
I’ve been riding herd at Freak Camp for years, and he don’t give me any damn respect. ”
Alice personally thought that Cousin Jonah wasn’t that bad to work with.
He gave clear instructions, detailed his expectations, and listened if she had concrete reasons why those expectations were unrealistic.
It could have been much worse, as she knew from working at Target and the local grocery store during high school.
She made a sympathetic noise and poured another finger of Jack into her Coke.
“Hell yeah!” Donnie nudged his half-full glass against Lucas’s. Lucas wasn’t expecting the motion, and swore softly as the Jack and ice in his plastic hotel cup (there had only been two actual glasses, and Alice had grabbed the other one) sloshed over the side.
“God, I hate that look he gets,” Donnie continued, animated with righteous indignation.
“You know the one, like I didn’t fucking reach his minimum IQ to fuck over monsters or something like that?
Fuck Jonah, and fuck his high horse. I can’t wait to get the fuck out of Freak Camp and start doing some real good in the field, you know? ”
Matthew leaned in with his elbows on his knees, not yet showing any sign of inebriation despite several refills from his flask. “One: respect is earned by more than time served. Two: he catches wind of you talking about him like that, Donnie, you’re gonna get your balls busted. Again.”
“Yeah, show some respect. Or some self-preservation, for fuck’s sake,” Charlie said.
He appeared to be the same age as Lucas but modeled himself after Matthew; Alice had noticed him echoing Matthew’s sentiments a few times that night.
Charlie downed his glass and refilled it to the brim.
“Else he’s gonna train you like he trains those freaks. Mebbe he’ll let me watch.”
“How does he train freaks?” Alice asked.
Matthew smiled woodenly at her. “You must have heard about his grand project to make monsters practical, right? Training them so they can’t attack humans, so that they can be used to take out other monsters?”
Alice nodded. “I’ve heard of it. But not a lot.
” It was something that Jonah had mentioned a time or two, and people around her had nodded like they knew what he was talking about, but it hadn’t been something that he wanted publicized, so she hadn’t pressed for details.
Whatever went on inside Freak Camp was outside her scope of public relations.
“Fuck yeah,” Charlie said, with a knowing look. “I’ve seen the shit he does. Fucked-up shit. But hell, it works.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” Lucas said dismissively. “That’s basic stuff, videos every guard at FREACS watches before they start. And we get refreshers, sometimes.”
“How to handle a freak, you know,” Donnie said. “How to hit a vamp or a shifter so they stay down, how to maintain discipline in the yard, that kinda shit.”
Charlie laughed. “You ain’t seen nothing.” He took another big swallow and then tilted his head. “Hey. You want to?”
“Want to what?” Matthew said, looking up from his cup.
“See one of the secret videos.” Charlie sat up from where he’d been lounging on his stomach on the carpet, suddenly aware of his importance. “Like, one of the ones that he did before the official ones.”
Donnie snorted. “I don’t fucking believe you got shit.”
Next thing she knew, Alice was crowded on the couch in front of Charlie’s laptop. He opened a folder called “Secret Videos” and double-clicked on a file labeled “19990310 Wednesday Session 4.”
The video began without any preparation or title card.
One moment the file was loading, and the next they could see a wide, high view of the Director’s office in FREACS, Jonah Dixon staring directly up at them in a ceiling corner, his face blank.
He sat by his desk, one hand tucked under the edge.
Probably had just hit the record button, Alice thought.
“Today is the fourth Wednesday training session with subject 89UI6703. This freak is unidentified, and so far is responsive to training. Pain tolerance exceeds human standard, but both the physical and nonphysical correction show better than anticipated results. Today’s session focuses on nonverbal commands as well as the more general focus on obedience.
The session will evolve according to subject response, but I plan a simple—”
“Oh, I’ve seen one of these,” Donnie said. “This is the boring shit. Come on, skip to the good stuff.”
Charlie tapped a key, and the video jumped ahead.
Standing in the room was a gaunt boy in the plain gray inmate garb of FREACS, his arms full of books and documents.
A guard hulked in the background, holding a heavy baton.
Alice vaguely recognized him from the employee database in the ASC intranet, but she had never seen that level of avid attention—and something else she couldn’t, didn’t want to name—on his face.
The Director didn’t even look up at the freak before him, but his right hand moved to tap the top of his desk. He repeated the movement, and then two fingers downward, while the boy hesitated.
The Director looked up. “Are you blind or disobedient?”
“S-sir, I have the b-books in their correct order.”
“You didn’t put them on the desk where I told you. You didn’t kneel.”
The boy took a tight breath. “No, sir.”
“You don’t appear to have any eye damage, so I can only assume you saw my instructions.”
“Yes, sir. I d-didn’t understand.”
“You’re coming very close to making me repeat myself. I am trying to make you more than a worthless freak, and you are making me waste breath on you. This will not continue. Mr. Sloan.”
The guard stepped forward and slammed the nightstick into the boy’s abdomen. The boy dropped, the books and papers falling around him. The guard landed a couple more blows until a hand gesture from the Director made him back off.
“And now you’ve dropped my papers,” he said. “Mr. Sloan, ten lashes. Then we’ll try this again.”
Alice watched, hand pressed over her mouth to hold back either bile or a scream, while a man she worked with and respected gave calm, cool-eyed instructions in the torture of a child.
The Director set impossible expectations, but he outlined them in the same even tone he had used in Alice’s last incident review meeting.
Through trial and error, he methodically worked through basic gesture commands, each step paid for in the boy’s pain.
Like a fucking dog, Alice thought, in numb horror.
At one minute and thirty-three seconds, after the boy had demonstrated Come, Fetch, Kneel, Stand, and Beg, the Director told him to kneel and then glanced at the guard.
The man looked hopeful. “Sir?” The pain and degradation had clearly . . . excited him. Alice could see his erection and became acutely aware of the four men pressed in around her, watching this horror show.
“Yes. Service Mr. Sloan, and be quick about it.” The Director turned his attention back to the books and papers on his desk.
When Alice saw the guard opening his pants, she put her hand over her eyes and struggled to breathe.
She heard when the video ended. Charlie, next to her, stretched out a hand to close the laptop.
“Fuck,” Donnie said. “You have more of those?”
“Excuse me,” Alice said, pushing up.
She rushed to the suite’s bathroom and just had time to slam the door and make it to the toilet before emptying her stomach.
There wasn’t much in there besides crappy bar food and too much Jack Daniels, but every time her stomach settled down she thought of the Director’s hand motions, his even voice, the growing excitement of the guard, and she had to bend over the toilet again.
When she felt hollowed out, physically and emotionally, she sat back and stared at the ceiling.
The knock at the bathroom door made her start and almost reach for the gun she wasn’t wearing.
“Alice?” It was Matthew. “You okay in there?”
She felt a wild rush of relief, as though she’d spotted a life buoy in an endless stretch of icy sea. Of everyone here, Matthew was the only one she knew. “Fine,” she called. “Just too much Jack, I think.”
“Yeah,” he said. “These shitheads are gonna keep watching, but I’m heading out. Want me to walk you to your car?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, fuck.” She had the acrid bite of vomit and alcohol in her mouth when she opened the bathroom door. She tried to smile for Matthew. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
He had that same tight smile on his face. “We don’t leave anyone behind. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” Alice did not think she would ever be okay again.