Chapter 10 #5
Two days had passed since Alice Dixon had cornered them in the Montana diner, and Tobias and Jake were hiding (taking a well-deserved vacation with some goddamn privacy, in Jake’s words) in the Wyoming wilderness, far out of range of cities or even cell towers.
It gave them both time to come down from the shock of the confrontation and to do some serious thinking.
“D-do you think any of it was true?” Tobias asked tentatively.
They hadn’t tried the USB drive she’d passed them yet, unwilling to risk their laptop with it and needing more privacy than most public computers offered.
Tobias had noticed more than once Jake considering tossing it out the window on their drive out of Montana, but he still fiddled with it, spinning it on its keychain around his finger while he lounged on the bed in their cabin.
Jake snorted skeptically. “Let me think for a sec. Yeah, no.”
Tobias had doubts, remembering how she’d locked eyes with him and told him that she’d seen the Director’s tapes. He shuddered again.
Jake hadn’t asked about the tapes she’d mentioned. Tobias was grateful for their unspoken understanding that if Tobias wanted to explain, he would, and if he didn’t, Jake wouldn’t push.
“I think some of it could be true,” Tobias said slowly, “but she’s gotta be insane, or think we are, to invite us to go after the A-A-ASC.”
“That’s how you know it’s a trap,” Jake said dryly. “I’m just hurt she thinks we’re that stupid. Like we’ve gotten this far on our own by being dumb as bricks.”
Tobias remembered the desperation in her eyes beneath the tight control in her face. He still couldn’t totally buy that she had been lying about all of it. He knew the look of someone utterly trapped.
That didn’t change the fact that whatever crisis Alice Dixon was tangled up in wasn’t Hawthorne business. She had all the power, resources, education, and influence to figure it out. For Tobias, proximity to any Dixon was tantamount to voluntarily re-entering Freak Camp.
Jake caught the USB drive between his fingers, and Tobias looked over to see if Jake had finally decided to get up and chuck it in the toilet. Instead, Jake tossed it into his open duffel at the end of the bed. Out of sight, if not out of mind, like many other things.
Tobias knew that Jake was pleased to be off-grid because it also meant no more of Tobias’s constant monitoring of the news. Tobias himself didn’t mind that loss as much as he would have, before Congress had voted down the bill to close Freak Camp.
Tobias had known the bill never really had a chance, of course.
Everyone had said so. The Cleveland massacre, all the angry protests and heartfelt testimonies across the country, changed nothing.
Ultimately, no one could deny the reality and danger of freaks, and (as Alice Dixon had so persuasively argued to the cameras) only the ASC had the knowledge to keep the country safe.
If they didn’t, who would? Was the public really willing to risk that?
Still, seeing the official outcome two weeks before their meeting with Alice had done something to Tobias’s head; he’d wanted to go straight to bed, but doing that in the middle of the day would’ve alarmed Jake.
Since then it had been harder to lift his head up, to look reals (no, people) in the eye, to smile and act like he belonged here, the way Jake had spent years teaching him to act.
The occasional nightmare that Tobias could shake off as soon as he woke had become frequent, brutal dreams he couldn’t hide from Jake, especially when he woke up choking from a phantom collar for the first time in years.
He really shouldn’t have watched the Director’s personal testimony to Congress.
The final vote was narrower than expected, which was the only real surprise.
Freak Camp would stay open and the ASC would maintain complete control, although the next budget bill hadn’t offered the same blank check it always had before, and there were rumors of an oversight committee or an audit sometime before the next election cycle.
But the senator who had been the harshest critic of the ASC announced her retirement at the end of her term. And Jonah Dixon remained in charge.
* * *
As she eyed the racks and racks of VHS tapes, Kayla decided she was a lucky bitch.
Like all fifteen-year-old girls, she had hopes and dreams that she never quite believed would become real, but they kept her going.
Maybe the camp would get firebombed, no survivors.
Maybe the incinerator would explode and take most of Special Research with it, earning her the opportunity to slip into someone else’s face and away in the confusion.
Maybe Crusher, like Victor, would catch something nasty and not be able to use his penis, even to pee, for months.
Some of these came true, and some of these she helped along.
She couldn’t transmit the clap—shifters got very few human diseases—but Kayla had carefully modified herself so the guards and hunters wouldn’t want to get between her thighs.
It had taken some creativity to grow spines that curved in ways that didn’t hurt her while she walked, but after the first time a visiting hunter had pinned her down on an interrogation table—he would have noticed the danger earlier if the bastard hadn’t tried to get it all in on the first thrust—and lost half his dick trying to pull out, no one else had so much as groped her.
She’d been sure to scream and wail, acting fucking confused and terrified even while they beat the shit out of her.
She’d come out of it with broken bones and barely any skin on her back, but they hadn’t realized that it wasn’t just a messed-up side effect of her being a monster.
Good thing Crusher hadn’t been around to say that she hadn’t been a virgin and that sure as hell hadn’t happened to him.
Between that, her subtly misshapen face, and her tendency to bite during blowjobs if the fuck hadn’t paid her right, Kayla managed to glide between a lot of the worst ordeals in the camp.
She worked decently on the computers and kept her mouth shut.
The guards thought she was stupid because she kept silent.
Too stupid to interest the Director, but smart and passive enough to clean storage closets, organize paperwork, and be assigned to copy old VHS interrogation tapes onto DVD.
Now, staring down at a tape neatly labeled (February 10, 1999) Rm. 3, 89UI6703, special session, she felt the fluttery sensation that always accompanied the rare realization that she could do something, influence the hell that was her life.
She thought about Tobias a lot, and not just because the guards liked to talk about how Hawthorne was still obsessed with his freak.
He had been the one not-dark spot in her life for a long time, and he had taught her more about surviving than he would ever expect.
She had watched him blend into his surroundings—as best he could without her advantages—and watched him do what he needed to survive without ever really being broken, watched him be kind even when it brought him no advantages.
He was her definition of humanity, and she tried, as best she could, to hold onto a little of it for herself.
If she had believed in prayer, she would have prayed for Tobias. As it was, she hoped—the way she hoped for very little else—that Hawthorne didn’t hit him too much, and that when they fucked he took it slow enough that Tobias didn’t get ripped open every time.
And each time that the hunters talked about how good a lay Pretty Freak must be, how Hawthorne had beaten the shit out of another hunter because he threatened his toy, she wondered what Hawthorne—what Jake—would do if he knew what had happened to Tobias here.
If he could see, for just a second, how the other monsters (no, hunters, she had to keep thinking of them as hunters; monsters were very different things) had treated him.
Even if he didn’t care about Tobias the way Tobias had cared about him, she was sure he would do something about the insult to his property.
So as she sorted the old storeroom and transferred hundreds of recorded sessions to DVD, she copied anything she found with Tobias’s number onto some of the old dead tapes.
She watched them on mute, noting who had participated, which clever bastard came up with new ideas.
After the first few, she watched anything with Director Dixon’s name on it at double speed.
She wanted to know which guards had participated, but didn’t need to know how strong Tobias was.
And whenever the guards came into the storage room to let her out for food or push her down for a blowjob—always well paid for, in advance, because they knew she kept her word—it looked like she was working. They never knew that she was carefully, precisely, thoroughly planning all their deaths.
She blew a couple guards to get Hawthorne’s address, and she’d been prepared to suck it up, smooth herself out, and spread her legs for Crusher to get the package sent.
Instead she went with another gambit, far more dangerous but with a surer payoff of getting it in the mail instead of a garbage can: she’d played terrified, heavily implied that the Director had given her the package to drop into the mail room, and let Crusher get close to her without even a negotiation.
He’d believed her, the stupid fuck. Hadn’t even checked the address on the label or commented on the weight.
Kayla had never been so happy. It was like she had sprayed kerosene in all their faces, soaked the bloodstained walls in gas and laid dynamite at the stones of the incinerator. And now—U.S. Postal Service, luck, and honest hatred willing—the fire was coming. She just had to wait.