Freak camp, p.10
Freak Camp, page 10
“No, I like it,” Elmer said. “Crusher.”
The silence after that stretched like a gagged witch on a rack.
Lucas Dixon finally broke it. “You should get that freak out of the yard,” he said. “He’s getting the dirt all bloody.”
A couple of guards laughed nervously, and Hank moved toward the unconscious body.
“Can I?” Crusher asked, stepping forward. Hank flinched away from him, then clearly regretted it. He glanced at Lucas.
Lucas sighed. “Who put me in fucking charge? Yeah, sure, go for it, Slo—Crusher. Special Research.”
Crusher smiled and leaned down to pick up the freak. The movement was almost gentle.
No one watched where he went—if the monster never actually ended up in Special Research, no one would ask questions, as long as the monster finally ended up in the incinerators. Whatever happened to him after Crusher took him out of the yard, that shifter never came back. Hank turned in his resignation, someone put Lucas in charge of a monster retrieval team, but Elmer “Crusher” Sloan stayed, made friends, and enjoyed his work more and more every day.
Full moon was a bad time for everyone, not just for the werewolves and other lunar-centric monsters who were moved to Intensive Containment for their dangerous periods. The guards had lists of who to round up, but sometimes they forgot, and sometimes they made deliberate mistakes. Mistakes such as taking monsters that had nothing to do with the moon, either because they wanted to, or because those monsters were “necessary for transformation-based experiments.” And sometimes the mistake went the other way, so none of the monsters could feel safe after the barracks doors were locked for the night.
Once, when Tobias had still been small enough to curl up with Becca in one cot, the guards had forgotten a name, or maybe a paper-pusher somewhere had filled out the forms wrong, and a wolf cut its way through half the barracks and ripped the heart out of a guard before she was taken down.
And even if the guards did everything right, if the werewolves ended up in Intensive Containment and all the other monsters remained in their beds, it felt no safer. The camp wasn’t that big, and whoever had designed Intensive Containment hadn’t bothered to add sound insulation. No matter what kind of gags they used, anyone with ears in Freak Camp could hear the screaming and snarling, no matter how they tried to drown it out.
Some monsters speculated that werewolves didn’t have to make noises while they were transforming, and the screams were caused by the things that the guards did in Intensive Containment to try to stop them from changing forms. The werewolves wouldn’t talk about what happened to them. Other monsters weren’t sure if it was so terrible that no one dared speak, or if the werewolves couldn’t remember anything but three days of pain.
Every full moon, the population of Freak Camp decreased.
Tobias didn’t know what happened in Intensive Containment. He hoped never to know. Nothing in Freak Camp drained new monsters so fast of their hope, their defiance, than three or four days there and the knowledge that this would happen the next month, every month, until the end of their lives.
He watched, four days after the full moon, to see if Marco would come back. It wasn’t that he cared. He couldn’t care, and Marco hadn’t been nice, and there was no reason that he should care. So he didn’t.
They were all standing in roll call, and this was when the surviving werewolves would limp back through the gates, eyes bruised and sunken from sleep deprivation, sometimes bleeding through their clothes from silver lacerations. They showed unnervingly little damage other than the exhaustion and the occasional cut. The werewolf transformation sped up healing and prevented anything other than silver from leaving injuries.
Marco was there, limping to a place in the new line, mouth tight and eyes vacant. He didn’t look at Tobias. He didn’t look at anything, really. But when Crusher moved toward him, he cringed.
Crusher saw the response and grinned his brightest, scariest smile. He cupped himself through his pants and stared at Marco, and when the boy didn’t respond, he laughed and turned to the rest of the line of silent, broken monsters.
Tobias felt queasy in a way that had nothing to do with hunger cramps before breakfast. He might not know what happened in Intensive Containment, but he thought he knew now what Crusher had done to Marco. Something the guards did to monsters, usually to the female ones. Sometimes it happened in the showers, but Becca had always made sure he didn’t watch. He knew, though, that it involved close body contact, a great deal of pain, and it broke monsters very fast.
Marco looked the same as other monsters who had been hurt that way: hollowed out, like he had been cut into so many times that the bits of him that made him strong and defiant had been scooped out.
He was weak and he was a monster. But beneath that broken look that was so familiar, Tobias could still see the early cockiness and youth and well-fedness that had first reminded him of Jake.
He hoped he never saw Jake looking the way Marco did now. But in spite of telling himself he didn’t care, he was glad to see Marco back.
“You survived,” Tobias whispered, while roll call continued. He didn’t look at Marco. He tried very hard not to move his mouth at all and didn’t raise his eyes from his toes, didn’t even glance up from the earth.
Marco didn’t look at him. “Don’t talk.”
Tobias smiled briefly, then emptied his mind and focused on the roll call again. But at least no one whose name he knew had died today.
***
The twenty-second day after Jake’s last visit was definitely the worst day.
Breakfast was the decent kind of bread (only stale) and gruel (tasteless and filling), but Tobias had slipped up and not watched his bowl closely enough, so it got swiped by a skinwalker and was empty before Tobias could even think about snatching it back.
Then he’d been assigned away from the library, on cleaning duty in the barracks, Reception, and Administration—backbreaking work not made easier by the stuffy, airless confines everywhere except Administration. But Tobias hated going in there more than anywhere else, because it was the Dixons’ headquarters, and while monsters didn’t disappear there like they did in Special Research . . . no monster wanted to be called inside.
He was relieved to escape at dusk, hurrying across the deserted yard to the mess hall, praying dinner would be something digestible, at least—
“Hey, Pretty Freak!”
Tobias jerked to a stop, catching his breath. That wasn’t his name—that most definitely was not his name—but he was the only monster in the yard. and Crusher had called it. He stayed perfectly still.
“C’mere, freak.”
Tobias turned and walked—mechanically, but not slowly—over to where Crusher and Victor stood smoking outside the break room (bitch room, monsters called it). He kept his eyes on the packed ground and the guards’ steel-tipped boots.
“Stand there,” Crusher said, and Tobias’s eyes flickered up enough to see him waving toward the wall, directly under the floodlight. Tobias put his back to it, trying to keep his hands still and chest moving normally, wondering if he’d missed something in one of the bathrooms. He hadn’t done anything like that shifter, though—
Crusher’s boots moved in front of him, less than a foot between them, and Tobias focused on breathing in and out at exactly the same pace, two seconds for each.
A hand settled on the back of his head, gripping his hair painfully and without an inch of slack, then jerked his head back and chin up. The fierce white light pierced his eyelids, and Tobias lost control over the pace of his breathing.
“So you’re Pretty Freak, huh?”
Victor barked out a laugh. “No, man, that’s Baby Freak. Where’d you get that—no, you know what, I don’t want to know.”
“Baby Freak, fine,” Crusher said. “That’s what they call you, ain’t it?”
Tobias tried to swallow and failed.
“Still got your tongue, don’t you?”
“Yes sir,” he gasped out.
“Good,” Crusher said, and twisted Tobias’s head to the side. “That’s good. Don’t use it much, though, do you? You’re a quiet freak. Think we can’t see you?” Something hard and blunt pressed into Tobias’s cheek—Crusher’s club, he realized, and couldn’t make his mouth work to answer. “I see you,” Crusher said softly, and jabbed the club harder into his cheek.
“Hey,” Victor said. “Just so you know—Pretty, Baby, whatever you want to call him, but that’s Hawthorne’s freak.”
“I don’t see his name anywhere.” Crusher jerked Tobias’s head back and forth, as though looking for a mark somewhere that said Hawthorne, but at least the club dropped away.
“Yeah, well, that’s why his kid’s always bringing him out. Guess they’re keeping an eye on him for some long-term project, maybe waiting for him to get big enough to swing on a hook. Maybe Hawthorne’s hook.” He chuckled.
Tobias didn’t listen. He didn’t care what they said, and they knew nothing about Jake. They couldn’t begin to understand, because Jake was nothing like them.
“Well,” Crusher said, twisting Tobias’s head to the side, “if he wants him, he better hurry up and get him. Freak Camp is a dangerous place for freaks.” He leaned close. “And I like this one—look, he’s so fucking easy.” He shook Tobias’s head back and forth again. “Like a fucking doll. Look at that face . . .”
Victor waved his cigarette. “Yeah, yeah, I see freak faces every fucking day, Elmer-my-man.”
Crusher turned. “What the fuck did you call me?”
“What? Crusher, of course.” Victor raised his eyes innocently, smoke from the burning cigarette curling up from his nose. “Dude, seriously, that’s Hawthorne’s monster. You don’t fuck with Hawthorne. Even the old man knew that.”
“The Director?” Crusher snorted, letting go of Tobias’s hair, letting it fall through his fingers, and moving away with a last caress across Tobias’s face with the backs of his knuckles. “What do I care that that old idiot was afraid of his son-in-law? New blood now, better that way. Anyway, it’s a fucking crime that Hawthorne can just reserve a monster, you know, a young one, and everyone just bows before him like he’s a fucking god. It’s not right, you know, special treatment like that.”
Tobias moved away slowly, not so fast that he would attract attention, not even so far that they would be sure that he had moved. But even the smallest distance between himself and Crusher helped him remember how to breathe. If he could just get far enough away…
“Yeah,” Victor agreed. “And the fact that you’ve laid claim to that puppy and we all keep our hands off while you’re having your fun don’t mean a thing.” He took a drag. “Completely different situation, right?”
“Fuck yourself, Todd,” Crusher said.
Victor laughed. “Why should I? I’ve got freaks to do that for me.”
They chuckled, but Tobias didn’t stick around to see if they would turn back to him. He had made it to the corner and from there he bolted, feet quiet on the dirt of the compound, listening hard for signs they were following him. If they came around the corner, he would have to stop. Monsters didn’t run in front of guards unless they had a good reason to be going somewhere fast. And monsters definitely didn’t run from guards if they wanted to survive and remain intact.
When he reached the door of the mess hall, he could still hear them distantly. He stopped and panted at the door, straining his ears for a clue of the kind of trouble he had brought on himself for that move.
“Fuck, where did he go?” That was Crusher, voice husky, with a hint of anger.
“Leave it, man, he’s Hawthorne’s. And hell, the puppy should keep you occupied for a week or so at least.”
Tobias ducked into the mess hall and grabbed a seat as fast and as quietly as possible. The guard patrolling saw him enter and came over, slapping his club into his hand. “Where the fuck you been, freak?”
Tobias wet his lips. “Crusher, sir.” It was true. But if the guard didn’t believe him…
The guard stared at him and then shook his head. “Goddamn pervert,” he said, almost to himself. And then, sneering down at Tobias: “You don’t fucking get up to eat. You stay right there, or maybe I let Crusher play with you after dinner too. You got that?”
Tobias kept his eyes locked on the table. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” The guard walked away.
Tobias let out a sigh of relief and glanced around.
Moldy bread and green porridge. No big loss. There’d been plenty of days he hadn’t gotten to eat anything, and a number of times he’d gone without for two days. So that wasn’t a good reason for why his whole body was still shaking, as much as he tried to hide it by huddling over the table.
His name had always been Baby Freak. Except to Becca, long ago, and on those best days when Jake visited. Then he was Toby. But all the guards and other freaks knew him as Baby Freak, and he hadn’t realized until now how much of an armor that name was.
The guards weren’t that creative, so nicknames got recycled as freaks came through the loading gate and eventually left through the incinerator. Marco wasn’t the first Puppy, and every witch was usually some version of Handy.
Pretty Freaks were different. Bad things happened to them. Things Becca had told him not to watch. Those freaks never lasted long.
That wasn’t him, though. Victor had told Crusher—he was Baby, Baby Freak. And Hawthorne’s. That was even more important.
Hawthorne’s, Tobias thought, over and over, making it one with his breath (Haw when inhaling, thorne when exhaling), until the monsters were permitted to put away their spotlessly cleaned plates and return to the barracks. Hawthorne’s.
Tobias would never know it himself, but he was glad there was another world outside Freak Camp for Jake. There had to be more than fear and pain and hunger.
Suddenly—shivering with hunger and fear in his cot—he needed to know that the rest existed. Even if he would never see it because he was a monster, even if he didn’t deserve anything better than these walls in his life, he knew that that other world had to exist because sometimes he had Jake. He needed to know that it was out there, or he didn’t know that he would be able to keep sitting down to the same nothingness and still believe that this was any better than Special Research and the incinerator.
There had to be more to the world than pain and fear and monsters screaming on the full moon and disappearing in the night. Maybe Jake would tell him if Tobias asked.
Jake brought a half-crushed bag of potato chips the next time he came. They made Tobias’s mouth intensely thirsty in the summer day, but he still savored them as he chewed, because he’d never had anything quite so overpoweringly . . . salty.
Waving a dismissive hand—so casual, like it was nothing, that was how amazing Jake was—Jake had set the bag in front of Tobias, saying he had some earlier. Tobias had gotten his meals lately, but he still took each chip with the same slow reverence with which he always treated Jake’s food. Even when he was hungry, he tried not to show it or do anything gross like a monster would. It was amazing enough that Jake wanted to see him at all, and Tobias wasn’t going to do anything to make him reconsider. Sometimes Jake asked what he liked more, or what he wanted Jake to bring next time, but Tobias usually shrugged or told him to bring whatever he wanted. It was always good, and Tobias was both amazed and glad that Jake had access to good food like that, all the time. Surely if he brought some to Tobias, that meant he ate plenty for himself too.
Tobias knew he could count on Jake to bring him something wonderful, and he didn’t care much past that.
He really didn’t want to ask for anything, like he expected Jake to go out of his way for a monster’s requests. He remembered the last time he had complained to Becca about being hungry. “We’re all hungry, Tobias,” she snapped. “Monsters always are. It’s nothing special or different from anyone around you, and it’s not going to change anytime soon. No one wants to hear about it.” But later that day, she had brought him a hunk of bread half as big as his head, all for him to eat.
As Tobias ate the potato chips, Jake went on full-speed about their drive up the California coast after a rumored pair of djinn. Tobias liked to hear him talk, and Jake knew that Tobias didn’t have much news to tell him or anything cool to share, so he usually did all the talking.
But now, as Jake’s story wound down, Tobias took the opportunity to ask what he’d been hoping to for a while. “What’s it like—out there in the real world?”
Jake stopped completely, looking at him in surprise, but Tobias didn’t look away. He knew it was okay, safe, because Jake wanted Tobias to look him in the eye. He reminded Tobias every visit.
“It’s . . .” Jake trailed off, unusually lost for words. “What do you mean, Toby? What do you want to know?”
Tobias shrugged.
“I don’t know, it’s just—really big.” Jake waved his hands apart. “And people are mostly the same everywhere you go. They believe the same stories, anyway, even if they talk a little different place to place. But it’s mostly the same . . .”
Tobias waited patiently, but Jake looked more uncomfortable than he’d ever seen him. He fidgeted with the peeling rubber on the edge of his tennis shoe, and Tobias’s confidence faded. He was about to tell Jake not to worry about it, about to apologize for asking stupid questions, when Jake started talking.
***
Jake had seen more of the country than just about any kid his age, but now he had trouble fitting it into words. It was hard to remember that Toby had seen nothing Jake had, had no frame for comparison, didn’t understand any of the TV or movie references. No matter how hard Jake tried to describe the small towns he and Dad dropped into for a few days or weeks, or a Little League baseball game, or some idiots faking a haunting in an abandoned house—Tobias’s eyes never showed comprehension. He gazed unwaveringly at Jake, listening to every word, but they weren’t getting anywhere.
