Page 38 of Freak Camp
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 overhis 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 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.
“You’re not a real,” Tobias said, staring down into the monster’s eyes.“You’re just a freak, same as me, and you don’t fuck with other freaks.We fuck back.And don’t call me Baby Freak, muscle boy.Understand?”
Snarling, the monster tried to reach for Tobias with his good arm.
Tobias crushed his windpipe with the plate and heaved the shifter’s considerable bulk off the table.
He was sitting at another table, calmly licking his plate clean, when the guards arrived in belated response to the scuffle.They caught the shapeshifter just as he was staggering to his feet, the throat wound already sloughing.He bellowed and charged at Tobias, and then the guards brought him down.Theyhad silver.
Tobias glanced over, and then back to his plate, satisfied that the situation was resolved.Maybe later he and Hulk would have another round behind the barracks.But the shifter wasn’t a real, a hunter, or a guard.
Very few things could hurt Tobias, and Hulk wasn’t one of them.It was about time Hulk learned that before Freak Camp got him killed.
***
Jake cleaned his shotgunin the living room while Roger sat in his study and pored over an ancient scroll.Then Jake cleaned the rest of the weapons Dad had left him—machete, knife, jury-rigged flamethrower—and gave Roger’s coffee table an extra shine to get the cleaner off.
Finished, he wandered into the study.“Can I help?”
Roger didn’t look up.“Can you read medieval Japanese?”
Jake shifted.“No.”
“Then no.”
Jake sighed and turned for the front door.He needed some air.“Back in twenty,” he called, and got a casual hand wave in reply.
