Page 79 of Freak Camp
“Come in!”the Director called.
The door swung open, and Crusher walked in.The first thing he saw was Tobias, and Tobias could see the crazy flickering in his eyes.When the guard licked his lips, Tobias couldn’t stop himself from making a small sound.
“Good evening, Mr.Sloan.”The Director stepped closer to Tobias and rested a hand on his shoulder.“Mr.Sloan has so kindly volunteered to help me.He wants you to be a good,obedientmonster as well, don’t you, Mr.Sloan?”
The guard scowled.“Call me Crusher.”
Momentarily distracted from tracing the scars on Tobias’s back and his hip, the Director looked up.“No,” he said.His nails dug into the bruises he’d left on Tobias’s hip the day before, and Tobias gasped and jerked against the chains.
Crusher made an involuntary noise, and Tobias—so close he could count the wrinkles across the Director’s forehead—saw the brief flash of a smile before the Director’s hand reached the raw nail marks on his inner thigh and clamped down.Tobias writhed harder, and Crusher gasped like he did when Tobias knew he was about to be on his knees.But he wasn’t, because it was the Director that had tied him up today, the Director who was hurting him now.
“Is that a problem, Mr.Sloan, with me using your proper name, giving you the respect you are entitled as a real human being and a guard at FREACS?Or do you want to leave and wallow with the other monsters?”
Crusher didn’t answer for a second.Tobias could hear him breathing, and it almost matched his own for raggedness, panic.Then the Director’s hand jerked, Tobias choked, and Crusher took a desperate breath.“No,” he said.
The Director’s voice snapped like a whip.“Show me some respect!No,what?”
“No,sir.”
The Director pulled out another noise from Tobias, and then he gentled his voice.“You want to be useful, don’t you?To help me make this little piece of shit an obedient, useful monster, don’t you, Mr.Sloan?”
“Yes,” Crusher gasped.“God, yes.Fuck, yeah, let me—”
The Director slid his fingers beneath Tobias’s collar and pulled him closer, pushed him away, made him sway.“Use proper words, Mr.Sloan.”
Crusher took a shuddering breath.“Yes, sir, I want that.Director Dixon, sir.”
The Director smiled again, so that only Tobias could see it, and walked to the table with his instruments.He handed an electric prod to Crusher.“When I tell you to, Mr.Sloan,” he said, and then picked up a riding crop before turning to Tobias.
“Let’s see what you know,” the Director said, swinging the riding crop casually in his hand.He brought it up and rested it on Tobias’s neck below the collar.“I have one question for you, 89UI6703.What are you?”
Tobias had been called a thousand things, had been told he was so many dirty things, but he had tried to forget them, tried to block them from his mind.Now, between the crop and the electric prod, he dragged out the names and curses.Eventually he found it easier to remember them.
“Enough,” the Director said at last, when Tobias had been reduced to blindness, stuttering incomprehensibly from pain and fear, shoulders burning from jerking at the chain, wrists one massive bruise from holding his weight when his legs gave out.The Director—looking satisfied, as though a project had just begun to show promise—stepped back to the small table with his instruments and began carefully cleaning the head of the crop.
“You see how well he responds?”he said conversationally, even though Crusher looked too absorbed in the way Tobias’s body shuddered to pay attention.“How thorough and creative he can be?It shows a decent level of intelligence and observation, but really says almost nothing about the freak’s true level of understanding.Even a moderately trained animal can produce rote responses to avoid pain.My goal—ourgoal—is to instill belief and understanding where previously there was only memorization.Do you understand me, Mr.Sloan?”
Crusher snapped his attention to the Director’s face, clearly struggling to recall the question.“He can’t just say the words.He has to mean them.”
The Director’s mouth quirked in a small smile.“Exactly.Very good, Mr.Sloan.”
Tobias could do very little but hang and sob.Compared with interrogations he had had in the past, the pain had been relatively light.Even compared with a hard whipping, the damage was minimal.
But it was worse, so much worse, because Tobias hadn’t been able to go away.He had to stay there, thinking, searching his mind for every degrading thing he had ever been called, for everything he had ever been told a monster was.He could have just given in, stayed silent, retreated, but the difference in pain between the crop and the prod was so vast that hecouldn’t.He couldn’t retreat when there was a way,any waythat the pain could be less.
Usually after a while, the guards and hunters didn’t give a damn what he was saying.They never had more than a handful of questions for him, questions he never had an answer to, and when he degenerated into mindless sounds and begging, it was what they had really wanted from the beginning.
The first time a “No,please,” left his lips, the Director paused, grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him until his feet left the floor.Tobias noted absently, as he gasped from the pressure on his neck, that the Director’s arm didn’t so much as tremble from supporting his weight.
“Did I give you permission to beg?”he asked.
“N-n-no, sir.”
“That’s what I thought.”The Director pushed him away and glanced at Crusher.“Twice.Space them out.Long shocks.”
Tobias tried desperately after that not to beg, to keep answering the Director’s single, horrible question, but pleading had been trained into him for so long he couldn’t stopplease don’tandno, Godfrom slipping out.And every time the Director gave his tight little nod, and Crusher jabbed the prod into his skin.
The first time he had saidGod—he wasn’t sure he believed in any kind of god, it was just a word that monsters used when they were in pain, though he knew some religious theory from his reading—the Director had whipped him hard, three or four times, then dragged him off his feet again.
