Page 47 of Fire
“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.”
