Page 67 of Fire
“That’s inconvenient,” Jake said. He palmed his gun from the center console and held it loosely as he prepared to get out of their car.
Tobias caught his hand. He forced the best smile he could. “I love you, Jake. No matter how this ends.”
He saw pain flash across Jake’s face, a struggle to control himself, and he gripped Tobias’s hand tight. “I love you too, Toby. Not a single regret.” Jake coughed and tucked his black ski mask into the front pocket of his tactical vest. “Let’s get our shit out of the back.”
The bags seemed heavier when hauling them out of the back seat and cargo area than they had going in. Jake set a backup charge by the gates while Tobias verified the information from Alice one more time. His hands trembled slightly.That could be a problem with a gun.
He looked over at Jake as he returned. They both had several guns, plenty of extra ammo, and three duffels each of other armaments. They certainly weren’t going to move quickly, and if a bullet caught them the right way they would be toast, even with the vests. Emphasis on thetoast.
Jake slammed the liftgate of the CR-V into place, Tobias picked up his last bag, and they headed into the camp.
Alice’s code got them inside. Halfway down the long, fluorescent-lit hallway, Jake, who had the lead, muttered, “Shit.”
Two hunters were coming down the hallway right at them: Tony Giordano and Dennis Beam. Giordano tended to hunt the east coast, but the couple of times he and the Hawthornes had crossed paths, Tobias had thought Giordano and Jake would end up slugging it out, civilians be damned.
And of course, in Tobias’s time, Beam had loved visiting Freak Camp.
Tobias braced himself to be recognized, his hand clenching around the gun he had already drawn. Jake stopped in the hallway, and Tobias came to a halt behind him.
Beam and Giordano also came to a stop ten feet in front of them. One tooth in Beam’s familiar nasty smile had been knocked out since Tobias last saw him.
“Making a delivery, Hawthorne? Didn’t think you had it in you to actually bring a freak in. Thought your MO was just fucking them.” If Beam noticed their bulletproof vests or the weapons they were carrying, he didn’t show it.
“You making a return while you’re at it?” Giordano leered at Tobias and didn’t even bother looking at Jake. “I’ve been dying to see if the stories about Pretty Freak’s mouth are true. So what do you?—”
Jake shot him in the head, and the top of Giordano’s skull vanished in a fine grainy spray. Tobias shot Beam in the chest when he went for his gun. When he fell, Tobias kept moving, and Jake followed, double-tapping Beam as he passed him.
Just watching Jake’s back,Tobias thought as he strode down the hall.Just following the plan.Maybe that explained why he felt numb, and his hands weren’t shaking anymore.
They paused at the next door, and Jake flashed a grin that was just a bit crazy, a little monstrous, and only then did Tobias feel his stomach flip over.
Please, God, let him be okay after this.
“You know what they call two dead sadistic fucks, Toby?” If his reloading was a bit frenetic, Jake didn’t seem to notice. “A good start.”
At least I’m still with him.
“Time for masks,” Tobias said. “Before we go out there.”Before we have to kill anyone else just because they’re running away and can identify us.
Even with the thought, Tobias knew he didn’t regret the bullet that had gone through Beam’s chest, or the one through Giordano’s head. He could remember his own fear, the sneers on their faces, the pain and crawling terror that they had handed out with glee, and he couldn’t, in that moment, think of anything to regret.
Jake pulled his mask from his pocket and pulled it over his head, and Tobias followed suit. From then it went just like the plan—disturbingly like the plan.
Jake sent a quick text to Alice, and the Special Research sirens went off as they pushed open the door and entered the yard. Jake shot the lock off the closest enclosure they came to, and then shot a vamp in the head when it charged at him. The other monsters in that enclosure, probably djinn or witches or something else that looked human, stared between Jake and the open gate with empty eyes.
A guard, running toward Special Research in response to the klaxons, stopped in his tracks as he saw Jake and Tobias. Tobias shot him high on the chest. Seeing a guard brought down, the monsters from the enclosure surged from the pen like a toothy wave and fell on him. The Hawthornes were already moving on as the guard started screaming.
They had talked about that. About laying the charges and opening the cages. Whether or not it would be smarter, and safer, and better for the towns and people closest to Freak Camp and Winnemucca if they just burned the whole damn place to the ground. Neither of them had been able to commit to it. Tobias knew that Jake was thinking ofhimwhen he thought of the freaks pinned inside those walls, burning alive.
Tobias didn’t have that ideal to fall back on. He couldn’t say that he had ever wished better for his fellow inmates than a fast bullet. There were monsters (not only the freaks) within those walls, and the cold part of him knew that it would probably be better if he just brought the whole thing down on everything inside.
Except for Kayla. Except for the handful he had known so long ago that were probably already fucking dead. In the end, he couldn’t burn the place to the ground knowing there were creatures—maybe monsters, maybe not—trapped alive in those damn cages. So he’d gone along with the plan of creating a distraction, of opening cages and barracks as they went, because some part of him couldn’t be the one to blast to pieces all those he had known before.
Honestly, he’d thought he would feel more guilty. But the strange numbness that had seeped into him while they drove only worsened as they laid the charges and shot down the guards and the occasional monster that rushed them. For all that it was dangerous work, and that triggering even one brick of C-4 at the wrong time would be the end of them, it seemed as though the moment Tobias had pulled that mask over his face, he was no longer the boy who had been known as Pretty Freak, who had knelt and been whipped in this yard. He was Tobias Hawthorne, Jake’s partner.
He and Jake split apart at one point, when Jake turned right around a barracks to get to the next pressure point and Tobias kept straight to clear the path. Even with Jake out of sight, Tobias felt confident because he could hear the report of Jake’s shotgun and the occasional shout and jeer. Everything was going according to plan.
Then he saw Crusher ducking around a corner.
