Page 44 of Fire
“Hunters went to collect a suspected monster.” Tobias’s tone was as flat as Director Dixon’s eyes. “They killed everybody. Including ch-children. It’s on video.”
“Fuck,” Jake breathed. They were showing the clip again: children, hunters, guns, blackness. Footage no one was supposed to see.
Abruptly, the din of the mall, the ruthless fluorescents, and the long distance between the Hawthornes and the nearest exit was too much.
“Toby,” Jake said. His fist was balled next to his tray, but he made an effort to keep his voice low and steady. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I need to see this.” Tobias didn’t move his eyes from the screens.
“Yeah, we can watch it at the room. Come on, Toby.”
Tobias glanced at him. Then with a quick nod, his expression still closed, he stood with his tray. He deposited it at the garbage cans, took one last look at the screens, and turned to leave.
Jake followed, leaving his tray behind. As much as he’d wished for the ASC to go up in flames, he felt nothing but a pit in his stomach at the thought of the shitshow to come.
* * *
Like a train wreckplayed over and over again in excruciating slow motion, the endlessly looping “ASC Massacre” story ignited a national firestorm of coverage. Two things were certain: the footage of ASC hunters slaughtering a family was horrific, and it had opened a floodgate of public criticism for the first time in ASC history.
Politicians, pundits, and civilians clamored for an immediate independent investigation, unprecedented budget oversight for the ASC, and the transfer of FREACS control to another government branch for review. Others—a minority of voices, not as loud, but backed by money and power—declared that the freaks and freaklovers in the video had deserved everything they got, even if they looked like children.
The most remarkable response came from a new group of voices that quickly captured the public attention.
A vigil for the Norfleet family, whose Cleveland suburban home had been the scene of the now infamous bloodbath, was held a few days after the tapes broke. Despite a statement of ASC disapproval, the just-announced congressional investigation, and the pundits’ warnings against politicizing a sensational tape before all the facts were known, the extended family refused to cancel the memorial for their loved ones: Mr. John Norfleet, Mrs. Nora Norfleet, their son Daniel and daughters Emily and Megan, the last of whom was the accused psychic.
When the crowd of mourners overflowed the confines of the church and spilled into the streets of Chagrin Falls, lighting the town up with candles, national news picked up the story.
Toby and Jake watched the coverage of the vigil from their motel room. It was on every network.
“I’ve never heard—” Toby stopped. Jake looked at him. “This has never... happened before, has it? This part, I mean. With all these people?”
“Hell no.” Jake’s fingers ached from gripping his bottle of Jack too tight, and he flexed them. “The ASC bastards do what they want, and people don’t talk about it. Ever. Freaks don’t get funerals.” He took another swallow. Toby was going to have to put him to bed, but Jake would make it up to him tomorrow. The whiskey was medicine for the churn in his gut that had nothing to do with dinner.
Growing up, he hadn’t questioned all he’d seen inside that camp or heard elsewhere: all the kids like Toby who had been torn from their families or point-blank murdered. Monsters hadn’t scared his father, so they didn’t scare Jake either, but the Hawthornes never hesitated to run from the ASC.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Toby asked, more quietly.
“Fuck if I know, Toby.” In Jake’s experience the ASC always won, but he’d never seen this before. Never seen the ASC lose their ruthless control of the narrative. Never seen every channel give airtime to the sobbing aunt, and the grandparents of the slaughtered children declaring that their loved ones had beeninnocent, no matter what the ASC said. And holy shit, they had a hell of a crowd. A sea of candle lights.
Over the next week, the Hawthornes waited for the ASC to come out swinging, with outraged defenses, accusations, and pointed question about the kind of family that harbors freaks. Instead, the media’s focus turned to new vigils and protests in other cities across the country, organized by others who had lost siblings, cousins, parents, and friends to the ASC.
The defiance caught like wildfire. Newspapers published local testimonies from those who’d lost loved ones years ago, sometimes more than a decade, and had never been able to speak of it before. Not all those lost had died in a storm of bullets; many were picked up by a black van as they returned home from school or errands, never to be seen again. Now, for the first time, people were demanding answers, askingwhy, and calling for proof they’d never received that their loved one had been a supernatural menace.
Jake still wasn’t sure what in the universe had come off its wheels, but something was definitely out of whack. Freaks were the worst sort of family skeleton, and households with a confirmed freak as a relative were often shunned by their community until they left the area for a life where no one remembered the outcast. Their pictures were removed from photo albums and taken off the mantelpiece, and people tried hard to forget them. Publicly acknowledging their existence had been the ultimate taboo—until now.
The nonstop footage of the ASC massacre scraped Jake’s nerves like worn-out brakes screaming down a mountain road. Every shot reminded him of what he could have lost before he ever realized what he might have, and it added another layer of guilt for all those who had lost the Toby in their life. He wanted to smash every screen showing the footage, or at least shut them off with prejudice. But he couldn’t because Toby had developed a fixation.
Toby read the papers obsessively, with the same intensity that he brought to researching a hunt. He stopped to watch the coverage every time he glimpsed it, and he turned on the news the moment they got back to their motel room.
Jake didn’t like the look in Toby’s eyes as he watched the talking heads debate the pros and cons of the “freaks” mowed down on film. Jake didn’t recognize that look; he didn’t know if it was fear, horror, or some godawful, returning combination of Toby’s old fear, withdrawal, and numb acceptance of everything thrown at him.
Once, in their motel room eating Chick-fil-A before a hunt, Jake could barely force his sandwich down listening to the latest news hour.
“. . . another protest in D.C. this past weekend in support ofshutting down the Facility for Research, Elimination, and Containment of Supernaturals, or, as it is commonly called, FREACS. Very little is known about its operation and personnel, and this lack of transparency has become a sticking point in debates over the last week, especially as more families have come forward with personal stories about alleged overreaches of authority.”
The wooden-faced news anchor spoke before images of long crowds marching in front of the White House, Capitol Hill, and the ASC headquarters. Many protesters carried signs with slogans like “The ASC is the REAL Monsters’ Nest” and “Victim Not Freak.” Some even read “Family Not Freak.”
The images cut away to a studio set with Anderson Cooper and an older man with a shiny bald head, captioned as the senior U.S. senator from Montana.
