Page 49 of Fire
Finally her training won out, and she spoke with careful neutrality. “Thank you for all your service, especially in the camp. I know it’s a... hard placement. Not many can handle it.”
He glanced at her quickly, then returned to navigating the D.C. streets, but she thought she sensed an easing of tension. “Charlie, that dumbass, never should have shown that. Shouldn’t even have had it. What happens in Freak Camp stays in Freak Camp, that’s the way... the way it should be. It’s a hell of a life, but we do what we have to. I couldn’t do what you do, with the cameras and the... well, all of it.”
She nodded.
When they stopped at her condo, Matthew looked at her for a long, careful moment. “Get some rest. You’re important, Alice.”
She forced a smile. “Yeah. I’ll just... it hit me.” She tried to make a brusque, dismissive gesture. “I couldn’t watch, it was... too much alcohol.” Alice couldn’t tell if he believed her.
“Yeah,” Matthew said. “It hit me that way the first time. But it gets... it gets easier.” He got out of her car, handed her keys that she took numbly. “Drink water and take a couple aspirin before bed. That’s what I do.”
Only when he was out of sight, cell phone in hand to call a cab to take him back to his own place, did Alice notice she was shaking.
* * *
The next morning,Alice called in sick to work.
She didn’t get out of bed until past noon, something she hadn’t done in years. When she could no longer deny (or block) the light peeking through her curtains, and her twisting and turning began to feel as smothering as the crushing horror that still filled her mind, Alice threw herself out of bed. She did not open the curtains.
Alice knew that eating was something she should do, but when she reached the kitchen her mind drew a blank. After standing and staring for too long at the gleaming metal of her fridge door, she filled a glass of water and sat, heavily, at her dining room table. For over an hour, she concentrated on nothing but emptying that glass.
Perhaps she could forget that last night had ever happened. Alice tried to imagine wiping that video and the avid eyes of the guards watching it from her mind. Going into work like nothing happened. She thought of looking into Jonah’s face, and in a sudden rush was certain she would be sick.
Alice lunged for the trash can, hitting her knees hard on the tile-patterned linoleum—then the nausea passed. Shaky, she stood and dragged the trash can to her table before sitting back down. She took another sip of water.
She had enough in her bank account for a one-way flight out of the country. She’d heard that Australia was nice this time of year, and London was big enough to get lost in without trying. The dollar could buy you a lot in Brazil.
As the light began to fade through the tightly shut blinds, she was no closer to a decision. Her stomach ached, but she still couldn’t imagine eating anything and holding it down. Moving slowly and mechanically, Alice pulled off the awful clothes from last night and put on a pair of pajamas. She let herself curl up on her sofa, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, the home improvement channel playing with the sound off.
The morning after that, she woke up aching, her face smashed into her battered couch cushions. Alice got up, changed into a new set of clothes, threw away everything perishable in her refrigerator, and packed a small bag. Her hand was shaking when she hit the speed dial for work.
“Thank you, I’m feeling much better,” she told the receptionist. “But I’ve gotten an urgent call from Florida. I’m going to have to head there directly to handle it. Will you please let my staff know I’ll be out of touch for a while? This could take a couple of weeks.”
She hung up, plugged her phone into its charger, and then left it behind in the apartment.
Alice drove north, into Pennsylvania farmland. She paid cash in advance for two weeks at a tiny cottage on the outskirts of a town. She bought food—simple, nutritional things that weren’t much effort—and then dumped them on the rickety table and curled up in the cottage’s listing recliner.
There, out of sight of the cameras and courthouses and liars that made up her world, she let the tears come. There wasn’t a single box of tissues in the whole damn cottage, but the previous tenant had an extra case of toilet paper. She went through six rolls, the damp tissue forming a small hill next to her chair. She took a walk at sunset, inhaling deeply the frosty air under the trees, feeling it sting her swollen eyes.
Jonah had been more than her boss, more than the de facto Dixon patriarch since Elijah’s passing. He’d been her personal role model, a steadfast leader for more years than she could count, someone who had made her proud of her job and what she did. She had loved him and believed in him, their mission, and in dedicating her life to fighting the supernatural in the best way she knew how: by serving the family, protecting the ASC’s independence, and creating a barrier between the ugliness of the hunt and the innocence of the civilian.
What foul thing had she spent her life defending?
When the weekend rolled around, Alice knew she had to leave. She had enough with her to get to some international destination; she only had to empty her bank balance. Then she would disappear. There was nothing in the ASC worth saving. She needed to rebuild herself somewhere new.
Two days after she made that decision, when she knew she had to go or she would be found out as a traitor to the ASC, Alice realized that she could not run away.
Her career might have been focused on the public relations side of the family business, but she had always truly believed the hunter dogma that monsters were evil: a scourge on the world, a danger to the innocent, and something that she as a hunter and a Dixon had a duty to oppose.
Even now, she didn’t think that was wrong. But she couldn’t think of Jonah Dixon, the Director of the ASC, ordering a cowering boy beaten for not begging quickly enough without recognizing a different kind of monster in him.
Alice wasn’t religious, but she believed in the human soul and that evil could defile and corrupt it until there was nothing human left.
The family she had been born into, the organization she had devoted her professional life to, was rotten from Jonah all the way down to peons like Charlie, and Alice could not face another day of complicity to keep it afloat.
She had come to Pennsylvania to find her footing, to identify who she was apart from the cousin and the family she’d idolized and shaped her life around. She still felt unmoored and breakable, but she had one thought grounding her, defining her in the shards of her old life:I am not that.
“This is my line,” she said aloud, to hear the words. “And I will not cross it.”
