Page 60 of Fire
Jake charged up the stairs and Roger expected his fist, but instead Jake shoved something else into his chest, pushing him back a step. It was a worn VHS.
“We’re gonna watch this,” Jake snarled. “And then you’re going to fucking explain yourself.” His hair stuck up from his head as though he had been pulling at it, and his eyes were bloodshot, shadowed with exhaustion.
Roger held the tape away from him, like it might bite. “Okay.” He looked up to where Tobias sat on the trunk lid of the Eldorado, looking over the junked cars like they might have answers to a question he hadn’t even figured out how to ask. “You coming in, Tobias?”
“Not while you watch that,” Tobias said.
The interrogation was almost worse this time, even with the added distance of grainy surveillance footage and some five years. Maybe because he knew what was coming.
The video didn’t show Tobiaslookingat him, which still burned in Roger’s nightmares: ones where he hadn’t made the call on time. Ones where he watched Tobias die in that camp and had to tell Jake. Instead, he had Jake’s eyes watching him with more contempt and hatred than Roger had ever seen on his face before.
When the camera showed Roger walking out of the room, leaving Tobias alone with the men torturing him, Jake hit the pause button.
“That’s why I called you.” Roger’s voice sounded weak and thin even to himself. “I couldn’t... I couldn’t...”
“You watched and youwalked out.” Jake’s voice shook. Roger couldn’t look him in the eye, but he felt certain that if he did, he’d see tears there. “What the fuck, Harper? You don’t know how much I just want to... fuck, knock the shit out of you, even though that does no damn good for Toby.”
“You’re right. But go ahead.” Roger wanted it, a clean moment of pain and recrimination.
It was harder to think that when Jake’s fist crashed into his face, knocking him a few paces back. Roger caught himself before he went down, absorbing the blow in his bones.
When he looked up, Jake was gone.
Roger had lowered himself into his chair and was gingerly feeling his aching jaw when Tobias came into the room. His expression unnervingly neutral (though not blank like in those videos, thank Christ), he took one look at Roger and headed for the kitchen. When he reappeared, he was holding an ice pack.
Roger had not realized he could feel worse. “Kid, I can’t take that from you.”
Tobias looked at him for a moment, then made a helpless gesture. “I’m here now. And you’ve always been nothing but good to me, Roger, even when you thought I was a grade-A freak. So don’t let that bruise get even worse than it is because you think you owe me your suffering.”
Roger felt the pain in his chest from watching that tape burst, like a lanced boil. There was still a hell of a lot of gunk and disgusting crap there, but with work he might be able to scrape it away, and maybe get to some kind of wound that could heal clean. He took the ice pack, lifting it to his jaw.
“Besides,” Tobias went on, “There was nothing you could do, and I’m out now. It’s done. And Jake will forgive you too, it just... might take some time for that rage to burn out.”
“I get it,” Roger said. In Jake’s place, he didn’t know that he would have stopped at one punch. And if he were in Tobias’s...
Fuck. How could he have ever looked at this kid and thought he was a monster?
“I don’t,” Tobias said. “And I’m afraid to try.”
* * *
Later that afternoon,when Jake settled down to watch the rest of the tapes, Tobias took the Eldorado and left the salvage yard behind him. He headed into town to find the library and bury himself in the dustiest, most unused corner. Tobias didn’t much like to think about why, but the truth was he couldn’t bear to be around Jake for another minute.
The drive to Truth or Consequences had been hell. Totally silent, other than the calls to Roger to give him as much warning as possible. No radio, and Tobias couldn’t think of focusing on a book in the face of their world ending, as it clearly was. They’d had a good run of six years, far more time than Tobias had thought possible in the beginning. He’d started to believe they could double or even quadruple that before Tobias’s past came back to bite them.
Tobias had spent most of the tense, gut-clenching drive trying to think of who had sent the tapes. It was the kind of malicious joke that any of the guards would’ve thought a laugh, but why had it taken so long, if that was all it was? Which of them would’ve gone to the trouble of packing it up for the mail instead of throwing it through the damn window? And that didn’t even touch on all those goddamn labels, so neatly printed.
There was only one sensible answer, and Tobias’s breath caught in his chest. But even for the Director, these damn tapes were strangely indirect. Wouldn’t he just send a team to collect Tobias? Why torment Jake?
Because Jake had displeased him. That had to be it. Henry Miller had sent him a report after their run-in, probably because he’d seen them kissing outside the bar. Of course. The Director always knew and would never fail to punish a monster that was trying to pretend to be more.
Tobias sat down between the library aisles, put his head between his knees and forced himself to breathe slowly.
At least they’d made it to Roger’s. Jake had delivered the promised blow, so surely his rage would start to ebb. Roger could help him. And maybe when Tobias got back (he’d stay away until the library closed, then find something to eat in the town), Jake wouldn’t be brimming with barely contained violence, the kind that telegraphed to every nerve in Tobias’s body the certainty ofa great deal of painif he stayed in range.
He knew, intellectually, that Jake would never hurt him. That he’d break his own fist on a wall first. That knowledge didn’t help the gut-deep terror he felt seeing Jake that angry. He’d felt a panic attack no more than a few breaths away all day.
Worse still was the knowledge from last night that Jake wasn’t listening to anything right now, that Tobias had no way of reaching him. Unless Roger could break through and shake some sense into him, Tobias knew nothing but ashes lay ahead. There was no going back to what they’d had even forty-eight hours ago.
