Page 71 of Fire
Tobias caught him and hauled him up firmly under his arm. Blood slicked his hands, and his nose filled with the sharp copper tang. Too familiar, here. “He’s dead.”
“Toby, gotta...” Jake strained toward where the Director’s corpse lay behind the desk.
Tobias relented, bringing him there. They both stood over the body, its open eyes and shattered flesh, bone and gore where the Director’s heart had been. Jake swung his gun out and put a shot into the head from barely two feet away. When he looked up, Tobias expected to see rage in his face, the mask of fury and pain that had become his regular expression for the last few weeks. Instead, what he saw was a sort of grim peace that Tobias didn’t understand at all.
“Okay,” Jake said. “Let’s... let’s set the last charges and light up this shithole.”
Together, they staggered out of the office and down the hall to the places they’d pinpointed on the blueprints as focal points for the explosives. Tobias laid more charges in the tech room, with special care to wipe and then light the servers, while Jake tried to stay upright and alert enough to shoot or distract anyone who tried to approach. Across the hall, Tobias saw a storage room filled with files and racks of DVDs, and after making sure Jake could hold himself steady against the wall, he went to set a charge in there as well.
He stopped just inside the door. There were neat folders, tall stacks of DVDs, and a box of jumbled VHS tapes in a corner, all worn, some unspooled or cracked. A booklet of mailing labels lay on the desk next to them.
He stood for a long minute, just staring, until Jake shouted for him.
“Toby! We gotta go!”
Tobias turned. Jake had his injured arm tied tight to his chest after their crude first aid, but he was still far too pale and swaying on his feet.
“Yeah.” Tobias gave one last glance at the room with the tapes. “Let’s go.”
Outside, the yard and compound was pandemonium, with freaks rushing everywhere, some swarming guards and falling by the dozens, others trying to climb the walls. Some had even succeeded and were helping pull others up.
One guard, no one Tobias recognized, took a shot at them even as a muzzled vamp grabbed his shoulder. Tobias felt a bullet fly past his face before the vamp spun the guard around and ripped his throat out with his fingernails, twisting his victim so that the blood ran into his mouth through the muzzle.
Beyond the dying guard, a ragged man and woman, each with only one remaining hand, moved together in a complicated dance that seemed to keep the guards and other monsters at bay. With their final synchronized gesture, a section of wall crumbled, and more of the monsters rushed toward the new exit.
Tobias and Jake headed in the opposite direction across the camp’s yard and met no more resistance, even though a handful of monsters raced in the same direction. When they reached the service entrance, Tobias was grateful to find the corridors empty as Jake leaned more heavily against him, his steps stumbling more often. The doors leading out had been left wide open, and nothing was left of Giordano’s and Beam’s bodies but bloody smears leading to the exit.
Tobias barreled shoulder-first through the final door and back into the sunlight on the other side. Tobias blinked in the brightness. Strange to think this was the same light that bathed the bloody scene behind them. Impossible to believe that the world inside Freak Camp was the same as outside of it.
Their Honda CR-V was the only car left in the lot. Probably the escapees had found car keys in Beam’s and Giordano’s pockets.
Tobias eased Jake into the Honda’s passenger seat and kissed him, quick and hard, and then got into the driver’s side.
They were half a mile from Freak Camp, passing the occasional monster also fleeing that place, when Tobias hit the code on his phone to trigger the blasting caps. The earth shuddered, and a flash bright as a supernova half-blinded Tobias through the rearview mirrors, followed by fire that shot skyward. Tobias could feel the heat on the back of his head and wondered if the Honda’s gas tanks could light up if the fire caught them.
Tobias glanced back at the mirror, just once, while the fireball that had once been Freak Camp rose into the sky and rivaled the sun for brightness.
When he looked back to the road, his hands were shaking. Bright spots swam in his vision, not completely explained by staring into the flames. He checked that Jake was still breathing, extended one hand to grip Jake’s knee, and then turned his attention to the road. In another five miles, if no one was on their tail, he’d call Roger to let him know they’d made it out alive.
There was a weird lightness in his chest, a dizzy relief buzzing in his skin, that he wanted to blame on adrenaline and fear and Jake’s injury. Maybe because of the seconds that he had thought Jake was dead.
But he was afraid to admit that maybe that C-4 had burned some of his fear away, along with the foundations of Freak Camp.
The Director had told him that the freak in him would always rejoice at destruction like this, at the slaughter of humans, at monsters winning the day and living to kill again. Jake had told him that fuckers like the Director and guards needed to die, that they were worse than any of the inmates.
But the Director would never be able to tell him anything again. Tobias could let his poison seep through him as it had once done, or he could trust Jake’s instinct, believe that Jake saw him truly.
With the open road speeding before them, the ruins of Freak Camp falling farther and farther behind, Tobias already knew it was no choice at all.
Beside him, Jake shifted gingerly. He reached up to touch his head wound, but stopped before Tobias’s hand could do more than twitch on his leg. “Nice fireball.” He looked over at Tobias, his face pale, bloodless under the blood, exhausted—but he was alive, satisfaction written in every line of his face. “You okay?”
Tobias let out a shaky breath. A hell of a lot had changed since the first time they had been on the highway together, driving away from Freak Camp, but some things never would. “I’m good, Jake. No regrets.”
EPILOGUE
Before the drive to Freak Camp, Toby, Jake and Roger had discussed the importance of keeping the lowest of profiles afterward. Like, low enough to be subterranean. But of all the going to ground options, they ultimately agreed it was best just to return to Boulder. The delivery guy from the best Chinese place knew them, and it wasn’t like their neighbors would be more surprised to see them back from the road at this time than any other.
Roger had connected them with a doctor whose Idaho clinic was open after-hours for a specific kind of cash-carrying clientele, and he did a brusque but thorough job of fixing up Jake’s arm and scalp wound, no questions asked. They paid him in cash, and after a few days recuperating in a cabin for which Roger had given them a key, they headed back to Colorado.
