Page 10 of Freak Camp
Even aside from the aggressive secrecy with which Hawthorne guarded his life and his son, he wasn’t an easy man to get along with or to keep in touch.Hawthorne tended to discourage those who tried, intentionally and unintentionally.Roger had only managed it for as long as he did because Leon knew that Roger could keep a secret, and that they could fall back on Roger’s homestead in New Mexico if they needed a pit stop or to bone up for a hunt.For better or for worse, when it came to knowing Hawthorne, Roger was a steady, even-tempered man who’d survived as many hunts as he had by never losing his head, so he could tolerate Leon’s dark, broody moods well enough.
Plus, there was the kid.When Roger first met him, Jake had been a tiny terror who’d learned well his father’s distrust and paranoia of the whole damn world.It had taken a few visits for Jake to decide that Roger wasn’t a threat who needed a pocketknife waved in his direction whenever he entered the room.A few more years had smoothed out Jake’s jumpiness, replacing it with bravado that was at least half-earned.Not even the Dixon kids knew more than Jake about the supernatural or could load a shotgun faster, even if the recoil would still knock him off his feet.
Roger had never had kids of his own or even wanted to go the fatherhood route, but he couldn’t shrug off the knowledge that he was one of maybe a handful of people in the country who had the privilege of knowing who Sally Dixon’s son really was.Nor did it miss his attention that he was one of few familiar, reliable faces in Jake’s world.The kid needed some role models who were no more than half the asshole his father was.
The Hawthornes stayed for dinner, which was sloppy joes, one of Jake’s favorites.The canned corn was less of a favorite, but it went over better than the green beans Roger had tried before.
Afterward Leon asked to borrow a couple of books on vampiric subspecies and settled down in the living room to read and take notes.Roger took Jake onto his back porch, where he had some walkie-talkies that needed fixing.Jake had quick fingers with anything mechanical, and he loved to brag that his dad already taught him everything there was to know about fixing cars.
“So you got to see the inside of Freak Camp, huh?”Roger asked.“There’s probably not a hundred hunters out there who’ve been inside.”
Jake grinned, straightening up.“Yep.Dad knew I could handle it.And it was a breeze, no sweat.”Roger raised his eyebrows, and Jake hastily added, “But I never let my guard down.I know how dangerous freaks are.”
“You bet your butt they are.And remember that just ’cause something felt easy the first time don’t mean it won’t put a Jake-sized hole in the wall the second time.Plenty of hunters get taken out by your standard-issue vengeful spirit when they get cocky.”
Jake nodded.“Dad always tells me that too.”Then he hesitated, and Roger looked up.“Did you know there’s kid freaks in Freak Camp?”
Roger didn’t answer immediately.He had only visited the facility twice since it had opened in 1985.The whole place and the people who ran it left a bad taste in his mouth.He didn’t remember seeing monsters there that weren’t adult-sized, but he couldn’t say he was surprised that the ASC had built a policy to hold younger ones too.“What kind of kid freaks?”
Jake shrugged.“All kinds.I mean, they only look like kids.I get that vampires and shifters can be any age.But they got some weird ones too.Stuff they don’t know how to label.”
Roger watched Jake’s face.Something was bothering the boy, even if he didn’t know how to talk about it.“Y’know,” he said at last, “you’re twice as old as the whole darn ASC and their Freak Camp.By rights, they should be in kindergarten.”
Jake grinned, and Roger set down his tools and stretched.His back still ached from a recent tussle with a mountain troll.They were his specialty, as he lived so close to the Black Range Mountains.Jake was forever asking when he could come along for a mountain troll hunt, and Roger always told him they didn’t make kid-size harnesses for hunting trips, so he had some growing to do.
“Let’s go kick your dad out of the living room and see what’s on TV.”
Jake scoffed, his grin broadening.“I’d like to see you try.”
“Kid, I eat mountain trolls for breakfast.”Roger tilted his head in pretend consideration.“So all right, I’d say I got a fifty-fifty chance against Leon Hawthorne.”
***
True to his word, Dadtook Jake back to Albuquerque, where they’d rented a mobile home back in August.Jake had started fifth grade there at César Chávez Elementary, but just a month later Dad had pulled him out for a hunting road trip through Colorado, Utah, and finally Nevada.Dad had told Jake’s teacher there was a family emergency, which was his usual excuse.Not many people wanted to argue with him or ask questions.
Now Jake had to go back to the boring old routine of riding the school bus, sitting through classes, and waiting for recess like all the boring kids around him.None of them knew a fraction of what he did, and Jake knew that whatever Dad said, the two of them would probably be somewhere else by Christmas, so there wasn’t much point to making buddies.At his last school he used to get into fights, until Dad told him that it wasn’t fair to the other kids to fight someone who was more than half a hunter already.
Sometimes Jake thought about the monster boy he’d met inside Freak Camp.He knew Tobias didn’t have anything like normal school for humans, but it sounded like he learned plenty in that library.It was hard for Jake to picture him while Jake sat in his brightly colored classroom with all the kids’ drawings on the wall and dumb posters telling them how great it was to learn math.Nothing had been colorful in Freak Camp.Out here in Albuquerque, it didn’t feel real.
When school let out, Jake was free to roam the neighborhood, making friends and enemies with older boys, figuring out ways to sneak into the movie theaters or snitch stuff from the convenience stores.The key was to run fast and not show up around the same place again.
Dad had returned to his part-time job at an auto shop.When he couldn’t get enough hours, he spent evenings at the pool halls around town.Dad could run a hell of a game with either pool or poker, and Jake knew how to heat up the frozen dinners by himself.
Sometimes Dad did other stuff that wasn’t pool or poker, and Jake wasn’t supposed to know about it.But he knew enough not to be surprised when they had to leave town in a hurry.That always happened sooner or later.
The weekend before Halloween, Dad told Jake to pack his bag, but they’d be coming back to the trailer.They hit the road at dawn Saturday morning, driving down to the border and into Mexico.
***
Leon settled back withhis bottle of tequila in a broken-down folding chair outside their rental in Chihuahua, Mexico.Twilight was fading into night, and Jake had disappeared an hour ago onto the streets, chasing some boys and exchanging taunts in Spanglish.
This week was the sixth anniversary of his wife’s death, which was also the national day of mourning of the Liberty Wolf Massacre.Leon preferred to spend it as far away from Washington, Dixons, and TV sets as possible.
He and Sally had met in one of those old-fashioned romantic tales: he’d been pinned to the hood of his car by a vampire, and she had leaped out of nowhere and nailed it with a stake.That had been Leon’s introduction to the monsters of the night, the creatures he’d never dreamed were real.
But Sally wanted out of the hunting business, and after Leon’s stint in Vietnam, he also saw the appeal of a quieter life, the kind with picket fences.Running away to elope in Vegas had been her idea, and he’d been just as eager to stick it to her asshole of a father who never saw Leon as anything but West Virginia trash.The Dixons were a blue-blooded Pennsylvania pedigree, like they individually had the Declaration of Independence tattooed on their ass cheeks.In their view, Sally had been slumming it the minute she’d crossed the state border, even if she was chasing a vampire.
Leon wasn’t the one who got her killed, though.That was her sonuvabitch father who had cajoled her back into one more mission, a firefight she had no business being anywhere near.The way the bastard told it, she’d wanted a getaway from home, like it was some fucking marital problems that drove her to it.Like he’d known anything about their marriage or what Leon and Sally had argued about.
