Page 29 of Freak Camp
***
The day Elmer got aname, Tobias was standing quietly in roll call when one of the shapeshifters—a too-thin, brown-haired man with livid burn scars over his arms from hot silver applied during interrogations—cracked.
Victor called 92SS448 to no response, and when Hank went in to “hit him awake,” the shifter went for his throat with teeth that were not designed for a human mouth.Elmer and Lucas—working “Dixon” shift, as the other guards called it when a high-and-mighty Dixon tried to do their job for a day—moved at the same time, but Elmer was closer.He aimed a vicious blow at the shifter’s head.
Shapeshifters, especially desperate ones, had reflexes that put normal humans to shame.The shifter knocked Elmer’s club out of his hand and reached for him with hands showing long claws of bone through the sloughing, pink flesh.
The guards went for their guns, not sure they would be able to fill the freak with bullets before Elmer got his heart ripped out.The monsters watched, not sure if they should jump in or run.
Then Elmer Sloan caught the shifter’s hand, a fierce grin on his face.Before the shifter could scream, Elmer had caught his other hand and twisted until it looked more like a dead spider than a hand.
The shifter dropped when Elmer kicked out his right kneecap.Slowly and deliberately, the guard stepped on the shifter’s shoulder and ground his sharp, iron boot heel down.The grin on his face never wavered.With more pressure, the shifter screamed and writhed.Everyone in the yard could hear the shoulder bones breaking.Then Elmer kicked him in the head until the shifter’s jaw broke, and he moved to the other side and broke the other shoulder.
When Elmer moved to the shifter’s hipbone, Hank stepped forward.“Easy, Crusher,” he said.“I think he’s fucking down.”
Elmer looked up at him—pupils blown and breathing uneven—and Hank, realizing what he’d said, stepped back.“Sloan ...I’m sorry, man, slip of the tongue, I didn’t mean—”
“No, I like it,” Elmer said.“Crusher.”
The silence after that stretched like a gagged witch on a rack.
Lucas Dixon finally broke it.“You should get that freak out of the yard,” he said.“He’s getting the dirt all bloody.”
A couple of guards laughed nervously, and Hank moved toward the unconscious body.
“Can I?”Crusher asked, stepping forward.Hank flinched away from him, then clearly regretted it.He glanced at Lucas.
Lucas sighed.“Who put me in fucking charge?Yeah, sure, go for it, Slo—Crusher.Special Research.”
Crusher smiled and leaned down to pick up the freak.The movement was almost gentle.
No one watched where he went—if the monster never actually ended up in Special Research, no one would ask questions, as long as the monster finally ended up in the incinerators.Whatever happened to him after Crusher took him out of the yard, that shifter never came back.Hank turned in his resignation, someone put Lucas in charge of a monster retrieval team, but Elmer “Crusher” Sloan stayed, made friends, and enjoyed his work more and more every day.
***
Full moon was a badtime for everyone, not just for the werewolves and other lunar-centric monsters who were moved to Intensive Containment for their dangerous periods.The guards had lists of who to round up, but sometimes they forgot, and sometimes they made deliberate mistakes.Mistakes such as taking monsters that had nothing to do with the moon, either because they wanted to, or because those monsters were “necessary for transformation-based experiments.”And sometimes the mistake went the other way, so none of the monsters could feel safe after the barracks doors were locked for the night.
Once, when Tobias had still been small enough to curl up with Becca in one bunk, the guards had forgotten a name, or maybe a paper-pusher somewhere had filled out the forms wrong, and a wolf cut its way through half the barracks and ripped the heart out of a guard before she was taken down.
And even if the guards did everything right, if the werewolves ended up in Intensive Containment and all the other monsters remained in their beds, it felt no safer.The camp wasn’t that big, and whoever had designed Intensive Containment hadn’t bothered to add sound insulation.No matter what kind of gags they used, anyone with ears in Freak Camp could hear the screaming and snarling, no matter how they tried to drown it out.
Some monsters speculated that werewolves didn’t have to make noises while they were transforming, and the screams were caused by thethingsthat the guards did in Intensive Containment to try to stop them from changing forms.The werewolves wouldn’t talk about what happened to them.Other monsters weren’t sure if it was so terrible that no one dared speak, or if the werewolves couldn’t remember anything but three days of pain.
Every full moon, the population of Freak Camp decreased.
Tobias didn’t know what happened in Intensive Containment.He hoped never to know.Nothing in Freak Camp drained new monsters so fast of their hope, their defiance, than three or four days there and the knowledge that this would happen the next month, every month, until the end of their lives.
He watched, four days after the full moon, to see if Marco would come back.It wasn’t that he cared.He couldn’t care, and Marco hadn’t been nice, and there was no reason that he should care.So he didn’t.
They were all standing in roll call, and this was when the surviving werewolves would limp back through the gates, eyes bruised and sunken from sleep deprivation, sometimes bleeding through their clothes from silver lacerations.They showed unnervingly little damage other than the exhaustion and the occasional cut.The werewolf transformation sped up healing and prevented anything other than silver from leaving injuries.
Marco was there, limping to a place in the new line, mouth tight and eyes vacant.He didn’t look at Tobias.He didn’t look at anything, really.But when Crusher moved toward him, he cringed.
Crusher saw the response and grinned his brightest, scariest smile.He cupped himself through his pants and stared at Marco, and when the boy didn’t respond, he laughed and turned to the rest of the line of silent, broken monsters.
Tobias felt queasy in a way that had nothing to do with hunger cramps before breakfast.He might not know what happened in Intensive Containment, but he thought he knew now what Crusher had done to Marco.Something the guards did to monsters, usually to the female ones.Sometimes it happened in the showers, but Becca had always made sure he didn’t watch.He knew, though, that it involved close body contact, a great deal of pain, and it broke monsters very fast.
Marco looked the same as other monsters who had been hurt that way: hollowed out, like he had been cut into so many times that the bits of him that made him strong and defiant had been scooped out.
