Page 46 of Freak Camp
“What are you doing to him?”she cried.“Get your hands off my husband!Let him go!”She swung the shotgun around.
Lucas, who had been securing the second floor, was suddenlythere, snatching the gun out of her hands, breaking the arm she swung at him and kicking in one of her knees.She went down, keening with pain and rage, but still tried to go for Lucas’s eyes with her good hand.Crooked-Teeth Dixon emptied his clip of tranquilizers into her back.
Lucas stood, pushing back his hair with his free hand.“Fucking freak lover.They’re worse than freaks.”He spat on the floor.
The taller Dixon—who had been examining the young, dead hunter—looked up.“So, what do we do with the bitch?”He wrinkled his nose in distaste at the woman lying motionless on the floor.“I suppose we can’t just shoot her and drop her body at the dump?Let her feed all the other nasties, since she wanted to so bad.”He smirked at Crooked-Teeth, who chuckled.Roger, not for the first time, had the urge to slug a Dixon in the face.
Lucas shot his cousins a look and turned to the two young hunter trainees, horrified and shell-shocked, staring from the monster to the unconscious woman to the lifeless body of their comrade-in-arms, whose blood was now soaking into the couch.Roger wished he could say something comforting to them, but he didn’t know what he could say that wouldn’t be either a lie or useless.This was part of hunting life.Even if you were lucky, people you knew died.If you were unlucky, it was the people who mattered the most.
“Two stretchers,” Lucas told them.
The kids, grateful for a direction, ran for the door.
When they were out of earshot, Lucas turned back to his cousin.“We’ll dump her in with the roogy.If the tranqs don’t kill her and he doesn’t kill her, we’ll let Freak Camp deal with her.”
Sweat chilled on Roger’s skin.He knew what happened at Freak Camp.Usually he tried not to think about it.“She’s human,” he said.“We know she’s human.”
Lucas shrugged.“Can’t besure’til we get her inside, can we?”He didn’t say it like he expected Roger to believe it.He was just sharing the line they used for civilians so that everyone could keep their stories straight.
“You son of a bitch,” Roger said.Lucas raised an eyebrow, and the other two Dixons paused in their cleanup activities, turning to keep their eyes on him, ready for trouble.Roger would have been an idiot to ignore the way their hands drifted to their guns.“She’shuman.”
Lucas threw up his hands.“What do you want me to do, Harper?You want me to just dump her with local police, have her tell them some bullshit story about how armed strangers came in, beat her, and stole her husband?Legislation against freak lovers ain’t what it should be.They might take the bitch’s word, and then ASC’s gonna have to get into it with local law enforcement, and somewhere along the way we’re gonna have to drag her through the legal system for shooting that kid over afreak.I mean, she’s guilty as hell of sheltering a freak, killing an officer of the law, and pissing off the Dixons.Faster, easier, less of a hassle for everyone just to dump her in with the freaks she loves.See if she still loves them when she finds out what they really are.”
Roger took a breath, ignoring the ringing in his ears.“You do this a lot, Lucas?”
Lucas shrugged.“They’re all monsters, Harper.Don’t care if they’re freaks or fucking them.World’s a safer place with less of this shit on the street.You gonna be a problem?”
Roger didn’t answer.He knew the fight was already lost.Dixons got their way, whether it was on a public stage or in private scenes like this.No witnesses, just silent and complicit accomplices and assholes like Roger himself, who told themselves that kicking up a fuss would do no one any good.Even if it also felt like the truth.
Hunting had never used to make him this kind of ill before the Liberty Wolf Massacre.Back then a hunter could hold to his own code that let him sleep the best he could at night.Now it was the Dixons’ way or getting arrested for interference with ASC operations.Roger didn’t kid himself that if you were already on their bad side, you’d end up in a black van headed to Nevada.
“Don’t call me again, Lucas,” Roger said finally.“Not when you’re storming a civilian’s home.”
“Freak lover,” Lucas corrected, “not civilian.But I’ll pass the word along.Thanks for the time.Considering your moral objections, I’m guessing you don’t want your share of the cash, huh?And you probably won’t help load the bitch in the van, either.”He grinned.
There was the sense of humor that Roger remembered wanting to smack out of the snot-nosed kid.“Fuck yourself, Dixon.”
The Dixons laughed, just as the two surviving kids came back in, each one pulling a stretcher awkwardly through the door.They looked confused but didn’t ask about the joke.
“Not today, Roger,” Lucas said.“There’s folks that do that for me.Enjoy your sanctimonious life!”He waved as Roger walked out the door, feeling sick.He didn’t look at the Dixons, the rougarou, the woman, the kids, or the darkening stain where one of their team had bled out his life.
Maybe the tranqs will stop her heart before she gets to FREACS, he thought.That would be a mercy.
After all, the tranquilizers had been designed to bring down a full rougarou.No one knew what they would do to a real, non-supernatural human.
He buried the thought that there was no way in hell that that should be any measure of comfort.
***
Speeding almost a hundredmiles an hour down a deserted Alabama highway, Jake found his eyes blurring, crushing the mile markers and the sharp bright stars into intermittent flashes of light that sketched out his world.
Or maybe it was the blood loss.
But probably not.The whatever-the-fuck warthog monster had barely touched him, and he had tied the injury off right away.More likely it was the concentration required to keep the Eldorado steady on the road with one hand, keep pressure on Dad’s gut wound with the other, and, above all, tonot panic.Panicking never helped.He just had to get to the nearest hospital before his hand went numb or Dad’s guts started oozing through his fingers.
The clock in the dash of the Eldorado clicked over to 12:02 a.m., and Jake realized that it was January 5th, and he was sixteen.
The laughter that bubbled up through his lips tasted a bit like blood and shook him until the road vibrated in his vision.The sound was semi-hysterical enough to bring Dad out of his half-shock, half-drug-induced slump between the bench seat and his son’s hand.
