Page 7 of Freak Camp (A Monster By Any Other Name #1)
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.
***
L eon settled back with his 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.
Dixon blamed his daughter’s death on Leon because he couldn’t face the truth. It was his idea to go to Liberty, his idea to bring his daughter along even though she hadn’t been on a hunt in years. And when all hell broke loose, Sally ended up on a pyre while her father walked away unscathed.
Then it just so happened that the aftermath of the slaughter lined things up perfectly for Dixon to achieve his lifelong dream of government power, with Congress falling over themselves to hand him the keys to the US Treasury. The murder of his only child was a small price to pay for that legacy.
So Dixon had turned a blind eye to what had actually gone down the night of the Liberty Wolf Massacre, what everyone had wanted to forget, just like it was easier to believe the First Lady had died that night.
People had said that, even insisted on it, wouldn’t hear otherwise.
The truth was that no one outside the ASC had any idea of when Dorothy Peterson actually died in the FREACS facility, or even if she might still be alive.
Leon didn’t care much about her fate. He wanted to know who had really killed his wife, his son’s mother, because it sure as hell wasn’t just the werewolves who were brought down that night.
No fucking way had it been a random attack. Dixon knew it too, even if he wouldn’t admit it. Leon would find the truth if he had to dig up every grave in the country.
***
T wo weeks after they got back from Mexico, Jake heard his name called over the school’s PA system during lunch.
He braced himself for an interrogation about Carla’s backpack (he’d had nothing to do with all the cheat sheets packed inside, whatever Noah said), but when he got to the front office, Dad was waiting for him.
Jake knew in an instant that they were leaving.
A weird kind of numbness settled over him.
He didn’t hear what Dad said to the receptionist, didn’t remember where he picked up his backpack, and he wasn’t aware of getting in the car.
Dad had already packed their other bags into the back seat, and the next thing Jake noticed, they were driving north on Highway 550.
Outside the city limits, Leon turned off the radio and glanced at Jake. “You okay, son?”
Jake shrugged.
After a pause, Leon said, “You want to know what went down?” His tone made it an offer, a fun story to entertain him like the cop chases on TV, but in reverse. Jake used to love hearing Dad’s narrow escapes, how he hoodwinked the bartender and truckers and local sheriff.
Today he found that he didn’t want to know why they were leaving behind the kinda-nice Mrs. Capizzo and those boys he hung out with after school, Enrique and Alberto, who maybe weren’t as dumb as all the other kids in his class.
He wouldn’t get to see any of them ever again.
That was the ironclad rule of his and Dad’s life: when the heat turns on, they’re miles away before the oven gets warm. Like they were never there at all.
Jake didn’t want to think about who they were leaving behind, the promise he’d made (and now couldn’t keep) to repay Enrique for the comic books in his bag. So he answered the way Dad expected. “What went down, sir?”
Leon told him, and it was the usual cast of dumb assholes that Dad had played like the easiest game of cards, like he could’ve done it all blindfolded. Jake nodded and smiled and even laughed when he was supposed to.
But as the sun set, after they stopped for McDonald’s and then turned back onto the highway, still heading north, Jake rested his head on his arm against the passenger window. He pretended to sleep, and Leon turned the radio back on.
Through half-closed eyes, Jake watched the mile markers and car lights flash by. It wasn’t like he could remember the faces and names of the places they’d lived before Albuquerque. Soon enough Mrs. Capizzo and Enrique would fade away. He wondered how long it would take before they forgot him too.