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PROCEED WITH CAUTION: This chapter takes you back to Freak Camp. We rate it NC-17 for graphic child abuse and rape.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Eight months ago
Alice didn't often go out drinking with family. Partly it was scheduling—managing public relations for the Agency of Supernatural Control took a significant amount of time, and her hours weren't exactly what she would call regular. Another factor was that most Campbells were either incredibly driven, borderline alcoholics, or complete assholes. After being surrounded by government assholes all day, she didn't have the tolerance to deal with other types, even if they were family.
Still, sometimes a group of cousins and distant relations would show up in the D.C. area for a meeting or mission, and Alice would end up shooting the breeze and trying to find that perfect balance between enough booze to have fun but not enough to put ASC secrets at risk.
On this particular night, a group of over a dozen boiled down to just five: Alice, Mark, Lucas, Jackson, plus Donnie Anders, who worked with Lucas at FREACS.
Alice was pleasantly buzzed, chatting with the guys in the sitting room of their hotel suite when the shop talk turned to their cousin Jonah.
"Gotta be a barrel of laughs working for that hardass, all his talk about reputation and shit." Lucas snorted. "I just have to keep freaks in line, and he's all about 'respect' this and 'pride in the family name' that. I've been riding herd at Freak Camp for years, and he don't give me any damn respect."
Alice personally thought that cousin Jonah wasn't that bad to work with. He gave clear instructions, detailed his expectations, and listened if she had concrete reasons why those expectations were unrealistic. It could have been much worse, as she knew from working at Target and the local grocery store during high school. She made a sympathetic noise and poured another finger of Jack into her Coke.
"Hell, yeah!" Donnie nudged his half-full glass against Lucas'. Lucas wasn't expecting the motion, and swore softly as the Jack and ice in his plastic hotel cup (there had only been two actual glasses, and Alice had grabbed the other one) sloshed over the side.
"God, I hate that look he gets," Donnie continued, animated with righteous indignation. "You know the one, like I didn't fucking reach his minimum IQ to fuck over monsters or something like that? Fuck Jonah, and fuck his high horse. I can't wait to get the fuck out of Freak Camp and start doing some real good in the field, you know?"
Mark leaned in with his elbows on his knees, not yet showing any sign of inebriation despite several refills from his flask. "One: respect is earned by more than time served. Two: he catches wind of you talking about him like that, Donnie, you're gonna get your balls busted. Again."
"Yeah, show some respect. Or some self-preservation, for fuck's sake," Jackson said. He appeared to be the same age as Lucas, but modeled himself after Mark; Alice had noticed him echoing Mark's sentiments a few times that night. Jackson downed his glass and refilled it to the brim. "Else he's gonna train you like he trains those freaks. Mebbe he'll let me watch."
"How does he train freaks?" Alice asked.
Mark smiled woodenly at her. "You must have heard about his grand project to make monsters practical, right? Training them so they can't attack humans, so that they can be used to take out other monsters?"
Alice nodded. "I've heard of it. But not a lot." It was something that Jonah had mentioned a time or two, and people around her had nodded like they knew what he was talking about, but it hadn't been something that he wanted publicized, so she hadn't pressed for details. Whatever went on inside Freak Camp was outside her scope of public relations.
"Fuck yeah," Jackson said, with a knowing look. "I've seen the shit he does. Fucked-up shit. But hell, it works."
"Yeah, I've seen that," Lucas said dismissively. "That's basic stuff, videos every guard at FREACS watches before they start. And we get refreshers, sometimes."
"How to handle a freak, you know," Donnie said. "How to hit a vamp or a shifter so they stay down, how to maintain discipline in the yard, that kinda shit."
Jackson laughed. "You ain't seen nothing." He took another big swallow and then tilted his head. "Hey. You want to?"
"Want to what?" Mark said, looking up from his cup.
"See one of the secret videos." Jackson sat up from where he'd been lounging on his stomach on the carpet, suddenly aware of his importance. "Like, one of the ones that he did before the official ones."
Donnie snorted. "I don't fucking believe you got shit."
Next thing she knew, Alice was crowded on the couch in front of Jackson's laptop. He opened a folder called "Secret Videos" and double-clicked on a file labeled "19990310 Wednesday Session 4."
The video began without any preparation or title card. One moment the file was loading, and the next they could see a wide, high view of the Director's office in FREACS, Jonah Campbell staring directly up at them in a ceiling corner, his face blank, eyes pale. He sat by his desk, one hand tucked under the edge. Probably had just hit the record button, Alice thought.
"Today is the fourth Wednesday training session with subject 88UI6703. This freak is unidentified, and so far is responsive to training. Pain tolerance exceeds human standard, but both the physical and non-physical correction show better than anticipated results. Today's session focuses on non-verbal commands as well as the more general focus on obedience. The session will evolve according to subject response, but I plan a simple—"
"Oh, I've seen one of these," Donnie said. "This is the boring shit. Come on, skip to the good stuff."
Jackson tapped a key, and the video jumped ahead.
Standing in the room was a gaunt boy in the plain gray inmate garb of FREACS, his arms full of books and documents. A guard hulked in the background, holding a heavy baton. Alice vaguely recognized him from the employee database in the ASC intranet, but she had never seen that level of avid attention—and something else she couldn't, didn't want to name—on his face.
The Director didn't even look up at the freak before him, but his right hand moved to tap the top of his desk. He repeated the movement, and then two fingers downward, while the boy hesitated.
The Director looked up. "Are you blind or disobedient?"
"S-sir, I have the b-books in their correct order."
"You didn't put them on the desk where I told you. You didn't kneel."
The boy took a tight breath. "No, sir."
"You don't appear to have any eye damage, so I can only assume you saw my instructions."
"Yes, sir. I d-didn't understand."
"You're coming very close to making me repeat myself. I am trying to make you more than a worthless freak, and you are making me waste breath on you. This will not continue. Mr. Rosenstein."
The guard stepped forward and slammed the nightstick into the boy's abdomen. The boy dropped, the books and papers falling around him. The guard landed a couple more blows until a hand gesture from the Director made him back off.
"And now you've dropped my papers," he said. "Mr. Rosenstein. Bend him over my desk and give him ten. And then we'll try this again."
Alice watched, hand pressed over her mouth to hold back either bile or a scream, while a man she worked with and respected gave calm, cool-eyed instructions in the torture of a child. The Director set impossible expectations, but he outlined them in the same even tone he had used in Alice's last incident review meeting. Through trial and error, he methodically worked through basic gesture commands, each step paid for in the boy's pain.
Like a fucking dog, Alice thought, in numb horror.
At minute thirty-three, after the boy had learned Come, Fetch, Kneel, Stand, and Beg, the Director told him to kneel and then glanced at the guard.
The man looked hopeful. "Sir?" The pain and degradation had clearly...excited him. Alice could see his erection and became acutely aware of the four men pressed in around her, watching this horror show.
"Yes. Service Mr. Rosenstein, and be quick about it." The Director turned his attention back to the books and papers on his desk.
When Alice saw the guard opening his pants, she put her hand over her eyes and struggled to breathe.
She heard when the video ended. Jackson, next to her, stretched out a hand to close the laptop.
"Fuck," Donnie said. "You have more of those?"
"Excuse me," Alice said, pushing up.
She rushed to the suite's bathroom and just had time to slam the door and make it to the toilet before emptying her stomach. There wasn't much in there besides crappy bar food and too much Jack Daniels, but every time her stomach settled down she thought of the Director's hand motions, his even voice, the growing excitement of the guard, and she had to bend over the toilet again.
When she felt hollowed out, physically and emotionally, she sat back and stared at the ceiling.
The knock at the bathroom door made her start and almost reach for the gun she wasn't wearing.
"Alice?" It was Mark. "You okay in there?"
She felt a wild rush of relief, as though she'd spotted a life buoy in an endless stretch of icy sea. Of everyone here, Mark was the only one she knew. "Fine," she called. "Just too much Jack, I think."
"Yeah," he said. "These shitheads are gonna keep watching, but I'm heading out. Want me to walk you to your car?"
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, fuck." She had the acrid bite of vomit and alcohol in her mouth when she opened the bathroom door. She tried to smile for Mark. "Thanks for coming to get me."
He had that same tight smile on his face. "We don't leave anyone behind. You sure you're okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. I'll be fine." Alice did not think she would ever be okay again.
As they walked out of the hotel suite, Jackson, Donnie, and Lucas were still clustered around the laptop, its light washing their faces pale and ghastly. Muffled cries of pain sounded tinny and distant from the computer's small speakers.
Mark and Alice didn't speak down the hall or in the elevator, not until they stepped outside into the icy January air. A few feet into the hotel's parking complex, Mark stopped, and Alice looked back at him.
"I know it's not easy." He paused, weighing his words. "Nothing that happens in Freak Camp is easy. You can't know until you're there."
For a moment, Alice didn't know what he meant, who he was excusing. Then it hit her, and Alice turned away, pressing her hand to her mouth, bile again climbing up her throat.
Mark had not been surprised by the videos. He had been there.
"Alice?" Mark stepped closer. He sounded concerned and maybe something else...was that suspicion?
Panic clearing her head a little, Alice waved him off, forcing the nausea down. Swallowing hard, she forced herself to speak. "I'm okay. I don't normally drink that much. At all, really. I need to get home."
Mark sighed with mixed amusement and exasperation. "I'll drive you home."
Alice handed her keys over without protest, watching Mark relax as he took them. He'd been drinking too, but seemed sober in the cold night air.
On the drive, she rested her face in her hand and struggled to find words.
Who was this man driving her home? She knew him, loved him as a distant cousin, one that she respected, but they had really spent less time together than she and Gwen, or others. Jonah had always spoken approvingly of Mark's leadership in the field and at FREACS, so Alice had assumed he was reliable and trustworthy.
Had Mark been in the room for those sessions? Had he known? Did he believe her, when she said it was just alcohol and not horror making the world seem dim and distant, putting sanity out of reach?
Finally her training won out, and she spoke with careful neutrality. "Thank you for all your service, especially in the camp. I know it's a...hard placement. Not many can handle it."
He glanced at her quickly, then returned to navigating the D.C. streets, but she thought she sensed an easing of tension. "Jackson, that dumbass, never should have shown that. Shouldn't even have had it. What happens in Freak Camp stays in Freak Camp, that's the way...the way it should be. It's a hell of a life, but we do what we have to. I couldn't do what you do, with the cameras and the...well, all of it."
She nodded.
When they stopped at her condo, Mark looked at her for a long, careful moment. "Get some rest. You're important, Alice."
She forced a smile. "Yeah. I'll just...it hit me." She tried to make a brusque, dismissive gesture. "I couldn't watch, it was...too much alcohol." Alice couldn't tell if he believed her.
"Yeah," Mark said. "It hit me that way the first time. But it gets...it gets easier." He got out of her car, handed her keys that she took numbly. "Drink water and take a couple aspirin before bed. That's what I do."
Only when he was out of sight, cell phone in hand to call a cab to take him back to his own place, did Alice notice she was shaking.
The next morning, Alice called in sick to work.
She didn't get out of bed until past noon, something she hadn't done in years. When she could no longer deny (or block) the light peeking through her curtains, and her twisting and turning began to feel as smothering as the crushing horror that still filled her mind, Alice threw herself out of bed. She did not open the curtains.
Alice knew that eating was something she should do, but when she reached the kitchen her mind drew a blank. After standing and staring for too long at the gleaming metal of her fridge door, she filled a glass of water and sat, heavily, at her dining room table. For over an hour, she concentrated on nothing but emptying that glass.
Perhaps she could forget that last night had ever happened. Alice tried to imagine wiping that video and the avid eyes of the guards watching it from her mind. Going into work like nothing happened. She thought of looking into Jonah's face, and in a sudden rush was certain she would be sick.
Alice lunged for the trash can, hitting her knees hard on the tile-patterned linoleum—then the nausea passed. Shaky, she stood and dragged the trash can to her table before sitting back down. She took another sip of water.
She had enough in her bank account for a one-way flight out of the country. She'd heard that Australia was nice this time of year, and London was big enough to get lost in without trying. The dollar could buy you a lot in Brazil.
As the light began to fade through the tightly shut blinds, she was no closer to a decision. Her stomach ached, but she still couldn't imagine eating anything and holding it down. Moving slowly and mechanically, Alice pulled off the awful clothes from last night and put on a pair of pajamas. She let herself curl up on her sofa, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, the home improvement channel playing with the sound off.
The morning after that, she woke up aching, her face smashed into her battered couch cushions. Alice got up, changed into a new set of clothes, threw away everything perishable in her refrigerator, and packed a small bag. Her hand was shaking when she hit the speed dial for work.
"Thank you, I'm feeling much better," she told the receptionist. "But I've gotten an urgent call from Florida, I'm going to have to head there directly to handle it. Will you please let my staff know I'll be out of touch for a while? This could take a couple of weeks."
She hung up, plugged her phone into its charger, and then left it behind in the apartment.
Alice drove north, into Pennsylvania farmland. She paid cash in advance for two weeks at a tiny cottage on the outskirts of a town. She bought food—simple, nutritional things that weren't much effort—and then dumped them on the rickety table and curled up in the cottage's listing recliner.
There, out of sight of the cameras and courthouses and liars that made up her world, she let the tears come. There wasn't a single box of tissues in the whole damn cottage, but the previous tenant had an extra case of toilet paper. She went through six rolls, the damp tissue forming a small hill next to her chair. She took a walk at sunset, inhaling deeply of the frosty air under the trees, feeling it sting her swollen eyes.
Jonah had been more than her boss, more than the de facto Campbell patriarch since Samuel's passing. He'd been her personal role model, a steadfast leader for more years than she could count, someone who had made her proud of her job and what she did. She had loved him and believed in him, their mission, and in dedicating her life to fighting the supernatural in the best way she knew how: by serving the family, protecting the ASC's independence, and creating a barrier between the ugliness of the hunt and the innocence of the civilian.
What foul thing had she spent her life defending?
When the weekend rolled around, Alice knew she had to leave. She had enough with her to get to some international destination; she only had to empty her bank balance. Then she would disappear. There was nothing in the ASC worth saving. She needed to rebuild herself somewhere new.
Two days after she made that decision, when she knew she had to go or she would be found out as a traitor to the ASC, Alice realized that she could not run away.
Her career might have been focused on the public relations side of the family business, but she had always truly believed the hunter dogma that monsters were evil: a scourge on the world, a danger to the innocent, and something that she as a hunter and a Campbell had a duty to oppose.
Even now, she didn't think that was wrong. But she couldn't think of Jonah Campbell, the Director of the ASC, ordering a cowering boy beaten for not begging quickly enough without recognizing a different kind of monster in him.
Alice wasn't religious, but she believed in the human soul and that evil could defile and corrupt it until there was nothing human left.
The family she had been born into, the organization she had devoted her professional life to, was rotten from Jonah all the way down to peons like Jackson, and Alice could not face another day of complicity to keep it afloat.
She had come to Pennsylvania to find her footing, to identify who she was apart from the cousin and the family she'd idolized and shaped her life around. She still felt unmoored and breakable, but she had one thought grounding her, defining her in the shards of her old life: I am not that.
This is my line, she wanted to scream, and I will not cross it.
Yet she, more than anyone, knew that words didn't fucking matter unless they were said at the right time, in the right way, to the right people, with the right support. Alice didn't have any of that.
She could get it, though. Which meant she had to go back.
Aside from building a career in PR for the ASC, being part of a hunting family meant that Alice had become very good at lying. Despite those years of experience at the fine art of deception, Alice was terrified that Jonah would be able to tell, simply by looking at her, what she knew, the revulsion she felt seeing him.
Even though it seemed that her disillusionment shone like a spotlight from every fiber of her being, the first time she saw Jonah after returning to work, he just smiled at her and handed her a briefing. "The Commissioner might be an issue," he said. "But the Senator won't be a problem. He's staunchly on our side."
She forced a smile on her face. "Good to know, sir. Thank you."
Jonah frowned. "Are you feeling well, Alice? I know you had some...health issues before that issue sent you to Florida."
She kept the smile even and free of tension. "That wasn't nearly as much of an issue as my contact thought it was. And the other thing was...just a little too much fun, sir, nothing more serious."
"Work hard, play hard, I suppose." He smiled. "Campbells tend to do both to somewhat unhealthy extremes, but you've always managed to tread the middle path. Let me know if you need more support for the dust-up with Allens and Menendez. I will need that report by Tuesday."
"Yes, sir," Alice said, her voice remaining level.
She went to her office, a short hallway from a man who had methodically tortured a child, and...shook for a minute. Then she made her hands still, her breathing steady, and her mind stop spinning. She had work to do.
In the months that followed, Alice did her job of maintaining good public relations for the ASC while secretly digging to the rotten heart of the organization. Because so often controlling public relations meant knowing the intimate details of things in danger of hitting the fan, she had more access to files than most in her department.
She found financial records, torture tapes, monster death rates inside Freak Camp, and learned, reading between the lines, of several horrifying cases of non-freak civilians who ended up within the walls of FREACS and never left them again. Worst were the clinical reports of experiments done on the monsters within the camp. Those made the bile rise in her throat and gave her nightmares to match the ones caused by the original video.
She found Jonah's stash of personal blackmail tapes and learned why the senior senator from Montana was so reliable in his support of ASC initiatives.
Somewhere in her hunt for information, she realized that the gaunt boy seen over and over in the 1999 videos was Dean Winchester's monster.
Alice made obsessive copies of documents, video recordings, names, dates, and financials, hoping one day she'd have the chance to expose every horror she and her family had perpetrated. It was damning enough, if she could ever get it in front of the right eyes (and maybe during the next election year). She worked tirelessly on building the trap that would burn everything to the ground.
Then the Cleveland massacre story broke.
Five months later
On C-SPAN, Congress was filibustering a bill to close Freak Camp, and Sam could not look away.
He stood with his arms folded in their motel room lined with ratty, flower-patterned wallpaper, watching each man and woman stand up in the congressional chamber to declare their stance, some passionately and some in a dry, rehearsed cadence in line with every speech they'd ever made.
Dean, Sam knew, couldn't stand "those slick-suited motherfuckers," but Sam needed to see this. It was the culmination of months of protest, of formal denunciations, of pledges of accountability, even justice. Sam's breath caught at times as he saw the momentous stakes before them, the potential for change in the laws he had always known to govern the universe.
But, naturally, nothing about the process was quick. Sam was good at being patient. Dean, on the other hand...
"Hey, Sam, let's go for a run."
Sam glanced at Dean. "You go."
Dean blew out his breath. "You know, you're gonna turn into a motel lamp if you stand there long enough. How many hours have they been at this?"
Sam checked the time, added the hours in his head. "Nearly twelve."
"How much longer do you think they'll keep going?"
Sam shrugged. "Maybe twelve more? They're tag-teaming." From all he'd read, the bill was unlikely to pass. This filibuster was led by the national security hawks deep in the ASC's pocket, who didn't want the bill to even reach the floor for a vote. He still needed to hear every argument, both those for and against shutting down Freak Camp. He needed to see what points had an impact, which ones could sway the vote.
"So, you can catch up later on whatever you miss in the next hour. Come on, Sam. Catch some rays with me."
Not so long ago, Sam would have struggled to say no to Dean, even when he suspected Dean was only asking for something he knew Sam could and would refuse. Now, Sam told Dean no all the time, over matters small and large, and he hardly ever thought about it. He rarely felt that clenching tension in his gut before saying no, either.
As he decided to relent this time, it was with the knowledge that he was saying yes willingly and wholeheartedly, and it was no more correct than any other answer.
"Okay," Sam said, with a last glance at the current speaker as he reached for the remote. "We can take a quick run."
As the Cleveland Massacre scandal intensified from a storm to a hurricane, Alice couldn't tell what it would demolish and what it would leave untouched. Despite the growing public outcry and demands for accountability, she knew that taking down the ASC, or at least its most corrupt elements, would require more than this furor and more than just herself.
As she wrestled with the dilemma of whom she could trust, Alice realized she knew someone who was certain to hate Freak Camp with all his heart. If Dean Winchester's under-the-radar lifestyle wasn't enough evidence, the fact that 88UI6703...Sam...had featured heavily in the "training videos" was bound to be a pretty good indication.
Even though Alice had long ago stopped updating Jonah on the whereabouts of his cousin Dean, she still kept up what she called her "Winchester Watch." Most of the time it gave her notices about where Dean and Sam had been, cases they had closed, and what monsters or supernatural threats they had eliminated. Sometimes she delegated that investigative work to one of her underlings, mostly as a training exercise. Piecing together a coherent story from fragments of news and supposition was good practice for them.
The idea that Dean Winchester was probably on her side hit Alice when she was in Butte, Montana, handling an issue with a local ASC office that had escalated enough to require her presence. After the situation was resolved, or as resolved as it was going to get, she checked on her Winchester Watch.
"You've got to be kidding me," she muttered.
"What, ma'am?" Her young, wide-eyed intern looked up.
"Nothing," Alice said. "Don't worry about it." She shut down her laptop and tucked it into its carrying case. "Just realized I have another errand to run before we head out. Should still be able to make the flight home tomorrow morning."
If her Winchester alerts were accurate, Sam and Dean had just finished a job in Deer Lodge, Montana, involving some kind of haunted object at the Old Montana Prison Museum. That was less than forty minutes away.
Deer Lodge was not that big. The alert had given her a bead on the Winchester's motel, but when she didn't spot Dean's car in the lot, she drove around town in her anonymous gray rental. Less than five minutes later, she spotted her quarry: the notorious Impala, parked at a diner.
The Four B's Restaurant was clunky but classic, with green signs and a retro diner interior. Alice parked on the other side of the lot from the Impala. Walking toward the restaurant, she wished she'd worn a hat, something with a brim to shade her face.
The place was almost empty. Alice ducked into one of the tall booths on the empty side of the restaurant and took a couple of careful breaths.
This was a stupid plan. She was going to get herself shot. Her face was extremely recognizable—she was literally the face of the ASC—and for the last six months she had succeeded in keeping anyone, especially a certain Director, from noticing her crisis of loyalty.
But what other options did she have? Try to convince the family that Jonah was a madman? Turn hunters to her side? Go public with the very private, damning information that she had collected and wait like a sitting duck for Jonah's surefire revenge? Messed up as it was, the renegade Winchesters were her best hope of allies, and Alice was probably the best chance they were ever going to get to take down FREACS and the ASC from the inside. She just had to tell them that.
Alice flipped open her phone and dialed a number that she had saved for exactly this occasion.
Dean Winchester didn't keep the same number for long and he couldn't be tracked reliably, but if you knew the right people, you could get the number of the hour.
He picked up on the third ring. "Winchester," he said.
"I have information about a mutual enemy," she said, more rapidly than she'd planned. "I'd like to meet to discuss it."
A pause. "I don't have any enemies," Dean Winchester said, the breezy unconcern so thick it carried a palpable fuck off undertone. "I'm just that lovable a guy."
"This enemy owns a place," Alice said, undeterred, even with the distant sense that she was teetering on the edge of solid ground, soil crumbling under her toes, and the bottom a long way down. "Your friend Sam lived there once."
A pause, and then Dean said in a new, dangerously low tone, "Who the fuck is this?"
Alice swallowed. The Winchesters had never been brought into the family. They were uncontrolled, unpredictable, deadly as any monster out there. "I can't say here. But I'm a friend, and we have the same goal."
"Like I trust a single fucking word you say," Dean snarled. "Where the fuck are you?"
She nearly hung up then, but in the background another voice said, "Dean, what is it?"
Sam. She recognized his voice in her gut, even if he had grown and changed from the abused boy in the videos. He didn't sound like a broken child anymore. Alice felt relieved, and her hand shook on her phone.
"I'm alone and unarmed." Then, with every ounce of well-honed calm she possessed, Alice took the plunge, diving headfirst into the abyss. "But if you're ready to meet now, I'm on the other side of the restaurant."
She could hear low, fervent swearing through the phone, echoed across the room. Her palms were slippery and her heart beat hard in her chest as though she were again testifying in front of a dozen cameras, about to lie through her teeth that the value of the ASC far outweighed the damage that it did.
"If you don't want to meet now," she continued, "that's fine. I won't follow you. I won't call you again. But if you're interested, call this number and we can set up a place and time."
"Dean, just give it to me!" Sam again. There was a brief scuffle with the phone, and then he came on, strong and confident. "Who is this?"
"I'm a friend," Alice said. "Or I want to be. This is Sam, right? I have information about a place where you used to live. I'm in the restaurant now, if you are ready to meet."
The silence lasted long enough that Alice began to wonder if their call had dropped. Wouldn't that be just her luck if Montana's shitty reception shot this to hell before the Winchesters even got the chance?
"You try something and it won't go well for you," Sam said, level and cold. "We'll come to you. Stay where you are, and don't make any sudden moves."
"You might recognize my face," Alice said cautiously. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't shoot me."
Sam Winchester hung up. Alice lay the phone on the table and carefully stretched out her hands next to it, palms up. That was the best she could do to appear harmless without sticking her hands in the air like she was going to get robbed. When the Winchesters rounded the corner, first Dean and then Sam, Sam's eyes locked onto her hands. She could tell the second he looked up and recognized her face, because he flinched backward.
Alice swallowed, tipping her head in greeting. "Hello, Sam. You're looking well. Hello, Dean. I'm your cousin Alice."
They did not move from the end of the row of booths. Dean was as handsome as the picture in his file. She recognized his hunter's stance, tense and on guard, one hand not-so-casually at his hip. He kept slightly in front of Sam, though Sam was taller and broader in the shoulders, slightly messy hair falling down his forehead.
Dean jerked his chin toward the exit. "Outside. You first."
Slowly, Alice stood, cautiously retrieving her purse. She swung it over her shoulder and kept her hands down and visible as she walked out of the restaurant. She felt more than heard them following. She walked into the parking lot, halfway between the restaurant and the road, stopping in a large empty space without any cars nearby before she turned around. The Winchesters stood shoulder-to-shoulder, about ten feet away. To her relief, all three of them were still clearly visible to the restaurant windows, and, she hoped, under the eye of the restaurant staff. Though she wasn't sure how much help they would be against the Winchesters.
Alice took a careful breath. "I reached out to you because I need help. You might have seen me on the news or know my role in the ASC organization."
Sam nodded, eyes locked on her face, while Dean glowered at his side.
"In spite of what you may have seen, the truth is that several months before the Cleveland video went public, I discovered what Jonah Campbell has been doing in FREACS. With monsters and with hunters. To innocents. It's evil." She looked straight at Sam for those last words, but his face didn't change, just as implacable as Dean's. "I can't continue like before. Letting it happen. Letting it slide. But I don't know anyone else who sees the ASC for what they really are, who might be capable of working with me to stop it. To bring the ASC down." She nearly faltered in the final line, her end goal, and all it could mean for her, the world, and the two hunters in front of her.
For a dozen frantic heartbeats, neither man responded or moved, and Alice willed herself not to move or look away. Then Dean said, his voice pleasantly smooth in a way that made her mouth go dry, "And why should we believe a single word from your lying Campbell lips?"
Alice had been prepared for a response like that. "You can report me, to start." In front of a press conference, she would have kept the smile on her face, kept the statement light. Here and now she let herself think, just a little, of what would happen if Jonah found out that she had betrayed him, and she let that show on her face. "For another, I can give you confidential, critical information, things that would bring people down if they got out. Blackmail, death records, FREACS blueprints, all here." She took a USB drive out of her purse and offered it to them. "You probably wouldn't want to look at it on a personal computer, or one that is too public, and it's not all the information I have, but it might count as a show of good faith."
The Winchesters exchanged a look, and then Dean held out his hand, beckoning, and she tossed the drive to him. He caught it easily. "How did you get my number? And how'd you pin us down in the Armpit of Nowhere, Montana?"
Alice offered a small, twisted smile. "I've been trying to track you for years, and the ASC has resources to make it possible. You never made it easy, and I never actually got enough before to find you. Your number came from one of the smaller hunter hotlines. I got lucky today with the location."
Dean waved the USB drive. "That's quite a coincidence."
"It is," Alice agreed.
"I don't like coincidences, and I sure as hell don't like you," Dean said. "C'mon, Sammy." He half-turned, sticking his hands and the drive in his pocket. He looked like he was thinking about just dropping it on the ground and crushing it, or tossing it the second she was gone.
Desperate, Alice spoke directly to Sam. "I saw the videos. The—Jonah's training sessions." She snapped her mouth shut on rising nausea and emotion, but she didn't need to say anything more. Sam went white, rocking backward onto his heels, and Dean turned his head toward him, before his attention snapped back to her.
"That was evil," Alice said, and perhaps it was good to speak now after all, to let them hear her voice shake. "I never—I never knew he was capable of that. That he was evil. Samuel wasn't, he had morals, even if they were fucked-up hunter morals, sometimes. Jonah doesn't, he's—" She caught and steadied herself, then went on. "Nothing justifies what he did in those videos. Nothing. And he doesn't see anything wrong with it. I can't, I cannot keep working beside him without fighting for a way to stop him. I'm asking for help. Help me. Let me help you. I have access to more than you can imagine inside the ASC, and I am willing to give you anything you need to bring it down."
She still couldn't tell if they believed her. It could all be over, her life crashing down, and FREACS and Director Jonah Campbell still standing. Sam turned his head to whisper into Dean's ear, and he murmured something back.
Dean straightened, the same glower on his face as when she had started. "First off, get it through your head, and you can tell anyone who asks, that going toe-to-toe against the Man, blowing up the goddamn ASC, whatever the fuck you're talking about, ain't in the Winchester agenda. Never has been. We're just two simple hunters minding our own business, taking out low-grade monsters screwing around in people's backyards. Small stuff. Stuff that matters to normal people, not to Washington yahoos like yourself.
"But second—" Dean held up two fingers. "We'll keep your number. Don't call us, we'll call you."
"People need you." Alice tried not to let her voice shake. "I can't bring this down by myself. I can't keep doing this job knowing that everything I've ever protected is a lie."
"You think you need us," Sam said. "But there's nothing we could do."
"You could tell people what happened!" Alice said, voice going high and tight despite herself. "You could tell them what he's done."
Sam's mouth quirked, but he held himself stiffly, as though careful of an old injury. "What would I tell them? Everything was done to a freak."
Come. Fetch. Kneel. Beg.
Alice flinched away from the memories of the video, and Sam's eyes grew tight and sad.
"You could just resign," Dean suggested, with a twist of his lips. "Go off the grid. Let them fuck themselves."
Alice swallowed. "I've considered it, but I have this position and I want—need—to use it. This is my line and I will not cross it."
"Well, good luck with that," Dean said. "Sam?"
After exchanging a look, the Winchesters went to their sleek black car, slamming the doors in smoothly choreographed unison. Then they pulled out of the lot.
Alice watched them until the Impala was not even a black dot on the outskirts of town.
"Fuck," she said.
"Fucking Campbells."
Sam couldn't disagree. Alice Campbell was a different type of Campbell from the hunters he'd known in Freak Camp, but he still felt chills remembering her steady gaze on him, how easily she'd found them. She had represented his worst fear for the last six years come true: the ASC had tracked him (them) down, proving that Sam would never truly be out of their grasp. Only the surprise of what she'd had to say—not a threat, but a plea for assistance—had kept him from shutting down completely after the encounter. The nightmares had gotten worse, though.
Two days had passed since Alice Campbell had cornered them in the Montana diner, and Sam and Dean were hiding (taking a well-deserved vacation with some goddamn privacy, in Dean's words) in the Wyoming wilderness, far out of range of cities or even cell towers. It gave them both time to come down from the shock of the confrontation and to do some serious thinking.
"D-do you think any of it was true?" Sam asked tentatively.
They hadn't tried the USB drive she'd passed them yet, unwilling to risk their laptop with it and needing more privacy than most public computers offered. Sam had noticed more than once Dean considering tossing it out the window on their drive out of Montana, but he still fiddled with it, spinning it on its keychain around his finger while he lounged on the bed in their cabin.
Dean snorted skeptically. "Let me think for a sec. Yeah. No."
Sam had doubts, remembering how she'd locked eyes with him and told him that she'd seen the Director's tapes. He shuddered again.
Dean hadn't asked about the tapes she'd mentioned. Sam was grateful for their unspoken understanding that if Sam wanted to explain, he would, and if he didn't, Dean wouldn't push.
"I think some of it could be true," Sam said slowly, "but she's gotta be insane, or think we are, to invite us to go after the A-A-ASC."
"That's how you know it's a trap," Dean said dryly. "I'm just hurt she thinks we're that stupid. Like we've gotten this far on our own by being dumb as bricks."
Sam remembered the desperation in her eyes, beneath the tight control in her face. He still couldn't totally buy that she had been lying about all of it. He knew the look of someone utterly trapped.
That didn't change the fact that whatever crisis Alice Campbell was tangled up in wasn't Winchester business. She had all the power, resources, education, and influence to figure it out. For Sam, proximity to any Campbell was tantamount to voluntarily re-entering Freak Camp.
Dean caught the USB drive between his fingers, and Sam looked over to see if Dean had finally decided to get up and chuck it in the toilet. Instead, Dean tossed it into his open duffel at the end of the bed. Out of sight, if not out of mind, like many other things.
Sam knew that Dean was pleased to be off-grid because it also meant no more of Sam's constant monitoring of the news. Sam himself didn't mind that loss as much as he would have, before Congress had voted down the bill to close Freak Camp.
Sam had known the bill never really had a chance, of course. Everyone had said so. The Cleveland massacre, all the angry protests and heartfelt testimonies across the country, changed nothing. Ultimately, no one could deny the reality and danger of freaks, and (as Alice Campbell had so persuasively argued to the cameras) only the ASC had the knowledge to keep the country safe. If they didn't, who would? Was the public really willing to risk that?
Still, seeing the official outcome two weeks before their meeting with Alice had done something to Sam's head; he'd wanted to go straight to bed, but doing that in the middle of the day would've alarmed Dean. Since then it had been harder to lift his head up, to look reals (no, people) in the eye, to smile and act like he belonged here, the way Dean had spent years teaching him to act. The occasional nightmare that Sam could shake off as soon as he woke had become frequent, brutal dreams he couldn't hide from Dean, especially when he woke up choking from a phantom collar for the first time in years.
He really shouldn't have watched the Director's personal testimony to Congress.
The final vote was narrower than expected, which was the only real surprise. Freak Camp would stay open and the ASC would maintain complete control, although the next budget bill hadn't offered the same blank check it always had before, and there were rumors of an oversight committee or an audit sometime before the next election cycle.
But the senator who had been the harshest critic of the ASC announced her retirement at the end of her term. And Jonah Campbell remained in charge.
Looking at the racks and racks of VHS tapes, Kayla decided she was a lucky bitch.
Like all fifteen-year-old girls, she had hopes and dreams that she never quite believed would become real, but they kept her going. Maybe the camp would get firebombed, no survivors. Maybe the incinerator would explode and take most of Special Research with it, earning her the opportunity to slip into someone else's face and away in the confusion. Maybe Crusher, like Victor, would catch something nasty and not be able to use his penis, even to pee, for months.
Some of these came true, and some of these she helped along. She couldn't transmit the clap—shifters got very few human diseases—but Kayla had carefully modified herself so the guards and hunters wouldn't want to get between her thighs. It had taken some creativity to grow spines that curved in ways that didn't hurt her while she walked, but after the first time a visiting hunter had pinned her down on an interrogation table—he would have noticed the danger earlier if the bastard hadn't tried to get it all in on the first thrust—and lost half his dick trying to pull out, no one else had so much as groped her. She'd been sure to scream and wail, acting fucking confused and terrified even while they beat the shit out of her. She'd come out of it with broken bones and barely any skin on her back, but they hadn't realized that it wasn't just a messed-up side-effect of her being a monster. Good thing Crusher hadn't been around to say that she hadn't been a virgin and that sure as hell hadn't happened to him.
Between that, her subtly misshapen face, and her tendency to bite during blowjobs if the fuck hadn't paid her right, Kayla managed to glide between a lot of the worst ordeals in the camp. She worked decently on the computers and kept her mouth shut. The guards thought she was stupid because she kept silent. Too stupid to interest the Director, but smart and passive enough to clean storage closets, organize paperwork, and be assigned to copy old VHS interrogation tapes onto DVD.
Now, staring down at a tape neatly labeled (February 10, 1999) Rm. 3, 88UI6703, special session,she felt the fluttery sensation that always accompanied the rare realization that she could do something, influence the hell that was her life.
She thought about Sam a lot, and not just because the guards liked to talk about how Winchester was still obsessed with his freak. He had been the one not-dark spot in her life for a long time, and he had taught her more about surviving than he would ever expect. She had watched him blend into his surroundings—as best he could without her advantages—and watched him do what he needed to survive without ever really being broken, watched him be kind even when it brought him no advantages. He was her definition of humanity, and she tried, as best she could, to hold onto a little of it for herself.
If she had believed in prayer, she would have prayed for Sam. As it was, she hoped—the way she hoped for very little else—that Winchester didn't hit him too much, and that when they fucked he took it slow enough that Sam didn't get ripped open every time.
And each time that the hunters talked about how good a lay Pretty Freak must be, how Winchester had beaten the shit out of another hunter because he threatened his toy, she wondered what Winchester—what Dean—would do if he knew what had happened to Sam here. If he could see, for just a second, how the other monsters (no, hunters, she had to keep thinking of them as hunters; monsters were very different things) had treated him. Even if he didn't care about Sam the way Sam had cared about him, she was sure he would do something about the insult to his property.
So as she sorted the old storeroom and transferred hundreds of recorded sessions to DVD, she copied anything she found with Sam's number onto some of the old dead tapes. She watched them on mute, noting who had participated, which clever bastard came up with new ideas. After the first few, she watched anything with Director Campbell's name on it at double speed. She wanted to know which guards had participated, but didn't need to know how strong Sam was.
And whenever the guards came into the storage room to let her out for food or push her down for a blowjob—always well paid for, in advance, because they knew she kept her word—it looked like she was working. They never knew that she was carefully, precisely, thoroughly planning all their deaths.
She blew a couple guards to get Winchester's address, and she'd been prepared to suck it up, smooth herself out, and spread her legs for Crusher to get the package sent. Instead she went with another gambit, far more dangerous but with a surer payoff of getting it in the mail instead of a garbage can: she'd played terrified, heavily implied that the Director had given her the package to drop into the mail room, and let him get close to her without even a negotiation. He'd believed her, the stupid fuck. Hadn't even checked the address on the label or commented on the weight.
Kayla had never been so happy. It was like she had sprayed kerosene in all their faces, soaked the bloodstained walls in gas and laid dynamite at the stones of the incinerator. And now—U.S. Postal Service, luck, and honest hatred willing—the fire was coming. She just had to wait.
End notes:
All the scenes in every chapter are true collaborations as we write and revise each other's work, to the point that I have trouble remembering which of us first drafted some of them, but I have to give a first-ever shoutout to Brose for writing the final scene in this chapter seven years ago.
We wrote 100,000 words in that first month of conceiving Freak Camp, words spanning the whole arc of the story, but as you might expect, a lot of these later scenes required heavy revision as we come to them now. Not so with this Kayla scene. From the first to last paragraphs, it is 95% word-for-word as she wrote it seven years ago. Of the many, many impressive things I know about Brose, this is one of my favorites.
-Lavinia
