Creature

  “Here we are,” Ames told him. One of the orderlies slid out of the backseat and held the door open for Mark. He followed the orderly through a door and then down a hall, turning finally into a treatment room very much like the one Dr. MacCallum had examined him in the night before.

  Except that in this room there were heavy straps made of thick webbing attached to the examining table.

  Mark frowned at the straps, and suddenly recalled the strange marks he’d seen on Jeff LaConner’s wrists the morning after he’d spent the night here.

  “Wh-What are those?” Mark asked, his voice betraying the fear that had begun to play once more around the edges of his mind.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Ames told him. “Just take off your clothes and put on this,” he went on, handing Mark a pale green hospital gown.

  “Why?” Mark demanded. “You already know what’s wrong with me, don’t you? I just got beat up. I’m not sick.”

  Ames’s voice hardened. “Just do what you’re told, Mark. We’re not going to hurt you. All we’re going to do is help you.”

  Mark’s eyes flicked toward the door, but one of the orderlies was blocking it, his eyes fixed on Mark as if he knew what he was thinking. Mark hesitated for a moment, his heart pounding.

  Then he reminded himself that it was his father who had sent him here. So whatever this was all about, it had to be okay, didn’t it? Still, his nervousness only increased as he slowly took off his clothes and put on the hospital gown.

  It wasn’t until he was already stretched out on the table that the orderlies suddenly jumped him, one of them holding him down while the other strapped his legs and arms securely to the metal surface.

  “What the hell—” Mark shouted. Then a gag was placed over his mouth and he felt a needle slipping into a vein in his forearm.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Ames assured him once more. “Believe me, Mark, you’re going to feel better than you’ve ever felt before in your life.”

  Mark struggled against the heavy straps for a moment, but as he tried to pull himself free, a stab of pain lashed through his chest.

  Even before the searing pain had faded away, Mark Tanner sank into the dark abyss of unconsciousness.

  14

  Linda Harris already had her book bag packed by the time the lunch bell rang. She’d been thinking about it all morning, but had finally made up her mind only fifteen minutes ago. She was going to skip lunch and go out to the hospital to visit Mark Tanner. She didn’t have time, really, but her class after lunch was only a study hall, and she could always say she’d spent the time in the library. In fact, if she had to, she could get Tiffany Welch—who always spent that hour helping the librarian—to back her up. As the clanging of the bell faded away, Linda hurried out of the classroom and toward the wide staircase that led to the main floor. She was halfway down the stairs when she heard Tiffany calling to her from the mezzanine above.

  “Linda? Wait up!”

  Linda hesitated, half tempted to pretend she hadn’t heard, then thought better of it. “Hi,” she said as the other girl caught up with her. “Look, I need a big favor. If I miss my study hall, will you tell Mr. Anders I was in the library?”

  Tiffany’s oval face reflected confusion for a moment, then her bright blue eyes took on a conspiratorial quality. “Where are you going? Are you cutting the whole afternoon?”

  The eagerness in her friend’s voice told Linda that Tiffany was considering coming with her; to Tiffany, practically anything was more interesting than school.

  “I’m just going to the hospital,” Linda said.

  Tiffany’s face brightened. “To see Jeff? I’ll go with you.”

  “Why would I want to see Jeff?” Linda demanded, her eyes flashing angrily. “After last night, I hope I never see him again!”

  The eager look faded from Tiffany’s eyes. “Then who?” At last, the light dawned. “You mean you’re going to see Mark?” she asked, her voice traced with scorn.

  “Well, why shouldn’t I?” Linda snapped.

  “He’s just such a … well, he’s kind of a wimp, isn’t he?” Tiffany said.

  Linda’s features congealed coldly. “Just because he isn’t a sports nut like everyone else around here doesn’t mean he’s a wimp. He happens to be a real nice guy. And he doesn’t go around jumping guys who are a lot smaller than he is, either.”

  Tiffany couldn’t resist the opening. “There aren’t any smaller guys,” she said, “unless you go over to the junior high.” Seeing Linda’s eyes glitter with tears, she relented. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “And I’ll cover for you, too. Say hi to him for me, okay?”

  Linda nodded, then turned away and hurried out of the school building.

  Twenty minutes later she came to the small county hospital and pushed her way into the waiting room. Except for a Chicano woman—her face pale and her eyes sunken and tired—the room was deserted. Linda looked around uncertainly for a moment, then went to ring the bell on the counter separating the reception area from the office.

  “She’s in Ricardo’s room,” the fragile woman suddenly said. “She’s giving my son a bath.”

  Linda turned to face the woman, realizing who she was but not knowing what to say to her. Before she could say anything at all, Susan Aldrich appeared. “All done, Mrs. Ramirez,” she said, then recognized Linda. “Well, hello. What brings you out here?” She glanced instinctively at the clock.

  “It’s lunch hour,” Linda explained. “I thought I’d come out and say hello to Mark.”

  “Mark?” the nurse replied blankly, then understood. “Oh, you mean Mark Tanner. He’s not here.”

  Linda looked at the nurse in confusion. “But they brought him in last night.”

  Susan Aldrich nodded. “And he left this morning, so I guess he must not have been hurt very badly.”

  Linda could barely believe it. She remembered the glimpse she’d caught of Mark last night as they’d moved him out of the emergency room, his face bruised and swollen, his chest swathed with heavy tape. “But where’d he go?” she breathed.

  “Home, I suppose,” Susan replied. “I could check if you want. He was already discharged when I got here this morning.”

  Linda shook her head. If she hurried, she still had time to get to the Tanners’, say hi, and be back at school in time for her fifth-period class.

  Sharon Tanner was just coming out of the house when Linda arrived. “Hi!” she greeted her. “You just caught me in time. I was going over to the hospital.” She held up some magazines and a book. “Mark must be getting bored with TV by now, don’t you think?”

  Linda gaped at Sharon. What was she talking about? “B-But isn’t he here?” she asked. “I was just at the hospital and they told me he was discharged this morning!”

  Now it was Sharon who stared dumbly, her mind reeling with confusion. There must be some mistake—when she’d left the hospital, Dr. MacCallum had made it clear that Mark wouldn’t be out until tomorrow, or this evening, at the earliest. “But that’s crazy!” she protested. “Of course he’s there. Whom did you talk to?”

  Linda repeated what had happened at the hospital. As Sharon listened, her eyes darkened with worry, but she still clung to the idea that it was some kind of mistake. “Come on,” she said to Linda, and turned back to the house. “I’m going to call the hospital and get this straightened out. My God,” she added, forcing a brittle laugh. “They can’t have lost him, can they?”

  Five minutes later, when she finally got Dr. MacCallum on the line, she was no longer laughing. “But why wasn’t I told?” she demanded. “I’ve never even talked to Dr. Ames!” She listened impatiently as MacCallum explained what had happened. “But it’s all ridiculous,” she protested when he was finished. “You said yourself there’s nothing seriously wrong with him. And why would he need a sports specialist? He was beaten up, not injured in a football game.”

  “I don’t know,” MacCallum replied honestly. “All I can tell you is th
at your husband’s signature was on the release. I even matched it against the forms he filled out here last night, just to be sure. It never occurred to me that he didn’t tell you this morning, or I would have called you myself.”

  When at last Sharon hung up, her worry of a few minutes earlier had been replaced with a hot anger. For her husband to have had Mark transferred to another hospital without even telling her—it was outrageous!

  She dropped Linda Harris off at the school, feeling no better for Linda’s assurances that Ames had been working with Robb almost since the day they’d moved to Silverdale, and that Robb was crazy about the program Ames had put him on.

  “But that’s not the point,” she’d tried to explain. “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with it at all. It just burns me up that no one told me what they were doing with Mark, that’s all!”

  Linda scrambled out of the car and slammed the door. “Tell Mark I’ll come and see him after school,” she called, but it was too late. Sharon’s anger in firm control of the accelerator, she sped away from the school, the tires of her car shrieking in protest.

  Mark lay in a haze, gazing glassily at a large television monitor that was suspended from the ceiling above his head. His ears were covered with a pair of headphones, and through the fog of drugs that clouded his brain, only the images on the screen and the sounds in his ears were real.

  It was like a dream—a pleasant dream in which he walked along a shady riverbank, pausing now and then to watch the water tumble over rocks or a turtle bask in the sun on a log. Birds flew overhead, and their sounds, mixed with the soothing babble of running water, filled his ears.

  A deer stepped out of a clump of aspens ahead, and Mark came to a halt, watching the animal as it grazed languidly on a clump of grass near the stream. Then other images began to flicker vaguely in his mind, images he couldn’t quite see but which his subconscious nevertheless registered and remembered.

  It was these images—the ones he couldn’t quite see—that he would remember later. All the rest of it, the vision of the stream and the birds singing, would fade away.

  As would the reality of what was happening around him, and to him.

  He was still strapped to the metal table, but he was no longer in the examining room to which he’d been brought on his arrival at the sports center. Nor, in reality, were the straps necessary, for Mark had ceased struggling against them immediately after that first shot—the first of more than half a dozen he’d received in the few hours he’d been there. Mark’s body, as relaxed now as his mind, was submitting nervelessly to the treatment it was undergoing. But they’d left the straps in place as they moved the metal table from room to room, more as precaution than anything else.

  Mark’s body, like Randy Stevens’s and Jeff LaConner’s on other, earlier days, was wired to an array of meters and monitors. An I.V. dripped into a needle taped securely to his upper right thigh, and another I.V. took a slow but continual sampling of his blood, a sampling that was being analyzed almost as quickly as it moved through the tiny capillary tube attached to the needle.

  A scanner hovered above his body, moving slowly up and down the length of the table, feeding a constantly changing series of data to a softly humming computer which, as fast as the digitalized images were absorbed into its memory banks, expanded and exaggerated them, then fed them onto an oversized monitor.

  Changes—drastic changes, even though they were imperceptible to the naked eye—had already taken place inside him.

  The hairline fracture in his jaw had all but disappeared, and the cracks in his ribs were healing rapidly.

  His bones, stimulated by the massive doses of synthetic hormones that had been dripping steadily into him since early that morning, had begun to respond, reproducing their own cells at an accelerated rate that had already added a sixteenth of an inch to Mark’s total height, and nearly a pound to his total weight.

  For nearly five hours Martin Ames had been overseeing Mark’s treatment, watching for the slightest sign of an adverse reaction. So far everything was proceeding beyond even his own highest expectations. Though few people would even have known what to look for, Ames was able to watch the changes in Mark’s body almost as they happened.

  His lung capacity had increased slightly, as had the size of his heart. His blood pressure—somewhat high when he had been brought in that morning—was normal now, and Ames felt pleased as he noted that the compensations he’d allowed for Mark’s emotional state just before his blood pressure was first measured had apparently been exactly precise.

  Even Mark’s brain showed minute chemical changes, changes that would soon embody themselves physically.

  And yet, Ames knew, without the enhancement of the bank of computers, Mark would appear no different now from the boy he had been a few hours ago.

  A soft electronic chime sounded, disturbing Ames’s concentration, and he glanced up irritably. A blue light was flashing on the wall. Could it really have been five hours that he’d been in the treatment room, his aides surrounding the examining table and making continuous, minute adjustments to the chemicals dripping into Mark’s body as he’d quietly issued a steady stream of orders? The strain in his muscles told him it was true.

  “All right,” he said, stretching his six-foot frame, massaging a knot in his right shoulder. “That’s it for now.”

  Immediately, one of the aides stopped the flow into Mark’s thigh from the I.V., and another slid the needle out of the vein, then swabbed the spot with a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol. It was a tiny needle, the mark barely visible in the center of a small bruise that would disappear within a few hours.

  Other aides began removing the monitoring devices. One by one the screens went blank, all except the one displaying Mark’s cardiovascular activity. That would be the last to be removed, when the final phase of Mark’s treatment had been completed.

  Ames watched the activity impassively. The session had gone perfectly. He was certain the prognosis for Mark Tanner was good.

  Unless …

  His mind shifted gears, and he thought of Jeff LaConner, who had been in this same room only hours before, wired to the same equipment. He still didn’t know what had gone wrong with Jeff. He’d been so careful, adjusting Jeff’s treatment after the first signs that the boy was developing a reaction to the therapy. It hadn’t worked; Jeff’s condition had only deteriorated.

  Somewhere there was an answer, and he was determined to find out what that answer was, to discover the miscalculation in the mix of hormones that had triggered the explosive response in Jeff LaConner and all the others.

  In the meantime, Mark Tanner, with his history of rheumatic fever and retarded growth, would provide more data, more knowledge, more progress.

  As Jerry Harris had promised, Mark was a perfect experimental subject. And in the end, Ames thought, Mark might benefit from the experimental treatment as much as he himself.

  Unless …

  He put the thought out of his mind as the team of aides finished their work. The monitor above Mark’s head had gone dark now, and the earphones had been removed from his head. The boy was stirring as the consciousness-suppressing drugs were filtered out of his bloodstream. In a few minutes he would awaken.

  “Unstrap him before he starts struggling,” Ames said as he stepped forward and took a hypodermic needle from the hand of his chief assistant. “We don’t want any marks on him at all.” Checking the needle carefully, he slid it into one of the veins of Mark’s right arm, then pressed the plunger.

  Almost as soon as the insulin hit Mark’s bloodstream, the boy broke out in a cold sweat and his body shook with tremors.

  The tremors increased. Abruptly, the dreamy look on Mark’s face was replaced with a grimace of fear and pain.

  The convulsions began then, Mark’s body jerking spasmodically as he went into the third phase of insulin shock. Only when he had finally fallen unconscious and his body relaxed did Ames nod.

  “All right,” he said.
“Take him in and get him dressed. By the time he wakes up, he won’t remember a thing.” A sardonic smile twisted his lips. “In fact,” he added, “he’ll probably feel better than he’s ever felt before in his life.”

  * * *

  At first Sharon Tanner wasn’t certain she’d come to the right place. She’d driven the two miles out of town almost unconsciously, simply following the road as her anger—most of it directed toward Blake—grew within her. Why would he have done such a thing without asking her? It wasn’t like him; wasn’t like him at all. But even as her anger built, the rational part of her mind answered her own question. Had he sought her agreement, she’d have simply assumed it was one more step in his ongoing campaign to get Mark involved in sports, and automatically objected.

  And she would have been right.

  She braked the car suddenly and stared at the building off to the right. The sports center appeared more like a campus than a clinic, completely surrounded by well-kept lawns. But then, as she drew nearer, she realized that these weren’t just lawns: they were playing fields, acres and acres of them. At least two football fields, a baseball diamond, and a hockey field. There was a track, too, with an infield that boasted an array of both high and low hurdles, a broad-jump track, and a high jump, as well as various exercise bars.

  In the center of all this was what looked like a lodge, but between her and the building were a pair of closed gates. She pulled the car up to the gates, rolled down the window and pressed a button on a large metal box mounted on an iron post. A moment later a male voice scratched from a speaker within the box: “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Dr. Ames,” Sharon said, her voice a little louder than she’d intended. “My name is Sharon Tanner. I’m Mark Tanner’s mother.”

  “One moment, please,” the voice replied. The speaker went dead. The seconds ticked by, and after nearly a minute, Sharon wondered if she was, indeed, at the right place. She was considering what to do when the speaker came to life again; at the same time, the gates began to swing open.