“Just got in,” he said.
“I left a message on your answering machine.”
“Yeah?”
“Another sleeper woke up today.”
“Jesus.” Childs pulled out the nearest chair and sat down. Earlier, he been willing to succumb to the numbing effects of his drink, but he came fighting back now, suddenly wide awake and clear-headed. It hadn’t been a fluke after all. When the Knight boy had come out of his coma, his eyes a different color, no one had been sure what to make of it. Now, it was beginning to look like another effect of the AA103. “Which one?”
“Cody Breswick.”
“How old was he?”
“According to our records, almost eight.”
“And when did he go under?”
“Two days before the Knight boy.”
“Incredible.”
“You think they might all start coming up?”
“I don’t know. I wish I understood what the hell was going on.” Childs ran a hand across his face. He hadn’t had a chance to shave this morning. He wasn’t one of those guys who had to shave twice a day or otherwise risk walking around with a ragged five o’clock shadow, but the stubble was beginning to irritate him now. He needed to clean up. More than that, he needed a good night’s sleep.
“You monitoring all his vitals?”
“Of course.”
“Anything out of the ordinary?”
“As far as I can tell, he’s as healthy as the day he went under. We’ve already started him on physical therapy and we did a complete blood work up. No surprises so far. The kid’s eating like he’s trying to fill a hollow leg.”
“I can’t believe this,” Childs muttered. He let out a breath that felt cool against the inside of his throat, and wondered if he might be coming down with a cold. Things had been stressful lately. That wasn’t something he liked to admit. He preferred to think that over the years he had learned to roll with the punches when things got to be a little overwhelming. Sometimes, though, you fooled yourself without realizing it. “Okay, I’ll be in first thing in the morning. Is he sleeping now?”
“Like a baby.”
“Good, then first thing in the morning, okay?”
“He’s your patient.”
[111]
Teri was asleep by the time Walt arrived home. She had learned, without intending to, how to sleep lightly these past few days. As soon as the front door opened, she was sitting up in bed, the covers already thrown back. Walt came down the hall, whispering her name. If she hadn’t recognized the voice she might very well have jumped him, and someone might have gotten hurt.
“Walt?”
He pushed the bedroom door open. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
Teri stepped out from behind the door, the Webster’s New World Dictionary in her hand. “Jesus, Walt, you nearly scared me to death.”
“Sorry.”
“You’ll never know how close you came to being sorry.”
She returned the book to the top of the bureau, next to the manila envelope that had come in the mail for her this afternoon. It was addressed to Teri Knight, written in a bold, almost childlike scrawl that slanted downward, left to right. The address under her name, written in that same crayon-like scrawl, had not been her home address. The address had been Walt’s.
Teri had opened the envelope apprehensively, curling back the corner of the flap and peering in as if she were afraid something might leap out at her if she weren’t careful. But it had only been a letter and some newspaper articles. The letter had been written by Richard Boyle, someone she had since come to know better than she had ever intended.
For a moment, now, Teri had two simultaneous debates vying for her attention. The first was whether or not she should tell him about what had happened here last night. The second was whether or not she should show Walt the contents of the envelope. She decided, rightly or wrongly, against both. It was late now. They were both tired. There would be plenty of time to tell him about Richard Boyle, his deeds and his death.
Teri moved the dictionary to cover the envelope and went to sit on the edge of the bed. A yawn came crawling up her throat. She held her hand over her mouth.
“What time is it?”
“A little after midnight.”
“You just get in?”
“Yeah.”
“How did it go?”
“He’s still doing it,” Walt said. He sat next to her, his eyes bright, his voice bubbly, a little boy who had just discovered that tomorrow’s Christmas. “Whatever he did to Gabe, he’s still doing it. I saw him pick up a group of teenagers, drive them back to the Institute for a couple of hours, then return them to the park again. And these kids, they were like the walking dead. Eyes glazed over. No reaction to their surroundings. He’s got ’em programmed somehow. That’s how he gets them to the Institute and back again without anyone taking notice. The damn kids don’t even know what’s going on.”
And neither do the parents, Teri thought. She wondered how long Childs had been picking Gabe up and dropping him off again before whatever it was that had gone wrong had forced the doctor to keep him permanently. And beneath that, she wondered what kind of a parent could have been so blind to such a thing?
“And you think that’s what happened to Gabe?”
“Of course, it is.”
“It might have been going on for years,” she said, her body still tight, still feeling the aches and pains from last night’s struggle. “Maybe all of Gabe’s life. And I never did anything to stop it.”
“You had no way of knowing, Teri.”
“I should have known, though. I should have seen a sign or something. He’s my son. Maybe if I had kept a closer eye on him, if I hadn’t been working, or maybe if…”
“Shhh,” Walt said. He took her into the fold of his arms and she stared vacantly across the room at the hall light seeping in through the open door. “That’s enough of that. None of this was your fault, you hear me? You can’t let him off the hook that easily, Teri. He’s the one who has to take responsibility for what happened to Gabe. Not you. It wasn’t your fault.”
Maybe.
But that didn’t make it hurt any less.
“We still don’t know where he is, do we?” she said softly. “Gabe, I mean.”
“Maybe not the exact location, but at least we’ve got some leads.”
“The Institute?”
He nodded.
“It’s not registered anywhere,” Teri said.
“What?”
“The Devol Research Institute. I checked. It’s not registered.”
“I guess I would have been surprised if it were.”
“So how are we supposed to find him?”
“The same way we found the building in St. Charles,” Walt said. “We’ll sit at the good doctor’s curbside tomorrow and follow him around all day, and the next day and the day after that, and we’ll keep following him around until he takes us where we want to go.”
“That easy?”
“That easy.”
“God, I hope you’re right.”
[112]
“We’re getting close, my friends.
“HGH. Human Growth Hormone. We’ve been using this hormone for some time now, most notably to assist the growth potential of children whose physical development is lagging behind the norm. It has proven to be quite effective within this given context. However, we’re coming to believe that HGH may actually have a much larger role to play within the arena of human aging.