Creature

by John Saul

  Sharon bit her lip and nodded. “But that’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  MacCallum took a deep breath. “Maybe it is,” he conceded. “But on the other hand, if you’re not part of TarrenTech, sometimes this place looks pretty weird.” He glanced sharply at Sharon out of the corner of his eye, but her face betrayed no trace of defensiveness. He smiled wryly at her. “Or maybe you don’t think it’s strange that even in a company town like this, TarrenTech either supports or runs everything. Everything. The schools, the town council, the library, even Rocky Mountain High.”

  “And the hospital?” Sharon asked, her heart suddenly skipping a beat. To her relief, MacCallum shook his head.

  “We’re county. Completely independent, although even that isn’t by TarrenTech’s choice. In fact, they offered to buy the hospital from the county a few years back. Claimed they could run it more cheaply and efficiently than the county. Unfortunately for them,” he went on, making no attempt to keep his sarcasm and anger toward TarrenTech out of his voice, “all of us aren’t quite as thrilled to have TarrenTech here as the company thinks we ought to be, and the county didn’t see it quite the company’s way. They had the idea that a public hospital should be run by the public, and wouldn’t knuckle under to Thornton.” His lips curled into a wry grin. “So anyway, if you think there’s some kind of conspiracy going on, I won’t argue with you. This whole place has always been a little too perfect for my tastes. In fact, I was very happy with it the way it used to be. Anyway, the whole thing smells bad to me.” He fell silent for a moment, then went on. “I assume you know all about Ricardo Ramirez?”

  Sharon nodded.

  “Well, if you ask me, TarrenTech wouldn’t have been so antsy to avoid any kind of legal action on Maria’s part if they didn’t have something to hide. I’m afraid I just don’t believe in that much corporate altruism. Which, I have to confess, is one of the reasons I’m here this morning.” He looked at her pointedly now. “I’m assuming you know something you haven’t told me about yet.”

  Sharon was silent for a few moments, making up her mind whether to trust him or not. But of course, she had no choice. Finally she nodded, reaching down to pull the small white package out of the bottom of her purse. “I—I found these out at TarrenTech the other day,” she said, her voice dropping so low MacCallum could barely hear her. “They were in a box marked for incineration, and when I had a chance, I just—well, I just took them.”

  She handed the package to MacCallum. He stared at it for a moment, then slowly unwrapped it. A moment later the brilliant glare of the afternoon sun shone on the two dead animals, both of them still frozen solid.

  His frown deepening, MacCallum read the tags. “Same litter,” he said. “Born May eighth. Their parents were Male Number 61 and Female Number 46.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Sharon replied. “But what could the other number mean? The one on the big one?”

  MacCallum studied it for a moment. Suddenly he was almost certain he knew. And then, as he thought about Jeff LaConner and Randy Stevens—maybe even Robb Harris?—he felt a wave of nausea rise in his stomach. “Growth hormones,” he breathed almost to himself. His eyes, oddly dazed, drifted toward Sharon. “That’s what it has to be, doesn’t it?” he asked. “They’re experimenting on animals with growth hormones.” He stared at the larger of the two mice once more. Now its strange deformities seemed to stand out.

  The enlarged feet and the long claws.

  The heaviness of the bone structure around its eyes, and the distended look to its jaw.

  He shook his head, unable to accept the idea that had taken such sudden form in his mind. “You’re not thinking they’re experimenting on the kids, are you?”

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Sharon said numbly, but knew in her heart that that was precisely what she had been thinking.

  “Look,” MacCallum told her. “Let me take these things back to the hospital and run some tests on them. It could be that we’re on the wrong track completely. I mean—maybe they’re experimenting with some kind of genetic engineering techniques out there. Certainly all kinds of things are possible with that now, and the big one might be nothing more than some kind of mutation. If it is, it won’t be too hard to find out—all I have to do is get a lab in Denver to run a DNA comparison on them.”

  “And if it’s not?” Sharon asked, hearing in her mind once again echoes of Blake’s assurances that Mark’s treatment was nothing more than a vitamin complex of some sort.

  “Then we’ll take it one step at a time,” MacCallum told her. He wished he could tell her not to worry, assure her that nothing as evil as human experimentation could be going on in Silverdale.

  But he couldn’t.

  They parted a few minutes later, MacCallum having carefully rewrapped the two small corpses in their butcher paper and put them into his briefcase.

  As soon as they left the square, the man who had been parked in a station wagon half a block away, his presence unnoticed by either Sharon or MacCallum, stepped out of his car and moved across the sidewalk to a pay phone, ignoring the unsecured convenience of the cellular phone mounted in the console next to the driver’s seat.

  For this call he needed privacy.

  MacCallum drove slowly away from the village, only part of his mind involved in negotiating the familiar route from the town out to the hospital half a mile beyond the city limits. He was going over the conversation he’d had with Sharon Tanner once more, examining every bit of it, wishing he could find a way to disagree with her. But he’d known Charlotte LaConner, too, and to him Charlotte had never seemed the sort to harbor paranoid tendencies.

  He turned onto the main highway but didn’t bother to speed up. There was little traffic on the road, and he was in no hurry. Beside him, resting on the passenger seat, was the briefcase containing the dead mice. As he glanced down at it, he was already speculating on what might have been done to the larger of the two.

  He was aware of certain experiments taking place with human growth hormones, aware that since the technology of synthesizing them had been developed, it was beginning to be possible to correct all sorts of genetic deficiencies and glandular imbalances.

  And, of course, it was just the sort of thing that the TarrenTech pharmaceutical division might be interested in.

  Also, it was just the sort of thing that Martin Ames would be interested in, with his ongoing research in the area of human physical development.

  But surely they couldn’t have begun experimenting on human beings. That was the sort of thing the Nazis had done back in the Second World War. And this was the end of the century! Even to consider such a thing—

  The thought broke off as MacCallum was suddenly distracted by something on the road ahead.

  It was a truck, a big semi, and even from here MacCallum could see that it was going far faster than the fifty-mile-an-hour speed limit posted all along the two-lane highway that branched off from the main north-south route to the west.

  He frowned. Didn’t the guy know there was a lot of open range to the west and he might come across a cow wandering along the road? At the speed the truck was traveling, it would have as little chance of survival as the cow itself.

  Instinctively, he pulled to the right, giving the oncoming vehicle plenty of space.

  * * *

  In the cab of the truck, the driver spotted the car ahead—an Audi, dark green. He raised his binoculars and checked the license plate, then glanced in the rearview mirrors. Just as he’d been told, there were no cars behind him.

  Nor were there any cars following the Audi, either.

  He smiled.

  The job was going to be easy.

  He pressed harder on the accelerator, and the pitch of the diesel engine under the hood changed slightly. A belch of black smoke rose from the twin exhausts flanking the cab itself, and the speedometer crept up toward the eighty-mile-per-hour mark.

  He saw the Audi move slightly away from the center line as
its driver attempted to give him more room.

  “But not enough, you sorry son of a bitch,” the driver muttered to himself.

  He was closing fast on the Audi now, only a hundred yards still separating them. He stepped harder on the accelerator, gaining yet a little more extra speed.

  Fifty yards now, then twenty-five.

  His hands tensed on the steering wheel and his left foot hovered over the brakes, ready to execute the quick maneuver he’d practiced so many times before.

  Ten yards.

  Mac MacCallum didn’t realize what was happening until the last possible instant. He was far to the right of the oncoming lane now, the tires on the right-hand side of the car kicking up a cloud of dust as they touched the hard-packed dirt and gravel of the road’s shoulder. The oncoming truck had almost reached him, and its left tires had drifted over the center line. For a moment Mac thought the truck must have lost its brakes and was running wild, but then he realized that the road here was almost level—surely the truck’s engine alone would have been enough to slow it down.

  Then he heard the scream of tires skidding against pavement, and the truck suddenly slewed toward him, its air horn blasting, the immense mass of its cab hurtling straight at the closed window next to his head.

  He wrenched at the wheel and for a split-second felt the tight steering mechanism of the Audi respond, but then the great chrome bumper of the truck smashed into the car.

  The window exploded inward and a maelstrom of shattered glass tore into his face, blinding him. The car itself rose into the air, its side all but torn away by the impact, then flipped over onto its back and landed upside down, skidding across the ground for nearly thirty feet before slamming into a large boulder.

  The roof had collapsed instantly when the car hit the ground, and now Mac, blood streaming from the lacerations that covered his face, struggled feebly to free himself from the tangled wreckage. The steering wheel was jammed against his chest, and every breath brought a searing agony of pain as his shattered ribs pierced both his lungs and tore at the muscles around his rib cage.

  But the car hadn’t caught on fire, and he wasn’t dead yet.

  The driver of the truck brought his vehicle to a skidding stop, all its wheels locked by the massive force he’d applied to the braking system. He scrambled out of the cab, a small air pump clutched in his right hand, its cord already attached to the cigarette lighter on the dash.

  Ignoring the car that lay smashed almost beyond recognition a few dozen yards away, he attached the air pump’s hose to the stem of the left front tire. Only when he’d made certain that the pump was operating properly did he turn his attention to the ruined Audi and the faint cries for help emanating from its twisted body.

  He moved quickly to the car, then paused warily, waiting to see if it was going to burst into flame. A small puddle of gasoline had formed beneath the filling pipe, but nowhere did he see any signs of smoke.

  Ignoring the driver’s side, he hurried around the car and squatted down, peering inside until he spotted what he was looking for.

  A black briefcase—the old-fashioned kind that opened at the top—was wedged between the passenger seat and the collapsed dashboard.

  The truck driver reached through the window and quickly worked it loose. He opened it, rifled through it for a moment, then pulled out the small package wrapped in white butcher paper. Satisfied, he shoved the briefcase back into the car and stepped back.

  “H-Help …” he heard a faint voice mumble. “I can’t …”

  “Sorry, buddy,” the truck driver said. “If you’re gonna stick your nose in where nobody wants you, you gotta expect some trouble.”

  Reaching into his pocket, he fished out a battered book of matches. Casually glancing in both directions, and still seeing no traffic approaching, he struck one of the matches and lit a cigarette. Then, stepping back and taking careful aim, he flicked the match into the small puddle forming beneath the gasoline intake, turned and fled.

  For a moment the puddle only blazed up, but then the fumes in the tank itself ignited and the muffled roar of the explosion filled the air. As the tank came apart, a glowing fireball rose over the car and the car itself was engulfed in flames.

  Inside the car Mac MacCallum, still conscious, saw the orange flames whirl around him and felt the heat of the air as he tried to breathe.

  A moment later, as the fire sucked the oxygen out of the air in the car, he felt himself passing out.

  The last thing in his mind before he died was Sharon Tanner.

  He wondered if they had killed her, too.

  * * *

  The driver stood well away from the truck until the small pump had overinflated the tire to the point where it blew out, then quickly returned the pump to its storage place under the front seat. He glanced only once at the wide black lines his skidding tires had left as he’d slewed the truck into the Audi, already well aware that they were an almost perfect imitation of the marks he’d have left trying to regain control of the big semi after a tire had blown.

  Satisfied, he snapped on the C.B. radio mounted on the dash of the truck and tuned it to Channel 9. Only after he’d reported the accident on the emergency band did he at last move back toward the burning car, so that when the police arrived, it would be clearly seen that he was doing his best to rescue the man he’d just killed.

  21

  “Mom?” Kelly said. When her mother didn’t turn around, she repeated the word, louder this time. “Mom!” Sharon was sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window but not really aware of what was happening outside. As had been the case ever since her meeting in the park with Mac MacCallum, she was considering what to do next. She’d already come to one decision: as soon as Mark came home, she would tell him that he was to spend no more time at the sports center.

  Blake wouldn’t like it—she knew that—and she still wasn’t sure what she would tell him when he demanded an explanation. What could she tell him? That she was almost certain the sports center was nothing less than a laboratory using the Silverdale children for experimentation? The least he’d do was laugh at her, and she wouldn’t really blame him if he accused her of falling victim to the same kind of paranoia Chuck LaConner insisted had overcome Charlotte.

  “Mom!” Kelly said once again, and this time the little girl’s voice penetrated Sharon’s consciousness. She turned and managed a smile.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I was just thinking about something.”

  Kelly was standing by the back door, her brows knit in a frown. “When are we going to have dinner?” she demanded. “I’m hungry!”

  Sharon glanced up at the clock. It was almost six-thirty, and she realized that she’d been sitting at the table for almost two hours. Hurriedly, she stood and went to the freezer, making a mental inventory of its contents.

  “Did Mark come home yet?” she asked.

  Kelly shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

  Sharon headed toward the kitchen door to call up the stairwell, then noticed Chivas curled up by the stove, his chin resting on his forepaws, his large eyes staring dolefully up at her. The dog’s presence was enough to tell her that her son wasn’t in the house—if he had been, Chivas would long ago have disappeared from the kitchen to trail along after Mark, whatever he might be doing.

  The front door slammed, and a moment later Mark himself appeared in the kitchen. Chivas instantly scrambled to his feet and skidded across the slick vinyl floor, his tail wagging madly.

  “Hey! Get down, you big idiot.” Mark pushed the dog aside, his face lit by an oddly triumphant grin that Sharon had never seen before. “Is Dad home yet?”

  Sharon shook her head. “And where have you been?” she countered, nodding pointedly toward the clock. “Look what time it is.”

  Mark’s smile faded only slightly. “At the center,” he replied. “I didn’t get there till almost four.”

  Sharon frowned, but when she spoke, she tried to keep her voice neu
tral. “What on earth did you do out there for two hours?” she asked.

  Mark shrugged, and idly picked an apple from a basket on the counter. “Just the usual stuff. Marty checked me over and then I did some exercises.”

  Sharon’s lips tightened. “What kind of exercises?” she asked.

  Mark’s smile faded away. “What does it matter?” he challenged her. “You don’t like what I’m doing anyway.”

  “Can’t a mother be curious?” Sharon said lightly, ignoring the faintly contemptuous tone his words had carried.

  “Aw, Jeez, Mom,” Mark replied, his eyes rolling with impatience. “What do you care what I do out there?”

  Now Sharon allowed her tone to harden. “I’m your mother. And is it some kind of big secret? Is something going on out there you don’t want me to know about?”

  Mark stared at her for a moment, then his mouth twisted into an insolent grin. “Yeah,” he said. “Marty’s gay, and we’re all getting it on together. Is that what you want to hear?”

  “Mark!” Sharon exclaimed, her eyes instantly going to Kelly, who was now staring curiously at her brother. “What on earth would make you even think of a thing like that?” she asked before her daughter could get a word in.

  Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems like you have this thing about the center, that’s all.”

  “It’s not a ‘thing,’ as you put it,” Sharon said tightly. “I just want to know what you were doing, that’s all. And if you don’t want me to keep asking you questions, you can start giving me some answers.”

  Mark’s eyes flashed with anger now. “All right!” he flared. “If it’s so damned important to you, here’s what happened. I went out there and stripped down, and they took my pulse and my blood pressure, and my measurements. Okay?” His eyes bored into her, but he didn’t give her a chance to say anything. “And then I did twenty minutes on the rowing machine. Okay? And then that was all, and I came home. Is that all right with you?”