The Disappeared

by David B. Silva

  The woman stepped onto the walkway, turned and brushed past the boy. It was a snap of the fingers, just like that, and then it was over. As near as Walt could tell, all she had done was put her hand on the boy's shoulder and whisper something. What she had whispered was anyone's guess.

  The boy displayed no outward acknowledgment, good or bad; he simply stayed on course to the restrooms, with barely a break in stride. The woman stayed to a course of her own. She circled around the perimeter of the park, and rejoined Childs in the bleachers.

  What the hell was that all about?

  After several minutes, the boy emerged again from the bathroom and stood at the entrance, looking confused. He shaded his eyes against the sun, glancing across the grass to where his friends were still huddled together, talking. And then he did a curious thing. He turned and went the other direction.

  That put Walt in a sudden quandary.

  He watched the kid disappear behind the foliage at the far side of the park, then glanced at the bleachers and noted that neither Childs nor the woman had budged an inch from where they were sitting. Whatever or whoever they were waiting for, they were still waiting. And that left Walt with a decision. Follow the boy or join the wait.

  He cut across the picnic area, around the outer edges of the ball field and slipped out through the wall of oak leaf hydrangea at the far side. The boy was crossing the street half-a-block up. His hands were jammed into the front pockets of his jeans, which were at least four inches too large around the waist and held up by nothing more than a length of rope. His head hung low as he shuffled along in no apparent hurry. He did not appear to be a boy with a mission.

  Walt kept a safe distance back.

  At the next corner, the boy turned right and continued on his odyssey through the suburban territories. If you followed half-a-dozen regular kids walking down the street, this one would blend in seamlessly, a chameleon with all the right colors, all the right moves. He was invisible if you weren't looking, reticent if you weren't listening. He was a thousand other kids, a single faceless child. All of these and none of these.

  So what was really going on?

  They moved in make-believe tandem three blocks down, two blocks over until the boy stopped outside a small, cubby-hole-of-a-store set back from the street. It was shouldered on one side by a coffee shop called Mimi's and a Coin-Operated Laundromat on the other. The boy raised his head and read the sign over the store. It read: The Book Mark. New and Used Books. Buy or Trade.

  This was where he had come.

  He sat on a reading bench outside the bookstore, his hands out of his pockets and clasped behind his head. He crossed his legs in front of him and stretched and stared off into the endless blue dreams of the afternoon sky.

  Walt crossed the street and got himself a window table at a place called The Sandwich Shop, where he could keep an eye on things without looking conspicuous. He ordered a slice of lemon meringue pie and a Diet Coke, then sat back and watched.

  A few minutes later, a girl, who looked to be a couple of years older than the boy—maybe sixteen or seventeen, it was so hard to tell these days—came down the same street, in the same direction. She was dressed in jeans with holes in the knees and an oversized sweat shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. Sunlight glistened off a string of four earrings dangling from her left ear.

  She stopped and looked up at the sign over the bookstore, the one that said: The Book Mark. As the boy had done before her, she seemed satisfied that she had found her way to the right place. She sat on the bench opposite him, curled protectively into the little space afforded.

  As far as Walt could tell, they exchanged not a glance nor a word nor any other form of communication that might indicate they knew each other. They sat like two strangers sharing a park bench out of necessity, neither liking nor disliking the need. And perhaps that was what they were. Two strangers sharing a bench.

  It was another fifteen minutes before the third one came along. Walt hadn't recognized the girl from the park, and he didn't recognize this second boy, either. The kid sat between the other two, his arms folded defiantly across his chest, his gaze faraway and out of touch.

  Walt finished his pie. He wiped his mouth and downed the last of the Diet Coke. This was beginning to get interesting. Three kids, all in their teens, parked on a bench outside a bookstore, waiting. Waiting for what?

  Childs, of course. They're waiting for the good Dr. Childs to come and pick them up and take them back to the Devol Research Institute. That's what they're waiting for. Only they don't know it, do they? That's what the laying-on of hands and the whispering was all about. It was the Pied Piper piping. And now the children are all in a line, waiting to follow the music wherever it takes them.

  He crumpled up his napkin and sat back in the booth. It was only a couple of minutes more before Childs and the woman finally showed up. The good doctor was punctual if nothing else. He pulled up to the curb and without a word, the three kids climbed off the bench and into the back seat of the car. Nothing to it. It was that easy, that quick, that inconspicuous.

  Slick was the word that came to Walt's mind as he watched the car pull out into the street again.

  The man was slick.

  [107]

  The empty elevator car, which had been parked on the top floor where all the lab work was being done, started its slow descent toward the basement. It would take several more days before all the test results would be completed. By then, Childs would be back in California. In fact, he had a ticket on the redeye heading out tonight. Pam would be faxing him the prelims as soon as they were available, and if there were any surprises—which he had no reason to expect—then she would express the samples. That had only been necessary once before, when they had first tried AA103. Nothing even remotely as intrusive had been introduced into the study since.

  The lab was fully equipped, though it had not always been. Most of the money had poured into the project in the mid-Eighties, after the incident with the AA103. The abrupt comatose states brought about by the experimental drug had initially been thought disastrous. People in the CIA and the DOD were in a panic, fearing that if the project were exposed the entire government might fall. But then an interesting thing had happened. The subjects, while still comatose, had stopped aging. It was the result Childs had been after all along. Only he had stumbled across it accidentally and didn't clearly understand why or how the natural process had been interrupted. Hence the money came pouring in. Find the answer and everything else would work itself out.

  He was still looking for the answer.

  The upstairs lab was primarily a biochemistry lab, though there was also a seldom-used bacteriology component. The blood and urine samples were already in testing. Some of the blood had been inserted into a special glass tube, then placed in a centrifuge and spun at a rate of several thousand revolutions per minute, separating the blood cells from the blood serum, which remained at the top of the tube. The serum went into little plastic cups next, then into an automatic analyzer that measured the color by shining lights through the sample plus a reagent solution. Other blood samples were given a flame photometer test for certain elements such as sodium and potassium. The examination of the liver cell samples under an electron microscope would come later.

  As the elevator neared the halfway point of its descent, everything was moving along smoothly, all on schedule. The routine examinations on all three subjects had been completed in a little more than forty-five minutes. In addition, Childs had already debriefed and reprogrammed the subjects, which was and always had been the trickiest element of the entire operation. The past five years, they had developed a system of hypnotic and subliminal commands in conjunction with a virtual reality simulator that actually reconstructed a powerful false memory in the minds of the subjects. They had spent the afternoon, the entire afternoon, at the park. That would be their only memory of their afternoon activity. Everything else would be masked. It was a remarkably effective s
ystem.

  Before virtual reality had been an option, the use of drugs and hypnosis in combination had served in a similar role. While the doctor had not been able to substitute a false memory, he had been able to erase any memories the subjects might have had of being at the lab. It was a process that left them not quite knowing what had happened. They simply closed their eyes at the park and when they opened them again, two hours had passed. In the place of those two hours sat a blank spot. No explanation.

  The elevator arrived at the basement. The counterweight set, the car settled onto the buffer, and the doors opened. Childs escorted the three teenagers into the car. They were the walking dead, fixed gazes, expressionless, going through all the motions and only distantly aware of their surroundings. He pressed the button for the first floor. The elevator doors closed.

  Pam was waiting in the lobby for them. She checked her watch as the doors opened and the four passengers stepped out. “Right on schedule.”

  “Couldn't have gone any smoother,” Childs said.

  “The lab's got everything?”

  “They're already doing the work up.”

  They went out through the back entrance, where the Buick was waiting. The kids climbed into the back seat. They would be back at the park, innocent and safe for another three months, in less than the usual two hours. Childs closed the door behind the girl.

  “I think I'll go straight from the park to the airport,” he said. “No sense in hanging around here twiddling my thumbs for the next three hours. Maybe they'll be able to get me on an earlier flight out.”

  “I'll fax you the prelims tomorrow.”

  He paused a moment, the driver's side door open. He looked across the top of the car, a wistful longing in his eyes. “You know, we've been doing this for I don't know how many years now. I sure as hell wish we could get over that last little hurdle.”

  “We're getting closer.”

  [108]

  “For many years we believed that aging was a process beyond our control. There was only so much punishment the body could take, we believed, before it lost its ability to renew itself. Death, we believed, was inevitable.

  “I'm here to tell you tonight that we may very well have been wrong.

  “Please, let me explain.

  “The most interesting development to come along in recent years has been our increased understanding of the nature of a genetic disease called progeria. More specifically Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome. This is a degenerative disease which afflicts children. By the age of ten or twelve they begin to demonstrate many of the signs of old age. These signs may include gray hair, baldness, loss of body fat, and atherosclerosis, which refers to the fatty deposits lining the arterial walls. While the cause of progeria is still unknown we have discovered that its victims demonstrate a dramatic reduction in the number of times their cells are able to regenerate themselves.

  “We know that progeria is a genetic disease and therefore we can now conclude that the aging process is a genetically-controlled process. If we're able to learn to identify and manipulate the gene or genes that trigger this process, then there's no reason to believe we won't be able to delay and perhaps even permanently suspend the aging process.

  “This is not idle speculation, ladies and gentlemen.

  “This is, in fact, quite achievable. Perhaps even as early as the end of this century.”

  Dr. Timothy Childs

  Commission on Death and Dying, 1982

  [109]

  Beep... beep... beep... beep...

  Cody Breswick heard the beat of his heart on the ECG machine before he heard anything else. It made a sound like the old Pong video game his father had shown him at the San Francisco Exploratorium the last time they were there. Beep. Beep. Beep. A steady, almost monotonous sound that called him up from the black, murky waters where he had been floating aimlessly for longer than he could imagine.

  The ring finger of his left hand twitched, then fell motionless again.

  Air escaped from his lungs in a short, sharp burst.

  He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry and what little saliva he could gather together wasn't enough to coat the inside of his mouth much less the inside of his throat. It felt raw and burning when he tried to swallow.

  He moaned.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  At the edge of the darkness, he could see the first bluish-purple glow of a sunrise. There was light out there somewhere beyond the darkness, beyond the black, formless landscape. He sensed it more than saw it, but it was there all right, gradually drawing in the surrounding darkness the way a Black Hole draws in the light. The black sky turned dark blue... turned light blue... turned white-orange... turned

  ...turned bright and illuminating, a burning, sparkling sun.

  His eyelids fluttered open against the light, and he was startled by the intensity. He blinked back the glare several times, felt his eyes water, and raised his hand to shade his eyes against the brightness. Overhead, a small fluorescent lamp cast its gaze over his pillow and halfway down the bed.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  The machine making that rhythmic sound stood against the wall, next to the bed. Across a screen near the top, a graph line moved from left to right, spiking synchronically to each new beep. Cody didn't know exactly what it did or how it did it, but he thought the beeping had something to do with his heart. Small round bandages on his chest and wrists and ankles were connected to long wire leads that seemed somehow to join him to the machine.

  He tried to move his legs. They felt as if they were cased in concrete. A dull throbbing pain went spiraling up his calves and through his thighs. His right arm, which lay in some sort of contoured half-cast, strapped across the biceps and forearm, spasmed then fell still again. There was a needle protruding from beneath several layers of medical tape across the inside of his elbow joint. The needle ran into a tube, the tube ran into a machine that sounded as if it were gnawing on something, and above the machine someone had hung two bags of clear liquid from a metal stand.

  “Mom ...”

  He glanced to his right, beyond the machinery, and realized he was not alone in this room. There was a girl in the bed to his right. She looked as if she might be a year or two older than him, her hair blond-brown, her fingernails unpolished and long. She took in a shallow breath and her chest expanded briefly then fell back again. Cody wondered distantly if she were dying.

  “Mom...”

  It was scary here. Beyond the girl, there was another bed, another girl. And beyond her, another bed still. Each of the beds had its own overhead light, its own staff of machines. It brought to mind images of a hospital, though this seemed as if it were one step beyond the hope of a hospital, a place where they brought the hopeless to die.

  “Mom...”

  He called out another half-a-dozen times before the door finally opened and a woman he didn't know walked through. She seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see her. And though later he would wonder about his mother and why she wasn't there, initially he didn't care that the woman wasn't his mother. Initially, all that mattered was that someone had finally arrived.

  Someone who wasn't hooked up to a machine.

  [110]

  There had been no early flights out of O'Hare and Childs had ended up hanging out at the airport for nearly three hours before his eight o'clock flight was ready to board. The plane landed a little after ten, Pacific Daylight Time. It took him another thirty minutes to retrieve his luggage and make it to his car, which was parked in the overnight lot half-a-mile from the terminal.

  By the time he made it home, he had begun to feel the effects of the trip. He dropped his suitcase in the entryway and headed for the wet bar in the living room, where he poured himself a Vodka Collins. There was a slight chill in the house, though he preferred it a little on the cool side and didn't have the energy to bother with the thermostat, which was mounted on the wall at the other end of the hall.

  Instead, he collapsed on the
couch.

  It had been a long haul. Not just the trip and the flight home, but everything that had happened over the past twenty years: the first administration of Genesis, the disappointment when it hadn't appeared to have had any effect, the follow-up with the children just in case, then the mishap with the AA103. A long journey and Childs still wasn't sure how far he had come.

  D.C. had instructed him to dispose of the AA103 and all his research notes shortly after the comas had started to crop up. If the public ever found out, he had said, all hell would break loose. The entire government would be in danger. Of course, that had been before they discovered the other side effect: that the children had stopped aging. By then, D.C. had already supervised the burning of the notes and the disposal of all ten vials of the drug.

  Childs had been devastated. He had naively allowed himself to believe that he had been part of something important, so important that the CIA and the DOD had wanted him on their team. That was the only way he had been able justify what he had done. It had been for the good of the country, for the good of mankind. The end truly would justify the means.

  Not all the AA103 had gone down the drain. Childs had not been able to bring himself to dispose of all of it. Shortly after the first child had fallen ill, he had set aside a single vial, replacing it with distilled water. He was perhaps naive, but he wasn't stupid. He realized that once word got out about what had happened things in Washington would heat up and eventually he would feel the pressure. So he had covered himself.

  He took another swipe at his drink.

  AA103.

  How close could a man come to uncovering the key to aging and still not quite figure it out? All he had to do was take a look at any of the dozens of sleepers scattered around the country. In ten years, not a single child in the group had grown older. Not a single child. Not a day older. They had all beaten Old Man Time's ticking clock, and they had done it because of him. And now the only thing that remained between him and history was understanding the connection to the AA103.