How close could a man come?
He gulped down the last of the Vodka Collins and nearly missed setting the glass on the coffee table. There was a quote he had picked up in college, though he couldn't remember who had said it. It was this: I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
“Not so me,” Childs said, knowing that the fear of failure had been a harbinger perched upon his shoulder for as long as he could remember. It was always there, always whispering calamities in his ear, rarely letting him sleep the dreamless night, rest the wakeful morning. And it had only become worse since Audrey had died.
“Not so me.”
The phone rang.
It startled him, and Childs barked the shin of his right leg against the coffee table as he sat up. It hurt something awful as he limped into the kitchen and grabbed the receiver off its cradle. “Yeah?”
“You're back?” Elizabeth said, surprised. Her last name was Tilley. She was in her late-fifties, and she had an extensive background in nursing, which was how Childs had first met her back in the days of the off-campus clinic near Berkeley. They had been together, professionally, ever since. If there was anyone in the world he trusted, it was Elizabeth. She was his adviser, his confidant, the only person who had truly shared his vision all these years.
“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.
“For example, we've recently learned that most people, when they enter what we've come to think of as our twilight years—the sixties, seventies and eighties—these people stop producing HGH. More important, when we give these same people regular injections of the Human Growth Hormone some interesting things begin to happen. They begin to increase bone density. They increase muscle tone. They lose an average of twelve percent of their body fat. And they find they have recharged energy levels.
“In essence, ladies and gentlemen, we're able to chart an array of specific, measurable changes in these population groups that indicate something remarkable is going on. It appears that HGH, administered to the elderly, might actually bring about a process of age reversal.
“These people get younger.”
Dr. Timothy Childs
Bay Area BioTech Conference
June 1989
[113]
Walt was already awake when the alarm clock brought Teri out of her sleep at a couple minutes of six the next morning. She found him in the kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee, waiting for the toaster to finish its business with a slice of bread.
“Morning.”
“How long have you been up?” she asked, plopping down at the table, wishing she'd had another three or four hours. It didn't come easy anymore, a good night's sleep. The nights had started growing longer after Gabe had first shown up on her doorstep, and then again when they had taken him from her, and then, she supposed, one more time after the incident two nights ago with Boyle. The nights kept getting longer and the mornings shorter.
“I don't know. Not long,” he said quietly. The tone of his voice struck her almost immediately as slightly foreign. He sounded as if he had slipped beneath a wave of sadness and the undertow was carrying him further out into the muddy waters.
“Are you all right?”
“I don't know.” He looked at her, something frighteningly unfamiliar behind his eyes, and looked away. “I thought I had put it all behind me. But now...”
“What is it, Walt?”
“It's not important. Really.”
Teri stared at him without saying a word.
“It's just something that surprised me, that's all. It's personal. It doesn't have anything to do with you or Gabe.”
“I can sit here all day if I have to,” Teri said.
Walt flashed a crooked smile, then took it back. “My father. He died three years ago, alone in a hospital in Nevada, at the age of seventy-three, after a bout with pneumonia. We didn't get along terribly well, and I guess somehow, over time, I came to think of myself as not really having a father. I hadn't seen him in eight or nine years.”
“I'm sorry,” Teri said.
“Today's the third anniversary of his death. I guess I'm a little surprised it still comes after me.” The knob on the toaster popped and Walt took possession of the bread almost the second it appeared out of the furnace. He dropped it on a plate, slapped on some butter and strawberry jam, and carried it over to the table. “Here, a little something to get you going. You look like you need it.”
“Thanks.”
“You want some coffee?”
“Black?”
“Coming up.”
She took a bite of her toast and dropped it back on the plate. She really wasn't that hungry. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” he said flatly.
For the second time, she considered showing him the envelope that had arrived in the mail yesterday. It seemed ever more pertinent in light of the anniversary of the death of his father. Though there was a time and a place for everything, and in the end she decided to put it off a little longer.
“What do you think Childs does with them?” she asked abruptly.
“I don't know,” Walt said. He placed the coffee cup in front of her and sat across the table in a chair that usually held a stack of newspapers. “It's got something to do with some research project, I suppose. Probably something to do with aging.”
“I keep thinking about what he told me.”
“What was that?”
“About Gabe getting older.”
“Yeah, well, you've got to remember who we're dealing with, Teri. This guy's been using children as guinea pigs for the past twenty years. I'm not sure you should put too much credence in anything he's said, especially anything about Gabe.”
“But if he was telling the truth...” She let the thought trail away, and it wasn't because the thought had come to her incomplete and wanting.
“What?”
“If he was telling the truth, then that would mean... it would mean Gabe was dying.” It was out there now, plain to see. Ignore it or fear it or try to make do.
Walt didn't say a word.
“And there's something else,” she said. “Childs might be the only person in the world who can save him.”
[114]
Childs came out of the house, checking his watch. He dug into his right front pocket, pulled out his keys, locked the front door, and started down the walkway. He had parked overnight at the front curb instead of in the garage where he usually kept the car.
It was ten past eight.
Walt and Teri had been parked across the street, half-a-block up, for over an hour. She had found herself an oldies station on the radio and a song called Breakdown by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers had just come on as Childs emerged from the house.
Walt tapped her on the forearm and pointed. “We're on.”
She turned off the radio and buckled her seat belt. Between the coffee and the cold morning air, Teri had finally come fully awake and alert. Added to that now was a sudden rush of adrenaline. “About time. I was beginning to wonder if he was taking the day off.”
“Me, too,” Walt said, starting the engine.
They pulled out, went down the block a couple of houses, then pulled into a driveway and turned around. Childs was making a right hand turn, two blocks up, by the time they were headed in the right direction.
“Don't lose him.”
Walt grinned. “I won't.”
He had warned her that she was going to have to be patient, that Childs might not lead them anywhere except to the office and back. And not just today, but tomorrow and maybe the day after and maybe the day after that as well. It could turn out to be long and arduous, he had said.
But instead, Childs took them on a sight-seeing tour through a maze of neighborhoods and twice around the business district, something he wouldn't be doing if he were going to the office or downtown to the mall or over to the Holiday Market to pick up some groceries. Even a careful man didn't waste his time worrying about being followed if he were only making a trip to the market.
“What's he doing?”
“Making sure no one's following him.”
“He's not going to the clinic, is he?”
“Nope,” Walt said.
“You think we hit a jackpot first coin in the slot?”
“That I do.”
It was almost nine by the time Childs finally pulled into the entrance of the Devol Research Institute. Walt slowed down out front and watched the Buick make the long straight line down the driveway to the parking lot. The sprinklers had come on sometime earlier. The landscaping glistened
and there were a number of small puddles in the road that seemed to explode under the weight of the car's tires.
“You were right,” Teri said, feeling a strange sense of dread settle over her. It was almost as if she had come to a fork in the road and deep in her heart she knew that neither of her options would take her to where she wanted to go.
“Lucky guess.”
“You think Gabe's inside somewhere?”
“He's in there, all right.”
“Can we get him?”
Walt pulled back into the street and accelerated. “Not yet. We have a little research to do first.”
[115]
Mitch, who had pulled over to the side of the road in front of a trash bin, watched the Pontiac Sunbird slow down outside the entrance to the Institute. This was not a good thing. Not a good thing at all.
Odd as it might sound, he had grown to admire Mrs. Knight. She was one tough woman, stubborn and dogged. He still had some bruises to prove it. But what she didn't seem to realize was that she was putting herself into the kind of jeopardy that could get her killed. She wasn't supposed to know about this place, and now that she did, something was going to have to be done about her.
The Sunbird pulled back into traffic and started down the street, gradually accelerating until it disappeared into the horizon. Mitch watched it go with a feeling of dread, the kind of thing that sometimes settled over him when he knew things had gotten out of hand.
No sense following them any further. Not now. All bets were off now that they had found their way this far.
He waited for an opening in the traffic, and drove down the street, talking to himself before pulling into the Institute entrance. D.C. was not going to be pleased with this new wrinkle. He was a man who preferred that things went smoothly. When they didn't, when the clamps got a little too tight, you couldn't trust being around him, because you never knew what he would do. And this... this... he wasn't going to like at all.
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