Creature Page 6

  “See you at lunchtime,” Linda promised. Then she was gone and Mark was filling out the numerous questionnaires and forms that would get him enrolled as a student at Silverdale High.

  Half an hour later Shirley Adams quickly went over the forms he’d completed and handed him yet another stack. “Take these to the nurse—two doors down, on the left—then come back here after you’re done. By then we should have a schedule for you.”

  “Wh-What about photography?” Mark asked hesitantly. “Back in San Marcos I was taking my second year of it.”

  Shirley Adams’s smile widened. “Then you’ll be in it here, too.”

  “You mean you really have a darkroom?”

  Miss Adams looked astonished. “This is Silverdale,” she said. “We have everything here.”

  Mark, dressed only in a pair of gym shorts that were two sizes too large, was standing on the scales when Robb Harris walked into the nurse’s office. Robb glanced at the scales, then smirked at Mark.

  “A hundred and five?” he asked. “You’re even scrawnier than I was when I came here.” Before Mark could say anything, Robb turned to the nurse. “The coach wants me to go over to the clinic this morning. Can you write me a pass?”

  “In a minute,” the nurse replied, not glancing up from the clipboard on which she had been noting Mark’s height, blood pressure, lung capacity, reflex responses, and myriad other details pertaining to his health.

  “Maybe you’d better write one for Mark, too,” Robb went on, dropping onto a chair and stretching his long legs out in front of him. “I bet Dr. Ames could fix him up in no time.”

  Mark frowned. “Dr. Ames?” he asked. “Who’s he?”

  “The sports clinic. Didn’t your dad tell you about it?”

  Mark shook his head, but already a tight knot of anxiety was forming in the pit of his stomach.

  “It’s a couple of miles out of town. It’s a sports camp all summer, and kids come from all over the country. But the rest of the year we get to use it.”

  Mark stared at Robb. “Use it for what?”

  “For training,” Robb replied. The look of scorn that had needled at Mark on Saturday evening came into his eyes once more. “Dr. Ames knows practically everything there is to know about sports medicine, and he’s got all kinds of special equipment out there. It’s neat.”

  “And,” the nurse added with a knowing glance at Mark, “the fact that the boys get a morning off from classes when the coach sends them out there doesn’t make it any tougher for them.”

  “Time off from classes?” Mark echoed. “Just so you can go out and train for football?”

  “And basketball and baseball,” Robb replied.

  Mark frowned. “So what’s wrong with you that you’re going today?”

  Robb shrugged. “Nothing. It’s just a checkup. All of us on the football team get one every week.”

  “Every week! What for?”

  Robb rolled his eyes impatiently. “Because you can get hurt playing football, dummy. Christ, look what happened to that guy from Fairfield on Saturday. He’s all torn up inside, but he looked just fine.”

  The nurse put her clipboard aside for a moment, scribbled something on the top sheet of a small pad of paper, and handed it to Robb, who stood up and stretched lazily, then grinned at Mark.

  “Sure you don’t want to come along?” he asked. “It sure beats sitting in a math class.”

  Mark shook his head. “Guess I’ll have to do without weekly checkups, since I’m not going out for football.”

  Robb looked at him sharply. “Oh, yeah? That’s not the way I hear it.”

  And then he was gone. Mark stared at the closed door where Robb had stood a moment before. The other boy’s last words echoed in Mark’s mind.

  The knot of anxiety in his stomach tightened.

  Robb Harris pedaled his bicycle slowly out of town, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his back, feeling no rush to reach his destination. That, he decided, was one of the best things about being on the football team. You never had to rush to get anywhere except practice, and at least one day a week you could count on half a day off from classes. Not, of course, that you could let your grades slip—Phil Collins was an absolute fanatic about that. Drop below a B average, and you were off the team. But if you were on the football team, the teachers were always ready to give you a little extra help, so it was really no sweat. And in the end the best football players from Silverdale always got their pick of where they wanted to go to college.

  They might not get scholarships, but they all at least got their choice.

  He breathed deeply of the mountain air, enjoying the rush of oxygen filling his lungs.

  Not like before, when he’d been growing up in San Marcos. From the time Robb had been seven years old, almost every breath had been an agony. He could still remember the terrible panic he felt whenever an attack began, the helpless, horrible fear as he gasped for air. It had been that way here, too, for the first few months. But then he’d started going to Dr. Ames, and been put on a regimen of exercise.

  For the first six weeks he’d absolutely hated it. But then the coughing had begun to ease and he’d started feeling better. A few months later, as he’d put on weight and grown out of his clothes, he decided that all the exercise was worth it.

  Then, summer before last, his dad had gotten him into the football camp, even though he’d never really played the game before. At first he felt clumsy and stupid, but as the summer progressed, he began to catch on. For the first time in his life he felt like everyone else.

  Maybe, he thought, that would happen to Mark, too. Except that Mark didn’t seem to care if he fit in or not. Robb snickered softly to himself, remembering Mark showing off his rabbits the other day.

  Christ, that was kid stuff. And if the other guys found out about it, Mark had better watch out.

  He turned off the narrow road that led up the valley toward the foothills, and steered the bike up the lane to the gates of the sports clinic, barely glancing at the sign he knew so well:

  ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH

  Mens Sana in Corpore Sano

  Robb still thought it was a dumb name but he hadn’t been able to convince Marty Ames that none of the kids cared about that old John Denver song anymore.

  The gates under the arching sign stood open, and Robb rode through with a wave to a gardener who was working on the turf of the playing field to the right. He parked the bike in the stand next to the entrance and pushed open the glass door into the lobby. It was large and airy, and furnished with an assortment of comfortable furniture. During the summer the lobby served as a lounge for a motley collection of husky youths. But now, during the school year, it was deserted, and Robb hurried through it, then turned left, passed the dining hall, and entered the waiting room next to Dr. Martin Ames’s office. Marjorie Jackson smiled up at Robb from behind the clutter on top of her desk. She was a middle-aged woman whose title was Assistant to the Director, and it was she, as all the boys knew, who actually took care of the day-to-day running of the camp, with little direction from her employer.

  “He’s in the rowing room,” she said without waiting for Robb to ask. “And,” she added, glancing at the clock on the wall, “you’re ten minutes late.”

  Even before Robb could begin to make up an excuse, she had gone back to her work, pointedly ignoring him. Only slightly abashed, Robb turned and left the office, then broke into a trot as he cut through the dining room and kitchen, toward the large training section at the back of the building. Marjorie might forgive him for the ten minutes, and Dr. Ames might not even mention it, but still, Robb would see the hurt look in the doctor’s eyes and know that he’d let him down.

  Robb, and most of the other boys on the team, far preferred Phil Collins’s shouting at them to Marty Ames’s grave look of abject disappointment.

  Today, though, Ames seemed not to have noticed Robb’s tardiness. When Robb came into the rowing room, the tall, dark-haired doctor merely looke
d up from the computer terminal he had been staring at and smiled a welcome.

  “Good game Saturday,” he commented.

  Robb shrugged modestly. “I didn’t really do much. A dozen plays, and that was about it.”

  Ames chuckled. “If you don’t let the other team keep the ball, the defense is going to sit on the bench.” His face turned more serious then. He was a good-looking man, though not quite handsome, and he appeared to be no more than thirty-five, though he was actually nearing fifty. He always joked to the boys that he had to work hard to keep as fit as his patients. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Robb replied. Without being told, he stripped down to his underwear, then stretched out on a treatment table next to the wall. An osteopath as well as an M.D., Ames ran his fingers expertly over Robb’s spine, then instructed the boy to roll over on his right side and draw up his left knee. Wrapping his arms around Robb’s torso, Ames applied a quick but gentle twist to the boy’s back, and Robb felt just a hint of something like vibration as one of his lower vertebrae adjusted itself back into perfect alignment.

  “Looking good,” Ames commented, then began wrapping the sleeve of a sphygmomanometer around his upper left arm. Satisfied, he nodded toward one of the rowing machines, and Robb, after pulling on a pair of gym shorts, took his position at the mechanical oars. He waited patiently as the doctor inserted an I.V. needle into his thigh, not even flinching as Ames expertly found the vein. “We’ll be monitoring your blood today,” he said, and Robb nodded, used to the procedures after more than a year.

  Facing him was a wide, curving screen whose sides were just beyond the reach of his peripheral vision. At a signal from Ames, Robb began rowing. With the first stroke, the screen in front of him came to life.

  It was a river scene, and though it looked to Robb like it might have been the Charles River in Boston, he knew that it was actually a computer-generated graphic, thrown onto the screen by three separate projectors. From where he sat, the illusion was almost perfect. He felt as if he were actually on the water. A few yards away he could see three other sculls, keeping pace with him.

  He applied himself harder to the oars, and immediately the other sculls seemed to drop behind, until the other rowers, too, picked up their pace, and one of them began gaining on him.

  Robb could feel himself sweating now, and he began working harder. Once again he pulled ahead, but then, while two of the other boats continued to drop back, the third once more began catching up with him. Cursing silently to himself, Robb renewed his efforts.

  At the computer terminal, Marty Ames studied the graphic readouts of the changes in Robb’s blood chemistry as the boy punished himself even harder. The blood-sugar level began dropping, and then he watched as Robb’s adrenal gland kicked in and a short burst of adrenaline shot into the boy’s system.

  Then, as the adrenaline faded from Robb’s circulatory system, Ames’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

  Once more the graphics on the screen changed.

  Robb’s eyes narrowed angrily as he saw his computer-generated competitor gaining on him. He leaned into the oars harder, but he was getting tired now and didn’t seem to be gaining any speed. He looked up from his labors to see the other boat catch up with him and move off to the right to pass him.

  “No!” Robb shouted out loud, then bit his lips in angry determination as he realized how much energy he’d wasted on the useless outburst. The tendons of his neck standing out, he forced himself to row harder. Once more he caught up with the other scull.

  Abruptly, the screen went blank. It was over.

  He was back in the rowing room at the sports clinic and Marty Ames was smiling at him, his expression reflecting his pride in Robb.

  “Not bad,” he said, which, coming from Marty Ames, was considered high praise. “How’d it feel?”

  Robb rested against the oars for a moment, panting, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “This setup really gets to me sometimes. I know nothing’s real, but when I’m doing it, I get so into it I could swear I was in a real race. And that guy in the number-three boat almost beat me.”

  “How come he didn’t?” Ames asked with deceptive mildness as he began removing the needle from Robb’s thigh.

  Now it was Robb who grinned. “ ’Cause I got pissed at him,” he confessed. “I just got pissed off at losing.”

  “And that,” Ames said, “is exactly the point. Your anger released a shot of adrenaline, and the adrenaline was just enough to put you across the line. In case you’re interested,” he added, glancing once more at the computer screen, “you beat him by exactly thirteen hundredths of a second.”

  “Not much,” Robb commented, standing up and stretching his tired muscles.

  “It was enough to win,” Ames told him. “And it’ll get better. If you just keep at it, it’ll keep getting better.”

  As Robb headed for the shower a few minutes later, he knew he’d keep at it, because he knew how much he liked winning.

  He liked it a lot.

  A whole lot.

  5

  Charlotte LaConner knew that Chuck wouldn’t approve of what she was about to do, and she was equally certain that he would find out about it. In Silverdale, after all, everyone always knew what everyone else was doing. Not that she particularly objected to the close scrutiny of a small town, she reflected as she put the final touches to the quarterly expense report she was compiling for the R&D Division. It was just that every now and then—times like today—she would have preferred a little more privacy.

  She pressed the enter key on her computer, waited until the machine announced that the expense report had been successfully transmitted back into the main tank of the TarrenTech computer, then logged off for the day.

  Charlotte had been working for only a few months, part of an experiment the company was conducting that, if successful, would allow women in Silverdale to work part-time at home. For now, the experiment was limited to the wives of men working for the company; only one man was participating—Bill Tangen, whose wife, Irene, was a pharmaceutical expert, working full-time while Bill took care of their baby daughter. For Charlotte, the program was working out perfectly. She discovered she liked working alone and got far more done in the space of a few hours than she’d ever accomplished while working full-time in the division offices. This morning, however, she’d found it hard to concentrate, and after finishing the expense report, she decided to call it a day.

  It was Rick Ramirez who had been preying on her mind all morning. Indeed, the injured boy had never really been out of her mind. Not that his name had even been mentioned yesterday. Silence had fallen over the LaConner household since the angry scene when Jeff had stormed from the house.

  Neither Chuck nor Jeff would discuss it with her.

  And that, Charlotte now realized, was what bothered her the most. Her husband and her son had clearly put the terrible incident out of their minds as though nothing at all had happened. But she herself had been unable to escape the image of the Fairfield player lying hurt on the field, and had awakened this morning determined to go to the hospital to see how he was doing.

  But why did she feel so guilty about it? What on earth could possibly be wrong with visiting an injured boy?

  She could almost see Chuck gazing at her with that look of his, the look that told her he couldn’t fathom her thought processes, and that, therefore, there must be something wrong with them. And she could hear him, too, his voice taking on what she thought of as his “logical tone.” “But don’t you see? If you go to the hospital, it’s as much as admitting that Jeff was somehow responsible for what happened. And even if he were responsible—which he’s not—it would still be a mistake. The lawyers could make hay with something like that.”

  Or was it Chuck’s voice she was hearing? Was that really what he’d say, or was it how she herself felt, deep inside?

  It didn’t matter. Right or wrong, she was going.

  Thirty m
inutes later, forcing herself not to glance around to see who might be watching, she pushed through the doors into the lobby of the small county hospital and stepped up to the counter. From behind the glass Anne Carson smiled at her, then rolled her eyes and pointed meaningfully at the phone she was cradling against her ear. Several times, as Charlotte watched, Anne opened her mouth to say something then closed it again as the person at the other end apparently went right on talking. Finally, though, Anne wearily put the phone back on the hook and slid open the glass panel that separated the waiting room from the office.

  “Charlotte! What brings you down here?” Concern spread over her face. “You’re not sick, are you?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “I … well, I wanted to find out how the Ramirez boy is. From Fairfield?”

  “Not good, I’m afraid,” she said, then forced a small smile. “He’s in room three, down the hall.” She hesitated, then understanding Charlotte’s distress, said, “It’s against the rules, but you can look in on him if you want to.”

  Charlotte’s step slowed as she moved down the corridor, and she came to a complete stop in front of the half-open door to the boy’s room. At last, steeling herself, she pushed the door open and stepped inside. There were two beds in the room, but only one of them was occupied. Covered only with a light blanket, his head held rigid in a metal brace, his eyes closed, Rick Ramirez had a strange stillness about him that told Charlotte instantly that he was not merely asleep. She stepped forward and stood beside the boy, gazing down into his face. A lock of curly black hair lay over one eye, and Charlotte instinctively reached out to brush it back.

  “Don’t touch him,” a soft but urgent voice said behind her. Gasping with surprise, Charlotte turned to see a pretty young woman, no more than thirty, coming out of the bathroom that connected this room and the next. “Please,” the woman went on. “I can do it.” She moved to the bed, and Charlotte stepped aside. Gently, her hand barely caressing the boy’s cheek, the woman carefully moved the lock of hair. Then she looked up, her dark eyes meeting Charlotte’s. “Who are you?” she asked.