David Silva - The Disappeared

“All it would take is a couple of weeks of physical therapy and strengthening and she’d be up and around, almost like new.”

“That is remarkable,” Pam said.

“Yes, indeed. You’ve done a fine job here, Pam.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He moved down the line of occupied beds, one at a time, going through the same routine of first checking their charts, then their pupils. No change. Not a single hint of change anywhere in the room. It had been this way for years now.

The comas had swept through nearly half of the participants of the research study in less than a month. It had taken that long to link the protracted unconsciousness to the administration of an experimental drug called AA103. Use of the drug had been halted immediately.

At first, Childs had thought the mishap would prove to be the end of the Karma Project. But he had managed to convince D.C. that they had nothing to lose by monitoring the children another six months. As it turned out, it was a lucky thing they hadn’t scrapped the study after all. In those six months, not a single child, not one, had demonstrated a single sign of growth or aging. It was the result they had been chasing all along and suddenly they had it. Somehow, they had managed to halt the aging process. The only glitch, and it was still a glitch to this very day, was that they didn’t know exactly how they had done it.

At the last bed, Childs nodded and dropped the bed sheet back over the boy’s legs. The children had always been well cared for. Their fingernails and toenails were clipped, their hair groomed, their bodies washed. They were fed a high-protein, vitamin-rich solution that helped them maintain their body mass, and there wasn’t a child in the study who wasn’t within five or six pounds of what was the natural weight for his age and height.

“Ever wonder what would happen if one of them came out of the sleep?” he asked casually. He stopped just outside the room and waited as Pam locked the door again behind them.

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, sir.”

“We have a room full of ageless children, Pam. As far as we can tell, they’re ageless because the coma has somehow suspended a process which modern science has always believed was unalterable. Have you ever wondered what would happen to that process once the coma ended?”

“No, sir. I can’t say that I have.”

“I hadn’t, either. Not until recently.”

“Wake you?”

Teri opened an eye to the clock on the nightstand. She groaned and rolled over on her side, away from the luminous dial. “No, I’m always wide awake at one-thirty in the morning. I like to get up early so I don’t miss anything.”

“Sorry,” Walt said. “I just thought I’d better check in.”

“Where are you?”

“In a dumpy motel on the outskirts of St. Charles.”

“St. Charles?” Both eyes opened and Teri sat up on one elbow. She wiped away what little sleep was left. “I just talked to Michelle tonight. It’s the same thing, Walt. Just like the others. They had a baby girl. Her name was Rebecca. She was eight years old when she disappeared.”

“It keeps getting more interesting, doesn’t it?”

“We’ve got him, Walt. Everywhere this guy goes another kid disappears.”

“We’re definitely getting there.”

“Jesus, what more do you want?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, his voice quietly subdued. “I guess I’m feeling a little confused about what went on with you and our good doctor back in your college days. Was that all he was to your group of friends? Just the guy who volunteered at the off-campus health clinic?”

“No,” she said, finally coming fully awake. She had forgotten to tell him about her conversation with Peggy the other morning. “No, there was more to it than that. I didn’t know this until a couple of days ago, when I was talking to Peggy. There was a drug that was going around then… I mean, well, there were lots of drugs that were going around, but this one was different. It was called Genesis, and it was something of an hallucinogen, something along the lines of LSD if I remember correctly.”

“You’re lucky you still have a brain, you know that?”

Oh, Teri knew it all right. She knew it better than most. Michael Jacobson hadn’t been so lucky. They called him Michael the Second because he joined the group a few months after Michael the First. Teri had married Michael the First. After they had married, they had decided to have children, and once they had made the decision to have children they had quietly moved out of the drug scene, giving up everything from Genesis to LSD to pot.

Having children wasn’t their only reason for quitting, though. Several weeks before, Michael the Second had taken the kind of trip that very few people ever came back from. He had come back from it, but he had not come back all the way. As far as she knew, he was still swimming in a world of nightmares and twisted images. The last she had heard he was staying at Agnew State Hospital. That had been before it had changed to the Agnew Developmental Center. To this day, as far as she knew, Michael the Second was still a faceless soul, one of the disappeared, living in a strange alienated world that belonged only to him.

“Yeah, I know,” she said sadly. “Anyway, what’s important is that Peggy told me Childs was the only supplier for the drug.”

“For Genesis?”

“Yeah.”

Walt fell suddenly quiet on the other end of the line. Teri reached for the lamp behind the clock on the night stand. The room brightened. It felt like an old sweatshirt, soft and familiar, and she realized she had begun to feel comfortable here.

“You know what this probably means, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Teri, this guy wasn’t trying to help you enjoy a little recreational mind tripping. He was using you. You and your friends, you guys were all guinea pigs. That’s how this whole thing got started.”

“My God,” Teri said softly. She took in a breath that felt cold and foreign, and expelled it as quickly as she could. The next breath came a little harder. “And whatever it was he did to us, we passed it on to the children.”

“It looks that way.”

“How could anyone…” The thought fell away naturally, because there was no sensible way to finish it. Some things, some people, simply defied understanding. It wasn’t bad enough that this man had kidnapped their children; he had somehow managed to poison them as well.

Except that wasn’t the entire truth, now was it? If she were going to be honest with herself, there was a point here where she needed to take responsibility for her own misdeeds. The late Sixties and early Seventies had been her playground, a time of naiveté and taking chances. It was Woodstock and Easy Rider . Don’t trust anyone over thirty. And bumper stickers that said: Tomorrow is canceled due to a lack of interest. She had played recklessly and with abandon, as had Michael and most of their friends. And now it was Gabe who was paying the price.

So, yes, she hated what Childs had done—what he was still doing—but there was little saving grace for her own actions.

“What do we do now?” Teri asked.

“Take a look in the bottom drawer of the nightstand and see if there’s a phone book in there. I want you to look up the Devol Research Institute. See if they happen to have a local listing.”

The phone book was buried beneath a stack of old Time magazines. Teri dug it out and spent a minute or two thumbing through the yellow pages, wondering in the back of her mind where Walt had stumbled across the name Devol. “What do you want me to look under?”

“You better try the white pages.”