David Silva - The Disappeared

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.”

“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.”

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.”