David Silva - The Disappeared

“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.”

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.”

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.

That was too bad for Mrs. Knight.

When the door opened, Gabe was watching Huckleberry Hound and absently scratching under the lip of his cast. He looked up, fully expecting to see Tilley step through, a slick smile on her face and a man or two behind her, just in case things got a little out of hand. That seemed to be the way things had shaped up around here. There were only two reasons that door ever opened. First, if she was bringing him a meal—and it wasn’t meal time, he knew that much, because he had just finished eating a tuna fish sandwich and a bag of potato chips for lunch. Or second, if she was here to take another stupid sample.

The worst of the sample taking had taken place yesterday. He had learned not to put up a fight when she was after blood. It didn’t hurt as much if he just closed his eyes and let her take what she wanted to take. But it hadn’t been his blood that she had wanted yesterday.

“We’re going to take another sample,” she had said, matter-of-factly. “And this one’s going to be a little different from the others. I don’t want to have any trouble out of you, do you understand? You can make it easy on yourself by just relaxing and keeping your eyes closed. If you do that, you’ll hardly even notice what’s going on.”

It hadn’t been that simple. Nor had it been as horrific as he had imagined after that little speech of hers. When he felt the first pin prick over his right lower ribs, he realized she had given him some sort of a shot.

“You rest for a few minutes and I’ll be right back,” she said. When she returned, she pinched him just below the ribs, complaining to herself that he was all skin and bones and they were going to have to do something about that. “How does that feel?”

“Tingly.”

“Good.”

She had him close his eyes again. Seeing the needle, she said, would only make the pain seem worse than it actually was. It hurt just the same, even without seeing the needle. Maybe that was because what he did see was enough to scare him half to death. Tilley had taken a knife and cut a slit into his side, just above his lower ribs. She was twisting and turning a needle in there, hunting around for just the right prize the way you hunted for the biggest stuffed bear at one of those crane-like vending machines you see at carnivals.

Gabe snapped his eyes shut.

“There,” she said, a moment later. “That wasn’t so bad, now was it?”

He looked down and saw a Band-Aid covering the damage. It was one of those children’s Band-Aids, the ones with the bright colors and shapes, as if that could somehow make what had happened less horrifying for him. It didn’t. It made it worse, in fact. Because suddenly he had a longing to be home again, with his mother, where there were no needles, no antiseptic smell, and no stupid witch posing as a nurse.