John Saul - Creature

Susan Aldrich nodded. "And he left this morning, so I guess he must not have been hurt very badly."

Linda could barely believe it. She remembered the glimpse she'd caught of Mark last night as they'd moved him out of the emergency room, his face bruised and swollen, his chest swathed with heavy tape. "But where'd he go?" she breathed.

"Home, I suppose," Susan replied. "I could check if you want. He was already discharged when I got here this morning."

Linda shook her head. If she hurried, she still had time to get to the Tanners', say hi, and be back at school in time for her fifth-period class.

Sharon Tanner was just coming out of the house when Linda arrived. "Hi!" she greeted her. "You just caught me in time. I was going over to the hospital." She held up some magazines and a book. "Mark must be getting bored with TV by now, don't you think?"

Linda gaped at Sharon. What was she talking about? "B-But isn't he here?" she asked. "I was just at the hospital and they told me he was discharged this morning!"

Now it was Sharon who stared dumbly, her mind reeling with confusion. There must be some mistake-when she'd left the hospital, Dr.MacCallum had made it clear that Mark wouldn't be out until tomorrow, or this evening, at the earliest. "But that's crazy!" she protested. "Of course he's there. Whom did you talk to?"

Linda repeated what had happened at the hospital. As Sharon listened, her eyes darkened with worry, but she still clung to the idea that it was some kind of mistake. "Come on," she said to Linda, and turned back to the house. "I'm going to call the hospital and get this straightened out. My God," she added, forcing a brittle laugh. "They can't have lost him, can they?"

Five minutes later, when she finally got Dr.MacCallum on the line, she was no longer laughing. "But why wasn't I told?" she demanded. "I've never even talked to Dr. Ames!" She listened impatiently asMacCallum explained what had happened. "But it's all ridiculous," she protested when he was finished. "You said yourself there's nothing seriously wrong with him. And why would he need a sports specialist? He was beaten up, not injured in a football game."

"I don't know,"MacCallum replied honestly. "All I can tell you is that your husband's signature was on the release. I even matched it against the forms he filled out here last night, just to be sure. It never occurred to me that he didn't tell you this morning, or I would have called you myself."

When at last Sharon hung up, her worry of a few minutes earlier had been replaced with a hot anger. For her husband to have had Mark transferred to another hospital without even telling her-it was outrageous!

She dropped Linda Harris off at the school, feeling no better for Linda's assurances that Ames had been working with Robb almost since the day they'd moved to Silverdale, and that Robb was crazy about the program Ames had put him on.

"But that's not the point," she'd tried to explain. "I'm sure there's nothing wrong with it at all. It just burns me up that no one told me what they were doing with Mark, that's all!"

Linda scrambled out of the car and slammed the door.

"Tell Mark I'll come and see him after school," she called, but it was too late. Sharon's anger in firm control of the accelerator, she sped away from the school, the tires of her car shrieking in protest.

Mark lay in a haze, gazing glassily at a large television monitor that was suspended from the ceiling above his head. His ears were covered with a pair of headphones, and through the fog of drugs that clouded his brain, only the images on the screen and the sounds in his ears were real.

It was like a dream-a pleasant dream in which he walked along a shady riverbank, pausing now and then to watch the water tumble over rocks or a turtle bask in the sun on a log. Birds flew overhead, and their sounds, mixed with the soothing babble of running water, filled his ears.

A deer stepped out of a clump of aspens ahead, and Mark came to a halt, watching the animal as it grazed languidly on a clump of grass near the stream. Then other images began to flicker vaguely in his mind, images he couldn't quite see but which his subconscious nevertheless registered and remembered.

It was these images-the ones he couldn't quite see-that he would remember later. All the rest of it, the vision of the stream and the birds singing, would fade away.

As would the reality of what was happening around him, and to him.

He was still strapped to the metal table, but he was no longer in the examining room to which he'd been brought on his arrival at the sports center. Nor, in reality, were the straps necessary, for Mark had ceased struggling against them immediately after that first shot-the first of more than half a dozen he'd received in the few hours he'd been there. Mark's body, as relaxed now as his mind, was submittingnervelessly to the treatment it was undergoing. But they'd left the straps in place as they moved the metal table from room to room, more as precaution than anything else.

Mark's body, like RandyStevens's and JeffLaConner's on other, earlier days, was wired to an array of meters and monitors. An I.V. dripped into a needle taped securely to his upper right thigh, and another I.V. took a slow but continual sampling of his blood, a sampling that was being analyzed almost as quickly as it moved through the tiny capillary tube attached to the needle.

A scanner hovered above his body, moving slowly up and down the length of the table, feeding a constantly changing series of data to a softly humming computer which, as fast as the digitalized images were absorbed into its memory banks, expanded and exaggerated them, then fed them onto an oversized monitor.

Changes-drastic changes, even though they were imperceptible to the naked eye-had already taken place inside him.

The hairline fracture in his jaw had all but disappeared, and the cracks in his ribs were healing rapidly.

His bones, stimulated by the massive doses of synthetic hormones that had been dripping steadily into him since early that morning, had begun to respond, reproducing their own cells at an accelerated rate that had already added a sixteenth of an inch to Mark's total height, and nearly a pound to his total weight.

For nearly five hours Martin Ames had been overseeing Mark's treatment, watching for the slightest sign of an adverse reaction. So far everything was proceeding beyond even his own highest expectations. Though few people would even have known what to look for, Ames was able to watch the changes in Mark's body almost as they happened.

His lung capacity had increased slightly, as had the size of his heart. His blood pressure-somewhat high when he had been brought in that morning-was normal now, and Ames felt pleased as he noted that the compensations he'd allowed for Mark's emotional state just before his blood pressure was first measured had apparently been exactly precise.

Even Mark's brain showed minute chemical changes, changes that would soon embody themselves physically.

And yet, Ames knew, without the enhancement of the bank of computers, Mark would appear no different now from the boy he had been a few hours ago.

A soft electronic chime sounded, disturbing Ames's concentration, and he glanced up irritably. A blue light was flashing on the wall. Could it really have been five hours that he'd been in the treatment room, his aides surrounding the examining table and making continuous, minute adjustments to the chemicals dripping into Mark's body as he'd quietly issued a steady stream of orders? The strain in his muscles told him it was true.

"All right," he said, stretching his six-foot frame, massaging a knot in his right shoulder. "That's it for now."

Immediately, one of the aides stopped the flow into Mark's thigh from the I.V., and another slid the needle out of the vein, then swabbed the spot with a wad of cotton soaked in alcohol. It was a tiny needle, the mark barely visible in the center of a small bruise that would disappear within a few hours.