Creature

Chapter Twenty-Three

The headache began during first period.

It crept up slowly, and for a while Mark hardly noticed it at all; it was nothing more than a slight throbbing at the base of his skull. But as the hour progressed, the pain inched up the back of his head, and when the first sharp pang struck, Mark flinched, his head coming up and his eyes widening with surprise. The math teacher, Carl Brent, happened to be looking right at Mark when it happened. He paused in his lecture.

"Do you have a question, Mark?"

The flash of pain was already ebbing, and Mark shook his head. Brent frowned, then went back to his lecture.

The next pang was stronger, and as it drove straight into Mark's skull, he bore down on the pencil he was holding until it broke with a sharp snap. Carl Brent's frown deepened and he gazed at Mark uncertainly. The boy's face looked pale. "Is something wrong, Mark?"

Mark hesitated. The pain was easing, but not as quickly as the first quick stab. "I-I just have a headache, that's all," he said. He leaned over to pick up the broken pencil, and as blood rushed into his head, a sickening wave of pain came over him. For a second he thought he might throw up. He straightened up quickly, but already his forehead was beaded with sweat. He wiped it away, then scrunched down in his seat.

He rummaged in his book bag for a pen, and tried to concentrate on the lesson, but then his vision blurred and everything in the room seemed to be tinged with red. And as Carl Brent went on with his lesson in plane geometry, a tiny flame of anger began to burn deep inside of Mark.

The third wave of the headache made Mark's whole body break out in a cold sweat, and suddenly he was afraid he was going to have an attack of diarrhea. He felt dizzy, and finally bent his head forward, as if trying to duck away from the pain.

"I think maybe you'd better go see the nurse, Mark," Carl Brent said. The rest of the class had turned to look at Mark now, but he made no move, and finally Brent spoke again. "Mark, did you hear me?"

Mark swallowed the lump that had risen in his throat, and managed to nod. He stood and took a step up the aisle. Another wave of searing pain slashed through his skull, and he had to put out a hand to steady himself against the wall.

Instantly, Linda Harris rose from her seat and went to him, instinctively glancing at the teacher.

Brent hesitated, then nodded. "Go with him."

"It's okay," Mark mumbled. "I can make it. It's just a headache. It's no big deal." The flame of anger inside him burned brighter.

Brent said nothing, but looked pointedly at Linda, who took Mark's arm.

"Come on," she said.

Mark's eyes met hers, and a pang of sudden fear shot through Linda. Mark's eyes-sunken even deeper than they'd been last night-seemed to bore into her. For a split-second she had a horrible feeling he was going to strike her. Then his eyes cleared and he winced as yet another wave of pain broke over him. Saying nothing, he started once more toward the door, Linda beside him, clutching his left arm to give him a little extra support.

Verna Sherman heard the door to the waiting room of her office open, and called out for whoever was there to come straight into her office. She quickly finished putting a final notation in the file she was updating, then put it to one side as Mark Tanner, leaning heavily on Linda Harris, lurched inside then sagged into one of the chairs, cradling his head in his hands.

Verna felt her stomach tighten as she saw Mark. It wasn't the first time she'd seen that strange look in the eyes of one of the boys. She reached for the phone and punched in the intercom code for Phil Collins's office. As soon as she heard his voice at the other end of the line, she told him to come to her office right away. "It's Mark Tanner," she said. "It looks like we have a problem. He… well, he looks just like Randy and Jeff did when they first started getting sick."

She put the phone back on the hook, then stood up and hurried around the desk. She laid a hand on Mark's forehead, but quickly withdrew it as he flinched away from her touch. She picked up one of the thermometers arrayed on the shelf above her sink, automatically swabbing it with cotton soaked in alcohol. "Headache?" she asked.

Mark nodded. Another wave of pain was cresting in his head, and he was unable to speak.

"It just started a few minutes ago, Miss Sherman," Linda told her. "M-Maybe he needs some aspirin." Even as she made the suggestion, Linda was certain that whatever was wrong with Mark, aspirin wasn't going to help. "Is he going to be all right?" she asked anxiously as the nurse tried to slip the thermometer into Mark's mouth.

Instantly, Mark's hand came up and knocked Verna Sherman's away. The thermometer clattered to the floor and rolled beneath the desk. Linda gasped, but Verna waved her away.

"Leave it," she snapped as she reached down to retrieve the thermometer. Then, sensing the lash of her own words, she spoke again, more gently. This wasn't, after all, Linda's fault. "It's all right. I can take care of him now. Just go on back to class."

"But-" Linda started to protest.

Verna shook her head. "I can't take care of both of you," she insisted. "I'm sure Mark will be fine, but not if you and I waste time arguing. All right?"

Linda still hesitated, but as the nurse turned back to Mark, kneeling next to him now and reaching tentatively toward his face, she decided she'd better do as Miss Sherman had told her. As she started out of the office, she heard the nurse speaking to Mark, her voice low, her words carefully enunciated.

"Now, Mark, I'm going to look at your eyes. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm your friend. Do you understand?"

Frowning, Linda turned around in time to see Mark, his eyes once again glowing oddly, staring at the nurse, finally nodding his head so slightly Linda almost missed it. Carefully, almost warily, Linda thought, the nurse reached out and tried to tip Mark's head toward the light.

Once again Mark's hand flashed up, striking the nurse painfully on the wrist.

Linda was about to go back into the inner office when a voice stopped her. "It's all right. I'll take care of this."

Linda, surprised, spun around to see Phil Collins, his breath coming quickly, as if he'd been running, standing just inside the door of the waiting room. Without waiting for her reply, he hustled her out into the hall, firmly closing the door behind her. As Linda started slowly back to her classroom, she heard the inside door close as well.

In Verna Sherman's office Phil Collins took one look at Mark Tanner and picked up the phone. A minute later he was talking to Marty Ames. "It's Tanner," he said. "Christ, Marty, it looks like JeffLaConner all over again! What the hell's going on?"

Ames cursed silently. He knew he'd been taking a risk with Mark, but after his conversation with Jerry Harris last week, he'd decided it was worth it. And yesterday, after another call from Harris, he'd doubled Mark's dosage of the growth hormone again, added a steroid compound, and strengthened the subliminal suggestion as well. If the boy turned on his own mother, who could blame anyone but Mark himself? And from what he'd heard already this morning, it apparently had almost worked.

But now…

"All right," he said aloud. "Just calm down, Phil. We'd better bring him out here. Just keep talking to him and try to keep him calm. Ifheis going-" He broke off his words, then began again. "If he's having a breakdown, there's a lot of pressure building up inside him, both physical and mental. Thevan'll be on its way within a couple of minutes."

Collins hung up the phone, then looked once more at Mark. He seemed to have shrunk back in his chair, but his eyes were flicking watchfully between the coach and the nurse, and when Collins moved toward him, his whole body tensed and his hands knotted into tight fists.

"Easy," Collins said. "Take it easy, Mark. We're going to help you. We're going to take you to the doctor, find out what's wrong, and fix it. Okay?"

Mark said nothing, but his head dropped down, hunching low between his shoulders. He flinched as yet another stab of pain shot through his skull. It felt as though his head were going to explode. As the pain spread out through his body, the red haze that fogged his vision deepened, and he squinted his eyes nearly closed in an effort to see.

Then a flicker of movement caught his attention and he instinctively struck out at it. There was a muted cry, then a thump as something hit the wall and fell to the floor.

"Jesus!" Collins swore softly. "You okay?"

Verna Sherman nodded and struggled to her feet, rubbing the bruise on her shoulder where Mark's fist had struck her. "What's wrong with him?" she asked. "Some of the other boys got sick, but I've never seen anything like this."

She started to move toward Mark once again, then thought better of it and retreated to the chair behind her desk. "Is Dr. Ames coming?"

Collins nodded. "There should be a van here any minute," he told her.

His words seemed to strike a nerve in Mark. He leaped out of the chair and started toward the door. Instantly, Collins threw his own heavy frame toward Mark and his arms snaked around the boy's waist as they both fell to the floor. For a second Collins thought it was going to be all right-Mark was pinned beneath him, and he outweighed the boy by at least fifty pounds. But as Mark lunged upward and to the side, Collins felt himself lose his balance, then Mark wriggled loose from his grip entirely and made another try for the door. Collins reached out, grasped one of Mark's ankles and jerked hard.

Mark dropped heavily, grunting as his left knee struck the floor, then spun around to glower at the coach, his grunt of pain giving way to ananimallike snarl as he confronted his attacker. The sheer fury in his eyes made Collins instinctively draw back, and Mark coiled himself to strike out once more.

Suddenly the door opened and three men from Rocky Mountain High pushed their way into the small office. As two of them grabbed Mark, the third one began forcing a straitjacket over Mark's head.

Bellowing with anger, Mark tried to duck away from the heavy canvas garment, but the two attendants holding him were too strong. The armless tube dropped over his torso, pinning his arms to his sides, and one of the men instantly pulled a heavy strap between his legs and buckled it in place while another one adjusted the neck so it couldn't slip down over Mark's shoulders.

"That's it," an attendant said when the straitjacket was firmly secured. "Let's get him out of here." Half carrying Mark, half dragging him, they escorted him out of the office and into the corridor. They were almost to the main door when the bell signaling the end of the hour clanged loudly and the corridor, empty only a moment before, instantly filled with milling teenagers.

As soon as they saw Mark, swaddled in heavy canvas and supported by two men, they stopped, staring curiously. Just as the attendants were hustling Mark through the front doors, Linda Harris pushed her way through the crowd.

"Mark? Mark!"

Mark had been struggling wildly against his bonds, a series of unintelligible grunts and snarls boiling up from his lungs. But as Linda Harris called his name, he froze for a second, then turned toward her.

His eyes, burning with fury only a second earlier, cleared, and he focused on Linda. For a moment he was silent, then his mouth opened.

"Help me," he pleaded, his voice barely a whisper as his eyes now flooded with tears. "Please help me…"

As Linda stared after him in shocked silence, the attendants led Mark to the van, put him inside, and drove away.

Twenty minutes later, driving Elaine Harris's car, Sharon pulled up in front of the school, shut off the engine, hurried up the front steps and into the main hall. She glanced in both directions, then spotted the sign on the door of Malcolm Fraser's office. Her heels clicking loudly on the marble floor, she strode toward the principal's door, then stopped to compose herself before stepping inside. Finally, praying that the fear that still held her in its grip didn't show too clearly on her face, she went in.

Shirley Adams, only back at her desk for a few minutes after helping the rest of the staff herd the students back into their classrooms, looked up from her desk, her expression annoyed. "I'm sorry," she began, "but I don't know-"

Her voice faltered as she realized the person who had just come in wasn't one of the kids. "I beg your pardon," she said. "I thought you were-" She faltered again, then managed a recovery. "May I help you?"

Sharon's breath caught as all her internal alarms sounded a warning. Something was wrong-she knew it as certainly as she knew her own name. She forced herself to produce a friendly smile. "I'm Sharon Tanner," she said. "Mark's mother." She heard the secretary gasp audibly and saw her eyes flick instantly toward the inner office. Every nerve in Sharon's body tingled.

The secretary pressed a button on an intercom. "Mr. Fraser? I think you might want to come out. Mrs. Tanner is here."

Therewassomething wrong. Why would the woman have summoned the principal before she had even stated her business? The inner door opened and a balding man of fifty or so years came out, rubbing his hands nervously before offering one of them to Sharon. "Mrs. Tanner," he began, and Sharon was certain his voice was a shade too hearty. "I was just going to call you."

She felt her knees begin to shake. "It's Mark, isn't it?" she demanded. "Something's happened to him."

"Now, just take it easy," Fraser began, but Sharon's eyes only fixed on him furiously.

"Where is he?" she asked, her voice rising dangerously. "What have you done with him?"

Fraser's eyes flicked toward the secretary, and Sharon knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that whatever he was about to tell her would be only a part of the truth. "I'm afraid he got sick this morning," the principal said. The fingers of his right hand were nervously twisting at the wedding band on his left, and he couldn't meet Sharon's eyes as he spoke. "I'm sure it's nothing serious, of course, but we always want to do the best we can for our kids."

Sharon felt a chill in her spine. "I want to know where he is!" she exclaimed. "If you've done something to my son-"

"Mrs. Tanner, please," Fraser begged. "If you'll just calm down, I'll try to explain."

"No!" Sharon stepped toward him. "I will not calm down, and you will tell me immediately exactly what has happened to Mark."

Fraser seemed to wilt before her anger. "The sports center," he said, his voice suddenly weak. "The nurse-and Phil Collins, too-they thought it would be best to send him out to Dr. Ames."

"Dear God," Sharon groaned. Turning away from Fraser, she pushed her way out of the office then broke into a run toward the main doors.

The sports center.

They'd sent him to the sports center, where all this had started.

As she bolted from the building and stumbled across the lawn toward Elaine's car, she prayed she wasn't too late.

Phil Collins stared at Mark Tanner in disbelief. The van was parked in the garage in the rear of the Rocky Mountain High building, and the three attendants were struggling to get Mark out of the vehicle. That brief moment of calm-those few seconds when Mark had stared so piteously at Linda Harris-had long since passed, and now he lashed out with his legs, his torso thrashing madly in the rear of the van. One of his feet caught an attendant on the chin and the man swore loudly, but ignored the ooze of blood that instantly began dripping from the cut on his face. Snatching a coil of rope from the corner of the van, he tied a loop in it, and when Mark again struck out at him with his foot, the attendant was ready. He slipped the loop over Mark's ankle and jerked it tight. Before Mark knew what was happening, the attendant yanked on the rope, pulling him out of the van and dropping him to the ground. Mark's head struck the concrete with a loud crack. He lay stunned for a few seconds, his vision blurred.

The attendant seized the opportunity to throw three more loops of rope around Mark's legs, binding them tightly together, fixing the end of the rope to the buckle of the straitjacket.

"Okay," he said grimly when he was done. "Let's get him inside."

The other two attendants, with Phil Collins helping, picked Mark up and carried him through the same door through which JeffLaConner had been brought the night the police had carried him down from the hills. Collins gazed curiously at the tile-lined corridor and the light fixtures covered with heavy wire mesh. He'd never been in this part of the building before, and his first fleeting thought was that it looked more like a prison than a clinic.

As they took Mark into a small cubicle and strapped him onto an examining table, Collins heard a high-pitched wail echo from somewhere nearby. He glanced at the attendants, but none of them seemed even to have noticed the strange sound.

A moment later Marty Ames came into the room and went immediately to Mark. Ignoring Collins completely, he set to work. Making certain that Mark's body was strapped securely to the table, he directed the attendants to begin cutting away the straitjacket.

A brilliant overhead light was suddenly switched on. Mark howled with pain as the white glare struck his eyes. He clamped his eyes closed and turned his head, and suddenly Collins could see his face clearly.

It seemed to be changing almost before his eyes.

His forehead had taken on a slope, and his brows jutted out, giving him a simian look. His jaw, too, was enlarged, and when his lips curled back as a snarl of rage rose in his throat, Collins could see the roots of his teeth where they emerged from the gums.

Mark's teeth seemed too large for his jaw, and two of his incisors were already overlapping.

His canines, much longer than the rest of his teeth, had taken on the look of fangs.

The attendants finished cutting away the straitjacket, and now Collins could see Mark's hands.

His fingers, the knuckles swollen into misshapen knots, were working at the straps as he struggled to loosen them, and his thick nails-almost like claws-were scratching at the heavy webbing, leaving rough abrasions on the nylon from which they had been constructed.

"Jesus," Collins breathed. "What's happening to him?"

Ames glanced at him. "He's growing," he snapped. "Isn't it obvious?"

"But yesterday-"

"We stepped up the treatment yesterday," Ames said. "His whole system's gone out of balance, and now it's out of control." He plunged a hypodermic needle into Mark's exposed arm, but even before he could press the plunger home, Mark lunged upward. The strap over his chest parted, and as Mark came to a sitting position, the needle snapped, leaving its end still buried beneath Mark's skin.

"The prods!" Ames commanded, but the order was unnecessary, for already two of the attendants were holding electric cattle prods against Mark and pressing on the buttons that would activate them.

As the shocks entered his body, Mark's muscles went into convulsions and he flopped back to the table. "Again!" Ames demanded, already preparing a second injection. As Mark once more went into a convulsion, Ames slid the second needle home and in the same movement pressed the plunger.

Mark continued to struggle, and Ames administered another shot. Only then did Mark's thrashings against his bonds slacken. As the drugs took hold, he stopped struggling, his jaw working, his eyes glowing with sullen fury. Then, at last, a sigh drifted from him and his eyes closed.

For a few seconds there was silence in the room. It was Phil Collins who finally broke it.

"H-How did it happen?" he asked. "Is he going to be all right?"

Ames, his eyes still fixed on Mark, ignored the first question. "I don't know," he said. "It's going faster with him than with the others. We're trying to figure out how to control it, but-"

Collins stared at him. "The others?" he echoed. "You mean there are more like him?"

Ames turned to gaze contemptuously at the coach. "What the hell did you think happened to the others?" he demanded.

Collins's mind reeled. He'd known there had been problems, known that some of the boys had reacted badly to the pressures of the sports program and had had mental problems.

Problems he'd been assured had been solved.

But of course, he'd wanted to believe the problems had been solved, because he liked what Ames-andTarrenTech – had done for his team. And Ames-as well as everyone atTarrenTech, from Jerry Harris on down-had always assured him that the problems were minor. It was just a matter of stopping the treatment and giving the boys time to recuperate.

And of course he'd never asked what that treatment was. Or what happened to the boys after they left Silverdale.

He hadn't wanted to know.

It had been easier to assume the boys were all right, living with their families in other parts of the country, going on with their lives.

But now, as he stared at Mark Tanner, he had to face what he'd known, deep inside, all along.

"They're still here, aren't they?" he asked, his voice hollow as he heard once again the bestial howl that had echoed through the corridors a few minutes before.

Ames nodded. "Of course they're here," he said.

"B-But you told me they were all right," Collins protested. He was grasping at straws now, trying to justify what he'd allowed himself to do, to become a part of. "You told me you'd just stopped the treatments! You told me they'd be fine!"

"And you believed it," Ames replied, his voice hard. "You believed it because you wanted to believe it. You wanted to believe in magic-in a miracle with no price-but there isn't any such thing! There's only science, and experimentation, and a lot of failure before you find success. And there's always a price, Collins." His voice dropped slightly and a cold smile twisted his lips. "Do you really think the lives of a few boys are too high a price for whatTarrenTech and I have given this town?"

Without waiting for an answer, he turned his back on Collins and began issuing orders on what was to be done with Mark Tanner.