The God Project (41 page)

“That’s the most beautiful part of it,” he said. “Hamlin doesn’t think Jason Montgomery or Randy Corliss is going to die. It looks like the project’s a success, Mark.”

Mark Malone opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out the thick stack of printouts that Sally had gleaned from the computer. He handed them to Randolph, his expression serious.

“You and Hamlin might be interested in seeing just how far Sally’d gotten,” he said. “Next time, I think you’d better make sure
no one
can trace you.” Then his face brightened, and he reached into the drawer once more, this time bringing out the bottle of Cognac he’d bought on the day the God Project had begun. For ten long years he’d been the project’s watchdog. Today he
was its savior. He broke the seal and poured them each a generous shot.

“Here’s to the future,” he said. “And all the wonderful creatures man is about to become.”

S
ALLY MONTGOMERY FACED HER REFLECTION
in the mirror with resignation. Her eyes seemed to have sunk deep within their sockets, and her hair, only three years ago a deep and luxuriant brown, had faded to a lifeless gray. Around her eyes, crow’s feet had taken hold and her forehead was creased with worry. And yet, even as she examined the deterioration, she felt no urge to fight it, but only a sense of relief that for her, the pain might soon be over.

It was The Boys who had done it to her.

She no longer thought of Jason as her son, nor of Randy Corliss as her foster son. To her, they had become The Boys. Strange, alien beings she neither knew nor trusted.

It had not been that way at first. At first they had been her children, both of them, with Randy Corliss filling the void in her life that had been left when Julie died. Even now she could remember the flood of emotion that had nearly overwhelmed her when she had gone to see Randy in his room at Eastbury Community Hospital.

He had lain still in bed, his eyes wide, his face expressionless. An image had flashed through her mind of pictures she had seen of children rescued from the
concentration camps after World War II, their bodies emaciated, their hair fallen out from starvation, their eyes vacant, bodies and minds numbed by years of unspeakable abuse.

But Randy’s skin had been ruddy that day, and the lack of hair had given his head an oddly inhuman appearance. And in his eyes, instead of the look of pain and sorrow that Sally had expected, there had been curiosity, and a certain strange detachment.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” he had asked. “Mom and Dad got killed in the fire, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” she had said, sitting by his bed and taking his hand in hers. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Randy.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

At the time, Sally had attributed the question, and the lack of response to his parents’ deaths, to shock. She had explained to him that she and Steve were going to take care of him, and that he and Jason would be like brothers now.

Randy had smiled, then gone to sleep.

That had been the beginning.

The next day, she and Steve had taken Randy home and begun the wait. Every moment of every day and night they kept the vigil, waiting for the moment when Jason or Randy would suddenly, with no warning whatever, stop breathing and die.

But it hadn’t happened. First the days, then the weeks and months, had slipped by and the boys grew and appeared to thrive. Slowly, imperceptibly, Sally and Steve began to let their guard down. Instead of watching for the boys’ deaths, they began planning for their lives. After the end of the first year, when Randy turned eleven, and Jason was just past ten, they took them to Mark Malone for their monthly examination. When he was done with the boys, Dr. Malone spoke to Steve and Sally in his office.

“They’re remarkable in every way,” he said. “They’re both large for their age and unusually well developed. It seems almost as if the GT-active factor, as well as protecting
them, allows them to mature more quickly than normal children.”

“What does that mean?” Sally asked. “I mean, for them?”

“I’m not sure,” Malone admitted. “It could mean nothing, but it could be a first sign of premature aging. It could be that while they’ll live very healthy lives, they’ll live short lives, even if the burn-out syndrome is never triggered. But that’s just speculation,” he assured them. “Frankly, with these boys, there’s no way of telling what might happen. All we can do is wait and see.”

The waiting had gone on for two more years. During those years the boys had grown closer and closer, their personalities taking on each other’s traits, until both Sally and Steve had unconsciously fallen into the habit of speaking to them as if they were a single unit. What was told to one would be passed on to the other. The blame for things gone wrong that was assigned to one was assumed by the other. What Randy did, Jason did, and vice versa.

They had no friends, being sufficient unto themselves, but Sally and Steve were never sure whether it was merely that the boys had no need for outside stimulation or whether such stimulation had become unavailable to them.

There had been incidents.

The worst of them had been what Sally had come to think of as The Circus.

It had occurred after the Barnum & Bailey extravaganza had played in Boston, and all the children of the neighborhood had decided to duplicate the show. Most of them, in the end, had decided that being a clown was the better part of valor, but Jason and Randy, though not invited to participate, had provided the thrills.

Their slack-rope act had not bothered Sally, for she had watched them prepare it, worried at first that they might hurt themselves, but impressed in the end that they had had the foresight to learn the trick of balancing on a rope at a low level. Only when they had become confident of themselves had they begun raising the
rope, until eventually both of them were able to walk it with ease at a height of ten feet.

She had not watched them rehearse the knife-throwing act, nor had she seen it. But she had heard about it.

The Circus had taken place in the Connors’ backyard, and the last act had been Jason and Randy. In turn, each of the boys had stood against the wall of the Connors’ garage, while the other threw six steak knives at him. First Jason had stood against the wall, while Randy hurled the evil-looking blades.

One by one, the blades had struck the garage, inches from the target, their handles quivering as their blades dug into the wood siding. When all six knives were surrounding him, Jason had stepped forward, taken a bow, then pulled the knives from the wall.

Then Randy took his place against the wall, his feet spread wide apart, his arms stretched out.

Jason stood ten feet away and aimed the first of the six knives. It whirled through the air and struck the wall between Randy’s legs.

The second knife buried itself in the wall next to his left ear.

The third knife struck next to his right ear.

By now the children in the audience were screaming and cheering so loudly that Kay Connors had looked out the window to see what was happening.

She was in time to see the last three knives whirl, in quick succession, through the air.

Two of them struck Randy Corliss’s hands, pinning them to the wall.

The third buried itself in Randy’s stomach.

The happy cheering turned into terrified screams. Frozen in horror, Mrs. Connors stared woodenly through the window.

She watched Jason calmly go to Randy and yank loose the two knives that were pinning his hands. And then she watched as Randy himself, his face wreathed in happy smiles, pulled the third knife from his own belly.

An hour later, as she listened to Kay Connors relate the story, Sally had tried to remain calm.

“I still don’t know how they did it,” Kay had said when she was finished telling the tale. Her face was still pale from her fright, and her hands were trembling slightly. “And I don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you right now, Sally, I don’t want those boys at my house again. They scared me nearly to death, and I don’t even want to think about how the other children felt. The girls were all crying, and some of the boys too. I know Jason and Randy thought it was a joke, but it wasn’t funny.”

Sally, of course, had immediately realized that it had not been a trick at all. Jason had simply hurled the knives into his friend, and Randy, far from being seriously injured, had healed within minutes. By the time the screaming children had been sorted out and Kay Connors had gotten to Randy, there hadn’t been even so much as a scar left to betray the secret of the “trick.”

Four days later, two five-year-old boys had tried to duplicate the trick. One of them had nearly bled to death, but the other one was unhurt, apparently the beneficiary of the flip of the coin that had determined which of the two would be the first target Sally had suspected differently. Though she could no longer be certain, she thought she remembered the name of the uninjured boy, Tony Phelps, from the list of children in Group Twenty-one.

It was after that incident that Sally had begun to wonder about the boys. They had listened to her quietly while she talked to them, first about the “stunt” they had pulled, which she knew had not been a stunt at all, then about the little boy who had almost died.

“But everybody’s going to die,” was Randy’s only comment.

“Besides,” Jason had added, “people who can get hurt shouldn’t play our games. They should just do whatever we tell them to do.”

“Do what you tell them?” Sally echoed. “Why should people do what you tell them?”

Jason had met her eyes. “Because we’re special,” he said. “We’re special, and that makes us better than other people.”

Sally had tried to explain to them that their inability to be hurt, or even to feel pain, did not make them better than other people. If anything, it meant that they had to be particularly careful of other people, because they might accidentally do something that would hurt someone else. The boys had only looked at each other and shrugged.

“We don’t do anything by accident,” Jason had said.

And so the wondering had begun, and, once more, the watching had begun. And slowly, Sally had come to realize that there was more to The Boys than the GT-active factor. There was a coldness about them, and an ever-increasing sense of their own superiority that was at first disturbing and eventually frightening.

Now Jason was twelve and Randy was thirteen, but they looked five years older.

And they did what they wanted, when they wanted.

Last night, very late, Sally had talked to Steve about them.

“They’re not human,” she had finished. “They’re not human and they’re dangerous.”

Steve, who had listened quietly for over an hour, had shifted uneasily in his chair, “What do you suggest we do?” he asked.

Sally had swallowed, unsure whether she would be able to voice the idea that had been growing steadily in her mind for several months now. But it had to be voiced. It had to be brought out in the open and discussed. If it wasn’t, she would surely lose her mind.

“I think we have to kill them.”

Steve Montgomery had stared at his wife. As the import of what she had just said began to register on part of his mind, another part seemed to shift gears, to step back, as if unwilling even to accept the words Sally had uttered.

What’s happened to her, that part of his mind had wondered. What’s happened to the woman I married?
Sally, over the last three years, had become almost a stranger to him. He had seen the changes in her face, but more than that, he had felt the changes in her spirit. In many ways she seemed more like a hunted animal than anything else.

Hunted, or haunted?

And yet, he had slowly come to realize, what he now saw in his wife was a reflection of what he felt himself. He, too, had come to regard the boys as something apart from himself, something he could only barely comprehend, but was afraid of.

What, he had often wondered, would they grow up to be, if they grew up at all?

At first he had dismissed the question, but then, as time had moved on, and the boys had not died, he had forced himself to face it.

And the only answer he had come up with, time and time again, was that whatever they grew up to be, it would not be human.

And so he, too, had come to feel haunted. Haunted by the feeling that he was raising
a
new species of man, indistinguishable from other men, but different. Cold, unfeeling, impervious to pain.

Impervious to pain, and therefore impervious to suffering. How many of them were there, and what would they do when the time came, as it inevitably would, when they realized their powers? Steve Montgomery, like his wife, didn’t know.

“All right,” he had said last night.

Sally had stared at him, momentarily shaken by the ease with which he had apparently accepted her idea. “Is that all you have to say? Just all right?”

Steve had nodded. “Three years ago, when we talked to Paul Randolph, I found out that you’d been right about the children all along. And I made up my mind about something that day. I decided that from that moment on, where the children were concerned, I’d go along with any decision you made. But I’ve watched those boys too, Sally. Whatever they are, they aren’t human. Randy Corliss is not our child, and never has been.
And neither is Jason. I’m not sure what they are, but I know what they’re not.” Then he repeated the words once again: “They’re not human.”

And so, earlier today, Sally had gone alone to see Mark Malone, and quietly explained to him what she wanted to do. He had listened to her, and for a long time after she had finished, had sat silently, apparently thinking.

“I need some time, Sally,” he’d said at last. “I need some time to think about this.”

“How much time?” Sally had asked. “This isn’t something I’ve just made up my mind to, Mark. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. The boys are growing up, and I’m afraid of them.”

“Have you thought of sending them away to school?”

“Of course I have,” Sally replied bitterly. “I’ve thought of everything, and in the end I always come down to the same thought. They’re some kind of monsters, Mark, and they have to be destroyed. It’s not myself I’m afraid for—it’s everybody. Can’t you understand that?”