The Select (39 page)

Alston nodded. "She wasn't responding
to the SLI anyway. Might as well leave her room entirely cold until
I can think of a way to get her out."

"You got it," Verran said.

"But I want her phone monitored 24
hours a day."

"No problem. I'll have Elliot hook up
a voice-activated recorder to her line and we'll check it all the
time."

"That will do, I suppose. But I want
someone to know where she is every minute of the day," Alston said.
"Got that?" He fixed Kurt and Elliot each with a hard stare, then
looked at Verran. "Every minute."

"You're the boss," Verran
said.

TWENTY

Floating. In darkness. Falling through
a limitless black void with no sense of movement or direction,
without so much as the sensation of air passing over his
skin.

I'm alive.

Tim didn't know the hour, the day, or
even the month, where he was or how he got there, but he knew he
was alive.

Or was he? In this formless darkness
in which he could feel nothing, hear nothing, could he call this
being alive?

Cogito, ergo
sum.

Okay. According to Descartes, he was
alive. But was he was awake or dreaming?

He seemed to be awake. He
was becoming aware of faint noises around him, of movement, of an
antiseptic odor. He tried to open his eyes but they wouldn't budge.
And then he realized that he didn't know if he was lying on his
back or his belly. He couldn't feel
anything
.

Where the hell was he?

And then he remembered...he had passed
out after being punched in the face in the early hours of Friday
morning. Suddenly he wanted to shout out his rage, his anger. But
how could he? He couldn't even open his mouth?

Wait. That must have been a dream. Had
to be—the bug in the fixture, the weird device in the headboard,
the grilling by Dr. Alston, the man's elaborate Kleederman
conspiracy. All a nightmare.

Get these eyes open and the whole
thing would be over. He'd see that ugly fixture in the ceiling of
the bedroom, the one in his dream he'd thought was bugged. And then
he could roll over and see his roomie conked out in the other bed.
Good old Kevin.

The eyes. He concentrated on the lids,
forcing them to move. Light began to filter through. He kept at it,
and the light brightened slowly, like the morning sun burning
through fog. But this wasn't sunlight. This was paler. Artificial
light. Fluorescent.

Shapes took form. White
shapes.

And then he saw himself, or at least
his torso, lying in bed on his right side, under a
sheet.

That's more like
it.

He tried to roll over, but his body
wouldn't respond. Why not? If he could just —

Wait. His left arm, lying along his
left flank, draped over his hip—it was wrapped in white. Some sort
of cloth. Gauze. And his right arm, too, lying supine upon the
mattress, was wrapped in gauze to the fingernails. Why?

Maybe he was still
dreaming. That had to be it. Because although he could see his
gauze-wrapped arms, he couldn't
feel
them—couldn't feel the gauze,
couldn't feel the pressure of their weight on his hip or the
mattress, couldn't feel
anything
. Almost like having no body
at all.

Then he saw the transparent tube
running into the gauze from an IVAC 560 on a pole beside the bed.
An IV.

He was on IVs! That meant he was in a
hospital. Jesus, what had happened to him? Had he had an
accident?

He spotted another tube, also clear
but larger gauge. This one coiled out from under the sheet and ran
down over the edge of the bed. The yellow fluid within it flowed
downward, out of him and over the edge.

A catheter. He'd been catheterized.
He'd seen those rubber tubes with the inflatable balloon at the
tip. His insides squirmed at the thought of one of those things
being snaked up his penis and into his bladder. Apparently it had
already been done. Why couldn't he feel it sitting in
there?

Tim dragged his gaze away from himself
and forced his eyelids open another millimeter to take in his
surroundings.

He wasn't alone. There was another bed
next to him, half a dozen feet away. And a white-swathed body under
the sheet. And beyond that, another. And another. All mummy
wrapped, with tubes running in and out of them. And beyond them
all, a picture window, looking out into a hallway.

Tim realized he'd seen this place
before. But he'd seen it from another perspective, from the hallway
on the far side of that window.

I'm in Ward C!

He wanted to scream but his larynx was
as dead as the rest of him.

Tim battled the panic,
bludgeoned it down. Panic wouldn't help here. He tried to think.
He
had
to
think.

The dream, the nightmare of being
bound and gagged, and then listening to Dr. Alston while strapped
into that chair in the basement of the Science Center, that all had
happened. And now he was a prisoner in Alston's private
preserve.

At least they hadn't killed
him.

But maybe this was worse.

Tim shifted his eyes down to his body.
He saw white gauzy fabric all around the periphery of his
vision—his head was wrapped like the rest of his body. Another
faceless Ward C patient. And something else: snaking up past his
right eye...a white tube. It seemed to go into his nose. A feeding
tube, snaking through a nostril, down the back of his throat, and
into his stomach.

Further down his body he saw the
gentle tidal rise and fall of his chest. Quinn had told him the
properties of the anesthetic Dr. Emerson was developing, and how it
was being used on the patients in Ward C. Obviously he'd been dosed
with it as well.

What had she said? She'd called it
9574 and it supposedly paralyzed all the voluntary muscles while it
let the diaphragm go on moving—like in sleep. But it didn't have
complete control of him. He'd managed to open his eyes, hadn't he?
He could move his eyeballs, couldn't he?

He drew his gaze away from the ward
about him and looked at himself again.

He had to get control of his body. He
could move his eyeballs and eyelids. But he needed his hands. He
searched out his right hand where it lay flopped out before him on
the mattress, palm up. If he could move it...

Maybe start small. Just a finger. One
lousy finger. He picked his little finger, the pinkie. He imagined
himself inside it, crawling through the tissues, wrapping himself
around the flexor digiti minimi tendon and pulling... pulling for
all he was worth...

And then it moved.
It
moved!

He tried it again. Yes,
the tip was in motion, flexing and extending, back and forth. The
arc was no more than maybe a centimeter, but he could move it,
dammit, he could
move
it. And he could actually feel something down there. A faint
tingle. He was regaining control. He was going to get out of here.
And then he was going to bring the walls down.

"Good morning, Number Eight. About
time you woke up."

A nurse, dark skin, brown eyes, her
nose and face behind a surgical mask, her hair tucked into a
surgical cap, was looking down at him. Tim's eyes fixed on her blue
eye shadow, so glossy, almost luminous. The eyes smiled down at
him.

"Time to turn you, Number Eight. But
first—" She held up a syringe filled with clear fluid. "Time for
your two-o'clock dose."

She poked the needle into the rubber
tip of the Y-adapter on the intravenous line and emptied the
syringe into the flow.

She patted his shoulder—he felt
nothing. "I'll be back in a sec to turn you."

Tim watched her go, then returned his
attention to his tingling fingers. He watched his pinkie finger
move again, but this time the arc seemed smaller. He had to keep
working at it. He tried again, struggling, pushing harder, but this
time it wouldn't budge. And the tingling, the parasthetic,
pins-and-needles sensation in his hand had faded.

...Time for your
two-o'clock dose...

The nurse's syringe. It had been
loaded with 9574. The fresh dose had turned him into dead meat
again. They had him on a round-the-clock schedule.

Movement...at the window into the
hall. Someone standing there, looking in. His eyes focused so
slowly.

Quinn! Jesus, it was Quinn, looking
right at him. Didn't she recognize him? But no, how could she? He
was swathed head to toe in gauze. He tried to shout, begged his
hands to move, but his voice remained silent, his limbs remained
inert.

Fear, frustration, terror, and rage
swam around him. Helpless...he was utterly helpless.

And then Quinn turned and walked
on.

Tim's vision blurred. He knew a tear
was running down his cheek, but he couldn't feel it.

*

Matt Crawford turned from the
floor-to-ceiling view of the harbor and crossed his living room.
He'd been putting it off all day. By nine o'clock he could hold out
no longer. He picked up the phone and called Quinn.

What a nightmare wild man Brown had
started by running off to Las Vegas. Both his parents were ready
for rubber rooms. Matt had spoken to Tim's mother just yesterday
and all she'd done was cry; she'd heard from Tim's father in Vegas
but his search for Tim was getting nowhere. Apparently Tim hadn't
used his credit card again after renting the car at the
airport.

And Quinn...Quinn had sounded like
someone on a ledge. When she'd called him last Friday, there'd been
something in her voice when she spoke Tim's name, something that
said she was worrying about someone who was a lot more than just a
friend.

No question about it,
Quinn had been
hurting
. And that could only mean...

Quinn and Tim...he hadn't
let it sink in at the time, but maybe it
was
possible. She did sound
broken-hearted that he'd left...left
her
.

And Tim. What the hell was he thinking
about with this Las Vegas stunt? Matt knew the guy, knew how he
liked to keep you off balance, be unpredictable, but this went way
beyond anything he'd done since Matt had known him.

And that was what had been bothering
Matt since Friday. This wasn't like Tim. This was something else.
This smelled bad.

Matt listened to the phone ringing.
Quinn picked up on the third. When he said hello she all but jumped
through the phone, the words frantically spilling out.

"Matt! Is it about Tim? Have you heard
from him? Did they find him?"

He'd intended to ask her point blank
if she and Tim had something going on. Now he didn't have to. He
wasn't sure how he felt about this. Quinn had never been his, so
why did he feel as if something special had been stolen away from
right under his nose?

"No, Quinn. Nothing yet. I just called
to talk to you and see how you're doing."

"I'm okay."

"Are you?"

She didn't answer, at least not with
words. Matt heard soft sobbing on the other end.

"You miss him that much." It wasn't a
question.

Her voice was a gasp.
"Yes."

"He'll be back soon."

"I'm afraid, Matt." She was getting
her voice back now. "I've got this horrible feeling I'm never going
to see him again."

She sounded so lost. This wasn't like
the Quinn he knew. Was this what love did to you?

"You'll see him. He's got to come back
soon."

"You really think so?" She sounded
like a ship-wrecked sailor groping for a piece of floating
debris.

"I guarantee it. When are you getting
in Friday?"

Christmas break was a few days away.
Maybe he'd drive out to Windham County and try to cheer her
up.

"For Christmas? I won't be leaving
until next Friday."

"The twenty-third? Our break starts
the sixteenth. Why so late?"

"Well, I'm working on this project. I
can get overtime if I stay, and I thought if Tim comes back I ought
to be here."

Matt resisted the impulse to say
that's crazy, that if Tim's old man finds him in Vegas, he'll bring
him straight back to New Hampshire.

"You're going to hang around an empty
campus?" He hated the thought of her being alone in a deserted
dorm. "You think that's a good idea?"

"It's not empty and you sound like my
mother."

"Sometimes mothers make a lot of
sense."

"I just got off the phone with her.
She's got one of her 'feelings' and wants me to come right
home."

"Is that so bad?"

"Do you have any idea how quiet a farm
gets in the winter?"