Tiffany's oval face reflected confusion for a moment, men her bright blue eyes took on a conspiratorial quality. "Where are you going? Are you cutting the whole afternoon?"
The eagerness in her friend's voice told Linda that Tiffany was considering coming with her, to Tiffany, practically anything was more interesting than school.
"I'm just going to the hospital," Linda said.
Tiffany's face brightened. "To see Jeff? I'll go with you."
"Why would I want to see Jeff?" Linda demanded, her eyes flashing angrily. "After last night, I hope I never see him again!"
The eager look faded from Tiffany's eyes. "Then who?" At last, the light dawned. "You mean you're going to see Mark?" she asked, her voice traced with scorn.
"Well, why shouldn't I?" Linda snapped.
"He's just such a… well, he's kind of a wimp, isn't he?" Tiffany said.
Linda's features congealed coldly. "Just because he isn't a sports nut like everyone else around here doesn't mean he's a wimp. He happens to be a real nice guy. And he doesn't go around jumping guys who are a lot smaller than he is, either."
Tiffany couldn't resist the opening. "Therearen'tany smaller guys," she said, "unless you go over to the junior high." Seeing Linda's eyes glitter with tears, she relented. "I'm sorry," she apologized. "And I'll cover for you, too. Say hi to him for me, okay?"
Linda nodded, then turned away and hurried out of the school building.
Twenty minutes later she came to the small county hospital and pushed her way into the waiting room. Except for a Chicano woman-her face pale and her eyes sunken and tired-the room was deserted. Linda looked around uncertainly for a moment, then went to ring the bell on the counter separating the reception area from the office.
"She's in Ricardo's room," the fragile woman suddenly said. "She's giving my son a bath."
Linda turned to face the woman, realizing who she was but not knowing what to say to her. Before she could say anything at all, Susan Aldrich appeared. "All done, Mrs. Ramirez," she said, then recognized Linda. "Well, hello. What brings you out here?" She glanced instinctively at the clock.
"It's lunch hour," Linda explained. "I thought I'd come out and say hello to Mark."
"Mark?" the nurse replied blankly, then understood. "Oh, you mean Mark Tanner. He's not here."
Linda looked at the nurse in confusion. "But they brought him in last night."
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.