As he passed Ames's suite, he glanced inside. Beyond the wreckage of Marge Jackson's office he could see the crumpled form of JeffLaConner lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He froze for a second, then rushed on.
He pushed his way into the gym and dashed across it to a small room on the other side.
There was a placard riveted to the door: TREATMENT ROOM B
He crashed his weight against the door, and it burst inward.
He froze where he was and stared into the room.
Sharon, still strapped to the metal table, raised her head as the door burst open, her eyes falling on Mark.
His facial distortion had worsened, thesupraorbital ridge over his eyes now jutting outward so that his eyes themselves had almost disappeared within the depths of their sockets. His jaw seemed far too heavy for his face and hung slightly open, and he held his over long arms akimbo. As she stared at him, an anguished wail escaped his lips. Sharon stifled a scream. "Mark," she gasped. "Help me." She struggled against the heavy nylon straps, but they held firm, pinning her to the table.
Mark stared at her face, and the familiar rage welled up in him again. But she hadn't done anything to him-he had no reason to be angry at her.
And then, vaguely, a memory stirred.
A memory of being on the rowing machine and feeling a growing anger toward the images of his opponents, was part of the treatment-he knew that now. They'd been giving him some kind of drug, a drug that induced anger, releasing extra stores of emotional energy from deep within his body.
A drug that made him furious, and made him desperate to win.
But yesterday-could it really have been only yesterday?- there had been other images, too. He could remember the flickering in the picture, could remember his anger shifting, focusing itself on his mother.
It was what they had wanted, and it had worked.
It was the sight of his mother's face that triggered the irrational rage, nothing more.
"Don't look at me!" he shouted. "Just don't look at me!"
Sharon hesitated, but something inside her told her to obey Mark without question. She let her head flop back onto the table, and her eyes fixed on the ceiling overhead. In the distance, dimly, muffled by the building, she could hear the sound of gunfire.
"What's happening?" she asked in a frightened whisper as she felt Mark's fingers working at the straps, jerking them loose. "What are they doing?"
"Killing us," Mark replied.
He jerked the last strap free, then turned away as Sharon sat up and rubbed at her numb legs.
"They want me to kill you," Mark told her. "That's what happened last night. I wasn't mad at you, Mom. They- They did something to me. If I look at you, I just go nuts!"
Sharon felt a sob rise in her throat and forced herself not to give in to it. Not yet-not now.
Now she could think of only one thing-getting herself and her son away from this place.
"Where are we?" she demanded. She swung her legs off the table and tested them against her weight. They threatened to buckle beneath her, but she steadied them with the sheer force of willpower.
"The-The gym," Mark stammered. "Behind the dining room."
"Come on," Sharon told him. She started to face him then, but remembered his words just in time. "Just follow me. I won't turn around unless you tell me to." Without waiting for Mark to reply, she ran out the door and across the gym toward the dining room.
Her heart was thumping and she was certain that at any second the attendants would appear, blocking her way, but when she burst into the dining room, she found it empty.
With Mark behind her, she ran through to the lobby and the front door beyond, praying that Elaine Harris's car was still parked in front of the building.
She hesitated at the front door, gazing fearfully through its heavy glass.
The car was still where she'd left it. In the yard there was a strange silence now. She took a deep breath, then threw the door open.
"Get in the backseat," she called over her shoulder to Mark. "Just get in and stay down."
She jerked the driver's door open and scrambled into the car, her fingers fumbling for the keys before she'd even slammed the door behind her. She heard the back door slam as she twisted the key, then uttered a silent oath as the starter ground but the engine failed to catch. Then, as her eyes flooded with tears of frustration, the engine roared to life. She released the brake and jammed the transmission into gear.
She pressed her foot to the floorboard, and the tires screamed as the station wagon shot forward, slewed around, then straightened. She ignored the driveway, heading straight across the front lawn toward the gates, coming back onto the roadway when she was still fifty yards from the fence.
She glanced at the rearview mirror, and behind her she could see Martin Ames, his hand waving wildly as he tried to get the guards' attention. But they were all huddled around a nearly shapeless mass on the ground near the fence, and by the time they looked up, she had almost reached the gates.
The car was moving at forty miles an hour when it struck the gates, and only at the last second, when she was certain the car wouldn't hit the stanchions to either side, did she duck her head down to protect herself if the windshield gave way.
She felt the impact as the car smashed into the metal. It lost some of its speed, then the gates gave way and the car once more sped up.
The windshield had held, and Sharon looked up again. Her foot was still jammed against the floorboard and the speedometer was going up rapidly now.
She braked as she came to the main road, then veered to the right, toward the mountains, and smashed her foot on the accelerator once more.
The car, with Mark crouched low in the backseat, raced away from Silverdale into the foothills of the Rockies.
Chapter Twenty-Six
DickKennally stood with his back to the window, staring out through the big picture window of Rocky Mountain High's dining room toward the mountains that rose majestically to the east. There was silence in the room, and he could feel the eyes of the three people behind him, feel them watching him, waiting for him to say something.
His eyes left the mountains and scanned the broad lawns and playing fields within the confines of the fence surrounding the property. It looked serene and peaceful, and there was, truly, no sign left of the carnage he'd seen when he arrived at the sports center two hours earlier. He'd been stunned at the sight that greeted him: Blake Tanner's body, still suspended from the fence, his dead fingers locked in the mesh, his body hanging limp, a pool of blood spreading beneath his feet.
A hundred yards farther down the fence another body, this one crumpled on the ground, riddled with bullets, but no more dead than Tanner himself. Ames had told him that the ruined remains had once been Randy Stevens, and as a wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm him,Kennally had rejected the statement as impossible. Whatever it was on the ground, surely it had never been human.
But then he had seen JeffLaConner, and slowly the full truth of what had been going on within the confines of the sports center had begun to sink in.
For the better part of an hour he'd put his emotions on hold and gone about the technical business of dealing with the mess. Photographs had been taken-photographs he was now certain would be destroyed-and the bodies had been removed to a room in the basement-the basement he hadn't known was there, with its isolation room and cages, its stark white-tiled walls and hard iron cots. The four guards fromTarrenTech had done the work, for even in his initial shock,Kennally had instinctively known better than to call in his own men. The driveway and lawns had been hosed down- even the fence itself had been washed-so that now as he looked out the window, no traces remained of the carnage that had taken place.