The sight at the bottom was startling. In contrast to the dark, rustic interior of the lodge, they were in a large underground complex that ran off a brightly lit corridor with a clean tiled floor and fluorescent lights running the length of the place. At intervals along the corridor were dormitorylike rooms—twelve, six on a side—each with its own numbered door and viewing window, some with venetian blinds up, some down. Like diorama exhibits in a museum.
Slowly they made their way, following the steady low-grade electronic groan emanating from someplace at the corridor’s end.
The first room on the right was empty, but it was clearly designed for children. The walls were painted with cartoon figures, toys were scattered all over the place, and a TV monitor was playing some animal show, with no sound.
Brendan stopped for a moment at the first window, staring at a large stuffed elephant doll sitting on a beanbag chair. He seemed transfixed. “Mr. Nisha,” he muttered to himself.
Martin nudged Rachel. In the room across the hall was a little girl. She was sitting on the floor, her head bobbing. Although the door was closed, Rachel could faintly hear the girl grunting as she rocked in place staring blankly at the wall. She was tethered by one foot to a metal clip on the floor. On her shirt was a name tag: TANYA. Her head, which had been shaved, was speckled with scabs along the sides. She wore a red wristband.
Rachel wasn’t certain the child could see her, or if the glass was one-way, but for a brief moment, the child stared at Rachel. Her eyes were like burnt-out fuses.
“My God,” Zakarian whispered.
Across the hall, Brendan was looking at another child, a little boy whose head was also shaved and scabbed. Blood ran down the side of his face where he had picked. Like the girl, he wore a red wristband. He was sitting in the corner looking at a spot on the floor. His body was twitching and he was drooling on himself. It was not Dylan.
Rachel held her breath and moved down the hall beside Zakarian with Brendan and Martin behind.
The next four rooms were empty. But the last two rooms had a child in each. Through the window on the right, a little girl was staring blankly at the TV monitor. She wore a green wristband. In the room across the hall, a little boy was curled up asleep on the floor in his underpants. His head had been shaved, but it was not Dylan. A red wristband was fastened around his wrist. They were color-coded. A name tag lay on the table. DANIEL. The little boy from earlier this evening—the one who mistook Rachel for his mother.
Rachel groaned, feeling as if she were in the midst of something unspeakable.
The humming at the very end of the corridor pulled her away. Its source was on the right behind two swinging doors with narrow glass panels through which they could see bright lights.
“Stay behind me,” Zakarian said.
With the pistol firmly gripped and Martin and Brendan beside her, Rachel held her breath as Zakarian pushed their way through, shotgun poised.
They froze.
They had entered an operating room, humming with electronic equipment. Clustered under two separate domes of lights were two groups of people in green scrubs standing around twin operating tables, each supporting a body whose head was locked in heavy metal frames, above which were television monitors casting scans of their brains with coordinates and lines indicating the paths of the stereotaxic probes. A man in street clothes sat at one of the computers.
Rachel could not tell if the patients were boys or if one of them was Dylan because the faces were blocked by the apparatus attached to their skulls. But the child on the right was wearing a green wristband, the other a red one.
Besides the deep hum, the only other sound was a kind of high-pitched whirring—like that of a dentist’s drill. Two of them were positioned on stands with metal arcs, viewing scopes, and long probes aimed at the children’s heads.
Zzzzzrrrrrrr.
The sound of the drills shot through Rachel.
“Police! Don’t anybody move,” Zakarian shouted.
The team of people under the lights looked up. And standing by the monitors of the brain scans, directing the operations, was a large man in street clothes.
Lucius Malenko.
Seeing the four of them standing there in horrid disbelief, Malenko coolly announced, “We seem to have uninvited company.”
“Drop the masks and keep your hands high,” Zakarian said, fanning them with the shotgun.
The surgical team was made up of six people—two teams of three and dressed in scrubs, caps, and masks. But nobody moved.
“NOW!” he growled.
Malenko nodded to them, and slowly one by one they began to remove their masks.
Rachel let out a gasp. They were children.
The surgical operating teams were all children—kids in their teens.
One was so short that he had to stand on a low footstool to adjust some instrument affixed to the head of one patient.
“What are you doing?” Martin said, stunned.
“If you weren’t so impatient, your son might have had the opportunity to join us someday.”
“They’re kids.”
“Only chronologically speaking,” he said. Then he turned to Zakarian. “Officer, this is not a police matter. There’s no need for guns. Please,” he said, waving to lower the weapons.
“I don’t think so,” Zakarian said. “Hands high. All of you.”
One of the masked children was holding a large syringe, one of several on a tray, ready to be inserted into the brain probe of the child on the left table—the one with the red wristband. Two others were manning the drill probes, the high-whining motor still cutting the air.
“Drop it and hands in the air.”
Rachel moved closer to the child banded with green.
It was Dylan.
Rachel groaned. He was breathing through a respirator. His head had been shaved and slathered with some bitter-smelling jelly-stuff-like burnt almonds. Clamped to his skull was a metal frame that looked like some medieval torture device. No probes had yet been inserted into his head, but a high-speed drill was poised to bore its way through his skull above his left ear. On the stainless steel tray beside Dylan’s head lay surgical knives, drill bits, and other glistening steel tools.
Unconscious beside him was some hapless child whose brain matter they were ready to harvest. Several probes aligned at his skull at different angles were poised for insertions. Beside his head were half a dozen large syringes for extraction.
“Turn off that drill,” she growled to one of the kids, who looked about twelve.
He shot a look to Malenko for help.
With both hands Rachel raised the pistol. “Turn it off, or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”
He turned it off.
“But isn’t this what you wanted, Mrs. Whitman?” Malenko asked. “To undo the damage you’d done? To make him a brilliant little boy so he could learn to love literature like that of the poet whose name he carries? Isn’t that what you wanted, Mrs. Whitman? Wasn’t that your dream—the scientifically correct child?”
“You son of a bitch,” she hissed.
Malenko looked at Martin. “And wasn’t it you who wanted a son to follow in Daddy’s footsteps?”
“But you’re harvesting other kids,” Martin said in utter disbelief.
“And where do you think incandescence comes from—battery implants? Just ask him,” he said, flashing his grin at Brendan LaMotte.
Brendan looked in shock.
“Oh, yes, I remember you,” Malenko continued. “When they brought you to us, you had little more language capabilities than the domestic cat. But we fixed you, didn’t we, Brendan? Perhaps a bit too much, I hear. But we solved your language deficiencies, no?”
“Y-y-you messed me up.”