“The gorks are restless tonight,” Jake the Snake said. “You can hear them in there. Tasers at the ready when we do the eight o’clock feeding, right?”
“They’re always worse at night,” Phil said. “I don’t… hey, what the fuck?”
Corinne felt it, too. They were used to the hum, the way you got used to the sound of a noisy fridge or a rattling air conditioner. Now, suddenly, it ramped up to the level they had to endure on movie nights that were also sparkler nights. Only on movie nights it mostly came from behind the closed and locked doors of Ward A, also known as Gorky Park. She could feel it coming from there now, but it was also coming from another direction, like the push of a strong wind. From the lounge, where those kids had gone to spend their free time when the show was over. First one bunch went down there, those who were still high-functioning, then a couple Corinne thought of as pre-gorks.
“What the fuck are they doing?” Phil shouted. He put his hands to the sides of his head.
Corinne ran for the lounge, pulling her zap-stick. Jake was behind her. Phil—perhaps more sensitized to the hum, maybe just scared—stayed where he was, palms pressed to his temples as if to keep his brains from exploding.
What Corinne saw when she got to the door was almost a dozen children. Even Iris Stanhope, who would certainly go to Gorky Park after tomorrow’s movie, was there. They were standing in a circle, hands joined, and now the hum was strong enough to make Corinne’s eyes water. She thought she could even feel her fillings vibrating.
Get the new one, she thought. The shrimp. I think he’s the one driving this. Zap him and it might break the circuit.
But even as she thought it, her fingers opened and her zap-stick dropped to the carpet. Behind her, almost lost in the hum, she heard Jake shouting for the kids to stop whatever they were doing and go to their rooms. The black girl was looking at Corinne, and there was an insolent smile on her lips.
I’ll slap that look right off you, missy, Corinne thought, and when she raised her hand, the black girl nodded.
That’s right, slap.
Another voice joined Kalisha’s: Slap!
Then all the others: Slap! Slap! Slap!
Corinne Rawson began to slap herself, first with her right hand, then with her left, back and forth, harder and harder, aware that her cheeks were first hot and then burning, but that awareness was faint and far away, because now the hum wasn’t a hum at all but a huge BWAAAAAA of internal feedback.
She was knocked to her knees as Jake rushed past her. “Stop whatever you’re doing, you fucking little—”
His hand swept up and there was a crackle of electricity as he zapped himself between the eyes. He jerked backward, legs first splaying out and then coming together in a funky dance floor move, eyes bulging. His mouth dropped open and he plugged the barrel of his zap-stick into it. The crackle of electricity was muffled, but the results were visible. His throat swelled like a bladder. Momentary blue light shone from his nostrils. Then he fell forward on his face, cramming the zap-stick’s slim barrel into his mouth all the way to the butt, his finger still convulsing on the trigger.
Kalisha led them into the resident corridor with their hands linked, like first-graders on a school outing. Phil the Pill saw them and cringed back, holding his zap-stick in one hand and gripping one of the screening room doors in the other. Farther down the corridor, between the cafeteria on one side and Ward A on the other, stood Dr. Everett Hallas, with his mouth hanging open.
Now fists began to hammer on Gorky Park’s locked double doors. Phil dropped his zap-stick and raised the hand that had been holding it, showing the oncoming children that it was empty.
“I won’t be a problem,” he said. “Whatever you mean to do, I won’t be a prob—”
The screening room doors slammed shut, cutting off his voice and also three of his fingers.
Dr. Hallas turned and fled.
Two other red caretakers emerged from the staff lounge beyond the stairway to the crematorium. They ran toward Kalisha and her makeshift cadre, both with drawn zap-sticks. They stopped outside the locked doors of Ward A, zapped each other, and dropped to their knees. There they continued to exchange bolts of electricity until both of them collapsed, insensible. More caretakers appeared, either saw or felt what was happening, and retreated, some few down the stairs to the crematorium (a dead end in more ways than one), others back to the staff lounge or the doctors’ lounge beyond it.
Come on, Sha. Avery was looking down the hall, past Phil—howling over the spouting stumps of his fingers—and the two dazed caretakers.
Aren’t we getting out?
Yes. But we’re letting them out, first.
The line of children began to walk down the hall to Ward A, into the heart of the hum.
23
“I don’t know how they pick their targets,” Maureen was saying. “I’ve often wondered about that, but it must work, because no one has dropped an atomic bomb or started a world-wide war in over seventy-five years. Think about what a fantastic accomplishment that is. I know some people say God is watching out for us, and some say it’s diplomacy, or what they call MAD, mutual assured destruction, but I don’t believe any of that. It’s the Institute.”
She paused for another drink of water, then resumed.
“They know which kids to take because of a test most children have at birth. I’m not supposed to know what that test is, I’m just a lowly housekeeper, but I listen as well as snitch. And I snoop. It’s called BDNF, which stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Kids with a high BDNF are targeted, followed, and eventually taken and brought to the Institute. Sometimes they’re as old as sixteen, but most are younger. They grab those with really high BDNF scores as soon as possible. We’ve had kids here as young as eight.”
That explains Avery, Luke thought. And the Wilcox twins.
“They’re prepared in Front Half. Part of the prep is done with injections, part of it with exposure to something Dr. Hendricks calls the Stasi Lights. Some of the kids who come in here have telepathic ability—thought-readers. Some are telekinetics—mind over matter. After the injections and exposure to the Stasi Lights, some of the kids stay the same, but most get at least a little stronger in whatever ability they were taken for. And there are a few, what Hendricks calls pinks, who get extra tests and shots and sometimes develop both abilities. I heard Dr. Hendricks say once that there might be even more abilities, and discovering them could change everything for the better.”
“TP as well as TK,” Luke murmured. “It happened to me, but I hid it. At least I tried to.”
“When they’re ready to… to be put to work, they’re moved from Front Half into Back Half. They see movies that show the same person over and over. At home, at work, at play, at family get-togethers. Then they get a trigger image that brings back the Stasi Lights and also binds them together. You see… the way it works… when they’re alone, their powers are small even after the enhancements, but when they’re together, their strength increases in a way… there’s a math word for it…”