The Newman Resident (24 page)

Richard saw someone under a blanket move. He wanted to run as fast as possible to that bed, but he thought better of it and walked carefully, keeping an eye on the dark blue blanket. As he got closer to the bed, he could see that the body was about the size of Christopher. He tried to get a look at the child’s face, just to be sure, and the boy opened his eyes.

“Oh no,” the boy whimpered as he pulled the blanket tight around his neck.

It wasn’t Christopher.

“Do you know where Christopher is?” Richard asked.

The boy didn’t answer.

“Do you know where Christopher is?” he asked again.

“I really am sick, sir,” the boy whispered.

“Don’t be afraid of me. I don’t work here. See,” he held out his arms, “I’m not wearing a uniform. I’m harmless.”

The boy studied Richard’s face, which must have been bruised and bloody.

“You don’t look harmless,” the boy said.

Richard looked down at his shirt. “No, I guess I don’t. I’ve been in a couple of fights today.”

“Fights? Why?”

“With the hosts here. I’m a father, and my son is here. I’m trying to find him.”

The boy let go of his blanket, amazed. “You are a father of a resident?”

“Yes.”

The boy sat up in bed. “How did you get in?”

“Do you know where Christopher is?”

“I don’t think I know who he is.”

“He was on the sabbatical.”

“Oh,” the boy said, nodding his head. “He hasn’t been here. I heard they brought him back last night, but he never slept here.” He pointed over to some beds about fifteen feet away.

Richard headed over there. He found a bed with “C. Carson” stamped on the plate, but the mattress was rolled up and the blanket was folded. There was nothing on the dresser or in the bookcase. Richard looked back at the boy.

“Where could he be?”

The boy shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”

Richard started back toward the double doors. “I’ve got to find him.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t belong here.”

As Richard passed by the boy’s bed, he read the name. “H. Jenkins.”

“Are you the son of Hunter and Tiffany Jenkins?”

“I used to be,” the boy said, lying back down in bed.

CHAPTER
FIFTY-SEVEN

A
fter he closed the double doors behind him, Richard pulled out his cell phone to check in with Carol or Harold or somebody, but there was no coverage. Just as he got to the stairwell door, it opened. A woman in a lab coat came out, but she was going in the opposite direction and didn’t see him. He slipped into the stairwell before the door closed. He ran down the stairs to the lobby level. He stood still for a moment, catching his breath, when the door opened. He jumped behind it as a short man in a safari uniform walked past and went up the stairs. Once the man was out of sight, Richard let out a breath and stepped away from the wall. He noticed for the first time another door and found some stairs leading down.

Finally, after three flights of stairs, he found another door. The sign on the door said “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” He reached for the door, but it was locked. There was a black pad next to the door, requiring a security card of some sort to get in. Richard leaned up against the door, pressing his ear against it, but couldn’t hear anything. He held onto the doorknob as he tried to listen, and soon felt the doorknob moving in his hand. He moved
back against the wall, holding his breath. The door opened and he could hear a man talking.

“No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” the man said, opening the door a little bit more, but hesitating. He seemed to be talking on his cell phone.

“Okay, I’ll be there immediately.” The man let go of the door and stepped back into the hall.

Richard caught the doorknob and let the door almost close. He waited a minute, until he could no longer hear the man on the phone, then opened the door and slipped through. He was in a long hallway, dimly lit. He saw a door labeled AUTHORIZED PERSONELL ONLY: POST-PROCEDURE LAB. He tried the door, but, of course, it was locked. When he put his ear to the door, he thought he could hear some noise. Maybe a person talking. Impulsively, he knocked on the door, then listened. The noise stopped. He knocked again, but louder. The doorknob began to turn and Richard stood by, ready to jump. When the door opened, he didn’t even wait to see who opened it but lunged forward, crashing into the other person. The two fell on the floor and Richard pulled back his fist, ready for a fight, but the other man lay on the floor, unconscious. He was a small man, wearing khaki scrubs and a surgical mask. No one else seemed to be in the room.

The room was some sort of lab: table, desk, a microscope, scientific instruments Richard didn’t recognize, and a computer. The microscope was on, probably what the man was working on when he was interrupted. Richard looked into the microscope and saw what looked like a thin slice of tissue. In the middle of it was something he’d never seen before. He tried focusing the lens. He thought he could identify the cells of the tissue, but embedded among the cells was what appeared to be some sort of tiny mechanical instrument.

A bulletin board above the desk was covered with brain scans, similar to the one Hunter had given him for Christopher. Various colors highlighted different portions of the brain, and lines of light crisscrossed the portions. On each of the scans was written the word “Gazelle.”

He lifted up one of the scan images and found another paper with “Seven Cubs” at the top. There were seven animals listed: giraffe, elephant, gazelle, zebra, gorilla, leopard, and lion. The word “gazelle” was circled. That pattern of animals seemed familiar to him. “Cubs.” Lions had cubs, but elephants had calves, zebras had foals, and he wasn’t sure what the others had. Seemed odd to call them all cubs; was there some meaning here?

Richard closed his eyes, trying to remember where he’d seen that grouping of animals before. The outside of the Newman school…the protective railings on the windows. Each floor had its own animal portrayed in its railings: one was giraffe, the next elephant, all the way up to lion. And the video, of Christopher walking…the pattern on the couch included each of these seven animals. The woman in the video called Christopher her “lion cub.” And, of course, there was his son’s phone message about someone wanting to make a lion out of him. Now, he was just a cub, but someone had bigger plans for him.

Richard stepped away from the desk, looking for other clues—something that might help him figure out where his son was. If Christopher was the lion cub mentioned on the piece of paper, maybe he was getting closer to finding him. He noticed a door in a dark corner of the room. When he stepped into the room, large lights automatically came on, revealing what looked like several operating tables. The walls were white tile and bare, and the room smelled of some chemical. The tables were empty, except for one which held a small body covered with a sheet. Richard walked over
to the table and touched the sheet, hesitant to pull it back. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and pulled the sheet down. He was shaking. When he finally opened his eyes, he saw the body of a little girl, probably about his son’s age. He was instantly relieved, but then felt guilty for feeling that way. While her body looked like it had not been touched by any medical procedure, there were a number of holes on the top and sides of her head, as though someone had been taking samples from her brain, and a small incision behind her ear. He covered her body back up and stepped away.

There was a tag tied to one of the girl’s toes: TANYA.

CHAPTER
FIFTY-EIGHT

R
ichard left the operating room and checked his cell phone again in the lab—still no coverage. He was badly shaken. Was Tanya ever even at the hospital? Did she really die of natural causes, or did Newman kill her so they could turn her into a research subject?

He scanned the bulletin board again, and the desk, hoping to find some clue. When he turned toward the door, he saw that the man he’d knocked out was gone. He opened the door slightly and saw two men in lab coats who had just walked past.

“It’s just the beginning,” one said. “I don’t think we can call it a success until our little lion makes it to adulthood.”

“I’ll be happy if he just makes it through today,” the other said.

Richard closed the door. He was going crazy an inch at a time. How would he ever be able to find his son in this place? He had to keep from getting caught, but he could spend all day searching individual rooms. And who’s to say one room he found empty wouldn’t have Christopher in it twenty minutes later? He’d said that he’d gotten away from them, but what did that mean? Had
they caught him by now? Was he somewhere in the school, or had they let him get out into the city, like Joseph’s son?

He heard footsteps coming and put his ear to the door. When that didn’t work very well, he opened the door again, slightly. Two men were walking down the hall. The first was a young man in a lab coat, early twenties, with about two days worth of sparse whiskers on his face. The second man was Hunter. They were deep in conversation.

“How much longer do you think this will take?” the younger man asked as they paused before climbing up the stairs. “He’s a tough resident.”

“Yeah, his parents are as stubborn as he is,” Hunter said. “I’d hoped by the end of the day he’d be rehabilitated.”

“What will we do if he isn’t?”

“We’ll have to augment our therapy with chemical procedures,” Hunter answered as the two men started up the stairs. “I hate doing that, it’s so expensive.”

Richard waited until the men were out of sight, then stepped from around the door into the dark hallway. About twenty yards away some light invaded the hall from underneath a closed door. He could hear his footsteps echo down the hall and shifted to walking on the balls of his feet. He felt his body pulling him to run and throw open the door, to find out if the tough little resident—the resident whose parents Hunter knew so well—was his son. But he knew he had to be careful.

When he got to the door, he paused as he read the sign: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY: REHABILITATION CENTER. The door looked like solid metal, and there was no window. Richard pushed on it, but it wouldn’t budge. Then he noticed the security card pad to the right of the door, the red light activated.

“Who are you?” a voice shouted.

Richard turned to see the young man in the lab coat standing about halfway between Richard and the stairwell door.

“What are you doing here?” the man said.

Richard stood straight, motioning with his hands like he was going to give a full explanation, but then he started running at the man. The man turned around, heading through the stairwell door and up the stairs. Richard made it to the door before it closed and leaped up the stairs, three at a time, pulling himself up with the rail. At the first level landing, the young man was almost an entire flight of stairs ahead. But at the second level, his lead had dropped to a half of a flight. Richard felt his sides aching. The next landing would be the lobby.

As the man rounded the corner and started up the last few steps, his foot caught on the end of his lab coat, tripping him. He fell back to the landing, but got to his feet and started up the stairs again. Richard barely made it around the corner, grabbing the man’s foot and tripping him again. The two fell to the landing. Richard felt a couple of hard blows to his sides, right below his ribs. He grabbed the man by his lab coat and threw him down the next set of stairs, leaping on top of him just as he hit the landing. The man didn’t move, but Richard could see he was still breathing. He searched the man’s pockets until he found the security card and ran down the stairs.

He tried the card on the Rehabilitation Center door, but nothing happened. Again, he held the card up to be read, and this time the door opened.

Richard ran into a large control room of some kind. It was dimly lit, but he could see a long counter with a panel full of knobs, switches, and lights. On either end of the counter were small color monitors showing a countdown. The count was sixteen.

A small flash card sat next to one of the monitors. The printed sticker on the card said: “The Seven Cubs.” He pulled out his cell phone and held it against the card until he heard the beep, indicating that the phone had copied something from the card. Probably encrypted and impossible to read, but it was better than nothing.

On the other side of the counter was a glass wall. He ran up to the glass and looked more closely. He could barely make out that in the center of the dimly lit room on the other side stood a straight-backed, metal chair.

And in the chair sat a very still little boy, his back to the control room.

CHAPTER
FIFTY-NINE

T
he room was too dark for Richard to see if the boy was Christopher or not. There was no security card reader on the metal door that led to the room, so he pushed on it without stopping. The door opened, and Richard stood still for a brief moment, feeling the silence. He didn’t even hear the door close behind him. The room was some sort of sound chamber, the other wall rounded, a half-circle that went from one end of the glass wall to the other. There was a gradual curve at the bottom of the wall, blending it into the floor, and another curve at the top. A little light was coming from above the glass wall, but Richard had a difficult time sensing space and distance. The white walls, white ceiling, white floor, seemed to blend far off in the distance. There was no surface to look at.

The boy in the chair hadn’t moved at all. His arms and legs were strapped to the chair, and his head was bowed, straight down onto his chest, like he was praying or sleeping. Or dead.

The light over the glass wall shut completely off. Richard turned to the control room, but could see nothing. He held his hand inches from his face, but couldn’t see it either. The chamber was totally dark and silent, and he became disoriented. He wasn’t
sure where the boy was now, or even which direction he himself was facing.