remembered the name of the uninjured boy, Tony Phelps, from the list of children in Group Twenty-one.
It was after that incident that Sally had begun to wonder about the boys. They had listened to her quietly while she talked to them, first about the “stunt” they had pulled, which she knew had not been a stunt at all, then about the little boy who had almost died.
“But everybody’s going to die,” was Randy’s only comment.
“Besides,” Jason had added, “people who can get hurt shouldn’t play our games. They should just do whatever we tell them to do.”
“Do what you tell them?” Sally echoed. “Why should people do what you tell them?”
Jason had met her eyes. “Because we’re special,” he said. “We’re special, and that makes us better than other people.”
Sally had tried to explain to them that their inability to be hurt, or even to feel pain, did not make them better than other people. If anything, it meant that they had to be particularly careful of other people, because they might accidentally do something that would hurt someone else. The boys had only looked at each other and shrugged.
“We don’t do anything by accident,” Jason had said.
And so the wondering had begun, and, once more, the watching had begun. And slowly, Sally had come to realize that there was more to The Boys than the GT-active factor. There was a coldness about them, and an ever-increasing sense of their own superiority that was at first disturbing and eventually frightening.
Now Jason was twelve and Randy was thirteen, but they looked five years older.
And they did what they wanted, when they wanted.
Last night, very late, Sally had talked to Steve about them.
“They’re not human,” she had finished. “They’re not human and they’re dangerous.”
Steve, who had listened quietly for over an hour, had shifted uneasily in his chair, “What do you suggest we do?” he asked.
Sally had swallowed, unsure whether she would be able to voice the idea that had been growing steadily in her mind for several months now. But it had to be voiced. It had to be brought out in the open and discussed. If it wasn’t, she would surely lose her mind.
“I think we have to kill them.”
Steve Montgomery had stared at his wife. As the import of what she had just said began to register on part of his mind, another part seemed to shift gears, to step back, as if unwilling even to accept the words Sally had uttered.
What’s happened to her, that part of his mind had wondered. What’s happened to the woman I married? Sally, over the last three years, had become almost a stranger to him. He had seen the changes in her face, but more than that, he had felt the changes in her spirit. In many ways she seemed more like a hunted animal than anything else.
Hunted, or haunted?
And yet, he had slowly come to realize, what he now saw in his wife was a reflection of what he felt himself. He, too, had come to regard the boys as something apart from himself, something he could only barely comprehend, but was afraid of.
What, he had often wondered, would they grow up to be, if they grew up at all?
At first he had dismissed the question, but then, as time had moved on, and the boys had not died, he had forced himself to face it.
And the only answer he had come up with, time and time again, was that whatever they grew up to be, it would not be human.
And so he, too, had come to feel haunted. Haunted by the feeling that he was raising a new species of man, indistinguishable from other men, but different. Cold, unfeeling, impervious to pain.
Impervious to pain, and therefore impervious to suffering. How many of them were there, and what would they do when the time came, as it inevitably would, when they realized their powers? Steve Montgomery, like his wife, didn’t know.
“All right,” he had said last night.
Sally had stared at him, momentarily shaken by the ease with which he had apparently accepted her idea. “Is that all you have to say? Just all right?”
Steve had nodded. “Three years ago, when we talked to Paul Randolph, I found out that you’d been right about the children all along. And I made up my mind about something that day. I decided that from that moment on, where the children were concerned, I’d go along with any decision you made. But I’ve watched those