“Who’s afraid of feeling it?” Jason laughed. “It just pisses me off that Dr. Malone thinks something’s wrong with us.”
“What does he know?” Randy sneered. And then Sally came in, carrying two needles. Jason looked at them, frowning.
“What is it?”
“Succinylcholine chloride,” Sally replied. “Five hundred milligrams for each of you. Which of you wants to be first?”
The boys glanced at each other and shrugged. “I’ll go first,” Randy offered.
“All right” Sally took his arm and rolled up the left sleeve of his pajama top. The injection, Malone had told her, was to go directly into muscle. The upper arm muscle would be fastest, but any muscle would do. Holding the needle in her right hand, she grasped his arm with her left.
And suddenly she lost her nerve.
Over Randy’s head, her eyes met Steve’s. “I—I can’t do it,” she whispered. “I just can’t do it.”
Steve shook his head. “Don’t look at me,” he said quietly. “I can’t do it either.”
And suddenly the boys were laughing at them. “Let me have the needle, Aunt Sally,” Randy said. “I’ll do it myself. It’s no big deal.”
“We’ll do it together,” Jason offered. “On three, well each give ourselves a shot in the leg. Okay?”
Silently, feeling as though she were in some kind of a dream, Sally gave each of the boys one of the needles. Then, as she and Steve looked on, they rolled up the legs of their pajamas, and, after Jason had counted to three, jabbed the needles into their legs, and pressed the plungers down. The liquid in the cylinders disappeared into the muscle of their thighs. When it was over, they pulled the needles out of their flesh, and looked at Sally, their eyes filled with contempt.
“Satisfied?” Jason asked.
Sally nodded and took the empty needles from her son. “Now go to bed,” she said, her voice choking with all the emotions she had held so carefully in check ever since she had reached her decision. “Go to bed, and go to sleep.”
She tucked them in and then did something she hadn’t done for a long time. She leaned over and kissed each of them on the forehead. A moment later, leaving the lights on, she and Steve slipped out of the room.
When they were alone, Jason suddenly felt a strange sensation in his body.
“Randy?” he said.
“Hunh?”
There was an odd strangling sound to Randy’s voice. Jason tried to sit up to look at his friend.
He couldn’t.
All he could do, and even that was a struggle, was roll over and stare across at the other bed. Randy was lying on his back, his eyes wide open, struggling to breathe.
“Wha—what’s wrong?” Jason managed to ask. “What—what did they give us?”
“Don’t know,” Randy gasped. “Can’t—can’t breathe.”
And then, as the full force of the lethal dose of poison struck him, Jason fell back on his pillow, and slipped into unconsciousness.
Downstairs, Sally sat desolately on the sofa, trying to accept what she had just done.
“It was the right thing to do,” she said over and over again. “It was the right thing to do and I had to do it.” Her tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks. “But, oh, God, Steve, I’ll never be able to live with it. Never.”
Steve nodded unhappily. “I keep telling myself they weren’t human,” he whispered. “But I guess I still don’t believe it. Randy, maybe. But Jason? God, Sally, he was our son.”
“He wasn’t,” Sally said, her voice rising. “He wasn’t our son. He was something else, and he had to die. He had to, Steve. But what’s going to happen to us now?”
Steve looked up and Sally felt a sudden calmness emanating from him. “Well be charged,” she heard him say, his voice sounding as if it were coming from a great distance away. “Well be charged with the murder of our own son and our foster son. And no one will believe it wasn’t murder, Sally.”
“And they’ll be right,” Sally cried. Her hands clenched together and she twisted them in her lap as if she were fighting some physical pain that was threatening to overwhelm her. “Oh, God, Steve, they’ll be right.”
And then, in a moment of silence, they heard a sound from upstairs.
They heard a door open. There were footsteps.
A moment later Jason and Randy came slowly down the stairs and stepped into the living room, where they stood quietly facing Jason’s parents.
And, since they were his parents, it was Jason who spoke.