“At the moment it doesn’t look like it, but I want some tests run on his blood. Also, it appears that Jason may have an unusual ability, which I’m testing right now.” He glanced at his watch. Two minutes had elapsed since he had withdrawn the needle from Jason’s arm. “Just sit tight a minute.”
He returned to the examining room and smiled at the boy. “All right,” he said. “Let’s have a look and see if you’re bleeding.”
Jason unfolded his arm, and Wiseman removed the cotton wad from the small wound.
Except that there was no wound there.
He examined the skin very closely, but nowhere could he find so much as a mark indicating that the skin had recently been punctured.
Chewing his lip thoughtfully, Wiseman led Jason back to the office, then sent him on out to the waiting room. “I want to talk to your father for a few minutes. Okay?”
Jason, glad that the examination was over, grinned happily. “Okay” Then something occurred to him. “I always get a sucker from Dr. Malone.”
“Well, I’m afraid I don’t have any,” Wiseman told him. “But maybe, if you’re a good boy, I can go down to Dr. Malone’s office in a few minutes and find one. How’s that?”
“Okay.”
Jason disappeared into the waiting room, and Wiseman closed the door behind him.
“Well?” Steve asked.
“Well,” Wiseman said softly, “I just don’t know. It appears to me that Jason heals at an abnormally fast rate.”
“What does that mean?”
Wiseman shrugged helplessly. “I can’t tell you. It would seem to me that it means Jason has some kind of abnormality in his body, and it’s manifesting itself in an accelerated regeneration of tissue. But I can’t be sure what else it might be doing.”
Steve frowned. “I don’t follow you.”
Wiseman wondered what to say, and finally decided to say as little as possible. His fingers began their habitual drumming on the desk top.
“I think perhaps it might be wise to keep Jason here for a day or two,” he began. “Jason seems to have some kind of abnormality, and until we find out just what it is and just what its effects are, I’d like to keep him under observation.”
“You mean here?” Steve asked. If nothing was wrong with Jason, why should he stay in the hospital?
“Here,” Wiseman agreed. Then, after a slight hesitation, he added, “Or perhaps in a diagnostic clinic.” He began carefully explaining to Steve exactly what he had in mind.
As he listened to the older man, Steve began to feel as if he had lost control over his life and the lives of his family. First Julie, then Sally, now Jason. What had happened? What was happening? He could understand none of it, and as Wiseman continued talking, it all began to sound more and more unreal. By the time Wiseman had finished, Steve’s resistance to the idea of putting an apparently healthy child in the hospital had begun to erode. Perhaps, he had begun to think, Jason should be put under observation. At least for a while …
Randy Corliss stood uncertainly outside the fence. The howling of the dogs grew louder. He wondered how many of them there were.
He’d never heard them before, or seen them. Had they been there all the time? But where? Maybe they’d been kept locked up in the basement. But what did it mean that they were loose now? Did they already know he had escaped, or were they loose every night, guarding the grounds. And then he saw them—three of them—moving steadily along his trail to the point where he’d gone into the water. They paused there; their baying stopped suddenly while they sniffed curiously around, first at the ground, then at the air. And then they turned and began moving toward him. Randy stood still, fascinated by the huge beasts, his fear eased by the high fence that separated him from them.
As he watched they discovered the fourth dog, lying dead near the fence, and suddenly their snuffling and sniffing gave way to whining. They poked at the corpse, pawing at it almost as if they were uncertain of what it was. And then, as one, they caught Randy’s scent. Their dead companion suddenly forgotten, they turned toward the fence, fangs bared, and began snarling. The ugly sound grew until the night was once again filled with their terrifying voices.
Randy fled into the woods.
For the first few minutes he simply ran, but then, as the baying of the dogs faded slightly, he paused. He had to think.