38
ZACHARIAH WAS ON THE FLOOR, BOUND AND gagged, glaring up at them with hate and rage.
“You’ll want to see your boy first,” Dombey said. “Then I can tell you how he came to be here.”
“Where is he?” Tina asked shakily.
“In the isolation chamber.” Dombey indicated the window in the back wall of the room. “Come on.” He went to the big pane of glass, where only a few small spots of frost remained.
For a moment Tina couldn’t move, afraid to see what they had done to Danny. Fear spread tendrils through her and rooted her feet to the floor.
Elliot touched her shoulder. “Don’t keep Danny waiting. He’s been waiting a long time. He’s been calling you for a long time.”
She took a step, then another, and before she knew it, she was at the window, beside Dombey.
A standard hospital bed stood in the center of the isolation chamber. It was ringed by ordinary medical equipment as well as by several mysterious electronic monitors.
Danny was in the bed, on his back. Most of him was covered, but his head, raised on a pillow, was turned toward the window. He stared at her through the side rails of the bed. “Danny,” she said softly. She had the irrational fear that, if she said his name loudly, the spell would be broken and he would vanish forever.
His face was thin and sallow. He appeared to be older than twelve. Indeed, he looked like a little old man.
Dombey, sensing her shock, said, “He’s emaciated. For the past six or seven weeks, he hasn’t been able to keep anything but liquids on his stomach. And not a lot of those.” Danny’s eyes were strange. Dark, as always. Big and round, as always. But they were sunken, ringed by unhealthy dark skin, which was not the way they had always been. She couldn’t pinpoint what else about his eyes made him so different from any eyes she had ever seen, but as she met Danny’s gaze, a shiver passed through her, and she felt a profound and terrible pity for him.
The boy blinked, and with what appeared to be great effort, at the cost of more than a little pain, he withdrew one arm from under the covers and reached out toward her. His arm was skin and bones, a pathetic stick. He thrust it between two of the side rails, and he opened his small weak hand beseechingly, reaching for love, trying desperately to touch her.
Her voice quivering, she said to Dombey, “I want to be with my boy. I want to hold him.” As the three of them moved to the airtight steel door that led into the room beyond the window, Elliot said, “Why is he in an isolation chamber? Is he ill?”
“Not now,” Dombey said, stopping at the door, turning to them, evidently disturbed by what he had to tell them. “Right now he’s on the verge of starving to death because it’s been so long since he’s been able to keep any food on his stomach. But he’s not infectious. He has been very infectious, off and on, but not at the moment. He’s had a unique disease, a man-made disease created in the laboratory. He’s the only person who’s ever survived it. He has a natural antibody in his blood that helps him fight off this particular virus, even though it’s an artificial bug. That’s what fascinated Dr. Tamaguchi.
He’s the head of this installation. Dr. Tamaguchi drove us very hard until we isolated the antibody and figured out why it was so effective against the disease. Of course, when that was accomplished, Danny was of no more scientific value. To Tamaguchi, that meant he was of no value at all … except in the crudest way. Tamaguchi decided to test Danny to destruction. For almost two months they’ve been reinfecting his body over and over again, letting the virus wear him down, trying to discover how many times he can lick it before it finally licks him. You see, there’s no permanent immunity to this disease. It’s like strep throat or the common cold or like cancer, because you can get it again and again . . . if you’re lucky enough to beat it the first time. Today, Danny just beat it for the fourteenth time.”
Tina gasped in horror.
Dombey said, “Although he gets weaker every day, for some reason he wins out over the virus faster each time. But each victory drains him. The disease is killing him, even if indirectly. It’s killing him by sapping his strength. Right now he’s clean and uninfected. Tomorrow they intend to stick another dirty needle in him.”
“My God,” Elliot said softly. “My God.”
Gripped by rage and revulsion, Tina started at Dombey. “I can’t believe what I just heard.”
“Brace yourself,” Dombey said grimly. “You haven’t heard half of it yet.”
He turned away from them, spun the wheel on the steel door, and swung that barrier inward.
Minutes ago, when Tina had first peered through the observation window, when she had seen the frighteningly thin child, she had told herself that she would not cry. Danny didn’t need to see her cry. He needed love and attention and protection. Her tears might upset him. And judging from his appearance, she was concerned that any serious emotional disturbance would literally destroy him.
Now, as she approached his bed, she bit her lower lip so hard that she tasted blood. She struggled to contain her tears, but she needed all her willpower to keep her eyes dry.
Danny became excited when he saw her drawing near, and in spite of his terrible condition, he shakily thrust himself into a sitting position, clutching at the bed rails with one frail, trembling hand, eagerly extending his other hand toward her.
She took the last few steps haltingly, her heart pounding, her throat constricted. She was overwhelmed with the joy of seeing him again but also with fear when she realized how hideously wasted he was.
When their hands touched, his small fingers curled tightly around hers. He held on with a fierce, desperate strength.
“Danny,” she said wonderingly. “Danny, Danny.”
From somewhere deep inside of him, from far down beneath all the pain and fear and anguish, Danny found a smile for her. It wasn’t much of a smile; it quivered on his lips as if sustaining it required more energy than lifting a hundred-pound weight. It was such a tentative smile, such a vague ghost of all the broad warm smiles she remembered, that it broke her heart.
“Mom.”
Tina could hardly recognize his weary, cracking voice. “Mom.”
“It’s all right,” she said.
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