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was okay. He nodded and went back to sitting on his hands, then began pawing the dirt with his feet. In minutes he had dug a small ditch. |
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For three innings the boy sat out the game. At the end of the third, Jack watched him walk off to the nearby woods, where the boys went to relieve themselves. Jack followed him. The kid had fallen to the shadows behind the gallery and moved into the dark shade of the oaks. Jack sauntered toward the opening where he had disappeared and waited until he was certain nobody had followed. Then he slipped into the woods. |
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What Jack Perry saw froze his blood. The kid was standing in front of a thick tree pounding his head against the trunk, as if trying to crush his skull. |
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No, as if trying to pound back something inside of it. |
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What Alphonse had done before ten ccs of sodium penthelate ended his freak-house existence. |
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Suddenly the green wall of trees fell away, and Jack Perry was back in the fluorescent chambers of BiOmega, thick with the close smell of animal feces and urine and disinfectant. He could hear the rhesus chatter cut by the shrieking of a three-year-old male chimp with the red, raw head fighting the restraints to hammer his head against the grate of his cage. The harness had been a last-ditch effort to save him from the fate of the others, including another chimp that in a lunatic frenzy had battered his head against the bars. |
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The boy snapped his head at Jack. It was a look that chilled him. |
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Mother of God, thought Perry. The same feral eyes. He tried to say something to deflect the intensity, but they held him and in a split second he felt the kid drill his way through. The kid was in his head. |
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The moment passed when some boys outside the trees called Matty back to the field. He brushed past Jack Perry and out of the woods, leaving him stunned in his tracks and wondering in the aftermath of the kid's withdrawal if he knew that he, Jack Perry, had helped conjure the demon raging in his skull. |
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From the third-base line Jerry Mars watched the boy in red number 11 run out of the trees and return to the bench. Then he saw Jack |
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