Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(72)

To his eyes, the darkness hid nothing, merely providing a different spectrum than daylight, a detailed grayscale image lacking the warmth of the daylight colors. Standing here in the grass, looking out across the lawn at Heather's house, the dark feeling acquired a name: fear. Not for himself, but for her.

He moved around behind the McFarland house, letting his feet take him where they would. With every passing second, the sky lightened, fading the predawn shadows into the background. Heather's back lawn, like his own, ran back about fifty feet from the house before descending steeply into the rocky canyon below. There was a point just before the edge where the lawn refused to venture, the abundance of pine needles making the soil too acidic for growth.

When this neighborhood had first been built, the trees had been cut back away from the houses, so that now only one huge pine remained, rising up outside of Heather's window, just around the far corner of the house. Mark moved toward it, his thoughts involuntarily turning to the Rag Man. Odd. Maybe it was because this was the tree he had climbed to kidnap her from her room.

It didn’t really matter. That bastard wasn’t going to threaten anyone, ever again. Jack Gregory had seen to that.

As he moved behind the McFarland's back deck and rounded the corner, Mark glanced up at Heather's window. Her bedroom light was on. Not surprising. Heather had always been an early riser, and even though she was sleeping again, the antipsychotic drugs had not changed that.

Searching for anything that might have elevated his concern to its current level, Mark spun in a slow circle. Nothing. Not a God damn thing out of the ordinary.

Yeah right—nothing but a tiny hole in the fabric of the universe materializing in his bedroom. That was damn sure enough to freak anybody out.

Now that he thought about it, it was a miracle he wasn't running around waving his arms and screaming, “Oh my God! We’re all gonna die!”

Not that most people would believe him. Heather would. But he wasn't going to tell her, at least not yet. She’d been through so much lately he wasn’t about to lay more stress on her. Besides, whatever it was had been looking at him.

Something like that had to have its origins in the Rho Project. But why would they look in on a high school kid? Maybe Jennifer had been right about his attracting too much attention to himself. Whatever it was, Mark wanted to have a theory before he discussed this with the two girls.

With one more glance up at Heather’s window, Mark turned back toward his house. At least for now, this was his problem and he would figure it out on his own.





75


Jennifer sat on Heather’s right, looking out the school bus window intently enough to make Heather wonder whether the scenery along the route to Los Alamos High had changed. Mark sat by himself two rows up. That was probably a good thing. She didn’t want to talk to him right now. It had been a long time since she had been this mad at anyone, and for it to be Mark that she was angry with was a new experience, one that she could have done without.

Heather had awakened on the first day of school with that special thrill of anticipation that this day always gave her. What in the world had possessed him to bring her down like this?

Heather had known for a while that Mark was less than thrilled with the idea that her parents had her on antipsychotic meds. Until this morning, he had never directly challenged her on the subject. But whatever good sense he had shown heretofore had evaporated as they waited for the bus. He’d actually had the nerve to say that her mom and dad were drugging her out of her mind and that she was crazy for knuckling under to their wishes.

If she hadn’t been quite so mad, Heather was sure she would have been reduced to tears by the verbal assault from someone she loved so dearly. She wasn’t going to let that happen, though. Mark wasn’t the one suffering from the horrifying mental fugues that had been ripping apart her reality, leaving her trembling with fear that she might completely lose her mind. He had no right to judge her or her parents. No right.

A sudden jolt as the rear tires of the bus climbed up over the curb as it turned into the high school, brought Heather’s thoughts back to the present. New bus driver. Heather hoped the bumpy entrance to the school grounds wasn’t a sign of things to come. In response to her mental question, the image of her old Magic 8-Ball toy came to mind, the answer swimming into view through the blue liquid beneath its lens.

“Don’t count on it.”

Without bothering to dwell on the unpleasant thought, Heather allowed herself to be swept from her seat, carried along by the excited throng toward the entrance to the high school entryway, and then into the hallway beyond. When she glanced around, Mark was gone, as was Jennifer. So much the better. All she wanted right now was some sense of return to normality, something that the bustling high school hallway promised to deliver.

First-day activities consumed her: class schedules, new teachers, book issue, locker assignment, assembly. Most of her classmates seemed genuinely happy to see her.

Only Paulette Carlton and her troupe of snobettes got in her face.

“Look what we have here,” Paulette exclaimed with an expert flip of her long, blond hair. “A certified, national science contest award winner. Nation’s biggest cheat.”

The other three girls, all members of the cheerleading squad, laughed loudly as they passed by in Paulette’s wake, Heather’s scowl lost on their backsides. Watching them from this angle, Heather could understand their popularity with the boys: lots of waggle and vocabularies that didn’t include the word no.