Escape from the Drooling Octopod! (14 page)
“We don't have time to go for help,” Beamer sputtered. “We're gonna have to save her ourselves.”
The good news was that Dr. Franck hadn't bothered to close the window. The bad news was that he was standing in a pool of light next to Alana, filling a syringe with a milky fluid.
Normally, kids are not known for being particularly quiet, but today was an exception. They slipped into the attic and scooted around the wall like mice, keeping in the shadows.
When the man finished filling his syringe, Scilla broke the silence. “What are you doing to Alana? She's no lab rat, ya' know!”
He looked confused, unable to see them in the dark outreaches of the attic. “I'm not trying to hurt her. I'm trying to save her!” He looked like he was speaking to a ghost, defending his actions.
“Why don't you take her to a hospital?” Scilla said, keeping up the attack. “You're no doctor â at least not that kind of doctor.”
“I've tried all kinds of doctors. No one knows how to save her!” There were tears in his eyes. The man suddenly collapsed, sinking to the floor against a tall cabinet. There, with his elbows balanced on his knees, he held his head in his hands and cried. “I'm the one who caused her to be like this,” he finally said between sobs. “I killed my wife and disfigured my daughter.”
It would have been easier to take if he'd said, “The sky is falling!”
Scilla was clearly rattled. “But . . . but . . . d'ya mean you murdered your wife?” she gasped.
“Not intentionally. She . . . my wife . . . brought Alana to work with her one day,” he said as he struggled back to his feet. “She was only seven at the time.” He walked over and leaned against the table with the computer monitors on the shelf above. “She wasn't supposed to be there. It was a maximum-security area, but my wife wanted her to see where we worked.” He turned back toward the kids, still unable to see them in the shadows. It was almost as if he were talking to himself, remembering. “I was so happy to see her. I picked her up.” His voice choked. “She always . . . giggled when I spun her around above my head. So . . . that's what I did.”
“That doesn't sound like something a murderer would do,” Scilla whispered to Beamer standing next to her.
“Oh, how she laughed,” the man said with tears in his eyes. “But then her feet struck a bottle.” His voice again broke. “The bottle flew off the shelf and broke on the floor next to my wife. I brought Alana down into my arms but froze, not knowing what to do. Soon, the alarm screamed. My wife collapsed to the floor. I set Alana down, pushing her behind me, and rushed toward my wife. But before I got to her, hands were grabbing me and pulling me away from her. I kept crying out my wife's name, trying to break free, but they pulled me back through the air lock. One glass door slammed in place before me then another, cutting me and my fellow workers off from the infected area â the area where my wife lay on the floor!”
“But what happened to Alana?” Scilla asked anxiously.
He almost lost it, his body heaving with sobs, but he fought them back and went on. “I looked through the crowd of scientists and lab technicians trying to find Alana, and then I turned back and saw her still in the room with her mother. She was so little, shorter than the lab table, that nobody had seen her disappear around to the other side of it. I screamed for someone to open the door. Then some people in those anti-contamination suits showed up and went through the air lock to get them.”
Oh, yeah
, Beamer thought,
now that part sounded pretty cool. I wonder what it's like, wearing one of those things that look like
rumpled, plastic space suits.
Mr. Franck took some deep breaths before he went on, talking as he walked to Alana's bedside. “It was too late for my wife. She was already . . . dead. Alana, suffering less exposure to the toxic chemical, lived. In fact, she seemed fine at first. I was so relieved. But a couple months later her skin began looking thin and pale. The chemical had caused specific cells to mutate. A month after that the first wrinkles began to appear. My daughter was racing toward old age.”
“Whoa, that's awful,” Beamer murmured with a gulp.
“But it doesn't sound like it was really your fault,” Scilla said more loudly. “I mean, it was Alana's foot that â ”
“But it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been so stupid!” he said as he rushed back to the table and banged his fist on it. “I knew that the area was dangerous. I was careless.”
The scientist's expression changed, like he suddenly real-ized that real people, not ghosts, were talking to him. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” he asked angrily as he walked toward them. “Are you the children who traumatized her?” he said through clenched teeth. Suddenly he grabbed Scilla and shoved her into an animal specimen cage. “I can't have you causing her any more harm.” He tripped Beamer as he and Ghoulie tried to get past him. He caught Ghoulie by the back of his collar and flung him into another cage.
“We didn't come here to hurt her,” Beamer protested as the man dragged him into a third cage and locked the door. “We came to help her!”
“I don't believe you,” he growled at them. “I know how you children treat anyone who is . . .
different
. At any rate, I can't let you stop me from doing what I have to do, even if it means that I have to break all the laws of man and God.”
Whoa, that was a lot of lawbreaking.
Beamer remembered the Ten Commandments, of course. But just from the few laws he heard about in Solomon Parker's case, the laws of men must be up there in the zillions.
The man's face softened, though, when he returned to his daughter. “Even as you are, you are beautiful to me, but I want you to be a normal girl â to have friends,” he said gently to her.
“I am a geneticist, you know,” Dr. Franck said, looking back at the kids in the cages. “I know how to do things with . . . the genetic code. I had only worked with plants, though, but I found a source for human DNA and began working with those genes identified with aging. It isn't legal. I could end up in jail, but I don't care as long as I can cure my daughter.”
“Do you know about DNA?” Ghoulie whispered to Scilla like a talking encyclopedia.
“Yes, I know about genes and all that stuff,” Scilla whispered angrily. “You may be a grade ahead of me and a genius, but I'm not stupid!”
“Okay, okay,” Ghoulie whispered. “I just wasn't sure you knew that it's the DNA code that gives you stuff like the color of your eyes and hair, the shape of your face, and â ”
“I got it!” whispered Scilla again.
“I've tried every variation of gene therapy I could think of trying to slow her growth rate,” Alana's father said. He swallowed hard. “But nothing has worked.”
Beamer didn't notice when Scilla's fingers, which were playing aimlessly on the cage door, accidentally tripped open the latch.
“I have one more drug combination to try,” Alana's father said gently to his daughter, his voice breaking, “but . . . it is the most dangerous one of all. It might . . . cost you your . . . life.” He noticeably sagged, his hands on the bed, bracing himself as he leaned over her. Then he straightened, his face taking on a harder expression, and walked back to the table. “But maybe that's just as well â better death than to live a life alone and friendless.”
“But she's not friendless!” Scilla yelled at him. “We're her friends.”
“Liar!” he shouted back at her. “Be quiet.”
“Hey, y'all,” Scilla whispered at Beamer and Ghoulie when Dr. Franck looked away. “Hey, y'all,” she whispered louder.
“What?” Beamer whispered. Then he saw Ghoulie's eyes pop open. A lightbulb had definitely gone on in Ghoulie's supercharged brain.
The man again picked up the syringe.
“Don't do it, Dr. Franck,” Ghoulie yelled. “You have your miracle! Go ahead. Check the latest cell activity.”
“I have given her no new medications for the past two months,” he answered as he wiped tears from his eyes. “There is no reason to expect that anything has changed.” But he hesitated, giving Ghoulie a long look. Then he seemed to dismiss whatever he was thinking. “What do you care, anyway?”
“Listen to me, you two!” Scilla whispered again. “Ani-mals may not be able to open these cages, but humans can.”
Beamer looked at her and finally got it. “You've gotta trust in God, Mr. Franck,” Beamer said as he fingered his cage latch. “I don't know how, but he will work things out for Alana. That's what my mom and dad have taught me since I was old enough to talk.”
Scilla quietly slipped outside her cage to help the others.
Again, Alana's father hesitated. “Why should I believe you? You hurt my little girl.”
“But we didn't mean to!” Beamer exclaimed. “We've played with Alana. We care about her. God cares about her too. I mean, I think he's the one who brought us to her. Don't do this to her!”
“No, I have to fix her,” Dr. Franck said, his voice choking. Once again he looked at the level of the liquid in the syringe.
“Check the readings on the monitor!” Ghoulie shouted to him again. “I'm telling the truth!”
Suddenly Beamer got his cage door open. He ran toward the doctor. “You can't do it!” he shouted, taking him to the floor before he could inject the fluid into Alana.
While Beamer tried to wrestle the syringe out of the scientist's hand, Ghoulie burst out of his cage and ran over to the monitor. He hit a key to display Alana's current cell activity. “Look, Dr. Franck! Here it is, just like I said.”
Dr. Franck, who had just grabbed back his syringe, looked up at the screen and gasped. “I don't understand it.” He let go of Beamer, stood up, and walked over to the screen. He tapped some more keys, looked at a screen showing Alana's cells two months ago, and tapped the keyboard again to see the current results. “You're right. The cells are not mutating as quickly as they were the last time I tested her. In fact, they look almost normal!”
Beamer looked knowingly at his buddies.
It might not fit into
the scientist's manual of cause and effect, but some things are beyond
science. Yep, science was a wonderful thing. After all, God had given
humans all of creation for making things to improve our lives. But
this time, the tree and the tree ship had worked with a science beyond
the five senses.
Dr. Franck was crying again, but these were happy tears as he hugged his still-sleeping daughter.
Like all holidays, this one had to end. And, as was usual for kids, it ended with the start of school. As they were about to walk by Alana's Pink Palace, Beamer wondered what would happen to her.
Alana
may no longer be aging at the speed of light, but she still
looked like the Wicked Witch of the West.
“Do you suppose Alana will ever be able to leave this house?” Scilla said as they passed the gate.
“They can do some pretty amazing things with plastic surgery these days,” Ghoulie said, “once her aging stabilizes and her face stops morphing.”
“Maybe so,” Beamer said with a worried look. Being “different” at all can be a hard road for any kid.
The Star-Fighters were all “different.” Beamer used to think that was a bad thing until last summer. Thanks to Old Lady Parker, the tree, and the tree ship, they'd learned that being different was often a good thing. You see, God created each person with their own special set of gifts.
Alana was definitely different, but Beamer didn't think that being ugly was one of her gifts. Maybe she had some gifts that would make up for her being ugly. A lot of cures for disease and inventions had been discovered by people who had diseases or problems themselves.
They were surprised to see that Alana's walk-in gate was wide open. Ms. Warrington stood about halfway up the walk, waving for them to come in. Puzzled by her strange expression, they followed her around the walkway and through the row of Italian cypress trees.
Alana was standing in the center of a large flower garden shaped like a wagon wheel, her back to them. Alana's nanny smiled at them and said, “I was hoping you'd let Alana walk to school with you. Maybe you could introduce her to some of the children. She doesn't know anyone, of course.”
That was when Alana turned to face them. They all flinched and sucked in their breath. She looked even worse than before. Her nose was longer and more twisted, and her chin jutted out about as far as her nose.
Beamer had expected anything but this.
Oh, man, this isn't
gonna be easy.
He watched as the poor girl reached up to cradle her face in her hands. But instead of crying, he heard laughter. Then she took off her face! Beamer blinked and opened his eyes wide. What he saw now was not a pretty face but at least a pleasant face. She still had wrinkles, although they were clearly fading.
