Frankenstein

hoof, he pawed the stall floor.
    His size appealed to her—so strong, so formidable.
    As Commander finished the last piece of the third apple, Ariel said,“We’ll go where we want and chase them down, and nothing will be able to stop us.”
    She reached up to stroke his forehead. With her fingers, she combed the pale forelock that cascaded over his poll.
    “We’ll kill everything. We’ll kill them all,” she said. “We’ll kill every last one of them.”

    
chapter
33

    How much they hated me
.
    Room 218. The boy in the bed. Bryce Walker pacing and restless.
    How much they hated me
.
    If Bryce had been inclined to second-guess his suspicion that the atmosphere in the hospital had become downright eerie and that the medical personnel were markedly less professional than they had been only the previous night, his conversation with young Travis Ahern all but eliminated his doubt.
    The two nurses standing over the boy’s bed, in the dark, saying nothing, attending to no nursing task, only watching him, watching and—in his words—
hating
him … The character of that incident was of such a piece with Bryce’s experiences during the morning that he and Travis at once became allies and conspirators.
    If something singular was happening, if the air of threat was not imagined, he would be responsible for the boy in a crisis. He needed, therefore, to know what had led to his hospitalization.
    According to the extensive notes on his chart and according to theyoung man himself, Travis Ahern was brought into the emergency room suffering from anaphylactic shock, an allergic reaction of such severity that his tongue, throat, and airways were nearly swollen shut. His blood pressure dropped so low that he lost consciousness. Injections of epinephrine saved his life.
    Because Rainbow Falls lacked an allergist, Travis’s G.P.—Kevin Flynn—hospitalized the boy and the next day administered skin tests, injections of small amounts of forty allergens in Travis’s back. Only strawberries and cat dander caused reactions, both moderate. Dr. Flynn scheduled another series of injections for later in the day.
    Before the physician returned, Travis endured a second episode of anaphylactic shock as bad as the first. He might well have died if he had not already been in the hospital.
    The boy was immediately put on a diet consisting only of those foods to which he had shown no sensitivity in the first battery of tests, and the second group of tests was postponed until the following day. His lunch, consumed before the allergen injections, became the focus of the search for a causative agent.
    In spite of a restricted diet known to be safe for him, Travis suffered a third episode, the worst of the three. This time, when he was revived with epinephrine and antihistamines, he was disoriented for a while, and his eyes remained nearly swollen shut for hours.
    Alarmed at the frequency of the attacks, Dr. Flynn decided, incredibly, that the offending substance must be in the boy’s drinking water. Travis drank eight to ten glasses of city tap water a day.
    His bedside carafe had been taken away and filled with orange juice. Ice cubes were made specially for him, using bottled water. Since then, he hadn’t experienced another allergic reaction.
    The laboratory was conducting chemical and mineral analyses of tap water. The primary purifying chemical used by the city was a form of chlorine. The number of parts per million seemed far too low to trigger anaphylactic shock, but apparently there were cases on record of minute quantities of substances causing fatal shock. Dr. Flynn was supposed to have done a skin test with the chlorine almost two hours earlier; but as yet he had not appeared.
    “As soon as they know what I’m allergic to, what I’m not allowed to eat or drink, then I can go home,” Travis said. “I really want to go home now.”
    Grace Ahern, a single mother, visited her son in the evenings. But because she struggled to support them on her salary, and feared for her job in this poor economy, she couldn’t leave work to be with him during the day. Morning and afternoon, they kept in touch by phone.
    “Except Mom hasn’t called today,” Travis said. “When I called her at home, I got our answering machine. Her direct line at work put me on to voice mail, but she must be there.”
    “Where does she work?”
    “At Meriwether Lewis.”
    “The elementary school?”
    “Yeah. She’s the dietician and chef.