Subject Seven

Chapter Fourteen
Cody Laurel

CODY PACED IN THE waiting room, his entire world revolving around a blood test. He wished Jeremy was there. Or Will. Anyone he could talk to.

He’d gone back to school after his folks took him home, and nothing was quite right. First, Hank and Glenn were avoiding him like the plague, not that he was complaining, and he heard from Jeremy that the same night he disappeared, they got their asses handed to them in a big way. The proof of that was in the casts they were wearing on their hands. Matching casts, only Glenn’s was a little bigger. Since then, every time he saw them in the hallway, they did their best to avoid him.

That didn’t help make his life much easier, though. His folks were still having trouble with the whole idea of him just losing four days. So now they were looking into other possibilities, like maybe whether or not he’d started experimenting with hard-core drugs.

He knew he was innocent, he knew the test should be negative, but he wasn’t stupid. Just because he didn’t take any drugs didn’t mean there weren’t any involved. He’d heard the stories from time to time. It was always possible someone had slipped him something at the football game. He couldn’t think of anyone who would-or why-but you never knew. His friends weren’t that stupid and neither Chadbourn nor Wagner had the brainpower to come up with the idea-but it could have been someone else or even a random thing, so yeah, he was worried.

And right now his parents were talking with the doctor who’d taken the test. Not Dr. Talbot, the usual physician they saw, but a different man, a specialist who’d been hired to give him a full battery of drug tests to make sure that he wasn’t a hardened drug freak. He’d heard his parents talking at home about how much the tests would cost, well, arguing really, about whether or not they could afford to get them done at all because apparently insurance didn’t cover paranoid exams of your son’s blood for illicit substances.

His dad had been against it. His mom had insisted. In the long run, Mom won. Mom always won. It had always been that way.

He kept pacing, worrying, doing his best to ignore the constriction in his chest and the fact that his lungs wanted to whistle. Asthma sucked. He wished he’d brought his Game Boy.

The door opened and his parents walked out with a man he’d never seen before. He had to guess the stranger was their new friend, the doctor.

“Cody?” The man walked forward and offered his hand. He had a very strong grip and a smile that looked like it belonged on a politician. “I’m Dr. Peebles. I’ve been talking to your parents about your blood test results.”

Cody looked at his mom first; her face was set and worried. Then his dad, who seemed a little more relaxed but only a little.

The doctor was still smiling when he looked back.

“Yeah? What was the verdict?”

“Well, there’s no evidence that you took any illegal drugs, and aside from a few tests that are very painful and cost prohibitive, I doubt we’d be able to check any more thoroughly than we already did.”

He nodded. He didn’t like the man. He didn’t trust the man. Everything about the guy just rubbed him wrong.

“I get the idea there’s a but in this.”

The doctor blinked. “A but?”

“Yeah, you know. You seem all good, BUT, we have to consider this or that other thing.”

The man nodded and got a serious look on his face. Cody had to wonder if he practiced the expression in the mirror to make it look so sincere.

“Well, Cody, the thing is, we have to consider blackouts very carefully.”

“Blackouts?”

A nod from Dr. Sincere. “Yes, blackouts, or fugues, or amnesia. The fact of the matter is, you lost four days of your life and we can’t figure out why.”

Cody swallowed hard. This was about to get bad, he could feel it in his stomach, like the way he felt at the top of the first roller-coaster hill when he knew the car was about to take a giant plummet downward and there was that chance that he was about to crash into the ground.

“The thing is, Cody, we’ve checked your head for possible causes, we’ve done examinations of your electrolytes for possible imbalances. .. and you’re in remarkable physical shape.”

He shook his head. The man had to be looking at someone else’s medical records. “No. I have asthma. My mom is always telling me I’ve got health problems.”

Another smile, but it was fast and lacked conviction. The doctor looked to his mom for a second and she in turn looked down, like she was guilty of letting out a shameful family secret. What the hell?

“Well, you’re in better shape than you think. At least physically.”

“What do you mean?” And there it was, that feeling like falling. The roller coaster was dropping fast and hard and it was a doozy, too.

“There are no signs of drugs, no physiological signs of trauma, and Cody, that only leaves one alternative that we can think of.”

Cody stepped back and looked from adult to adult, his eyes widening in his head. His mother and father looked away. Mom had a fretting look on her pretty face and Dad, well, Dad was looking about as happy as he probably would if Cody suddenly decided he needed to get a sex change. “You’re kidding me. You think I’m mental.”

“We just need to take a few more tests to make sure that the fugue state was just a fluke, a one-time thing.”

“Oh, hell no.” Cody shook his head. “I am not going to a mental ward.”

“No, Cody, it’s nothing that serious.” The doctor was speaking.

His mother interrupted. “Cody! We don’t use that sort of language!”

He shook his head again, scowling. “Yeah, well, no offense, Mom, but no one is calling you a mental case.”

“Just calm down, Cody. It’s a test, that’s all.”

“Well, what if I’m done with tests?” He took a step back toward the doctor, his head aching. “What if I just want to go back home and get on with my life?”

His dad stepped forward and swelled up with a deep breath. “It’s not your choice, Cody. It’s going to happen and you’re going to answer all the damned questions carefully and truthfully, you understand me?” Dad stepped in closer still and Cody looked up at him, reminded forcefully of exactly how large the man was. “I’m done playing games here, Cody. This is serious stuff and you’re not going to pull any stunts.”

Stunts? What kind of stunts? He’d never pulled anything until he woke up in a damned jail cell and yeah, that was a big one, but he hadn’t done it.

“Fine! Just get out of my face!” The anger surged hard into him and his voice came out louder than he meant it to. He’d never, ever yelled at either of his parents. He knew better, was raised better.

“What did you say to me?” Dad’s face was red with anger. Cody knew just how he felt. He would have backed down instantly in most cases, but not this time. Not today. That throbbing, thrumming headache was giving him balls the size of Texas. The world swam for a second, growing darker and then lighter and then darker again and Cody forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. Asthma, no matter what Dr. Sunshine said, was a real issue and one he couldn’t take lightly.

The doctor stepped forward, moving between them. “Let’s just calm down. Cody, once the test is done, we can all get back to our regular lives.”

Cody stared hard at him and nodded. His knees wanted to shake, adrenaline made him feel dizzy. Had his heart ever beat this hard?

Sure. He could go back to his life after the test.

Unless they decided he was crazy.

He nodded again and moved over to one of the waiting room chairs, sitting down and settling in. It might be a long wait.

“So do it. Do the test. Let’s get this done.” His mother tried to talk to him, but Cody looked away, too angry to deal with her. His sense of… of betrayal was simply too sharp to ignore.

Still, what if he was crazy? What then?

He had a bad feeling he’d be finding out soon enough.