“It’s about the babies.” The man got right to the point. “We’re going to be straight with you, honey. As much as we applaud your courage in saving those children, and as much as we adore those two little boys…” He shook his head. “They don’t belong here. They’re not ours, and we can’t keep continuing to provide for them. And you certainly can’t take them permanently under your wing. You know that.”
“You need to go to the authorities,” her mother remarked. “You need to turn those babies over to someone who can properly take care of them.”
Sighing, Ingrid sat in her chair. “I know that. You’re right. These little boys have special abilities that I’m not prepared to handle once they start to manifest, whenever that’ll be.”
“Plus the neighbors are getting suspicious,” her mother added.
“I’m worried they’ll end up back with the people who created them,” Ingrid emphasized. “Where’s someplace safe enough? You tell me. How can I know I can trust the people I give them to?”
“I have a suggestion,” her father stated, making her smile. She knew he wouldn’t have called this gathering unless he believed he had a doable plan of action. “You take ‘em to Heathfield.”
Ingrid racked her brain. The name sounded familiar, but… “Where’s Heathfield?”
“It’s a small town about a hundred or so miles south of Yaegerton.”
“What’s in Heathfield?”
“We think some of those people who were kept as prisoners at that company you used to work for, where you took the babies from, we think that’s where those people went,” her mother explained.
Ingrid stared at her. “What people? Who?” Then it hit her.
Her father loudly cleared his throat as he adjusted himself in his chair. For good measure, he took a sip of his drink. “Ray Lipscomb. Remember him?”
She nodded. “Yeah. You two went to high school together. He comes here on occasion to visit his daughter, right?”
“That’s him. You’re right. We keep in contact every now and then. Anyway, he runs the bowling alley in that town. He was telling me six strangers recently arrived in town. Apparently, they claim they’d escaped from that facility you were working at.”
“Pendlebrooke Mental Institute?”
“No, the other one. The labs.”
“Docenti Labs?’
“That’s the one.”
“What else did he say?”
“It’s a pretty inventive story,” her father admitted. “Those people claim they’d been bred there and kept there their entire lives. They’d been used for experiments.”
Her mother leaned over the table. “They said they’d been told the world had been destroyed, and they were among the last survivors of a nuclear fallout. It wasn’t until one of the workers there let it slip that the world hadn’t been destroyed that they decided to escape. They made it all the way to Heathfield before they went to the authorities to ask for help.”
“Do you know anything about those people?” her father asked.
She took a deep breath to calm herself. “I know of them, yes, but I’ve never met them directly. They were always referred to as ‘the children.’”
Her dad grunted and took another noisy sip of coffee. “Obviously they’re not children anymore. Ray says they’re grown adults in their twenties.”
“What else can you tell us about them? What else do you know about them?” her mother gently pressed.
“Not a whole lot. My job was in the breeding area. The company was trying to create more children like them.”
Her father gave her a dark look. “What do you mean, they were trying to create more like them?”
Ingrid didn’t flinch when she returned his gaze. “It was known that those children had special abilities. And before you ask, no. I don’t know what those abilities are. But the company was attempting to breed more children with those special genes.” She gestured behind her. “Those little boys I brought with me are the only two surviving babies…out of hundreds.”
Her mother covered her mouth with a hand as she gasped in shock. “Hundreds?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the number was more in the thousands,” Ingrid confessed. “That’s if you count all the test tube trials that didn’t pan out and were incinerated.”
