Syndrome

by Thomas Hoover

  "What the hell are you doing down here?" Van de Vliet demanded. The pitch of his voice had noticeably gone up.

  Who?Ally wondered.Who's he talking to?

  There are definitely new people in the room.

  "Come on, Ally," said a voice in her ear, urgent. This time she knew who it was. It was Stone. "Damn them all. I'm getting you out of here.Now."

  Chapter 35

  Friday, April 10

  10:07p.m.

  She felt the straps on the gurney loosening and then she started prying her eyes open. She thought, hoped, it was Stone, but she couldn't see well enough to be absolutely sure. Her mind and her vision were still overflowing with horrifying nightmares of time gone awry. What did all those bizarre dreams mean?

  She was groggy but was coming alert. Perhaps it was the sense of electricity in the room, but something very unscheduled was going on.

  When she finally got her eyes open and focused, what greeted her was a blinding row of white lights directly overhead that seemed to isolate her. But there was tumult all around her in the lab, a cacophony of alarmed voices echoing off the hard surfaces of glass and steel. She squinted into the light as she felt Stone slip his arm around her shoulders and raise her up.

  Thank God, he's here, she thought.

  "Come on," he was saying. "She's not interested in you. She just wants Kristen out of here. This is the only way."

  "Who. .?" She was startled by the sound of her own voice, mildly surprised to discover she was even capable of speech.

  She gazed around, trying to find her when. . Jesus!

  Katherine Starr was standing next to Kristen. She was moving in a surreal way, gripping Kristen's hand and pulling her along.

  Stone had found her.He had understood. Katherine Starr appeared to be wearing a blue bathrobe under a gray mackintosh, but the part that got Ally's attention was the knife she was holding, glistening like a.

  No, itwasa scalpel, shiny and sharp as a razor.

  Tough luck, guys. No pistol this time, but she still managed to come up with a convincing substitute.

  She didn't look any saner than she did the last time. Now, though, she finally had what she'd come for. She had her daughter. Could it be that Kristen was about to be liberated? Had the world come full circle?

  "No." The voice belonged to Winston Bartlett. "I want her with me."

  "You‘rethe prick responsible for this." Katherine whirled on him, brandishing the scalpel.

  "Mrs. Starr," Van de Vliet interjected, eyeing the sharp metal, "you can't take Kristen away now. She's at a very delicate stage of her procedure."

  "I seem to be doing a lot of things I can't," she declared turning back. "I'm not supposed to be out of my room, but I am. And now I'm getting us both out of here. We're going through that air lock and onto the elevator. So whose throat do I need to cut to do it?"

  Winston Bartlett was edging away, and his eyes betrayed he was more concerned than he wished to appear.

  "Look at her," Katherine Starr continued shoving Kristen- who was completely disoriented her eyes blinking in confusion-in front of Van de Vliet. "She doesn't know me; she doesn't know anything. She's acting like a baby. What inhellhave you done to her?"

  "She had the procedure she wanted. At the time I warned there might be side effects we couldn't anticipate."

  "She's lost her mind. That's what you call aside effect?”

  All this time Kristen was just standing and staring blankly into space, but there were growing storm clouds welling in her eyes. It caused Ally to wonder what was really going on with her. Had this troubled girl been made permanently childlike, or was there a split personality at work? Did she have a new mind now, or a parallel mind?

  "We're still trying to stabilize her condition," Van de Vliet said in a soothing tone. "We just need a little more time."

  That was when Kristen wrenched free of her mother's grasp. Her eyes had just gone critical, traveling into pure madness. She strode over and seized a glass jar containing a clear solvent.

  "I want them all to die," she said in a little girl's voice. "They're going to kill me if I don't kill them first."

  Now Katherine Starr had turned and was staring at her. "Kristy, honey, put the bottle down. I'm going to take you home. I don't know what he's done to you, but I'm not going to let you stay here anymore. You're coming with me."

  This is not going to end well,Ally thought. She began struggling to her feet, trying to clear her mind enough for an exit strategy.

  Nina was upstairs, or at least that was where shehadbeen.Okay, the first order of business is to get her out. Stone could probably manage on his own. .

  Now Kristen was walking over to an electric heater positioned on a lab workbench. She switched it on and the tungsten elements immediately began to glow. Then, still holding the bottle, she turned back to Van de Vliet.

  "I see things that I never saw before. My mind has powers it never had till now."

  He nodded knowingly. "I always suspected that-"

  "I'm able to think just like I did when I was little," she continued, cutting him off. "Sometimes I'm there, in that world. Then sometimes I flip back. But I can always tell when grown-ups are lying to me. What did you do to my mind?"

  "Kristen," Van de Vliet said "the brain has many functions that we still only barely understand. With the Beta procedure, we don't really know what activates general cell replacement or what the nature of the replacement tissue actually is. We're just at the beginning of a marvelous-"

  "I'm seeing a future in which nothing exists," she muttered despairingly, still holding the glass bottle of solvent. "I don't want to be a part of it."

  Van de Vliet was staring at her, his eyes flooded with alarm. "What. .whatare you seeing, Kristen?"

  "I'm seeing you dead." She glared around "All of you."

  Then, with an animal scream, she whirled and flung the glass liter bottle at the electric heater on the laboratory workbench. It crashed into the shiny steel case with a splintering sound followed by an explosion that sent a ball of fire and a shock wave through the room. In an instant the entire end of the lab was engulfed in a sea of flame.

  Ally sensed herself being knocked to the floor, but she also felt a surge of adrenaline. This was endgame, the moment when everybody found out who they were.

  A hand was gripping her like a vise. It was Stone's, but the blast had knocked him to the floor too and he was now motionless, slumped against the side of a laboratory bench. It was like she was being held in a death grip. Was she going to have to carry him out? She wasn't even sure she had the strength in her legs to getherselfout.

  Now something even more horrible was slowly beginning to happen. The central part of the lab had several sets of steel shelving arranged in rows, and each supported a carefully organized arrangement of sample vials filled with some kind of organic solvent. She saw with horror that the first towering set of shelves, easily seven feet high, was slowly tipping from the force of the blast. It teetered for an instant and then fell into the set of shelves next to it with all the ponderous majesty of a giant sequoia.

  What happened next sounded like the end of the world. As the first set of shelves crashed against the second, like a row of massive steel-and-glass dominoes, each subsequent tower tipped and fell against the next, and on and on.

  All the while, as the tumbling racks were spewing flammable solvents across the smoky lab space, they were ripping out electrical wiring and sending sparks flying.

  The whole danger dynamic of the room had been turned upside down. Katherine Starr and Debra and David now lay pinned beneath a tangled mass of angle-iron supports that had collapsed in the wake of the falling shelves. All three appeared to be unconscious.

  Winston Bartlett was at the far end of the room. He'd been slammed against the wall by the force of the explosion but was pulling himself up. He seemed to be unhurt, though it was hard to see through the billowing smoke.

  Karl Van de Vliet was standing in the middl
e of the laboratory, his eyes glazed, flames and smoke swirling about him.

  What does this mean to him?Ally wondered. Years of research data being obliterated in an instant.

  But the horror wasn't over. The fire was depleting the hermetically sealed room's oxygen. Ally sensed that anybody who didn't get out of the lab in the next five minutes wasn't going to be going anywhere standing up.

  But what was happening with Kristen? She was walking through the flames as though on a country stroll. It was like the fires of hell were all around her and she was ambling through them unscathed.She must be experiencing third-degree burns, Ally thought, yet there’s a sense that nothing can harm her. How could it be?

  And then an astonishing possibility began to dawn on her. With the stem cell enzymes working at full blast, was it possible her body was immediately replacing its damaged cells? Could it be that the telomerase enzyme didn't know the difference between a cell that had aged and one that had been damaged by its environment?

  "Jesus," Stone said, finally stirring, "what's-"

  At that moment the overhead lights flickered and died and the emergency lights clicked on, sending battery-powered beams through the smoke.

  "Christ, Ally," he declared gazing around still dazed as his consciousness seemed to be slowly returning. "We've got to get people out of here."

  There didn't appear to be a sprinkler system. Probably, she thought, because an onslaught of water would wipe out all the computers.

  Now she was thinking about the automatic air locks. How did those steel-and-glass doors work without electricity? Did they have a battery backup, or some kind of fail-safe mechanism, which provided a manual override in case of a power outage?

  Now Winston Bartlett was striding toward the center of the room. From the dazed look in his eyes, it wasn't clear whether he knew where he was or not. Kristen was walking toward him, on a collision course.

  "You let this happen," she said "You wanted to ruin my life."

  "Kristy, nobodymadeyou do anything," he said choking from the smoke. "But now we've got to-"

  "It's too late," she declared lashing out with the side of her hand against his neck. He staggered back, flailing, and seized an iron girder.

  There was a blast of voltage, a shower of sparks, and he screamed as he crumpled sideways. Then the force of his fall broke his hand loose from the electrical short. He lay prostrate on the smoky floor of the lab, twitching.

  My God, Ally thought,she really is determined to kill us all before she's through.

  "Kristen," Van de Vliet was pleading, "please. There's still time. I'm going to do everything I can for you."

  He was gasping for air and now more vials of flammable liquid were exploding from the heat and igniting. He turned and stumbled toward the air lock. There were sounds of yelling on the other side.

  The people outside can't get through,Ally realized. The security lock has no override.

  We 're going to die.

  Van de Vliet pounded on the button controls of the air lock, but there was no response. Smoke was billowing around him and he choked, coughing and dropping to one knee.

  Then Kristen walked up behind him. She appeared not to notice the flames and smoke swirling around her.

  "This is where you get what's coming, you bastard. I warned you you'd better do something for me. But you never really intended to help me. I was just an experiment. That's all I ever was. For both of you. Youfuckers." And she lashed out with a powerful fist, sending him to the floor.

  Outside there was now the wail of a siren, the sound faintly filtering through. And the pounding on the other side of the air lock continued, though now it had the force of authority.

  At last, Ally thought,somebody finally got serious and called the fire department.

  Now Kristen had bent over the prostrate Van de Vliet and was doing something, though Ally couldn't tell what.

  "Keep your face close to the floor," Stone was yelling. "It's where the last of the air is. Hang on. We'll be okay."

  She had a premonition they were not going to be okay. They all were going to suffocate.

  All, that was, except Kristen. She seemed to possess some magic immunity from the horrors around her. She had risen and was standing over Van de Vliet like a statue, while everybody else was on the floor.

  As Ally watched her-a serene figure in the middle of chaos and death-she began to have an odd sensation. The burning in her lungs, from the smoke, started to dissipate. And strength felt like it was pouring into her limbs. The tongues of flame around her had become dancing white figures that invited her to rise and join them.

  She did, slowly, not quite knowing what she was doing. Then she walked to the jammed air lock. She stepped over Karl Van de Vliet's collapsed frame and placed her hands on the steel. It was already scalding, but she only took fleeting notice of that.

  While a firefighter's ax futilely pounded on the outside, she seized the wide bar of the door and ripped it open, to the sound of wrenching metal.

  It was a superhuman effort she didn't realize she was capable of. And it was the last thing she remembered. The space around her had become a blazing white cloud and she didn't feel the hands of the two firefighters who seized her as she fell through the open air lock.

  Chapter 36

  Friday, June 5

  8:39p.m.

  Days later, Alexa Hampton was still considering herself one of the luckiest people alive. When she'd regained consciousness the next week in Lenox Hill Hospital, hooked up to oxygen and being fed by an IV, she noticed that the nurses were looking at her strangely and whispering to each other. Finally she couldn't stand it anymore and asked why.

  "It was what you did," a young Puerto Rican woman declared, gazing at her in awe through her rimless glasses. "No one can believe it."

  Then she explained. What they couldn't believe-as reported by the New Jersey firefighters-was that she had single-handedly wrenched open the steel-door air lock of the laboratory at the Dorian Institute. At the time firefighters were on the other side vainly trying to dismantle the door with their axes. Yet she'd just yanked it aside like paper. It was reminiscent of those urban legends of superhuman strength in times of crisis, like the story of a panicked woman who hoisted an overturned Chevy van to free a pinned child. Later, though, some of the New Jersey fire crew went back and looked again. The steel hinges had literally been sheared off. .

  How did shedothat? More important, though, symptoms of her stenosis had entirely disappeared and she felt better than ever in her life. The stem cell technology pioneered by Karl Van de Vliet had indeed produced a miracle. She even had a new kind of energy, periodically. It was unlike anything she’d ever felt.

  Other things were new as well. She’d been seeing a lot of Stone Aimes and helping him finish his book on the Gerex Corporation's successful clinical trials with stem cell technology. After all the publicity following the fire at the Dorian Institute, the manuscript was generating a lot of buzz. A paperback auction was already in the works, with a half-million floor, and Time had abruptly taken a second look at the "first serial" excerpt his agent had been trying to place with them and come up with six figures. The only part Stone hadn't reported was the ghastly side effect of the early Beta experiment, the Syndrome, because Kristen Starr had disappeared. He had no proof and his publisher refused to print potentially libelous speculation.

  In the meantime, Winston Bartlett hadn't been seen in public since that tragic day. The business press speculated he had become a Howard Hughes-like recluse in his Gramercy Park mansion. Ally had tried several times to reach him through his office to find out what he wanted to do about the design job, and each time she was told he would get back to her. He never did.

  Maybe he was still recuperating. When the firefighters pulled him out of the flaming wreckage, his clothes were singed from the electricity that had coursed through his body, his heart was stopped and he appeared to be dead. In fact, he was dead.

  The paramedics imm
ediately began intensive CPR. Moments later, his heart was beating again. Then he declared he was well enough that he didn't need to go to a hospital. He had his Japanese henchman, Kenji Noda, help him to his McDonnell Douglas and he disappeared into the night.

  Oxygen had not been to his brain for. . No one knew how long. The paramedics said he awoke in what seemed another reality.

  Was he still alive? There had been no reports otherwise, but he most certainly had withdrawn from the world.

  Karl Van de Vliet, for his part, had been hospitalized for severe burns. He remained in the trauma unit at New York Hospital, but when Alexa tried to go visit him, she was told he wasn't accepting visitors but was doing well. Katherine Starr was dead from a massive concussion, along with the two researchers, Debra Connolly and David Hopkins, who had been in the wrong place when the steel racks collapsed. And Alexa never been able to find out what happened to Kristen Starr. Officially, nobody by that name was there.

  But business was business. With the clinical trials over, the pending sale of the Gerex Corporation to Cambridge Pharmaceuticals was proceeding on autopilot, handled by Grant Hampton, who stood to make a bundle or so he bragged to Alexa. The Dorian Institute had been closed and all the remaining records moved to a converted facility near Liverpool.

  After six days in Lenox Hill, Ally went home, and three days after that she had returned to her desk at CitiSpace. Now, inevitably, she was back to her workaholic habits and grueling hours.

  Today, though, she had knocked off early, since Nina had taken a cab down to join her for supper.

  She marveled just thinking about it. Her mom taking a cab. By herself. It truly was a miracle.

  Their "light" repast had consisted of cold roast beef and room-temperature stout, two of Nina's favorites. She had never been much for cucumber sandwiches with the crust cut off. Afterward, she elected to have a brandy.

  "The trouble with having your mind back," she said as she settled onto the couch, snifter in hand, "is that sometimes you remember things you'd just as soon forget." Outside thunder boomed from an early evening rainstorm, which had blown in from the northwest.