Thomas Hoover: Syndrome

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.

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 she do that? 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 immediately 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.

"Well, Mom, at least now you can pick and choose what you want to remember and what you want to forget." She didn't really mind the storm. Having her mother back was such a blessing.

It still felt odd, though, having her rescued from what had to be an inevitable, ignominious fate. It was as though time had gone in reverse. A miracle was very much in progress. .

She was experiencing a miracle too, though of a slightly different sort. She felt pretty much normal, if occasionally shaky and uncertain on her feet. But at unexpected times she would have bursts of energy that defied reality. They were, in fact, scary, like that thing with the steel door. Something weird would sometimes take control of her body and she didn't really know what it was. .

Truthfully, she was feeling some of that tonight. She had joined her mother with a brandy and was thinking about taking Knickers for an early walk, downpour or not. She wanted to see the river through the mists of a storm.

That was when the phone rang. She got up and made her way to the kitchen and took the receiver off the wall.