_Friday, April 10
10:07 P.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
scalpel.
No, it _was _a 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 're the 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 in hell have 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 a _side 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 she had been. 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 . .
. what are 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 get herself out.
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 middle 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, nobody made you 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 saying, "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. You
fuckers." 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.