Syndrome, Thomas Hoover [best free e reader txt] 📗
- Author: Thomas Hoover
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“Let’s get you out. Then we’ll talk.”
“I’ll drag you if I have to.”
As they moved quietly along the wall, they could hear an argument under way. She recognized the voices as Ellen ‘Hara’s and Karl Van de Vliet’s.
“I won’t allow my staff to be part of this,” Ellen was declaring. “I’ve seen Kristen. Any form of the Beta is dangerous. If you do anything involving that procedure again, you’ll put everybody here at risk.”
“Don’t you think I’ve thought about that, agonized about it? We have one chance to turn all this around. This is it.”
“I don’t want to be involved and I don’t want any of my people involved do you hear me?”
“Then keep them upstairs.” He was striding out of his office, flipping on the lights in the hallway.
“Oh shit,” Ally whispered. She opened a door and pulled Stone into the examining room, where her mother had first been admitted. Just as she did she heard the ding of the elevator and caught a glimpse of Debra and David Van de Vliet’s senior researchers, getting off.
When she closed the door, the room should have been pitch black. But it wasn’t. A candle was burning on a counter and there was a figure at the far end of the room.
He was sitting on the examining table, in the lotus position, his eyes closed.
“Are you ready?” Kenji Noda asked. “I think just about everyone is here now.”
Oh my God, Ally thought. What are we going to do?
She watched helplessly as he reached over and touched a button on the desk. A red light popped on above the door. A moment later, it opened.
“What are you doing here?” Debra asked, staring at them.
“Getting some exercise,” Stone said.
Then Winston Bartlett appeared in the doorway behind her.
“How did they get up here?”
“Ally, I’m not going to let them do this to you,” Stone declared, seizing her hand. “We’re going to—”
“Ken, please get him out of here,” Bartlett said. ‘Take him back downstairs, anywhere.”
“You shouldn’t be out of your wheelchair,” Debra was saying. She turned to Ellen. “Would you get—”
“I’m not getting you anything,” Ellen O’Hara declared. “I’ve just submitted my resignation. Effective three minutes ago. I don’t know a thing about what’s going on here and, from now on, I don’t want to know.”
She got on the elevator and the door closed.
“Ken,” Bartlett said, “first things first. Go after that woman. Don’t let her leave the building.”
Now Debra was rolling in a wheelchair. David had appeared also, deep disquiet in his eyes, and he helped her in.
“There’s very little risk to this,” he said. “Believe me.”
She felt him giving her an injection in her left arm.
No, don’t…
As the room started to spin, she reached out and grabbed Stone’s arm and pulled him down to her.
“Downstairs,” she whispered. “Look around. There’s—”
She didn’t get to finish because Debra was whisking her out the door and toward the laboratory. Stone had just grinned confusedly, seemingly not paying any attention to what she was saying. Instead he ambled toward the open stair door and disappeared.
At this point, however, no one appeared to notice or to care. They were rolling her through the steel air lock. On the other side, Winston Bartlett was already waiting, standing next to a gurney with straps.
No!
Friday, April 10
9:34 P.M.
She was still conscious as David and Debra lifted her onto the gurney. There was no operating table in the laboratory, but this procedure did not require one. It consisted of a series of small subcutaneous injections along both sides of the spine, followed by a larger injection at the base of the skull.
As the injections began, she drifted into a mind-set where she was never entirely sure how much was real, how much was fantasy, how much deliberate, how much accidental. She remembered that she felt her grasp of reality slipping away, but there was no sense of pain. Instead, images and sensations in a sequence that corresponded to the passage of time drifted through her mind. It was couched in terms of the people she knew.
The first image was her mother, Nina, and they were together, struggling through a dense forest Initially, she thought they were looking for her father’s grave, but then it became clear they were searching for some kind of magic potion that would save her mother’s life. As they clawed their way through tangled tendrils and dark arbors, she became increasingly convinced their quest was doomed, that she was destined to watch Nina pass into oblivion.
But then something happened. The forest opened out onto a vast meadow bathed in sunshine. In the center was a cluster of snow-white mushrooms, and she knew instinctively that these would bring eternal life to anyone who ate them.
“Come,” she said to Nina, “these can save you.”
“Ally, I’m too old now. I don’t want to be saved. There comes a moment in your life when you’ve done everything you feel you needed to do. You’ve had the good times and now all that’s left is the slow deterioration of what’s left of your body. It robs the joy out of living.”
“No, Mom, this is different,” she said plucking one of the white mushrooms and holding it out. “This prevents you from growing any older. You’ll stay just the way you are. You can have a miracle.”
“‘To never escape this vale of tears? To watch everyone you love grow old and wither and die? Is that the ‘miracle’ you want me to have?” Then she looked up at the flawless blue sky and held out her arms as though to embrace the sun. “My mind Ally. You’ve given me back my mind. Now I can live out whatever more life God will see fit to give me and actually know who I am and where I am. That’s miracle enough for me.”
As she said it, a beam of white light came directly from the sun and enveloped her. Then the meadow around them faded away and all she could see was Karl Van de Vliet, who was bending over her and lifting back her eyelids.
“Alexa, I can’t tell you what you’re about to feel, because no one has ever been where you’re about to be. God help us, but we’re on the high wire without a net here. But any new cell configurations should immediately form tissue that’s a facsimile of what’s already there. That’s what the simulations show.”
She was listening to him, not sure if he was real or a dream. Then she heard Bartlett’s voice.
“Why are you talking to her, Karl? She can’t hear you.”
“We don’t actually know whether she can or not. At some level I think she’s aware of her surroundings. In a way we should hope that she is. If there are going to be impacts on her consciousness, I’d rather she be alert and able to remember what it was like.”
Then the voices drifted away, but she was sure she had no control over anything. The white mushrooms. She was thinking about them again. Only now they were above her and growing toward the sky and then she realized she was underground, buried and looking up from her own grave.
What happened next was a journey through time-somewhere in the far-distant future. She seemed to be watching it through a large window, unable to interact with what was happening on the other side.
Time.
She felt a sensation at the back of her neck and the images faded away.
“This damned well better be right” came a voice. “There’s not going to be another chance.”
“I did an activity simulation for a range of antibodies, just to make sure she wouldn’t automatically reject the enzyme because of the earlier injection.” The voice belonged to Karl Van de Vliet Her mind was clearing and she recognized it “But all the results indicate that the effect of the antibodies is essentially washed out at this concentration of active enzyme. Have the good grace to let me try to get this right.”
She was listening and trying to understand what was going on. Her mind had been drifting through time and space, but now she was aware that something new was happening. The hallucinations, the conversations around her, all were beginning to focus in, to build in intensity.
But that was not what was really happening; it was merely a mask over something that had entered the laboratory, some kind of force.
Then her vision began to work in a strange way that felt more like a sixth sense. She was “seeing” what was going on in the room, even though her eyes were shut. Or perhaps they weren’t. She didn’t know and she was still strapped to the gurney, so she had no way to check.
“Kristy,” Winston Bartlett said dismay in his voice, “you shouldn’t be in here. You should be resting.”
“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.”
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
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