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Full text of "The X-Files Novels
"
See other formats
Bag
F i
DON'T MISS THE X-FILES MOVIE
COMING SOON TO THEATERS!
Aati
A m
l fi Wane
MO hs way
AEW FOE TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
KEVIN |]. ANDERSON
Created by Chris Garber
& HarperCollins e-books
THEX-FILES
KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Based on the characters created by
Chris Carter
To all the agents, investigators, scientists, and other employees of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. In conjunction with my writing research, I
have met several agents and seen the Bureau at work on real cases. These
people aren’t all like Mulder and Scully, but they are all proud of the
professionalism and dedication they bring to their jobs. Contents
One
Late on a night filled with cold mist and still...
1
Two
The bear stood huge, five times the size of an... 10
Three
As Mulder led her out of the Hoover Building, Scully...
14
Four
The dog stopped in the middle of the road, distracted...
21
Five
The middle of morning on a gray day.
Early mist...
28
Six
The house looked like most of the others on the... 33
Seven
No one would ever find them in this cabin, isolated...
38
Eight
Even through the thick fabric of her clumsy gloves, she...
43
Nine
Dr. Elliott Hughart was torn between intentionally putting the
mangled...
48
Ten
Not long before sunset, a patch of bright blue
sky...
55
Eleven
He tried to hide and he tried to sleep—but nothing...
60
Twelve
Mulder didn’t feel at all nondescript or unnoticeable as he...
66
Thirteen
In a nondescript office with few furnishings, Adam Lentz sat...
74
Fourteen
The midday sunlight dappled the patches in the Oregon hills...
83
Fifteen
As they approached the veterinary clinic in the sleepy
coastal...
89
Sixteen
Some people might have thought being alone in a morgue...
96
Seventeen
The bridge spread out into the early morning fog. Its...
103
Eighteen
Mulder pulled up to the Mini Serve pump in the... 107
Nineteen
“We’re federal agents,” Mulder announced. “I’m going to reach for...
113
Twenty
On hearing Jody’s cry, Patrice awoke from a restless sleep.
121
Twenty-One
Edmund was amazed at how fast the officials arrived,
considering...
126
Twenty-Two
The ocean crashed against the black cliffs with a
hollow...
129
Twenty-Three
The cold rain sheeted down, drenching him and the roadside...
134
Twenty-Four
Scully was already tired of driving and glad for the...
140
Twenty-Five
Outside the cabin, Vader barked. He stood up on
the...
145
Twenty-Six
“Patrice!” Dorman called in a hoarse voice, then walked toward...
149
Twenty-Seven
The dense trees clawed at him. Their branches scratched his...
156
Twenty-Eight
The logging truck sat half off the road in a...
162
Twenty-Nine
Scully became disoriented on the winding dirt logging roads, but...
170
Thirty
No matter how far Jody ran, Dorman followed. The
only...
174
Thirty-One
The sudden carnage astonished Scully, and time seemed to stop...
181
Thirty-Two
The phone rang in Adam Lentz’s plain
government office, and...
186
Thirty-Three
The red pickup truck Mulder had commandeered handled surprisingly
well.
189
Thirty-Four
Fifty miles at least to the nearest hospital, along tangled...
192
Thirty-Five
The wounds in Jeremy Dorman’s throat had sealed, and a...
198
Thirty-Six
To Adam Lentz and his crew of professionals, the fugitives...
205
Thirty-Seven
With a brief sigh from the backseat, Jody woke up...
209
Thirty-Eight
As the pickup truck droned on and the darkness
deepened,...
213
Thirty-Nine
As the two vehicles toiled down the muddy rutted drive,...
216
Forty
Scully’s cellular phone rang in the quiet darkness of the...
219
Forty-One
Satellite dishes mounted atop the van tilted at different azimuths...
224
Forty-Two
Back to the haunted house, Scully thought as she
drove...
228
Forty-Three
The hail of small-caliber bullets struck Jeremy Dorman, and he...
234
Forty-Four
As soon as Lentz and his team conveniently appeared, Mulder...
238
Forty-Five
The trap had sprung. Not as neatly as Adam Lentz...
242
Forty-Six
The shock wave toppled some of the
remaining girders and...
246
Forty-Seven
Mulder should have known the men in suits would be...
253
Forty-Eight
In the hospital, Scully checked and rechecked Jody Kennessy’s lab...
257
Forty-Nine
Adam Lentz made his final report verbally and face
to...
262
Fifty
The people were strange here, Jody thought...but at least he...
266
Acknowledgments
273
About the Author
Praise
Other Books in the X-Files Series
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Sunday, 11:13 P.M.
Late on a night filled with cold mist and still X air, the alarm went off.
It was a crude security system hastily erected around the abandoned
burn site, and Vernon Ruckman was the only guard stationed to
monitor the night shift . . . but he got paid—
and surprisingly well—to take care that no intruders got into the
unstable ruins of the DyMar Laboratory on the outskirts of Portland,
Oregon. He drove his half-rusted Buick sedan up the wet gravel
driveway. The bald tires crunched up the gentle rise where the cancer
research facility had stood until a week and a half ago.
Vernon shifted into park, unbuckled his seatbelt, and got out to
investigate. He had to be sharp, alert. He had to scope out the scene.
He flicked on the beam of his official security flashlight—heavy
enough to be used as a weapon—and shone it like a firehose of light
into the blackened ruins that covered the site. His employers hadn’t
given Vernon his own security vehicle, but they had provided him
with a uniform, 2
THEX-FILES
a badge, and a loaded revolver. He had to display confidence and an
intimidating appearance if he was to chase off rambunctious kids
daring each other to go into the charred husk of the laboratory
building. In the week and a half since the facility had been bombed,
he had already chased a few trespassers away, teenagers who ran
giggling into the night. Vernon had never managed to catch any of
them.
This was no laughing matter. The DyMar ruins were unstable, set to
be demolished in a few days. Already construction equipment,
bulldozers, steam shovels, and little Bobcats were parked around large
fuel storage tanks. A padlocked locker that contained blasting caps
and explosives. Someone sure was in a hurry to erase the remains of
the medical research facility.
In the meantime, this place was an accident waiting to happen. And
Vernon Ruckman didn’t want it to happen on his watch.
The brilliant flashlight beam carved an expanding cone through the
mist and penetrated the labyrinth of tilted girders, charred wooden
beams, and fallen roof timbers. DyMar Lab looked like an abandoned
movie set for an old horror film, and Vernon could imagine celluloid
monsters shambling out of the mist from where they had lurked in the
ruins.
After the fire, a rented chain-link fence had been thrown up around
the perimeter—and now Vernon saw that the gate hung partially
open. With a soft exhale of breeze, the chain-link sang faintly, and the
gate creaked; then the air fell still again, like a held breath.
He thought he heard movement inside the building, debris shifting,
stone and wood stirring. Vernon swung the gate open wide enough for
him to enter the premises. He paused to listen carefully, then
proceeded with caution, just like the guidebook said to antibodies
3
do. His left hand gripped the flashlight, while his right hovered above
the heavy police revolver strapped to his hip.
He had handcuffs in a small case on his leather belt, and he thought
he knew how to use them, but he had never managed to catch anyone
yet. Being a nighttime security guard generally involved a lot of
reading, mixed with a few false alarms (especially if you had a vivid
imagination)—and not much else. Vernon’s girlfriend was a night owl,
an English major and aspiring poet who spent most of the night
waiting to be inspired by the muse, or else putting in a few hours at
the round-the-clock coffee shop where she worked. Vernon had
adjusted his own biological cycle to keep up with her, and this night-
shift job had seemed the perfect solution, though he had been tired
and groggy for the first week or so.
Now Vernon was wide awake as he entered the burned-out labyrinth.
Someone was indeed in there.
Old ashes crunched under his feet, splinters of broken glass and
smashed concrete. Vernon remembered how this research facility had
once looked, a high-tech place with unusual modern Northwestern
architecture—a mixture of glossy futuristic glass and steel, and rich
golden wood from the Oregon coastal forests.
The lab had burned quite well after the violent protest, the arson, and
the explosion. It wouldn’t surprise him if this late-night intruder was
something more than just kids—perhaps some member of the animal
rights group that had claimed responsibility for the fire. Maybe it was
an activist collecting souvenirs, war trophies of their bloody victory.
Vernon didn’t know. He just sensed he had to be careful.
He stepped deeper inside, ducking his head to 4
THEX-FILES
avoid a fallen wooden pole, black and warty with gray-white ashes
where it had split in the intense heat. The floor of the main building
seemed unstable, ready to tumble into the basement levels. Some of
the walls had collapsed, partitions blackened, windows blasted out.
He heard someone moving stealthily. Vernon tilted the flashlight
around, and white light stabbed into the shadows, making strange
angles, black shapes that leapt at him and skittered along the walls.
He had never been afraid of closed-in spaces, but now it seemed as if
the whole place was ready to cave in on him. Vernon paused, shone
his light around. He heard the sound again, quiet rustling, a person
intent on uncovering something in the wreckage. It came from the far
corner, an enclosed office area with a partially slumped ceiling where
the reinforced barricades had withstood most of the destruction.
He saw a shadow move there, tossing debris away, digging. Vernon
swallowed hard and stepped forward. “You there! This is private
property. No trespassing.” He rested his hand on the butt of his
revolver. Show no fear. He wouldn’t let this intruder run from him.
Vernon directed his flashlight onto the figure. A large, broad-
shouldered man stood up and turned toward him slowly. The intruder
didn’t run, didn’t panic—and that made Vernon even more nervous.
Oddly dressed, the man wore mismatched clothes, covered with soot;
they looked like something stolen from a lost duffel bag or torn down
from a clothesline.
“What are you doing here?” Vernon demanded. He flared the light
into the man’s face. The intruder was dirty, unkempt—and he didn’t
look at all well. Great, Vernon thought. A vagrant, rooting around in
the ruins to find something he could salvage and sell.
“There’s nothing for you to take in here.”
antibodies
5
“Yes, there is,” the man said. His voice was strangely strong and
confident, and Vernon was taken aback.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Vernon repeated, losing his nerve
now.
“Yes I am,” the man answered. “I’m authorized. I . . . worked at
DyMar.”
Vernon moved forward. This was entirely unexpected. He continued to
shine the flashlight, counting on its intimidation factor.
“My name is Dorman, Jeremy Dorman.” The man fumbled in his shirt
pocket, and Vernon grabbed for his revolver. “I’m just trying to show
you my DyMar ID,” Dorman said.
Vernon took another step closer, and in the glare of his powerful
flashlight he could see that the intruder appeared sick, sweating. . . .
“Looks like you need to go to a doctor.”
“No. What I need . . . is in here,” Dorman said, pointing. Vernon saw
that the burly man had pulled away some of the rubble to reveal a
hidden fire safe. Dorman finally managed to pluck a bent and battered
photo badge out of his shirt pocket—a DyMar Laboratory clearance
badge. This man had worked here . . . but that didn’t mean he could
root around in the burned wreckage now.
“That means nothing to me,” Vernon said. “I’m going to take you in,
and if you really have authorization to be here, we'll get this all
straightened out.”
“No!” Dorman said, so violently that spittle sprayed from his lips.
“You’re wasting my time.” For a moment, it looked as if the skin on
his face shifted and blurred, then reset itself to normal. Vernon
swallowed hard, but tried to maintain his stance. Dorman ignored him
and turned around. Indignant, Vernon stepped forward and drew his
weapon. “I don’t think so, Mr. Dorman. Get up against 6
THEX-FILES
2)
the wall—right now.” Vernon suddenly noticed the thick bulges
underneath the man’s grimy shirt. They seemed to move of their own
accord, twitching. Dorman looked at him with narrowed dark eyes.
Vernon gestured with the revolver. With no sign of intimidation or
respect, the man went to one of the intact concrete walls that was
smeared and blackened from the fire. “I told you, you’re wasting my
time,”
Dorman growled. “I don’t have much time.”
“We'll take all the time we need,” Vernon said. With a sigh, Dorman
spread his hands against the soot-blackened wall and waited. The skin
on his hands was waxy, plastic-looking . . . runny somehow. Vernon
wondered if the man had been exposed to some kind of toxic
substance, acid or industrial waste. Despite the reassurance of his gun,
Vernon didn’t like this at all. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one
of the bulges beneath Dorman’s shirt squirm. “Stand still while I frisk
you.”
Dorman gritted his teeth and stared at the concrete wall in front of
him, as if counting particles of ash. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Don’t threaten me,” Vernon answered quickly.
“Then don’t touch me,” Dorman retorted. In response, Vernon tucked
the flashlight between his elbow and his side, then quickly patted the
man down, frisking him with one hand.
Dorman’s skin felt hot and strangely lumpy—and then Vernon’s hand
touched a wet, slick substance. He snatched his palm back quickly.
“Gross!” he said.
“What is this?” He looked down at his hand and saw that it was
covered with a strange mucus, a slime. Dorman’s skin suddenly
writhed and squirmed, almost as if an army of rats rushed along
beneath the flesh. “You shouldn’t have touched that.” Dorman turned
around and looked at him angrily.
“What is this stuff?” Vernon shoved the revolver antibodies
7
back into his holster and, staring squeamishly at his hand, tried to
wipe the slime off on his pants. He backed away, looking in horror at
the unsettling movement throughout Dorman’s body.
Suddenly his palm burned. It felt like acid eating deep into his flesh.
“Hey!” He staggered backward, his heels skidding on the uneven
rubble.
A burning, tingling sensation started at Vernon’s hand, as if miniature
bubbles were racing up his wrist, tiny bullets firing through his
nerves, into his arms, his shoulders, his chest.
Dorman lowered his arms and turned to watch. “I told you not to
touch me,” he said.
Vernon Ruckman felt all of his muscles lock up. Seizures wracked his
body, a thousand tiny fireworks exploded in his head. He couldn’t see
anymore, other than bright psychedelic flashes, static in front of his
vision. His arms and legs jittered, his muscles spasmed and convulsed.
From inside his head he heard bones breaking. His own bones.
He screamed as he fell backward, as if his entire body had turned into
a minefield.
The flashlight, still glowing brightly, dropped to the ash-covered
ground.
Dorman watched the still-twitching body of the guard for a few
moments before turning his attention back to the half-exposed safe.
The victim’s skin rippled and bubbled as large red-black blotches
appeared in the destroyed muscle tissue. The guard’s flashlight
illuminated a brilliant white fan across the ground, and Dorman could
see swollen growths, pustules, tumors, lumps.
The usual.
Dorman ripped away the last of the wall frame 8
THEX-FILES
and the powdery gypsum from the burned Sheetrock to expose the fire
safe. He knew the combination well enough, and quickly spun through
the numbers, listening to the cylinders click into position. With one
meaty, numb hand, he pounded on the door to chip free some of the
blackened paint that had caked in the cracks. He swung open the
door.
But the safe was empty. Somebody had already taken the contents, the
records, and the stable prototypes. He whirled to look at the dead
guard, as if Vernon Ruckman somehow had been involved with the
theft. He winced as another spasm coursed through him. His last hope
had been inside that safe. Or so he thought.
Dorman stood up, furious. Now what was he going to do? He looked
down at his hand, and the skin on his palm shifted and changed, like a
cellular thunderstorm. He shuddered as minor convulsions trooped
through his muscle systems, but taking deep breaths, he managed to
get his body under control again.
It was getting harder every day, but he vowed to keep doing whatever
was necessary to stay alive. Dorman had always done what was
necessary. Sickened with despair, he wandered aimlessly around the
wreckage of DyMar Laboratory. The computer equipment was entirely
trashed, all of the lab supplies obliterated. He found a melted and
broken desk, and from its placement he knew it had been David
Kennessy’s, the lead researcher.
“Damn you, David,” Dorman muttered.
Using all his strength, he ripped open one of the top drawers, and in
the debris there he found an old framed photograph—burned around
the edges, the glass cracked—and stared at it. He peeled the photo out
of the remnants of the frame.
antibodies
9
David, dark-haired and dashing, smiled beside a strong-looking and
pretty young woman with strawberryblond hair and a towheaded boy.
Sitting in front of them, tongue lolling out, was the Kennessys’ black
Labrador, always the dog . . . The family portrait had been taken when
the boy was eleven years old—before the leukemia had struck him.
Patrice and Jody Kennessy. Dorman took the photo and stood up. He
thought he knew where they might have gone, and he was sure he
could find them. He had to. Now that the other records were gone,
only the dog’s blood held the answer he needed. He would gamble on
where they might go, where Patrice might think to hide. She didn’t
even know the remarkable secret their family pet carried inside his
body.
Dorman looked back to the guard’s dead body. Paying no attention to
the horrible blotches on his skin, he removed the guard’s revolver and
tucked it in his pants pocket. If it came down to a crisis situation, he
might need the weapon in order to get his way. Leaving the cooling,
blotched corpse behind and taking the weapon and the photograph,
Jeremy Dorman walked away from the burned DyMar Laboratory.
Inside of him, the biological time bomb kept ticking. He didn’t have
many days left.
TWO
FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
Monday, 7:43 A.M.
The bear stood huge, five times the size of X an all-star wrestler.
Bronze-brown fur bristled from its cable-thick muscles—a Kodiak
bear, a prize specimen. Its claws were spread as it leaned over to rip a
salmon from the rocky stream, pristine and uninterrupted. Mulder
stared at the claws, the fangs, the sheer primal power.
He was glad the creature was simply stuffed and on display in the
Hoover Building, but even still, he appreciated the glass barrier.
Mounting this beast must have been a taxidermist’s nightmare. The
prize hunting trophy had been confiscated in an FBI raid against a
drug kingpin. The drug lord had spent over twenty thousand dollars
for his own personal hunting expedition to Alaska, and then spent
more money to have his prize kill mounted. When the FBI arrested the
man, they had confiscated the gigantic bear according to RICO
statutes—since the drug lord had funded the expedition with illicit
drug money, the stuffed bear was forfeited to the federal government.
antibodies
11
Not knowing what else to do with it, the FBI had put the monster on
display beside other noteworthy confiscated items: a customized
Harley-Davidson motorcycle, emerald and diamond necklaces,
earrings, bracelets, bricks of solid gold. Sometimes Mulder left his
quiet and dim basement offices where he kept the X-Files just to come
up and peruse the display case.
Looking at the powerful bear, Mulder continued to be preoccupied,
perplexed by a recent and highly unusual death report he had
received, an X-File that had come across his desk from a field agent in
Oregon. When a monster like this bear killed its prey, it left no doubt
as to the cause of death. A bizarre disease raised many questions,
though—especially a new and virulent disease found at the site of a
medical research laboratory that had recently been destroyed by
arson. Unanswered questions had always intrigued Agent Fox Mulder.
He went back down in the elevator to his own offices, where he could
sit and read the death report again. Then he would go meet Scully.
She stood between the thick, soundproofed Plexiglas partitions inside
the FBI’s practice firing range. Special Agent Dana Scully removed her
handgun, a new Sig Sauer 9mm. She slapped in an expanded clip that
carried fifteen bullets, an extra one in the chamber. She entered the
code at the computer keypad at her left; hydraulics hummed, and a
cable trundled the black silhouetted “bad guy” target to a range of
twenty yards. She locked it into place and reached up to grab a set of
padded earphones. She snugged the hearing protection over her head,
pressing down her red-gold hair.
Then she gripped her pistol, assuming a proper 12
THEX-FILES
isosceles firing stance, and aimed at her target. Squinting and focusing
down the hairline, she squeezed the trigger in an unconscious reflex
and popped off the first round. She paid no attention to where it
struck, simply aimed and shot again, firing over and over. Expended
casings flew into the air like metal popcorn, clinking and rattling on
the cement floor. The smell of burned black powder filled her nostrils.
She thought of those shadowy men who had killed her sister Melissa,
those who had repeatedly tried to silence or discredit Mulder and his
admittedly unorthodox theories.
Scully had to stay calm, maintain her firing stance, maintain her edge.
If she let her anger and frustration simmer through her, then her aim
would be off. She looked at the black silhouette of the target and saw
only the featureless men who had entwined themselves so deeply in
her life. Smallpox scars, nose implants, vaccination records, and
mysterious disappearances—like her own—and the cancer that was
almost certainly a result of what they had done to her while she had
been abducted. She had no way to fight against the conspiracies, no
target to shoot at. She had no choice but to keep searching. Scully
gritted her teeth and shot again and again until the entire clip was
expended. Removing her ear protection, she punched the button to
retrieve the yellowish paper target. FBI agents had to requalify at the
Quantico firing range at least once every three months. Scully wasn’t
due for another four weeks yet, but still she liked to come early in the
morning to practice. The range was empty then, and she could take
her time.
Later in the day, tour groups would come through to watch
demonstrations as a special agent forced into tour guide service
showed off his marksmanship skills with the Sig Sauer, the M-16, and
possibly a Thompson submachine gun. Scully wanted to be long
finished here antibodies
13
before the first groups of wide-eyed Boy Scouts or schoolteachers
marched in behind the observation windows. She retrieved the
battered target, studying her skill, and was pleased to see how well
her sixteen shots had clustered around the center of the silhouetted
chest. Quantico instructors taught agents not to think of their mark as
a person but as a “target.” She didn’t aim for the heart or the head or
the side. She aimed for the
“center of mass.” She didn’t aim to shoot the bad guys—she simply
“removed the target.”
Drawing her weapon and firing upon a suspect was the last possible
resort of a good agent, not the proper way to end an investigation
unless all other methods failed. Besides, the paperwork was
horrendous. Once a federal agent fired her weapon, she had to
account for every single shell casing expended—sometimes a difficult
task during a heated running firefight. Scully yanked the paper target
from its binder clip and left the gunshot-spattered piece of support
cardboard hanging in place. She punched the computer controls to
reset the target to its average point, and then looked up, startled to
see her partner Mulder leaning against the wall in the observation
gallery. She wondered how long he had been waiting for her.
“Good shooting, Scully,” he said. He didn’t ask whether she was
simply doing target practice or somehow exorcising personal demons.
“Spying on me, Mulder?” she said lightly, trying to cover her surprise.
After an awkward moment of silence she said, “All right, what is it?”
“A new case. And this one is going to capture your interest, no doubt
about it.” He smiled. She replaced her safety goggles on the proper
hook and followed him. Even if they weren’t always believable,
Mulder’s discoveries were always interesting and unusual.
THREE
Khe Sanh Khoffee Shoppe
Washington, D.C.
Monday, 8:44 A.M.
As Mulder led her out of the Hoover
X Building, Scully wondered about the new case he had found almost
as much as she dreaded the coffee shop where he planned to take her.
Even his offhanded promise, “I’m buying,” hadn’t exactly won her
over. They walked together past the metal detector, out the door, and
down the granite steps. At all corners of the big, box-like building,
uniformed FBI security teams manned imposing-looking guard
stations. Mulder and Scully passed alongside the line of tourists that
had already begun to form for the first FBI tour of the day. Though
most of the pedestrians wore the formal business attire typical in the
bureaucratic environment of Washington, D.C., the knowing looks told
Scully that the tourists recognized them as obvious federal agents.
Other federal buildings stood tall around them, ornate and majestic—
the architecture in downtown Washington had to compete with itself.
Upstairs in antibodies
15
many of these buildings were numerous consulting firms, law offices,
and high-powered lobbyist organizations. The bottom levels contained
cafes, delis, and newsstands.
Mulder held the glass door of the Khe Sanh Khoffee Shoppe. “Mulder,
why do you want to take me here so often?” she asked, scanning the
meager clientele inside. Many immigrant Korean families had opened
similar businesses in the federal district—usually delicious cafeterias,
coffee shops, and restaurants. But the proprietors of the Khe Sanh
Khoffee Shoppe imitated mediocre American cuisine with a
vengeance, with unfortunate results.
“T like the place,” Mulder said with a shrug. “They serve coffee in
those nice big Styrofoam cups.”
Scully went inside without further argument. In her opinion, they had
more important things to do... and she wasn’t hungry.
Handwritten daily specials were listed on a white board propped on
an easel near a large and dusty silk plant. A refrigerator filled with
bottled water and soft drinks stood beside the cash register. An empty
steam table occupied a large portion of the coffee shop; at lunchtime
the proprietors served a cheap—and cheaptasting—lunch buffet of
various Americanized Oriental specialties.
Mulder set his briefcase on one of the cleared tables, then bolted for
the cash register and coffee line as Scully took her seat. “Can I get you
anything, Scully?” he called.
“Just coffee,” she said, against her better judgment. He raised his
eyebrows. “They’ve got a great fried egg and hash browns breakfast
special.”
“Just coffee,” she repeated.
Mulder came back with two large Styrofoam cups. Scully could smell
the bitter aroma even before he set 16
THEX-FILES
the cup in front of her. She held it in both hands, enjoying the warmth
on her fingertips. Getting down to business, Mulder snapped open his
briefcase. “This one will interest you, I think.” He withdrew a manila
folder. “Portland, Oregon,” he said. “This is DyMar Laboratory, a
federally funded cancer research center.”
He handed her a slick brochure showcasing a beautifully modern
laboratory facility: a glass-andsteel framework trimmed with
handsome wood decking, support beams, and hardwood floors. The
reception areas were heavily decorated with glowing golden wood and
potted plants, while the laboratory areas were clean, white, and
sterile.
“Nice place,” Scully said as she folded the pages together again. “I’ve
read a lot about current cancer research, but I’m not aware of their
work.”
“DyMar tried to keep a low profile,” Mulder said,
“until recently.”
“What changed?” Scully asked, setting the brochure down on the
small table. Mulder removed the next item, a black-and-white glossy
photo of the same place. This time the building was destroyed, gutted
by fire, barricaded by chain-link fences—an abandoned war zone.
“Presumably sabotage and arson,” Mulder said.
“The investigation is still pending. This happened a week and a half
ago. A Portland newspaper received a letter from a protest group—
Liberation Now—claiming responsibility for the destruction. But
nobody’s ever heard of them. They were supposedly animal rights
activists upset at some of the research the lead scientist, Dr. David
Kennessy, was performing. Hightech research, and a lot of it was
classified.”
“And the activists burned the place down?”
“Blew it up and burned it down, actually.”
“That’s rather extreme, Mulder—usually those antibodies
17
groups are just content to make their statement and get some
publicity.” Scully stared down at the charred building.
“Exactly, Scully. Somebody really wanted to stop the
experimentation.”
“What was Kennessy’s research that got the group so excited?”
“The information on that is very vague,” Mulder said, his forehead
creasing. His voice became troubled.
“New cancer therapy techniques—really cutting-edge stuff—he and
his brother Darin worked together for years, in an unlikely
combination of approaches. David was the biologist and medical
chemist, while Darin came to the field from a background in electrical
engineering.”
“Electrical engineering and cancer reseach?”
Scully asked. “Those two don’t usually go together. Was he developing
a new treatment apparatus or diagnostic equipment?”
“Unknown,” Mulder said. “Darin Kennessy apparently had a falling-
out with his brother six months ago. He abandoned his work at DyMar
and joined a fringe group of survivalists out in the Oregon wilderness.
Needless to say, he isn’t reachable by phone.”
Scully looked again at the brochure, but found no mention of the
specific team members. “So, did David Kennessy continue the work
even without his brother?”
“Yes,” Mulder said. “He and their junior research partner, Jeremy
Dorman. I’ve tried to locate their records and reports to determine the
exact nature of their investigations, but most of the documents have
been removed from the files. As far as I know, Kennessy concentrated
on obscure techniques that have never been previously used in cancer
research.”
Scully frowned. “Why would anyone be so upset about that? Did his
research show any progress?”
18
THEX-FILES
Mulder gulped his coffee. “Well, apparently the members of the mob
were outraged at some supposedly cruel and unapproved animal tests
Kennessy had performed. No details, but I suppose the good doctor
strayed a bit from the rules of the Geneva Convention.” Mulder
shrugged. “Most of the records were burned or destroyed, and it’s hard
to get any concrete information.”
“Anyone hurt in the fire?” Scully asked.
“Kennessy and Dorman were both reported killed in the blaze, though
the investigators had trouble identifying—or even accounting for—all
the body parts. Remember, the lab didn’t just burn, it exploded. There
must have been some kind of bombs planted. That group meant
business, Scully.”
“That’s all interesting, Mulder, but Pm not sure why it’s interesting to
you.”
“Tm getting to that.”
Scully’s brow furrowed as she looked down at the glossy print of the
burned lab. She handed the photo back to Mulder.
At other tables, people in business suits hunched over, continuing
their own conversations, oblivious to anyone listening in. Scully kept
her senses alert out of habit as a federal investigator. A group of men
from NASA sat at one table, discussing proposals and modifications to
a new interplanetary probe, while other men at a different table talked
in hushed tones about how best to cut the space program budget.
“Kennessy had apparently been threatened before,” Mulder said, “but
this group came out of nowhere and drew a big crowd. I’ve found no
record of any organization called Liberation Now before the DyMar
incident, until the Portland Oregonian received the letter claiming
responsibility.”
“Why would Kennessy have kept working under such conditions?”
Scully picked up the colorful brochure and antibodies
19
unfolded it again, skimming down the predictable propaganda
statements about “new cancer breakthroughs,” “remarkable treatment
alternatives,” and “a cure is just around the corner.” She took a deep
breath; the words struck a chord with her. Oncologists had been using
those same phrases since the 1950s.
Mulder withdrew another photo of a boy eleven or twelve years old.
The boy was smiling for the camera, but looked skeletal and weak, his
face gaunt, his skin gray and papery, much of his hair gone.
“This is his twelve-year-old son Jody, terminally ill with cancer—
acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Kennessy was desperate to find a cure,
and he certainly wasn’t going to let a few protesters delay his work.
Not for a minute.”
She rested her chin in her hands. “I still don’t see how an arson and
property-destruction case would capture your interest.”
Mulder removed the last photo from the folder. A man in a security
guard’s uniform lay sprawled in the burned debris, his face twisted in
a mask of agony, his skin blotched and swollen with sinuous lumps,
arms and legs bent at strange angles. He looked like a spider that had
been dosed with bug spray.
“This man was found at the burned lab just last night,” Mulder said.
“Look at those symptoms. No one has figured it out yet.”
Scully snatched the photo and looked intently at it. Her eyes showed
her alarm. “He appears to be dead from some fast-acting and
exceedingly virulent pathogen.”
Mulder waited for her to absorb the gruesome details, then said, “I
wonder if something in Kennessy’s research could be responsible?
Something that didn’t entirely perish in the fire...”
Scully frowned slightly as she concentrated.
“Well, we don’t know what exactly the arsonists did 20
THEX-FILES
before they destroyed the lab. Maybe they liberated some of the
experimental animals . . . maybe something very dangerous got loose.”
Mulder took another sip of his coffee, then retrieved the papers from
the folder. He waited for her to draw her own conclusions.
Scully let her interest show plainly as she continued to study the
photo. “Look at those tumors . . . How fast did the symptoms appear?”
“The victim was apparently normal and healthy when he reported to
work a few hours earlier.” He leaned forward intently. “What do you
think this guard stumbled upon?”
Scully pursed her lips in concern. “I can’t really say without seeing it
myself. Is this man’s body being held in quarantine?”
“Yes. I thought you might want to come with me to take a look.”
Scully took her first sip of the coffee, and it did indeed taste as awful
as she had feared. “Let’s go, Mulder,” she said, standing up from the
table. She handed him back the colorful brochure with its optimistic
proclamations. Kennessy must have performed some radical and
unorthodox tests on his lab animals, she thought. It was possible that
after the violent destruction of the facility, and with this possible
disease outbreak, some of the animals had escaped. And perhaps they
carried something deadly.
FOUR
State Highway 22
Coast Range, Oregon
Monday, 10:00 P.M.
The dog stopped in the middle of the road, X distracted on his way to
the forest. The ditch smelled damp and spicy with fallen leaves.
Roadside reflectors poked out of the ditches beside gravel driveways
and rural mailboxes. Unlike the rich spruce and cedar forest, the road
smelled of vehicles, tires, hot engines, and belching exhaust. The twin
headlights of the approaching car looked like bright coins. The image
fixated the dog, imprinting spots on his dark-adapted eyes. He could
hear the car dominating the night noises of insects and stirring
branches in the trees around him.
The car sounded loud. The car sounded angry. The road was wet and
dark, shrouded by thick trees. The kids were cranky after a long day
of traveling . . . and at this point the impromptu vacation didn’t seem
like such a good idea after all.
The rugged and scenic coast was still a dozen 22
THEX-FILES
miles away, and then it would be another unknown number of miles
up the highway until they encountered one of the clustered tourist
havens filled with cafes, art galleries, souvenir shops, and places to
stay—each one called an “inn” or a “lodge,” never a simple motel.
Ten miles back, they had driven past a lonely crossroads occupied by
a gas station, a hamburger joint, and a rundown fifties-era motel with
a pink neon NO flickering next to the VACANCY sign.
“We should have planned this trip better,” Sharon said beside him in
the front seat.
“I believe you mentioned that already,” Richard answered testily.
“Once or twice.”
In the backseat, Megan and Rory displayed their intense boredom in
uncharacteristic ways. Rory was so restless he had switched off his
Game Boy, and Megan was so tired she had stopped picking on her
brother.
“There’s nothing to do,” Rory said.
“Dad, don’t you know any other games?” Megan asked. “Were you
ever bored as a kid?”
He forced a smile, then glanced up in the rearview mirror to see them
sulking in the back seat of the Subaru Outback. Richard had rented
the car for this vacation, impressed by its good wheels, good traction
for those mountain roads. At the start of the long drive, he had felt
like SuperDad.
“Well, my sister and I used to play a game called
‘Silo.’ We were in Illinois, where they’ve got lots of farms. You’d keep
watch around the countryside and call out every time you saw a silo
next to a barn. Whoever saw the most silos won the game.” He tried to
make it sound interesting, but even back then only the tedium of the
Midwestern rural landscape had made Silo a viable form of
entertainment.
“Doesn’t do much good when it’s dark out, Dad,”
Rory said.
antibodies
23
“T don’t think there are any silos or barns out here anyway,” Megan
chimed in.
The dark trees pressing close to the narrow highway rushed by, and
his blazing headlights made tunnels in front of him. He kept driving,
kept trying to think of ways to distract his kids. He vowed to make
this a good vacation after all. Tomorrow they would go see the Devil’s
Churn, where waves from the ocean shot up like a geyser through a
hole in the rock, and then they would head up to the Columbia River
Gorge and see waterfall after waterfall. Now, though, he just wanted
to find a place to spend the night.
“Dog!” his wife cried. “A dog! Watch out!”
For a frozen instant, Richard thought she was playing some bizarre
variant of the Silo game, but then he spotted the black four-legged
form hesitating in the middle of the road, its liquid eyes like pools of
quicksilver that reflected the headlights.
He slammed on the brakes, and the new tires on the rental Subaru
skiied across the slick coating of fallen leaves. The car slewed, slowed,
but continued forward like a locomotive, barely under control. In the
back, the kids screamed. The brakes and tires screamed even louder.
The dog tried to leap away at the last instant, but the Subaru bumper
struck it with a horrible muffled thump. The black Lab flew onto the
hood, into the windshield, then caromed off the side into the
weedfilled ditch. The car screeched to a halt, spewing wet gravel from
the road’s shoulder. “Jesus Christ!” Richard shouted, slamming the
gearshift into park so quickly the entire vehicle rocked.
He grabbed at his seatbelt, fumbling, punching, struggling, until the
buckle finally popped free of the catch. Megan and Rory huddled in
stunned silence in 24
THEX-FILES
the back, but Richard popped the door open and sprang out. He
looked from side to side, belatedly thinking to check if another car or
truck might be bearing down on them. Nothing. No traffic, just the
night. In the deep forest, even the nocturnal insects had fallen silent,
as if watching.
He walked around the front of the car with a sick dread. He saw the
dent in the bumper, a smashed headlight, a scrape in the hood of the
rental car. He remembered too vividly the offhanded and cheerful
manner in which he had declined insurance coverage from the rental
agent. He stared down now, wondering how much the repairs would
cost. The back door opened a crack, and a very pale-looking Megan
eased out. “Daddy? Is he all right?” She peered around, blinking in the
darkness. “Is the dog going to be okay?”
He swallowed hard, then crunched around the front of the car into the
wet weeds. “Just a second, honey. I’m still looking.”
The dog lay sprawled and twitching, a big black Labrador with a
smashed skull. He could see the skid marks where it had tumbled
across the underbrush. It still moved, attempting to drag itself into the
brambles toward a barbed-wire fence and denser foliage beyond. But
its body was too broken to let it move. The dog wheezed through
broken ribs. Blood trickled from its black nose. Christ, why couldn’t
the thing have just been killed outright? A mercy.
“Better take him to a doctor,” Rory said, startling him. He hadn’t
heard the boy climb out of the car. Sharon stood up at the passenger
side. She looked at him wide-eyed, and he gave a slight shake of his
head.
“T don’t think a doctor will be able to help him, sport,” he said to his
son.
antibodies
25
“We can’t just leave him here,” Megan said, indignant. “We gotta take
him to a vet.”
He looked down at the broken dog, the dented rental car, and felt
absolutely helpless. His wife hung on the open door. “Richard, there’s
a blanket in the back. We can move the suitcases between the kids,
clear a spot. We’ll take the dog to the nearest veterinary clinic. The
next town up the road should have one.”
Richard looked at the kids, his wife, and the dog. He had absolutely
no choice. Swallowing bile, knowing it would do no good, he went to
get the blanket while Sharon worked to rearrange their suitcases. The
next reasonably sized town up the road, Lincoln City, turned out to be
all the way to the coast. The lights had been doused except for dim
illumination through window shades in back rooms where the locals
watched TV. As he drove through town, desperately searching for an
animal care clinic, he wondered why the inhabitants hadn’t bothered
to roll up the sidewalks with sundown.
Finally he saw an unlit painted sign, “Hughart’s Family Veterinary
Clinic,” and he swerved into the empty parking lot. Megan and Rory
both sniffled in the backseat; his wife sat tight-lipped and silent next
to him up front.
Richard took the responsibility himself, climbing the cement steps and
ringing the buzzer at the veterinarian’s door. He vigorously rapped his
knuckles on the window until finally a light flicked on in the foyer.
When an old man peered at them through the glass, Richard shouted,
“We’ve got a hurt dog in the car. We need your help.”
The old veterinarian showed no surprise at all, as if he had expected
nothing else. He unlocked the door 26
THEX-FILES
as Richard gestured toward the Subaru. “We hit him back up the
highway. I... I think it’s pretty bad.”
“We’ll see what we can do,” the vet said, going around to the rear of
the car. Richard swung open the hatchback, and both Megan and Rory
clambered out of their seats, intently interested, their eyes wide with
hope. The vet took one look at the children, then met Richard’s eyes,
understanding exactly the undertones here. In back, the dog lay
bloody and mangled, somehow still alive. To Richard’s surprise, the
black Lab seemed stronger than before, breathing more evenly, deeply
asleep. The vet stared at it, and from the masked expression on the old
man’s face, Richard knew the dog had no hope of surviving.
“This isn’t your dog?” the vet asked.
“No, sir,” Richard answered. “No tags, either. Didn’t see any.”
Megan peered into the back to look. “Is he going to be all right,
Mister?” she asked. “Are we coming back to visit him, Daddy?”
“We'll have to leave him here, honey,” he answered.
“This man will know what to do with the dog.”
The vet smiled at her. “Of course he’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ve got
some special kinds of bandages.” He looked up at Richard. “If you
could help me carry him in back to the surgery, I’ll let you all be on
your way.”
Richard swallowed hard. The way the old man looked right into his
heart, he knew the vet must see cases like this every week, hurt
animals abandoned to his care.
Together the two men reached under the blanket, lifting the heavy
dog. With a grunt, they began to shuffle-walk to the back door of the
clinic. “He’s hot,”
the vet said as they entered the swinging door. Leaving the dog on the
operating table, the vet went around the room, flicking on lights.
antibodies
27
Anxious to be away, Richard stepped to the door, thanking the old
man profusely. He left one of his business cards on the reception table,
hesitated, then thought better of it. He tucked the card back in his
pocket and hurried out the front door.
He rushed back to the Subaru and swung himself inside. “He'll take
care of everything,” Richard said to no one in particular, then jammed
the vehicle into gear. His hands felt grimy, dirty, covered with fur and
a smear of the dog’s blood.
The car drove off as Richard desperately tried to relocate the peace
and joy of a family vacation. The night insects resumed their music in
the forest.
FIVE
Mercy Hospital
Portland, Oregon
Tuesday, 10:03 A.M.
The middle of morning on a gray day. Early X mist hanging above and
through the air made the temperature clammy and colder than it
should have been. The clouds and gloom would burn off by noon,
giving a blessed few minutes of sunshine before the clouds and the
rain rolled in again.
Typical morning, typical Portland.
Scully didn’t suppose it made any difference if she and Mulder were
going to spend the day in a hospital morgue anyway.
In the basement levels of the hospital, the quiet halls were like tombs.
Scully had seen the same thing in many hospitals where she had
performed autopsies or continued investigations on cold cadavers in
refrigerator drawers. But though the places were by now familiar, she
would never find them comforting. Dr. Frank Quinton, Portland’s
medical examiner, was a bald man with a feathery fringe of white hair
surrounding the back of his head. He had wire-rimmed glasses and a
cherubic face.
antibodies
29
Judging by his friendly, grandfatherly smile, Scully would have
pegged him as a charming, goodnatured man—but she could see a
tired hardness behind his eyes. In his career as a coroner, Quinton
must have seen too many teenagers pulled from wrecked cars, too
many suicides and senseless accidents, too many examples of the
quirky nature of death.
He warmly shook Scully’s hand, and Mulder’s. Mulder nodded at his
partner, speaking to the coroner.
“As I mentioned on the phone, sir, Agent Scully is a medical doctor
herself, and she has had experience with many unusual deaths.
Perhaps she can offer some suggestions.”
The coroner beamed at her, and Scully couldn’t help but smile back at
the kind-faced man. “What is the status of the body now?”
“We used full disinfectants and have been keeping the body in cold
storage to stop the spread of any biological agents,” the ME said.
The morgue attendant held out a clipboard and smiled like a puppy
dog next to Quinton. The assistant was young and scrawny, but
already nearly as bald as the medical examiner. From the idolizing
way he looked up at the ME, Scully guessed that Frank Quinton must
be his mentor, that one day the morgue attendant wanted to be a
medical examiner himself.
“He’s in drawer 4E,” the attendant said, though Scully was certain the
coroner already knew where the guard’s body was stored. The
attendant hurried over to the bank of clean stainless-steel refrigerator
drawers. Most, Scully knew, would contain people who had died of
natural causes, heart attacks, or car accidents, surgical failures from
the hospital, or old retirees fallen like dead leaves in nursing homes.
One drawer, though, had been marked with yel-30
THEX-FILES
low tape and sealed with stickers displaying the clawed-circle
BIOHAZARD LABEL: 4E.
“Thank you, Edmund,” the ME said as Mulder and Scully followed him
to the morgue refrigerators.
“You’ve used appropriate quarantine conditions?”
Scully asked.
Quinton looked over at her. “Luckily, the police were spooked enough
by the appearance of the corpse that they took precautions, gloves,
contamination wraps. Everything was burned in the hospital
incinerator here.”
Edmund stopped in front of the stainless-steel drawer and peeled away
the BioHazard sticker. A card on the front panel of the drawer labeled
it RESTRICTED, POLICE EVIDENCE.
After tugging on a sterile pair of rubber gloves, Edmund grabbed the
drawer handle and yanked it open. “Here it is. We don’t usually get
anything as curious as this poor guy.” He held open the drawer, and a
gust of frosty air drifted out. With both hands, Edmund dragged out
the plasticdraped cadaver of the dead guard. Like a showroom model
revealing a new sports car, the attendant drew back the sheet. He
stood aside proudly to let the medical examiner, Scully, and Mulder
push forward. Mixed with the cold breath of the refrigerator, the smell
of heavy, caustic disinfectants swirled in the air, stinging Scully’s eyes
and nostrils. She was unable to keep herself from bending over in
fascination. She saw the splotches of coagulated blood beneath the
guard’s skin like blackened bruises, the lumpy, doughy growths that
had sprouted like mushrooms inside his tissues.
“Tve never seen tumors that could grow so fast,”
Scully said. “The limited rate of cellular reproduction should make
such a rapid spread impossible.” She bent down and observed a faint
slimy covering on antibodies
31
some patches of skin. Some kind of clear mucus . . . like slime.
“Were treating this as a high-contamination scenario. Our lab tests
are expected back in another day or so from the CDC,” Quinton said.
“Pm doing my own analysis, under tight controls, but this is an
unusual one. We can’t just do it in-house.”
Scully continued to study the body with the practiced eye of a
physician analyzing the symptoms, the patterns, trying to imagine the
pathology. The attendant offered her a box of latex gloves. She
snapped on a pair, flexing her fingers, then she reached forward to
touch the cadaver’s skin. She expected it to be cold and hard with
rigor—but instead the body felt warm, fresh, and flexible.
“When was this man brought in?” she asked.
“Sunday night,” Quinton answered.
She could smell the frosty coldness from the refrigerator, felt it with
her hand. “What’s his body temperature? He’s still warm,” she said.
The medical examiner reached forward curiously, and laid his own
gloved hand on the cadaver’s bruised shoulder. The ME turned and
looked sternly at the morgue attendant. “Edmund, are these
refrigerators acting up again?”
The morgue attendant scrambled backward like a panicked squirrel,
devastated that his mentor had spoken sternly to him. “Everything is
working fine, sir. I had Maintenance check it just yesterday.” He
dashed over to study the gauges. “It says that the drawers are all at
constant temperature.”
“Feel his temperature for yourself,” the ME snapped. Edmund
stuttered, “No, sir, I'll take your word for it. Pll get Maintenance down
here right away.”
“Do that,” Quinton said. He peeled off his gloves and went over to a
sink to scrub his hands thoroughly. Scully did the same.
32
THEX-FILES
“I hope those refrigerators don’t fall apart on us again,” Quinton
muttered. “The last thing I need is for that guy to start to smell.”
Scully looked again at the cadaver and tried to picture what Dymar’s
mysterious research might have produced. If something had gotten
loose, they might have to deal with a lot more bodies just like this
one. What had Darin Kennessy known, or suspected, that had led him
to run and hide from the research entirely?
“Let’s go, Mulder. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.” Scully dried her
hands and brushed her red hair away from her face. “We need to find
out what Kennessy was working on.”
SIX
Kennessy Residence
Tigard, Oregon
Tuesday, 12:17 P.M.
The house looked like most of the others on X the street—suburban
normal, built in the seventies with aluminum siding, shake shingles,
average lawn, average hedges, nothing to make it stand out among the
other middle-class homes in a residential town on the outskirts of
Portland.
“Somehow, I expected the home of a hotshot young cancer researcher
to be more . . . impressive,”
Mulder said. “Maybe a white lab coat draped on the mailbox, test
tubes lining the front walkway . . .”
“Researchers aren’t that glamorous, Mulder. They don’t spend their
time playing golf and living in mansions. Besides,” she added, “the
Kennessy family had some rather extraordinary medical expenses
beyond what insurance would cover.”
According to records they had obtained, Jody Kennessy’s leukemia
and his ever-worsening spiral of last-ditch treatments had gobbled
their savings and forced them into taking a second mortgage.
Together, Mulder and Scully walked up the drive-34
THEX-FILES
way toward the front door. Wrought-iron railings lined the two steps
up to the porch. A forlorn, waterlogged cactus looked out of place
beside the downspout of the garage. Mulder removed his notepad, and
Scully brushed her hands down her jacket. The air was cool and damp,
but her shiver came as much from her thoughts.
After seeing the guard’s body and the gruesome results of the disease
that had so rapidly struck him down, Scully knew they had to
determine exactly what David Kennessy had been developing at the
DyMar Laboratory. The available records had been destroyed in the
fire, and Mulder had so far been unable to track down anyone in
charge; he couldn’t even pinpoint who had overseen DyMar’s funding
from the federal government.
The dead ends and false leads intrigued him, kept him hunting, while
the medical questions engaged Scully’s interest.
She wouldn’t necessarily expect the wife of a researcher to know
much about his work, but in this case there were extenuating
circumstances. She and Mulder had decided their next step would be
to talk to Kennessy’s widow Patrice—an intelligent woman in her own
right. In her heart, Scully also wanted to see Jody.
Mulder looked up at the house as he approached the front door. The
garage door was closed, the drapes on the house windows drawn,
everything quiet and dark. The fat Sunday Portland Oregonian lay in a
protective plastic wrapper on the driveway, untouched. And it was
Tuesday.
As Mulder reached for the doorbell, Scully instantly noticed the
shattered latch. “Mulder. . .”
She bent to inspect the lock. It had been broken in, the wood
splintered. She could see dents around the antibodies
35
knob and the dead bolt, the torn-up jamb. Someone had crudely
pressed the fragments back in place, a cosmetic cover-up that would
fool casual passersby from the street.
Mulder pounded on the door. “Hello!” he shouted. Scully stepped into
a flowerbed to peer inside the window; through a gap in the drapes
she saw overturned furniture in the main room, scattered debris on
the floor.
“Mulder, we have sufficient cause to enter the premises.”
He pushed harder, and the door swung easily open. “Federal agents,”
he called out—but the Kennessy home answered them only with a
quiet, gasping echo of his call. Mulder and Scully stepped into the
foyer, and both stopped simultaneously to stare at the disaster.
“Very subtle,” Mulder said.
The home had been ransacked, furniture tipped over, upholstery
slashed, stuffing pulled out. The baseboards had been pried away from
the walls, the carpeting ripped up as the violent searchers dug down
to the floorboards. Cabinets and cupboards hung open, bookshelves
lay tipped over, with books and knickknacks strewn about.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anybody here,”
Scully said, hands on her hips.
“What we need to find is a housekeeper,” Mulder answered.
They searched through the rooms anyway. Scully couldn’t help
wondering why anyone would have ransacked the place. Had the
violent protest group struck at Kennessy’s family as well, not satisfied
with killing David Kennessy and Jeremy Dorman, not content with
burning down the entire DyMar facility?
Had Patrice and Jody been here when the attack occurred?
36
THEX-FILES
Scully dreaded finding their bodies in the back room, gagged, beaten,
or just shot to death where they stood.
But the house was empty.
“We'll have to get evidence technicians to search for blood traces,”
Scully said. “We’ll need to seal off the site and get a team in here right
away.”
They entered Jody’s room. The Sheetrock had been smashed open,
presumably to let the searchers look between the studs in the walls.
The boy’s bed had been overturned, the mattress flayed of its sheets
and fabric covering.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Scully said. “Very violent . . . and very
thorough.”
Mulder picked up a smashed model of an alien spaceship from
Independence Day. Scully could imagine how carefully and lovingly the
twelve-year-old boy must have assembled it.
“Just like the DyMar attack two weeks ago,”
Mulder said.
Mulder bent over to pick up a chunk of broken gypsum board, turning
it in his fingers. Scully retrieved a fighter jet model that had been
suspended by fish line from the ceiling but now lay with its plastic
airfoils broken on the floor, its fuselage cracked so that someone could
pry inside. Searching.
Scully stood, feeling cold. She thought of the young boy who had
already received a death sentence as the cancer ravaged his body.
Jody Kennessy had been through enough already, and now he had to
endure whatever had happened here.
Scully turned around and walked into the kitchen, mindful of the
drinking glasses shattered on the linoleum floor and on the Formica
countertop. The searchers couldn’t possibly have been looking for
anything inside the glass tumblers. They had simply enjoyed the
destruction.
antibodies
37
Mulder bent down next to the refrigerator and looked at an orange
plastic dog food bowl. He picked it up, turning it to show the name
VADER written in magic marker across the front. The bowl was
empty, the food crumbs hard and dry.
“Look at this, Scully,” he said. “If something happened to Patrice and
Jody Kennessy . . . then where is the dog?”
Scully frowned. “Maybe the same place they are.”
With a long, slow look at the devastation in the kitchen, Scully
swallowed hard. “Looks like our search just got wider.”
SEVEN
Coast Range, Oregon
Tuesday, 2:05 P.M.
No one would ever find them in this cabin, X isolated out in the
wilderness of the Oregon coastal mountains. No one would help them,
no one would rescue them.
Patrice and Jody Kennessy were alone, desperately trying to hold onto
some semblance of normal life by the barest edges of their fingernails.
As far as Patrice was concerned, though, it wasn’t working. Day after
day of living in fear, jumping at shadows, hiding from mysterious
noises . . . but they had no other choice for survival—and Patrice was
determined that her son would survive this. She went to the window
of the small cabin and parted the dingy drapes to watch Jody bounce
a tennis ball against the outside wall. He was in plain view, but within
running distance of the thick forest that ringed the hollow. Each
impact of the tennis ball sounded like gunshots aimed at her.
At one time the isolation of this plot of land had been a valuable asset,
back when she had designed the place for her brother-in-law as a
place for him to get antibodies
39
away from DyMar. Darin was good at getting away, she thought.
Scattered empty patches on the steep hills in the distance showed
where clear-cutting teams had removed acres and acres of hardwood a
few years before, leaving stubbled rectangles like scabs on the
mountainside.
This cabin was supposed to be a private vacation hideout for
relaxation and solitude. Darin had deliberately refused to put in a
phone, or a mailbox, and they had promised to keep the location
secret. No one was supposed to know about this place. Now the
isolation was like a fortress wall around them. No one knew where
they were. No one would ever find them out here.
A small twin-engine plane buzzed overhead, aimless and barely seen
in the sky; the drone faded as it passed out of sight.
Their plight kept Patrice on the verge of terror and paralysis each day.
Jody, so brave that it choked her up every time she thought about it,
had been through so much already—the pursuit, the attack on Dymar
. and before that, the doctor’s assessment—terminal cancer,
leukemia, not long to live. It was like a downwardplunging guillotine
blade heading for his neck. After the original leukemia diagnosis, what
greater threat could shadowy conspirators possibly use? What could
outweigh the demon inside Jody’s own twelve-year-old body? Any
other ordeal must pale in comparison.
As the tennis ball bounced away from the cabin into the knee-high
weeds, Jody chased after it in a vain attempt to amuse himself. Patrice
moved to the edge of the window to keep him in view. Ever since the
fire and the attack, Patrice took great care never to let him out of her
sight.
The boy seemed so much healthier now. Patrice didn’t dare to hope
for the remission to continue. He 40
THEX-FILES
should be in the hospital now, but she couldn’t take him. She didn’t
dare.
Jody halfheartedly bounced the tennis ball again, then once more ran
after it. He had passed a remarkable milestone—their crisis situation
had become ordinary after two weeks, and his boredom had
overwhelmed his fear. He looked so young, so carefree, even after
everything that had happened.
Twelve should have been a magic age for him, the verge of the
teenage years, when concerns fostered by puberty achieved universal
importance. But Jody was no longer a normal boy. The jury was still
out as to whether he would survive this or not. Patrice opened the
screen door and, with a glance over her shoulder, stepped onto the
porch, taking care to keep the worried expression off her face.
Although by now, Jody would probably consider any look of concern
normal for her.
The gray Oregon cloud cover had broken for its daily hour of
sunshine. The meadow looked fresh from the previous night’s rain
showers, when the patter of raindrops had sounded like creeping
footsteps outside the window. Patrice had lain awake for hours,
staring at the ceiling. Now the tall pines and aspens cast afternoon
shadows across the muddy driveway that led down from the rise,
away from the distant highway. Jody smacked the tennis ball too
hard, and it sailed off to the driveway, struck a stone, and bounced
into the thick meadow. With a shout of anger that finally betrayed his
tension, Jody hurled his tennis racket after it, then stood fuming.
Impulsive, Patrice thought. Jody became more like his father every
day.
“Hey, Jody!” she called, quelling most of the scolding tone. He fetched
the racket and plodded toward her, his eyes toward the ground. He
had been restless and moody all day. “What’s wrong with you?”
antibodies
41
Jody averted his eyes, turned instead to squint where the sunshine lit
the dense pines. Far away, she could hear the deep drone of a heavily
laden log truck growling down the highway on the other side of the
tree barricade.
“Its Vader,” he finally answered, and looked up at his mother for
understanding. “He didn’t come back yesterday, and I haven’t seen
him all morning.”
Now Patrice understood, and she felt the relief wash over her. For a
moment, she had been afraid he might have seen some stranger or
heard something about them on the radio news.
“Just wait and see. Your dog’ll be all right—he always is.”
Vader and Jody were about the same age, and had been inseparable
all their lives. Despite her worries, Patrice smiled at the thought of the
smart and goodnatured black Lab. Eleven years before, she had
thought the world was golden. Their one-year-old son sat in his
diapers in the middle of the hardwood floor, scooting around. He had
tossed aside his action figure companions and played with the dog
instead. The boy knew “Ma” and “Da” and attempted to say “Vader,”
though the dog’s name came out more like a strangled “drrrr!”
Patrice and David chuckled together as they watched the black Lab
play with Jody. Vader romped back and forth, his paws slipping on
the polished floor. Jody squealed with delight. Vader woofed and
circled the baby, who tried to spin on his diaper on the floor.
Those had been peaceful times, bright times. Now, though, she hadn’t
had a moment’s peace since the fateful night she had received a
desperate call from her husband at his beseiged laboratory.
Up until then, learning that her son was dying of cancer had been the
worst moment of her life. 42
THEX-FILES
“But what if Vader’s lying hurt in a ditch somewhere, Mom?” Jody
asked. She could see tears on the edges of her son’s eyes as he fought
hard against crying. “What if he’s in a fur trap, or got shot by a
hunter?”
Patrice shook her head, trying to comfort her son.
“Vader will come home safe and sound. He always does.”
Once again, Patrice felt the shudder. Yes, he always did.
EIGHT
Mercy Hospital
Portland, Oregon
Tuesday, 2:24 P.M.
Even through the thick fabric of her clumsy X gloves, she could feel
the slick softness of the corpse’s inner cavity. Scully’s movements were
irritatingly sluggish and imprecise—but at least the heavy gear
protected her from exposure to whatever had killed Vernon Ruckman.
The forced-air respirator pumped a cold, stale wind into her face. Her
eyes were dry, burning. She wished she could just rub them, but
enclosed in the anticontamination suit, Scully had no choice but to
endure the discomfort until the autopsy of the dead security guard
was complete.
Her tape recorder rested on a table, voice-activated, waiting for her to
say in detail what she was seeing. This wasn’t a typical autopsy,
though. She could see dozens of baffling physical anomalies just on
first glance, and the mystery and horrific manifestations of the
symptoms grew more astonishing as she proceeded with her thorough
inspection. Still, the step-by-step postmortem procedure had 44
THEX-FILES
been established for a reason. She remembered teaching it to students
at Quantico, during the brief period when the X-Files had been closed
and she and Mulder had been separated. Some of her students had
already completed their training through the FBI Academy and
become special agents like herself. But she doubted any of them would
ever work a case like this one.
At such times, falling back on a routine was the only way to keep her
mind clear and focused. First step. “Test,” she said, and the red light
of the voice-activated recorder winked on. She continued speaking in
a normal voice, muffled through her transparent plastic faceplate.
“Subject’s name, Vernon Ruckman. Age, thirtytwo; weight,
approximately one hundred eighty-five pounds. General external
physical condition is good. He appears to have been quite healthy
until this disease struck him down.” Now he looked as if every cell in
his body had gone haywire all at once. She looked at the man’s
blotchy body, the dark red marks of tarlike blood pooled in pockets
beneath his skin. The man’s face had frozen in a contortion of agony,
lips peeled back from his teeth.
“Fortunately, the people who found this body and the medical
examiner established quarantine protocols immediately. No one
handled this cadaver with unprotected hands.” She suspected that this
disease, whatever it was, might be exceedingly virulent.
“Outward symptoms, the blotches, the swellings under the skin, are
reminiscent of the bubonic plague.” But the Black Death, while killing
about onethird of Europe when it raged through the population
centers of the Middle Ages, had acted over the course of several days,
even in its deadliest pneumonic form.
“This man seems to have been struck down nearly instantaneously,
however. I know of no disease short antibodies
45
of a direct nerve toxin that can act with such extreme lethality.”
Scully touched the skin on Ruckman’s arms, which hung like loose
folds of rubbery fabric draped on the bones. “The epidermis shows
substantial slippage, as if the connective tissue to the muscles has
been destroyed somehow.
“As for the muscle fiber itself . . .” She pushed against the meat of the
body with her fingers, felt an unusual softness, a squishing. Her heart
jumped.
“Muscle fibers seem dissociated . . . almost mealy.”
Part of the skin split open, and Scully drew back, surprised. A clear,
whitish liquid oozed out, and she gingerly touched it with her gloved
fingertips. The substance was sticky, thick and syrupy.
“Tve found some sort of unusual . . . mucus-like substance coming
from the skin of this man. It seems to have pooled and collected
within the subcutaneous tissue. My manipulations have released it.”
She touched her fingertips together, and the slime stuck, then dripped
back down onto the body. “I don’t understand this at all,” Scully
admitted to the tape recorder. She would probably delete that line in
her report.
“Proceeding with the body cavity,” she said, then drew the stainless-
steel tray of saws, scalpels, spreaders, and forceps close to her side.
Taking great care with the scalpel so as not to puncture the fabric of
her gloves, she cut into the man’s body cavity and used a rib-spreader
to open up the chest. It was hard work; sweat dripped down her
forehead, tickling her eyebrows.
Looking at the mess of the guard’s opened chest, she reached inside
the wet cavity, fishing around with her protected fingers. Getting
down to work, Scully began by taking an inventory, removing lungs,
liver, heart, intestines, weighing each on a mass-balance. 46
THEX-FILES
“Its difficult to recognize the individual organs, due to the abundant
presence”—perhaps infestation was a better word, she thought— “of
tumors.”
In and around the organs, Vernon Ruckman’s lumps, growths, tumors
spread like a nest of viperous worms, thick and insidious. As she
watched, they moved, slipping and settling, with a discomforting
writhing appearance.
But in a body this disturbed, this damaged, no doubt the simple
process of autopsy would have caused a vigorous reaction, not to
mention the possibility of contraction due to the temperature
variations from the morgue refrigerator to the heated room. Among
the displayed organs, Scully found other large pockets of the mucus.
Inside, under the lungs, she discovered a large nodule of the slimy,
runny substance—almost like a biological island or a storehouse. She
withdrew a sample of the unusual fluid and sealed it in an Extreme
Hazard container. She would perform her own analysis of the
specimen and send another sample to the Centers for Disease Control
to supplement the samples already sent by the ME. Perhaps the
pathogen specialists had seen something like this before. But she had a
far more immediate concern.
“My primary conclusion, which is still pure speculation,” Scully
continued, “is that the biological research at DyMar Laboratory may
have produced some sort of disease organism. We have not been able
to track down full disclosure of David Kennessy’s experiments or his
techniques, and so I am at a disadvantage to go on the record with
any more detailed conjectures.”
She stared down at Ruckman’s open body, unsettled. The tape
recorder waited for her to speak again. If the situation was as bad as
Scully feared, then they would certainly need much more help than
either she or Mulder could give by themselves.
antibodies
47
“The lumps and misshapen portions inside Vernon Ruckman’s body
look as if rapid outgrowths of cells engulfed his body with astonishing
speed.” Dr. Kennessy was working on cancer research. Could he have
somehow produced a genetic or microbial basis for the disease? she
wondered. Had he unleashed some terrible viral form of cancer?
She swallowed hard, frightened by her own idea.
“All this is very far-fetched, but difficult to discount in light of the
symptoms I have observed in this body—
especially if this man was visibly healthy mere hours before his body
was found.”
The period from onset to death was at a maximum only part of an
evening, perhaps much less. No time for treatment, no time even for
him to realize his fate. . . . Vernon Ruckman had had only minutes
before a terminal disease struck him down.
Barely even time enough to pray.
NINE
Hughart’s Family Veterinary Clinic
Lincoln City, Oregon
Tuesday, 1:11 A.M.
Dr. Elliott Hughart was torn between intenX tionally putting the
mangled black Labrador to sleep, or just letting it die. As a
veterinarian, he had to make the same decision year after year after
year. And it never got easier.
The dog lay on one of the stainless-steel surgical tables, still alive
against all odds. The rest of the veterinary clinic was quiet and silent.
A few other animals hunkered in their wire cages, quiet, but restive
and suspicious.
Outside, it was dark, drizzling as it usually did this time of night, but
the temperature was warm enough for the vet to prop open the back
door. The damp breeze mitigated the smell of chemicals and
frightened pets that thickened the air. Hughart had always believed in
the curative properties of fresh air, and that went for animals as well
as humans. His living quarters were upstairs, and he had left the
television on, the single set of dinner dishes unwashed—but he spent
more time down here in the antibodies
49
office, surgery, and lab anyway. This part was home for him—the
other rooms upstairs were just the place where he slept and ate.
After all these years, Hughart kept his veterinary practice more as a
matter of habit than out of any great hope of making it a huge success.
He had scraped by over the years. The locals came to him regularly,
though many of them expected free treatment as a favor to a friend or
neighbor. Occasionally, tourists had accidents with their pets. Hughart
had seen many cases like this black Lab: some guilt-ridden sightseer
delivering the carcass or the still-living but grievously injured animal,
expecting Hughart to work miracles. Sometimes the families stayed.
Most of the time—as in this instance—they fled to continue their
interrupted vacations.
The black Lab lay shivering, sniffing, whimpering. Blood smeared the
steel table. At first, Hughart had done what he could to patch the
injuries, stop the bleeding, bandage the worst gashes—but he didn’t
need a set of X-rays to tell that the dog had a shattered pelvis and a
crushed spine, as well as major internal damage.
The black Lab wasn’t tagged, was without any papers. It could never
recover from these wounds, and even if it pulled through by some
miracle, Hughart would have no choice but to relinquish it to the
animal shelter, where it would sit in a cage for a few days and hope
pathetically for freedom before the shelter destroyed it anyway.
Wasted. All wasted. Hughart drew a deep breath and sighed.
The dog shivered under his hands, but its body temperature burned
higher than he had ever felt in an animal before. He inserted a
thermometer, genuinely curious, then watched in astonishment as the
digital readout climbed from 103 to 104. Normally a dog’s 50
THEX-FILES
temperature should have been 101.5, or 102 at most—
and with the shock from his injuries, this dog’s body temp should have
dropped. The number on the readout climbed to 106°F. He drew a
routine blood sample, then checked diligently for any other signs of
sickness or disease, some cause for the fever that rose like a furnace
from its body. What he found, though, surprised him even more.
The black Lab’s massive injuries almost seemed to be healing rapidly,
the wounds shrinking. He lifted one of the bandages he had pressed
against a gash on the dog’s rib cage, but though the gauze was soaked
with blood, he saw no sign of the wound. Only matted fur. The
veterinarian knew it must be his imagination, mere wishful thinking
that somehow he might be able to save the dog.
But that would never happen. Hughart knew it in his mind, though his
heart continued to hope. The dog’s body trembled, quietly
whimpering. With his calloused thumb, Hughart lifted one of its
squeezed-shut eyelids and saw a milky covering across its rolled-up
eye, like a partially boiled egg. The dog was deep in a coma. Gone. It
barely breathed. The temperature reached 107°F. Even without the
injuries, this fever was deadly.
A ribbon of blood trickled out of the wet black nostrils. Seeing that
tiny injury, a little flaw of red blood across the black fur of the
delicate muzzle, made Hughart decide not to put the dog through any
more of this. Enough was enough.
He stared down at his canine patient for some time before he shuffled
over to his medicine cabinet, unlocked the doors, and removed a large
syringe and a bottle of Euthanol, concentrated sodium pentabarbitol.
The dog weighed about sixty to eighty pounds, and the suggested dose
was about 1 cc for each ten antibodies
51
pounds, plus a little extra. He drew 10 ccs, which should be more than
sufficient.
If the dog’s owners ever came back, they would find the notation
“PTS” in the records, which was a euphemism for “Put To Sleep”’—
which was itself a euphemism for killing the animal . . . or putting it
out of its misery, as veterinarian school had always taught. Once he
had made the decision, Hughart didn’t pause. He bent over the dog
and inserted the needle into the skin behind the dog’s neck and
quietly but firmly injected the lethal dose. After its enormous injuries,
the black Lab didn’t flinch from the prick of the hypodermic.
A cool, clammy breeze eased through the crackedopen door, but the
dog remained hot and feverish. Dr. Hughart heaved a heavy sigh as he
discarded the used syringe. “Sorry, boy,” he said. “Go chase some
rabbits in your dreams .. . in a place where you don’t have to watch
out for cars.”
The chemical would take effect soon, suppressing the dog’s respiration
and eventually stopping his heart. Irrevocable, but peaceful.
First, though, Hughart took the blood sample back to the small lab
area in the adjoining room. The animal’s high body temperature
puzzled him. He’d never seen a case like this before. Often animals
went into shock if they survived the trauma of being struck by a motor
vehicle, but they didn’t usually have such a high fever.
The back room was perfectly organized according to a system he had
developed over decades, though a casual observer might just see it as
cluttered. He flicked on the overhead lights in the small
Formicatopped lab area and placed a smear of the blood on a glass
slide. First step would be to check the dog’s white blood cell count to
see if maybe he had some sort of infection, or parasites in the blood.
52
THEX-FILES
The dog could have been very sick, even dying, before he’d been hit
by the car. In fact, that could explain why the animal had been so
sluggish, so unaware of the large automobile bearing down on him. A
fever that high would have been intolerable. If the dog suffered from
some major illness, Hughart needed to keep a record of it.
Out in the adjoining operating and recovery area, two of the other
dogs began to bark and whimper. A cat yowled, and the cages rattled.
Hughart paid little attention. Dogs and cats made a typical chaotic
noise, to which he’d grown deaf after so many years. In fact, he’d been
surprised at how quiet the animals were when thrown together in a
strange situation, penned up in a cage for overnight care. They were
already smarting from spaying or neutering or whatever ailments had
brought them into the vet’s office in the first place.
The only animal he was worried about was the dying black Labrador,
and by now the Euthanol would be working.
Bothered by the distracting shadows, Hughart switched on a brighter
fluorescent lamp tucked under the cabinets, then illuminated the slide
under his microscope with a small lamp. Rubbing his eyes first, he
gazed down at the smear of blood, fiddling with the focus knob.
The dog should even now be drifting off to perpetual dreams—but its
blood was absolutely alive. In addition to the usual red and white cells
and platelets, Hughart saw tiny specks, little silvery components .. .
like squarish glittering crystals that moved about on their own. If this
was some sort of massive infection, it was not like any microorganism
he had ever before laid eyes on. The odd shapes were as large as the
cells and moved about with blurred speed.
“That’s incredible,” he said, and his voice sounded antibodies
53
loud in the claustrophobic lab area. He often talked to the animals
around him, or to himself, and it had never bothered him before.
Now, though, he wished he wasn’t alone; he wished he had someone
with him to share this amazing discovery. What kind of disease or
infection looked like this?
After a long career in veterinary medicine, he would have thought
he’d seen just about everything. But he had never before witnessed
anything remotely like this.
And he hoped it wasn’t contagious.
This revamped building had been Elliott Hughart’s home, his place of
work, for decades, but now it seemed strange and sinister to him. If
this dog had some sort of unknown disease, he would have to contact
the Centers for Disease Control. He knew what to do in the case of a
rabies outbreak or other diseases that normally afflicted household
pets—
but these tiny microscopic . . . slivers? They were utterly foreign to
him.
In the back surgery room, the caged animals set up a louder racket,
yowling and barking. The old man noticed it subconsciously, but the
noise wasn’t enough to tear him from his fascination with what he saw
under the microscope.
Hughart rubbed his eyes and focused the microscope again, blurring
the image past its prime point and then back to sharp focus again. The
glittering specks were still there, buzzing about, moving cells. He
swallowed hard; his throat was dry and cottony. What to do now?
Then he realized that the barking and meowing inside the operating
room cages had become an outright din, as if a fox had charged into a
henhouse. Hughart spun around, bumped into his metal stool,
knocked it over, and hopped about on one foot 54
THEX-FILES
as pain shot through his hip. When he finally rushed into the
operating room, he looked at the cages first to see the captive animals
pressed back against the bars of their cages, trying to get away from
the center of the room.
He didn’t even look at the black Lab, because it should have been
dead by now—but then he heard paws skittering across the slick
surface of stainless steel.
The dog got to its feet, shook itself, and leaped down from the table,
leaving a smear of blood on the clean surface. But the dog showed no
more wounds, no damage. It trembled with energy, completely healed.
Hughart stood in total shock, unable to believe that the dog had not
only regained consciousness—
despite its grievous injuries and the euthanasia drug—
but had jumped down from the table. This was as incredible as the
swarming contamination in the blood sample.
He caught his breath, then eased forward. “Here, boy, let me take a
look.”
Quivering, the dog barked at him, then backed away.
TEN
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Tuesday, 4:50 P.M.
Not long before sunset, a patch of bright X blue sky made a rare
appearance in the hills over Portland. Mulder squinted up, wishing he
had brought along sunglasses as he maneuvered the rental car up the
steep drive to the site of the DyMar Laboratory. Much of the facility’s
structure remained intact, though entirely gutted by the fire. The walls
were blackened, the wood support structure burned to charcoal, the
office furniture slumped and twisted. Some overhead beams had
toppled, while others balanced precariously against the concrete load-
bearing walls and metal girders. Glass shards lay scattered among
ashes and broken stone.
As they crested the hill and reached the sagging chain-link fence
around the site, Mulder shifted the car into park and looked through
the windshield. “A real fixer-upper,” he said. “TIl have to talk to my
real estate agent.”
Scully got out of the car and looked over at him.
“Too late to make an offer, Mulder—this place is 56
THEX-FILES
scheduled to be demolished in a few days to make way for a new
business park.” She scanned the thick stands of dark pines and the
sweeping view of Portland spread out below, with its sinuous river
and necklace of bridges.
Mulder realized the construction crew was moving awfully fast,
disturbingly so. He and Scully might not even be able to finish a
decent investigation in the amount of time alloted to them.
He opened the chain-link gate; sections of the fence sagged and left
wide gaps. Signs declaring DANGER and WARNING adorned the
fence, marking the hazards of the half-collapsed building; he doubted
those signs would discourage any but the meekest of vandals.
“Apparently Vernon Ruckman’s death has proved a greater deterrent
than any signs or guards,” Scully said. She held on to the chain link
for a moment, then followed Mulder into the burned area. “I
contacted local law enforcement, trying to get a status on their arson
investigation. But so far, all they would tell me is that it’s ‘pending—
no progress.’ ”
Mulder raised his eyebrows. “A protest group large enough to turn
into a destructive mob, and they can’t find any members?”
The FBI crime lab was analyzing the note claiming responsibility. By
late that evening they expected to have results on whoever was
behind Liberation Now. From what Mulder had seen, the letter
seemed to be a very amateurish job.
He stared at the blackened walls of the DyMar facility for a moment,
then the two agents entered the shell of the building, stepping
gingerly. The smell of soot, burned plastics, and other volatile
chemicals bit into Mulder’s nostrils.
As he stood inside the ruins, looking across the hilltop vista toward
the forests and the city below, Mulder imagined that night two weeks
earlier, when a mob of antibodies
57
angry and uncontrolled protesters had marched up the gravel drive.
He drew a deep breath of the ash-clogged air.
“Conjures up images of peasants carrying torches, doesn’t it, Scully?”
He looked up at the unstable ceiling, the splintered pillars, the
collapsed walls. He gingerly took another step into what must have
been a main lobby area. “A mob of angry people charging up the hill
to burn down the evil laboratory, destroy the mad scientist.”
Beside him, Scully appeared deeply disturbed. “But what were they so
worried about?” she said. “What did they know? This was cancer
research. Of all the different kinds of science, surely cancer research is
something even the most vehement protesters will abide.”
“I don’t think it was the cancer part that concerned them,” Mulder
said.
“What then?” Scully asked, frowning. “The animal testing? I don’t
know what sort of experiments Dr. Kennessy was doing, but I’ve
researched animal rights groups before—and while they sometimes
break in and release a few dogs and rats from their cages, Pm unaware
of any other situation that has exhibited this extreme level of
violence.”
“T think it was the type of research itself,” Mulder said. “Something
about it must have been very scary. Otherwise, why would all of his
records be sealed away?”
“You already have an idea, Mulder. I can tell.”
“David Kennessy and his brother had made some waves in the
research community, trying unorthodox new approaches and
treatments that had been abandoned by everyone else. According to
Kennessy’s resume, he was an expert in abnormal biochemistry, and
his brother Darin had worked for years in Silicon Valley. Tell me,
Scully, what sort of relationship could there be between electronics
and cancer research?”
58
THEX-FILES
Scully didn’t offer any of her thoughts as she poked around, looking
for where the guard had been found. She saw the yellow-taped section
and stood gazing at the rough outline of the body impressed into the
loose ash, while Mulder ranged around the perimeter. He moved a
fallen sheet of twisted metal out of the way and stumbled upon a fire
safe, its door blackened but ajar. He called for Scully.
“Does it contain anything?” she asked. Mulder raised his eyebrows
and rummaged around in the sooty debris. “It’s open, but empty. And
the inside is dirty but not burned.” He waited for that to sink in, then
looked up at his partner. From her expression, it was clear she thought
the same thing he did. The safe had been opened after the fire, not
before. “Someone else was here that night, someone looking for the
contents of this safe.”
“That’s why the guard came up here into the ruins. He saw someone.”
Scully frowned. “That could explain why he was here. But it still
doesn’t tell us what killed him. He wasn’t shot or strangled. We don’t
even know that he met up with the intruder.”
“But it’s possible, even likely,” Mulder said. Scully looked at him
curiously. “So this other person took all the records we need?”
He shrugged. “Come on, Scully. Most of the other information on
Kennessy’s cancer research was locked away and classified. We can’t
get our hands on it. There may well have been some evidence here,
too—
but now that’s gone as well, and a security guard is dead.”
“Mulder, he was dead from a kind of disease.”
“He was dead from some kind of toxic pathogen. We don’t know
where it came from.”
“So whoever was here that night killed the guard, and stole the
records from the safe?”
antibodies
59
Mulder cocked his head to one side. “Unless someone else got to it
first.”
Scully remained tight-lipped as they eased around a burned wall,
ducked under a fallen girder, and crunched slowly into the interior.
What remained of the lab areas sprawled like a dangerous maze, black
and unstable. Part of the floor had collapsed, tumbling down into the
basement clean rooms, holding areas, and storage vaults. The
remaining section of floor creaked underfoot, demonstrably weakened
after the fire.
Mulder picked up a shard of glass. The intense heat had bent and
smoothed its sharp edges. “Even after his brother abandoned the
research, I think Kennessy was very close to some sort of magnificent
breakthrough, and he was willing to bend a few rules because of his
son’s condition. Someone found out about his work and tried to stop
him from taking rash action. I suspect that this supposedly
spontaneous protest movement, from a group nobody’s ever heard of,
was a violent effort to silence him and erase all the progress he had
made.”
Scully brushed her reddish hair back away from her face, leaving a
little soot mark on her cheek. She sounded very tired. “Mulder, you
see conspiracies everywhere.”
He reached forward to brush the smudge from her face. “Yeah, Scully,
but sometimes I’m right. And in this case it cost the lives of two
people—maybe more.”
ELEVEN
Under Burnside Bridge
Portland, Oregon
Tuesday, 11:21 P.M.
He tried to hide and he tried to sleep—but X nothing came to him but
a succession of vicious nightmares.
Jeremy Dorman did not know whether
the dreams were caused by the swarms of microscopic invaders
tinkering with his head, with his thought processes . . . or whether the
nightmares came as a result of his guilty conscience. Wet and clammy,
clad in tattered clothes that didn’t fit him right, he huddled under the
shelter of Burnside Bridge, on the damp and trash-strewn shore of the
Willamette River. The muddy green-blue water curled along in its
stately course.
Years ago, downtown Portland had cleaned up River Park, making it
an attractive, well-lit, and scenic area for the yuppies to jog, the
tourists to sit on cold concrete benches and look out across the water.
Young couples could listen to street musicians while they sipped on
their gourmet coffee concoctions. But not at this dark hour. Now most
people sat in their warm homes, not thinking about the cold and
antibodies
61
lonely night outside. Dorman listened to the soft gurgle of the slow-
moving river against the tumbled rocks around the bridge pilings. The
water smelled warm and rich and alive, but the cool mist had a frosty
metallic tang to it. Dorman shivered. Pigeons nested in the bridge
superstructure above, cooing and rustling. Farther down the walk
came the rattling sound of another vagrant rummaging through trash
cans to find recyclable bottles or cans. A few brown bags containing
empty malt liquor and cheap wine bottles lay piled against the
greenpainted wastebaskets. Dorman huddled in the shadows, in bodily
pain, in mental misery. Fighting a spasm of his rebellious body, he
rolled into a mud puddle, smearing dirt all over his back . . . but he
didn’t even notice. A heavy truck rumbled overhead across the bridge
with a sound like a muffled explosion. Like the DyMar explosion.
That night, the last night, came back to him too vividly—the darkness
filled with fire and shouts and explosions. Murderous and destructive
people: faceless, nameless, all brought together by someone pulling
strings invisibly in the shadows. And they were malicious, destructive.
He must have fallen asleep . . . or somehow been transported back in
time. His memory had been enhanced in a sort of cruel and unusual
punishment, perhaps by the wildcard action of his affliction.
“A chain-link fence and a couple of rent-a-cops does not make me feel
safe,” Dorman had said to David Kennessy. This wasn’t exactly a high-
security installation they were working in—after all, David had
smuggled his damned pet dog in there, and a handgun. “I’m starting to
think your brother had the right idea to walk away from all this six
months ago.”
DyMar had called for backup security from the 62
THEX-FILES
state police, and had been turned down. The ostensible reason was
some buried statute that allowed the police to defer “internal
company disputes” to private security forces. David paced around the
basement laboratory rooms, fuming, demanding to know how the
police could consider a mob of demonstrators to be an internal
company dispute. It still hadn’t occurred to him that somebody might
want the lab unprotected.
For all his biochemical brilliance, David Kennessy was clueless. His
brother Darin hadn’t been quite so politically naive, and Darin had
gotten the hell out of Dodge—in time. David had stayed—for his son’s
sake. Neither of them understood the stakes involved in their own
research.
When the actual destruction started, Jeremy recalled seeing David
scrambling to grab his records, his samples, like in all those old
movies where the mad scientist strives to rescue a single notebook
from the flames. David seemed more pissed off than frightened. He
kicked a few stray pencils away from his feet, and spoke in his “let’s
be reasonable” voice.
“Some boneheaded fanatic is always trying to stop progress—but it
never works. Nobody can undiscover this new technology.” He made a
rude noise through his lips.
Indeed, biological manufacturing and submicroscopic engineering had
been progressing at remarkable speed for years now. Genetic
engineers used the DNA machinery of certain bacteria to produce
artificial insulin. A corporation in Syracuse, New York, had patented
techniques for storing and reading data in cubes made of
bacteriorhodopsin, a genetically altered protein. Too many people
were working on too many different aspects of the problem. David
was right—nobody could undiscover the technology.
antibodies
63
But Dorman himself knew that some people in the government were
certainly intent on trying to do just that. And even with all the prior
planning and the hushed agreements, they hadn’t given Dorman
himself time to escape, despite their promises. While David was
distracted, rushing to the phone to warn his wife about the attack and
her own danger, Dorman had not been able to find any of the pure
original nanomachines, just the prototypes, the leftover and
questionable samples that had been used—with mixed results—on the
other lab animals, before their success with the dog. But still, the
prototypes had worked . . . to a certain extent. They had saved him,
technically at least.
Then Dorman heard windows smashing upstairs, the murderous
shouts pouring closer—and he knew it was time.
Those prototypes had been his last resort, the only thing he could find.
They had been viable enough in the lab rat tests, hadn’t they? And the
dog was just fine, perfectly healthy. What choice did he have but to
take a chance? Still, the possibility froze Dorman with terror,
uncertainty, for a moment—if he did this, it would be an irrevocable
act. He couldn’t just go to the drugstore and get the antidote.
But the thought of how those men had betrayed him, how they meant
to kill him and tidy up all their problems, gave him the determination
he needed. After Dorman added the activation hormone and the self-
perpetuating carrier fluid, the prototypes were supposed to adapt,
reset their programming. With a small whumpp, a Molotov cocktail
exploded in the lobby, and then came running feet. He heard hushed
voices in quiet discussion that sounded cool and professional—a
contrast to the chanting and yelling that continued outside, the
protests Dorman knew were staged.
64
THEX-FILES
Quickly, silently, Dorman injected himself, just before David Kennessy
returned to his side. Now the lead researcher finally looked afraid, and
with good reason.
Four of the gunshots struck Kennessy in the chest, driving him
backward into the lab tables. Then the DyMar building erupted into
flames—much faster than Jeremy Dorman could have imagined. He
tried to escape, but even as he fled, the flames swept along, closing in
on him as the walls ignited. The shock wave of another large
explosion pummeled him against one of the concrete basement walls.
The stairwell became a chute of fire, searing his skin. He had watched
his flesh bubble and blacken. Dorman shouted with outrage at the
betrayal. . . . Now he awoke screaming under the bridge. The echoes
of his outcry vibrated against the river water, ricocheting across the
river and up under the bridge. Dorman hauled himself to his feet. His
eyes adjusted to the dim illumination of streetlights and the moon
filtering through clouds above. His body twisted and contorted. He
could feel the growths squirming in him, seething, taking on a life of
their own.
Dorman clenched his teeth, brought his elbows tight against his ribs,
struggling to regain control. He breathed heavily through his nostrils.
The air was cold and metallic, soured with the memory of burning
blood.
As he swayed to his feet, Dorman looked down at the rock
embankment where he had slept so fitfully. There he saw the bodies of
five pigeons, wings splayed, feathers ruffled, their eyes glassy gray.
Their beaks hung open with a trickle of blood curling down from their
tongues.
Dorman stared at the dead birds, and his stomach clenched, turning a
somersault with nausea. He didn’t antibodies
65
know what his body had done, how he had lost control during his
nightmares. Only the pigeons knew. A last gray feather drifted to the
ground in silence. Dorman staggered away, climbing up toward the
road. He had to get out of Portland. He had to find his quarry, find the
dog, before it was too late for any of them.
TWELVE
Main Post Office
Milwaukie, Oregon
Wednesday, 10:59 A.M.
Mulder didn’t feel at all nondescript or X unnoticeable as he and
Scully stood in the lobby of the main post office. They moved back
and forth, pretending to wait in line, then going back to the counter
and filling out unnecessary Express Mail forms. The postal officials at
the counter watched them warily.
All the while, Scully and Mulder kept their eyes on the wall of covered
cubbyholes, numbered post office boxes, especially number 3733.
Each box looked like a tiny prison cubicle.
Every time a new customer walked in and marched toward the
appropriate section of boxes, he and Scully exchanged a glance. They
tensed, then relaxed, as person after person failed to fit the
description, went to the wrong cubbyhole, or simply conducted
routine post office business, oblivious to the FBI surveillance.
Finally, after about an hour and twenty minutes of stakeout, a gaunt
man pushed open the heavy glass door and moved directly to the wall
of P.O. boxes. His antibodies
67
face was lean, his head completely shaven and glistening as if he used
furniture polish every morning. His chin, though, held an explosion of
black bristly beard. His eyes were sunken, his cheekbones high and
protruding.
“Scully, that’s him,” he said. Mulder had seen various photos of
Alphonse Gurik in his criminal file—
but previously he had had long hair and no beard. Still, the effect was
the same.
Scully gave a brief nod, then flicked her eyes away so as not to draw
the man’s suspicions. Mulder nonchalantly picked up a colorful
brochure describing the Postal Service’s selection of stamps featuring
famous sports figures, raising his eyebrows in feigned interest.
The National Crime Information Center had rapidly and easily
completed their analysis of the letter claiming responsibility for the
destruction of the DyMar Lab. Liberation Now had mailed their note
on a piece of easily traceable stationery, written by hand in block
letters and sporting two smudged fingerprints. Sloppy. The whole thing
had been sloppy and amateurish.
NCIC and the FBI crime lab had studied the note, using handwriting
analysis and fingerprint identification. This man, Alphonse Gurik—
who had no permanent address—had been involved in many causes
for many outspoken protest groups. His rap sheet had listed name
after name of organizations that sounded so outrageous they couldn’t
possibly exist. Gurik had written the letter claiming responsibility for
the destruction and arson at DyMar. But already Mulder had expressed
his doubts. After visiting the burned DyMar site, it was clear to both of
them that this had been a professional job, eerily precise and coldly
destructive. Alphonse Gurik seemed to be a rank amateur, perhaps
deluded, certainly 68
THEX-FILES
sincere. Mulder didn’t think him capable of what had happened at
DyMar.
As the man reached for P.O. Box 3733, spun his combination, and
opened the little window to withdraw his mail, Scully nodded at
Mulder. They both moved forward, reaching into their overcoats to
withdraw their ID wallets.
“Mr. Alphonse Gurik,” she said in a firm, uncompromising voice,
“were federal agents, and we are placing you under arrest.”
The bald man whirled, dropped his mail in a scattershot on the floor,
and then slammed his back against the wall of boxes.
“T didn’t do anything!” he said, his face stricken with terror. He raised
his hands in total surrender.
“You’ve got no right to arrest me.”
The other customers in the post office backed away, fascinated and
afraid. Two workers at the counter leaned forward and craned their
necks so they could see better.
Scully withdrew the folded piece of paper from her inner pocket. “This
is an arrest warrant with your name on it. We have identified you as
the author of a letter claiming responsibility for the fire and explosion
at DyMar Laboratory, which resulted in the deaths of two
researchers.”
“But, but—” Gurik’s face paled. A thread of spittle connected his lips
as he tried to find the appropriate words.
Mulder came forward and grabbed the bald man’s arm after removing
a set of handcuffs from his belt. Scully hung back, keeping herself in a
bladed position, ready and prepared for any unexpected action from
the prisoner. An FBI agent always had to be prepared no matter now
submissive a detainee might appear.
“We’re always happy to hear your side of this, Mr. Gurik,” Mulder
said. He took advantage of Gurik’s antibodies
69
shock to bring the man’s arms down and cuff his wrists behind him.
Scully read the memorized set of Miranda rights, which Alphonse
Gurik seemed to know very well already.
According to his file, this man had been arrested seven times already
on minor vandalism and protest charges—throwing rocks through
windows or spraypainting misspelled threats on the headquarters
buildings of companies he didn’t like. Mulder gauged him to be a
principled man, well-read in his field. Gurik had the courage to stand
up for what he believed in, but he gave over his beliefs a little too
easily. As Mulder turned the prisoner around, escorting him toward
the glass door, Scully bent down to retrieve Gurik’s scattered mail.
They ushered him outside. It took thirty seconds, almost like
clockwork, until Gurik began to babble, trying to make excuses.
“Okay, I sent the letter! I admit it, I sent the letter—but I didn’t burn
anything. I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t blow up that building.”
Mulder thought he was probably telling the truth. Gurik’s previous
minor pranks had made him a nuisance, but could not be construed as
a dry run for the destruction of an entire research facility.
“It’s a little convenient to change your story now, isn’t it?” Scully said.
“Two people are dead, and you'll be up for murder charges. This isn’t
a few out-of-hand protest activities like the ones you’ve been arrested
for in the past.”
“I was just a protester. We picketed DyMar a few times in the past...
but suddenly the whole place just exploded! Everybody was running
and screaming, but I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“So why did you write the letter?” Mulder asked.
“Somebody had to take responsibility,” Gurik said. “I kept waiting, but
nobody sent any letters, 70
THEX-FILES
nobody took credit. It was a terrible tragedy, yeah! But the whole
scene would have been pointless if nobody announced what we were
protesting against. I thought we were trying to free all those lab
animals, that’s why I sent the letter...
“Some of us got together on this, a few different independent groups.
There was this one guy who really railed against the stuff at DyYMar—
he even drafted the letter to the paper and made sure we all had a
copy before the protest. He showed us videotapes, smuggled reports.
You wouldn’t believe what they were doing to the lab animals. You
should have seen what they did to that poor dog.”
Scully crossed her arms over her chest. “So what happened to this
man?”
“We couldn’t even find him again—he must have turned chicken after
all. So I sent the letter myself. Somebody had to. The world has to
know.”
Outside the post office, Gurik looked desperately toward an old woody
station wagon with peeling paint, touched up with spots of primer
coat. Boxes of leaflets, maps, newspaper clippings, and other literature
crammed the worn seats of the station wagon. Bumper stickers and
decals cluttered the car body and rear. One of the car’s windshield
wipers had broken off, Mulder saw, but at least it was on the
passenger side.
“I didn’t burn anything, though,” Gurik insisted fervently. “I didn’t
even throw rocks. We just shouted and held our signs. I don’t know
who threw the firebombs. It wasn’t me.”
“Why don’t you explain to us about Liberation Now?” Mulder asked,
falling into the routine. “How do they fit into this?”
“It’s just an organization I made up. Really! It’s not an official group—
there aren’t even any members but me. I can make any group I want.
I’ve done it before. antibodies
71
Lots of activists were there that night, other groups, people Pd never
seen before.”
“So who set up the protest at DyMar?” Scully said.
“T don’t know.” Still pressed against the side of his car, Gurik twisted
his head over his other shoulder to look at her. “We have connections,
you know. All of us activist groups. We talk. We don’t always agree,
but when we can join forces it’s stronger.
“I think the DyMar protest was pulled together by leaders of a few
smaller groups that included animal rights activists, genetic
engineering protesters, industrial labor organizations, and even some
fundamentalist religious groups. Of course, with all my work in the
past they wouldn’t dare leave me out.”
“No, of course not,” Mulder said. He had hoped Gurik would be able
to lead them toward other members of Liberation Now, but it
appeared that he was the sole member of his own little splinter group.
The violent protesters had materialized promptly, with no known
leaders and no prior history, conveniently turned into a mob that
burned the facility down and destroyed all records and research .. .
then evaporated without a trace. Whoever had engineered the bloody
protest had so smoothly pulled together the various groups that even
their respective members didn’t know they were being herded to the
same place at the same time.
Mulder thought it was very clear that the entire incident had been
staged.
“What were you fighting against at DyMar?”
Scully said.
Gurik raised his eyebrows, indignant. “What do you mean, what were
we fighting against? The horrible animal research, of course! It’s a
medical facility. You’ve got to know what scientists do in places like
that.”
72
THEX-FILES
“No,” Scully said, “I don’t know. What I do know is that they were
trying to find medical breakthroughs that would help people. People
dying of cancer.”
Gurik snorted and turned his head. “Yeah, as if animals have any less
right to a peaceful existence than humans do! By what standard do we
torture animals so that humans can live longer?”
Scully blinked at Mulder in disbelief. How could you argue with
someone like this?
“Actually,” Mulder said, “our investigation hasn’t turned up evidence
of any animal experimentation beyond the lab rat stage.”
“What?” Gurik said. “You’re lying.”
Mulder turned to Scully, cutting the protester off.
“I think he’s been set up, Scully. This guy doesn’t know anything.
Someone wanted to destroy DyMar and David Kennessy, while
transferring the blame elsewhere.”
Scully raised her eyebrows. “Who would want to do that, and why?”
Mulder looked hard at her. “I think Patrice Kennessy knows the
answer to that question, and that’s why she’s in trouble.”
Scully looked pained at the mention of the missing woman. “We’ve
got to find Patrice and Jody,” she said. “I suggest we question the
missing brother, Darin, as well. The boy himself can’t be too hard to
find. If hes weak from his cancer treatments, he’ll need medical
attention soon. We’ve got to get to him.”
“Cancer treatments!” Gurik exploded. “Do you know how they
develop those things? Do you know what they do?” He growled in his
throat as if he wanted to spit. “You should see the surgeries, the drugs,
the apparatuses they hook to those poor little animals. Dogs and cats,
anything that got lost and picked up on the streets.”
“Im aware of how . . . difficult cancer treatments antibodies
73
can be,” Scully said coldly, thinking of what she herself had endured,
how the treatment had been nearly as lethal as the cancer itself.
But she had no patience for this now. “Some research is necessary to
help people in the future. I don’t condone excessive pain or malicious
treatment of animals, but the research helps humans, helps find other
methods of curing terminal diseases. I’m sorry, but I cannot
sympathize with your attitude or your priorities.”
Gurik twisted around enough so that he could look directly at her.
“Yeah, and you don’t think they’re experimenting on humans, too?”
His eyes were not panicky now, but burning with rage. He nodded
knowingly at her. The skin on his shaven head wrinkled like leather.
“They’re sadistic bastards,” he said. “You wouldn’t say that if you
knew how some of the research was conducted!” He drew a deep
breath. “You haven’t seen the things I have.”
THIRTEEN
Federal Office Building
Crystal City, Virginia
Wednesday, 11:30 A.M.
In a nondescript office with few furnishX ings, Adam Lentz sat at his
governmentissue desk and pondered the videotape in front of him.
The tape still smelled of smoke from the DyMar fire, and he was
anxious to play it. Lentz’s name wasn’t stenciled on the office door,
nor did he have a plaque on the new desk, none of the trappings of
importance or power. Useless trappings. Adam Lentz had many titles,
many positions, which he could adopt and use at his convenience. He
simply had to select whichever role would allow him best to complete
his real job.
The office had plain white walls, an interior room with no windows,
no blinds—no means for anyone else to spy on him. The federal
building itself sported completely unremarkable architecture, just
another generic government building full of beehive offices for the
unfathomable business of a sprawling bureaucracy. Each evening,
after working hours, Crystal City became a ghost town as federal
employees—clerks and antibodies
75
paper pushers and filing assistants—rushed home to Gaithersburg,
Georgetown, Annapolis, Silver Spring . . . leaving much of the area
uninhabited. Lentz often stayed late just to witness the patterns of
human tribal behavior.
Part of his role in the unnamed government office had been to oversee
David and Darin Kennessy’s research at DyMar Laboratory. Other
groups at the California Institute of Technology, NASA Ames, the
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing—even Mitsubishi’s Advanced
Technology Research and Development Center in Japan—had forged
ahead with their attempts. But the Kennessys had experienced a few
crucial lucky breaks—or made shrewd decisions—and Lentz knew
DyMar was the most likely site for a breakthrough. He had followed
the work, seen the brothers’
remarkable progress, egged them on, and held them back. Some of the
earlier experiments on rats and small lab animals had been amazing—
and some had been horrific. Those initial samples and prototypes had
all been confiscated and, he hoped, destroyed. But David Kennessy,
who had kept working even after his brother left, had proved too
successful for his own good. Things had gotten out of control, and
Kennessy hadn’t even seen it coming.
Lentz hoped the confiscated tape had not been damaged in the
cleansing fire that had obliterated DyMar. His clean-up teams had
scoured the wreckage for any evidence, any intact samples or notes,
and they had found the hidden fire safe, removed its contents, and
brought the tape to him.
He swiveled a small portable TV/VCR that he had set on his desk and
plugged into a floor socket. He closed and locked his office door, but
left the lights on, harsh and flickering fluorescent fixtures in the
ceiling. He sat back in his standard-issue desk chair—he wasn’t one
for 76
THEX-FILES
extravagant amenities—and popped the tape into the player. He had
heard about an extraordinary tape, but he had never personally seen
it. After adjusting the tracking and the volume, Lentz sat back to
watch. In the clean and brightly lit lab, the dog paced inside his cage,
an enclosure designed for larger animals. He whined twice with an
uncertain twitch of his tail, as if hoping for a quick end to his
confinement.
“Good boy, Vader,” David Kennessy said, moving across the camera’s
field of view. “Just sit.”
Kennessy paced the room, running a hand through his dark hair,
brushing aside a film of perspiration on his forehead. Oh, he was
nervous, all right—
acting cocky, doing his best to look confident. Darin Kennessy—
perhaps the smarter brother—had abandoned the research and gone
to ground half a year before. But David hadn’t been so wise. He had
continued to push. People were very interested in what this team had
accomplished, and he obviously felt he had to prove it with a
videotape. Kennessy didn’t know, though, that the success would be
his own downfall. He had proven too much, and he had frightened the
people who had never really believed he could do it. But Lentz knew
the researcher’s own son was dying, which might have tempted him
into taking unacceptable risks. That was dangerous. Kennessy adjusted
the camera himself, shoving his hand in the field of view, jittering the
image. Beside him, near the dog’s cage, the big-shouldered technical
assistant, Jeremy Dorman, stood like Igor next to his beloved
Frankenstein.
“All right,” Kennessy said into the camcorder’s microphone. A lot of
white noise buzzed in the background, diagnostic equipment, air
filters, the rattle of small lab rodents in their own cages. “Tonight,
you're in for a rilly big shew!”
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As if anybody remembered Ed Sullivan, Lentz thought.
Kennessy postured in front of the camera. “I’ve already filed my data,
sent my detailed documentation. My initial rodent tests showed the
amazing potential. But those progress reports either went unread, or
at least were not understood. I’m tired of having my memos disappear
in your piles of paper. Considering that this breakthrough will change
the universe as we know it, ’'d think somebody might want to give up
a coffee break to have a look.”
Oh no, Dr. Kennessy, Lentz thought as he watched, your reports didn’t
disappear. We paid a great deal of atten- tion.
“They’re management boobs, David,” Dorman muttered. “You can’t
expect them to understand what they’re funding.” Then he covered his
mouth, as if appalled that he had made such a comment within range
of the camcorder’s microphone.
Kennessy glanced at his watch, then over at Dorman. “Are you
prepared, Herr Dorman?”
The big lab assistant fidgeted, rested his hand on the wire cage. The
black Lab poked his muzzle against Dorman’s palm, snuffling. Dorman
practically leaped out of his skin.
“Are you sure we should do this?” he asked. Kennessy looked at his
assistant with an expression of pure scorn. “No, Jeremy. I want to just
give up, shelve the work, and let Jody die. Maybe I should retire and
become a CPA.”
Dorman raised both hands in embarrassed surrender. “All right, all
right—just checking.”
In the background, on one of the poured-concrete basement walls, a
poster showed Albert Einstein handing a candle to someone few
people would recognize by sight—K. Eric Drexler; Drexler, in turn,
was extending a candle toward the viewer. Come on, take it!
78
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Drexler had been one of the first major visionaries behind genetic
engineering some years before. Too bad we couldn’t have gotten to him
soon enough, Lentz thought.
Vader looked expectantly at his master, then sat down in the middle
of his cage. His tail thumped on the floor. “Good boy,” Kennessy
muttered. Jeremy Dorman went out of range, then returned a few
moments later holding a handgun, a clunky but powerful Smith &
Wesson. According to records Lentz had easily obtained, Dorman
himself had gone into a Portland gun shop and purchased the weapon
with cash. At least the handgun hadn’t come out of their funding
request.
Kennessy spoke again to the camera as his assistant sweated. Dorman
looked down at the handgun, then over at the caged dog.
“What I am about to show you will be shocking in the extreme. I
shouldn’t need to add the disclaimer that this is real, with no special
effects, no artificial preparations.” He crossed his arms and stared
firmly into the camera eye. “My intention is to jar you so thoroughly
that you are ready to question all your preconceptions.”
He turned to Dorman. “Gridley, you may fire when ready.”
Dorman looked confused, as if wondering who Kennessy meant, then
he raised the Smith & Wesson. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down,
exhibiting his nervousness. He pointed the gun at the dog. Vader
sensed something was wrong. He backed up as far as he could in the
cage, then growled loud and low. His dark eyes met Dorman’s, and he
bared his fangs.
Dorman’s hand began to shake.
Kennessy’s eyes flared. “Come on, Jeremy, dammit!
Don’t make this any worse than it is.”
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Dorman fired twice. The gunshots sounded thin and tinny on the
videotape. Both bullets hit the big black dog, and the impact smashed
him into the mesh of the cage. One shot struck Vader’s rib cage;
another shattered his spine. Blood flew out from the bullet holes,
drenching his fur.
Vader yelped and then sat down from the impact. He panted.
Dorman looked stupidly down at the handgun.
“My God!” he muttered. “The animal rights activists would crucify us,
David.”
But Kennessy didn’t allow the silence to hang on the tape. He stepped
forward, delivering his rehearsed speech. He was running this show.
Melodramatic though it might seem, he knew it would work.
“My medical breakthrough opens the doorway to numerous other
applications. That’s why so many people have been working on it for
so long. The first researchers to make this breakthrough work are
going to shake up society like you won’t be able to imagine.”
Kennessy sounded as if he was giving a speech to a board of directors,
while his pet dog lay shot and bleeding in his cage.
Lentz had to admire a man like that.
He nodded to himself and leaned forward, closer to the television. He
rested his elbows on the desktop. All the more reason to make sure the
technology is tightly controlled, and released only when we deem it
necessary. On the screen, Kennessy turned to the cage, looking down
with clinical detachment. “After a major trauma like this, the first
thing that happens is that the nanocritters shut down all of the dog’s
pain centers.”
In his cage, Vader sat, confused. His tongue lolled out. He had
clumsily managed to prop himself upright. The dog seemed not to
notice the gaping holes in his back. After a moment, the black Lab lay
down on the floor of the cage, squishing his fur in the 80
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blood still running along his sides. His eyes grew heavy, and he sank
down in deep sleep, resting his head on his front paws. He took a huge
breath and released it slowly.
Kennessy knelt down on the floor beside the cage, reached his hand in
to pat Vader on the head. “His temperature is already rising from the
waste heat. Look, the blood has stopped flowing. Jeremy, get the
camera over here so we can have a close-up.”
Dorman looked befuddled, then scurried over to grab the camera. The
view on the videotape rocked and shook, then came into focus on the
dog, zooming in on the injuries. Kennessy let the images speak for
themselves for a moment, before he picked up the thread of his
lecture.
“A large-scale physical trauma like this is actually easier to fix than a
widespread disease, like cancer. A gunshot injury needs a bit of
patchwork, cellular bandages, and some reconstruction.
“With a genetic disease, though, each cell must be repaired, every
anomaly tweaked and adjusted. Purging a cancer patient might take
weeks or months. These bullet wounds, though—” He gestured down
at the motionless black Lab. “Well, Vader will be up chasing squirrels
again tomorrow.”
Dorman looked down in amazement and disbelief. “If this gets to the
newspapers, David, we’re all out of a job.”
“I don’t think so,” Kennessy answered, and smiled. “Pll bet you a box
of dog biscuits.”
Within an hour, the dog woke up again, groggy but rapidly
recovering. Vader stood up in the cage, shook himself, then barked.
Healthy. Healed. As good as new. Kennessy released him from the
cage, and the dog bounded out, starved for attention and praise.
Kennessy laughed out loud and ruffled his fur. Lentz watched in
astonishment, understanding antibodies
81
now that Kennessy’s work was even more frightening, even more
successful than he had feared. His people had been absolutely right to
take the samples, lock them away, and then destroy all the remaining
evidence. If something like this became available to the general
public, he couldn’t conceive of the earth-shattering consequences. No,
everything had to be destroyed. Lentz popped out the videotape and
locked it within a repository for classified documents. The fire safe at
DyMar had protected this tape and the other documents with it, but
unfortunately he knew with a grim certainty that they had not
recovered every scrap, every sample.
Now, after all he had seen, Lentz finally understood the frantic phone
call they had tapped, when David Kennessy had dialed his home
number on the night of the explosive protest, on the night of the fire.
Kennessy’s voice had been frantic, ragged. He didn’t even let his wife
speak. “Patrice, take Jody and Vader and get out of there— now!
Everything I was afraid of is going down. You have to run. I’m already
trapped at DyMar, but you can get away. Keep running. Don’t let them
... get you.”
Then the phone recording was cut off before Kennessy or his wife
could say anything else. Patrice Kennessy had listened to her husband,
had acted quickly. By the time the clean-up teams got to their
suburban house, she had packed up with the boy and the dog, and
vanished.
After seeing the videotape, Lentz realized what a grave mistake he had
made. Before, he had worried that Patrice might have a few notes,
some research information that Lentz needed to retrieve. Now,
though, the danger had increased by orders of magnitude. How could
he have missed it before? The dog 82
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wasn’t just a family pet that the Kennessys couldn’t bear to leave
behind. That black Lab was the dog. It was the research animal, it
carried the nanomachines inside its bloodstream, lurking there, just
waiting to spread around the world.
Lentz swallowed hard and grabbed for the phone. After a moment,
though, he froze and gently set the receiver back in the cradle. This
was not a mistake he wanted to admit to the man in charge. He would
take care of it himself.
Everything else had been destroyed in the DyMar fire—but now Adam
Lentz had to call in all of his resources, get reinforcements, spend
whatever time or money was necessary.
He had a woman, a boy, and, especially, their pet dog to track down.
FOURTEEN
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Wednesday, 1:10 P.M.
The midday sunlight dappled the patches in X the Oregon hills where
the trees had been shaved in strips from clearcut logging. Patrice and
Jody sat by the table in the living room with the curtains open and the
lights switched off, working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle they
had found in one of the cedar window seats.
The two of them had finished a lunch of cold sandwiches and an old
bag of potato chips that had gone stale in the damp air. Jody never
complained. Patrice was just glad her son had an appetite again. His
mysterious remission was remarkable, but she couldn’t allow herself
to hope. Soon, she dreaded, the blush of health would fade, and Jody
would resume his negotiations with the Grim Reaper. But still, she
clung to every moment with him. Jody was all she had left.
Now the two of them hunched over the scattered puzzle pieces. When
finished, the image would show the planet Earth rising over lunar
crags, as photographed by 84
THEX-FILES
one of the Apollo astronauts. The blue-green sphere covered most of
the small wooden table, with jagged gaps from a few continents not
yet filled in. They weren’t having much fun, barely even occupying
their minds. They were just killing time. Patrice and Jody talked little,
in the shared silence of two people who’d had only their own
company for many days. They could get by with partial sentences,
cryptic comments, private jokes. Jody reached forward with a jagged
piece of the Antarctic ice cap, turning it to see how the interlocking
pieces fit in.
“Have you ever known somebody who went to Antarctica, Mom?”
Jody asked.
Patrice forced a smile. “That’s not exactly on the standard tour list,
kid.”
“Did Dad ever go there? For his research? Or Uncle Darin?”
She froze her face before a troubled frown could pass over her
features. “You mean to test out a new medical treatment on, say,
penguins? Or polar bears?”
Why not? He had tested it on Vader... .
“Polar bears live at the North Pole, Mom.” Jody shook his head with
mock scorn. “Get your data right.”
Sometimes he sounded just like his father. She had explained to her
son why they had to hide from the outside world, why they had to
wait until they learned some answers and discovered who had been
behind the destruction of DyMar. Darin had split from his brother
after a huge fight about the dangers of their research, about the edge
they were skirting. He had walked away from DyMar, sold his home,
left this vacation cabin to rot, and joined an isolated group of
survivalists in the Oregon wilds. From that point on, David had
spoken of Darin with scorn, dismissing the usual misguided
complaints by Luddite groups, like the one his brother had joined.
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85
Darin had insisted they would be in danger as soon as more people
found out about their research, but somehow David could not believe
anybody but the technically literate would understand how significant
a breakthrough he had made. “It’s always nice to see that some people
understand more than you give them credit for,” David answered.
“But I wouldn’t count on it.”
But Patrice knew he was naive. True this wasn’t the type of thing
ordinary people got up in arms about—it was too complicated and
required too much foresight to see how the world would change, to
sort the dangers they feared from the miracles he offered. But some
people were paying attention. Darin had had good reason to fear,
good reason to run. Patrice’s question now was who was orchestrating
all this?
The demonstrators outside DyMar consisted of an odd mix of religious
groups, labor union representatives, animal-rights activists, and who
knew what else. Some were fruitcakes, some were violent. Her
husband had died there, with only a crisp warning for her. Go. Get
away! Don’t let them catch you. They'll be after you.
Hoping it was just a temporary emergency, a flareup of destructive
demonstrators, she had thrown Jody and the dog into their car,
driving aimlessly for hours. She had seen the DyMar fire blazing on
the distant bluff, and she feared the worst. Still not grasping the
magnitude of the conspiracy, she had rushed home, hoping to find
David there, hoping he had at least left her a message.
Instead, their place had been ransacked. People searching for
something, searching for them. Patrice had run, taking only a few
items they needed, using her wits and her fear as they raced away
from Tigard, away from the Portland metropolitan area, into the deep
wilderness.
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THEX-FILES
She had swapped license plates several times in darkened parking lots,
waited until near midnight and then grabbed a day’s maximum cash
from an ATM in downtown Eugene, Oregon; she had driven across
town to another ATM, after midnight this time and therefore a new
date, and gotten a second day’s maximum. Then she had fled for the
coast, for Darin’s old, abandoned cabin, where she and Jody could go
to ground, for however long it took for them to feel safe again.
For years she had worked freelance as an architect, doing her designs
from home, especially in the last few months when Jody became more
and more ill from his cancer and—worse—from the conventional
chemo and radiation treatments themselves. Patrice had designed this
little hideaway as a favor for her brother-in-law several years ago.
With rented equipment, Darin had installed the electricity himself,
graded the driveway, cut down a few trees, but never gotten around to
making it much of a vacation home. He had been too swallowed up in
his eightdays-a-week research efforts. Corrupted by David, no doubt.
No one else would know about this place, no one would think to look
for them here, in an unused vacation home built years ago for a
brother who had disappeared half a year previously. It should have
been a perfect place for her and Jody to catch their breath, to plan
their next step.
But now the dog had disappeared, too. Vader had been Jody’s last
remaining sparkle of joy, his anchor during the chaos. The black Lab
had been so excited to be out of the suburbs, where he could run
through the forest. He had been a city dog for so long, fenced in;
suddenly he had been turned loose in the Oregon forests.
She wasn’t surprised that Vader had run off, but antibodies
87
she always expected him to come home. She should have kept him on
a rope—but how could she bear to do that, when she and her son
were already trapped here? Prisoners in hiding? Patrice had been so
afraid, she had stripped away the dog’s ID tag. Now if Vader were
caught, or injured somehow, there would be no way to get them back
together—and no way to track them down.
Jody had taken it hard, trying his best to keep his hopes up. His every
thought was a wish for his dog to return. Apart from his gloom, he
looked increasingly healthy now; most of his hair had grown back
after the leukemia therapies. His energy level was higher than it had
been in a long time. He looked like a normal kid again.
But his sadness over Vader was like an open sore. After every piece he
placed in the Earth-Moon jigsaw puzzle, he glanced through the dingy
curtains over the main windows, searching the treeline. Suddenly he
jumped up. “Mom, he’s back!” Jody shouted, pushing away from his
chair. For a moment, Patrice reacted with alarm, thinking of the
hunters, wondering who could have found them, how she might have
given them away. But then, through the open screen door, she could
hear the dog barking. She stood up from the puzzle table, astonished
to see the black Labrador bounding out of the trees.
Jody leaped away from the table and bolted out the door. He ran
toward the black dog so hard she expected her son to sprawl on his
face on the gravel driveway or trip on a stump or fallen branch in the
yard.
“Jody, be careful!” she called. Just what she needed—if the boy broke
his arm, that would ruin everything. So far, she had managed to avoid
all contact with doctors and any people who kept names and records.
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THEX-FILES
Jody remained oblivious to everything but his excitement over the
dog.
The boy reached his dog safely, and each tried to outdo the other’s
enthusiasm. Vader barked and danced around in circles, leaping into
the air. Jody threw his arms around the dog’s neck and wrestled him
to the wet ground in a tumble of black fur, pale skin, and weeds.
Dripping and grass-stained, Jody raced Vader back to the cabin.
Patrice wiped her hands on a kitchen towel and came out to the porch
to greet him.
“T told you he’d be okay,” she said.
Idiotically happy, Jody nodded and then stroked the dog.
Patrice bent over and ran her fingers through the black fur. The
wedding ring, still on her finger, stood out among the dark strands.
The black Lab had a difficult time standing still for her, shifting on all
four paws and letting his tongue loll out. His tail wagged like an out-
of-control rudder, rocking his body off balance on his four paws.
Other than mud spatters and a few cockleburrs, she found nothing
amiss. No injuries, no wounds. Not a mark on him.
She patted the dog’s head, and Vader rolled his deep brown eyes up at
her. With a shake of her head, she said, “I wish you could tell us
stories.”
FIFTEEN
Hughart’s Family Veterinary Clinic
Lincoln City, Oregon
Wednesday, 5:01 P.M.
As they approached the veterinary clinic in X the sleepy coastal town
of Lincoln City, Scully could hear the barking dogs.
The building was a large old house that had been converted into a
business. The aluminum siding was white, smudged with mildew; the
wooden shutters looked as if they needed a coat of paint. The two
agents climbed the concrete steps to the main entrance and pushed
open a storm door. On their way to tracking down David Kennessy’s
survivalist brother, a report from this veterinarian’s office had caught
Mulder’s attention. When Scully had requested a rush analysis of the
strange fluid she had taken during the security guard’s autopsy, the
CDC
had immediately recognized a distinct similarity to another sample—
also submitted from rural Oregon. Elliott Hughart had treated a dog, a
black Labrador, who was also infected with the same substance.
Mulder had been intrigued by the coincidence. Now at least they had
someplace to start looking. In the front lobby, the veterinarian’s
receptionist 90
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looked harried. Other patrons sat in folding chairs around the lobby
beside pet carriers. Kittens wrestled in a cage. Dogs whined on their
leashes. Posters warned of the hazards of heartworm, feline leukemia,
and fleas, next to a magazine rack filled with monthsold issues of
Time, CatFancy, and People. Mulder flashed his ID as he strode up to
the receptionist. “I’m Agent Fox Mulder, Federal Bureau of
Investigation. We’d like to see Dr. Hughart, please.”
“Do you have an appointment?” The information didn’t sink in for a
few seconds, then the harried woman blinked at him. “Uh, the FBI?”
“We’re here to see him about a dog he treated two days ago,” Scully
said. “He submitted a sample to the Centers for Disease Control.”
“TIl get the doctor for you as soon as possible,”
she said. “I believe he’s performing a neutering operation at the
moment. Would you like to go into the surgery room and wait?”
Mulder shuffled his feet. “We’ll stay out here, thanks.”
Three-quarters of an hour later, when Scully had a roaring headache
from the noise and chaos of the distressed animals, the old doctor
came out. He blinked under bushy gray eyebrows, looking distracted
but curious. The FBI agents were easy to spot in the waiting room.
“Please come back to my office,” the veterinarian said with a gesture
to a small examining room. He closed the door.
A stainless-steel table filled the center of the room, and the smell of
wet fur and disinfectants hung in the air. Cabinets containing
thermometers and hypodermic needles for treatment of tapeworms,
rabies, and distemper sat behind glass doors.
“Now, then,” Hughart said in a quiet, gentle voice, but obviously
flustered. “I’ve never had to deal with the FBI before. How can I help
you?”
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“You submitted a sample to the CDC yesterday from a black Labrador
dog you treated,” Scully said.
“We'd like to ask you a few questions.”
Mulder held out a snapshot of Vader that they had taken from the
family possessions at the ransacked Tigard home. “Can you identify
the dog for us, sir? Is this the one you treated?”
Surprised, the veterinarian raised his eyebrows.
“That’s almost impossible to tell, just from a photograph like this. But
the size and age look about right. Could be the same animal.” The old
veterinarian blinked. “Is this a criminal matter? Why is the FBI
involved?”
Scully withdrew the photos of Patrice and Jody Kennessey. “We're
trying to find these two people, and we have reason to believe they
are the dog’s owners.”
The doctor shook his head and shrugged. “They weren’t the ones who
brought him in. The dog was hit by a car, brought in by a tourist. The
man was real anxious to get out of here. Kids were crying in the back
of the station wagon. It was late at night. But I treated the dog
anyway, though there wasn’t much cause for hope.” He shook his
head. “You can tell when they’re about to die. They know it. You can
see it in their eyes. But this dog . . . very strange.”
“Strange in what way?” Scully asked.
“The dog was severely injured,” the old man said.
“Massive damage, broken ribs, shattered pelvis, crushed spine,
ruptured internal organs. I didn’t expect him to live, and the dog was
in a great deal of pain.” He distractedly wiped his fingers across the
recently cleaned steel table, leaving fingerprint smears.
“T patched him up, but clearly there was no hope. He was hot, his
body temperature higher than any fever I’ve seen in an animal before.
That’s why I took the blood sample. Never expected what I actually
found, though.”
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THEX-FILES
Mulder’s eyebrows perked up. Scully looked at her partner, then back
at the veterinarian. “With severe trauma from a car accident, I
wouldn’t expect the temperature to rise,” she said. “Not if the dog was
in shock and entering a coma state.”
The doctor nodded his head patiently. “Yes, that’s why I was so
curious. I believe the animal had some sort of infection before the
accident. Perhaps that’s why he was so disoriented and got struck by
the car.”
Hughart looked deeply disturbed, almost embarrassed. “When I saw
there was no hope, I gave the dog an injection of Euthanol—sodium
pentabarbitol—to put him to sleep. Ten ccs, way more than enough
for the body mass of a black Lab. It’s the only thing to do in cases like
that, to put the animal out of its misery . . . and this dog was in a
world of misery.”
“Could we see the body of the dog?” Scully asked.
“No.” The veterinarian turned away. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“Why?” Mulder asked.
Hughart looked at them from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows before
glancing back down at his scrubbed-clean fingers. “I was working in
the lab, studying the fresh blood sample, when I heard a noise. I came
in and found that the dog had jumped off the table. I swear its forelegs
were broken, its rib cage crushed.”
Scully drew back, unable to believe what she was hearing. “And did
you examine the dog?”
“I couldn’t.” Hughart shook his head. “When I tried to get to the dog,
it barked at me, turned, then pushed its way through the door. I ran,
but that black Lab bounded out into the night, as frisky as if he were
just a puppy.”
Scully looked at Mulder with eyebrows raised. The veterinarian
seemed distracted by his own recollection. He scratched his hair in
puzzlement. “I antibodies
93
thought I saw a shadow disappearing toward the trees, but I couldn’t
be sure. I called for it to come back, but that dog knew exactly where
he wanted to go.”
Scully was astonished. “Are you suggesting that a dog struck by a car,
as well as given an injection of concentrated sodium pentabarbitol . . .
was somehow able to leap down from your operating table and run
out the door?”
“Quite a lot of stamina,” Mulder said.
“Look,” the veterinarian said, “I don’t have an explanation, but it
happened. I guess somehow the dog. . . wasn’t as injured after all. But
I can’t believe I made a mistake like that. I spent hours searching the
woods around here, the streets, the yards. I expected to find the body
out in the parking lot or not far from here . . . but I saw nothing.
There’ve been no reports either. People around here talk about
unusual things like that.”
Scully changed the subject. “Do you still have the original blood
sample from the dog? Could I take a look at it?”
“Sure,” the veterinarian said, as if glad for the opportunity to be
vindicated. He led the two agents to a small laboratory area where he
performed simple tests for worms or blood counts. On one countertop
underneath low fluorescent lights stood a bulky stereomicroscope.
Hughart pulled out a slide from a case where a dried smear of blood
had turned brown under the cover slip. He inserted the slide under the
lens, flicked on the lamp beneath it, and turned the knobs to adjust
the lens. The old man stepped back and motioned for Scully to take a
look.
“When I first glanced at it,” the veterinarian said,
“the blood was swarming with those tiny specks. I’ve never seen
anything like it, and in my practice I’ve 94
THEX-FILES
encountered plenty of blood-borne parasites in animals. Nematodes,
amoebas, other kinds of pests. But these . . . these were so unusual.
That’s why I sent the sample to the CDC.”
“And they called us.” Scully looked down and saw the dog’s blood
cells, as well as numerous little glints that seemed too angular, too
geometrical, unlike any other microorganism she had ever seen.
“When they were moving and alive, those things looked almost .. . I
can’t describe it,” the old vet said.
“They’ve all stopped now, hibernating somehow. Or dead.”
Scully studied the specks and could not understand them either.
Mulder waited patiently at her side, and she finally let him take a
look. He looked at her knowingly. Scully turned to the veterinarian.
“Thank you for your time, Dr. Hughart. We may be back in touch. If
you find any information on the location of the dog or its owners,
please contact us.”
“But what is this?” the doctor asked, following as Scully led Mulder
toward the door. “And what prompted an FBI follow-up?”
“It’s a missing persons case,” Mulder said, “and there’s some urgency.”
The two agents made their way out through the reception area, where
they encountered a different assortment of cats and dogs and cages.
Several of the examining room doors were closed, and strange sounds
came from behind them.
The veterinarian seemed reluctant to get back to his routine chaos of
yowling animals, lingering in the door to watch them go down the
steps. Mulder held his comments until they had climbed back in the
car, ready to drive off again. “Scully, I think the Kennessys were doing
some very unorthodox research at DyMar Lab.”
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95
“T admit, it’s some kind of strange infection, Mulder, but that doesn’t
mean—”
“Think about it, Scully.” His eyes gleamed. “If DyMar developed some
sort of amazing regenerative treatment, David might well have tested
it on the pet dog.” Scully bit her lip. “With his son’s condition, he
would have been desperate enough for just about anything.”
She slumped into the seat and buckled her seatbelt.
“But, Mulder, what kind of treatment could heal a dog from disastrous
injuries after a car accident, then neutralize the effects of sodium
pentabarbitol designed to put the dog to sleep?”
“Maybe something in the combined expertise of Darin and David
Kennessy,” Mulder said, and started the car.
She unfolded the state highway map, looking for the next stopping
point on their search: the vicinity where Darin Kennessy had gone into
hiding. “But, Mulder, if they really developed such a . . . miracle cure,
why would Darin have abandoned the research?
Why would someone want to blow up the lab and destroy all the
records?”
Mulder eased out of the parking lot and waited as a string of RVs
drove along the Coast Highway, before he turned right and followed
the road through the small picturesque town. He thought of the dead
security guard, the rampant and unexplained growths, the slime.
“Maybe all of DyMar’s samples weren’t so successful. Maybe
something much worse got loose.”
Scully looked at the road ahead. “We’ve got to find that dog, Mulder.”
Without answering, he accelerated the car.
SIXTEEN
Mercy Hospital Morgue
Portland, Oregon
Thursday, 2:04 A.M.
Some people might have thought being
X alone in a morgue late at night would be frightening—or at least
cause for some uneasiness. But Edmund found the silent and dimly lit
hospital the best place to study. He had hours of quiet solitude, and he
had his medical books, as well as popularized versions of true crime
and coroner’s work.
Someday he hoped to get into medical school himself and study
forensic medicine. The subject fascinated him. Eventually, if he
worked hard, he might become at least a first or second assistant to
the county medical examiner, Frank Quinton. That was the highest
goal Edmund thought he could reach. Studying was somewhat hard
for him, and he knew that medical school would be an enormous
challenge. That was why he hoped to learn as much as he could on his
own, looking at the pictures and diagrams, boning up on the details
before he got a chance to enter college.
After all, Abraham Lincoln had been a self-antibodies 97
educated man, hadn’t he? Nothing wrong with it, no way, no how.
And Edmund had the time and the concentration and the ambition to
learn as much as he could.
Fluorescent lights shone in white pools around him on the clean tile
floor, the white walls. The steel and chrome gleamed. The air vents
made a sound like the soft breath of a peacefully sleeping man. The
hospital corridors were silent. No intercom, no elevator bell, no
footsteps from crepe-soled shoes walking down the halls.
He was all alone down here in the morgue on the night shift—and he
liked it that way. Edmund flipped pages in one of his medical texts,
refreshing his memory as to the difference between a perforating and a
penetrating wound. In a penetrating wound, the bullet simply passed
into the body and remained there, while in a perforating wound, the
bullet plowed through the other side, usually tearing out a larger
chunk of flesh in the exit wound, as opposed to the neat round entry
hole.
Edmund scratched the bald top of his head as he read the distinction
over and over again, trying to keep the terms straight. On another
page, he analyzed gunshot diagrams, saw dotted lines indicating the
passage of bullets through the body cavity, how one course could be
instantly fatal while another could be easily healed.
At least it was quiet here so he could concentrate, and when Edmund
finally got all of the explanations clear in his mind, they usually
stayed in place. The back of his head throbbed with a tension
headache, but Edmund didn’t want to get more coffee or take aspirin.
He would think his way through it. Just when he thought he was on
the verge of a revelation, ready to grin with exhilarated triumph, he
heard something moving . . . stirring. 98
THEX-FILES
Edmund perked up, squaring his shoulders and looking around the
room. Only a week before, another morgue attendant had told him a
whopper about a cadaver—a man decapitated in an auto accident—
that had supposedly gotten up and walked out of the Allegheny
Catholic Medical Center. One of the lights flickered in the left corner,
but Edmund saw no shambling, headless corpses . . . or any other
manifestations of ridiculous urban legends.
He stared at the dying bulb, realizing that its strobe-light pattern was
distracting him. He sighed and jotted a little note for the maintenance
crew. Maintenance had already double-checked the temperature in the
refrigerator drawers, had added more freon, and claimed that
everything in the small vaults—including 4E—was exactly the way it
should be.
Hearing no further sound, Edmund turned the page and flipped to
another chapter about the various types of trauma that could be
inflicted by blunt weapons.
Then he noticed the sound of movement again—a brushing, stirring . .
. and then a loud thump. Edmund sat bolt upright, blinking repeatedly.
He knew this wasn’t his imagination, no way, no how. He had worked
here in the morgue long enough that he didn’t get easily spooked by
sounds of settling buildings or whirring support machinery. Another
thump. Something striking metal. He stood up, trying to determine the
source of the noise. He wondered if someone was hurt, or if some
sinister lurker had slipped into the quiet morgue . . . but why?
Edmund had been at his station for the previous three hours and he
had heard nothing, seen nothing. He could remember everyone who
had entered the place.
Again, he heard a pounding, and a thump, and a scraping. There was
no pretense of quiet at all any-antibodies 99
more. Someone hammered inside a chamber, growing more frantic.
Edmund scuttled to the rear of the room with growing dread—in his
heart, he knew where he would find the source of the noise. One of
the refrigerator drawers—one of the drawers that contained a cadaver.
He had read horror stories in school, especially Edgar Allan Poe, about
premature burials, people not actually dead. He had heard spooky
stories about comatose victims slammed into morgue refrigerators
until they died from the cold rather than their own injuries—patients
who had been misdiagnosed, in a diabetic shock or epileptic seizures
that gave all the appearance of death.
From his limited medical expertise, Edmund had dismissed each of
these anecdotal examples as urban legends, old wives’ tales . . . but
right now there could be no mistaking it.
Someone was pounding from the inside of one of the refrigerator
doors.
He went over, listening. “Hello!” he shouted. “I'll get you out.” It was
the least he could do. A RESTRICTED sign marked the drawer making
the sounds, yellow tape, and a BIOHAZARD symbol. Drawer 4E. This
one contained the body of the dead security guard, and Edmund knew
the blotched, lumpy, slimecovered corpse had been inside the drawer
for days. Days! Agent Scully had even performed an autopsy on the
man.
This guy could not still be alive.
The restless noises fell quiet after his shout, then he heard a stirring,
almost like . . . rats crawling within the walls.
Edmund swallowed hard. Was this a prank, someone trying to spook
him? People picked on him often, called him a geek.
If this was a joke, he would get even with them. 100
THEX-FILES
But if someone needed help, Edmund had to take the chance.
“Are you in there?” he said, leaning closer to the sealed refrigerator
door. “T’ll let you out.” He pressed his white lips together to squeeze
just a little more bravery into his system, and tugged on the handle of
4E.
The door popped open, and something inside tried to push its way
free. Something horrible. Edmund screamed and fought against the
door. He saw a strange twisted shape inside the unlit chamber
thrashing about, denting the stainless-steel walls. The sliding drawer
rocked and rattled. A fleshy appendage protruded, bending around in
ways no jointed limb would ever move . . . more like a stubby tentacle.
Edmund wailed again and used his back to push against the door,
squirming out of the way so the groping thing would not be able to
touch him. His weight was more than enough to force back the attack.
Other protrusions from the body core, twisted lumps that seemed to
have been arms or hands at one point, scraped and scrabbled for a
hold against the slippery metal door, trying to get in.
A sticky coating of slime, like saliva, drooled from the inside ceiling of
the drawer.
Edmund pushed hard enough that the door almost closed. Two of the
tentacles and one manyjointed finger were caught in the edge. Other
limbs—
far too many for the normal complement of arms and legs—flailed and
pounded, struggling to get out. But he heard no sound from vocal
chords. No words. No scream of pain. Just frantic movement. Edmund
pushed harder, crushing the pseudo-fingers. Finally they jerked and
broke away, yanking themselves back into the relative safety of the
refrigerator drawer. Biting back an outcry, Edmund slammed himself
antibodies
101
against the steel door, shoving until he heard the latch click and lock
into place.
Trembling with a huge sigh of relief, he fiddled with the latch to make
sure it was solid. Then he stood in shock, staring at the silent
refrigerator drawer. He had a moment of blessed peace—but then he
heard the trapped thing inside pounding about in a frenzy. Edmund
shouted at it in panic, “Be quiet in there!”
The best thing he could think of was to rush to the temperature
controls, where he dialed the setting as low as it could possibly go—to
hard freeze. That would knock the thing down, keep it still. The
refrigerators had just been charged, and the freezers would do their
work quickly. They were designed to preserve evidence and tissue
without any chance of further decay or handling damage. Inside the
coffin-sized drawer, the cold recirculating air would even now be
intense, stunning that thing that had somehow gotten inside where the
guard’s body was stored.
In a few moments he heard the frantic thrashing begin to subside—but
it might have been just a ruse. Edmund wanted to run, but he didn’t
dare leave. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t think of any other
way to deal with the problem. Cold . . . cold. That would freeze the
thing.
The thumping and scrabbling slowed, and finally Edmund got up the
nerve to hurry to the telephone. He punched a button and called
Security. When two hospital guards eventually came down—already
skeptical and taking their sweet time, since they received more false
alarms from night-shift morgue attendants than in any other place or
any other time in the hospital—the creature inside the drawer had
fallen entirely silent. Probably frozen by now.
102
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They laughed at Edmund, thinking it was just his imagination. But he
endured their joking for now. He stood back, unwilling to be
anywhere close by when they opened up drawer 4E. He warned them
again, but they slid open the drawer anyway. Their laughter stopped
instantly as they stared down at the hideous remains.
SEVENTEEN
Ross Island Bridge
Portland, Oregon
Thursday, 7:18 A.M.
The bridge spread out into the early mornX ing fog. Its vaulted and
lacy metal girders disappeared into the mist like an infinite tunnel.
To Jeremy Dorman it was just a route
across the Willamette River on his long and stumbling trek out of the
city, toward the wilderness . . . toward where he might find Patrice
and Jody Kennessy.
He took another step, then another, weaving. He couldn’t feel his feet;
they were just lumps of distant flesh at the ends of his legs, which
themselves felt rubbery, as if his body were changing, altering,
growing joints in odd places. At the peak of the bridge, he felt
suspended in air, though the dawn murk prevented him from seeing
the river far below. The city lights of skyscrapers and streetlamps were
mere fairy glows.
Dorman staggered along, focusing his mind on the vanishing point,
where the bridge disappeared into the fog. His goal was just to get to
the other side 104
THEX-FILES
of the bridge. One step at a time. And after he succeeded in that task,
he would set another for himself, and another, until he finally made
his way out of Portland.
The wooded coastal mountains—the precious dog— seemed an
impossibly long distance away. The morning air was clammy and cold,
but he couldn’t feel it, didn’t notice his sticky clothes. His skin crawled
with gooseflesh, but it had nothing to do with the temperature, just
the rampant disaster happening within all of his cells. As a scientist,
he should have found it interesting—but as the victim of the change,
he found it only horrifying.
Dorman swallowed hard. His throat felt slick, as if clogged with slime,
a mucus that oozed from his pores. When he clenched his teeth, they
rattled loosely in their gums. His vision carried a black fringe of static
around the edges.
He walked onward. He had no other alternative. A pickup truck
roared by on the deck plates of the bridge. The echoes of the engine
and the tires throbbed in his ears. He watched the red taillights
disappear. Suddenly Dorman’s stomach clenched, his spine whipped
about like an angry serpent. He feared he would disintegrate here,
slough off into a pool of dissociated flesh and twitching muscles, a
gelatinous mass that would drip down beneath the grated walkway of
the bridge.
“Noooo!” he cried, a howling inhuman voice in the stillness.
Dorman reached out with one of his slick, waxy hands and grabbed
the bridge railing to support himself, willing his body to cease its
convulsions. He was losing control again.
It was getting harder and harder to stop his body. All of his biological
systems were refusing commands from his mind, taking on a life of
their own. He antibodies
105
gripped the bridge rail with both hands and squeezed until he thought
the steel would bend. He must have looked like a potential suicide
waiting to leap over the edge into the infinite murk of whispering
water below—but Dorman had no intention of killing himself. In fact,
everything he was doing was a desperate effort to keep himself alive,
no matter what. No matter the cost.
He couldn’t go to a hospital or seek other medical attention—no
doctor in the world would know how to treat his affliction. And any
time he reported his name, he might draw the attention of .. .
unwanted eyes. He couldn’t risk that. He would have to endure the
pain for now.
Finally, when the spasm passed and he felt only weak and trembly,
Dorman set off again. His body wouldn’t fall apart on him yet. Not
yet. But he needed to focus, needed to reestablish the goal in his mind.
He had to find the damned dog.
He reached into his tattered shirt pocket and pawed out the wrinkled,
soot-smudged photo he had taken from the broken frame in David
Kennessy’s desk. Lovely young Patrice with her fine features and
strawberry blond hair, and wiry, tousle-haired Jody grinning for the
camera. Their expressions reflected the peaceful times before Jody’s
leukemia, before David’s desperate drive for research. Dorman
narrowed his eyes and burned the picture into his brain. He had been
a close friend of the Kennessys. He had been Jody’s surrogate uncle,
practically a member of the family—far more than the skittish and
rude brother Darin, that’s for sure. And because he knew her so well,
Dorman had a good idea where Patrice would think to hide. She
would imagine she was safe there, since Darin had loved his secrets so
much. In the deep pocket of his tattered jacket, the 106
THEX-FILES
revolver he had taken from the security guard hung like a heavy club.
When he finally reached the far end of the Ross Island Bridge, Dorman
stared westward. The forested, fog-shrouded mountains of the coast
were a long distance away. Once he found them, Dorman hoped he
could get away with the dog without Patrice or Jody seeing him. He
didn’t want to have to kill them—hell, the kid was already a skeleton,
nearly dead from his leukemia—
but he would shoot them, and the dog, too, if it became necessary. In
the big picture, it didn’t really matter how much he cared for them.
He already had plenty of blood on his hands. Once again, he cursed
David and his naiveté. Darin had understood, and he had run to hide
under a rock. But David, hot-headed and desperate to help Jody, had
blindly ignored the true sources of funding for their work. Did he
really think they were giving DyMar all those millions just so David
Kennessy could turn around and decide the morally responsible
approach to its use?
David had stumbled into a political minefield, and he had set in
motion all the events that had caused so much damage—including
Jeremy Dorman’s own desperate gambit for survival. A gambit that
was failing. Though the prototype samples had kept him alive at first,
now his entire body was falling into a biological meltdown, and he
could do nothing about it.
At least, not until he found the dog.
EIGHTEEN
Oregon Coast
Thursday, 12:25 P.M.
Mulder pulled up to the Mini Serve pump X in the small, rundown gas
station. As he got out of the car, he looked toward the glassed-in office
and the tall, unlit CONOCO
sign. He half expected to see old men sitting in rocking chairs on the
porch, or at least someone coming out to offer Andy Griffith—like
hospitality. Scully got out of the car to stretch. They had been driving
for hours up Highway 101, seeing the rugged coastline, small villages,
and secluded houses tucked away into the forested hills.
Somewhere out here David Kennessy’s brother had joined his isolated
group of survivalists, and it was the same general area where the
black Lab had been hit by the car. That made too great a coincidence
for Mulder’s mind. He wanted to find Darin and get some straight
answers about the DyMar research. If Darin knew why DyMar had
been destroyed, he might also know why Patrice had gone missing.
But further information on the survivalists was vague. The group, by
its very nature, kept its exact 108
THEX-FILES
location secret, without phones or electricity. Finding the camp might
be as hard as finding Patrice and Jody. Mulder popped the gas tank
and lifted the nozzle from the pump. Then the office door banged
open, but instead of a “service with a smile” attendant, a short
potbellied man with a fringe of gray-white hair scuttled out.
“Hey, don’t touch that!” the potbellied man snapped, wearing a
stormy expression. “This ain’t no self-serve.”
Mulder looked at the gas nozzle in his hand, then at the Mini Serve
sign. The potbellied man came over and grabbed the nozzle out of
Mulder’s grasp as if it were a dangerous toy in the hands of a child.
The man slid the nozzle into the gas tank, squeezed and locked on the
handle, then stepped back proudly, as if only a professional could be
trusted with such a delicate operation.
“What is the problem, sir?” Scully asked. The potbellied man glowered
at her, then at Mulder, as if they were incredibly stupid. “Damn
Californians.” He shook his head after glancing at the license plate of
their rental car. “This is Oregon. We don’t allow amateurs to pump
their own gas.”
Mulder and Scully looked at each other from across the roof of the
car. “Actually, we’re not Californians,”
Mulder said, reaching inside his overcoat. “We’re federal agents. We
work for the FBI—and I can assure you that pumping gas is one of the
rigorous training courses we’re required to undergo at Quantico.” He
flashed his ID and gestured over at Scully. “In fact, Agent Scully here
is nearly as qualified as I am to fill up a tank.”
The potbellied man looked at Mulder skeptically. His flannel shirt was
oil-stained and tattered. His jowls had been shaved intermittently,
giving him a rugged, patchy appearance. He didn’t seem the type ever
to have dirtied his hands with knotting a necktie. antibodies
109
Scully drew out the photo of Patrice and Jody Kennessy. “We're
searching for these people,” she said. “A woman, mid-thirties, her son,
twelve years old.”
“Never seen ’em,” the man said, then devoted his entire attention to
the gas nozzle. On the pump, numbers clicked around and around in
circles.
“They’re also with a dog,” Mulder said, “a black Labrador.”
“Never seen ’em,” the man repeated.
“You didn’t even look at the picture, sir.” Scully pushed it closer to his
face across the top of the car. The man looked at it carefully, then
turned away again. “Never seen ’em. I got better things to do than to
keep my eye on every stranger that comes through here.”
Mulder raised his eyebrows. In his mind this man was exactly the type
who would keep a careful eye on every stranger or customer who
came through—and he had no doubt that before the afternoon was
over, everyone within ten miles would hear the gossip that federal
agents were searching for someone on the isolated stretches of the
Oregon coast.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea where we might locate a
survivalist compound in this area?”
Mulder added. “We believe they may have been taken there, to be
with a family member.”
The potbellied man raised his eyebrows. “I know some of those places
exist in the hills and the thick forest—nobody in their right mind goes
looking too close for them.”
Scully took out her business card. “If you do see anything, sir, we’d
appreciate it if you give us a call. We’re not trying to arrest these two
for anything. They need help.”
“Sure, always happy to do my duty,” the man said, and tucked the
card into his shirt pocket without 110
THEX-FILES
even glancing at it. He topped off the gas tank to an even dollar
amount and then, maliciously, it seemed, squirted a few cents more
into the tank. Mulder paid him, got a receipt, and then he and Scully
climbed back in the car. “People around here sure value their
privacy,” Mulder said. “Especially outside of the cities, Oregon has a
reputation for harboring survivalists, isolationists, and anybody else
who doesn’t want to be bothered.”
Scully glanced down at the photo in her hands, at Jody Kennessy’s
smiling face, and Mulder knew what must be occupying her mind. “I
wonder why David Kennessy’s brother wanted so badly to drop out of
sight,” she said.
After four more hours of knocking on doors, stopping at cafes,
souvenir shops, and art galleries scattered along the back roads,
Mulder wasn’t sure they would get any benefit out of continuing their
methodical search unless they found a better lead to the location of
Darin Kennessy.
But they could either sit and cool their heels in their Lincoln City
motel room, or they could do something. Mulder preferred to do
something. Usually. He picked up his cell phone to see if he could call
Frank Quinton, the medical examiner, to check on any results of the
analysis of the strange mucus, but he saw that the phone was out of
range. He sighed. They could have missed a dozen phone calls by
now. The wooded mountains were sparsely inhabited, often even
without electrical utilities. Cellular phone substations were too widely
separated to get reception. He collapsed the antenna and tucked the
phone back into his pocket.
“Looks like we’re on our own, Scully,” he said. The brooding pines
stood dense and dominant on antibodies
111
either side of the road, like a cathedral tunnel. Wet leaves, spruce
needles, and slick moisture coated the pavement. Someone had
bothered to put up an unbroken barbed-wire fence from which NO
TRESPASSING
signs dangled at frequent intervals.
Mulder drove slowly, glancing from side to side.
“Not too friendly, are they?”
“Seems like they’re overdoing it a bit,” Scully agreed. “Anybody who
needs that much privacy must be hiding something. Do you think
we're close to the survivalist compound?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mulder saw a black shape moving, an
animal loping along. He squinted at it intently, then hit the brakes.
“Look, Scully!” He pointed, sure of what he saw in the trees behind
the barbed-wire fence: a black dog about the right size to be the
missing pet, looking at them curiously, then loping back off into the
trees.
“Let’s go check it out. Maybe it’s Vader.”
He swung the car onto the narrow gravel shoulder, then hopped out.
Scully exited into the ditch, trying to maintain her footing. Mulder
sprinted to the barbed wire, pushing down on the rusted strands and
ducking through. He turned to hold one of the wires up for Scully. Off
in the trees, the dog looked at them before trotting nervously away.
“Here, boy!” Mulder called, then tried whistling. He ran crashing after
it through the underbrush. The dog barked and turned and bolted.
Scully chased after him. “That’s not the way to get a skittish dog to
come back to you,” she said. Mulder paused to listen, and the dog
barked again. “Come on, Scully.”
Along the trees even this deep in the woods he saw frequent NO
TRESPASSING signs, along with PRIVATE
PROPERTY, WARNING—VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. 112
THEX-FILES
Several of the signs were peppered with buckshot dents.
Scully hurried, but kept herself intensely alert, aware of the very real
danger of excessive traps and the illegal countermeasures some of
these survivalist groups were known to use. At any moment they
could step into a hunting snare, snap a trip wire, or find themselves
dropped into a trap pit. Finally, as Mulder continued up the slope after
the black dog, ducking between trees and wheezing from lack of
breath, he reached the crest of the hill. A line of DANGER signs
marked the area.
As Scully came close to him, flushed from the pursuit, they topped the
rise. “Uh-oh, Mulder.”
Suddenly dozens of dogs began barking and baying. She saw a chain-
link fence topped with razor wire, surrounding an entire compound of
half-buried houses, bunkers, prefabricated cabins, and guard shacks.
The black dog raced toward the compound. Mulder and Scully skidded
to a stop in the soft forest dirt as armed men rushed from the guard
shacks at the corners of the compound. Other people stepped out of
the cabins. Women peered through the windows, grabbing their
children and protecting them from what they thought must be an
unexpected government raid. The men shouted and raised their rifles,
firing warning shots into the air.
Mulder instantly held up his hands. Other dogs came bounding out of
the compound, German shepherds, rottweilers, and Doberman
pinschers.
“Mulder, I think we found the survivalists we’ve been looking for,”
Scully said.
NINETEEN
Survivalist Compound
Thursday, 5:09 P.M.
“Were federal agents,” Mulder announced. X “I’m going to reach for
my identification.”
With agonizing slowness, he groped inside his topcoat.
Unfortunately, all the weapons remained leveled at him, if possible
with even greater ire. He realized that radical survivalists probably
wanted nothing to do with any government agency. One middle-aged
man with a long beard stepped forward to the fence and glowered at
them. “And do federal agents not know how to read?” he said in a
firm, intelligent voice. “You’ve passed dozens NO TRESPASSING signs
to get here. Do you have a duly authorized search warrant?”
“Pm sorry, sir,” Scully said. “We were trying to stop your dog, the
black one. We’re searching for a man named Darin Kennessy. We have
reason to believe he may have information on these people.” She
reached inside her jacket and withdrew the photos. “A woman and her
boy.”
114
THEX-FILES
“If you come one step closer, you'll be into a minefield,” the bearded
man said. The other survivalists continued watching Mulder and
Scully with increased suspicion. “Just stay where you are.”
Mulder couldn’t imagine that the survivalists would let their dogs run
loose if there were really a minefield around the compound .. . but,
then again, it wasn’t completely inconceivable either. He didn’t feel
like arguing with this man.
“Who are they?” one of the women asked, also holding a high-
powered rifle. “Those two people you’re looking for?” She looked at
least as deadly as the men. “And why do you need to talk to Darin?”
Mulder kept his face impassive, not showing his excitement at
learning they had finally tracked down the brother of David Kennessy.
“The boy is the nephew of Darin Kennessy. He desperately needs
medical attention,” Scully said, raising her voice. “They have a black
Labrador dog. We saw your dog and thought it might be the one we
were looking for.”
The man with the beard laughed. “This is a spaniel, not a black Lab,”
he said.
“What happened to the boy’s dad?” the woman asked.
“He was recently killed,” Mulder said. “The laboratory where he
worked—the same place Darin worked—was destroyed in a fire. The
woman and the boy disappeared. We hoped they might have come
here, to be with you.”
“Why should we trust you?” the man with the beard asked. “You’re
probably the people Darin warned us about.”
“Go get Darin,” the woman yelled over her shoulder; then she looked
at the bearded man. “He’s the one who’s got to decide this. Besides,
we have plenty of firepower to take care of these two, if there’s
trouble.”
antibodies
115
“There won’t be any trouble,” Scully assured them. “We just need
some information.”
A lean man with bushy cinnamon-red hair climbed up the
underground stairs of one of the halfburied shacks. Uncertainly, he
came closer, approaching the bearded man and the angry-looking
woman.
“Tm Darin Kennessy, David’s brother. What is it you want?”
Shouting across the fence, Mulder and Scully briefly explained the
situation, and Darin Kennessy looked deeply disturbed. “You
suspected something beforehand, didn’t you—before DyMar was
destroyed and your brother was killed?” Mulder asked. “You left your
research many months ago and came out here . . . to hide?”
Darin became indignant. “I left my research for philosophical reasons.
I thought the technology was turning in a very alarming direction, and
I did not like some of the funding . . . sources my brother was using. I
wanted to separate myself from the work and the men associated with
it. Cut loose entirely.”
“We're trying to stay away from people like that,”
the man with the beard said. “We’re trying to stay away from
everything, build our own life here. We want to create a protected
place to live with caring neighbors, with strong families. We’re self-
sufficient. We don’t need any interference from people like you—
people who wear suits and ties.”
Mulder cocked his chin. “Did you folks by any chance read the
Unabomber Manifesto?”
Darin Kennessy scowled. “I’m as repelled by the Unabomber’s use of
bomb technology as I am by the atrocities of modern technology. But
not everything—
just one facet in particular. Nanotechnology.”
He waited for a beat. Mulder thought the rugged dress and homespun
appearance of the man shifted subtly, so he could see the highly
intelligent computer 116
THEX-FILES
chip researcher hiding beneath the disguise. “Very tiny self-replicating
machines small enough to work inside a human cell, versatile enough
to assemble just about anything . . . and smart enough to know what
they’re doing.”
Mulder looked at Scully. “Big things come in small packages.”
Darin’s eyes shone with fervor. “Because each nanomachine is so
small, it can move its parts very rapidly—think of a hummingbird’s
wings vibrating. A swarm of nanomachines could scour through a pile
of rubble or a tank of seawater and separate out every single atom of
gold, platinum, or silver and sort them into convenient bins, all in
total silence, with no waste and no unsightly mess.”
Scully’s brow furrowed. “And this was your DyMar work?”
“T started long before that,” Darin said. “But David and I took our
ideas in even more exciting directions. Inside a human body, nano-
scouts could do the same work as white corpuscles do in fighting
diseases, bacteria, and viruses. But unlike white corpuscles, these
nano-doctors can also inspect DNA strands, find any individual cell
that turns cancerous, then reprogram the DNA, fixing any errors and
mutations they find. What if we could succeed in creating
infinitesimal devices that can be injected into a body to act as
‘biological policemen’—submicroscopic robots that seek out and repair
damage on a cellular level?”
“A cure for cancer,” Mulder said.
“And everything else.”
Scully flashed him a somewhat skeptical look.
“Mr. Kennessy, ’ve read some speculative pieces in popular science
magazines, but certainly nothing that would suggest we are within
decades of having such a breakthrough in nanotechnology.”
“Progress is often closer than you think,” he said. antibodies
117
“Researchers at the University of Wisconsin used lithographic
techniques to produce a train of gears a tenth of a millimeter across.
Engineers at AT&T Bell Laboratories created semiconductors out of
clusters containing only six to twelve atoms at a time. Using scanning
tunneling microscopy, scientists at the IBM
Almaden Research Center drew a complete map of Earth’s western
hemisphere only a fiftieth the diameter of a human hair.”
“But there must be a limit to how small we can physically manipulate
tools and circuit paths,” Mulder said.
The dogs set up a louder barking, and the man with the beard went
over to shush them. Darin Kennessy frowned, distracted, as if torn by
his need to hide and deny all his technological breakthroughs and his
clear passion for the work he had abandoned.
“That’s only tackling the problem from one direction. Between David
and myself, we also started to build from the bottom up. Self-
assembly, the way nature does it. Researchers at Harvard have made
use of amino acids and proteins as templates for new structures
smaller than the size of a cell, for instance.
“With our combined expertise in silicon microminiaturization
techniques and biological self-assembly, we tried to match up those
advances to yield a sudden breakthrough.”
“And did you?”
“Maybe. It seemed to be working very well, up until the time I
abandoned it. I suspect my fool brother continued pushing, playing
with fire.”
“So why did you leave your research, if it was so promising?”
“There’s a dark side, Agent Mulder,” Darin continued, glancing over at
the other survivalists. “Mistakes happen. Researchers usually screw up
half a dozen times before they achieve success—it’s just part of the
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learning process. The question is, can we afford that learning process
with nanotechnology?”
The woman with the shotgun grumbled, but kept her direct comments
to herself.
“Just suppose one of our first nanomachines—a simple one, without
fail-safe programming—happens to escape from the lab,” Darin said.
“If this one goes about copying itself, and each copy builds more
copies, in about ten hours there would be sixty-eight billion
nanomachines. In less than two days, the runaway nanomachines
could take apart the entire Earth— working one molecule at a time! Two
days, from beginning to end. Think of the last time you saw any
government make a decision that fast, even in an emergency.”
No wonder Kennessy’s research was so threatening to people in well-
established circles of power, Mulder realized. No wonder they might
be trying to suppress it, at all costs.
“But you left DyMar before you reached a point where you could
release your findings?” Scully asked.
“Nobody was ever going to release our findings,”
Darin said, his voice dripping with scorn. “I knew it would never be
made available to society. David made noises about going public,
releasing the results of our first tests with lab rats and small animals,
but I always talked him out of it, and so did our assistant, Jeremy
Dorman.” He drew a deep breath. “I guess he must have come too
close, if those people felt they finally had to burn down the lab facility
and destroy all our records.”
“Patrice and Jody aren’t with you, are they?”
Scully said, confirming her suspicions. “Do you know where they
are?”
Darin snorted. “No, we went our separate ways. I haven’t spoken to
any of them since I came out here to join the camp.” He gestured to
the dogs, the guard antibodies
119
shacks, the razor wire. “This wouldn’t be scenic enough for them.”
“But you are Jody’s uncle,” Mulder said.
“The only person that kid spent time with was Jeremy Dorman. He
was the closest thing to a real uncle the boy had.”
“He was also killed in the DyMar fire,” Scully said.
“He was low man on the totem pole,” Darin Kennessy said, “but he
knew how to pull the business deals. He got us our initial funding and
kept it coming. When I left to come out here, I think he was perfectly
happy to step into my shoes, working with David.”
Darin frowned. “But I had nothing more to do with them, not then and
not now.” He seemed deeply troubled, as if the news of his brother’s
death was just now breaking through his consciousness. “We used to
be close, used to spend time out in the deep woods.”
“Where?” Mulder asked.
“Patrice designed a little cabin for me, just to get away from it all.”
Scully looked at Mulder, than at Darin. “Sir, could you tell us how we
could locate the cabin?”
Darin frowned again, looking skittish and uneasy.
“Tt’s up near Colvain, off on some winding fire roads.”
“Here’s my card,” Mulder said. “In case they do show up or you learn
anything.”
Darin frowned at him. “We don’t have any phones here.”
Scully grabbed Mulder’s sleeve. “Thank you for your time.”
“Be careful of the minefield,” the man with the beard warned.
“We'll watch our step,” Scully said.
Feeling tired and sweaty, Mulder was nonetheless excited by the
information they had learned. 120
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They made their way back through the thick woods past the dozens of
warning signs to where they had parked their car at the edge of the
road. Scully couldn’t believe how the survivalists lived.
“Some people will do anything to survive,” she muttered.
TWENTY
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Thursday, 11:47 P.M.
On hearing Jody’s cry, Patrice awoke from a X restless sleep. She sat
up in her narrow cot in the cabin’s single back bedroom, throwing
aside the musty-smelling blankets.
“Jody!”
The cabin was dark and too silent—until the dog woofed, once. She
blinked the disorientation of sleep away and brushed mussed
strawberry blond hair away from her eyes. She struggled free of the
last tangles of blankets, as if they were a restraining net trying to keep
her from the boy. He needed her. On her way to the main room, she
stumbled into an old wooden chair, hurt her foot as she kicked it
away, then plunged blindly ahead into the darkness.
“Jody!”
The moonlight gave just enough silvery light to guide her way once
she got her bearings. On the sofa in the main room, she saw her boy
lying in a sweat. The last embers of their fire in the hearth glowed
redorange, providing more wood smell than heat. After dark, no one
should have been able to see the smoke. 122
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For a moment the smoldering embers reminded her of the DyMar fire,
where her husband had died in the raging flames. She shuddered at
the thought, the reminder of the violence. David had been ambitious
and impulsive and perhaps he had taken ill-advised risks. But David
had believed passionately in his research, and he had tried to do his
best. Now he had died for his discoveries . . . and Jody had lost his
father.
Vader sat erect close to Jody, a black guardian snuffling the boy’s
chest in concern. Seeing Patrice, Vader’s tail thumped on the
hardwood floor next to where one of the pillows had fallen. The black
Lab pushed his muzzle into the blankets, whining. Jody moaned and
made another frightened sound. Patrice stopped, looking down at her
son. Vader stared back up with his liquid brown eyes, emitting
another whine, as if asking why she didn’t do anything. But she let
Jody sleep.
Nightmares again.
Several times in the past week, Jody had awakened in the isolated and
silent cabin, frightened and lost. Since the start of their desperate
flight, he’d had good reason for nightmares. But was it his fear that
brought on the dreams . . . or something else?
Patrice knelt down, and Vader squirmed with energy, pushing his nose
against her side, anxious for her to reassure him. She patted him on
the head, thumping hard, just the way he had always liked it.
“Its okay, Vader,” she said, attempting to soothe herself more than
the dog. With the flat of her palm, she touched Jody’s forehead,
feeling the heat. The boy stirred, and she wondered if she should wake
him. His body was a war zone, a cellular battlefield. Though David
had repeatedly denied what he had done, she knew full well what
caused the fever.
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123
Sometimes Patrice wondered if her son would be better off dead after
all—and then she hated herself for even thinking such things. .. .
Vader padded across the floor toward the fireplace, nosed around the
base of a faded overstuffed chair, and came back to Jody’s bedside
with a slobbersoggy tennis ball in his jaws. He wanted to play, as if
convinced that would make everything all right. Patrice frowned at
Vader, turning away from the sofa. “You’ve got so damned much
energy, you know that?”
Vader whined, then chewed on the tennis ball. She remembered
sitting at home in their living room, back in the old suburban house in
Tigard—now trashed and ransacked—with David. Jody, in extreme
pain from his cancer, had soaked in a hot, hot bath, taken his
prescription painkillers, and gone to bed early, leaving his parents
alone.
Vader didn’t want to settle down, though, and if his boy wouldn’t
play, then he would pester the adults. David halfheartedly played tug-
of-war with the black Lab, while Patrice watched with a mixture of
uneasiness and fascination. The family dog was twelve years old
already, the same age as Jody, and he shouldn’t have been nearly so
frisky.
“Vader’s like a puppy again,” Patrice said. Previously, the black Lab
had settled into a middleaged routine of sleeping most of the time,
except for a lot of licking and tail-wagging to greet them every day
when they came home. But lately the dog had been more energetic
and playful than he had been in years.
“I wonder what happened to him,” she said. David’s grin, his short
dark hair, and his heavy eyebrows made him look dashing. “Nothing.”
Patrice sat up and pulled her hand away from him. “Did you take
Vader into your lab again? What did you do to him?” She raised her
voice, and the 124
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words came out with cold anger. “What did you do to him!”
Vader dropped the pull-toy in his jaws, staring at her as if she had
gone insane. What business did she have yelling when they were
trying to play?
David looked at her, hard. He raised his eyebrows in an expression of
sincerity. “I didn’t do anything. Honest.”
With a woof, Vader lunged back with the pull-toy again, wagging his
tail and growling as he dug his paws into the carpet. David fought
back, leaning against the sofa to gain more leverage. “Just look at
him! How can you think anything’s wrong?”
But in their years of marriage, Patrice had learned one thing, and she
had learned to hate it. She could always tell when David was lying. . .
. Her husband had been focused on his research, bulldozing ahead and
ignoring regulations and restrictions. He didn’t consult with her on
many things, just barged along, doing what he insisted was right. That
was just the way David Kennessy did things. He had been too focused,
too involved in his work to take note of the suspicious occurrences at
DyMar until it was too late. She herself had noticed things, people
watching their house at night, keeping an eye on her when she was
out with David, odd clicks on the phone line . . . but David had
brushed her worries aside. Such a brilliant man, yet so oblivious. At
the last moment, at least, he had called her, warned her. She had
grabbed Jody and run, even as the protesters burned down the DyMar
facility, trapping her husband in the inferno with Jeremy; she barely
made it into hiding here with her son. Her healthy son. On the sofa,
Jody fell into a more restful sleep. His temperature remained high, but
Patrice knew she could do nothing about that. She tucked the blankets
around him again, brushed straight the sweat-sticky bangs across his
forehead.
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125
Vader let the tennis ball thump on the floor, giving up on the
possibility of play. With a heavy sigh, the dog turned three times in a
circle in front of the sofa, then slumped into a comfortable position,
guarding his boy. He let out a long, heavy animal sigh. Comforted by
the dog’s devotion, Patrice wandered back to her cot, glad she hadn’t
awakened her son after all. At least she hadn’t switched on any lights .
. . lights that could have been seen out in the darkness. Leaving Jody
to sleep, she lay awake in her own cot, alternately growing too hot,
then shivering. Patrice longed for rest, but she knew she couldn’t let
her guard down. Not for an instant.
With her eyes closed, Patrice quietly cursed her husband and listened
for sounds outside.
TWENTY-ONE
Mercy Hospital Morgue
Portland, Oregon
Friday, 5:09 A.M.
Edmund was amazed at how fast the officials X arrived, considering
that they supposedly came all the way from Atlanta, Georgia. Their
very demeanor unnerved him so much he didn’t dare question their
credentials. He was just glad that somebody seemed to believe his
story.
Edmund had sealed drawer 4E after the previous night’s incident and
lowered the temperature as far as it would go, though nobody showed
much interest in looking for the monsters that had given him the
willies. He was waiting to talk to his mentor Dr. Quinton, who was
busy analyzing the mucus specimen taken during the autopsy. He
expected the ME
any minute now, and then he would feel vindicated. But the officials
showed up first, three of them, non-descript but professional, with a
manner that made Edmund want to avert his eyes. They looked clean-
cut, well-dressed, but grim.
“We’re here from the Centers for Disease Control,”
one man said and ripped out a badge bearing a gold-antibodies 127
plated shield and a blurry ID photo. He folded the identification back
into his suit faster than Edmund could make out any of the words.
“The CDC?” he stammered. “Are you here for... ?”
“Its imperative that we confiscate the organic tissue you have stored
in your morgue refrigerator,” said the man on the left. “We
understand you had an incident yesterday.”
“We certainly did,” Edmund said. “Have you seen this sort of thing
before? I looked in all my medical books—”
“We have to destroy the specimen, just to be safe,”
said the man on the right. Edmund felt relieved to know that someone
was in charge, someone else could take care of it from here.
“We need to inspect all records you have regarding the victim, the
autopsy, and any specimens you might have kept,” the man in the
middle said. “We’re also going to take extreme precautions to sterilize
every inch of your morgue refrigerators.”
“Do you think I’m infected?” Edmund said.
“That’s highly unlikely, sir. You would have manifested symptoms
immediately.”
Edmund swallowed hard. But he knew his responsibilities.
“But—but I have to get approval,” he said. “The medical examiner has
explicit responsibility.”
“Yes, I do,” Frank Quinton said, walking into the morgue and scanning
the situation. The medical examiner’s grandfatherly face clouded over.
“What’s going on here?”
The man on the right spoke up. “I assure you, sir, we have the proper
authority here. This is a potential matter of national security and
public health. We are very concerned.”
“And so am I,” Quinton said. “Are you working with the other federal
agents who were here?”
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“This . . . phase of the operation is out of their jurisdiction, sir. This
outbreak poses an extreme danger without proper containment
procedures.”
The central man’s eyes were hard, and even the ME seemed
intimidated.
“Sir,” the first man said, “we need to get an entire team in here to
remove the . . . biomaterial from the refrigerator. We’ll inconvenience
you as little as possible.”
“Well, I suppose . . .” Quinton’s voice trailed off, sounding flustered as
the three CDC men quickly ushered them both out of the quiet and
clean room.
“Edmund, let’s go for a cup of coffee,” Quinton finally said, glancing
uneasily over his shoulder. Happy for the coroner’s invitation—he had
never been so lucky before—Edmund took the elevator and went to
the hospital cafeteria for a while, still trying to recover. He kept seeing
the many-tentacled creature trying to escape from the morgue
refrigerator drawer. Normally he would have had a thousand
questions for the ME, checking details, demonstrating all the trivia he
had learned from his midnight studies in the morgue. But Quinton sat
quiet and reticent, looking at his hands, deeply troubled. He took out
the card the FBI agents had given him previously, turning it over and
over in his hands.
When they returned to the basement level an hour later, they found
that the morgue had been scoured and sterilized. Drawer 4E had been
ripped out entirely, its contents taken away. The men had left no
receipt, no paperwork.
“We don’t have any way to contact them to find out their results,”
Edmund said.
But the medical examiner just shook his head.
“Maybe that’s for the best.”
TWENTY-TWO
The Devil’s Churn
Oregon Coast
Friday, 10:13 A.M.
The ocean crashed against the black cliffs X with a hollow booming
sound like boulders dropped from a great height. The breeze at the
scenic overlook whipped cold and salty and wet against Scully’s face.
“Tt’s called the Devil’s Churn,” Mulder had said, though Scully could
certainly read the OREGON STATE
SCENIC MARKER sign.
Below, the water turned milky in a frothing maelstrom as the breakers
slammed into a hollowed-out indentation in the cliff. Sea caves there
had collapsed, creating a sort of chute; as the waves struck the narrow
passage head-on, it funneled the force of the water and sprayed it into
a dramatic tower, like a water cannon blasting as high as the clifftops
above, drenching unwary sightseers.
According to the signs, dozens of people had died at this place:
unsuspecting tourists picking their way down to the mouth of the
Churn, caught standing in the wrong place when the unexpected
geyser of water exploded upward. Their bodies had been battered 130
THEX-FILES
against the algae-slick rocks or simply sucked out to sea.
Station wagons, minivans, and rental cars were parked in the scenic
area as families from out of state as well as locals came to stare down
at the sea. Obnoxious seagulls screamed overhead. A battered old
vending coach stood open with aluminum awnings rattling in the
breeze; a grinning man with a golf cap sold warmed-over hot dogs,
sour coffee, bagged chips, and canned soft drinks. On the other side of
the parking area, a woman with braids huddled in a down hunting
vest, watching her handmade rugs flap vigorously on a clothesline.
Fighting back a headache and drawing a deep breath of the cool, salty
breeze, Scully buttoned her coat to keep warm. Mulder went directly
over to the cliff edge, eagerly peering down and waiting for the water
to spray up. Scully withdrew her cell phone, glad to see that the signal
here was strong enough, at last. She punched in the buttons for the
Portland medical examiner.
“Ah, Agent Scully,” Dr. Quinton said, “I’ve been trying to call you all
morning.”
“Any results?” she asked. After seeing the slide of the dog’s
contaminated blood at the veterinarian’s, she had asked the medical
examiner to look at his own sample of the slimy mucus she had taken
during Vernon Ruckman’s autopsy.
By the unsteady-looking guardrail, Mulder watched in fascination as a
rooster tail of cold spray jetted into the air, curling up to the
precipice, and then raining back down into the sea. She gestured for
Mulder to come back to her as she pressed the phone tightly against
her ear, concentrating on the ME’s staticky words.
“Apparently something . . . unusual happened to the plague victim’s
body in the morgue refrigerator.”
Quinton seemed hesitant, at a loss for words. “Our antibodies
131
attendant reported hearing noises, something moving inside the sealed
drawer. And it’s been sealed since you left it.”
“That’s impossible,” Scully said. “The man couldn’t still be alive. Even
if the plague put him in some kind of extreme coma, I’d already
performed an autopsy.”
The ME said, “I know Edmund, and he’s not the skittish sort. A little
bit of a pest sometimes, but this isn’t the kind of story he would make
up. I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, but. . .” Quinton
hesitated again, and Scully pressed the phone closer to her ear,
straining to hear the undertone in his voice.
“Unfortunately, before I could check it out myself, some gentlemen
from the Centers for Disease Control came in and sterilized
everything. As a precaution, they took the entire refrigerator drawer.”
“From the CDC?” Scully said in disbelief. She had worked many times
with the CDC, and they were always consummate professionals,
following official procedures rigorously. This sounded like something
else entirely, some one else. Now she was even more concerned about
what she had learned earlier that morning when she called Atlanta to
check on the status of the sample she had personally sent in.
Apparently, their lab technician had lost the specimen.
Mulder came up to her, brushing his damp hair back, though the wind
continued to blow it around. He looked at her, raising his eyebrows.
She watched him as she spoke into the phone, keeping her voice
carefully neutral. “Dr. Quinton, you kept a sample of the substance for
your own analysis. Were you able to find anything?”
The ME pondered for a moment before answering. She heard static on
the line, clicking, a warbling background tone. They still must be at
the edge of reception 132
THEX-FILES
for cellular transmissions. “I think it’s an infestation of some kind,”
Quinton said finally. “Tiny flecks unlike anything I’ve seen before. The
sample is utterly clotted with them. Under highest magnification they
don’t look like any microorganism I’ve ever seen. Squarish little boxes,
cubes, geometrical shapes .. .”
Scully felt cold as she heard the ME’s words, echoing what Darin
Kennessy had told them at the survivalist camp.
“Have you ever seen anything like this, Agent Scully?” the ME
persisted on the phone. “You’re a doctor yourself.”
Scully cleared her throat. “I’ll have to get back to you on that, sir. Let
me speak with my partner and compare notes. Thanks for your
information.” She ended the call and then looked at Mulder. After she
briefly recounted the conversation, Mulder nodded. “They sure were
eager to get rid of the guard’s body. Every trace.”
Scully pondered as she listened to the roar of the ocean against the
rocks below. “That doesn’t sound like the way the Centers for Disease
Control operates. No official receipt, no phone number in case Dr.
Quinton has further information.”
Mulder buttoned his coat against the chilly breeze.
“Scully, I don’t think that was the CDC. I think it could well be
representatives from the same group that arranged for the destruction
of DyMar Laboratory and pinned the blame on a scapegoat animal
rights group.”
“Mulder, why would anyone be willing to take such extreme action?”
“You heard Kennessy’s brother. Nanotechnology research,” he said.
“Its gotten loose somehow, maybe from a research animal carrying
something very dangerous. The mucus from the dead security guard
sounds just like what we saw in the sample of the dog’s blood—”
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133
Scully put her hands on her hips as the sea wind whipped her red hair.
“Mulder, I think we need to find that dog, and Patrice and Jody
Kennessy.”
Behind them the Devil’s Churn erupted again with a loud booming
sound. Spray shot high into the air. A group of children stood next to
their parents at the guardrail and cheered and laughed at the
spectacle. No one seemed to be paying any attention to the food
vendor in his van or the braided woman with her handmade rugs.
“T agree, Scully—and after that report from the ME, I think maybe we
aren’t the only ones looking for them.”
TWENTY-THREE
Tillamook County
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 10:47 A.M.
The cold rain sheeted down, drenching him X and the roadside and
everything all around—but Jeremy Dorman’s other problems were far
worse than a bit of lousy weather. The external world was all bad data
to him now, irrelevant numbness. The forest of nerves inside him
provided enough pain for a world all its own.
His shoes and clothes were soaked, his skin gray and clammy—but
those discomforts were insignificant compared to the raging war
within his own cells. Slick patches of the protectant carrier fluid
coated his skin, swarming with the reproducing nanocritters. His
muscles trembled and vibrated, but he continued lifting his legs,
taking steps, moving along. Dorman’s brain seemed like a mere
passenger in his body now. It took a conscious effort to keep the joints
bending, the limbs moving, like a puppeteer working a complicated
new marionette while wearing a blindfold and thick gloves. A car
roared past him, spraying water. Its tires antibodies
135
struck a puddle in a depression in the road and jetted cold rainwater
all over him. The taillights flickered red for an instant as the driver
realized what he had done, and then, maliciously, the man honked a
few times and continued weaving down the road.
Dorman trudged along the muddy shoulder, uncaring. He focused
ahead. The long road curved into the wooded mountains. He had no
idea how many miles he had gone from Portland, but he hoped he
could find some way to hurry. He had no money and he didn’t dare
rent a car anyway, at the risk of someone spotting his identity. No one
knew he was still alive, and he wanted to keep it that way. Not that he
would trust his rebellious body or flickering depth perception if he
was driving...
He shambled past a small county weigh station, a little shack with a
gate and a red stoplight for trucks. Opaque miniblinds covered the
windows, and a sign that looked as if it hadn’t been changed in
months said, WEIGH STATION CLOSED.
As Dorman trudged past, he looked longingly at the shelter. It would
be unheated, with no food or supplies, but it would be dry. He longed
to get out of the rain for a while, to sleep . . . but he would likely
never wake up again. His time was rapidly running out. He continued
past the weigh station. Waterlogged potato fields sprawled in one
direction, with a marsh on the other side of the road. Dorman headed
toward the gentle uphill slope leading into the mountains. Strange and
unfathomable shapes skirled across his vision like static. The
nanocritters in his body were messing around with his optic nerves
again, fixing them, making improvements . . . or just toying with
them. He hadn’t been able to see colors for days. Dorman clenched his
jaws together, feeling the ache in his bones. He almost enjoyed the
ache—a real 136
THEX-FILES
pain, not a phantom side effect of having his body invaded by self-
programmed machines.
He picked up his pace, so focused on keeping himself moving forward
that he didn’t even hear the loud hum of the approaching truck.
The vehicle grew louder, a large log truck halfloaded with pine logs
whose bark had been splintered off and most of their large protruding
branches amputated. Dorman turned and looked at it, then stepped
farther to the side of the road. The driver flashed his headlights.
Dorman heard the engine growl as the trucker shifted down through
the gears. The air brakes sighed as the log truck came to a halt thirty
feet in front of Dorman.
He just stood and stared, unable to believe what had happened, what
a stroke of luck. This man was going to give him a ride. Dorman
hurried forward, squelching water from his shoes. He huddled his
arms around his chest.
The driver leaned over the seat and popped open the passenger door.
The rain continued to slash down, pelting the wet logs, steaming off
the truck’s warm grille.
Dorman grabbed the door handle and swung it open. His leg jittered
as he lifted it to step on the running board. Finally he gained his
balance and hauled himself up. He was dripping, exhausted, cold.
“Boy, you look miserable,” the truck driver said. He was short and
portly, with dirty-blond hair and blue eyes.
“I am miserable,” Dorman answered, surprised that his voice worked
so well.
“Well, then, be miserable inside the truck cab here. You got a place to
go—or just wandering?”
“Tve got a place to go,” Dorman said. “I’m just trying to get there.”
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137
“Well, you can ride with me until the Coast Highway turnoff. My
name’s Wayne—Wayne Hykaway.”
Dorman looked at him, suspicious. He didn’t want his identity known.
“Pm ... David,” he said. He slammed the truck’s door, shoving his
hands into the waterlogged pockets of his tattered jacket, hunched
over and huddling into himself. Hykaway had extended his hand but
quickly drew it back when it became obvious Dorman had no
intention of shaking it.
The interior of the cab was warm and humid. Heat blasted from the
vents. The windshield wipers slapped back and forth in an effort to
keep the view clear. News radio played across the speakers of a fartoo-
expensive sound system, crackling with static from poor reception out
here in the wilderness. The trucker wrestled with the stick shift and
rammed the vehicle into gear again. With a groan and a labor of its
engines, the log truck began to move forward along the wet road
uphill toward the trees. As the truck picked up speed, Dorman could
only think that he was growing closer to his destination every minute,
every mile. This man had no idea of the deadly risk he had just taken,
but Dorman had to think of his ultimate goal of finding Patrice and
Jody—
and the dog. Whatever the cost.
Dorman sat back, pressed against the door of the truck, trying to
ignore the guilt and fear. Water trickled down his face, and he blinked
it away. He maintained his view through the windshield, watching the
wipers tock back and forth. He tried to keep as far away from Wayne
Hykaway as possible. He didn’t dare let the man touch him. He
couldn’t risk the exposure another body would bring. The cordial
trucker switched off the talk radio and tried in vain to strike up a
conversation, but when Dorman proved reticent, he just began to talk
about 138
THEX-FILES
himself instead. He chatted about the books he liked to read, his
hobby of tai chi relaxation techniques, how he had once trained
unemployed people. Hykaway kept one hand on the steering wheel of
the mammoth logging truck, and with the other he fiddled with the
air vent controls, the heater. When he couldn’t think of anything to
say, he flicked on the radio again, tuning to a different station, then
switched it off in disgust.
Dorman concentrated on his body, turning his thoughts inward. He
could feel his skin crawling and squirming, his muscle growths
moving of their own accord. He pressed his elbows against his ribs,
feeling the clammy fabric of his jacket as well as the slick ooze of the
nanomachine carrier mucus that seeped out of his pores.
After fifteen minutes of Dorman’s trancelike silence, the trucker began
to glance at him sidelong, as if wondering what kind of psychopath he
had foolishly picked up.
Dorman avoided his gaze, staring out the side window—and then his
gut spasmed. He hunched over and clenched his hands to his stomach.
He hissed breath through his teeth. He felt something jerk beneath his
skin, like a mole burrowing through his rib cage.
“Hey, are you all right?” the trucker said.
“Yes,” Dorman answered, ripping the answer out of his voice box. He
squeezed hard enough until he could finally regain control over his
rebellious biological systems. He sucked in deep pounding breaths.
Finally the convulsions settled down again. Still, he felt his internal
organs moving, exploring their freedom, twitching in places that
should never have been able to move. It was like a roiling storm inside
of him.
Wayne Hykaway glanced at him again, then turned antibodies
139
back to concentrate on the wet road. He kept both hands gripped
white on the steering wheel.
Dorman remained seated in silence, huddled against the hard comfort
of the passenger-side door. A bit of slime began to pool on the seat
around him. He knew he could lose control again at any moment.
Every hour it got harder and harder. .. .
TWENTY-FOUR
Max’s General Store and Art Gallery
Colvain, Oregon
Friday, 12:01 P.M.
Scully was already tired of driving and glad X for the chance to stop
and ask a few more people if they recognized Patrice and Jody
Kennessy.
Mulder sat in the passenger seat, munching cheese curls from a bag in
his lap and dropping a few crumbs on his overcoat. He plastered his
face to the unfolded official road map of the state of Oregon.
“T can’t find this town on the map,” Mulder said.
“Colvain, Oregon.”
Scully parked in front of a quaint old shake-shingle house with a
hand-painted sign dangling on a chain on a post out front. MAX’S
GENERAL STORE AND ART
GALLERY.
“Mulder, we’re in the town and I can’t find it.”
The heavy wooden door of the general store advertised Morley
cigarettes; a bell on the top jingled as they entered the creaking
hardwood floor of Max’s.
“Of course they’d have a bell,” Mulder said, looking up. Old 1950s-
style coolers and refrigerators—enam-antibodies 141
eled white with chrome trim—held lunch meats, bottled soft drinks,
and frozen dinners. Boxes around the cash register displayed giant-size
Slim Jims and seemingly infinite varieties of beef jerky. T-shirts hung
on a rack beside shelves full of knickknacks, most made from sweet-
smelling cedar and painted with witty folk sayings related to the
soggy weather in Oregon. Shot glasses, placemats, playing cards, and
key chains rounded out the assortment. Scully saw a few simple
watercolor paintings hanging aslant on the far wall above a beer
cooler; price tags dangled from the gold-painted frames. “I wonder if
there’s some kind of county ordinance that requires each town to have
a certain number of art galleries,” she said. Behind the cash register,
an old woman sat barricaded by newspaper racks and wire trays that
held gum, candy, and breath mints. Her hair was dyed an outrageous
red, her glasses thick and smudged with fingerprints. She was reading
a well-thumbed tabloid with headlines proclaiming Bigfoot Found in
New Jersey, Alien Embryos Frozen in Government Facility, and even
Cannibal Cult in Arkansas.
Mulder looked at the headlines and raised his eyebrows at Scully. The
red-headed woman looked up over her glasses. “May I help you folks?
Do you need maps or sodas?”
Mulder flashed his badge and ID. “We’re federal agents, ma’am. We’re
wondering if you could give us directions to a cabin near here, some
property owned by a Mr. Darin Kennessy?”
Scully withdrew the much-handled Kennessy photos and spread them
on the counter. The woman hurriedly folded her tabloid and shoved it
beside the cash register. Through her smudged glasses, she peered
down at the photos.
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“We're looking for these two people,” Scully said, offering no further
information.
Jody Kennessy smiled optimistically up from the photograph, but his
face was gaunt and sunken, his hair mostly fallen out, his skin grayish
and sickly from the rigorous chemo and radiation treatments. The
woman removed her glasses and wiped them off with a Kleenex, then
put them on her face again.
“Yes, I think I’ve seen these two before. The woman at least. Been out
here a week or two.”
Mulder perked up. “Yes, that’s about the time frame were talking
about.”
Scully leaned forward, unable to stop herself from telling too many
details, so as to enlist the woman’s aid. “This young man is very
seriously ill. He’s dying of leukemia. He needs immediate treatment.
He may have gotten significantly worse since this photo was taken.”
The woman looked down at Jody’s photograph again. “Well, then,
maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “As I recall, the boy with this woman
seemed pretty healthy to me. They could be staying out at the
Kennessys’
cabin. It’s been empty a long time.”
The woman rocked back on her chair, which let out a metal squeal.
She pressed the thick glasses up against the bridge of her nose.
“Nothing much moves around here without us knowing about it.”
“Could you give us directions, ma’am?” Scully repeated.
The redheaded woman withdrew a pen, but didn’t bother to write
down directions. “About seven or eight miles back, you turn on a little
road called Locust Springs Drive, go about a quarter of a mile, turn
left on a logging road—it’s the third driveway on your right.” She
toyed with her strand of fake pearls.
“This is the best lead we’ve got so far,” Scully said softly, looking
eagerly at her partner. The thought of antibodies
143
rescuing Jody Kennessy, helping him out in his weakened state, gave
her new energy. As an FBI agent, Scully was supposed to maintain her
objectivity and not get emotionally involved in a case lest her
judgment be influenced. In this instance she couldn’t help it. She and
Jody Kennessy both shared the shadow of cancer, and the connection
to this boy she’d never met was too strong. Her desire to help him was
far more powerful than Scully had anticipated when she and Mulder
had left Washington to investigate the DyMar fire.
The bell on the door jingled again, and a state policeman strode in, his
boots heavy on the worn wooden floor of the general store. Scully
looked over her shoulders as the trooper walked casually over to the
soft drink cooler and grabbed a large bottle of orange soda.
“The usual, Jared?” the woman called from the cash register, already
ringing him up.
“Would I ever change, Maxie?” he answered, and she tossed him a
pack of artificially colored cheese crackers from the snack rack.
The policeman nodded politely to Mulder and Scully and noticed the
photographs as well as Mulder’s badge wallet. “Can I help you folks?”
“Were federal agents, sir,” Scully said. She picked up the photographs
to show him and asked for his assistance. Perhaps he could escort
them out to the isolated cabin where Patrice or Jody might be held
captive—but suddenly the radio at Jared’s hip squelched. A
dispatcher’s voice came over, sounding alarmed but brisk and
professional. “Jared, come in, please. We’ve got an emergency
situation here. A passing motorist found a dead body up the highway
about three quarters of a mile past Doyle’s property.”
The trooper grabbed his radio. “Officer Penwick here,” he said. “What
do you mean by a dead body?
What condition?”
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“A trucker,” the dispatcher answered. “His logging rig is half off the
road. The guy’s sprawled by the steering wheel, and . . . well, it’s
weird. Not like any accident injuries I’ve ever heard of.”
Mulder quickly looked at Scully, intrigued. They both understood that
this sounded remarkably like their own case. “You go ahead, Scully. I
can ride out to the location of the body with Officer, uh, Penwick here
and take a look around. If it’s nothing, Pll have him take me to the
cabin and meet up with you.”
Uneasy about being separated from him, but realizing that they had to
investigate both possibilities without delay, she nodded. “Make sure
you take appropriate precautions.”
“I will, Scully.” Mulder hurried for the door. The bell jangled as the
trooper left, clutching his cheese crackers and orange soda on one
hand as he sent off an acknowledgment on his walkie-talkie. He
glanced over his shoulder. “Put it on my tab, Maxie—
Pll catch you later.”
Scully hurried behind them, letting the jingling door swing shut.
Mulder and the trooper raced for his police vehicle, parked aslant in
front of the general store.
Mulder called back at her, “Just see if you can find them, Scully. Learn
what you can. I’ll contact you on the cell phone.”
The two car doors slammed, and with a spray of wet gravel the
highway patrolman spun around and raced up the road with his red
lights flashing. She returned to their rental car, grabbing her keys.
When she glanced down at the unit on the car seat, she finally noticed
to her dismay that her cellular phone wasn’t working. They were out
of range once more.
TWENTY-FIVE
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 12:58 P.M.
Outside the cabin, Vader barked. He stood X up on the porch and
paced, letting a low growl loose in his throat.
Patrice stiffened and hurried to the lace curtains. Her mouth went dry.
She had owned Vader for a dozen years, and she knew that this time
the dog was not making one of his puppy barks at a squirrel.
This was a bark of warning. She had been expecting something like
this. Dreading it. Outside, the trees girdling the hollow stood tall and
dark, claustrophobic around the hills that sheltered them. The rough
trunks seemed to have approached silently closer, like an implacable
army ... like the mob she had imagined surrounded DyMar. The
grassy, weed-filled clearing stirred in a faint breeze, laden with
moisture from the recent downpour. She had once thought of the
meadow as beautiful, a perfect set-piece to display the wilderness
cabin to best effect—a wonderful spot, Darin had said, and she had
shared his enthusiasm.
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THEX-FILES
Now, though, the broad clearing made her feel exposed and
vulnerable.
Vader barked again and stepped forward to the edge of the porch, his
muzzle pointed toward the driveway that plunged into the forest. His
black nostrils quivered.
“What is it, Mom?” Jody asked. From the drawn expression on his
face, she could tell he felt the fear as much as she did. In the past two
weeks she had trained him well enough.
“Someone’s coming,” she said.
Forcing bravery upon herself, she doused the lights inside the cabin,
let the curtains dangle shut, then swung open the front door to stand
guard on the porch. They had run here, gone to ground, without
preparation. She had to count on their hiding place, since she had no
gun, no other weapons. Patrice had ransacked the cabin, but Darin
had not believed in handguns. She had only her bare hands and her
ingenuity. Vader looked over his shoulder at her, then turned toward
the driveway again.
Jody crowded next to her, trying to see, but she pushed him back
inside. “Mom!” he said indignantly, but she pointed a scolding finger
at him, her face hard. He backed away quickly.
The mother’s protective instinct hung on her like a drug. She had been
helpless in the face of his cancer, she had been helpless when his
father was murdered by shadowy men pretending to be activists, the
same people who had tapped their phones, followed them, and might
even now be trying to track them down. But she had taken action to
get her son to safety, and she had kept him alive so far. Patrice
Kennessy had no intention of giving up now.
A figure appeared in the trees, approaching on foot down the long
driveway bordered by dark pines, coming closer, intent on the cabin.
antibodies
147
Patrice didn’t have time to run.
She had taken Jody out to the coastal wilderness because of its
abundance of survivalists, of religious cults and extremists—all of
whom knew how to be left alone. David’s own brother had joined one
such group, abandoning even this cabin to find deeper isolation, but
she hadn’t dared to go to Darin and ask for protection. The people
hunting them down would think to find David’s brother. She had to do
the unexpected. Now her mind raced, and she tried to think of even
the smallest misstep she might have made to tip off who she was and
where she and Jody were staying. Suddenly she remembered that the
last time she had gone into a grocery store, she had noticed the cover
of a weekly Oregon newspaper depicting the fenced-off and burned
ruins of DyMar Laboratory. Surprised, she had flinched and tried to
maintain her composure, cradling her groceries in front of the TV
Guide s and beef jerky strips and candy bars. The old woman with
shockingly dyed red hair had looked up at her from behind smeared
eyeglasses. No one, Patrice insisted to herself, would have put such a
coincidence together, would have taken note of a woman traveling
alone with her twelve-year-old son, would have connected all the
details.
Still, the clerk had stared at her too intently... .
“Who is it, Mom?” Jody asked in a stage whisper from the cold
fireplace. “Can you see?” Patrice was glad she hadn’t built a fire that
morning, because the telltale wisp of gray-white smoke would have
attracted even more attention.
They had made a plan for such a situation, that they would both try to
slip away unnoticed and vanish in the trees, hiding out in the wooded
hills. Jody knew the surrounding forest well enough. But this intruder
had taken them by surprise. He had come on 148
THEX-FILES
foot, with no telltale engine noise. And now neither of them had time
to run.
“Jody, you stay back there. Take Vader, go to the back door, and hide.
Be ready to run into the trees if you have to, but right now it’ll be a
tipoff.”
He blinked at her in alarm. “But I can’t leave you behind, Mom.”
“If I buy you some time, then you can get a head start. If they don’t
mean any harm, then you don’t have anything to worry about.” Her
face turned to stone, and Jody flushed as he realized what she meant.
She turned back to the door, squinting her eyes.
“Now keep yourself out of sight. Wait until the timing’s right.”
With a grim expression on her face, Patrice crossed her arms over her
chest and waited on her front porch to meet the approaching stranger.
The terror and urgency nearly paralyzed her. This was the moment of
confrontation she had dreaded ever since receiving David’s desperate
phone call. The figure was a broad-shouldered man walking with an
odd injured gait. He looked as if he had passed on foot through a car
wash with open cans of waste oil in his arms. He staggered toward the
cabin, but stopped dead in his tracks when he noticed her on the
porch.
Vader growled.
Even from a distance, Patrice could see his dark gaze turn toward her,
his eyes lock with hers. He had changed, his facial features distorted
somehow—but she recognized him. She felt a flood of relief, a
sensation she had not experienced in some time. A friend at last!
“Jeremy,” she said with a sigh. “Jeremy Dorman!”
TWENTY-SIX
Kennessys’ Cabin
Oregon Coast Range
Friday, 1:14 P.M.
“Patrice!” Dorman called in a hoarse voice, X then walked toward her
at an accelerated, somehow ominous pace.
She had bought newspapers from
unattended machines on shadowy street corners, and had read that
her husband’s lab partner had also perished in the DyMar fire,
murdered by the men who wanted to keep David’s nanotech research
from becoming public knowledge.
“Jeremy, are those men after you, too? How did you get away?”
The fact that Jeremy Dorman had somehow escaped gave her a flash
of hope that perhaps David might have survived as well. But she could
not grasp the thought; it slipped through her mental fingers. She had a
thousand questions for him, but most of all she was glad just to see a
familiar face, another person facing the same predicament as she was .
. . But something was very wrong about Jeremy’s presence here. He
had known to look for her and Jody in this cabin. She knew that
David had always talked 150
THEX-FILES
too much. Even his brother’s secret hideaway would never have been
a secret for long, after tedious hours of small talk in the laboratory,
David and Jeremy together. She was suddenly wary. “Were you
followed? If they come after us here, we don’t have any weapons—”
“Patrice,” he interrupted her, “I’m desperate. Please help me.” He
swallowed hard . . . and his throat continued to move far longer than
it should have. “I need to come inside.”
As he stepped closer, the burly man looked very sick, barely able to
move, as if suffering from a hundred ills. His skin had a strange, wet
cast—and not just from the misty moisture in the air, but with a kind
of slickness. Like slime.
“What happened to you, Jeremy?” She gestured toward the door,
wondering why she felt so uneasy. Dorman had spent a great deal of
time with her family, especially after Darin had abandoned the work
and fled to his survivalist camp. “You look awful.”
“T have a lot to explain, but not much time. Look at me, at the shape
I’m in. This is very important—do you have the dog here as well?”
She remained frozen in place; then it was all she could do to step
forward and grip the damp, mossy handrail. Why did he want to know
about Vader, hidden inside with Jody? Even though this was Jeremy,
Jeremy Dorman, she felt the need to be cautious.
“I want some answers first,” she said, not moving from the porch. He
stopped in his tracks, uncertain.
“How did you survive the fire at DyMar? We thought you were dead.”
“T was supposed to die there,” Dorman said, his voice heavy.
“What do you mean, you were supposed to die there? On the phone, in
his last message to me, David said the DyMar protest was some kind of
setup, that it wasn’t just animal rights people after all.”
antibodies
151
Dorman’s dark, hooded eyes bored into her. “I was betrayed, just like
David was.” He took two steps closer.
“What are you saying?” After what she had been through, Patrice
thought almost anything might sound believable by now.
Dorman nodded. “They had orders to make sure nothing would
survive, no record of our nanotechnology research. Only ashes.”
Patrice stood her ground, silently warning him not to approach closer.
“David said the conspiracy went much deeper in the government than
he had thought. I didn’t believe him until I went back to our house—
only to find it ransacked.”
Dorman lurched to a halt ten feet from the porch, stopping in the
weeds of the meadow. He walked away from the cleared driveway, on
the trampled path toward the door of the cabin. “They’re all after you
now, too, Patrice. We can help each other. But I need Vader. He
carries the stable prototypes in his bloodstream.”
“Prototypes? What are you talking about?”
“The nanotechnology prototypes. I had to use some of the defective
earlier generations, samples from the small lab animals, but many of
those exhibited shocking . . . anomalies. I didn’t have any choice,
though. The lab was on fire, everything was burning. I was supposed
to be able to get away, but this was the only way I could survive.” He
looked at her, pleading, then lowered his voice. “But they don’t work
the way they were supposed to. With Vader’s blood, there is a chance
I can reprogram them in myself.”
Her mind reeled. She knew what David had been working on, had
suspected something wrong with their black Lab.
“Where’s Jody?” Dorman said, peering past her to see through the
curtains or the half-closed door. “Hey, Jody! Come out here! It’s all
right.”
152
THEX-FILES
Jody had always looked at Dorman as a friend of his father’s, a
surrogate uncle—especially after Darin had left. They played video
games together; Jeremy was just about the only adult who knew as
many Nintendo 64 tricks as Jody did. They exchanged tips and
techniques for Wave Race, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Shadows of the
Empire.
Before Patrice could collect her thoughts, understand exactly where
the situation stood, Jody pulled open the cabin door, accompanied by
his black dog.
“Jeremy!”
Dorman looked down at Vader, delighted and relieved, but the dog
curled back his dark lips to expose fangs. The low growl sounded like
a chainsaw embedded in the dog’s throat, as if Vader had some kind of
grudge against Dorman.
But Dorman paid no attention. He was staring at Jody—healthy Jody
—in amazement. The skin on Dorman’s face blurred and shifted. He
winced, somehow forcing it back into place. “Jody, you’re . . . you’re
recovered from the cancer.”
2)
“Its a miracle,
remission.”
Patrice said stiffly. “Some kind of spontaneous
The sudden predatory expression on Dorman’s oddly glistening face
made a knot in her stomach. “No, it’s not a spontaneous remission. Is
it, Jody? My God, you have it, too.”
The boy paled, took a step backward.
“I know what your dad did to you.” For some odd reason, Dorman
kept his eyes fixed upon Jody and the dog.
Patrice looked at Jody in confusion, then an instant of dawning horror
as she realized the magnitude of what David had done, the risk he had
taken, the real reason why his brother had been so frightened of the
research. Jody’s recent good health was not the result of another
remission. All of David’s hard work and antibodies
153
manic commitment had paid off after all. He had found his cure for
cancer, without telling Patrice. But in the space of an indrawn breath,
her incredible joy and relief and lingering heartbreak tempered with
fear of Jeremy Dorman. Fear of his predatory glances at Jody, of his
unnaturally shifting features, his slipping control.
“This is even better than Vader.” Dorman’s dark eyes blazed, taking on
a distorted look. “I just need a sample of your son’s blood, Patrice.
Some of his blood. Not much.”
Shocked and confused, Patrice flinched, but stood defiantly on the
porch, not moving. She wasn’t going to let anyone touch her son. “His
blood? What on earth—”
“T don’t have time to explain to you, Patrice. I didn’t know they meant
to kill David! They were staging the protest, they meant to burn the
place down, but they were going to move the research to a more
isolated establishment.” His face contorted with anger.
“I was supposed to be their lead researcher in the new facility, but
they tried to murder me, too!”
Patrice’s mind reeled; her perception of reality was being assaulted
from too many directions at once.
“You knew all along they intended to burn the place down? You were
part of the conspiracy.”
“No, I didn’t mean that! It was all supposed to be under control. They
lied to me, too.”
“You let David be killed, you bastard. You wanted the credit, wanted
his research.”
“Patrice . . . Jody, Pll die without your help. Right now.” Dorman
strode toward the porch with great speed, but Patrice moved to block
his path.
“Jody, get back in the cabin—right now. We can’t trust him! He
betrayed your father!” Her voice was ice cold, and the boy was
already frightened. He quickly moved to do as she asked.
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THEX-FILES
Dorman stopped five feet away, glowering at her.
“Don’t do this. You don’t understand.”
“T know I’ve got to protect my son, after all he’s been through. You’re
probably still working for those men, hunting us. I’m not letting you
near him.” She held her fists at her sides, ready to tear this man apart
with her bare hands. “Jody, go out and hide in the forest! You know
where to go, just like we planned before,” she shouted into the gap of
the half-open door. “Go!”
Something squirmed beneath Dorman’s chest. He hunched over,
covering his stomach and his ribs. Finally, he rose up with his eyes
glassy and painstricken. “I can’t... wait . . . any longer, Patrice.” He
swayed in his step, coming closer.
In the back of the cabin, the rear door banged shut. Jody had run
outside, making a beeline for the forest. Inside, she thanked her son
for not arguing. She had feared he would side with Jeremy and want
to help the man.
Vader bounded around the side of the cabin after Jody, barking.
Dismissing Patrice, Dorman turned toward the back. “Jody! Come
here to me, boy!” He trudged away from the porch over to the side of
the cabin. Patrice felt an animal scream build within her throat. “You
leave my boy alone!”
Dorman spun about and withdrew a revolver from his pants pocket.
He gripped it with unsteady hands, holding it in front of her
disbelieving gaze.
“You don’t know what yow’re doing, Patrice,” he said.
“You don’t know anything about what’s going on. I can just shoot the
dog—or Jody—and get the blood I need. Maybe that would be easiest
after all.”
His muscle control was sporadic, though, and he could not keep a
steady bead on her. Patrice could not believe he would shoot her
anyway. Not Jeremy Dorman.
antibodies
155
With an outcry, she vaulted over the porch railing, throwing herself in
a battering-ram tackle toward Dorman.
As he saw her charging him, he flinched backward with a look of
horror on his face. “No! Don’t touch me!”
Then she plowed into him, knocking his gun away and driving the
man to the ground. “Jody, run! Keep running!” she screamed.
Dorman thrashed and writhed, trying to kick her away. “No, Patrice!
Stay away. Stay away from me!”
But she fought with him, clawing, pummeling. His skin was slick and
slimy...
Without a word, Jody and the dog raced into the forest.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 1:26 P.M.
The dense trees clawed at him. Their
X branches scratched his face, tugged his hair, grabbed his shirt—but
Jody kept sprinting anyway. The last words he heard were his
mother’s desperate shout. “Jody, run! Keep running!”
Over the past two weeks Patrice had drilled into him her fear and
paranoia. They had made contingency plans. Jody knew full well that
people were after them, powerful and deadly people. Someone had
betrayed his father, burned down the whole laboratory facility. He
and his mother had driven away into the night, sleeping in their car
parked off the road, going from place to place before finally arriving
at the cabin. Again and again his mother had pounded into him that
they must trust no one—and now it appeared that she might even
have meant Jeremy Dorman himself. Jeremy, who had been like an
uncle to him, who had played with him whenever he and his father
could tear themselves away from work.
antibodies
157
Now Jody didn’t think; he just responded. He ran out the back door,
across the meadow to the trees. Vader bounded into the fringe of
pines ahead of him, barking as if scouting a safe path.
The cabin quickly fell behind, and Jody turned abruptly left, heading
uphill. He hopped over a fallen tree, crunching broken branches and
plowing through thick, thorny shrubs. Vines grabbed at the toes of his
shoes, but Jody kept stumbling along. He had explored these back
woods in the last few weeks. His mother had hovered over him,
making sure he didn’t get into trouble or stray too far away, but still
Jody had found time to poke around in the trees. He understood
where he was supposed to go, how best to elude pursuit. He knew his
way. He knew a few of the secret spots in the forest, but he didn’t
remember a hiding place that would be good enough or safe enough.
His mother had told him to keep running, and he couldn’t let her
down.
If I buy you some time, then you can get a head start, she had said.
“Jody, wait!” It was Jeremy Dorman’s voice, but it carried a strange
and strangled undertone. “Hey, Jody—it’s okay. I’m not going to hurt
you.”
Jody hesitated, then kept pushing ahead. Vader barked loudly and
dashed under another fallen tree, then bounded up a rocky slope. Jody
scrambled after him.
“Come here, boy. I need to talk to you,” Dorman called from far back,
near the cabin. Jody knew the man had just ducked into the trees,
following him. He paused for a moment, panting. His joints still ached
sometimes with the strange tingly feeling, as if parts of his body had
gone to sleep—but this discomfort was nothing like what he had
experienced before, when the leukemia was at its worst, when he had
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THEX-FILES
estly felt like dying just to stop the bone-deep ache. Now Jody felt
healthy enough to go through with this effort—but he didn’t want to
keep it up for long. His skin crawled, and sweat prickled on his back,
on his neck.
He heard Dorman lumbering through the trees, crashing branches
aside, alarmingly close. How could the man have moved so fast?
“Your mother wants to see you. She’s waiting back at the cabin.”
Jody hurried down a slope into a small gully where a stream trickled
over rocks and fallen branches. Two days ago, as a game, he had
skipped and hopped from stone to tree trunk to outcropping, crossing
the stream and daring himself not to fall. Now the boy ran as fast as
he could. Halfway across he slipped on a moss-covered boulder, and
his right foot plunged into the icy water that chuckled along the
banks.
He hissed in surprise, yanked his dripping foot back out of the stream,
and continued across the stream. His mom had always warned him
against getting his shoes wet . . . but right now Jody knew simple
escape was much more important, was worth any sort of risk.
Dorman shouted again, “Jody, come here.” He seemed a little more
angry, his words sharper. “Come on, please. Only you can help me.
Hey, Jody, I’m begging you!”
With his shoe soggy, Jody climbed back onto the bank. He heaved a
deep breath to keep running. Grabbing a pine branch and getting
sticky resin on his palm, he used it to haul himself up out of the gully
to more level ground so he could run again. He had a stitch in his
side, which sent a sharp pain around his kidneys, his stomach, but he
pressed his hand against the ache so he could keep fleeing. Jody didn’t
understand what was going on, but he trusted antibodies
159
his fear, and he trusted his mother’s warning. He vowed not to let
Jeremy Dorman catch him. He paused in his tracks, gasping beside a
tree as he listened intently for further pursuit. Down the slope on the
other side of the stream, he saw the heavy form of Jeremy Dorman
and his tattered shirt. Their eyes met from across the great distance in
the shadowy forest. Seeing a complete stranger behind Jeremy’s eyes,
Jody ran with redoubled effort. His heart pounded, and his breath
came in great gasps. He dove through clawing bushes that held him
back. Behind him, Dorman had no difficulty charging through the
underbrush. Jody scrambled up a slope, slipping on loose wet leaves.
He knew he couldn’t keep up this incredible effort for long. Dorman
didn’t seem to be slowing at all.
He ran to a small gully, thick with deadfall and lichen-mottled
sandstone outcroppings. The trees and shadows stood thick enough
around him that he knew Dorman couldn’t see him, and he had a
chance to duck down in a damp animal hollow between a rotting tree
stump and a cracked boulder. Twigs, vines, and underbrush crackled
as he tried to huddle in the shelter.
He sat in silence, his lungs laboring, his pulse hammering. He listened
for the man’s approach. He had heard nothing at all from his mother,
and he feared she might be hurt back at the cabin. What had Dorman
done to her, what had she sacrificed so that he could get away?
Heavy footsteps crunched on the forest floor, but the man had stopped
calling out now. Jody remembered playing chase games on his
Nintendo system, how he and Jeremy Dorman would be opponents in
death-defying races across the country or on alien landscapes.
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THEX-FILES
But this was real, with a lot more at stake than a mere highest score.
Dorman came closer, pushing shrubs away, looking through the forest
murk. Jody sat in tense silence, praying that his hiding place would
remain secure. In the distance Vader barked, and Dorman paused,
then turned in a different direction. Jody saw his chance and
attempted to slip away, but as he moved one of the fallen branches
aside, a precariously balanced log crunched down into the brittle
deadwood. Dorman froze again, and then came charging toward
Jody’s hiding place.
The boy ducked down under the fallen trunk again, scuttled along
next to the slick rock, and wormed his way out the other side of the
gully. He stood up and raced off again, keeping his head low, pushing
branches out of the way as Dorman yelled at him, fighting through the
front of the thicket. Jody risked a glance over his should to see how
close his pursuer had come.
Dorman reached up with a meaty hand, pointing toward him. Jody
recognized a handgun at the same moment he saw a blaze of light
flare from its muzzle. A loud crack echoed through the forest. A chunk
of splintered bark and wood exploded away from the pine tree only
two feet above his head. Dorman had shot at him!
“Come here right now, dammit!” Dorman yelled. Biting back an
outcry, Jody scrambled away into the thick underbrush behind the
tree that had protected him. Through the forest murk, he heard Vader
barking, whining as if in encouragement. Jody trusted his dog a lot
more than he would ever trust Jeremy Dorman. Jody ran off again,
holding his side. His head pounded, his heart ran like a race car
engine. antibodies
161
Back behind him, Dorman sloshed across the cold stream, not even
trying to use the stepping stones.
“Jody, come here!”
Jody fled desperately toward the sound of the barking dog—and, he
hoped, safety.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Rural Oregon
Friday, 1:03 P.M.
The logging truck sat half off the road in a X shallow ditch, its cab
tilted at an odd angle like a metallic behemoth with a broken back.
As they drove up in the police cruiser, Mulder could tell instantly that
something was wrong. This was more than a standard traffic accident.
A red Ford pickup sat parked on the shoulder beside the logging truck,
and a man with a plastic rain poncho climbed out of the driver’s side
as Officer Jared Penwick pulled to a halt.
Studying the scene, Mulder spotted sinuous tire marks in the wet
grass. The logging truck had weaved back and forth out of control
before grinding to a stop here. A few raindrops spattered the police
cruiser’s windshield, and Jared left the wipers streaking back and
forth. He picked up his handset, clicked the transmit button, and
reported in to the dispatcher that they had arrived at the scene.
The man in the pickup truck waited beside his vehicle, hunched over
in the plastic slicker as the antibodies
163
trooper crunched toward him. Mulder followed, pulling his topcoat
closed to keep himself warm. The wind and the rain mussed his hair,
but there was nothing he could do about it.
“You didn’t touch anything in there did you, Dominic?” Jared said.
“Pm not going near that thing,” the man in the pickup answered with
a suspicious glance at Mulder.
“That guy in there is gross.”
“This is Agent Mulder of the FBI,” Jared said.
“T was just driving down the road,” Dominic said, still keeping his eyes
on Mulder, until he flicked his gaze toward the tilted log truck. “When
I saw that truck there, I thought the driver maybe lost control in the
rain. Either that, or sometimes truckers just pull off the road and sleep
—not too much traffic on this stretch, you know—but it was
dangerous the way he had parked. Didn’t have an orange triangle set
up around the back of the truck bed, like he should. I was going to
chew his ass.”
Dominic flicked rainwater away from his face before shaking his head.
He swallowed hard. “But then I got a look inside the cab. My God,
never seen anything like that.”
Mulder left Jared to stand with the pickup owner as he went over to
the logging truck. He held the driver’s-side door handle and cautiously
raised himself up by stepping on the running board. Inside the cab,
the driver of the truck sprawled back with his arms akimbo, his legs
jammed up, and his knees wedged behind the steering wheel like a
cockroach that had been sprayed with an exterminator’s poison. The
pudgy man’s face was contorted and swollen with lumps, his jaw
slack. The whites of his eyes were gray and smoky, laced with red
lines of worse-thanbloodshot veins. Purplish-black blotches stood out
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THEX-FILES
leopard spots all over his skin, as if a miniaturized bombing raid had
taken place in his vascular system. The truck window was tightly
rolled up. The rain continued to trickle off the slanted roof of the cab
and down the passenger-side window. From inside, the windshield
was fogged in some places. Mulder thought he saw faint steam rising
from the body. Still balanced on the running board, he turned back to
the state trooper, who stood looking at him curiously. “Can you run
the plates and registration?”
Mulder asked. “See if you can find out who this guy was and where he
might have been going.”
It made Mulder very uneasy to see another hideous death so close to
the possible location of Patrice and Jody Kennessy—so close to where
Scully had gone to look for them.
The trooper came forward and took his turn peering through the
driver’s-side window, as if it were a circus peep show. “That’s
disgusting,” he said. “What happened to the guy?”
“No one should touch the body until we can get some more help out
here,” Mulder said briskly. “The medical examiner in Portland has
dealt with this before. He should probably be called in, since he’ll
know how to handle this.”
The trooper hesitated, as if he wanted to ask a dozen more questions,
but instead he trotted back to talk on his radio.
Mulder walked around the front of the truck, saw how the cab had
shifted to the right, nearly jackknifing the vehicle. The splintered logs
were still securely fastened by chains to the long truck bed. If the
driver had gone into convulsions and swerved the heavy vehicle off
the road, luckily his foot had slipped from the accelerator. The log
truck had come to a stop on this rise without careening into a tree or
crashing over a steeper embankment. antibodies
165
Mulder stared at the grille of the truck as the rain picked up again.
Trickles of water slithered down his back, and he shrugged his
shoulders, pulling up the collar of his topcoat in an effort to keep
himself a little drier.
Mulder continued walking around the truck, descending into the
ditch. His shoes splashed in the water, and the weeds danced along his
pant cuffs. Once he got completely drenched, he supposed, it wouldn’t
matter if the rain got any heavier. Then he saw that the log truck’s
passenger door hung ajar.
He froze, suddenly considering possibilities. What if someone else had
been in the truck, a passenger—
someone with the driver, maybe even a hitchhiker?
The carrier of this lethal biological agent?
Mulder walked carefully over to the open door, glancing behind him
into the close trees, the tall weeds, wondering if he would see another
corpse, the body of a passenger who had undergone similar
convulsions but managed to stagger away and collapse outside.
But he saw nothing. The rain began to sheet down harder.
“What did you find, Agent Mulder?” the trooper called.
“Still checking,” he said. “Stay where you are.”
The trooper called out again. “I’ve got the Portland ME and some
other local law enforcement on their way. We’ll have a real party
scene here in a little while.” Then, happy to let Mulder continue his
business, Officer Penwick turned back to chat with the pickup driver.
Mulder carefully opened the heavy passengerside door, and the metal
swung out with a groan of hinges. He stepped back to peer inside. The
dead trucker looked even more bent and 166
THEX-FILES
twisted from this perspective. Condensed steam had formed a halo
across the windshield and the driver’sside door. The air smelled
humid, but without the sour sharpness of death. The body hadn’t been
here for long, despite its horrible condition. The passenger seat
interested Mulder the most, though. He saw threads and tatters of
cloth from a shirt that had been split or torn. Runnels of a strange
translucent sticky substance clung to the fabric of the seat. A kind of
congealed . . . slime, similar to what Mulder had seen on the dead
security guard. He swallowed hard, not wanting to get any closer,
careful not to touch anything. This was indeed the same thing they
had encountered before at the morgue. Mulder was sure this strange
toxin, this lethal agent, was the result of Kennessy’s renegade work.
Perhaps the unfortunate trucker had picked up someone and had
become infected in close quarters. After the truck had crashed and the
driver had died, the mysterious passenger had slipped away and
escaped. But where would he go?
Mulder saw a square of something like paper lying in the footwell
beneath the passenger seat. At first he thought it was a candy wrapper
or some kind of label, but then he realized it was a photograph, bent
and half-hidden in the shadow of the seat. Mulder withdrew a pen
from his pocket and leaned forward, still careful not to touch any of
the slimy residue. It was risky, but he felt a growing sense of urgency.
Extending the pen, he reached in and drew the bent photo toward
him. The edges were surrounded by other threads, as if the photo had
fallen out of a shirt pocket during some sort of violent struggle. He
used the pen to flip over the photograph. It was a picture Mulder had
not seen before, but he certainly antibodies
167
recognized the faces of the woman and the young boy. He had seen
them often enough in the past few days, had shown other photos to
hundreds of people in their search for Patrice and Jody.
That meant whoever had been a passenger here in the truck, whoever
had carried the nanotech plague, was also on his way, also connected
to the woman and her son.
Headed to the same place Scully had gone. Mulder tossed the pen into
the truck, not daring to put it back in his pocket. As he hurried back
around to the road, the trooper called to him from his patrol car,
waving him over. “Agent Mulder!”
Mulder stepped away from the truck, wet and cold, feeling a deeper
tension now. Distracted, Mulder went to see what Officer Penwick
wanted.
“There’s a truck weigh station a few miles back on this road. It’s rarely
open, but they have Highway Patrol surveillance cameras that operate
automatically. I had somebody run them back a few hours to see if we
could grab an image of this truck passing.” Penwick smiled, and
Mulder nodded at the man’s good thinking. “That way we can at least
establish a solid time frame.”
“Did you find anything?” Mulder asked. The trooper smiled. “Two
images. One, we got the log truck barreling past—10:52 A.M. And a
few minutes before that, we caught a man walking past. Very little
traffic on the road.”
“Can we get a video grab?” Mulder said eagerly, sliding into the front
seat of the patrol car, looking down at the small screen mounted
below the dash for their crime computer linkups.
“I thought you might want that,” Penwick said, fiddling with the
keypad. “I just had it up here . . . ah, there we go.”
The first image showed the log truck heading down the road,
obviously the same vehicle now 168
THEX-FILES
stalled in the ditch. The digital time code on the bottom of the picture
verified what the trooper had said. But Mulder was more interested in
something else. “Let me see the hitchhiker, the other man.” His brows
knitted as he tried to think of other possibilities. If the nanotechnology
pathogen was as lethal as he suspected, the trucker wouldn’t have
lasted long in close quarters with it.
The new image was somewhat blurry, but showed a man walking on
the muddy shoulder, seemingly impervious to the rain. He looked
directly at the camera, at the weigh station, as if longing to stop there
and take shelter, but then he walked on.
Mulder had seen enough, though. He had looked at the file pictures,
the DyMar background dossiers, the photos of the two researchers
supposedly killed in the devastating fire.
It was Jeremy Dorman—David Kennessy’s assistant. He was still alive.
And if Dorman had been exposed to something at DyMar, he was even
now carrying a substance that had already killed at least two people.
He slid out of the front of the patrol car, looking urgently at the
trooper. “Officer Penwick, you have to stay here and protect the
scene. This is a highly hazardous place. Do not let anyone go near the
body or even inside the cab of the truck without proper
decontamination equipment.”
“Sure, Agent Mulder,” the trooper said. “But where will you be?”
Mulder turned toward Dominic. “Sir, ’m a federal agent. I need the
use of your vehicle.”
“My truck?” Dominic said.
“T need to reach my partner. I’m afraid she may be in grave danger.”
Before Dominic could argue with him, Mulder opened the door of the
Ford pickup and extended his left hand. “The keys, please.”
antibodies
169
Dominic looked questioningly over at the state trooper, but Officer
Penwick simply shrugged. “I’ve seen his ID. He is who he says.” Then
the trooper tucked his hat down against the rain. “Don’t worry,
Dominic. Pll give you a ride home.”
The pickup driver frowned, as if this hadn’t been the part that
concerned him at all. Mulder slammed the door, and the old engine
started with a comforting roar. He wrestled with the stick shift, trying
to remember how to apply the clutch and nudge the gas pedal.
“You take good care of my truck!” Dominic yelled. “I don’t want to
waste time messing with insurance companies.”
Mulder pushed down hard on the accelerator, hoping he would reach
Scully in time.
TWENTY-NINE
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 1:45 P.M.
Scully became disoriented on the winding X dirt logging roads, but
after making a cautious Y-turn on the narrow track, she finally found
the driveway as described by Maxie at the general store and art
gallery. She saw no mailbox, only a metal reflector post that bore a
cryptic number designating a specific plot for fire control or trash
pickup. It was just a nondescript private road chewed through the
dense underbrush, climbing over a rise and vanishing somewhere back
into a secluded hollow. This was it, though—the place where Patrice
and Jody Kennessy had supposedly been taken, or gone into hiding.
Scully drove down the driveway as quickly as she dared through mud
puddles and over bumps. Up the rise on either side of her, the forest
seemed too close. Branches ticked and scraped along the sideview
mirrors. She accelerated over a large bump, some longburied log, and
reached the top of the rise. The bottom of the car scraped on the
gravel as she headed down antibodies
171
the slope. Ahead of her, in a cleared meadow surrounded on all sides
by dense trees, sat a single isolated cabin. A perfect place for hiding.
This modest, rugged home seemed even more out of the way and
invisible than the survivalist outpost she and Mulder had visited the
day before. She drove forward cautiously, noticing a muddy car
parked to one side of the cabin, where a corrugated metal overhang
protected it from the rain. The car was a Volvo, the type a yuppie
medical researcher would have driven—not the old pickup or sport
utility vehicle a regular inhabitant of these mountains would have
purchased.
Her heart raced. This place felt right: isolated, quiet, ominous. She
had come miles from the nearest assistance, miles from reliable phone
reception. Anyone could hide out here, and anything could happen.
She eased the car to a stop in front of the cabin and waited for a few
moments. This was a dangerous situation. She was approaching alone
with no backup. She had no way of knowing whether Patrice and Jody
were hiding voluntarily, or if someone held them hostage here,
someone with weapons.
As Scully stepped out of the car, her head pounded. She paused for a
moment as colors flashed before her eyes, but then with a deep breath
she calmed herself and slammed the car door. “Hello?”
She wasn’t approaching in secret. Anyone who lived in this cabin
would have heard her approach, perhaps even before her car topped
the rise. She couldn’t be stealthy. She had to be apparent. Scully stood
beside the car for a few seconds, waiting. She withdrew her ID wallet
with her left hand and kept her right hand on the Sig Sauer handgun
on her hip. She was ready for anything.
Most of all, though, she just wanted to see Jody and make sure he got
the medical attention he needed. 172
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“Hello? Anybody there?” Scully called, speaking loudly enough to be
heard by anyone inside the house. She took two steps away from the
car. The cabin seemed like a haunted house. Its windows were dark,
some covered with drapes. Nothing stirred inside. She heard no
sounds from within . . . but the door was ajar.
Beside the door she saw a fresh gouge in the wood siding, pale
splinters . . . the mark from a small-caliber bullet.
Scully stepped up onto the slick wooden porch.
“Anybody home?” she said again. “I’m a federal agent.”
As she hesitated in front of the door, though, Scully looked to her left
and spotted a figure in the tall grass beside the cabin. A human figure,
lying still. Scully froze, all senses alert, then approached to the edge of
the porch, peering over the railing. It was a woman, sprawled on her
chest in the tall grass. Scully rushed back down the steps, then pulled
herself to a halt as she looked down at a woman she recognized as
Patrice Kennessy, with strawberry blond hair and narrow features—
but the resemblance ended there. Scully recalled the smiling woman
whose photo she had looked at so many times—her husband a
wellknown and talented researcher, her son laughing and happy
before the leukemia had struck him. But Patrice Kennessy was no
longer vivacious, no longer even on the run to protect her son. Now
she lay twisted in the meadow, her head turned toward Scully and her
expression grim and desperate even in death. Her skin was blotched
with numerous hemorrhages from subcutaneous damage, distorted
with wild growths in all shapes and sizes. Her eyes were squeezed
shut, and Scully saw tiny maps of blood on the lids. Her hands were
outstretched like claws, as if she had died while fighting tooth and
nail against something horrible.
antibodies
173
Scully stood stricken. She had arrived too late. She moved back,
knowing not to approach or touch the possibly contagious body.
Patrice was already dead. Now the only thing that remained was to
find Jody and keep him safe—unless something had already happened
to him.
She listened to the wind whispering through the tall pines, a shushing
sound as needles scraped against each other. The clouds overhead
were thick with the constant threat of rain. She heard a few birds and
other forest sounds, but the silence and abandonment of the place
seemed oppressive, surrounding her. Then she heard a dog bark off in
the forest, a sharp excited sound—and a moment later came the
distinctive crack of a gunshot.
“Come here right now, dammit!” She heard the words, a voice
flattened by distance, made gruff with a threat. “Jody, come here!”
Scully drew her handgun and advanced toward the forest, following
the sound of voices. Jody was still out here, running for his life—and a
man who must have carried the plague, the man who had exposed
Patrice Kennessy, was now after the boy. Scully had to catch him first.
She ran toward the forest.
THIRTY
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 1:59 P.M.
No matter how far Jody ran, Dorman folX lowed. The only shelter he
could think of was the cabin, endlessly far back through the trees. The
small building was not much of an island of safety, but he could think
of no better place to go. At least there he could find some crude
weapons, something with which to fight back.
His mother was resourceful, and Jody could be, too. He had learned a
lot from her in the past weeks. Jody circled through the trees in a long
arc, looping around the meadow and approaching from the rear.
Vader continued to bark in the trees, sometimes running close to Jody
and then bounding off, as if ready to hunt or play. Jody wondered if
the black Lab thought it was all some kind of game.
He continued stumbling along, his legs aching as if sharp metal pins
had been inserted into his knees. His side was aflame with pain. His
face had been scratched by sharp branches and whipping pine needles,
but he paid no attention to the minor injuries; antibodies
175
they would fade quickly. His throat was dry, and he couldn’t draw in
enough breath.
As quietly as he could move, he stumbled along without trails,
without guidance, but after weeks of nothing to do but play in the
woods, he knew how to find the cabin. Vader would follow him.
Together they could get out of this, and his mother . . . if she was still
safe. From above, Jody could see the small building and the meadow
ahead. He’d come farther than he had thought, but now he could see
another car in the driveway. A strange vehicle.
He felt a rush of cold fear. Someone else had tracked him down! One
of those others his mother had warned him about. Even if he
succeeded in outsmarting Jeremy Dorman and escaping back to the
cabin, would others be waiting there for him? Or did they mean to
help? He had no way of knowing.
But right now his greatest fear was much closer at hand.
Dorman continued to charge after him like a truck, plowing through
the trees and underbrush, closing the gap. Jody couldn’t believe how
fast the broad-shouldered man was moving, especially because the big
lab assistant did not look at all healthy.
“Jody, please! I won’t hurt you if you just let me talk to you for a
second.”
Jody didn’t waste his breath answering. He ran back, arrowing toward
the cabin, but abruptly came to a steep slope where a mudslide had
sheared off the gentle hillside. Two enormous trees had uprooted,
tumbling down and leaving a gash in the dirt like an open wound.
Jody didn’t have time to go around. Dorman was approaching too fast,
rushing along the hillside, holding onto trees and pulling himself
along. The slope looked too steep. He couldn’t possibly get down it.
176
THEX-FILES
He heard the dog bark again. Halfway to the bottom, off to the left of
the mudslide, Vader stood with his paws spread, his fur tangled with
cockleburrs and weeds. He barked up at his boy.
With no other choice, Jody decided to follow. He eased himself over
the lip of the mudslide and started to descend, using his hands,
digging his fingers into the cold ground, stepping on loose rocks, and
looking for support. He heard twigs snapping, branches crashing
aside, as Dorman came closer. Jody tried to move faster. He looked up
and glimpsed the burly figure at the upper edge of the hillside. He
gasped—and his hand slipped. Jody’s foot stepped on an unstable
rock, which popped out of the raw dirt like a rotten tooth coming
loose from a gum. He bit back an outcry as he began to fall.
He scrabbled with his fingers, digging into the mud, but his body slid
down, tumbling, rolling, covering his clothes in dirt and mud. Rocks
pattered around him.
As he bounced and slid, Jody saw Dorman standing at the lip of the
mudslide, his hands outstretched like claws, ready to bend down and
grab him—but the boy was too far away, still falling, still picking up
speed.
Jody rolled, struck his side, and then his head—
but he remained conscious, terrified that he would break his leg so
that he couldn’t keep running away from Dorman.
Dirt and rocks showered around him, but he didn’t scream, didn’t
even cry out—and he finally came to rest at the bottom of the slide,
up against one of the toppled trees. Its matted root system stuck out
like a dirt-encrusted scrubbing pad. He slammed hard against the bark
and lay gasping, struggling, trying to move. His back hurt.
antibodies
177
Then, to his horror, he saw Jeremy Dorman bounding down the sharp
slope up above, somehow keeping his balance. Dirt and gravel flew up
from his feet as he stomped heavy indentations in the soft hillside. He
waved the revolver in his hand in a threat to keep Jody where he was
—not that Jody could have gotten up and moved fast enough anyway.
Dorman skidded to a halt just above the boy. His face was flushed...
and his skin looked as if it were crawling, writhing, seething like a pot
of candle wax slowly coming to a boil. Rage and exertion contorted
the man’s face.
He held the handgun up, gripping it with both hands and pointing the
barrel directly at Jody. It looked like a cyclopean eye, a deadly open-
mouthed viper.
Then Dorman’s shoulders sagged, and he just stared at the boy for a
few moments. “Jody, why do you have to make this so hard? Haven’t I
been through enough—haven’t you been through enough?”
“Where’s my mom?” Jody demanded, drawing deep breaths. His heart
thumped like a jackhammer and his breath felt cold and frosty, like
knives in his lungs. He struggled to get to his knees. Dorman gestured
with the revolver again. “All I need is some of your blood, Jody, that’s
all. Just some blood. Fresh blood.”
“T said, where’s my mom?” Jody shouted. Dorman looked as if a
thunderstorm passed across his face. Both the boy and the man were
so intent on each other, neither heard the other person approach.
“Freeze! Federal agent!”
Dana Scully stood in the trees fifteen feet away, her feet braced, her
arms extended and gripping her handgun in a precise firing position.
“Don’t move,” she said.
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x
Scully had breathlessly followed the sounds of pursuit, the barking
dog, the angry shouted words. When she came upon the hulking man
who loomed too close over Jody Kennessy, she knew she had to
prevent this man—this carrier of something like a deadly viral cancer
—from so much as touching the boy. Both the intimidating man and
the twelve-yearold Jody snapped their glances aside to look at her,
astonished. Jody’s expression flooded with relief, then rapidly turned
to suspicion.
“You’re one of them!” the boy whispered. Scully wondered how much
Patrice Kennessy had told him, how much Jody knew about the death
of his father and the possible conspiracy involving DyMar. But what
astonished her the most was the appearance of the boy. He seemed
healthy, not gaunt and haggard, not at all pale and sickly. He should
have been in the final stages of terminal lymphoblastic leukemia.
Granted, Jody looked exhausted, battered . . . haunted perhaps by
constant fear and lack of sleep. But certainly not like a terminal cancer
patient. Nearly a month earlier, Jody had been bedridden, at death’s
doorway. But now the boy had run vigorously through the forest and
been caught by this man only because he had stumbled and fallen
down a steep hillside.
The large man scowled at Scully, dismissed her, and tried to ease
closer to the boy.
“I said don’t move, sir,” Scully said. Seeing the revolver hanging
loosely in his hand, she feared he might take Jody in a hostage
situation. “Put your gun down,” she said, “and identify yourself.”
The man looked at her with such pure disgust and impatience that she
felt cold. “You don’t know what’s going on here,” he said. “Stop
interfering.” He looked antibodies
179
hungrily back down at the trapped Jody, then snapped his glance
toward Scully once more. “Or are you one of them? Just like the boy
says? Out to annihilate both of us?”
Before she could answer or question him further, a black shape like a
rocket-propelled battering ram bounded from the underbrush and
launched itself toward the man threatening Jody.
In a flash Scully recognized the dog, the black Lab that had somehow
survived being struck by a car, that had escaped from the
veterinarian’s office and gone on the run with Patrice and Jody.
“Vader!” Jody cried.
The dog lunged. Black Labradors were not normally used as attack
dogs, but Vader must have been able to sense the fear and tension in
the air. He knew who the enemy was, and he fought back. The burly
man whirled, raising his gun and gripping the trigger with the sudden
unexpected threat—
but the dog crashed into him, growling and snarling, spoiling his aim.
The man cried out, threw up his free hand to ward off the attack—and
his finger squeezed the trigger.
The explosion roared through the quiet isolation far from the main
road.
Instead of taking off Jody’s head, the .38-caliber shell slammed into
the boy’s chest before he could hurl himself out of the way. The
impact sprayed blood behind him, knocking the boy’s lean frame back
against the fallen tree, as if someone with an invisible piano wire had
just jerked him backward. Jody cried out, and slid down the rain-slick
bole of the tree. Vader bore the gunman to the ground. The man tried
to fight the dog off, but the suddenly vicious black Lab bit at his face,
his throat. Scully raced over to the wounded boy, dropped to her
knees, and cradled Jody’s head. “Oh my God!”
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The boy blinked his eyes, wide with astonishment and seemingly far
away. Blood bubbled out of his mouth, and he spat it aside. “So tired.”
She stroked his hair, unable to leave him to rescue the big man who
had shot him.
The dog continued growling, snapping his jaws, digging his muzzle
into the man’s throat, ripping at the tendons. Blood sprayed onto the
forest floor. The man dropped his smoking revolver and pounded on
the black Lab’s rib cage, trying to knock him away, but growing
weaker and weaker.
Scully stared at where foamy scarlet blood blossomed from the center
of Jody’s chest. A hole with neat round edges stood out against a
welling, pulsing lake of blood. She could tell from the placement of
the wound that no simple first aid would do Jody any good.
“Oh, no,” she said and bent down, tearing Jody’s shirt wider and
looking at the gunshot wound that had penetrated his left lung and
perhaps struck the heart. A serious wound—a deadly wound. He
would never survive.
Jody’s skin turned gray and pale. His eyes were closed in
unconsciousness. Blood continued to pour from the bullet hole.
Leaning forward, Scully pushed aside her empathy for Jody, mentally
clicking into her emergency medical mindset, slapping the heel of her
hand on the wound and pressing down, pushing hard against the cloth
of his shirt to stop the flow of blood. At her side, she could hear the
dog continuing his attack on the fallen man—a vicious attack, a
personal vendetta, as if this man had once hurt the dog very badly.
Scully concentrated, though, on helping the boy. She had to slow the
terrible bleeding from the bullet wound.
THIRTY-ONE
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 2:20 P.M.
The sudden carnage astonished Scully, and X time seemed to stop as
the forest pressed around her, the smell of blood and black powder
from the gunshots. The birdsong and the breeze fell silent.
She hesitated for only a moment before snapping back into her
mindset as a federal agent. After pressing down her makeshift
bandage, she stood up jerkily from the mortally wounded boy and ran
over to the dog, who was still growling and snapping at the fallen
man. She grabbed Vader by the skin of his neck, grappling with his
strong shoulders and front forepaws to pull him away. His bloodied
victim lay twitching in the mud, leaves, and twigs. She tugged at the
dog, dragging him away. The dog continued to growl, and Scully
realized the danger of throwing herself upon a vicious animal that had
just ripped out the throat of a man. A killer. But the black Lab
acquiesced and staggered away, sitting down obediently in the forest
debris. Frothy blood covered his muzzle, and his sepia eyes were 182
THEX-FILES
bright and angry, still fixed on the fallen form. Scully saw his red
teeth and shivered.
She glanced down at the man who had held Jody at bay, who had
shot the boy. His throat was mangled. His shirt hung in tatters,
shredded as if it had burst from the inside.
Though he was obviously dead, the man’s hand jittered and jerked
like a frog on a dissection table, and his skin squirmed as if alive from
the inside, the home of a colony of swarming cockroaches. Patches of
his exposed skin glistened, wet and gelatinous . . . like the mucus
Scully had found during her autopsy of Vernon Ruckman.
His skin also had an uneven darkish cast . . . but the blotches shifted
and faded, mobile hemorrhages that healed and passed across his
complexion. This man must be the carrier of the instantly disruptive
disease that had killed Patrice Kennessy and Vernon Ruckman, and
probably the trucker Mulder had gone to investigate. She had no idea
who this was, but he looked oddly familiar to her. He must have some
connection with DyMar Laboratory, with David Kennessy’s research,
and the radical cancer treatment he had meant to develop for his son.
As time seemed to stand still, Scully looked over at the black Lab to
see if Vader might be suffering from the effects of the plague as well—
but apparently the cellular destruction did not transfer readily across
species boundaries. Vader sat patiently, not wagging his tail but
focused intently on her reaction. He whined, as if daring her to
challenge what he had done to protect his boy.
She whirled back toward Jody, who still lay gasping and bleeding
from the bullet wound in his chest. She tore off more of his shirtsleeve
and pressed the wadded cloth hard upon the open bubbling wound.
This was a penetrating wound—the bullet had not antibodies
183
passed through the other side of Jody’s back, but remained lodged
somewhere in his lung, in his heart . . . Scully couldn’t imagine how
the boy might survive—but she kept on treating him, doing what she
knew best. She had lost fellow agents before, other people injured on
cases—but she felt a unique affinity with Jody.
The twelve-year-old also suffered from a form of terminal cancer; both
he and Scully were victims of the vagaries of fate, the mutations of
one cell too many. Jody had already been given a death sentence by
his own biology, but Scully didn’t intend to let a tragic accident rob
him of his last month or so of life. This was one thing she could
control. She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out the cellular phone.
With shaking, blood-tipped fingers, she punched in the programmed
number for Mulder’s phone—but all she received was a burst of static.
She was out of range in the isolated wooded hills. She tried three
times, hoping for at least a faint signal, some stray opening of the
electromagnetic window in the ionosphere . . . but she had no such
luck. It was almost as if someone was jamming her phone. Scully was
alone.
She thought about running back to the car, driving it across the
rugged meadows as close as she could get to the slide area, then
rushing to Jody and carrying him to the car. It would be easier that
way, if the car could travel over the wet and uneven meadow. But that
would also mean she’d have to leave Jody’s side. She looked at the
blood on her hands from pressing down on his gunshot wound, saw
his pale complexion, and noted his faint fluttery breathing. No, she
would not leave him. Jody might well die before she made it back
here with the car, and she vowed not to let the boy die alone.
“Looks like Pll have to take you myself, then,” she 184
THEX-FILES
said grimly, and bent over to gather up the young man. “Above and
beyond the call of duty.”
Jody’s frame was slight and frail. Though he appeared to have fought
back the worst ravages of his wasting disease, he still had not put on
much weight, and she could lift him. It was lucky they were close to
the cabin.
Vader whined next to her, wanting to come close. Jody moaned when
she moved him. She tried not to hurt him further, though she had no
choice but to get him back to her car, where she could drive at
breakneck speed to the nearest hospital . . . wherever that might be.
She left the mangled and bloody form of the attacker lying on the
trampled forest floor. The burly man was dead, killed before her eyes.
Later on, evidence technicians would come here and study the body of
this man, as well as Patrice’s. But that was in the future. There would
be plenty of time to pick up the loose threads, to explain the pieces.
For now, the only thing that mattered to Scully was to get this boy to
medical attention. She felt so helpless. She was sure that whatever
first aid she could give him—even whatever emergency room surgery
the doctors could perform whenever she arrived at a medical center—
would be too little, too late.
But she refused to give up.
In her arms, Jody felt warm and feverish. Incredibly hot, in fact. But
Scully couldn’t waste time thinking of explanations. She trudged
ahead at her best speed, lugging him out of the forest, taking him to
help. The black Lab followed close at her heels, silent and worried.
Jody continued to bleed, spilling crimson droplets along the forest
floor, the grass, finally out to the clearing around the cabin. Scully
focused her attention antibodies
185
straight ahead and kept moving toward her rental car. She had to get
out of here, had to hurry. She looked off to one side as she bypassed
the plague-ridden body of Patrice Kennessy. She was glad Jody didn’t
have to see his mother like this. Perhaps he didn’t even know what
had happened to her. Scully reached the car and gently set the boy
down on the ground, leaning his back against the back fender as she
opened the rear door. Vader barked and jumped in, then barked again,
as if urging her to hurry.
Scully picked up Jody’s limp form and gently positioned him inside
the car. Her makeshift bandage had fallen off, soaked with blood. But
the bleeding from his huge wound had slowed remarkably,
congealing. Scully worried that meant Jody’s heartbeat was weak, at
the edge of death. She pressed more cloth against the bullet hole, and
then jumped into the driver’s seat and started the car.
She drove off at a reckless speed up the bumpy dirt driveway, over the
rise. She scraped the bottom of her car again as she headed back
toward the logging road, but she accelerated this time, ignoring all
caution. The isolated cabin with all of its murder and death fell behind
them.
In the back seat, Vader looked through the rear window and
continued barking.
THIRTY-TWO
Federal Office Building
Crystal City, Virginia
Friday, 12:08 P.M.
The phone rang in Adam Lentz’s plain govX ernment office, and he
grabbed for it immediately. Very few people knew his direct number,
so the call had to be important, though it startled him from his quiet
and intense study of maps and detailed local survey charts of the
Oregon wilderness.
“Hello,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. Lentz listened to the voice
on the other end of the phone, feeling a sudden chill. “Yes, sir,” he
answered.
“T was about to have a progress report for you.”
Indeed, he had put together a careful map of his ongoing search, a
listing of all the attempts he had made, the professional hunters and
investigators combing the wooded, mountainous area of western
Oregon.
“In fact,” Lentz said, “I have my briefcase packed and a ticket
voucher. My plane leaves for Portland within the hour. I’m going to
head up the mobile tactical command center there. I want to be on
site so I can take care of things personally.”
antibodies
187
He listened to the voice, detecting no displeasure, no scorn, only the
faintest background lilt of sarcasm. The man didn’t want a formal
report. Not at this time. In fact, he tended to avoid anything on paper
whatsoever, so Lentz verbally gave him a summary of what he had
done to track down Patrice and Jody Kennessy and their pet dog.
Lentz looked at his topographical maps. With a flat voice he listed
where the six teams had concentrated their searches, rattling off one
after another. He did not need to make his efforts sound extravagant
or impressive—just competent.
Finally, though, a hint of criticism came from the other end of the
phone conversation. “We had thought all of the uncontrolled samples
of Kennessy’s nanomachines were destroyed. Your previous reports
stated as much. This was a very important goal of ours, and I’m quite
disappointed to learn that this isn’t so. And the dog—that’s a rather
large mistake.”
Lentz swallowed. “We believed those efforts had been successful after
the fire at DyMar. We had sent sterilization crews in to retrieve any
unburned records. We found the fire safe and the videotape, but
nothing else.”
“Yes,” the man said on the phone, “but from the condition of the dead
security guard—as well as several other bodies—we must assume that
some of the nanomachines have now escaped.”
“We'll get them, sir,” Lentz said. “We’re doing our best to track down
the fugitives. Finding the dog should be no problem. When we
complete our mission, I assure you, there won’t be any samples
remaining.”
“That isn’t a suggestion,” the voice said. “That’s the way it must be.”
“T understand, sir,” Lentz replied. “I’ve narrowed down my search,
concentrating on a particular area in rural Oregon.”
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THEX-FILES
He rolled up the maps as he talked, folded other documents, and slid
them into his briefcase. He glanced at his watch. His plane would be
departing soon. He had only unmarked carry-on luggage, and he had
papers that allowed him to bypass normal ticketing requirements.
Lentz could take advantage of one of those empty seats the airlines
were required to keep on all flights for important military or
government personnel. His passes allowed him to move about at will
with no written record of his travel plans or his movements. Such
things were required in his line of work.
“And one last thing,” said the man on the phone.
“Tve suggested this before, but I will reiterate it. You would do well to
keep your eye on Agent Mulder. Make sure part of your team is
specifically assigned to shadowing his movements, following
everything he does. Eavesdrop on every conversation he has.
“You already have the manpower that you need, but Agent Mulder has
a certain . . . talent for the unexpected. If you stay close to him, he
may well lead you exactly where you need to be.”
“Thank you, sir,” Lentz said, then glanced at his watch again. “I need
to get to National Airport. I'll remain in touch, but for now I’ve got a
plane to catch.”
“And a mission to accomplish,” the man said without the slightest hint
of emotion.
THIRTY-THREE
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 3:15 P.M.
The red pickup truck Mulder had commanX deered handled
surprisingly well. With its big tires and high clearance, it ran like a
steamroller over the potholes, puddles, and broken branches on the
old logging road and the overgrown half-graded driveway that led
back to the isolated cabin.
After seeing the dead trucker’s body and the image of supposedly dead
Jeremy Dorman on the surveillance videotape, he felt an urgency to
find Scully, to warn her. But the cabin was quiet, empty, abandoned.
Leaving the truck and walking around, he saw fresh tire marks
embedded in the soft mud and gravel. Someone had driven here
recently and then departed again. Could Scully have gone already?
Where would she go?
When he discovered the woman’s body lying in the grass, he knew it
was Patrice Kennessy, without a doubt.
Mulder frowned and stepped back away from her. Patrice’s skin had
been ravaged by the same disease he 190
THEX-FILES
had just seen on the dead truck driver. He swallowed hard.
“Scully!” He moved with greater urgency. The scarlet blood spatters
on the ground were obvious, bright red coins splashed in an uneven
pattern. With a sheen of sweat on his forehead, Mulder broke into a
trot, looking ahead, then back down to the ground as he followed the
blood trail back into the forest. Now he saw footprints. Scully’s shoes.
Paw prints from a dog. His heart beat faster.
Mulder found his way to the base of a steep slope where a mudslide
had gouged the hillside. Near one of the horizontal tree trunks Mulder
saw the bloodsmeared man with broad shoulders, tattered clothes, and
a mangled throat ripped all the way down to the neck bone.
He recognized the burly man from the DyMar personnel photos, from
the surveillance video at the truck weigh station. Jeremy Dorman—
certainly dead now.
Mulder also smelled gunpowder beyond the blood. The dead man’s
hand clutched a service revolver. From the smell, Mulder could tell it
had been recently fired—but Dorman didn’t look as if he’d be firing it
again anytime soon.
Mulder bent over to inspect the gaping wound in the man’s throat.
Had the black Lab attacked him?
But even as he watched, Dorman’s mangled larynx and the muscle
tissue and skin around it looked melted, smoothing itself over, as if
someone had sealed it with wax. His throat injury was filled with
translucent mucus, slime oozing over the mangled skin.
Around him, Mulder saw signs of a struggle where rocks and mud had
slid down the slope. It looked as if someone had fallen over the edge,
and antibodies
191
then been pursued. He saw more of the dog’s footprints, Scully’s shoe
prints. And smaller prints—the boy’s?
“Scully!” he called out again, but he heard no answer, only the rustle
of pine trees and a few birds. The forest remained hushed, fearful or
angry. Mulder listened, but he heard no answer.
Then the dead man on the ground lurched up as if spring-loaded.
His claw-like left hand grabbed the edge of Mulder’s overcoat. Mulder
cried out and struggled backward, but the desperate man clung to his
coat. Without changing his cadaverous expression, Jeremy Dorman
brought up the revolver he held in his hand, pointing it threateningly
at Mulder. Mulder looked down and saw the clutching hand, its
covering of skin squirming, moving—infested with nanomachines?—
slicked with a coating of slime. A contagious mucus .. . the carrier of
the deadly nanotech plague.
THIRTY-FOUR
Oregon Wilderness
Friday, 4:19 P.M.
Fifty miles at least to the nearest hospital, X along tangled roads
through wooded
mountains—and Scully didn’t know
exactly where she was going. She raced away as the lowering sun
glittered through the trees, and then the clouds closed over again. She
kept driving, pushing her foot to the floor and wrestling with the
curves of the county road, heading north. Dark pine trees flashed by
like tunnel walls on either side of her.
In the backseat, Vader whimpered, very upset. Clumps of blood and
foam bristled from his muzzle. She hadn’t taken time to clean him up.
He snuffled at the motionless boy on the seat beside him. Scully
remembered the brutal way the dog had attacked the hulking man
who had carried the plague that killed Patrice Kennessy, who had
threatened Jody. Now, despite the spattered evidence of dried blood
on his fur, he seemed utterly loyal and devoted to guarding his
master. Before driving away from the cabin, she had antibodies
193
checked Jody’s pulse. It was faint, his breathing shallow—but the boy
still lived, clinging tenaciously. He seemed to be in a coma. In the past
twenty minutes Jody hadn’t made a sound, not even a groan. She
glanced up in the rearview mirror, just to reassure herself. From the
trees on her right, a dog stepped into the road in front of her, and she
spotted it out of the corner of her eye. Scully slammed the brakes and
yanked the steering wheel.
The dog bounded back out of sight, into the underbrush. She swerved,
nearly lost control of the car on the slick road, then at the latest
minute regained it. Behind her, in the rearview mirror, she saw the
dark shape of the dog trot back across the road, undaunted by its close
call.
In the backseat Jody gasped, and his spine arched with some kind of
convulsion. Scully jerked the car to a stop in the middle of the road
and unbuckled her seatbelt to reach back, dreading to find that the
boy had finally succumbed to death, that he had reached the limits of
endurance.
She touched him. Jody’s skin was hot and feverish, damp with sweat.
His skin burned. Sweat trickled along his forehead. His eyes were
squeezed shut. Despite all her medical training, Scully still didn’t
know what to do.
In a moment the convulsion faded, and Jody breathed a little more
easily. Vader nudged the boy in the shoulder and then licked Jody’s
cheek, whimpering. Seeing him stabilized for the moment, Scully
didn’t dare waste any more time. She shifted back into gear and
roared off, her tires spinning on the leafcovered asphalt. Trees
swallowed the curves ahead, and she was forced to concentrate on the
road rather than her patient.
194
THEX-FILES
Beside her the cell phone still displayed NO SERVICE
on its little screen. She felt incredibly isolated, like the survivalists in
the group where Jody’s uncle had gone to hide. Those people wanted
it that way, but right now Scully would have much preferred a large,
brightly lit hospital with lots of doctors and other specialists to help.
She wished Mulder were here. She wished she could at least call him.
When Jody coughed and sat up in the back seat, looking groggy but
otherwise perfectly healthy, Scully nearly drove off the road.
Vader barked and nuzzled the young man, crawling all over him,
slobbering on him, utterly happy to see Jody restored.
Scully slammed on the brakes. The car slewed onto the soft shoulder,
and she came to a stop near an unmarked dirt road.
“Jody!” she cried. “You're all right.”
“Pm hungry,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He looked around in the
backseat. His shirt still hung open, and though dried blood was caked
on his skin, she could see that the wound itself had closed over. She
popped open her door and raced to the back of the car, leaving the
driver’s side open. The helpful chiming bell scolded her for leaving the
keys in the ignition. In the back she bent over, grasping Jody by the
shoulders.
“Sit back. Are you all right?” She touched him, checking his skin. His
fever had dropped, but he still felt warm. “How do you feel?”
She saw that skin had folded over the gunshot wound in his chest,
clean and smooth, with a plastic appearance. “I don’t believe this,”
Scully said.
“Is there anything to eat?” Jody asked. Scully remembered the bag of
cheese curls Mulder had left in the front seat, and she moved around
to the antibodies
195
other side of the car to get it. The boy grabbed the bag of snack food
and ate greedily, chomping handfuls as powdery orange flavoring
covered his lips and fingers. The black Lab wiggled and squirmed in
the backseat, demanding as much attention as his boy could give him,
though Jody was more interested in just eating. Offhandedly, he
patted Vader on the shoulders. Finished with the cheese curls, Jody
leaned forward to scrounge around. Scully saw something glint. With
a quiet sound, a piece of metal dropped away from his back.
Scully reached behind him, and Jody distractedly shifted aside to give
her room. She picked up a slug—
the bullet that had been lodged inside him. She lifted the back of his
shirt, saw a red mark, a puckered scar that faded even as she watched.
She held the flattened bullet between her fingertips, amazed.
“Jody, do you know what’s happened to you?”
she said.
The boy looked up at her, his face smeared with cheese powder. Vader
sat next to him and laid his chin on Jody’s shoulder, blinking his big
brown eyes and looking absolutely at peace, enthralled to have the
boy back and ready to pay attention to him. Jody shrugged.
“Something my dad did.” He yawned. “Nanotech . . . no, he called
them nanocritters. Biological policemen to make me better from the
leukemia, fix me up. He made me promise not to tell anybody—not
even my mom.”
Before she could think of another thing to ask, Jody yawned again and
his eyes dulled. Now that he had eaten, an overpowering weariness
came over him.
“T need to rest,” he said, and though Scully tried to ask him more
questions, Jody was unable to answer. He blinked his heavy eyelids
several times and then drew a deep breath, fading backward into the
seat, where he dropped into a deep and restful sleep, 196
THEX-FILES
not the shock-induced coma she had seen before. This sleep was
healing and important for his body. Scully stood back up and stepped
away from the car, her mind reeling with what she had seen. The dull
bell tone continued to remind her that she had her door open and the
keys dangling in the ignition. The implications astounded her, and she
stood completely at a loss. Mulder had suspected as much. She would
have been skeptical herself, unable to believe the cellular technology
had advanced so far—
but she’d witnessed Jody Kennessy’s healing powers with her own
eyes, not to mention the fact that he had visibly recovered from the
terrible wasting cancer that had left him an invalid, weak and skeletal,
according to the photos and records she had seen. Scully moved
slowly, in a daze, as she climbed back behind the steering wheel. Her
head pounded. Her joints ached, and she tried to tell herself that it
was just from the stressful several days of sleeping in hotel rooms,
traveling across country, and not an additional set of symptoms from
her own cancer, the affliction that had resulted perhaps from her
abduction, the unfathomable tests that had been done on her . . . the
experiments.
Scully buckled her seatbelt and pulled the door closed, if only to halt
the idiotic bell. In the backseat, Vader heaved a heavy sigh and rested
his head on Jody’s lap. His tail bumped against the padded armrest of
the rear door. She drove off, slower this time, aimless. David Kennessy
had developed something wonderful, something astonishing—she
realized the power he had tapped into at DyMar Laboratory. It had
been a federally funded cancer research facility, and this work had a
profound meaning for the millions of cancer patients each year—
people like herself. It was appalling and unethical for Dr. Kennessy to
antibodies
197
have given his own son such an unproven and risky course of
treatment. As a medical doctor, she was indignant at the very idea
that he had bypassed all the checks and balances, the control groups,
the FDA analysis, other independent studies. But then again, she
understood the heartache, the desperate need to do something,
anything, taking unorthodox measures when none of the normal ones
would suffice. Was it so different from laetrile therapy, prayer healers,
crystal meditation, or any number of other last-ditch schemes that
terminal patients tried?
She had found that as hope diminished, the gullibility factor
increased. With nothing to lose, why not try everything? And Jody
Kennessy had indeed been dying. He’d had no other chance.
However, prayer healers and crystal meditation offered no threat to
the population at large, and Scully realized with a sick tenseness in
her stomach that the risk was far greater with Kennessy’s
nanotechnology experiments. If he had made the slightest mistake in
tailoring or adapting his “biological policemen” to human DNA, they
could become profoundly destructive on a cellular level. The
“nanocritters” could reproduce and transmit themselves from person
to person. They could cause a radical outrage of growths inside other
people, healthy people, scrambling the genetic pattern.
That would have been a concern only if the nanomachines didn’t work
properly .. . and Kennessy had brashly gambled that he had made no
mistakes. Scully set her jaw and drove along, tugging down the sun
visor in an effort to counteract the flickering tree shadows that danced
in an interlocking pattern across her windshield.
After the plague victims she and Mulder had seen, it appeared that
something must have gone wrong—
very wrong.
THIRTY-FIVE
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 4:23 P.M.
The wounds in Jeremy Dorman’s throat had sealed, and a tangible
heat emanated from him, a pulsing warmth that radiated from X his
skin and body.
The supposedly dead man opened his
mouth and formed words, but only a whispery gurgle came from his
ruined voice box. He jabbed with the revolver and hissed words using
only modulated breath. “Your weapon—drop it!”
Mulder slowly reached to the other side of his overcoat, found the
handgun in its pancake holster. He dropped his handgun on the forest
floor with a thump. It struck the mud, slid to one side, and rested
against a clump of dried pine needles.
“Nanotechnology,” Mulder said, trying to quell the wonder in his
voice. “You’re healing yourself.”
“Yow’re one of them,” Dorman said, his voice harsh, his breath still
grievously wounded. “One of those men.”
Then he released his grip on Mulder’s overcoat, antibodies
199
leaving a handprint of slime that seeped into the fabric, spreading,
moving of its own accord like an amoeba.
“Can I take off my coat?” Mulder asked, trying to keep the alarm out
of his voice.
“Go ahead.” Dorman heaved himself to his feet, still holding the
revolver. Mulder shed his outer jacket, keeping only his dark
sportcoat.
“How did you find me?” Dorman said. “Who are you?”
“Pm with the FBI. My name is Mulder. I’ve been looking for Patrice
and Jody Kennessy. I’m after them, not you . . . though I would
certainly like to know how you survived the DyMar fire, Mr. Dorman.”
The man snorted. “FBI. I knew you were involved in the conspiracy.
You’re trying to suppress information, destroy our discoveries. You
thought I was dead. You thought you had killed me.”
Mulder would have laughed under any other circumstances. “No one’s
ever accused me of being involved in a conspiracy. I assure you, I had
never heard of you, or David Kennessy, or DyMar Laboratory before
the destruction of the facility.” He paused.
“You’re contaminated with something from Kennessy’s research, aren’t
you?”
“T am the research!” Dorman said, raising his voice, which was still
rough and rocky. Something in his chest squirmed beneath the
tattered covering of his shirt. Dorman winced, nearly doubled over.
Mulder saw writhing lumps like serpents, growths of a strange oily
color that flickered into motion beneath his skin, and then calmed,
seeping back into his muscle mass.
“It looks to me like the research still needs a little work,” Mulder said.
Dorman gestured with the revolver for Mulder to turn around. “You
have a vehicle here?”
200
THEX-FILES
Mulder nodded, thinking of the battered pickup.
“So to speak.”
“We’re going to get out of here. You have to help me find Jody, or at
least the dog. They’re with the other one . . . the woman. She left me
for dead.”
“Considering the condition of your throat, that would have been a
reasonable assumption,” Mulder said, covering his relief at hearing
confirmation that Scully had been here, that she was still alive.
“You’re going to help me, Agent Mulder.” Now Dorman’s voice had an
edge. “You are my key to tracking them down.”
“So you can kill them both like you murdered Patrice Kennessy and
the truck driver and the security guard?” Mulder said.
Dorman winced again as an inner turmoil convulsed through his body.
“I didn’t mean to. I had to.”
Then he snapped his gaze back toward Mulder. “But if you don’t help
me, I’ll do the same to you. Don’t try to touch me.”
“Believe me, Mr. Dorman”—he glanced down at the slime-encrusted
wounds on the man’s exposed skin—“touching you is absolutely the
last thing on my mind.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Dorman said, his face twisted with
anguish. “I don’t. I never meant for any of this to happen. . . but it’s
rapidly becoming impossible not to hurt anyone else. If I can just get a
few drops of fresh blood—preferably the boy’s blood, but the dog
might do—no one else needs to get hurt, and I can be well again. It’s
all so simple. Everybody wins.”
For once Mulder let his skepticism show. He knew the dog had been
used as some sort of research animal—but what did the boy have to
do with it? “What will that accomplish? I don’t understand.”
Dorman flashed him a look of pure scorn. “Of course you don’t
understand, Agent Mulder.”
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201
“Then explain it to me,” Mulder said. “Youve got those
nanotechnology machines inside your body, don’t you?”
“David called them ‘nanocritters’-—very cute.”
“The dog has them inside his bloodstream,” Mulder guessed.
“Developed by David and Darin Kennessy for Jody’s cancer.”
“And apparently Jody’s nanocritters work just fine.” Dorman’s dark
eyes flashed. “He’s already cured of leukemia.”
Mulder froze under the tangled, shadowy forest branches as he tried
to digest the information. “But if . . . if the dog and the boy are
infected, if the dog recovers from his injuries and Jody’s healthy now
—why are you falling apart? Why do you bring death to anyone you
touch?”
Dorman practically shouted, “Because their nanocritters function
perfectly! Unlike mine.” He gestured for Mulder to march out of the
forest, back toward the isolated cabin where he had parked the pickup
truck.
“T didn’t have time. The lab was burning, and I was supposed to die,
just like David. They betrayed me! I took . . . whatever was available.”
Mulder’s eyes widened, turning to look over his shoulder. “You used
early generation nanocritters, the ones not fully tested. You injected
yourself so your body could heal, so you could escape while everyone
else thought you were dead.”
Dorman scowled. “That dog was our first real success. I realize now
that David must have immediately taken a fresh batch of virgin
nanocritters and secretly injected them in his son. Jody was almost
dead already from his leukemia, so what difference did it make? I
doubt Patrice even knew. But after seeing Jody today—he’s cured.
He’s healthy. The nanocritters worked perfectly inside him.” Dorman’s
skin shuddered and rippled in the dim forest light. 202
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“Unlike yours,” Mulder pointed out.
“David was too paranoid to leave anything valuable within easy reach.
He’d learned that much at least from his brother. I only had access to
what remained in our cryostorage. Some of our prototypes had
produced . . . alarming results. I should have been more careful, but
the facility was burning around me. When the machines got into my
system, they reproduced and adjusted to my genetics, my cell
structure. I thought it would work.”
As he trudged into the meadow, Mulder’s mind raced ahead, sifting
the possibilities. “So DyMar was bombed because someone else was
funding your research, and they didn’t want the nanotechnology to get
loose. They didn’t want David Kennessy testing it out on his pet dog or
his son.”
Dorman’s voice carried a strange tone. “The cure to disease, the
possibility of immortality—why wouldn’t they want it all to
themselves? They intended to take the samples to an isolation
laboratory where they could continue the work in secret.” He
continued under his breath. “I was supposed to be in charge of that
work, but those people decided to obliterate me as well as David and
everyone else.”
He gestured again with the revolver, and Mulder stepped carefully,
swallowing hard as understanding crystallized around him.
The prototype nanocritters had adapted themselves to the DNA of the
initial lab animals, but when Dorman had brashly injected them into
himself, the cellular scouts were forced to adapt to completely
different genetics: biological policemen with conflicting sets of
instructions. The drastic shift must have knocked the already unstable
machines out of whack. Mulder continued to speculate. “So your
prototype nanocritters are confused with conflicting programming.
When they hit a third person, a new genetic antibodies
203
structure, they grow even more rampant. That’s what causes this viral
form of cancer whenever you touch someone, a shutdown in the
nervous system that grows like wildfire throughout the human body.”
“If that’s what you believe,” Dorman said with a low mutter. “I
haven’t exactly had time to run a lot of tests.”
Mulder frowned. “Is that mucus”—he carefully pointed at Dorman’s
throat, which was glistening with slime—“a carrier substance for the
nanocritters?”
Dorman nodded. “It’s infested with them. If someone gets the carrier
fluid on them, the nanomachines quickly penetrate their body . . .”
The battered red pickup stood parked in the muddy driveway right in
front of them now. As he walked, Dorman made every effort to avoid
the fallen body of Patrice Kennessy.
“And now the same thing is happening to you as happened to your
victims,” Mulder said, “but much more slowly. Your body is falling
apart, and you think Jody’s blood will save you somehow.”
Dorman sighed, at the end of his patience. “The nanocritters in his
system are completely stable. That’s what I need. They’re working the
way they should, not flawed with contradictory errors like mine. The
dog’s nanocritters are good, too, but Jody’s are already conformed to
human DNA.”
Dorman drew a deep breath, and Mulder realized that the man had no
reason to believe his own theory; he merely hoped against hope that
his speculation was true. “If I can get an infusion of stable
nanocritters, they’ll be stronger than my warped ones. They will
supersede the infestation in my own body and give them a new
blueprint.” He looked intensely at Mulder, as if he wanted to grab the
FBI agent and shake his shoulders. “Is that so wrong?”
When the two men reached the old pickup parked 204
THEX-FILES
in front of the cabin, Dorman told Mulder to take out his car keys.
“Tve left them in the ignition,” Mulder said.
“Very trusting of you.”
“Tt’s not my truck,” Mulder said, making excuses, hesitating, trying to
figure out what to do next. Dorman yanked open his creaking door.
“Okay, let’s go.” He slid onto the seat, but remained as far toward the
passenger door as possible, avoiding contact. “We’ve got to find
them.”
Mulder drove off, trapped in the same vehicle with the man whose
touch caused instant death.
THIRTY-SIX
Tactical Team Temporary Command Post
Oregon District
Friday, 6:10 P.M.
To Adam Lentz and his crew of professionals, X the fugitives were
leaving a trail of clues like muddy footprints on a snow-white carpet.
He didn’t know the members of his team by name, but he knew their
skills, that they had been hand-picked for this and other similar
assignments. This group could handle everything themselves, but
Lentz wanted to be on the scene in person to watch over them, to
intimidate them . . . and to be sure he could claim the proper credit
when this was all over. In his line of work, he didn’t get official
promotions, awards, or trophies. In fact, his successes didn’t even
amount to tangible pay raises, though income was never a factor for
him. He had many sources of cash.
He had flown into Portland, discreet and professional. He had been
met at the airport and whisked off to the rendezvous point. Other
team members converged at the site of a local police call, their first
stop. Their high-tech mobile sanitation van arrived, 206
THEX-FILES
escorted by a black sedan. Men in black suits and ties boiled out of the
open doors next to where a logging truck had swerved off the road.
The report had come in over the airwaves, and Lentz’s response team
had scrambled.
A state trooper, Officer Jared Penwick, had remained at the scene.
Next to him, huddled in the patrol car passenger seat—obviously not a
prisoner—was an old man wearing a red wide-billed cap and a rain
slicker. The man looked miserable and worried. The men in suits
flashed their badges and announced themselves as operatives from the
federal government. They all wore sidearms. They moved quickly as a
unit.
The doors to the cleanup van popped open and men in spacesuit-like
anti-contamination gear clambered out, armed with plastic bags and
foam guns. The team member in the rear carried a flamethrower.
“What’s going on here?” Officer Penwick said, stepping toward them.
“We're the official cleanup team,” Lentz answered. He hadn’t even
bothered to take out his badge. “We would appreciate your full
cooperation.”
He stood stoically out of range beyond the risk of contamination as
the crew opened the truck driver’s door and descended upon the
victim with plastic wrapping. They sprayed thick foam and acid, using
extreme decontamination efforts. They quickly had the dead trucker
bundled, his arms and legs bent so he could be wrapped up like a
dying caterpillar in a cocoon.
The trooper watched everything, wide-eyed.
“Hey, you can’t just take—”
“We’re doing this to eliminate all risk of contamination, sir. Did you
or this gentleman here”’—he nodded toward the man in the rain
slicker—“actually open up the truck cab or go inside?”
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207
“No,” Officer Penwick said, “but there was an FBI agent with us.
Agent Mulder. One of your people, I suppose?”
Lentz didn’t answer.
The trooper continued, “He commandeered this man’s pickup truck
and headed off. He said he had to meet his partner, which had
something to do with this situation. I’ve been waiting here for’—he
glanced at his watch—“close to an hour.”
“We'll take care of everything from this point on, sir. Don’t concern
yourself.” Lentz stepped back, shielding his eyes as the suited man
with the flamethrower sprayed jellied gasoline inside the cab of the
logging truck and then ignited it with a whump and a roar.
“Holy shit!” said the man in the rain slicker. He slammed the door of
the patrol car as a wave of heat ruffled over them, sending clouds of
steam from the wet weeds and asphalt.
“You’d best step back,” Lentz said to the trooper.
“The gas tank will blow at any minute.”
They hustled away, ducking low. The rest of the team had gotten the
trucker’s body wrapped up and tucked inside a sterile isolation
chamber within the cleanup vehicle. They would shuck their suits and
incinerate them as soon as they got inside. The log truck burned, an
incandescent torch in the gray rainy afternoon. The gas tank exploded
with a deafening roar, and all the men ducked just long enough to
avoid the flying debris before they turned back to their work.
“You mentioned Agent Mulder,” Lentz said, returning to the trooper.
“Can you tell us where he’s gone?”
“Sure, I know where he’s headed,” Officer Penwick said, still
astounded at the fireball, how the men had so efficiently obliterated
all the evidence. The 208
THEX-FILES
sound of the fire crackled and roared, while the black smoke stank of
gasoline, chemicals, and wet wood. The trooper gave Lentz directions
on how to find Darin Kennessy’s cabin. Lentz wrote nothing down, but
memorized every word. He had to restrain himself from shaking his
head.
A trail like muddy footprints on a snow-white carpet... The men
climbed back into the black sedan, while the rest of the crew sealed
the cleanup van and its driver started the engine.
“Hey!” The old man in the rain slicker opened the passenger door of
the trooper’s car and stood up. He shouted at Lentz, “When do I get
my pickup back?”
If the image of Agent Fox Mulder driving around in a battered redneck
pickup truck amused Lentz, his face betrayed no expression.
“We'll do everything we can, sir. There’s no need to worry.”
Lentz then climbed into the sedan, and the team raced off to
Kennessy’s isolated cabin.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Oregon Back Roads
Friday, 6:17 P.M.
With a brief sigh from the backseat, Jody X woke up again at dusk,
refreshed, fully healed—and ready to talk.
“Who are you, lady?” Jody asked,
startling her again. He woke up so quickly and fully. Vader sat up next
to him, panting and happy, as if all was right with the world again.
“My name is Dana Scully,” she said, intent on the darkening road.
“Dana—just call me Dana. I was here looking for you. I wanted to
make sure you got to the hospital before your cancer got any worse.”
“T don’t need the hospital,” Jody said with a lilt in his voice that made
it clear he thought the answer to that was plain. “Not anymore.”
Scully drove on into the dusk. She hadn’t been able to reach Mulder.
“And why is it that you don’t need a hospital?”
Scully asked. “I’ve seen your medical records, Jody.”
“I was sick. Cancer.” Then he closed his eyes, trying to remember.
“Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, 210
THEX-FILES
that’s what it’s called—or ‘ALL.’ My dad said there were lots of names
for it, cancer in the blood.”
“Tt means your blood cells are being made wrong,”
Scully said. “They’re not working properly and killing the ones that
are.”
“But I’m fixed now—or most of the way,” Jody said confidently. He
patted Vader on the head, then hugged his dog. The black Lab
absolutely loved it. Though Scully suspected the answers, she still had
a hard time wrestling with the actual facts. Jody suddenly looked
forward at her with suspicion. “Are you one of those people chasing
after us?
Are you the one my mom was so afraid of?”
“No,” Scully said, “I was trying to save you from those people. You
were very hard to find, Jody. Your mom did a good job of hiding
you.” She bit her lip, knowing what he was going to ask next . . . and
he did, looking around the backseat, suddenly realizing where he was.
“Hey, what happened to my mom? Where is she?
Jeremy was chasing her, and she told me to run.”
“Jeremy?” Scully asked, hating herself for so blatantly avoiding his
question.
“Jeremy Dorman,” Jody said, as if she should already know this
information. “My dad’s assistant. We thought he was killed in the fire,
too, but he wasn’t. I think there’s something wrong with him, though.
He said he needed my blood.” Jody hung his head, absently patting
the dog. He swallowed hard. “Jeremy did something to my mom,
didn’t he?”
Scully drew a deep breath and slowed the car. She didn’t want to be
distracted by any sharp curves or road hazards as she told Jody
Kennessy that his mother was dead.
“She tried to protect you, I think,” Scully said, “but that man, Mr.
Dorman, who came after you . . .” She paused as her mind raced
through possible choices of antibodies
211
words. “Well, he is very sick. He’s got some kind of disease. You were
smart not to let him touch you.”
“And did my mom catch the disease?” Jody asked.
Scully nodded, looking straight ahead and hoping he would still see
her answer. “Yes.”
“T don’t think it was a disease,” Jody said. He spoke bravely, his voice
strong. “I think Jeremy has nanocritters inside him, too. He stole them
from the lab . . . but they’re not working right in him. His nanocritters
kill people. I saw what he looked like.”
“Is that why he was after you?” Scully asked. She was impressed by
his intelligence and composure after such an awful ordeal—but his
story seemed so fantastic. Yet, after what she had seen, how could he
be making it up?
Jody sighed and his shoulders slumped. “I think those people are
probably after him, too. We’re carrying the only samples left, carrying
them inside us. Somebody doesn’t want them to get loose.”
He blinked up, and Scully glanced in the rearview mirror, seeing his
bright eyes in the fading light. He seemed terrified and innocent. She
thought of the cancer ravaging him, how he faced a similar fate but a
much greater risk than she herself did.
“Do you think I’m a threat, Dana? Are other people going to die
because of me?”
“No.” Scully said. “ve touched you, and I’m fine. ’m going to make
sure you're okay.”
The boy said nothing—it was hard to tell whether her words had the
reassuring effect she intended.
“These ‘nanocritters’, Jody. What did your dad say to you about
them?”
“He told me they were biological policemen that went through my
body looking for the bad cells and fixing them one at a time,” Jody
said. “The nanocritters can also protect me when I get hurt.”
212
THEX-FILES
“Like from a gunshot,” she said.
Scully realized that if the nanomachines were able to repair well-
entrenched leukemia, a gunshot would have been simple patchwork.
They could easily stop the bleeding, plug up holes, seal the skin.
Altering acute leukemia, though, was a monumentally more difficult
task. The biological policemen would have to comb through billions of
cells in Jody’s body, a massive restructuring. It was the difference
between a Band-Aid and a vaccine.
“You're not going to take me to a hospital, are you?” Jody asked. “I’m
not supposed to be out in public. I’m not supposed to let my name get
around anywhere.”
Scully thought about what he had said. She wished she could talk this
over with Mulder. If Kennessy’s nanotechnology actually worked—as
was apparent from the evidence of her own eyes—Jody and his dog
were all that remained of the DyMar research. Everything else had
been systematically destroyed, and these two in her backseat were
living carriers of the functional nanocritters . . . and somebody wanted
to destroy them. It could be a grave mistake for her to take the boy to
a hospital and entrust him into the care of other unsuspecting people.
Scully had no doubt that before long Jody and Vader would fall into
the hands of those men who had caused the destruction of DyMar. As
she drove on, Scully knew she couldn’t let this boy be captured and
whisked away, his identity erased. Jody Kennessy would not be swept
under the rug. She felt too close to him.
“No, Jody,” Scully said, “you don’t have to worry. I'll keep you safe.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Oregon Back Roads
Friday, 6:24 P.M.
As the pickup truck droned on and the X darkness deepened, at least
Mulder didn’t have to look at Jeremy Dorman, didn’t have to see the
sickening squirming and unexplained motion of his body.
After a long period of uneasiness, restlessness, and barely suppressed
pain, Dorman seemed to be dropping into unconsciousness. Mulder
could see that the former researcher, the man who had faced—and
been seemingly killed by—the other conspirators, was in anguish. He
clearly didn’t have long to live. His body could no longer function
with such severe ravages. If Dorman didn’t get his help soon, there
would be no point.
But Mulder didn’t know how much to believe the man’s story. How
much had he himself been responsible for the DyMar disaster?
Dorman lifted his heavy-lidded eyes, and when he noticed the antenna
of Mulder’s cellular phone poking from the pocket of his suit jacket,
he sat up at once.
“Your phone, Agent Mulder. You have a cell phone!”
214
THEX-FILES
Mulder blinked. “What about my phone?”
“Use it. Pull it out and dial your partner. We can find them that way.”
So far Mulder had avoided bringing this monstrously distorted man
anywhere close to Scully or the innocent boy in her possession—but
now he didn’t see any way he could talk himself out of it.
“Take out your phone, Agent Mulder,” Dorman growled, the threat
clear in his voice. “Now.”
Mulder gripped the steering wheel with his left hand, compensating
from side to side to maintain a steady course on the uneven road. He
yanked out the phone and extended the antenna with his teeth. With
some relief, he saw that the light still blinked NO SERVICE.
“T can’t,” Mulder said and turned the phone so that Dorman could see.
“You know how far out we are. There aren’t any substations nearby or
booster antennas.” He drew a deep breath. “Believe me, Mr. Dorman,
I’ve wanted to call her many times.”
The big man slumped against the passenger-side door until the
armrest creaked. Dorman used his fingertip to rub at an imaginary
mark on the pickup window; his finger left a tracing of sticky,
translucent slime on the glass.
Mulder kept his eyes on the road. The headlights stabbed into the
mist.
When Dorman looked at Mulder, in the shadows his eyes seemed very
bright. “Jody will help me. I know he will.” Dark trees flickered past
them in the twilight. “He and I were pals. I was his foster uncle. We
played games, we talked about things. Jody’s dad was always busy,
and his uncle—that jerk—told them all to go to hell when he had his
fight with David and ran off to stick his head in the sand. But Jody
knows I would never hurt him. He has to know that, no matter what
else has happened.”
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215
He gestured to the phone lying between them on the seat. “Try it,
Agent Mulder. Call your partner. Please.”
The sincerity and desperation in Dorman’s voice sent tingles down
Mulder’s spine. Reluctantly, without any faith that it would work, he
picked up the phone and punched in Scully’s speed-dial number. This
time, to his surprise, the phone rang.
THIRTY-NINE
Tactical Team Temporary Command Post
Oregon District
Friday, 6:36 P.M.
As the two vehicles toiled down the muddy X rutted drive, Lentz
couldn’t believe they had missed the obvious connection all this time.
Earlier, they had quietly checked out the survivalist enclave where
David Kennessy’s brother Darin had gone to ground, thinking himself
invisible and protected. But Patrice had not gone there. There was no
sign of the dog or the twelve-year-old boy. She had come instead to
this land and this cabin, which had belonged to Kennessy’s brother,
purchased long ago and seemingly ignored. Focused on the red
herring of the survivalist enclave, Lentz had not spotted this hiding
place on any of their computer searches of where Patrice might have
gone.
This cabin would have been a perfect place for Patrice to shelter her
son and the dog. But now it appeared that someone had found them
first.
The team again sprang out of their vehicles, this time fully armed,
their automatic rifles and grenade launchers pointed toward the small,
silent building. antibodies
217
They waited. No one moved—nobody inside, nobody on the team.
They were like a set of plastic army men forever frozen in attack
positions.
“Move closer,” Lentz said without raising his voice. In the still-misty
air, his words carried clearly. The team members shuffled about,
exchanging positions, moving closer, tightening a noose around the
cabin. Others sprinted around the back to secure the site. Lentz flicked
his glance around, confident that every member of the group had
noticed the twin sets of fresh tire tracks on the driveway. Agent
Mulder had already been here, as had his partner Scully. One of the
men shouted, gesturing toward a thick patch of tall grass and weeds
near the front porch. Lentz and the others hurried over to find a
woman’s body sprawled on the ground, blotched from the ravages of
rampant nanotech infestation. She had been tainted. The disease had
gotten her, too. The viral infestation was spreading, and with each
victim the prospect for containment grew worse and worse. The team
members had just barely thwarted an outbreak in the Mercy Hospital
morgue, where the nanomachines had continued their work on the
first victim, crudely reanimating some of the cadaver’s bodily systems.
It was Lentz’s job to ensure that such a close call never happened
again.
“They’ve gone,” Lentz said, “but we’ve got more tidying up to do
here.”
He directed the teams in the cleanup van to put on fresh protective
gear and prepare for another sterilization routine. Lentz stood back
and drew a deep breath, inhaling the resiny scent of the nearby forest,
the damp perfume of the clean fresh meadow. He turned to one of the
men. “Burn the cabin to the ground,” he said.
“Make sure nothing remains.”
218
THEX-FILES
He turned to see the crew already swaddling Patrice Kennessy’s body
with the plastic and the foam. Another man took out pumping
equipment and began to spray jellied gasoline around the exterior
cabin walls, then made a special effort to douse the meadow where
Patrice had lain.
Lentz didn’t bother to stay and watch the fire. He went back to the
car, where the radio systems connected to other satellite uplinks and
receiving dishes, to cellular phone tapping or jamming devices and
security descramblers.
Other members of the extended tactical squadron had been keeping
tabs on Agent Mulder, and now Lentz required whatever information
they could give him.
Mulder could be the one to lead them right where they needed to be.
FORTY
Oregon Back Roads
Friday, 6:47 P.M.
Scully’s cellular phone rang in the quiet X darkness of the car’s front
seat, like an electronic chipmunk chittering. She snatched it up,
knowing who it must be, relieved to be back in touch with her partner
at last. In the rear of the car Jody remained quiet, curious. The dog
whimpered, but fell silent. She yanked out the antenna while driving
with one hand.
“Scully, it’s me.” Mulder’s voice was surrounded by a nimbus of static,
but still understandable.
“Mulder, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours,”
she said quickly, before he could say anything. “Listen, this is
important. I’ve got Jody Kennessy with me. He’s healed from his
leukemia, and he’s got amazing regenerative abilities—but he’s in
danger. We’re both in danger.” Her breath caught in her throat.
“Mulder, he doesn’t have the plague—he has the cure.”
“I know, Scully. It’s Kennessy’s nanotechnology. The actual plague
carrier is Jeremy Dorman—and he’s sitting right here next to me...a
little too close, but I don’t have much choice at the moment.”
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Dorman was alive! She couldn’t believe it. She had looked at the
blood-soaked body, his hand still twitching. No human being could
have survived an injury such as that.
“Mulder, I saw the dog attack him, tear his throat out—”
But then, Scully realized, she never would have believed young Jody
could live after the gunshot wound he had received.
“Dorman’s got the nanomachines in him as well,”
Mulder said, “but his are malfunctioning. Rather spectacularly, rd
say.”
Jody leaned forward, concerned. “What is it, Dana? Is Jeremy after
us?”
“He’s got my partner,” Scully muttered quietly to the boy.
Mulder’s voice continued at the same time. “Those nanocritters are
amazing things with remarkable healing abilities, as we’ve both seen.
No wonder somebody wants to keep them under wraps.”
“Mulder, we saw what happened at the DyMar Lab. We know people
came in and confiscated all evidence of the dead security guard in the
hospital morgue. I’m not going to let Jody Kennessy or the dog be
captured, taken in, and somehow erased.”
“I don’t think that’s what Mr. Dorman wants, either,” Mulder said. “He
wants to meet.” She heard a mumbled discussion on the phone,
Dorman saying something in a threatening tone. She remembered his
gruff, dismissive voice from her confrontation with him in the forest,
just before he had accidentally shot Jody. “In fact, he insists on it.”
She pulled into a clearing at the side of the road. The trees were
thinning, becoming scrubbier, and she looked down a shallow grade
to a small city ahead. She hadn’t noticed the town’s name as she drove
along, but from the direction she had been heading, antibodies
221
Scully knew she must be nearing the suburbs around Portland.
“Mulder, are you all right?” she said.
“Dorman needs something from Jody. Some of his blood.”
Scully interrupted. “I stopped him before . . . or at least I tried. I won’t
let Jody get hurt.”
Mulder’s voice fell silent for a few seconds on the phone, then she
heard a scuffle. “Mulder! Are you all right?” she called out, wondering
what was happening and how far away she was from helping him. He
didn’t answer her.
As Mulder tried to think of something to say, Dorman finally gave up
in frustration and reached over to snatch the telephone from Mulder’s
hand.
“Hey!” he said, then flinched away to keep from touching the slime-
slick man.
Dorman cradled the cellular phone and pushed it against his
fluctuating face. The skin on his cheeks glistened and squirmed. The
mucus on his hands left sticky patches on the black plastic.
“Agent Scully, tell Jody I’m sorry I shot him,”
Dorman said into the phone. “But I knew he would heal, just like the
dog. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
He reached up to flick on the dome light in the pickup’s cab so that
Mulder could see the intent look on his face and the revolver still held
in his hand.
“You need to tell the boy something for me, please. I need to explain
to him.”
Mulder knew his own conversation with Scully was now over. He
couldn’t touch the telephone again, or else the nanocritters would
infiltrate his body too and leave him a splotched, convulsing wreck
like Dorman’s other victims.
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Dorman swallowed, and from the anguished look on his face and the
yellow shadows cast from the dim dome light, Mulder thought
perhaps the distorted man really was sorry for all that had happened.
“Tell him his mother is dead—and it’s because of me. But it was an
accident. She was trying to protect him. She didn’t know that just
touching me would be deadly.”
His lips pressed together. “The nanocritters in my body are going
wrong, very wrong. They didn’t heal her, like Jody’s do—they
destroyed his mother’s systems, and she died. There was nothing I
could do.” He spoke faster and faster. “I warned her to stay away from
me, but she”— he drew a deep breath—“she moved too fast. Jody
knows how tough his mom was.”
Dorman looked up, turning his gleaming, hooded eyes at Mulder.
Mulder kept driving. The red pickup rattled over a pothole, and a
loose wrench in the rear bed clanged and bounced. He hoped one of
the bumps would knock it free so he wouldn’t have to hear the grating
noise any more.
“Listen, Agent Scully.” Dorman’s voice was soothing; his mangled
voice box must have healed quite nicely. “Jody’s nanocritters work
just fine—and that’s what I need his blood for. I think the nanocritters
his dad gave him might be able to fix the ones in me. It’s my only
chance.”
Dorman winced as his body convulsed again, and he tried not to gasp
into the phone. The hand holding the revolver twitched and jerked.
Mulder hoped his fingers wouldn’t clench around the trigger and shoot
a hole through the roof of the pickup.
“You saw how I look,” he said. “Jody remembers what I was like, how
everything was between us. Me and him playing Mario Kart or Cruisin’
USA. Remind him about the one time I let him beat me.”
Then he sat back, curling his mouth in a little bit antibodies
223
of a smile, perhaps nostalgic, perhaps predatory.
“David Kennessy was right. There are government men after us. They
want to destroy everything we created—but I got away, and so did
Jody and Vader. But we’re marked for eradication. I’m going to die in
less than a day unless my nanocritters can be fixed. Unless I can see
Jody.”
Mulder looked over at him. The broad-shouldered, devastatingly sick
man was very persuasive. On the phone he could hear faint voices, a
discussion—presumably Jody talking to Scully. By the expression on
Dorman’s face, Jody seemed swayed by the big man’s arguments. And
why not? Dorman was the only connection remaining to the boy’s
past. The twelve year old would give him the benefit of the doubt.
Dorman’s shoulders sagged with relief.
Mulder felt sick in the pit of his stomach, still not sure whether to
believe Dorman or not. Finally Dorman growled into the phone again.
“Yes, Agent Scully. Let’s all go back to DyMar. The lab will be burnt
and abandoned, but it’s neutral ground. I know you can’t trick me
there.”
He rested the revolver in his lap, calmer and confident now. “You
have to understand how desperate I am—that’s the only reason I’m
doing this. But I won’t hesitate. Unless you bring Jody to meet me, I
will kill your partner.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t even need a gun. All I need to do is
touch him.” As if in an effort to provoke Mulder, he dropped the
revolver onto the worn seat between them.
“Just be at DyMar.” He punched the END button. He looked at the
sticky residue on the black plastic of the phone, frowned in
disappointment. He rolled down his window and tossed the phone
away. It bounced on the gravel and shattered.
“I guess we won’t be needing that anymore.”
FORTY-ONE
Mobile Tactical Command Center
Northwestern Oregon
Friday, 7:01 P.M.
Satellite dishes mounted atop the van tilted X at different azimuths to
tap into various relay satellites. Computer signal processors sifted
through the complex medley of transmissions broadcast by hundreds
of thousands of unsuspecting people.
The van sat parked at the terminus of a short dirt road that ended in a
shallow dumping ground. Compost, deadwood, rotting garbage, and
uprooted stumps stood in a massive pile like a revolutionary’s
barricade. Some farmer or logger had been tossing his debris here for
years rather than pay a disposal fee at the county dump. PRIVATE
PROPERTY and KEEP OUT signs offered impotent threats; Adam Lentz
had far more serious methods of intimidation at his disposal.
No one had been out here for some time, though, especially not after
dark. The men on the professional surveillance team had the area to
themselves—and with the black-program technology rigged into the
van, they had most of North America at their fingertips. Tree branches
bristling with pine needles offered a antibodies
225
mesh of camouflage overhead, and the thick clouds made the night
dark and soupy, blocking the stars—
but neither the trees nor the clouds hampered satellite transmissions.
The computers in the dashboard of the mobile tactical command
center scanned thousands of frequencies, ran transmissions through
voice-recognition algorithms, searched for key words, targeted on
likely transmission points.
They had continued their invisible surveillance for hours with no
success, but Adam Lentz was not a man to give up. Unless he
broached the subject himself, the rest of his team members would not
dare to comment on the matter either.
Lentz was also not one to lose patience. He had cultivated it over the
years, when patience and a cool lack of emotion as well as an absence
of remorse had allowed him to rise to this unrecognized yet still
substantial position of power. Though few people understood what he
was all about, Lentz was content with his place in the world, with the
importance of his activities. But he would have been much more
content if he could just find Agent Fox Mulder.
“He can’t know we’re looking for him,” Lentz muttered. The man at
the command console looked over, his face stony, reflecting no
surprise whatsoever.
“We’ve been very discreet,” the man said. Lentz tapped his fingertips
on the dashboard, pondering. He knew Mulder and Scully had split
up. Agent Mulder had seen the dead trucker whose body Lentz’s team
had cleanly eliminated. Both Mulder and Scully had been to Dorman’s
isolated cabin out in the hollow, which—along with the body of
Patrice Kennessy—was now a pile of smoldering ashes. Then they had
fled, and Lentz believed either Agent Mulder or Scully had the boy
Jody and his nanotechinfected dog. 226
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But something else was spreading the plague. Patrice Kennessy and
the boy had feared something. Was the dog going rampant? Had the
nanomachines within it—as Lentz had witnessed so clearly and so
brutally in the videotaped demonstration—somehow gone haywire so
that they now destroyed human beings?
The prospect frightened even him, and he knew that his superiors
were absolutely right in insisting that all such dangerous research be
contained. Only responsible, authorized people should know about it.
He had to restore order to the world. Outside, the awakening night
insects in the Oregon deep woods made a humming, buzzing sound.
Grasshoppers, tree bugs . . . Lentz didn’t know their scientific names.
He had never been much interested in wildlife. The hive behavior of
humanity in general had been enough to capture his interest.
He sat back and waited, clearing his mind, thinking of nothing. A man
with many pressures, burdens, and dark secrets, Lentz found it most
restful when he could make his mind entirely blank. He had no plans
to set in motion, no schemes to concoct. He proceeded with his
missions one step at a time.
And in this instance, he couldn’t proceed to the next step until they
heard from Agent Mulder. The man at the command deck sat up
quickly.
“Incoming,” he said. He pushed down his earphones and fiddled with
switches on his receiver.
“Transmission number confirmed, frequency confirmed.” He almost
allowed himself a smile, then turned to Lentz. “Voice pattern match
confirmed. It’s Agent Mulder. I’m recording.”
He handed the earphones to Lentz, who quickly snugged them in
place. The technician fiddled with the controls and the recorder.
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227
Lentz listened to a staticky, warbled conversation between Mulder and
Scully. In spite of his own tight control over his reactions, Lentz’s eyes
went wide, and his eyebrows lifted.
Yes, Scully had the boy and the dog in her custody—and the boy had
healed himself from a grievous wound . . . but the most astonishing
news of all was that the organization’s patsy, Jeremy Dorman, had not
been killed in the DyMar fire after all. He was still alive, still a threat .
. . and now Dorman, too, was a carrier of the rogue nanotechnology.
And so was the boy! The infestation was already spreading.
After various threats and explanations, Dorman and Agent Scully
worked to arrange a time and a place where they could meet. Mulder
and Scully, Dorman, Jody, and the dog were all falling right into his
lap—if Lentz’s team could set up their trap sufficiently ahead of time.
As soon as the cellular transmission ended, Lentz launched his team
into motion.
Every member of his group was well aware of how to reach the
burned-out ruins of the laboratory. After all, each one of the
mercenaries had been part of the supposed protest group that had
brought down the cancer research establishment. They had thrown the
firebombs themselves, set the accelerants, detonated the facility so
that little more than an unstable skeleton remained.
“We have to get there first,” Lentz said. The mobile van launched like
a killer shark out of the dead-end dirt road and onto the leaf-slick
highway, accelerating recklessly up the coast at a speed far from safe.
But a mere traffic accident was not enough to worry Adam Lentz at
that moment.
FORTY-TWO
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 8:45 P.M.
Back to the haunted house, Scully thought as X she drove up the steep
driveway to the gutted, fire-blackened ruins of the DyMar Laboratory.
Behind the clouds the moon spread a
pearlescent glow, a shimmering brightness in the soupy sky overhead.
On the hills surrounding DyMar, the forest had once been a peaceful,
protective barricade—but now Scully thought the trees were ominous,
offering cover for the stealthy movement of enemies, perhaps more
violent protesters . . . or those other men that Jody feared were after
him and his mother.
“Stay in the car, Jody.” She walked to the sagging chain-link fence
that had been erected to keep trespassers from the dangerous
construction site. Nobody manned it now.
The bluff overlooking the sprawling city of Portland was prime
business real estate, but she saw only the blackened ruins like the
carcass of a dragon sprawled beneath the diluted moonlight. The place
was empty, dangerous yet enticing.
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229
As Scully passed through the open and too-inviting chain-link gate,
she heard a car door slam. She whirled, expecting to see Mulder and
his captor, the big man who had shot Jody—but it was only the boy
climbing out of the car and looking around curiously. The black Lab
bounded out next to him, anxious to be free, glad that his boy was
healthy.
“Be careful, Jody,” she called.
“Tm following you,” he said. Before she could scold him, he added, “I
don’t want to be left alone.”
Scully didn’t want him to go into the burned ruins with her, but she
couldn’t blame him, either. “All right. Come on, then.”
Jody hurried toward her while Vader bounded ahead, frolicking.
“Keep the dog next to you,” Scully warned.
Small sounds of settling debris came from the unstable site, structural
timbers tugged by time and gravity. No damp breeze stirred the ashes,
but still the blackened timbers creaked and groaned. Some of the
structural walls remained intact, but looked ready to collapse at any
moment. Part of the floor had fallen into the basement levels, but in
one section concrete-block walls stood tall, coated with fire-blistered
enamel paint and covered with soot. Bulldozers sat like metal
leviathans outside the building perimeter. A steam shovel, Porta Potti
outhouses, and construction lockers had been set up by the contractor
in charge of erasing the last scar of DyMar’s presence.
Scully thought she heard a sound, and proceeded cautiously toward
the bulldozer. Fuel tanks sat near the heavy equipment. The
demolitions crew had been ready to begin—and she wondered if the
unusual rush to level the place had anything to do with the cover-up
plans Dorman had talked about.
Then Scully saw a metal locker that had been 230
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pried open. A starburst of bright silver showed where a crowbar had
ripped off the lock, just below the marking, DANGER: EXPLOSIVES.
Suddenly the darkness seemed much more oppressive, the silence
unnatural. The air was cold and gauzy damp in her nostrils, with a
sour poison of old burning.
“Jody, keep close to me,” she said.
Her heart pounded, and all of her senses came fully alert. This
meeting between the boy and Jeremy Dorman would be tense and
dangerous. But she would make sure Jody got through it.
She heard the approach of another engine, a vehicle rattling and
laboring up the slope, tires crunching on gravel. Twin headlights
swept through the night like bright coins.
“Stay with me.” She put a protective hand on Jody’s shoulder, and the
two stayed at the edge of the burned-out building.
It was an old red pickup truck patched with primer, rusted on the
sides. The body groaned and creaked as the driver’s door opened and
Mulder climbed out. Of all the unbelievable things she had witnessed
with Fox Mulder, seeing her strictly suit-and-tie partner driving a
battered old pickup ranked among the most unusual.
“Fancy meeting you here, Scully,” Mulder said. A larger form heaved
itself out of the passenger side. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light,
and even the shadows could not hide that something was wrong with
the way he moved, the way his limbs seemed to have extra joints, the
way weariness and pain seemed ready to crush him.
Jeremy Dorman had looked bad before, and now he appeared even
worse.
Scully took a step forward but kept herself in front of Jody. “Are you
all right, Mulder?”
“For now,” he said.
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231
Dorman took a step closer to Mulder, who edged away in an attempt
to keep his distance. The broad-shouldered man held a revolver in his
hand . . . but the weapon itself seemed the least threatening aspect
about him. Scully drew her own handgun. She was a good shot and
utterly confident. She pointed the 9mm directly at Jeremy Dorman.
“Release Agent Mulder right now,” she said. “Mulder, step away from
him.”
He did so by two or three steps, but he moved slowly, carefully, not
wanting to provoke Dorman.
“Tm afraid I can’t return your partner’s weapon,”
Dorman said. “I’ve touched it, you see, and it’s no use to anyone
anymore.”
“And I’ve also lost my jacket and my cell phone,”
Mulder said. “Think of all the paperwork I’m going to need to fill out.”
Jody came hesitantly forward, standing close behind Scully. “Jeremy,
why are you doing this?” he said. “You’re as bad as . . . as bad as
them.”
Dorman’s shoulders sagged, and Scully was reminded of the pathetic
lummox Lenny from Of Mice and Men, who hurt things he loved
without knowing why or how.
“Pm sorry, Jody,” he said, spreading one hand while he gripped the
revolver in the other. “You can see how this is affecting me. I had to
come here. You can help me. It’s the only way I know to survive.”
Jody said nothing.
“Other people are after us, Jody,” Dorman said. He took a step closer.
Scully did not back away, maintaining herself as a barrier between
them.
“We’re being hunted by government officials, people trying to bury
your dad’s work so that no other cancer patients will ever be helped.
No one else will be cured like you were. These men want to keep that
cure for themselves.”
He was so emphatic that the skin on his face shifted 232
THEX-FILES
with his intense emotion. “The protesters that killed your dad, the
ones who burned down this whole facility, were not just animal-rights
activists. They were staged by the group I’m talking about. It was
planned. It’s a conspiracy. They’re the ones who killed your father.”
At that point, as if on cue, other figures appeared, shadowy
silhouettes, men in dark suits emerging from the perimeter of the
chain-link fence. They came out of the trees and the access road.
Another group trudged up the steep driveway with bright flashlights
blazing.
“We have evidence that suggests otherwise, Mr. Dorman,” said one of
the men in the lead. “We’re your reinforcements, Agent Mulder. We’ll
take care of the situation from here.”
Dorman looked around wildly and glared at Mulder, as if the agent
had betrayed him.
“How did you know our names?” Mulder asked. Scully backed away
until she clutched Jody’s wrist. “It’s not that simple,” she said. “We
won't relinquish custody of this boy.”
“Tm afraid you have to,” the man in the lead said.
“T assure you, our jurisdiction in this matter supersedes yours.”
The men came closer; their dark suits acted as camouflage in the
shadowy overhangs in the burned building.
“Identify yourselves,” Scully said.
“These men don’t carry business cards, Scully,”
Mulder said.
Jody looked at the man who had spoken. “What did you mean?” he
said, his eyes gleaming. “What did you mean that they weren’t the
ones who killed my father?”
The man in the lead looked over at Jody like an insect collector
assessing a prize specimen. “Mr. Dorman didn’t explain to you what
really happened to your father?” His voice held a mocking tone.
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233
“Don’t you dare, Lentz,” Dorman said. His voice seethed. He had
raised the revolver in his hand, but Lentz didn’t seem at all bothered
by the threat.
“Jeremy killed your dad, Jody. Not us.”
“You bastard!” Dorman wailed in despair. Scully was too astonished to
respond, but it was clear to her that Dorman realized he would never
convince the boy to help him, not now. With a roar, swinging his too-
flexible arms, Jeremy Dorman brought up the revolver in his hand,
aiming at Lentz.
The other team members were much faster, though. They snatched
their own weapons and opened fire.
FORTY-THREE
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 9:03 P.M.
The hail of small-caliber bullets struck X Jeremy Dorman, and he
thrashed out his arms in a scream of pain—as his body suddenly went
haywire. Mulder and Scully both dove to one side, reacting according
to their training. Jody cried out as Scully dragged him with her,
scrambling toward shelter among the large construction equipment.
Mulder moved away, shouting for the men to hold their fire, but no
one paid the slightest attention to him.
Dorman himself remained the focus of all the shooting. He had known
these men wanted to take him down, though he doubted that they had
known he was still alive before now. They did not know what had
changed inside of him . . . how he was different. Adam Lentz had
betrayed him before: The people in the organization that had
promised him his own laboratory, the ability to continue the
nanotechnology research, had already attempted to destroy him. Now
they were here to finish the job.
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235
As two hot bullets struck him, one high in the shoulder and the other
on the left side of his rib cage, the pain and adrenaline and fury
destroyed the last vestiges of his control over his own body. He let slip
his hold on the systems that had played havoc with his genetic
structure, his muscles and nerves. He roared a wordless howl of
outrage.
And his body changed.
His skin stretched like a trembling drumhead. Inside, his muscles
convulsed and clenched. The wild tumorous growths that had
protruded from his ribs, his skin, his neck, came loose, ripping their
way through his already mangled shirt.
The mass of protrusions had fought themselves free one time
previously, while he had been trapped with Wayne Hykaway in the
logging truck. But that loss of control was nothing compared to the
unleashed biological chaos he exhibited now, a wild-card
reorganization that the nanocritters had found in his most primitive
DNA coding.
His shoulders groaned, his biceps bulged, and his arms bent and
twisted. Another whipping tumor crawled out of his throat from the
base of his tongue. The skin on his face and neck ran like melting
plastic. The men in dark suits continued to fire at him, in alarm and
self-defense now, but Dorman’s bodily integrity was breaking down,
mutating, able to absorb the impacts like soft clay.
From his position at the lead of the team, Adam Lentz reacted quickly,
retreating to cover as the gunfire continued. Dorman charged forward
to attack the nearest dark-suited man with one twisted arm while
tentacles whipped out in a hideously primeval mass from his body. His
mind was a blur, filled with pain and static and conflicting images.
The nerve signals he tried to 236
THEX-FILES
send to his muscles had very little effect. Now his warped and
rebellious body broke free, going on the rampage.
The government man’s cool professionalism quickly degenerated into
a scream as an explosion of fleshy protrusions, tentacled claws, a
nightmare of bizarre biological abominations wrapped around his
arms, his chest, his neck. Dorman squeezed and strangled, until the
man broke like balsa kindling in his grasp.
Another bullet shattered Dorman’s femur, but before he could
collapse, the nanomachines knitted the bone together again, allowing
him to charge forward to snare another victim.
The hot translucent slime covered Dorman’s body, providing a vehicle
for the seething nanocritters. He needed only to touch the enemy men
and the cellular plague would instantly eradicate their systems—but
his out-of-control body took great delight in snapping their necks,
crushing their windpipes, folding up their rib cages like accordions.
The single tentacle whipped out of his mouth like the long sharp
tongue of a serpent, lashing the air. He didn’t know how to interpret
his own senses anymore. He had no idea how much—or how little—
humanity still remained within him.
For now he saw only the enemy, the conspirators, the traitors—and
his buzzing, disintegrating brain thought only of killing them.
But even as he continued the struggle, Dorman felt disoriented. His
vision blurred and distorted. The surrounding agents brought more
weapons to bear. The bullet impacts drove him away, and Dorman
stumbled backward.
A dim spark in his mind made him remember the DyMar laboratory,
the rooms where Darin and David Kennessy had developed their
fantastic work—work antibodies
237
that even now had brought them to this threshold of disaster.
Like a wounded animal fleeing into its lair, Jeremy Dorman lurched
into the burned wreckage, seeking refuge.
And the men with weapons charged after him.
FORTY-FOUR
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 9:19 P.M.
As soon as Lentz and his team conveniently X appeared, Mulder knew
that these men were no “reinforcements,” but a cleanup crew, minor
players in the same conspiracy that he and Scully battled constantly.
They had tracked Patrice and Jody, they had staged the violent protest
that burned the lab down, they had ransacked the Kennessy home,
they had confiscated the evidence in the hospital morgue.
Mulder could do without that kind of “reinforcement” any day of the
week. When the shots rang out, he was instantly afraid that he, Scully,
and young Jody would all be mowed down in the rain of bullets. He
ducked to one side, seeking shelter. Thanks to Dorman, he no longer
had a handgun of his own, but Scully was still armed.
“Scully, stay with the boy!” he shouted. He heard the solid wet impact
of bullets striking skin, and Dorman roared in pain.
Mulder scuttled along the darkened ground, ducking behind fallen
beams and broken walls. He antibodies
239
looked up as the ululating sound emanating from the ominous fugitive
turned more bestial, less defined. Jeremy Dorman transformed into a
monster before his eyes.
All the horrors of wild cellular growth, the reckless spread of a
malignant cancer with a mind of its own, extended like some ill-
defined creature that had lain dormant inside Dorman’s cells. Now it
spread forth, growing without a plan. Like tract home develop- ments
approved by a bribed city council, he thought. And this cellular assault
was unleashed with a predatory mind bent on attack and destruction.
From her vantage point, Scully couldn’t see the details. She shielded
Jody with her own body and ran over to the shelter of the nearby
bulldozer. With the bright echoing sound of metal upon metal, bullets
ricocheted from the armored side of the machine. Scully dove down
into the shadows, knocking Jody to safety. Mulder kept low, racing
along the broken bricks and fallen timbers. He ran into the dubious
shelter of the gutted structure of the DyMar Laboratory. Dorman—or
what was left of him—managed to grab two more of the attacking
agents and kill them, using a combination of hands and tentacles, as
well as the incredibly virulent plague that lived in the slime on his
skin.
Gunfire continued to ring out, sounding like an out-of-control popcorn
popper. Yellow pinpoints of light flew like fireflies in the darkness.
Mulder could see that the dark-suited men had scattered to surround
the entire perimeter. They closed in, driving Dorman back into the
ruins.
As if it was part of a plan.
Mulder ducked beneath an overhanging archway, bristling with teeth
of shattered glass, had somehow remained standing even after the fire
and the explosion. Over by the bulldozer, Jody shouted in despair as
240
THEX-FILES
his dog let out a long and nerve-grating chain of barks and growls.
Raising his head, Mulder saw a dark shadow, the black Labrador,
racing into the ruins. Vader barked and snapped as he pursued Jeremy
Dorman. Lentz’s other agents also crept up to the labyrinthine
wreckage, but they were wary now. Dorman had withstood their hail
of gunfire, and he had already killed several of them. Two of the men
had flashlights, bright white eyes that burned a white lance into the
murk. Ash sifted down from where Dorman had stirred the debris.
Mulder smelled the tang of soot and burned plastic. One of the agents
pinned Dorman with his flashlight beam, attempting to stun him like a
deer facing oncoming headlights. With a grunt, the monstrous man
shoved sideways against a support pillar, knocking a charred wooden
pole down along with a shower of concrete blocks.
The agent with the flashlight tried to scramble back, but the wreckage
fell on his upper leg. Part of the wall collapsed. Mulder heard the hard
bamboo sound of a bone breaking. Then the dark-suited man, who
had been so calm as he hunted down his victim, yelped in pain; he
had a high-pitched bawling voice. Somewhere inside the burned
building, the dog barked.
Mulder tried to stay under cover, but he made plenty of noise as he
tripped over fallen bricks and crunched broken glass. He ducked
behind a slumped, charred desk as more gunfire rang out. A bullet
struck the office furniture, and Mulder let out a hiss of surprise. He
could see Scully outside in the pearly gray of fog-muffled moonlight.
She was holding the boy back, clutching his torn shirt. Jody continued
to shout after his dog as the gunfire peppered the night with sharp
sounds. Scully pushed Jody back down as a barrage of bullets struck
the bulldozer again. antibodies
241
Another shot slammed into the desk near where Mulder hid.
He realized that these shots couldn’t be accidental misfires, though
they would be excused as such. To the men who had surrounded the
DyMar site and tried to kill Dorman and Jody, it might also prove
advantageous if Agents Mulder and Scully were also
“accidentally” caught in the line of fire.
FORTY-FIVE
DyMar Inferno
Friday, 9:38 P.M.
The trap had sprung. Not as neatly as X Adam Lentz had hoped,
perhaps, but still the results would be the same . . . if a bit messier.
Messes could be cleaned up.
The gunfire crackled in the night with sharp, deadly sounds, but none
of the shots caused sufficient damage to take down Jeremy Dorman,
their immediate target. Though Lentz’s team members had standing
instructions to use all the force necessary to capture the boy and the
dog as well, Agent Scully had protected young Jody Kennessy. She
had sheltered him with all the training and skills she had learned at
the FBI Academy at Quantico.
Lentz and his men had undergone more rigorous training, though, in
other . . . less accredited schools. After the initial gunfire, he thought
he had seen Agent Mulder also run for cover into the gutted building.
No matter. Everything would be taken care of in time.
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243
Jeremy Dorman’s horrific transformation had captured the focus of
the team members. Seeing several of their comrades slaughtered in the
monster’s murderous rage, they set out after him, grim-faced and
murderous. Though Lentz himself had ducked out of the way of
Dorman and his plague-laced slime, he was still disappointed in how
his team’s cool efficiency had so quickly shattered into a backwash of
vengeance. He’d believed that these men were the best and most
professional in the world. If so, the world should offer better. He
heard the shrill cry of another man inside the burned ruins, and more
gunshots rang out. The team had trapped Dorman inside the unstable
facility. In that respect, at least, everything was going as smoothly as
he had hoped.
Lentz stopped at the nearest tactical vehicle, reached into the front
seat, and took out the demolition control. But he had to wait for the
right moment. His team had arrived a full twenty-five minutes before
Agent Scully and the boy, but Lentz had not moved prematurely. It
was so much more efficient to wait for everyone to reach the same
rendezvous point.
Lentz’s hand-picked demolitions men had used the blasting caps stored
at the construction site, as well as other incendiaries and explosives
they kept inside their cleanup van. Working in the precarious
structure, his men had rigged sealed drums of jellied gasoline in the
half-collapsed basement levels. When the drums exploded, flames
would shoot up through the remaining floors and incinerate the rest of
the DyMar building. No trace would remain.
Lentz didn’t particularly want to obliterate his team members who had
foolishly followed Dorman inside, chasing him in a cat-and-mouse
routine among the falling-down walls. But they were expendable. 244
THEX-FILES
Each man had been aware of the risks when he signed up.
Agent Mulder had also vanished inside, and Lentz suspected that some
of the gunfire was also directed at him. The team members would
have taken it upon themselves to eradicate all witnesses. Lentz had
received clear instructions that Mulder was not to be killed. He and
his partner Scully were already part of a larger plan, but Lentz had to
make on-the-spot decisions. He had to set priorities—and seeing the
rampaging thing unleashed from within Dorman’s body had hardened
him to the extreme necessity. If he had to, Lentz would make excuses
to his superiors. Later.
Mulder and Scully both knew too much, after all, and this weapon,
this breakthrough, this curse of rampant nano-technology had to be
controlled, no matter what the cost. Only certain people could be
trusted with so much power.
And the time was now.
One of the other men rushed back to the armored cleanup van. His
eyes were glazed; sweat bristled across his forehead. He panted,
looking around wildly. Lentz glanced over at him and snapped,
“Control yourself.”
The effect was like an electric shock running through the team
member. He stopped, reeled for a second, then swallowed hard. He
stood straight, his breathing resumed a normal rate almost instantly,
and he cleared his throat, waiting for additional orders. Lentz held up
the control in his hand. A small transmitter. “Is everything prepared?”
The man looked down at the controls inside the van. He blinked, then
answered quickly. His words were as fast and as crisp as the gunshots
that pattered through the darkness.
“That’s all you need, sir. It will set off the blasting antibodies
245
caps and trigger the remaining explosives. On a parallel circuit, the
jellied gasoline will ignite. Just push the red button. That’s all you
need.”
Lentz nodded to him curtly. “Thank you.” He took one last look at the
blackened skeletal building and pushed the indicated button.
The DyMar Laboratory erupted in fresh flames.
FORTY-SIX
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 9:47 P.M.
The shock wave toppled some of the remainX ing girders and the
once-solid concrete wall. The metal desk sheltered Mulder from the
worst of the blast, but still the hammer of heat pressed the heavy
piece of furniture against the wall, nearly crushing him. Flames swept
upward, bright yellow and orange, moving rapidly, as if by magic.
He’d thought most of the flammables would have been consumed in
the first fire two weeks earlier. Shielding his eyes from the glare and
the hot wind, Mulder could see from the magnitude of the blaze that
someone had rigged the ruins to go up in an instant inferno.
The dark-suited men had planned for this. Hearing a shriek of terror
and pain, Mulder carefully raised his head, blinking his watery eyes
against the furnace blast of the inferno. He saw one of the men who
had hunted after him stumbling through the wreckage, his suit
engulfed in flames. More gunshots rang out, frantic firepower among
shouts and screams—and a barking dog.
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247
The fire raced up along the wooden support beams. The heat was so
intense, even the glass and broken stone seemed to have caught fire.
The black Labrador had bounded into the building, gotten caught in
the explosion, and was thrown against a wall. Vader’s fur smoldered,
but still he ran, casting about for something. One of the overhead
girders fell with a crash among the debris. Flames licked along the
splintered edge.
Mulder stood up from behind the desk, shielding his eyes. “Vader!” he
shouted. “Hey, over here!” That black dog was evidence. Vader’s
bloodstream carried functional nanotechnology that could be studied
to save so many people, without the horrendous mutations Jeremy
Dorman had suffered.
Mulder waved his hand to get the dog’s attention, but instead another
man trapped inside the wreckage turned and fired at him. The gunshot
spanged against the desk and ricocheted onto one of the broken
concrete walls. Before the man could shoot again, though, the
inhuman form of Jeremy Dorman crashed through the debris. The
man with the gun tore his attention from Mulder—the easy target—to
the monstrous creature. He didn’t have time to make an outcry before
several of Dorman’s new appendages grasped him. With a twisted but
powerful arm, Dorman snapped the man’s neck, then discarded him.
At the moment, Mulder didn’t feel inclined to shower the distorted
man with gratitude. Shielding his eyes, barely able to see through the
smoke and the blaze, he staggered toward the outside, needing to get
away.
The dog was hopelessly lost inside the facility. Mulder couldn’t
understand why Vader had run into such a dangerous area in the first
place. The unstable floor was on fire. The walls, the 248
THEX-FILES
debris . . . even the air burned his lungs with each gasping, retching
breath he drew.
Mulder didn’t know how he was going to get out alive.
Scully clutched Jody’s torn shirt, but the fabric ripped and pulled free
as he lunged after his dog.
“Jody, no!”
But the boy charged after Vader. The men in the ambush continued
shooting, but Dorman was killing them one after another. The black
dog plunged directly into the crossfire. The twelve-year-old boy—
perhaps a bit too confident in his own immortality, as many twelve-
year-olds were—ran after him a few seconds later.
Scully dropped the useless scrap of cloth in her hand. Desperate, she
stood up from behind the shelter of the bulldozer. Scully watched the
boy run miraculously unharmed toward the charred walls of DyMar.
With a loud ricochet, another bullet bounced off the heavy tractor
tread; she didn’t even bother to duck. Bits of debris showered Jody,
but he lowered his head and kept running. He stood screaming at the
edge of the walls, looking at the barrier of flames. He ducked down
and tried to get inside. She heard Mulder’s voice call out for the dog,
then more gunshots. The DyMar facility and all it stood for continued
to burn.
So far, no police, no fire engines, no help whatsoever came to
investigate the gunfire, the explosion, the flames.
“Mulder!” she shouted. She didn’t know where he was or how he
could get out. Jody ducked recklessly inside. “Jody!” she shouted.
“Come back here!”
She ran to the threshold and squinted through the smoke. A girder
tumbled as a ceiling collapsed, show-antibodies 249
ering sparks. Part of the floor showed gaps and holes where the flames
and the explosion beneath had weakened it, causing it to crack and
tumble down in sections like a house of cards.
Jody stood half-balanced, flailing his hands.
“Vader, where are you? Vader!”
Throwing all caution to the wind, needing to save the boy as if it were
some measure of her own worthiness to survive, Scully hurried inside.
She struggled ahead, taking shallow breaths. Most of the time, she
held her eyes closed, blinking them open for a quick glimpse, then
staggering along.
“Vader!” Jody called again, out of sight. Finally Scully reached the
boy’s side and grabbed his arm. “We have to go, Jody. Out of here!
The whole place is going to collapse.”
“Scully!” Mulder shouted, his voice raw and ragged with the smoke
and heat. She turned to see him making his way across the floor,
stepping in flames and racing along. He swatted out a fire that
smoldered on his trousers.
She gestured for him to hurry—but then a wall behind her crumbled.
Concrete blocks fell to one side in a mound of cinders as a wooden
support beam split.
“Hello, Jody . . .” Jeremy Dorman’s tortured voice said as he pushed
himself through the fire and debris of the wall he had just knocked
down. The distorted man stood free, undisturbed by the heat raging
around him. Embers pattered on his body, smoking on his skin and
leaving black craters that shifted and melted and healed over. His
body ran like candle wax. His clothes were fully involved in the fire
that blazed around him, but his skin thrashed and writhed, a horror
show of tentacles and growths. Dorman blocked their way out.
“Jody, you wouldn’t help me when I asked—and now look what’s
happened.”
250
THEX-FILES
Jody bit back a small scream and only glared at the hideously mutated
creature. “You killed my dad.”
“Now we're all going to die in this fire,” Dorman said.
Scully doubted that even the swarming nanomachines could protect
the boy from the intense flames. She knew for a fact, though, that she
and Mulder had no such protection, mere humans, completely
susceptible to the fire’s heat and smoke. They were both doomed
unless they could get around this man. Mulder tripped and fell to one
knee in the hot broken glass; he hauled himself up again without an
outcry. Scully still had her handgun, but she knew that would offer no
real threat against Dorman. He would laugh off her bullets, the way
he had ignored the crossfire from the dark-suited men. . . the way he
even now didn’t seem troubled by the fire that raged around them.
“Jody, come to me,” Dorman said, plodding closer. His skin roiled and
rippled, glistening with slime that oozed from his every pore. Jody
staggered back toward Scully. She could see burns on his skin,
scratches and bleeding cuts where debris had showered him in the
explosion, and she wondered briefly why the small injuries weren’t
magically healing as his gunshot wound had. Was something wrong
with his nanocritters? Had they given up, or shut down somehow?
Scully knew she couldn’t protect the boy. Dorman lunged closer,
reaching out to him with a flamecovered hand. And then from a wall
of burning wreckage to one side, where the light and the smoke made
visibility impossible, the black Labrador howled and launched himself
at the target.
Dorman spun about, his head twisting and swiveling. His broken, bent
hands rose up, thrashing. antibodies
251
His tentacles and tumors quivered like a basket of snakes. The dog, a
black-furred bulldozer, knocked Dorman backward.
“Vader!” Jody screamed.
The dog drove Dorman staggering into the flames, where bright light
and curling fire rose up through ever-growing gaps in the floor, as if
the pit of hell itself lay beneath the support platform.
Dorman yelped, and his tentacles wrapped around the dog. The black
Lab’s fur caught on fire in patches, but Vader didn’t seem to notice.
Immune to the plague Dorman carried, the dog snapped his jaws,
digging his fangs deep into the soft flowing flesh of the nanotech-
infected man.
Dorman wrestled with the heavy animal and both tumbled to the
creaking, splintering floorboards. Dorman’s left foot crashed through
one of the flame-filled holes.
He cried out. His tentacles writhed. The dog bit ferociously at his face.
Then the floor collapsed in an avalanche of flaming debris. Sparks and
smoke flew upward like a landmine explosion. With a howl and a
scream, both Dorman and Vader fell into the seething basement. Jody
wailed and made as if to run after his dog, but Scully grabbed him
fiercely by the arms. She dragged the boy back toward the opening,
and safety. Coughing, Mulder followed, stumbling after her. The
flames roared higher, and more girders collapsed. Another concrete
wall toppled into shards, then an entire section of the floor fell in,
nearly dragging them with it. They reached the threshold of the
collapsing building, and Scully could think of nothing more than to
push herself out into the fresh air, into the blessed relief. Safe from the
fire.
The cool night seemed impossibly dark and cold 252
THEX-FILES
as they fought their way from the flames and the wreckage. Her eyes
burned, so filled with tears that she could barely see. Scully held the
despairing boy, wrapping her arms around him. Mulder touched her
shoulder, getting her attention as they stumbled away from the
flames.
She looked up to see a group of men waiting for them, staring coldly.
The survivors of Lentz’s team held their automatic weapons high and
pointed at them.
“Give me the boy,” Adam Lentz said.
FORTY-SEVEN
DyMar Inferno
Friday, 9:58 P.M.
Mulder should have known the men in
X suits would be waiting for them at the perimeter of the inferno.
Some of Lentz’s
“reinforcements” would have realized
there was no need to endanger themselves—
better just to hang around and let any survivors come to them.
“Stop right there, Agent Mulder, Agent Scully,”
the man in the lead said. “There’s still a chance we can bring this to a
satisfactory resolution.”
“Were not interested in your satisfactory resolution,” Mulder
answered with a raw cough. Scully’s eyes flashed as she placed her
arm protectively around the boy. “You’re not taking Jody. We know
why you want him.”
“Then you know the danger,” Lentz said. “Our friend Mr. Dorman just
showed us all what could go wrong. This technology can’t be allowed
to be disseminated uncontrolled. We have no other choice.” He
smiled, but not with his eyes. “Don’t make this difficult.”
254
THEX-FILES
“You’re not taking him,” she said more vehemently. To emphasize her
point, Scully drew herself tall. Her face was smudged with soot; her
clothes reeked of smoke and cinder burns. She stood defiantly in front
of Jody, a barricade between him and their automatic weapons.
Mulder wasn’t sure if her body would block a hail of high-powered
gunfire, but he thought her sheer determination just might stop them.
“I don’t know who you are, Mr. Lentz,” Mulder said, taking a step
closer to Scully to support her stand, “but this young man is in our
protective custody.”
“I just want to help him,” Lentz said smoothly.
“We'll take him to medical care. A special facility where he'll be
looked after by people who can . . . understand his condition. You
know no normal hospital would be able to help him.”
Scully did not budge. “I’m not convinced he would survive your
treatment.”
From below, finally, Mulder could hear sirens and approaching
vehicles. Response crews with flashing red and blue lights raced along
the suburb streets toward the base of the hill. The second DyMar fire
continued to blaze at the top of the bluff. Mulder stepped backward,
closer to his partner. He kept his eyes nailed on Lentz’s, ignoring the
other men in suits.
“Now you're sounding like me, Scully,” Mulder said.
“Give us the boy now,” Lentz said. Below, the sirens were getting
louder, closer.
“Not a chance in hell,” Scully answered. Fire engines and police cars
raced up the hill, sirens wailing. They would reach the hilltop inferno
in seconds. If Lentz meant to do something, it would be antibodies
255
now. But Mulder knew if he did shoot them, he wouldn’t have time to
clean up his mess before the DyMar site became very public.
“Mr. Lentz—” one of the surviving team members said.
Scully took one step, paused a terribly long moment, then began to
walk slowly away, one step at a time. Her determination didn’t waver.
Lentz stared at her. The other men kept their guns trained.
Rescue workers and firefighters yanked open the chain-link gate,
hauling it aside so the fire trucks could drive inside.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Lentz said coldly. He eyed the
arriving vehicles, as if still gauging whether he could get away with
shooting the two agents and eliminating the bodies under the very
noses of the rushing emergency crews. Adam Lentz and his men stood
angry and defeated, backlit by the raging inferno that burned the
remains of DyMar Laboratory to the ground.
But Scully knew she was saving the boy’s life. She kept walking,
holding Jody’s arm. He looked forlornly back at the wall of flames.
As the uniformed men rushed to hook up hoses and rig their fire
engine, Lentz’s team stepped back, disappearing into the forest
shadows. Somehow the three of them managed to reach the rental car.
“PIL drive, Scully,” Mulder said as he popped open the driver’s-side
door. “You’re a bit distracted.”
“Tll keep an eye on Jody,” she said. Mulder started the engine, half-
expecting that gunshots from the trees would ring out and the
windshield would explode with spider-webbed bullet cracks. But
instead, he managed to drive off, his tires spitting loose gravel on the
steep driveway 256
THEX-FILES
leading down from DyMar Laboratory. He had to flash his ID several
times to get past the converging authorities. He wondered how Lentz
would explain himself and his team . . . if they were found at all in the
surrounding forest.
FORTY-EIGHT
Mercy Hospital
Portland, Oregon
Saturday, 12:16 P.M.
In the hospital, Scully checked and reX checked Jody Kennessy’s lab
results, but she remained as baffled after an hour of contemplation as
when she had first seen the data. She sat in the bustling cafeteria at
lunchtime, nursing a bitter-tasting cup of coffee. Doctors and nurses
came through, chatting about cases the way sports fans talked about
football games; patients spent time out of their stuffy rooms with their
family members. Finally, realizing the charts would show her nothing
else, Scully got another cup to go, and went to meet Mulder where he
sat stationed on guard duty outside the boy’s hospital room.
As she walked from the elevator down the hall, she waved the manila
folder in her hand. Mulder looked up, eager for confirmation of the
technology. He stuffed the magazine he had been reading back into its
plain brown envelope. The door to Jody’s room stood ajar, with the
TV droning inside. So far, no mysterious strangers had come to
challenge the boy. 258
THEX-FILES
“I don’t know whether to be more astonished at the evidence of
functional nanotechnology—or at the lack of it.” Scully shook her
head and pushed the dot matrix printouts of lab scans at Mulder. He
picked them up, glancing down at the numbers, graphs, and tables,
but obviously didn’t know what he was looking for. “I take it this isn’t
what you expected?”
“Absolutely no traces of nanotechnology in Jody’s blood.” She crossed
her arms over her chest. “Look at the lab results.”
Mulder scratched his dark hair. “How can that be?
You saw him heal from a gunshot wound—a mortal wound.”
“Maybe I was mistaken,” she said, “Perhaps the bullet managed to
miss vital organs—”
“But Scully, look at how healthy he is! You saw the picture of him
with the leukemia symptoms. He only had a month or two to live. We
know David Kennessy tested his cure on him.”
Scully shrugged. “He’s clean, Mulder. Remember the sample of dog’s
blood at the veterinarian’s office? The remnants of nanotechnology
were quite obvious. Dr. Quinton said the same thing about the fluid
specimen I took during my autopsy of Vernon Ruckman. The traces
aren’t hard to find if the nanomachines are as ubiquitous in the
bloodstream as they should be—and there would have to be millions
upon millions of them in order to effect the dramatic cellular repairs
that we witnessed.”
Her first evidence that something was not as she suspected, though,
had been Jody’s recent scrapes, scratches, and cuts after the fire.
Though not serious, they failed to heal any more quickly than other
ordinary scratches. Jody Kennessy now seemed like a normal boy,
despite what she knew of his background.
“Then where did the nanocritters go?” Mulder asked. “Did Jody lose
them somehow?”
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259
Scully had no idea how to explain it. Together they entered Jody’s
room, where the boy sat up in bed, paying little attention to the
television that played loudly in the background. Considering all he
had been through, the twelve-year-old seemed to be taking the ordeal
well enough. He gave Scully a wan smile when he saw her.
A few moments later, the chief oncologist bustled into the room,
holding a clipboard in his hand and shaking his head. He looked over
at Scully, then at Jody, dismissing Mulder entirely.
“T see no evidence of leukemia, Agent Scully,” he said, shaking his
head. “Are you sure this is the same boy?”
“Yes, we’re sure.”
The oncologist sighed. “I’ve looked at the boy’s previous charts and
lab results. No blast cells in the blood, and I performed a lumbar
puncture to study the cerebrospinal fluid for the presence of blast cells
still nothing. Very standard procedures, and usually very conclusive.
In an advanced case such as his is supposed to be, the symptoms
should be obvious just by looking at him—lord knows, I’ve seen
enough cases.”
Now the oncologist finally looked at Jody. “But this boy’s leukemia is
completely gone. Not just in remission—it’s gone.”
Scully hadn’t honestly expected anything else. The oncologist blinked
his eyes and let his chart hang by his hip. “I’ve seen medical miracles
happen .. . not often, but given the number of patients through here,
occasionally events occur that medicine just can’t explain. But this
boy, who was facing terminal cancer only a month or two ago, now
shows no symptoms whatsoever.”
The oncologist raised his eyebrows at Jody, who seemed uninterested
in the discussion, as if he knew 260
THEX-FILES
the answers all along. “Mr. Kennessy, you’re cured. Do you understand
the magnitude of that diagnosis?
You’re completely healthy, other than a few scratches and scrapes and
minor burns. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.”
“We'll let you know if we have any further questions,” Scully said, and
the doctor seemed disappointed that she wasn’t quite as amazed as he
was. A little too brusquely, perhaps, she ushered him out the door of
the hospital room.
After the oncologist departed, she and Mulder sat at the end of Jody’s
bed. “Do you know why there’s no trace left of the nanocritters in
your bloodstream, Jody? We can’t understand it. The nanomachines
healed you from the gunshot wound before, they cured you of your
cancer—but they’re gone now.”
“Because I’m cured.” Jody looked up at the television, but did not care
about the housewives’ talk show going on at low volume. “My dad
said they would shut down and dissolve when they were done. He
made them so they would fix my leukemia cell by cell. He said it
would take a long time, but I would get better every day. Then, when
they were finished . . . the nanocritters were supposed to shut
themselves down.”
Mulder raised his eyebrows at Scully. “A fail-safe mechanism. I
wonder if his brother Darin even knew about it.”
“Mulder, that implies an incredible level of technological
sophistication—” she began, but then realized that the entire prospect
of self-sustaining biological policemen that worked on the human
body, using nothing more than DNA strands as an instruction manual,
was also fantastically beyond what she had believed were modern
capabilities.
“Jody,” she said, leaning closer to the boy, “we intend to release these
results as widely as possible. antibodies
261
We need to let everyone know that you are no longer carrying any
signs of the nanotechnology. If you’re clean, there should be no reason
why those men will continue to be after you.”
“Whatever,” he said, sounding glum.
Scully didn’t waste her effort in a false cheeriness. The boy would
have to deal with his situation in his own way.
Jody Kennessy had carried a miracle cure, not just for cancer but
probably for all forms of disease that afflicted humanity. The
nanocritters in his blood might even have offered immortality.
But with DyMar Laboratory destroyed, Jeremy Dorman and the black
Lab swallowed up in the inferno, and David Kennessy and anyone else
involved in the project dead, similar nanotechnology breakthroughs
would be a long time coming if they had to be made from scratch.
Scully already had an idea of how the Bureau might keep Jody safe in
the long run, where they could take him. It didn’t make her feel good,
but it was the best option she could think of.
Mulder, meanwhile, would simply write up the case, keep all of his
records and his unexplained speculations, add them to his folders full
of anecdotal evidence. Once again, he had nothing hard and fast to
prove anything to anyone.
Just another X-File.
Before long, Scully figured, Mulder would need to install several more
file cabinets in his cramped office, just to keep track of them all.
FORTY-NINE
Federal Office Building
Crystal City, Virginia
Sunday, 2:04 P.M.
Adam Lentz made his final report verX bally and face to face, with no
paperwork buffers between them. There would be no written record of
this investigation, nothing that could be uncovered and read by the
wrong sets of prying eyes. Instead, Lentz had to face down the man
and tell him everything directly, in his own words.
It was one of the most terrifying experiences he had ever known.
A curl of acrid cigarette smoke rose from the ashtray, clinging like a
deadly shroud around the man. He was gaunt, his eyes haunted, his
face unremarkable, his dark brown hair combed back. He did not look
to be a man who held the eggshells of human lives at the mercy of his
crushing grip. He didn’t look like a man who had seen presidents die,
who had engineered the fall of governments and the rise of others,
who played with unknowing test groups of people and called them
“merchandise.”
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263
But still, he played world politics the way other people played the
game of Risk.
He took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly
through parchment-dry lips. So far, he had said nothing.
Lentz stood inside the nondescript office, facing the man squarely. The
ashtray on the desk was crowded with stubbed-out cigarette butts.
“How can you be so sure?” the man finally said. His voice was
deceptively soft, with a melodious quality. Though he had never once
served in the military, at least not in any official capacity, Lentz stood
ramrod straight. “Scully and Mulder have tested the boy’s blood
extensively. We have complete access to his hospital records. There is
absolutely no evidence of a nanotechnology infestation, no
microscopic machines, no fragments—nothing. He’s clean.”
“Then how do you explain his remarkable healing properties? The
gunshot wound?”
“No one actually saw that, sir,” Lentz said. “At least, no one on
record.”
The man just looked at him, smoke curling around his face. Lentz
knew his answer wasn’t acceptable. Not yet. “And the leukemia? The
boy shows no sign of further illness, as I understand it.”
“Dr. Kennessy knew the potential threat of nanotechnology—he was
no fool—and he might have been able to program his nanocritters to
shut down once their mission was accomplished, once his son was
cured of his cancer. And according to the tests recently run in the
hospital, Jody Kennessy is perfectly healthy, no longer suffering from
acute lymphoblastic leukemia.”
Eyebrows raised. “So he’s been cured, but he no longer carries the
cure.” The man blew out a long breath of cigarette smoke. “We can be
happy for that, 264
THEX-FILES
at least. We certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to get their hands on
this miracle.”
Lentz didn’t answer, simply stood watchful and wary. In a secret
repository, a building whose address was unknown, in rooms without
numbers, drawers without markings, the Cigarette-Smoking Man kept
samples and bits of evidence hidden away so that no one else could
see. These tangible items would have proven enormously useful to
others who sought the truth in all its many forms.
But this man would never share them.
“What about Agents Mulder and Scully?” the smoking man said.
“What do they have left?”
“More theories, more hypotheses, but no evidence,”
Lentz said.
The smoking man inhaled again, then coughed several times, a deep
ominous cough that held a taint of much deeper ills. Perhaps he just
had a guilty conscience . . . or perhaps something was wrong with him
physically.
Lentz fidgeted, waiting to be dismissed or complimented or even
reprimanded. The silence was the worst.
“To reiterate,” Lentz said, speaking uncomfortably into the man’s
continued gaze. Languid smoke curled up and around, making a
sinuous arabesque dance in the air. “We have destroyed the bodies of
all the known plague victims and sterilized every place touched by the
nanotechnology. We believe none of these selfreproducing devices has
survived.”
“Dorman?” the smoking man asked. “And the dog?”
“We sifted through the DyMar wreckage and found an assortment of
bones and teeth and a partial skull. We believe these to be the remains
of Dorman and the dog.”
“Did dental records verify this?”
antibodies
265
“Impossible, sir,” Lentz answered. “The nanotechnology cellular
growths had distorted and changed the bone structure and the teeth,
even removing all the fillings from Dorman’s mouth. We can’t make a
positive identification, even as to the species. However, we have
eyewitness accounts. We saw the two fall into the flames. We found
the bones. There seems to be no question.”
“There are always questions,” the man said, raising his eyebrows. But
then, unconcerned, he lit another cigarette and smoked half of it
without saying a word. Lentz waited.
Finally the man stubbed out the butt in the already overcrowded
ashtray. He coughed one more time, and finally allowed himself a
thin-lipped smile.
“Very good, Mr. Lentz. I don’t think the world is ready yet for miracle
cures . . . at least not anytime soon.”
“T agree, sir,” Lentz said.
As the man nodded slightly in dismissal, Lentz turned, forcibly
stopping himself from running full-tilt out of the office. Behind him,
the man coughed again. Louder this time.
FIFTY
Survivalist Compound
Oregon Wilderness
One Month Later
The people were strange here, Jody thought X . . . but at least he felt
safe. After the ordeal he had recently survived, after his entire world
had been destroyed in stages—first the leukemia, then the fire that
had killed his father, then the long flight that ended with the death of
his mother—he felt he could adapt easily. Here in the survivalist
compound, his Uncle Darin was overly protective but helpful as well.
The man refused to talk about his work, his past . . . and that was just
fine with Jody. Everyone in this isolated but vehement community fit
together like interlocking puzzle pieces.
Just like the puzzle of the Earth rising above the Moon he and his
mother had put together one of those last afternoons hidden in the
cabin. .. . Jody swallowed hard. He missed her very much.
After Agent Scully had brought him here, the other members of the
heavily guarded survivalist compound had taken him under their
wing. Jody Kennessy was an icon for them now, something like a
mascot for their antibodies
267
group—this twelve-year-old boy had taken on the dark and repressive
system, and had survived. Jody’s story had only heightened the
resolve of the compound members to keep themselves isolated and
away from the interfering and destructive government they despised
so much.
Jody, his Uncle Darin, and the other survivalists spent their days
together in difficult physical work. All the members of the compound
shared their own specialties with Jody, instructing him. Still healing
from the stinging wounds in his heart and in his mind, Jody spent
much of his time walking the camp’s extended perimeter, when he
wasn’t working in their gardens or fields to help make the colony
selfsufficient. The survivalists did a lot of hunting and farming to
supplement their enormous stockpile of canned and dried foods.
It was as if this entire community had been ripped up and
transplanted here from another time, a selfsufficient time. Jody didn’t
mind. He was alone now. He didn’t feel close even to his Uncle Darin .
.. but he would survive. He had overcome terminal cancer, hadn’t he?
The other members of the group knew to leave Jody alone when he
was in one of his moods, to give him the time and space he needed.
Jody wandered the barbedwire fences, looking at the trees . . . but
mainly just being by himself and walking.
A mist clung to the forest, hiding in the hollows, drifting like cottony
fog as the day warmed up. Overhead, the clouds remained gray and
heavy, barely seen through the tall treetops. He watched his step
carefully, though Darin had assured him that there really was no
minefield, no booby traps or secret defenses. The survivalists just liked
to foster such rumors to maintain the aura of fear and security around
their compound. Their main goal was to be left undisturbed by the
outside world, and they would use whatever means necessary to
accomplish that end. 268
THEX-FILES
Jody heard a dog bark in the distance, clear and sharp. The cold damp
air seemed to intensify the sound waves.
The survivalists had many dogs in their compound, German
shepherds, bloodhounds, rottweilers, Dobermans. But this dog
sounded familiar. Jody looked up. The dog barked again, and now he
was more certain. “Come here, boy,” he called. He heard a crashing
sound through the underbrush, branches and vines tossed aside as a
large black dog bounded toward him, emerging from the mist. The
dog barked happily upon seeing him.
“Vader!” Jody called. His heart swelled, but then he dropped his
voice, concerned.
The dog looked unharmed, fully healed. Jody had seen Vader vanish
into the flames. He had seen the DyMar facility collapse into embers,
shards, and twisted girders.
But Jody also knew that his dog was special, just like he’d been before
all the nanocritters in his own body had died off. Vader had no such
fail-safe system. The dog bounded toward him, practically knocking
Jody over, licking his face, wagging his tail so furiously that it rocked
his entire body back and forth. Vader wore no tags, no collar, no way
to prove his identity. But Jody knew.
He suspected his uncle might guess the truth, but the story he would
have to tell the others was just that he had found another dog, another
black Lab like Vader. He would give his new pet the same name. The
rest of the survivalists didn’t know, and no one else in the outside
world would ever need to find out. He hugged the dog, ruffling his fur
and squeezing his neck. He shouldn’t have doubted. He should have
kept watch, hoping, waiting. His mother had said it herself. The dog
would come back to him eventually. Vader always did.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book like this is sometimes as involved as the deepest
government conspiracy. For Antibodies, a few of the shadowy people
lurking behind the scenes were: Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Chris Carter,
Mary Astadourian, Jennifer Sebree, Frank Spotnitz, Caitlin Blasdell,
John Silbersack, Dr. Robert V. Stannard at Adobe Pet Hospital, Tom
Stutler, Jason C. Williams, Elton Elliot, Andrew Asch, Lil Mitchell,
Catherine Ulatowski, Angela Kato, Sarah Jones, and (as always) my
wife, Rebecca Moesta.
About the Author
One of today's most popular SF writers, KEVIN J. ANDERSON is the
author of the internationally bestselling and award-winning Dune
prequels (co-authored with Brian Herbert) and numerous Star Wars
novels, and has carved an indisputable niche for himself with science
fiction epics featuring his own highly successful Saga of Seven Suns
series. His critically acclaimed work has won or been nominated for
numerous major awards. His most recent book is The Last Days of
Krypton, and he lives in Colorado.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your
favorite HarperCollins author.
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Document Outline
e Title Page
+ Dedication Page
e Contents
VOODOO OOO OOOO OO OO VOODOO OOO ODO OOOO OOOO)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
OOOO OOO OOO GOGO 000O
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
The X-Files From HarperEntertainment
Copyright Notice
About the Publisher