T H E X -F I L E S
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
Late on a night filled with cold mist and still…
1
The bear stood huge, five times the size of an… 10
As Mulder led her out of the Hoover Building, Scully…
14
The dog stopped in the middle of the road, distracted…
21
The middle of morning on a gray day.
Early mist…
28
The house looked like most of the others on the… 33
No one would ever find them in this cabin, isolated…
38
Even through the thick fabric of her clumsy gloves, she…
43
Dr. Elliott Hughart was torn between intentionally putting the mangled…
48
Not long before sunset, a patch of bright blue
sky…
55
He tried to hide and he tried to sleep—but nothing…
60
Mulder didn’t feel at all nondescript or unnoticeable as he…
66
In a nondescript office with few furnishings, Adam Lentz sat…
74
The midday sunlight dappled the patches in the Oregon hills…
83
As they approached the veterinary clinic in the sleepy
coastal…
89
Some people might have thought being alone in a morgue…
96
The bridge spread out into the early morning fog. Its…
103
Mulder pulled up to the Mini Serve pump in the… 107
“We’re federal agents,” Mulder announced. “I’m going to reach for…
113
On hearing Jody’s cry, Patrice awoke from a restless sleep.
121
Edmund was amazed at how fast the officials arrived,
considering…
126
The ocean crashed against the black cliffs with a
hollow…
129
The cold rain sheeted down, drenching him and the roadside…
134
Scully was already tired of driving and glad for the…
140
Outside the cabin, Vader barked. He stood up on
the…
145
“Patrice!” Dorman called in a hoarse voice, then walked toward…
149
The dense trees clawed at him. Their branches scratched his…
156
The logging truck sat half off the road in a…
162
Scully became disoriented on the winding dirt logging roads, but…
170
No matter how far Jody ran, Dorman followed. The
only…
174
The sudden carnage astonished Scully, and time seemed to stop…
181
The phone rang in Adam Lentz’s plain
government office, and…
186
The red pickup truck Mulder had commandeered handled surprisingly well.
189
Fifty miles at least to the nearest hospital, along tangled…
192
The wounds in Jeremy Dorman’s throat had sealed, and a…
198
To Adam Lentz and his crew of professionals, the fugitives…
205
With a brief sigh from the backseat, Jody woke up…
209
As the pickup truck droned on and the darkness
deepened,…
213
As the two vehicles toiled down the muddy rutted drive,…
216
Scully’s cellular phone rang in the quiet darkness of the…
219
Satellite dishes mounted atop the van tilted at different azimuths…
224
Back to the haunted house, Scully thought as she
drove…
228
The hail of small-caliber bullets struck Jeremy Dorman, and he…
234
As soon as Lentz and his team conveniently appeared, Mulder…
238
The trap had sprung. Not as neatly as Adam Lentz…
242
The shock wave toppled some of the
remaining girders and…
246
Mulder should have known the men in suits would be…
253
In the hospital, Scully checked and rechecked Jody Kennessy’s lab…
257
Adam Lentz made his final report verbally and face
to…
262
The people were strange here, Jody thought…but at least he…
266
273
Other Books in the X-Files Series
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
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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
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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
T H E X - F I L E S
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
T H E X - F I L E S
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.
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
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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.
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.
“I 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
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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?”
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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 I’m not sure why it’s interesting to you.”
“I’m 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
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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
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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.
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
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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.
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“I 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
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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.
“I don’t think a doctor will be able to help him, sport,” he said to his son.
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“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
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
“I’ve 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
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some patches of skin. Some kind of clear mucus . . . like slime.
“We’re treating this as a high-contamination scenario. Our lab tests are expected back in another day or so from the CDC,” Quinton said. “I’m 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. I’ll 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.
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“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.”
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
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.”
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
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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
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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?”
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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.
“It’s 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
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“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.
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
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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
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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.
“I’ve 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
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“It’s 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.
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“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.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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. “I’ll 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
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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
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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, I’m unaware of any other situation that has exhibited this extreme level of violence.”
“I 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?”
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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?”
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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.”
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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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
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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
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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, “we’re 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.
“I 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
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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
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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 DyMar—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
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Lots of activists were there that night, other groups, people I’d never seen before.”
“So who set up the protest at DyMar?” Scully said.
“I 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.”
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“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 he’s 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.”
“I’m aware of how . . . difficult cancer treatments antibodies
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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.”
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
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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
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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, I’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!
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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. “I’ll 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
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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.
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
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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. antibodies
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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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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
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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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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.
“I 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.”
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.”
“I’ll 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.
“I 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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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
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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
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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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“I 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.
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
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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.
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But if someone needed help, Edmund had to take the chance.
“Are you in there?” he said, leaning closer to the sealed refrigerator door. “I’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
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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
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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.
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Survivalist Compound
Thursday, 5:09 P.M.
“We’re 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?”
“I’m 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.”
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“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.”
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“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.
“I’m 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
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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?”
“I 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, I’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
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“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 118
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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
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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.
“It’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.
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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.
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.
“It’s 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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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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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.
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 . . . ?”
“It’s 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?”