The man on the right spoke up. “I assure you, sir, we have the proper authority here. This is a potential matter of national security and public health. We are very concerned.”
“And so am I,” Quinton said. “Are you working with the other federal agents who were here?”
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“This . . . phase of the operation is out of their jurisdiction, sir. This outbreak poses an extreme danger without proper containment procedures.”
The central man’s eyes were hard, and even the ME seemed intimidated.
“Sir,” the first man said, “we need to get an entire team in here to remove the . . . biomaterial from the refrigerator. We’ll inconvenience you as little as possible.”
“Well, I suppose . . .” Quinton’s voice trailed off, sounding flustered as the three CDC men quickly ushered them both out of the quiet and clean room.
“Edmund, let’s go for a cup of coffee,” Quinton finally said, glancing uneasily over his shoulder. Happy for the coroner’s invitation—he had never been so lucky before—Edmund took the elevator and went to the hospital cafeteria for a while, still trying to recover. He kept seeing the many-tentacled creature trying to escape from the morgue refrigerator drawer. Normally he would have had a thousand questions for the ME, checking details, demonstrating all the trivia he had learned from his midnight studies in the morgue. But Quinton sat quiet and reticent, looking at his hands, deeply troubled. He took out the card the FBI agents had given him previously, turning it over and over in his hands.
When they returned to the basement level an hour later, they found that the morgue had been scoured and sterilized. Drawer 4E had been ripped out entirely, its contents taken away. The men had left no receipt, no paperwork.
“We don’t have any way to contact them to find out their results,” Edmund said.
But the medical examiner just shook his head.
“Maybe that’s for the best.”
The Devil’s Churn
Oregon Coast
Friday, 10:13 A.M.
The ocean crashed against the black cliffs X with a hollow booming sound like boulders dropped from a great height. The breeze at the scenic overlook whipped cold and salty and wet against Scully’s face.
“It’s called the Devil’s Churn,” Mulder had said, though Scully could certainly read the OREGON STATE
SCENIC MARKER sign.
Below, the water turned milky in a frothing maelstrom as the breakers slammed into a hollowed-out indentation in the cliff. Sea caves there had collapsed, creating a sort of chute; as the waves struck the narrow passage head-on, it funneled the force of the water and sprayed it into a dramatic tower, like a water cannon blasting as high as the clifftops above, drenching unwary sightseers.
According to the signs, dozens of people had died at this place: unsuspecting tourists picking their way down to the mouth of the Churn, caught standing in the wrong place when the unexpected geyser of water exploded upward. Their bodies had been battered 130
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against the algae-slick rocks or simply sucked out to sea.
Station wagons, minivans, and rental cars were parked in the scenic area as families from out of state as well as locals came to stare down at the sea. Obnoxious seagulls screamed overhead. A battered old vending coach stood open with aluminum awnings rattling in the breeze; a grinning man with a golf cap sold warmed-over hot dogs, sour coffee, bagged chips, and canned soft drinks. On the other side of the parking area, a woman with braids huddled in a down hunting vest, watching her handmade rugs flap vigorously on a clothesline.
Fighting back a headache and drawing a deep breath of the cool, salty breeze, Scully buttoned her coat to keep warm. Mulder went directly over to the cliff edge, eagerly peering down and waiting for the water to spray up. Scully withdrew her cell phone, glad to see that the signal here was strong enough, at last. She punched in the buttons for the Portland medical examiner.
“Ah, Agent Scully,” Dr. Quinton said, “I’ve been trying to call you all morning.”
“Any results?” she asked. After seeing the slide of the dog’s contaminated blood at the veterinarian’s, she had asked the medical examiner to look at his own sample of the slimy mucus she had taken during Vernon Ruckman’s autopsy.
By the unsteady-looking guardrail, Mulder watched in fascination as a rooster tail of cold spray jetted into the air, curling up to the precipice, and then raining back down into the sea. She gestured for Mulder to come back to her as she pressed the phone tightly against her ear, concentrating on the ME’s staticky words.
“Apparently something . . . unusual happened to the plague victim’s body in the morgue refrigerator.”
Quinton seemed hesitant, at a loss for words. “Our antibodies
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attendant reported hearing noises, something moving inside the sealed drawer. And it’s been sealed since you left it.”
“That’s impossible,” Scully said. “The man couldn’t still be alive. Even if the plague put him in some kind of extreme coma, I’d already performed an autopsy.”
The ME said, “I know Edmund, and he’s not the skittish sort. A little bit of a pest sometimes, but this isn’t the kind of story he would make up. I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, but . . .” Quinton hesitated again, and Scully pressed the phone closer to her ear, straining to hear the undertone in his voice.
“Unfortunately, before I could check it out myself, some gentlemen from the Centers for Disease Control came in and sterilized everything. As a precaution, they took the entire refrigerator drawer.”
“From the CDC?” Scully said in disbelief. She had worked many times with the CDC, and they were always consummate professionals, following official procedures rigorously. This sounded like something else entirely, some one else. Now she was even more concerned about what she had learned earlier that morning when she called Atlanta to check on the status of the sample she had personally sent in. Apparently, their lab technician had lost the specimen.
Mulder came up to her, brushing his damp hair back, though the wind continued to blow it around. He looked at her, raising his eyebrows. She watched him as she spoke into the phone, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “Dr. Quinton, you kept a sample of the substance for your own analysis. Were you able to find anything?”
The ME pondered for a moment before answering. She heard static on the line, clicking, a warbling background tone. They still must be at the edge of reception 132
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for cellular transmissions. “I think it’s an infestation of some kind,” Quinton said finally. “Tiny flecks unlike anything I’ve seen before. The sample is utterly clotted with them. Under highest magnification they don’t look like any microorganism I’ve ever seen. Squarish little boxes, cubes, geometrical shapes . . .”
Scully felt cold as she heard the ME’s words, echoing what Darin Kennessy had told them at the survivalist camp.
“Have you ever seen anything like this, Agent Scully?” the ME persisted on the phone. “You’re a doctor yourself.”
Scully cleared her throat. “I’ll have to get back to you on that, sir. Let me speak with my partner and compare notes. Thanks for your information.” She ended the call and then looked at Mulder. After she briefly recounted the conversation, Mulder nodded. “They sure were eager to get rid of the guard’s body. Every trace.”
Scully pondered as she listened to the roar of the ocean against the rocks below. “That doesn’t sound like the way the Centers for Disease Control operates. No official receipt, no phone number in case Dr. Quinton has further information.”
Mulder buttoned his coat against the chilly breeze.
“Scully, I don’t think that was the CDC. I think it could well be representatives from the same group that arranged for the destruction of DyMar Laboratory and pinned the blame on a scapegoat animal rights group.”
“Mulder, why would anyone be willing to take such extreme action?”
“You heard Kennessy’s brother. Nanotechnology research,” he said. “It’s gotten loose somehow, maybe from a research animal carrying something very dangerous. The mucus from the dead security guard sounds just like what we saw in the sample of the dog’s blood—”
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Scully put her hands on her hips as the sea wind whipped her red hair. “Mulder, I think we need to find that dog, and Patrice and Jody Kennessy.”
Behind them the Devil’s Churn erupted again with a loud booming sound. Spray shot high into the air. A group of children stood next to their parents at the guardrail and cheered and laughed at the spectacle. No one seemed to be paying any attention to the food vendor in his van or the braided woman with her handmade rugs.
“I agree, Scully—and after that report from the ME, I think maybe we aren’t the only ones looking for them.”
Tillamook County
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 10:47 A.M.
The cold rain sheeted down, drenching him X and the roadside and everything all around—but Jeremy Dorman’s other problems were far worse than a bit of lousy weather. The external world was all bad data to him now, irrelevant numbness. The forest of nerves inside him provided enough pain for a world all its own.
His shoes and clothes were soaked, his skin gray and clammy—but those discomforts were insignificant compared to the raging war within his own cells. Slick patches of the protectant carrier fluid coated his skin, swarming with the reproducing nanocritters. His muscles trembled and vibrated, but he continued lifting his legs, taking steps, moving along. Dorman’s brain seemed like a mere passenger in his body now. It took a conscious effort to keep the joints bending, the limbs moving, like a puppeteer working a complicated new marionette while wearing a blindfold and thick gloves. A car roared past him, spraying water. Its tires antibodies
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struck a puddle in a depression in the road and jetted cold rainwater all over him. The taillights flickered red for an instant as the driver realized what he had done, and then, maliciously, the man honked a few times and continued weaving down the road.
Dorman trudged along the muddy shoulder, uncaring. He focused ahead. The long road curved into the wooded mountains. He had no idea how many miles he had gone from Portland, but he hoped he could find some way to hurry. He had no money and he didn’t dare rent a car anyway, at the risk of someone spotting his identity. No one knew he was still alive, and he wanted to keep it that way. Not that he would trust his rebellious body or flickering depth perception if he was driving . . .
He shambled past a small county weigh station, a little shack with a gate and a red stoplight for trucks. Opaque miniblinds covered the windows, and a sign that looked as if it hadn’t been changed in months said, WEIGH STATION CLOSED.
As Dorman trudged past, he looked longingly at the shelter. It would be unheated, with no food or supplies, but it would be dry. He longed to get out of the rain for a while, to sleep . . . but he would likely never wake up again. His time was rapidly running out. He continued past the weigh station. Waterlogged potato fields sprawled in one direction, with a marsh on the other side of the road. Dorman headed toward the gentle uphill slope leading into the mountains. Strange and unfathomable shapes skirled across his vision like static. The nanocritters in his body were messing around with his optic nerves again, fixing them, making improvements . . . or just toying with them. He hadn’t been able to see colors for days. Dorman clenched his jaws together, feeling the ache in his bones. He almost enjoyed the ache—a real 136
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pain, not a phantom side effect of having his body invaded by self-programmed machines.
He picked up his pace, so focused on keeping himself moving forward that he didn’t even hear the loud hum of the approaching truck.
The vehicle grew louder, a large log truck halfloaded with pine logs whose bark had been splintered off and most of their large protruding branches amputated. Dorman turned and looked at it, then stepped farther to the side of the road. The driver flashed his headlights.
Dorman heard the engine growl as the trucker shifted down through the gears. The air brakes sighed as the log truck came to a halt thirty feet in front of Dorman.
He just stood and stared, unable to believe what had happened, what a stroke of luck. This man was going to give him a ride. Dorman hurried forward, squelching water from his shoes. He huddled his arms around his chest.
The driver leaned over the seat and popped open the passenger door. The rain continued to slash down, pelting the wet logs, steaming off the truck’s warm grille.
Dorman grabbed the door handle and swung it open. His leg jittered as he lifted it to step on the running board. Finally he gained his balance and hauled himself up. He was dripping, exhausted, cold.
“Boy, you look miserable,” the truck driver said. He was short and portly, with dirty-blond hair and blue eyes.
“I am miserable,” Dorman answered, surprised that his voice worked so well.
“Well, then, be miserable inside the truck cab here. You got a place to go—or just wandering?”
“I’ve got a place to go,” Dorman said. “I’m just trying to get there.”
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“Well, you can ride with me until the Coast Highway turnoff. My name’s Wayne—Wayne Hykaway.”
Dorman looked at him, suspicious. He didn’t want his identity known. “I’m . . . David,” he said. He slammed the truck’s door, shoving his hands into the waterlogged pockets of his tattered jacket, hunched over and huddling into himself. Hykaway had extended his hand but quickly drew it back when it became obvious Dorman had no intention of shaking it.
The interior of the cab was warm and humid. Heat blasted from the vents. The windshield wipers slapped back and forth in an effort to keep the view clear. News radio played across the speakers of a fartoo-expensive sound system, crackling with static from poor reception out here in the wilderness. The trucker wrestled with the stick shift and rammed the vehicle into gear again. With a groan and a labor of its engines, the log truck began to move forward along the wet road uphill toward the trees. As the truck picked up speed, Dorman could only think that he was growing closer to his destination every minute, every mile. This man had no idea of the deadly risk he had just taken, but Dorman had to think of his ultimate goal of finding Patrice and Jody—
and the dog. Whatever the cost.
Dorman sat back, pressed against the door of the truck, trying to ignore the guilt and fear. Water trickled down his face, and he blinked it away. He maintained his view through the windshield, watching the wipers tock back and forth. He tried to keep as far away from Wayne Hykaway as possible. He didn’t dare let the man touch him. He couldn’t risk the exposure another body would bring. The cordial trucker switched off the talk radio and tried in vain to strike up a conversation, but when Dorman proved reticent, he just began to talk about 138
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himself instead. He chatted about the books he liked to read, his hobby of tai chi relaxation techniques, how he had once trained unemployed people. Hykaway kept one hand on the steering wheel of the mammoth logging truck, and with the other he fiddled with the air vent controls, the heater. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he flicked on the radio again, tuning to a different station, then switched it off in disgust.
Dorman concentrated on his body, turning his thoughts inward. He could feel his skin crawling and squirming, his muscle growths moving of their own accord. He pressed his elbows against his ribs, feeling the clammy fabric of his jacket as well as the slick ooze of the nanomachine carrier mucus that seeped out of his pores.
After fifteen minutes of Dorman’s trancelike silence, the trucker began to glance at him sidelong, as if wondering what kind of psychopath he had foolishly picked up.
Dorman avoided his gaze, staring out the side window—and then his gut spasmed. He hunched over and clenched his hands to his stomach. He hissed breath through his teeth. He felt something jerk beneath his skin, like a mole burrowing through his rib cage.
“Hey, are you all right?” the trucker said.
“Yes,” Dorman answered, ripping the answer out of his voice box. He squeezed hard enough until he could finally regain control over his rebellious biological systems. He sucked in deep pounding breaths. Finally the convulsions settled down again. Still, he felt his internal organs moving, exploring their freedom, twitching in places that should never have been able to move. It was like a roiling storm inside of him.
Wayne Hykaway glanced at him again, then turned antibodies
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back to concentrate on the wet road. He kept both hands gripped white on the steering wheel.
Dorman remained seated in silence, huddled against the hard comfort of the passenger-side door. A bit of slime began to pool on the seat around him. He knew he could lose control again at any moment. Every hour it got harder and harder. . . .
Max’s General Store and Art Gallery
Colvain, Oregon
Friday, 12:01 P.M.
Scully was already tired of driving and glad X for the chance to stop and ask a few more people if they recognized Patrice and Jody Kennessy.
Mulder sat in the passenger seat, munching cheese curls from a bag in his lap and dropping a few crumbs on his overcoat. He plastered his face to the unfolded official road map of the state of Oregon.
“I can’t find this town on the map,” Mulder said.
“Colvain, Oregon.”
Scully parked in front of a quaint old shake-shingle house with a hand-painted sign dangling on a chain on a post out front. MAX’S GENERAL STORE AND ART
GALLERY.
“Mulder, we’re in the town and I can’t find it.”
The heavy wooden door of the general store advertised Morley cigarettes; a bell on the top jingled as they entered the creaking hardwood floor of Max’s.
“Of course they’d have a bell,” Mulder said, looking up. Old 1950s-style coolers and refrigerators—enam-antibodies 141
eled white with chrome trim—held lunch meats, bottled soft drinks, and frozen dinners. Boxes around the cash register displayed giant-size Slim Jims and seemingly infinite varieties of beef jerky. T-shirts hung on a rack beside shelves full of knickknacks, most made from sweet-smelling cedar and painted with witty folk sayings related to the soggy weather in Oregon. Shot glasses, placemats, playing cards, and key chains rounded out the assortment. Scully saw a few simple watercolor paintings hanging aslant on the far wall above a beer cooler; price tags dangled from the gold-painted frames. “I wonder if there’s some kind of county ordinance that requires each town to have a certain number of art galleries,” she said. Behind the cash register, an old woman sat barricaded by newspaper racks and wire trays that held gum, candy, and breath mints. Her hair was dyed an outrageous red, her glasses thick and smudged with fingerprints. She was reading a well-thumbed tabloid with headlines proclaiming Bigfoot Found in New Jersey, Alien Embryos Frozen in Government Facility, and even Cannibal Cult in Arkansas.
Mulder looked at the headlines and raised his eyebrows at Scully. The red-headed woman looked up over her glasses. “May I help you folks? Do you need maps or sodas?”
Mulder flashed his badge and ID. “We’re federal agents, ma’am. We’re wondering if you could give us directions to a cabin near here, some property owned by a Mr. Darin Kennessy?”
Scully withdrew the much-handled Kennessy photos and spread them on the counter. The woman hurriedly folded her tabloid and shoved it beside the cash register. Through her smudged glasses, she peered down at the photos.
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“We’re looking for these two people,” Scully said, offering no further information.
Jody Kennessy smiled optimistically up from the photograph, but his face was gaunt and sunken, his hair mostly fallen out, his skin grayish and sickly from the rigorous chemo and radiation treatments. The woman removed her glasses and wiped them off with a Kleenex, then put them on her face again.
“Yes, I think I’ve seen these two before. The woman at least. Been out here a week or two.”
Mulder perked up. “Yes, that’s about the time frame we’re talking about.”
Scully leaned forward, unable to stop herself from telling too many details, so as to enlist the woman’s aid. “This young man is very seriously ill. He’s dying of leukemia. He needs immediate treatment. He may have gotten significantly worse since this photo was taken.”
The woman looked down at Jody’s photograph again. “Well, then, maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “As I recall, the boy with this woman seemed pretty healthy to me. They could be staying out at the Kennessys’
cabin. It’s been empty a long time.”
The woman rocked back on her chair, which let out a metal squeal. She pressed the thick glasses up against the bridge of her nose. “Nothing much moves around here without us knowing about it.”
“Could you give us directions, ma’am?” Scully repeated.
The redheaded woman withdrew a pen, but didn’t bother to write down directions. “About seven or eight miles back, you turn on a little road called Locust Springs Drive, go about a quarter of a mile, turn left on a logging road—it’s the third driveway on your right.” She toyed with her strand of fake pearls.
“This is the best lead we’ve got so far,” Scully said softly, looking eagerly at her partner. The thought of antibodies
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rescuing Jody Kennessy, helping him out in his weakened state, gave her new energy. As an FBI agent, Scully was supposed to maintain her objectivity and not get emotionally involved in a case lest her judgment be influenced. In this instance she couldn’t help it. She and Jody Kennessy both shared the shadow of cancer, and the connection to this boy she’d never met was too strong. Her desire to help him was far more powerful than Scully had anticipated when she and Mulder had left Washington to investigate the DyMar fire.
The bell on the door jingled again, and a state policeman strode in, his boots heavy on the worn wooden floor of the general store. Scully looked over her shoulders as the trooper walked casually over to the soft drink cooler and grabbed a large bottle of orange soda.
“The usual, Jared?” the woman called from the cash register, already ringing him up.
“Would I ever change, Maxie?” he answered, and she tossed him a pack of artificially colored cheese crackers from the snack rack.
The policeman nodded politely to Mulder and Scully and noticed the photographs as well as Mulder’s badge wallet. “Can I help you folks?”
“We’re federal agents, sir,” Scully said. She picked up the photographs to show him and asked for his assistance. Perhaps he could escort them out to the isolated cabin where Patrice or Jody might be held captive—but suddenly the radio at Jared’s hip squelched. A dispatcher’s voice came over, sounding alarmed but brisk and professional. “Jared, come in, please. We’ve got an emergency situation here. A passing motorist found a dead body up the highway about three quarters of a mile past Doyle’s property.”
The trooper grabbed his radio. “Officer Penwick here,” he said. “What do you mean by a dead body?
What condition?”
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“A trucker,” the dispatcher answered. “His logging rig is half off the road. The guy’s sprawled by the steering wheel, and . . . well, it’s weird. Not like any accident injuries I’ve ever heard of.”
Mulder quickly looked at Scully, intrigued. They both understood that this sounded remarkably like their own case. “You go ahead, Scully. I can ride out to the location of the body with Officer, uh, Penwick here and take a look around. If it’s nothing, I’ll have him take me to the cabin and meet up with you.”
Uneasy about being separated from him, but realizing that they had to investigate both possibilities without delay, she nodded. “Make sure you take appropriate precautions.”
“I will, Scully.” Mulder hurried for the door. The bell jangled as the trooper left, clutching his cheese crackers and orange soda on one hand as he sent off an acknowledgment on his walkie-talkie. He glanced over his shoulder. “Put it on my tab, Maxie—
I’ll catch you later.”
Scully hurried behind them, letting the jingling door swing shut. Mulder and the trooper raced for his police vehicle, parked aslant in front of the general store.
Mulder called back at her, “Just see if you can find them, Scully. Learn what you can. I’ll contact you on the cell phone.”
The two car doors slammed, and with a spray of wet gravel the highway patrolman spun around and raced up the road with his red lights flashing. She returned to their rental car, grabbing her keys. When she glanced down at the unit on the car seat, she finally noticed to her dismay that her cellular phone wasn’t working. They were out of range once more.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 12:58 P.M.
Outside the cabin, Vader barked. He stood X up on the porch and paced, letting a low growl loose in his throat.
Patrice stiffened and hurried to the lace curtains. Her mouth went dry. She had owned Vader for a dozen years, and she knew that this time the dog was not making one of his puppy barks at a squirrel.
This was a bark of warning. She had been expecting something like this. Dreading it. Outside, the trees girdling the hollow stood tall and dark, claustrophobic around the hills that sheltered them. The rough trunks seemed to have approached silently closer, like an implacable army . . . like the mob she had imagined surrounded DyMar. The grassy, weed-filled clearing stirred in a faint breeze, laden with moisture from the recent downpour. She had once thought of the meadow as beautiful, a perfect set-piece to display the wilderness cabin to best effect—a wonderful spot, Darin had said, and she had shared his enthusiasm.
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Now, though, the broad clearing made her feel exposed and vulnerable.
Vader barked again and stepped forward to the edge of the porch, his muzzle pointed toward the driveway that plunged into the forest. His black nostrils quivered.
“What is it, Mom?” Jody asked. From the drawn expression on his face, she could tell he felt the fear as much as she did. In the past two weeks she had trained him well enough.
“Someone’s coming,” she said.
Forcing bravery upon herself, she doused the lights inside the cabin, let the curtains dangle shut, then swung open the front door to stand guard on the porch. They had run here, gone to ground, without preparation. She had to count on their hiding place, since she had no gun, no other weapons. Patrice had ransacked the cabin, but Darin had not believed in handguns. She had only her bare hands and her ingenuity. Vader looked over his shoulder at her, then turned toward the driveway again.
Jody crowded next to her, trying to see, but she pushed him back inside. “Mom!” he said indignantly, but she pointed a scolding finger at him, her face hard. He backed away quickly.
The mother’s protective instinct hung on her like a drug. She had been helpless in the face of his cancer, she had been helpless when his father was murdered by shadowy men pretending to be activists, the same people who had tapped their phones, followed them, and might even now be trying to track them down. But she had taken action to get her son to safety, and she had kept him alive so far. Patrice Kennessy had no intention of giving up now.
A figure appeared in the trees, approaching on foot down the long driveway bordered by dark pines, coming closer, intent on the cabin.
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Patrice didn’t have time to run.
She had taken Jody out to the coastal wilderness because of its abundance of survivalists, of religious cults and extremists—all of whom knew how to be left alone. David’s own brother had joined one such group, abandoning even this cabin to find deeper isolation, but she hadn’t dared to go to Darin and ask for protection. The people hunting them down would think to find David’s brother. She had to do the unexpected. Now her mind raced, and she tried to think of even the smallest misstep she might have made to tip off who she was and where she and Jody were staying. Suddenly she remembered that the last time she had gone into a grocery store, she had noticed the cover of a weekly Oregon newspaper depicting the fenced-off and burned ruins of DyMar Laboratory. Surprised, she had flinched and tried to maintain her composure, cradling her groceries in front of the TV Guide s and beef jerky strips and candy bars. The old woman with shockingly dyed red hair had looked up at her from behind smeared eyeglasses. No one, Patrice insisted to herself, would have put such a coincidence together, would have taken note of a woman traveling alone with her twelve-year-old son, would have connected all the details.
Still, the clerk had stared at her too intently. . . .
“Who is it, Mom?” Jody asked in a stage whisper from the cold fireplace. “Can you see?” Patrice was glad she hadn’t built a fire that morning, because the telltale wisp of gray-white smoke would have attracted even more attention.
They had made a plan for such a situation, that they would both try to slip away unnoticed and vanish in the trees, hiding out in the wooded hills. Jody knew the surrounding forest well enough. But this intruder had taken them by surprise. He had come on 148
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foot, with no telltale engine noise. And now neither of them had time to run.
“Jody, you stay back there. Take Vader, go to the back door, and hide. Be ready to run into the trees if you have to, but right now it’ll be a tipoff.”
He blinked at her in alarm. “But I can’t leave you behind, Mom.”
“If I buy you some time, then you can get a head start. If they don’t mean any harm, then you don’t have anything to worry about.” Her face turned to stone, and Jody flushed as he realized what she meant. She turned back to the door, squinting her eyes.
“Now keep yourself out of sight. Wait until the timing’s right.”
With a grim expression on her face, Patrice crossed her arms over her chest and waited on her front porch to meet the approaching stranger. The terror and urgency nearly paralyzed her. This was the moment of confrontation she had dreaded ever since receiving David’s desperate phone call. The figure was a broad-shouldered man walking with an odd injured gait. He looked as if he had passed on foot through a car wash with open cans of waste oil in his arms. He staggered toward the cabin, but stopped dead in his tracks when he noticed her on the porch.
Vader growled.
Even from a distance, Patrice could see his dark gaze turn toward her, his eyes lock with hers. He had changed, his facial features distorted somehow—but she recognized him. She felt a flood of relief, a sensation she had not experienced in some time. A friend at last!
“Jeremy,” she said with a sigh. “Jeremy Dorman!”
Kennessys’ Cabin
Oregon Coast Range
Friday, 1:14 P.M.
“Patrice!” Dorman called in a hoarse voice, X then walked toward her at an accelerated, somehow ominous pace.
She had bought newspapers from
unattended machines on shadowy street corners, and had read that her husband’s lab partner had also perished in the DyMar fire, murdered by the men who wanted to keep David’s nanotech research from becoming public knowledge.
“Jeremy, are those men after you, too? How did you get away?”
The fact that Jeremy Dorman had somehow escaped gave her a flash of hope that perhaps David might have survived as well. But she could not grasp the thought; it slipped through her mental fingers. She had a thousand questions for him, but most of all she was glad just to see a familiar face, another person facing the same predicament as she was . . . But something was very wrong about Jeremy’s presence here. He had known to look for her and Jody in this cabin. She knew that David had always talked 150
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too much. Even his brother’s secret hideaway would never have been a secret for long, after tedious hours of small talk in the laboratory, David and Jeremy together. She was suddenly wary. “Were you followed? If they come after us here, we don’t have any weapons—”
“Patrice,” he interrupted her, “I’m desperate. Please help me.” He swallowed hard . . . and his throat continued to move far longer than it should have. “I need to come inside.”
As he stepped closer, the burly man looked very sick, barely able to move, as if suffering from a hundred ills. His skin had a strange, wet cast—and not just from the misty moisture in the air, but with a kind of slickness. Like slime.
“What happened to you, Jeremy?” She gestured toward the door, wondering why she felt so uneasy. Dorman had spent a great deal of time with her family, especially after Darin had abandoned the work and fled to his survivalist camp. “You look awful.”
“I have a lot to explain, but not much time. Look at me, at the shape I’m in. This is very important—do you have the dog here as well?”
She remained frozen in place; then it was all she could do to step forward and grip the damp, mossy handrail. Why did he want to know about Vader, hidden inside with Jody? Even though this was Jeremy, Jeremy Dorman, she felt the need to be cautious.
“I want some answers first,” she said, not moving from the porch. He stopped in his tracks, uncertain.
“How did you survive the fire at DyMar? We thought you were dead.”
“I was supposed to die there,” Dorman said, his voice heavy.
“What do you mean, you were supposed to die there? On the phone, in his last message to me, David said the DyMar protest was some kind of setup, that it wasn’t just animal rights people after all.”
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Dorman’s dark, hooded eyes bored into her. “I was betrayed, just like David was.” He took two steps closer.
“What are you saying?” After what she had been through, Patrice thought almost anything might sound believable by now.
Dorman nodded. “They had orders to make sure nothing would survive, no record of our nanotechnology research. Only ashes.”
Patrice stood her ground, silently warning him not to approach closer. “David said the conspiracy went much deeper in the government than he had thought. I didn’t believe him until I went back to our house—only to find it ransacked.”
Dorman lurched to a halt ten feet from the porch, stopping in the weeds of the meadow. He walked away from the cleared driveway, on the trampled path toward the door of the cabin. “They’re all after you now, too, Patrice. We can help each other. But I need Vader. He carries the stable prototypes in his bloodstream.”
“Prototypes? What are you talking about?”
“The nanotechnology prototypes. I had to use some of the defective earlier generations, samples from the small lab animals, but many of those exhibited shocking . . . anomalies. I didn’t have any choice, though. The lab was on fire, everything was burning. I was supposed to be able to get away, but this was the only way I could survive.” He looked at her, pleading, then lowered his voice. “But they don’t work the way they were supposed to. With Vader’s blood, there is a chance I can reprogram them in myself.”
Her mind reeled. She knew what David had been working on, had suspected something wrong with their black Lab.
“Where’s Jody?” Dorman said, peering past her to see through the curtains or the half-closed door. “Hey, Jody! Come out here! It’s all right.”
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Jody had always looked at Dorman as a friend of his father’s, a surrogate uncle—especially after Darin had left. They played video games together; Jeremy was just about the only adult who knew as many Nintendo 64 tricks as Jody did. They exchanged tips and techniques for Wave Race, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and Shadows of the Empire.
Before Patrice could collect her thoughts, understand exactly where the situation stood, Jody pulled open the cabin door, accompanied by his black dog.
“Jeremy!”
Dorman looked down at Vader, delighted and relieved, but the dog curled back his dark lips to expose fangs. The low growl sounded like a chainsaw embedded in the dog’s throat, as if Vader had some kind of grudge against Dorman.
But Dorman paid no attention. He was staring at Jody—healthy Jody—in amazement. The skin on Dorman’s face blurred and shifted. He winced, somehow forcing it back into place. “Jody, you’re . . . you’re recovered from the cancer.”
“It’s a miracle,” Patrice said stiffly. “Some kind of spontaneous remission.”
The sudden predatory expression on Dorman’s oddly glistening face made a knot in her stomach. “No, it’s not a spontaneous remission. Is it, Jody? My God, you have it, too.”
The boy paled, took a step backward.
“I know what your dad did to you.” For some odd reason, Dorman kept his eyes fixed upon Jody and the dog.
Patrice looked at Jody in confusion, then an instant of dawning horror as she realized the magnitude of what David had done, the risk he had taken, the real reason why his brother had been so frightened of the research. Jody’s recent good health was not the result of another remission. All of David’s hard work and antibodies
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manic commitment had paid off after all. He had found his cure for cancer, without telling Patrice. But in the space of an indrawn breath, her incredible joy and relief and lingering heartbreak tempered with fear of Jeremy Dorman. Fear of his predatory glances at Jody, of his unnaturally shifting features, his slipping control.
“This is even better than Vader.” Dorman’s dark eyes blazed, taking on a distorted look. “I just need a sample of your son’s blood, Patrice. Some of his blood. Not much.”
Shocked and confused, Patrice flinched, but stood defiantly on the porch, not moving. She wasn’t going to let anyone touch her son. “His blood? What on earth—”
“I don’t have time to explain to you, Patrice. I didn’t know they meant to kill David! They were staging the protest, they meant to burn the place down, but they were going to move the research to a more isolated establishment.” His face contorted with anger.
“I was supposed to be their lead researcher in the new facility, but they tried to murder me, too!”
Patrice’s mind reeled; her perception of reality was being assaulted from too many directions at once.
“You knew all along they intended to burn the place down? You were part of the conspiracy.”
“No, I didn’t mean that! It was all supposed to be under control. They lied to me, too.”
“You let David be killed, you bastard. You wanted the credit, wanted his research.”
“Patrice . . . Jody, I’ll die without your help. Right now.” Dorman strode toward the porch with great speed, but Patrice moved to block his path.
“Jody, get back in the cabin—right now. We can’t trust him! He betrayed your father!” Her voice was ice cold, and the boy was already frightened. He quickly moved to do as she asked.
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Dorman stopped five feet away, glowering at her.
“Don’t do this. You don’t understand.”
“I know I’ve got to protect my son, after all he’s been through. You’re probably still working for those men, hunting us. I’m not letting you near him.” She held her fists at her sides, ready to tear this man apart with her bare hands. “Jody, go out and hide in the forest! You know where to go, just like we planned before,” she shouted into the gap of the half-open door. “Go!”
Something squirmed beneath Dorman’s chest. He hunched over, covering his stomach and his ribs. Finally, he rose up with his eyes glassy and painstricken. “I can’t . . . wait . . . any longer, Patrice.” He swayed in his step, coming closer.
In the back of the cabin, the rear door banged shut. Jody had run outside, making a beeline for the forest. Inside, she thanked her son for not arguing. She had feared he would side with Jeremy and want to help the man.
Vader bounded around the side of the cabin after Jody, barking.
Dismissing Patrice, Dorman turned toward the back. “Jody! Come here to me, boy!” He trudged away from the porch over to the side of the cabin. Patrice felt an animal scream build within her throat. “You leave my boy alone!”
Dorman spun about and withdrew a revolver from his pants pocket. He gripped it with unsteady hands, holding it in front of her disbelieving gaze.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, Patrice,” he said.
“You don’t know anything about what’s going on. I can just shoot the dog—or Jody—and get the blood I need. Maybe that would be easiest after all.”
His muscle control was sporadic, though, and he could not keep a steady bead on her. Patrice could not believe he would shoot her anyway. Not Jeremy Dorman.
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With an outcry, she vaulted over the porch railing, throwing herself in a battering-ram tackle toward Dorman.
As he saw her charging him, he flinched backward with a look of horror on his face. “No! Don’t touch me!”
Then she plowed into him, knocking his gun away and driving the man to the ground. “Jody, run! Keep running!” she screamed.
Dorman thrashed and writhed, trying to kick her away. “No, Patrice! Stay away. Stay away from me!”
But she fought with him, clawing, pummeling. His skin was slick and slimy . . .
Without a word, Jody and the dog raced into the forest.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 1:26 P.M.
The dense trees clawed at him. Their
X branches scratched his face, tugged his hair, grabbed his shirt—but Jody kept sprinting anyway. The last words he heard were his mother’s desperate shout. “Jody, run! Keep running!”
Over the past two weeks Patrice had drilled into him her fear and paranoia. They had made contingency plans. Jody knew full well that people were after them, powerful and deadly people. Someone had betrayed his father, burned down the whole laboratory facility. He and his mother had driven away into the night, sleeping in their car parked off the road, going from place to place before finally arriving at the cabin. Again and again his mother had pounded into him that they must trust no one—and now it appeared that she might even have meant Jeremy Dorman himself. Jeremy, who had been like an uncle to him, who had played with him whenever he and his father could tear themselves away from work.
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Now Jody didn’t think; he just responded. He ran out the back door, across the meadow to the trees. Vader bounded into the fringe of pines ahead of him, barking as if scouting a safe path.
The cabin quickly fell behind, and Jody turned abruptly left, heading uphill. He hopped over a fallen tree, crunching broken branches and plowing through thick, thorny shrubs. Vines grabbed at the toes of his shoes, but Jody kept stumbling along. He had explored these back woods in the last few weeks. His mother had hovered over him, making sure he didn’t get into trouble or stray too far away, but still Jody had found time to poke around in the trees. He understood where he was supposed to go, how best to elude pursuit. He knew his way. He knew a few of the secret spots in the forest, but he didn’t remember a hiding place that would be good enough or safe enough. His mother had told him to keep running, and he couldn’t let her down.
If I buy you some time, then you can get a head start, she had said.
“Jody, wait!” It was Jeremy Dorman’s voice, but it carried a strange and strangled undertone. “Hey, Jody—it’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Jody hesitated, then kept pushing ahead. Vader barked loudly and dashed under another fallen tree, then bounded up a rocky slope. Jody scrambled after him.
“Come here, boy. I need to talk to you,” Dorman called from far back, near the cabin. Jody knew the man had just ducked into the trees, following him. He paused for a moment, panting. His joints still ached sometimes with the strange tingly feeling, as if parts of his body had gone to sleep—but this discomfort was nothing like what he had experienced before, when the leukemia was at its worst, when he had hon-158
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estly felt like dying just to stop the bone-deep ache. Now Jody felt healthy enough to go through with this effort—but he didn’t want to keep it up for long. His skin crawled, and sweat prickled on his back, on his neck.
He heard Dorman lumbering through the trees, crashing branches aside, alarmingly close. How could the man have moved so fast? “Your mother wants to see you. She’s waiting back at the cabin.”
Jody hurried down a slope into a small gully where a stream trickled over rocks and fallen branches. Two days ago, as a game, he had skipped and hopped from stone to tree trunk to outcropping, crossing the stream and daring himself not to fall. Now the boy ran as fast as he could. Halfway across he slipped on a moss-covered boulder, and his right foot plunged into the icy water that chuckled along the banks.
He hissed in surprise, yanked his dripping foot back out of the stream, and continued across the stream. His mom had always warned him against getting his shoes wet . . . but right now Jody knew simple escape was much more important, was worth any sort of risk.
Dorman shouted again, “Jody, come here.” He seemed a little more angry, his words sharper. “Come on, please. Only you can help me. Hey, Jody, I’m begging you!”
With his shoe soggy, Jody climbed back onto the bank. He heaved a deep breath to keep running. Grabbing a pine branch and getting sticky resin on his palm, he used it to haul himself up out of the gully to more level ground so he could run again. He had a stitch in his side, which sent a sharp pain around his kidneys, his stomach, but he pressed his hand against the ache so he could keep fleeing. Jody didn’t understand what was going on, but he trusted antibodies
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his fear, and he trusted his mother’s warning. He vowed not to let Jeremy Dorman catch him. He paused in his tracks, gasping beside a tree as he listened intently for further pursuit. Down the slope on the other side of the stream, he saw the heavy form of Jeremy Dorman and his tattered shirt. Their eyes met from across the great distance in the shadowy forest. Seeing a complete stranger behind Jeremy’s eyes, Jody ran with redoubled effort. His heart pounded, and his breath came in great gasps. He dove through clawing bushes that held him back. Behind him, Dorman had no difficulty charging through the underbrush. Jody scrambled up a slope, slipping on loose wet leaves. He knew he couldn’t keep up this incredible effort for long. Dorman didn’t seem to be slowing at all.
He ran to a small gully, thick with deadfall and lichen-mottled sandstone outcroppings. The trees and shadows stood thick enough around him that he knew Dorman couldn’t see him, and he had a chance to duck down in a damp animal hollow between a rotting tree stump and a cracked boulder. Twigs, vines, and underbrush crackled as he tried to huddle in the shelter.
He sat in silence, his lungs laboring, his pulse hammering. He listened for the man’s approach. He had heard nothing at all from his mother, and he feared she might be hurt back at the cabin. What had Dorman done to her, what had she sacrificed so that he could get away?
Heavy footsteps crunched on the forest floor, but the man had stopped calling out now. Jody remembered playing chase games on his Nintendo system, how he and Jeremy Dorman would be opponents in death-defying races across the country or on alien landscapes.
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But this was real, with a lot more at stake than a mere highest score.
Dorman came closer, pushing shrubs away, looking through the forest murk. Jody sat in tense silence, praying that his hiding place would remain secure. In the distance Vader barked, and Dorman paused, then turned in a different direction. Jody saw his chance and attempted to slip away, but as he moved one of the fallen branches aside, a precariously balanced log crunched down into the brittle deadwood. Dorman froze again, and then came charging toward Jody’s hiding place.
The boy ducked down under the fallen trunk again, scuttled along next to the slick rock, and wormed his way out the other side of the gully. He stood up and raced off again, keeping his head low, pushing branches out of the way as Dorman yelled at him, fighting through the front of the thicket. Jody risked a glance over his should to see how close his pursuer had come.
Dorman reached up with a meaty hand, pointing toward him. Jody recognized a handgun at the same moment he saw a blaze of light flare from its muzzle. A loud crack echoed through the forest. A chunk of splintered bark and wood exploded away from the pine tree only two feet above his head. Dorman had shot at him!
“Come here right now, dammit!” Dorman yelled. Biting back an outcry, Jody scrambled away into the thick underbrush behind the tree that had protected him. Through the forest murk, he heard Vader barking, whining as if in encouragement. Jody trusted his dog a lot more than he would ever trust Jeremy Dorman. Jody ran off again, holding his side. His head pounded, his heart ran like a race car engine. antibodies
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Back behind him, Dorman sloshed across the cold stream, not even trying to use the stepping stones.
“Jody, come here!”
Jody fled desperately toward the sound of the barking dog—and, he hoped, safety.
Rural Oregon
Friday, 1:03 P.M.
The logging truck sat half off the road in a X shallow ditch, its cab tilted at an odd angle like a metallic behemoth with a broken back.
As they drove up in the police cruiser, Mulder could tell instantly that something was wrong. This was more than a standard traffic accident. A red Ford pickup sat parked on the shoulder beside the logging truck, and a man with a plastic rain poncho climbed out of the driver’s side as Officer Jared Penwick pulled to a halt.
Studying the scene, Mulder spotted sinuous tire marks in the wet grass. The logging truck had weaved back and forth out of control before grinding to a stop here. A few raindrops spattered the police cruiser’s windshield, and Jared left the wipers streaking back and forth. He picked up his handset, clicked the transmit button, and reported in to the dispatcher that they had arrived at the scene.
The man in the pickup truck waited beside his vehicle, hunched over in the plastic slicker as the antibodies
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trooper crunched toward him. Mulder followed, pulling his topcoat closed to keep himself warm. The wind and the rain mussed his hair, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“You didn’t touch anything in there did you, Dominic?” Jared said.
“I’m not going near that thing,” the man in the pickup answered with a suspicious glance at Mulder.
“That guy in there is gross.”
“This is Agent Mulder of the FBI,” Jared said.
“I was just driving down the road,” Dominic said, still keeping his eyes on Mulder, until he flicked his gaze toward the tilted log truck. “When I saw that truck there, I thought the driver maybe lost control in the rain. Either that, or sometimes truckers just pull off the road and sleep—not too much traffic on this stretch, you know—but it was dangerous the way he had parked. Didn’t have an orange triangle set up around the back of the truck bed, like he should. I was going to chew his ass.”
Dominic flicked rainwater away from his face before shaking his head. He swallowed hard. “But then I got a look inside the cab. My God, never seen anything like that.”
Mulder left Jared to stand with the pickup owner as he went over to the logging truck. He held the driver’s-side door handle and cautiously raised himself up by stepping on the running board. Inside the cab, the driver of the truck sprawled back with his arms akimbo, his legs jammed up, and his knees wedged behind the steering wheel like a cockroach that had been sprayed with an exterminator’s poison. The pudgy man’s face was contorted and swollen with lumps, his jaw slack. The whites of his eyes were gray and smoky, laced with red lines of worse-thanbloodshot veins. Purplish-black blotches stood out like 164
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leopard spots all over his skin, as if a miniaturized bombing raid had taken place in his vascular system. The truck window was tightly rolled up. The rain continued to trickle off the slanted roof of the cab and down the passenger-side window. From inside, the windshield was fogged in some places. Mulder thought he saw faint steam rising from the body. Still balanced on the running board, he turned back to the state trooper, who stood looking at him curiously. “Can you run the plates and registration?”
Mulder asked. “See if you can find out who this guy was and where he might have been going.”
It made Mulder very uneasy to see another hideous death so close to the possible location of Patrice and Jody Kennessy—so close to where Scully had gone to look for them.
The trooper came forward and took his turn peering through the driver’s-side window, as if it were a circus peep show. “That’s disgusting,” he said. “What happened to the guy?”
“No one should touch the body until we can get some more help out here,” Mulder said briskly. “The medical examiner in Portland has dealt with this before. He should probably be called in, since he’ll know how to handle this.”
The trooper hesitated, as if he wanted to ask a dozen more questions, but instead he trotted back to talk on his radio.
Mulder walked around the front of the truck, saw how the cab had shifted to the right, nearly jackknifing the vehicle. The splintered logs were still securely fastened by chains to the long truck bed. If the driver had gone into convulsions and swerved the heavy vehicle off the road, luckily his foot had slipped from the accelerator. The log truck had come to a stop on this rise without careening into a tree or crashing over a steeper embankment. antibodies
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Mulder stared at the grille of the truck as the rain picked up again. Trickles of water slithered down his back, and he shrugged his shoulders, pulling up the collar of his topcoat in an effort to keep himself a little drier.
Mulder continued walking around the truck, descending into the ditch. His shoes splashed in the water, and the weeds danced along his pant cuffs. Once he got completely drenched, he supposed, it wouldn’t matter if the rain got any heavier. Then he saw that the log truck’s passenger door hung ajar.
He froze, suddenly considering possibilities. What if someone else had been in the truck, a passenger—
someone with the driver, maybe even a hitchhiker?
The carrier of this lethal biological agent?
Mulder walked carefully over to the open door, glancing behind him into the close trees, the tall weeds, wondering if he would see another corpse, the body of a passenger who had undergone similar convulsions but managed to stagger away and collapse outside.
But he saw nothing. The rain began to sheet down harder.
“What did you find, Agent Mulder?” the trooper called.
“Still checking,” he said. “Stay where you are.”
The trooper called out again. “I’ve got the Portland ME and some other local law enforcement on their way. We’ll have a real party scene here in a little while.” Then, happy to let Mulder continue his business, Officer Penwick turned back to chat with the pickup driver.
Mulder carefully opened the heavy passengerside door, and the metal swung out with a groan of hinges. He stepped back to peer inside. The dead trucker looked even more bent and 166
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twisted from this perspective. Condensed steam had formed a halo across the windshield and the driver’sside door. The air smelled humid, but without the sour sharpness of death. The body hadn’t been here for long, despite its horrible condition. The passenger seat interested Mulder the most, though. He saw threads and tatters of cloth from a shirt that had been split or torn. Runnels of a strange translucent sticky substance clung to the fabric of the seat. A kind of congealed . . . slime, similar to what Mulder had seen on the dead security guard. He swallowed hard, not wanting to get any closer, careful not to touch anything. This was indeed the same thing they had encountered before at the morgue. Mulder was sure this strange toxin, this lethal agent, was the result of Kennessy’s renegade work. Perhaps the unfortunate trucker had picked up someone and had become infected in close quarters. After the truck had crashed and the driver had died, the mysterious passenger had slipped away and escaped. But where would he go?
Mulder saw a square of something like paper lying in the footwell beneath the passenger seat. At first he thought it was a candy wrapper or some kind of label, but then he realized it was a photograph, bent and half-hidden in the shadow of the seat. Mulder withdrew a pen from his pocket and leaned forward, still careful not to touch any of the slimy residue. It was risky, but he felt a growing sense of urgency. Extending the pen, he reached in and drew the bent photo toward him. The edges were surrounded by other threads, as if the photo had fallen out of a shirt pocket during some sort of violent struggle. He used the pen to flip over the photograph. It was a picture Mulder had not seen before, but he certainly antibodies
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recognized the faces of the woman and the young boy. He had seen them often enough in the past few days, had shown other photos to hundreds of people in their search for Patrice and Jody.
That meant whoever had been a passenger here in the truck, whoever had carried the nanotech plague, was also on his way, also connected to the woman and her son.
Headed to the same place Scully had gone. Mulder tossed the pen into the truck, not daring to put it back in his pocket. As he hurried back around to the road, the trooper called to him from his patrol car, waving him over. “Agent Mulder!”
Mulder stepped away from the truck, wet and cold, feeling a deeper tension now. Distracted, Mulder went to see what Officer Penwick wanted.
“There’s a truck weigh station a few miles back on this road. It’s rarely open, but they have Highway Patrol surveillance cameras that operate automatically. I had somebody run them back a few hours to see if we could grab an image of this truck passing.” Penwick smiled, and Mulder nodded at the man’s good thinking. “That way we can at least establish a solid time frame.”
“Did you find anything?” Mulder asked. The trooper smiled. “Two images. One, we got the log truck barreling past—10:52 A.M. And a few minutes before that, we caught a man walking past. Very little traffic on the road.”
“Can we get a video grab?” Mulder said eagerly, sliding into the front seat of the patrol car, looking down at the small screen mounted below the dash for their crime computer linkups.
“I thought you might want that,” Penwick said, fiddling with the keypad. “I just had it up here . . . ah, there we go.”
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stalled in the ditch. The digital time code on the bottom of the picture verified what the trooper had said. But Mulder was more interested in something else. “Let me see the hitchhiker, the other man.” His brows knitted as he tried to think of other possibilities. If the nanotechnology pathogen was as lethal as he suspected, the trucker wouldn’t have lasted long in close quarters with it.
The new image was somewhat blurry, but showed a man walking on the muddy shoulder, seemingly impervious to the rain. He looked directly at the camera, at the weigh station, as if longing to stop there and take shelter, but then he walked on.
Mulder had seen enough, though. He had looked at the file pictures, the DyMar background dossiers, the photos of the two researchers supposedly killed in the devastating fire.
It was Jeremy Dorman—David Kennessy’s assistant. He was still alive. And if Dorman had been exposed to something at DyMar, he was even now carrying a substance that had already killed at least two people. He slid out of the front of the patrol car, looking urgently at the trooper. “Officer Penwick, you have to stay here and protect the scene. This is a highly hazardous place. Do not let anyone go near the body or even inside the cab of the truck without proper decontamination equipment.”
“Sure, Agent Mulder,” the trooper said. “But where will you be?”
Mulder turned toward Dominic. “Sir, I’m a federal agent. I need the use of your vehicle.”
“My truck?” Dominic said.
“I need to reach my partner. I’m afraid she may be in grave danger.” Before Dominic could argue with him, Mulder opened the door of the Ford pickup and extended his left hand. “The keys, please.”
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Dominic looked questioningly over at the state trooper, but Officer Penwick simply shrugged. “I’ve seen his ID. He is who he says.” Then the trooper tucked his hat down against the rain. “Don’t worry, Dominic. I’ll give you a ride home.”
The pickup driver frowned, as if this hadn’t been the part that concerned him at all. Mulder slammed the door, and the old engine started with a comforting roar. He wrestled with the stick shift, trying to remember how to apply the clutch and nudge the gas pedal.
“You take good care of my truck!” Dominic yelled. “I don’t want to waste time messing with insurance companies.”
Mulder pushed down hard on the accelerator, hoping he would reach Scully in time.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 1:45 P.M.
Scully became disoriented on the winding X dirt logging roads, but after making a cautious Y-turn on the narrow track, she finally found the driveway as described by Maxie at the general store and art gallery. She saw no mailbox, only a metal reflector post that bore a cryptic number designating a specific plot for fire control or trash pickup. It was just a nondescript private road chewed through the dense underbrush, climbing over a rise and vanishing somewhere back into a secluded hollow. This was it, though—the place where Patrice and Jody Kennessy had supposedly been taken, or gone into hiding.
Scully drove down the driveway as quickly as she dared through mud puddles and over bumps. Up the rise on either side of her, the forest seemed too close. Branches ticked and scraped along the sideview mirrors. She accelerated over a large bump, some longburied log, and reached the top of the rise. The bottom of the car scraped on the gravel as she headed down antibodies
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the slope. Ahead of her, in a cleared meadow surrounded on all sides by dense trees, sat a single isolated cabin. A perfect place for hiding. This modest, rugged home seemed even more out of the way and invisible than the survivalist outpost she and Mulder had visited the day before. She drove forward cautiously, noticing a muddy car parked to one side of the cabin, where a corrugated metal overhang protected it from the rain. The car was a Volvo, the type a yuppie medical researcher would have driven—not the old pickup or sport utility vehicle a regular inhabitant of these mountains would have purchased.
Her heart raced. This place felt right: isolated, quiet, ominous. She had come miles from the nearest assistance, miles from reliable phone reception. Anyone could hide out here, and anything could happen. She eased the car to a stop in front of the cabin and waited for a few moments. This was a dangerous situation. She was approaching alone with no backup. She had no way of knowing whether Patrice and Jody were hiding voluntarily, or if someone held them hostage here, someone with weapons.
As Scully stepped out of the car, her head pounded. She paused for a moment as colors flashed before her eyes, but then with a deep breath she calmed herself and slammed the car door. “Hello?”
She wasn’t approaching in secret. Anyone who lived in this cabin would have heard her approach, perhaps even before her car topped the rise. She couldn’t be stealthy. She had to be apparent. Scully stood beside the car for a few seconds, waiting. She withdrew her ID wallet with her left hand and kept her right hand on the Sig Sauer handgun on her hip. She was ready for anything.
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“Hello? Anybody there?” Scully called, speaking loudly enough to be heard by anyone inside the house. She took two steps away from the car. The cabin seemed like a haunted house. Its windows were dark, some covered with drapes. Nothing stirred inside. She heard no sounds from within . . . but the door was ajar.
Beside the door she saw a fresh gouge in the wood siding, pale splinters . . . the mark from a small-caliber bullet.
Scully stepped up onto the slick wooden porch.
“Anybody home?” she said again. “I’m a federal agent.”
As she hesitated in front of the door, though, Scully looked to her left and spotted a figure in the tall grass beside the cabin. A human figure, lying still. Scully froze, all senses alert, then approached to the edge of the porch, peering over the railing. It was a woman, sprawled on her chest in the tall grass. Scully rushed back down the steps, then pulled herself to a halt as she looked down at a woman she recognized as Patrice Kennessy, with strawberry blond hair and narrow features—but the resemblance ended there. Scully recalled the smiling woman whose photo she had looked at so many times—her husband a wellknown and talented researcher, her son laughing and happy before the leukemia had struck him. But Patrice Kennessy was no longer vivacious, no longer even on the run to protect her son. Now she lay twisted in the meadow, her head turned toward Scully and her expression grim and desperate even in death. Her skin was blotched with numerous hemorrhages from subcutaneous damage, distorted with wild growths in all shapes and sizes. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and Scully saw tiny maps of blood on the lids. Her hands were outstretched like claws, as if she had died while fighting tooth and nail against something horrible.
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Scully stood stricken. She had arrived too late. She moved back, knowing not to approach or touch the possibly contagious body. Patrice was already dead. Now the only thing that remained was to find Jody and keep him safe—unless something had already happened to him.
She listened to the wind whispering through the tall pines, a shushing sound as needles scraped against each other. The clouds overhead were thick with the constant threat of rain. She heard a few birds and other forest sounds, but the silence and abandonment of the place seemed oppressive, surrounding her. Then she heard a dog bark off in the forest, a sharp excited sound—and a moment later came the distinctive crack of a gunshot.
“Come here right now, dammit!” She heard the words, a voice flattened by distance, made gruff with a threat. “Jody, come here!”
Scully drew her handgun and advanced toward the forest, following the sound of voices. Jody was still out here, running for his life—and a man who must have carried the plague, the man who had exposed Patrice Kennessy, was now after the boy. Scully had to catch him first. She ran toward the forest.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 1:59 P.M.
No matter how far Jody ran, Dorman folX lowed. The only shelter he could think of was the cabin, endlessly far back through the trees. The small building was not much of an island of safety, but he could think of no better place to go. At least there he could find some crude weapons, something with which to fight back.
His mother was resourceful, and Jody could be, too. He had learned a lot from her in the past weeks. Jody circled through the trees in a long arc, looping around the meadow and approaching from the rear. Vader continued to bark in the trees, sometimes running close to Jody and then bounding off, as if ready to hunt or play. Jody wondered if the black Lab thought it was all some kind of game.
He continued stumbling along, his legs aching as if sharp metal pins had been inserted into his knees. His side was aflame with pain. His face had been scratched by sharp branches and whipping pine needles, but he paid no attention to the minor injuries; antibodies
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they would fade quickly. His throat was dry, and he couldn’t draw in enough breath.
As quietly as he could move, he stumbled along without trails, without guidance, but after weeks of nothing to do but play in the woods, he knew how to find the cabin. Vader would follow him. Together they could get out of this, and his mother . . . if she was still safe. From above, Jody could see the small building and the meadow ahead. He’d come farther than he had thought, but now he could see another car in the driveway. A strange vehicle.
He felt a rush of cold fear. Someone else had tracked him down! One of those others his mother had warned him about. Even if he succeeded in outsmarting Jeremy Dorman and escaping back to the cabin, would others be waiting there for him? Or did they mean to help? He had no way of knowing.
But right now his greatest fear was much closer at hand.
Dorman continued to charge after him like a truck, plowing through the trees and underbrush, closing the gap. Jody couldn’t believe how fast the broad-shouldered man was moving, especially because the big lab assistant did not look at all healthy.
“Jody, please! I won’t hurt you if you just let me talk to you for a second.”
Jody didn’t waste his breath answering. He ran back, arrowing toward the cabin, but abruptly came to a steep slope where a mudslide had sheared off the gentle hillside. Two enormous trees had uprooted, tumbling down and leaving a gash in the dirt like an open wound.
Jody didn’t have time to go around. Dorman was approaching too fast, rushing along the hillside, holding onto trees and pulling himself along. The slope looked too steep. He couldn’t possibly get down it.
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He heard the dog bark again. Halfway to the bottom, off to the left of the mudslide, Vader stood with his paws spread, his fur tangled with cockleburrs and weeds. He barked up at his boy.
With no other choice, Jody decided to follow. He eased himself over the lip of the mudslide and started to descend, using his hands, digging his fingers into the cold ground, stepping on loose rocks, and looking for support. He heard twigs snapping, branches crashing aside, as Dorman came closer. Jody tried to move faster. He looked up and glimpsed the burly figure at the upper edge of the hillside. He gasped—and his hand slipped. Jody’s foot stepped on an unstable rock, which popped out of the raw dirt like a rotten tooth coming loose from a gum. He bit back an outcry as he began to fall.
He scrabbled with his fingers, digging into the mud, but his body slid down, tumbling, rolling, covering his clothes in dirt and mud. Rocks pattered around him.
As he bounced and slid, Jody saw Dorman standing at the lip of the mudslide, his hands outstretched like claws, ready to bend down and grab him—but the boy was too far away, still falling, still picking up speed.
Jody rolled, struck his side, and then his head—
but he remained conscious, terrified that he would break his leg so that he couldn’t keep running away from Dorman.
Dirt and rocks showered around him, but he didn’t scream, didn’t even cry out—and he finally came to rest at the bottom of the slide, up against one of the toppled trees. Its matted root system stuck out like a dirt-encrusted scrubbing pad. He slammed hard against the bark and lay gasping, struggling, trying to move. His back hurt.
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Then, to his horror, he saw Jeremy Dorman bounding down the sharp slope up above, somehow keeping his balance. Dirt and gravel flew up from his feet as he stomped heavy indentations in the soft hillside. He waved the revolver in his hand in a threat to keep Jody where he was—not that Jody could have gotten up and moved fast enough anyway. Dorman skidded to a halt just above the boy. His face was flushed . . . and his skin looked as if it were crawling, writhing, seething like a pot of candle wax slowly coming to a boil. Rage and exertion contorted the man’s face.
He held the handgun up, gripping it with both hands and pointing the barrel directly at Jody. It looked like a cyclopean eye, a deadly open-mouthed viper.
Then Dorman’s shoulders sagged, and he just stared at the boy for a few moments. “Jody, why do you have to make this so hard? Haven’t I been through enough—haven’t you been through enough?”
“Where’s my mom?” Jody demanded, drawing deep breaths. His heart thumped like a jackhammer and his breath felt cold and frosty, like knives in his lungs. He struggled to get to his knees. Dorman gestured with the revolver again. “All I need is some of your blood, Jody, that’s all. Just some blood. Fresh blood.”
“I said, where’s my mom?” Jody shouted. Dorman looked as if a thunderstorm passed across his face. Both the boy and the man were so intent on each other, neither heard the other person approach.
“Freeze! Federal agent!”
Dana Scully stood in the trees fifteen feet away, her feet braced, her arms extended and gripping her handgun in a precise firing position.
“Don’t move,” she said.
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*
*
*
Scully had breathlessly followed the sounds of pursuit, the barking dog, the angry shouted words. When she came upon the hulking man who loomed too close over Jody Kennessy, she knew she had to prevent this man—this carrier of something like a deadly viral cancer—from so much as touching the boy. Both the intimidating man and the twelve-yearold Jody snapped their glances aside to look at her, astonished. Jody’s expression flooded with relief, then rapidly turned to suspicion.
“You’re one of them!” the boy whispered. Scully wondered how much Patrice Kennessy had told him, how much Jody knew about the death of his father and the possible conspiracy involving DyMar. But what astonished her the most was the appearance of the boy. He seemed healthy, not gaunt and haggard, not at all pale and sickly. He should have been in the final stages of terminal lymphoblastic leukemia. Granted, Jody looked exhausted, battered . . . haunted perhaps by constant fear and lack of sleep. But certainly not like a terminal cancer patient. Nearly a month earlier, Jody had been bedridden, at death’s doorway. But now the boy had run vigorously through the forest and been caught by this man only because he had stumbled and fallen down a steep hillside.
The large man scowled at Scully, dismissed her, and tried to ease closer to the boy.
“I said don’t move, sir,” Scully said. Seeing the revolver hanging loosely in his hand, she feared he might take Jody in a hostage situation. “Put your gun down,” she said, “and identify yourself.”
The man looked at her with such pure disgust and impatience that she felt cold. “You don’t know what’s going on here,” he said. “Stop interfering.” He looked antibodies
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hungrily back down at the trapped Jody, then snapped his glance toward Scully once more. “Or are you one of them? Just like the boy says? Out to annihilate both of us?”
Before she could answer or question him further, a black shape like a rocket-propelled battering ram bounded from the underbrush and launched itself toward the man threatening Jody.
In a flash Scully recognized the dog, the black Lab that had somehow survived being struck by a car, that had escaped from the veterinarian’s office and gone on the run with Patrice and Jody.
“Vader!” Jody cried.
The dog lunged. Black Labradors were not normally used as attack dogs, but Vader must have been able to sense the fear and tension in the air. He knew who the enemy was, and he fought back. The burly man whirled, raising his gun and gripping the trigger with the sudden unexpected threat—
but the dog crashed into him, growling and snarling, spoiling his aim. The man cried out, threw up his free hand to ward off the attack—and his finger squeezed the trigger.
The explosion roared through the quiet isolation far from the main road.
Instead of taking off Jody’s head, the .38-caliber shell slammed into the boy’s chest before he could hurl himself out of the way. The impact sprayed blood behind him, knocking the boy’s lean frame back against the fallen tree, as if someone with an invisible piano wire had just jerked him backward. Jody cried out, and slid down the rain-slick bole of the tree. Vader bore the gunman to the ground. The man tried to fight the dog off, but the suddenly vicious black Lab bit at his face, his throat. Scully raced over to the wounded boy, dropped to her knees, and cradled Jody’s head. “Oh my God!”
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The boy blinked his eyes, wide with astonishment and seemingly far away. Blood bubbled out of his mouth, and he spat it aside. “So tired.” She stroked his hair, unable to leave him to rescue the big man who had shot him.
The dog continued growling, snapping his jaws, digging his muzzle into the man’s throat, ripping at the tendons. Blood sprayed onto the forest floor. The man dropped his smoking revolver and pounded on the black Lab’s rib cage, trying to knock him away, but growing weaker and weaker.
Scully stared at where foamy scarlet blood blossomed from the center of Jody’s chest. A hole with neat round edges stood out against a welling, pulsing lake of blood. She could tell from the placement of the wound that no simple first aid would do Jody any good.
“Oh, no,” she said and bent down, tearing Jody’s shirt wider and looking at the gunshot wound that had penetrated his left lung and perhaps struck the heart. A serious wound—a deadly wound. He would never survive.
Jody’s skin turned gray and pale. His eyes were closed in unconsciousness. Blood continued to pour from the bullet hole.
Leaning forward, Scully pushed aside her empathy for Jody, mentally clicking into her emergency medical mindset, slapping the heel of her hand on the wound and pressing down, pushing hard against the cloth of his shirt to stop the flow of blood. At her side, she could hear the dog continuing his attack on the fallen man—a vicious attack, a personal vendetta, as if this man had once hurt the dog very badly. Scully concentrated, though, on helping the boy. She had to slow the terrible bleeding from the bullet wound.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 2:20 P.M.
The sudden carnage astonished Scully, and X time seemed to stop as the forest pressed around her, the smell of blood and black powder from the gunshots. The birdsong and the breeze fell silent.
She hesitated for only a moment before snapping back into her mindset as a federal agent. After pressing down her makeshift bandage, she stood up jerkily from the mortally wounded boy and ran over to the dog, who was still growling and snapping at the fallen man. She grabbed Vader by the skin of his neck, grappling with his strong shoulders and front forepaws to pull him away. His bloodied victim lay twitching in the mud, leaves, and twigs. She tugged at the dog, dragging him away. The dog continued to growl, and Scully realized the danger of throwing herself upon a vicious animal that had just ripped out the throat of a man. A killer. But the black Lab acquiesced and staggered away, sitting down obediently in the forest debris. Frothy blood covered his muzzle, and his sepia eyes were 182
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bright and angry, still fixed on the fallen form. Scully saw his red teeth and shivered.
She glanced down at the man who had held Jody at bay, who had shot the boy. His throat was mangled. His shirt hung in tatters, shredded as if it had burst from the inside.
Though he was obviously dead, the man’s hand jittered and jerked like a frog on a dissection table, and his skin squirmed as if alive from the inside, the home of a colony of swarming cockroaches. Patches of his exposed skin glistened, wet and gelatinous . . . like the mucus Scully had found during her autopsy of Vernon Ruckman.
His skin also had an uneven darkish cast . . . but the blotches shifted and faded, mobile hemorrhages that healed and passed across his complexion. This man must be the carrier of the instantly disruptive disease that had killed Patrice Kennessy and Vernon Ruckman, and probably the trucker Mulder had gone to investigate. She had no idea who this was, but he looked oddly familiar to her. He must have some connection with DyMar Laboratory, with David Kennessy’s research, and the radical cancer treatment he had meant to develop for his son.
As time seemed to stand still, Scully looked over at the black Lab to see if Vader might be suffering from the effects of the plague as well—but apparently the cellular destruction did not transfer readily across species boundaries. Vader sat patiently, not wagging his tail but focused intently on her reaction. He whined, as if daring her to challenge what he had done to protect his boy.
She whirled back toward Jody, who still lay gasping and bleeding from the bullet wound in his chest. She tore off more of his shirtsleeve and pressed the wadded cloth hard upon the open bubbling wound. This was a penetrating wound—the bullet had not antibodies
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passed through the other side of Jody’s back, but remained lodged somewhere in his lung, in his heart . . . Scully couldn’t imagine how the boy might survive—but she kept on treating him, doing what she knew best. She had lost fellow agents before, other people injured on cases—but she felt a unique affinity with Jody.
The twelve-year-old also suffered from a form of terminal cancer; both he and Scully were victims of the vagaries of fate, the mutations of one cell too many. Jody had already been given a death sentence by his own biology, but Scully didn’t intend to let a tragic accident rob him of his last month or so of life. This was one thing she could control. She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out the cellular phone. With shaking, blood-tipped fingers, she punched in the programmed number for Mulder’s phone—but all she received was a burst of static. She was out of range in the isolated wooded hills. She tried three times, hoping for at least a faint signal, some stray opening of the electromagnetic window in the ionosphere . . . but she had no such luck. It was almost as if someone was jamming her phone. Scully was alone.
She thought about running back to the car, driving it across the rugged meadows as close as she could get to the slide area, then rushing to Jody and carrying him to the car. It would be easier that way, if the car could travel over the wet and uneven meadow. But that would also mean she’d have to leave Jody’s side. She looked at the blood on her hands from pressing down on his gunshot wound, saw his pale complexion, and noted his faint fluttery breathing. No, she would not leave him. Jody might well die before she made it back here with the car, and she vowed not to let the boy die alone.
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said grimly, and bent over to gather up the young man. “Above and beyond the call of duty.”
Jody’s frame was slight and frail. Though he appeared to have fought back the worst ravages of his wasting disease, he still had not put on much weight, and she could lift him. It was lucky they were close to the cabin.
Vader whined next to her, wanting to come close. Jody moaned when she moved him. She tried not to hurt him further, though she had no choice but to get him back to her car, where she could drive at breakneck speed to the nearest hospital . . . wherever that might be.
She left the mangled and bloody form of the attacker lying on the trampled forest floor. The burly man was dead, killed before her eyes. Later on, evidence technicians would come here and study the body of this man, as well as Patrice’s. But that was in the future. There would be plenty of time to pick up the loose threads, to explain the pieces. For now, the only thing that mattered to Scully was to get this boy to medical attention. She felt so helpless. She was sure that whatever first aid she could give him—even whatever emergency room surgery the doctors could perform whenever she arrived at a medical center—would be too little, too late.
But she refused to give up.
In her arms, Jody felt warm and feverish. Incredibly hot, in fact. But Scully couldn’t waste time thinking of explanations. She trudged ahead at her best speed, lugging him out of the forest, taking him to help. The black Lab followed close at her heels, silent and worried.
Jody continued to bleed, spilling crimson droplets along the forest floor, the grass, finally out to the clearing around the cabin. Scully focused her attention antibodies
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straight ahead and kept moving toward her rental car. She had to get out of here, had to hurry. She looked off to one side as she bypassed the plague-ridden body of Patrice Kennessy. She was glad Jody didn’t have to see his mother like this. Perhaps he didn’t even know what had happened to her. Scully reached the car and gently set the boy down on the ground, leaning his back against the back fender as she opened the rear door. Vader barked and jumped in, then barked again, as if urging her to hurry.
Scully picked up Jody’s limp form and gently positioned him inside the car. Her makeshift bandage had fallen off, soaked with blood. But the bleeding from his huge wound had slowed remarkably, congealing. Scully worried that meant Jody’s heartbeat was weak, at the edge of death. She pressed more cloth against the bullet hole, and then jumped into the driver’s seat and started the car.
She drove off at a reckless speed up the bumpy dirt driveway, over the rise. She scraped the bottom of her car again as she headed back toward the logging road, but she accelerated this time, ignoring all caution. The isolated cabin with all of its murder and death fell behind them.
In the back seat, Vader looked through the rear window and continued barking.
Federal Office Building
Crystal City, Virginia
Friday, 12:08 P.M.
The phone rang in Adam Lentz’s plain govX ernment office, and he grabbed for it immediately. Very few people knew his direct number, so the call had to be important, though it startled him from his quiet and intense study of maps and detailed local survey charts of the Oregon wilderness.
“Hello,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. Lentz listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, feeling a sudden chill. “Yes, sir,” he answered.
“I was about to have a progress report for you.”
Indeed, he had put together a careful map of his ongoing search, a listing of all the attempts he had made, the professional hunters and investigators combing the wooded, mountainous area of western Oregon.
“In fact,” Lentz said, “I have my briefcase packed and a ticket voucher. My plane leaves for Portland within the hour. I’m going to head up the mobile tactical command center there. I want to be on site so I can take care of things personally.”
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He listened to the voice, detecting no displeasure, no scorn, only the faintest background lilt of sarcasm. The man didn’t want a formal report. Not at this time. In fact, he tended to avoid anything on paper whatsoever, so Lentz verbally gave him a summary of what he had done to track down Patrice and Jody Kennessy and their pet dog.
Lentz looked at his topographical maps. With a flat voice he listed where the six teams had concentrated their searches, rattling off one after another. He did not need to make his efforts sound extravagant or impressive—just competent.
Finally, though, a hint of criticism came from the other end of the phone conversation. “We had thought all of the uncontrolled samples of Kennessy’s nanomachines were destroyed. Your previous reports stated as much. This was a very important goal of ours, and I’m quite disappointed to learn that this isn’t so. And the dog—that’s a rather large mistake.”
Lentz swallowed. “We believed those efforts had been successful after the fire at DyMar. We had sent sterilization crews in to retrieve any unburned records. We found the fire safe and the videotape, but nothing else.”
“Yes,” the man said on the phone, “but from the condition of the dead security guard—as well as several other bodies—we must assume that some of the nanomachines have now escaped.”
“We’ll get them, sir,” Lentz said. “We’re doing our best to track down the fugitives. Finding the dog should be no problem. When we complete our mission, I assure you, there won’t be any samples remaining.”
“That isn’t a suggestion,” the voice said. “That’s the way it must be.”
“I understand, sir,” Lentz replied. “I’ve narrowed down my search, concentrating on a particular area in rural Oregon.”
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He rolled up the maps as he talked, folded other documents, and slid them into his briefcase. He glanced at his watch. His plane would be departing soon. He had only unmarked carry-on luggage, and he had papers that allowed him to bypass normal ticketing requirements. Lentz could take advantage of one of those empty seats the airlines were required to keep on all flights for important military or government personnel. His passes allowed him to move about at will with no written record of his travel plans or his movements. Such things were required in his line of work.
“And one last thing,” said the man on the phone.
“I’ve suggested this before, but I will reiterate it. You would do well to keep your eye on Agent Mulder. Make sure part of your team is specifically assigned to shadowing his movements, following everything he does. Eavesdrop on every conversation he has.
“You already have the manpower that you need, but Agent Mulder has a certain . . . talent for the unexpected. If you stay close to him, he may well lead you exactly where you need to be.”
“Thank you, sir,” Lentz said, then glanced at his watch again. “I need to get to National Airport. I’ll remain in touch, but for now I’ve got a plane to catch.”
“And a mission to accomplish,” the man said without the slightest hint of emotion.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 3:15 P.M.
The red pickup truck Mulder had commanX deered handled surprisingly well. With its big tires and high clearance, it ran like a steamroller over the potholes, puddles, and broken branches on the old logging road and the overgrown half-graded driveway that led back to the isolated cabin.
After seeing the dead trucker’s body and the image of supposedly dead Jeremy Dorman on the surveillance videotape, he felt an urgency to find Scully, to warn her. But the cabin was quiet, empty, abandoned. Leaving the truck and walking around, he saw fresh tire marks embedded in the soft mud and gravel. Someone had driven here recently and then departed again. Could Scully have gone already? Where would she go?
When he discovered the woman’s body lying in the grass, he knew it was Patrice Kennessy, without a doubt.
Mulder frowned and stepped back away from her. Patrice’s skin had been ravaged by the same disease he 190
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had just seen on the dead truck driver. He swallowed hard.
“Scully!” He moved with greater urgency. The scarlet blood spatters on the ground were obvious, bright red coins splashed in an uneven pattern. With a sheen of sweat on his forehead, Mulder broke into a trot, looking ahead, then back down to the ground as he followed the blood trail back into the forest. Now he saw footprints. Scully’s shoes. Paw prints from a dog. His heart beat faster.
Mulder found his way to the base of a steep slope where a mudslide had gouged the hillside. Near one of the horizontal tree trunks Mulder saw the bloodsmeared man with broad shoulders, tattered clothes, and a mangled throat ripped all the way down to the neck bone.
He recognized the burly man from the DyMar personnel photos, from the surveillance video at the truck weigh station. Jeremy Dorman—certainly dead now.
Mulder also smelled gunpowder beyond the blood. The dead man’s hand clutched a service revolver. From the smell, Mulder could tell it had been recently fired—but Dorman didn’t look as if he’d be firing it again anytime soon.
Mulder bent over to inspect the gaping wound in the man’s throat. Had the black Lab attacked him?
But even as he watched, Dorman’s mangled larynx and the muscle tissue and skin around it looked melted, smoothing itself over, as if someone had sealed it with wax. His throat injury was filled with translucent mucus, slime oozing over the mangled skin.
Around him, Mulder saw signs of a struggle where rocks and mud had slid down the slope. It looked as if someone had fallen over the edge, and antibodies
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then been pursued. He saw more of the dog’s footprints, Scully’s shoe prints. And smaller prints—the boy’s?
“Scully!” he called out again, but he heard no answer, only the rustle of pine trees and a few birds. The forest remained hushed, fearful or angry. Mulder listened, but he heard no answer.
Then the dead man on the ground lurched up as if spring-loaded.
His claw-like left hand grabbed the edge of Mulder’s overcoat. Mulder cried out and struggled backward, but the desperate man clung to his coat. Without changing his cadaverous expression, Jeremy Dorman brought up the revolver he held in his hand, pointing it threateningly at Mulder. Mulder looked down and saw the clutching hand, its covering of skin squirming, moving—infested with nanomachines?—slicked with a coating of slime. A contagious mucus . . . the carrier of the deadly nanotech plague.
Oregon Wilderness
Friday, 4:19 P.M.
Fifty miles at least to the nearest hospital, X along tangled roads through wooded
mountains—and Scully didn’t know
exactly where she was going. She raced away as the lowering sun glittered through the trees, and then the clouds closed over again. She kept driving, pushing her foot to the floor and wrestling with the curves of the county road, heading north. Dark pine trees flashed by like tunnel walls on either side of her.
In the backseat, Vader whimpered, very upset. Clumps of blood and foam bristled from his muzzle. She hadn’t taken time to clean him up. He snuffled at the motionless boy on the seat beside him. Scully remembered the brutal way the dog had attacked the hulking man who had carried the plague that killed Patrice Kennessy, who had threatened Jody. Now, despite the spattered evidence of dried blood on his fur, he seemed utterly loyal and devoted to guarding his master. Before driving away from the cabin, she had antibodies
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checked Jody’s pulse. It was faint, his breathing shallow—but the boy still lived, clinging tenaciously. He seemed to be in a coma. In the past twenty minutes Jody hadn’t made a sound, not even a groan. She glanced up in the rearview mirror, just to reassure herself. From the trees on her right, a dog stepped into the road in front of her, and she spotted it out of the corner of her eye. Scully slammed the brakes and yanked the steering wheel.
The dog bounded back out of sight, into the underbrush. She swerved, nearly lost control of the car on the slick road, then at the latest minute regained it. Behind her, in the rearview mirror, she saw the dark shape of the dog trot back across the road, undaunted by its close call.
In the backseat Jody gasped, and his spine arched with some kind of convulsion. Scully jerked the car to a stop in the middle of the road and unbuckled her seatbelt to reach back, dreading to find that the boy had finally succumbed to death, that he had reached the limits of endurance.
She touched him. Jody’s skin was hot and feverish, damp with sweat. His skin burned. Sweat trickled along his forehead. His eyes were squeezed shut. Despite all her medical training, Scully still didn’t know what to do.
In a moment the convulsion faded, and Jody breathed a little more easily. Vader nudged the boy in the shoulder and then licked Jody’s cheek, whimpering. Seeing him stabilized for the moment, Scully didn’t dare waste any more time. She shifted back into gear and roared off, her tires spinning on the leafcovered asphalt. Trees swallowed the curves ahead, and she was forced to concentrate on the road rather than her patient.
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Beside her the cell phone still displayed NO SERVICE
on its little screen. She felt incredibly isolated, like the survivalists in the group where Jody’s uncle had gone to hide. Those people wanted it that way, but right now Scully would have much preferred a large, brightly lit hospital with lots of doctors and other specialists to help. She wished Mulder were here. She wished she could at least call him.
When Jody coughed and sat up in the back seat, looking groggy but otherwise perfectly healthy, Scully nearly drove off the road.
Vader barked and nuzzled the young man, crawling all over him, slobbering on him, utterly happy to see Jody restored.
Scully slammed on the brakes. The car slewed onto the soft shoulder, and she came to a stop near an unmarked dirt road.
“Jody!” she cried. “You’re all right.”
“I’m hungry,” he said, rubbing his eyes. He looked around in the backseat. His shirt still hung open, and though dried blood was caked on his skin, she could see that the wound itself had closed over. She popped open her door and raced to the back of the car, leaving the driver’s side open. The helpful chiming bell scolded her for leaving the keys in the ignition. In the back she bent over, grasping Jody by the shoulders.
“Sit back. Are you all right?” She touched him, checking his skin. His fever had dropped, but he still felt warm. “How do you feel?”
She saw that skin had folded over the gunshot wound in his chest, clean and smooth, with a plastic appearance. “I don’t believe this,” Scully said.
“Is there anything to eat?” Jody asked. Scully remembered the bag of cheese curls Mulder had left in the front seat, and she moved around to the antibodies
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other side of the car to get it. The boy grabbed the bag of snack food and ate greedily, chomping handfuls as powdery orange flavoring covered his lips and fingers. The black Lab wiggled and squirmed in the backseat, demanding as much attention as his boy could give him, though Jody was more interested in just eating. Offhandedly, he patted Vader on the shoulders. Finished with the cheese curls, Jody leaned forward to scrounge around. Scully saw something glint. With a quiet sound, a piece of metal dropped away from his back.
Scully reached behind him, and Jody distractedly shifted aside to give her room. She picked up a slug—
the bullet that had been lodged inside him. She lifted the back of his shirt, saw a red mark, a puckered scar that faded even as she watched. She held the flattened bullet between her fingertips, amazed.
“Jody, do you know what’s happened to you?”
she said.
The boy looked up at her, his face smeared with cheese powder. Vader sat next to him and laid his chin on Jody’s shoulder, blinking his big brown eyes and looking absolutely at peace, enthralled to have the boy back and ready to pay attention to him. Jody shrugged. “Something my dad did.” He yawned. “Nanotech . . . no, he called them nanocritters. Biological policemen to make me better from the leukemia, fix me up. He made me promise not to tell anybody—not even my mom.”
Before she could think of another thing to ask, Jody yawned again and his eyes dulled. Now that he had eaten, an overpowering weariness came over him.
“I need to rest,” he said, and though Scully tried to ask him more questions, Jody was unable to answer. He blinked his heavy eyelids several times and then drew a deep breath, fading backward into the seat, where he dropped into a deep and restful sleep, 196
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not the shock-induced coma she had seen before. This sleep was healing and important for his body. Scully stood back up and stepped away from the car, her mind reeling with what she had seen. The dull bell tone continued to remind her that she had her door open and the keys dangling in the ignition. The implications astounded her, and she stood completely at a loss. Mulder had suspected as much. She would have been skeptical herself, unable to believe the cellular technology had advanced so far—
but she’d witnessed Jody Kennessy’s healing powers with her own eyes, not to mention the fact that he had visibly recovered from the terrible wasting cancer that had left him an invalid, weak and skeletal, according to the photos and records she had seen. Scully moved slowly, in a daze, as she climbed back behind the steering wheel. Her head pounded. Her joints ached, and she tried to tell herself that it was just from the stressful several days of sleeping in hotel rooms, traveling across country, and not an additional set of symptoms from her own cancer, the affliction that had resulted perhaps from her abduction, the unfathomable tests that had been done on her . . . the experiments.
Scully buckled her seatbelt and pulled the door closed, if only to halt the idiotic bell. In the backseat, Vader heaved a heavy sigh and rested his head on Jody’s lap. His tail bumped against the padded armrest of the rear door. She drove off, slower this time, aimless. David Kennessy had developed something wonderful, something astonishing—she realized the power he had tapped into at DyMar Laboratory. It had been a federally funded cancer research facility, and this work had a profound meaning for the millions of cancer patients each year—people like herself. It was appalling and unethical for Dr. Kennessy to antibodies
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have given his own son such an unproven and risky course of treatment. As a medical doctor, she was indignant at the very idea that he had bypassed all the checks and balances, the control groups, the FDA analysis, other independent studies. But then again, she understood the heartache, the desperate need to do something, anything, taking unorthodox measures when none of the normal ones would suffice. Was it so different from laetrile therapy, prayer healers, crystal meditation, or any number of other last-ditch schemes that terminal patients tried?
She had found that as hope diminished, the gullibility factor increased. With nothing to lose, why not try everything? And Jody Kennessy had indeed been dying. He’d had no other chance.
However, prayer healers and crystal meditation offered no threat to the population at large, and Scully realized with a sick tenseness in her stomach that the risk was far greater with Kennessy’s nanotechnology experiments. If he had made the slightest mistake in tailoring or adapting his “biological policemen” to human DNA, they could become profoundly destructive on a cellular level. The “nanocritters” could reproduce and transmit themselves from person to person. They could cause a radical outrage of growths inside other people, healthy people, scrambling the genetic pattern.
That would have been a concern only if the nanomachines didn’t work properly . . . and Kennessy had brashly gambled that he had made no mistakes. Scully set her jaw and drove along, tugging down the sun visor in an effort to counteract the flickering tree shadows that danced in an interlocking pattern across her windshield.
After the plague victims she and Mulder had seen, it appeared that something must have gone wrong—
very wrong.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 4:23 P.M.
The wounds in Jeremy Dorman’s throat had sealed, and a tangible heat emanated from him, a pulsing warmth that radiated from X his skin and body.
The supposedly dead man opened his
mouth and formed words, but only a whispery gurgle came from his ruined voice box. He jabbed with the revolver and hissed words using only modulated breath. “Your weapon—drop it!”
Mulder slowly reached to the other side of his overcoat, found the handgun in its pancake holster. He dropped his handgun on the forest floor with a thump. It struck the mud, slid to one side, and rested against a clump of dried pine needles.
“Nanotechnology,” Mulder said, trying to quell the wonder in his voice. “You’re healing yourself.”
“You’re one of them,” Dorman said, his voice harsh, his breath still grievously wounded. “One of those men.”
Then he released his grip on Mulder’s overcoat, antibodies
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leaving a handprint of slime that seeped into the fabric, spreading, moving of its own accord like an amoeba.
“Can I take off my coat?” Mulder asked, trying to keep the alarm out of his voice.
“Go ahead.” Dorman heaved himself to his feet, still holding the revolver. Mulder shed his outer jacket, keeping only his dark sportcoat.
“How did you find me?” Dorman said. “Who are you?”
“I’m with the FBI. My name is Mulder. I’ve been looking for Patrice and Jody Kennessy. I’m after them, not you . . . though I would certainly like to know how you survived the DyMar fire, Mr. Dorman.”
The man snorted. “FBI. I knew you were involved in the conspiracy. You’re trying to suppress information, destroy our discoveries. You thought I was dead. You thought you had killed me.”
Mulder would have laughed under any other circumstances. “No one’s ever accused me of being involved in a conspiracy. I assure you, I had never heard of you, or David Kennessy, or DyMar Laboratory before the destruction of the facility.” He paused.
“You’re contaminated with something from Kennessy’s research, aren’t you?”
“I am the research!” Dorman said, raising his voice, which was still rough and rocky. Something in his chest squirmed beneath the tattered covering of his shirt. Dorman winced, nearly doubled over. Mulder saw writhing lumps like serpents, growths of a strange oily color that flickered into motion beneath his skin, and then calmed, seeping back into his muscle mass.
“It looks to me like the research still needs a little work,” Mulder said.
Dorman gestured with the revolver for Mulder to turn around. “You have a vehicle here?”
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Mulder nodded, thinking of the battered pickup.
“So to speak.”
“We’re going to get out of here. You have to help me find Jody, or at least the dog. They’re with the other one . . . the woman. She left me for dead.”
“Considering the condition of your throat, that would have been a reasonable assumption,” Mulder said, covering his relief at hearing confirmation that Scully had been here, that she was still alive.
“You’re going to help me, Agent Mulder.” Now Dorman’s voice had an edge. “You are my key to tracking them down.”
“So you can kill them both like you murdered Patrice Kennessy and the truck driver and the security guard?” Mulder said.
Dorman winced again as an inner turmoil convulsed through his body. “I didn’t mean to. I had to.”
Then he snapped his gaze back toward Mulder. “But if you don’t help me, I’ll do the same to you. Don’t try to touch me.”
“Believe me, Mr. Dorman”—he glanced down at the slime-encrusted wounds on the man’s exposed skin—“touching you is absolutely the last thing on my mind.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Dorman said, his face twisted with anguish. “I don’t. I never meant for any of this to happen . . . but it’s rapidly becoming impossible not to hurt anyone else. If I can just get a few drops of fresh blood—preferably the boy’s blood, but the dog might do—no one else needs to get hurt, and I can be well again. It’s all so simple. Everybody wins.”
For once Mulder let his skepticism show. He knew the dog had been used as some sort of research animal—but what did the boy have to do with it? “What will that accomplish? I don’t understand.”
Dorman flashed him a look of pure scorn. “Of course you don’t understand, Agent Mulder.”
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“Then explain it to me,” Mulder said. “You’ve got those nanotechnology machines inside your body, don’t you?”
“David called them ‘nanocritters’—very cute.”
“The dog has them inside his bloodstream,” Mulder guessed. “Developed by David and Darin Kennessy for Jody’s cancer.”
“And apparently Jody’s nanocritters work just fine.” Dorman’s dark eyes flashed. “He’s already cured of leukemia.”
Mulder froze under the tangled, shadowy forest branches as he tried to digest the information. “But if . . . if the dog and the boy are infected, if the dog recovers from his injuries and Jody’s healthy now—why are you falling apart? Why do you bring death to anyone you touch?”
Dorman practically shouted, “Because their nanocritters function perfectly! Unlike mine.” He gestured for Mulder to march out of the forest, back toward the isolated cabin where he had parked the pickup truck.
“I didn’t have time. The lab was burning, and I was supposed to die, just like David. They betrayed me! I took . . . whatever was available.”
Mulder’s eyes widened, turning to look over his shoulder. “You used early generation nanocritters, the ones not fully tested. You injected yourself so your body could heal, so you could escape while everyone else thought you were dead.”
Dorman scowled. “That dog was our first real success. I realize now that David must have immediately taken a fresh batch of virgin nanocritters and secretly injected them in his son. Jody was almost dead already from his leukemia, so what difference did it make? I doubt Patrice even knew. But after seeing Jody today—he’s cured. He’s healthy. The nanocritters worked perfectly inside him.” Dorman’s skin shuddered and rippled in the dim forest light. 202
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“Unlike yours,” Mulder pointed out.
“David was too paranoid to leave anything valuable within easy reach. He’d learned that much at least from his brother. I only had access to what remained in our cryostorage. Some of our prototypes had produced . . . alarming results. I should have been more careful, but the facility was burning around me. When the machines got into my system, they reproduced and adjusted to my genetics, my cell structure. I thought it would work.”
As he trudged into the meadow, Mulder’s mind raced ahead, sifting the possibilities. “So DyMar was bombed because someone else was funding your research, and they didn’t want the nanotechnology to get loose. They didn’t want David Kennessy testing it out on his pet dog or his son.”
Dorman’s voice carried a strange tone. “The cure to disease, the possibility of immortality—why wouldn’t they want it all to themselves? They intended to take the samples to an isolation laboratory where they could continue the work in secret.” He continued under his breath. “I was supposed to be in charge of that work, but those people decided to obliterate me as well as David and everyone else.”
He gestured again with the revolver, and Mulder stepped carefully, swallowing hard as understanding crystallized around him.
The prototype nanocritters had adapted themselves to the DNA of the initial lab animals, but when Dorman had brashly injected them into himself, the cellular scouts were forced to adapt to completely different genetics: biological policemen with conflicting sets of instructions. The drastic shift must have knocked the already unstable machines out of whack. Mulder continued to speculate. “So your prototype nanocritters are confused with conflicting programming. When they hit a third person, a new genetic antibodies
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structure, they grow even more rampant. That’s what causes this viral form of cancer whenever you touch someone, a shutdown in the nervous system that grows like wildfire throughout the human body.”
“If that’s what you believe,” Dorman said with a low mutter. “I haven’t exactly had time to run a lot of tests.”
Mulder frowned. “Is that mucus”—he carefully pointed at Dorman’s throat, which was glistening with slime—“a carrier substance for the nanocritters?”
Dorman nodded. “It’s infested with them. If someone gets the carrier fluid on them, the nanomachines quickly penetrate their body . . .”
The battered red pickup stood parked in the muddy driveway right in front of them now. As he walked, Dorman made every effort to avoid the fallen body of Patrice Kennessy.
“And now the same thing is happening to you as happened to your victims,” Mulder said, “but much more slowly. Your body is falling apart, and you think Jody’s blood will save you somehow.”
Dorman sighed, at the end of his patience. “The nanocritters in his system are completely stable. That’s what I need. They’re working the way they should, not flawed with contradictory errors like mine. The dog’s nanocritters are good, too, but Jody’s are already conformed to human DNA.”
Dorman drew a deep breath, and Mulder realized that the man had no reason to believe his own theory; he merely hoped against hope that his speculation was true. “If I can get an infusion of stable nanocritters, they’ll be stronger than my warped ones. They will supersede the infestation in my own body and give them a new blueprint.” He looked intensely at Mulder, as if he wanted to grab the FBI agent and shake his shoulders. “Is that so wrong?”
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in front of the cabin, Dorman told Mulder to take out his car keys.
“I’ve left them in the ignition,” Mulder said.
“Very trusting of you.”
“It’s not my truck,” Mulder said, making excuses, hesitating, trying to figure out what to do next. Dorman yanked open his creaking door. “Okay, let’s go.” He slid onto the seat, but remained as far toward the passenger door as possible, avoiding contact. “We’ve got to find them.”
Mulder drove off, trapped in the same vehicle with the man whose touch caused instant death.
Tactical Team Temporary Command Post
Oregon District
Friday, 6:10 P.M.
To Adam Lentz and his crew of professionals, X the fugitives were leaving a trail of clues like muddy footprints on a snow-white carpet.
He didn’t know the members of his team by name, but he knew their skills, that they had been hand-picked for this and other similar assignments. This group could handle everything themselves, but Lentz wanted to be on the scene in person to watch over them, to intimidate them . . . and to be sure he could claim the proper credit when this was all over. In his line of work, he didn’t get official promotions, awards, or trophies. In fact, his successes didn’t even amount to tangible pay raises, though income was never a factor for him. He had many sources of cash.
He had flown into Portland, discreet and professional. He had been met at the airport and whisked off to the rendezvous point. Other team members converged at the site of a local police call, their first stop. Their high-tech mobile sanitation van arrived, 206
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escorted by a black sedan. Men in black suits and ties boiled out of the open doors next to where a logging truck had swerved off the road. The report had come in over the airwaves, and Lentz’s response team had scrambled.
A state trooper, Officer Jared Penwick, had remained at the scene. Next to him, huddled in the patrol car passenger seat—obviously not a prisoner—was an old man wearing a red wide-billed cap and a rain slicker. The man looked miserable and worried. The men in suits flashed their badges and announced themselves as operatives from the federal government. They all wore sidearms. They moved quickly as a unit.
The doors to the cleanup van popped open and men in spacesuit-like anti-contamination gear clambered out, armed with plastic bags and foam guns. The team member in the rear carried a flamethrower.
“What’s going on here?” Officer Penwick said, stepping toward them.
“We’re the official cleanup team,” Lentz answered. He hadn’t even bothered to take out his badge. “We would appreciate your full cooperation.”
He stood stoically out of range beyond the risk of contamination as the crew opened the truck driver’s door and descended upon the victim with plastic wrapping. They sprayed thick foam and acid, using extreme decontamination efforts. They quickly had the dead trucker bundled, his arms and legs bent so he could be wrapped up like a dying caterpillar in a cocoon.
The trooper watched everything, wide-eyed.
“Hey, you can’t just take—”
“We’re doing this to eliminate all risk of contamination, sir. Did you or this gentleman here”—he nodded toward the man in the rain slicker—“actually open up the truck cab or go inside?”
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“No,” Officer Penwick said, “but there was an FBI agent with us. Agent Mulder. One of your people, I suppose?”
Lentz didn’t answer.
The trooper continued, “He commandeered this man’s pickup truck and headed off. He said he had to meet his partner, which had something to do with this situation. I’ve been waiting here for”—he glanced at his watch—“close to an hour.”
“We’ll take care of everything from this point on, sir. Don’t concern yourself.” Lentz stepped back, shielding his eyes as the suited man with the flamethrower sprayed jellied gasoline inside the cab of the logging truck and then ignited it with a whump and a roar.
“Holy shit!” said the man in the rain slicker. He slammed the door of the patrol car as a wave of heat ruffled over them, sending clouds of steam from the wet weeds and asphalt.
“You’d best step back,” Lentz said to the trooper.
“The gas tank will blow at any minute.”
They hustled away, ducking low. The rest of the team had gotten the trucker’s body wrapped up and tucked inside a sterile isolation chamber within the cleanup vehicle. They would shuck their suits and incinerate them as soon as they got inside. The log truck burned, an incandescent torch in the gray rainy afternoon. The gas tank exploded with a deafening roar, and all the men ducked just long enough to avoid the flying debris before they turned back to their work.
“You mentioned Agent Mulder,” Lentz said, returning to the trooper. “Can you tell us where he’s gone?”
“Sure, I know where he’s headed,” Officer Penwick said, still astounded at the fireball, how the men had so efficiently obliterated all the evidence. The 208
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sound of the fire crackled and roared, while the black smoke stank of gasoline, chemicals, and wet wood. The trooper gave Lentz directions on how to find Darin Kennessy’s cabin. Lentz wrote nothing down, but memorized every word. He had to restrain himself from shaking his head.
A trail like muddy footprints on a snow-white carpet . . . The men climbed back into the black sedan, while the rest of the crew sealed the cleanup van and its driver started the engine.
“Hey!” The old man in the rain slicker opened the passenger door of the trooper’s car and stood up. He shouted at Lentz, “When do I get my pickup back?”
If the image of Agent Fox Mulder driving around in a battered redneck pickup truck amused Lentz, his face betrayed no expression.
“We’ll do everything we can, sir. There’s no need to worry.”
Lentz then climbed into the sedan, and the team raced off to Kennessy’s isolated cabin.
Oregon Back Roads
Friday, 6:17 P.M.
With a brief sigh from the backseat, Jody X woke up again at dusk, refreshed, fully healed—and ready to talk.
“Who are you, lady?” Jody asked,
startling her again. He woke up so quickly and fully. Vader sat up next to him, panting and happy, as if all was right with the world again.
“My name is Dana Scully,” she said, intent on the darkening road. “Dana—just call me Dana. I was here looking for you. I wanted to make sure you got to the hospital before your cancer got any worse.”
“I don’t need the hospital,” Jody said with a lilt in his voice that made it clear he thought the answer to that was plain. “Not anymore.”
Scully drove on into the dusk. She hadn’t been able to reach Mulder.
“And why is it that you don’t need a hospital?”
Scully asked. “I’ve seen your medical records, Jody.”
“I was sick. Cancer.” Then he closed his eyes, trying to remember. “Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, 210
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that’s what it’s called—or ‘ALL.’ My dad said there were lots of names for it, cancer in the blood.”
“It means your blood cells are being made wrong,”
Scully said. “They’re not working properly and killing the ones that are.”
“But I’m fixed now—or most of the way,” Jody said confidently. He patted Vader on the head, then hugged his dog. The black Lab absolutely loved it. Though Scully suspected the answers, she still had a hard time wrestling with the actual facts. Jody suddenly looked forward at her with suspicion. “Are you one of those people chasing after us?
Are you the one my mom was so afraid of?”
“No,” Scully said, “I was trying to save you from those people. You were very hard to find, Jody. Your mom did a good job of hiding you.” She bit her lip, knowing what he was going to ask next . . . and he did, looking around the backseat, suddenly realizing where he was.
“Hey, what happened to my mom? Where is she?
Jeremy was chasing her, and she told me to run.”
“Jeremy?” Scully asked, hating herself for so blatantly avoiding his question.
“Jeremy Dorman,” Jody said, as if she should already know this information. “My dad’s assistant. We thought he was killed in the fire, too, but he wasn’t. I think there’s something wrong with him, though. He said he needed my blood.” Jody hung his head, absently patting the dog. He swallowed hard. “Jeremy did something to my mom, didn’t he?”
Scully drew a deep breath and slowed the car. She didn’t want to be distracted by any sharp curves or road hazards as she told Jody Kennessy that his mother was dead.
“She tried to protect you, I think,” Scully said, “but that man, Mr. Dorman, who came after you . . .” She paused as her mind raced through possible choices of antibodies
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words. “Well, he is very sick. He’s got some kind of disease. You were smart not to let him touch you.”
“And did my mom catch the disease?” Jody asked.
Scully nodded, looking straight ahead and hoping he would still see her answer. “Yes.”
“I don’t think it was a disease,” Jody said. He spoke bravely, his voice strong. “I think Jeremy has nanocritters inside him, too. He stole them from the lab . . . but they’re not working right in him. His nanocritters kill people. I saw what he looked like.”
“Is that why he was after you?” Scully asked. She was impressed by his intelligence and composure after such an awful ordeal—but his story seemed so fantastic. Yet, after what she had seen, how could he be making it up?
Jody sighed and his shoulders slumped. “I think those people are probably after him, too. We’re carrying the only samples left, carrying them inside us. Somebody doesn’t want them to get loose.”
He blinked up, and Scully glanced in the rearview mirror, seeing his bright eyes in the fading light. He seemed terrified and innocent. She thought of the cancer ravaging him, how he faced a similar fate but a much greater risk than she herself did.
“Do you think I’m a threat, Dana? Are other people going to die because of me?”
“No.” Scully said. “I’ve touched you, and I’m fine. I’m going to make sure you’re okay.”
The boy said nothing—it was hard to tell whether her words had the reassuring effect she intended.
“These ‘nanocritters’, Jody. What did your dad say to you about them?”
“He told me they were biological policemen that went through my body looking for the bad cells and fixing them one at a time,” Jody said. “The nanocritters can also protect me when I get hurt.”
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“Like from a gunshot,” she said.
Scully realized that if the nanomachines were able to repair well-entrenched leukemia, a gunshot would have been simple patchwork. They could easily stop the bleeding, plug up holes, seal the skin. Altering acute leukemia, though, was a monumentally more difficult task. The biological policemen would have to comb through billions of cells in Jody’s body, a massive restructuring. It was the difference between a Band-Aid and a vaccine.
“You’re not going to take me to a hospital, are you?” Jody asked. “I’m not supposed to be out in public. I’m not supposed to let my name get around anywhere.”
Scully thought about what he had said. She wished she could talk this over with Mulder. If Kennessy’s nanotechnology actually worked—as was apparent from the evidence of her own eyes—Jody and his dog were all that remained of the DyMar research. Everything else had been systematically destroyed, and these two in her backseat were living carriers of the functional nanocritters . . . and somebody wanted to destroy them. It could be a grave mistake for her to take the boy to a hospital and entrust him into the care of other unsuspecting people. Scully had no doubt that before long Jody and Vader would fall into the hands of those men who had caused the destruction of DyMar. As she drove on, Scully knew she couldn’t let this boy be captured and whisked away, his identity erased. Jody Kennessy would not be swept under the rug. She felt too close to him.
“No, Jody,” Scully said, “you don’t have to worry. I’ll keep you safe.”
Oregon Back Roads
Friday, 6:24 P.M.
As the pickup truck droned on and the X darkness deepened, at least Mulder didn’t have to look at Jeremy Dorman, didn’t have to see the sickening squirming and unexplained motion of his body.
After a long period of uneasiness, restlessness, and barely suppressed pain, Dorman seemed to be dropping into unconsciousness. Mulder could see that the former researcher, the man who had faced—and been seemingly killed by—the other conspirators, was in anguish. He clearly didn’t have long to live. His body could no longer function with such severe ravages. If Dorman didn’t get his help soon, there would be no point.
But Mulder didn’t know how much to believe the man’s story. How much had he himself been responsible for the DyMar disaster?
Dorman lifted his heavy-lidded eyes, and when he noticed the antenna of Mulder’s cellular phone poking from the pocket of his suit jacket, he sat up at once.
“Your phone, Agent Mulder. You have a cell phone!”
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Mulder blinked. “What about my phone?”
“Use it. Pull it out and dial your partner. We can find them that way.”
So far Mulder had avoided bringing this monstrously distorted man anywhere close to Scully or the innocent boy in her possession—but now he didn’t see any way he could talk himself out of it.
“Take out your phone, Agent Mulder,” Dorman growled, the threat clear in his voice. “Now.”
Mulder gripped the steering wheel with his left hand, compensating from side to side to maintain a steady course on the uneven road. He yanked out the phone and extended the antenna with his teeth. With some relief, he saw that the light still blinked NO SERVICE.
“I can’t,” Mulder said and turned the phone so that Dorman could see. “You know how far out we are. There aren’t any substations nearby or booster antennas.” He drew a deep breath. “Believe me, Mr. Dorman, I’ve wanted to call her many times.”
The big man slumped against the passenger-side door until the armrest creaked. Dorman used his fingertip to rub at an imaginary mark on the pickup window; his finger left a tracing of sticky, translucent slime on the glass.
Mulder kept his eyes on the road. The headlights stabbed into the mist.
When Dorman looked at Mulder, in the shadows his eyes seemed very bright. “Jody will help me. I know he will.” Dark trees flickered past them in the twilight. “He and I were pals. I was his foster uncle. We played games, we talked about things. Jody’s dad was always busy, and his uncle—that jerk—told them all to go to hell when he had his fight with David and ran off to stick his head in the sand. But Jody knows I would never hurt him. He has to know that, no matter what else has happened.”
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He gestured to the phone lying between them on the seat. “Try it, Agent Mulder. Call your partner. Please.”
The sincerity and desperation in Dorman’s voice sent tingles down Mulder’s spine. Reluctantly, without any faith that it would work, he picked up the phone and punched in Scully’s speed-dial number. This time, to his surprise, the phone rang.
Tactical Team Temporary Command Post
Oregon District
Friday, 6:36 P.M.
As the two vehicles toiled down the muddy X rutted drive, Lentz couldn’t believe they had missed the obvious connection all this time. Earlier, they had quietly checked out the survivalist enclave where David Kennessy’s brother Darin had gone to ground, thinking himself invisible and protected. But Patrice had not gone there. There was no sign of the dog or the twelve-year-old boy. She had come instead to this land and this cabin, which had belonged to Kennessy’s brother, purchased long ago and seemingly ignored. Focused on the red herring of the survivalist enclave, Lentz had not spotted this hiding place on any of their computer searches of where Patrice might have gone.
This cabin would have been a perfect place for Patrice to shelter her son and the dog. But now it appeared that someone had found them first.
The team again sprang out of their vehicles, this time fully armed, their automatic rifles and grenade launchers pointed toward the small, silent building. antibodies
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They waited. No one moved—nobody inside, nobody on the team. They were like a set of plastic army men forever frozen in attack positions.
“Move closer,” Lentz said without raising his voice. In the still-misty air, his words carried clearly. The team members shuffled about, exchanging positions, moving closer, tightening a noose around the cabin. Others sprinted around the back to secure the site. Lentz flicked his glance around, confident that every member of the group had noticed the twin sets of fresh tire tracks on the driveway. Agent Mulder had already been here, as had his partner Scully. One of the men shouted, gesturing toward a thick patch of tall grass and weeds near the front porch. Lentz and the others hurried over to find a woman’s body sprawled on the ground, blotched from the ravages of rampant nanotech infestation. She had been tainted. The disease had gotten her, too. The viral infestation was spreading, and with each victim the prospect for containment grew worse and worse. The team members had just barely thwarted an outbreak in the Mercy Hospital morgue, where the nanomachines had continued their work on the first victim, crudely reanimating some of the cadaver’s bodily systems.
It was Lentz’s job to ensure that such a close call never happened again.
“They’ve gone,” Lentz said, “but we’ve got more tidying up to do here.”
He directed the teams in the cleanup van to put on fresh protective gear and prepare for another sterilization routine. Lentz stood back and drew a deep breath, inhaling the resiny scent of the nearby forest, the damp perfume of the clean fresh meadow. He turned to one of the men. “Burn the cabin to the ground,” he said.
“Make sure nothing remains.”
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He turned to see the crew already swaddling Patrice Kennessy’s body with the plastic and the foam. Another man took out pumping equipment and began to spray jellied gasoline around the exterior cabin walls, then made a special effort to douse the meadow where Patrice had lain.
Lentz didn’t bother to stay and watch the fire. He went back to the car, where the radio systems connected to other satellite uplinks and receiving dishes, to cellular phone tapping or jamming devices and security descramblers.
Other members of the extended tactical squadron had been keeping tabs on Agent Mulder, and now Lentz required whatever information they could give him.
Mulder could be the one to lead them right where they needed to be.
Oregon Back Roads
Friday, 6:47 P.M.
Scully’s cellular phone rang in the quiet X darkness of the car’s front seat, like an electronic chipmunk chittering. She snatched it up, knowing who it must be, relieved to be back in touch with her partner at last. In the rear of the car Jody remained quiet, curious. The dog whimpered, but fell silent. She yanked out the antenna while driving with one hand.
“Scully, it’s me.” Mulder’s voice was surrounded by a nimbus of static, but still understandable.
“Mulder, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours,”
she said quickly, before he could say anything. “Listen, this is important. I’ve got Jody Kennessy with me. He’s healed from his leukemia, and he’s got amazing regenerative abilities—but he’s in danger. We’re both in danger.” Her breath caught in her throat. “Mulder, he doesn’t have the plague—he has the cure.”
“I know, Scully. It’s Kennessy’s nanotechnology. The actual plague carrier is Jeremy Dorman—and he’s sitting right here next to me . . . a little too close, but I don’t have much choice at the moment.”
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Dorman was alive! She couldn’t believe it. She had looked at the blood-soaked body, his hand still twitching. No human being could have survived an injury such as that.
“Mulder, I saw the dog attack him, tear his throat out—”
But then, Scully realized, she never would have believed young Jody could live after the gunshot wound he had received.
“Dorman’s got the nanomachines in him as well,”
Mulder said, “but his are malfunctioning. Rather spectacularly, I’d say.”
Jody leaned forward, concerned. “What is it, Dana? Is Jeremy after us?”
“He’s got my partner,” Scully muttered quietly to the boy.
Mulder’s voice continued at the same time. “Those nanocritters are amazing things with remarkable healing abilities, as we’ve both seen. No wonder somebody wants to keep them under wraps.”
“Mulder, we saw what happened at the DyMar Lab. We know people came in and confiscated all evidence of the dead security guard in the hospital morgue. I’m not going to let Jody Kennessy or the dog be captured, taken in, and somehow erased.”
“I don’t think that’s what Mr. Dorman wants, either,” Mulder said. “He wants to meet.” She heard a mumbled discussion on the phone, Dorman saying something in a threatening tone. She remembered his gruff, dismissive voice from her confrontation with him in the forest, just before he had accidentally shot Jody. “In fact, he insists on it.”
She pulled into a clearing at the side of the road. The trees were thinning, becoming scrubbier, and she looked down a shallow grade to a small city ahead. She hadn’t noticed the town’s name as she drove along, but from the direction she had been heading, antibodies
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Scully knew she must be nearing the suburbs around Portland.
“Mulder, are you all right?” she said.
“Dorman needs something from Jody. Some of his blood.”
Scully interrupted. “I stopped him before . . . or at least I tried. I won’t let Jody get hurt.”
Mulder’s voice fell silent for a few seconds on the phone, then she heard a scuffle. “Mulder! Are you all right?” she called out, wondering what was happening and how far away she was from helping him. He didn’t answer her.
As Mulder tried to think of something to say, Dorman finally gave up in frustration and reached over to snatch the telephone from Mulder’s hand.
“Hey!” he said, then flinched away to keep from touching the slime-slick man.
Dorman cradled the cellular phone and pushed it against his fluctuating face. The skin on his cheeks glistened and squirmed. The mucus on his hands left sticky patches on the black plastic.
“Agent Scully, tell Jody I’m sorry I shot him,”
Dorman said into the phone. “But I knew he would heal, just like the dog. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
He reached up to flick on the dome light in the pickup’s cab so that Mulder could see the intent look on his face and the revolver still held in his hand.
“You need to tell the boy something for me, please. I need to explain to him.”
Mulder knew his own conversation with Scully was now over. He couldn’t touch the telephone again, or else the nanocritters would infiltrate his body too and leave him a splotched, convulsing wreck like Dorman’s other victims.
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Dorman swallowed, and from the anguished look on his face and the yellow shadows cast from the dim dome light, Mulder thought perhaps the distorted man really was sorry for all that had happened. “Tell him his mother is dead—and it’s because of me. But it was an accident. She was trying to protect him. She didn’t know that just touching me would be deadly.”
His lips pressed together. “The nanocritters in my body are going wrong, very wrong. They didn’t heal her, like Jody’s do—they destroyed his mother’s systems, and she died. There was nothing I could do.” He spoke faster and faster. “I warned her to stay away from me, but she”— he drew a deep breath—“she moved too fast. Jody knows how tough his mom was.”
Dorman looked up, turning his gleaming, hooded eyes at Mulder.
Mulder kept driving. The red pickup rattled over a pothole, and a loose wrench in the rear bed clanged and bounced. He hoped one of the bumps would knock it free so he wouldn’t have to hear the grating noise any more.
“Listen, Agent Scully.” Dorman’s voice was soothing; his mangled voice box must have healed quite nicely. “Jody’s nanocritters work just fine—and that’s what I need his blood for. I think the nanocritters his dad gave him might be able to fix the ones in me. It’s my only chance.”
Dorman winced as his body convulsed again, and he tried not to gasp into the phone. The hand holding the revolver twitched and jerked. Mulder hoped his fingers wouldn’t clench around the trigger and shoot a hole through the roof of the pickup.
“You saw how I look,” he said. “Jody remembers what I was like, how everything was between us. Me and him playing Mario Kart or Cruisin’ USA. Remind him about the one time I let him beat me.”
Then he sat back, curling his mouth in a little bit antibodies
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of a smile, perhaps nostalgic, perhaps predatory.
“David Kennessy was right. There are government men after us. They want to destroy everything we created—but I got away, and so did Jody and Vader. But we’re marked for eradication. I’m going to die in less than a day unless my nanocritters can be fixed. Unless I can see Jody.”
Mulder looked over at him. The broad-shouldered, devastatingly sick man was very persuasive. On the phone he could hear faint voices, a discussion—presumably Jody talking to Scully. By the expression on Dorman’s face, Jody seemed swayed by the big man’s arguments. And why not? Dorman was the only connection remaining to the boy’s past. The twelve year old would give him the benefit of the doubt. Dorman’s shoulders sagged with relief.
Mulder felt sick in the pit of his stomach, still not sure whether to believe Dorman or not. Finally Dorman growled into the phone again.
“Yes, Agent Scully. Let’s all go back to DyMar. The lab will be burnt and abandoned, but it’s neutral ground. I know you can’t trick me there.”
He rested the revolver in his lap, calmer and confident now. “You have to understand how desperate I am—that’s the only reason I’m doing this. But I won’t hesitate. Unless you bring Jody to meet me, I will kill your partner.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t even need a gun. All I need to do is touch him.” As if in an effort to provoke Mulder, he dropped the revolver onto the worn seat between them.
“Just be at DyMar.” He punched the END button. He looked at the sticky residue on the black plastic of the phone, frowned in disappointment. He rolled down his window and tossed the phone away. It bounced on the gravel and shattered.
“I guess we won’t be needing that anymore.”
Mobile Tactical Command Center
Northwestern Oregon
Friday, 7:01 P.M.
Satellite dishes mounted atop the van tilted X at different azimuths to tap into various relay satellites. Computer signal processors sifted through the complex medley of transmissions broadcast by hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people.
The van sat parked at the terminus of a short dirt road that ended in a shallow dumping ground. Compost, deadwood, rotting garbage, and uprooted stumps stood in a massive pile like a revolutionary’s barricade. Some farmer or logger had been tossing his debris here for years rather than pay a disposal fee at the county dump. PRIVATE PROPERTY and KEEP OUT signs offered impotent threats; Adam Lentz had far more serious methods of intimidation at his disposal.
No one had been out here for some time, though, especially not after dark. The men on the professional surveillance team had the area to themselves—and with the black-program technology rigged into the van, they had most of North America at their fingertips. Tree branches bristling with pine needles offered a antibodies
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mesh of camouflage overhead, and the thick clouds made the night dark and soupy, blocking the stars—
but neither the trees nor the clouds hampered satellite transmissions.
The computers in the dashboard of the mobile tactical command center scanned thousands of frequencies, ran transmissions through voice-recognition algorithms, searched for key words, targeted on likely transmission points.
They had continued their invisible surveillance for hours with no success, but Adam Lentz was not a man to give up. Unless he broached the subject himself, the rest of his team members would not dare to comment on the matter either.
Lentz was also not one to lose patience. He had cultivated it over the years, when patience and a cool lack of emotion as well as an absence of remorse had allowed him to rise to this unrecognized yet still substantial position of power. Though few people understood what he was all about, Lentz was content with his place in the world, with the importance of his activities. But he would have been much more content if he could just find Agent Fox Mulder.
“He can’t know we’re looking for him,” Lentz muttered. The man at the command console looked over, his face stony, reflecting no surprise whatsoever.
“We’ve been very discreet,” the man said. Lentz tapped his fingertips on the dashboard, pondering. He knew Mulder and Scully had split up. Agent Mulder had seen the dead trucker whose body Lentz’s team had cleanly eliminated. Both Mulder and Scully had been to Dorman’s isolated cabin out in the hollow, which—along with the body of Patrice Kennessy—was now a pile of smoldering ashes. Then they had fled, and Lentz believed either Agent Mulder or Scully had the boy Jody and his nanotechinfected dog. 226
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But something else was spreading the plague. Patrice Kennessy and the boy had feared something. Was the dog going rampant? Had the nanomachines within it—as Lentz had witnessed so clearly and so brutally in the videotaped demonstration—somehow gone haywire so that they now destroyed human beings?
The prospect frightened even him, and he knew that his superiors were absolutely right in insisting that all such dangerous research be contained. Only responsible, authorized people should know about it. He had to restore order to the world. Outside, the awakening night insects in the Oregon deep woods made a humming, buzzing sound. Grasshoppers, tree bugs . . . Lentz didn’t know their scientific names. He had never been much interested in wildlife. The hive behavior of humanity in general had been enough to capture his interest.
He sat back and waited, clearing his mind, thinking of nothing. A man with many pressures, burdens, and dark secrets, Lentz found it most restful when he could make his mind entirely blank. He had no plans to set in motion, no schemes to concoct. He proceeded with his missions one step at a time.
And in this instance, he couldn’t proceed to the next step until they heard from Agent Mulder. The man at the command deck sat up quickly.
“Incoming,” he said. He pushed down his earphones and fiddled with switches on his receiver.
“Transmission number confirmed, frequency confirmed.” He almost allowed himself a smile, then turned to Lentz. “Voice pattern match confirmed. It’s Agent Mulder. I’m recording.”
He handed the earphones to Lentz, who quickly snugged them in place. The technician fiddled with the controls and the recorder.
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Lentz listened to a staticky, warbled conversation between Mulder and Scully. In spite of his own tight control over his reactions, Lentz’s eyes went wide, and his eyebrows lifted.
Yes, Scully had the boy and the dog in her custody—and the boy had healed himself from a grievous wound . . . but the most astonishing news of all was that the organization’s patsy, Jeremy Dorman, had not been killed in the DyMar fire after all. He was still alive, still a threat . . . and now Dorman, too, was a carrier of the rogue nanotechnology. And so was the boy! The infestation was already spreading.
After various threats and explanations, Dorman and Agent Scully worked to arrange a time and a place where they could meet. Mulder and Scully, Dorman, Jody, and the dog were all falling right into his lap—if Lentz’s team could set up their trap sufficiently ahead of time. As soon as the cellular transmission ended, Lentz launched his team into motion.
Every member of his group was well aware of how to reach the burned-out ruins of the laboratory. After all, each one of the mercenaries had been part of the supposed protest group that had brought down the cancer research establishment. They had thrown the firebombs themselves, set the accelerants, detonated the facility so that little more than an unstable skeleton remained.
“We have to get there first,” Lentz said. The mobile van launched like a killer shark out of the dead-end dirt road and onto the leaf-slick highway, accelerating recklessly up the coast at a speed far from safe.
But a mere traffic accident was not enough to worry Adam Lentz at that moment.
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 8:45 P.M.
Back to the haunted house, Scully thought as X she drove up the steep driveway to the gutted, fire-blackened ruins of the DyMar Laboratory.
Behind the clouds the moon spread a
pearlescent glow, a shimmering brightness in the soupy sky overhead. On the hills surrounding DyMar, the forest had once been a peaceful, protective barricade—but now Scully thought the trees were ominous, offering cover for the stealthy movement of enemies, perhaps more violent protesters . . . or those other men that Jody feared were after him and his mother.
“Stay in the car, Jody.” She walked to the sagging chain-link fence that had been erected to keep trespassers from the dangerous construction site. Nobody manned it now.
The bluff overlooking the sprawling city of Portland was prime business real estate, but she saw only the blackened ruins like the carcass of a dragon sprawled beneath the diluted moonlight. The place was empty, dangerous yet enticing.
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As Scully passed through the open and too-inviting chain-link gate, she heard a car door slam. She whirled, expecting to see Mulder and his captor, the big man who had shot Jody—but it was only the boy climbing out of the car and looking around curiously. The black Lab bounded out next to him, anxious to be free, glad that his boy was healthy.
“Be careful, Jody,” she called.
“I’m following you,” he said. Before she could scold him, he added, “I don’t want to be left alone.”
Scully didn’t want him to go into the burned ruins with her, but she couldn’t blame him, either. “All right. Come on, then.”
Jody hurried toward her while Vader bounded ahead, frolicking. “Keep the dog next to you,” Scully warned.
Small sounds of settling debris came from the unstable site, structural timbers tugged by time and gravity. No damp breeze stirred the ashes, but still the blackened timbers creaked and groaned. Some of the structural walls remained intact, but looked ready to collapse at any moment. Part of the floor had fallen into the basement levels, but in one section concrete-block walls stood tall, coated with fire-blistered enamel paint and covered with soot. Bulldozers sat like metal leviathans outside the building perimeter. A steam shovel, Porta Potti outhouses, and construction lockers had been set up by the contractor in charge of erasing the last scar of DyMar’s presence.
Scully thought she heard a sound, and proceeded cautiously toward the bulldozer. Fuel tanks sat near the heavy equipment. The demolitions crew had been ready to begin—and she wondered if the unusual rush to level the place had anything to do with the cover-up plans Dorman had talked about.
Then Scully saw a metal locker that had been 230
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pried open. A starburst of bright silver showed where a crowbar had ripped off the lock, just below the marking, DANGER: EXPLOSIVES.
Suddenly the darkness seemed much more oppressive, the silence unnatural. The air was cold and gauzy damp in her nostrils, with a sour poison of old burning.
“Jody, keep close to me,” she said.
Her heart pounded, and all of her senses came fully alert. This meeting between the boy and Jeremy Dorman would be tense and dangerous. But she would make sure Jody got through it.
She heard the approach of another engine, a vehicle rattling and laboring up the slope, tires crunching on gravel. Twin headlights swept through the night like bright coins.
“Stay with me.” She put a protective hand on Jody’s shoulder, and the two stayed at the edge of the burned-out building.
It was an old red pickup truck patched with primer, rusted on the sides. The body groaned and creaked as the driver’s door opened and Mulder climbed out. Of all the unbelievable things she had witnessed with Fox Mulder, seeing her strictly suit-and-tie partner driving a battered old pickup ranked among the most unusual.
“Fancy meeting you here, Scully,” Mulder said. A larger form heaved itself out of the passenger side. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and even the shadows could not hide that something was wrong with the way he moved, the way his limbs seemed to have extra joints, the way weariness and pain seemed ready to crush him.
Jeremy Dorman had looked bad before, and now he appeared even worse.
Scully took a step forward but kept herself in front of Jody. “Are you all right, Mulder?”
“For now,” he said.
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Dorman took a step closer to Mulder, who edged away in an attempt to keep his distance. The broad-shouldered man held a revolver in his hand . . . but the weapon itself seemed the least threatening aspect about him. Scully drew her own handgun. She was a good shot and utterly confident. She pointed the 9mm directly at Jeremy Dorman. “Release Agent Mulder right now,” she said. “Mulder, step away from him.”
He did so by two or three steps, but he moved slowly, carefully, not wanting to provoke Dorman.
“I’m afraid I can’t return your partner’s weapon,”
Dorman said. “I’ve touched it, you see, and it’s no use to anyone anymore.”
“And I’ve also lost my jacket and my cell phone,”
Mulder said. “Think of all the paperwork I’m going to need to fill out.”
Jody came hesitantly forward, standing close behind Scully. “Jeremy, why are you doing this?” he said. “You’re as bad as . . . as bad as them.”
Dorman’s shoulders sagged, and Scully was reminded of the pathetic lummox Lenny from Of Mice and Men, who hurt things he loved without knowing why or how.
“I’m sorry, Jody,” he said, spreading one hand while he gripped the revolver in the other. “You can see how this is affecting me. I had to come here. You can help me. It’s the only way I know to survive.”
Jody said nothing.
“Other people are after us, Jody,” Dorman said. He took a step closer. Scully did not back away, maintaining herself as a barrier between them.
“We’re being hunted by government officials, people trying to bury your dad’s work so that no other cancer patients will ever be helped. No one else will be cured like you were. These men want to keep that cure for themselves.”
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with his intense emotion. “The protesters that killed your dad, the ones who burned down this whole facility, were not just animal-rights activists. They were staged by the group I’m talking about. It was planned. It’s a conspiracy. They’re the ones who killed your father.”
At that point, as if on cue, other figures appeared, shadowy silhouettes, men in dark suits emerging from the perimeter of the chain-link fence. They came out of the trees and the access road. Another group trudged up the steep driveway with bright flashlights blazing.
“We have evidence that suggests otherwise, Mr. Dorman,” said one of the men in the lead. “We’re your reinforcements, Agent Mulder. We’ll take care of the situation from here.”
Dorman looked around wildly and glared at Mulder, as if the agent had betrayed him.
“How did you know our names?” Mulder asked. Scully backed away until she clutched Jody’s wrist. “It’s not that simple,” she said. “We won’t relinquish custody of this boy.”
“I’m afraid you have to,” the man in the lead said.
“I assure you, our jurisdiction in this matter supersedes yours.”
The men came closer; their dark suits acted as camouflage in the shadowy overhangs in the burned building.
“Identify yourselves,” Scully said.
“These men don’t carry business cards, Scully,”
Mulder said.
Jody looked at the man who had spoken. “What did you mean?” he said, his eyes gleaming. “What did you mean that they weren’t the ones who killed my father?”
The man in the lead looked over at Jody like an insect collector assessing a prize specimen. “Mr. Dorman didn’t explain to you what really happened to your father?” His voice held a mocking tone. antibodies
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“Don’t you dare, Lentz,” Dorman said. His voice seethed. He had raised the revolver in his hand, but Lentz didn’t seem at all bothered by the threat.
“Jeremy killed your dad, Jody. Not us.”
“You bastard!” Dorman wailed in despair. Scully was too astonished to respond, but it was clear to her that Dorman realized he would never convince the boy to help him, not now. With a roar, swinging his too-flexible arms, Jeremy Dorman brought up the revolver in his hand, aiming at Lentz.
The other team members were much faster, though. They snatched their own weapons and opened fire.
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 9:03 P.M.
The hail of small-caliber bullets struck X Jeremy Dorman, and he thrashed out his arms in a scream of pain—as his body suddenly went haywire. Mulder and Scully both dove to one side, reacting according to their training. Jody cried out as Scully dragged him with her, scrambling toward shelter among the large construction equipment. Mulder moved away, shouting for the men to hold their fire, but no one paid the slightest attention to him.
Dorman himself remained the focus of all the shooting. He had known these men wanted to take him down, though he doubted that they had known he was still alive before now. They did not know what had changed inside of him . . . how he was different. Adam Lentz had betrayed him before: The people in the organization that had promised him his own laboratory, the ability to continue the nanotechnology research, had already attempted to destroy him. Now they were here to finish the job.
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As two hot bullets struck him, one high in the shoulder and the other on the left side of his rib cage, the pain and adrenaline and fury destroyed the last vestiges of his control over his own body. He let slip his hold on the systems that had played havoc with his genetic structure, his muscles and nerves. He roared a wordless howl of outrage.
And his body changed.
His skin stretched like a trembling drumhead. Inside, his muscles convulsed and clenched. The wild tumorous growths that had protruded from his ribs, his skin, his neck, came loose, ripping their way through his already mangled shirt.
The mass of protrusions had fought themselves free one time previously, while he had been trapped with Wayne Hykaway in the logging truck. But that loss of control was nothing compared to the unleashed biological chaos he exhibited now, a wild-card reorganization that the nanocritters had found in his most primitive DNA coding.
His shoulders groaned, his biceps bulged, and his arms bent and twisted. Another whipping tumor crawled out of his throat from the base of his tongue. The skin on his face and neck ran like melting plastic. The men in dark suits continued to fire at him, in alarm and self-defense now, but Dorman’s bodily integrity was breaking down, mutating, able to absorb the impacts like soft clay.
From his position at the lead of the team, Adam Lentz reacted quickly, retreating to cover as the gunfire continued. Dorman charged forward to attack the nearest dark-suited man with one twisted arm while tentacles whipped out in a hideously primeval mass from his body. His mind was a blur, filled with pain and static and conflicting images. The nerve signals he tried to 236
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send to his muscles had very little effect. Now his warped and rebellious body broke free, going on the rampage.
The government man’s cool professionalism quickly degenerated into a scream as an explosion of fleshy protrusions, tentacled claws, a nightmare of bizarre biological abominations wrapped around his arms, his chest, his neck. Dorman squeezed and strangled, until the man broke like balsa kindling in his grasp.
Another bullet shattered Dorman’s femur, but before he could collapse, the nanomachines knitted the bone together again, allowing him to charge forward to snare another victim.
The hot translucent slime covered Dorman’s body, providing a vehicle for the seething nanocritters. He needed only to touch the enemy men and the cellular plague would instantly eradicate their systems—but his out-of-control body took great delight in snapping their necks, crushing their windpipes, folding up their rib cages like accordions.
The single tentacle whipped out of his mouth like the long sharp tongue of a serpent, lashing the air. He didn’t know how to interpret his own senses anymore. He had no idea how much—or how little—humanity still remained within him.
For now he saw only the enemy, the conspirators, the traitors—and his buzzing, disintegrating brain thought only of killing them.
But even as he continued the struggle, Dorman felt disoriented. His vision blurred and distorted. The surrounding agents brought more weapons to bear. The bullet impacts drove him away, and Dorman stumbled backward.
A dim spark in his mind made him remember the DyMar laboratory, the rooms where Darin and David Kennessy had developed their fantastic work—work antibodies
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that even now had brought them to this threshold of disaster.
Like a wounded animal fleeing into its lair, Jeremy Dorman lurched into the burned wreckage, seeking refuge.
And the men with weapons charged after him.
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 9:19 P.M.
As soon as Lentz and his team conveniently X appeared, Mulder knew that these men were no “reinforcements,” but a cleanup crew, minor players in the same conspiracy that he and Scully battled constantly. They had tracked Patrice and Jody, they had staged the violent protest that burned the lab down, they had ransacked the Kennessy home, they had confiscated the evidence in the hospital morgue.
Mulder could do without that kind of “reinforcement” any day of the week. When the shots rang out, he was instantly afraid that he, Scully, and young Jody would all be mowed down in the rain of bullets. He ducked to one side, seeking shelter. Thanks to Dorman, he no longer had a handgun of his own, but Scully was still armed.
“Scully, stay with the boy!” he shouted. He heard the solid wet impact of bullets striking skin, and Dorman roared in pain.
Mulder scuttled along the darkened ground, ducking behind fallen beams and broken walls. He antibodies
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looked up as the ululating sound emanating from the ominous fugitive turned more bestial, less defined. Jeremy Dorman transformed into a monster before his eyes.
All the horrors of wild cellular growth, the reckless spread of a malignant cancer with a mind of its own, extended like some ill-defined creature that had lain dormant inside Dorman’s cells. Now it spread forth, growing without a plan. Like tract home develop- ments approved by a bribed city council, he thought. And this cellular assault was unleashed with a predatory mind bent on attack and destruction. From her vantage point, Scully couldn’t see the details. She shielded Jody with her own body and ran over to the shelter of the nearby bulldozer. With the bright echoing sound of metal upon metal, bullets ricocheted from the armored side of the machine. Scully dove down into the shadows, knocking Jody to safety. Mulder kept low, racing along the broken bricks and fallen timbers. He ran into the dubious shelter of the gutted structure of the DyMar Laboratory. Dorman—or what was left of him—managed to grab two more of the attacking agents and kill them, using a combination of hands and tentacles, as well as the incredibly virulent plague that lived in the slime on his skin.
Gunfire continued to ring out, sounding like an out-of-control popcorn popper. Yellow pinpoints of light flew like fireflies in the darkness. Mulder could see that the dark-suited men had scattered to surround the entire perimeter. They closed in, driving Dorman back into the ruins.
As if it was part of a plan.
Mulder ducked beneath an overhanging archway, bristling with teeth of shattered glass, had somehow remained standing even after the fire and the explosion. Over by the bulldozer, Jody shouted in despair as 240
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his dog let out a long and nerve-grating chain of barks and growls. Raising his head, Mulder saw a dark shadow, the black Labrador, racing into the ruins. Vader barked and snapped as he pursued Jeremy Dorman. Lentz’s other agents also crept up to the labyrinthine wreckage, but they were wary now. Dorman had withstood their hail of gunfire, and he had already killed several of them. Two of the men had flashlights, bright white eyes that burned a white lance into the murk. Ash sifted down from where Dorman had stirred the debris. Mulder smelled the tang of soot and burned plastic. One of the agents pinned Dorman with his flashlight beam, attempting to stun him like a deer facing oncoming headlights. With a grunt, the monstrous man shoved sideways against a support pillar, knocking a charred wooden pole down along with a shower of concrete blocks.
The agent with the flashlight tried to scramble back, but the wreckage fell on his upper leg. Part of the wall collapsed. Mulder heard the hard bamboo sound of a bone breaking. Then the dark-suited man, who had been so calm as he hunted down his victim, yelped in pain; he had a high-pitched bawling voice. Somewhere inside the burned building, the dog barked.
Mulder tried to stay under cover, but he made plenty of noise as he tripped over fallen bricks and crunched broken glass. He ducked behind a slumped, charred desk as more gunfire rang out. A bullet struck the office furniture, and Mulder let out a hiss of surprise. He could see Scully outside in the pearly gray of fog-muffled moonlight. She was holding the boy back, clutching his torn shirt. Jody continued to shout after his dog as the gunfire peppered the night with sharp sounds. Scully pushed Jody back down as a barrage of bullets struck the bulldozer again. antibodies
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Another shot slammed into the desk near where Mulder hid.
He realized that these shots couldn’t be accidental misfires, though they would be excused as such. To the men who had surrounded the DyMar site and tried to kill Dorman and Jody, it might also prove advantageous if Agents Mulder and Scully were also
“accidentally” caught in the line of fire.
DyMar Inferno
Friday, 9:38 P.M.
The trap had sprung. Not as neatly as X Adam Lentz had hoped, perhaps, but still the results would be the same . . . if a bit messier.
Messes could be cleaned up.
The gunfire crackled in the night with sharp, deadly sounds, but none of the shots caused sufficient damage to take down Jeremy Dorman, their immediate target. Though Lentz’s team members had standing instructions to use all the force necessary to capture the boy and the dog as well, Agent Scully had protected young Jody Kennessy. She had sheltered him with all the training and skills she had learned at the FBI Academy at Quantico.
Lentz and his men had undergone more rigorous training, though, in other . . . less accredited schools. After the initial gunfire, he thought he had seen Agent Mulder also run for cover into the gutted building. No matter. Everything would be taken care of in time.
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Jeremy Dorman’s horrific transformation had captured the focus of the team members. Seeing several of their comrades slaughtered in the monster’s murderous rage, they set out after him, grim-faced and murderous. Though Lentz himself had ducked out of the way of Dorman and his plague-laced slime, he was still disappointed in how his team’s cool efficiency had so quickly shattered into a backwash of vengeance. He’d believed that these men were the best and most professional in the world. If so, the world should offer better. He heard the shrill cry of another man inside the burned ruins, and more gunshots rang out. The team had trapped Dorman inside the unstable facility. In that respect, at least, everything was going as smoothly as he had hoped.
Lentz stopped at the nearest tactical vehicle, reached into the front seat, and took out the demolition control. But he had to wait for the right moment. His team had arrived a full twenty-five minutes before Agent Scully and the boy, but Lentz had not moved prematurely. It was so much more efficient to wait for everyone to reach the same rendezvous point.
Lentz’s hand-picked demolitions men had used the blasting caps stored at the construction site, as well as other incendiaries and explosives they kept inside their cleanup van. Working in the precarious structure, his men had rigged sealed drums of jellied gasoline in the half-collapsed basement levels. When the drums exploded, flames would shoot up through the remaining floors and incinerate the rest of the DyMar building. No trace would remain.
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Each man had been aware of the risks when he signed up.
Agent Mulder had also vanished inside, and Lentz suspected that some of the gunfire was also directed at him. The team members would have taken it upon themselves to eradicate all witnesses. Lentz had received clear instructions that Mulder was not to be killed. He and his partner Scully were already part of a larger plan, but Lentz had to make on-the-spot decisions. He had to set priorities—and seeing the rampaging thing unleashed from within Dorman’s body had hardened him to the extreme necessity. If he had to, Lentz would make excuses to his superiors. Later.
Mulder and Scully both knew too much, after all, and this weapon, this breakthrough, this curse of rampant nano-technology had to be controlled, no matter what the cost. Only certain people could be trusted with so much power.
And the time was now.
One of the other men rushed back to the armored cleanup van. His eyes were glazed; sweat bristled across his forehead. He panted, looking around wildly. Lentz glanced over at him and snapped, “Control yourself.”
The effect was like an electric shock running through the team member. He stopped, reeled for a second, then swallowed hard. He stood straight, his breathing resumed a normal rate almost instantly, and he cleared his throat, waiting for additional orders. Lentz held up the control in his hand. A small transmitter. “Is everything prepared?”
The man looked down at the controls inside the van. He blinked, then answered quickly. His words were as fast and as crisp as the gunshots that pattered through the darkness.
“That’s all you need, sir. It will set off the blasting antibodies
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caps and trigger the remaining explosives. On a parallel circuit, the jellied gasoline will ignite. Just push the red button. That’s all you need.”
Lentz nodded to him curtly. “Thank you.” He took one last look at the blackened skeletal building and pushed the indicated button.
The DyMar Laboratory erupted in fresh flames.
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 9:47 P.M.
The shock wave toppled some of the remainX ing girders and the once-solid concrete wall. The metal desk sheltered Mulder from the worst of the blast, but still the hammer of heat pressed the heavy piece of furniture against the wall, nearly crushing him. Flames swept upward, bright yellow and orange, moving rapidly, as if by magic. He’d thought most of the flammables would have been consumed in the first fire two weeks earlier. Shielding his eyes from the glare and the hot wind, Mulder could see from the magnitude of the blaze that someone had rigged the ruins to go up in an instant inferno.
The dark-suited men had planned for this. Hearing a shriek of terror and pain, Mulder carefully raised his head, blinking his watery eyes against the furnace blast of the inferno. He saw one of the men who had hunted after him stumbling through the wreckage, his suit engulfed in flames. More gunshots rang out, frantic firepower among shouts and screams—and a barking dog.
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The fire raced up along the wooden support beams. The heat was so intense, even the glass and broken stone seemed to have caught fire. The black Labrador had bounded into the building, gotten caught in the explosion, and was thrown against a wall. Vader’s fur smoldered, but still he ran, casting about for something. One of the overhead girders fell with a crash among the debris. Flames licked along the splintered edge.
Mulder stood up from behind the desk, shielding his eyes. “Vader!” he shouted. “Hey, over here!” That black dog was evidence. Vader’s bloodstream carried functional nanotechnology that could be studied to save so many people, without the horrendous mutations Jeremy Dorman had suffered.
Mulder waved his hand to get the dog’s attention, but instead another man trapped inside the wreckage turned and fired at him. The gunshot spanged against the desk and ricocheted onto one of the broken concrete walls. Before the man could shoot again, though, the inhuman form of Jeremy Dorman crashed through the debris. The man with the gun tore his attention from Mulder—the easy target—to the monstrous creature. He didn’t have time to make an outcry before several of Dorman’s new appendages grasped him. With a twisted but powerful arm, Dorman snapped the man’s neck, then discarded him.
At the moment, Mulder didn’t feel inclined to shower the distorted man with gratitude. Shielding his eyes, barely able to see through the smoke and the blaze, he staggered toward the outside, needing to get away.
The dog was hopelessly lost inside the facility. Mulder couldn’t understand why Vader had run into such a dangerous area in the first place. The unstable floor was on fire. The walls, the 248
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debris . . . even the air burned his lungs with each gasping, retching breath he drew.
Mulder didn’t know how he was going to get out alive.
Scully clutched Jody’s torn shirt, but the fabric ripped and pulled free as he lunged after his dog.
“Jody, no!”
But the boy charged after Vader. The men in the ambush continued shooting, but Dorman was killing them one after another. The black dog plunged directly into the crossfire. The twelve-year-old boy—perhaps a bit too confident in his own immortality, as many twelve-year-olds were—ran after him a few seconds later.
Scully dropped the useless scrap of cloth in her hand. Desperate, she stood up from behind the shelter of the bulldozer. Scully watched the boy run miraculously unharmed toward the charred walls of DyMar. With a loud ricochet, another bullet bounced off the heavy tractor tread; she didn’t even bother to duck. Bits of debris showered Jody, but he lowered his head and kept running. He stood screaming at the edge of the walls, looking at the barrier of flames. He ducked down and tried to get inside. She heard Mulder’s voice call out for the dog, then more gunshots. The DyMar facility and all it stood for continued to burn.
So far, no police, no fire engines, no help whatsoever came to investigate the gunfire, the explosion, the flames.
“Mulder!” she shouted. She didn’t know where he was or how he could get out. Jody ducked recklessly inside. “Jody!” she shouted. “Come back here!”
She ran to the threshold and squinted through the smoke. A girder tumbled as a ceiling collapsed, show-antibodies 249
ering sparks. Part of the floor showed gaps and holes where the flames and the explosion beneath had weakened it, causing it to crack and tumble down in sections like a house of cards.
Jody stood half-balanced, flailing his hands.
“Vader, where are you? Vader!”
Throwing all caution to the wind, needing to save the boy as if it were some measure of her own worthiness to survive, Scully hurried inside. She struggled ahead, taking shallow breaths. Most of the time, she held her eyes closed, blinking them open for a quick glimpse, then staggering along.
“Vader!” Jody called again, out of sight. Finally Scully reached the boy’s side and grabbed his arm. “We have to go, Jody. Out of here! The whole place is going to collapse.”
“Scully!” Mulder shouted, his voice raw and ragged with the smoke and heat. She turned to see him making his way across the floor, stepping in flames and racing along. He swatted out a fire that smoldered on his trousers.
She gestured for him to hurry—but then a wall behind her crumbled. Concrete blocks fell to one side in a mound of cinders as a wooden support beam split.
“Hello, Jody . . .” Jeremy Dorman’s tortured voice said as he pushed himself through the fire and debris of the wall he had just knocked down. The distorted man stood free, undisturbed by the heat raging around him. Embers pattered on his body, smoking on his skin and leaving black craters that shifted and melted and healed over. His body ran like candle wax. His clothes were fully involved in the fire that blazed around him, but his skin thrashed and writhed, a horror show of tentacles and growths. Dorman blocked their way out.
“Jody, you wouldn’t help me when I asked—and now look what’s happened.”
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Jody bit back a small scream and only glared at the hideously mutated creature. “You killed my dad.”
“Now we’re all going to die in this fire,” Dorman said.
Scully doubted that even the swarming nanomachines could protect the boy from the intense flames. She knew for a fact, though, that she and Mulder had no such protection, mere humans, completely susceptible to the fire’s heat and smoke. They were both doomed unless they could get around this man. Mulder tripped and fell to one knee in the hot broken glass; he hauled himself up again without an outcry. Scully still had her handgun, but she knew that would offer no real threat against Dorman. He would laugh off her bullets, the way he had ignored the crossfire from the dark-suited men . . . the way he even now didn’t seem troubled by the fire that raged around them.
“Jody, come to me,” Dorman said, plodding closer. His skin roiled and rippled, glistening with slime that oozed from his every pore. Jody staggered back toward Scully. She could see burns on his skin, scratches and bleeding cuts where debris had showered him in the explosion, and she wondered briefly why the small injuries weren’t magically healing as his gunshot wound had. Was something wrong with his nanocritters? Had they given up, or shut down somehow?
Scully knew she couldn’t protect the boy. Dorman lunged closer, reaching out to him with a flamecovered hand. And then from a wall of burning wreckage to one side, where the light and the smoke made visibility impossible, the black Labrador howled and launched himself at the target.
Dorman spun about, his head twisting and swiveling. His broken, bent hands rose up, thrashing. antibodies
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His tentacles and tumors quivered like a basket of snakes. The dog, a black-furred bulldozer, knocked Dorman backward.
“Vader!” Jody screamed.
The dog drove Dorman staggering into the flames, where bright light and curling fire rose up through ever-growing gaps in the floor, as if the pit of hell itself lay beneath the support platform.
Dorman yelped, and his tentacles wrapped around the dog. The black Lab’s fur caught on fire in patches, but Vader didn’t seem to notice. Immune to the plague Dorman carried, the dog snapped his jaws, digging his fangs deep into the soft flowing flesh of the nanotech-infected man.
Dorman wrestled with the heavy animal and both tumbled to the creaking, splintering floorboards. Dorman’s left foot crashed through one of the flame-filled holes.
He cried out. His tentacles writhed. The dog bit ferociously at his face.
Then the floor collapsed in an avalanche of flaming debris. Sparks and smoke flew upward like a landmine explosion. With a howl and a scream, both Dorman and Vader fell into the seething basement. Jody wailed and made as if to run after his dog, but Scully grabbed him fiercely by the arms. She dragged the boy back toward the opening, and safety. Coughing, Mulder followed, stumbling after her. The flames roared higher, and more girders collapsed. Another concrete wall toppled into shards, then an entire section of the floor fell in, nearly dragging them with it. They reached the threshold of the collapsing building, and Scully could think of nothing more than to push herself out into the fresh air, into the blessed relief. Safe from the fire.
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as they fought their way from the flames and the wreckage. Her eyes burned, so filled with tears that she could barely see. Scully held the despairing boy, wrapping her arms around him. Mulder touched her shoulder, getting her attention as they stumbled away from the flames.
She looked up to see a group of men waiting for them, staring coldly. The survivors of Lentz’s team held their automatic weapons high and pointed at them.
“Give me the boy,” Adam Lentz said.
DyMar Inferno
Friday, 9:58 P.M.
Mulder should have known the men in
X suits would be waiting for them at the perimeter of the inferno. Some of Lentz’s
“reinforcements” would have realized
there was no need to endanger themselves—
better just to hang around and let any survivors come to them.
“Stop right there, Agent Mulder, Agent Scully,”
the man in the lead said. “There’s still a chance we can bring this to a satisfactory resolution.”
“We’re not interested in your satisfactory resolution,” Mulder answered with a raw cough. Scully’s eyes flashed as she placed her arm protectively around the boy. “You’re not taking Jody. We know why you want him.”
“Then you know the danger,” Lentz said. “Our friend Mr. Dorman just showed us all what could go wrong. This technology can’t be allowed to be disseminated uncontrolled. We have no other choice.” He smiled, but not with his eyes. “Don’t make this difficult.”
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“You’re not taking him,” she said more vehemently. To emphasize her point, Scully drew herself tall. Her face was smudged with soot; her clothes reeked of smoke and cinder burns. She stood defiantly in front of Jody, a barricade between him and their automatic weapons. Mulder wasn’t sure if her body would block a hail of high-powered gunfire, but he thought her sheer determination just might stop them.
“I don’t know who you are, Mr. Lentz,” Mulder said, taking a step closer to Scully to support her stand, “but this young man is in our protective custody.”
“I just want to help him,” Lentz said smoothly.
“We’ll take him to medical care. A special facility where he’ll be looked after by people who can . . . understand his condition. You know no normal hospital would be able to help him.”
Scully did not budge. “I’m not convinced he would survive your treatment.”
From below, finally, Mulder could hear sirens and approaching vehicles. Response crews with flashing red and blue lights raced along the suburb streets toward the base of the hill. The second DyMar fire continued to blaze at the top of the bluff. Mulder stepped backward, closer to his partner. He kept his eyes nailed on Lentz’s, ignoring the other men in suits.
“Now you’re sounding like me, Scully,” Mulder said.
“Give us the boy now,” Lentz said. Below, the sirens were getting louder, closer.
“Not a chance in hell,” Scully answered. Fire engines and police cars raced up the hill, sirens wailing. They would reach the hilltop inferno in seconds. If Lentz meant to do something, it would be antibodies
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now. But Mulder knew if he did shoot them, he wouldn’t have time to clean up his mess before the DyMar site became very public.
“Mr. Lentz—” one of the surviving team members said.
Scully took one step, paused a terribly long moment, then began to walk slowly away, one step at a time. Her determination didn’t waver. Lentz stared at her. The other men kept their guns trained.
Rescue workers and firefighters yanked open the chain-link gate, hauling it aside so the fire trucks could drive inside.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Lentz said coldly. He eyed the arriving vehicles, as if still gauging whether he could get away with shooting the two agents and eliminating the bodies under the very noses of the rushing emergency crews. Adam Lentz and his men stood angry and defeated, backlit by the raging inferno that burned the remains of DyMar Laboratory to the ground.
But Scully knew she was saving the boy’s life. She kept walking, holding Jody’s arm. He looked forlornly back at the wall of flames.
As the uniformed men rushed to hook up hoses and rig their fire engine, Lentz’s team stepped back, disappearing into the forest shadows. Somehow the three of them managed to reach the rental car.
“I’ll drive, Scully,” Mulder said as he popped open the driver’s-side door. “You’re a bit distracted.”
“I’ll keep an eye on Jody,” she said. Mulder started the engine, half-expecting that gunshots from the trees would ring out and the windshield would explode with spider-webbed bullet cracks. But instead, he managed to drive off, his tires spitting loose gravel on the steep driveway 256
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leading down from DyMar Laboratory. He had to flash his ID several times to get past the converging authorities. He wondered how Lentz would explain himself and his team . . . if they were found at all in the surrounding forest.
Mercy Hospital
Portland, Oregon
Saturday, 12:16 P.M.
In the hospital, Scully checked and reX checked Jody Kennessy’s lab results, but she remained as baffled after an hour of contemplation as when she had first seen the data. She sat in the bustling cafeteria at lunchtime, nursing a bitter-tasting cup of coffee. Doctors and nurses came through, chatting about cases the way sports fans talked about football games; patients spent time out of their stuffy rooms with their family members. Finally, realizing the charts would show her nothing else, Scully got another cup to go, and went to meet Mulder where he sat stationed on guard duty outside the boy’s hospital room.
As she walked from the elevator down the hall, she waved the manila folder in her hand. Mulder looked up, eager for confirmation of the technology. He stuffed the magazine he had been reading back into its plain brown envelope. The door to Jody’s room stood ajar, with the TV droning inside. So far, no mysterious strangers had come to challenge the boy. 258
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“I don’t know whether to be more astonished at the evidence of functional nanotechnology—or at the lack of it.” Scully shook her head and pushed the dot matrix printouts of lab scans at Mulder. He picked them up, glancing down at the numbers, graphs, and tables, but obviously didn’t know what he was looking for. “I take it this isn’t what you expected?”
“Absolutely no traces of nanotechnology in Jody’s blood.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Look at the lab results.”
Mulder scratched his dark hair. “How can that be?
You saw him heal from a gunshot wound—a mortal wound.”
“Maybe I was mistaken,” she said, “Perhaps the bullet managed to miss vital organs—”
“But Scully, look at how healthy he is! You saw the picture of him with the leukemia symptoms. He only had a month or two to live. We know David Kennessy tested his cure on him.”
Scully shrugged. “He’s clean, Mulder. Remember the sample of dog’s blood at the veterinarian’s office? The remnants of nanotechnology were quite obvious. Dr. Quinton said the same thing about the fluid specimen I took during my autopsy of Vernon Ruckman. The traces aren’t hard to find if the nanomachines are as ubiquitous in the bloodstream as they should be—and there would have to be millions upon millions of them in order to effect the dramatic cellular repairs that we witnessed.”
Her first evidence that something was not as she suspected, though, had been Jody’s recent scrapes, scratches, and cuts after the fire. Though not serious, they failed to heal any more quickly than other ordinary scratches. Jody Kennessy now seemed like a normal boy, despite what she knew of his background.
“Then where did the nanocritters go?” Mulder asked. “Did Jody lose them somehow?”
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Scully had no idea how to explain it. Together they entered Jody’s room, where the boy sat up in bed, paying little attention to the television that played loudly in the background. Considering all he had been through, the twelve-year-old seemed to be taking the ordeal well enough. He gave Scully a wan smile when he saw her.
A few moments later, the chief oncologist bustled into the room, holding a clipboard in his hand and shaking his head. He looked over at Scully, then at Jody, dismissing Mulder entirely.
“I see no evidence of leukemia, Agent Scully,” he said, shaking his head. “Are you sure this is the same boy?”
“Yes, we’re sure.”
The oncologist sighed. “I’ve looked at the boy’s previous charts and lab results. No blast cells in the blood, and I performed a lumbar puncture to study the cerebrospinal fluid for the presence of blast cells—
still nothing. Very standard procedures, and usually very conclusive. In an advanced case such as his is supposed to be, the symptoms should be obvious just by looking at him—lord knows, I’ve seen enough cases.”
Now the oncologist finally looked at Jody. “But this boy’s leukemia is completely gone. Not just in remission—it’s gone.”
Scully hadn’t honestly expected anything else. The oncologist blinked his eyes and let his chart hang by his hip. “I’ve seen medical miracles happen . . . not often, but given the number of patients through here, occasionally events occur that medicine just can’t explain. But this boy, who was facing terminal cancer only a month or two ago, now shows no symptoms whatsoever.”
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the answers all along. “Mr. Kennessy, you’re cured. Do you understand the magnitude of that diagnosis?
You’re completely healthy, other than a few scratches and scrapes and minor burns. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.”
“We’ll let you know if we have any further questions,” Scully said, and the doctor seemed disappointed that she wasn’t quite as amazed as he was. A little too brusquely, perhaps, she ushered him out the door of the hospital room.
After the oncologist departed, she and Mulder sat at the end of Jody’s bed. “Do you know why there’s no trace left of the nanocritters in your bloodstream, Jody? We can’t understand it. The nanomachines healed you from the gunshot wound before, they cured you of your cancer—but they’re gone now.”
“Because I’m cured.” Jody looked up at the television, but did not care about the housewives’ talk show going on at low volume. “My dad said they would shut down and dissolve when they were done. He made them so they would fix my leukemia cell by cell. He said it would take a long time, but I would get better every day. Then, when they were finished . . . the nanocritters were supposed to shut themselves down.”
Mulder raised his eyebrows at Scully. “A fail-safe mechanism. I wonder if his brother Darin even knew about it.”
“Mulder, that implies an incredible level of technological sophistication—” she began, but then realized that the entire prospect of self-sustaining biological policemen that worked on the human body, using nothing more than DNA strands as an instruction manual, was also fantastically beyond what she had believed were modern capabilities.
“Jody,” she said, leaning closer to the boy, “we intend to release these results as widely as possible. antibodies
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We need to let everyone know that you are no longer carrying any signs of the nanotechnology. If you’re clean, there should be no reason why those men will continue to be after you.”
“Whatever,” he said, sounding glum.
Scully didn’t waste her effort in a false cheeriness. The boy would have to deal with his situation in his own way.
Jody Kennessy had carried a miracle cure, not just for cancer but probably for all forms of disease that afflicted humanity. The nanocritters in his blood might even have offered immortality.
But with DyMar Laboratory destroyed, Jeremy Dorman and the black Lab swallowed up in the inferno, and David Kennessy and anyone else involved in the project dead, similar nanotechnology breakthroughs would be a long time coming if they had to be made from scratch. Scully already had an idea of how the Bureau might keep Jody safe in the long run, where they could take him. It didn’t make her feel good, but it was the best option she could think of.
Mulder, meanwhile, would simply write up the case, keep all of his records and his unexplained speculations, add them to his folders full of anecdotal evidence. Once again, he had nothing hard and fast to prove anything to anyone.
Just another X-File.
Before long, Scully figured, Mulder would need to install several more file cabinets in his cramped office, just to keep track of them all.
Federal Office Building
Crystal City, Virginia
Sunday, 2:04 P.M.
Adam Lentz made his final report verX bally and face to face, with no paperwork buffers between them. There would be no written record of this investigation, nothing that could be uncovered and read by the wrong sets of prying eyes. Instead, Lentz had to face down the man and tell him everything directly, in his own words.
It was one of the most terrifying experiences he had ever known.
A curl of acrid cigarette smoke rose from the ashtray, clinging like a deadly shroud around the man. He was gaunt, his eyes haunted, his face unremarkable, his dark brown hair combed back. He did not look to be a man who held the eggshells of human lives at the mercy of his crushing grip. He didn’t look like a man who had seen presidents die, who had engineered the fall of governments and the rise of others, who played with unknowing test groups of people and called them “merchandise.”
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But still, he played world politics the way other people played the game of Risk.
He took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly through parchment-dry lips. So far, he had said nothing.
Lentz stood inside the nondescript office, facing the man squarely. The ashtray on the desk was crowded with stubbed-out cigarette butts.
“How can you be so sure?” the man finally said. His voice was deceptively soft, with a melodious quality. Though he had never once served in the military, at least not in any official capacity, Lentz stood ramrod straight. “Scully and Mulder have tested the boy’s blood extensively. We have complete access to his hospital records. There is absolutely no evidence of a nanotechnology infestation, no microscopic machines, no fragments—nothing. He’s clean.”
“Then how do you explain his remarkable healing properties? The gunshot wound?”
“No one actually saw that, sir,” Lentz said. “At least, no one on record.”
The man just looked at him, smoke curling around his face. Lentz knew his answer wasn’t acceptable. Not yet. “And the leukemia? The boy shows no sign of further illness, as I understand it.”
“Dr. Kennessy knew the potential threat of nanotechnology—he was no fool—and he might have been able to program his nanocritters to shut down once their mission was accomplished, once his son was cured of his cancer. And according to the tests recently run in the hospital, Jody Kennessy is perfectly healthy, no longer suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia.”
Eyebrows raised. “So he’s been cured, but he no longer carries the cure.” The man blew out a long breath of cigarette smoke. “We can be happy for that, 264
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at least. We certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to get their hands on this miracle.”
Lentz didn’t answer, simply stood watchful and wary. In a secret repository, a building whose address was unknown, in rooms without numbers, drawers without markings, the Cigarette-Smoking Man kept samples and bits of evidence hidden away so that no one else could see. These tangible items would have proven enormously useful to others who sought the truth in all its many forms.
But this man would never share them.
“What about Agents Mulder and Scully?” the smoking man said. “What do they have left?”
“More theories, more hypotheses, but no evidence,”
Lentz said.
The smoking man inhaled again, then coughed several times, a deep ominous cough that held a taint of much deeper ills. Perhaps he just had a guilty conscience . . . or perhaps something was wrong with him physically.
Lentz fidgeted, waiting to be dismissed or complimented or even reprimanded. The silence was the worst.
“To reiterate,” Lentz said, speaking uncomfortably into the man’s continued gaze. Languid smoke curled up and around, making a sinuous arabesque dance in the air. “We have destroyed the bodies of all the known plague victims and sterilized every place touched by the nanotechnology. We believe none of these selfreproducing devices has survived.”
“Dorman?” the smoking man asked. “And the dog?”
“We sifted through the DyMar wreckage and found an assortment of bones and teeth and a partial skull. We believe these to be the remains of Dorman and the dog.”
“Did dental records verify this?”
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“Impossible, sir,” Lentz answered. “The nanotechnology cellular growths had distorted and changed the bone structure and the teeth, even removing all the fillings from Dorman’s mouth. We can’t make a positive identification, even as to the species. However, we have eyewitness accounts. We saw the two fall into the flames. We found the bones. There seems to be no question.”
“There are always questions,” the man said, raising his eyebrows. But then, unconcerned, he lit another cigarette and smoked half of it without saying a word. Lentz waited.
Finally the man stubbed out the butt in the already overcrowded ashtray. He coughed one more time, and finally allowed himself a thin-lipped smile.
“Very good, Mr. Lentz. I don’t think the world is ready yet for miracle cures . . . at least not anytime soon.”
“I agree, sir,” Lentz said.
As the man nodded slightly in dismissal, Lentz turned, forcibly stopping himself from running full-tilt out of the office. Behind him, the man coughed again. Louder this time.
Survivalist Compound
Oregon Wilderness
One Month Later
The people were strange here, Jody thought X . . . but at least he felt safe. After the ordeal he had recently survived, after his entire world had been destroyed in stages—first the leukemia, then the fire that had killed his father, then the long flight that ended with the death of his mother—he felt he could adapt easily. Here in the survivalist compound, his Uncle Darin was overly protective but helpful as well. The man refused to talk about his work, his past . . . and that was just fine with Jody. Everyone in this isolated but vehement community fit together like interlocking puzzle pieces.
Just like the puzzle of the Earth rising above the Moon he and his mother had put together one of those last afternoons hidden in the cabin. . . . Jody swallowed hard. He missed her very much.
After Agent Scully had brought him here, the other members of the heavily guarded survivalist compound had taken him under their wing. Jody Kennessy was an icon for them now, something like a mascot for their antibodies
267
group—this twelve-year-old boy had taken on the dark and repressive system, and had survived. Jody’s story had only heightened the resolve of the compound members to keep themselves isolated and away from the interfering and destructive government they despised so much.
Jody, his Uncle Darin, and the other survivalists spent their days together in difficult physical work. All the members of the compound shared their own specialties with Jody, instructing him. Still healing from the stinging wounds in his heart and in his mind, Jody spent much of his time walking the camp’s extended perimeter, when he wasn’t working in their gardens or fields to help make the colony selfsufficient. The survivalists did a lot of hunting and farming to supplement their enormous stockpile of canned and dried foods.
It was as if this entire community had been ripped up and transplanted here from another time, a selfsufficient time. Jody didn’t mind. He was alone now. He didn’t feel close even to his Uncle Darin . . . but he would survive. He had overcome terminal cancer, hadn’t he?
The other members of the group knew to leave Jody alone when he was in one of his moods, to give him the time and space he needed. Jody wandered the barbedwire fences, looking at the trees . . . but mainly just being by himself and walking.
A mist clung to the forest, hiding in the hollows, drifting like cottony fog as the day warmed up. Overhead, the clouds remained gray and heavy, barely seen through the tall treetops. He watched his step carefully, though Darin had assured him that there really was no minefield, no booby traps or secret defenses. The survivalists just liked to foster such rumors to maintain the aura of fear and security around their compound. Their main goal was to be left undisturbed by the outside world, and they would use whatever means necessary to accomplish that end. 268
T H E X - F I L E S
Jody heard a dog bark in the distance, clear and sharp. The cold damp air seemed to intensify the sound waves.
The survivalists had many dogs in their compound, German shepherds, bloodhounds, rottweilers, Dobermans. But this dog sounded familiar. Jody looked up. The dog barked again, and now he was more certain. “Come here, boy,” he called. He heard a crashing sound through the underbrush, branches and vines tossed aside as a large black dog bounded toward him, emerging from the mist. The dog barked happily upon seeing him.
“Vader!” Jody called. His heart swelled, but then he dropped his voice, concerned.
The dog looked unharmed, fully healed. Jody had seen Vader vanish into the flames. He had seen the DyMar facility collapse into embers, shards, and twisted girders.
But Jody also knew that his dog was special, just like he’d been before all the nanocritters in his own body had died off. Vader had no such fail-safe system. The dog bounded toward him, practically knocking Jody over, licking his face, wagging his tail so furiously that it rocked his entire body back and forth. Vader wore no tags, no collar, no way to prove his identity. But Jody knew.
He suspected his uncle might guess the truth, but the story he would have to tell the others was just that he had found another dog, another black Lab like Vader. He would give his new pet the same name. The rest of the survivalists didn’t know, and no one else in the outside world would ever need to find out. He hugged the dog, ruffling his fur and squeezing his neck. He shouldn’t have doubted. He should have kept watch, hoping, waiting. His mother had said it herself. The dog would come back to him eventually. Vader always did.
Writing a book like this is sometimes as involved as the deepest government conspiracy. For Antibodies, a few of the shadowy people lurking behind the scenes were: Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Chris Carter, Mary Astadourian, Jennifer Sebree, Frank Spotnitz, Caitlin Blasdell, John Silbersack, Dr. Robert V. Stannard at Adobe Pet Hospital, Tom Stutler, Jason C. Williams, Elton Elliot, Andrew Asch, Lil Mitchell, Catherine Ulatowski, Angela Kato, Sarah Jones, and (as always) my wife, Rebecca Moesta.
One of today's most popular SF writers, KEVIN J. ANDERSON is the author of the internationally bestselling and award-winning Dune prequels (co-authored with Brian Herbert) and numerous Star Wars novels, and has carved an indisputable niche for himself with science fiction epics featuring his own highly successful Saga of Seven Suns series. His critically acclaimed work has won or been nominated for numerous major awards. His most recent book is The Last Days of Krypton, and he lives in Colorado.
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The X-Files: Goblins
The X-Files: Whirlwind
The X-Files: Ground Zero
The X-Files: Antibodies
The X-Files: Ruins
The X-Files: Skin
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