The X-Files: Antibodies (17 page)

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 down-pour. 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.

146

T H E X - F I L E S

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 inge-nuity. Vader looked over his shoulder at her, then turned toward the driveway again.

Jody crowded next to her, trying to see, but she pushed him back inside. “Mom!” he said indignantly, but she pointed a scolding finger at him, her face hard.

He backed away quickly.

The mother’s protective instinct hung on her like a drug. She had been helpless in the face of his cancer, she had been helpless when his father was murdered by shadowy men pretending to be activists, the same people who had tapped their phones, followed them, and might even now be trying to track them down.

But she had taken action to get her son to safety, and she had kept him alive so far. Patrice Kennessy had no intention of giving up now.

A figure appeared in the trees, approaching on foot down the long driveway bordered by dark pines, coming closer, intent on the cabin.

antibodies

147

Patrice didn’t have time to run.

She had taken Jody out to the coastal wilderness because of its abundance of survivalists, of religious cults and extremists—all of whom knew how to be left alone. David’s own brother had joined one such group, abandoning even this cabin to find deeper isolation, but she hadn’t dared to go to Darin and ask for protection. The people hunting them down would think to find David’s brother. She had to do the unexpected.

Now her mind raced, and she tried to think of even the smallest misstep she might have made to tip off who she was and where she and Jody were staying.

Suddenly she remembered that the last time she had gone into a grocery store, she had noticed the cover of a weekly Oregon newspaper depicting the fenced-off and burned ruins of DyMar Laboratory.

Surprised, she had flinched and tried to maintain her composure, cradling her groceries in front of the
TV Guide
s and beef jerky strips and candy bars. The old woman with shockingly dyed red hair had looked up at her from behind smeared eyeglasses. No one, Patrice insisted to herself, would have put such a coincidence together, would have taken note of a woman traveling alone with her twelve-year-old son, would have connected all the details.

Still, the clerk had stared at her too intently. . . .

“Who is it, Mom?” Jody asked in a stage whisper from the cold fireplace. “Can you see?” Patrice was glad she hadn’t built a fire that morning, because the telltale wisp of gray-white smoke would have attracted even more attention.

They had made a plan for such a situation, that they would both try to slip away unnoticed and vanish in the trees, hiding out in the wooded hills. Jody knew the surrounding forest well enough. But this intruder had taken them by surprise. He had come on 148

T H E X - F I L E S

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 tim-ing’s right.”

With a grim expression on her face, Patrice crossed her arms over her chest and waited on her front porch to meet the approaching stranger. The terror and urgency nearly paralyzed her. This was the moment of confrontation she had dreaded ever since receiving David’s desperate phone call.

The figure was a broad-shouldered man walking with an odd injured gait. He looked as if he had passed on foot through a car wash with open cans of waste oil in his arms. He staggered toward the cabin, but stopped dead in his tracks when he noticed her on the porch.

Vader growled.

Even from a distance, Patrice could see his dark gaze turn toward her, his eyes lock with hers. He had changed, his facial features distorted somehow—but she recognized him. She felt a flood of relief, a sensation she had not experienced in some time. A friend at last!

“Jeremy,” she said with a sigh. “Jeremy Dorman!”

TWENTY-SIX

Kennessys’ Cabin

Oregon Coast Range

Friday, 1:14 P.M.

“Patrice!” Dorman called in a hoarse voice, X then walked toward her at an accelerated, somehow ominous pace.

She had bought newspapers from

unattended machines on shadowy street corners, and had read that her husband’s lab partner had also perished in the DyMar fire, murdered by the men who wanted to keep David’s nanotech research from becoming public knowledge.

“Jeremy, are those men after you, too? How did you get away?”

The fact that Jeremy Dorman had somehow escaped gave her a flash of hope that perhaps David might have survived as well. But she could not grasp the thought; it slipped through her mental fingers. She had a thousand questions for him, but most of all she was glad just to see a familiar face, another person facing the same predicament as she was . . .

But something was very wrong about Jeremy’s presence here. He had known to look for her and Jody in this cabin. She knew that David had always talked 150

T H E X - F I L E S

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.”

antibodies

151

Dorman’s dark, hooded eyes bored into her. “I was betrayed, just like David was.” He took two steps closer.

“What are you saying?” After what she had been through, Patrice thought almost anything might sound believable by now.

Dorman nodded. “They had orders to make sure nothing would survive, no record of our nanotechnology research. Only ashes.”

Patrice stood her ground, silently warning him not to approach closer. “David said the conspiracy went much deeper in the government than he had thought. I didn’t believe him until I went back to our house—only to find it ransacked.”

Dorman lurched to a halt ten feet from the porch, stopping in the weeds of the meadow. He walked away from the cleared driveway, on the trampled path toward the door of the cabin. “They’re all after you now, too, Patrice. We can help each other. But I need Vader. He carries the stable prototypes in his bloodstream.”

“Prototypes? What are you talking about?”

“The nanotechnology prototypes. I had to use some of the defective earlier generations, samples from the small lab animals, but many of those exhibited shocking . . . anomalies. I didn’t have any choice, though. The lab was on fire, everything was burning. I was supposed to be able to get away, but this was the only way I could survive.” He looked at her, pleading, then lowered his voice. “But they don’t work the way they were supposed to. With Vader’s blood, there is a chance I can reprogram them in myself.”

Her mind reeled. She knew what David had been working on, had suspected something wrong with their black Lab.

“Where’s Jody?” Dorman said, peering past her to see through the curtains or the half-closed door. “Hey, Jody! Come out here! It’s all right.”

152

T H E X - F I L E S

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 forc-ing 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

153

manic commitment had paid off after all. He had found his cure for cancer, without telling Patrice.

But in the space of an indrawn breath, her incredible joy and relief and lingering heartbreak tempered with fear of Jeremy Dorman. Fear of his predatory glances at Jody, of his unnaturally shifting features, his slipping control.

“This is even better than Vader.” Dorman’s dark eyes blazed, taking on a distorted look. “I just need a sample of your son’s blood, Patrice. Some of his blood.

Not much.”

Shocked and confused, Patrice flinched, but stood defiantly on the porch, not moving. She wasn’t going to let anyone touch her son. “His
blood
? What on earth—”

“I don’t have time to explain to you, Patrice. I didn’t know they meant to kill David! They were stag-ing 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.