The X-Files: Antibodies (19 page)

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 fas-tened 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.

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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 passenger-side 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’s-side 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.”

The first image showed the log truck heading down the road, obviously the same vehicle now 168

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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.

TWENTY-NINE

Kennessys’ Cabin

Coast Range, Oregon

Friday, 1:45 P.M.

Scully became disoriented on the winding X dirt logging roads, but after making a cautious Y-turn on the narrow track, she finally found the driveway as described by Maxie at the general store and art gallery. She saw no mailbox, only a metal reflector post that bore a cryptic number designating a specific plot for fire control or trash pickup.

It was just a nondescript private road chewed through the dense underbrush, climbing over a rise and vanishing somewhere back into a secluded hollow. This was it, though—the place where Patrice and Jody Kennessy had supposedly been taken, or gone into hiding.

Scully drove down the driveway as quickly as she dared through mud puddles and over bumps. Up the rise on either side of her, the forest seemed too close.

Branches ticked and scraped along the sideview mirrors.

She accelerated over a large bump, some long-buried 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.

Most of all, though, she just wanted to see Jody and make sure he got the medical attention he needed.

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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 well-known 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.