The X-Files: Antibodies (2 page)

Vernon paused, shone his light around. He heard the sound again, quiet rustling, a person intent on uncovering something in the wreckage. It came from the far corner, an enclosed office area with a partially slumped ceiling where the reinforced barricades had withstood most of the destruction.

He saw a shadow move there, tossing debris away, digging. Vernon swallowed hard and stepped forward. “You there! This is private property. No trespassing.” He rested his hand on the butt of his revolver. Show no fear. He wouldn’t let this intruder run from him.

Vernon directed his flashlight onto the figure. A large, broad-shouldered man stood up and turned toward him slowly. The intruder didn’t run, didn’t panic—and that made Vernon even more nervous.

Oddly dressed, the man wore mismatched clothes, covered with soot; they looked like something stolen from a lost duffel bag or torn down from a clothesline.

“What are you doing here?” Vernon demanded.

He flared the light into the man’s face. The intruder was dirty, unkempt—and he didn’t look at all well.

Great,
Vernon thought. A vagrant, rooting around in the ruins to find something he could salvage and sell.

“There’s nothing for you to take in here.”

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“Yes, there is,” the man said. His voice was strangely strong and confident, and Vernon was taken aback.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Vernon repeated, losing his nerve now.

“Yes I am,” the man answered. “I’m authorized.

I . . . worked at DyMar.”

Vernon moved forward. This was entirely unexpected. He continued to shine the flashlight, counting on its intimidation factor.

“My name is Dorman, Jeremy Dorman.” The man fumbled in his shirt pocket, and Vernon grabbed for his revolver. “I’m just trying to show you my DyMar ID,” Dorman said.

Vernon took another step closer, and in the glare of his powerful flashlight he could see that the intruder appeared sick, sweating. . . . “Looks like you need to go to a doctor.”

“No. What I need . . . is in here,” Dorman said, pointing. Vernon saw that the burly man had pulled away some of the rubble to reveal a hidden fire safe.

Dorman finally managed to pluck a bent and battered photo badge out of his shirt pocket—a DyMar Laboratory clearance badge. This man had worked here . . . but that didn’t mean he could root around in the burned wreckage now.

“That means nothing to me,” Vernon said. “I’m going to take you in, and if you really have authoriza-tion to be here, we’ll get this all straightened out.”

“No!” Dorman said, so violently that spittle sprayed from his lips. “You’re wasting my time.” For a moment, it looked as if the skin on his face shifted and blurred, then reset itself to normal. Vernon swallowed hard, but tried to maintain his stance.

Dorman ignored him and turned around.

Indignant, Vernon stepped forward and drew his weapon. “I don’t think so, Mr. Dorman. Get up against 6

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the wall—right now.” Vernon suddenly noticed the thick bulges underneath the man’s grimy shirt. They seemed to move of their own accord, twitching.

Dorman looked at him with narrowed dark eyes.

Vernon gestured with the revolver. With no sign of intimidation or respect, the man went to one of the intact concrete walls that was smeared and blackened from the fire. “I told you, you’re wasting my time,”

Dorman growled. “I don’t have much time.”

“We’ll take all the time we need,” Vernon said.

With a sigh, Dorman spread his hands against the soot-blackened wall and waited. The skin on his hands was waxy, plastic-looking . . . runny somehow. Vernon wondered if the man had been exposed to some kind of toxic substance, acid or industrial waste. Despite the reassurance of his gun, Vernon didn’t like this at all.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the bulges beneath Dorman’s shirt squirm. “Stand still while I frisk you.”

Dorman gritted his teeth and stared at the concrete wall in front of him, as if counting particles of ash. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“Don’t threaten me,” Vernon answered quickly.

“Then don’t touch me,” Dorman retorted. In response, Vernon tucked the flashlight between his elbow and his side, then quickly patted the man down, frisking him with one hand.

Dorman’s skin felt hot and strangely lumpy—and then Vernon’s hand touched a wet, slick substance. He snatched his palm back quickly. “Gross!” he said.

“What is this?” He looked down at his hand and saw that it was covered with a strange mucus, a slime.

Dorman’s skin suddenly writhed and squirmed, almost as if an army of rats rushed along beneath the flesh. “You shouldn’t have touched that.” Dorman turned around and looked at him angrily.

“What is this stuff?” Vernon shoved the revolver antibodies

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back into his holster and, staring squeamishly at his hand, tried to wipe the slime off on his pants. He backed away, looking in horror at the unsettling movement throughout Dorman’s body.

Suddenly his palm burned. It felt like acid eating deep into his flesh. “Hey!” He staggered backward, his heels skidding on the uneven rubble.

A burning, tingling sensation started at Vernon’s hand, as if miniature bubbles were racing up his wrist, tiny bullets firing through his nerves, into his arms, his shoulders, his chest.

Dorman lowered his arms and turned to watch. “I told you not to touch me,” he said.

Vernon Ruckman felt all of his muscles lock up.

Seizures wracked his body, a thousand tiny fire-works exploded in his head. He couldn’t see anymore, other than bright psychedelic flashes, static in front of his vision. His arms and legs jittered, his muscles spasmed and convulsed.

From inside his head he heard bones breaking.

His own bones.

He screamed as he fell backward, as if his entire body had turned into a minefield.

The flashlight, still glowing brightly, dropped to the ash-covered ground.

Dorman watched the still-twitching body of the guard for a few moments before turning his attention back to the half-exposed safe. The victim’s skin rippled and bubbled as large red-black blotches appeared in the destroyed muscle tissue. The guard’s flashlight illuminated a brilliant white fan across the ground, and Dorman could see swollen growths, pustules, tumors, lumps.

The usual.

Dorman ripped away the last of the wall frame 8

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and the powdery gypsum from the burned Sheetrock to expose the fire safe. He knew the combination well enough, and quickly spun through the numbers, listening to the cylinders click into position. With one meaty, numb hand, he pounded on the door to chip free some of the blackened paint that had caked in the cracks. He swung open the door.

But the safe was empty. Somebody had already taken the contents, the records, and the
stable
prototypes.

He whirled to look at the dead guard, as if Vernon Ruckman somehow had been involved with the theft.

He winced as another spasm coursed through him.

His last hope had been inside that safe. Or so he thought.

Dorman stood up, furious. Now what was he going to do? He looked down at his hand, and the skin on his palm shifted and changed, like a cellular thunderstorm. He shuddered as minor convulsions trooped through his muscle systems, but taking deep breaths, he managed to get his body under control again.

It was getting harder every day, but he vowed to keep doing whatever was necessary to stay alive.

Dorman had always done what was necessary.

Sickened with despair, he wandered aimlessly around the wreckage of DyMar Laboratory. The computer equipment was entirely trashed, all of the lab supplies obliterated. He found a melted and broken desk, and from its placement he knew it had been David Kennessy’s, the lead researcher.

“Damn you, David,” Dorman muttered.

Using all his strength, he ripped open one of the top drawers, and in the debris there he found an old framed photograph—burned around the edges, the glass cracked—and stared at it. He peeled the photo out of the remnants of the frame.

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David, dark-haired and dashing, smiled beside a strong-looking and pretty young woman with strawberry-blond hair and a towheaded boy. Sitting in front of them, tongue lolling out, was the Kennessys’ black Labrador, always the dog . . . The family portrait had been taken when the boy was eleven years old—before the leukemia had struck him.
Patrice and Jody Kennessy.

Dorman took the photo and stood up. He thought he knew where they might have gone, and he was sure he could find them. He
had
to. Now that the other records were gone, only the dog’s blood held the answer he needed. He would gamble on where they might go, where Patrice might think to hide. She didn’t even know the remarkable secret their family pet carried inside his body.

Dorman looked back to the guard’s dead body.

Paying no attention to the horrible blotches on his skin, he removed the guard’s revolver and tucked it in his pants pocket. If it came down to a crisis situation, he might need the weapon in order to get his way.

Leaving the cooling, blotched corpse behind and taking the weapon and the photograph, Jeremy Dorman walked away from the burned DyMar Laboratory.

Inside of him, the biological time bomb kept tick-ing. He didn’t have many days left.

TWO

FBI Headquarters

Washington, D.C.

Monday, 7:43 A.M.

The bear stood huge, five times the size of X an all-star wrestler. Bronze-brown fur bristled from its cable-thick muscles—a Kodiak bear, a prize specimen. Its claws were spread as it leaned over to rip a salmon from the rocky stream, pristine and uninterrupted.

Mulder stared at the claws, the fangs, the sheer primal power.

He was glad the creature was simply stuffed and on display in the Hoover Building, but even still, he appreciated the glass barrier. Mounting this beast must have been a taxidermist’s nightmare.

The prize hunting trophy had been confiscated in an FBI raid against a drug kingpin. The drug lord had spent over twenty thousand dollars for his own personal hunting expedition to Alaska, and then spent more money to have his prize kill mounted. When the FBI arrested the man, they had confiscated the gigantic bear according to RICO statutes—since the drug lord had funded the expedition with illicit drug money, the stuffed bear was forfeited to the federal government.

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Not knowing what else to do with it, the FBI had put the monster on display beside other noteworthy confiscated items: a customized Harley-Davidson motor-cycle, emerald and diamond necklaces, earrings, brace-lets, bricks of solid gold.

Sometimes Mulder left his quiet and dim basement offices where he kept the X-Files just to come up and peruse the display case.

Looking at the powerful bear, Mulder continued to be preoccupied, perplexed by a recent and highly unusual death report he had received, an X-File that had come across his desk from a field agent in Oregon.

When a monster like this bear killed its prey, it left no doubt as to the cause of death. A bizarre disease raised many questions, though—especially a new and virulent disease found at the site of a medical research laboratory that had recently been destroyed by arson.

Unanswered questions had always intrigued Agent Fox Mulder.

He went back down in the elevator to his own offices, where he could sit and read the death report again. Then he would go meet Scully.

She stood between the thick, soundproofed Plexiglas partitions inside the FBI’s practice firing range. Special Agent Dana Scully removed her handgun, a new Sig Sauer 9mm. She slapped in an expanded clip that carried fifteen bullets, an extra one in the chamber.

She entered the code at the computer keypad at her left; hydraulics hummed, and a cable trundled the black silhouetted “bad guy” target to a range of twenty yards. She locked it into place and reached up to grab a set of padded earphones. She snugged the hearing protection over her head, pressing down her red-gold hair.

Then she gripped her pistol, assuming a proper 12

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isosceles firing stance, and aimed at her target. Squinting and focusing down the hairline, she squeezed the trigger in an unconscious reflex and popped off the first round.

She paid no attention to where it struck, simply aimed and shot again, firing over and over. Expended casings flew into the air like metal popcorn, clinking and rattling on the cement floor. The smell of burned black powder filled her nostrils.

She thought of those shadowy men who had killed her sister Melissa, those who had repeatedly tried to silence or discredit Mulder and his admittedly unorthodox theories.

Scully had to stay calm, maintain her firing stance, maintain her edge. If she let her anger and frustration simmer through her, then her aim would be off.

She looked at the black silhouette of the target and saw only the featureless men who had entwined themselves so deeply in her life. Smallpox scars, nose implants, vaccination records, and mysterious disappearances—like her own—and the cancer that was almost certainly a result of what they had done to her while she had been abducted. She had no way to fight against the conspiracies, no target to shoot at. She had no choice but to keep searching. Scully gritted her teeth and shot again and again until the entire clip was expended.

Removing her ear protection, she punched the button to retrieve the yellowish paper target. FBI agents had to requalify at the Quantico firing range at least once every three months. Scully wasn’t due for another four weeks yet, but still she liked to come early in the morning to practice. The range was empty then, and she could take her time.

Later in the day, tour groups would come through to watch demonstrations as a special agent forced into tour guide service showed off his marksmanship skills with the Sig Sauer, the M-16, and possibly a Thompson sub-machine gun. Scully wanted to be long finished here antibodies

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before the first groups of wide-eyed Boy Scouts or school-teachers marched in behind the observation windows.