The X-Files: Antibodies (22 page)

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 leaf-covered 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 abduc-tion, 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.

THIRTY-FIVE

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, seep-ing 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.”