The X-Files: Antibodies (26 page)

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.”

He was so emphatic that the skin on his face shifted 232

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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.

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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.

FORTY-THREE

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

237

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.

FORTY-FOUR

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.

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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.

FORTY-FIVE

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.