The X-Files: Antibodies (28 page)
“Give me the boy,” Adam Lentz said.
DyMar Inferno
Friday, 9:58 P.M.
Mulder should have known the men in X suits would be waiting for them at the perimeter of the inferno. Some of Lentz’s
“reinforcements” would have realized there was no need to endanger themselves—
better just to hang around and let any survivors come to them.
“Stop right there, Agent Mulder, Agent Scully,”
the man in the lead said. “There’s still a chance we can bring this to a satisfactory resolution.”
“We’re not interested in your satisfactory resolution,” Mulder answered with a raw cough.
Scully’s eyes flashed as she placed her arm protectively around the boy. “You’re not taking Jody. We know why you want him.”
“Then you know the danger,” Lentz said. “Our friend Mr. Dorman just showed us all what could go wrong. This technology can’t be allowed to be dissem-inated uncontrolled. We have no other choice.” He smiled, but not with his eyes. “Don’t make this difficult.”
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“You’re
not
taking him,” she said more vehemently.
To emphasize her point, Scully drew herself tall.
Her face was smudged with soot; her clothes reeked of smoke and cinder burns. She stood defiantly in front of Jody, a barricade between him and their automatic weapons. Mulder wasn’t sure if her body would block a hail of high-powered gunfire, but he thought her sheer determination just might stop them.
“I don’t know who you are, Mr. Lentz,” Mulder said, taking a step closer to Scully to support her stand, “but this young man is in our protective custody.”
“I just want to help him,” Lentz said smoothly.
“We’ll take him to medical care. A special facility where he’ll be looked after by people who can . . .
understand his condition. You know no normal hospital would be able to help him.”
Scully did not budge. “I’m not convinced he would survive your treatment.”
From below, finally, Mulder could hear sirens and approaching vehicles. Response crews with flashing red and blue lights raced along the suburb streets toward the base of the hill. The second DyMar fire continued to blaze at the top of the bluff.
Mulder stepped backward, closer to his partner.
He kept his eyes nailed on Lentz’s, ignoring the other men in suits.
“Now you’re sounding like me, Scully,” Mulder said.
“Give us the boy now,” Lentz said. Below, the sirens were getting louder, closer.
“Not a chance in hell,” Scully answered.
Fire engines and police cars raced up the hill, sirens wailing. They would reach the hilltop inferno in seconds. If Lentz meant to do something, it would be antibodies
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now. But Mulder knew if he did shoot them, he wouldn’t have time to clean up his mess before the DyMar site became very public.
“Mr. Lentz—” one of the surviving team members said.
Scully took one step, paused a terribly long moment, then began to walk slowly away, one step at a time. Her determination didn’t waver.
Lentz stared at her. The other men kept their guns trained.
Rescue workers and firefighters yanked open the chain-link gate, hauling it aside so the fire trucks could drive inside.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Lentz said coldly. He eyed the arriving vehicles, as if still gauging whether he could get away with shooting the two agents and eliminating the bodies under the very noses of the rushing emergency crews. Adam Lentz and his men stood angry and defeated, backlit by the raging inferno that burned the remains of DyMar Laboratory to the ground.
But Scully knew she was saving the boy’s life. She kept walking, holding Jody’s arm. He looked forlornly back at the wall of flames.
As the uniformed men rushed to hook up hoses and rig their fire engine, Lentz’s team stepped back, disappearing into the forest shadows.
Somehow the three of them managed to reach the rental car.
“I’ll drive, Scully,” Mulder said as he popped open the driver’s-side door. “You’re a bit distracted.”
“I’ll keep an eye on Jody,” she said.
Mulder started the engine, half-expecting that gunshots from the trees would ring out and the windshield would explode with spider-webbed bullet cracks. But instead, he managed to drive off, his tires spitting loose gravel on the steep driveway 256
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leading down from DyMar Laboratory. He had to flash his ID several times to get past the converging authorities. He wondered how Lentz would explain himself and his team . . . if they were found at all in the surrounding forest.
Mercy Hospital
Portland, Oregon
Saturday, 12:16 P.M.
In the hospital, Scully checked and re-X checked Jody Kennessy’s lab results, but she remained as baffled after an hour of contem-plation as when she had first seen the data.
She sat in the bustling cafeteria at lunchtime, nursing a bitter-tasting cup of coffee. Doctors and nurses came through, chatting about cases the way sports fans talked about football games; patients spent time out of their stuffy rooms with their family members.
Finally, realizing the charts would show her nothing else, Scully got another cup to go, and went to meet Mulder where he sat stationed on guard duty outside the boy’s hospital room.
As she walked from the elevator down the hall, she waved the manila folder in her hand. Mulder looked up, eager for confirmation of the technology.
He stuffed the magazine he had been reading back into its plain brown envelope. The door to Jody’s room stood ajar, with the TV droning inside. So far, no mysterious strangers had come to challenge the boy.
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“I don’t know whether to be more astonished at the evidence of functional nanotechnology—or at the lack of it.” Scully shook her head and pushed the dot matrix printouts of lab scans at Mulder.
He picked them up, glancing down at the numbers, graphs, and tables, but obviously didn’t know what he was looking for. “I take it this isn’t what you expected?”
“Absolutely no traces of nanotechnology in Jody’s blood.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Look at the lab results.”
Mulder scratched his dark hair. “How can that be?
You saw him heal from a gunshot wound—a mortal wound.”
“Maybe I was mistaken,” she said, “Perhaps the bullet managed to miss vital organs—”
“But Scully, look at how healthy he is! You saw the picture of him with the leukemia symptoms. He only had a month or two to live. We
know
David Kennessy tested his cure on him.”
Scully shrugged. “He’s clean, Mulder. Remember the sample of dog’s blood at the veterinarian’s office? The remnants of nanotechnology were quite obvious. Dr.
Quinton said the same thing about the fluid specimen I took during my autopsy of Vernon Ruckman. The traces aren’t hard to find if the nanomachines are as ubiquitous in the bloodstream as they should be—and there would have to be millions upon millions of them in order to effect the dramatic cellular repairs that we witnessed.”
Her first evidence that something was not as she suspected, though, had been Jody’s recent scrapes, scratches, and cuts after the fire. Though not serious, they failed to heal any more quickly than other ordinary scratches. Jody Kennessy now seemed like a normal boy, despite what she knew of his background.
“Then where did the nanocritters go?” Mulder asked. “Did Jody lose them somehow?”
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Scully had no idea how to explain it.
Together they entered Jody’s room, where the boy sat up in bed, paying little attention to the television that played loudly in the background. Considering all he had been through, the twelve-year-old seemed to be taking the ordeal well enough. He gave Scully a wan smile when he saw her.
A few moments later, the chief oncologist bustled into the room, holding a clipboard in his hand and shaking his head. He looked over at Scully, then at Jody, dismissing Mulder entirely.
“I see no evidence of leukemia, Agent Scully,” he said, shaking his head. “Are you sure this is the same boy?”
“Yes, we’re sure.”
The oncologist sighed. “I’ve looked at the boy’s previous charts and lab results. No blast cells in the blood, and I performed a lumbar puncture to study the cerebrospinal fluid for the presence of blast cells—
still nothing. Very standard procedures, and usually very conclusive. In an advanced case such as his is supposed to be, the symptoms should be obvious just by looking at him—lord knows, I’ve seen enough cases.”
Now the oncologist finally looked at Jody. “But this boy’s leukemia is completely gone. Not just in remission—it’s
gone
.”
Scully hadn’t honestly expected anything else.
The oncologist blinked his eyes and let his chart hang by his hip. “I’ve seen medical miracles happen . . .
not often, but given the number of patients through here, occasionally events occur that medicine just can’t explain. But this boy, who was facing terminal cancer only a month or two ago, now shows no symptoms whatsoever.”
The oncologist raised his eyebrows at Jody, who seemed uninterested in the discussion, as if he knew 260
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the answers all along. “Mr. Kennessy, you’re cured.
Do you understand the magnitude of that diagnosis?
You’re completely healthy, other than a few scratches and scrapes and minor burns. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you.”
“We’ll let you know if we have any further questions,” Scully said, and the doctor seemed disappointed that she wasn’t quite as amazed as he was. A little too brusquely, perhaps, she ushered him out the door of the hospital room.
After the oncologist departed, she and Mulder sat at the end of Jody’s bed. “Do you know why there’s no trace left of the nanocritters in your bloodstream, Jody? We can’t understand it. The nanomachines healed you from the gunshot wound before, they cured you of your cancer—but they’re gone now.”
“Because I’m cured.” Jody looked up at the television, but did not care about the housewives’ talk show going on at low volume. “My dad said they would shut down and dissolve when they were done. He made them so they would fix my leukemia cell by cell.
He said it would take a long time, but I would get better every day. Then, when they were finished . . . the nanocritters were supposed to shut themselves down.”
Mulder raised his eyebrows at Scully. “A fail-safe mechanism. I wonder if his brother Darin even knew about it.”
“Mulder, that implies an incredible level of technological sophistication—” she began, but then realized that the entire prospect of self-sustaining biological policemen that worked on the human body, using nothing more than DNA strands as an instruction manual, was also fantastically beyond what she had believed were modern capabilities.
“Jody,” she said, leaning closer to the boy, “we intend to release these results as widely as possible.
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We need to let everyone know that you are no longer carrying any signs of the nanotechnology. If you’re clean, there should be no reason why those men will continue to be after you.”
“Whatever,” he said, sounding glum.
Scully didn’t waste her effort in a false cheeriness.
The boy would have to deal with his situation in his own way.
Jody Kennessy had carried a miracle cure, not just for cancer but probably for all forms of disease that afflicted humanity. The nanocritters in his blood might even have offered immortality.
But with DyMar Laboratory destroyed, Jeremy Dorman and the black Lab swallowed up in the inferno, and David Kennessy and anyone else involved in the project dead, similar nanotechnology breakthroughs would be a long time coming if they had to be made from scratch.
Scully already had an idea of how the Bureau might keep Jody safe in the long run, where they could take him. It didn’t make her feel good, but it was the best option she could think of.
Mulder, meanwhile, would simply write up the case, keep all of his records and his unexplained speculations, add them to his folders full of anecdotal evidence. Once again, he had nothing hard and fast to prove anything to anyone.
Just another X-File.
Before long, Scully figured, Mulder would need to install several more file cabinets in his cramped office, just to keep track of them all.
Federal Office Building
Crystal City, Virginia
Sunday, 2:04 P.M.
Adam Lentz made his final report ver-X bally and face to face, with no paperwork buffers between them. There would be no written record of this investigation, nothing that could be uncovered and read by the wrong sets of prying eyes. Instead, Lentz had to face down the man and tell him everything directly, in his own words.
It was one of the most terrifying experiences he had ever known.
A curl of acrid cigarette smoke rose from the ashtray, clinging like a deadly shroud around the man.
He was gaunt, his eyes haunted, his face unremarkable, his dark brown hair combed back.
He did not look to be a man who held the egg-shells of human lives at the mercy of his crushing grip.
He didn’t look like a man who had seen presidents die, who had engineered the fall of governments and the rise of others, who played with unknowing test groups of people and called them “merchandise.”
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But still, he played world politics the way other people played the game of Risk.
He took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly through parchment-dry lips. So far, he had said nothing.
Lentz stood inside the nondescript office, facing the man squarely. The ashtray on the desk was crowded with stubbed-out cigarette butts.
“How can you be so sure?” the man finally said.
His voice was deceptively soft, with a melodious qual-ity.
Though he had never once served in the military, at least not in any official capacity, Lentz stood ramrod straight. “Scully and Mulder have tested the boy’s blood extensively. We have complete access to his hospital records. There is absolutely no evidence of a nanotechnology infestation, no microscopic machines, no fragments—nothing. He’s clean.”