The X-Files: Antibodies (4 page)

“We should have planned this trip better,” Sharon said beside him in the front seat.

“I believe you mentioned that already,” Richard answered testily. “Once or twice.”

In the backseat, Megan and Rory displayed their intense boredom in uncharacteristic ways. Rory was so restless he had switched off his Game Boy, and Megan was so tired she had stopped picking on her brother.

“There’s nothing to do,” Rory said.

“Dad, don’t you know any other games?” Megan asked. “Were you ever bored as a kid?”

He forced a smile, then glanced up in the rearview mirror to see them sulking in the back seat of the Subaru Outback. Richard had rented the car for this vacation, impressed by its good wheels, good traction for those mountain roads. At the start of the long drive, he had felt like SuperDad.

“Well, my sister and I used to play a game called

‘Silo.’ We were in Illinois, where they’ve got lots of farms. You’d keep watch around the countryside and call out every time you saw a silo next to a barn.

Whoever saw the most silos won the game.” He tried to make it sound interesting, but even back then only the tedium of the Midwestern rural landscape had made Silo a viable form of entertainment.

“Doesn’t do much good when it’s dark out, Dad,”

Rory said.

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“I don’t think there are any silos or barns out here anyway,” Megan chimed in.

The dark trees pressing close to the narrow highway rushed by, and his blazing headlights made tunnels in front of him. He kept driving, kept trying to think of ways to distract his kids. He vowed to make this a good vacation after all. Tomorrow they would go see the Devil’s Churn, where waves from the ocean shot up like a geyser through a hole in the rock, and then they would head up to the Columbia River Gorge and see waterfall after waterfall.

Now, though, he just wanted to find a place to spend the night.

“Dog!” his wife cried. “A dog! Watch out!”

For a frozen instant, Richard thought she was playing some bizarre variant of the Silo game, but then he spotted the black four-legged form hesitating in the middle of the road, its liquid eyes like pools of quicksilver that reflected the headlights.

He slammed on the brakes, and the new tires on the rental Subaru skiied across the slick coating of fallen leaves. The car slewed, slowed, but continued forward like a locomotive, barely under control.

In the back, the kids screamed. The brakes and tires screamed even louder.

The dog tried to leap away at the last instant, but the Subaru bumper struck it with a horrible muffled thump. The black Lab flew onto the hood, into the windshield, then caromed off the side into the weed-filled ditch.

The car screeched to a halt, spewing wet gravel from the road’s shoulder. “Jesus Christ!” Richard shouted, slamming the gearshift into park so quickly the entire vehicle rocked.

He grabbed at his seatbelt, fumbling, punching, struggling, until the buckle finally popped free of the catch. Megan and Rory huddled in stunned silence in 24

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the back, but Richard popped the door open and sprang out. He looked from side to side, belatedly thinking to check if another car or truck might be bearing down on them.

Nothing. No traffic, just the night. In the deep forest, even the nocturnal insects had fallen silent, as if watching.

He walked around the front of the car with a sick dread. He saw the dent in the bumper, a smashed headlight, a scrape in the hood of the rental car. He remembered too vividly the offhanded and cheerful manner in which he had declined insurance coverage from the rental agent. He stared down now, wondering how much the repairs would cost.

The back door opened a crack, and a very pale-looking Megan eased out. “Daddy? Is he all right?” She peered around, blinking in the darkness. “Is the dog going to be okay?”

He swallowed hard, then crunched around the front of the car into the wet weeds. “Just a second, honey. I’m still looking.”

The dog lay sprawled and twitching, a big black Labrador with a smashed skull. He could see the skid marks where it had tumbled across the underbrush. It still moved, attempting to drag itself into the brambles toward a barbed-wire fence and denser foliage beyond. But its body was too broken to let it move.

The dog wheezed through broken ribs. Blood trickled from its black nose. Christ, why couldn’t the thing have just been killed outright? A mercy.

“Better take him to a doctor,” Rory said, startling him. He hadn’t heard the boy climb out of the car.

Sharon stood up at the passenger side. She looked at him wide-eyed, and he gave a slight shake of his head.

“I don’t think a doctor will be able to help him, sport,” he said to his son.

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“We can’t just leave him here,” Megan said, indignant. “We gotta take him to a vet.”

He looked down at the broken dog, the dented rental car, and felt absolutely helpless. His wife hung on the open door. “Richard, there’s a blanket in the back. We can move the suitcases between the kids, clear a spot. We’ll take the dog to the nearest veterinary clinic. The next town up the road should have one.”

Richard looked at the kids, his wife, and the dog.

He had absolutely no choice. Swallowing bile, knowing it would do no good, he went to get the blanket while Sharon worked to rearrange their suitcases.

The next reasonably sized town up the road, Lincoln City, turned out to be all the way to the coast. The lights had been doused except for dim illumination through window shades in back rooms where the locals watched TV. As he drove through town, desperately searching for an animal care clinic, he wondered why the inhabitants hadn’t bothered to roll up the sidewalks with sundown.

Finally he saw an unlit painted sign, “Hughart’s Family Veterinary Clinic,” and he swerved into the empty parking lot. Megan and Rory both sniffled in the backseat; his wife sat tight-lipped and silent next to him up front.

Richard took the responsibility himself, climbing the cement steps and ringing the buzzer at the veterinarian’s door. He vigorously rapped his knuckles on the window until finally a light flicked on in the foyer.

When an old man peered at them through the glass, Richard shouted, “We’ve got a hurt dog in the car. We need your help.”

The old veterinarian showed no surprise at all, as if he had expected nothing else. He unlocked the door 26

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as Richard gestured toward the Subaru. “We hit him back up the highway. I . . . I think it’s pretty bad.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” the vet said, going around to the rear of the car. Richard swung open the hatchback, and both Megan and Rory clambered out of their seats, intently interested, their eyes wide with hope.

The vet took one look at the children, then met Richard’s eyes, understanding exactly the undertones here.

In back, the dog lay bloody and mangled, somehow still alive. To Richard’s surprise, the black Lab seemed stronger than before, breathing more evenly, deeply asleep. The vet stared at it, and from the masked expression on the old man’s face, Richard knew the dog had no hope of surviving.

“This isn’t your dog?” the vet asked.

“No, sir,” Richard answered. “No tags, either.

Didn’t see any.”

Megan peered into the back to look. “Is he going to be all right, Mister?” she asked. “Are we coming back to visit him, Daddy?”

“We’ll have to leave him here, honey,” he answered.

“This man will know what to do with the dog.”

The vet smiled at her. “Of course he’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ve got some special kinds of bandages.” He looked up at Richard. “If you could help me carry him in back to the surgery, I’ll let you all be on your way.”

Richard swallowed hard. The way the old man looked right into his heart, he knew the vet must see cases like this every week, hurt animals abandoned to his care.

Together the two men reached under the blanket, lifting the heavy dog. With a grunt, they began to shuffle-walk to the back door of the clinic. “He’s
hot
,”

the vet said as they entered the swinging door.

Leaving the dog on the operating table, the vet went around the room, flicking on lights.

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Anxious to be away, Richard stepped to the door, thanking the old man profusely. He left one of his business cards on the reception table, hesitated, then thought better of it. He tucked the card back in his pocket and hurried out the front door.

He rushed back to the Subaru and swung himself inside. “He’ll take care of everything,” Richard said to no one in particular, then jammed the vehicle into gear. His hands felt grimy, dirty, covered with fur and a smear of the dog’s blood.

The car drove off as Richard desperately tried to relocate the peace and joy of a family vacation. The night insects resumed their music in the forest.

FIVE

Mercy Hospital

Portland, Oregon

Tuesday, 10:03 A.M.

The middle of morning on a gray day. Early X mist hanging above and through the air made the temperature clammy and colder than it should have been. The clouds and gloom would burn off by noon, giving a blessed few minutes of sunshine before the clouds and the rain rolled in again.

Typical morning, typical Portland.

Scully didn’t suppose it made any difference if she and Mulder were going to spend the day in a hospital morgue anyway.

In the basement levels of the hospital, the quiet halls were like tombs. Scully had seen the same thing in many hospitals where she had performed autopsies or continued investigations on cold cadavers in refrigerator drawers. But though the places were by now familiar, she would never find them comforting.

Dr. Frank Quinton, Portland’s medical examiner, was a bald man with a feathery fringe of white hair surrounding the back of his head. He had wire-rimmed glasses and a cherubic face.

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Judging by his friendly, grandfatherly smile, Scully would have pegged him as a charming, good-natured man—but she could see a tired hardness behind his eyes. In his career as a coroner, Quinton must have seen too many teenagers pulled from wrecked cars, too many suicides and senseless accidents, too many examples of the quirky nature of death.

He warmly shook Scully’s hand, and Mulder’s.

Mulder nodded at his partner, speaking to the coroner.

“As I mentioned on the phone, sir, Agent Scully is a medical doctor herself, and she has had experience with many unusual deaths. Perhaps she can offer some suggestions.”

The coroner beamed at her, and Scully couldn’t help but smile back at the kind-faced man. “What is the status of the body now?”

“We used full disinfectants and have been keeping the body in cold storage to stop the spread of any biological agents,” the ME said.

The morgue attendant held out a clipboard and smiled like a puppy dog next to Quinton. The assistant was young and scrawny, but already nearly as bald as the medical examiner. From the idolizing way he looked up at the ME, Scully guessed that Frank Quinton must be his mentor, that one day the morgue attendant wanted to be a medical examiner himself.

“He’s in drawer 4E,” the attendant said, though Scully was certain the coroner already knew where the guard’s body was stored. The attendant hurried over to the bank of clean stainless-steel refrigerator drawers. Most, Scully knew, would contain people who had died of natural causes, heart attacks, or car accidents, surgical failures from the hospital, or old retirees fallen like dead leaves in nursing homes.

One drawer, though, had been marked with yel-30

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low tape and sealed with stickers displaying the clawed-circle BIOHAZARD LABEL: 4E.

“Thank you, Edmund,” the ME said as Mulder and Scully followed him to the morgue refrigerators.

“You’ve used appropriate quarantine conditions?”

Scully asked.

Quinton looked over at her. “Luckily, the police were spooked enough by the appearance of the corpse that they took precautions, gloves, contamination wraps. Everything was burned in the hospital inciner-ator here.”

Edmund stopped in front of the stainless-steel drawer and peeled away the BioHazard sticker. A card on the front panel of the drawer labeled it RESTRICTED, POLICE EVIDENCE.

After tugging on a sterile pair of rubber gloves, Edmund grabbed the drawer handle and yanked it open. “Here it is. We don’t usually get anything as curious as this poor guy.” He held open the drawer, and a gust of frosty air drifted out.

With both hands, Edmund dragged out the plastic-draped cadaver of the dead guard. Like a showroom model revealing a new sports car, the attendant drew back the sheet. He stood aside proudly to let the medical examiner, Scully, and Mulder push forward.

Mixed with the cold breath of the refrigerator, the smell of heavy, caustic disinfectants swirled in the air, stinging Scully’s eyes and nostrils. She was unable to keep herself from bending over in fascination. She saw the splotches of coagulated blood beneath the guard’s skin like blackened bruises, the lumpy, doughy growths that had sprouted like mush-rooms inside his tissues.

“I’ve never seen tumors that could grow so fast,”

Scully said. “The limited rate of cellular reproduction should make such a rapid spread impossible.” She bent down and observed a faint slimy covering on antibodies

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some patches of skin. Some kind of clear mucus . . .

like slime.

“We’re treating this as a high-contamination sce-nario. Our lab tests are expected back in another day or so from the CDC,” Quinton said. “I’m doing my own analysis, under tight controls, but this is an unusual one. We can’t just do it in-house.”

Scully continued to study the body with the practiced eye of a physician analyzing the symptoms, the patterns, trying to imagine the pathology. The attendant offered her a box of latex gloves. She snapped on a pair, flexing her fingers, then she reached forward to touch the cadaver’s skin. She expected it to be cold and hard with rigor—but instead the body felt warm, fresh, and flexible.