The X-Files: Antibodies (6 page)
Patrice and David chuckled together as they watched the black Lab play with Jody. Vader romped back and forth, his paws slipping on the polished floor. Jody squealed with delight. Vader woofed and circled the baby, who tried to spin on his diaper on the floor.
Those had been peaceful times, bright times. Now, though, she hadn’t had a moment’s peace since the fateful night she had received a desperate call from her husband at his beseiged laboratory.
Up until then, learning that her son was dying of cancer had been the worst moment of her life.
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“But what if Vader’s lying hurt in a ditch somewhere, Mom?” Jody asked. She could see tears on the edges of her son’s eyes as he fought hard against crying. “What if he’s in a fur trap, or got shot by a hunter?”
Patrice shook her head, trying to comfort her son.
“Vader will come home safe and sound. He always does.”
Once again, Patrice felt the shudder.
Yes, he always
did.
Mercy Hospital
Portland, Oregon
Tuesday, 2:24 P.M.
Even through the thick fabric of her clumsy X gloves, she could feel the slick softness of the corpse’s inner cavity. Scully’s movements were irritatingly sluggish and impre-cise—but at least the heavy gear protected her from exposure to whatever had killed Vernon Ruckman.
The forced-air respirator pumped a cold, stale wind into her face. Her eyes were dry, burning. She wished she could just rub them, but enclosed in the anticontamination suit, Scully had no choice but to endure the discomfort until the autopsy of the dead security guard was complete.
Her tape recorder rested on a table, voice-activated, waiting for her to say in detail what she was seeing.
This wasn’t a typical autopsy, though. She could see dozens of baffling physical anomalies just on first glance, and the mystery and horrific manifestations of the symptoms grew more astonishing as she proceeded with her thorough inspection.
Still, the step-by-step postmortem procedure had 44
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been established for a reason. She remembered teach-ing it to students at Quantico, during the brief period when the X-Files had been closed and she and Mulder had been separated. Some of her students had already completed their training through the FBI Academy and become special agents like herself.
But she doubted any of them would ever work a case like this one.
At such times, falling back on a routine was the only way to keep her mind clear and focused.
First step. “Test,” she said, and the red light of the voice-activated recorder winked on. She continued speaking in a normal voice, muffled through her trans-parent plastic faceplate.
“Subject’s name, Vernon Ruckman. Age, thirty-two; weight, approximately one hundred eighty-five pounds. General external physical condition is good.
He appears to have been quite healthy until this disease struck him down.” Now he looked as if every cell in his body had gone haywire all at once.
She looked at the man’s blotchy body, the dark red marks of tarlike blood pooled in pockets beneath his skin. The man’s face had frozen in a contortion of agony, lips peeled back from his teeth.
“Fortunately, the people who found this body and the medical examiner established quarantine protocols immediately. No one handled this cadaver with unprotected hands.” She suspected that this disease, whatever it was, might be exceedingly virulent.
“Outward symptoms, the blotches, the swellings under the skin, are reminiscent of the bubonic plague.” But the Black Death, while killing about one-third of Europe when it raged through the population centers of the Middle Ages, had acted over the course of several days, even in its deadliest pneumonic form.
“This man seems to have been struck down nearly instantaneously, however. I know of no disease short antibodies
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of a direct nerve toxin that can act with such extreme lethality.”
Scully touched the skin on Ruckman’s arms, which hung like loose folds of rubbery fabric draped on the bones. “The epidermis shows substantial slip-page, as if the connective tissue to the muscles has been destroyed somehow.
“As for the muscle fiber itself . . .” She pushed against the meat of the body with her fingers, felt an unusual softness, a squishing. Her heart jumped.
“Muscle fibers seem dissociated . . . almost
mealy
.”
Part of the skin split open, and Scully drew back, surprised. A clear, whitish liquid oozed out, and she gingerly touched it with her gloved fingertips. The substance was sticky, thick and syrupy.
“I’ve found some sort of unusual . . . mucus-like substance coming from the skin of this man. It seems to have pooled and collected within the subcutaneous tissue. My manipulations have released it.”
She touched her fingertips together, and the slime stuck, then dripped back down onto the body. “I don’t understand this at all,” Scully admitted to the tape recorder. She would probably delete that line in her report.
“Proceeding with the body cavity,” she said, then drew the stainless-steel tray of saws, scalpels, spreaders, and forceps close to her side.
Taking great care with the scalpel so as not to puncture the fabric of her gloves, she cut into the man’s body cavity and used a rib-spreader to open up the chest. It was hard work; sweat dripped down her forehead, tickling her eyebrows.
Looking at the mess of the guard’s opened chest, she reached inside the wet cavity, fishing around with her protected fingers. Getting down to work, Scully began by taking an inventory, removing lungs, liver, heart, intestines, weighing each on a mass-balance.
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“It’s difficult to recognize the individual organs, due to the abundant presence”—perhaps
infestation
was a better word, she thought— “of tumors.”
In and around the organs, Vernon Ruckman’s lumps, growths, tumors spread like a nest of viperous worms, thick and insidious. As she watched, they moved, slipping and settling, with a discomforting
writhing
appearance.
But in a body this disturbed, this damaged, no doubt the simple process of autopsy would have caused a vigorous reaction, not to mention the possibility of contraction due to the temperature variations from the morgue refrigerator to the heated room.
Among the displayed organs, Scully found other large pockets of the mucus. Inside, under the lungs, she discovered a large nodule of the slimy, runny substance—almost like a biological island or a storehouse.
She withdrew a sample of the unusual fluid and sealed it in an Extreme Hazard container. She would perform her own analysis of the specimen and send another sample to the Centers for Disease Control to supplement the samples already sent by the ME. Perhaps the pathogen specialists had seen something like this before.
But she had a far more immediate concern.
“My primary conclusion, which is still pure speculation,” Scully continued, “is that the biological research at DyMar Laboratory may have produced some sort of disease organism. We have not been able to track down full disclosure of David Kennessy’s experiments or his techniques, and so I am at a disadvantage to go on the record with any more detailed conjectures.”
She stared down at Ruckman’s open body, unsettled. The tape recorder waited for her to speak again.
If the situation was as bad as Scully feared, then they would certainly need much more help than either she or Mulder could give by themselves.
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“The lumps and misshapen portions inside Vernon Ruckman’s body look as if rapid outgrowths of cells engulfed his body with astonishing speed.” Dr.
Kennessy was working on cancer research. Could he have somehow produced a genetic or microbial basis for the disease? she wondered. Had he unleashed some terrible viral form of cancer?
She swallowed hard, frightened by her own idea.
“All this is very far-fetched, but difficult to discount in light of the symptoms I have observed in this body—
especially if this man was visibly healthy mere hours before his body was found.”
The period from onset to death was at a maximum only part of an evening, perhaps much less. No time for treatment, no time even for him to realize his fate. . . .
Vernon Ruckman had had only minutes before a terminal disease struck him down.
Barely even time enough to pray.
Hughart’s Family Veterinary Clinic Lincoln City, Oregon
Tuesday, 1:11 A.M.
Dr. Elliott Hughart was torn between inten-X tionally putting the mangled black Labrador to sleep, or just letting it die. As a veterinarian, he had to make the same decision year after year after year. And it never got easier.
The dog lay on one of the stainless-steel surgical tables, still alive against all odds. The rest of the veterinary clinic was quiet and silent. A few other animals hunkered in their wire cages, quiet, but restive and suspicious.
Outside, it was dark, drizzling as it usually did this time of night, but the temperature was warm enough for the vet to prop open the back door. The damp breeze mitigated the smell of chemicals and frightened pets that thickened the air. Hughart had always believed in the curative properties of fresh air, and that went for animals as well as humans.
His living quarters were upstairs, and he had left the television on, the single set of dinner dishes unwashed—but he spent more time down here in the antibodies
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office, surgery, and lab anyway.
This
part was home for him—the other rooms upstairs were just the place where he slept and ate.
After all these years, Hughart kept his veterinary practice more as a matter of habit than out of any great hope of making it a huge success. He had scraped by over the years. The locals came to him regularly, though many of them expected free treatment as a favor to a friend or neighbor. Occasionally, tourists had accidents with their pets. Hughart had seen many cases like this black Lab: some guilt-ridden sightseer delivering the carcass or the still-living but grievously injured animal, expecting Hughart to work miracles.
Sometimes the families stayed. Most of the time—as in this instance—they fled to continue their interrupted vacations.
The black Lab lay shivering, sniffing, whimpering.
Blood smeared the steel table. At first, Hughart had done what he could to patch the injuries, stop the bleeding, bandage the worst gashes—but he didn’t need a set of X-rays to tell that the dog had a shattered pelvis and a crushed spine, as well as major internal damage.
The black Lab wasn’t tagged, was without any papers. It could never recover from these wounds, and even if it pulled through by some miracle, Hughart would have no choice but to relinquish it to the animal shelter, where it would sit in a cage for a few days and hope pathetically for freedom before the shelter destroyed it anyway.
Wasted. All wasted. Hughart drew a deep breath and sighed.
The dog shivered under his hands, but its body temperature burned higher than he had ever felt in an animal before. He inserted a thermometer, genuinely curious, then watched in astonishment as the digital readout climbed from 103 to 104. Normally a dog’s 50
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temperature should have been 101.5, or 102 at most—
and with the shock from his injuries, this dog’s body temp should have dropped. The number on the readout climbed to 106˚F.
He drew a routine blood sample, then checked diligently for any other signs of sickness or disease, some cause for the fever that rose like a furnace from its body. What he found, though, surprised him even more.
The black Lab’s massive injuries almost seemed to be healing rapidly, the wounds shrinking. He lifted one of the bandages he had pressed against a gash on the dog’s rib cage, but though the gauze was soaked with blood, he saw no sign of the wound. Only matted fur. The veterinarian knew it must be his imagination, mere wishful thinking that somehow he might be able to save the dog.
But that would never happen. Hughart knew it in his mind, though his heart continued to hope.
The dog’s body trembled, quietly whimpering.
With his calloused thumb, Hughart lifted one of its squeezed-shut eyelids and saw a milky covering across its rolled-up eye, like a partially boiled egg. The dog was deep in a coma. Gone. It barely breathed.
The temperature reached 107˚F. Even without the injuries, this fever was deadly.
A ribbon of blood trickled out of the wet black nostrils. Seeing that tiny injury, a little flaw of red blood across the black fur of the delicate muzzle, made Hughart decide not to put the dog through any more of this. Enough was enough.
He stared down at his canine patient for some time before he shuffled over to his medicine cabinet, unlocked the doors, and removed a large syringe and a bottle of Euthanol, concentrated sodium pentabarbitol. The dog weighed about sixty to eighty pounds, and the suggested dose was about 1 cc for each ten antibodies
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pounds, plus a little extra. He drew 10 ccs, which should be more than sufficient.
If the dog’s owners ever came back, they would find the notation “PTS” in the records, which was a euphemism for “Put To Sleep”—which was itself a euphemism for killing the animal . . . or putting it out of its misery, as veterinarian school had always taught.
Once he had made the decision, Hughart didn’t pause. He bent over the dog and inserted the needle into the skin behind the dog’s neck and quietly but firmly injected the lethal dose. After its enormous injuries, the black Lab didn’t flinch from the prick of the hypodermic.
A cool, clammy breeze eased through the cracked-open door, but the dog remained hot and feverish.
Dr. Hughart heaved a heavy sigh as he discarded the used syringe. “Sorry, boy,” he said. “Go chase some rabbits in your dreams . . . in a place where you don’t have to watch out for cars.”
The chemical would take effect soon, suppressing the dog’s respiration and eventually stopping his heart. Irrevocable, but peaceful.