The X-Files: Antibodies (20 page)
“Come here right now, dammit!” She heard the words, a voice flattened by distance, made gruff with a threat. “Jody, come here!”
Scully drew her handgun and advanced toward the forest, following the sound of voices. Jody was still out here, running for his life—and a man who must have carried the plague, the man who had exposed Patrice Kennessy, was now after the boy.
Scully had to catch him first. She ran toward the forest.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 1:59 P.M.
No matter how far Jody ran, Dorman fol-X lowed. The only shelter he could think of was the cabin, endlessly far back through the trees. The small building was not much of an island of safety, but he could think of no better place to go. At least there he could find some crude weapons, something with which to fight back.
His mother was resourceful, and Jody could be, too. He had learned a lot from her in the past weeks.
Jody circled through the trees in a long arc, looping around the meadow and approaching from the rear.
Vader continued to bark in the trees, sometimes running close to Jody and then bounding off, as if ready to hunt or play. Jody wondered if the black Lab thought it was all some kind of game.
He continued stumbling along, his legs aching as if sharp metal pins had been inserted into his knees.
His side was aflame with pain. His face had been scratched by sharp branches and whipping pine needles, but he paid no attention to the minor injuries; antibodies
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they would fade quickly. His throat was dry, and he couldn’t draw in enough breath.
As quietly as he could move, he stumbled along without trails, without guidance, but after weeks of nothing to do but play in the woods, he knew how to find the cabin. Vader would follow him. Together they could get out of this, and his mother . . . if she was still safe.
From above, Jody could see the small building and the meadow ahead. He’d come farther than he had thought, but now he could see another car in the driveway. A strange vehicle.
He felt a rush of cold fear. Someone else had tracked him down! One of those others his mother had warned him about. Even if he succeeded in outsmarting Jeremy Dorman and escaping back to the cabin, would others be waiting there for him? Or did they mean to help? He had no way of knowing.
But right now his greatest fear was much closer at hand.
Dorman continued to charge after him like a truck, plowing through the trees and underbrush, closing the gap. Jody couldn’t believe how fast the broad-shouldered man was moving, especially because the big lab assistant did not look at all healthy.
“Jody, please! I won’t hurt you if you just let me talk to you for a second.”
Jody didn’t waste his breath answering. He ran back, arrowing toward the cabin, but abruptly came to a steep slope where a mudslide had sheared off the gentle hillside. Two enormous trees had uprooted, tumbling down and leaving a gash in the dirt like an open wound.
Jody didn’t have time to go around. Dorman was approaching too fast, rushing along the hillside, holding onto trees and pulling himself along.
The slope looked too steep. He couldn’t possibly get down it.
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He heard the dog bark again. Halfway to the bottom, off to the left of the mudslide, Vader stood with his paws spread, his fur tangled with cockleburrs and weeds. He barked up at his boy.
With no other choice, Jody decided to follow.
He eased himself over the lip of the mudslide and started to descend, using his hands, digging his fingers into the cold ground, stepping on loose rocks, and looking for support. He heard twigs snapping, branches crashing aside, as Dorman came closer.
Jody tried to move faster. He looked up and glimpsed the burly figure at the upper edge of the hillside. He gasped—and his hand slipped.
Jody’s foot stepped on an unstable rock, which popped out of the raw dirt like a rotten tooth coming loose from a gum. He bit back an outcry as he began to fall.
He scrabbled with his fingers, digging into the mud, but his body slid down, tumbling, rolling, covering his clothes in dirt and mud. Rocks pattered around him.
As he bounced and slid, Jody saw Dorman standing at the lip of the mudslide, his hands outstretched like claws, ready to bend down and grab him—but the boy was too far away, still falling, still picking up speed.
Jody rolled, struck his side, and then his head—
but he remained conscious, terrified that he would break his leg so that he couldn’t keep running away from Dorman.
Dirt and rocks showered around him, but he didn’t scream, didn’t even cry out—and he finally came to rest at the bottom of the slide, up against one of the toppled trees. Its matted root system stuck out like a dirt-encrusted scrubbing pad. He slammed hard against the bark and lay gasping, struggling, trying to move. His back hurt.
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Then, to his horror, he saw Jeremy Dorman bounding down the sharp slope up above, somehow keeping his balance. Dirt and gravel flew up from his feet as he stomped heavy indentations in the soft hillside. He waved the revolver in his hand in a threat to keep Jody where he was—not that Jody could have gotten up and moved fast enough anyway.
Dorman skidded to a halt just above the boy. His face was flushed . . . and his skin looked as if it were
crawling
, writhing, seething like a pot of candle wax slowly coming to a boil. Rage and exertion contorted the man’s face.
He held the handgun up, gripping it with both hands and pointing the barrel directly at Jody. It looked like a cyclopean eye, a deadly open-mouthed viper.
Then Dorman’s shoulders sagged, and he just stared at the boy for a few moments. “Jody, why do you have to make this so hard? Haven’t I been through enough—haven’t
you
been through enough?”
“Where’s my mom?” Jody demanded, drawing deep breaths. His heart thumped like a jackhammer and his breath felt cold and frosty, like knives in his lungs. He struggled to get to his knees.
Dorman gestured with the revolver again. “All I need is some of your blood, Jody, that’s all. Just some blood. Fresh blood.”
“I said, where’s my mom?” Jody shouted.
Dorman looked as if a thunderstorm passed across his face. Both the boy and the man were so intent on each other, neither heard the other person approach.
“Freeze! Federal agent!”
Dana Scully stood in the trees fifteen feet away, her feet braced, her arms extended and gripping her handgun in a precise firing position.
“Don’t move,” she said.
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*
*
Both the intimidating man and the twelve-year-old Jody snapped their glances aside to look at her, astonished. Jody’s expression flooded with relief, then rapidly turned to suspicion.
“You’re one of
them
!” the boy whispered.
Scully wondered how much Patrice Kennessy had told him, how much Jody knew about the death of his father and the possible conspiracy involving DyMar.
But what astonished her the most was the appearance of the boy. He seemed healthy, not gaunt and haggard, not at all pale and sickly. He should have been in the final stages of terminal lymphoblastic leukemia. Granted, Jody looked exhausted, battered . . .
haunted perhaps by constant fear and lack of sleep. But certainly not like a terminal cancer patient.
Nearly a month earlier, Jody had been bedridden, at death’s doorway. But now the boy had run vigorously through the forest and been caught by this man only because he had stumbled and fallen down a steep hillside.
The large man scowled at Scully, dismissed her, and tried to ease closer to the boy.
“I said don’t move, sir,” Scully said. Seeing the revolver hanging loosely in his hand, she feared he might take Jody in a hostage situation. “Put your gun down,” she said, “and identify yourself.”
The man looked at her with such pure disgust and impatience that she felt cold. “You don’t know what’s going on here,” he said. “Stop interfering.” He looked antibodies
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hungrily back down at the trapped Jody, then snapped his glance toward Scully once more. “Or are you one of
them
? Just like the boy says? Out to annihilate both of us?”
Before she could answer or question him further, a black shape like a rocket-propelled battering ram bounded from the underbrush and launched itself toward the man threatening Jody.
In a flash Scully recognized the dog, the black Lab that had somehow survived being struck by a car, that had escaped from the veterinarian’s office and gone on the run with Patrice and Jody.
“Vader!” Jody cried.
The dog lunged. Black Labradors were not normally used as attack dogs, but Vader must have been able to sense the fear and tension in the air. He knew who the enemy was, and he fought back.
The burly man whirled, raising his gun and gripping the trigger with the sudden unexpected threat—
but the dog crashed into him, growling and snarling, spoiling his aim. The man cried out, threw up his free hand to ward off the attack—and his finger squeezed the trigger.
The explosion roared through the quiet isolation far from the main road.
Instead of taking off Jody’s head, the .38-caliber shell slammed into the boy’s chest before he could hurl himself out of the way. The impact sprayed blood behind him, knocking the boy’s lean frame back against the fallen tree, as if someone with an invisible piano wire had just jerked him backward. Jody cried out, and slid down the rain-slick bole of the tree.
Vader bore the gunman to the ground. The man tried to fight the dog off, but the suddenly vicious black Lab bit at his face, his throat.
Scully raced over to the wounded boy, dropped to her knees, and cradled Jody’s head. “Oh my God!”
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The boy blinked his eyes, wide with astonishment and seemingly far away. Blood bubbled out of his mouth, and he spat it aside. “So tired.” She stroked his hair, unable to leave him to rescue the big man who had shot him.
The dog continued growling, snapping his jaws, digging his muzzle into the man’s throat, ripping at the tendons. Blood sprayed onto the forest floor. The man dropped his smoking revolver and pounded on the black Lab’s rib cage, trying to knock him away, but growing weaker and weaker.
Scully stared at where foamy scarlet blood blos-somed from the center of Jody’s chest. A hole with neat round edges stood out against a welling, pulsing lake of blood. She could tell from the placement of the wound that no simple first aid would do Jody any good.
“Oh, no,” she said and bent down, tearing Jody’s shirt wider and looking at the gunshot wound that had penetrated his left lung and perhaps struck the heart. A serious wound—a deadly wound.
He would never survive.
Jody’s skin turned gray and pale. His eyes were closed in unconsciousness. Blood continued to pour from the bullet hole.
Leaning forward, Scully pushed aside her empa-thy for Jody, mentally clicking into her emergency medical mindset, slapping the heel of her hand on the wound and pressing down, pushing hard against the cloth of his shirt to stop the flow of blood. At her side, she could hear the dog continuing his attack on the fallen man—a vicious attack, a personal vendetta, as if this man had once hurt the dog very badly. Scully concentrated, though, on helping the boy. She had to slow the terrible bleeding from the bullet wound.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 2:20 P.M.
The sudden carnage astonished Scully, and X time seemed to stop as the forest pressed around her, the smell of blood and black powder from the gunshots. The birdsong and the breeze fell silent.
She hesitated for only a moment before snapping back into her mindset as a federal agent. After pressing down her makeshift bandage, she stood up jerk-ily from the mortally wounded boy and ran over to the dog, who was still growling and snapping at the fallen man. She grabbed Vader by the skin of his neck, grappling with his strong shoulders and front forepaws to pull him away. His bloodied victim lay twitching in the mud, leaves, and twigs.
She tugged at the dog, dragging him away.
The dog continued to growl, and Scully realized the danger of throwing herself upon a vicious animal that had just ripped out the throat of a man. A killer.
But the black Lab acquiesced and staggered away, sitting down obediently in the forest debris. Frothy blood covered his muzzle, and his sepia eyes were 182
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bright and angry, still fixed on the fallen form. Scully saw his red teeth and shivered.
She glanced down at the man who had held Jody at bay, who had shot the boy. His throat was mangled.
His shirt hung in tatters, shredded as if it had burst from the inside.
Though he was obviously dead, the man’s hand jittered and jerked like a frog on a dissection table, and his skin squirmed as if alive from the inside, the home of a colony of swarming cockroaches. Patches of his exposed skin glistened, wet and gelatinous . . . like the mucus Scully had found during her autopsy of Vernon Ruckman.
His skin also had an uneven darkish cast . . . but the blotches shifted and faded, mobile hemorrhages that healed and passed across his complexion. This man must be the carrier of the instantly disruptive disease that had killed Patrice Kennessy and Vernon Ruckman, and probably the trucker Mulder had gone to investigate. She had no idea who this was, but he looked oddly familiar to her. He must have some connection with DyMar Laboratory, with David Kennessy’s research, and the radical cancer treatment he had meant to develop for his son.
As time seemed to stand still, Scully looked over at the black Lab to see if Vader might be suffering from the effects of the plague as well—but apparently the cellular destruction did not transfer readily across species boundaries. Vader sat patiently, not wagging his tail but focused intently on her reaction. He whined, as if daring her to challenge what he had done to protect his boy.
