Leaving Jody to sleep, she lay awake in her own cot, alternately growing too hot, then shivering.
Patrice longed for rest, but she knew she couldn’t let her guard down. Not for an instant.
With her eyes closed, Patrice quietly cursed her husband and listened for sounds outside.
Mercy Hospital Morgue
Portland, Oregon
Friday, 5:09 A.M.
Edmund was amazed at how fast the officials X arrived, considering that they supposedly came all the way from Atlanta, Georgia. Their very demeanor unnerved him so much he didn’t dare question their credentials.
He was just glad that somebody seemed to believe his story.
Edmund had sealed drawer 4E after the previous night’s incident and lowered the temperature as far as it would go, though nobody showed much interest in looking for the monsters that had given him the willies. He was waiting to talk to his mentor Dr.
Quinton, who was busy analyzing the mucus specimen taken during the autopsy. He expected the ME
any minute now, and then he would feel vindicated.
But the officials showed up first, three of them, non-descript but professional, with a manner that made Edmund want to avert his eyes. They looked clean-cut, well-dressed, but grim.
“We’re here from the Centers for Disease Control,”
one man said and ripped out a badge bearing a gold-antibodies
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plated shield and a blurry ID photo. He folded the identification back into his suit faster than Edmund could make out any of the words.
“The CDC?” he stammered. “Are you here for . . . ?”
“It’s imperative that we confiscate the organic tissue you have stored in your morgue refrigerator,” said the man on the left. “We understand you had an incident yesterday.”
“We certainly did,” Edmund said. “Have you seen this sort of thing before? I looked in all my medical books—”
“We have to destroy the specimen, just to be safe,”
said the man on the right. Edmund felt relieved to know that someone was in charge, someone else could take care of it from here.
“We need to inspect all records you have regard-ing the victim, the autopsy, and any specimens you might have kept,” the man in the middle said. “We’re also going to take extreme precautions to sterilize every inch of your morgue refrigerators.”
“Do you think I’m infected?” Edmund said.
“That’s highly unlikely, sir. You would have manifested symptoms immediately.”
Edmund swallowed hard. But he knew his responsibilities.
“But—but I have to get approval,” he said. “The medical examiner has explicit responsibility.”
“Yes, I do,” Frank Quinton said, walking into the morgue and scanning the situation. The medical examiner’s grandfatherly face clouded over. “What’s going on here?”
The man on the right spoke up. “I assure you, sir, we have the proper authority here. This is a potential matter of national security and public health. We are very concerned.”
“And so am I,” Quinton said. “Are you working with the other federal agents who were here?”
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“This . . . phase of the operation is out of their jurisdiction, sir. This outbreak poses an extreme danger without proper containment procedures.”
The central man’s eyes were hard, and even the ME seemed intimidated.
“Sir,” the first man said, “we need to get an entire team in here to remove the . . . biomaterial from the refrigerator. We’ll inconvenience you as little as possible.”
“Well, I suppose . . .” Quinton’s voice trailed off, sounding flustered as the three CDC men quickly ushered them both out of the quiet and clean room.
“Edmund, let’s go for a cup of coffee,” Quinton finally said, glancing uneasily over his shoulder.
Happy for the coroner’s invitation—he had never been so lucky before—Edmund took the elevator and went to the hospital cafeteria for a while, still trying to recover. He kept seeing the many-tentacled creature trying to escape from the morgue refrigerator drawer.
Normally he would have had a thousand questions for the ME, checking details, demonstrating all the trivia he had learned from his midnight studies in the morgue. But Quinton sat quiet and reticent, looking at his hands, deeply troubled. He took out the card the FBI agents had given him previously, turning it over and over in his hands.
When they returned to the basement level an hour later, they found that the morgue had been scoured and sterilized. Drawer 4E had been ripped out entirely, its contents taken away. The men had left no receipt, no paperwork.
“We don’t have any way to contact them to find out their results,” Edmund said.
But the medical examiner just shook his head.
“Maybe that’s for the best.”
The Devil’s Churn
Oregon Coast
Friday, 10:13 A.M.
The ocean crashed against the black cliffs X with a hollow booming sound like boulders dropped from a great height. The breeze at the scenic overlook whipped cold and salty and wet against Scully’s face.
“It’s called the Devil’s Churn,” Mulder had said, though Scully could certainly read the OREGON STATE
SCENIC MARKER sign.
Below, the water turned milky in a frothing mael-strom as the breakers slammed into a hollowed-out indentation in the cliff. Sea caves there had collapsed, creating a sort of chute; as the waves struck the narrow passage head-on, it funneled the force of the water and sprayed it into a dramatic tower, like a water cannon blasting as high as the clifftops above, drenching unwary sightseers.
According to the signs, dozens of people had died at this place: unsuspecting tourists picking their way down to the mouth of the Churn, caught standing in the wrong place when the unexpected geyser of water exploded upward. Their bodies had been battered 130
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against the algae-slick rocks or simply sucked out to sea.
Station wagons, minivans, and rental cars were parked in the scenic area as families from out of state as well as locals came to stare down at the sea.
Obnoxious seagulls screamed overhead.
A battered old vending coach stood open with aluminum awnings rattling in the breeze; a grinning man with a golf cap sold warmed-over hot dogs, sour coffee, bagged chips, and canned soft drinks. On the other side of the parking area, a woman with braids huddled in a down hunting vest, watching her handmade rugs flap vigorously on a clothesline.
Fighting back a headache and drawing a deep breath of the cool, salty breeze, Scully buttoned her coat to keep warm. Mulder went directly over to the cliff edge, eagerly peering down and waiting for the water to spray up. Scully withdrew her cell phone, glad to see that the signal here was strong enough, at last. She punched in the buttons for the Portland medical examiner.
“Ah, Agent Scully,” Dr. Quinton said, “I’ve been trying to call you all morning.”
“Any results?” she asked. After seeing the slide of the dog’s contaminated blood at the veterinarian’s, she had asked the medical examiner to look at his own sample of the slimy mucus she had taken during Vernon Ruckman’s autopsy.
By the unsteady-looking guardrail, Mulder watched in fascination as a rooster tail of cold spray jetted into the air, curling up to the precipice, and then raining back down into the sea. She gestured for Mulder to come back to her as she pressed the phone tightly against her ear, concentrating on the ME’s staticky words.
“Apparently something . . . unusual happened to the plague victim’s body in the morgue refrigerator.”
Quinton seemed hesitant, at a loss for words. “Our antibodies
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attendant reported hearing noises, something moving inside the sealed drawer. And it’s been sealed since you left it.”
“That’s impossible,” Scully said. “The man couldn’t still be alive. Even if the plague put him in some kind of extreme coma, I’d already performed an autopsy.”
The ME said, “I know Edmund, and he’s not the skittish sort. A little bit of a pest sometimes, but this isn’t the kind of story he would make up. I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, but . . .” Quinton hesitated again, and Scully pressed the phone closer to her ear, straining to hear the undertone in his voice.
“Unfortunately, before I could check it out myself, some gentlemen from the Centers for Disease Control came in and sterilized everything. As a precaution, they took the entire refrigerator drawer.”
“From the CDC?” Scully said in disbelief. She had worked many times with the CDC, and they were always consummate professionals, following official procedures rigorously. This sounded like something else entirely, some
one
else.
Now she was even more concerned about what she had learned earlier that morning when she called Atlanta to check on the status of the sample she had personally sent in. Apparently, their lab technician had lost the specimen.
Mulder came up to her, brushing his damp hair back, though the wind continued to blow it around.
He looked at her, raising his eyebrows. She watched him as she spoke into the phone, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “Dr. Quinton, you kept a sample of the substance for your own analysis. Were you able to find anything?”
The ME pondered for a moment before answering.
She heard static on the line, clicking, a warbling background tone. They still must be at the edge of reception 132
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for cellular transmissions. “I think it’s an infestation of some kind,” Quinton said finally. “Tiny flecks unlike anything I’ve seen before. The sample is utterly clotted with them. Under highest magnification they don’t look like any microorganism I’ve ever seen. Squarish little boxes, cubes, geometrical shapes . . .”
Scully felt cold as she heard the ME’s words, echoing what Darin Kennessy had told them at the survivalist camp.
“Have you ever seen anything like this, Agent Scully?” the ME persisted on the phone. “You’re a doctor yourself.”
Scully cleared her throat. “I’ll have to get back to you on that, sir. Let me speak with my partner and compare notes. Thanks for your information.” She ended the call and then looked at Mulder.
After she briefly recounted the conversation, Mulder nodded. “They sure were eager to get rid of the guard’s body. Every trace.”
Scully pondered as she listened to the roar of the ocean against the rocks below. “That doesn’t sound like the way the Centers for Disease Control operates.
No official receipt, no phone number in case Dr.
Quinton has further information.”
Mulder buttoned his coat against the chilly breeze.
“Scully, I don’t think that was the CDC. I think it could well be representatives from the same group that arranged for the destruction of DyMar Laboratory and pinned the blame on a scapegoat animal rights group.”
“Mulder, why would anyone be willing to take such extreme action?”
“You heard Kennessy’s brother. Nanotechnology research,” he said. “It’s gotten loose somehow, maybe from a research animal carrying something very dangerous. The mucus from the dead security guard sounds just like what we saw in the sample of the dog’s blood—”
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Scully put her hands on her hips as the sea wind whipped her red hair. “Mulder, I think we need to find that dog, and Patrice and Jody Kennessy.”
Behind them the Devil’s Churn erupted again with a loud booming sound. Spray shot high into the air. A group of children stood next to their parents at the guardrail and cheered and laughed at the specta-cle. No one seemed to be paying any attention to the food vendor in his van or the braided woman with her handmade rugs.
“I agree, Scully—and after that report from the ME, I think maybe we aren’t the only ones looking for them.”
Tillamook County
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 10:47 A.M.
The cold rain sheeted down, drenching him X and the roadside and everything all around—but Jeremy Dorman’s other problems were far worse than a bit of lousy weather. The external world was all bad data to him now, irrelevant numbness. The forest of nerves inside him provided enough pain for a world all its own.
His shoes and clothes were soaked, his skin gray and clammy—but those discomforts were insignificant compared to the raging war within his own cells. Slick patches of the protectant carrier fluid coated his skin, swarming with the reproducing nanocritters.
His muscles trembled and vibrated, but he continued lifting his legs, taking steps, moving along.
Dorman’s brain seemed like a mere passenger in his body now. It took a conscious effort to keep the joints bending, the limbs moving, like a puppeteer working a complicated new marionette while wearing a blind-fold and thick gloves.
A car roared past him, spraying water. Its tires antibodies
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struck a puddle in a depression in the road and jetted cold rainwater all over him. The taillights flickered red for an instant as the driver realized what he had done, and then, maliciously, the man honked a few times and continued weaving down the road.
Dorman trudged along the muddy shoulder, uncaring. He focused ahead. The long road curved into the wooded mountains. He had no idea how many miles he had gone from Portland, but he hoped he could find some way to hurry. He had no money and he didn’t dare rent a car anyway, at the risk of someone spotting his identity. No one knew he was still alive, and he wanted to keep it that way. Not that he would trust his rebellious body or flickering depth perception if he was driving . . .
He shambled past a small county weigh station, a little shack with a gate and a red stoplight for trucks.
Opaque miniblinds covered the windows, and a sign that looked as if it hadn’t been changed in months said, WEIGH STATION CLOSED.
As Dorman trudged past, he looked longingly at the shelter. It would be unheated, with no food or supplies, but it would be dry. He longed to get out of the rain for a while, to sleep . . . but he would likely never wake up again. His time was rapidly running out.
He continued past the weigh station. Waterlogged potato fields sprawled in one direction, with a marsh on the other side of the road. Dorman headed toward the gentle uphill slope leading into the mountains.