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Dorman stopped five feet away, glowering at her.
“Don’t do this. You don’t understand.”
“I know I’ve got to protect my son, after all he’s been through. You’re probably still working for those men, hunting us. I’m not letting you near him.” She held her fists at her sides, ready to tear this man apart with her bare hands. “Jody, go out and hide in the forest! You know where to go, just like we planned before,” she shouted into the gap of the half-open door. “Go!”
Something squirmed beneath Dorman’s chest. He hunched over, covering his stomach and his ribs.
Finally, he rose up with his eyes glassy and pain-stricken. “I can’t . . . wait . . . any longer, Patrice.” He swayed in his step, coming closer.
In the back of the cabin, the rear door banged shut. Jody had run outside, making a beeline for the forest. Inside, she thanked her son for not arguing. She had feared he would side with Jeremy and want to help the man.
Vader bounded around the side of the cabin after Jody, barking.
Dismissing Patrice, Dorman turned toward the back. “Jody! Come here to me, boy!” He trudged away from the porch over to the side of the cabin.
Patrice felt an animal scream build within her throat. “You leave my boy alone!”
Dorman spun about and withdrew a revolver from his pants pocket. He gripped it with unsteady hands, holding it in front of her disbelieving gaze.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, Patrice,” he said.
“You don’t know anything about what’s going on. I can just shoot the dog—or Jody—and get the blood I need. Maybe that would be easiest after all.”
His muscle control was sporadic, though, and he could not keep a steady bead on her. Patrice could not believe he would shoot her anyway. Not Jeremy Dorman.
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With an outcry, she vaulted over the porch railing, throwing herself in a battering-ram tackle toward Dorman.
As he saw her charging him, he flinched backward with a look of horror on his face. “No! Don’t touch me!”
Then she plowed into him, knocking his gun away and driving the man to the ground. “Jody, run! Keep running!” she screamed.
Dorman thrashed and writhed, trying to kick her away. “No, Patrice! Stay away. Stay away from me!”
But she fought with him, clawing, pummeling. His skin was slick and slimy . . .
Without a word, Jody and the dog raced into the forest.
Kennessys’ Cabin
Coast Range, Oregon
Friday, 1:26 P.M.
The dense trees clawed at him. Their X branches scratched his face, tugged his hair, grabbed his shirt—but Jody kept sprinting anyway. The last words he heard were his mother’s desperate shout. “Jody, run! Keep running!”
Over the past two weeks Patrice had drilled into him her fear and paranoia. They had made contin-gency plans. Jody knew full well that people were after them, powerful and deadly people. Someone had betrayed his father, burned down the whole laboratory facility.
He and his mother had driven away into the night, sleeping in their car parked off the road, going from place to place before finally arriving at the cabin.
Again and again his mother had pounded into him that they must trust no one—and now it appeared that she might even have meant Jeremy Dorman himself.
Jeremy, who had been like an uncle to him, who had played with him whenever he and his father could tear themselves away from work.
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Now Jody didn’t think; he just responded. He ran out the back door, across the meadow to the trees.
Vader bounded into the fringe of pines ahead of him, barking as if scouting a safe path.
The cabin quickly fell behind, and Jody turned abruptly left, heading uphill. He hopped over a fallen tree, crunching broken branches and plowing through thick, thorny shrubs. Vines grabbed at the toes of his shoes, but Jody kept stumbling along.
He had explored these back woods in the last few weeks. His mother had hovered over him, making sure he didn’t get into trouble or stray too far away, but still Jody had found time to poke around in the trees. He understood where he was supposed to go, how best to elude pursuit. He knew his way.
He knew a few of the secret spots in the forest, but he didn’t remember a hiding place that would be good enough or safe enough. His mother had told him to keep running, and he couldn’t let her down.
If I buy you some time, then you can get a head start,
she had said.
“Jody, wait!” It was Jeremy Dorman’s voice, but it carried a strange and strangled undertone. “Hey, Jody—it’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Jody hesitated, then kept pushing ahead. Vader barked loudly and dashed under another fallen tree, then bounded up a rocky slope. Jody scrambled after him.
“Come here, boy. I need to talk to you,” Dorman called from far back, near the cabin. Jody knew the man had just ducked into the trees, following him.
He paused for a moment, panting. His joints still ached sometimes with the strange tingly feeling, as if parts of his body had gone to sleep—but this discomfort was nothing like what he had experienced before, when the leukemia was at its worst, when he had hon-158
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estly felt like dying just to stop the bone-deep ache.
Now Jody felt healthy enough to go through with this effort—but he didn’t want to keep it up for long. His skin crawled, and sweat prickled on his back, on his neck.
He heard Dorman lumbering through the trees, crashing branches aside, alarmingly close. How could the man have moved so fast? “Your mother wants to see you. She’s waiting back at the cabin.”
Jody hurried down a slope into a small gully where a stream trickled over rocks and fallen branches. Two days ago, as a game, he had skipped and hopped from stone to tree trunk to outcropping, crossing the stream and daring himself not to fall.
Now the boy ran as fast as he could. Halfway across he slipped on a moss-covered boulder, and his right foot plunged into the icy water that chuckled along the banks.
He hissed in surprise, yanked his dripping foot back out of the stream, and continued across the stream. His mom had always warned him against getting his shoes wet . . . but right now Jody knew simple escape was much more important, was worth any sort of risk.
Dorman shouted again, “Jody, come here.” He seemed a little more angry, his words sharper. “Come on, please. Only you can help me. Hey, Jody, I’m beg-ging you!”
With his shoe soggy, Jody climbed back onto the bank. He heaved a deep breath to keep running.
Grabbing a pine branch and getting sticky resin on his palm, he used it to haul himself up out of the gully to more level ground so he could run again.
He had a stitch in his side, which sent a sharp pain around his kidneys, his stomach, but he pressed his hand against the ache so he could keep fleeing. Jody didn’t understand what was going on, but he trusted antibodies
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his fear, and he trusted his mother’s warning. He vowed not to let Jeremy Dorman catch him.
He paused in his tracks, gasping beside a tree as he listened intently for further pursuit.
Down the slope on the other side of the stream, he saw the heavy form of Jeremy Dorman and his tattered shirt. Their eyes met from across the great distance in the shadowy forest.
Seeing a complete stranger behind Jeremy’s eyes, Jody ran with redoubled effort. His heart pounded, and his breath came in great gasps. He dove through clawing bushes that held him back. Behind him, Dorman had no difficulty charging through the underbrush.
Jody scrambled up a slope, slipping on loose wet leaves. He knew he couldn’t keep up this incredible effort for long. Dorman didn’t seem to be slowing at all.
He ran to a small gully, thick with deadfall and lichen-mottled sandstone outcroppings. The trees and shadows stood thick enough around him that he knew Dorman couldn’t see him, and he had a chance to duck down in a damp animal hollow between a rotting tree stump and a cracked boulder. Twigs, vines, and underbrush crackled as he tried to huddle in the shelter.
He sat in silence, his lungs laboring, his pulse hammering. He listened for the man’s approach. He had heard nothing at all from his mother, and he feared she might be hurt back at the cabin. What had Dorman done to her, what had she sacrificed so that he could get away?
Heavy footsteps crunched on the forest floor, but the man had stopped calling out now. Jody remembered playing chase games on his Nintendo system, how he and Jeremy Dorman would be opponents in death-defying races across the country or on alien landscapes.
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But this was real, with a lot more at stake than a mere highest score.
Dorman came closer, pushing shrubs away, looking through the forest murk. Jody sat in tense silence, praying that his hiding place would remain secure.
In the distance Vader barked, and Dorman paused, then turned in a different direction. Jody saw his chance and attempted to slip away, but as he moved one of the fallen branches aside, a precariously balanced log crunched down into the brittle deadwood.
Dorman froze again, and then came charging toward Jody’s hiding place.
The boy ducked down under the fallen trunk again, scuttled along next to the slick rock, and wormed his way out the other side of the gully. He stood up and raced off again, keeping his head low, pushing branches out of the way as Dorman yelled at him, fighting through the front of the thicket. Jody risked a glance over his should to see how close his pursuer had come.
Dorman reached up with a meaty hand, pointing toward him. Jody recognized a handgun at the same moment he saw a blaze of light flare from its muzzle.
A loud crack echoed through the forest. A chunk of splintered bark and wood exploded away from the pine tree only two feet above his head. Dorman had shot at him!
“Come here right now, dammit!” Dorman yelled.
Biting back an outcry, Jody scrambled away into the thick underbrush behind the tree that had protected him.
Through the forest murk, he heard Vader barking, whining as if in encouragement. Jody trusted his dog a lot more than he would ever trust Jeremy Dorman.
Jody ran off again, holding his side. His head pounded, his heart ran like a race car engine.
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Back behind him, Dorman sloshed across the cold stream, not even trying to use the stepping stones.
“Jody, come here!”
Jody fled desperately toward the sound of the barking dog—and, he hoped, safety.
Rural Oregon
Friday, 1:03 P.M.
The logging truck sat half off the road in a X shallow ditch, its cab tilted at an odd angle like a metallic behemoth with a broken back.
As they drove up in the police cruiser, Mulder could tell instantly that something was wrong.
This was more than a standard traffic accident. A red Ford pickup sat parked on the shoulder beside the logging truck, and a man with a plastic rain poncho climbed out of the driver’s side as Officer Jared Penwick pulled to a halt.
Studying the scene, Mulder spotted sinuous tire marks in the wet grass. The logging truck had weaved back and forth out of control before grinding to a stop here. A few raindrops spattered the police cruiser’s windshield, and Jared left the wipers streaking back and forth. He picked up his handset, clicked the transmit button, and reported in to the dispatcher that they had arrived at the scene.
The man in the pickup truck waited beside his vehicle, hunched over in the plastic slicker as the antibodies
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trooper crunched toward him. Mulder followed, pulling his topcoat closed to keep himself warm. The wind and the rain mussed his hair, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“You didn’t touch anything in there did you, Dominic?” Jared said.
“I’m not going near that thing,” the man in the pickup answered with a suspicious glance at Mulder.
“That guy in there is gross.”
“This is Agent Mulder of the FBI,” Jared said.
“I was just driving down the road,” Dominic said, still keeping his eyes on Mulder, until he flicked his gaze toward the tilted log truck. “When I saw that truck there, I thought the driver maybe lost control in the rain. Either that, or sometimes truckers just pull off the road and sleep—not too much traffic on this stretch, you know—but it was dangerous the way he had parked. Didn’t have an orange triangle set up around the back of the truck bed, like he should. I was going to chew his ass.”
Dominic flicked rainwater away from his face before shaking his head. He swallowed hard. “But then I got a look inside the cab. My God, never seen anything like that.”
Mulder left Jared to stand with the pickup owner as he went over to the logging truck. He held the driver’s-side door handle and cautiously raised himself up by stepping on the running board.
Inside the cab, the driver of the truck sprawled back with his arms akimbo, his legs jammed up, and his knees wedged behind the steering wheel like a cockroach that had been sprayed with an extermina-tor’s poison.
The pudgy man’s face was contorted and swollen with lumps, his jaw slack. The whites of his eyes were gray and smoky, laced with red lines of worse-than-bloodshot veins. Purplish-black blotches stood out like 164
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leopard spots all over his skin, as if a miniaturized bombing raid had taken place in his vascular system.
The truck window was tightly rolled up. The rain continued to trickle off the slanted roof of the cab and down the passenger-side window. From inside, the windshield was fogged in some places. Mulder thought he saw faint steam rising from the body.
Still balanced on the running board, he turned back to the state trooper, who stood looking at him curiously. “Can you run the plates and registration?”
Mulder asked. “See if you can find out who this guy was and where he might have been going.”
It made Mulder very uneasy to see another hideous death so close to the possible location of Patrice and Jody Kennessy—so close to where Scully had gone to look for them.