Lentz and his men had undergone more rigorous training, though, in other . . . less accredited schools.
After the initial gunfire, he thought he had seen Agent Mulder also run for cover into the gutted building. No matter. Everything would be taken care of in time.
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Jeremy Dorman’s horrific transformation had captured the focus of the team members. Seeing several of their comrades slaughtered in the monster’s murderous rage, they set out after him, grim-faced and murderous.
Though Lentz himself had ducked out of the way of Dorman and his plague-laced slime, he was still disappointed in how his team’s cool efficiency had so quickly shattered into a backwash of vengeance. He’d believed that these men were the best and most professional in the world. If so, the world should offer better.
He heard the shrill cry of another man inside the burned ruins, and more gunshots rang out. The team had trapped Dorman inside the unstable facility. In that respect, at least, everything was going as smoothly as he had hoped.
Lentz stopped at the nearest tactical vehicle, reached into the front seat, and took out the demolition control. But he had to wait for the right moment.
His team had arrived a full twenty-five minutes before Agent Scully and the boy, but Lentz had not moved prematurely. It was so much more efficient to wait for everyone to reach the same rendezvous point.
Lentz’s hand-picked demolitions men had used the blasting caps stored at the construction site, as well as other incendiaries and explosives they kept inside their cleanup van. Working in the precarious structure, his men had rigged sealed drums of jellied gasoline in the half-collapsed basement levels. When the drums exploded, flames would shoot up through the remaining floors and incinerate the rest of the DyMar building. No trace would remain.
Lentz didn’t particularly want to obliterate his team members who had foolishly followed Dorman inside, chasing him in a cat-and-mouse routine among the falling-down walls. But they were expendable.
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Each man had been aware of the risks when he signed up.
Agent Mulder had also vanished inside, and Lentz suspected that some of the gunfire was also directed at him. The team members would have taken it upon themselves to eradicate all witnesses.
Lentz had received clear instructions that Mulder was not to be killed. He and his partner Scully were already part of a larger plan, but Lentz had to make on-the-spot decisions. He had to set priorities—and seeing the rampaging
thing
unleashed from within Dorman’s body had hardened him to the extreme necessity. If he had to, Lentz would make excuses to his superiors. Later.
Mulder and Scully both knew too much, after all, and this weapon, this breakthrough, this curse of rampant nano-technology had to be controlled, no matter what the cost. Only certain people could be trusted with so much power.
And the time was now.
One of the other men rushed back to the armored cleanup van. His eyes were glazed; sweat bristled across his forehead. He panted, looking around wildly.
Lentz glanced over at him and snapped, “Control yourself.”
The effect was like an electric shock running through the team member. He stopped, reeled for a second, then swallowed hard. He stood straight, his breathing resumed a normal rate almost instantly, and he cleared his throat, waiting for additional orders.
Lentz held up the control in his hand. A small transmitter. “Is everything prepared?”
The man looked down at the controls inside the van. He blinked, then answered quickly. His words were as fast and as crisp as the gunshots that pattered through the darkness.
“That’s all you need, sir. It will set off the blasting antibodies
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caps and trigger the remaining explosives. On a paral-lel circuit, the jellied gasoline will ignite. Just push the red button. That’s all you need.”
Lentz nodded to him curtly. “Thank you.” He took one last look at the blackened skeletal building and pushed the indicated button.
The DyMar Laboratory erupted in fresh flames.
DyMar Laboratory Ruins
Friday, 9:47 P.M.
The shock wave toppled some of the remain-X ing girders and the once-solid concrete wall.
The metal desk sheltered Mulder from the worst of the blast, but still the hammer of heat pressed the heavy piece of furniture against the wall, nearly crushing him.
Flames swept upward, bright yellow and orange, moving rapidly, as if by magic. He’d thought most of the flammables would have been consumed in the first fire two weeks earlier. Shielding his eyes from the glare and the hot wind, Mulder could see from the magnitude of the blaze that someone had rigged the ruins to go up in an instant inferno.
The dark-suited men had planned for this.
Hearing a shriek of terror and pain, Mulder carefully raised his head, blinking his watery eyes against the furnace blast of the inferno. He saw one of the men who had hunted after him stumbling through the wreckage, his suit engulfed in flames. More gunshots rang out, frantic firepower among shouts and screams—and a barking dog.
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The fire raced up along the wooden support beams.
The heat was so intense, even the glass and broken stone seemed to have caught fire. The black Labrador had bounded into the building, gotten caught in the explosion, and was thrown against a wall. Vader’s fur smoldered, but still he ran, casting about for something.
One of the overhead girders fell with a crash among the debris. Flames licked along the splintered edge.
Mulder stood up from behind the desk, shielding his eyes. “Vader!” he shouted. “Hey, over here!” That black dog was evidence. Vader’s bloodstream carried functional nanotechnology that could be studied to save so many people, without the horrendous mutations Jeremy Dorman had suffered.
Mulder waved his hand to get the dog’s attention, but instead another man trapped inside the wreckage turned and fired at him. The gunshot spanged against the desk and ricocheted onto one of the broken concrete walls.
Before the man could shoot again, though, the inhuman form of Jeremy Dorman crashed through the debris. The man with the gun tore his attention from Mulder—the easy target—to the monstrous creature.
He didn’t have time to make an outcry before several of Dorman’s new appendages grasped him. With a twisted but powerful arm, Dorman snapped the man’s neck, then discarded him.
At the moment, Mulder didn’t feel inclined to shower the distorted man with gratitude. Shielding his eyes, barely able to see through the smoke and the blaze, he staggered toward the outside, needing to get away.
The dog was hopelessly lost inside the facility.
Mulder couldn’t understand why Vader had run into such a dangerous area in the first place.
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debris . . . even the air burned his lungs with each gasping, retching breath he drew.
Mulder didn’t know how he was going to get out alive.
Scully clutched Jody’s torn shirt, but the fabric ripped and pulled free as he lunged after his dog.
“Jody, no!”
But the boy charged after Vader. The men in the ambush continued shooting, but Dorman was killing them one after another. The black dog plunged directly into the crossfire. The twelve-year-old boy—perhaps a bit too confident in his own immortality, as many twelve-year-olds were—ran after him a few seconds later.
Scully dropped the useless scrap of cloth in her hand. Desperate, she stood up from behind the shelter of the bulldozer. Scully watched the boy run miracu-lously unharmed toward the charred walls of DyMar.
With a loud ricochet, another bullet bounced off the heavy tractor tread; she didn’t even bother to duck.
Bits of debris showered Jody, but he lowered his head and kept running. He stood screaming at the edge of the walls, looking at the barrier of flames. He ducked down and tried to get inside. She heard Mulder’s voice call out for the dog, then more gunshots. The DyMar facility and all it stood for continued to burn.
So far, no police, no fire engines, no help whatsoever came to investigate the gunfire, the explosion, the flames.
“Mulder!” she shouted. She didn’t know where he was or how he could get out. Jody ducked recklessly inside. “Jody!” she shouted. “Come back here!”
She ran to the threshold and squinted through the smoke. A girder tumbled as a ceiling collapsed, show-antibodies
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ering sparks. Part of the floor showed gaps and holes where the flames and the explosion beneath had weakened it, causing it to crack and tumble down in sections like a house of cards.
Jody stood half-balanced, flailing his hands.
“Vader, where are you? Vader!”
Throwing all caution to the wind, needing to save the boy as if it were some measure of her own worthi-ness to survive, Scully hurried inside. She struggled ahead, taking shallow breaths. Most of the time, she held her eyes closed, blinking them open for a quick glimpse, then staggering along.
“Vader!” Jody called again, out of sight.
Finally Scully reached the boy’s side and grabbed his arm. “We have to go, Jody. Out of here! The whole place is going to collapse.”
“Scully!” Mulder shouted, his voice raw and ragged with the smoke and heat. She turned to see him making his way across the floor, stepping in flames and racing along. He swatted out a fire that smoldered on his trousers.
She gestured for him to hurry—but then a wall behind her crumbled. Concrete blocks fell to one side in a mound of cinders as a wooden support beam split.
“Hello, Jody . . .” Jeremy Dorman’s tortured voice said as he pushed himself through the fire and debris of the wall he had just knocked down. The distorted man stood free, undisturbed by the heat raging around him. Embers pattered on his body, smoking on his skin and leaving black craters that shifted and melted and healed over. His body ran like candle wax.
His clothes were fully involved in the fire that blazed around him, but his skin thrashed and writhed, a horror show of tentacles and growths.
Dorman blocked their way out.
“Jody, you wouldn’t help me when I asked—and now look what’s happened.”
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Jody bit back a small scream and only glared at the hideously mutated creature. “You killed my dad.”
“Now we’re all going to die in this fire,” Dorman said.
Scully doubted that even the swarming nanomachines could protect the boy from the intense flames.
She knew for a fact, though, that she and Mulder had no such protection, mere humans, completely suscep-tible to the fire’s heat and smoke. They were both doomed unless they could get around this man.
Mulder tripped and fell to one knee in the hot broken glass; he hauled himself up again without an outcry. Scully still had her handgun, but she knew that would offer no real threat against Dorman. He would laugh off her bullets, the way he had ignored the crossfire from the dark-suited men . . . the way he even now didn’t seem troubled by the fire that raged around them.
“Jody, come to me,” Dorman said, plodding closer. His skin roiled and rippled, glistening with slime that oozed from his every pore.
Jody staggered back toward Scully. She could see burns on his skin, scratches and bleeding cuts where debris had showered him in the explosion, and she wondered briefly why the small injuries weren’t magi-cally healing as his gunshot wound had. Was something wrong with his nanocritters? Had they given up, or shut down somehow?
Scully knew she couldn’t protect the boy. Dorman lunged closer, reaching out to him with a flame-covered hand.
And then from a wall of burning wreckage to one side, where the light and the smoke made visibility impossible, the black Labrador howled and launched himself at the target.
Dorman spun about, his head twisting and swiveling. His broken, bent hands rose up, thrashing.
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His tentacles and tumors quivered like a basket of snakes. The dog, a black-furred bulldozer, knocked Dorman backward.
“Vader!” Jody screamed.
The dog drove Dorman staggering into the flames, where bright light and curling fire rose up through ever-growing gaps in the floor, as if the pit of hell itself lay beneath the support platform.
Dorman yelped, and his tentacles wrapped around the dog. The black Lab’s fur caught on fire in patches, but Vader didn’t seem to notice. Immune to the plague Dorman carried, the dog snapped his jaws, digging his fangs deep into the soft flowing flesh of the nanotech-infected man.
Dorman wrestled with the heavy animal and both tumbled to the creaking, splintering floorboards. Dorman’s left foot crashed through one of the flame-filled holes.
He cried out. His tentacles writhed. The dog bit ferociously at his face.
Then the floor collapsed in an avalanche of flam-ing debris. Sparks and smoke flew upward like a land-mine explosion. With a howl and a scream, both Dorman and Vader fell into the seething basement.
Jody wailed and made as if to run after his dog, but Scully grabbed him fiercely by the arms. She dragged the boy back toward the opening, and safety.
Coughing, Mulder followed, stumbling after her.
The flames roared higher, and more girders collapsed. Another concrete wall toppled into shards, then an entire section of the floor fell in, nearly dragging them with it.
They reached the threshold of the collapsing building, and Scully could think of nothing more than to push herself out into the fresh air, into the blessed relief. Safe from the fire.
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as they fought their way from the flames and the wreckage. Her eyes burned, so filled with tears that she could barely see. Scully held the despairing boy, wrapping her arms around him. Mulder touched her shoulder, getting her attention as they stumbled away from the flames.
She looked up to see a group of men waiting for them, staring coldly. The survivors of Lentz’s team held their automatic weapons high and pointed at them.