Skin : the X-files (14 page)

He pressed his mouth over Stanton’s open lips and exhaled, inflating the man’s chest. Scully continued the cardiac compressions, while Barrett stood watching. The minutes passed in silence, Mulder and Scully working together to bring the man back.

Finally, Scully stopped, leaning back from the body.

Her red hair was damp with effort. “He’s gone, Mulder. I don’t understand. He didn’t have a heart condition. He was strong enough to kill an officer. How could a stun gun have done this to him?”

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Mulder didn’t have an answer. As voices drifted into the corridor from out in the tunnel, a strange thought struck him. Leary had fired a total of three shots at Stanton—and hadn’t slowed him down. Scully had hit him once with the electric stun gun, and he had died.

Similarly, the John Doe had quite possibly fallen out of a moving van at seventy miles per hour, and had not received a scratch. Then two interns had shocked him with a defibrillator—
and he had died on the stretcher
.

“Scully,” he started—but then stopped himself as a team of paramedics rushed a portable stretcher into the corridor. They were followed by a handful of uniformed officers. Barrett started shouting orders, and the paramedics rushed to the dead officer’s side. Then they saw Stanton, and shouted for a second stretcher.

Mulder and Scully stepped out of the way as more paramedics moved into the corridor and lifted Stanton onto another stretcher. Scully watched with determined eyes. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this, Mulder. I’m going to perform the autopsy myself—and find out what really killed him.”

Mulder felt the same level of determination move through him. Stanton was dead, but the case was far from over. Mulder was still convinced—Perry Stanton may have killed a nurse and a police officer, but he was not a murderer. He was a victim.

Mulder had seen it in his anguished eyes.

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X The digitized view screen flickered, then changed to a dull green color. Scully leaned back in the leather office chair, her arms stretched out in front of her. A radiology tech in a white lab coat hovered over her shoulder, his warm breath nipping at her ear-lobe. “Just another few seconds.” Scully tapped the edge of the keyboard beneath the screen, anticipation rising through her tense muscles. She pictured Stanton’s body engulfed by the enormous, cylindrical MRI machine two rooms away. Mulder had remained with the body while she had accompanied the tech to the viewing room. They would regroup at the pathology lab downstairs, where they would be joined by Barrett and the investigator from the CDC.

“You want print copies as well, correct?” the tech 136

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asked, interrupting her thoughts. Scully nodded, and the tech hit a sequence of keys on a color laser printer next to the viewing screen. The young man was short and had thick, plastic-rimmed glasses. He was obviously enjoying her company—and the opportunity to show off his expertise with the MRI machine.

The MRI scan was not normal autopsy procedure, but Scully had decided to take every extra measure possible to understand what had happened to Perry Stanton. In truth, she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt at Stanton’s sudden death. She knew it was not really her fault—but she
had
fired the stun gun. At the very least, she needed to know why his body had so fatally overre-acted.

“Here we go,” the tech coughed, pointing at the screen. The printer began to hum just as the screen flickered again, and suddenly the dull green display was replaced by a shifting sea of gray. The gray conformed roughly to the shape of a human skull, representing a vertical cross section taken through the direct center of Perry Stanton’s brain.

It took Scully less than a second to realize that all of her previous assumptions had to be reevaluated. Even without the autopsy, she knew for a fact that Stanton had not died from anything related to the encephalitis virus.

“This can’t be right.”

The tech glanced at the screen, then turned to the printer and pulled out a stack of pages. The pages showed the same image, multiplied four times at slightly 137

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different angles. “This is the sequence you ordered. The machine’s been in use all morning—and nobody’s had a complaint.”

Scully took the pictures from him, looking them over.

She had never seen anything like it before. There was no edema, none of the cerebral swelling she would have expected from encephalitis lethargica—but Stanton’s brain was anything but normal. She reached forward with a finger and traced a large, dark gray spot near the center of the picture. It was the hypothalamus, the gland that regulated the nervous system—but it was enormous, nearly three times as large as normal. Surrounding the engorged gland were half a dozen strange polyp-type growths, arranged in a rough semicircle. In all her time spent in pathology labs, she had never seen such a manifestation.

She rose quickly from the leather chair, the pictures tucked under her right arm. She wanted to get to that autopsy room as soon as possible. She watched as the tech hit a few computer keys, sending the viewing screen back to its original green. “We’ll keep the pictures on file for as long as you’d like. Just ask for me if you need a second look.”

The young man winked from behind his thick glasses, but Scully was already moving out into the radiology wing. Her thoughts were three floors away, in a basement lab filled with plastic organ trays and steel fluid gutters.

*

*

*

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Scully never made it to the autopsy room. She had taken three steps out of the elevator when she heard Mulder’s angry voice echoing through the cinder-block pathology ward.

She found her partner blockaded in the long central hallway that ran down the center of the ward by three red-faced men wearing white lab coats. All of the coats had name tags, with tiny red seals that Scully recognized from her previous dealings with the CDC. Mulder’s focus was the tallest man, a mid-fifties African-American with thick eyelids and speckled gray hair. The man had his arms crossed against his chest, a disdainful look in his eyes. His name tag identified him as Dr. Basil Georgian, a senior infectious disease investigator. Scully caught the tail end of Mulder’s heated interchange as she arrived at his side.

“This isn’t merely an infectious disease scare.” Mulder was near-shouting. “It’s an FBI investigation. You don’t have automatic priority or jurisdiction.” Georgian shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong.

We’ve got two reported cases of encephalitis lethargica.

That’s all the jurisdiction we need. Your murderer is dead, Agent Mulder. He’s not going to go anywhere. Our virus is still very much alive—at least in one coma victim. We’ve got to make sure that’s where it stays contained.”

Mulder turned to Scully. “These guys seem to think they’re going to run off with our body.” Scully looked at Georgian. Georgian shrugged. “Our 139

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superiors in Atlanta have already spoken to your superiors in Washington. Everyone agrees that it’s more appro-priate for us to handle the autopsy in our biocontainment lab in Hoboken—where the microbe can be properly studied, handled, and contained. We’ll send you the reports when we’re finished. Lethargica doesn’t come around often, and we intend to figure out what it’s doing in New York.”

Without another word, Georgian spun on his heels and headed down the hallway, flanked by his two associates. Scully could see Stanton’s stretcher being wheeled through a pair of double doors another ten yards beyond them—most likely to an underground garage, where an ambulance was waiting. Mulder started after them—but she stopped him with an outstretched hand. “They aren’t going to change their minds. And they do have priority.

From an official standpoint, our investigation is finished.

Our perp is in custody—so to speak.” Mulder sighed, shaking his head. “
They’ll send us their
report?
That’s ridiculous. This is our case.”

“But the infectious disease makes it their concern.

Mulder, I don’t think we have much choice.”

“So we just let it go?”

Scully didn’t like the idea any more than he did. But they had to let the CDC scientists do their job. In the meantime—Scully still had the MRI scans. She pulled them out from under her arm and showed one of the views to Mulder. “While we’re waiting for their autopsy report, we still have a lead to work with. This is one of 140

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the strangest MRIs I’ve ever seen. You see these polyps surrounding the hypothalamus?”

Mulder squinted, following her finger. To an un-trained observer, the idiosyncrasy was fairly obtuse—but to Scully it was like a massive neon sign. “Given Stanton’s sudden onset of psychosis, my guess is these polyps might have something to do with excess dopamine production. That would involve the hypothalamus—and explain the violence and disorientation.”

“Dopamine,” Mulder repeated. “That’s a neurotransmitter, right? A chemical used by the nervous system to transmit information?”

Scully nodded. She wouldn’t know for sure until she saw the CDC autopsy report, but it seemed a viable possibility. Still, it wasn’t an explanation. “I’d like to run these pictures through the hospital’s Medline system, see if anything like this has been reported before.” Mulder was still looking longingly in the direction of Stanton’s body. “Scully, how many times have we worked with the CDC before?”

Scully raised an eyebrow. “A half dozen. Maybe more.

Why?”

Mulder shrugged. “First the John Doe. Now Perry Stanton. It seems that people are going to great lengths to keep us from getting our hands on anyone involved in that skin transplant.”

Scully resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Mulder, I called the CDC about the lethargica—not the other way around.”

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Mulder gestured toward the MRI scans. “Does that look like lethargica?”

Scully paused. “The truth is, I have no idea what this is. That’s why we need to find out if it’s ever happened before.”

Ten minutes later, Scully and Mulder huddled together in the corner of a cramped administrative office located one floor above the pathology ward. They had borrowed the office from a human-resources manager, bypassing any questions or possible red tape with a flick of their federal IDs. The office was sparse, containing little more than a desk, a few chairs, and an IBM workstation. In other words, it was a no-frills window into cyberspace.

The computer whirred as the inboard modem connected the two agents to the nationwide medical data base located in Washington, DC. Scully was closest to the screen, and her face glowed a techno blue as she maneuvered a plastic track ball through a half dozen menus loaded with options and navigational commands. Mulder had already placed one of the MRI pictures into the scanner next to the oversize processor, and in a few minutes they would begin to search the hundred million stored files for any possible match.

“This search should cover any MRIs, CAT scans, or skull X rays with similar manifestations,” Scully said.

“The Medline system is linked to every hospital in the country, and many throughout the world. If there’s an associated syndrome, we’ll surely find something—” 142

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She paused, as the screen began to change. Suddenly, her eyes widened. Mulder read the notice at the top of the file that had suddenly appeared. “One match. New York Hospital, 1984.”

Scully immediately realized the significance of the notice. As she skimmed the first paragraph of the file, her shock grew. The MRI scan had matched a pair of CAT

scans taken on two inmates of Rikers Island in New York, shortly before their deaths. Both inmates had been part of some sort of volunteer experimental study performed in the early eighties. Even more stunning, according to the file, the study was conducted under the auspices of a fledgling biotech company located just outside Manhattan. Scully immediately recognized the company’s name.

“Fibrol International,” Mulder stated, his voice characteristically calm. “The same company that manufac-tures the red powder I found at the accident scene.” Scully didn’t know what to say. She scrolled further down the file and found the two CAT scans that had heralded the match. In both images, she saw the same unmistakable pattern of polyps surrounding an enlarged hypothalamus. At the bottom of the file she found a link to an attached file. She hit the link, and the CAT scans were replaced by a single page of official-looking text.

“It’s a prosecutorial assessment,” she said, reading the heading. “There was a criminal investigation into the man behind the experimentation—Fibrol’s founder and CEO, Emile Paladin. But it looks as though it never came 143

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to trial. According to this, the experiment had been conducted with full permission from the inmates. There’s no explanation of the cause of death—just that it was accidental.”

“Look at this,” Mulder said, tapping a paragraph lower down in the assessment. There was a brief description of the nature of the experiment. “Skin transplantation, Scully. The experiment had to do with a radical new method of skin transplantation.” Scully rubbed her scalp with her fingers. It was hard to believe. Perry Stanton’s brain had been ravaged by the same polyps that had killed the two inmates. But Stanton had not been the subject of an experimental transplantation.

“The red powder,” Mulder continued. “It’s the link—

and Fibrol is the common denominator. We’ve got to find this Emile Paladin.”

“This happened fifteen years ago,” Scully responded.

“And Perry Stanton wasn’t part of any radical experiment.”

“Not directly. But the John Doe might have been. And Stanton’s wearing his skin.”

Scully shook her head. What Mulder was implying was extremely unlikely. What sort of mechanism could transfer such a fatal cerebral reaction—through nothing more than a slab of harvested skin? It didn’t make medical sense.

Still, she didn’t know what to make of the connection to Fibrol. They needed to find out more about the experi-144