Skin : the X-files (9 page)

Friedler Medical Arts Building on the Columbia Medical School campus. He didn’t need to look at his watch to know it was close to five in the morning; his muscles had that strange, wiry feeling that meant he was nearing twenty-four hours without sleep. He realized that he and Scully couldn’t keep going like this for much longer. But until Perry Stanton was taken into custody, they were in a fierce race with the mysteries of the case.

Just minutes ago, Scully had phoned him with the lat-est news from Detective Barrett’s manhunt. Stanton had wrecked a taxicab somewhere in northern Brooklyn, and the driver had narrowly escaped with his life. The search was now focused on a five-block area, and Barrett was cer-81

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tain they would find Stanton within the next few hours.

Which meant it was all the more important for Mulder and Scully to keep barreling ahead. They had split up to reach the two med students as quickly as possible. Even so, Mulder prayed they would be quick enough. If Scully’s theory was right, there was a dangerous, diseased man still raging through the streets of New York.

And if Mulder was right—a disease didn’t begin to explain the phenomenon they were chasing:
something
that could transform a quiet, gentle professor into a vicious
killer, with inhuman strength.

It took Mulder a few minutes to reach the anatomy lab on the third floor of the vast stone building. He was out of breath as he exited the marble stairwell, and he paused for a moment by the double doors that led into the lab, leaning against the wall. He could see the cavernous room through a small circular window in the center of one of the doors. The room was close to fifty yards deep, rectangular, and contained two parallel rows of waist-high steel tables. Mulder could vaguely make out the bulky shapes on the tables; the bodies were wrapped in opaque plastic bags, and there were bright red plastic organ trays on carts attached to the stainless steel blood and fluid gutters that ran the length of each table.

Mulder swallowed back a gust of nausea as he pressed his palm against one of the double doors. It was more physiological than mental; he had seen many dead bodies in his career, and he was not squeamish by nature.

But the clinical nature of the anatomy lab triggered 82

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something primitive inside of him. Here, the human body was nothing more than meat. There was no room for philosophies of life, soul, or even God. Here, humanity was defined by bright red plastic organ trays and stainless steel fluid gutters.

He pushed the door inward and stepped inside the long laboratory. The strong scent of formaldehyde filled his nostrils, and he fought the urge to gag. His gaze roamed over the cadaver tables, jumping from bag to bag. Then he caught sight of his quarry, standing alone near the back of the room, bent over an open body bag.

From that distance, Michael Lifton appeared to be tall, gangly, with short reddish hair and youthful features. He was wearing crimson sweatpants and a gray athletic T-shirt beneath a white lab coat. There was a thick book open on the cart at the head of the dissecting table, and Lifton seemed completely entranced by the open body in front of him. He didn’t look up until Mulder was a few feet away, and when he did his eyes seemed glazed, far away. His eyelids drooped unnaturally low, and there was a slight tremble in his upper lip.
Was he ill? Or simply
tired?
Lifton coughed, as the color returned to his cheeks.

“Excuse me, I didn’t hear you come in. Can I help you?” Mulder shifted his gaze from Lifton’s face to his bloodied gloves and the scalpel balanced between his thumb and forefinger. “Hope I’m not interrupting. I’m Agent Fox Mulder from the FBI. I tried your dorm room, but there was no one home. Your next-door neighbor told me I could find you here.” 83

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Lifton didn’t move for a full second. Then he carefully set the scalpel down next to the open book. Mulder read the large-print heading that stretched across the two open pages: PARTIAL BOWEL RESECTION. His gaze slid to the open lower abdomen on the dissecting table. It looked like a bag overflowing with black snakes.

Mulder quickly moved his eyes back to the young man’s face.

“The FBI?” Lifton asked, his eyes wide. “Am I in some sort of trouble?”

Lifton coughed again, and the sound was coarse, vaguely pneumatic. Mulder saw beads of sweat running down the sides of the kid’s face. It looked like he was running a fever. “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Lifton?”

“Call me Mike. I’ve got a bit of a cold. And I’ve been working in here most of the night; the formaldehyde screws with my allergies. What is this about?” Lifton’s hands were trembling, and Mulder could not tell if it was nervousness, or another sign of fever. He thought about Scully’s microbe theory. Any minute, she would be arriving at Josh Kemper’s apartment; would he be suffering from the same flulike symptoms as the kid in front of Mulder? Were the symptoms just the beginning of something worse? “I need to speak to you about a skin harvest you and Josh Kemper performed last Friday night.”

Lifton took a tiny step back from the dissecting table, his hands falling to his sides. “Did we do something wrong?”

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Mulder could tell from Lifton’s tone that he was not as surprised by the idea as Mulder would have suspected.

“Well, we think you and Josh might have harvested skin from the wrong body.”

Lifton closed his eyes, his cheeks pale. “I knew it. I thought something was wrong. But Josh insisted. He said Eckleman probably blew the tags. He said the body was close enough to the chart. Blond hair, blue eyes, no outward trauma.”

“So what made you suspect it was the wrong body?” Lifton sighed, using his forearm to wipe the sweat off of his forehead. “First, there was the tattoo. A dragon, on his right arm. And then there was the strange rash.” Mulder’s instincts perked up. He remembered what Bernstein had told him about the rash on Stanton’s neck.

“What sort of rash?”

Lifton turned his head to the side. He pointed to a clear area of skin, right below his hairline. “Here, on the nape of his neck. A circular eruption, thousands of tiny red dots. Josh told me it was nothing—and it probably was. But if the guy had been in the ICU, it would have been in the chart. A straight shot from the ER, maybe it would have been missed. But not in the ICU.” Mulder nodded. The John Doe had gone straight from the ER to the morgue. Derrick Kaplan had spent time in the ICU before he died. Mike Lifton was a smart kid—

but he had allowed himself to be bullied into performing the harvest, even though he had suspected it was the wrong body.

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“After you finished the harvest,” Mulder continued,

“what did you do with the body?” Lifton looked at him. “What do you mean? We returned it to the morgue, of course.”

“To the same locker?”

“Yes. Fifty something. Fifty-two, or fifty-four. I’ve usually got a good head for numbers, but I’ve been practicing in here nearly every night this week. Lack of sleep, you know. Screws with everything.” Mulder nodded. He hoped it was just lack of sleep that was affecting Mike Lifton. But he had to cover the bases—to prove or disprove Scully’s theory. “We need to get you checked up by a doctor right away. There might be a chance that you caught something from the John Doe.”

Lifton’s face turned even paler. “What do you mean?

Did he die from some sort of infectious disease?”

“We’re not sure. That’s why we need you to get checked out.”

Lifton’s entire body seemed to sag as he thought about what Mulder was saying. Then Mulder noticed another tremor move through Lifton’s upper lip, followed by a heavy cough. “I think we should get you to an ER right away. Just to be sure.”

He didn’t know whether or not it was evidence of Scully’s theory—but suddenly, he didn’t like the way Mike Lifton looked. It seemed as though Lifton’s condition was deteriorating as he watched. As the student hastily repacked the open cadaver with trembling hands, 86

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Mulder hoped that Scully had gotten to the other med student in time.

“Mr. Kemper! Mr. Josh Kemper!” Scully’s voice reverberated off the heavy apartment door. “This is Agent Dana Scully of the FBI! The building superintendent is here with me, and if you don’t answer the door, I’m coming inside!”

Scully could feel her heart pounding as she waited for a response. She glanced at the short, stocky man in the untucked gray T-shirt standing next to her, and nodded.

Mitch Butler began fumbling through his oversize ring of apartment keys. Scully cursed to herself as she watched the super’s stubby fingers struggling to find the correct one.
This was taking too long.

Scully had called for an ambulance when she had first arrived at the Columbia-owned apartment building and found Kemper unresponsive to her attempts to get inside his room, but she knew it would be another few minutes before the paramedics would arrive. She had already lost valuable time rousing the grubby superintendent out of his apartment on the first floor; the trip upstairs to the fourth floor had been insufferably long.

“Here it is,” Butler finally exclaimed, holding up a copper-colored key. “Apartment four-twelve.” Scully took the key from him and went to work on the lock. The door came open, and she rushed inside. “Mr.

Kemper? Josh?”

The living room was small and almost devoid of fur-87

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niture. There was a gray couch in one corner, facing a small television sitting on top of a cardboard box. A picture of two dogs wearing tuxedos took up most of the far wall, and dirty laundry invaded every inch of bare floor.

Scully was reminded of her own med-school days—

when even an hour for laundry would have been a gift from heaven. She had been a kid, like Josh Kemper—just trying to survive.

“How many rooms?” she shouted back toward the super, who was still standing in the entrance, breathing hard from the four flights of stairs.

“Just this one, the kitchen, and the bedroom. Through that door.”

Scully headed for the open doorway on the other side of the living room. She passed through a small hallway and found herself in a tiny kitchen: porcelain-tiled floor, chipped plaster hanging from the walls, a light fixture that looked like it was older than the electricity that powered it. There was an open container of orange juice on a small wooden table in front of the refrigerator.
Otherwise,
no signs of life
. Scully rushed across the kitchen and through another open doorway.

She nearly tripped on a pile of bedding, catching her balance against a large wooden dresser. There was a bare mattress in the middle of the room, covered with medical texts and science magazines.
But still no sign of Kemper.

“The bathroom,” she shouted back over her shoulder.

“Where is the bathroom?”

“Off the bedroom.”

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Scully cursed, her eyes wildly searching the cramped space—then she saw the closed door, directly on the other side of the dresser, partially obscured by a sea of hanging colored beads. She shoved the beads aside and yanked the door open.

There he was. Shirtless, lying facedown on the floor, one arm crooked around the base of the toilet, the other twisted strangely behind his back. Scully dropped to her knees and put her hand against the side of his neck. No pulse. His skin felt warm to the touch, but it had a waxy appearance and had turned a blue-gray color. No doubt about it—Josh Kemper was dead. She gently unhooked his right arm from around the base of the toilet, noting the lack of rigor mortis in his joints. She used her weight to roll him over.

His eyes and mouth were open, an anguished expression frozen on his boyish face. His face and bare chest were slightly purple where the blood had pooled beneath his skin. Scully reached forward and pushed an errant lock of blond hair out of the way, then pressed her index finger against Kemper’s cheek. The pressure caused a slight blanching of the area beneath her finger-tip. When she moved her hand away, the discoloration returned.
Early nonfixed lividity.
That meant he had been dead less than four hours—perhaps three, but no less than two. From the anguished look on his face and the awkward positioning of his body, Scully guessed he had convulsed or stroked out. But there were no obvious wounds to his head or face, so it wasn’t the fall that had 89

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killed him. It had been something else—something inside his body.

Scully had a sudden thought and tilted Kemper’s head to the side. But the back of his neck looked clear. No red dots, no circular rash. Still, that didn’t mean it wasn’t the same disease that had sent Stanton into a violent fit.

She sighed, rising to her feet. She turned to the sink and turned the water faucet as hot as it would go. Then she grabbed a bar of soap and began working on her hands. She knew she had taken a risk by coming into the room at all—but she doubted it was anything airborne or even contagious to the touch. Airborne viruses deadly enough to kill a man Kemper’s age were extremely rare—and if the John Doe had been an airborne carrier, there would have been many more victims by now. That meant it was probably something blood-borne. Those at risk included the interns who worked on him, the two med students, perhaps the paramedics who had brought him in, and Bernstein’s surgical team at Jamaica Hospital.

“Ms. Scully?” The super’s hack crept at her from somewhere in the bedroom. “Is everything all right in there?”

“Mr. Butler,” Scully responded, “I need you to go downstairs and wait for the ambulance. I’ll join you in a moment.”

Scully listened as Butler’s plodding footsteps trickled away. Then she finished washing her hands and pulled her cellular phone out of her breast pocket. Her shoul-90

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ders sagged as she dialed Mulder’s number. He answered on the second ring.

“Mulder, where are you?”

His voice sounded tinny through the phone’s ear-piece. “The ER at Columbia Medical School.” Scully glanced at the body on the bathroom floor. She could hear sirens in the distance, but she wasn’t sure if it was through the phone or through the thin apartment walls. “I take it you found Mike Lifton?”