Skin

by Ben Mezrich

  He glanced back at her. “It would take a pretty big microbe to crush a nurse’s skull.”

  As Scully followed Mulder out into the hallway, she failed to notice the tall, angled man watching from the now-deserted operating room on the other side of the viewing windows. The man was dressed in a blue orderly uniform, most of his young face obscured by a sterile white surgical mask. His skin was dark and vaguely Asiatic, his black hair cropped tight beneath a pink antiseptic cap.

  His narrow eyes followed the two agents until they disappeared from view. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny cellular phone. He dialed quickly, his long fingers flickering over the numbered keys. A few seconds later, he began to speak in a low, nasal voice. The words were foreign, the tone rising and falling as the syllables chased one another through the thin material of the young man’s surgical mask. There was a brief pause, then a deep voice responded from somewhere far away. The young man nodded, slipping the phone back into his pocket.

  An anticipatory tremor moved through his shoulders. Then he grinned, his high, brown cheeks pulling at his mask. For him, the task ahead was more than an act of loyalty, or of duty—it was an act of nearly erotic pleasure.

  His fingers curled together as he followed the two FBI agents out into the hospital hallway.

  4

  Forty minutes later, Mulder shivered against a sudden blast of refrigerated air as he pursued the ample ME’s assistant into the cold-storage room lodged deep in the basement of New York Hospital. It had been a relatively easy task to trace the skin graft back across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, but in the process he and Scully had run into the first sign that their investigation was not going to take a simple route—and at the same time, the first strike against Scully’s growing belief that the case would soon be explained by a conventional medical query. As Mulder had predicted, Stanton’s transformation would not be solved through a quick trip to the New York Fire Department Skin Bank.

  “Missing,” Scully had said, hanging up the phone as she and Mulder had exited through the Jamaica Hospital ER. “They’re unable to locate the six trays of harvested skin from which Stanton’s transplant was taken.”

  The administrator of the skin bank had assured Scully that the FBI would be notified the minute the missing trays had been located. He had also insisted that this was not a matter for alarm; the grossly understaffed and underfunded skin bank dealt with hundreds of pounds of skin on a weekly basis, and mistakes like this were not uncommon. And although he hadn’t been able to find the harvested skin, the administrator had been able to give Scully the name and location of the donor corpse: Derrick Kaplan, a current inhabitant of the New York Hospital morgue.

  While Scully had accepted the administrator’s comments at face value, Mulder had felt his own suspicions rising. He didn’t believe Stanton’s behavior could be explained by any known microbe—and the missing skin seemed like too much of a coincidence. Still, he and Scully had been left with a lead to follow. While the NYPD continued their search for Perry Stanton, he and Scully would follow the skin graft back to its source.

  After Scully had hung up on the skin bank, she and Mulder headed directly to New York Hospital. After a short stop at the front desk, they had located the ME’s assistant half-asleep in his office two elevator stops below the ER. Short, unkempt, with curly blond hair and thick lips, Leif Eckleman was exactly the type of man Mulder had expected to find working the basement warren of a hospital morgue. Likewise, Mulder hadn’t been surprised to see the neck of a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s sticking out of the open top drawer of the man’s cluttered desk; alcohol went with the territory. Mulder tried not to pass any judgments.

  “The two kids from the med school got here late Friday night,” Eckleman mumbled, as he crossed the rectangular room to a set of filing cabinets standing flush against a cinder-block wall. His words were slightly slurred, but Mulder couldn’t tell whether it was the alcohol or the fact that he had just been awakened from a deep sleep. “Josh Kemper, and a buddy of his—Mike, I think his name was. Used OR Six, upstairs in the surgical ward. Cleaned it up pretty good afterward. No complaints from the surgeons.”

  Eckleman pulled open one of the cabinets and began to search through the manila folders inside. Mulder watched Scully amble across the center of the room, her low heels clicking against the tiled floor. Her gaze was pinned to the wall of body drawers that stretched the entire length of the room. Mulder counted at least sixty—and he knew that this was only one of eight similar cold-storage rooms that made up the hospital’s morgue. Even so, New York was a big city; hard to find an apartment, and probably equally hard to find a drawer.

  “Here it is,” Eckleman finally said, lifting a folder out of the cabinet. “Mike Lifton, that was the other kid’s name. Both were in their third year at Columbia Med. They signed for your donor at three-fifteen A.M. Derrick Kaplan—Caucasian, mid-thirties, blond hair, blue eyes. Locker fifty-two.”

  Mulder was already moving toward the wall of drawers. Scully turned to Eckleman as Mulder scanned the numbered labels. “May I take a look at the file?”

  Eckleman shrugged, handing her the folder. “Not much to see. Kaplan came into the ER complaining of chest pains, then died in the ICU of an aortic dissection. Had a donor card in his wallet. The skin boys got to him first, because the van from the eye bank got stuck in the mess on the FDR Drive. The big accident, you know. Collected seven bodies that same night, but only Kaplan had the vulture card.”

  “The vulture card?” Mulder heard Scully ask, as he finally located the steel drawer with the number fifty-two written in black Magic Marker across its cardboard label. “Is that what you call it?”

  “You work down here, you get to be fairly morbid. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with vultures. Damned efficient birds—they don’t let anything go to waste. Not so different from the harvest teams, when you think about it.”

  Mulder wasn’t sure he wanted to think about it. He grasped the handle beneath the numbered label and gave it a gentle yank. The drawer rolled outward with a mild, metallic groan. Mulder paused for a brief moment, then glanced at Scully. She was engrossed in Kaplan’s folder. Mulder cleared his throat.

  Scully looked up. Mulder pointed, and Scully’s face momentarily blanched. The locker was empty. She quickly turned toward the ME’s assistant. “Mr. Eckleman?”

  Eckleman rubbed the back of his hand against his thick lips. Then he laughed, nervously. “Whoops. That’s not good. You sure that’s number fifty-two?”

  Mulder rechecked the label. “Is there any chance the body was moved?”

  Eckleman quickly crossed back to the file cabinet. “Shouldn’t have been. But sometimes they get switched around. Especially on the busy nights. And Friday was a busy night. Seven bodies, like I said. And there’s always a chance the kids put the body back in the wrong drawer.”

  He paused as he pulled a handful of files out of the cabinet. He began reading to himself, and Mulder crossed back to Scully, who was still looking through Kaplan’s chart. “Anything significant, Scully?”

  Scully shook her head. “Nothing noticeably viral. But we need the body to know for sure. Or, at the very least, a sample of his skin.”

  Mulder felt his adrenaline rising. First the missing trays at the skin bank—now the missing body. Then again, he didn’t want to get ahead of himself. He glanced at the flustered, semidrunk ME’s assistant; certainly, the man could have gotten the drawers mixed up.

  “I’ll check the other six that came in that night, and all of the empties. Odds are, we’ll find our boy.” Eckleman tucked the files under his right arm and hurried back to the storage wall. He began pulling open the drawers, humming nervously to himself as he worked. Mulder could tell the man was embarrassed. Perhaps this sort of thing had happened before. “Locker fifty-three is all right. Angela Dotter, one of the victims from the accident. Got a steering wheel right through her rib cage. Fifty-four and fifty-five look good, too. And her
e’s another from the accident. Kid can’t be more than twenty…”

  Eckleman paused midsentence as the next drawer slid to a stop by his knees. He began mumbling, half to himself. The stack of files slipped out from under his arm, the pages fanning out as they hit the floor. “What the hell? This can’t be right.”

  He reached forward, and the sound of a zipper reverberated through the room. Mulder moved forward as Eckleman hovered over the toe tag. “Derrick Kaplan. It’s him. But this doesn’t make any sense.”

  Mulder looked over the man’s shoulder. The corpse was staring straight up, blue eyes wide-open. Mulder heard Scully exhale as she joined him next to the drawer. It was immediately obvious what was wrong with the body.

  Derrick Kaplan wasn’t missing any skin.

  “Damn it,” Eckleman said, again rubbing at his watery lips. “The little vultures must have skinned the wrong body.”

  “The wrong body?” Mulder asked.

  Eckleman didn’t respond. Instead, he bent down and began pulling open the bottom row of steel drawers: the empties. Each time he stared into another blank box, he cursed, each profanity more colorful and obscene than the last. “Can’t blame this on me. No way can they blame this one on me. I didn’t skin anybody. I wasn’t even in here—”

  Eckleman stopped, as he suddenly realized that he had reached the last drawer. “Well, son of a bitch. Unless they double-stacked it in one of the other drawers, it’s not here.”

  Mulder looked at the row of open, empty drawers. He didn’t know whether to be frustrated or intrigued. “Can we at least figure out which body is missing?”

  “Probably the one that was originally slated for this drawer,” Scully answered, pointing at Derrick Kaplan’s corpse. “Didn’t you say this was supposed to contain one of the seven brought in that same Friday night?”

  Eckleman nodded, returning to the stack of folders he had dropped on the floor. His stubby fingers were trembling by the time he found the correct file. “A John Doe. Brought into the ER from the scene of the big car accident I told you about. Also blond, blue eyes—but mid-to early twenties. With a dragon tattoo on his right shoulder.”

  “Was the John Doe a trauma victim?” Scully asked. “Did he die from injuries sustained in the accident?”

  There was a pause as Eckleman read through the file. Then he shook his head. “Actually, no. There were no signs of external injuries. The two interns who worked on him didn’t know what killed him. He was scheduled for an autopsy at eight tomorrow morning.”

  Mulder and Scully exchanged looks. A missing body, an autopsy less than five hours away. The trail was getting more circuitous—and, despite their efforts, they still hadn’t found an ounce of the original skin.

  “I better go report this,” Eckleman grumbled, heading toward the door. “Administrator Cavanaugh is going to have my ass for dinner. But I tell you, it isn’t my fault. I didn’t skin the wrong damn body.”

  Mulder watched him trudge out of the cold-storage room. Then he turned back toward Scully. She was looking through the John Doe’s file. “These are big institutions we’re dealing with—and it’s very late at night. At two in the morning, things get lost. At eight in the morning, they tend to turn up. In the meantime, we have to speak to those med students. If something was transmitted from this John Doe to Perry Stanton—they’re the obvious link.”

  With the John Doe’s body missing and Perry Stanton still at large, the two med students were the only link. Mulder felt his pulse quicken as he glanced back at the empty storage drawer. Somehow, he found the steel rectangle more foreboding without a corpse inside. It was like digging in a graveyard and finding an empty coffin.

  Despite Scully’s words, Mulder did not believe the missing corpse was a coincidence. He was certain the John Doe’s skin held the key to the tragedy in the recovery room. And he would not accept any explanation that did not expose what had really happened to Perry Stanton—no matter how rational it seemed.

  5

  The broken glass glittered like an emerald carpet in the triangle of light, jagged green shards spread out across the black asphalt in the shape of a bloated July moon. Perry Stanton stood beneath a streetlamp at the edge of the curb, his thin shoulders heaving under his torn hospital smock. He could see bottle necks sticking out of the glass like phallic icebergs, the trace of an alcoholic’s rage or a fraternity party that had overflowed into the dark Brooklyn streets. Stanton’s mind whirled as the shards grew in his eyes, huge green thorns taunting him, daring him, begging him forward.

  Suddenly, his mouth opened and a dull moan escaped into the night air. His bare feet curled inward against the sidewalk, and his spine arched back. The muscles in his thighs contracted, and he threw himself forward, diving headlong into the street. His body crashed down into the glass, and he rolled back and forth against the shards, his arms flailing wildly at his sides.

  He could hear the hospital smock tearing, the glass crunching under his weight. But he felt no relief. The glass did nothing to stop the horrible itching. The shards should have ripped through his skin as easily as it ripped his thin smock—but the terrible crawling continued unabated. It felt as though every inch of his body was infested with tiny, hungry maggots. It was so bad he couldn’t keep a single thought in his head, so bad that every command from his brain seemed to echo a thousand times before it found his muscles.

  Lying flat on his back in the broken glass, he slammed his palms over his eyes and an anguished wail bellowed through his lungs. What the hell was going on? What the hell was wrong with him?

  He felt something warm and wet against his closed eyelids, and he quickly pulled his hands away. His eyes opened, and he stared at his blooded palms. He quickly crawled to his knees, more tears burning at his eyes.

  Even through the intense itching, he could still remember the woman’s head between his palms. He could still hear the bones in her skull crunching as he had squeezed. He could still see her eyes bulging forward, the blood spouting out of her ears, her cheeks collapsing into her mouth—he could still feel her die between his palms. Between his palms.

  And worst of all—he could still feel the rage emanating through his body. The rage that had overwhelmed his thoughts and his brain and made him leap up out of the hospital bed. The fierce anger that had started somewhere in the itching: an unbelievable heat, burning downward through his flesh. It had felt as if his veins and arteries had caught fire, his insides boiling under the intense flame.

  Then the fiery rage had entered his skull and everything had gone white. He had seen the nurse leaning over him, and it was like looking through someone else’s eyes. The rage had taken over, and he had grabbed her head in his hands.

  After that, it had all happened so fast. The itching, burning rage had made him destroy everything within reach. And then a single thought had twisted through the agony—escape.

  His head jerked back and forth as new tremors spiraled through his body. He shook the broken glass out of his smock as he staggered to his feet. Escape. Somewhere in what was left of his mind, he knew the command was not his own. It also came from somewhere in the horrible itching. Somewhere in his skin.

  He had no choice but to obey. When he resisted, the itching only grew worse. He stumbled forward, his bare feet crunching against the glass. He wasn’t sure where he was—but he knew he wasn’t far ahead of the sirens or the shouts. He couldn’t let them catch him. He knew what the itching and the rage would make him do if they caught him. More skulls between his palms—

  A sudden screech tore into his ears, and he looked up through blurry eyes. He saw the yellow hood of a taxicab careening around the corner ahead of him, the startled driver leaning heavily on his horn. There was a brief, frozen second—then the front fender glanced against Stanton’s left thigh.

  The cab skidded to a sudden stop. Stanton looked down and saw the mangled hood still partially wrapped around his leg. He stepped back, his entire body beginning to shake. The itchiness swept up th
rough his hips, across his chest, to his face. No, no, no!

  The driver-side door came open, and a tall, dark-skinned man leapt out. He saw Stanton, and shouted something. Then he noticed his ruined cab. His eyes widened. “Mister, are you okay?”

  Stanton’s skin caught fire, and his mind turned white. He tried to fight back, tried to stop the commands before they reached his muscles. He tried to picture himself as he was before—gentle, kind, weak. He tried to focus on the image of his daughter, beautiful Emily, and his life before the transplant.

  But the thoughts vanished as the maggots crawled through his skin. He lurched forward, his face contorted. The taxi driver stepped back, fear evident on his face. Somehow, Stanton managed to coax a single word through his constricted throat.

  “Run.”

  The taxi driver stared at him. Stanton held out his hands as he staggered forward. The driver saw the blood on his palms, and realization hit him. He turned and ran screaming down the dark street.

  Stanton stumbled after him, the single word still echoing through his brain.

  Run. Run. Run!

  6

  The sky had turned a dull gray by the time Mulder trudged up the stone steps that led to the arched entrance of the J. P. 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 latest 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 certain they would find Stanton within the next few hours.