Skin

by Ben Mezrich

  “He won’t get far,” Kenyon murmured, looking back at the subway car. He watched as the other officer herded the passengers out of the stopped train. “I think you winged him pretty good. He’ll make it twenty, twenty-five yards at the most.”

  Leary didn’t respond. Kenyon must have been right. He couldn’t possibly have missed at such close range. Then again, why hadn’t the little man gone down? How could a guy take a hit at such close range and not go down?

  He pushed the thought away as he reached for his two-way radio. He was about to call it in when Kenyon pointed toward the turnstiles. “Don’t bother with the radio. Here comes Big-Assed Barrett and the two fibbies.”

  Leary watched the hulking detective and the two well-dressed agents as they strolled onto the platform. Then he turned back toward the dark subway tunnel.

  Whether he had winged the little bastard or not—Perry Stanton wasn’t going to get away. Not this time.

  10

  Scully watched in clinical disgust as a rat the size of a basketball ran headfirst into the stone wall to her right, bounced off, then scurried beneath the iron tracks. She turned her attention back to the dark tunnel, maneuvering the crisp orange beam of her flashlight until she found the outline of Mulder’s shoulders a few feet ahead. She could hear her partner’s low voice over the rumble of the underground ventilation system, and she hurried her pace, closing the distance. Detective Barrett came into view, her huge form hovering just ahead of Mulder in the darkness. Mulder was pointing at the heavy revolver that hung from Barrett’s right paw.

  “He’s not in control,” Mulder was arguing. “Certainly, there are more humane ways to bring him in.”

  “He’s a murderer,” Barrett hissed back, “and I’m not going to put myself or my officers at risk. If you feel comfortable armed with a chunk of plastic and a battery, that’s your prerogative.”

  Scully glanced down at the stun gun in her gloved left hand. She and Mulder had procured the nonlethal weapons at the FBI East Side armory on the way to the subway terminal. The device was about the size of a paperback book, no more than three pounds. The textured plastic handle felt warm through the latex enveloping Scully’s fingers.

  “The Taser is just as effective as a bullet,” Mulder said. “It can disable a three-hundred-pound man without causing any permanent damage.”

  “I know what the manual says,” Barrett shot back. “But have you ever aimed one of those toys at a junkie in a PCP rage? Roughly equivalent to poking a rattlesnake with a paper clip.”

  Scully cleared her throat. In her mind, the discussion was moot. The other three police officers were at least twenty yards ahead by now, and all were armed with high-powered service revolvers. Barrett had sent the officers ahead because two of them had worked for the Transit Police before and knew the tunnel layout. “Hopefully, there won’t be any need for lethal force. Detective Barrett, how far does this tunnel go before we reach the next platform?”

  “About half a mile,” Barrett responded, heading forward again. “But there are numerous junctions leading off the main line. Construction adjuncts, equipment areas, voltage rooms; plenty of places for Stanton to hide. I’ve got teams guarding all the exits—but if we don’t find him now, we’ll have to call in the dogs and the search squads.”

  Scully took a deep breath, nearly choking on the dank, heavy air. She could imagine the fear and confusion Stanton was feeling as he ran through the darkness—his brain misinterpreting every signal from his nervous system, his psychotic paranoia sending him farther away from the people who were trying to help.

  A few minutes passed in determined silence as they worked their way deeper into the tunnel. The ground was uneven around the tracks, covered in packed dirt and gravel. The walls were curved and roughly tiled, huge chunks of stone jutting out from a thick infrastructure of cement and steel.

  Up ahead, Scully made out a sharp left turn. Beneath an orange emergency lantern stood one of the three police officers. The cop waved them forward, and Scully quickened her gait. She followed the turn up a slow incline and found herself at a junction between two tunnels. The subway track continued to the left, into the better-lit shaft. The other shaft angled into pure darkness, the walls and floor carved out of what looked to be jagged limestone.

  “It’s the new line,” the officer explained. He was mildly overweight, and sweat ran in rivulets down the sides of his red face. “Still under construction. Leary spotted him ’bout thirty yards ahead. He and Kenyon went in after ’im.”

  Scully pointed her flashlight into the pitch-black shaft. The hungry air swallowed the orange beam after only a few yards. She glanced at Mulder and Barrett. The under-construction tunnel was a dangerous place to chase the carrier of a rare, fatal disease. She contemplated asking Barrett to call for backup—when a thunderous crack echoed off the limestone walls.

  Scully’s stomach lurched as she recognized the echoing report of a police-issue nine millimeter. She saw Mulder dart forward, and quickly rushed to follow. She could hear Barrett and the overweight officer a few steps behind her, but she forced them out of her thoughts, concentrating on the dark floor beneath her feet. Her flashlight beam bounced over slabs of stone and chunks of rail, and she tried to keep her feet as light as possible. She saw Mulder cut sharply to the right and found herself stumbling up a narrow incline. She guessed it was some sort of construction access—perhaps leading all the way to the surface. If so, there would be a team of officers waiting at the top. If they had heard the gunshot, they would already be streaming inside—

  Scully nearly collided with Mulder’s back as he reared up, his flashlight diving toward the floor. Scully added her own orange beam and saw the officer curled up against the stone wall. She recognized the man’s bright red hair and quickly dropped to one knee. She saw a thin pool of blood seeping out from just above Leary’s right ear. She reached forward, feeling for the man’s pulse.

  “He’s alive,” she whispered, applying gentle but constant pressure to the bleeding head wound. “Looks like he got hit with something, probably a metal pipe or a heavy rock. Maybe a skull fracture.”

  “Gun’s still in his hand,” Mulder responded, also dropping to his knees. “The barrel’s warm. Three bullets missing from the chamber.”

  There were heavy footsteps from behind, and Scully quickly looked over her shoulder. She watched Barrett lumber the last few steps, followed by the overweight officer.

  “Christ,” Barrett said, looking at the downed man. Then she glanced up the narrow, black incline that seemed to continue on forever. “Where the hell is Kenyon?”

  Scully turned her attention back to the man in front of her, trying to get a better look at his wound. “I need a medical kit right away. And we’ve got to get paramedics down here immediately.”

  “There’s a kit back at the junction,” the portly cop said. Barrett nodded at him, and he raced back in the direction they had come from. Meanwhile, Mulder had taken a few more steps up the dark incline. He glanced back at Scully, and she nodded.

  Mulder started forward, his stun gun out ahead of him. Barrett quickly moved past Scully and the downed officer. Her intention was obvious. Mulder gestured toward the revolver in her gloved right hand. “Just remember, one of your officers is somewhere up ahead.”

  Barrett nodded. Scully called after them, as they faded into the darkness, “I’ll follow when the paramedics get here—and I’ll make sure he doesn’t double back and get away. That’s if he hasn’t already reached the surface.”

  “He’s not going to reach the surface,” Barrett responded.

  “Why is that?” Scully asked.

  “Because it’s a dead end. They capped this construction access off with three tons of cement two weeks ago.” Barrett’s voice trailed off as she and Mulder moved out of range.

  Mulder’s chest burned as the adrenaline pumped through his body. His eyes were wide-open, chasing the orange beam from his flashlight as he navigated across the uneven tunnel floo
r. He could hear Barrett’s heavy gasps from a few feet behind his right shoulder; every few seconds a curse echoed into his ears as she struggled to keep up.

  A dozen yards into the tunnel, the air began to taste vaguely metallic, and a thick, mildewy scent rose off the limestone walls. The tunnel seemed to be narrowing as they neared the surface, the curved walls closing in like the inner curls of an angry fist. Mulder slowed his pace, motioning for Barrett to keep quiet. They were close to the dead end—and that meant Perry Stanton and the other officer had to be nearby.

  The tunnel took a sharp right, and suddenly Mulder found himself in the entrance to a small, rectangular corridor. Mulder moved the flashlight along the walls and saw wires and steel cables running in parallel twists across the limestone. Every few feet he made out little dark alcoves dug directly into the walls.

  “Generator room,” Barrett whispered as she joined him in the entrance to the corridor. “They powered the excavation equipment from generators housed in those empty alcoves. The cement wall should be right on the other side of this corridor.”

  Mulder pointed his flashlight toward the nearest generator alcove. The space looked to be about ten feet deep, and at least three feet in diameter. Easily enough room for a diminutive professor. Or an officer’s body.

  Mulder raised his stun gun and slowly advanced into the corridor. His neck tingled as he swung the flashlight back and forth, trying to illuminate as much area as possible. Despite his efforts, he was surrounded by black air. After a few feet, he realized the danger he was in; Stanton could hit him from either side, and he’d never see him coming. He was about to turn back toward Barrett—when his right foot touched something soft.

  He quickly aimed the flashlight toward the ground. He saw wisps of blue, marred by spots of seeping red. Then the orange beam touched the shiny curves of a police badge.

  He was about to call for Barrett when there was a sudden motion from his right. He turned just as the shape hit him, right below the shoulder. His stun gun went off, sparks flying through the darkness as the twin metal contacts glanced off a limestone wall.

  Mulder’s shoulder hit the ground, and the air was knocked out of him. His hands opened, and the flashlight and stun gun clattered away. The flashlight beam twirled through the blackness, and he caught sight of Perry Stanton’s face rearing up above him, a look of anguish in his blue eyes. Then he saw Stanton’s hands, clenched into wiry fists, rising above his head. Stanton leaped toward him, and Mulder shouted, raising his arms, wondering why the hell he always seemed to lose his weapon at the worst time—when, suddenly, there was a high-pitched buzzing. Stanton froze midstep, his eyes widening, his mouth curling open. Convulsions rocked his body, his muscles twisting into strange knots beneath his skin. He arched backward, his knees giving out. He collapsed to the ground a few feet away, his arms and legs twitching. Then he went still.

  Mulder crawled to his knees as Scully entered the corridor, the stun gun hanging loosely from her right hand. Barrett rushed out from behind her, her revolver uselessly pointed at Stanton’s prone body. “I couldn’t get a clear shot. Christ, he came at you so fast.”

  Scully hurried to Mulder’s side. She was out of breath, sweat dripping into her eyes. “Are you okay? Leary regained consciousness shortly after we separated. I decided he could wait for the paramedics on his own.”

  “Good timing, Scully. And even better aim.”

  Scully smiled. “Actually, I didn’t aim. I just fired. You got lucky and saved yourself a nasty hangover.”

  Mulder gestured toward the cop lying in the middle of the corridor. “Officer Kenyon wasn’t so lucky.”

  Scully followed her flashlight to the man and checked his pulse. Then she pushed his shoulder, turning him onto his side. She looked up, and Mulder saw the stricken look on her face. He glanced at the officer—and realized the man’s head was facing the wrong direction. Stanton had twisted his neck 180 degrees, snapping his spinal column.

  Barrett saw the dead officer and noisily reholstered her gun. “The damn animal. I don’t care how sick he is—I’m gonna make sure he spends the rest of his life in a cell.”

  Mulder didn’t respond to Barrett’s angry comment. No matter how tragic the situation—he didn’t believe Stanton was responsible. He thought about the anguished look in the professor’s eyes—and the strange convulsions that had racked his body. It had almost seemed as if Stanton’s muscles had been fighting his skin—struggling to tear through.

  Mulder rose slowly and found his flashlight along the nearby wall. Then he trained the light on the downed professor. Stanton was lying on his back, his arms and legs twisted unnaturally at his sides. His eyes were wide open, his lips curled back. Mulder took a tentative step forward. Something wasn’t right.

  “Scully,” he said, focusing the flashlight on Stanton’s still chest, “I don’t think he’s breathing.”

  Scully stepped away from the dead officer. “He’s just stunned, Mulder. The voltage running through the Taser contacts wasn’t anywhere near enough to kill him.”

  Just the same, she moved to the little man’s side and dropped to her knees. She carefully leaned forward, holding her ear above his mouth. Then her eyebrows rose, and she quickly touched the side of his neck with a gloved finger.

  She drew her hand away, staring. Sudden alarm swept across her features. She tilted Stanton’s head back, searching his mouth and throat for obstructions. Then she moved both hands over his chest and started vigorous CPR. Mulder dropped next to her, leaning over to give mouth-to-mouth. Scully stopped him with her hand. “Mulder, the lethargica.”

  Mulder shrugged her hand away. Even if she was right—and Stanton was infected with the blood-borne strain of encephalitis, Mulder knew the odds were enormously in his favor. Saliva, on its own, was not a likely carrier. And he couldn’t get the vision of Emily Kysdale out of his mind. Despite what he had done—this was a young woman’s father.

  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?”

  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.

  11

  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 war
m breath nipping at her earlobe. “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 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 overreacted.

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