Skin

by Ben Mezrich

  “Something went wrong. It was a mistake to send a first-stage drone on an unobserved mission. We need to send Tien—”

  “Julian, we don’t have time.”

  “But his partner—”

  “Forget her,” the first voice snapped. “We need to head back to the main lab and proceed with the final stage. The satellite link will allow us only a small window for our demonstration.”

  The voices disintegrated as Mulder’s limp body settled back against the stretcher. Reality faded away to the rhythmic click click click of an oversize steel stapler.

  23

  Scully sat on the wet front steps of the clinic, staring in frustration at the blueprint open on her lap. It had been more than two hours since she had left the hotel, and still she had found no trace of Mulder. She had scoured every inch of the clinic, had questioned Fielding and her staff; Mulder had left the clinic the same way he had come—through the front door. He had found no underground tunnels, no hint of the basement floor.

  But Scully knew better than to discount Mulder’s ability to find what didn’t seem to exist. After searching the clinic, she had headed straight to the records library in the town hall. While at the town hall, she had considered reporting the body in her hotel room—but had decided she didn’t have time. She had to make sure Mulder was all right.

  She ran her fingers across the center of the blueprint, tracing a shadowy line that she assumed represented Alkut’s main road. She had found the blueprint in a booklet printed by the national Thai power company—an idea that had come to her while looking at the electrocuted man in her bedroom. Someone had dug power lines beneath the town’s streets, which meant there had to be a better map of the town—and perhaps its underground—than the one provided by the U.S. military.

  But after twenty minutes of trying to decipher the strange Thai notations and geographic cues that covered most of the power-company blueprint, Scully was no longer sure that the map was going to provide much help. The town’s buildings were represented by little more than numbered dots, connected by dark lines that could have been anything from dirt paths to paved highways. The only structures represented clearly on the blueprint were the power lines; the entire map was covered in spiderwebs of bright red ink, connected by larger blue trunks. The blue trunks seemed to be focused near the larger town buildings, such as the clinic and the town hall. Scully guessed they were the feeder lines, connected directly to the hydraulic power plant located a half mile beyond the north edge of town.

  Scully flicked an oversize mosquito off the blueprint as her fingers reached the junction between the main road and the street where the clinic was located. The mosquito angrily buzzed off, leaving behind one of its front legs. Beneath the leg ran one of the blue trunks leading toward the clinic. Scully followed it with her eyes, her mind wandering to Mulder. Damn it, where the hell are you? In a few minutes she was going to have to put in a call to Washington, then another to Van Epps. On orders from Washington, the military would turn the town upside down searching for a missing FBI agent—and in the process, scare off any chance they had of solving the mysteries of the Stanton case.

  Scully heard a buzzing in her right ear, and felt the injured mosquito land on her exposed neck. Even missing a leg, it would not give up. Like the lizard on the fan, it was a creature too simple to face reality. She was about to slap it away when her eyes involuntarily focused on a spot on the blueprint.

  She saw that three of the blue trunks converged within a few centimeters of each other, somewhere close to the clinic. She leaned over the map, trying to decipher the exact location. She barely even noticed the sharp pinch as the mosquito dug its nose into her skin. Her head was spinning as she traced the few centimeters of map between the clinic and the three blue trunks. She suddenly looked up.

  She stared at the decrepit building across the street. Then she moved her eyes from the steeple to the door—to the heap of plastic sheeting next to the front entrance. She remembered how the sheeting had covered the door. She had assumed that the church was abandoned.

  She turned back to the blueprint, oblivious of the bloated, sated mosquito that lifted off from her neck and flew past her face. The blueprint didn’t make any sense—unless she and Mulder had both been looking in the wrong place. The thought was like a gunshot, sending Scully to her feet.

  If she had read the blueprint right, there were three power lines feeding electricity to the abandoned church across the street.

  24

  Mulder’s throat constricted, and he lurched forward, gasping for air. His skull throbbed, and he violently shook his head back and forth, desperate to silence the horrid ringing in his ears. Then his eyes came open—and memory crashed into him with a burst of fluorescent light.

  He was lying on the same stretcher in the same underground chamber, but the Velcro straps were gone. The curtain was pulled back, and there was no sign of the blue-eyed man or Julian Kyle. As far as Mulder could tell, he was alone in the chamber. He noticed with a start that his clothes were gone; he was wearing a white hospital smock, and there was a thin rubber wire sticking out of his right arm. Eyes wide, he followed the rubber wire to a bottle of yellowish liquid hanging from the IV rack above his shoulder.

  Without thought, he grabbed the wire and yanked it out of his arm. Thin drops of blood dribbled down his wrist, and he quickly applied pressure, cursing at the sharp pain. As he stared at the yellow liquid dripping from the detached IV wire, his entire body started to tremble. A strange, crawling feeling was moving up his left leg. It felt like a thousand worms twitching through his skin.

  He clenched his teeth and yanked the smock up. A dozen oversize staples were sticking out from his calf, winding down toward his Achilles tendon. To his surprise, the yellow strip below the staples had shriveled into a hard mass, barely touching the skin beneath. Mulder quickly grabbed the withered slab and yanked as hard as he could. It tore free, dragging half the staples with it. Blood ran freely down his calf, but he barely noticed. He was staring at the failed transplant, relief billowing through him. As he pressed the slab between his fingers, it disintegrated to a fine dust. Mulder exhaled, watching the dust flow through his fingers to the floor.

  “I’ve heard of a patient rejecting a skin transplant,” he mused, “but never a transplant rejecting a patient.”

  He carefully tore a strip of material from the bottom of his smock and wrapped it tightly around his calf. The bleeding slowed, and although he could still feel the few remaining staples, he barely felt any pain. He thought about the balm he had splashed on himself, and how the transplanted skin had reacted. In his mind, connections were forming. But he still needed more information to convince himself that his theories were true.

  He shifted his legs off the stretcher, ignoring the dull pounding in his skull. No worse than a bad hangover, he told himself—a cup of coffee and you’ll be as good as new. His feet touched the cold cement floor, and a new shiver moved up through his shoulders. He felt exposed in the thin hospital smock, and he half expected the blue-eyed man to return with another slab of skin. This time, he would not have the balm to protect him. The transplant would stick—and then? He had a feeling he knew exactly what would happen. But he needed proof.

  He rose, slowly, and staggered through the open curtain that surrounded his stretcher. The other stretchers that filled the chamber were still empty, and he noticed again that each had a single IV rack nearby, supporting similar bottles of yellowish liquid. As he moved past the stretchers, he scratched the tiny wound in his forearm, wondering how long he had been unconscious—and how much of the unknown substance was coursing through his veins.

  He reached the far wall of the chamber and paused, his eyes shifting across the medical machinery. He was a few feet away from the electron microscope, and his gaze settled on the row of computer monitors nearby. As before, the monitors were all switched on, the screens glowing blue. Mulder noticed that the processors beneath the monitors were connected by a serie
s of wires to the electron microscope. It was a situation he could not resist.

  He ran his fingers along the boxlike microscope housing and found a pair of switches. He flicked both of them to the on position, and watched as the computer screens changed color. A second later, tiny, plate-shaped objects bounced across a background of swirling red. Mulder recognized the objects from the broken model in Julian Kyle’s office. Epidermal cells; but there was something unnatural about the way they were moving—an almost violent cadence spurred by some unknown desire. The skin cells seemed—for lack of a better word—hungry.

  Mulder chided himself. His body and mind had suffered extreme abuse in the past few hours, and he was letting his thoughts get carried away. He drifted past the computer screens—and noticed a small steel file cabinet by the last monitor. The cabinet was barely waist high, and he hadn’t noticed it before. A thrill moved through him as he dropped to one knee. File cabinets were an FBI agent’s pornography.

  Mulder began rifling through the drawers. Within a few seconds, he had forgotten about the pounding in his skull and the blood still soaking through the loose tourniquet around his calf. All of his thoughts were trained on the pages that sped past his fingers.

  He had reached the back half of the second drawer when he stopped, drawing out a familiar sheet of paper. It was the same list of 130 soldiers he had found beneath the golden Buddha. But in this list, there was a difference. One of the names was crossed off. Next to the name was a small, handwritten note:

  Dopamine inhibitor deficiency, due to IV malfunction. Began cardiac convulsions shortly after 2 A.M. en route to in-house demonstration. Drone escaped custody shortly afterward.

  Mulder rocked back on his feet, rereading the words. He thought back to the three men who had assaulted him. He pictured their overdilated eyes, their faraway stares. Drone was a fitting description. He remembered the tail end of the conversation he had heard, just before he had lost consciousness. Kyle had mentioned something about sending a drone after Scully. The memory sent shards of fear down Mulder’s spine—but then he remembered the last part of the conversation. Kyle had said that the drone—the ‘first-stage drone’—had been unable to complete the mission. Then the other man had mentioned something about a final stage—and a demonstration. A demonstration that was going to take place at a main laboratory…

  Mulder turned back to the file cabinet. Near the back of the same drawer, his fingers hit a thick sheaf of pages. As he lifted the sheaf free, he saw that the front page was another copy of the familiar list. But as he turned the pages, his pulse quickened. The list did not end at 130 names: It was sixteen pages long. Mulder quickly did the calculations. Over two thousand soldiers. All designated as napalm-burn victims brought to Alkut between 1970 and 1973. It was unthinkable. Two thousand men who should have died more than twenty-five years ago. His mind whirling, Mulder opened the last drawer in the filing cabinet. The drawer was filled with photocopies of MRI scans. He pulled a handful free, leafing through them. The scans were cross sections of human brains, similar to the scans Scully had taken of Perry Stanton. Mulder was no expert, but he remembered what Scully had shown him, and he noticed some obvious similarities. As in Stanton’s and the prisoners’ MRIs, the brains in the scans had enlarged hypothalamuses. But as far as Mulder could tell, there were no polyps surrounding the augmented glands—

  “Mulder!”

  Mulder nearly dropped the scans as he whirled on his heels. He saw Scully rushing across the chamber. She had her gun out, and her eyes were scanning the room. Mulder tried to stand, but a rush of dizziness knocked him back to a crouch. In his excitement at finding the file cabinet, he had forgotten about the abuses his body had suffered. He leaned against the cabinet as Scully dropped to his side. She took in the hospital smock, then saw the bloodied tourniquet around his calf.

  She quickly slid her gun back into its holster and put the back of her hand against his neck, checking his pulse. Her hand felt warm and reassuring. Mulder tried to smile. His head was pounding worse than before. But he wasn’t going to give in to the pain. They were too close to solving their case. “I’m fine. A little elective surgery, that’s all.”

  “Elective?” Scully asked, as her fingers probed beneath the edge of the makeshift tourniquet.

  “As you can imagine, my vote was in the minority.”

  Scully’s concern abated slightly as she discerned that the wound was minor. Then she shifted her attention to the small puncture where he had pulled out the IV wire. The anxiety returned to her face. “Do you know what you were given?

  “Over there, by the stretcher. The yellowish liquid. I think it was some sort of dopamine inhibitor.”

  Scully raised her eyebrows. “That would explain your sluggishness. But what makes you think that?”

  Mulder showed her the first list, with the handwritten notation. “According to this, one of the transplant patients died from a lack of dopamine inhibitor. I believe all the transplant recipients have to get periodic infusions of the inhibitor—to keep them from going psychotic.”

  Scully stared at him. “All the transplant recipients. Are you implying—”

  “They tried to transplant skin onto my calf. Thankfully, the procedure was a failure. But they didn’t know that—and hooked me up to the inhibitor.” Mulder had made enormous jumps to come to the conclusion—but he knew he was on the right track. The blue-eyed man had tried to transplant skin onto his body—to turn him into a drone. They had left him with a dopamine-inhibitor drip. As Scully had explained back when she had first seen Perry Stanton’s MRIs, dopamine was a neurotransmitter related to psychotic violence. Excess dopamine might also have explained the polyps surrounding Perry Stanton’s hypothalamus.

  Mulder handed Scully the MRI scans, and watched as she leafed through them. “The hypothalamuses are enlarged,” she said, “like Stanton’s. And look at this. The motor cortex has nearly doubled in size—while the amygdala has become almost nonexistent.”

  Mulder raised his eyebrows, confused. “The motor cortex and the amygdala?”

  “The motor cortex is the part of the brain associated with involuntary reflex and motor control,” Scully explained, still staring at the MRIs. “The amygdala is associated with personality and thought. If these MRIs are real, then the people whose brains have been photographed would be almost automatons—”

  “Drones,” Mulder interrupted. For some reason, Scully wasn’t as shocked by the term as Mulder would have expected. Mulder shifted against the file cabinet. “They can follow simple commands—they can be controlled. Unless they don’t get their dopamine inhibitor—and turn out like Perry Stanton.”

  Scully paused, still looking at the MRIs. “If your list is to be believed, our John Doe arrived here in Alkut—along with one hundred twenty-nine others—more than twenty-five years ago, burned almost to death. You’re saying that all these men have been turned into drones?”

  Mulder paused. He knew how insane it sounded. But he had his own experience to go from. They had tried to put the skin on him—to transform him. “That’s just the beginning.”

  He showed her the list of two thousand names. Her eyes widened as she flipped through the pages. Two thousand men stolen from their families, turned into guinea pigs. Scully shook her head. “Impossible. The logistics alone would be incredible. These men would have to be kept in an intensive care facility. Someplace really big—with enough financing to last more than two decades. And for what purpose? Two thousand mindless drones—what’s the point?”

  Mulder slowly struggled to his feet, using Scully’s arm for balance. “I don’t think the drones are the final product. They were the first stage, the prototype. Paladin must be planning to create something much more valuable.”

  Scully exhaled. They had been through this before. She knew that death certificates could be faked—but Mulder had no real evidence that Paladin was still alive. Mulder thought about describing the blue-eyed man—but the surgical mask had hidden most of
his features.

  For the moment, Scully let the argument go and gestured toward the open chamber. “So you’re convinced that Paladin’s search for synthetic skin led to all of this.”

  Mulder paused. He had been developing a theory since his trip to the temple—but he knew that Scully would never buy into it. Still, he felt the need to tell her his thoughts. “It’s not synthetic. It’s scavenged.”

  He started across the chamber. Scully followed alongside. “What do you mean?”

  “Trowbridge told us that Paladin was a devoted student of Thai mythology. I think Paladin knew about the Skin Eater before he ever came to Alkut. He went looking for the creature—and has been using its skin as the source of his transplants.” To Mulder, it made perfect sense. Skin was the source of the Skin Eater’s power. Skin was also the source of Perry Stanton’s invulnerability, and his strength. Paladin had wandered in the mountains surrounding Alkut—and had found a way to make miracles.

  Scully stopped near the row of computer screens. She stared, silently, at the unnatural epidermal cells migrating across the swirls of red. Finally, she shook her head. “It has to be synthetic, Mulder. Some sort of chemical structure that interacts with the patient’s bloodstream, spreading into the muscle-control centers of the brain. An extremely elastic and inviolable substance—except to electricity. Electricity passes right through the skin into the nervous system itself, setting off a cardiac reaction.”

  Mulder raised his eyebrows. Stanton and the John Doe had both died from electric shocks. But Scully had not accepted the connection before.

  “I had an encounter with one of these men,” Scully explained. “In my hotel room. He went into cardiac arrest after shoving a hypodermic needle into a light socket.”

  Mulder nodded. Now he understood why she had been willing to accept his premise—if not his conclusions.