Skin : the X-files (27 page)

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 275

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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 infu-sions 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 276

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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 277

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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 278

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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.” 279

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

“If these men are just the beginning,” Scully continued, “what’s next?”

Mulder wasn’t sure. But the sinking feeling in his gut told him where they would have to go to find out. “If Emile Paladin is experimenting on two thousand missing soldiers, he needs a private, secluded place to work. A place where no one would dare bother him.” Scully exhaled at his obvious attempt at melodrama.

But Mulder was sure she was thinking along the same lines. As soon as he recovered his balance, they would be heading into the mountains that surrounded Alkut.

Searching for a secret intensive care unit—and a mythological lair.

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X Scully sprawled next to Mulder against the fallen evergreen trunk, watching in awe as the three Thai guides hacked at the underbrush with their huge, curved machetes. All three men were bare to the waist, and their sinewy bodies glowed in the sweltering heat. A few feet away, the emaciated teenage monk guided their progress with abrupt flicks of his bony hand; even after seven hours of trekking upward through the dense tropical forest, he and the hired guides showed no sign of tiring. The sky had gone from orange to gray nearly an hour ago, and still they pushed forward, refusing to give up on the promise of reaching the mountain base before darkness set in.

“Very close,” the teenage monk called over his shoulder, as he checked the sky with his eyes. “Trail ends over next hill.”

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Scully contained her enthusiasm. Malku had been making similar statements for the past three miles. What the teenage monk described as hills were actually small mountains covered in densely packed broadleaf evergreens, oak, laurel, and dipterocarps, a native Southeast Asian tree. And as far as Scully could tell, the “trail” was little more than a handful of disconnected breaks in the underbrush, separated by lush green barriers of tropical plant life.

Mulder noticed the skeptical expression on Scully’s face, as he slipped off one of his combat boots and shook stones the size of marbles to the ground. A cloud of mosquitoes buzzed around his face, and he blinked rapidly, struggling to keep the irritating insects out of his eyes.

“He knows where he’s going, Scully. It’s his religion, after all.”

Scully glanced skeptically at her partner. It was a strange sight—Mulder in military camouflage, with combat boots and an assault rifle slung over his right shoulder. They had found the uniform and rifle at a shop next door to the town hall. Like the Jeep, the items were souvenirs of the Vietnam War—and both had been kept in surprisingly good shape. The uniform was frayed at the edges, and there were three quarter-sized holes in the lower back—but it fit Mulder ’s frame. He had balked at wearing the uniform until the shop owner had promised him that the original owner had survived his wounds.

The automatic rifle was a much easier decision.

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Mulder’s gun had vanished with his clothes, and they did not have time to navigate the necessary channels in search of a replacement. Mulder’s FBI training covered most models of assault rifles, including the CAR-15 slung over his shoulder. Basically, it was a shorter, carbine version of the M-16, chambered in 5.56 mm. The gun had come fitted with a single box magazine containing twenty rounds. The shopkeeper had done a good job keeping the machine oiled and clean, and it seemed battle-ready. A brutal weapon; surely capable of cutting through even the most durable synthetic skin.

“I don’t share your confidence,” Scully finally responded, focusing on the thin young monk. His jutting chin and narrow eyes made him look like some sort of plucked bird. “Even if the place we’re looking for does exist, there are literally thousands of caves at the foot of See Dum Kao.”

Mulder shrugged, pulling his boot back over his foot. He winced as the motion tweaked the edge of the fresh bandage around his calf. “You saw the map Ganon showed me in the temple. Malku has spent years memorizing its twists and turns. His whole life has been dedicated to understanding the legend of the Skin Eater. The cave is at the end of this trail.” Scully tightened the clasp holding her hair. It had been a struggle holding back her reservations when Mulder had brought her to Ganon and the Skin Eater temple.

When the ancient monk had instructed his young 283

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apprentice to guide the agents to the legendary home of the Skin Eater, she had remained silent for one simple reason: The legendary mountain lair was their best bet for locating a private hospital large enough to hold two thousand burned soldiers. The myth was a good cover for unethical, radical experimentation. Emile Paladin could have set up some sort of private hospital during the war—and transferred control to Fibrol after his death. The company could have provided the funding necessary to keep the hospital functioning, while someone else—perhaps Julian Kyle—continued the transplant research.

But in no way did Scully give credence to the fairy tale itself. She had seen Allan and Rina Trowbridges’ bodies.

She had read Emile Paladin’s death certificate. And she had found nothing in the underground laboratory that remotely suggested a connection to some sort of skin-eating beast. The skin sample that had been transplanted onto Mulder’s calf had disintegrated into dust—and during microscopic analysis, the dust itself had decomposed beyond the molecular level, making any conclusions impossible. When Scully and Mulder had returned to the hotel before setting off for the mountains, they had found no trace of the electrocuted corpse. Scully assumed that the body had been discovered by the owner of the hotel and carted off along with the Trowbridges. She had unsuccessfully tried to track the body down by phone, and had finally accepted the obvious: another autopsy that would never take place.

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All of the evidence pointed to a medical conspiracy: transplant experimentation with some sort of nefari-ous purpose, one valuable enough to kill for—and to spur a cover-up of violence and misdirection. In retrospect, Scully realized that their entire case had been watched, and to some extent guided, by sources unknown. From the missing John Doe to the outbreak of encephalitis lethargica, they had been steered away from the simple truth. In that, Mulder had been completely on target. The skin Perry Stanton had received was the source of his murderous rampage. But Scully was equally convinced that the source of that skin was science, not myth. And the people behind the skin were criminals: accessories to murder, conspirators who had at the very least falsified Vietnam War records—and at worst, kidnapped and experimented on American soldiers.

“Mulder, it’s important that we keep focus. We’re here to conduct a limited search of the area, to see if we can find traces of a major intensive care clinic or a laboratory. We’re searching for criminal suspects—not monsters.”

Mulder’s response was cut off by a terrified shout that rang out from one of the machete-wielding guides.

Mulder leapt to his feet, the assault rifle spinning expertly to his hands. Scully’s Smith & Wesson seemed minuscule by comparison. The shouting changed to rhythmic chanting as the three guides backed away from the cleared underbrush. Scully moved between 285