The X-Files: Antibodies Read Online Free PDF Page B

performed autopsies or continued investigations on cold cadavers in refrigerator drawers. But though the places were by now familiar, she would never find them comforting.
    Dr. Frank Quinton, Portland’s medical examiner, was a bald man with a feathery fringe of white hair surrounding the back of his head. He had wire-rimmed glasses and a cherubic face.

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    Judging by his friendly, grandfatherly smile, Scully would have pegged him as a charming, good-natured man—but she could see a tired hardness behind his eyes. In his career as a coroner, Quinton must have seen too many teenagers pulled from wrecked cars, too many suicides and senseless accidents, too many examples of the quirky nature of death.
    He warmly shook Scully’s hand, and Mulder’s.
    Mulder nodded at his partner, speaking to the coroner.
    “As I mentioned on the phone, sir, Agent Scully is a medical doctor herself, and she has had experience with many unusual deaths. Perhaps she can offer some suggestions.”
    The coroner beamed at her, and Scully couldn’t help but smile back at the kind-faced man. “What is the status of the body now?”
    “We used full disinfectants and have been keeping the body in cold storage to stop the spread of any biological agents,” the ME said.
    The morgue attendant held out a clipboard and smiled like a puppy dog next to Quinton. The assistant was young and scrawny, but already nearly as bald as the medical examiner. From the idolizing way he looked up at the ME, Scully guessed that Frank Quinton must be his mentor, that one day the morgue attendant wanted to be a medical examiner himself.
    “He’s in drawer 4E,” the attendant said, though Scully was certain the coroner already knew where the guard’s body was stored. The attendant hurried over to the bank of clean stainless-steel refrigerator drawers. Most, Scully knew, would contain people who had died of natural causes, heart attacks, or car accidents, surgical failures from the hospital, or old retirees fallen like dead leaves in nursing homes.
    One drawer, though, had been marked with yel-30
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    low tape and sealed with stickers displaying the clawed-circle BIOHAZARD LABEL: 4E.
    “Thank you, Edmund,” the ME said as Mulder and Scully followed him to the morgue refrigerators.
    “You’ve used appropriate quarantine conditions?”
    Scully asked.
    Quinton looked over at her. “Luckily, the police were spooked enough by the appearance of the corpse that they took precautions, gloves, contamination wraps. Everything was burned in the hospital inciner-ator here.”
    Edmund stopped in front of the stainless-steel drawer and peeled away the BioHazard sticker. A card on the front panel of the drawer labeled it RESTRICTED, POLICE EVIDENCE.
    After tugging on a sterile pair of rubber gloves, Edmund grabbed the drawer handle and yanked it open. “Here it is. We don’t usually get anything as curious as this poor guy.” He held open the drawer, and a gust of frosty air drifted out.
    With both hands, Edmund dragged out the plastic-draped cadaver of the dead guard. Like a showroom model revealing a new sports car, the attendant drew back the sheet. He stood aside proudly to let the medical examiner, Scully, and Mulder push forward.
    Mixed with the cold breath of the refrigerator, the smell of heavy, caustic disinfectants swirled in the air, stinging Scully’s eyes and nostrils. She was unable to keep herself from bending over in fascination. She saw the splotches of coagulated blood beneath the guard’s skin like blackened bruises, the lumpy, doughy growths that had sprouted like mush-rooms inside his tissues.
    “I’ve never seen tumors that could grow so fast,”
    Scully said. “The limited rate of cellular reproduction should make such a rapid spread impossible.” She bent down and observed a faint slimy covering on antibodies
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    some patches of skin. Some kind of clear mucus . . .
    like slime.
    “We’re treating this as a