So, this chapter is pretty weird - hope it's good weird. Enjoy!
But leave a review - let me know what you're thinkin!
Chapter 5
Only Angela and Brennan were left in the latter's office, as everyone else had gone into the lab area to follow the Doctor's advice. The two of them had already turned on every possible light in the room, and now, they were grasping opposite ends of the sofa.
"On three?" Angela said. "One, two, three!"
With that, they each lifted their end a few inches off the floor and moved it against the wall, as the Doctor had counseled.
"Why are we doing this?" asked Brennan, exasperated.
"Because when we went up a creek, someone came along with a paddle," Angela reasoned. "Or at least a long stick. I know the reasons seem far-fetched, but it's all we've got right now. And at least this Doctor is now acknowledging that he isn't who he said he was, that's a plus. Makes me feel a little bit better, since he's willing to admit that."
"It's madness!"
"Sweetie, all we're doing is giving him a chance."
"Based on what evidence?" Brennan half-yelled, half-whined.
"When are you going to learn? Not everything is about hard data, Brennan. Hodgins has some prior knowledge, and thinks the Doctor is on the up-and-up and knows something about this case. Sweets doesn't think he's a threat. These people are experts, right? You'd want them to trust you wouldn't you? Anyway, hopefully, at worst, all this Doctor will do is waste our time."
"Our time is valuable..."
"Brennan, Cam is in charge, and she made the call, okay? There's no more work we can do on that skeleton without the Doctor's help, so just... roll with it. Have a drink, if you have to. Find a way to be okay with all this. Fighting against it isn't going to do anyone any good. We're a team, we work as a unit, a body, and you're kind of out-voted here."
The two women filed into Angela's office and repeated the process, then joined their cohorts on the forensic platform a few minutes later. Sweets and Booth had apparently safeguarded the bone room by turning on all possible lights and pushing all furniture against the wall. Hodgins and the Doctor had overseen and helped with the process in the lab and in Hodgins' "ookie room."
The Doctor opened his mouth to speak, presumably to impart instruction for the next step, but he was interrupted by the large sliding doors at the end of the lab. Cam came through them with two men in tow, both of whom were wearing uniforms from the Jeffersonian's cafeteria. Each of the three was pushing a large cart, heaped high with various things wrapped in white paper, cellophane and different kinds of factory packaging.
"What the hell is all that?" Hodgins wanted to know.
"It's meat," Cam said with a sigh. "Everything the Jeffersonian's cafeteria had."
"This is wonderful. Thank you," the Doctor said quite seriously to the men.
"Yeah, well, Dr. Saroyan didn't give us a choice," one of them replied. "She commandeered our meat." The two of them sniggered like teenagers.
"I'll speak to your supervisor in the morning about how we'll make the departmental budgets balance," she said. "Just get online now and start re-ordering for the morning rush."
"Sure thing," the other cafeteria worker replied with a sarcastic salute. "Anything else?"
Cam dismissed them, and turned to the Doctor. "Now what?"
"Now, we create our perimeter of meat," he said. He planted both feet far apart, crossing his arms, trying to keep from moving, pacing. "The microscopic creatures we are dealing with are called the Vashta Nerada. They live in the shadows - it's how they hunt. That's why we put all of the furniture at the sides of the room, to minimize the presence of incidental shadows. That way, if the Vashta Nerada get on the move, it will be easier to see the swarm advancing. Now, as I told you, they strip flesh down to nothing in no time flat, so we'll need to put meat around the shadow perimeters. That means near to, or under, the furniture. As close to the shadows as possible, but not in the shadows. If something is consumed, we will hear it, and we will know that we are being hunted."
"Holy crap," Angela commented.
The Doctor had insisted that it was too dangerous to split up the group with the Vashta Nerada on the loose, and lurking in such a seemingly innocuous place as a random shadow. More eyes meant more safety.
So the whole group, all seven, shuttled to the Medico-Legal lab's staff kitchen to raid packed lunches in the fridge. Angela pulled a brown paper sack, and said, "This apparently belongs to Dr. Marshall. He's got... a ham sandwich, an apple and a packet of something called Pirate's Booty."
"Extract the ham," the Doctor told her.
"Put it in here," said Hodgins, coming forward with a clear, gallon-sized Ziploc bag.
Booth pulled his stack of index cards from his breast pocket and wrote a quick note.
"What are you doing?" Brennan asked him.
"I'm writing an IOU, and an apology," he said, annoyed. "You don't just manhandle someone's sandwich and steal the ham out of it with no explanation, and without bothering to replace it."
Brennan shrugged, and went back to sulking over the whole situation. Nevertheless, she and Cam kept a close eye on the shadows as the Doctor had instructed. Brennan's gut instinct was to believe the Doctor was not completely sane and that his theory about this Vashta Nerada was off the rails entirely. But much as when she debated over the merits of spirituality with Booth, she got stuck in her internal argument when she realized that she could not prove the non-existence of something, which, technically, left open the possibility of its existence.
She hated this, absolutely hated it. She was a scientist, for God's sake, not a ghost-chaser. But that niggling bit of room, of possibility...
Plus, everyone else seemed to be on-board with it, and what was she to do? Stand over Charles Hasbrook's bones for another two hours by herself, getting nothing, while her colleagues did something proactive, albeit a bit ridiculous?
Sweets reached into the fridge and extracted two lunch pouches with shoulder slings. "Let's see... okay, half a leftover McDonald's hamburger, fruit salad, a pudding cup and some gum. Who puts gum in the fridge?"
"Never mind, Sweets," Booth sighed, ripping an index card in half and handing him the new note he had written. "Just get the burger and leave him a note."
"Why'd you rip it in half?"
"Because I'm writing everything twice. We leave one as an IOU for the person we're stealing from, and keep a copy for ourselves so the Jeffersonian can reimburse everyone."
"For two ounces of ham?" asked Angela cynically. "For half a Happy-Meal?"
"It all adds up, Angela," Both reminded her.
The Doctor said with a smirk, "Very scrupulous, Agent Booth."
"Scrupulous is my job, all right?" Booth snapped.
"All right," Sweets echoed, dropping the half burger patty in Hodgins' Ziploc, and replacing the pouch with the note inside. "Next we have... hmm, some string cheese, watermelon wedges, and... bingo! Beef jerky!"
When they had extracted all the meat they could from this room, they proceeded up to the Anthropology suite's kitchenette to see what they could scavenge. Hodgins' Ziploc was soon half-full of lunch meat, beef jerky, Slim Jims, messy clumps of chicken salad, the odd leftover chicken leg or piece of steak.
On their way up the mahogany stairs from the Egyptian Studies department to the office of the Director of Ancient Languages (who Angela reported had a personal mini-fridge), Cam hung back and caught up with the Doctor.
"Listen, I'm pretty much on-board here, but... can I just ask? What's your objective? I mean, I get that by shoving the shadows to one side and creating a meat perimeter, we can sort of contain the organism, and that's a big 'sort of'," Cam said to him. "But once we do that, what are you planning to do? Stand around in the lab until they go away?"
"I'm planning to examine the bones again," the Doctor told her.
"For what purpose?" Brennan asked, stopping on the step and turning to face the Doctor. "I oversee those remains and I need to know what your intentions are."
"If I can discern an eating pattern, I might be able to work out which strain or sub-species of Vashta Nerada we're dealing with. From there, I might be able to work out what, if anything, they're doing, what they want, maybe even what they'll do next."
"How will you discern an eating pattern?"
"The Vashta Nerada will have left microscopic scores on the bones."
"I've already checked for microscopic scoring, markings, anomalies of any sort. I found nothing."
"I'm going to use a high-powered microscope."
Brennan scoffed. "The microscopes we use at the Jeffersonian are state-of-the-art, and we found nothing!"
"I mean high, HIGH-powered, Dr. Brennan," he said, growing weary of her resistance to his every move and suggestion. He pushed past her and proceeded up the stairs, where the others were now waiting for them on the landing.
"I don't know what that means," she protested, climbing the stairs after him.
"I have a device that will augment the microscope's power," he snapped, trying hard not to snap.
"Augment its power?" she asked. "These microscopes reside at the edge of what is possible, Doctor."
"Dr. Brennan," Hodgins interjected, speaking delightedly. "The Doctor is not bound by the frontiers of what is possible, not as you know them."
"Oh, boy," the Doctor muttered, before Brennan could utter another protest.
"What?" asked Cam, very attuned to what the Doctor was doing. She whirled around, and found him standing on the landing a few steps below her, peering out a window that was about five feet wide and perhaps three stories high.
"Take a look outside," he said. "Tell me what's wrong with this picture."
Everyone attempted to gather around the window. The view opened upon the Jeffersonian's north end. There was a long strip of concrete walkway, bordered on the right by a parking lot, and bordered on the left by a row of street lamps. Behind the street lamps there was a row of trees, roughly the same height as the lampposts.
"Whoa. Now, that's just odd," Booth said. He turned to Cam. "Don't you think that's odd?"
"It sure is," Cam agreed.
"Oh!" even Brennan said, startled.
"I don't see anything wrong," said Sweets.
"Seriously?" asked Angela. "You don't see it? Look at where the trees are, in relation to the streetlights and the shadows."
"Yeah, okay," Sweets conceded. Then after a moment, he saw it. "Oh! Holy crap!"
"I know, right?" Angela said, a little creeped out, and unconsciously grabbing onto Sweets' arm.
Because in spite of the fact that the lamps were between the trees and the concrete walkway, there was a shadow cast across the pavement, distinctly tree-shaped. There was a giant shadow where a shadow had no right to be.
"Is that them?" asked Cam. "Is that the Vashta Nerada?"
"Yep," said the Doctor. He turned away from the window, and stared at a spot that was over everyone's head in the distance.. "We've been taking precautions for small cells, little swarms, lurking in the corners. I wasn't prepared for anything like this."
He turned abruptly and stared out the window again. Cam came up beside him. "What are we looking at? What kind of damage should we prepare for?"
"A swarm that size could strip everyone in this building of all of their flesh in a matter of a minute or two," he told her.
"Okay, well, that's damage enough," she sighed.
The Doctor buried both hands in his hair and gritted his teeth. "This isn't right. What's it doing? What does it want?"
"Is it sentient?" asked Sweets.
The Doctor rounded on him. "What did you say?"
"The swarm, the Vashta Nerada, is it sentient?"
"Yes," said the Doctor. "It is. A group of them can think like a single organism."
"And it can hear and see?"
"Yes."
"Well, if we assume that its instincts are like any other thinking, hearing, seeing organism, its first priority is its own survival," said Sweets. "Does it know it's been found out, and that the crew at the Jeffersonian is trying to fight it?"
"I'd say it probably does," the Doctor mused.
"Okay, look," said Booth. "This is like any other situation where there's a group of thugs encroaching upon a stronghold."
"Are you saying we should treat this like a zombie apocalypse?" Hodgins said, with a twinkle in his eyes.
Booth rolled his eyes. "No, I'm saying we need to figure out how much of a threat there is. Is there just this one big shadow-cloud thing, or are there more? What are their resources? What is their weakness?"
"Their weakness is that they move slowly," said the Doctor. "Their resource... well, the fact that they can kill you in a split second and no one will hear you scream. Does that count?"
"Ugh," Angela groaned.
"Okay, are we surrounded?" asked Booth.
"Only one way to find out," said the Doctor. "Let's split up and check in the other three cardinal directions of the Jeffersonian. This is the north. We need to see what's happening on the south, east, and west sides."
"I thought you said we shouldn't split up," Cam pointed out.
"Based on recent events, Dr. Saroyan, I'm willing to bet that the Vashta Nerada are not in the building in the dark corners just yet. But they will be. One partner watches for rogue shadows, though, just in case, the other partner looks out the window, assesses the situation. Both eyes open, brains alert. Report back to the lab in fifteen minutes, yeah?"
The group agreed. All except Dr. Brennan who was still a pillar of incredulity and stubbornness. Booth put his arm around her. "You're with me, baby," he teased with a big smile.
"Fine," the Doctor said. "Booth and Brennan, you take the east wing. Dr. Saroyan, you go with Dr. Hodgins to the south. Angela and Sweets... west."
"What are you going to do?" asked Booth.
"I'm going back to the lab to amp up those microscopes, see if I can isolate a strain or species."
"Wait, wait," Sweets said. "You said their only weakness is that they move slowly?"
"It's the only one I know of."
"Isn't there a way to exploit that?" Sweets wondered.
"That's true," said Angela. "Isn't that why we ask the question? What's their weakness? How can we exploit it?"
"And can they be killed?" asked Booth.
"I don't kill," said the Doctor. "I only... well, incapacitate."
"Okay. Can they be incapacitated?"