Tension is mounting...
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Chapter 8
Cam and Booth moved the suicide victim found in the sewer to a gurney, then pulled some rarely-used embalming tools off a high shelf in a corner cabinet, tucking them beside the body for transport. They left him near the door of the Autopsy Room for easy access, then they grabbed flashlights and headed down to the garage where Booth's black SUV was parked.
From a stakeout two nights before, Booth's trunk had been carrying around FBI-issue body armor for three men and one woman. They had made two trips back up to the lab, Booth hauling heaps of equipment, Cam following closely, watching the shadows and carrying two helmets at a time in one hand. They piled them on the floor of the forensic platform for easy-access, then went in search of a British alien invader, and their own resident bone expert.
Dr. Brennan was standing at the top of quite a tall ladder in "Limbo," with the Doctor at the bottom, very nervously holding it steady.
"Please hurry," he encouraged.
"Why?" she asked nonchalantly. "If I fall and break a bone, you claim to know enough to be able to set it properly."
"Well, I do, yes. But ideally, we would just avoid the falling, and any resultant broken bones," he said.
She ignored him and pulled a drawer out of a very high shelf and yanked the lid off, peering inside. Her sudden moves made his hearts thump a little harder, momentarily. "This one might be congruent, relatively speaking."
"Okay, good, now come down from there," the Doctor said.
"How's it going?" asked Cam with a smirk at the jittery man, as she and Booth approached.
"Slowly," the Doctor sighed, white-knuckling the ladder as Brennan descended, holding a drawer under one arm, grasping the rungs with the other.
"Well, we can't be too careful," said Brennan. "The Doctor isn't just a certain height and basic build - no one really is. As it happens, he has an unusually vertical pelvis and slightly larger cervical vertebrae than most humans."
"Bones, somehow I don't think the Hava Nagilas are going to care," Booth sighed.
"It's Vastha Nerada. And yeah, I've spent the last forty minutes telling her that," the Doctor offered as Brennan reached the last five rungs. She turned and handed him the drawer so she could use both hands to climb down. Along with the drawer, she gave him a dirty look.
The Doctor carried the drawer to one of the exam tables, and pulled out the femur of an adult male. "It seems promising," Brennan commented. "But let's make certain that the skeleton is intact. The last one was missing a scapula, two phalanges and a coccyx."
"How does that combination of bones go missing?" Booth wondered.
"Booth, do you want to investigate what happened to the victims in Limbo, or do you want to dispatch these so-called carnivorous shadows?" she asked, her voice having risen slightly in pitch.
"Sorry, Bones," he said, chuckling inside. "Took my eye off the ball for a second."
Twenty minutes later, all two hundred and six bones of a forty-one-year-old murder victim from somewhere in Eastern Europe, approximately six feet tall, had been laid out anatomically on a chrome table.
"Well?" asked Agent Booth.
"This skeleton still does not have the correct pelvic shape," Brennan answered, moving around behind the Doctor. She placed her hands on his hips and pinched with her index and middle fingers, and thumbs.
"Whoa, what are you doing?" Booth asked her, reaching out. "You can't just do that, Bones!"
The Doctor sighed. "She's feeling my iliac crests. A little while ago it was my clavicle and cervical vertebrae. You know, Dr. Brennan, as flirtation goes, I've definitely had worse."
"What?" she asked, distracted and annoyed.
Cam suppressed a smile.
The Doctor addressed Agent Booth. "This is the third time she's done it. It's fine. I'm finding it faster just to humour her."
Brennan ignored them and moved back around to view the skeleton. "No, the pelvis is not similar at all. And the brow ridge is completely non-reflective of the Doctor's physiognomy. This one would be a more accurate surrogate for Booth, actually," Brennan said. Then, she studied the Doctor's face for the millionth time since they'd arrived in Limbo. "No, you clearly have a Northern European cranial shape, and the corresponding eye orbits and nasal-labial combination, suggesting you're descended from the Nordic invaders of Scotland or England, and their native progeny."
"Oi!" he shouted. "I am not the grandchild of British Vikings!"
"It doesn't matter whether you are or not," she said evenly, placating. "The fact is, this man's brow ridge indicates a Ural heritage and you..."
"Bones, do the words needle in a haystack mean anything to you? What are the odds you're going to find a skeleton in this room that's fully intact, and has every single quality you're looking for, to match the Doctor's shape?"
"Easily estimable, given the size of this room and current and historical statistics involving Caucasian male victims of..." she began.
"They're slim," Cam said loudly. "The chances are slim. So let's just use this one. Okay? Because we all love your quirky anal retention but frankly, we're on a schedule." She was now looking at Dr. Brennan with a tight, wider-than-necessary smile.
The two men's eye's slid to Brennan's face very carefully, just to see what she would do.
She set her jaw sideways, as she often did when frustrated. "Okay," she said reluctantly. "I just hope Hodgins' concoction of hallucinogenic mold is enough to confuse the organisms into not looking too closely at the skeleton's cranium."
"I hope so too," Cam said, with the same tight smile.
The Doctor started loading the bones back into the drawer, and Dr. Brennan began to help. He looked up at Cam and asked, "Have you come to tell me you found what we need?
"Yep," she answered. "Although, I don't really understand what good body armor is going to do. Microscopic organisms can get into any nook or cranny we can imagine."
"I know," he shrugged. "But a wise woman once pointed out to me that a sealed space-suit makes a tougher meal for the Vashta Nerada. 'Course, that was with the mesh concentration dialled up to eight-hundred per cent. But, if we can slow them down with the 'shrooms and put one more tough layer between them and you, then maybe we can give this a go, and not completely die."
"Not completely die?" asked Cam, slightly panicked, mostly amused.
"Space suit?" Booth asked, eyebrows and lips cocked.
"He's not from this planet," Brennan clarified with a straight face, straight mouth, and eyes brightly trained on her partner. All three of them looked at her with surprise, unable to tell if she was being serious or sarcastic. They all knew that Dr. Brennan wasn't particularly well-versed in sarcasm, but also was not wont to believe in the far-fetched claims of someone she just met, or for that matter, someone she knows well.
After a pause, the Doctor spoke. "Well, then," he said, replacing the drawer's lid. "Let's load up our cargo."
The phone at Cam's hip rang as they left Limbo and entered the grey stone corridor.
"Yes?" she asked it. There was a pause during which the Doctor, Brennan and Booth could hear the voice of a man on the other end, shouting and frantic. "Okay, okay, calm down, Frank. I need you to be strong, okay? Just stay where you are. Those windows are airtight, you'll be fine. You did the right thing by calling. I'll let you know if you need to get away from there. Just call me again if the pattern changes or they start moving faster, can you do that? Thank you, Frank."
She ended the call. As soon as she did, she received another call of the same type from another guard. As soon as she ended the second call, a third came in. She let it ring for a moment, and sighed, as her heart started to beat just a little faster.
The Doctor was staring at her with an earnest frown. "Shadows on the move?"
Cam nodded. "The guards say they are starting to spread."
After giving the crew the next update and set of directions, the Doctor began climbing the stairs out of the Medico-Legal lab of the Jeffersonian, with a two-way radio in his hand.
"Angela, can you hear me?" he asked through the device.
"I can, Doctor," she answered. "Where are you?"
"On the steps, headed up to the second floor from the lab."
"Okay, hold on," she said. She paused. Then, "I see you! Wait, why are you alone? Shouldn't you be traveling with a partner?"
The Doctor sighed. It was a very good question that reflected his current life's choices, though Angela thought she was just asking if he should be using the "buddy system" to navigate the shadowy Jeffersonian.
"It's all right, Angela," he told her. "I'm headed up to the roof. I'm not bringing anyone outdoors with me on a night like this. It's too dangerous."
"Oh, you're one of those," she said.
"Yes, as it happens, I am," he confirmed. "Anyway, will you surveille a few steps ahead of me so that I don't walk into a shadow that will, you know, end my life?"
"Sure," she told him. "The coast is clear all the way up to the top of the stairs. When you get there, turn left, and you'll see a door with a leaning bar. Go through that door, and it'll put you in a well-lit tourist area. That's the easiest way to get to the roof. You just find the green exit sign and climb."
"Okay," he said. "Here I go."
Angela guided the Doctor all the way up the stairwell to the roof this way, and when he came through the door high above the gardens of the Jeffersonian Institute into a crisp, clear night, he saw the TARDIS, just to his right, exactly where he had left it.
He should have gone straight to it, but he couldn't help himself; he had to see the Vashta Nerada.
He walked to the edge, and peered over.
"Blimey," he muttered to himself. A slightly transparent, charcoal-grey cloud seemed to surround the entire building, like a dangerous patch of factory exhaust. He shuddered, and forced himself to look away, to enter the TARDIS.
He felt daunted. He didn't want to let the crew in the lab know it, but he was wondering how the hell this ruse was going to accommodate a swarm the size of the one he just saw. He briefly considered simply loading everyone into the TARDIS and teleporting them out of there, but that would not solve the problem: there would still be a pissed-off carnivorous swarm, out to get them. And in that case, it would be on the loose in Washington. This way, at least they could keep it contained, focused on them, and not the populace.
But, it was nice to know that a TARDIS escape was an option, should worse come to worse...
The good news was, the shadow seemed to be turning into a cloud as it spread, rather than a denser shadow. That must mean that their forces were suffering somehow; or whatever reason, they were not able to add any troops to the cause, so they were spreading their existing personnel thinner, with not enough units to form a complete abysmal black shroud around the whole Jeffersonian.
The bad news was that this meant that the shadows were closing in, definitely trying to metaphorically suffocate the Jeffersonian.
It also meant that if anyone got trapped in the "cloud," they would likely have a slower death, and would feel the meat being torn from their bones for a few seconds, rather than having it happen in a painless flash.
This was a possibility that they had intensified, he knew, by deciding to slow them down with hallucinogenics, and to use body armor. Were they really doing the right thing?
He sighed to himself as he set coordinates to move the TARDIS. What was the right thing? Was he really wrangling with himself over whether or not to make potential death instantaneous for these people, or whether to give them a chance at a possible mere maiming? How the hell was he supposed to live with choices like this?
In other news, good or bad, this action taken by the Vashta Nerada might confirm what the Doctor had said in the bone room: that the Vashta Nerada probably were all connected by a psychic field. He had sort of known this before, as he knew that a swarm was more or less sentient, and he had seen it mesh its sentience with another sentience, back in the Library, as it spoke with the voices of River Song's dead friends. But thus far, he had had no confirmation that the smaller swarms confer with one another, and could coordinate as a whole. This might be to their advantage, or it might not.
But, he resolved to push forward. The plan they had in motion was the only option now, and it was a good plan that had a realistic chance at working. It's not like he was leading these people into certain death. So, the less the Jeffersonian crew knew about his doubts, the better. He reckoned it was kinder to have them be confident, because the alternative was to do nothing...