Evolved

By Martin Ross

**

Edgar Hoover FBI Building

Washington, D.C.

9:12 a.m.

“Sweet fancy Moses,” Mulder muttered. He blinked into the glare. “What in hell is this?”

“It’s called lighting,” Scully informed her partner, leading him stumbling across the threshold into the refurbished X Division quarters.

“As you can see, we’ve moved up in the world, though it took a budget cycle or so to make the move from the basement,” Clawson enthused, gliding about the tricked-out 10^th floor suite like a Beverly Hills realtor. “State-of-the-art comms and logistical systems, top-of-the-line NSA firewalls backed by Pentagon-level biometric security. Real-time satellite uplinks, ultra-HD orthoimagery from nearly anywhere on the planet, with hundreds of GIS overlays…”

“Kinda bright,” Mulder observed, blinking rapidly and shielding his eyes. His guide stopped dead.

“You’ll have to pardon Mulder, Agent Clawson,” Scully purred. “Our former accommodations were better suited to Ozark cavefish or mushroom production.”

Clawson chuckled anxiously. “Of course. Dim, 30 degrees,” he called out. The room darkened, and the new X-Files chief beamed proudly.

Mulder removed his hand and scanned the space. “It’s still here,” he murmured.

The young agent breathed sharply, then grinned as abruptly and rested on the edge of a long table whose surface glowed with a dozen data displays. “Look, I know this has to be, well, jarring, Agent Mulder. I know you two operated way under the radar, on a practically non-existent budget. But after the revelations of the Bari Trasadi technology, of the, um, planned incursion, the X Division attracted a lot of high-level attention and high-profile resource commitments. All of this, Agent Mulder, is at your disposal. You have a virtually blank check.”

“Please tell me you didn’t get rid of the Mr. Coffee. I finally had the filter seasoned just right, and I could use a hot shot of caffeine about now.”

Clawson’s face fell, like a lost child whose refrigerator drawing had been repurposed as bus station toilet paper.

“Sorry, Agent Clawson,” Mulder sighed as he caught Scully’s glacial stare. “I’m just having a slight case of Rip Van Winkle Syndrome, along with a residual spatial/temporal hangover. This is…impressive. I’m sure I’ll be like a boy in a Sharper Image once I get back on the horse.”

“Speaking of which,” Clawson transitioned awkwardly. “How would you like to jump back into the saddle right now?”

Mulder brightened. “Giddyap. But, really, I wasn’t shitting about the coffee. I’m betting Keurig, right?”

**

The uniformed, sturdy young man rose from a sleek, neo-Scandinavian conference table and extended a heavily calloused but scrubbed palm toward Mulder and Scully. “Jason Smith. Ranger Jason Smith, National Park Service.”

Mulder transferred his Dark Italian Expresso and pumped the hand once. “Ranger Smith.”

It was a statement rather than a greeting. Scully shot him a warning glare as Clawson slid in behind a slim tablet.

“Ranger Smith—“ Clawson began. Mulder coughed, and the X Division Chief nudged a carafe of water toward him. “Ranger Smith has been assigned to Golden Mesa National Forest for the past two years. The forest covers roughly 980,000 acres in Northwest Arizona and Southeast Nevada, and includes the world’s largest stand of Engelmann spruce as well as significant populations of whitetail and mule deer, elk, antelope, turkey, coyote.”

“Bears?” Mulder ventured. Scully appeared to stretch her leg under the table. Mulder’s chair retreated a few inches.

“A few Ursus americanus, black bear, seasonally,” Ranger Smith drawled.

“They’re pretty intelligent, right, Ranger Smith? On average, I mean…”

Smith’s fish-out-of-water formality dissolved into millennial fervor. “Supposedly the smartest native nonhuman mammal in North America. Most biologists I’ve talked to rank them near the great apes or even a three-year-old human, far as IQ.”

“I’ve heard they can be quite a nuisance, especially to picnickers—?”

“Ranger,” Scully powered in, “what brings you to the FBI?”

Smith leaned forward. “Officially, I’m testifying before a Senate Interior subcommittee this afternoon, on Endangered Species Act funding. But we’ve had some kinda, well, hinky occurrences the last month or so at the park, and Sen. Matheson on the subcommittee suggested I speak to somebody here.”

Senator Rich Matheson Jr.’s father at one time had been Mulder’s influential insider rabbi, using his congressional clout at times to intervene on Mulder’s behalf and at times to draw Mulder and Scully further into the murky depths. Though their relationship had soured after some intrigue involving nanotechnology, Matheson Sr. had remained a backroom booster for the X-Files, and Mulder guessed he’d tapped whatever small reserves remained in the Skinner favor bank. For the National Park Service? Mulder was intrigued.

“Why don’t you tell us the nature of your problem?” Scully murmured.

Ranger Smith frowned, and glanced at Clawson, who shrugged. “Tell you what. Why don’t I show you? This was taken two weeks ago, by one of our guys out on a routine check.”

Clawson tapped the pad, and an image materialized on the screen behind Smith. It was a vertical, ill-lit shot – likely a smartphone photo taken near dusk – of a lush evergreen forest at ground level. Perhaps 30 yards from the photographer, a blurred figure moved between a pair of what appeared to be the prized Golden Mesa spruces. There was a familiarity to the hulking, seemingly furry figure and its lengthy stride, but yet something strikingly different.

“Hoochie mama,” Mulder whispered, his chair springing to its upright position.

“And boom goes the dynamite,” Scully sighed. “I’m going to regret this, I know, but aren’t Sasquatch sightings normally confined to the Pacific Northwest?”

“Climate change?” Ranger Smith attempted, as if he’d practiced the hypothesis during the in-flight TV package. “I mean, haven’t global temperature shifts screwed with species habitat, migration patterns, even among mammals? I mean, we’re recording avian and insect species I’ve never seen in the park before…”

Clawson rocked, scowling. “But wouldn’t global warming drive a cooler-climate species further north rather than into the Southwest? If Bigfoot exists, that is.”

Mulder was shaking his head. Scully forged ahead. “Not necessarily. If climate or other natural factors depleted other regional species, a carnivorous or omnivorous mammal might migrate far from its traditional range simply in search of new food sources. There are a number of minimally uninterrupted natural corridors in the West that could provide safe cover for, say, a migrating bear.”

“Bears?” Mulder sputtered. “C’mon, Scully, babe. Bears?”

“Pedals,” she announced, firmly.

Clawson and Smith waited as Mulder exploded in laughter.

“Pedals,” he finally wheezed. “Pedals the bipedal bear.”

“Bipolar?” Clawson queried.

“Bipedal – walking on two legs, fully erect in the boring way, just like an E-gyptian. Over the past two years, rural New Jersians have regularly spotted an American black bear with two apparently maimed front legs nicknamed Pedals walking upright near residential neighborhoods. Though global bear buffs petitioned wildlife officials to relocate the beloved bipedal bruin to a sanctuary, Pedals perished tragically last fall in what was believed to be a premeditated act of archery. You can find all the case particulars on the Rest In Peace, Pedals the Walking Bear Facebook page, hashtag #justiceforpedals, where I’m guessing my partner researched the phenomenon of dysfunctionally erect ursines between Pinterest pantsuit searches.”

Scully searched for words, abandoned the two that initially surfaced, and set her jaw. “If this bear were seriously incapacitated, it’s likely its pack—

“Black bears don’t usually gather in packs,” Ranger Smith interjected.

“It’s likely other free-ranging bears might see it as a weak, easily eliminated competitor,” she continued through her teeth. “Perhaps this animal fled its original habitat out of survival, or maybe its inability to capture wild food species drove it toward the national forest and humans. Especially if, on top of it’s…infirmity…it was shunned by the pac–, by other solo bears because of its unusual mutation.”

“At last,” Mulder crowed. “She acknowledges the elephant in the room. The white elephant.”

The quartet glanced again toward the screen, at the blurred, hulking, furry, white figure striding through the evergreens.

“It’s not unheard of,” Smith offered, possibly in Scully’s defense. “There’s a rare subspecies of the black called the Kermode bear, mostly in British Colombia. The indigenous community calls them ‘spirit bears’ because of their white or cream-colored fur, and some tourists confuse them for Ursus maritimus. Sorry, polar bears. They’re not albinos or related to the ‘blonde’ brown bears found in Alaska. In fact, common black bears sometimes bear, ah, give birth to a white cub. Like Agent Scully said, it’s like a mutation that just started breeding true in the Canadian population.”

“Guys, c’mon,” Mulder squeaked. “Those look like bear arms – uh, the arms of a bear – to you? Especially a maimed bipedal blonde bear’s arms? You think you can buy me a drink and mention spirit bears and I’ll give you my room key?”

Smith paused. “Well, actually, there is one key problem with your theory, Agent Scully. This isn’t the only specimen we’ve identified.” He nodded to Clawson, who clicked up a new image, this time an even-grainier still from time-stamped video footage. A similar hulking white furry figure outside a wood-framed structure, back to the camera, heading seemingly into the nearby wood.

“About a week ago, the main ranger’s station was burglarized, the rear door jimmied, and somewhere around $24,000 in equipment stolen. Electronic equipment – GPS receivers and transponders, RFID tracking gear, some new communications equipment we’d just got in last month.”

“Picnic paraphernalia?” Mulder deadpanned. This time, Scully’s toe connected.

“Nah, just the high-tech stuff, and neither the gift shop or the information building were touched.” Smith sighed. “Agent Clawson, can you zoom in on the, uh, creature, please?”

Clawson silently manipulated the touch-screen, and Scully squinted at a dark, rectangular object tucked under the figure’s arm. She could make out a contrasting logo at the center of the object. A white apple.

“More cyber-savvy than the aaaaverage bear,” Mulder posited.

“Obviously, we’re talking about a human culprit or culprits,” Scully stated. “We likely would have seen some viral video pop up, if the take from the ranger’s station hadn’t changed our Bigfoot’s plans. There had to be some trace evidence at the scene.”

Smith looked unhappy. “Yeah, there was. A few smudged prints here and there, and some hair apparently ripped out when the thief was disconnecting the laptop.”

“Well, then…”

“The prints were too smudged for an ID, but they were roughly twice the size of human fingerprints. And the hair, it was white and coarse – far coarser than normal human hair.”

“Of course, your thief probably used actual pelts for his ‘sasquatch’ suit,” Scully suggested. “DNA testing should at least pinpoint the species used, and maybe give you a lead to where he obtained the skins.”

“We had a rapid DNA test done at the state lab. And you were right – the hairs weren’t human. We were lucky, because they were, um, torn out by the roots. The follicles were intact. And fresh. The non-human follicles.”

Scully fell silent.

“’Sides,” Smith continued. “You see that trail sign the, uh, the suspect’s passing? It’s a six-foot sign, and as you can see, he, or she — sorry, ma’am — is easily two heads taller.”

“And what did the DNA test show?” Scully croaked.

“Inconclusive. At least relative to known North American species. We plan to expand the search to more exotic and foreign mammals.”

“Ah,” Mulder smiled with a significant glance toward Scully. He looked away quickly. “You won’t find it in any known wildlife database, Ranger Smith.”

“We’re back to Bigfoot?” Clawson asked neutrally, or as neutrally as he could muster.

“Bigfoot is soooo last year,” Mulder huffed. “What has two opposable thumbs, ambles like a sasquatch, and is as white as the driven snow? And it’s not Gary Busey.”

The ranger and the agents stared once again at the hirsute felon. “Mulder, please,” Scully implored. “That’s absurd.”

“Noo,” Mulder smiled, eyes all aglow. “It’s abominable.”

**

“So, what, we wait a week or so before we ask for a raise?” Scully suggested as the elevator doors closed.

“I just want my basement back,” Mulder murmured, punching the parking level button. “I mean, can you imagine what all that tech radiation could do to my manhood alone?”

Scully rode silently, arms crossed.

“OK,” her partner relented. “I guess maybe I was kind of a butt up there…”

“Right latitude, wrong longitude,” she corrected. “Clawson’s absolutely ecstatic to have you on the team, and all you can do is bitch about your life’s mission finally being validated? And that poor young ranger…”

“Ra-a-a-anger Smith,” Mulder sang. “Ranger Smith. C’mon, Booboo…”

Scully sighed deeply, then cracked. “Picnic paraphernalia?”

“A generation that’s forgotten its Hanna-Barbera is doomed to suffer obscure pop culture references.”

Scully shook her head, “Well, I will say, Yogi, you do seem to have regained some of your adolescent exuberance. I actually kind of like it. I’ve, well, I’ve…missed it.”

The pair rode in a comfortable, smiling silence to the underground garage.

“But an abominable snowman?” she demanded as the doors slid open

“A yeti,” he amended. “We are, after all, scientists.”

Scully turned him. “And this is the theory you plan to pursue?”

Mulder extracted his keys and beeped the locks on their nearby sedan. “Does a bipedal bear shit in the forest?”
Saint Petersburg

Russia

1874

“Nikolay Przhevalsky?” Inspector Starbak squeaked.

Inspector Fyodor Petrovich, Special Corps of Gendarmes, brushed a crumb of his lunchtime pastry from his open tunic with a lazy grin. He knew the skeptical, diminutive redhead would raise a brow at the subject of their latest investigation.

“Director Shuvalov himself authorized the inquiry,” Petrovich shrugged. For once, it was the truth of the matter, though the Corps’ director likely was motivated far more by politics than by any thirst for plumbing the unknown.

It was well-known in the ranks that Shuvalov months earlier had been dispatched to London on a mission to arrange a marriage between Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna and the Duke of Edinburgh, as well as to pave the way for the Russian invasion of the Central Asian Khanate of Khiva with minimal international damage to the Anglophile director’s reputation. Petrovich, too, had heard the rumors that high officials might be positioning Shuvalov for an honorary post outside any sphere of influence, and the former Ministry of Internal Affairs likely was using Petrovich and the Corps’ secretive Byuro Neizvestnykh Obstoyatel’stvakh to excavate any dirty laundry that might assure him a softer landing, possibly in a diplomatic post in his beloved London.

Petrovich did not care – he was aware politics and power drove most progress or inquiry, and what little justice to be had in this empire. He had researched with great interest Przhevalsky’s dossier, and was convinced there was a solid Bureau of Unknown Circumstances file here. Przhevalsky was an honored military scholar of noble Belarus birth who had distinguished himself as a scientist and explorer. In 1872, he had crossed into Tibet, collecting thousands of plant, bird, and insect species as well as 70 reptiles and the skins of more than a hundred mammals. Subsequently, Przehevalsky was awarded the Imperial Geographical Society’s Constantine Medal, promoted to lieutenant-general, appointed to the Tsar’s General Staff, and received the Order of St. Vladimir, 4th Class.

However, there was talk. Talk of strange deaths during the Tibetan expedition, of a secret cargo shipped by rail under armed guard from the mountainous hinterlands, of hushed experiments being conducted within the bowels of a university laboratory in Moscow. The truth, as Petrovich exhaustively reminded Starbak, was somewhere out there.

Starbak, considered too delicate for active military service (his boots could scarcely reach the stirrups of even a small cavalry steed), was, fortunately, versed in medicine and a number of burgeoning scientific disciplines, and besides was the first cousin of a distinguished admiral. He was a pragmatist, challenging Petrovich’ more fanciful hypotheses but loyal to the Byuro Neobychnykh Obstoyatel’stv and its impetuous commander.

“So, what is our next step?” Starbak sighed.

Mulder/Scully residence

Georgetown

“You’re going camping. Without us.” It was a matter-of-fact statement, and Mulder realized how Charlotte already was favoring her mother. At that thought, Charlotte turned grinning to Scully, then pivoted sheepishly back to Mulder. Mulder grinned; Scully rolled her eyes at her daughter’s transparent attempt to conceal her telepathic transgression.

“It’s a case, honey,” Scully murmured. “We’d be working most of the time, and Walter’s way too young to go tramping through the woods. Maybe when we come back, we can take a family trip to the Appalachian Trail. How’s that sound?”

“I want to see the snowman,” Charlotte pouted before she realized she’d slipped again. “Sorry. What is an abom–, abom–?”

Scully began to speak, but Mulder pulled the child onto the couch beside him. “Remember Kwame, the big gorilla we saw at the zoo last month?”

“He was awesome!” Charlotte cooed, and Scully was placated by her show of childlike exuberance.

“Yeah, well, nobody’s actually met one, but scientists think the abominable snowman, or yeti, may be kind of like a cousin of the great apes–, ah, gorillas and other big monkeys.”

“Well,” Scully injected smoothly. “In one genetic study, researchers matched DNA from hair samples found in the Himalayas with a prehistoric bear…”

“Don’t confuse the child,” Mulder admonished. “About a hundred years ago, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury led a British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition, and found footprints that looked just like a man’s.”

“Yeah, that’s dumbing it down,” Scully grunted.

“Howard-Bury’s guides – the guys who carried his bags and stuff – told him that the footprints belonged to The Wildman of the Snows, or ‘metoh-kangmi.’”

“‘Kang-mi’ was the guides’ word for ‘snowman,’ and ‘metoh’ means ‘man-bear,’” Scully elaborated. She smiled angelically at Charlotte’s dad. “As long as we’re giving her an immersion course in Tibetan…”

Mulder smirked back. “So, anyway, about 40 years later, Professor Frederic Wood Jones, an anthropologist— You know what an anthropologist is, honey?”

Charlotte yawned. Mulder jiggled her gently. “Professor Jones was a very smart man, and he took a good look at a yeti scalp—” He caught Scully’s eye. “He looked real hard at some yeti hair some guys at the local monastery’d found. He concluded definitively that the hair was not, I repeat not, from a bear.”

“Honey, daddy forgot that Professor Jones said the yeti hair actually came from an antelope. Or a big ox,” Scully added, locking eyes with Mulder.

“Of course, Jones was an anthropologist, not a geneticist, uh, sweetie, so he might have made a…”

“A big boo-boo, Yogi?” Scully inquired. The girl giggled without recognizing the artistry of her mother’s Don Messick characterization. “Charlotte, you want to watch Doc McStuffins until dinner?”

Charlotte looked eagerly to Mulder, who finally sighed and waved her on with a kiss to the forehead. She vanished.

“Mulder, I hope your cryptozoological infatuation isn’t going to interfere with your objectivity,” Scully said, closing her laptop and joining him on the couch. His arm snaked about her shoulder. “Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation. This is very likely some offshoot of the clown sightings epidemic – some idiot dressing up in a Halloween Warehouse ape suit.”

“An ape suit made out of unknown mammal fur? And the scale of the fingerprints found at the scene? If the thief were wearing a costume with gloves that size, how did he – or she – manipulate all those cords and electronic equipment in the ranger station?”

“I’m just saying, keep an open mind, Mulder. How do you suggest a yeti managed to wind up in the wilds of Arizona, anyway?”

“I’ve thought about that,” Mulder said. “The Bering Strait. No, bear with me, Scully. At its narrowest point, the strait is about 50 miles from Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, to Cape Denzhnev in Russia.”

“So we’re talking Michael Phelps? Height’s about right…”

Mulder breathed heavily. “I am talking Max Gottschalk. In 1913, Gottschalk became the first modern voyager to make it across the Bering Strait without a boat. He traveled from Siberia to the Big Diomede Island off the Alaskan coast. Via dogsled.”

“Twenty-five miles off the Alaskan coast,” Scully pointed out, placing a hand on Mulder’s thigh. “Big Diomede is almost halfway between Alaska and Russia. Yes, the strait is frozen from mid-December potentially until  June. Yes, the yeti, if such a creature exists, inhabits one of the planet’s most inhospitably frigid regions, so, yes, conceivably, a large, bipedal mammal with a sufficient level of dexterity might theoretically survive such a journey.

“But, Mulder, you still have to explain why such a creature would migrate so far from his native region – a region where he faced little or no predation or resource competition, mind you, undertake a potentially lethal trek across 50 or so miles of ice – if he took the shortest possible route, and eventually migrate hundreds of miles into a temperate ecosystem entirely removed from his original Himalayan habitat. Why the hell are you grinning?”

He squeezed her. “You Googled Max Gottschalk. You measured the distance from Russia to Big Diomede. You analyzed glacial depth and duration. You checked out my theory before I even raised it. Hey, why don’t you lock the door? For about three minutes or so…”

Scully suddenly jerked her hand from Mulder’s inner thigh. “Oh, my God, Mulder. You fell asleep in the middle of foreplay last night.”

“Sorry, Scully. It’s just, for one shining moment, you came over to the Force.”

“Oh baby, oh baby, Star Wars references…”

“I mean, it’s almost like we’re completing each other’s…” Mulder waited.

“Get Walter ready for dinner,” Scully grunted, disappearing into the hall.

“Like Obi-Wan and Luke,” Mulder mused.

**

“Gigantopithecus was quadrupedal,” Scully sighed, closing Hawking’s Black Holes and Baby Universes for the fifth time.

“Unless it ultimately evolved as a bipedal ape, like Oreopithecus,” Mulder persisted, nearly upsetting his ginger ale. “I’d say that over a few hundred thousand years, it might have had the time to perfect the technique.”

“There’s a reason he was called Gigantopithecus, Mulder. A mammal of such massive structure and weight likely would have as much difficulty as a Bengal tiger or a rhinoceros achieving a consistent upright posture.”

“Rhinoceros?” Mulder’s knee bumped his tray table. “Rhinoceros?”

“Jesus!” the bulky businessman at Scully’s shoulder barked. He rose unsteadily to his feet. “I thought, take the First Class bump, you’ve earned it. But no. Excuse me, Lady.”

Scully pressed back as Window Seat’s left hip caressed her shoulder.

“Think I just saw a couple of guys head back to the john,” Mulder advised, craning to peek down the aisle.

“I’m not going TO the john,” the businessman growled, squeezing free of Mulder’s knees. “I’m going to stand BY the john. There’s a difference. Til we’re wheels down.”

Mulder blinked as the man retreated, then looked to Scully. “He leave his pretzels?”

Travelers Inn

Fountain Hills, Arizona

4:43 p.m.

“Wow,” Scully breathed as she surveyed the vaulted lobby atrium, the extended teak registration desk, the off-lobby steak joint and sports bar, and a lobby-length mural depicting the founding of the Arizona territory. “Just…wow.”

“Things really have looked up — beats the mom-and-pop Bates Motels back in the day,” Mulder concurred, pocketing the room cards. “No need to check for bedbugs, homicidal Siamese twins, horny sheriffs, inbred hillbillies, invisible predators, or teen vampires. Oh, I am so looting the suite.”

“I do think a double would have been sufficient, Mulder.”

Her partner sighed. “You still don’t get the ‘consultant’ thing. If you don’t pad the expenses, the client doesn’t feel like he’s getting his money’s worth.”

“Well, then, let’s go hog wild, then. I saw a Lucky Boy right off the interstate. Monster-Size our fries?”

“And I saw a chupacabra at the Walmart,” Mulder mumbled, pivoting toward the steakhouse. Scully redirected him toward the elevator bank.

“Oh, shit,” he mumbled, simultaneously peering over and attempting to hunch down behind Scully’s shoulder.

“Mulder? What?”

“Scully. I see…dead people.”

**

“Ah,” Jose Chung beamed, closing the distance between himself and the agents with surprising speed. “The brilliant, insightful, and always aesthetically pleasing Special Agent Scully.” The author, draped in Eddie Bauer hiking togs and his de rigueur ascot, glanced up at Mulder. “Oh, my, you brought a friend.”

“I thought you were dead,” Mulder stated. “Extremely so, in fact.”

“In the words of Charles Dickens, rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

“With a pickaxe. And it was Mark Twain.” Mulder had viewed the crime scene photos during a weekend visit at former FBI profiler Frank Black’s Tacoma-area cabin. Researching a series of murders seemingly connected to the Selfosophy psycho-religious movement, Chung, self-acclaimed author of From Outer Space and the not-so-posthumous Doomsday Defense, succumbed or now seemingly succumbed to said axe blow, administered by an acolyte of the prognosticator Nostradamus.

“Twain was a plagiarist and a hack – didn’t even have the integrity to write under his own name,” Chung dismissed. “Luckily, my attacker was an even worse hack, literally. I sustained a mere flesh wound that penetrated a portion of my brain that, fortunately for the literate populace, was used only for olfactory sensation and Sudoku. I recuperated in a vegetative state for four months, learned to do the Word Jumbles and regain full motor function, and, voila, yours truly, dented but not defeated. Let me tell you: Never, ever allow a critic to get the upper hand.”

“Mr. Chung,” Scully began. “I’m…I’m truly gratified to see you still among the living. But could I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Paleopalooza,” the author announced with a flourish Scully momentarily misinterpreted as a neurological dysfunction.

“That’s the working title, anyway,” Chung continued after his pause had produced the desired effect. “What do you think?”

“Speechless,” Mulder murmured.

“Delightful.” Chung turned to Scully. “I initially proposed You Say You Want a De-Evolution?, but my agent was concerned Yoko Ono or the Nike people might sue. But in either case, Chung is back, this time blowing the lid off the New Apocalypse.”

“What happened to the old one?” Mulder inquired.

Chung regarded him severely. “It would appear you eff-bombed THAT up by poking into trans dimensional vortices you had no business poking into. I was forced to ditch 543 pages of Jose Chung’s Alien Makeover — pure gold. But never fear: We remain good and verily screwed as a species.”

“How so?”

The author poked his huge glasses back into place, and peered about for the hotel bar. “I can’t discuss the Sixth Extinction without a second appletini. You’re buying – trust me, money well-spent. For me, at least.”

**

Chung smacked his lips as the second empty hit the scarred table. “So where were we? Ah, yes, the end of everything as we know it. Plus, you think we can get more of these cheese things?  They’re absolutely addictive.”

“Paleopalooza,” Mulder prodded, signaling the waitress.

Chung adjusted his ascot. “Let me ask you: Where do we get off? What makes us so goldarned special? Why does Homo sapiens get to be the Big Kahuna of Spaceship Earth?”

“Human sentience and self-awareness?” Scully suggested. “The ability to reason, to process needs, emotions, and societal objectives into viable, sustainable solutions?”

Mulder sipped his Coke. “Opposable thumbs? Bipedal locomotion? iPhone 7?”

“Precisely,” Chung commended. “We’re the capo di tutt’i capi of the animal kingdom primarily because we’re the only species impressed with its own PR. We define ourselves by wholly human criteria. Manual dexterity, technology, extreme snowboarding. Cockroaches have survived the last several extinctions on their strength of will and the rest of the planet’s table scraps. Our notions of collective civilization and engineering efficiency pale with respect to the hymenopteran insects. We have one-celled beasties living under ice floes and volcanoes, while humankind breaks out the sunscreen if the mercury hits 80 degrees.

“And our precious opposable thumbs have become lodged up our collective recti. Religious and political tyranny, genocide, virulent bigotry, environmental homicide, nationally televised groin injuries for cash prizes, Duck Dynasty, Pokemon, Kardashians? The host of The Apprentice has been elected leader of the so-called advanced world, and his TV gig’s gone to the former governor of California. And the KFC Bowl, for God’s sake? If that isn’t human de-evolution, then I’m not the New York Times’ bestselling nonfiction trade paperback author, November 10-15, 1996.”

“But the Information Age, space exploration, genetic research, nanotechnology,  biomedicine,” Scully protested.

“And what, pray tell, have we done with them? We’ve perfected a mechanism enabling individuals thousands of miles apart to instantaneously, in all caps, scream LIBTARD and NAZI at each other. The World Wide Web is a 24-hour adult book store with sticky keys. We can’t find our way out of a men’s room stall without GPS. We expend terabytes of digital information and code to create angry weaponized birds, and the millennial generation is convinced that anything worth saying is worth saying only in 140 characters or less. We’re collapsing under the weight of our sentient desire to one-up and distract ourselves, even as we reject the greatest scientific miracles of the modern epoch.

“We consult Jenny McCarthy about whether to vaccinate the kiddies against the next great plague, all the while Purel-ing ourselves to the point where a dirty lettuce leaf or an unwashed toddler might kill us. We’re reverting to Paleolithic diets an encephalitic Cro-Magnon wouldn’t touch, washed down with microbe-laden unpasteurized milk. We’re more terrified by gluten than by random mall shootings or global climate shifts, more scandalized by genetically engineered apples and stem cell therapies than by infant mortality or starvation in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s as if we’re virtually dry-humping extinction, de-evolving to zoological second-class status. It’s the Great Paleopalooza – the re-Neanderthalization of the species, and the soon-to-be-trademarked catchphrase of a modern generation. And, by the way, where is that girl with the cheese crackers?”

“Apocalypse, pools of blood, dogs living with cats, blah blah blah…,” Mulder recapped. “So you came out here to commune with Nature before the Big Lights Out?”

“I came here to document the dawn of the next great era in mammalian razzle-dazzle,” Jose Chung announced somberly. He reached inside his jacket, withdrew a Galaxy, and displayed a familiar, blurred, white, furry bipedal image on the screen. “There’s a new sheriff in town, Agent Mulder, and he’s got some awfully big shoes to fill. If he wore shoes.”

“We’re being replaced by the Abominable Snowman?” Scully drawled.

“Why should the hairless have all the fun?” Chung posed, touching his own liver-spotted scalp. “Your capriciously named Ranger Smith showed me the security feed of last week’s hairy hominid heist. They’ve evaded human detection for centuries, they’ve got us by a good three feet and the strength of four John Cenas, and now they have the technology.”

Mulder cackled, collecting a handful of newly delivered crackers. “The technology? The technology to locate lost yuppies in the woods, track spotted owls, and differentiate yuppie poop from spotted owl guano. All our yeti or whatever got away with was a really boring Radio Shack clearance sale.”

“Or did he?” Chung posed, sliding from the booth. “Sorry, appletinis tend to make me dramatically cryptic.” He plucked his MicroTherm StormDown Field Jacket from the hook above the booth. “Toodles.”

“Well, at least he gave us something to chew on,” Scully suggested as the server deposited the bill before Mulder.

Mulder displayed the check. “And we reciprocated. He put a room service cheeseburger and chocolate lava cake on our tab.”

Golden Mesa National Forest

Arizona

8:03 a.m.

“Breathtaking,” Scully murmured as she surveyed the blue ranges beyond the dense, evergreen, riparian expanse.

“Yeah, it’s really cool,” Mulder nodded, jerking his pack free from the rental’s rear compartment. “You remembered the BBQ sunflower seeds at the minimart, right?”

“C’mon, Ralph Waldo,” she sighed, shouldering her own gear and locking the SUV. “There’s Ranger Smith. And don’t even think it.”

The ranger bee-lined past a knot of Japanese twentysomethings in cryptic logo tees and cargo shorts scanning a relief map of the government preserve. “Agents, glad to see you made it out okay. Good flight?”

“Roomy,” Mulder supplied. “All ready to brave the wilderness.”

“Definitely, you should do that,” Smith grinned. “Though with those shoes, I think you may be relieved we can narrow down the wilderness we’ll need to brave.”

“Ouch,” Mulder complained. “Land’s End. Outlet, of course.”

“They’re really sharp. Nonetheless, this way, guys.”

The trio dodged an elementary school group, a clutch of elderly birders and a man-mountain in a Smokey the Bear Shirt up the wildflower-lined path to the main ranger’s station. The ranger led his federal companions past a crowded gift shop and a series of displays outlining Golden Mesa’s history, and into his tight but millennial-neat office. Smith slid in behind a pair of flat screen monitors.

“One of the guys is into unmanned aerial vehicles – drones – and he used a few local military connections to score us the use of a couple of micro drones equipped with new-gen thermal imaging cameras.”

“And boom goes the dyna—“

“Scully,” Mulder admonished. “Quit using Seth MacFarlane against me. Especially his failed spinoff work. Ranger Smi–, I mean, Jason, what’re we talking about here?”

“Armasight, with an AMRF2200 modular range finder and a 2X A-focal doubler.”

“Woof.”

Scully rapped Mulder’s shoulder. “Boys?”

“Uh, yeah,” Ranger Smith murmured. “OK, so I’m thinking we save those nice Land’s End boots and do a little aerial reconnaissance over a radius of maybe 10 miles both around the station and the second sighting location on Shiban Trail, which by the way, is about 23 miles due west. I figure that triangulates a fairly reasonable habitat range, at least for starters. That includes a key Salt River tributary – I figure they it, they, whatever, would want to be near a water supply. We spot a heat signature – and I’m assuming it’ll be a fairly obvious signature – then we can narrow down our search. Cool?”

“Wicked cool,” Mulder grinned.

“Yup,” Scully responded.

Smith nodded, opened the IR monitor window, and tapped in a few commands. “And…we’re off.”

Over the next 31 minutes, Mulder craned over the ranger’s shoulder, peering over miles of phosphorescent violet conifers broken occasionally by a winding stream or clearing. Mulder started a few times at red and yellow moving signatures, which turned out to be deer, wild horses, or hikers.

“By the way,” Mulder mumbled as he watched a pair of human signatures seemingly rubbing together against a spruce, “I put together a bipedal suspect list.  Assuming our burglar is mammalian – a fairly safe bet, than we narrow the known candidates to some kind of hominian ape,  a macropod like a kangaroo or wallaby, a steroidal kangaroo rat, a wicked huge  springhare, a colossal hopping mouse, or a seriously confused African ground pangolin. Though the extinct giant pangolin or ground sloth might fit our bill, if some pocket of the species managed to survive.”

“Apes and mice, plural, Agent, incidentally,” Smith corrected, piloting the droid away from the heat-generating fornicators. “A forensics prof at ASU was able to compare the security cam and cell phone videos and distinguish two separate, um, suspect yetis? Sorry, go on, Agent.”

“The absence of any arboreal or anchoring tail would appear to eliminate the marsupials, though Australian marsupials have shown an astonishing parallel evolution with their non-pouched mammalian brothers.” Scully noisily flopped her National Geographic onto a nearby table; Mulder refused eye contact. “Certain primates like the gelada baboon will go temporarily bipedal when moving between adjacent feeding ranges, and bears will fight in a bipedal stance, and in a rare case such as Pedals the Bipedal Bear, when injured.” Scully refused eye contact. “The spotted skunk has been known to stand on its rear legs when threatened. You wanna follow up on that one, Scully. Wow, you text your mom with that finger?”

Scully sprung from her chair. “I was pointing, Mulder. Look.”

Mulder and Smith turned back to the monitor, where a lanky, bipedal blood orange shape was moving briskly through a tree line adjacent to a river clearing.

“Thar she blows,” Mulder breathed. “Can you bring it down a little, not enough to spook it?”

Smith nodded excitedly, and the drone dipped a few dozen feet. The creature’s back was to the camera as it seemingly eviscerated an object with a fading signal Mulder assumed to be a fish. Then, suddenly, the “yeti” jumped and staggered. It dropped the alleged fish and raised its long arm to its head.

“Dude, fingers,” Mulder prodded Scully. She prodded back, more harshly.

“What’s it holding?” Smith interrupted, tapping the monitor.

Scully leaned in. “No,” she whispered as the “monster” began frantically waggling its fingers. “Oh, hell, no.”

Ranger Smith leaned back, shaving his jaw with his calloused fingers. “My guess is a 64-gig iPhone 5C, Black Otterbox case.”

“You got a good eye, Ranger,” Mulder marveled.

“Not really,” Smith sighed, yanking open desk doors and sifting through drawer clutter.  “I think it’s mine.”

“The more cogent question,” Scully suggested, “is who he – or she – talking to?”

**

Kingfisher Bend was a healthy 20 minutes from the ranger station, by ATV. Mulder was off the three-wheeler before it fully stopped, sidearm drawn. He crunched delicately through the pine needles, Smith and Scully in tow, crouching behind a Ponderosa pine as he reached the river clearing.  Smith ventured outside the canopy, peering about, his own rifle cradled at his side.

“I think it’s gone,” the ranger eventually ventured.

Mulder and Scully conducted a quadrant-by-quadrant sweep of the site, carefully avoiding non-vegetative surfaces that might offer up impressions. The park had been under a fire watch due to a lengthy dry spell, so the soil above the back was hard and unyielding, but Scully, clinging to the rocks above the embankment, soon shouted to the men. Mulder and Smith discovered her firing off a series of smartphone shots of a crisp footprint in the mud inches above the water line.

“I have a cast kit in my bag,” Smith volunteered, striding with barely constrained exuberance toward the ATV.

“15 inches maybe, 7-8 inches wide,” Mulder eyeballed. “Notice the big piggy and the piggy next door are nearly identical in size and spacing, while the remaining piggies are crowded. Classical Himalayan yeti.”

“As I don’t have a piggy database at my immediate disposal, I suppose I’ll have to take your word,” Scully grunted as she scrambled back to secure ground without Mulder’s assistance.

“The Sasquatch tracks recorded to date—”

“There aren’t enough allegeds on the planet to begin to address what’s wrong with that statement,” Scully lamented.

“—generally follow a human configuration, toes descending in size from Mr. Big to the pinkie. Fortunately, I do happen to possess a piggy database back at the hotel.”

“How I’ve begged for you to surf porn like the other guys,” Scully exhaled.

“My theory is the yeti’s toe distribution is designed especially for mountainous, ice-covered terrain, the two larger toes providing traction. Sasquatch doesn’t require that type of adaptation.”

Scully’s gaze shifted. “There’s something else Sasquatch doesn’t require.”

Mulder followed her scan to a shallow second impression three feet from the print. It was rectangular, perhaps two inches by 4, a small round void at one end, a slitted dimple at the other.

“Ranger Smith’s phone,” Mulder concluded. “Lacking pockets, our alleged cryptohominid had to set it down to snag his morning treat. Which, by the way…”

“For once, I’m ahead of you, Agent Mulder,” Ranger Smith called from above. He displayed a freezer-sized Ziploc containing a bloody, partially masticated trout. “Luckily, I took a couple units of forensics at the community college before changing majors. And, as I told you before, I got a DNA guy.”

Mulder gestured toward the iPhone print. “And a tracking device, providing the damned dirty alleged ape hasn’t trashed it. What’s kinda strange, though…”

His thought was interrupted as Scully whipped up, weapon in hand. “You hear that?” she whispered harshly. “Something’s in the trees, about 11 o’clock behind my shoulder.”

Mulder and Smith unholstered slowly, and needles, branches, and boughs began to snap and pop in the pines. Mulder cursed and scrambled to solid ground. Before Scully could gain traction, he’d disappeared into the woods, crashing through the foliage as he pursued the sound of flight and flashes of white ahead. Low branches slapped and pummeled Mulder as he picked up speed. As the trees thinned, he slowed in surprise as he realized his prey was human, rather than hominid.

“Hey!” Mulder shouted, eloquently. The slight figure — cloaked in a dirty white hoodie and matching balaclava – kept running. In a gesture he’d never have attempted in an urban pursuit, Mulder raised his gun and fired into the air. Without skipping a beat, the figure vanished into the next cluster of Ponderosas.

“Shi—!” Mulder roared as he resumed the chase, only to perform a perfect backflip and came to rest with a whump on a deceptively hard bed of pine needles.

“Mulder?”

Mulder opened his eyes to see white starbursts and the concerned faces of Scully and Ranger Smith hovering above him. He mumbled instructions. Scully and Smith exchanged glances.

“What?” Scully inquired, leaning closer.

“Shit.”

“Mulder, follow my finger with your eyes.”

“No, Scully,” Mulder moaned as he waved them off and rose to a wobbly sitting position. “Shit. On my shoes. I slipped on it. We need to bag them. I think maybe it’s yeti shit.”

**

As the ATV pulled off the trail into the graveled space beside the station, Mulder spotted it. He jumped out, wincing as he crunched barefooted into the rocks, and stared at the supersized bus parked illegally by the curb bordering the parking lot. A small mob of largely young and, dare he judge, nerdish visitors were clustered by the cab.

“MOTW,” Smith recited, gawking at the dripping moss-green legend on the side of the vehicle.

“Monster of the Week,” Scully groaned. “The Knowledge Channel. ‘What you don’t know, we cover.’”

“Your partner should get checked out. Where’s he going?”

She sighed. “The circus just came to town, and Mulder wants to see the freak show. C’mon.”

By the time they reached the bus, Mulder had flashed tin and scattered the geek patrol. He was laughing and chatting with a tall, ruggedly telegenic twentysomething as his equally millennial crew debarked, a few bearing bulky equipment cases.

“Hey, Scully, meet Bo Rodman,” Mulder grinned, possible concussion seemingly forgotten. “Bo, this is my partner, and Jason Smith — he’s kinda the sheriff around these parts.”

“Ranger,” Smith amended. “Can I ask what you guys doing here?”

Bo nodded at him and hopped down from the cab, nearly colliding with Scully. “Hey. I was just telling Fox, we’re looking to do an investigation of the Mesa Monster.”

“Investigation. Ah. And just how did you happen to hear of the ‘Mesa Monster’?”

Capped teeth emerged from Bo’s square jaw. “Well, we were doing a piece for the new season on some lake monster sightings over in Tortilla Flats…”

Mulder straightened. “Serpentine?”

“Focus,” Scully ordered.

“So we were packing up for lunch when Scot showed me this YouTube feed that’s just the shits.” He pulled his iPhone from a cargo pocket and clicked up a dark and grainy – and familiar – scene. Punching the play arrow, he reran Smith’s security feed.

“How’d they get that?” Smith demanded weakly.

“Oh, that’s just the teaser, Bro,” Bo assured him. He searched up a second video. “This one, we got Messaged directly, ‘bout a half-hour ago on our way up.”

Scully closed her eyes. Mulder looked at the ground.

“How’d they…?” Smith whispered as he stared at the aerial yeti footage.

“Must’ve hacked the drone,” Mulder suggested. “You, know, that video was taken as part of an ongoing federal… Oh, hell.”

“Yeah,” Bo empathized. “So, we certainly don’t want to disrupt your routine or anything, Ranger, but we already contacted the Parks Service, and I was wondering if you had a few minutes to sign some standard releases? Boilerplate stuff. We assume all liability for any damage, blahblahblah.”

“You got any theories?” Mulder asked.

Bo reluctantly glanced back. “Me?”

“Sure. I watch the show – you seem to actually have a reasonable grasp of zoology and folklore.”

“Two years at the San Diego Zoo. Intern. Well, community service, but hey…”

“So, any thoughts?”

“Well, you ever heard of the Mogollon Monster? Been sighted all over central and east Arizona for more than 100 years. Seven feet tall, red eyes, smells like dead fish or a skunk. Earliest reported witness said it had long white/gray hair and two-inch claws. Claimed it was drinking the blood of a dead cougar.”

“Someone was drinking, anyway,” Scully asserted. Bo shrugged.

“Heard there’ve been a lot more sightings by Indi–, Native Amer–, uh, indigenous peoples on a few of the Apache reservations, but good luck opening them up. We were onto a hot lead on a wendigo a year or so ago, and…”

“Thank you, Mr. Rodman,” Scully interrupted. “Here’s my card. Stay available.”

“Hellz, yea—” Bo began, but Scully was already marching back toward the ranger’s station.

**

Scully regarded Mulder and Smith neutrally as they appeared in the office doorway.

“In our defense,” Mulder began.

“Let’s move on, gentlemen,” his partner advised. “The cat, or bear, or protohominid is out of the bag, and by tomorrow, that drone footage likely will have gotten a few million hits. I’d say we have a narrow window before every…every Mulder…in a three-state area shows up here.”

“Already got my NSA guy tracking Jason’s phone,” Mulder diverted hastily. “Which brings me to something that hit me as a little bit off down by the river. Jason, you told me your phone was equipped with an Otterbox?”

Smith dropped into his chair. “Military-grade rubber. Eight million ways to trash your gear out here.”

Mulder nodded. “So why wasn’t it on your phone down on the riverbank? The impression we found was of a naked smartphone – no case.”

Smith mulled, then shook his head.

“I was thinking about something Chung said last night,” Mulder told Scully. “About yetis and human technology, and about why they might steal park equipment with little real practical value outside scientific applications. Why do you take your phone out of its case, Scully?”

A brow rose. “To…look at it? I don’t know…”

“To look at it. Examine it. Maybe to tinker around, pop the hood, see how it ticks?”

“What are you getting at, Agent?” Ranger Smith drawled.

“Reverse engineering.”

“Say what?”

“Look, say we have a creature with higher-than-average primate intelligence who’s moved further and further into man’s habitat. Or, more accurately, has been crowded out of its own. After a while, maybe this creature begins to explore the conveniences, the comforts, the social structure of the beast that’s gained dominion over its former territory, over the species. TVs, manmade heat and refrigeration, internal combustion, microwave ovens, planes, computers and cellphones. Technology – the key to Homo sapiens’ ascension through the zoological ranks.

“And who’s to say this is their first heist? I bet if we checked sheriff’s departments around the area, we’d discover a number of home or business break-ins, with thefts confined to gadgets, appliances, and devices.”

“And they’re, what?” Scully challenged. “Pirating them?”

“Learning, Scully. Catching up to the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, and the Information Age in one sweeping move. Studying human tech in order to develop their own.”

“Reverse engineering…”

Mulder shrugged. “A-bomb – that’s what I’m calling him, her, it – was talking to somebody on the ranger’s phone. That guy in the woods wasn’t a lost birdwatcher. I think the yeti have an accomplice, a human accomplice. Look, Scully, you and I have dealt with some of the more radical eco-activists. What do they argue? How do they excuse acts of vandalism, even dangerous acts? Man’s continuing global clusterfuck. Maybe this guy’s trying to speed up Chung’s anticipated timetable for Man’s succession.” Mulder’s own phone buzzed; he held up a finger.

“Yeah,” he greeted. “Wow, great…What? What do you mean? Right now? You sure? Okaaay, thanks.”

Mulder ended the call absently, then silently examined a park map on the opposite wall.

“Mulder?” Scully prompted.

“Fox?” Ranger Smith attempted. Mulder looked up. “I mean, Agent Mulder?”

Mulder smiled lamely. “My buddy, he located your phone. No, Jason, you won’t need your jacket. It’s right here. At the station. C’mon.”

**

“Yup,” Mulder announced as he carefully pulled the smartphone, sans Otterbox, from the storage compartment of the ATV. “Well, we know one more thing about the yeti.”

Smith mournfully inspected the scarred casing, the cracked screen bearing a single, very large fingerprint. “What’s that, Agent?”

“He’s a world-class dick.”

Travelers Inn

7:23 p.m.

“Clawson angry?” Scully asked gently as Mulder pocketed his phone.

“Not as much as you’d imagine,” he replied, looking to his newly arrived Cowboy Cut ribeye for consolation. “He said Skinner was curious but philosophical about the social media leak, wondered how, why, and who would have hacked the drone camera. He asked how much I told the MOTW crew. Turns out they’re already running network promos on the great Mogollon Monster hunt. Oh, and Clawson sent his love.”

“That didn’t happen,” Scully stated.

“Nah.” Mulder sawed into his steak.

Scully picked at her Cobb salad. “So who did hack the drone?”

“Dunno,” Mulder ruminated. Literally. “Though I bet…nyom…it was our yeti-whishperer.”

“The man in the woods?”

“Hoodie Boy.” Mulder swallowed. “He wasn’t dressed like an Old Navy ninja for a romp through the gillyflowers. I think our yeti made our drone and called Hoodie Boy, who beat it out to the site, too late, to clean up any trace.”

“That makes no sense, Mulder,” Scully objected. “If he was trying to conceal the yeti’s existence, why release that video? Why even hack the video?”

“I think he was only interested in cleaning up the human trace – A-Bomb must’ve left the phone behind when he scrambled back to his hidey hole, and Hoodie Boy realized it when his calls went unanswered. Hoodie Boy retrieved the phone just as we arrived, then tried to throw us by planting it on the ATV while we were down by the river. If he wanted us off the yeti’s trail, he’d have wiped the phone. Incidentally, Smith’s doing a comparison of the smartphone print and the print found in the station after the theft. You wanna hand me the butter? Thanks.”

Mulder chewed and Scully stewed until a burst of laughter exploded across the dining room. Bo Rodman and his crew followed a petite blonde server to a corner table, settling in with a clatter. Bo spotted Mulder and saluted, talked briefly to a bearded man to his left, and worked his way through the Wednesday dinner crowd.

“Wonderful,” Scully muttered.

“The FBI’s most wanted!” the producer/monster hunter proclaimed, squeezing Scully into the corner of the booth. “So what’s the haps? Any good leads on our friend?”

“We can’t comment on a—”

“You want a beer?” Mulder invited. “Youch!”

Scully smiled innocently.

“Hellz yeah. Oh, don’t worry about them – they don’t listen to me half the time anyway.”

“Great.” Mulder signaled the waitress. “So, there’s a lake serpent in Tortilla Flats.”

“Sorry, boys,” Scully blurted. “I’ve got paperwork.”

“On what?” Mulder asked, withdrawing his legs.

Scully stared across the table as Bo helped himself to a chunk of ciabatta bread.

“On the thing, the classified thing,” she finally responded.

“Oh, that thing. See you upstairs.”

“Don’t hurry,” Scully recommended as Bo skirted out of the booth.

Bo and Mulder stared after her, then the agent turned with a smile. “Lake serpent.”

**

Scully froze in the bar entry. Jose Chung, winner of the 1987 Pasadena Speculative Non-Fiction Writer’s “Speckie” Award, waved her in with his glowing green martini.

“Please, allow me to order you one of these delightful concoctions,” the author cooed as she took the opposite stool. “I imagine it’s been a difficult day. As the millennials would say, you’re trending. Barmaid, un appletini, and another triple for me. Gracias.”

Scully leaned back. Quirky and narcissistic as he was, Chung was a somewhat comforting presence. “I will admit, I was a bit surprised not to find you at the park today. You missed quite a bit of excitement today.”

“It fortunately missed me, as well,” he said. “Besides, I’m what you might call a very indoorsy sort of fellow. Which reminds me – how is the unfortunate Agent Mulder? I understand he took a nasty blow to the noggin. Nothing permanently jogged loose or back into place, I trust?”

“Same old Mulder,” she smiled. Chung shrugged wistfully. “So how did you occupy your day?”

Chung beamed as the appletinis arrived. “Nostrovia!,” he toasted.

“That sounds suspiciously like a lead-in,” Scully suggested.

Chung’s eyes lit. “If I had a daughter, Agent,” he began, fondly, “she almost certainly would prove a bitter and erosive disappointment. She would lure me in with infantile babble and amateurishly endearing crayon drawings and A-minuses that should have been straight As, given her bloodline. Then, adolescence would set in, and more and more of my writing energies would be diverted to parent-teacher conferences, bail and juvenile court hearings, hanging about maternity wards and embarrassingly inept first-grade productions, and, ultimately, endless ‘There, theres’ as her own domestic bliss falls to ashes. As I reached the inevitable point of senescence, she likely would attempt to seize my literary power of attorney, posthumously publishing foolishly preserved manuscripts revealing – hypothetically, of course – old Dad’s penchant toward footwear fetishes. You are so much better than a daughter.

“And yes, that was by way of preface.” Chung sipped his appletini and toasted the barkeep. “Whilst you and Skippy were chasing through the forests primeval and racking up ‘Likes,’ I was engaged in cerebral pursuits at the local public library and a few frontier museums of dubious pedigree. Voila.”

Chung pushed a photocopy of a clipping toward Scully. It was stamped June 15, 1874, and in the purplish prose of the day outlined “the august visit of heralded Russian explorer and diplomat Nikolay Przhevalsky to our humble Valley.”

“’While the specific purpose and business of the esteemed Mr. Przhevalsky and his ensemble remain shrouded in secrecy,’” Scully read, “’the legendary former imperial soldier and naturalist was heard during his tour of the desert countryside to acclaim upon its grand beauty. Asked by this writer to elaborate upon his forays deep into the forbidding reaches of the Asian region, Przhevalsky offered a brief and succinct reply in his native tongue, which, unfortunately, his interpreter was unable to adequately convey in English.’”

“Przhevalsky was, to put it crassly and succinctly, a dick,” Chung noted. “And a racist and drunkard. One out of three, I suppose. I’ve found very few additional accounts of the tsarist bastard’s visit, which itself is significant.”

“It was unofficial, off the books,” Scully nodded. “Naturally, an imperial Russian VIP visiting a then-small Western community would be noteworthy and, I assume difficult to contain locally. At the same time, in those unconnected times, it was unlikely such an event would leak to state or national newspapers. You said very few additional accounts. What else do you have?”

Chung produced a soiled, creased, and yellowed photo. It depicted a haughty, mustachioed thirtysomething man with a Stalin-style cut and an impeccable, continentally cut suit and waistcoat, flanked uncomfortably by a group of what were clearly locals in Stetsons and fedoras. They were posing before a large paneled wagon with high spoked wheels. To the left and right of the Przhevalsky Fan Club were thick chains encircling the wagon’s body.

“Precious cargo,” Scully surmised. “Any indication why they needed the heavy security? And how does this relate to our, um, hairy friend?”

Chung drained his martini with a satisfied smacking. “Cue the balalaikas! Nikolay Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky was born in 1839 to a noble Belarusian family in the western Russian village of Smolensk. Like any good little Russian boy born to nobility, he was enrolled at the military academy at St. Petersburg, but he was destined to make maps, not war, and wound up a geography teacher at a military school in Warsaw.  In 1867, Nikolay actually asked to be shipped to Siberia to explore the Ussuri River basin along the Russian-Chinese border. That led to publication of the electrifyingly titled Travels In the Ussuri Region 1867-69 and a ticket to Central Asia – the Broadway of 19^th Century Russian explorers.

“In roughly 1870, Przhevalsky and his merry little band of Russkies crossed the Gobi Desert, explored the upper Yangtze, and then, in 1872, crossed into – wait for it, wait for it – Tibet.”

“Ah.”

“You bet your sweet but stylishly demure little panties. Nikolay and the Boys surveyed more than 7,000 square miles, collecting more than 5,000 plants, 1,000 birds, 3,000 insects, 70 reptiles, and the skins of 130 different mammals, in addition to some key military intelligence. Our lad returns home to great fanfare, a promotion to lieutenant-general on the tsar’s general staff, and both the Imperial Geography Society’s Constantine Medal and the Order of St. Vladimir. Think a Grammy and a Tony, with a Golden Globes nod tossed in. He returns to the region in 1876 for four more expeditions, before catching a scorching case of typhus from the Chur River. They gave him a very nice statue in St. Petersburg, and named a horse, a gazelle, and five lizards after him. I should get one lizard named for me, God forbid!”

Scully sipped her cocktail thoughtfully before looking up. “If I get where this all is going…”

“Bingo!” Chung exclaimed, rousing the bartender. “Oh. Sorry. Please go on.”

“I assume your theory is that Przhevalsky returned from that first expedition with more than merely 5,000 plants, 1,000 birds, and 130 mammals.”

“Bingo! Agent Scully, I believe Nikolay made a discovery of far more import to the Empire than a spotted Nepalese hornet or a shaggy pony. After all, they don’t hand out those Orders of St. Vladimir like M&Ms, I assume. I believe that during his travels in Tibet, he heard the tales of a certain Himalayan behemoth, and like any dedicated scientist with a jones for fame and medals, decided to bag himself a yeti.”

Scully jumped at a roar of laughter from the nearby steakhouse. “No simple task, I’d imagine. And even if he succeeded, and managed to bring one back alive, why wouldn’t he have trumpeted his discovery? It would have made scientific history.”

Chung fell silent, arching a brow at his drinking companion.

“Agent,” he finally said. “You’ve seen some literally incredible things over the last 20 years. The existence of alien intelligence, evidence of uncanny human mental powers, giant flukelike men. But until the destruction of a trans dimensional rift on nationwide TV, these discoveries wound up buried under layers of government subterfuge and obfuscation. Why, pray tell, is that?”

He arched the other brow until Scully exhaled and slugged down the rest of her appletini.

“If you can’t civilize it, weaponize it,” Chung suggested. He grabbed for a cocktail napkin and his pen. “Say, that’s pretty good.”

**

Scully’s phone rattled on the nightstand as she slipped out of her jeans. She was halfway to it when she spotted a familiar visage on the muted room TV. She seized the remote and cranked the volume.

“Why are we so arrogant as to assume we’re alone among the intelligent apes?” Mulder challenged in extreme close-up. “Because we’re too clever to let a seven-foot, hairy hominid give us the slip? I think that says more about us than them, er, it. Right?”

Cue titles. “IT’S THE ONLY MONSTER ON THE FBI’S MOST WANTED LIST, AND WE’RE IN ON THE HUNT! BE THERE FOR THE SEASON PREMIERE OF MONSTER OF THE WEEK, IN TWO WEEKS ON THE KNOWLEDGE CHANNEL!”

Cut to mid-close-up Bo Rodman, hanging from MOTW bus cab. “I’m Bo. Join us for another expedition into the unknown! What you don’t know CAN hurt you!”

“Mulder,” Scully growled, silencing the set. She glanced down at her phone. CHARLIE2. Scully dropped onto the bed, staring at the display before hitting callback.

“Dana?” Even after the past few years, Charles Scully’s disembodied voice occasionally jarred her more than the face that mirrored her dead brother. The neurosurgeon’s tone betrayed a sanity, a peace that had eluded the tragically wayward young man of her Earth. The Charles Scully that could have been. Though her “brother” from another universe had become a trusted confidante and friend, that continued to torment Scully.

“Hey,” she nonetheless responded, breezily. “Sorry I missed you. Mulder was on cable.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow.”

“Anyway, I checked the journals and talked to some of the guys at the Georgetown Zoological Cognizance Lab, and there doesn’t seem to be any physiological reason why your ape couldn’t have advanced from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion. Bipedalism appears far more related to environmental adaptation than biological change. Ancient climatic shifts forced many early hominids out of the trees and onto grasslands. An erect structure, along with other defenses, helped them deter predators, and it’s been suggested bipedalism increased the amount of primate body surface exposed to favorable wind speeds and temperatures, helping dissipate heat that could slow their reactions. If you’re trying to tranquilize Mulder, you better look in a new direction.”

“Worth a try. Have a good time at the Smithsonian?”

Charlie’s clinical voice warmed. “She loved it, especially the aeronautics stuff. I still marvel at how you guys arrived at the same technology through such a circuitous route. Oh, and we stopped at a Korean taco food truck, Charlotte’s insistence. Hope it didn’t spoil her supper. Your mom already seems wary about me spending time with…”

“Charlie, stop it. You know it’s not you. You know that. It’s just…”

“I know. Give it time. Time heals.”

“Indeed. Though Mulder might want to hang out with his new friends a little longer.”

**

Scully started awake at the first thump. The red LED readout at her elbow read 1:43. A low rumble sounded from the suite’s main room, evolving into a rhythmic growl. She slid stealthily from under the comforter, sliding the bedside drawer silently open and extracting her Glock. Scully’s bare feet bore into the carpet, and she edged toward the doorway.

“Well, hey, you’re up,” Mulder grinned from the floor. “You din’t have to do…waking up. I gotta key, y’know, though the lock thing kept, you know, kept moving.” Mulder tried to remove the new shoe that had replaced his yeti-soiled Land’s End boot, but fell on his back in the effort and surrendered. “Hey, hey, as long as you’re already up…”

“Don’t even,” Scully sighed.

“No, no,” Mulder placated, using the coffee table to climb to his feet. “Jus’ let me find something to get these things off.”

“Whoa,” a voice erupted from the couch. Scully leveled her gun, and Bo Rodman’s head popped up above the sofa back and as quickly ducked behind the cushions. “I thought you said something about a…a…nightcap, dude.”

Mulder giggled. “Oh, shit, I, uh, forgot all about you. Scully, where’s the, you know, the minibar?”

His partner loudly thumbed off her safety.

“Yeah,” Mulder mumbled. “You prolly better go, Bro.”

**

“Can you drive any, I don’t know, softer?”

Scully’s foot twitched on the gas pedal.

“OK, OK, you’re still pissed, I got that,” Mulder said as saguaro and chollo and tractor trailers hurtled by. “Soooo, Przhevalsky bagged hisself a yeti for the tsar, who decided to, what, turn it into some kind of supersoldier?”

“I don’t think that’s what I suggested at all,” Scully replied. “Though Chung found some evidence that the imperial government might have been conducting some sort of covert research involving  Przhevalsky, who then turns up in Arizona with a mysterious cargo under lock and key. I’m not yet ready to concede he had a stowaway snowman in tow, but it bears further investigation. And what did you do with your evening, beyond wallowing in Coors and testosterone?”

“Actually, before we moved on to the entertainment portion of the program, Bo provided some interesting insights. Did you know he was the first-season host of Hack’d?”

“I think Downton Abbey was on at the same time…”

“So, they did this segment on drones, and it turns out it’s not that tough to hack a drone — non-commercial models particularly creates an unprotected wireless signal, and even with encryption, a group at Johns Hopkins discovered three different ways to send rogue commands from a laptop and crash the drone. Few months back, a Trend Micro security researcher demonstrated the Icarus Box, which lets you lock an operator out and hijack a drone or any other radio-controlled device that runs over the DSMx wireless transmission protocol. The major manufacturers have been rushing to release patches and updates, but a talented hacker could probably bypass those in a few moves. Same time, wireless IP surveillance cameras are pretty easy to hack, even by smartphone. So it’s not inconceivable our social media leaker either captured the live yeti feed or copied the video file.

“But either way, that requires some advanced planning on our hacker’s part, or at least some expectation of a hacking opportunity. But Smith’s plan to use the drones was kind of a last-minute thing.”

Scully turned at the arrowhead logo into the National Park, to find a lengthy queue of vehicles creeping toward the Golden Mesa visitor’s center. “I don’t quite get where you’re going with this.”

“Well, unless our hacker was waiting in a camper for a random drone to fly by in a vast wilderness area, how did he or she know any video would be available?”

“A prank?” Scully suggested, edging forward. “I mean, Mulder, you can buy a small drone for $50 bucks at a Walmart. A national park might seem the ideal place to get some aerial video, and some computer lab delinquent might think it was a hoot to hijack a few drones.”

“National parks are considered no-drone zones because of the noise, safety, and wildlife disruption issues, “ Mulder countered. “You can get hit for $50 to a few thousand if you get caught. So any illegal drone use likely would be confined to the more remote reaches of the forest – it’s unlikely a hacker would see any major opportunity here.”

“So where are you going with this?”

Mulder gestured toward the congested parking lot ahead. “It’s where we’re going, Scully.”

**

“Yesterday’s anonymous release of what may be the first major video of the Mogollon Monster has generated a standing room only crowd at Golden Mesa National Park,” Bo said, waving a hand toward the distant Superstition Mountains as a throng behind MOTW-emblazoned barriers stared on memorized. “This may be the largest audience we’ve ever witnessed in our quest to find America’s unknown creatures. Come along with us on the search for our Monster of the Week.” Bo released his abdominal muscles. “And that’s a wrap. Pack her up, and we’ll head up to King Crab Bend.”

“Kingfisher Bend,” Mulder corrected from the sidelines.

America’s Favorite Cryptozoologist whipped around with a broad grin, and approached palm aloft. “My Mulder from another mother! And, hey, Agent Dana! Man, you shoulda stuck around for the par-tay!”

“I feel like I was a part of it,” she said drily as Mulder delivered five. Bo turned to her, expectantly, then dropped his arm under Scully’s dead stare.

“Bo, bro, I wonder if you could do us a favor?” Mulder interjected.

“Dude, anything. You’re practically like family…”

“Well, family…” Mulder disclaimed, averting eye contact with Scully. He glanced at the mob behind him as a dozen smartphone cams fired off. “Can we talk on the bus?”

**

Ranger Smith nodded Mulder, Scully, and Rodman into the cluttered office, grimacing as an indication he was about to wrap things up.

“No, that’s not been substantiated,” he admonished patiently into the handset. “I can’t comment on that, you know that. Lemme get you the number for NPS Communications, OK?”

“Guys,” he finally beamed as he cradled the phone. “Sorry ‘bout that – been ringing off the hook all morning. Mostly local media, bloggers, weird support groups.”

“Yeah,” Mulder responded. “I noticed you’re really packin’ em in today.”

“Right? Damn social media – like a mob scene. Dr. Loracz had a hell of a time getting into the park today.”

“Hope we didn’t hold him up,” Scully said.

“Oh, no – he’s been on sabbatical for four month, and he was happy to help,” Smith dismissed. “I set him up in the wildlife lab – he brought a portable rapid DNA unit. Wanna head over there? Sorry, Mr. Rodman, but I don’t think–”

“Actually, we invited him along,” Mulder smiled. “Bo’s been a big help with the more ‘unusual’ elements of this case, as well as a few technical aspects. You know he used to host a show about hackers?”

Smith’s grin widened. “Don’t watch much TV.”

“Well, as part of that show, Bo learned a lot about the cyber universe – IP tracking, program code and tags. We wanted to get a line on how your drone video got into the public domain so quickly, and Bo’s got a regular data command post on his bus.”

“Good luck with that,” Smith laughed uncertainly. “I’ve heard it’s not so tough to hack a drone.”

“Yeah, that isn’t what happened,” Mulder chuckled back.

“Jason, isn’t a record crowd, especially a sustained crowd, a good thing for the park? I mean, we’re right up on budget hearings on the Hill, and I noticed Golden Mesa’s approps have been steadily shrinking over the past five years.”

“We’re low-hanging meat,” Smith countered.

“Fruit,” Mulder corrected.

“Yeah, that. Nobody cares about the Parks, especially when a microscopic slice of their tax dollar goes to maintain them. Wildlife preservation, the ecosystem, climate change – that’s like collateral damage to those Beltway guys.”

“But a little media buzz about some mysterious creature deep in the wilds might help whip up park attendance, which has been particularly low here over the last 10 years,” Mulder suggested. “Especially if you know a cable network production crew is in the vicinity. They broadcast the MOTW tip line at the end of every episode and on the website, so it was simple to lure Bo and the boys out.”

Smith sputtered. “What? Guys, seriously?”

Bo leaned forward. “Dude, you know that every .jpeg, every video file contains breadcrumbs you can use to trace it back to point of origin?”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. So I had our IT guy break down the code of that drone video we were sent, hoping I could give my buds here a lead on who sent it to me. And guess what I found, Bro?”

“Mm.”

“My guy expected to find some kind of complicated trail, like you’d see if a file was copied onto an external system and a dupe sent through a maze of IP addresses. But this .mpeg file was the original, Dude. You get me?”

“In other words, straight from the drone camera feed, first-gen,” Mulder said. “My guess is that in your rush to get the video out to MOTW – probably while you were bringing the drones back in and we were gearing up to get to the scene – you accidentally sent the original drone feed instead of a copy. The evidence should still be on your system.”

Smith’s eyes darted to his monitor, a calloused paw twitched toward the keyboard. His mouth formed an innocent grin, but his eyes weren’t in it, and he slumped back in his chair.

“Scooby Doo!” Bo exclaimed. “I should’ve known it was the friendly park ranger all along. If it weren’t for us meddling kids…”

“Bo, seriously, dude,” Mulder sighed. “Jason?”

“Shiiiit,” Smith moaned, making it four syllables. “Guys, I’m sorry. I guess I just saw a way to generate some public interest – like you said, I knew Mr. Rodman here would bust a nut over that video. I know it was wrong. I mean, I didn’t break any federal laws, did I?”

“Wait,” Bo broke in. “So this whole monster thing is one big fraud?”

“Yes,” Scully said, as Mulder shook his head.

“Why bring in the FBI if he simply wanted to get bodies into the park with a harmless video leak?” he posed. “Even if he’d staged the station burglary – which for reasons I am too hung over to repeat just doesn’t track – the federal government isn’t going to write off even a few thousand dollars of its overpriced gear. You guys will shoot a week or so of video, stalk through the pines with your night scopes, edit in a spooky soundtrack and a cryptically unsatisfying wrap-up. Fade to black, Cialis commercial.”

“Well, that’s kind of oversimplifying the process…” Bo protested.

“No, I think that thing we saw in the security and drone video is the real deal. And Jason knows it.”

“Well, we don’t actually—”

“Jason,” Mulder warned. “Only you can prevent pants fires. If it weren’t for being a little rusty, it would have hit me immediately. Your phone. No millennial – even a nature boy like you – can go 24 hours without their smartphone fix. Yet, you expected us to buy that you didn’t miss your stolen phone for a week?

“Now, either you’re as dumb as Scully says you are,” – Mulder waved off his partner’s protest – “or somebody flipped the script on you, and you had to think fast and sloppy on your feet when we realized Bigfoot had gone broadband.”

“He shouldn’t have even been able to get a signal in that part of the—” Jason’s lips clamped, then parted. “Look, he never gave me his name.”

Mulder smiled. “Maybe you are smarter than the average bear, Jason. Just barely.”

The ranger stared out the window at the wilderness beyond. “Wait a minute.”

“Here it comes,” Mulder murmured.

“That stuff about breadcrumbs and IP addresses and codes. That was a bunch of shit, wasn’t it?”

Bo shrugged. “Shit, I don’t know, bro.”

**

“Dr. Loracz?”

The slight, balding scientist continued to study the readout on the printer-sized box before him. Scully stepped further into the wildlife lab, a clutter of Pyrex, outdated gadgets and gauges, and thick zoology texts.

“Dr. Loracz?”

He turned, and jumped. The veterinary scientist grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, I was so focused on my work, I didn’t…notice… you.”

“Agent Dana Scully, Professor,” she smiled, flashing her ID. Loracz looked expectantly into the redhead agent’s face. Scully was accustomed to academic fanboy interest – she was a specimen they seldom seemed to encounter. “I understand you’re running the DNA samples we found yesterday.”

“Oh, yes,” Loracz said, eyes locked. “Nice to take the old RapidHIT out for a spin now and then. And, I have to say, the trip’s been highly worthwhile. Your creature left a significant amount of saliva on the Oncorhynchus apache you brought back – enough to get a fairly complete chromosomal profile. Let me see if I can laymanize this, Agent.”

“I’m a physician, Professor,” Scully supplied.

“Ah, well, great, then. So you know that Homo sapiens possesses 23 pairs of chromosomes, just like Neanderthals and Denisovians – an extinct human subspecies. Twenty-four pairs is the normal complement for every other known member of the family Hominidae, which as you know includes the chimps and great apes. Our donor sample has 25. Twenty-FIVE. Just like the earlier hair samples Jason submitted.”

Scully nodded. “And…uh…what about bears?”

Loracz squinted. “Pardon?”

“Would a…bear…maybe also have, ah, 50 chromosomes?”

“Heavens, no. Seventy-four – 37 pairs.” He chuckled. “Sorry. So we are fairly certain the donor is some form of hominid primate. But then we look at Chromosome 2, and we find that he – the donor was a male – is a horse of a different color.”

Scully frowned. Loracz grinned.

“I meant that metaphorically, of course.”

“Of course.”

“The donor is not a member of the family Equidae, a horse. That was simply a—”

“Got it,” Scully smiled forcefully. “Chromosome 2.”

Loracz fumbled absently with his reddened right ear. “Yes, yes, Chromosome 2 is the second-largest human chromosome, spanning more than 242 million base pairs. It’s thus a focal point for genomic comparison. And not only does its analog in this sample differ sharply from Chromosome 2, but it also contains DNA sequences I’ve never seen in any primate sample.”

“What do you think that means?”

“That the sample contained DNA sequences I’ve never seen in any primate sample.”

“Oh.”

**

“I got into the Park Service to try to do something, you know?” Ranger Smith said. “For the planet, you know? For the animals?”

Bo Rodman had been banished to his shoot with promises Mulder likely was not authorized to make. Mulder nodded sympathetically, nearly knee to knee with the ranger.

“Go on,” the agent murmured.

“Did you know 150 to 200 plants and animals become extinct every 24 hours?”

“Yes, I actually did.”

“Oh.” Smith blinked. “We did that shit. We’re doing that shit. It’s like a fucking shooting gallery out there, man. Hunters, poachers, malls, subdivisions, the oil companies, the rain forests. I mean, ripping out the rain forests, not—”

“Gotcha,” Mulder smiled, seeking to steer this back toward something resembling a criminal investigation.

“Yeah…so. The parks are the only place where they’re protected – wildlife, that is. But, like I said, nobody cares about that, or the parks. It’s just a matter of time. So when I got this call in D.C., the night after I talked to you guys, it blew my mind.”

Mulder leaned in.

“He didn’t give his name,” Smith lamented. “But he took credit for the station robbery. Well, he didn’t take personal credit.”

“The yeti did it.”

“Yup. I know, crazy, right?”

“Well…”

“So I tell him bullshit, and he tells me everything that got stolen, down to serial numbers. Then he asks if I’d like to help him keep the park open and protect an endangered species. You know, the…”

“Yeti, yeah.”

“I tell him I already talked to you guys, and he says even better.”

Mulder frowned. “The FBI, even better?”

“Yeah, right? So he tells me where to hide my iPhone, out by the trail, and tells me to get some drones in the air.”

“He wanted the yeti on video?”

“Right? He wanted you guys to see ‘The Island,’ he called it. Kept saying it — no fucking idea what he meant. Then he told me to make a copy of the video and send it to the TV guys. Except I kinda fucked that up, you know?”

“I know,” Mulder nodded, patting Smith’s knee.

**

Scully stopped halfway down the walk to the parking lot. “Mulder.”

The MOTW bus was still parked by the curb, still surrounded by nature lovers and lookie-loos. This time, however, the crowd was focused on an animated, obscenity-laced argument between Bo Rodman, a burly cameraman, and three yetis. Three small yetis, one with a thick East Coast accent.

“Now, THIS is what I’m talking,” Mulder grinned as he stepped up the pace with a hapless Scully in tow.

“Agents, great!” Bo shouted as Mulder stepped between the producer and the three erstwhile hominids, waving his ID. “Get these assholes out of here!”

“Who you callin’ asshole, dickweed?” the smallest, roundest, female yeti bellowed. Her Velcro fasteners tore as she pivoted to Mulder and Scully. “This asshole assaulted us!”

“That’s abominable,” Mulder deadpanned. “What, nothing? Okay, what happened? Bo, then the Beastie Girl.”

“Fran. Fran Giordano,” the little yeti snapped.

“Fran here and her two gorillas (Scully snorted despite herself) were sabotaging our shoot out on the trail,” Bo growled. “The guys’d found a set of big tracks leading into the woods, and these guys jumped them.”

The cameraman stepped in. “Wasn’t so much jumped us as—”

“Ryan,” Bo warned. Mulder nodded and turned to Giordano. “Just what kind of monkey business are you guys up to, Fran?”

Fran removed her yeti head to reveal an even more daunting scowl. “We’re with FINS.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Friends in Intervention for New Species,” she clarified in icy Bronx syllables. “We protect the hidden species Greenpeace and World Wildlife won’t.”

“A cryptid preservation activist group?” Scully pondered. “I never heard of you before. Are you a local chapter?”

Fran paused, then her jaw jutted. “We’re like, kinda, well, it. Kyle and Ozzie and me. I’m a post-grad in the ASU Environmental Sciences Department. One day, we were watching some video of unknown deep sea species in the Mariana Trench and it hit us, there’s no place where they can escape from us anymore. We’re already losing you know how many species a day?”

“Already saw that Powerpoint,” Mulder said.

“Well, smartass, imagine how long the Sasquatch, the tatzelwurm, the mokele-mbembe will last when we finally track them down? I mean, fuck, we even call them monsters, like they’re a human threat instead of a vital component of a sustainable ecosystem. We can’t stop commercial development, the destruction of the rainforests, overfishing, but we can try to slow down morons like this guy. All we did was scream and wave our arms around when his crew walked into our trap and maybe scare off the real Mogollon ‘Monster’ or whatever it is.”

Bo sneered. “Ever occur to you ecoterrorists that maybe exposure on Monster–, MOTW, might help raise public consciousness about these vulnerable and endangered creatures?”

Fran looked to her comrades, and the trio erupted in laughter.

“Yeah, Bro, that was kind of a stretch,” Mulder admitted.

Travelers Inn

3:10 p.m.

“’Curiouser and curiouser’…” Jose Chung mulled.

“Also Charles Dickens, I assume,” a barefooted Mulder grunted from the hotel bed. “Remind me again why you’re here?”

“Because, Agent Mulder, three heads are better than 1 ½,” the author suggested.

“I felt Mr. Chung might provide a little additional perspective,” Scully intervened. “After all, he may have established a historical explanation for the creature’s presence in the States.”

“Which poses even more questions. Why would a Russian explorer covertly bring a yeti to America? Even back in the 1870s, I’d think he’d have had some federal hurdles to clear, or at least a few rubles to spread around.”

Chung tipped his plastic cup of unauthorized minibar bourbon at Mulder. “Actually, Russia supported the Union in the Civil War, I suspect to protect the commercial ventures that popped up after the Russkies sold us Alaska. Horrible place – got Nanook’s Revenge from some bad seal meat. Quid pro quo, y’know – we likely would have let Przhevalsky bring a live Tyrannosaur in for the goodwill value. As for the Big Why, I believe I may have a working hypothesis. Teddy Roosevelt.”

Mulder rose to an elbow and raised a brow at Scully. She slumped behind her laptop.

“Theodore Roosevelt Jr., as we know, was a rugged outdoorsman and carnivore,” Chung continued, unbidden. “But he also was a crackerjack naturalist and wildlife lover from childhood, in a way far removed from the rumors about Grover Cleveland. Did you know he was essentially the father of the modern national parks system?

“Teddy was a weak child, asthmatic, but his pop, Teddy Sr., took him on family treks to Europe, Egypt, and ultimately, the Alps, where Teddy 2 caught the fitness bug, did his hitch in the military, and went on to murder many a hapless critter. Pop’d made his fortune in the plate glass biz and a New York philanthropist–”

“Wikipedia much?” Mulder yawned. But he was upright now, and Chung pressed on.

“Like Przhevalsky, Teddy was a soldier and naturalist with a yen to explore and plenty of yen from good old dad. Could these two wacky guys have hooked up somewhere along the way?”

He paused for effect. Mulder sighed loudly.

“You’re a very ungracious audience,” Chung scolded. “The answer, of course, is yes, or I would never have brought it up. Delving through Pop Roosevelt’s memoirs, I found that the Roosevelts bumped into Przhevalsky at a diplomatic do during a sojourn in London. Przhevalsky was an Anglophile in addition to any other philes he might have engaged in, and that toddling town was his favorite. Pops noted young Teddy was fascinated by Przhevalsky’s military strategies and East Asian expeditions, and nearly talked the Russky’s ear off, through an interpreter, of course, which must have been uber-annoying.”

“I empathize,” Mulder muttered, now resigned to raiding the minibar booze.

“Fact: Teddy knew Nikolay. Get me another Wild Turkey, that’s a good boy. Fact: Nikolay returned from Tibet with a mysterious cargo, which wound up here in the Garden State.”

“The Garden State’s New Jersey.”

“Fact: Pop Roosevelt was loaded. Fact: Nikolay obviously needed some pull and probably a couple boxcars, and, as I clarified in Point 3, Pops was loaded and connected. Ergo, Pop Roosevelt aided and abetted Nikolay Przhevalsky in smuggling and transporting an abominable snowman across the Continental Divide.”

Mulder belted his airline Bailey’s in one gulp. “First of all, most of those aren’t really facts, the way I understand facts. Second, that is some pretty hefty ergo-ing. You’ve taken two historical figures from roughly the same timeframe, jammed them together in a sloppy Forrest Gump narrative, and come up with a whopper that lacks plausibility, continuity, and any kind of logical motivation.”

“So you like my theory?” Chung asked.

“Actually, I’ve heard worse,” Mulder conceded, scrounging for another Bailey’s.

**

“Now that Dr. Seuss is gone, a little briefing and, if it won’t spoil supper, maybe a little debriefing?”

“That first one sounds good,” Scully responded. “The second sounds like a promise you and the Bailey’s can’t keep. Since you two already defiled the minibar, let me grab some cashews first.”

Mulder pouted, then bounced back onto the bed. “Fact: Ranger Smith’s anonymous accomplice apparently used a burner phone he or she’s now trashed. Fact: Anonymous actually wanted us on the case, wanted us as witnesses.”

“That’s not altogether surprising,” Scully said, struggling with the cashew bag. The bag exploded, and nuts rained across the carpet. She sighed and dropped into an armchair. “You’ve become a brand name for every…ah, those well acquainted with more esoteric scientific disciplines. Your reputation and indiscriminate social media use precede you. For whatever reason, Anonymous wants an audience, wants us to document the yeti’s existence. The creature’s existence, I mean.”

“Now I AM turned on,” Mulder smirked. “But why?”

“Maybe, and I hate to fuel the legend, but maybe he saw you as a potential ally – someone who could be trusted to protect, rather than exploit, the creature. What?”

Mulder popped off the mattress and rushed to Scully’s laptop. “Let’s go back to Przhevalsky. Przhevalsky the naturalist, not the soldier. Let’s say he happens on a yeti – maybe a colony of yetis – in the Tibetan wilds. He brings the creature back to Mother Russia in the hope of imperial glory and the pursuit of knowledge. But who’s he bring the beast back to? The imperialist military machine? A tsarist government steeped in espionage and expansionist dreams? Alexander II conquered Turkestan and pushed into Siberia and the Caucasus. Part of the reason he was so keen on Przhevalsky exploring Eastern Asia was to get a bead on China’s intentions. Maybe I had it right before – the tsar saw military potential in Przhevalsky’s incredible hulk. Or maybe Przhevalsky’s comrades planned to put A-Bomb Sr. on a dissection slab. Either way, Przhevalsky the naturalist, the conservationist, couldn’t go along with it.

“But what was he to do? Return the creature to its original habitat? Przhevalsky the soldier knew Tibet was a geopolitical hotspot — the British Empire was creeping from northern India into the Himalayas, the Emirate of Afghanistan and the Russian Empire were expanding into Central Asia, and Chinese authority loomed over the region. To his perspective, the yeti species could well be on its way to extinction, if not for his find.

“But then Przhevalsky remembers his London encounter with the young boy, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., with his keen interest in wildlife conservation and a rich daddy who doted on Teddy and indulged his frail son’s outdoor interests. The sparsely inhabited U.S. West might provide a safe, sustainable haven for a large species. And the rest is—”

“–baseless and fantasy-driven speculation,” Scully concluded. “Speaking of which, The Island. What do you think that means?”

“Maybe it’s a literal island,” Mulder said, tapping furiously away. He studied Google Maps. “Nah, no large lakes in Golden Mesa or the immediate area. My guess is typical narcissistic gameplay. Hoodie Guy wants us to know how clever he is, maybe aggrandizing his relationship with the yeti. The Island of Dr. Moreau, maybe? Moreau experimented with half-human beasts; Hoodie Guy seems to have developed some kind of mentor/master relationship with the yeti.”

“The Island was Aldous Huxley’s last novel,” Scully ventured. “Kind of a riff on Brave New World – an ideal society that attracts the unwanted attention of the overpopulated outside world. Maybe the yeti are the ‘subjects’ of our guy’s imagined utopia. Goes along with your narcissism profile. And since you seem to be on a mad scientist kick, The Island’s inhabitants used artificial insemination and trance states for rapid advanced learning. Going with Mulderesque logic, maybe a similar technique was used to teach abominable snowmen to use a smartphone.”

”Seems a little obscure, Poindexter, though I’m happy that PBS membership is paying off for you. I’ll start surfing the Lit 101 angle. Unless, maybe, you’d be up for a little hooky…?

Scully smiled, knelt beside Mulder’s ear, and turned his face to hers.

“Read my lips,” she whispered, then mouthed three additional words.

“Little more efficient, I suppose,” Mulder considered as Scully headed toward the bathroom. Then she halted, turned.

“Yeah?” He rose eagerly, pulling at his T-shirt tail.

“No,” Scully stated, absently. “Mulder, get that drone video up.”

**

Fran and Kyle and Ozzie loaded their now-empty Gatorade jugs into their packs, having successfully completed FINS’ first major offensive op.

The dusky forest was now redolent of a smell that recalled for the organization’s commander the Newark bus terminal john at the end of a long day: Mingled urine, the lingering musk of a day in ape suits, and the sharp edge of pine.

“I don’t know how many times I can do this,” Ozzie complained, belatedly zipping up.

Fran wheeled on him, and despite his significant height advantage, Oz stepped off. “This is one of the frigging highest-traffic areas in the park – that stugatz Rodman’s not getting any monster footage tonight now that we’ve saturated the site. Sides, dude, I’ve heard you take a piss in the morning – like you’re puttin’ out a friggin’ forest fire. Anyways, we’re done for the night – time to vacate.”

Kyle snorted. Giordano scowled. “Sorry, Franny. Vacated, you know?”

“Friggin’ morons.” Fran slung her bag over her broad shoulders and headed for the trail head and the carefully hidden Vespas.

Vegan pizza was on the menu that night, so the trio crunched though the winding terrain at a brisk clip. But halfway down, on the fringe of a thick stand of Golden Mesa’s famous Englemann spruce, Fran clothes-pinned her companions and gestured for silence.

“Friggin’ shit,” she whispered hoarsely. “There it is. There it fucking is.”

Indeed, there it was. Seven feet of dirty cream fur, long limbs, and vaguely simian features, perhaps 10 yards off the trail, snacking on what appeared to be some form of shelf fungus from the bark of a nearby spruce.

“We gotta get this,” Fran breathed, almost orgasmically. “Kyle, your GoPro charged?”

Kyle’s eyes widened. “You mean video? He’s too far away. Besides, isn’t this like what Rodman’s doing? Exploitation?”

She grabbed the front of his jacket. “This is for, like, posterity, preservation. We may be the first humans to document a living, breathing, loving, caring whatever-it-is. And maybe we sell it to Channel 12 or Greenpeace or somethin’ and clear enough for those night-vision goggles Ozzie’s been whinin’ for. Rodman gets fucked over, and the cause gets some needed PR. Look, shithead – she’s eating mushrooms. She’s clearly a vegetarian.”

“Makes you so sure it’s a girl?” Kyle rasped.

“Cause, like you two, she ain’t got a set. Get the fuck down there.”

Kyle swallowed, then unholstered his GoPro Hero5, and began his descent into the grove, chanting a semi-religious, semi-profane mantra. He activated the camera as he stealthily approached the creature, praying his ninja-black ensemble would provide adequate cover. He framed the beast in the viewfinder and began to shoot in a wholly involuntary, trembling cinema verite style.

And then the forest was filled with Macklemores White Privilege II. “Shit,” Kyle gasped as, simultaneously, he fumbled in his jacket to silence the ringtone and the creature jumped with a wrenching scream. It spun and extended its arm accusingly toward FINS’ co-founder. A white arc of light connected the two, and Kyle spun twice before face-planting in the spruce needles.

As his last synapses failed, he heard the monster crash through the forest to a backbeat of hip-hop and Vespas ripping dirt.

**

“Mess with Sasquatch, you wind up jerky,” Mulder muttered as he watched the sheriff’s men tote a bagful of Kyle up the incline to the trail. “Not a mark on him, Scully.”

“But his pupils are blown,” his partner murmured, pulling her jacket tight against the chill morning. “What are we talking about here?”

Ranger Smith had made the call roughly a half-hour after the Maricopa County P.D. rousted him from his lack of sleep, roughly an hour after the surviving members of FINS called 9-1-1 from an Apache Junction biker bar. A bond of guilt and fear of incarceration had formed between the ranger and the agent, and he eyed Mulder and Scully anxiously as he attempted small-talk with the deputies.

Suddenly, a deputy emerged from the trees waving an evidence bag. After an animated exchange, the cop relinquished the bag to Ranger Smith. Smith scrambled up the hill and extended the bag and the scored metal cylinder inside.

“Mag lite,” Smith puffed. “Thing had a flashlight?”

Mulder delicately plucked the bag from his fingers. “Yeah, let’s not put out an eye or a frontal lobe here. Look carefully, but don’t touch, Jason. What seems to be missing from this light?”

Smith glanced up with a frown. “The light. There is none. What is that thing?’’

“My guess,” Mulder drawled, examining the conical prong soldered in where the LED bulb originally had been, “is that this is some kind of very advanced electroshock weapon. Think the Mike Tyson’s grandmother of all tasers. Except where a taser is intended for generalized, temporary neuromuscular incapacitation, this mamma-jamma blows the central nervous system. The mydriasis, or blown pupils, was probably caused by disruption of the iris dilator and sphincter, or inner cranial pressure from the neural injury to the brain.”

“Thing had a taser?” Smith amended.

“A defensive weapon, I imagine. A very sophisticated one. Immediate and permanent incapacitation.”

“You mean, the guy, my guy armed that thing?”

Mulder glanced at the officers hauling the body bag up the dirt trail. “I think it’s more complicated than that. I’ll ask him when I see him.”

Smith’s brow creased. “And when do you expect to do that?”

“After the dinner hour, of course,” Mulder said. “We’re not animals.”

Morgan Dairy

6:54 p.m.

“Bought the place about two years ago, from the bank,” Scully reported, adjusting her seatback. “Close proximity to the state forest, livestock and agricultural facilities that could conceal whatever it is he’s up to.”

Mulder sucked on his shake as he watched the farmhouse up the hill.  “Reverse engineering. Chung was right about at least one thing: The yetis want technology. To study, to adapt. With human assistance.”

“Say I could possibly buy such an implausible premise. Why, Mulder?”

“Try preservation. If we subscribe to Chung’s theory, these creatures have been here for nearly 140 years. But what was once open range and woodlands is becoming a claustrophobic ecosystem, as commercial and residential development, expanded infrastructure, and urban sprawl crowd wild species. Golden Mesa is a stable environment. The original conspiracy with Smith was designed to draw attention to the park, boost attendance, and, I believe, introduce the yeti to the world, as an intelligent, identifiable, humanlike species. A species worthy of EPA protection, of activist support, of popular empathy. That’s why a public reveal was so important – to keep this population from falling into government hands and winding up in an underground lab somewhere.

“Somehow, he managed to develop a rapport with them, foster their intelligence and skills. Past studies have proven chimpanzees can use and combine tools in complex sequences and combinations, and new research indicates the Sumatran orangutan, the bearded capuchin, and the Burmese long-tailed macaque may be even more accomplished tool users. But say a primate species that’s developed parallel with Homo sapiens has evolved not only to use tools but to engineer tools, maybe even analyze human technology. What if their analytical abilities actually superseded ours, and we only won the primate derby because we happened on fire and the fulcrum first, lucked onto cultivating food and building shelter in a manner that enabled us to collectively establish civilizations, belief systems, and ultimately, explore technology. By the time Man staked and enforced his claim, the yeti had no room to grow.”

Scully eyed Chung’s rental, parked beside a huge fabricated farm shed. “So our friend’s essentially running a vocational school for exceptional hominids?”

“I think it may go beyond that,” Mulder said. “Okay, I’m going in.”

“We.”

Mulder shook his head. “Scully, I think the best approach here is to approach this guy geek-to-geek, rather than going in full commando. I don’t think those creatures are violent by nature, but they are large, strong, and essentially feral. I need his trust to maintain control of the situation.”

Scully slumped. “All right, Mulder. But if I don’t get some kind of high sign within the next 20 minutes, I’m bringing in county and state back-up and lighting the place up. Understood?”

“That’s my little helpmate,” Mulder called, plunging into the night.

**

Mulder flattened himself against the corrugated steel of the barn, clenching his Glock as he gently tried the knob of the reinforced door. It turned effortlessly, and a half-inch gap revealed only inky darkness.

He slipped inside, quickly pulling the thankfully lubricated door closed behind him. Mulder could see a seam of light above the concrete floor perhaps 20 feet away, and he crept toward it.

And a door opened, momentarily blinding the agent…

**

“It occurred to me that Ranger Smith’s visit to the X Division was a last-minute decision, after consulting with Sen. Matheson,” Mulder related, five minutes later. “We assumed you concocted this cockamamie plan to attract my attention, but when you called Smith that night, how could you possibly known he’d met with us, unless somehow I believed Matheson was a part of all this? He’s far more of a political animal than his dad, and I can’t believe this farkakte business is his style.

“But once Smith told you Scully and I were involved, you decided it would work to your advantage. To attract the real target of your attention. Jose Chung. He’d contacted you after the initial yeti footage leaked, doing research for his next book about the demise of the human species. You saw an opportunity to get the world’s attention. And since Scully and I had played a key role in From Outer Space, you figured we’d be willing to do his footwork.”

“You’re a bit more intelligent than Mr. Chung suggested,” Professor Loracz beamed.

“Gee, thanks. By the way, you know this is border tape, not duct tape?” Mulder jerked his right wrist free from the folding chair by way of illustration.

The scientist shrugged. “It was intended as a calming device, not a restraint.” Loracz made a clicking noise with his tongue, and a pair of towering figures materialized behind him. Not quite apelike, not wholly humanoid.

“Ah,” Mulder nodded, gawping at the currently pacific yeti. “Hey, guys.”

“Jose Chung is a visionary,” Loracz murmured. “I knew if anyone could see the importance of this discovery, of my work, it would be him. But I had to pick the right moment. You were a great help. Thank you.”

“Timing is everything, as I once told a young Ted Kaczynski,” a new voice acknowledged from the shadows of the huge space. “The good doctor invited me for the unveiling.” Standing now beside Loracz, the author subtly twirled a finger next to his right temple. One of the yeti rumbled subtly, and Mulder smiled in satisfaction for Scully’s sake.

“By the way,” Loracz inquired, “how did you arrive at me?”

“When my partner interviewed you, she assumed, to her somewhat narcissistic mind, that you were geek-crushing on her.”

“I was nothing but a gentleman.” Loracz seemed slightly hurt.

“Yeah, I know. It took a little while to put the pieces together. Word to the wise: Too much eye contact creeps the chicks, dude. But you weren’t looking at her eyes, were you? You were looking at her mouth, at her lip movements. Old habit. It took her a couple of tries to get your attention, which she attributed to Absent-Minded Professor Syndrome. Actually, you had trouble hearing her. And you started playing with your ear, which was red not with boyish ardor but with irritation. The irritation that can occur with infection from a cochlear implant. In some cases, meningitis can occur – an inflammation in the membrane of the brain.”

“There you go,” Chung sang. Mulder glared him into silence.

“I got the implant 15 years ago – I’d suffered complete hearing loss at five, and it was a virtual miracle,” Loracz confirmed. “But it’s had its share of side effects and malfunctions. It drops out on occasion.”

“Like in the woods, when you went to try to grab the phone your hairy pal had dropped in his escape,” Mulder nodded. “You didn’t even pause when I fired that warning shot into the air.”

“You discharged a weapon in a national park?” the scientist gasped.

“Let’s just stay on point, okay? Once I realized you’d at some point been hearing-impaired, I took a new look at the drone footage. It seemed as if your buddy was gesticulating wildly after he spotted the drone, but he was instinctively attempting to communicate with you non-verbally. The phone was for one-way use, right? I can’t imagine he could manipulate the touchscreen. You were probably using simple verbal commands to stage his appearance and have him flee the scene before he could arrive. I’m guessing you wanted Spooky Mulder to track the yeti here for whatever big reveal you were planning for Chung. But he panicked and left the phone. And then you panicked and ditched the phone in the ATV before leading me on a merry chase.”

“Once you came out with Jason and had your guns drawn, I knew you weren’t ready.”

“But now I am, although a tranquilizer dart wasn’t the greatest icebreaker. If you don’t mind…” Mulder lifted his free arm and began wriggling and flexing his fingers. The larger of the two yetis stiffened, then began to respond in silent gestures. “American Sign Language; ASL. Like the language Francine Patterson used to communicate with Koko the lowland gorilla. In the drone video, your guy was signing about a ‘monster bird’ about to attack him. Just now, I told him essentially that he smelled hella-funky. He suggested as much about me.”

“Patterson’s Gorilla Sign Language was a primitive modification of ASL,” Loracz argued, excitedly. “Koko learned more than 1,000 signs, but these two have learned roughly 2,000, and the rest are learning rapidly. Their cognitive capabilities are far more advanced than that of Gorilla gorilla. As you and Mr. Chung are about to discover.”

Mulder ripped the other arm free. “I already saw a pretty impressive display of their talents this morning.”

“The young man,” Loracz sighed. “I regret that, but he frightened Jane. Taking a life was very traumatic for her.”

“The lady monster,” Chung supplied. “For Jane Goodall. The big fella’s Darwin. Not TOO spot-on.”

“The supertaser – that was Jane’s or Darwin’s?” Mulder asked.

“That particular innovation’s was Jane’s, though, of course, I had to handle the engineering tasks.” Loracz looked back and smiled at the shorter yeti and smiled. Disturbingly, she smiled back. “Their brains are wired much differently than ours – they have a phenomenal aptitude for systems and system adaptation. Far more evolved than ours. They can see options and possibilities beyond our reasoning – it’s largely how they’ve managed to avoid contact with humans for hundreds of years.”

“Reverse engineering,” Mulder responded. “It’s why they stole that equipment from the park, as well, I assume from other area homes and businesses.”

“And from campsites and campers,” Loracz noted. “Amazing how many people seek to commune with nature but refuse to unplug from their tech. They stuck mainly to small thefts, seemingly inconsequential items. In their hands, however, they are far from inconsequential.”

“Like the combo mag lite/neural death ray? Ever thought about going QVC with that one?”

“As I said, that poor man’s death was deeply regrettable,” Loracz murmured. “But you haven’t seen anything yet. Do you need any help—”

Mulder tore his ankles free from the chair.

“Well, good,” the scientist smiled.

**

“Holy shit, Batman,” Mulder stated as Loracz ushered Chung and the agent into the barn’s workshop, Jane and Darwin in tow.

The yeti census tripled in one sweep of the room. A quartet of creatures glanced briefly up, then returned to their scrutiny of Kindles and fish finders and car batteries and humidifiers and toaster ovens. A jumble of electronics and appliances awaited inspection on a series of benches lining the south wall.

“Louis,” Loracz called gently. The smallest yeti turned, somewhat reluctantly. Loracz signed a brief request, and Louis (Leakey, Mulder assumed) nodded. Loracz beamed at the agent and the author, and waved them to the hominid’s workstation.

The veterinarian signed, and Louis poured a measuring cup of aromatic deep brown sludge into the reservoir of a Proctor-Silex coffeemaker, lightly tapped the “On” switch, and stepped back. In a few seconds, a stream of water, sparkling and crisply clear, flowed into the carafe. Loracz signed a rave review, pulled the full carafe from its now-deactivated heating element, and displayed it to Mulder.

“Yeah, actually, I’m good,” Mulder said.

“Microbe-free, chemical-free, zero heavy metals,” Loracz crowed. “Imagine the applications.  Solid waste treatment plants converted to effortlessly supply a city’s water.”

“Dian?”

Without turning, a female abominable waved a paw over the sensor of an RCA 51” flatscreen, and the LED array came alive with what appeared to be HD security video of a two-story home. Two boys were playing catch on a verdant lawn.

“Live feed?” Mulder asked. “Drone surveillance, hacked home security feed?”

“No hack, no drone, no wireless, no transmitters,” Loracz said. “Dian’s receiver captures over-the-air light rays and translates them into images with only a .009-second delay from a distance of 3,000 miles. Look behind the roof, Agent.”

Mulder blinked as he stared at the screen and the hazy outline of the St. Louis Arch.

“There’s a strip joint about a half mile in on the Illinois side, off I-55,” Chung provided without an ounce of mirth. “.009 seconds. Terrific. You never know what can happen on live TV. I still recall Charles Rocket dropping an F-bomb on SNL—.”

“Mr. Chung,” Prof. Loracz admonished. “You fail to garner the significance of this moment. In months, weeks, days, HOURS, our friends here have conquered frontiers in sustainability, security, survival using technology Homo sapiens took centuries to develop for the ultimate goal of toasting a pizza bagel, sexting personal reproductive organs, or watching cartoon bears pitch toilet tissue. This presentation was designed just for you. This intelligence, this evolutionary leap, this species — it must be preserved at all costs. But it will take those like you and Agent Mulder to ensure our friends a place in the human ecosystem.”

Chung placed a hand gently on Loracz’ shoulder. The yetis tensed, but the professor signed reassurance.

“My friend,” Chung began, softly but severely. “I garner the significance – I garner like nobody’s business. I’d give this all 500 stars on Yelp, and urge the Nobel Committee to suspend its newly outdated human eligibility requirements. It’s a miracle, a quantum step, a fundamental shift in the terrestrial paradigm. It’s also utterly terrifying.

“My friend Agent Mulder has shown me a photo of a young man whose brain was switched off by a $9.99 Ace Hardware flashlight. By a creature interrupted eating tree mold. Tree mold, death ray. That is not a natural progression, Dr. Loracz. That’s not good parenting. Which is understandable: We’ve pretty much botched every major effort to be responsible parents to this planet, to this species. It makes sense we’d truly screw the pooch with a special needs child, even a gifted one.”

Chung located a mag lite on the work bench, turned to Jane. Her eyes widened as held the instrument before her face, touched fingers to his forehead and drawing them down and forward, extending his pinkie and thumb.

The yeti looked to its companions, who stared back silently. Jane began slowly to sign, her apelike features creasing.

“I asked, why?” Chung reiterated as his fingers flew. He turned to a mute Mulder. “Tried to hit on Marlee Matlin at my agent’s house one time. Jane. Why did you make this thing?”

Jane paused, then signed furiously, her eyes moving between Loracz and Mulder. Loracz paled, then fumbled for a chair.

Chung nodded. “We certainly are. So, again, why?” The yeti’s eyes were immobile as she communicated with the writer. “Fair enough. That’s smart. What other smart things have you made?”

She turned again to the group, repeated Chung’s query. A silent group dialogue ensued. One of the yet-unidentified yeti’s turned toward a microwave – a small popcorn-centric model Mulder’d seen at Walgreen’s. The creature, a male (Mulder noted, impressed), explained in sober flourishes. He regarded Loracz’ back warily, but the doctor seemed to have retreated into his own world.

“I understand. Very good. Thank you.” Chung turned to Mulder. “Agent, I’m going to recommend we immediately leave the premises and immediately contact Homeland Security or perhaps the National Guard.” The author touched Loracz’ shoulder. “Doctor, why don’t you come along with us?”

The yeti whisperer looked up disconsolately. “What?”

“Come on,” Mulder repeated.

Loracz shook his head. “I had…no idea they felt this way. I only wanted to help them reach their potential, secure their survival. Now, well, now I can hardly leave them.”

“People will come,” Chung advised. “You might talk to your friends – it’ll probably be at least a half hour.”

Mulder took Chung by the shoulder. At the workshop door, the older man looked back. “Oh, and if you’re feeling peckish, I pass on the burrito.”

Scully burst in as they reached the barn exit, sidearm leveled.

“Put it in your pants,” Mulder advised. “We’ve overstayed.”

He caught Chung by the arm halfway across the yard. “Just what did they say? What’s that thing do?”

Chung peeked back at the barn. “Buy a copy, like everybody else.”

**

Mulder had just cleared DHS’ gatekeepers and Scully had reached the first asphalt road when the compressed explosion shook the car and a green glow momentarily illuminated the rear windshield. Scully slammed the brakes, and the agents craned back.

Chung shrugged. “The burrito schtick. Little too smart for the room, eh?”

From Jose Chung’s Paleopalooza:

A Monkey once danced in an assembly of the Beasts, and so pleased them all by his performance that they elected him their King. A Fox, envying him the honor, discovered a piece of meat lying in a trap, and leading the Monkey to the place where it was, said that she had found a store, but had not used it — she had kept it for him as treasure trove of his kingdom, and counseled him to lay hold of it. The Monkey approached carelessly and was caught in the trap; and on his accusing the Fox of purposely leading him into the snare, she replied, “Oh Monkey, and are you, with such a mind as yours, going to be King over the Beasts?”

 Aesop’s lesson in the dangers of unrefrigerated meat. My Uncle Oswaldo perished from complications arising from a leftover pork loin he’d illegally lifted from his neighbor’s Frigidaire following a 48-hour blackout. His dying words, uttered as my Aunt Lucinda watched Oswaldo’s remaining life and bodily fluids flow from his body: “I thought it couldn’t hurt you if it was already cooked!” Misplaced faith in technology; in badly served, ill-digested data.

 A cockroach survives three landlords, eighteen tenants, five resistance-bolstering fumigations, and the heels of a hundred human loafers, not to mention three or four global extinctions. A software engineer with a masters from UC-Berkeley and a mastery of Mandarin and conversational Spanish is flattened by the city Metro Number Nine as he voice-texts his wife “Pizza or Chinese? J” on his iPhone. What would our old Greek fable monger make of that one, had he been exposed to the horrors of pesticides, cellular technology, and urban mass transit?

 Like little Ralphie’s Schrodingerian Red Ryder BB gun that simultaneously subdues rustling polecats and produces cyclopean blindness, we have to ponder whether our bottomless pot of curiosity and our marvelous toys ultimately will guide us through Extinction No. 6, or under the wheels of the Number Nine Metro…

**

“Sen. Matheson sends along his thanks for your assistance with the National Parks matter,” Agent Clawson informed Mulder with the merest slip of dryness as the elevator doors enveloped them. “He told me you two likely saved thousands of lives.”

“Did he?” Mulder mused. “And how’d he arrive at that conclusion?”

Clawson indulged in a fleeting smile. “If the device that took out Loracz’ farmhouse was any indication, I suspect those toys you came across could have caused some significant damage.”

“Misfit toys,” Mulder murmured abruptly.

“Misfit toys?”

Mulder grinned. “That’s it. Loracz’ compound. The Island. Loracz had grown up exceptional, different, isolated, likely shunned by playmates and classmates. He likely shared a deep affinity with the yeti – forced into the shadows, wary of contact with humans. And when he discovered their technologically adaptive intelligence, it must have seemed a natural.”

Clawson frowned slightly as the elevator hummed downward. “I’m not tracking.”

“What was your favorite movie, TV show as a kid?”

The X Division’s director glanced sheepishly at Mulder. “I dunno. Okay. Wizard of Oz.”

Mulder nodded appreciatively. “I was a Trekkie. Scully was into Melville; she’s such a hot nerd. Loracz was an outcast, a boy with a brilliant mind and the inability to properly process the tools and resources necessary to fulfill his potential. He no doubt found himself in the company of other misunderstood, socially awkward, and very gifted people. And in the company of proto-hominid toymakers. Bumbles.”

The smile returned to Clawson’s face. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The Island of Misfit Toys. The bird that swam, the train with square wheels…”

“The microwave that blew an entire species out of existence.”

They rode in silence.

“I thought we were headed to Skinner’s office for my exit interview,” Mulder admitted as the elevator doors opened to a comfortably dim and familiar corridor.

“I told you, you’re golden,” Clawson assured, nodding toward the end of the glum hall. “This way, Agent.”

Mulder pulse quickened as his new chief slipped a key into the lock of the door of the office at the end of the basement corridor. As the door swung inward, he inhaled. Two fed-surplus workhorse desks flanked the west and north walls. Cork bulletin boards flanked one of the desks. Centered mathematically behind the desk was a poster, virgin no doubt straight out of the Amazon tube, but a twin for the print Karin Berquist had presented posthumously to Mulder.

“I Want To Believe,” Clawson read. “Well, we all do, Agent Mulder. I know this is something of a new world for you, and maybe you’ve experienced enough new worlds for a while. I thought you might appreciate a little bit of the old. And, speaking of…”

Clawson stepped aside, and Mulder stared at the device on the edge of the opposite desk.

“The original started a fire in the Art Theft breakroom,” the lead agent explained, patting the Mr. Coffee. “But I managed to find this on eBay.”

“Wow, just wow,” Mulder whispered. He scanned the serenely dim office with a smile. “And the files? They coming downstairs too, right?”

Clawson was silent for a moment. “Agent Mulder, we are, ah, actually a…paperless office…”

Mulder blinked.

“We have 256-gig expandable memory tablets for you and agent Scully, fully loaded and biometrically secured,” his young boss hastened. “It’s…the Bureau’s new…green initiative…”

Mulder finally nodded.

“Coffee?” Clawson offered.

**

“I am afraid we have no more room for you, either in steerage or in our rather cramped quarters,” Przhevalsky smiled coldly, as his stoic aide leveled a standard-issue Berdan rifle at Petrovich and Starbak.

The shipyards were virtually deserted that night, and the four stood silently on the frigid deck of the SS Vostochnaya Zvezda. Inspector Petrovich broke the tension with a sardonic laugh.

“There is no need of this drama,” the investigator suggested. “Please, Colonel, let us retreat from the cold.” Carefully, he pulled a bottle of clear liquid from his cloak. The Cossack did not move.

“I am aware of the nature of your latest unauthorized mission,” Petrovich continued. “I had a rather candid conversation with one of your Society colleagues from the Tibet expedition. It took only one bottle and the threat of his pension to persuade him to share his adventures. Then, there was the curious matter of the university’s new laboratory. Do cadavers require manacles these days? A half a bottle and a handful of rubles loosened the guard’s tongue. The shipyard watchman? Well, I am sorry to report I have only the one bottle remaining.

“Please, Colonel. Do not fear the loss of your pension. We are men of war, but also men of science, first, am I right? I have no wish to impede your journey, nor to report your infraction. The tsar will not miss one more ape, will he?” He directed the last toward the indeed hulking aide. Starbak sighed.

Przhevalsky’s arrogant mien dissolved. His thick mustache twitched. “And what would you propose, Inspector? Compensation for your expenses, plus perhaps some interest?”

Petrovich waved away the offer. “I propose we share a little vodka and a little Truth.”

**

The steamer’s hold was dimly lit, but Petrovich inhaled sharply as he surveyed Przhevalsky’s precious cargo. A dozen sets of not-quite human but startlingly expressive eyes met the inspector’s.

“They are young, more frightened of you I am sure than are you of them,” Przhevalsky reassured him. “The filthy Mongolians had murdered their mother, and then the ‘scientists’ at the university, well…”

“Yes,” Petrovich nodded. “Thank you for satisfying my impertinent curiosity. I wish you – all of you – a safe and uneventful voyage.”

**

What will be Man’s next evolutionary move, if the genetic tank isn’t already running on fumes? Homo sapiens sapiens in 125,000 short years has progressed from large rocks and sharp sticks to spears and slings and swords and muskets and tanks and atoms to racing randomly with scissors about this house we call Earth. Without GPS, we struggle to find the Home Depot. Without Yelp, we struggle to nourish ourselves. After a childhood of being harangued not to get into the car with strangers, we now hop into the first strange car we find on our phone, inebriated, alone, with that addled sense of optimism we as a species seem to embrace despite every contraindication.

 So where are we Ubering next, with science, God, or blind human impulse at the wheel?

**

“Where is he?” Charlotte whined with the drama only a five-year-old can convey.

Scully glanced up from her chopping with a smile. “Daddy’s new boss had a surprise for him, so he’ll be a little late, not too much. Hey, I heard you had a great time with Uncle Charlie at the museum while we were gone.”

“Yeah – it was sooo awesome,” she bubbled. “I liked the cavemen. They were kinda scary, but kinda smart, too. They figured out how to make fire happen.”

Scully’s knife paused in mid-carrot, then descended back into a staccato rhythm.

Charlotte paused. “Mommy? You OK? Why are you–? I mean, you look kinda sad.”

Scully glanced guiltily down at her empathetic child and ruffled her hair. “I’m fine, baby. I was just thinking about something from our trip.”

Charlotte nodded thoughtfully. “You gonna be mad at me if I tell you something?”

Scully scooped her daughter from the floor, planting a kiss on her broad forehead. “Never.”

“It’s Grandma. She’s scared.”

“Scared? About…what?”

“About Uncle Charlie. Isn’t that silly?”

Scully rocked Charlotte gently for a moment. “Of course it is. And now, my precious one, I have to make fire happen.” She turned to the stove, activated a burner, and eased her giggling girl to the floor.

Charlotte paused at the door. “Can we see a Christmas show tonight, if it’s on the Netflick?”

“Uh, sure. But Christmas is over, silly. Why?”

“I dunno,” the child sang. “I just feel like it…”

**
Oh, the places you’ll go!, Theodor Seuss Geisel once proclaimed. The good doctor lived through a Depression, two world wars and a nice cold one, The Bomb, Jim Crow, the civil rights era, Hitler, Stalin, McCarthy, Nixon, and New York socialite Kitty Carlisle during a particularly pitched battle of wits on To Tell The Truth. Geisel taught us a person’s a person, no matter how small, and, BTW, advocated slapping Japanese-Americans into internment camps, each one and all. One fish, two fish, potato, potahto…

 This little digression is simply to say

That humans are humans, any week, any day.

They drive blundering, blimpishly wherever they may,

And thump bumpily-bump over all in their way.

**

“It’s been like four hours — I think that dude was yanking our crank,” Stoner’s chick complained, as she scoured the woodland floor. “We’re gonna wind up dead.”

“We’re gonna wind up good and wrecked,” Stoner promised, stumbling over a pine branch and thumping his cranium on the nearest tree. He shook it off. “Guy’s an Indian, babe – full Apache. He knows his ‘shrooms. Red with white spots, remember…”

“All I know is I’m seriously jonesing for some Arby’s,” his old lady groaned, toeing aside a clump of ferns.

Stoner bent beside the Ponderosa that had nearly concussed him. “Babe, we locate the mother lode, I’ll take you to KFC and we’ll get our bucket on… OH, HELL, YES!”

She craned over his shoulder. Stoner began humming Spirit In The Sky as he yanked a Safeway bag from his back jeans pocket. He began carefully harvesting the small grove of smurfily colorful fungi from the forest bed.

His bag was soon inflated with Amanita muscaria, commonly known as “fly agaric.” As advertised by his Apache friend – actually an Armenian-American Ecstasy dealer from Bakersfield who’d found a whole new demographic with his indigenous mystic scam — A. muscaria was indeed a psychoactive fungus that liked to hang in pine, spruce, and other coniferous clusters. Muscimol, the active ingredient in the species, binds with muscarinic acetylcholine receptors leading to the excitation of neurons bearing these receptors – an interaction of little consequence to Stoner and his friend, the eastern Siberian shamans and old-school Indo-Iranians, or Lewis Carroll, whose toadstool-ensconced caterpillar may have had far more to impart to young Alice with Alice.

The amanita is a toxic fungus, though careful and expert preparation – including parboiling – can render the mushroom edible and edifying.

“Hey, let’s do a couple for the road,” Stoner suggested, tossing his girl one of the raw ‘shrooms and selecting a plump specimen for himself. He dangled it by the stem over his gaping and gap-toothed mouth.

“Wait,” his companion urged abruptly. “You sure these things are safe?”

Stoner examined his psychotropic snack. “Here. Gimme.” He retrieved her ‘shroom, smiled, and rubbed the dirt from the caps before returning hers. “Okay, bottoms up!”

“Dude, look!”

Stoner followed her trembling finger to a spot roughly three feet in front of his bent right knee.

“Awesome,” he whispered.

The small butterfly was resting on a clump of pine needles, its translucent bronze-fringed near-lavender wings fluttering delicately, almost as if in slo-mo. It was a Glaucopsyche xerces, but Latin niceties were lost on the pair. The Arizona forest grew silent and Time and Mind locked on the frail and ethereal creature, its antennae vibrating in the dry Southwest breeze.

“In the middle of our porridge plates, there was a blue butterfly painted,” Stoner suddenly murmured. His friend looked up momentarily from the foraging insect. “And each morning we tried who should reach the butterfly first. Then the Grandmother said: ‘Do not eat the poor butterfly.’”

 The verse hung in the air as the butterfly alit.

“That was so…cool,” the girl breathed. “Dude, did you make that up?”

Stoner hoisted his bag. “Some shit I heard in community college. Banged the instructor.”

Fun fact: The pair had been the first humans since about 1943 to lay eyes on Glaucopsyche xerces. Development in the San Francisco Bay Area had fostered a population of ants that quickly supplanted the existing ants with whom the larval Xerces Blue had shared a symbiotic relationship. The symbiotic cycle broken, the Glaucopsyche dwindled to a small colony subsequently diverted by a Category 2 hurricane to a small vegetative island some 500 miles north of Marquesas Island.

The species thrived landlocked for more than 70 years in its new habitat, until an isolated but horrific and theoretically climate-related Category 5 tropical cyclone power-blasted the island free of all flora and fauna. A few survivors in the eye of the cyclone made landfall as the storm dissipated off the coast of Costa Rico, most succumbing within days to contact with automotive windshields, jeep tires, and unregulated bootleg pesticides applied liberally to farm fields.

The surviving trio was captured by a 12-year-old Los Angelean named Brian, whose Silicon Valley parents were green-vacationing near Puntarenas. The blue beauties somehow barely made it past Customs and found a new home in a four-foot terrarium off the glass-fronted living room. The father’s dual gambling and coke addictions one day brought a rain of semi-automatic fire down on their Valley home and liberated the last Glaucopsyche xerces. A semi-tractor trailer delivering crème-filled snake cakes ended one of the three; a second made it as far as Phoenix before a western diamondback dislocated by construction of a new casino/resort gobbled the feeding lepidopteran for last-resort sustenance.

An egg-laden third followed the currents ultimately to Golden Mesa National Forest, where it located a lush outcropping of the pines that had once sustained its kind. It lit on a cluster of pine needles in preparation to deposit its load and establish a new North American population when a pair of mammals strayed into the forest ostensibly in search of fungal nourishment. Alert to the perils in this exposed site, it set forth for a more isolated setting, but was drawn momentarily to the male mammal by the pheromones it was emitting in the presence of its female.

“Get it off me!!” Stoner screeched as the insect flitted about his face and shoulders. “Dude, get off me!!!” A meaty, McMuffin-stained palm slammed into the butterfly, which fell crumpled to the packed forest floor. A rubber-soled Goodwill sneaker incorporated it – and its eggs – into the pine needles and dirt.

“Shit,” Stoner panted as he snagged his bag of ‘shrooms. “I fucking HATE nature.”

**

What will be Man’s epitaph? He conquered Space, plumbed the deepest recesses of Cyberspace? He harnessed the awesome power of the Atom, the limitless energy of the Sun? He mastered Peace and Goodwill and an avocado that won’t go brown before he can tear his way into the tortilla chips? He ruled his domain with benevolent prudence?

  I suspect that when the day arrives, when our hunger for petrochemicals and designer cross-trainers turns this orb into the universe’ top water park, when we’ve weaponized every single-celled organism and obliterated every biped, quadruped, and finned vertebrate for hate, sport, and sushi, when our solar system’s prizewinning biology experiment is reduced to a 197-square-mile overflow parking lot, Man’s legacy will be, simply:

 Too smart for his own good.

TITLE: The One That Got Away

AUTHOR: Jo-Ann Lassiter

EMAIL: JoLassi555@cs.com

RATING: PG13

CLASSIFICATION: MSR

SUMMARY: Has Scully fallen for another man?

DISTRIBUTION: Post anywhere.

NOTES: Written for VS10. Mulder and Scully are a couple.

DISCLAIMER: Just borrowing them, Chris. Thanks for the loaner.

Saturday, April 5

Hyatt Regency Grand Ballroom

Washington, D.C.

9:16 p.m.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.” The harsh whisper held traces of frustration, annoyance and petulance.

“It’s not as if I had any choice, you know.” The tiniest bit of anger tinged the whispered reply.

“*You* were the one he invited. Not me.” An unspoken chuckle could most definitely be heard this time.

“And I invited you.” The response was equally as smarmy.

His eyebrow raised. “Do you call ‘You’re coming with me’ an invitation?”

She mulled it over a second or two, then smiled sweetly. “Yes.”

“You would,” he grumbled.

“Agent Scully,” a deep, smooth voice called. “Dana.”

She looked up into the smiling face of the devastatingly handsome Jason Alden III, their host–and grandson of the director of the FBI. “Jason,” she breathed. “Thank you for inviting me.”

A not-too-discreet cough from Mulder brought her out of the daze Jason Alden’s presence always seemed to put her in.

“Oh.” She indicated the man sitting beside her with a toss of her head. “This is my partner.”

When Jason raised an eyebrow, her mouth opened in a totally different kind of ‘oh’ as the blue in his eyes appeared to deepen. My God, he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“Fox Mulder,” Mulder said loudly, sticking his hand out right in front of her face and obstructing her view of the blond Adonis.

Distaste practically dripping from his mouth, Alden allowed only the briefest touch of his fingers on Mulder’s before pulling back and brushing them off on his pants leg. The man lost a great deal of his appeal with that demonstration of rudeness. The sour look on his face caused his features to distort into something profoundly repugnant.

Then his attention was off Mulder and back on her, and the transformation was nothing short of amazing. All the looks were once again in place, the charm was turned back on, and Scully found that her infatuation had not only faded, it had coalesced into revulsion.

“Would you grant me the honor of a dance?” he asked.

She heard Mulder’s hard swallow beside her. He’d obviously noted her fascination with the man, and she knew he was dying inside. Nonetheless, a few seconds earlier she wouldn’t have cared. Although she knew it would have killed him, she would have gone off and left him thinking he’d lost her to another man. Or, at the very least, he would know that he was not, as she had so often told him, the love of her life. She would have gone and left him without a second thought. She knew this for a fact.

She also knew that it would have been against her will. Mulder *was* the love of her life, and she would never knowingly hurt him like that. As she opened her mouth to turn down Alden’s proposal, Mulder lurched to his feet with a hastily uttered, “Excuse me,” and dashed out the French doors behind them.

“As I was saying, dear Dana…” She felt her control slip away as she nodded and allowed herself to be pulled up into Jason’s arms.

As he swept her onto the dance floor, her eyes were drawn to Mulder’s sorrowful face looking in from the other side of the window. His hair was plastered to his face, the wind buffeted him, and lightning flashed behind him.

She couldn’t help but think, though, that the rain falling upon him was not the reason why his eyes were wet.

**

Mulder shivered, telling himself that his desire to experience a lightning strike firsthand had nothing to do with the vision of Scully in another man’s arms.

He didn’t understand it. Yes, she’d seemed enthralled by the man when he first made an appearance, but that seemed to diminish after Mulder’s ‘introduction’ to the oily bastard. He was sure Scully had seen the loathing the other man didn’t even try to hide when he looked upon Mulder, and that it had turned her off.

Yet she hadn’t hesitated to accept the asshole’s invitation to dance after Mulder, suddenly possessed of an intense need for fresh air, had escaped outside. Sadist that he was, though, he had to watch her departure from the room. From him.

He’d barely noticed the storm into which he’d stepped. His rapt attention had been on the way she practically glided over the parquet floor, wrapped in the arms of a man who wasn’t him.

Right before she’d disappeared from sight, she’d locked eyes with him for a very brief few seconds. It was at that moment, when he detected not one glimmer of the love she said she felt for him, that he decided to die.

**

It was as she danced a waltz unerringly in the arms of the most gorgeous man in the world that Scully began to have her suspicions.

She didn’t know how to waltz.

Yet she whirled and swirled and floated across the floor as if she’d done it all her life. Remarkable, she thought at first, how easily she had picked up on the flow and rhythm of the music. She smiled at Jason.

Since they’d begun, he’d not once taken his eyes from hers. The attention he was lavishing on her was flattering, and so unusual to be coming from someone other than Mulder.

Mulder.

Her eyes darted to the little alcove in which they’d been sitting when Alden had intruded upon them. Was Mulder still out in the rain? The wintry weather was finally gone, but it had been cool enough that they’d needed their coats.

Now it was dark, cold and raining; he was outside in only his suit jacket. And she was tripping the light fantastic to a dance she didn’t know with a man she didn’t like?

What the hell?

With a snarl, she turned back to the man holding her possessively, and before he could seduce her again with those hypnotic–hypnotic!–eyes, she took aim and blackened one of those baby blues.

Gasps of horror and exclamations of surprise were expressed when Alden’s tanned and buff body hit the ballroom floor. As she was exiting the room, she heard the director’s appalled and condemning, “Agent Scully!” just before the room exploded in applause and female catcalls of “Good for you, honey!” and

“It’s about time!” She heard one or two “Slimeball’s” before the scene faded from her hearing as she left the room.

She walked straight to the last place she’d seen him, and without hesitation threw open the doors. There was no one on the veranda, and she was about to go back inside when she saw him.

He was standing in the middle of the perfectly-cut grass, easily the tallest thing on the lawn, arms extended over his head as if reaching–

“Mulder!” she yelled, hitching up her dress, vaulting over the wall and racing toward his shivering form. Barreling into him at full speed, she knocked him flat on his back; he blinked in dismay and tried to look away from her. “Hypnosis,” she said before he could engage in any more self-flagellation. “That bastard was hypnotizing me.”

He blinked, and when his gaze met hers, she nodded in confirmation. “It’s true,” she told him.

“Then you…” He swallowed a few times, and she could see him fighting back tears.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Once I realized, though, I made sure not to make eye contact with him.”

“How…?” he asked, as she helped him to his feet and they walked back to the house.

She smiled in remembrance. “It was you. I thought of you, and that broke the spell.” Her grin widened as she recalled how she’d left Alden. “Then I decked him.”

His mouth fell open in awe. “The director’s grandson? You hit him?”

She nodded. “He won’t be hypnotizing any unsuspecting females for at least a few days. Not with the shiner he’s going to have.”

“But the director’s grandson, Scully. What’s going to happen to you for hitting the director’s grandson?” He helped her up onto the terrace, and then launched himself up and over the railing.

She shrugged. “If the cheers and jeers I heard in there are any indication, I wasn’t the only one he tried his little deception on.” He followed her inside although she could sense his reticence.

“Is there any way to get our coats and get out of here without going through that room?” He indicated the grand ballroom, which had thinned out considerably since her departure.

She looked around. Other than the door through which they’d just come, no other exit presented itself.

He sighed in defeat. “Let’s get it over with.”

**

She was assaulted as soon as she walked through the door. As the director and his wife made a beeline for his partner, Mulder stepped in front of her.

“It’s all right, Mulder,” she said softly, taking hold of his arm and gently pushing him out of harm’s way. “I’m not sorry for what I did, and I’m going to tell him so.”

He let his admiration and pride for her shine through in his gaze; smiling very slightly, he moved to stand behind her.

“Director,” she said, as he came to a halt before her. “Ma’am,” she nodded to the woman with him.

“Agent Scully,” the director said, his eyes taking in their sodden forms. “I’d like to apologize for Jason’s behavior toward you. I had no idea he’d been practicing… seducing… women.”

“Thank you, sir,” his partner said. “Er… is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” the director’s wife said. “Although…” Her eyes twinkled. “…you may have put a crimp in his style for the next few weeks.”

“And his mother will see to it that his style is permanently crimped after that,” the director growled.

“Uh… yes, sir,” Scully said, and Mulder could tell that she was at a loss as to how to respond next.

“Sir, if you don’t mind, Agent Scully and I have to be going. We, uh…” He held out one dripping arm.

“Oh. Of course, Agent Mulder.” The man nodded to both of them. “Good night, Agents.”

Resting his hand in his spot on Scully’s back, Mulder guided her to the coat check in the foyer. Several women stopped his partner to offer their thanks and/or congratulations for finally putting Alden in his place.

When they were safely out the front door, alone under the awning, Scully whacked Mulder on the arm with her purse. “Don’t think I don’t know what you were doing out there in the rain.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, meeting her eyes momentarily before looking away. “Although I can’t say the thought has never crossed my mind, I can honestly say that since we’ve been ‘together’ I have never once felt the urge to ‘off’ myself.”

“What do you think happened?” she asked softly.

“I think he affected me, too. I don’t know if it was an offshoot of what he was doing to you or if it was deliberate. All I know is that I felt despondent; not quite suicidal, but not about to interfere if nature wanted to take me out.” He looked into her eyes. “But I couldn’t leave you. I guess a part of me was hoping that you’d rescue me.” He smiled. “And you did.”

Grabbing onto his rear end, she squeezed it possessively. “You bet your mighty fine ass, I did.” She pulled him off the bottom step, back into the rain.

He sidled up to her, letting her feel what she could do to him with one well-placed touch. “You keep that up, and I won’t be responsible for my actions,” he breathed, rubbing himself against her hip.

Squirming out of his embrace, she tugged him–rather forcefully–toward the parking lot. “Come on, Flash. That human lightning rod of yours is about to see a few sparks.”

The End

He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass.

Old Testament, Psalm lxxii. 6.

Feedback gratefully accepted by Jo-Ann at JoLassi555@cs.com

Thanks for reading!

Title: Tell Me Again Scully

Authors: FoxfireX and Girlie_girl7

EM: Foxfirex_00@yahoo.com, Girlie_girl74@yahoo.com

Date: 03-30-03

Rating: G

Category: MSR, MT

Spoilers: Nothing past JS

Archive: anywhere

Disclaimer: Fox owns ’em

Summary: Mulder and Scully and a mermaid, what more

can we say.

~ Tell Me Again Scully ~

“Tell me again, Scully, why we’re going all the way to Diamond Lake, Arkansas.”

“Mulder, I already explained it on the plane.”

“I know. I just like hearing you believe in mermaids.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far, I just wanted to choose the least dangerous and most enjoyable case for us to investigate.  There’s a small cabin on a small body of water where hopefully very soon my small body will be pressed against yours.”

“I like the way you think.” He shot her a sidelong glance, while keeping his eyes on the map and the road. Navigating wasn’t something he was used to doing, it was usually her job. But she wanted to trade

places, so he humored her. Little did she know that they were in danger of getting completely lost, as he had a bad habit of just not paying that close attention to maps.

“I thought you might. We haven’t had a break in so long I’ve forgotten what it’s like not to work.” She smiled lazily at him.

He could plainly see the small lines around her eyes, and the faint bruising under them. She was tired. They’d been pushing themselves too hard lately, he thought they were somehow trying to make up for being involved. They were so afraid that their work would slide because of the attention they were paying to each other but they were working themselves into the ground.

What neither of them realized was they hadn’t paid attention to anything but each other in years, eons before they began having a physical relationship. They were the only ones that didn’t see it.

“The legend goes that at the turn of the century, two young lovers living in the mountains around Diamond Lake were separated by their families.”

“Sort of a Hatfields and McCoys type thing?” Mulder mused.

“I don’t know Mulder, just listen, will you?”

“Okay.” He said contritely. She knew better.

“Anyway. The two young lovers decide to each paddle to the middle of the lake to meet, where they won’t be detected. A storm blows up and overturns the raven-haired woman’s canoe and she drowns, leaving her lover to slowly go mad.”

“I like that story.” Mulder responded, after a heartbeat passed.

“I knew it was right up your alley.” Scully smiled again, this time the corner of her mouth turning up like a woman with a secret.

“You mean the going mad part, don’t you.”

“I didn’t say that.” A giggle escaped as she spoke.

“Sure, make fun of the certifiable. Just remember, you sleep with me.”

“Every chance I get, G-man, your lack of saneness doesn’t scare me. To get back to the story, every night the locals swear a half- woman, half-fish can be seen slicing through the water looking for her lover.”

“Which half? Turn here.”

“Which half, what?”

“Which half is fish, and which half is woman?”

“Mulder. What difference could that possibly make.” She slid him another look, this one without the smile.

“It could make a huge difference. Okay, okay, since I am playing your typical role, what makes this an X-File, Scully?” Mulder turned the map around in his hands, wondering if it would make more sense upside

down.

“Directly it isn’t. But local kids keep trying to find the mermaid and end up drowning in the lake. Local PD had decided to put an end to this nonsense one and for all. Besides, I managed to finagle us a nice little cabin on the lake.” She raised an eyebrow suggestively at him.

He loved it when she used her eyebrow for good and not evil.

“Scully, I like the way you finagle.”

—

“Mulder just admit it, you’ve gotten us lost.” They had been driving along winding roads, skirting the lake but so far had no luck finding the one that lead to their cabin.

“I am not lost. I am…temporarily misdirected. Have a little faith, Scully.”

Up ahead an old rusted out pickup truck was parked along side of the road, it might have been a Dodge, at one time, but was so badly patched, it looked like a hybrid of several makes. Next to it stood three men, deep in conversation.

“Hey Jim, what time did that guy say he’d be here? We’ve been waiting nigh on an hour.” Tom, the youngest of the group and the one with the worst attitude was losing his patience.

“Relax, will ya? He said he’d be here with the semis. He’ll be here.” Jim replied, leaning negligently on the door of the truck with his arms folded.

“Good thing we ran into them AK47’s in Natches, weren’t it, Jim?”   Jake asked, sniffing and wiping his nose. Jake always had a runny nose a fact that drove Jim nuts and he was the dim bulb of the group, which was a distinct honor. Jake paced the edge of the road. Keeping a nervous eye out. He was the first to spot the late model sedan creeping toward them. “Jim?”

“Who the hell is that?” Tom demanded angrily.

“Sure ain’t our contact, that’s fur damn sure.” Jim replied with an edge to his voice. No one drove this road; these people must be lost.

The car slid to a stop next to the trio. The window slid down and a man’s face appeared from behind the tinted glass. “Hey you fellas wouldn’t happen to know how to get to Waterline road, would you?”

Tom spoke up. “Ya missed it ’bout a quarter mile back. Turn around and look fer a dirt road to the left. Take it until it dead ends and that’ll be Waterline. Ya’ll lookin’ for the cabins down there?”

“Um yeah. Hey thanks.” Mulder rolled his window back up. Scully swung the car around.

“What do you think they’re doing out here, Mulder?” She watched them in her rear view mirror.

“Stop right there, Scully. We’re looking for a mermaid and a quiet place to go skinny-dipping. We’re not here to look into suspicious looking hillbillies. This is as close to a vacation as the X-Files gets, don’t go looking for trouble.” Scully smiled at him and rolled her head to the side to pop her neck. Relaxing. That was not something she was used to.

She found the road and turned, at the end of the dusty drive they found another road crudely marked as Waterline and turned down what looked like a cow path. The path ended at a small clearing.

Mulder jumped out of the car, and headed toward the first small building nearest them. “This must be the office, I’ll get the key.”

Scully exited the car and surveyed their surroundings. Quiet, near the water, just what she wanted. She could make out three small cabins through the trees, separated by at least one hundred yards. Skinny-dipping. She had to admit the idea had merit.

—

Loading the guns into the bed of the truck, the trio covered them with a tarp and jumped in the cab. Tom fired up the engine, and turned around, taking the dirt road he had sent the strangers down an hour before.

“Where we goin’ Tom?” Jake asked. He was tired and hungry, waiting all this time for the man with the guns to show up.

“I want to check out those two what asked fer directions. They don’t look like they belong out here. It’ll just take a minute.” Tom knew just where to pull the truck so he could cut through the dense trees

and slip unobserved to the edge of the clearing near the Waterline Cabins.

The mountain men crouched down, watching the cabins for some sign of life. “Who you think they are, Tom?” Jake whispered.

“I dunno. Feds like as not. Bet someone done ratted on us.” Tom glanced around to make sure both the other men were down and hidden from view.

“What we gonna do iffen they are Feds?” Jim asked, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the brush nearby.

“Kill ’em. Both of ’em.”

—

Mulder carried their bags into the cabin. He had to admit, for such a rural area it was well maintained. “Look Scully,” he said turning on the faucet in the kitchen, “running water.”

“Good, cause I’m going to go wash up, then we can figure out what we’re going to do for dinner.” She grabbed her smallest case and headed for the bathroom.

Mulder watched her go. He considered joining her in the shower, but figured there wasn’t going to be enough room for him alone in there, much less two of them. He stepped out the front door and closed his eyes, absorbing the quiet solitude their location afforded.

A twig snapped somewhere behind him. He turned slightly and listened, but didn’t hear anything else. He continued a few steps toward the lake, stretching his arms above his head. He was wearing his black

leather jacket, as the air was cooling quickly the later it got. He was also wearing his gun strapped to his narrow waist, on a clip on his jeans.

The setting sun glinted off the warm chestnut of his hair. As Mulder arched his back his T-shirt pulled taut across his shoulders and upper chest.  Here he stood, looking like an image from a fantasy when

Scully glanced out the bathroom window to see what he was doing. Her hair was wrapped in a towel and she was struggling not to bump into the sink, walls or towel rack in the tiny bathroom.

Scully hesitated briefly, content to watch the beauty of her lover before she finished up and went in search of her hair dryer. As she turned, Scully just missed seeing the three men creep out from the

edge of the woods where Mulder was standing.

Tom had not missed the gun strapped to Mulder’s waist, either. That had solidified the idea in his head that these two weren’t here on vacation, and needed to be dealt with.

Mulder closed his eyes again just for a moment, and was grabbed from behind.

—

He was crudely blindfolded, and tossed into what he assumed was the bed of a truck. Someone sat near him, to forestall any ideas of jumping while en route. A strip of cloth replaced the rough hand that had covered his mouth when they grabbed him. He could tell it wasn’t tied well, he was moving it with his jaw.

The truck came to a stop several minutes later and he was hauled out and dropped on his feet. The blindfold came off and the three men he had asked directions of stood before him. The back of the truck was covered with a tarp that hid something. From sitting on it he wasn’t sure what it was, but he wouldn’t be surprised to find that they were guns.

Mulder’s hands remained unbound, and he spit the gag from his mouth. They were still at the lake, how far from the cabin he wasn’t sure but they stood at the water’s edge while the sun dipped from the sky.

Jake, Tom and Jim surrounded Mulder. His hazel eyes flashed from one to the other, but he remained unmoving.

“We know why you’re here.” Jake said, taking a step closer to Mulder’s right side.

“You’ve got it wrong. I have no interest in your ‘activities’. Whatever they are.”

Tom stepped in, grabbing Mulder’s left arm, and jerking it behind him. The pain was quick and sharp, but Mulder made no sound. His teeth clenched, the telltale muscle along his jaw jumped but he managed to

keep his outward calm demeanor.

“You lie. You’re a fed, an’ so is that lil’ red-head that’s with you.”   Jim said. He took position in front of Mulder, balling his hands into fists that Mulder kept an eye on. He was fairly certain he was about to get his ass kicked but good.

“We are FBI, but we’re not here investigating you.” Tom jerked up again on Mulder’s arm, the socket threatening to give way. “I’m telling you the truth.” He panted a few times, blowing out through the pain. He’d die here, he decided, before he let these backwoods thugs know they were scaring the hell out of him.

“Jake, go git the boat.” Tom yelled. Jake jumped to do his bidding, running off around a bend. Mulder spared him little thought, keeping his eye on the remaining two. They, no doubt, were going to beat him

senseless, at the least. They might even kill him here, and dump him overboard on the lake.  That  prospect didn’t hold much charm for him.

“Look, I can see that privacy is very important to you all. I can promise you one thing, if I don’t come back the one thing you aren’t going to have is privacy. The FBI will come looking for me, I guarantee it.” He could hear the roar of the small engine attached to the boat coming for him. If he could stall them long enough maybe Scully could find him she’d at least be armed.

“Let ’em come. We’ll kill s’many as we can, then take to the hills. Ain’t a fed in this country who can find us if we don’t wanna be found.” Tom pushed Mulder into the boat, Jim following close behind.

Jake navigated the fishing boat out into the center of the lake, where he knew it was deepest. He stopped and cut the engine.

—

Scully pulled her phone from her pocket. She’d lost track of Mulder over an hour ago, and so far came across no sign of him. She skirted the edge of the lake, hoping to find footprints or something. “Help me

out here, Mulder, you were the Indian Guide, not me.” She muttered impatiently to herself.

A rustle in the underbrush startled her, but after pausing a moment, she decided it was an animal that had no intent of eating her so she went on.

From the brush, a pair of glowing green eyes watched the woman search for the man she loved. The being hiding behind a felled tree knew exactly what was happening to the woman’s mate, but she felt

uncertain. Should she help? She feared discovery, her green eyes narrowing; she would have no peace here if she was found, but knowing the pain of love separated, she had her answer. She would help, and

hope she could still remain undetected by the outside world.

—

This is it, Mulder thought. Fight now or die. He braced himself for battle, as he was sitting in the center of the boat unbound. The men were talking among themselves, presumably over the best way to kill

him.  Mulder shifted his weight onto his toes, wondering if he should try to take them all on or just jump overboard and swim for shore.

Suddenly, his phone rang.

The same phone that hadn’t worked worth a damn way up here rang as clear as day, making him jump and causing the three stooges to grab their guns. They apparently weren’t accustomed to the chirp of a cell.

“It’s for me.” Mulder deadpanned.

“Answer it, and make who ever it is believe that everythin’ is hunkey dory, you got that?” Jim pointed his gun for emphasis.

“What in th’ hell are ya doin’? Just let it ring!” Tom yelled.

“It’ll buy us some time, if whoever it is he talks to thinks he’s alive and doin’ fine.” The other two nodded, but dubiously.

“Mulder.” He said into his cell, crouching now and keeping an eye on the dim trio.

“Mulder, where are you? I’ve been…” Scully’s voiced faded for a moment. Their connection was not good and might not last.

“Scully, listen to me. Get off this mountain. Get somewhere safe call out the Calvary, go, now..”

Tom reached out and slapped the phone from Mulder’s grasp, it fell to the floor of the boat, still on. “Damn it! I tol’ you not to let him talk on that durn thing. Now look! That other fed’ll git away.” Tom

reached a meaty fist back and slammed it into Mulder’s face, splitting his lip.

Mulder spat blood, but he also managed to notice that the phone had not been switched off, lying on the floor. In a moment of desperation, or inspiration he wasn’t sure he started saying goodbye to Scully.

“I’m sorry Scully!” He shouted quickly as Tom grabbed his arms and pushed him back down to a sitting position. “They’re going to kill me, baby, and I’m sorry. I love you, never forget that.”

“Shut UP!” Jim roared, searching on the bottom of the boat for the phone. Jake cocked his gun and pointed it at Mulder’s head.

Mulder never missed a beat, if he was going to eat lead soon, so to speak, he was going to at least say goodbye to the woman he should have married a long time ago. “You have to get off this mountain

Scully, don’t stay to look for me. Do this for me, go!”

—

On the other end of the phone Scully’s brow furrowed, tears slid down her cheeks and her mouth worked silently. She knew he didn’t have the phone any longer and couldn’t hear her. She also knew he was about to die as she listened. She looked around desperately, walking to the edge of the water but having no idea where he was or if she could even swim that far.

At that moment, something came out of the bushes, brushed past her leg and splashed into the water. She didn’t get a clear look at it, but she had the feeling it had long hair, like a woman. No woman could

move that fast, though, or take off that smoothly into the water.

—

Jim found the phone and searched its panel for the ‘off’ key.

“Leave it on.” Jake said, in a shaky, high-pitched voice. “Let her hear him die.” Oh no. That was not what Mulder wanted. Not this, Scully would never be able to shake it, he knew her too well. “Be a man, you little shit. Turn off the phone.” He growled at Jim, Mulder had to make him switch it off.

Scully wouldn’t turn off her phone.

—

Scully heard most of the exchange, the connection getting fuzzy as someone was moving Mulder’s cell phone around. She could hear him screaming for her to turn off the phone and leave.

How could she do that? She wanted to, she knew she was just waiting to hear the shot that would end his life, but how could she cut off the last moments of her connection to him? How could she turn off the phone when she could still hear his voice? The voice she heard night after night on the phone when he couldn’t sleep for all those years. The voice that so recently she had come to love as he called her name while making love to her.

—

Across the cool, dark surface of the water Isabella skimmed silently. She could sense where the boat was sitting she knew these waters like no one else ever could. She created virtually no wake behind her and

counted on the element of surprise.

As she neared the boat, she picked up speed. Her only chance to make it in time was to go quickly and hit the boat with all her might, and hopefully dislodge its occupants.

Jake began to squeeze the trigger and time slowed to a crawl for Mulder. No way, at this range would Einstein there miss him. No way he was going to survive being shot from this range with that caliber. His

eyes glazed over, thinking of Scully, her creamy skin, her soft lips, her tiny, strong hands. No matter what came after this life it would be his own personal hell being away from her.

Something crashed into the side of the boat, flipping it onto its side in a heartbeat, throwing its occupants into the water. Mulder was so surprised, at first he didn’t think to start swimming for shore. He broke the surface of the water and blinked rapidly to clear his eyes. He could see Jake and Tom flailing wildly. Evidently they couldn’t swim.

The boat had a hole in the side and was sinking fast. The only man able to tread water was Jim, and he had the bad fortune not to swim clear of his partners before they grabbed on to him in hopes of being

saved. All three sank to the bottom, Mulder knew that would be the last of them. He spun in the water, trying to determine which direction he should take to shore when an arm circled his waist and he was tugged sharply to the left.

His first instinct was to fight, thinking somehow one of the mountain men had managed to grab him. Orientation set in, however and he realized that he was being pulled along at an amazing pace. The water was slapping him in the face, filling his mouth and making it difficult to see so he extended a hand and touched cool, slippery skin next to him. It almost felt like, well, a fish. He managed half an

amazed chuckle when his mouth filled with water again and he began to sputter.

The mermaid they had come to find was saving his butt. Scully was going to love this.

As Mulder and his mermaid rescuer neared the shore, she slowed. His feet found purchase in the sandy bottom and he stood, squinting in the darkness to see her. For a moment she raised her torso out of the

water, droplets sliding down her bare breasts. He could just glimpse the area around her waist where the skin took on a definite scale appearance, when she turned and left.

“Mulder!” Scully sobbed, hearing a commotion near the waters edge she ran to it to find him standing soaking wet knee deep.

He turned just in time to catch her as she launched herself into his arms, she was crying and clinging to him, asking if he was hurt, asking how he got there.

“Shhh I’m okay, Scully, don’t cry. She saved me.”

Scully wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. Mulder was walking toward the shore, carrying her slight weight against his chest, “Who, who saved you?”

“The mermaid. You should have seen her, Scully…”

“Mulder.” Scully’s voice warned. “Not again.”

~ The End ~

Title:  Tears Like Raindrops Fall

Author:  Fox’s Chickadee

E-Mail: FoxyFoxChickadee@yahoo.com

Summary:  Thunder and lightening bring back bad memories  for poor Mulder.

Spoilers:  None

Rating:  PG-13

Category:  MSR, MT

Disclaimer:   I wish I owned these two beautiful characters.  But  they belong only to each other.

Archives:  I’d be so thrilled!  Let me know so I can come and visit!

Feedback:  Please!  It feeds my muse.  And without food, my muse can’t work.

Thanks: To my very best friend and beta, Jen, who gave me the courage to  actually go ahead and write.

Jenjen, you do so rock!

Disclaimer:  Fox William Mulder and Dana Katherine Scully are the creations and property of Mr. Chris

Cater, esq, AKA Surfer Dude.  This story is just for fun, and no infingement is intended.

Mulder flinched at the loud boom of thunder, his arms cradling his  aching midsection.  Mulder could feel the layers of bandage wrapped  tightly around his ribs.  The window suddenly lit up with a flash of

lightening, it’s light highlighting more bandages on Mulder’s hand as  he held the curtains back to look at

the driving rain outside.

Thunder always made him think of his father.  Not only because of the  many times his father derided him for his childish fear of the claps  and clatters, but also for the few words of comfort:

“The thunder can’t hurt you, Fox.  It’s the lightning that strikes you  dead.”

But that wasn’t true with his father.  The pain of the slaps and blows  was great, but the sting of the cruel words hurt as well.

The furious storm called up many memories from his childhood, but the  pain in his hand was linked to one particular event.   His eidetic  memory played the scene out before him as if it were yesterday. Dad was  burning some documents in the fireplace, and he asked Fox to tend the  fire.

Fooolishly, the boy had added an oversized chunk of wood.

“Get that out NOW,” Dad had snarled at him.  Without thinking, Fox had  reached in to pull off the log, burning his hand in the process.

“What a dope.”  Dad was right, too.  He was a dope.  Too stupid to use  the poker, and afraid of thunder to boot.

Mulder counted the seconds between the electrical flashes and the  booming noise that followed, and the number should have reassured him.

It should have, except he was a feeble little sissy boy.  He squeezed his eyes shut to hold back the

tears.

“Mulder, is something wrong?” Scully asked, looking up from her notebook.  She’d come over to his place so they could catch up on their paperwork.   He’d warned her about the predicted thunderstorm, but she’d smiled and  told him she wasn’t afraid of a little rain.

“No,” he managed to answer in a choked whisper.

“When I was a little girl, I used to be afraid of the thunder,” Scully  said.

Mulder shuddered.  Suddenly, he felt cold.  He let go of the curtains,  turning to face Scully.  He shivered, holding his arms protectively  around him.

“My dad explained that we were safe inside the house.  He taught me how  the lightning rod worked,” she continued.

“And you were a girl,” Mulder added, almost beneath his breath.

“Oh, I suppose boys aren’t afraid of anything,” Scully answered lightly.

“They shouldn’t be,” Mulder said, turning his face away.

“Mulder, what’s wrong?  Do you need more pain medicine?” Scully asked.

“I’m fine.  My hand hardly hurts at all,” Mulder said.

“But what about your ribs?”

Mulder blushed.  The injury to his ribs embarrassed him, because it  proved what a wimp he was.  He should have been able to subdue their  suspect yesterday without getting himself hurt.  Weak sissy boys let  bad guys overcome them, breaking their ribs in the process.  Mulder had  fought the man as he tried to burn evidence in a woodburning stove,  burning his hand badly trying to pull the vital pages out of the

fire.   Maybe if his fire phobia hadn’t made him hesitate, Mulder might have been  able to overpower the big man.

The suspect had other ideas though, as Mulder howled in pain at his burned fingers.  The man had jumped on him, his whole weight at one point pressing on Mulder’s ribs.  Mulder squeezed his eyes shut as he remembered the awful sound of his ribs cracking loudly.

“Oh they’re okay,” he answered carefully, wincing in pain as he tried to  take a deep breath.

“Mulder…” Scully said, frowning at him.  “You’re in pain.  Do you need the bandages to be tighter?”

“No, I think they’re tight enough.”  Mulder coughed, yelping at the  stabbing pain in his chest.   Suddenly, he remembered another case of  broken ribs when he was a kid.  His father had become so angry with  him that he had pushed him aside roughly, throwing Fox into a heavy wooden cabinet.

“Fox, you stupid idiot!” Bill Mulder had shouted as his big hands  grasped Fox’s arms, shaking him hard

before tossing his son aside  like a rag doll.  “I told you not to leave your basketball in the living room.”

Mulder squeezed his eyes shut, yet again, as he fought tears.  If he hadn’t been so clumsy, he wouldn’t have broken his ribs, not then and not now.

“Mulder, you need to eat something,” Scully said, bringing him back to the present with her soft, gentle

voice.  “I’m going to get you  some soup.”

“I’m not hungry, Scully.” he said.  The idea of eating anything  nauseated him.

“You have to keep up your strength.”  Scully walked away, going into the kitchen where Mulder could here her banging pots and pans.  The whirr of the can opener entered his ears.

“All ready,” she said, carrying a bowl, spoon and napkin back into the living room.  “Come on, Mulder, eat up.”

He sat at the table and Scully placed the steaming bowl of soup in front of him.  Mulder looked down at

the thick yellow broth, swimming with chicken pieces and noodles.

Mulder reached for the spoon with his bandaged right hand, grimacing in pain as he tried to hold the utensil.  It slipped from his clumsy fingers, splashing soup on the table.  Scully watched him, her eyes filled with pensive emotion.

Mulder tried picking the spoon up with his left hand, but it felt awkward.  He brought a spoonful of soup up to his mouth, but it spilled down his shirt.  -Damn it.  I can’t even eat soup without screwing it up.- he

thought.

“Oh, Mulder,” Scully said.  “Let me help you.”  She dabbed at the soup dripping off his chin with the napkin.  “I should have realized you’d have trouble eating with your bandage.”

Scully raised a spoonful of soup to Mulder’s mouth.  He closed his eyes as he swallowed, humiliated at

being fed like a baby.  Spoonful after spoonful trickled down his throat until he felt like choking.

He turned his face, before she could put another spoonful into his lips. “No more, Scully.  Please.  I

can’t eat any more.”

“Do you feel sick?” she asked, concern painting her beautiful face with sadness.

“No, I’m fine.  Really,” he lied as he pushed away from the table.  His ribs ached terribly.  He paused

for a moment, afraid that he might pass out.  How humiliating would that be? he wondered.  He made his way to the couch, carefully lowering himself onto the cushions.  Grateful that he hadn’t fainted, he leaned back and watched as a flash of lightening lit up the sky beyond the window.

He couldn’t let Scully know what was really bothering him.  If she knew what a screw up he was, she wouldn’t love him anymore.  Why would a woman as beautiful and perfect as Dana Katherine Scully want a pathetic looser like him?  No, he had to keep those terrible memories of his father to himself.

“Mulder, why don’t you lie down?”  Scully’s voice was soft and gentle, and the touch of her hands on his

shoulders filled the cold void inside him with warmth.

He leaned against her as she lowered him back onto the couch, but then a stab of  white-hot pain from his ribs brought him back to the harsh but undeniable fact that he couldn’t even lie down and take a nap without screwing up.

The pain made him grown, and the grown started him coughing and coughing, which made the pain even worse.  But even worse than the cough and the pain were the look he saw in Scully’s eyes.

“Fox William Mulder, I expect you to tell me the truth,” she said sternly but not angrily.  “I am your doctor and I need to know when you are in pain.”

Mulder could only nod weakly he didn’t have the heart to lie to her.

“You must take your pills for pain and the medicine to stop your cough or you will not get well and heal,”

Scully chided him.

He squeezed his eyes shut, as he always did when he had to hold back his tears.  He could only hope that

Scully understood how sorry he was that he had lied to her.

Scully gave him two big pills to swallow, and then two spoonfuls of thick, bitter cough syrup, but he didn’t complain.

“Now I want you to rest,” she said.  This time when she helped him lie down, it did not hurt as much and

he did not cough.

“I think I’m all better,” Mulder said confidently.

“I’m glad, but still you should rest,” Scully said.

The medicines were making Mulder’s head feel funny, but most of all he felt good.  The storm seemed to be dying down too.

“The thunder isn’t scary any more.”  When Mulder realized what he had just said, his face turned red.

He covered his face with his hands, so Scully couldn’t see how embarrassed he was, and so that he wouldn’t have to see the look of pity and disgust that she would surely be wearing.

Gentle hands peeled his hands from his face, and Scully’s gentle voice was without pity or disgust.

“Thunder and lightning can’t hurt you here.  But it is okay to feel afraid,” she said.

“For a girl, maybe,” he whispered.  He could not hold back his tears.  The hurt of his shame was more than the hurt of his hand or his midsection, and the shame of showing his shame before Scully made it hurt even more.

“Who told you that, Mulder?  Who made you feel that you were wrong to feel afraid?”  Scully’s voice was angry, but Mulder sensed that the anger was not aimed at him.

“He was just trying to make me grow up strong,” Mulder tried to explain.

“You were just a little boy.  He should have comforted you and made you feel safe, the way my father did,” Scully said.

Somehow the strong medicines had unlocked Mulder’s lips and his heart.

“I’m a clumsy wuss.  No wonder he was ashamed of me.”

“Fox William Mulder, I wouldn’t stand for that from anyone else, and I certainly won’t stand for it from

you.”  Scully was even angrier than before.  “You are a strong brave man, the bravest man I’ve ever known.  I can’t stand the way he hurt you, because…. because I love you.”

Mulder felt warm tears on his cheek, but this time they were Scully’s tears.  She hugged him hard, but

somehow it didn’t hurt, even where his ribs were sore.  Mulder felt secure in the warm circle of her arms in a way he’d never felt before.

She loved him.  She had even said it out loud.  Although he was happy, he still couldn’t quite believe

his good fortune.

“I hope you never change your mind about me, Scully,” he said.  “There are things about me that you don’t know yet.  He sighed, thinking again about all the times he’d failed, all the people he’d disappointed.

“I’ll never change my mind,” Scully said, smiling a warm smile.  And to his surprise, she began to sing.

“That’s beautiful, Scully,” Mulder said.  He’d heard the song before, but it had never meant more to him

than it did right now.

I don’t care who you are Where you’re from What you did As long as you love me.

The End

Author’s note:  I’m not a big Backstreet Boys fan, but I borrowed  “As Long As You Love Me” because the

opening line of this song  could have been written for Mulder and Scully:

Although loneliness has always been a friend of mine

I’m leavin’ my life in your hands

Title: Rain and Shine

Author: Caroline McKenna

Summary: There’s nothing like nature to settle an argument.

Rating: PG

Spoilers: minor ones for Triangle.

Category: Pretty harmless… MSR and a little A. We’ll save the MT for later.

Archive: Written for I Made This Productions Virtual Season 10 project. They have full rights

for two weeks and after that, let me know where you’re taking it so I can visit.\

Disclaimer: They aren’t mine, you know that. Don’t rub it in.

Feedback: Of course!

Email: cmckenna1121@yahoo.com

Author’s notes: Thanks to all the wonderful people at MR who really kept me writing. You know, I had

no intention of doing a rain fic… my muse was on vacation in Florida or somewhere. One day, though,

at rehearsal it started raining really hard, and all 50 cast members grew silent. It was really

magical. Anyway, nobody really cares… LOL. Thanks to the ever-wonderful Vickie for the speedy beta!

“Come on, Scully! It is completely plausible!” Mulder argued, rising from one of the red plush

seats that decorated the theatre. The building was empty, closed off by yellow police tape to

authorize an FBI investigation.

“You honestly think that a ghost replaced the prop knife for a real one?” Her left eyebrow raised in

a way that Mulder was all too familiar with.

He knew she was probably right. One of the cast members had probably taken the retractable knife

and put a kitchen knife in its’ place, but there was something tickling at his brain. Something

didn’t make sense, didn’t fit. Everybody liked Jen Wills; she was one of the most popular actresses

on the Broadway circuit and there was nobody to argue that she was made for the role of Nancy in

the musical “Oliver!” Mulder had to agree. To see the petite woman on stage belting out “As Long As

He Needs Me” was pretty amazing.

At first, when Scully suggested going to the theatre, he was more than a little reluctant. For

some reason, watching ten year old boys sing, dance, and pick people’s pockets didn’t appeal to

his sense of classic entertainment. Scully had talked him into it, however, whispering

seductively into his ear about what she would do when they returned to the motel.

“Well, yeah,” Mulder defended himself, although weakly. He knew that it all sounded crazy, but then again, half of what came out of his mouth sounded crazy. Insanity wasn’t always considered a bad thing, at least not by certain redheaded FBI agents. Mulder grinned at the thought. Even though Scully did not believe all his theories- *any* of his theories, she still believed in him. She believed in him enough to trust him with her heart, her mind, and her body.

“Care to elaborate on that, Mulder?” She moved closer to him with her hands on her hips, challenging him.

“Well,” he began uneasily, “There wasn’t a crumb of evidence of any foul play…”

“Mulder, a woman was murdered.”

“Besides that. The table where the dummy knife was found was absolutely spotless. We have no concrete suspects…” he trailed off.

“So you automatically jump to ghosts?” she asked sarcastically.

Mulder smiled sheepishly, and turned his head away, afraid to answer.

“That is so typical, Mulder,” she scolded, “We could have been back to the hotel hours ago. I need a good night’s rest, I’m still suffering from jetlag. But you wouldn’t think of that, would you Mulder? Of course not.”

“That time of the month again, Scully?”

The look on her face told him that he had definitely said the wrong thing. Mulder knew he was in deep shit.

But she didn’t say anything for a good thirty seconds. “Mulder, when women are angry, they aren’t always PMS-ing.” Her tone was calm, and controlled, almost too much for Mulder’s liking.

“Look, Scully, all I’m saying is why must you always contradict me? I’m not only talking about now. I mean, I know this ghost thing is bogus, but it’s *all* the time. I can never get a word in edgewise without you shoving some kind of scientific fact down my throat.” He had tried to keep composed, he really had. It hadn’t worked very well.

“Me?” Scully practically screeched, “*I* never believe *you*? Mulder, what kind of drugs are you on?”

He interrupted her, “Drugs! You always assume I’m on drugs…”

Scully ignored him and kept talking, “You are the one who never believes me. If I don’t go along with your theory, you ditch me and usually end up in the ICU…”

Their conversations overlapped painfully, the clamor of their voices, each so different, so perfectly opposite that they almost harmonized.

“Every time I say something you don’t like you assume I’m on drugs. Why can’t you ever accept that maybe I mean when I say?”

“…and then I sit there for three days, worrying myself sick, until you come out of whatever coma you’re in only to sit and worry some more while you’re entering surgery…”

“Because sometimes I do mean it, Scully. After the Queen Anne or whatever that damn boat was… what I said, I meant it. But I know you don’t believe me, you never do…”

“Of course when you come out of surgery, you treat me like I’m… I don’t know, precious or something and of course I love that, but when you’re all better, you go back to your normal ditching self…”

A deafening clap of thunder echoed through the theatre, shaking the ground and rendering the two agents silent. They remained that way as the droplets of rain began to echo off the tin roof. The soft pitter patter sped up and became louder, filling the whole room with the sound of spring.

Mulder could feel his anger ceasing with each bead of water to bounce off the roof. For the first time, he was glad the theatre didn’t have enough money to afford a new roof that year. The sound was calming, soothing to a point.

He glanced at Scully out of the corner of his eye.   She appeared relaxed as well, her eyes closed and her lips curving up, just listening to the glory of nature.

Mulder sat on the edge of the stage as the rain died down to only a pitter or a patter once in a while. Scully joined him, an expression of contrition on her face.

“Mulder, I’m sorry..”

“I’m sorry, Scully…”

He broke into an earsplitting grin. They thought too much alike.

“You first,” he offered courteously.

“Mulder, I’m sorry for yelling at you and, you know, accusing you of ditching me. I know you haven’t done that in quite some time, and I really do appreciate the effort.” She avoided his eyes, looking down at the dirty stage floor.

As much as he was glad to hear her apology, her original, bitter words still rang in his ears.

“…worrying myself sick…”

“I’m sorry for making you worry, Scully. You know that the last thing I want is to bring you pain. And I guess I didn’t mean it when I said that you don’t listen to me. You listen to me more than anyone else ever has. I love you,” He took her hand. Everything was going to be fine.

“I know. I love you too Mulder, but I guess that goes without saying.”

“And Scully?” Mulder smiled.

“Yes, Mulder?” she responded.

“I do think you’re precious,” he said, referring to her earlier comment. He hadn’t totally tuned her out, after all. He had heard every word that she said, and had also heard the insecurity behind it.

“Thank you. And, by the way, I did believe what you said after the Queen Anne.”

“That’s good to hear, Scully.”

“Come on, Mulder,” Scully dragged him to his feet and then brought her face to his, quickly kissing his lips. “We’ve got a case to crack, ghost or no ghost.”

“Aww…” Mulder complained. He had hoped that they could go back to the hotel and… make up.

“In the morning.” Scully smiled.

~end~

TITLE:  Prairie Interlude

AUTHOR: J. Millington

EMAIL: varmstro@earthlink.net

ARCHIVE:  Please ask.

DISCLAIMER:  Mulder, Scully and Skinner belong to Chris Carter, 1013 Productions and Fox. No copyright infringement is intended.

FEEDBACK:    Gratefully accepted.

DISCLAIMER:  Mulder, Scully and Skinner belong to Chris Carter, 1013 Productions and Fox. No copyright infringement is intended.

More J. Millington fanfic is available at: http://home.earthlink.net/~varmstro/

***********

Prairie Interlude

by J. Millington

varmstro@earthlink.net

Normally a long drive through the flat Kansas prairie land was too boring for words.

Normally she’d almost be willing to shoot her partner again in order to take the driver’s seat from him.  The only thing more boring than driving through the flatlands was watching it pass by, endless and unchanging, while someone else drove.

Scully glanced over at her partner’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, could almost hear him grind his teeth in concentration over the steady thwack-thwack-thwack of the wipers.  A gust of wind caught them broadside and shoved the car to the shoulder before Mulder could wrestle it back onto the road.  Nope, this was definitely one time when she had no problem with letting the manly man drive.

She switched the radio on again, hoping they were within range of a station now.  Grainy static, then a

clear voice, “Another rainy day here in the heartland.  Look out for a bit of wind from time to time, folks.”

“No shit,” Mulder mumbled.

Scully turned the dial.  A country singer cheerfully sang out, “‘Cause I love a rainy night, Yes I love a rainy night, Ooh I love a rainy night.”

“Eddie Rabbit?  Oh, please,” Mulder said.

She turned the radio off.  “I’m impressed, Mulder.  I didn’t know your appreciation of American music

included county singers.”

He spared her a grin.  “After all these years together, there’s still plenty that you don’t know about me.”

“Such as how you’re going to get us to Wichita in time to make our flight?”

“I’m a man of mystery, Scully, not a miracle worker.  Maybe with this storm front moving through the flight will be delayed.”

“I hope so.”  She shuddered. ” I hate taking off during bad weather.”

“You cover it well, though.  Except for the gouges your nails leave in my arm when you mistake it for your armrest.”

“I do not.”

“Sure you do and I’ve got the scars to prove it.  I’ve just never. . .”  He squinted and leaned forward.  “Is

hat what I think it is?”

She stared through the downpour and caught a glimpse of flashing lights up ahead.

******

Mulder rolled to a stop at the road block but waited to roll down his window until the Kansas state patrolman was at their vehicle.  As soon as he rolled it down the wind picked up and blew straight into the car.  Mulder took the full force of the water, wiping his sleeve across his face in a futile attempt to dry off the worst of it.

“Sorry, folks, but the bridge up ahead is washed out.  You’ll have to turn around..”

Scully leaned in towards the driver’s side window.  “We have to catch a flight out of Wichita in two

hours.  What’s the best way around?”

“Well, the quickest route, and the best road conditions under the circumstances, would be to double back to Highway 183, take that north to 54 and then straight in to Wichita.  But that’s going to add another 55 or 60 miles.  No way you’re going to make your plane.”

“He’s right, Scully.”  Mulder let out a sigh.  “That was the last flight out to D.C. tonight.  Officer, can

you recommend a motel in the area?  Looks like we might as well sit this one out until tomorrow.”

“Glad to hear you say that.  This is no kind of weather for trying to get anywhere in a hurry.  Back just before Coldwater there’s a decent motel.  Kind of old fashioned, but the man who runs it keeps it up pretty well.  Good luck,”

“Thanks,” Mulder said as he rolled up his window, “this just  keeps getting better and better.”

Scully fished through her briefcase for the cell phone and the useless plane ticket.  “Might as well try to switch our flight to tomorrow.”  She punched in the number for airline.  And punched her way through the automated menu, finally getting “the next available representative will be with you” message.  The scratchy strains of “Come Fly with Me” was grating on her nerves when a live voice come on.  Scully tried to explain what she needed as the signal broke up.

Lightning flashed nearby followed by a boom of thunder.  The connection was lost and she flipped the phone closed in frustration.  It would just have to wait until she could call from the motel.

******

The motel was easy to find, it’s orange and pink neon light cutting through the gloom.  The parking lot

looked full but the word ‘vacancy’ was thankfully still lit under the words Great Plains Inn and Cafe.

The lights in the cafe were, unfortunately, dim.  The tiny office was tacked onto a larger building, probably the owner’s living quarters.  The front desk was empty and Mulder gave the bell on the counter a gentle tap.

“Just a minute,” came a voice from behind the office door.  When the door opened an elderly man came out, followed by the echoes of canned laughter and a mouthwatering beefy aroma, stew or pot roast or

something equally delicious.

“You two sure look a sight. Reckon you need a room.”

“Two rooms if you have them,” Mulder said.

“Oh, sorry.  Thought you were a couple.” He gave a nod to Scully.  “Didn’t mean to presume, ma’am.”

“No problem.” Scully said pulling out her identification.  “We’re with the FBI.  On our way back to Wichita we got caught in the storm and now it looks like the bridge up ahead is washed out.”

“Well it looks like your luck is going to get better.  I have two rooms left, directly across from the office.  Normally they rent out last, since they’re closest to the highway, but I don’t believe they’ll be much traffic tonight.”

It only took a minute to register.  When they were done Mulder cast a longing glance in the direction of the darkened cafe.  “Looks like the cafe is closed for the evening.  Is there somewhere else we could get something to eat?”

“Well, there’s the Belleflower Restaurant in Coldwater, but I think they would be closed by the time you got there.  And the convenience store on the higway has some premade sandwiches.”  He shook his head.  “Listen, the kids have been on their own for fifteen years but Myra still cooks like she’s got a houseful of teenagers to feed.  If you don’t mind beef stew, I can bring you a bowl when it’s done.  Should only be a half hour or so.”

“Are you sure?” Scully asked.  “We wouldn’t want to put you out.”

“You’d be doing me a favor, to tell the truth. Saving me from leftovers.”  The man smiled and handed them their keys

******

The room wasn’t bad.  The old motel was one of those ancient motor courts, a u-shaped arrangement of tiny cabins with carports between where guests could park their cars.  This one had a well-maintained vintage quality, from the sturdy maple furniture to the quilt on the bed, it felt cozy.  Almost like a bed-and-breakfast.

The bathroom was pink and green ceramic tile, straight out of the forties but clean and well lit.  Good. She needed to call the airline.  She needed to call her dentist and reschedule an appointment.  And one of them really needed to call work and let them know they would be delayed in getting back to the office.

But all that could wait.  The first thing on Scully’s agenda was a nice, long bath.  Hopefully the hot water

heater was as wonderful as the rest of the accommodations.

For much of her life it seemed like she needed to be in tight control.  Her father had certainly demanded discipline.  Her work in forensic science demanded exacting attention to detail.   And playing counterpoint to Mulder’s sometimes wild leaps of intuition required a kind of balance that could take

its toll.

That’s why she savored baths.  Complete privacy and gallon upon gallon of warm and soothing water.  In the bathtub the only thing she was required to do was close her eyes and soak. Preferably in scented

bubbles.

When she finally emerged from the steamy room she felt more relaxed than she had in days.  So what if the drive had been hell.  So what if they’d missed their flight.  Right here and now she was warm and clean and comfortable.  She was just pulling on her robe when there was a knock on the door.  Peering through the peephole she saw Mulder carrying a covered tray.

When she let him in he leaned in close and sniffed her hair.  “You smell really nice.  I see your time was  well spent.”  She suspected he was curious about her indulgence in baths.  “All you had to do was ask and I would have been glad to scrub your back.”

“Mulder, sometimes a women just needs a little ‘me’ time.  Speaking of smelling good. . .”  She breathed

deeply.

He set the tray down on the table.  “Mr. Greene delivered this a few minutes ago.”

“Mr. Greene?  Husband of Myra?”

“Yeah, and lucky beneficiary of her culinary skills.”   He took off the cover and grinned.  “I may be wrong, but I think these biscuits are homemade.”

She inhaled deeply.  Not only were the biscuits homemade, but the stew smelled better than her Mom’s

best.  And was that apple pie?  Hell with the diet, if she was forced to take this tiny, out-of-the-way vacation, she was determined to enjoy it.

While they ate the conversation drifted; Scully’s mom’s apple pie, plans for the upcoming weekend, an outrageous movie that Mulder wanted her to see.  Anything but work.  As she watched him laugh she realized that she hadn’t seen Mulder this relaxed in a very long time.

Finally she sat back and sighed deeply.  Reaching for the remote, she switched on the television, while

Mulder opened the door to put the tray out for the Greenes to collect.

“Hey, Scully.  You’ve got to come and look at this.”

She pulled her robe tighter around her body against the draft.  “Mulder, close the door.”

Instead he picked up her coat and handed it to her.  “Hurry.  Trust me, it’ll be worth it.”

She draped her coat over her shoulders and peaked around the door.  “Oh, Mulder,” she gasped.  In the

distance balls of light skipped and danced across the horizon.  “Is that. . . .?”

“No,” he laughed.  “Ball lightning.  Concentrated collections of plasma that slowly dissipate in the atmosphere.  Often associated with thunderstorms.”

They watched the show for several minutes until a bolt of lightning streaked through the middle of the

glowing spheres.  They vanished and the thunderclap was almost deafening.

“Wow.”

Mulder laughed.  “Wow?  For a woman with a distinguished undergraduate degree in physics, I didn’t think nature would be able to amaze you with such a simple trick.”

She put her arm around Mulder and leaned into his warm embrace.  “The simple tricks of nature are often beautiful enough to rate a ‘wow’.  Besides, after all these years of chasing lights in the sky with old Spooky, maybe I’ve learned to appreciate the simple things a little bit more.”

He gave her a squeeze and pulled her back inside.  Sitting side-by-side on the bed, they watched the local weather report.

“More rain.  What a surprise.”  Scully didn’t really sound too upset.  “I guess we really should see about

getting a flight out tomorrow.”

“I know,” Mulder sighed.  “But right now I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be.”

“Who would have thought that Coldwater, Kansas was the perfect vacation spot.”

“Vacation?”  He laughed.  “I don’t know if I’d go that far.  But this interlude is just what I needed.”

Thunder rattled the small building.  Mulder got up and opened the window, letting in the clean, fresh air.

“I know what you mean, Mulder,” Scully said, joining him by the window.  “Sometimes it’s good to just stop and take a step back.”

He held her close.  “You’re right about that.  Sometimes you need to take time to stop and smell the ozone.”

The end

Maelstrom

03/02/03

Author: Malibu

Spoilers:  None

Rating:  pg-13 for a few bad words and disturbing

crimes

The fingers of Mulder’s right hand drummed steadily to a beat only he could hear against the dashboard of the car.  The knuckles of his left hand were white as he clutched the steering wheel in what was tantamount to a death grip.   Scully sighed inwardly as she shifted uncomfortably on the black vinyl seat of their rental car.  The humidity was stifling, matched only by the tension that enveloped both her and Mulder like an unwanted blanket on a hot summer night.

Pushing a hand through her hair, she chanced a sideways glance at her partner.  Mulder’s profile was set in stone.  His jaw clenched tightly, shoulders held stiff and straight, impenetrable.  A lock of thick chestnut hair had fallen damply across his forehead.  She instinctively wanted to reach over and softly brush it aside but deemed it unwise.  His whole body screamed pissed off.

“Mulder,”  She began tentatively.

His head whipped around.  Eyes so green they rivaled freshly mined emeralds flashed dangerously at her.  He raised his hand open palmed in a dismissive gesture before turning back to the road.  Anger rolled off him in waves.  Scully sighed, aloud this time, and turned to the scenery that flew passed the car.  Colors blurring into a mismatched artists palette.  She hadn’t questioned him when he had left the main highway and turned onto the coast road.  A pissed off and petulant Mulder was not to be reasoned with.

“Why?”

Mulder’s voice, its tone deceptively soft cut through the air as decisively as a hot iron through butter.  Scully felt an involuntary shiver pass over her.  She knew that tone, it was the one he used when dealing with a particularly recalcitrant suspect and he wasn’t going to brook anything but the truth.  She didn’t however, question his query.  She knew exactly what he was questioning.  Why hadn’t she sided with him on his analysis of the case they had just left?  A case he was now fleeing as if the very hounds of hell were pursuing them.

Lying her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes.  A kaleidoscope of images ran across her closed lids, her own private slideshow.

Click:  Five towns.

Click:  Five small bodies.  All male between the ages of nine and eleven. Beaten and then strangled.  All abducted from their beds while there was a parent in the house.  No sign of a forced entry.  All returned to their beds, dead, 72 hours later.

Click:  Mulder, not sleeping, refusing to eat.  Consumed with solving the crime.  Exhausting both himself and those around him.

Click:  Mulder in tears.

Click:  Mulder screaming out into the night as the dreams came.

Click:  Mulder finally telling her what he truly believed. Alien abduction.

The local Police had eventually bought into custody a woman who was employed as a maid by a service that all the families used.  Mulder was furious.

“No Prints, Scully.  No physical evidence at all.  That woman is smaller than you.  How could she have carried out those boys who weighed about the same as her, through an occupied house unseen?  It’s all circumstantial bullshit!”

He had carried on his tirade until he finally fell asleep.  Scully had sat watching him sleep for a while, occasionally smoothing the hair from his forehead.  When awake Mulder was the personification of energy, all forward motion.  In rest he had the face of a sleeping child.  Long eyelashes lying low on his high cheekbones, soft full lower lip pouting slightly.  While she had to agree that the lack of evidence was troubling, the woman in question had held a key to all five residences, she was definitely a suspect.  Mulder was out on a limb on this one.  He wasn’t here to profile.  They had happened upon the crimes purely by accident.  Driving back from a well deserved vacation.  Life had been hard on them lately and they had needed time to re-group and re-group they had indeed.  Scully allowed herself a small smile at the memory, but their luck being what it was they had happened upon this on the way home.  Mulder was out on a limb here, he wasn’t here to profile or investigate.

He was simply here to assist, whatever the hell that meant.

Mulder had been no calmer in the morning and had confronted the detective in charge with his usual take no prisoners approach.  Finally, as his rants had approached the sound barrier she had lain her hand on his arm and said quietly,

“Mulder, I think you’re wrong about this.”

His eyes, always a window to his feelings, had registered a depth of pain that took her aback.  He had shaken off her hand and stepped back as if she had physically struck him.  The detective had a self-satisfied smirk on his face that she had itched to smack off.  Mulder strode over to the door, pausing only to throw over his shoulder,

“Be ready detective, because it’s not over.  You’re going to lose more.”  Before sweeping through the door without so much as a backwards glance at her. His silence was a living breathing entity and had continued as they went back to the motel, changed into travel clothes, threw their bags into the car and

left.  Her only attempt at conversation was met with a heated glare, a definite storm brewing in his hazel eyes.

Scully opened her eyes as she heard Mulder’s tersely muttered, “Fine.”  Rolling her shoulders to try and ease the tension gathering there, she cranked open a window.  The salty tang of sea air assaulted her senses but bought no relief from the humidity.  The breeze that washed over her was far from refreshing, more like a blast from a furnace.  Black clouds were gathering on the horizon and the closeness of the air was suffocating, dusty and thick.  All the ingredients of a summer storm and the surf in the cauldron of the sea roiled wickedly.  She clutched wildly at the door handle when the car lurched suddenly to the right as Mulder skidded to a halt on the sandy verge at the side of the road.  He was out of the car and headed down the dune to the beach before she could form a question.  Scully was torn, he probably needed some time alone but the man she cared so deeply for was obviously in pain and the need to help him was physical in its intensity.  Her decision made, she bolted from the car and scrambled down the bank after him.

“Mulder!”

The breeze took her words and mockingly threw them back at her.  Waist high sea grass snapped unforgiving at her bare arms, driven by the rising winds.

“Damn it!”

She flung at his retreating back.  Running full out she caught up with him and reached for his arm.

Spinning around he glared at her.

“Go back to the car, Scully.”

“No,”  she countered.

His arms folded protectively across his chest and in his eyes she saw the walls come up.

“Mulder, please listen to me.”  Her hand reached for his face and he jerked away.

“You saw the evidence,”  he growled.  A flush of temper tinting his cheekbones.   Her own temper answered.

“What evidence, Mulder?”  She snapped out.

“There was no blood, no fingerprints.  Nothing was disturbed at all.  No evidence, Mulder.  There was nothing!”

“Exactly,”  he said softly.

Frustration raced through her, “You’re seeing things that aren’t there, Mulder.”

His intake of breath and the paleness of his face told her the mistake.

“Seeing things, Scully?”  His baritone voice taking on a dangerous, honeyed cadence.  “Like maybe, little green men?  Ghosts, perhaps?  ‘Spooky’ things, Scully?”

“Mulder.”

“No!”  His voice was rising now, fingers running distractedly through his hair and pacing in his

agitation.  “After all these years and all the crap we’ve seen, it’s still not enough is it?”  His tone dropped a level and his shoulders sagged in defeat.

“After all that we have become to each other, Scully. Why is it easier to believe that your partner has finally lost it than it is to see the truth?”   His hands came to fall loosely at his sides, palms turned up as if in a question of their own.  His wind ravaged hair had fallen into his eyes, eyes that were now downcast as he distractedly sucked on his lower lip.

Scully reached for his arm slowly, so as not to startle him.  A fat drop of rain falling onto her hand as she did so.  Vaguely she registered the roar of thunder.  Waves crashed violently upon the sand, accompanying the distant rumble.  A gull screeched harpy like above them.  All around them was a veritable symphony of nature.

“Mulder.”  She spoke very softly.  No answer from the man in front of her.  The cacophony surrounding them registering with him not at all.  Placing two fingers under his chin, she gently raised his face to hers.  Deep hazel met blue and the tears that had been threatening for a while now finally fell as his voice cracked,  “They’ll take more, Scully.  Why the children?  Why do they hurt the children?”  He fell heavily to his knees and Scully fell with him gathering him into her arms as the storm broke literally and physically.

Rain fell onto her back soaking her thin white tee shirt as she rocked him slowly, gentle hands running through his soft hair.  Moving her hands to his taut shoulders she felt the sobs wrack his body as the storm around them grew in power, lashing them both with driving rain and soaking them through.  His tears ran warm down her neck as his fingers fisted into her shirt.

“You did your best, Mulder,”  she soothed.  Finally resorting to comforting crooning sounds of the sort that seemed to pull him from even his worst  nightmares.  The sand beneath them dug grittily into her knees even through their denim covering, her  hair whipped across her face as if snakes from Medusa and she gave no thought to moving.  Mulder clung to her as a child separated from his mother might when finally reunited.

These cases exhausted them both.  Cases with children always affected them both deeply.  Cases where the children had been physically or sexually abused crucified him for reasons that Scully wasn’t sure she was ready to explore.  What felt like eons after they had fallen to the sand, she felt him shift against her and his crying slowed to a hitch in his breath now and then.  Mother nature seemed to be somewhat pacified too, the pelting rain having tapered off to a soft drizzle. Mulder finally raised his face to hers.

“Hey,”  she whispered.  The anguish and angry fire in his eyes had been replaced by a gold flecked hue of complete emotional depletion.

“You’re all wet, Scully,”  he stated simply, raising a hand to run his knuckles gently down her cheek.

“It’s raining, Mulder.”  She smiled softly.

Getting to his feet, he helped her up and pulled her into the circle of his arms as if to shield her from the rain.

“You’ll catch cold,”  he murmured into her hair.

“It’s a warm rain, Mulder.  Summer storm.”

His head was lowering slowly down to hers.  She still had questions and he still needed answers but right now she had all she needed right here.  He was safe and relatively whole.  His firm chest pressed against her, the heat of him relegating everything else to secondary status.

“A storm that needed to break.”  She spoke softly against his lips as the tip of his warm tongue ran across her lower lip and his mouth captured hers.

“Let Fire Cleanse What Rain Cannot”

Summary:  When Mulder journeys so deeply into a killer’s mind, Scully and Skinner are there to bring him back.  But not even the rains of a violent storm are enough to wash away the damage that’s been done.

Rating: R – for language, violence, and implied sexual deviance

Let Fire Cleanse What Rain Cannot

by Daydreamer

A hand rested on her shoulder, firm and comforting.  She looked up into warm brown eyes that tried to hide behind steel-rimmed glasses and smiled.  “Thank you for coming, Walter,” she said softly.

“How is he?”  Skinner nodded at the man who sat in the interrogation room, hunched over a table filled with files and photos.  Evidence bags littered one side of the table and they could see where Mulder had pulled out a baseball cap, a yellow and blue geometric patterned scarf, and a necklace.  A straight razor, the kind the killer had used on all his victims, rested by his right elbow.

“Exhausted,” Scully said with a sigh, as she looked back through the window.  A cup sat at Mulder’s side, and as  they watched he lifted it, drank, and grimaced.  “He’s living on coffee,” she said, as she pointed to the cup.  “We’ve been here four days and I don’t think he’s slept more than a couple of hours.”

Skinner looked at his watch.  “I was on a late flight.  It’s nearly eleven now — why are you two still here?”

Scully shrugged.  “I just got back from the autopsy on the Wilmington girl.”  She looked up to see Skinner’s lifted eyebrow and nodded.  “Same as the others.”  Again, she turned to stare at Mulder through the window.  “He wasn’t at the motel, so I came back here.”

“Is he eating?” Skinner asked.

She shook her head.  “He plays with his food, trying to convince me he’s eating it, but I know nothing is going down.  He’s quick to insist that I eat, but he’s exempted himself from that requirement this go round.”  She looked back at the AD for a moment, noting the wet coat, the  streaked glasses, the drops of water that dotted his head.

“Still raining?” she asked, as she passed over a handful of paper towels.

Skinner nodded.  “Pouring.  Another front is on the way; they expect a short respite tomorrow, then at least two more days of this deluge.”  He wiped his face, then his glasses and shed the coat, hanging it over a chair to drip dry.  “All right,” the AD said, rolling his shoulders as he stared through the window at his agent, “tell me what happened with that debacle yesterday.”

Scully sighed again.  “Golson wasn’t listening to Mulder.  It didn’t matter what he said, what he did, the man just tuned him out.”  She shook her head and glanced at Skinner.  “And you know how that goes.  When the leader shows derision, the rest of the troops aren’t far behind.  We couldn’t get any help.”

“But Mulder had an outline — he developed a profile and even had a possible location for the kills identified, didn’t he?” Skinner asked.

Scully nodded.  “Yeah.  Fat lot of good it did.  After I finished the autopsies on the last two vics … what we already knew was confirmed — the killer used a razor,” she pointed at the one on the table in front of Mulder, “and his victims slowly bled to death.  There wasn’t enough blood at the scenes for the actual kill to have occurred there.  They were nothing more than dump sites.”

“And?” Skinner prompted.

“Mulder found a connection — all the girls had gone to the same elementary school.”

“But these were young women — all over eighteen.”

“Yeah,” Scully agreed, “but the connection was there.  It was the first thing Mulder insisted on when we got here –the background on the victims didn’t go back far enough.  Once the additional information began to come in, the connection was obvious.”

“So why exactly do we have another dead body and no clue as to who the perp is?”

“Because Golson is an asshole,” Scully said succinctly.  “Mulder told him to stake out the school — he was sure the perp was using it for his killing ground.  But instead, Golson leads a raid, charging in with a full SWAT team and searching the building room by room.”  She snorted in disgust.  “They found the kill site — the boy’s locker room in the gym — but Mulder is sure the perp’s been  warned off now, and since we’ve had the school under surveillance the last day and a half, and we have a new body within in the past ten hours, I have to agree with him.”  She shook her head again.  “All the raid did was  force the killer to find a new kill site.  Golson hasn’t done anything to actually find the man or determine who

the next victim will be.”  She slammed her hand on the wall.  “We’d be done if that jerk had just listened to Mulder!  This would all be over!”

Skinner rested his hand on her shoulder again, waiting patiently while she drew several deep breaths.  “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner.”  He clenched his teeth and gritted out, “But I can assure you that Golson not listening to Mulder will *not* be a problem any more.”

Scully nodded shortly and raised a hand to cover the AD’s for a moment.  “He’s taking this really hard.  Based on when the different victims went to that school, it looks like they were all about eight years old when they came in contact with the perp.  Information has been slow to comein, but it looks like at least two of the women have been in therapy to help deal with childhood molestation.”  She released Skinner and reached out and touched the glass.

“Mulder is convinced the perp is the molester.”

Skinner took his hand from Scully’s shoulder and pinched the bridge of his nose.  “Does he have any idea what triggered the guy’s need to track these women down now — all these years later?”

She shrugged.  “He probably does.  He’s been really –deep — into this one.  I don’t understand half of what he says, but he seems to be able to draw some coherent ideas out of his ramblings.”

“Does Mulder have any idea why the perp has been so active lately?  Four kills in the last five months,

and then three in the last four days.  What’s his take on that?”

“The rain,” Scully said.  “Mulder says he kills in the rain to wash it away.”

“It?  What it?”

She shrugged.  “Who knows?  The blood?  The evidence? Sin or evil?  I don’t know.”  She shook her head.  “Only Mulder seems to have any idea of why the rain is so important.”

“Did anyone check Mulder’s theory?  Has it really only rained four times in the last five months?”

Scully nodded.  “I called Danny and had him run it.  No one around here was going to help.  But he confirms —  until this current storm, it’s basically been no rain –well, no heavy rains.  But when it did rain, he killed.”

“The initial trigger?”

“They closed the school permanently in June.  They built a new one on the other side of town.”

Skinner stared at the man at the table a bit longer, then shook himself.  “Let’s go talk to him, shall we?”

Scully nodded and moved to the door as Skinner grabbed his coat and followed.  A few steps down the corridor and they were at the interrogation room door.  Skinner opened it and entered, not surprised when Mulder didn’t even lift his head at the intrusion.  He had printouts spread before him and had highlighted several names on the papers.  His lips moved but no sound emerged.  As Skinner watched, Scully stepped forward, then knelt beside Mulder.

“Hey,” she said softly.

There was no response.

“Mulder?” Scully called, her hand reaching out to gently cup his cheek.  His head turned slowly and glazed eyes cleared as he looked down at her.  A slow smile spread lazily across his lips.  “You with me?” Scully asked  quietly.

“Hey, Scully,” Mulder replied, leaning into her touch.  “Where’ve you been?”  He turned his head and nuzzled her hand, then leaned down and gently kissed her cheek.  “I missed you.”

Scully placed a hand on the table and rose to her feet, letting her hand drift around to the back of Mulder’s  head, her fingers carding through the silky hair there.

“The AD is here,” she said softly, shifting her body so that Mulder would see Skinner when he looked up.

Mulder blinked twice, then nodded.  “Hey, Walter,” he said, “you should have been here yesterday.”

Skinner stepped around the table to stand on Mulder’s other side.  He reached out and touched the younger man’s shoulder.

“So I heard.  Golson giving you a hard time?”

Mulder shrugged.  “No more than most, I suppose.”

“But it screwed the case, didn’t it?”

Mulder shrugged again.  “No way to know.  Can’t measure a negative.  Can’t know what might have happened if we’d done it my way.  Can’t be sure that anything different would have occurred.”

Skinner tightened his grip on Mulder’s shoulder and then let go as the cataract of words stopped.  “You know, don’t you?” Skinner asked gently.

Mulder shook his head, then nodded.  He folded his arms on the table and let his forehead fall to rest on them.  “We’d have had him, I’m sure of it.  Theresa Wilmington did not have to die.”

“It’s not your fault,” Skinner said, even as Scully wrapped her arms around Mulder and whispered the same words into his ear.

“I can’t fix what’s happened, Mulder,” Skinner said softly, “but I can make sure it won’t happen again.”  He waited until his agent lifted his head.  “Do you have anything we can go on?”

Mulder nodded.  “It’s simple, really.  The women all attended Florence Nightingale Elementary School between 1985 and 1989.”

“You think it’s someone who worked there during those years?”  Skinner asked.

Mulder shook his head.  “I already checked.  No one stands out as a possible.  There’s no one employee who was employed for those years only.  Of course, it could still be an employee, but I’m leaning more towards an outsider who had access.  A counselor, or volunteer …”

“Maybe a substitute teacher?” Scully offered and Mulder nodded.

“Harder to get records on things like that,” he said.  “I’m not even sure if we’ll be able to get an accurate volunteer list, though I did ask that Golson get some people on it.”  He gave a little snort and added, “Not that he would necessarily do something I asked.”

“I’ll check it out, Mulder,” Skinner said reassuringly.”I’ll make sure it’s being looked into.”  He pulled a

chair around, then sat next to his agent.  “Do you have anything else for me?”

“The women have been killed in alphabetical order.”

“Excuse me?” Scully looked at Mulder in disbelief.

“Amanda Bradford, Patty Abbott, Lucinda Welles?”

“Amanda Bradford, first letter A.  Patty Abbott, second letter in Abbott — B.  Lucinda Welles, third letter C.”

Scully was nodding.  “Wendy Dawson, fourth letter D.  Alice Jones, fifth letter E.”

“Yvonne McCaffrey, Theresa Wilmington,” Skinner said, counting on his fingers as he spoke.  He looked up at Mulder.  “You know who’s next,” he said, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

Mulder shook his head.  “I have it narrowed down to five.  Rebekkah Goldblum, Lizabeth Hampton, Andrea Stalmich, Tressa Maravich, and Lateefah Jackson.”

He lifted his hand and scrubbed at his face.  “And that’s just if he sticks to the same four year period

he’s followed so far.”

“Why would he change now?” Skinner asked.

“We’ve made him change his MO.  He can’t use the school for his kill site anymore.  I just don’t know what else he’ll change.”  Mulder rubbed his face again, squeezing his temples between his thumb and fingers.

“Does your head hurt?” Scully asked quickly and he nodded.

“Let’s go eat something, Mulder,” she urged quietly, “and then we can lie down and sleep.”  She ran her hand up and down his arm, soothing him with firm strokes.  “You need to sleep.”

He shook his head, then stared across the room, his gaze slowly losing focus.  “He’s broken.  There are only pieces  left of something that once was whole.  Broken.  Like me.  I close my eyes and sometimes I can almost put the pieces back together to form one whole me.  Sometimes.  Sometimes I can.”

Scully closed her eyes in pain at his words, but continued to rub his arm.  He was growing cold.  Opening her eyes again, she stared up at Skinner as he wrapped his coat around Mulder.

Mulder was staring up at the ceiling.  “He wants it to be over.  He can stare at the ceiling for hours and pray that the next moment will not come.  Or the moment after  that.”  He began to rock, a slow, back and forth movement of his torso only, while his eyes remained fixed on the ceiling tiles.  “But it always comes and I just lie there, staring.  Staring at shadows.  Shadows on the ceiling that never change.  Lines and circles in the dust that have been there for as long as my memories.”  He shifted his head and looked toward Scully, looking more *through* her than *at* her.  “There’s nothing there.  Nothing that I can’t  close my eyes and see in every detail.  But I keep staring. It’s all I have left.”

“Not you, Mulder,” Scully murmured quietly.  “This is not about you.”

For a second his eyes caught hers and locked, boring deep into her soul before the glazed look took over again.  “It’s always about me, Scully,” he said softly, with a slow, sad smile.

“I stare to get away, but sounds from the world — outside  sounds that have lost any meaning or context make their way into the stillness of my mind and linger longer than they should.  I listen to them sometimes.  I forget myself and I listen to the sounds and see the pictures they loosen from me cast on the bare walls of my mind.  I listen and the pain starts all over again.”

Scully looked up at Skinner, pleading with her eyes, and the AD bent down, grasping Mulder’s shoulder.  “Enough, Mulder,” he said firmly.  “You’ve done enough.  You need to rest now.”

“Memories are dangerous things,” Mulder mumbled, his head falling forward until his chin nearly rested on his chest.  He shivered in the stale air of the small room, and Scully pulled Skinner’s coat around him more tightly.  “They linger at the edge of each thought, waiting for me  and when I’m least ready, when I’m in my weakest state  they … they creep up on me.  They creep up on me when  I’m not ready for it and they fill me with …”  He shook his head.  “They’re very dangerous things — memories.”

“This is not about you, Mulder,” Scully said again, shaking him gently.  “This is not about you.”

“It’s the same, Scully,” Mulder whispered.  “Me, him, it’s all the same inside.  I can lie there, shattered and without hope, without possibility, and all I have left are memories.  He’s the same way.  Without the memories, we could become numb.  We could cease to feel.  Without them we could be completely alone.”

“Oh, Mulder,” Scully said sadly, her hand cupping his cheek and pulling him around to look at her.  “Do you really want to be alone?”

He drew a shaky breath and shook his head.  “I’m not.  I’m  not alone anymore.”  His hand trembled as he reached out to stroke her hair.  “But he is.  Singular and separate from the world around him.  He wants it to be over.  But the memories are there and he can’t get away from them.  Even the storm is not enough to wash him clean.”  Mulder shivered violently and collapsed against Scully.  She held him

tightly, stroking his back, murmuring soft nonsense in his ear until he calmed and pulled back slowly.

“He has a love affair with blades — anything sharp.”  Mulder reached out and lifted the razor, turning it in his hand so the light from the overhead glinted off the blade.  “It draws his attention, makes him — makes him hard.  For him, the penetration of the blade is better than sex.  Penetration — the blade sinks in …”  He drew the blade straight across his arm, staring mesmerized as the blood welled up.  He ignored Scully’s soft cry of alarm, disregarded Skinner’s quick grasp of his hand, didn’t see the razor being pulled from his grip and dropped onto the table.  “The blood flows, he gets his release, and through it all, he’s the one in control.”

Scully ripped his shirt mercilessly, exposing the cut across his forearm.  Skinner shed his tie without thinking and handed it over, even as he moved to the door and barked at the agent passing by, “Get me a first aid kit, a hot cup of coffee and several blankets.  NOW!”

Mulder’s eyes were haunted as he lifted them to stare at Scully.  His teeth were chattering and his skin was ice cold.  “He’s into self-mutilation — or he was.  He’s probably been seen by a local psychiatrist or psychologist, maybe even done a spell as an in-patient.”

Scully wrapped the tie around the wound, pulling it tight as she shook her head.  “Oh, Mulder,” she murmured, “why do you *do* this to yourself?”

“Stitches?” Skinner asked cautiously.

She shook her head.  “I can close it with steri-strips,” she said, still applying pressure to the wound.  “Mulder,” she called softly, “are you with us?”

He was staring at her, but his eyes were vacant and held no clue as to what was going on in his mind.

There was a knock on the door and Skinner went back, opened it, and took the items he had requested.

“Get a basin of warm water,” he ordered, before turning quickly and kicking the door shut.  He placed the coffee on the table, the first aid kit next to it, then dropped a blanket over Mulder’s shoulders, adding it to the coat already wrapped around him.

Another knock signaled the arrival of the water, and Skinner watched in silence as Scully washed Mulder’s arm then coated the wound with antibiotic ointment and neatly applied the steri-strips.  She bandaged the whole thing, wrapping a layer of gauze around it and taping it closed.  Once finished, she rocked back on her heels for a moment, assessing her partner.

“Mulder?” she asked cautiously, brushing back the wayward strand of hair that consistently fell over his eyes.

He looked up, his gaze clear, then stared at his arm.  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

Skinner shook his head and pushed the coffee forward.  “Are you still cold?”

Mulder shrugged, but lifted the warm liquid and drank gratefully.  His other hand clutched Skinner’s coat and the blanket about him.

Skinner looked at Scully.  “Will you be all right here for a minute?” he asked.  When she nodded, he said, “I want to go speak to Golson again.  We need to get people out looking at medical records — see if we can’t find someone who was hospitalized for cutting.  And I want all of those women Mulder identified put under guard.”  He reached the door and rubbed his face, then stepped back to the table and scooped the razor up.  Mulder was staring quietly into the inky blackness of his coffee inbetween sips, and he missed the silent exchange between his partner and his boss.  Skinner’s eyebrow raised in question as he held the razor, and Scully nodded once.  Blade still in hand, Skinner stepped back to the door.  “I’ll be back as quickly as I can, and then I’ll go with you to the hotel.”

****************

Skinner surprised himself by falling asleep almost as soon as he hit the bed at midnight, but wasn’t surprised to find himself awake three hours later. He tossed and turned for three-quarters of an hour before giving up and rising.

Slipping into his clothes, he spread the files he’d brought with him across the bed, then frowned as he looked at them.  There was something they were missing — someone who  consistently had access to these women when they were children at the school.

He walked to the sink and lifted the ice bucket, then pocketed his key card and stepped out.  The motel Mulder had chosen was like so many of his low budget choices.  It was an older, traditional motel — three long, low buildings spread out in a U-shaped court, parking at the door for each room.  A narrow, covered concrete walkway provided some protection from the pouring rain, but Skinner still wished he’d thrown his coat on before he’d stepped out.

He was debating going back for it when a sound caught his attention and he looked out into the darkened parking lot.  There, almost in the center of the court, stood Mulder.   Bare-chested and barefoot, he stood with his head lifted to the rain and his arms lifted to the sky.  As Skinner  watched, he shivered violently in the cold air.

“Fuck,” Skinner muttered under his breath as he dropped the ice bucket and darted out onto the asphalt, into the rain.  He stopped a few feet away, the cold rain soaking through his hastily thrown on clothes, and called, “Mulder?  Talk to me, please.”

It took a moment, but Skinner could see when his words reached the younger man.  Mulder’s arms came down and wrapped around his chest, and he blinked owlishly, clearing the water from his eyes before he looked at  Skinner.  “Hey, Walter,” he said softly, a puzzled look crossing his face as he looked around and shivered again. ” ‘m cold.”

“I know,” Skinner said, reaching out to take Mulder’s arm and lead him back toward the rooms.  “What were you doing out here?”

Mulder shrugged then said, “I wanted to know what it was like for him — to be in the rain.”

Skinner knocked on the door, listening in almost amusement as Scully awoke, then cursed, “Shit!”  The door flew open and she stood there dressed in nothing but an oversized T-shirt.

“Loose something?” Skinner asked wryly, leading Mulder into the room and letting Scully take over pulling him toward  the bed.  He went straight to the bathroom and gathered towels, keeping one for himself and passing the rest to  Scully.

“You’re freezing, Mulder,” Scully said, as she rubbed his chest briskly with the rough terrycloth.  “He’s freezing,” she repeated, looking up at Skinner.

“Hot shower,” the AD said, as he tossed his towel aside.  “Make it a quick one.  I’m going back to my room and change.”

“He’s a cop,” Mulder said, as Scully pulled him to his feet.

“What?” Skinner halted at the door and turned to look incredulously at his agent.

“The killer — he’s a cop.”  Mulder lifted a hand and pushed his dripping hair back from his face.  “Probably decorated.  All this time, he’s been trying to repent, to make amends for what he did to those girls, but it’s caught up to him.  The rain is to wash it away — wash his guilt away.  He knows crime scenes, knows we won’t  be able to get anything from a site in this rain.  Kill ’em in the showers at the gym — everything washes away.  Dump ’em in the rain — everything washes away.”  He  shook his head.  “Hmmmmm, try DARE officers.  See who  worked that school from ’85 to ’89.”

“Why’s he doing this now?” Scully asked softly.  “Just because the school closed?”

Mulder shrugged.  “Maybe.  The school closing may have brought it all back for him.  Or maybe he’s in a different position, a more high profile job and the guilt is more than he can take.  Even the way he kills them, letting  them bleed to death — it’s another form of washing away the sin, washing away the guilt.”  Mulder shivered again, and added, “He wants to wash it all away.”

Skinner nodded and Scully said, “Shower,” tugging at Mulder’s arm gently.  He shuddered again, but followed  her without saying anything further.

Skinner ducked back into his room, retrieving the forgotten ice bucket on his way and quickly changed.  Several phone calls later, he’d awakened SAC Golson who had been quite unhappy to be called at 4:15 in the morning.  It had made Skinner smile.  The local Police Chief had been awakened  as well, and Skinner had assurances that the names of all officers who had regular contact with the school during the specified years would be available within the next hour.

He grabbed his umbrella and coat, then braved the rain  to dash down to the coffee shop that sat next to the motel.

Five minutes later, he had three large hot coffees and three cinnamon rolls and was out in the rain again.  When  he got back to Mulder and Scully’s room, Scully was dressed  and Mulder was sitting on the bed, putting on his socks.

Both took the coffee gratefully but Mulder had to be urged  to eat his roll.  He obediently downed half of it before  he mutinied.

“No more,” he said firmly.  “I’ll just get sick.”

Skinner nodded his acceptance, then asked, “Are we ready, then?”

The trip to the local police station was made in silence.  Skinner was gratified to see that, while clearly annoyed at having been so summarily summoned in the wee hours,  Golson had, at least, shown up as ordered.  Other agents  milled about the conference room and police officers  mingled amongst them.

As Skinner started to step into the room, the Police Chief  halted him.  “Assistant Director Skinner?” the man called.  “I have the information you requested.”  He passed the file over with a frown.  “I have to tell you, I don’t like this insinuation that one of my men is responsible for these — atrocities.”

Skinner nodded.  “I understand your feelings completely, Chief,” he said, “but I’m sure you agree we can’t afford not to check out all possibilities.”  Skinner’s finger  ran down the list of names.  It was short — just three people.  “Where are these officers now?” he asked.

“Brancuzzi quit the force about ten years ago.  Flores transferred upstate.”

“That just leaves Henderson.”

The Chief nodded.  “He’s one of my best officers — highly decorated.  He’s a detective now — been working this case  nonstop since it first popped.”

Mulder was bouncing on the toes of his feet.  “Where is  he now?” he demanded.

The Police Chief looked at him coolly, vestiges of Golsos attitude still in the air, until Skinner cleared his throat meaningfully.  “Henderson’s on guard duty with one of the girls.”  He opened a small notebook and scanned the pages, then said, “He and his partner are watching Lateefah  Jackson.”

“Fuck!” Mulder exclaimed, already moving for the door, Scully in his wake.

“Get your people moving, Chief,” Skinner ordered.  “Your man Henderson is most likely our perp and you’ve just handed him his next victim.  Tell ’em to come in silent — no lights, no sirens — until we assess the situation.”

He whirled and raced after his agents.

When they pulled up across from the Jackson house, it was obvious that they were too late.  Henderson’s partner was slumped over the wheel of their car, dead from a stab wound to the heart.  “I’ll call it in,” Skinner said sadly, pulling his cell phone.  “In the meantime, we wait for the locals.  We’ll assess the situation and go in in force.”

He stepped to the side to make his call, then turned back when Scully called, “No, Mulder!”

Looking up, he was in time to see his agent sprinting across the street, up the yard and through the front door of Lateefah Jackson’s house.  Scully was already moving,  racing behind him, her gun drawn, and he pulled his own weapon and followed, mumbling “Oh, fuck!” before yelling into the phone, “Get backup out here NOW!  It’s going down — I repeat, it is going down NOW!”

When he reached the door, Mulder stood in the hallway, motioning for him and Scully to keep back.  He was staring into a room and as Skinner paused, catching his breath, he could hear Henderson.

“You don’t understand,” Henderson said, his voice totally controlled.  “No one can understand.  What I did — what I did to these girls.”

Skinner eased down the hall and peered over Mulder’s shoulder.  Henderson’s arm was wrapped around the woman’s throat, the knife pressed hard against the carotid.  His eyes were haunted as he murmured, “I was supposed to protect them.”

“I understand,” Mulder said, taking a step forward into the bathroom.

Skinner reached out and nudged him, moving him slightly to the right and against the tub so that he had a clear sight on Henderson.  His weapon was up, aimed and ready.  All that was needed was to get the woman out of the way.

“No on can understand,” Henderson said, spitting the words out from between clenched teeth.  “It was my job to protect them.  I failed.  I couldn’t even protect them from myself.”

“This doesn’t have to end badly,” Mulder said, inching forward again.

“Stay back!” Henderson ordered, his voice rising for the first time.  “I have to do this.”

“No — you don’t,” Mulder said quietly.  “You hurt this girl once — you didn’t protect her.  You can protect

her now.”  He reached out slowly.  “Let her go.”

Henderson’s right arm tightened on the woman’s throat, but his left hand darted upward to press against his temple.  “You’re confusing me,” he said plaintively.

“It’s not me that’s confusing,” Mulder said, his voice low and hypnotic.  “It’s the memories.  The memories are always there, aren’t they?  No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, they’re always there.”

Henderson gulped, an audible sound, and nodded.

“I can close my eyes,” Mulder murmured, “and I can still see it …”

“What do you see?” Henderson asked, his arm loosening fractionally.

“My failure,” Mulder said softly.  “I watched them take her.  I was supposed to protect her, I was supposed to keep her safe, and I just let her go.”

Henderson’s eyes were wide as he stared at Mulder, and Skinner was poised, ready, waiting.  Henderson’s arm loosened again, and the woman looked at him, her eyes filled with tears and silent pleading.  “Just wait,” he whispered, praying she heard him, praying she knew the words were for her. ‘And be *quiet,*’ he added to himself. ‘Don’t attract his attention.’  Thank goodness Lateefah Jackson didn’t seem to be a whimperer.

“You understand,” Henderson said, “you know it can’t go on.”

“I know it was *my* failure,” Mulder said softly, shaking his head.  “It wasn’t her fault.  She’s not the one responsible.”  He shook himself and seemed to refocus  on the man before him.  “She was no more responsible than Lateefah was.”

Henderson’s arm loosened again, the knife dropping away from the woman’s neck to dangle from his hand.

“But if they’re gone — if they’re not always there to remind me — maybe I can sleep again.  Maybe I can still live.”

“I know three things,” Mulder said firmly.  “Just three things …”

Skinner nodded at the woman, bobbing his head three short times and hoped it was understanding he saw dawn in her eyes.

“One,” Mulder began, “it is never the victim’s fault.”

He drew a deep breath and inched forward again.

Henderson was totally focused on Mulder, seemingly  oblivious to Skinner in the doorway.  Behind him, Skinner could hear locals arriving and Scully corralling them in the living room.

“Two, we can’t change the past.  Nothing we do now will ever erase something that has already happened.”

Skinner nodded at the woman again and watched as her body tensed.

“And three …” Mulder leapt forward, yanking the woman from Henderson’s grasp and toppling backward into the  tub.

Skinner’s bullet took Henderson between the eyes and the man fell without a sound.  Vacant eyes that still showed surprise stared up at him when the AD moved to check the body.  He turned and pulled the woman from Mulder’s grasp bundling her into the arms of a cop who was waiting in  the hall, then edged aside as Scully scooted in.

“What part of ‘we wait’ didn’t you understand, Agent  Mulder?” Skinner asked wryly, as he loomed over the man in the tub.

Mulder lay sprawled on his back, his ears still ringing  and his head aching.  “Sorry, Sir,” the younger man said,  not quite able to manage a true contriteness, but making a passable effort.

“I’m sure,” Skinner said, nodding.  “Just rest,” he added with a wave, “the paramedics will be in to look at you shortly.”  He stepped around Scully and back out into the living room.

“I feel dirty,” Mulder said absently as he ran a hand through his hair, “like I won’t ever get clean again.”

“Then let’s go back to the motel.  We can take a shower,” Scully suggested, as she helped him to his feet.

“It’s not enough,” Mulder said sadly.  “He waited for the rains, waited for the storms to come and it wasn’t enough to wash it clean.  There’s not enough water to wash this away.”

“Then come outside with me,” Scully said softly, taking his hand.  “The rain has stopped.  Come walk with me in the sun.”  She pulled him to his feet and led him out the door, away from death and destruction and into the purity of a new day.  Out where the sun shone brightly  for the first time in over a week.  “Let the sun burn it away,” she murmured, as she watched him turn his face upward, eyes closed to the brightness, but a soft smile on his lips.

“Let fire cleanse what rain cannot.”

End

Tuesday

By Martin Ross

Category: Casefile

Rating: PG-13 for delicately suggested FBI sex and science-based drug use

Synopsis: Tuesday night in Peterson County means mini-mart pizza, disoriented cows, fugitive geneticists, exit ramp McNuggets, furtive farmers, laconic lawmen, and a love that cannot be spoken.

Disclaimer: The X-Files belong to Chris Carter. Period.

Peterson County, Illinois

Tuesday

It was the moment that chills the blood of every federal law enforcement officer old enough to remember Waco or Ruby Ridge. When months of training at Quantico, years of experience in the field, a lifetime of tightly honed instincts vanish in a frosty puff of fear. When the bulletproof shield of authority shuts down.

And the barrel comes up. Just a notch.

Scully’s sidearm was out before the old man could kick a shell into the chamber. Mulder raised an index finger and pocketed his Bureau ID, a slight smile forming on his lips as his heart pounded against his ribs.

“Sir, we’re not from the neighborhood,” the agent murmured. “We’re a couple of dumbasses from D.C. who trusted our GPS a little too much. I don’t know your sociopolitical beliefs and I probably don’t want to. We’re just trying to find a meth lab blew up a few days ago around here, maybe violate somebody else’s sovereign rights.”

The old man’s expression didn’t shift, but after a tick, his muscular shoulder relaxed, and the shotgun dropped back to standard trespasser elevation. Then the farmer barked, once, and carefully lowered his weapon. Scully held her two-handed stance.

“You took 1100 North ‘steada south, din’tcha?” the old man rasped quietly. There was an intelligence, a vigor in his voice Mulder hadn’t expected. “You’re looking for the Kendrick place on 1100 South, right off 300 East. Reset your little magic box, and it oughtta take you right to the door. You have a good day, now, or whatever it is you folks say.”

The screen door creaked and slapped shut in unison with the heavy front door. Mulder nodded and turned back to the dusty rental as Scully gaped, gun still leveled at the porch.

“You’ve scared him enough for one day,” her partner called. “You wanna drive for awhile?”

**

The Kendrick place was, as advertised, right off County 1100 South and 300 East. The deputy at the bottom of the drive, anticipating the agent’s geographical and probably general ignorance, provided unnecessarily detailed directions to the remote machine shed a quarter-mile away where Jason Kendrick had squandered half his father’s meager inheritance on lab equipment, anhydrous ammonia, and EPA-quality respirators.

“You know, he’da raised a crop this year, the mo-ron would probably’d gotten away with it,” Sheriff Latraub lamented as Mulder surveyed what was left of the outbuilding and, presumably, Jason Kendrick. A trio in DEA-emblazoned biohazard suits tromped through the two-year-old corn residue toward the scorched building. “Coulda been a brilliant scheme. Bought himself a few hundred bags of no-name corn, nobody at the co-op’d thought anything about the anhydrous or the protective gear. What comes of straying outside your skill set. Used to be we just had to watch out for the homeboys down from Cook County trying to shop product to the numbnuts at the high school. Jason was FFA president before he went off to the U of I, God’s sake.”

“I blame AMC,” Mulder mused.

“Hah?”

“Breaking Bad, you know, the guy from Malcolm in the Middle?”

The portly lawman spat into the berm. “Don’t have Dish.” A subtle smirk kinked his mustache. “Took you awhile to get here. GPS on the fritz?”

“Stopped for a chat with one of your local militia guys,” Scully murmured before Mulder could stop her. “Not exactly a down-home welcome.”

The sheriff came off his cruiser. “What, he draw down on you? A couple of feds. Who we talking about?”

“We took 1100 South, instead of North,” Mulder grinned dismissively. “Just a suspicious old guy, probably hadn’t had visitors in a decade.”

“No difference,” Latraub grunted. “I can’t have some dumb old redneck playing chicken with law enforcement. You get a name?”

“Harwood,” Scully replied. Mulder sighed. “It was on the mailbox.”

“Hold up a sec. You mean Ray Harwood? Old guy, real fit? That don’t sound like Ray. He’s a little quiet, maybe too quiet, like they say, but he’s not the violent type. Never had any trouble with him. Just what did he say?”

“Nothing, particularly,” Scully admitted. “He met us with a shotgun almost as soon as we were out of the car, and when we identified ourselves, it didn’t seem to, ah, weaken his resolve.”

The sheriff frowned, looked off at the smoldering meth lab. “I’m thinking maybe we pay Ray a call, see what’s crawled up inside ‘im.”

“I really think my partner’s…” Mulder began before catching Scully’s baleful glare.

“Look, you like fried chicken? ‘Cause Ray’s right on the way to the best in the county. We’ll do a little recon and then grab some lunch, OK? It ain’t coq au vin, but otherwise, you got Hardee’s at the exit or minimart pizza.”

Scully’s brow rose. “Coq au vin?”

“Sorry,” Latraub grinned, yanking his driver’s door open. “I blame Food Network.” He caught the surprised look on Mulder’s face. “Town bowling alley shut down five years ago, and softball’s about eight months off. Playing the rube’s about the only entertainment I get these days.”

**

“Why’d you have to make such a federal case back there?” Mulder muttered as he dodged a rut in the gravel road. The sheriff’s cruiser spit cinders and pebbles against their grill.

Scully turned, her expression unreadable behind her shades. “Perhaps because it is a federal case when some citizen draws down on my partner and I in the middle of nowhere. I might ask why you’re not a little more concerned?”

“I don’t know,” her partner murmured, watching a pasture of cows watch him. “I can’t describe it, but it didn’t feel like hostility coming off Harwood. Not even fear. He just, you know, he just seemed to want to be left alone.”

“Well, it appears he picked a fairly dismal way to accomplish it.”

**

The old man was on the porch, in an aluminum lawn chair that had probably seen a few July 4ths during the Kennedy era. The shotgun was nowhere in sight.

“Figured you’d be back,” he rasped, low and calm, keeping his place as Latraub and the agents approached.

“Well, you figured right,” the sheriff said, cheerfully. “What were you thinking, Ray?”

Harwood shrugged. “The wrong thing, obviously.”

“Obviously. These two want to cause trouble for you, not much I can do. What’s up?”

“Kids,” the old man grunted, as if that explained volumes. Latraub nodded as if it did. “Been buzzing the place at night, shit-faced, lobbing their beer cans at the house and yelling shit. You know what shit. I suppose it’s put me in a foul frame of mind.”

Latraub turned to the agents. “Been getting a lot of that from the university next county over. Guess they figure it’s safer to conduct their extracurricular horseshit out here in the sticks. Well, Ray, can’t have you pulling this kind of crap with federal agents. You know?”

“Overreaction,” Harwood nodded. It seemed to be what he thought his guests wanted to hear, but somehow it rang sincere, if somewhat inadequate.

Latraub looked to the feds. “Whaddya think?”

Scully glanced at Mulder, and, after a second, exhaled and snatched the keys from her partner.

“Let’s get that chicken,” she ordered.

**

Sheriff Latraub waved a drumstick. “Ray and his folks been here, wow, probably since we became a state. Seven, eight generations, I guess.”

The lawman had been chatty since they’d arrived at the packed diner, whether out of relief or fear Scully would change her mind, she didn’t know. Mulder nodded eagerly at the local history as he shoveled gizzards, slaw, and fries into his maw and Scully picked at a limp pile of scantily dressed iceberg leaves.

“And what you have to understand about the Harwoods is, they’re no right-wing militia types. Next door, in Southern Indiana, they’ve had their problems with the Klan on and off the last 100 years or so. Well, in the ’30s, Ray’s great-uncle helped drive those sheet-wearing mo-rons right out of the county. In the ‘60s, Ray’s cousin called out the state’s attorney when he found out some of the local assholes were hassling the Mexican vegetable-pickers we get through in the fall. Then chased the Springfield TV folks off when they came to talk about it for the six o’clock news. And Ray? Well, last fall, he caught some of the local toughs beatin’ crap outta some queer kid – sorry, homosexual – around behind the coffee shop. Well, I’ll just say those punks got a little lesson in social tolerance from ol’ Ray. That one wound up on CNN and the networks – biggest thing around here since the Great Martian Invasion of ’79. Without Ray, of course.

“What I’m sayin’ is, Ray’s no dumbass – him and his dad and his grandpa all went off to college, but they always came back to the land. And they’re pretty damned good at it – Ray’s people always got a bumper-load of corn off some pretty marginal ground, though Ray himself’s had a few iffy years lately.”

“Excuse me,” Mulder said, swallowing a cud of macerated cabbage. “The Great What of When?”

“And boom goes the dynamite,” Scully muttered.

“What?” the sheriff frowned. Then he grinned. “Oh, yeah, the Martians. Old piece of genu-wine regional horseshit. Back in 1879, some of the locals reported seein’ lights in the sky, creepy shadows in the fields. Idiot wrote a book about it in the ‘70s; every once in a while, some cable TV show comes around and does a piece on the UFOs. One of the local business guys once tried to get a campaign going – the ‘Roswell of Southern Illinois.’ Never took off, though. You enjoying that salad, Agent?,” Latraub inquired with mixed skepticism and amusement.

“Delightful.”

The sheriff nodded, shoved his plate of bones aside, and plucked the check from the wood-grained formica. “Prob’ly swamp gas, though the lack of a swamp around here poses a slight challenge. I’ll get this one, make up for Ray’s inhospitality.”

**

There wasn’t really much left to do there: Examination of the salvageable remains of Kendrick’s machine shed had yielded the standard accoutrement of the modern redneck homebrew meth lab – nothing to indicate the sort of genetic voodoo Mulder’s anonymous tipster had attempted to hang on Jason Kendrick’s ex-roommate, Ari Murad.

The Albanian post-grad had disappeared from the University of Illinois four weeks ago, leaving behind an empty off-campus apartment, $1,450 in stolen lab equipment, a poorly-hidden notebook filled with recipes for blending recombinant DNA and noroviruses, and a refrigerated petri dish teeming with what appeared to be the microscopic love brood of a starfish and a Great Plains Toad.

Mulder had regaled the Urbana P.D. with accounts of Murad’s famed great-granduncle, Ismail, a famed geneticist with interesting notions for ridding the then-communist republic of annoying Islamic and Christian influences. The Urbana P.D. collectively nodded and collected the university’s purloined paraphernalia, leaving the agent to track Murad’s cell phone history directly to esteemed alumnus and former keg-buddy Jason Kendrick. From the scorched evidence scattered amid the local corn stubble, it would appear Ari had won the Science Fair and Mulder would be forced to pursue a new avenue of investigation.

Scully rode silently as her partner considered just what that avenue might be. She averted a head-on collision with the dashboard as Mulder yanked their rental into a long-abandoned Mobil station.

“I got it,” he breathed.

“You will soon,” Scully threatened.

“The cows,” Mulder stated.

Scully leaned back, the urge to pistol-whip her partner subsiding. “I will assume, given our bucolic surroundings and the fact that over the past half hour, I’ve spotted more Holsteins than, frankly, I might ever have cared to have seen, that you mean these cows.”

“Don’t you notice anything strange about these cows?” Mulder gestured toward the pasture across the blacktop road. Scully stared at a half-dozen black-and-white bovines; a few stared back.

“They’re rather unexpressive,” she concluded.

“I mean their orientation,” Mulder sighed.

“Not that it’s any of your business, but precisely how do their sexual proclivities—“

“Their geographical orientation, Scully, jeez. Satellite images have proven cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction. Same with wild deer. The theory is that some mammals, including bats and African mole rats, are influenced by the Earth’s magnetic fields. Makes sense – migrating birds do it, salmon do it…”

“Even educated fleas do it, yes, Mulder,” Scully snapped. “Your point?”

Mulder pointed to the intersecting county road. “That’s a north-south route, right?”

“And all but one of the 12, no, ah, 13 cows in that field is standing parallel with that road.”

“Hold on,” Mulder advised, wrenching the wheel and bumping back onto the road, in the direction from whence they’d come.

“I knew it was coming,” Scully murmured as fence posts and utility poles hurtled past. A half-mile later, Mulder braked at a stream where a trio of Swiss Browns was grazing. Facing north. He made two more stops before Scully sat up and peered out her window. Four more stops, and her face was pasted to the car window.

“If you haven’t noticed, we’ve passed County Road 1100. And every cow for at least 15 miles to the east or west of it’s been lined up in an east-west orientation. I’ll bet I drive another 20 miles, and we’ll see a buttload of reoriented cows.”

“I’ll accept your hypothesis, if it gets us reoriented toward a motel shower,” Scully said. “It’s intriguing, Mulder, but what does it mean?”

Her partner grinned triumphantly. “Not the slightest.”

**

“Closed,” Alice Falstaff half-shouted from New Books, a single shelf currently holding five volumes, a weekly record for the Plaindale Community Library. The Library Fund was as red as the Britannicas that held court over Reference, but a couple donors had come through around Christmas.

The young man at the locked door rapped again with a single knuckle.

Alice adjusted her bifocals and waved a hand irritably. “I said we’re closed. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 to 4.”

The man smiled amiably, reached into his jacket, and held his wallet to the glass. Alice squinted and edged forward, past the checkout counter and the fundraising thermometer for the proposed new book van. The idiot kept grinning, and the librarian growled inaudibly and glared at his ID. Then fumbled for the key.

Mulder replaced his FBI ID and stepped inside the faintly musty cool of the small-town library. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but I need some information about the area. You have any bound newspapers, microfilm, maybe back into the 1870s?”

Alice crossed her arms. “I have a meeting at the church in an hour. You can’t come back Thursday? Or perhaps,” she sighed loudly, “I could open up special for you tomorrow.”

“Well, my partner and I are probably heading out tomorrow, and I really need this information.” It was not really a lie, to the best of Scully’s knowledge. “Oh, and a history of the county would be great, too. I tried Googling first, but there were only some high school sports stats, a couple obits, and few vague references to the region during the 19th Century.”

Mulder’s reference to the unprinted page seemed only to further annoy the slight gray woman. “Do you have a warrant?”

“I’m not sure I actually need one for a public library,” the agent squeaked. Mulder glanced past Alice at the outsized cardboard thermometer. “Look, would fif–, er, $100 help you get your, uh, bookmobile?”

“Van,” Alice stated flatly. “A moment, please.” The librarian strode purposefully to the checkout counter, and as Levar Burton looked on from the wall above, lifted a huge embroidered purse from below. She rummaged, and an iPhone emerged. She stared down her nose at the keyboard display and delicately tapped out seven digits.

“Ada, Alice,” she said drily. “We have something of an emergency down here, so you and the others just start without me. But you tell Betty it’s chili next Saturday or I’m taking my business to the Lutherans. I don’t care. All right, then. Fill you in later.”

The librarian re-interred her smartphone and inspected Mulder. “See that ID again, and then we’ll go to the basement. Let me lock that hundred up.”

**

Scully had emerged fresh and rejuvenated from the Motel Six bathroom to find Mulder and the rental car gone. Assuming he had continued his Suessian inventory of North-Facing and West-Facing Bovines, she re-re-reviewed the Murad casefile, reconned the immediate motel perimeter for dinner possibilities (McNuggets, a microwave burrito, or a truck stop burger appeared the best bets), and settled in with the Barefoot Contessa, who was preparing canapés and frothy summer drinks for her Hamptons BFFs. Then stayed for a courtroom dispute between an obese stylist and her dissatisfied customer, the final 15 minutes of Two and Some-Odd Men, the 6 O’Clock Litany of Local Mayhem and International Despair on one of the Springfield stations, and a long wait at a Chinese restaurant with Jerry, George, and Elaine.

Scully was learning how to smoke a brisket with Bobby Flay when Mulder returned, a stack of yellowed volumes and a large white bag in hand. He dropped the bag on the nightstand and the books on the extra bed Scully always secured for such purposes.

“You dig in,” Mulder said. “I’ve got some research to do.”

Bobby Flay’s sardonic countenance disappeared with a flick of Scully’s wrist. She glanced at the bed.

“The History of Peterson County, Volume I?”

Mulder nodded, tugging a Big Mac free of the bag. “The author was very detail-oriented, not to mention averse to paragraph returns. Volume II covered the ‘20s and ‘30s, and the other five the more recent affairs of the Petersonians, ah, the Peterson Countians?”

“Ah, the Great Invasion of ’79,” Scully breathed.

“And some more recent developments.” He slapped three large red-bound tomes. “The Peterson County Herald-Guardian, 1934, 1967, and 2012. I need to stop at the high school tomorrow morning.”

Scully strayed to the nightstand, the aroma of Mulder’s burger making her light-headed. She reached into the bag. “And this has what to do with Ari Murad or Jason Kendrick?”

Mulder swiped a bead of ketchup from his chin. “Oh, absolutely nothing. I didn’t know what you wanted, and it looked like you were in one of your cute little diet phases at lunch.”

Scully stared disconsolately at the tub of lettuce, walnuts, and cranberries in her hand.

“Looksh yummy,” Mulder observed through a mouthful of beef patty, cheese, pickle, special sauce, and sesame seed bun.

**

“Try the Honey Mustard and the Ranch together on one nugget,” Mulder suggested. Scully pointedly jammed her composite chicken chunk in the Sweet-and-Sour. They were sharing the Exit 93 Mickey D’s with a table of raucous teens, a couple clearly crossing the Great Nothing between St. Louis and Chicago, a Sasquatchesque trucker, and a trio of older ladies who’d broken out the canasta deck over McCafes and apple pies. “So, anyway, in 1879, several UFOs were reported over Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Illinois. The first started April 5th in Omaha — more than a 100 people saw a spherical flying object roughly 12 feet long, with a steel-like body. A cigar-shaped craft appeared over Sioux City, Iowa, several nights later, and a Methodist minister who gave a detailed description of an ovoid UFO in the local paper. This continued for about a week more, then they left the area.”

“Smart move,” Scully muttered, gnawing on a nugget. A dispute had broken out among the canasta players, and the trucker rewrapped his burger for the road. “That was 18 years after the supposed local sightings. How do you explain that?”

“The accounts of the 1879 sighting described a smaller, more compact object, like an egg with ringed lights. The Peterson County witnesses included a local pastor, who had a conveniently theological theory about the UFO, and the mayor. But the sighting was isolated, as far as the records I can find online. That doesn’t track with the average event.”

“Yeah, the average ones. So, I repeat, what does this have to do with our case at hand? And what about those newspapers? Let me guess: 1934, 1967, and 2012. You’re studying up on our shotgun-toting buddy Ray’s family history. You having a change of heart about our harmless old man?

“Not really. I just find his pattern of behavior interesting.” Mulder reached for the penultimate nugget; Scully claimed it. “Here’s a fundamentally asocial man, lives like a hermit but by all accounts is rational, successful in his trade, and educated. Tries to stay out of the public spotlight, but stands up to a group of young bullies on behalf of what I’d imagine is a very unpopular cause. Just like his great-grand uncle and his cousin in their day.”

“I have to imagine that not every rural blue-collar working man is a cross-burning, gay-bashing, Jew-hating fascist,” Scully countered, swiping her chicken through ranch dressing. “Maybe inclusivity, Christian intolerance, is part of the family’s religious or cultural background, a racial memory of sorts.”

Mulder leaned in as the teen table erupted in bawdy laughter. “And the family, Scully. Don’t you find that odd? Most multi-generational farms pass from father to son to grandson, or at least between siblings. But from Ray’s great-grand uncle to his first cousin to Ray?”

“Again, the rural culture, Mulder. The drive to keep land in the family, but no offspring to inherit. The cousin and Ray may have been the only relatives interested.”

“A long line of asocial, corn-lovin’ bachelor farmers?”

“Genetics is a tricky thing,” Scully said, moving in for the last McNugget. “Who knows what emotional or social factors are woven into the chromosomes? I don’t know what you’re getting at, or why you particularly care. I don’t necessarily see anything anomalous here.”

“OK,” Mulder grinned. “Come back to the room, and I’ll show you an anomaly.”

“Mister, you need to work on your closing,” Scully advised.

Mulder cackled insincerely, alarming the canasta club. “Seriously, I want you to explain something.”

“Mulder, why is this so all-consuming? You think there’s some connection between the UFOs and Harwood?”

Her partner frowned. “Noooo. Not necessarily.”

“Then what’s the deal?”

Mulder played with an orphaned fry, then wiped his fingers on his slacks. “Dunno. Just bored, I guess. Two conundrums in the same town – you gotta admit that’s kinda cool.”

“Conundra,” Scully corrected. “I have to admit no such thing. Sorry you’re bored, Mulder.”

He shrugged, then grinned evilly. “I do have one idea. Involves a couple dozen packets of sweet-and-sour sauce and some Quantico-style interrogation role-playing.”

Scully looped her handbag over her shoulder. “C’mon, let’s look at this anomaly of yours.”

**

Mulder handled the yellowed pages of the Peterson County Herald-Guardian with reverence, nonetheless scattering newsprint crumbs across the bedspread. He tapped a high-contrast portrait of a seemingly sullen, hard-featured man strikingly similar to Ray Harwood.

“June 12, 1933,” Mulder began. “‘…Witnesses told county authorities local farmer Delbert Harwood personally faced down the hooded riders, armed only with a single-barrel shotgun. After angry words were exchanged, the group abruptly ended its drill and disbanded before the sheriff’s department arrived. When asked to comment on the encounter, Harwood told this reporter to, quote, “peddle your papers elsewhere.””

“So the locals aren’t exactly silver-tongued devils,” Scully murmured.

“Just hold on.” Mulder shoved the 1932 bound volume aside and retrieved another, flipping it open to a yellow sticky. “October 1967. ‘The complaint, which alleged physical assaults on several workers and price-gouging by local merchants reportedly confined to the Mexican pickers, was filed by Carl Harwood, a grain farmer who himself does not use migrant labor.’ Harwood would offer no comment on his complaint, other than to tell reporters to ‘go peddle their papers elsewhere.’”

Scully paused as Mulder opened the third volume. The newsprint was fresher and less fragrant, though the typography and stilted headlines hadn’t changed much in 40 years.

“This is the gay-bashing incident last October. ‘Peterson County Prosecutor Glen Faulkes indicated he had no plans to bring charges against Harwood, despite the 17-year-old assailant’s broken arm. Faulkes said Harwood acted in defense of the Peterson High School junior, who himself sustained two broken fingers and several minor contusions in the altercation. Peterson himself was silent regarding the incident – “Go peddle your crap somewhere else,” the area grain farmer told a Springfield Channel 55 WRSP news crew at the courthouse yesterday.’ The phraseology’s updated, but the cliché’s the same.”

Scully was silent for a moment. “Families, even whole communities, develop common idioms and catchphrases. You go to any Scully family reunion and you’ll invariably hear, ‘Dana, how’s that lunatic partner of yours?’”

“Yeah, OK, fine,” Mulder groused, slamming the bound volume shut. “You win.” He searched for the remote and flipped on the scuffed set bolted to the motel dresser. “Hey, Ghost Hunter’s Marathon on Syfy.”

“Yay,” Scully stated as Mulder wedged her pillow under his shoulders. “I win.” She snatched the remote from him and stated, “You know, I brought back some of those sweet and sour packs in my purse…”

**

Scully started with a grunt as the tentacle tightened around her ankle. Swearing off McNuggets, she wiped a bead of drool from her chin and sat up on the worn but spotless motel spread. On the set, a pair of geeks in night-vision goggles were rushing through the halls of a cluttered home that looked borrowed from Hoarders.

Scully glanced at the bedside clock: 12:35.

“Hey, Mulder,” she rasped, silencing the paranormal investigators with the remote. “We need to get on the road early tomorrow. Mulder?”

An exhaustive investigation revealed no Mulder, nor, for that matter, the rental car. The final deductive pieces fell into place with the hastily scrawled note her partner had left atop the TV: “Be back.”

“Of course,” Scully sighed, surveying the perhaps 237th such room she’d inhabited since Quantico and Mulder’s discarded suit on the worn carpet beside the bed. “And they say we can’t have it all.”

**

“Yeah, Mr. Harwood?” Mulder greeted cheerfully. “This is Agent Mulder. Remember me? Yep. Well, I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, but I have a few more questions.”

The agent watched the shadow behind the front room curtains, tethered by a twisted cord. Old-school landline, he observed, switching the iPhone to his other hand. Smart.

“Nah, it’s not about Jason Kendrick. Or this morning. Wanted to chat about your Great-Uncle Delbert and your cousin Carl. And some visitors you folks had, oh, about 130 years or so ago.”

The figure stopped pacing.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist,” Mulder murmured. “You ever heard of the X-Files bureau of the FBI. We investigate what you might call anomalies, and I think we got the mother of anomalies right here in Peterson County. Tell you what: I’m probably about a half-hour away, but I remember where the place is. See you soon.”

Mulder ended the call quickly, before the old man could protest further, and grinned with the excitement of a boy with his dad’s pilfered Playboy.

**

Scully soon tired of diner-hopping with Guy and redecorating with the Income Property crew and following tiara-ed toddlers and ditzy Kardashians and moon-shining hill folk. In her agitated state, sleep was impossible, but Scully was suspended in the gray, restless limbo of Nowhere on a Tuesday night.

The Murad casefile took all of five minutes to re-review, and the Gideon bible, a Pizza Hut delivery flyer, and the fire procedures screwed to the motel door were about it for reading matter. Then Scully’s eye caught the tangle of aged newsprint and musty binding on the bed.

Lots of school chili suppers, bake sales, zoning and sewer meetings, endless football and basketball games written in florid battle metaphors. Scully revisited the oddly activist history of the Harwood Clan in an attempt to divine just what had sent her partner/partner into the rural night. She found herself viewing Ray Harwood in a different light, grudgingly admiring the stand he’d taken in what had to be a treacherously unpopular cause.

Then Scully spotted it, below the fold from the Harwood piece, in 24-point sans-serif bold. Something primal kicked in as she locked in on the headline, and her frustration with Mulder was forgotten.

Kendrick barn rejected by historical commission

Scully wasn’t surprised – the accompanying photo showed a gap-toothed, eczema-ravaged, round barn with a definite Pisa tilt. Abandoned, no doubt decades ago, in favor of the Morton building/farm shop in which the late Jason Kendrick had concocted his addictive product line. Forgotten off in the farthest reach of Nowhere, until the Kendricks saw an opportunity at a tax break. Forgotten, no doubt, again.

Scully reached for her jacket, pried on her heels, and began to jot a note for Mulder.

“Aaah, screw it,” she decided.

**

Mulder stealthily negotiated the embankment at the edge of the Harwood property, and followed a line of oaks to the backyard, where a single lawn chair kept watch on the cornfields beyond. The kitchen light was off, but he had a straight line of vision through to the living room, where the agents of NCIS’ Los Angeles branch were stalking a shady character in Venice Beach.

He advanced on the small but immaculate frame house, then stopped with a frown. He hadn’t remembered any TV in the background when he’d called…

“Think I was born yesterday, Agent?” Ray Harwood mused as Mulder felt cold metal between the scapulae.

“Actually,” Mulder sighed, “quite the opposite.”

**

Harwood placed the shotgun on the broad, ‘40s-era department store table as he took the captain’s chair opposite Mulder.

“My partner knows—” Mulder started uncertainly.

“Nothing,” Harwood completed. “You let her in on your little operation, she’d have been out of the shadows by now, storming the place. You kind of do what you feel like, don’t you? Professionally and personally. Don’t look so shocked, Agent Mulder. I could feel the old married vibe off the both of you this morning, when you and Kenny Latraub came back. Bet her life’s full of surprises, or full of something. You want some coffee?”

Mulder did not glance at the weapon on the table. “Sure. Thanks.”

Harwood nodded. “Not loaded, you know. Still want a cup?”

“Long as you have some brewed already. I’ve got a lot of questions.”

“Bet you do, bet you do. Black?”

“Yup.”

Harwood reached into a cabinet above the huge old basin sink as Mulder scanned the home with satisfaction. Few adornments, no photos. A few bookcases stuffed with an eclectic assortment of non-fiction.

A minute later, the old farmer returned with a steaming china mug and a small, dusty old book with the legend “Farmer’s Pocket Companion” and the imprint of the John Deere Plow Company. The volume fanned momentarily as it fell to the table before Mulder. It was filled with tight sepia script.

“Read,” Harwood ordered. “Maybe you won’t feel the need to ask too many questions. I’ll just sit. Nothing much else to do.”

Mulder read.

**

It was in the very epicenter of Nowhere, where asphalt gave way to gravel and gravel surrendered to dirt and corn stubble. The barn resembled a huge hunchbacked creature slumbering in the corner of the now-fallow field, the full, insistent moonlight defining its gray, damaged spine.

Scully advanced, cursing once again her choice of footwear as she traversed desiccated cobs and stover and stalks. She gripped her weapon as she glanced back at the battered sedan she’d commandeered from the motel manager and listened to the chirruping insects that owned this outpost of Nowhere.

She angled in from the side, careful to cast no shadow across the gaping maw of the barn. Then, with a sudden swift move, Scully disappeared into the maw.

**

Elam tossed the last shovelful of dirt onto the mound and pounded the soil with the back of the broad iron blade, hoping to silence the faint humming. It had droned like a plague of locusts before the farmer had interred it; now it was a low, regular rhythm unlike anything he’d ever heard in God’s Creation. Elam questioned, in fact, that this infernal machine was of His creation.

He slumped against the trunk of the thick red oak that shaded the expanse between field’s edge and the rear of his small frame house. Elam had no family – influenza had claimed his folks in ’56, and he’d stoically continued tilling the sod and tending to the animals that had sustained their spartan and isolated lives. He had few friends, and scarcely any visitors in the years since their deaths – the “grave” would be barely noticeable once the spring grass emerged.

Now to the other grave – the chore he’d been dreading. The flash that penetrated his thick feedbag curtains, the terrible clatter that had abruptly ended Elam’s slumber had been merely the prelude to a waking nightmare. If the ruined contraption he’d buried was of some other world, the creature that lay some five feet beyond clearly was of Hell. While he’d never been much religious after his folks had passed, Elam could feel there was something of the damned that had been brought almost literally to his doorstep, and thus had been reluctant to bring his neighbors or the sheriff into this affair.

Elam steeled himself and climbed back to his feet, retrieved the shovel, and bit into the hard ground.

And dropped the shovel as a keening wail broke the night. Then, with a jolt, he realized: He hadn’t so much heard the beastly cry as felt it. In his head. Elam stumbled over the shovel and was sent sprawling onto his belly, face-to-face with the abomination.

And screamed as a heavy gray lid rose and moonlight caught the aqueous surface of a single black eyeball. From the damage to the machine, Elam had assumed the creature was dead, but could not bring himself to confirm it.

Elam was paralyzed, his heart slamming against his ribs, as he tried to break contact with the alien eye. His calloused fingers trembled and searched in the darkness, finally encountering and tightening on the rough wooden handle. He used the shovel as a lever, and planting his boots uneasily, raised the implement above his head, unconsciously chanted a verse from Psalms, his ma’s favorite, as if to exorcise the demon that now lie on his farmstead.

Then it blinked.

No. It was fear – the black orb retreated into a thick gray fold as the creature faced its impending mortality, its violent end at the hands of a strange being in a strange place, Elam suspected, far from home. It cried out again, this time aloud and in Elam’s skull. His head filled with high, frantic jabber as the creature shifted and the eye contracted in pain and terror.

And another voice, clear and serene, his mother, broke through the cacophony. Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.

By divine command men are bound to be kind to strangers, and what God commands in others he will exemplify in Himself…

Elam blinked; tears escaped as he glanced momentarily to the sea of stars above his fields.

Test me, O LORD, and try me, examine my heart and my mind; for your love is ever before me, and I walk continually in your truth…

Elam’s lank, calloused fingers trembled as he leaned closer. Mustering his strength, he touched its. . .hide. Seemingly every molecule of his brain suddenly jumped with new data, horrific and otherwordly visions, ideas that had no place in Elam’s time or universe.

And something else.

“God,” he whispered hoarsely, hurling the shovel away.

**

“God,” Mulder whispered, turning the page.

**

Scully advanced, palms dry and calm against the grip of her Glock. The light of the full moon leaked through slats and missing panels and the hayloft above. Long-abandoned tools laid here and there; a grain wagon had been collecting dust most likely since the ‘70s. Otherwise, Scully was alone.

She sighed and clicked on her mag lite. Scully played the beam around the interior of the structure. The historical society’s decision appeared justified: The barn had been repeatedly and haphazardly patched, probably after repeated storm damage. Peterson County was in the middle of Tornado Alley.

The agent laughed nervously at her own folly, and lowered both gun and flashlight. Shaking her head, she glanced down at the dirt floor.

And spotted a familiar swoosh, surrounded by a pattern of ridges and valleys in the shape of a size 11 Nike.

“Boom,” Scully muttered. The shoeprint turned out to have several companions. The parade of treadmarks ended in the center of the barn, circled back outside, and ended in the grass to the side of the barn. A search of the periphery revealed ATV ruts, and a trace on the ruts turned up, of all things, a Kawasaki ATV, parked discreetly in the shadows to the rear of the barn.

And that’s where the trail ended. Glock in hand, Scully carefully circumnavigated the barn, stopping only to listen to the muffled strains of Jay Z.

“What the —?” Scully whispered. The music was distinct, but it sounded almost subterranean. The agent turned to the scabbed side of the barn and what appeared to be a broad board leaning against it. Scully reached down and placed her hand on the board. And felt the music. In tone-deafening Dolby.

Tornado Alley, she reflected, feeling about the “board.” Scully discovered the handle, lifted the Glock, and flung the storm cellar hatch open…

**

Mulder looked up abruptly from the journal. “How?”

Harwood refilled his mug, this time from a squat bottle of amber liquid that had gathered grime on the kitchen counter. He shrugged.

“We just, I don’t know, connected. She knew what I was thinking, and I could see what she felt, her pain.”

Mulder’s eyes widened with Harwood’s use of the pronoun. The farmer smiled distantly. “Guess I preferred to think of her as a her. All these years, I don’t know if she was a she, and eventually, it didn’t seem to matter. Like the verse says, the scales fell from my eyes that moment out there when…”

“When you touched her,” Mulder whispered. “Right, Elam?”

Harwood slumped into the chair opposite the agent. “It was part of knowing her, joining with her. She just, I guessed, stopped things. They live a lot longer’n any of us, and I have no idea how long she’d traveled around out there before we, ah, met. They don’t think in those terms, you know?”

“And you two…?”

Harwood bolted his whiskey. “Not how you think. But it was, well, wondrous, I guess is the word. She showed me the world, and not just mine.”

Mulder tapped the journal against the table. “That’s why you left. Kept leaving.”

“Had to disappear every once in a while, reappear as Delbert, as Carl, as Ray. Otherwise, they’d get suspicious, they’d ask questions. They’d come.”

“And she went with you? Where?”

Harwood’s lip twitched. “She stayed here. We got a well behind the corn. Guess you’d call it hibernation. Like I said, minutes, hours, seconds — pretty much all the same to her.”

“And the episodes with the night riders, the migrant workers, the gay-bashers.”

The old farmer — far older than his lined face could convey — placed his mug carefully on the chipped wood and considered. “What she and I had, nobody would’ve understood. Not whites nor blacks nor Jews nor Mexicans nor straight nor gay. Funny, probably could’ve done more to fix race relations on this planet just by showing up at the diner some Friday night. And that’s what she gave me, more than 100 years I wasn’t entitled to. Black, white, Jew, Mexican, gay, Methodist — didn’t seem to amount to too much any more.”

“Gave?”

Harwood perked. “Hah?”

“She gave you, what she and you had, you don’t know if she WAS a she.”

Harwood stared at Mulder, then glanced away into the darkness outside.

“What happened?” Mulder asked.

**

Meth has no single smell — like Flay, Legasse, Puck, every master chef has his or her own riff on methamphetamine, a distinctive palette based on trial-and-error or the materials at hand or unguarded in their neighborhood or community. In her years with the Bureau, Scully had smelled the sweet bouquet of ether, the acrid stench of a hundred incontinent cats, a mulligatawny of household chemicals blended lovingly with cold tabs or ammonia fertilizer.

Inching toward the bottom of the warped cellar steps, she detected none of the various parfums associated with the Heartland’s prime drug du jour. If anything, there was only an organic scent that reminded Scully somehow of high school biology lab. But without the not-so-subtle hint of chemical preservation. Frog sans formaldehyde.

Scully’s mind went first to the psychotropic thrills of toad-licking — the pursuit of hapless amphibians for a bufotoxin-induced high. Largely urban legend, though some claimed that with the popular preparation… Another culinary reference — Scully cursed bypassing a Big Mac.

Then she remembered the Urbana PD/FBI file on Kendrick and Murad. Jason Kendrick had come home for an advanced degree in commercial chemistry, inviting his roomie along to explore a future in biology. Fortunate for Ari Murad that he’d subleased the rattletrap barn rather than sharing Kendrick’s sleek machine shed. The shed was on a more-highly traveled road — Jason might have been concerned about a young Middle Easterner shuttling between his shed and the old farmstead here in Corn Country.

Either that or Kendrick might have been more than a bit creeped-out by the echinophibians or starfrogs or whatever Murad had managed to create in their shared digs. Scully felt a slight chill as she descended into the cellar, and it had nothing to do with the cool of the evening.

Boxes of supplies, bags of Doritos and Cheetos, cases of Dew lined the “foyer” of the Kendrick cavern. Jay Z gave way to Diddy as she moved through the dirt-walled corridor toward the light and the throbbing beat. She lingered in the shadows beyond the aura of a super strength battery-powered lamp. Scully could make out an open laptop flanked by a mi-fi device and a stack of legal pads. The laptop monitor illuminated sharply a bespectacled face with a Mediterranean nose and dark, focused eyes.

That is, semi-focused. Ari Murad stared blankly at the screen, wobbling slightly on a canvas camp chair and fumbling neon-tangerine cheese curls from a bag in his lap. Crumpled green cans littered the dust around him.

A few yards away, Scully could make out a blue child’s wading pool and a steady chirping. The fragrance of frog grew stronger as her eyes traveled to a large translucent Rubbermaid tub half-filled with sloshing water and ill-defined, sluggishly sloshing shapes. She swallowed her revulsion as she steeled herself, and lunged into the light.

“Ari Murad!” she shouted. “Place your hands where I can see them!!”

Murad turned slowly, a befuddled half-grin on his half-lit, fully lit features. “Shit, man,” he mumbled, and dived for a backpack resting against the pool.

“Don’t do that!!” Scully bellowed, feeling somewhat foolish. Her arms stiffened as she swung toward the moving student. Murad came up with what appeared to be a large caliber gun.

“Get outta here, bitch!” he slurred, waving the weapon.

“I’m FBI, Ari,” Scully murmured, trying to soften the mood of the room. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Aw, fuck,” Murad moaned. “Jason’s gonna shit.”

The agent paused. “Ari, when did you last speak with your friend?”

“Couple days ago. He’s been busy with his latest batch– with the farm. The cows and shit.”

“And you’ve been down here how long?”

“Bout four days. Jason says I gotta keep it on the DL, you know, Arab dude kinda sticks out around these parts, right?” Murad grinned before leveling his piece.

Scully made her decision. It could either set him off or take the fight out of him. “Ari, your friend Jason? I’m afraid he’s gone. There was an explosion at the machine shed.”

Murad slumped against a dirt wall. “Oh, fuck. Jason, man. I said that meth shit was dangerous — you read about those labs goin’ up all the time. It’s so old-school. Jason’s dead, man. Fuck.”

“And what are you doing, Ari?” Scully inquired, gun still at arm’s length. “We found your ‘experiment.’ Molecular biology? Gene splicing?”

“Some cool shit, right?” Murad swelled, weapon waggling. “My Uncle Ismail — you prolly heard of him — he left some notes on neural regeneration, restoring lost nerves, even limbs. I started looking at echinoderms and amphibians — both have amazing regenerative abilities. If I could tap into that shit, it might be the answer to human neurodegenerative disease, that kinda thing.”

“I read Hirokawa’s paper on brittle stars,” Scully nodded.

“Yeah, yeah. Well, so I started screwing around with some echinoderm and amphibian chromosomal material, you know, half to identify promising genotypes, half just for the shit of it, and I managed to come up with a viable cross. Things bred like those things — you know, kids used to send away for ’em, they were really just brine shrimp. Usually died after a couple days, if they hatched at all.”

“Sea monkeys.” Scully began to perceive the conversation drifting. “And did you find it? A transferable regenerative trait?” She didn’t note that pioneering work already had been done in the field, with terrifying results.

“Nah. Outta my pay grade. But I did make a pretty cool discovery. Know what you get when you cross a starfish with a frog?”

“A very exhausted and irritable FBI agent with a cocked gun in your root cellar.”

Murad blinked, then cackled. “That’s pretty good. Naw, though. You get a high that makes meth seem like Advil. Transferring a certain echinoderm chain into the right Bufo chromosome produces an enzyme you can synthesize into a kick-ass psychotropic compound.”

Scully gaped at the student. “You’ve successfully produced not merely a cross-genera or cross-family but a cross-phylum hybrid, shattered the frontiers of modern genetic science, all so you capture the market on club drugs?”

“Yeah, right?” Murad grinned. “Jason was thinking old-school chemistry. Biotechnology — that’s where the next great psychopharmaceuticals are coming from.” The fugitive then grew pensive. “Jason. Fuck. Poor dumb shit.”

“Yeah,” Scully murmured. “Why don’t you slide your weapon over here before we have two tragedies on our hands?”

Murad struggled to his feet. “Nah, time you guys and DEA and probably ICE get done with me, I’ll probably be buried deeper’n bin Laden.” He leveled his gun and stepped into the light.

“Oh, shit,” he sighed, glancing at his “weapon.” Scully quickly stepped forward and yanked the glass bong from the narcotized student’s fingers, then shoved him to the dirt. After securing his wrists, she glanced curiosity at the Rubbermaid tub and the shadows twitching and crawling inside it. Scully lifted a corner of the plastic lid, then snapped it back into place as she felt half-digested McNuggets roil inside her.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Murad asked, struggling to roll onto his back.

“Shut up,” Scully requested.

**

“Time meant nothing to her,” Harwood murmured, still staring off into the blackness outside. “But place, home, well. Every once in a while, I could feel her thinking about it. Them. See, she’d been I guess what you’d call a scout, looking to see what she could scavenge various places. Buried her friend out there, under that big tree. Somewhere — probably further away than any human could even calculate — they had to be wondering what had happened. Because minutes, hours, seconds were all the same, it kept fresh in her brain, though she had me and me her.”

“When’d it happen?” Mulder inquired. “When’d they find her?”

Harwood grinned then, horribly, painfully. “They didn’t.”

Mulder’s chest tightened, and his fingers strayed toward his sidearm. “Where is she?”

Harwood stood, took his mug to the sink, rinsed and wiped it, and placed it gently in a cupboard above.

“Ray? Elam?”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “She’s still here.”

Mulder planted his palms on the table, mouth dry. “Can I see her, Elam?”

“You want, sure. See… See, it was about a week ago when she, when she felt them. They were close. Not close like you and I think about, but close. Few days, and they’d be close enough to feel her, too. We been together a century, more, and I thought I’d felt everything, we’d felt everything. But this one was new, what I felt. She was excited and some things only she could tell you. One thing I could tell.”

“She was leaving.” Mulder slumped back.

“Minutes, seconds, hours. I’d lived two lifetimes with her — watched my own die of smallpox, war, drink, age. It was different for her. She’d been with them for centuries, maybe more. Me, a blink of an eye. I could feel her leaving already. And then I began to feel something, something I hadn’t felt for 134 years. Wonder if she saw it coming, or maybe if she just…”

“Where is she, Elam?”

Harwood turned toward Mulder. “Two lifetimes. Everything she’d shown me, everything we’d shared. The idea of having nobody who could…understand, well that was unbearable. The idea she’d leave me to live out my days alone here, well…”

“You said she was still here, Elam,” Mulder prodded. “Where is she?”

Harwood nodded, then disappeared into the living room beyond. He returned a moment later with a thickly bound pebbled leather volume. He flipped the volume open and spread it before Mulder. The kitchen was silent as the agent studied the solitary photo — yellowed, faded about the borders, simultaneously mundane and startling. The eye held Mulder until he remembered to breathe. He understood why the old farmer had been so quick on the draw when two suits had shown up in his drive.

“She’s out there,” Harwood informed him, hollowly, glancing at his empty shotgun. “The big tree. Took me a while to dig that grave. ‘Bout 134 years.”

Mulder studied the old man, who was now becoming older with every sweep of the red plastic clock above the kitchen sink. Harwood waited. Mulder’s chair squeaked on the linoleum.

“Can I leave?” he asked in the doorway.

“You can,” Harwood responded with a curious emphasis.

**

The manager’s Chevy died before it could bump into place outside Scully’s room. Mulder’s dusty rental slid in beside her; he nodded as they opened their doors in unison.

“Where’d you go?” he asked.

“Drive in the country,” Scully yawned. “We’re going to have to talk with Latraub and some DEA guys in the morning. You?”

“Same. Except for the DEA guys.” Mulder hesitated. “I’m beat.”

“Same.”

The pair trudged wordlessly to the door. Mulder fumbled with the key and admitted them to a box full of stale, chilled air.

“Hey, Scully,” he began, as if he’d come to a major decision.

“No,” she stated, seizing her partner by the shirtfront and shoving him onto the bed.

**

Mulder fell face-first onto the carpet as he attempted to respond to the insistent rapping. The naked agent bounced to his feet, glanced at the other naked agent lying atop the spread, still purring softly, and searched in the semi-darkness for his slacks. Mulder collided with the motel desk, swallowed a few choice observations, and snagged his khakis and shirt. The rapping continued as he hobbled to the door, circled back, threw the comforter over Scully’s bare rump, and again collided with the desk.

Mulder reeled back as the mid-morning sun exploded into the room. The small, dark figure bathed in the blinding light gradually took form and identity.

“My bound volumes,” Alice Falstaff stated. “You promised.”

Mulder nodded stupidly and limped to the second bed. Alice waited patiently, eyes straight ahead, as he gathered the periodicals and hauled them to the open station wagon at the curb. The librarian kicked up gravel as she pulled out, barely missing Latraub’s cruiser. The lawman waved as he pulled into the spot.

“Missed the party last night,” Latraub grinned, adjusting his Sam Browne. “Just got done with the DEA folks — probably heading here next.”

Mulder had no idea what the sheriff was talking about. Latraub didn’t appear to notice as he headed for the motel door.

“Busy night last night, between your partner’s little raid and the blackouts.”

“Blackouts?” Mulder grunted.

“Weirdest thing,” Latraub nodded. “Power went out for about seven minutes all over the county, ’bout 3 a.m. Even my cruiser went dead. Probably those aliens, huh? Come back for the chicken, right?”

And moved on when they didn’t find what they really came for. Mulder laughed lamely.

“Most feds we’ve had here since my grandma thought she saw Dillinger eating meatloaf at the Main Street Diner. Just another boring Tuesday in the sticks, huh?”

Before Mulder could react, the sheriff pushed past into the room. Scully, bent over the bedside table, yelped and sprinted into the bathroom as Latraub turned discreetly toward the wall.

“Was gonna wish you a happy Hump Day,” the lawman murmured. “But I see I’m a little late.”