Authors: Chris Carter
Kurtzweil hurried until he was alongside him. "S.A.C. Darius Michaud never tried or intended to defuse the bomb."
Mulder paused, teetering on the edge of the curb. Around them L'Enfant Plaza was a wasteland of rain-slicked streets and empty newspaper machines. In the near-distance ugly government buildings loomed, and a few Yellow Cabs hopefully trolled Constitution Avenue for customers. Mulder looked around in disgust, turned to Kurtzweil, and said in rhetorical disbelief, "He just let it explode."
Kurtzweil tugged at the collar of his rain-coat. "What's the question nobody's asking? Why
that
building? Why not the federal build-ing?"
Mulder looked pained. "The federal build-ing was too well guarded—"
"
No
." Kurtzweil's voice grew agitated as Mulder stepped into the street, raising his hand to hail a cab.
"They put the bomb in the build-ing across the street because it
did
have federal offices. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had a provisional medical quarantine office there. Which is where the bodies were found. But
that's
the thing—"
The taxi pulled over. Kurtzweil sidestepped a puddle as he followed Mulder to its side. "—the thing you didn't know. That you'd never think to check."
Mulder was already pulling the door open, lowering himself to slide inside. Kurtzweil gazed at him, his eyes no longer sad but fierce, almost challenging. "Those people were al-ready dead."
Mulder blinked. "Before the bomb went off?"
"That's what I'm saying."
Mulder stared at him for a moment. He shook his head. "Michaud was a twenty-two-year veteran of the Bureau—"
"Michaud was a patriot. The men he's loyal to know their way around Dallas. They blew away that building to hide something. Maybe something even they couldn't predict."
Kurtzweil leaned against the cab and looked at Mulder, waiting. The younger man shook his head, no longer quite disbelieving but as though slowly teasing out the answer to a puzzle. "You're saying they destroyed an entire building to hide the bodies of three fire-men?"
Kurtzweil banged the top of the cab tri-umphantly—the right answer at last! "And one little boy."
Without a word, Mulder got into the cab and slammed the door. He looked at the driver.
"Take me to Arlington." He rolled down the window and stared up at Kurtzweil.
"I think you're full of shit," he said.
"Do you?" Kurtzweil asked evenly. He rapped the taxi's roof and stepped away, watch-ing as it sped away. "Do you really, Agent Mulder?" he repeated to himself thoughtfully.
Inside the cab, Mulder leaned forward, frowning. "I changed my mind," he said to the driver. "I want to go to Georgetown."
Dana Scully lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Despite her exhaustion, she hadn't been able to sleep; hadn't been able to do anything, really, but lie there and endlessly replay the events of the last two days: the explosion in Dallas and its after-math, the interminable meeting that had led to the termination of her career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Outside the rain beat at the windows, a noise that she normally found reassuring, but which tonight sounded only like another reprimand, another reminder that some-how she had come up short, in the Bureau's esti-mation and—what was even worse—her own.
And Mulder's. At the thought of her partner, Scully sighed and closed her eyes, fighting back a despair that went even deeper than tears. It didn't even bear thinking about, that this was the end of it—
Don't
go there
, a voice echoed inside her skull, trying to put a wry spin on it. But Scully only bit her lip.
I'm there
, she thought.
The rain battered the walls of her apart-ment, the wind sent branches rattling against the roof; and then she heard something else. She sat up bolt upright, cocking her head.
Someone was pounding at the door. Scully glanced at her bedside clock. 3:17. She grabbed her bathrobe and hurried into the living room. At the door she hesitated, listening to whoever was on the other side pause, then begin to bang even harder. She peeked through the peephole, stepped back, and sighed, her relief tinged with annoyance. Then she removed the safety chain, unlocked the door, and pulled it open.
Mulder stood there, his clothes wet and hair disheveled. Despite his disarray, and the hour, he looked strangely, even disturbingly, alert.
"I wake you?"
Scully shook her head. "No."
"Why not?" Mulder breezed past her into the apartment. As he did she caught the sweet-sour reek of tequila and the fainter, stale smoky scent that all bars have at closing time. "It's three A.M.—"
She closed the door and stared at him in disbelief. "Are you
drunk
, Mulder?"
"I was until about twenty minutes ago."
Scully crossed her arms against her chest and stared at him coolly. "Is that before or after you got the idea to come here?"
Mulder looked puzzled. "What are you implying, Scully?"
"I thought you may have gotten drunk and decided to come here to talk me out of quit-ting."
"Is that what you'd like me to do?"
Scully shut her eyes and leaned against the wall. Recalling how fifteen minutes ago, an hour ago, she had been thinking exactly that. After a moment she opened her eyes and sighed. "Go home, Mulder. It's late."
He shook his head, with a resolute, slightly manic gleam in his eyes. A look Scully knew all too well and usually to her peril. He reached down to pick up her windbreaker, still lying on the couch where she'd dropped it last night, and held it out to her. "Get dressed, Scully."
"Mulder, what are you
doingl"
"Just get dressed," he said. The manic gleam grew even more intense, but it couldn't hide the beginning of a grin, the slightest hint that something big was afoot. "I'll explain on the way."
CHAPTER 5
BLACKWOOD. TEXAS
The night breeze swept across the prairie relentlessly. After a while the wind seemed to rise, as though heavy weather was moving in.
Above the desolation of sage and dust, two black, unmarked helicopters appeared, swoop-ing perilously close to the ground.
They buzzed past, flying at dangerously low altitude toward their destination: several large, ominously glowing domes, duplicates of the moon's own reflection upon the prairie. Only a few hundred yards away, the commonplace lights of the housing development sparked the night, white and yellow and ice-blue where a television was on. But there was nothing com-monplace about the work site that had sprung up where, only days before, four young boys had knelt digging in the brick-colored earth.
Now, the white hoods of several geodesic dome tents stretched over nearly the entire patch of ground. They were surrounded by long white cargo trucks, their tanks devoid of any markings, and a number of anonymous support vehicles: cars, vans, pickup trucks. Between these, figures in black fatigues moved purpose-fully, their somber uniforms in stark contrast to the white Hazardous Materials suits worn by their counterparts who stepped in and out of the central dome and support tents.
Overhead the hum of the choppers became a drone, as the two aircraft banked and then slowly settled upon the ground. Dust devils spun up around them; tents billowed and tugged at their struts. The eerie daylight glow of the main dome washed over one of the heli-copters, as several men in fatigues gestured at the pilot. An instant later and the chopper's door swung open. A man stepped down, mov-ing with studied, almost casual ease as he shielded his eyes from the dust and blinding light. He lowered his head instinctively as he walked beneath the whirring propellers, head-ing to where a line of trucks provided a makeshift windbreak from the helicopter's prop wash. Once there, he stood with his back to it all—choppers, drones, the huge and weirdly glowing tent—and lit a cigarette.
"Sir?"
The Cigarette-Smoking Man replaced his light and inhaled, then turned to look at the uniformed man addressing him. "Dr. Bronsch-weig is waiting for you in the main staging area."
The Cigarette-Smoking Man regarded him through slit eyes, his weathered face dull gray in the dome's glare. His expression was cool, almost disinterested, but after a moment he nodded and without a word followed the other man across the field. At the entrance to the central dome, the uniformed man nodded curtly, indicating the bulky white form of someone in a Haz-Mat suit. "Dr. Smith will escort you inside," he said, and left.
"This way, sir." From behind his mask the man's voice sounded hollow and thin. He held open a vinyl flap, and the Cigarette-Smoking Man ducked beneath.
Inside, the dome was a maze of clear plastic tubing, translucent vinyl walls, and opaque barriers separating one work area from another. In between, in makeshift cubicles and plastic-sided alleys, men and women stood or sat before stainless steel tables. Some wore Haz-Mat suits or surgical masks; all had the intense, almost dreamy expressions of people engaged in work they had spent a lifetime preparing for. The tables were covered with vials and alem-bics and crucibles of glass, but also with home-lier instruments: hammers, chisels, sifters, and strainers, all the accoutrements of the archae-ologist's art. The entire place resembled a cross between a high-tech dig and a surgical operat-ing theater.
Or a modern abattoir. There were refriger-ation units everywhere, huge and linked by sheaves of electrical cords. The dome res-onated with their humming, and the faint sweetish smell they exuded. The Cigarette-Smoking Man passed them quickly and in silence, barely taking note of the hive of activ-ity around him, until finally he came to the entrance to the very center of the dome. Here he took the bulky white suit and mask that an underling handed him, donning it quickly before drawing aside the last vinyl flap and entering.
Inside was a small, partitionless area, banked roundabout with refrigeration units. It was cold, cold enough that the Cigarette-Smoking Man's breath clouded even inside his mask. Several metal gurneys were tucked beneath halogen lights and shrouds of plastic sheathing. In the middle of it all, a small mound of bare earth had been covered by a clear plastic cover, like a manhole cover: twelve inches thick, its transparent surface crisscrossed by heavy stainless steel bars. The walls of the earthen hole had been shored up by inserting a sort of metal tube into the ground, like a culvert, big enough for a man to pass through. It was this that the sturdy cover fit over, like a trapdoor. And it was from this entrance into the underworld that Dr. Bronschweig appeared, suited up, his head obscured by the cumbersome mask. He pushed aside the clear plastic hatch and stepped out as the Cigarette-Smoking Man approached him,
"You've got something to show me."
Dr. Bronschweig nodded. Not even his mask could hide his excited expression, or the nervous tone edging his voice. "Yes."
He pointed to the hatch, the ladder that could be glimpsed now leading into the earth. The Cigarette-Smoking Man slung himself down the hole, moving awkwardly in his suit as he went down the ladder. A moment later Dr. Bronschweig followed.
They were inside the cave, a frigid chamber lit by an array of halogen and fluorescent lights. "We brought the atmosphere here back down to freezing in order to control the develop-ment," he explained.
"And that development is like nothing we've ever seen…"
The Cigarette-Smoking Man stood beside him, catching his breath. "Brought on by what?"
"Heat, I think. The coincident invasion of a host—the fireman—and an environment that raised his body temperature above 98.6."
He motioned the other man to follow him to one end of the cavern. Two portable drilling rigs had been set up on the floor, their pistons moving silently up and down, like macabre rocking horses. Behind them, more plastic sheets hung from the ceiling, to form an eerily glowing drapery of cool blue lit from within. Dr. Bronschweig hesitated, then pushed away the plastic.
"Here—"
The flickering blue light revealed a gurney, draped with the ubiquitous plastic but differing from the others the Cigarette-Smoking Man had seen in one regard:
There was a body on it. A man, unclothed, his body covered with a filigree of tubes and cords and wires that led to a battery of monitors lined up against the cavern wall. There was a muted drone as the equipment registered his vital signs, the rhythmic pulse and sigh of respirators and the metronomic beat of a cardiac ventilator monitor-ing his heartbeat. The Cigarette-Smoking Man quietly stared down at its occupant.
"This man's still alive," he said. He stared at the body before him. The skin was nearly translucent, a clear gray aspic of tissue and muscle fibers. Beneath the surface, veins and capillaries were clearly visible, pulsing slightly, blue and crimson strands threading along arms, legs, and thickening like rope at the man's neck. "This man's still
alive
…."
Dr. Bronschweig shrugged. "Technically and biologically. But he'll never recover."
The Cigarette-Smoking Man shook his head. "How can this be?"
"The developing organism is using his life energy, digesting bone and tissue. We've just slowed the process." He reached to grasp the swivel neck of a lamp, redirecting it so that it shone directly on the fireman's torso. Beneath the smooth spongy planes of his chest, some-thing moved.
The Cigarette-Smoking Man grimaced.
On the gurney, the body of the fireman shud-dered. A ripple seemed to race through it, the glistening translucent skin shuddering the way a sea nettle does when it flounders upon a beach. The chest heaved gently, as though something inside had moved and stretched. A closer look revealed a hand attached to what had to be an organism.
Then the darkness
blinked
. Just once, very slowly; and resolved itself into an eye, almond-shaped, watchful.
The Cigarette-Smoking Man gazed at it, his mind working frantically as he measured all the possibilities of what was before him, all the consequences…
"Do you want us to destroy this one, too?" Dr. Bronschweig was asking. "Before it ges-tates?"