Now that he had returned to civilization, the dense jungle wilderness seemed another world away, with its bugs and scorpions and snakes and miserable rainy condi-tions . . . though it had been only two days ago. The ordeal had still not faded from his mind.
With the aid of the ATV's computerized map, he and Scully had managed to work their way east toward one of the paved roads in the state of Quintana Roo.
Then, like a survivalist senior citizen driving a "Don't bother me or else!"
RV, Mulder barreled along the roads, terrify-ing shepherds and pedestrians, dark-haired Indians wearing colorfully embroidered Maya clothes.
Using a small first-aid kit she found in the all-terrain vehicle, Scully had taken care of the worst of Cassandra's injuries, giving her painkillers and applying disinfectants. She could do nothing more until they found an actual hospital.
Finally, a Mexican police cruiser had stopped them, the officer demanding to know what they were doing there in a U.S. military vehicle. Scully had politely requested to be taken to the nearest American embassy.
During the grueling drive through the unmarked for-est, they had found MRE
rations in the storage compart-ment—"Meals Ready-to-Eat"—as well as bottled water. Cassandra had been unable to talk or eat, and she seemed so dazed by her ordeal that Mulder had doubted she would remember anything to back up his theory about the alien space craft rescue, any more than he expected to find witnesses from the commando opera-tion. Scully and Mulder ate some rations, however, and by the time of their arrest they felt relatively comfortable again and ready to go back home.
Cassandra had been treated in a Mexican emergency medical care center while Mulder made the appropriate phone calls and Scully filled out the extensive paper-work. Upon arriving in Miami, Cassandra had been taken to Jackson Memorial for observation and recovery. The young woman was so weary after her ordeal that she viewed the forced hospital stay as a relief instead of a burden.
Walking down the linoleum-tiled hall, Mulder won-dered if the archaeologist's daughter would recognize him, now that he had cleaned up and changed clothes.
She had never seen him in his suit-and-tie FBI uniform.
He punched an elevator button and rode up to see her. The heavy doors closed on him, sealing him alone in the small elevator—and he experienced an unexpected dread as he thought of Carlos Barreio trapped in the lifeboat chamber onboard the derelict ship, dragged into the air with the salvaged wreck ... and from there to the stars.
Fortunately, the hospital elevator didn't prove nearly so threatening.
Cassandra Rubicon lay propped on the bed sur-rounded by bleached white sheets, her head bandaged like a Civil War veteran's. She stared at the television mounted high on the wall, wearing a look of combined boredom and amusement as she absorbed a women's afternoon talk show. The topic of the heated discussion was "Women who claim to be married to aliens from outer space."
"I should have remembered to set my VCR," Mulder said. "I wanted to catch this one."
Cassandra saw him standing at the door to her room, and her face brightened.
"There are some things I don't miss out in the jungle," she said. She picked up the TV remote control and stabbed the power button; the picture on the tube winked out with a faint cry of dismay.
"Feeling better?" he asked, coming to stand beside her bed.
"Much," she said. "And your own appearance is much improved."
He glanced down at the uninteresting and uneaten meal on a tray at her bedside. "You should eat your Jell-O—after all, you've had a pretty rough time."
She forced a smile for him. The heavy bandages cov-ered much of her mussed cinnamon-brown hair. "Well, archaeology isn't for wimps, Mr. Mulder."
"Please, just call me Mulder," he said. "I can't help but think that Mister Mulder was my father's name."
At Mulder's mention of his own father, the young woman's face tightened again.
"I have to ask you this, Cassandra," he said, growing more serious, "because everything we saw has been destroyed without a trace. Did your team happen to smuggle out any notes, any photographs, any hard evi-dence from the Xitaclan site?"
She shook her head, then winced as a flicker of pain crossed her face. "No, there's nothing. My entire team died down there: John and Cait, Christopher and Kelly— all dead, struck down at the beginning of their careers. My own father was murdered because of me, because of Xitaclan." She swallowed, then looked back at the televi-sion herself, as if wishing she could be distracted by the talk show again, anything but the discussion she was now having with Mulder. "No, Mulder. It's all gone now, including our records. The only thing I have left is my memories—and even those aren't too clear."
Mulder stood next to her, momentarily turning his attention to the blank television set, trying to find the right words.
Cassandra seemed withdrawn, as if searching for an inner reservoir of strength. When she spoke, it surprised him. "There are still a thousand unexcavated sites in the Yucatan, Mulder. Maybe when I get back on my feet I'll put together a new expedition. Who knows what else we might find?"
Mulder allowed himself a small smile. "Who knows?"
Scully's home, Annapolis, MD Sunday, 1:07 p.m.
With her little dog curled up asleep on the sofa, Scully flicked on the computer and sat down at her desk, taking a deep breath.
So different from wandering lost in the wet and bug-laden jungles of Central America, she thought. And quite an improvement.
Now that she had returned home, she had to get into the right frame of mind to work on her official report about Xitaclan, juggling the loose ends in her mind until she finally succeeded in tying them together. There were other cases, other investigations ... other X-Files. She had to close this one and move on.
In a few hours of peace and solitude in her own apartment, Scully could finish up the backlog of paper-work that had piled up during their trip to Mexico. It felt good to be back in civilization.
She crossed her legs in her chair and rested a lined legal notepad on her knee to jot down notes, sketching out her thoughts before committing her report to the computer. She scribbled several headings, writing her ideas under broadly defined categories.
Their specific assignment—to search for the missing archaeology team members—had been completed. Scully felt grateful to be able to mark an official case closed, technically at least. Assistant Director Skinner would appreciate that.
On the legal pad, she listed the names of the four murdered team members, adding details of how she had discovered their bodies submerged in the cenote, how she and Mulder had recovered them from the water. She described the apparent cause of death—murder by gun-shot wounds, broken vertebrae, and/or drowning. She concluded that Cait Barron, Christopher Porte, Kelly Rowan, and John Forbin had all been killed by members of the guerrilla organization Liberation Quintana Roo.
She didn't know what to write under "Cassandra Rubicon." She had been found alive and unharmed— though how, Scully did not understand. She still had no satisfactory explanation for the young woman's disap-pearance, the lost two weeks in her life. Had she been out wandering in the jungle or hiding down in the ruins of Xitaclan while the rest of her team members lay dead in the sacrificial well? Scully could not include Mulder's talk about buried spacecraft and suspended animation chambers.
As a side note, she scribbled a sentence about how, in the wake of the Xitaclan disaster and the debacle of the U.S. military covert operation, the Mexican government had finally come in with a sufficient force to crack down on the guerrilla activities. Soldiers had confiscated the remaining illegal arms and arrested the surviving revolu-tionaries who could be found hiding in jungle villages.
The violent Liberation Quintana Roo movement had been crushed. Their nominal leader, the turncoat police chief Carlos Barreio, remained at large. Mulder main-tained his own explanation for what had happened to the man. Despite Scully's coaxing, her partner had not been forthcoming with sufficient details that she felt comfort-able about including Mulder's speculations in her report. They didn't have a specific bearing on the case.
As for the tactical nuclear weapon that had supposedly obliterated Xavier Salida's fortress—their investiga-tions had uncovered no evidence of additional black-market armaments, other diverted nuclear devices that had fallen into the hands of Central American criminals. A continued search, though, would have to be conducted by other federal agencies, such as the CIA or the State Department.
Under "Vladimir Rubicon," Scully summarized the scenario of how the old man had been killed: struck on the head by Fernando Victorio Aguilar because the old archaeologist had threatened to broadcast his report and call in additional government-sanctioned help—all of which would have interfered with Aguilar's artifact thievery.
Hesitating, she made a notation that their guide Aguilar, Rubicon's murderer, had been killed by "a wild animal" in the jungle.
Then she swallowed and procrastinated, doodling with her pencil before getting up to make herself a cup of instant coffee, heating the water in her microwave.
The monstrous feathered serpents were the hardest part for Scully to explain.
Their presence posed the great-est difficulties for her rational report. She did not know how to account for the creatures, but she had seen them with her own eyes. She could not ignore their existence.
Earlier, Mulder had described his glimpses of the unearthly serpent creatures in the moonlight, and she had thought he had just been imagining things. But she herself had watched the towering, coiling beast with its long iridescent scales and curved fangs.
Finally, steeling herself, Scully sat at her desk again and picked up the pencil. Without further thought, she wrote down her own explanation, the best she could come up with.
The feathered serpents must be members of a large, previously uncataloged species of reptile, perhaps nearly extinct, but with enough representatives surviving into historical times to account for the numerous legendary images on Maya structures and artifacts. In retrospect, she realized Mulder had been right—the feathered ser-pent image appeared on so many glyphs and stelae that it seemed likely the ancient Maya had seen some of the creatures in life.
Mulder had even suggested that the car-nivorous feathered serpents could be responsible for the numerous accounts of missing people in the area around Xitaclan.
She commented on the density of the Central American rain forests, how many thousands of new species were identified every year. She conjectured that it was not completely beyond the realm of possibility that a large reptilian carnivore—especially one with such apparent intelligence—could have remained heretofore undetected by scientific expeditions and zoological study teams.
Agent Mulder had reminded her of how many images of similar creatures existed in the world's mythologies: dragons, cockatrices, wyverns, Chinese water dragons—and the more she thought about it, the more sense it made that such rare beasts might have indeed existed.
With the destruction of the Xitaclan site and the significant amounts of new volcanic activity there, Mulder had been unable to offer any corroborating evidence. His alien artifacts remained unconfirmed, his derelict spacecraft destroyed. She felt that, while she would include his verbal eyewitness account, she could do nothing more than let it stand on its own.
She sipped her bitter coffee and scanned over her notes as she turned to her computer. She crossed out a few lines scribbled on the legal pad, tried to arrange her thoughts on paper, then rested her fingers on the key-board.
She would have to smooth everything out in her final report. Scully could say only that the many anomalies at Xitaclan remained unexplained.
FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C. Sunday, 2:12 p.m.
Though FBI Headquarters never shut down entirely, the Sunday afternoon quiet sur-rounded Mulder with a warm peacefulness unlike the usual bustle of a normal business day.
Only one bank of fluorescents shone from the ceiling, the others were gray and dark. The atmosphere inside the FBI offices surrounded him like a tangible presence: the thousands of investigations, the case files, telephones that would normally be ringing, photocopy machines whirring and clanking into the night.
The phone beside his desk remained silent—down the hall, the other computers, the neighboring offices, the adjacent cubicles equally quiet.
It was not a rare occurrence for him to come in on the weekend; Scully had often joked about his lack of a social life.
Now he sat pensive, with the miniblinds drawn and a desk lamp switched on.
Rubbing the bridge of his nose, he pushed aside his stack of books on Maya myths and archaeology.
He studied a sheaf of satellite photos he had obtained through sensible use of two Washington Redskins tickets. He had invested in season passes, though his caseload rarely allowed him the time to go to the actual games. However, the tickets often proved to be a useful form of currency for getting unofficial favors done in the Bureau.
He sat down and looked at the finely detailed photos, a few of them showing the devastated crater remaining where a Mexican drug lord's private villa had once been. Curious, he turned to another photo, studying the close-in target of the hellish, blasted landscape around the ruins of Xitaclan.
The volcanic hotbed had already generated enormous excitement among geologists. That part of the Yucatan should have been geologically stable instead of giving birth to an erupting volcano, much like the mysterious appearance of Paricutin in 1948. The cone of the new vol-cano had already begun to take shape, and early geologi-cal reports suggested that the new eruption would continue for years.
Mulder wondered if there could be any connection between Paricutin and Xitaclan, but dismissed the thought.
He would have no chance to go back to the Yucatan. He had no reason to return, because the erupting lava and volcanic tremors would have annihilated all evi-dence, even down to the mundane archaeological ruins. Not a scrap of Xitaclan's ancient glory remained.