At least, not until he found the dog.
Oregon Coast
Thursday, 12:25 P.M.
Mulder pulled up to the Mini Serve pump X in the small, rundown gas station. As he got out of the car, he looked toward the glassed-in office and the tall, unlit CONOCO
sign. He half expected to see old men sitting in rocking chairs on the porch, or at least someone coming out to offer Andy Griffith–like hospitality.
Scully got out of the car to stretch. They had been driving for hours up Highway 101, seeing the rugged coastline, small villages, and secluded houses tucked away into the forested hills.
Somewhere out here David Kennessy’s brother had joined his isolated group of survivalists, and it was the same general area where the black Lab had been hit by the car. That made too great a coincidence for Mulder’s mind. He wanted to find Darin and get some straight answers about the DyMar research. If Darin knew why DyMar had been destroyed, he might also know why Patrice had gone missing.
But further information on the survivalists was vague. The group, by its very nature, kept its exact 108
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location secret, without phones or electricity. Finding the camp might be as hard as finding Patrice and Jody.
Mulder popped the gas tank and lifted the nozzle from the pump. Then the office door banged open, but instead of a “service with a smile” attendant, a short potbellied man with a fringe of gray-white hair scuttled out.
“Hey, don’t touch that!” the potbellied man snapped, wearing a stormy expression. “This ain’t no self-serve.”
Mulder looked at the gas nozzle in his hand, then at the Mini Serve sign. The potbellied man came over and grabbed the nozzle out of Mulder’s grasp as if it were a dangerous toy in the hands of a child. The man slid the nozzle into the gas tank, squeezed and locked on the handle, then stepped back proudly, as if only a professional could be trusted with such a delicate operation.
“What is the problem, sir?” Scully asked.
The potbellied man glowered at her, then at Mulder, as if they were incredibly stupid. “Damn Californians.” He shook his head after glancing at the license plate of their rental car. “This is Oregon. We don’t allow amateurs to pump their own gas.”
Mulder and Scully looked at each other from across the roof of the car. “Actually, we’re not Californians,”
Mulder said, reaching inside his overcoat. “We’re federal agents. We work for the FBI—and I can assure you that pumping gas is one of the rigorous training courses we’re required to undergo at Quantico.” He flashed his ID and gestured over at Scully. “In fact, Agent Scully here is nearly as qualified as I am to fill up a tank.”
The potbellied man looked at Mulder skeptically.
His flannel shirt was oil-stained and tattered. His jowls had been shaved intermittently, giving him a rugged, patchy appearance. He didn’t seem the type ever to have dirtied his hands with knotting a necktie.
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Scully drew out the photo of Patrice and Jody Kennessy. “We’re searching for these people,” she said. “A woman, mid-thirties, her son, twelve years old.”
“Never seen ’em,” the man said, then devoted his entire attention to the gas nozzle. On the pump, numbers clicked around and around in circles.
“They’re also with a dog,” Mulder said, “a black Labrador.”
“Never seen ’em,” the man repeated.
“You didn’t even look at the picture, sir.” Scully pushed it closer to his face across the top of the car.
The man looked at it carefully, then turned away again. “Never seen ’em. I got better things to do than to keep my eye on every stranger that comes through here.”
Mulder raised his eyebrows. In his mind this man was
exactly
the type who would keep a careful eye on every stranger or customer who came through—and he had no doubt that before the afternoon was over, everyone within ten miles would hear the gossip that federal agents were searching for someone on the isolated stretches of the Oregon coast.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea where we might locate a survivalist compound in this area?”
Mulder added. “We believe they may have been taken there, to be with a family member.”
The potbellied man raised his eyebrows. “I know some of those places exist in the hills and the thick forest—nobody in their right mind goes looking too close for them.”
Scully took out her business card. “If you do see anything, sir, we’d appreciate it if you give us a call.
We’re not trying to arrest these two for anything. They need help.”
“Sure, always happy to do my duty,” the man said, and tucked the card into his shirt pocket without 110
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even glancing at it. He topped off the gas tank to an even dollar amount and then, maliciously, it seemed, squirted a few cents more into the tank.
Mulder paid him, got a receipt, and then he and Scully climbed back in the car. “People around here sure value their privacy,” Mulder said. “Especially outside of the cities, Oregon has a reputation for har-boring survivalists, isolationists, and anybody else who doesn’t want to be bothered.”
Scully glanced down at the photo in her hands, at Jody Kennessy’s smiling face, and Mulder knew what must be occupying her mind. “I wonder why David Kennessy’s brother wanted so badly to drop out of sight,” she said.
After four more hours of knocking on doors, stopping at cafes, souvenir shops, and art galleries scattered along the back roads, Mulder wasn’t sure they would get any benefit out of continuing their methodical search unless they found a better lead to the location of Darin Kennessy.
But they could either sit and cool their heels in their Lincoln City motel room, or they could do something. Mulder preferred to do something. Usually.
He picked up his cell phone to see if he could call Frank Quinton, the medical examiner, to check on any results of the analysis of the strange mucus, but he saw that the phone was out of range. He sighed. They could have missed a dozen phone calls by now. The wooded mountains were sparsely inhabited, often even without electrical utilities. Cellular phone substations were too widely separated to get reception. He collapsed the antenna and tucked the phone back into his pocket.
“Looks like we’re on our own, Scully,” he said.
The brooding pines stood dense and dominant on antibodies
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either side of the road, like a cathedral tunnel. Wet leaves, spruce needles, and slick moisture coated the pavement. Someone had bothered to put up an unbroken barbed-wire fence from which NO TRESPASSING
signs dangled at frequent intervals.
Mulder drove slowly, glancing from side to side.
“Not too friendly, are they?”
“Seems like they’re overdoing it a bit,” Scully agreed. “Anybody who needs that much privacy must be hiding something. Do you think we’re close to the survivalist compound?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Mulder saw a black shape moving, an animal loping along. He squinted at it intently, then hit the brakes.
“Look, Scully!” He pointed, sure of what he saw in the trees behind the barbed-wire fence: a black dog about the right size to be the missing pet, looking at them curiously, then loping back off into the trees.
“Let’s go check it out. Maybe it’s Vader.”
He swung the car onto the narrow gravel shoulder, then hopped out. Scully exited into the ditch, trying to maintain her footing.
Mulder sprinted to the barbed wire, pushing down on the rusted strands and ducking through. He turned to hold one of the wires up for Scully. Off in the trees, the dog looked at them before trotting nervously away.
“Here, boy!” Mulder called, then tried whistling.
He ran crashing after it through the underbrush. The dog barked and turned and bolted.
Scully chased after him. “That’s not the way to get a skittish dog to come back to you,” she said.
Mulder paused to listen, and the dog barked again. “Come on, Scully.”
Along the trees even this deep in the woods he saw frequent NO TRESPASSING signs, along with PRIVATE
PROPERTY, WARNING—VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
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Several of the signs were peppered with buckshot dents.
Scully hurried, but kept herself intensely alert, aware of the very real danger of excessive traps and the illegal countermeasures some of these survivalist groups were known to use. At any moment they could step into a hunting snare, snap a trip wire, or find themselves dropped into a trap pit.
Finally, as Mulder continued up the slope after the black dog, ducking between trees and wheezing from lack of breath, he reached the crest of the hill. A line of DANGER signs marked the area.
As Scully came close to him, flushed from the pursuit, they topped the rise. “Uh-oh, Mulder.”
Suddenly dozens of dogs began barking and bay-ing. She saw a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, surrounding an entire compound of half-buried houses, bunkers, prefabricated cabins, and guard shacks.
The black dog raced toward the compound.
Mulder and Scully skidded to a stop in the soft forest dirt as armed men rushed from the guard shacks at the corners of the compound. Other people stepped out of the cabins. Women peered through the windows, grabbing their children and protecting them from what they thought must be an unexpected government raid. The men shouted and raised their rifles, firing warning shots into the air.
Mulder instantly held up his hands. Other dogs came bounding out of the compound, German shepherds, rottweilers, and Doberman pinschers.
“Mulder, I think we found the survivalists we’ve been looking for,” Scully said.
Survivalist Compound
Thursday, 5:09 P.M.
“We’re federal agents,” Mulder announced.
X “I’m going to reach for my identification.”
With agonizing slowness, he groped inside his topcoat.
Unfortunately, all the weapons remained leveled at him, if possible with even greater ire. He realized that radical survivalists probably wanted nothing to do with any government agency.
One middle-aged man with a long beard stepped forward to the fence and glowered at them. “And do federal agents not know how to read?” he said in a firm, intelligent voice. “You’ve passed dozens NO TRESPASSING signs to get here. Do you have a duly authorized search warrant?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Scully said. “We were trying to stop your dog, the black one. We’re searching for a man named Darin Kennessy. We have reason to believe he may have information on these people.” She reached inside her jacket and withdrew the photos. “A woman and her boy.”
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“If you come one step closer, you’ll be into a minefield,” the bearded man said. The other survivalists continued watching Mulder and Scully with increased suspicion. “Just stay where you are.”
Mulder couldn’t imagine that the survivalists would let their dogs run loose if there were really a minefield around the compound . . . but, then again, it wasn’t completely inconceivable either. He didn’t feel like arguing with this man.
“Who are they?” one of the women asked, also holding a high-powered rifle. “Those two people you’re looking for?” She looked at least as deadly as the men. “And why do you need to talk to Darin?”
Mulder kept his face impassive, not showing his excitement at learning they had finally tracked down the brother of David Kennessy.
“The boy is the nephew of Darin Kennessy. He desperately needs medical attention,” Scully said, raising her voice. “They have a black Labrador dog. We saw your dog and thought it might be the one we were looking for.”
The man with the beard laughed. “This is a spaniel, not a black Lab,” he said.
“What happened to the boy’s dad?” the woman asked.
“He was recently killed,” Mulder said. “The laboratory where he worked—the same place Darin worked—was destroyed in a fire. The woman and the boy disappeared. We hoped they might have come here, to be with you.”
“Why should we trust you?” the man with the beard asked. “You’re probably the people Darin warned us about.”
“Go get Darin,” the woman yelled over her shoulder; then she looked at the bearded man. “He’s the one who’s got to decide this. Besides, we have plenty of firepower to take care of these two, if there’s trouble.”
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“There won’t be any trouble,” Scully assured them. “We just need some information.”
A lean man with bushy cinnamon-red hair climbed up the underground stairs of one of the half-buried shacks. Uncertainly, he came closer, approaching the bearded man and the angry-looking woman.
“I’m Darin Kennessy, David’s brother. What is it you want?”
Shouting across the fence, Mulder and Scully briefly explained the situation, and Darin Kennessy looked deeply disturbed. “You suspected something beforehand, didn’t you—before DyMar was destroyed and your brother was killed?” Mulder asked. “You left your research many months ago and came out here . . . to hide?”
Darin became indignant. “I left my research for philosophical reasons. I thought the technology was turning in a very alarming direction, and I did not like some of the funding . . . sources my brother was using.
I wanted to separate myself from the work and the men associated with it. Cut loose entirely.”
“We’re trying to stay away from people like that,”
the man with the beard said. “We’re trying to stay away from everything, build our own life here. We want to create a protected place to live with caring neighbors, with strong families. We’re self-sufficient.
We don’t need any interference from people like you—people who wear suits and ties.”
Mulder cocked his chin. “Did you folks by any chance read the
Unabomber Manifesto
?”
Darin Kennessy scowled. “I’m as repelled by the Unabomber’s use of bomb technology as I am by the atrocities of modern technology. But not everything—
just one facet in particular. Nanotechnology.”
He waited for a beat. Mulder thought the rugged dress and homespun appearance of the man shifted subtly, so he could see the highly intelligent computer 116