3) The Hitchhiker's Guide to Wyoming
OUTSKIRTS OF HERD CROSSING COUNTY, WYOMING
1:09 A.M.
A car idled by the side of a dark road. The two occupants were silent.
Then Mulder slammed his hands violently against the wheel. "Dammit, Skinner!" he hollered.
"Yes, it was obnoxious of him to send us out here this late. No, it's not his fault that you misread the directions," snapped Scully, staring out the passenger side window of the rental car. "We can't be too far away, and the land is so flat we should probably be able to spot the chemical plant from some distance. If it were lighter out," she added after some consideration.
"Not this late at night. The bastard." Mulder shone his flashlight at the map. "That was a left turn we just took, right?"
"We didn't take any turn. We went straight at the crossroads."
"Before that." Mulder grimaced at the map, then messily re-folded it. "Scully, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"I hope not."
Mulder shot her a look. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Don't worry about it."
Mulder thought for a moment. "Look, Scully, our being lost on this road might actually help us out here."
"What, you think we're going to see a tractor-trailer conveniently labeled 'Herd Crossing's Own Toxic Hair Dye, Drain Cleaner, and Spermicide, Limited' heading down the road so we'll be able to follow it into town?"
"Look, earlier this morning--all right, yesterday morning--when Skinner called us into his office, he said it was a case that would require us to be more low-profile than usual. In other words, showing up in the dead of night and flashing around our badges is probably not going to help us here." Mulder watched Scully unbuckle her seatbelt, kick off her heels, and draw her petite legs up underneath herself. "We masquerade as lost tourists. We drive until we find some sign of civilization, which will hopefully help us find our way to Cowpatch Cross-"
"Herd Crossing."
"-where we can get motel rooms and be able to ride out the 'lost tourist' excuse long enough to figure out what's going on in town."
"That sounds almost as if it would work."
"Why so doubtful?"
"Because we're out of gas." Scully tilted her head at the dashboard readouts.
The car died.
There was silence along the long, dark highway. For a moment.
"DAMMIT, SKINNER!"
"That's not going to help!" Scully yelled, slamming her feet back onto the car floor. "We wait until morning, we hitchhike, that's all there is to it. If anything, it just adds verisimilitude to our act. Who would get stranded on an investigation job?"
Besides incompetent FBI agents? A tense Mulder shrugged and hissed air out from between his teeth, shaking his head slowly.
Another beat passed. "For what it's worth, I feel the same way as you do right now," Scully offered more softly.
Mulder's head jerked up. "What? Oh, right. Right, of course. So. Backseat?"
"What?"
"I said, backseat?"
Scully shook her head. He definitely didn't mean what she thought he meant, right? "Mulder, I don't-"
"I should get it. I'm taller." Mulder took off his seatbelt and slid between his and Scully's seats into the backseat of the rental car. "Hope you don't mind my sleeping on top of your suitcase."
"Not at all," said Scully, realization dawning. "Go right ahead." She curled up in a ball on her seat and shut her eyes. It was going to be a long night, but at least it wasn't cold inside the car. Well, not very.
She tried really hard to remember that.
Scully could hear Mulder shifting around in the back, presumably trying to get comfortable. She sighed, trying to stay quiet but feeling acutely uncomfortable. And not just because of the armrest digging into her back.
What on earth could possess an entire town to become more paranoid than the Lone Gunmen for months on end? And how did it cause two notably sane federal agents to slip completely out of character and turn tail to run? It probably was the water after all, Scully thought. If Hemingway and Brown had been disturbed enough to take off from--what was it? Herders' Cross, or something?--she wouldn't put it beyond them to have been in such a state that they accidentally took a water sample from the wrong source under the assumption that it would contain whatever the affected town's water supply did. Or--no, surely they wouldn't purposely falsify evidence. No one would be stupid enough to try passing off local D.C. water as a Wyoming sample. Would they? Scully sighed again, frustrated that Hemingway and Brown had acted so unprofessionally.
Speaking of unprofessional, were those snores emanating from Special Agent Fox Mulder's backseat? Scully twisted around to see the back of the car. Sure enough, he was sprawled across the entire back seat of the car, and he still didn't fit. He was right about one thing, she thought wryly, if he tried sleeping up front, he'd be too cramped to try driving by the time it got light out. If we could even drive at all, with the car in this condition. She squinted at him in the dark. His mouth was open slightly, and it was probably only a matter of time until he began to drool. Scully smiled, then abruptly realized what had been bothering her--she couldn't sleep with her contacts in, and of course her contact solution was in the suitcase that Mulder was currently using as a pillow. She gritted her teeth. To wake him up, or to destroy her eyesight?
Maybe there was a way to get at the contacts without disturbing him. Scully got out of the front passenger seat, shivering, and made her way--incurring a minimum of bumping-into-things damage--to the backseat. Mulder's suitcase had fallen to the floor: Surely it would be easy enough to put it under his head while removing her own. Scully stealthily lifted the suitcase and put her hand on top of her own case. Carefully, she slid her suitcase out from under Mulder's unconscious head as she substituted his case. "Yes," she whispered, retreating to her rapidly-cooling passenger seat. Unlatching her case, Scully quickly replaced her contacts into their saline solution. While she was at it, she dragged out a few of her shirts to drape over herself as blankets--after consideration, she took out some extras. Closing her suitcase, Scully leaned over into the backseat just long enough to to efficiently tuck some of her shirts around Mulder, who had to have been as cold as she was. Satisfied, she snuggled back into her own seat. And fell asleep.
Even before his partner's breathing evened out, Mulder's eyes were wide open and staring at the ceiling of their rental car. She expected him to be able to sleep now?
He shifted further into the lumpy seat cushion. The shirts smelled like Scully.
THE NEXT MORNING
Scully stirred. Her everything ached.
"Urgh." She creaked one eye open, flailing an arm for her bedside table and instead colliding with a cold hard dashboard. With a shock, Scully realized where she was and sat bolt upright--and regretted it as soon as her back twisted in pain. "Mulder?" She turned around to see the backseat devoid of both Mulder and her shirts, though his suitcase was still there. Where'd he go? she thought, panicky.
Thump.
Did that just come from the roof? Scully abruptly quit breathing and reached silently for her gun on the floor. If there had been a sunroof, she'd be able to tell what was on top of the car, but as it was she'd have to risk going out the door if she couldn't figure out--oh. "Mulder?" she called upwards.
"Scully?" Thump.
"Mulder, what are you doing on the roof?" Scully holstered her gun, put her shoes back on, and left the car. Sure enough, Mulder was standing on the roof of the car, waving around something long and bright white in his hand like a signal flag or semaphore. She squinted, realizing that she'd left both glasses and contacts in the car.
"Scully." Mulder jumped off the roof onto the pavement as Scully retrieved her contacts from her suitcase and turned back around.
"My shirts!" Scully grabbed for the 'signal flag,' which had evidently been constructed out of two tied-together white blouses.
"Yeah, I'm signaling for help," Mulder explained. "I'm not sure why I woke up with these on top of me-"
Scully blinked, remembering her nocturnal activities. She almost suspected something from the look on Mulder's face, but deciding that their current situation was a little more important than what he did or didn't remember, she ignored it. She fidgeted with with the shirts, untying their crude knot and tossing them back into the car.
"-but it occurred to me that a passing car further down the road might see them if I got up high enough. So far, nobody's stopped, which is either because they're too far away to notice me or because they don't care." Mulder exhaled loudly and slouched against the car. "Looks like it's just you an' me."
Hands on hips, Scully surveyed the road. Wyoming was flatter than she'd thought it would be--maybe this was just one abnormally flat stretch. She'd heard stories about huge forests. Still, the lack of scenery might make it easier for passing motorists to spot the unlucky agents. There was snow piled around, but it was melting and obviously a few days old, and the sky wasn't cloudy enough to warrant fear of another snowstorm any time soon.
"Mulder, do you see that?"
"See what?" Mulder followed his partner's gesture to the horizon. "Yeah, Scully, it's a blob."
"It's worth a try."
Mulder squinted past the acreage of snow and mud. "It could be mountains."
"It could be Herd Pass."
"Herd Crossing. And it looks like mountains."
"It's not mountains, it's too localized. There's no sign of any other tectonic activity-"
"But it could be."
Scully shot Mulder a look, but he was grinning back at her. She felt herself color slightly, mentally damning her traitorous fair skin. She shivered. "Mulder, this is probably not the greatest time to be fooling around."
"Oh, but we've got all the time in this world, Dana."
"You know that's not what I meant."
"What's not what you meant?" Mulder was already rummaging in the backseat of the car again. "Yeah, I know what you mean-"
A brief stomach flip.
"-I think I just saw smoke coming out from it, too-"
Okay, so that's not what he was talking about after all, thought Scully, trying to keep her mind in one place. Shut up. Not the time. Shut up and figure out how to get out of here. She meticulously folded her mistreated blouses and put them back into her suitcase.
"-so it's either the chemical factory or a volcano, which is kind of unlikely in Wisconsin-"
"Wyoming."
"-and I don't see anyone else coming along this road, so-"
"I do," Scully interjected again. Mulder popped back out of the backseat to follow her pointing finger a second time: Sure enough, there was a tractor-trailer approaching from the far distance of the road--the road that seemed to lead towards the chemical factory. Damn, if I'd kept waving those shirts a little longer, I could've pretended I saw it first myself, he thought, clambering back up onto the car roof, pulling off his jacket and waving it.
"Mulder, he'll see us anyway!" Scully yelled up to him, even as she windmilled her own arms in an attempt to attract the driver of the truck's attention.
Whether it was due to the jacket-waving, the arm-waving, or the fact that a car seemed to be broken down by the side of the road, the tractor-trailer did indeed slow down and stop by the now-frantic agents. The trucker rolled down his window and stuck his head out.
"Got a breakdown?" he called.
"Yeah, uh--oh shit-" Mulder half-jumped, half-fell off the car roof in an effort to reach the truck. Scully was right behind him as he ran up to the cab.
"Yeah, we, ah, weren't keeping an eye on the gas tank and so if you have any extra that would be a lifesaver, sir," Scully started.
"Even if you just give us a lift to the next town, we'd find some way to pay you back," Mulder continued.
The trucker sucked his teeth and shook his head slowly. "Sorry, but I can't fit you both in with me. I only got room for one other person here."
The two agents looked at one another, implicit in their faces that neither one was going to abandon the other with a broken-down rental car in the middle of Wyoming. They turned back to the trucker.
"Uh, about that extra gas," Mulder started.
"Yeah, sure. Hang on, I got some in the back." The trucker unbuckled himself and jumped down from the cab of the truck. The three headed around to the back of the trailer; the driver unlocked the door and hauled out a large can of gasoline from where it was perched on top of cargo boxes. "This is all I know for sure I can spare right now. It oughta be enough to get you to the next gas station," he advised, pointing in the direction the agents had driven from the night before.
"I can't thank you enough, sir," said Scully as Mulder headed back towards the rental car with the can, "but we were actually heading in the other direction. Do you know how far it is to the next gas station or rest stop if we keep going that way?"
The driver froze in the middle of re-closing the back of his trailer. Scully's stomach sank again as the man slowly turned around. She glimpsed a rictus of horror on his face before it smoothed into a more pleasant, if still somewhat disturbing and obviously forced, expression of concern. "Look, lady, you really don't want to go that way."
"Ah, sorry, is there something I should know?" Obviously there was something he didn't want her to know, or he wouldn't have switched his expression so quickly, she thought. The truck driver's lips tightened.
A few minutes later, Mulder capped the gas can and stepped back out from around the other side of the car. "Hey, thanks again for the-" he stopped. The truck was gone. Scully was standing in the middle of the road, looking pissed off. Uh-oh. "Uh, Scully?" He walked over to her. "What the hell just happened there?"
Scully was staring into the distance, where the truck was rapidly disappearing in a haze of tossed-up mud and snow remnants. "Well, Mulder, it seems like that town certainly does have a local reputation," she finally said. "All he would tell me before taking off was that it was dangerous, and that none of the trucks in his company stop there anymore. And that it's going to be impossible to catch a ride there, since everybody this end of the state border avoids the place like the plague. So it's doubly lucky he was nice enough to give us the gas." She turned to him, a small terse smile on her lips. "On the plus side, at least we know that we were on the right road after all."
11 A.M.
The car ride had been mostly quiet, interspersed with a few speculations on the best way to go about infiltrating Herd Crossing. Scully thought it would be a good idea to rent hotel rooms in the next town over from Herd Crossing, so as to minimize inadvertently following in Hemingway and Brown's respective erroneous steps--there would be less of a chance of their accidentally drinking contaminated water or attracting unwanted attention. However, as Mulder pointed out, if what they'd seen so far was any judge, the next town over from Herd Crossing could very well be the city where their plane had landed. Or in Canada. Scully agreed to this point, though not without some reluctance.
"I'm just having some trouble understanding what could have spooked two seasoned FBI agents so badly that they ran back to D.C. as quickly as they could," she finally confessed as they drove along.
"We've seen some pretty strange things ourselves," pointed out Mulder. "I'll bet we've seen and done stuff those two aren't even able to have nightmares about--they haven't been working on the X-Files for the past few years."
"Yes, but almost all of our cases are completely unrelated. It's hard to predict whether or not anything we've learned in one case will actually be applicable in another." There was an uncomfortable silence. "It also worries me that we didn't get the chance to speak with Hemingway and Brown before we left. Their reports are almost completely incoherent, and speaking with them might have helped us figure out how to deal with whatever it was they met up with."
Mulder's face was set. "Maybe it wasn't that our schedules clashed, or even that Skinner wanted it all cleared up as soon as possible."
Scully turned to face him. "What do you mean? Are you suggesting that we were deliberately sent in here without all the information we needed?"
"You said it, not me." Mulder's face didn't change. "You're right, we have almost no idea what we're walking into. The only thing that's for sure is that there's something in that town that scares the shit out of anyone who steps into it, and someone didn't allow an opportunity for us to figure out how to arm ourselves against it."
The silence that widened was even more uncomfortable.
"One thing about our infiltrating a town of paranoiacs," Scully eventually said, "is that you're going to fit right in."
Mulder turned to her incredulously, swerving the car slightly. "Scully, you just said it yourself! Skinner didn't even give us a chance to talk to the agents who were on the case before we were assigned to it. How screwed-up is that?"
"Mulder, from the amount of information I got out of that trucker--or, rather, the lack thereof--I think it's fairly safe to say that whatever's in the town is also fairly hard to describe," Scully countered. "I didn't mean that we're walking into some conspiracy trap. It's more likely that Skinner just wants to deal with whatever the problem is in this town as quickly as possible so that no one else has to diefrom it."
"I know people have been dying. I just don't see the merits of rushing in as blind as the Light Brigade."
Scully shrugged and stared out her window. Mulder was obviously in a bad mood, and she couldn't blame him. "I think we're arguing the same side here," she muttered.
Mulder let out a deep breath. "Well, whatever the hell is going on, we'll find out soon enough. It looks like we're getting pretty close to the town."
His partner peered out at the approaching mass. "Yeah. I think I see a neon sign."
"Motel, with any luck."
It was probably too much to hope for that they could find a place to stay that wasn't a dive, Scully thought. She was right.
Author's Endnotes
Ooh, they're getting closer. Finally. I apologize for taking three entire chapters just to get the dynamic duo to the outskirts of the town they're supposed to be investigating--obviously, brevity has never been one of my strong points, and "brevity is the soul of wit" . . . .
