4) Herd Crossing: A G-Man Did It
HERD CROSSING MOTEL
11:21 A.M.
The first thing that struck them in Herd Crossing was the stench. And "struck" really is the appropriate word here--it was almost like some kind of physical presence, Mulder thought, sleeve protectively up against his nose, that sucker-punched you right in the face and traveled straight down to your stomach from there. Where it roiled unpleasantly, and didn't go away even after you entered a building. Scully looked even more grossed-out than he was, probably because her apartment was generally in a higher state of cleanliness than was his. Whatever the reason, something was rotten in Herd Crossing. And it smelled far, far worse than a rat--even one that had died of severe trauma to the digestive system.
"Uh," said Mulder to the lady inside the motel lobby, trying to get his bearings. "Uh, we'd like to rent a room here for a while."
"Two rooms," gagged Scully.
"Two rooms," agreed Mulder, suppressing the urge to throw up.
The old lady behind the counter emitted a sort of sneering giggle. Bad marital problems, eh? she thought to herself, then noticed the absence of wedding rings on the agents' left hands. Real bad marital problems. Even the rings are gone.
Why in hell doesn't this old bat seem to smell anything? thought Mulder incredulously. Is she actually used to this? Is it some kind of regular phenomenon around here? Or is she just too old to have a functioning olfactory sense?
The old lady slid two keys across the counter. "Money up front," she lisped.
Scully fumbled in her purse for a moment, trying not to breathe, and slid her credit card across the counter. If she waited for Mulder to pay, he'd probably start hedging about the price of the rooms, and God knew she didn't want to hang around here any longer than was absolutely necessary. Maybe the smell will be better in our rooms. She signed the bottom of the receipt, keeping a copy for expenses reimbursement.
"Rooms are right down that hallway and to your left." The lady pointed.
"Excellent, thank you." Scully grabbed a key and started down the hallway at a fast clip. Mulder took the remaining key and started after her, then turned back to the counter, eyes watering.
"Uh, ma'am?" he called urgently.
"Yeah?"
"Don't you, uh, smell something?"
"No."
"Oh. Huh. Thanks." Mulder spun back around and headed after Scully.
"I'm just about the only one, though," he heard her call after him as he followed his partner into her room at a run.
Scully slammed the door behind Mulder, then flung her suitcase open on her ratty bed and began rifling through it with abandon.
"This is disgusting. No wonder the others all went nuts." Mulder violently spat a sunflower seed into the trash can near the door, then slumped down next to it. "If I had to live here, I'd be psychotic too."
"Mulder, as awful as this may be, I find it unlikely that it alone was capable of causing several dozen locals to commit suicide."
"I don't know about that." Mulder rolled his head to the side to get a better look at the tight-lipped Scully, who had located a small bottle of perfume and was spraying it around the room like a ward. "It smells like not only did the herd actually cross, it also experienced severe to lethal indigestion on the way through. Scully, that old lady said she didn't notice a thing."
"Yes, I heard her. She also mentioned that most everyone else did--that probably includes the other locals, too. She must be an anomaly." Scully sat down on her bed, mollified by the effects of the perfume, and tugged off her shoes again.
"And she's not exhibiting any signs of paranoia. The two have to be linked." Mulder ate another sunflower seed. "What's causing that horrible stink, anyway? Toxic emissions from the chemical plant? Jesus, you could reach out and squeeze industrial byproduct crap out of the air."
"Frankly, I don't see what else is capable of producing such a smell. We didn't notice a thing until we got close enough to this town to read the sign on the motel." Scully flopped down on the bed. "Of course, you realize the smell could be entirely unrelated to the reason why the town is going insane."
"I don't know about that either. Look, either way it has to be important that the first thing we found when we drove into Herd Crossing, a town reputed to hold only psychos, was a lucid woman. What were the odds of that?"
"I'd say the first thing we found was the smell, not the woman, but since that's probably not relevant to begin with I'll have to concede the point." Scully set her alarm clock on the bedside table. "Someone had to call the police first. Could it have been her?" She reached for the case file again as Mulder continued pensively staring at the ceiling. "No, these records say that the first call to higher authorities came from a younger married couple near the center of town, who said they'd noticed their neighbors acting funny. They called again a few hours later, saying they were now in fear of their own lives. A few similar cases started trickling in, then the number of reports exploded--then it dropped again, and flatlined."
"At what point did the state police come in?"
"Well, that rise and fall in the number of concerned citizens all occurred within a few days, which was also apparently the time it took for the Wyoming state police to decide that something was really out of the ordinary." Scully sighed and dropped the file again.
"Yeah, then they went nuts, called us, and we know what happened next. Look, let's go talk to the old lady. She has to know something."
BACK IN THE MOTEL LOBBY
"No. I don't get out much."
"You haven't noticed anything strange at all?" Mulder was incredulous.
"Nope, why? You Feds or something?" The old lady laughed in his face.
Scully coughed. "Excuse him, ma'am." Mulder shot her a dirty look, which she studiously ignored as she continued. "We just heard some strange things about this town as we were heading along the road, and we thought it would be interesting to find out what was going on."
"Why you going this way to begin with? Some kind of honeymoon tour of the northern U.S. of A.?" the old lady demanded, popping a peppermint candy into her mouth.
Mulder and Scully looked at each other. "You could say that," Scully said carefully. It wouldn't be anything approaching the truth, but you could certainly say it if you really wanted to, she thought silently.
"That's one damn boring honeymoon." The woman turned down the volume on her desktop radio and moved her chair closer to the couch the two agents were occupying in the lobby. "No wonder you wanted to check up on the first piece of interesting news you heard. So, just what is goin' on out there?"
I still can't believe she hasn't heard a thing or gone outside in almost three months. Mulder rubbed his temples. Even though he'd stooped to the level of spraying Scully's perfume on his own shoulders, the smell of Herd Crossing was causing his eyes to water. "We heard that all the townspeople were, uh, acting funny. Something about the water, maybe?"
"Hah, I knew it!" shouted the old lady triumphantly, slamming a fist down onto the counter. "They finally done it!"
"Knew what?" "Who did what?" Mulder and Scully leaned forward expectantly.
The old lady leaned forwards, too, eyes conspiratorially squinted. "Them damn G-men. They finally gone and poisoned our water supply. I knew I was right when I installed that emergency bunker in my basement."
Dead silence from the couch currently occupied by G-people.
"I got me a decade's worth of essential supplies of every kind in my very own fallout shelter, which is why I ain't left the motel in six months." The old lady self-importantly clacked her dentures and sat back in her chair. "Sure, I noticed I was getting fewer customers, but they're always scarce in the winter anyway."
Said silence continued. Scully's face appeared to be frozen in incredulity, whereas Mulder just looked slumped and disgusted by this point.
The old lady turned her gaze on Scully and tilted her head at Mulder. "So, what's he like in bed?"
"I can't believe what a waste of time that was." Mulder paced the length of his room. Through the thin wall, he could hear Scully spraying more perfume into the air.
"I know that, Mulder."
He spread his hands in disbelief. "She was interrogating us!"
"I know that, Mulder."
"And then she turned out to be a delusional nut job anyway! So much for the 'last sane person in town' act!"
"I know that, too, Mulder."
He let his hands drop. "I can't believe some of the lies you told her about me. That was just uncalled for."
"I'm good at it."
"I know that, Scully." Mulder flopped spread-eagled down onto his bed, staring at the ceiling. "Shit, what if she's right? You heard anything about federal plans to poison this place?"
"If I had, would I have agreed to come here and investigate why the citizenry is self-destructing?" There was a clinking sound.
"Raiding the minibar so soon, Scully?"
"Not quite. I had the presence of mind to bring a field testing kit with me, and I'm just trying to see if the water does indeed contain LSD or something similar."
"Wow, you're good." Mulder hoisted himself up onto his elbows. "Did I ever tell you that you're adorable in goggles?"
"That, I don't know, Mulder, and I think I could live without ever hearing it." More clinking. "But I probably wouldn't have thought of bringing the kit if you hadn't kept me waiting so long at my apartment. I only remembered it at the last minute."
"See, I am good for something."
"A lot of things. You can help me decipher these results, for one."
"Sure thing." Mulder dragged himself off his bed, shedding his overcoat in the process, and headed over to Scully's room. She was hunched over her table, staring at small slips of paper that were laid out in front of her, along with a few test tubes.
"The water at first glance seems to be fine," she said, looking up at him with wide eyes through the goggles. "But there's something else that's strange here."
What do you know, I was right about the goggles, thought Mulder. "Like what?" He took a seat next to her.
"Well, as I said, the results for the water seem to be fine--at first." Scully took off her goggles, leaving red marks on her face from the elastic. She set down the goggles on the table in front of her and picked up one of the slips of paper. "But it seems as if the test paper's being contaminated by the air before it has a chance to finish the curing process."
"Something in the air. I knew it," said Mulder tersely. "I still think the chemical factory's emissions have something to do with it. It's the only thing we can think of that would cause this godforsaken disgusting smell, for one-" Scully handed him a nose and mouth-covering mask, the kind she used for autopsies, strapping one on herself. Mulder looked at it as if it were the last life preserver on a sinking ship. "Scully, you're my angel." He put it on. "I could just hug you."
"Don't knock over the water samples," joked Scully through her mask. "What were you saying about the air?"
"Well, since it seems fairly certain that the test results for the water are initially normal and that the air is the only thing causing the results to go screwy, I guess we know that the water's probably fine. At least in terms of mind-altering chemicals, though it can't hurt to take an extra sample back to D.C. just in case there's something else in there that the field kit doesn't pick up on."
Scully held up a sealed flask of water. "Already thought of that."
"Great. So, as I was saying, the air's the killer." Mulder sat back in his chair, hands on his knees. "It's obviously driving the locals crazy. The receptionist must still be in the early stages because she hardly ever leaves the motel and would therefore get less exposure to the emissions. Her own developing paranoias--though she didn't really seem to be visibly afraid so much as suspicious--have obviously not reached the lethal stages yet."
Scully shrugged. "All right, well, it's a good sign in terms of our own safety that the water doesn't seem to be the culprit. Still, it means we have to go through a lot more trouble finding out exactly what in the air is causing people to turn against their own minds. I still don't buy your theory about the virus, though."
"Why not?"
"Well, besides what we've already been over in terms of industrial chemicals being unable to affect viruses in that way--I'm just hoping that a fear virus can't exist because, if it is in this town, we've probably been exposed to it by now," she said reluctantly.
Mulder grimaced, not that this was visible through his mask. "Yeah. But Hemingway's field report states that he and Agent Brown began feeling edgy less than half an hour after entering the town."
"It's strange that they didn't mention the smell. Edginess, but not the smell." Scully glanced at her watch and sighed. "We've been here for about an hour and fifteen minutes. Personally, the only reason I felt sick is because of the smell, and since I can't notice it as much as before due to the mask and perfume, I'm feeling a lot better."
"If the emissions have a cumulative effect . . . ?" mused Mulder. "That wouldn't account for how quickly the other agents succumbed. Or why the old lady said that most people, which seems to include the locals, notice the smell. Which they wouldn't if it were something you could get used to, since the factory's been here for decades." He rubbed his forehead again. "There has to be something, some other factor, we don't know about yet."
"Well, we only just got here, after all," pointed out Scully, leaning back in her chair. "We can't expect to know everything about the town right away. We should probably go out and talk to whomever is still lucid further into the town."
"Probably whomever's still in the factory, too." Mulder stood up. "All right, let's go. But I'm keeping the mask on."
Author's Endnotes
No, the Big Mystery of Cow Herd--uh, Herd Crossing--is not just that it stinks to high Heaven. Though that is a significant thing, of course. I wouldn't torture poor Mulder and Scully with that horrible stench without a good reason. Though there may be someone else in the town who would . . . ooh, cliffhanger . . . .