4
When dawn broke in New York City, pedestrians started filing into the sidewalks and automobiles started congesting the highways. The city's homeless lifted their faces to sky grateful to be alive, and the pulse of the city began pumping once more, building to a pitch in what was supposed to be one of the greatest cities in the world. However, for every little great city, there was the lowest possible denominator trying to destroy it. They were the ones who had become disposable human beings: dishonest cretins who refused to live in society by showing their distaste for it by stealing and robbing whatever they could take. As the storeowner of the jewelry shop on Third Avenue commenced with opening his business early for a new client, he was hustled in by street thugs and pinned to the floor in shock. Young punks barely fifteen had decided to toss their lives into the sewer by brandishing stolen guns, shattering glass cabinets and taking anything they could steal. They didn't want the money for anything worthwhile like food or clothes; they wanted to throw away their lives and futures for the disgusting habit of inhaling poisonous powders into their bodies in order to reach out closer to death itself. The whole degenerating spectacle barely took two minutes and even with the loud shrill of the store alarm screaming, the two rejects of human life had what they wanted and were racing back for the darkness of the criminal underground to ignore their respective consciences and reject their natural human instincts for propriety. Before they could reach the condemned and deserted tenement they had forced themselves to dwell within away from normal people, they were knocked to their feet and sent sprawling to the sidewalk by the sight of a large round shield painted in red, white and blue. One boy landed hard breaking his jaw and his left wrist. The other boy tripped and slid into the street into the street. Ricocheting off a mailbox, the shield returned to the hand of a figure disguising himself from the public in a long overcoat. Secreting it away under his coat, he waited for his similarly disguised traveling companion to return to him after having stringing up the two felons for the authorities before traveling up the block and anonymously returning the stolen jewelry to the store.
In Moonville, Ohio, the State Police was on a fifty-mile stretch of Highway 85 looking for James Lionel Bartwell, a known pedophile and drug-user who had promised to kill his girlfriend for sending him to prison. He had escaped with three other men, but they were now recovered and Bartwell was still on the run. Helicopters checked every local shed and barn, hounds dragged officers along train tracks and water boats dragged and searched the nearby Cuyahoga River. Bartwell was currently on everyone's wish list, and they wanted him back in prison where he had worked so hard to get himself sent. The sky in the area was growing gray, and the rain would likely make the manhunt harder. In the midst of stopping cars, the state police heard the hum of jet engines and cocked their heads to the sky. A large bug-shaped craft had emerged from out of the horizon coming toward them and stopped thirty feet above their heads, its jet engines warping and distorting the air around it for an accurate look. Amidst the downdraft of the strange craft, a hatch opened and a form was tossed out. Trussed up by rope and restraints, the body of James Lionel Bartwell had been dumped off as human trash back to the authorities, and two men believing themselves Booster Gold and the Blue Beetle once again began listening to radio transmissions for something to keep them busy.
Gil Grissom hadn't been keeping up with these tabloid stories of people running around helping the police, catching criminals or saving mankind from themselves. His life was bugs and the secrets they could tell him through entomology to solve crimes. He strode through the Las Vegas CSI offices with a bit of a swagger carrying and mugging over with the glee of a child on Christmas day over his specimen in his glass beaker. Among his team of intellectuals and science geeks, his favorite colleague was probably Sara Sidle. She probably knew him better than anyone else and rumor was they had feelings for each other.
"What do you have?" Sara looked up with the curiosity of a young girl.
"Blattus domesticatus." Grissom held up his tiny subject. "Other wise known as the common cockroach, but there's nothing really common about them. I call this subject Irving because I found him in that house on Irving which had exploded."
"So he survived a gas explosion to become the newest member of your collection." Sara observed.
"Right between my fetal pig and mosquito larvae." Grissom beamed with restrained childhood excitement. "By the way, there's a body in a dumpster on Decatur. Take Greg with you. He needs the experience; feel free to let him get dirty."
"Right…" Sara looked over her shoulder. "Greg…"
"What?" Greg had wanted to get fieldwork, but he also felt as if he was going through hazing as a new CSI. "I just left the sewers with Nick after collecting body parts."
"This body is in one piece…" Grissom told him.
"Right…" Greg looked to Sara. She was musing a bit of a grin at his quandary. Knowing he had wanted this, he just took a deep breath, turned round in his damp and squishing shoes and decided to willingly accompany her on the examination of the body in the dumpster, but he didn't get very far. After just a few feet past a corner, he felt a hand on his arm grab and drag him into the trace lab. His eyes looked up to Fox Mulder standing over him. His hair was partially combed, his clothes rumpled as if he had slept in them and his eyes slightly lucid as if he had not had any sleep in over seven days.
"I want you to tell me what that is." Mulder slammed down a vial of a white, opaque substance.
"Looks like ejaculation."
"Maybe, maybe not…" Mulder looked at Greg. "You won't know till you check."
"Excuse me…" Grissom turned into the room taking offense at the treatment of his people. "You don't have the authority to come in here and take hostage of my employees."
"Fox Mulder, FBI…" Mulder flashed his Government ID into Grissom's face as proof he could. "As a duly authorized investigative agent of the Federal Government, I have the right to commandeer any local or state crime lab in the course of an investigation and right now, this sample is in the hands of your employee."
"Grissom…" Greg looked to his superior. Still standing in the hallway, Sara shifted her weight to her left hip and folded her arms before her chest. Looking from her to Greg, Grissom made an uncommitted look and cleared his throat.
"Process it, Greg…" He spoke. "Then join Sara in the field. Agent, a word?" He turned to Mulder.
Greg turned to process the substance and Sara departed wandered away with a few thoughts for herself. Mulder rolled his eyes gratingly annoyed at the bearded CSI head and trailed him into a small and darkened room adorned with insect posters and shelves of biological specimens. Standing in the doorway between light and shadow, he watched from a safe position as Gil Grissom maneuvered around his desk, seated himself with austere but hesitant authority and tilted his head up to remove and clean his glasses.
"So what case is this now?" Gil looked up with mild annoyance. "Still following around people in Halloween costumes?"
"My partner vanished last night from a sealed room." Mulder spoke still checking out the room. "She had just been given a new assignment and was supposed to catch a flight this morning, but she never gave me the details. Her belongings were still in the room, barred against myself which suggests to me she was taken through another non-conventional means. That substance was coated on her room phone and the railing of her balcony. Sending away for analysis would have taken too long and your lab is among the best in the country."
"How do you think this relates to your case?"
"I don't have enough to venture a guess right now." Mulder lifted his head to Grissom with a distant glare from his eyes. "The abduction of an agent in the field takes priority over everything else."
"My lab is your lab…" Grissom tried to be accommodating, but Mulder was too engrossed in his thought that he was unaware he had turned away coldly from their talk. For some reason, he was recalling the movie where Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder had set forth into the sky for a flying ballet above the skyline of Metropolis. Not figuring Scully to fall into a childlike infatuation for a hero of godlike attributes, he instead wondered if she could have departed under her own power for other reasons, but what would they be? Skinner told her to head for Toronto. She wouldn't pass on an order to pursue something else. What was he missing here? Something had happened, but what? Something powerful had occurred here, but what?
"Scully…" Mulder stood a few feet from the fingerprints lab in the open CSI corridor. "Where are you?"
Another state, another jurisdiction, another crime by more disposal human beings… two brothers and their cousin had been selling illegal substances undercover for seven years, but when they shot and murdered Michael Burns, a concerned father for being brave enough to drive them from out of a Denver neighborhood, they had passed the line of no return. Javier Martinez told his cousins the police had a warrant for their arrest, and after shooting and killing one more person, they had stolen and recklessly sped away in a dark red SUV racing away at speeds of 90 miles an hour down Interstate 70. Jorge Cruz was doing the driving as his brother Carlos fired at police through the skylight with a stolen automatic weapon and Javier firing from out the back. Two police cars chasing them had turned into five and then seven more with two state police vehicles and a police chopper following their run from justice. Motorists were being run off the road, bullets were cracking bulletproof glass and high-velocity shells were littering the interstate behind three youths with conjoined destinies in the electric chair. Still haplessly convinced that he should stay out of prison, Jorge gunned the engine of his stolen vehicle plowing through slow drivers and demolishing the way through and around commuters in his path. Carlos dived down inside after being shot from the police chopper. Despite a bullet in his left lung, Carlos gritted his teeth, checked his weapon and tried to fight off unconsciousness and human conscience to kill those whose mission was to serve and protect. Javier took a shot to the head from the chopper this time. Watching a police cruiser attempting a pit maneuver, Jorge drove the highway patrol officer off the roof proving he had no recourse against criminal acts. His eyes turned to the road next and the presence before him. The blonde beauty in the flapping red cape and shapely costume braced herself and reached to his speeding vehicle…
… and flipped it over her head!!!!
It sounded as if thunder cracked and the sky had opened up as ten tons of mechanical American engineering flipped up front over end and then crashed down to asphalt and earth, tumbling and throwing around the lawless contents within it. Jorge's head hit the windshield and his ribs cracked against the steering wheel. Carlos was flung hard into the road and skidded and slid over loose rocks and road debris with his head flailing from his shoulders. The cousin was tossed around within the vehicle for a few minutes; it seemed as if it had all occurred in slow motion. The SUV landed upside down, its weight crushing down on the roof. Barely a second behind, police cars made a wall of defense around the flipped truck and the murderous drug-traffickers trying to crawl from it. Police and law enforcement grabbed their guns, revolvers and rifles and hastened upon the strange woman before them. Her long blonde hair flitted around her head as she realized what was happening. She turned briefly revealing the proud red letter emblazoned against yellow on her bust and stepped back from orders directed at her. At one time, she had carried a gun herself, she had a position in law enforcement or something like it and had even worked among their colleagues. Instead of allowing herself to be taken against her will, the mind of Dana Scully tossed back her now long flaxen locks, held her chest out as she looked to the sky and quickly ascended into it. Her arms didn't rise above her head to maneuver her powerful shapely form until she had reached fifty feet up into the air. Police and law officers followed her trajectory with the tips of their guns before looking for survivors in the crashed SUV.
"Agent?"
Mulder snapped awake from a chair in the CSI break room. A now warm Pepsi before him and two-thirds of his second Hostess cake before him, he tried focusing his eyes back on Greg Sanders with a file on the residue from Scully's hotel room.
"Agent?" Greg had processed the substance. "The soluble is a mixture of polyester synthetics, dacron, human epithelials, processed wool, human hair and a host of trace elements from iron to xenon but the gamut of it… the majority of is water with an electro-magnetic signature. My best guess, it's some sort of waste or sludge… but it has no discernible waste material in it. It's as if it was collected from a combination of sources in contact with each other in a water solution except that it is bonded at a molecular level."
"It's ectoplasm." Mulder perused the report.
"Ectoplasm…" Greg rolled his eyes thinking. "You mean like, ghosts and séances…"
"Yeah…" Mulder yawned and turned his head trying to wake or rouse himself into full consciousness. "You did good. Go join your colleague in the field."
"Yes sir…" Greg stepped back ready to join Sara.
"Now, where am I going to get a parapsychologist that will give me the time of day…" Mulder shrunk into his seat once more and moodily sighed tiredly toward the ceiling.