THE X-FILES: REHMS ROAD
CHAPTER TWO
HIGHWAY
41
PESHTIGO,
WISCONSIN
11:34
AM
ONE
WEEK LATER
"Where the hell are we?" Agent Mulder
asked the crumpled highway map he tried relentlessly to fold it.
Agent Scully, who was beside him at the
wheel of a flashy rental car, gave him a dirty look.
"You tell me." She scoffed. "You've got
the map."
"Well all I can really tell is that we're
still in the state of Wisconsin.
Scully suddenly burst out laughing. "God,
this road goes on forever with endless fields on both sides. Is it possible
we've crossed into area 51 or something?"
"This is nothing like New Mexico." Mulder
jeered at Scully's lame joke. "No, this part of the country is just populated
with paranoid cows."
This got him another dirty look. He continued
to fold the map in a hurried fashion, but no mater how hard he tried, the map
continued to hinder.
Mulder looked up at the road in time to
see a passing sign that read: PESHTIGO POPULATION 3748.
"Hey look Scully." Mulder said, pointed to
the old sign. "We're now arriving in Peshtėgo."
"I think you're supposed to pronounce it Peshtigo,
Mulder."
"Peshtigo, as in—-"
"As in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Now where does
that crazy old woman live?"
A few minutes later, the FBI agents found
themselves at a small one-story house off the main highway, Ms. Carson's
Residence. The house was dark inside, but through a dirty window on the garage,
an old Buick was visible.
Mulder and Scully advanced towards the
front porch, but before Mulder had a chance to knock, Sarah Carson opened it.
Taken aback, Mulder introduced himself.
"Ma'm, I'm special agent Fox Mulder with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
He held up his badge. "This is my partner, Agent Dana Scully. Are you Ms.
Carson?"
"Yes, I am. Please, come in. And you can
call me Sarah." She replied gaily, leading them into the dark house. The
curtains were drawn, giving little light to distinguish objects in the room.
The atmosphere was thick and hazy with the chocking odor of cigarette smoke.
The outlines of an old couch and two unmatching armchairs structured the room.
"The police told me to expect you folks.
They said you're from D.C., is that right?"
"That's right ma'm." Scully said, entering
the dark room with the caution of a blind cat. A bouquet of roses tottered as
she bumped into a low standing coffee as she found her way to the furthest
armchair.
Sarah smiled, and seemed unaware that the
agents were having in the darkness. "Please, call me Sarah." She paused before
lighting a cigarette. "Oh, do you mind if I smoke?"
"Go ahead." Mulder said, taking a seat in
the other armchair.
"I always ask people that because
sometimes the smoke bothers them. I guess it's a just habit. Now you folks
wanted to ask me some questions about my accident."
"Yeah, uh, we've heard a lot about it,"
Mulder said, trying to recall what the deputy had told him. But all he could
remember was the article in the USA TODAY. "It's gotten a lot of media
attention."
"Yes. It's been in the news everywhere."
Ms. Carson said, inhaling her cigarette. The match illuminated the room with
its brief, tiny glow.
"The
local police were eager to get us up here, but they haven't quite told us
anything about your account that sounded anything similar to the papers."
Mulder said, still adjusting to the low light.
"Oh
those damned reporters changed my story so many times that I don't know what to
believe anymore. The police think I told them reporters what I saw for
attention, but they just see me as some lonely old lady whose fallen off her rocker."
Sarah ranted. "But I'm not stupid. I know what my eyes saw, and it wasn't a deer!
I may have glasses, but I still know a man when I see one."
Scully
pursed her lips and Mulder apologized. "I'm sorry, uh, Sarah, I didn't mean to
offend you—."
"I
know you didn't young man. You're just doing your job."
"Right."
Mulder said a bit confused. "Now let me see if I can get this straight. The
police insist this thing you saw last week was nothing more than a deer, but
you told the papers that it was a, a UFO, right?
Sarah
inhaled. "I told them I didn't know what it was, but I thought it was a deer
when I first hit it. When I got out of my car, I could swear it was a man.
He was dressed in a black jacket, and jeans." She twisted and smoldered her
cigarette in an ashtray.
"Why
don't you start from the top, Sarah." Scully said. "Try to remember that night,
but start before you got out of your car.
Carson
lit another cigarette and took a long puff. "O.K., well, I was driving home one
night, last week, when I saw something run out into the road and hit my car. It
scared me, and I panicked and—-" She took another puff. "And so I swerved to
miss it, but of course I didn't, so I stopped the car and got out. Oh, I was so
frightened that I had killed the poor thing. When I got out, I touched him to
see if he was still alive." Sarah stashed the second cigarette into the ashtray
crudely, and put her hand over he mouth, visually disturbed. And no one seemed
to believe her.
Nobody spoke for a long minute.
"What happened after that?" Scully asked
finally.
"I know what I saw happened, but I don't
know why, or how." She took a deep breath as if to brace for impact all the
nervous tension and emotions that the horrible experience was burdening her
with. She hoped, in that brief moment she had, that these FBI agents would see
this the way she did, and put an end to her nightmare.
"There was a flash of horribly bright
light and— I don't remember much after that. I closed my eyes because of the
light, and when I opened them, the body was gone. After that, I drove home and
called the police.
"The local police say you claimed to have
seen the man disappear into thin air."
"They told you that?"
"That's
about all they told us."
Sarah shook her head. "Yes, that's sort of
what happened. But I'm not sure anymore. It happened so fast.
Mulder and Scully glanced at each other.
"The only thing I can tell you for certain
is that he wasn't from this world. Now, I don't believe in UFO's and that
Speilburgen Encounters riff raff and those stupid magazines in the checkout
aisles of the supermarket. I only know what I saw; I believe that I saw
something strange to this world.
"Why do you say that?" Scully asked.
"I could see that he had a weird face,
like a birth defect or something. And weird black eyes."
To Sarah, Mulder still seemed skeptical
that she was telling the truth. "You said it was just lying in the road?" He
asked her.
"Yes. It was so still that I thought it
was dead."
"Are you sure you're car made contact with
the… man?"
"Do you wanna see the dent and the broken
light? I haven't gotten it fixed yet." Sarah began to sound irritated and
impatient. Their interrogation on her was going nowhere, and the FBI agents
were too stiff to exhibit anything more than an unbiased viewpoint.
Would they believe her, or were they just
like the others?
"That's O.K., we don't need to see the
vehicle right now." Mulder assured her. "Does anyone ever talk about seeing
aliens in the area?"
"Well I don't know about aliens, but my
brother, he saw a UFO down by North point! It had big flashing lights…"
"Thank you for cooperating, Miss Carson."
Scully cut her off, convinced that there was nothing unusual about the case.
She and Mulder got up to leave. But Mulder
wasn't in as much of a hurry to leave. As he got up to leave, Sarah stopped
him.
"Agent Mulder? Do you believe that I saw
the alien? When the police wrote a report for my accident, they concluded that
I hit a deer, but they still haven't found proof."
Mulder
turned looked at the old woman and thought about the question for a moment
before answering.
Do
they continue investigating the case? Are there really aliens crossing the
Wisconsin back roads? And what will Mulder tell Sarah?
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more reviews I get, the faster the answers will arrive!
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