(Good Vibrations -- Chapter Seven)

The Bushwhackers

10:45 A.M.

SOMEWHERE IN THE WOODS

YELLOW BARN, PENNSYLVANIA

Scully delicately spat out a small leaf that had somehow found its way into her mouth. "Are you sure she pointed over here?"

"I'm positive," came her partner's confident tone from near ground level. "Ow. Hold back this branch, would you?"

"How is this bush more suspicious than any of the other two hundred of them we've passed already?" Scully held back the offending branch, watching Mulder dig around in the dirt.

"It looked loose from a distance."

". . . Are you sure she didn't point, say, that way?"

"Yes." Mulder edged out from beneath said suspicious shrubbery. "What about that bush? I think it looks loose." He pointed to one that stood a few feet away.

"That's not loose. That's just scrawny."

"In a way, they all are." Mulder started towards it, brushing dirt off his $1 t-shirt (courtesy of the same store that had supplied their camping equipment) and his old sweatpants, both of which were looking decidedly the worse for wear. "C'mon, Scully--if you were engaged in secret military operations, where would you hide?"

"Nowhere within fifty miles of Yellow Barn, Pennsylvania," asserted Scully, walking after him.

"Yes, because in your genius you have realized that there is no point to stealing cheap motels out from under people. But this could be the shadow government we're talking about here, Scully."

"And they think that there's a point to stealing cheap motels out from under people?"

"Possibly, possibly. That's why they put the 'I'-"

"- 'in FBI,' " Scully finished. "Yes, so you've said. Repeatedly."

Mulder grasped the Other Suspicious Bush and gave it a forceful tug. "It is loose!" The bush popped out of the ground in one piece, showering dirt on his feet. "Ha!"

Scully looked dubiously at her underbrush-waving partner. "Yes. It was loose. Because it was dead."

"Right. Well, one of these has to be the right one." Mulder dropped the offending shrubbery and surveyed the surrounding woods.

"Has it occurred to you," said Scully, "that maybe the mysterious disappearing military personnel -- if they were even military; if any of them ever disappeared -- might have a better way of vanishing than pulling up loose plants and burrowing under them?"

"I just think it's a good idea to start with the basics." Mulder rapped on a tree to see if it were hollow, then sat down at its base. Scully followed suit.

"And I just think we're operating on hearsay here," she said, not unkindly. "Charlotte met those people about a year ago, had no positive identification for them, and wasn't even really sure that any of them disappeared behind her back to begin with." She spread her hands. "So, really, what do we actually know?"

Mulder shrugged. "Well, somebody was here. Whether or not they were really military, that's the name they were operating under. Don't you want to find out why?"

"Don't you want to find Lowell?"

He regarded her in surprise. "Scully, you said just yesterday that that was a wild goose chase."

She sighed. "I know. I still think it is. But I . . . well, if it comes down to either going on a wild goose chase that Skinner assigned us, or going on a wild goose chase prompted by questionable information . . . I think you know which one I'd prefer."

A moment passed, then Mulder spoke up again in a soft voice. "Scully, you saved about a hundred lives last night." He observed her slight shudder. "I'm not going to ask how you knew what to do," he continued, and saw her relax a little. "But the fact remains that if something as weird as what we saw happen last night could happen at all -- it's possible that these people could still be in danger, isn't it?"

She sighed. Let another moment pass. "Mulder. . . ."

"What do you say?"

"I say I've never heard of any fault lines around here. . . . And I say that that bush over there looks loose." A slight smile curved her lips.

Mulder squinted at said bush. "What do you know. . . ."

Sure enough, the bush -- which turned out to be made of plastic, and had a MADE IN CHINA imprint -- lifted away, taking a clean circle of dirt-covered concrete with it.

"Foxhole?" offered Scully with some irony.

He looked down into the dark depths, feeling decidedly dubious about the situation. "Got a flashlight?"

"Sadly, I do not."

Mulder cursed quietly under his breath and squatted down to inspect the exposed tunnel. "It's got a ladder built into the side."

"You first, or shall I?"

". . . I'll go." Hoping devoutly that nothing down there was about to grab his ankles, Mulder lowered himself down into the tunnel feetfirst. Scully watched with some anxiety as he clambered down the metal rungs.

"What's down there?" she called as the top of his head disappeared from view.

"I have no idea."

"Great." Scully hopped onto the ladder and began climbing down after him.

Predictably enough, it was pitch-black inside the hole. About ten feet down, Mulder hit bottom and jumped out of the way to make room for Scully. When her own feet touched down, the two directed their attentions to what little was visible in the dim light filtering through the hole above them.

"Light switch?" Mulder felt along a likely-looking bump on the wall and flicked it. A burst of brightness caused the partners to cover their eyes, and when their retinas adjusted, they saw that the light came from a row of lightbulbs strung along the top of what appeared to be an electrically outfitted mineshaft.

"You ever hear of any mining operations around here?"

"I think Billy would have mentioned it."

The partners started forwards across the gravel pathway under the mineshaft shorings. The passageway was wide enough to fit about three people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and lengthwise -- well, it stretched off into the distance, and at that point appeared to fork into two separate shafts. Their footsteps echoed as they reached the intersection.

A few feet to the right was a steel door. Mulder tried the handle and found it locked.

A few feet to the left was a steel door. Scully tried the handle and found it locked.

"Well," said Mulder, stepping back to survey the situation. "That's interesting."

"Very." Scully ran her fingers over the digital keypad mounted below the left door's handle. "I wonder what happens if we enter the wrong combination?" she mused.

"Ever seen 'Indiana Jones'?"

"Hmm."

"Hey, Scully, how fast can you run?"

"What? Why?" Scully turned around to see Mulder bending over the keypad of the other door.

"Because I'm going to try out some combinations."

Scully stepped back warily, but no deathtraps appeared to have been sprung by Mulder's actions. "If only one of the Lone Gunmen were here," she murmured.

"Frohike would kill to hear you say that," remarked Mulder, then jumped back in horror as the keypad began to beep in his face. "Holy sh-"

And the door swung open.

Recovering admirably, Mulder held the door open for the astonished Scully.

"Mulder, what on earth did you just do?"

"Judicious experimentational application of statistical probability in random sequencing patterns. . . . I just hit random keys. After you-?"

". . . Thank you." Indiana Jones he's not. Bemused, Scully stepped through the doorway, still on the lookout for deathtraps. Following her, Mulder propped the door open slightly with a rock on the off-chance that getting back out again would require the still-unknown password.

Beyond the door was another hallway, though it would have been more at home in an office building than a subterranean hideaway -- except maybe for the floor, which was the same rough gravel as the mineshaft had been. They walked cautiously along, crunching the gravel under their cheaply-shod feet and peering into the occasional open doorway. Inside were normal-looking offices -- all completely deserted.

"Something tells me the military didn't dig a huge hole in the ground just to set up extra office space," stated Mulder, and Scully pointed towards the end of the hallway. There was another metal door -- this one, thankfully, without a keypad.

Or, as it turned out, any sort of lock. The agents cautiously edged through it, halfway expecting to run into a full army regiment, complete with functioning armored tank and anti-aircraft artillery. And then they found themselves in a laboratory -- a spotless one, all stainless steel and glass.

"Either this has never been used," said Scully as she examined a rack of test tubes, "or the occupants were extremely fastidious about cleaning up after themselves." She ran her finger along a lab table. "Mulder, what on earth do you think they were testing in here?" Scully turned around and saw her partner wandering along rows of lab tables and glass cases, a look of open wonder all over his face.

"This is amazing!"

"Yes, but . . . where did they all go, and why?" Scully asked, perplexed. "The existence of this place does nothing to explain a freak earthquake, either. This isn't seismological equipment."

Mulder opened a cabinet. It held empty beakers and thin plastic tubing. "Scully, did you notice how the tops were charred off a lot of the trees in the woods?"

"No, I didn't," she responded. "Mulder, if you're going to bring up alien crash sites again. . . ."

"Then I don't need to repeat myself, do I?" Mulder shut the cabinet and turned around to face her, euphoric smile lighting up his face. "Maybe it's Area 51 all over again, Scully, maybe it's another Roswell. Say that a, a something crashes here-"

"Mulder-"

"-and somehow nobody notices except the military, and there's no way they can move the, uh, remains all the way across the country, so they bury them where nobody's going to notice. And so that gives them time to look at the remains more carefully, right?"

"I thought you said you didn't remember hearing about UFO reports in this area," said Scully carefully, sticking to the all-too-familiar subject although thrown slightly off-balance by the excited shine in his eyes.

He shrugged expansively. "So nobody was looking up in the sky that night except the Air Force. I don't know."

"And so you think the military went to all the trouble of building an underground base around a crash site?"

"Stranger things have happened."

She shook her head. "But it's deserted here. And what about the earthquake?"

Mulder held up a cautionary finger. "Not an earthquake. I'm guessing that somebody moved something a little too quickly down here, which did not do good things to the supports holding up the ground over the crash site remains."

Scully's mind was whirring. "Supposing there really was something big down in here -- the motel fell down here, too . . . there has to have been room somewhere underground for the motel to fit. And the ground closed up again perfectly, as if it had never opened to begin with. How could that happen?"

"Let's find out."

"Well, as long as we're down here . . . and nobody seems to be telling us to leave. . . ."

"But isn't it more interesting when they tell us to leave?"

"Maybe if your idea of 'interesting' involves being chased at gunpoint and then suspended from active duty without pay."

"That's interesting, too, in a way."

The two started through the maze of lab stations towards the opposite side of the room, where yet another door stood. Upon reaching it, Scully pushed it open, and the partners stepped through the doorway.

There was a wide, high-ceilinged room on the other side -- it could have been an aircraft hangar. Except that there was no aircraft sitting in the echoing expanse. . . .

. . . just a slightly squashed, but otherwise intact, pink building. Billy's Shangri-La #2.

The agents looked at one another. Then they looked up. Sure enough, there was a crack in the concrete ceiling. They looked to the right. On the far wall in the direction of where the aboveground highway probably stood was an enormous scorch mark, with a blasted-out area behind it. Something appeared to have exited the hangar-like chamber with incautious haste. Underground. Through a wall, and then through who knew how much solid ground.

"Maybe somebody mistook the gas for the brake," Mulder eventually said, breaking the reverential silence that had fallen.

Scully shook her head slowly. "Mulder . . . don't you hear that . . . ?"

"What?" He cocked his head to listen.

Yes, there did seem to be some kind of noise in the distance. Almost like. . . .

"Someone's coming," said Scully tensely, quietly; "a lot of someones."

"Either that, or another earthquake," said Mulder, and with that gut-sinking revelation they both spun around at the same time, ripping open the door behind them and taking off back through the laboratory. Colliding a few times with various bits of laboratory furniture, the agents made it to the next doorway in time to see vibrating bits of gravel begin skittering into the lab from the hangar. They wrenched the next door open, running with a controlled, silent terror through the deserted office hallway as the noise around them increased to a dull roar.

Mulder hit the last propped-open door with his full body weight, and Scully shot past him. They took the next turn at too high a speed, coughing on the edges of the dust cloud that had followed them from the hangar; both partners overbalanced and crashed to the shaking ground. Scully rebounded first, pulling Mulder back up by his waist, and they took off down the final stretch of mineshaft at full tilt.

Is it just my imagination, or is it getting louder in here? And a lot harder to breathe -- ?

In front of them, a lightbulb wobbled and dropped like an overripe pear from its perch on the shoring and shattered on the gravel. The agents dodged it -- Scully swerving around the obstacle, Mulder opting to leap straight over it-- and heard the crystalline sounds of a series of bulbs further behind them detach and break into shards. Some bulbs shattered even before hitting the ground, splintering in the middle of the rapidly approaching cloud of thick air and stone.

And then they found themselves swarming up the ladder, and at some point Scully tripped and wound up in Mulder's arms, but that was all right because now they were out, they were out, they were free in the air-

and they were running again because the ground wouldn't hold still; dodging the falling trees and detachable bushes, and civilization was somewhere this way-

"Ah!" Mulder skidded to avoid running into the path of a toppling fir tree. Scully plowed into his back at a dead run, and they both stumbled into a tangled heap onto the ground, nearly blacking out from hyperventilation.

At some point, the noise stopped. Some time after that, Mulder realized that he might be crushing Scully, and rolled himself off of her warm crumpled body.

"Scully -- ?"

"Uhmmm." She dragged herself up onto her elbows, staring at him through confused blue eyes. She blinked, managing to focus on his face. "We got out?"

He managed one weak nod in affirmation. "We got out."

"Oh, good," she wheezed, and flopped over onto her back. Mulder followed suit, and they lay there like that on the ground for a while. Staring up at the bright sky and the trees that remained to frame it.

"They are, too, burnt," Mulder said eventually, once he'd gotten his breath back.

"Really?" Scully squinted dreamily up at the heavens. A few more minutes elapsed. "Mulder. . . ."

"Scully?"

"Never take me into the woods again. . . ."

"Not a problem."

"Can we leave now?"

"I hope so . . ." Mulder sat partway up, gingerly feeling his battered ribs. "Anything broken?"

"From our escaping being buried alive, or from your landing on me like a sack of boulders? I don't know." Scully experimentally tested her joints. "I don't think so."

With a groan, Mulder hoisted himself up onto his knees, using the fallen fir as leverage. He stood on mildly shaky legs. Sack of boulders, huh? His clothes were definitely in bad condition, and somewhere along the way they had both lost their sandals. Ran straight out of them, probably, thought Mulder as Scully hauled herself upright.

"Let's not do this ever again," she proposed.

"Which part? Getting stuck in a collapsing tunnel, or uncovering military secrets?"

"I'm willing to take a hiatus from both if you get me out of here."

"Will do."

A brief silence.

"I take it that landing on you like a sack of boulders is still up for an encore?"

"Don't push your luck, or I'll make sure you break something next time."

"Is that a promise?"

And so the bruised partners limped their way towards civilization, leaning on one another for support.