5:57 p.m.
In his ears, a snuffling.
Mulder peeled open his eyes and looked into a giant mouth. Also, teeth. From the mouth came a thick pink tongue, which slapped him across the face. Awareness dawned. He was lying on his back on a hard wooden bench. He dropped his feet to the sidewalk, sat up, and regretted it. Everything around him swam. His stomach churned. His head throbbed. He groaned, rested his forearms on his knees, buried his face in his hands, and made a heroic effort not to throw up. He felt like he had an icicle jammed in the right side of his head.
A high-pitched voice said, "Hey, man, you don't look so hot."
Mulder turned—grimacing—and squinted at a pretty teenager of about fifteen. Her hair was a mess of dreadlocks, one half dyed neon pink, the other bright blue. Her eyes were green. She wore a worn-out winter coat that was too large for her, and she was tethered an elderly Rottweiler by a green leash. They both looked hungry and neglected. After the cold strangeness of the zombies at the Superfund site, she seemed warm and real. She cocked her head at him.
Still gripping his throbbing temples, he glanced up at the sign looming over his head. BUS STOP. They'd dumped him in bustling downtown Lawdon. He blinked a few times and looked out at the horizon. He could just see the Superfund site in the distance, lit up with orange lights. He was on the wrong end of twilight. He'd been out cold for something like three and a half hours.
The girl raised an eyebrow. "Did you get mugged?"
"Unh." Mulder cleared his throat.
She tucked a pink dreadlock behind her ear. She scuffed the sidewalk with a neon-green sneaker. "You should watch out. This is a high-crime area. That's why I got Bruno here. I mean, all he'll do is slobber you to death, but people don't know that."
High-crime area. Mulder startled and began patting his pockets. He found his gun tucked safely in its holster. His badge and wallet had been crammed into in one pants pocket, the keys to Winn's BMW in the other. Okay. He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. Okay. The whole right side of his face rang with pain, like he'd been hit with a two-by-four. Both his lip and his nose were still trickling blood, and he'd left a pretty impressive pool of it underneath the bench.
The girl watched him with increasing alarm. "Oh my God. You need a doctor."
"It's fine." He wiped his face with his sleeve and tried to wave her off. "I work for the FBI."
"Yeah, sure." The girl broke out a tender, indulgent smile. "And I'm the First Lady. Look, I don't, like, hang out with old guys. But you really shouldn't be in this neighborhood." She took a wad of money from one of her coat pockets. Crumpled, damp ones, a fistful of quarters. She turned his hand over and folded his fingers over the cash. Her hand was freezing.
For a moment, Mulder just stared. "I don't need money."
The girl pointed. "Pay phone." She pointed again. "Diner. Call somebody, get something to eat, go home. And maybe lay off the booze or the smack or whatever. It's not doing anything for you."
His savior shook her head and trotted off.
#
Mulder shook his head, looked down at the little pile of cash, then staggered over to the pay phone and fed it a quarter. He pressed his head against the cool metal case and dialed the number for the Whispering Pines Motor Court.
It rang eleven times. Then: "Identify yourself."
"It's me," Mulder said.
On the other end, Frohike announced, "It's Mulder."
"Your flu," said Mulder. "If I had it, I'd have it by now, right?"
"I don't know," said Frohike. "I guess."
Mulder closed his eyes. "What's going on in Raleigh?"
"What do you mean?"
"Any kind of official activity? CDC?"
"No, it's been quiet. Even the police radio." Frohike chuffed. "Even the ham radio."
"OK," said Mulder. "I'm in the place. Lowdown. Lawdon."
"Did you find her?" Frohike probed.
"No."
"I'm telling you. She was there."
Mulder nodded. "She's here now. I'm this close."
"What are you gonna do?"
"Well." Mulder cleared his throat. He turned around and leaned against the phone and looked up at the darkening sky. "I'm going to buy a cup of coffee and drink it. Then I'm going to call Skinner. It's getting beyond me." Frohike didn't say anything about that, which was kind of him, since the whole situation had gotten beyond Mulder sometime between Wickham's death and Winn's. "We're going to have to run it like a kidnapping. Door-to-door." He looked both ways down the street. Tactically, it was a disaster. Every second building was abandoned. The infrastructure hadn't been maintained at all. It was ten times worse than a gunfight in a parking garage. The FBI would have to invade the place. "This town sucks."
"What do you want us to do?"
"Are the burner phones still on?"
"Hold on." Frohike put down the phone.
Silence. Some distant clicking.
Langley picked up the line. "No, they got wise when they hit Lawdon city limits."
"Did they buy the phones in the city?" Mulder asked. "Or here?"
Langley passed the phone to Byers. "Raleigh."
"OK," said Mulder. "I'm going to call you back in one hour."
Frohike again. "Mulder—"
"Yeah."
He hesitated. "We're worried. About both of you."
"Don't be," Mulder said. "I'm great. Aces."
Before Frohike could say anything else, Mulder hung up.
#
There were only a few people in the diner, and they worked there: a waitress, a cashier and a fry cook. They were all middle-aged and looked like they'd been squeezing a thin living out of this place for the last twenty years. They stared at him like they were afraid he was going to stick them up. He held out his money, asked for a glass of ice water, a cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie.
The waitress said, "You want your pie heated up?"
"Sure."
She brought him the ice water first, and he soaked a handful of paper napkins in it and pressed them to his face. He showed her his badge, which settled her down a bit and reduced the likelihood that he would be arrested by city cops and MPs in the same day. That would have been a record, even for Mulder.
"What do you know about the chemical factory?" Mulder said.
The name on the waitress's tag was: JANINE. "Nobody goes down there anymore. They say you can get cancer."
"But somebody still works there."
Janine shrugged.
"Who do you think it is?" Mulder asked.
"Superfund guys? The EPA? The National Guard? Feds—like you. They come down here sometimes. Nobody's going to say no to business." She placed a small plate in front of him, with a small triangle of pie. "Even that business. But they keep to themselves. Nobody really wants to talk about it. The town blames them for what happened."
"Do you?"
Janine shrugged again. "Somebody broke the law. Somebody got caught. Is that the law's fault? I don't know." She put a cup of coffee in front of him, and a little dish with plastic cups of creamer in it, and a container of sugar. "My real opinion is there's too much trouble in the world without going to look for it."
That was a life philosophy Mulder had never seriously considered before. He smiled, in a tense, social way, took his plate and settled in at a booth. The pie was hot and sweet and it was the first thing he'd eaten since breakfast yesterday morning. It occupied his full attention.
He didn't look up until a shadow fell across his plate. A man had taken the seat across from him. He was a young, trim Hispanic man, neatly and casually dressed, but with a hard expression. He was in very good health, considering that they were sitting in the middle of an environmental and moral disaster. Mulder put down his fork.
"You're him," said the man. "Aren't you? You came. You really came."
His eyes were like mirrors. No depth at all.
#
He said his name was Brian Alvarez, and that he was AWOL from the U.S. Navy. Five days ago, three of them had fled the Superfund site, with the support and assistance of the project's head nuclear scientist, Chandler Wickham. They didn't know where to go or what to do, only that to remain would be a disaster beyond imagining.
They had volunteered for the project out of patriotism, or a love of adventure, or even for the hazard pay. It wasn't a trick. They were young men, but they were soldiers and had gone into it with their eyes wide open. They had been told that they were joining a top-secret Special Forces unit. He knew that the group was involved in secret tests, tests that had a real risk to life and limb. It was a volunteer military and they had signed up to go to war. How was this any different?
They soon found out. Not long after the camp had been established, a strange and severe illness had begun to spread among the troops. You got delirious and crazy. You felt certain you were going to die. Some of the guys had. How many? A lot. And the men who came through it were… different. Better, in some ways.
Worse, in others.
In the throes of his illness, Alvarez had prayed to God, and he had survived. "But it's like… like the world turned black-and-white, Agent Mulder." He held his thumb and index finger a few inches apart. "Or like on the TV, when they do the letterboxes. That's what happened to us." He had never again felt completely whole. His former faith no longer provided him any comfort or answers. He didn't feel afraid of anything. He stopped having dreams—and nightmares. "It's not right, sir," said Alvarez. "We can't think anymore. We can't even think. It's messed up."
Not everyone felt like they had lost something, but Wickham helped the few survivors who did.
Once they had snuck off the base, they had gone into hiding in Lawdon, but planning the next step was difficult. It was easy to work together, to take quick and decisive action. If someone had told them to attack a building, they would have known exactly how to handle it. But they had lost the imagination and insight necessary to weigh options and make a plan. The could plot out the pros and cons of certain things, but had no way of measuring the value. Nothing scared them and nothing excited them.
They had depended greatly on Chandler Wickham. Wickham had never been infected. He had continued working at the Superfund site, looking for other ways to get men out of the project. It was Wickham who had come up with Scully's name. An old college friend. A medical doctor who worked special cases for the FBI. Someone who could be counted on to understand what had happened and deal with the issue discreetly. Someone with political connections.
Mulder imagined what Wickham must have been going through. He had created these monsters and now he had to care for them, in a very real and grinding way. Protect them from threats, finance their escape, provide leadership and moral guidance. Like a parent. Wickham would never be able to tell anyone about it, and these men's lives depended entirely on his judgement. The burden must have been extraordinary.
"And then," said Alvarez, "he caught it."
Maybe it was a lab accident, or maybe the other men had found him out and infected him deliberately. The moment he began to feel ill, Wickham would have known what was coming. He would have known that he only had a few hours left. Maybe a day. One day of moral insight. One day of humanity. Calling Scully was a wise way to spend that time.
But Scully had arrived too late.
The Superfund men had known that Wickham was unlikely to survive the infection. They also knew that the risk of exposure—not just of the project, but of their own escape—was great. They were very good, tactically. They had been thoroughly trained on the need for operational security. This was exactly the kind of problem their new minds had been designed to deal with. They had followed Wickham, in order to clean up the mess, like good soldiers.
And how did good soldiers handle a mess? Mulder felt a cold fog fill him up. He tried not to be angry. To lash out at these men was wrong. They had done what they were designed to do. They were the weapons, not the triggermen.
Toy soldiers.
"Alvarez," he said, struggling to rise above his emotions.
"Yessir," said the young man.
"Is Agent Scully alive?"
Alvarez blinked. "Huh?"
Under the table, Mulder made a fist. "Did you hurt her?"
"Oh." He gave Mulder a meaningless, strange, empty smile. "Nosir. Not a bit."
Mulder was not entirely sure he had heard that correctly.
"She's with us, sir," said Alvarez. "Just around the corner."
"'With us?' What the hell does that mean?"
"Chandler was our officer," said Alvarez. "He made the strategic decisions. And he's dead."
In a flash, Mulder understood. "No way."
Alvarez shrugged.
"No way," Mulder repeated.
Alvarez leaned forward. "We've been waiting for someone to come and tell us what we're supposed to do."
He looked at Mulder with childlike trust.