She didn't believe him, of course.
When it was over they went back to the diner to wait. Scully wanted to put herself on the outside of a glass of ice water and Mulder wanted to see a newscast. At the bar he asked for an envelope. While Scully cleaned the booth with a napkin, he tore a page from the back of the self-help book and wrote directions to the place where he had left Winn's car. His handwriting was spindly and cramped, almost illegible. Not good. On the front of the envelope he scrawled c/o Det. Peterson. He put the page and the keys inside and asked one of the waitresses to make sure it got to the Raleigh Police Department. She took the letter and held it like it was stuffed with bad news.
Mulder sat in the two-person booth across from Scully and dropped his head on his folded arms. He was looking over her shoulder at the big TV in the corner. It was on CNN. Something about celebrities. He said, "Have you ever been to the state university here?"
She looked at him like he was at the bottom of a microscope. "Mulder, I barely know where we are."
"NC State," he clarified. "Cause I have. I went to see your friend Chandler Wickham's offices yesterday." He waited. She didn't say who's Wickham. So Mulder was right about that. "You know what he did for a living?"
"He was a physicist."
"Yeah," he said, yawning. "But not like you."
She chuffed. "Nobody's a physicist like me."
"Well, that's true." He scuffed the floor with his shoe. "Scully, I got a story for you."
He laid it out for her, sometimes trailing off for a moment when the story got ahead of him, then picking up again when she pushed him. She got that look on her face somewhere around Jiang's leaf. She drew back slightly and began to tap her fingers. When he had brought them up to the present she squeezed his knuckles, for just a second, like an apology.
He sighed. "You think I'm crazy."
She put her chin on her hand. "I think you're carrying around a lot of guilt about that Raleigh detective for no reason."
"Scully—"
"Mulder. The genetic science you're talking about is decades away from being a reality. And even if it was possible, that's only the first hurdle. Gene therapy? Designer viruses?" She spread her hands in bafflement.
"Come on," he said. "Something happened here."
"Something." She leaned forward to look in his eyes. "You know I don't share this need that you have to tie it all up. I accept that there are things that we don't or can't understand. But that doesn't mean they're beyond comprehension." She held up her cup. "Take a scoop of water from the ocean. There's no fish in it. That doesn't mean fish don't exist." She put the cup down. "So we don't have the whole picture. That doesn't mean we can fill up the blank spaces with speculation and fantasy."
"But if it was real."
Her smile was more like a grimace.
Mulder held up his hand in surrender. "I'm just saying. If it was real. We can keep working. We can—we can come back with more equipment. Quantico. The CDC." He hesitated. "Or we can go to the media."
A public exposé. The last bullet in the gun.
It was last bullet in the gun for a reason, which Scully never hesitated to remind him. She said, "And tell them what? That an army of genetically engineered killers are prowling the streets of Lawdon, North Carolina? That we need to quarantine a major metropolitan area because of a disease that was eradicated almost a hundred years ago? You know what they'd say. You know what they would do to us. To the X-Files."
He bit his lip. Sometimes she made him feel that his entire belief system was built of eggshell—not necessarily false, but thin and brittle.
At least she was gentle about it. She took a breath and softened her tone. "But if it is true then it's beyond me, and beyond you. It's already out there." She inclined her head at the window. "And it will prove itself. Today or tomorrow or a week from now. In the most public way possible." She lifted a shoulder, a gesture that indicated not carelessness, but resignation. "There either is no ballgame, or it's already over. I think you know that. Or else all of these things that you've done would be insanely reckless and dangerous."
"Yeah," said Mulder. "You're right. That doesn't sound like me at all."
She glanced at the waitresses. Twenty years of eking a meager living out of a dying town. "I wouldn't want to spend the apocalypse here, Mulder." She turned around and drew her feet up, leaning against the wall and settling in to the tiny booth. "And I would not want that for you."
She let her eyes go half-lidded. He saw how the stress of the last eighteen hours weighed on her.
"I'm tired," she pleaded. "Let's go home."
#
"Go home."
That was what Mulder had told the soldiers, after three five-minute clinical interviews.
The kid with the rifle was called Henry Clayton, and he was a nineteen-year-old private second class from Birmingham, Alabama. Back home, he'd lived in a three-bedroom apartment with his mother and two sisters. College ambitions had put him in the Army. The extra pay and a sense of adventure had brought him to the DARPA project. The older one with the knife was Eli Brinkman, but Alvarez had to introduce him, because he wasn't very good at conversation anymore. The full-sleeve tattoos on his arms proclaimed him to be a proud Marine, with a juvie record, who loved a girl named Julia, five years sober last November. A guy who had turned his life around about six years ago and was never going back.
Mulder felt that was likely. Brinkman had eyes like plastic buttons and trouble answering basic questions.
They were calm, untroubled, incurious, obedient men. But Mulder felt troubled and rebellious enough for all three of them. Behind the eyes of Clayton, Brinkman and Alvarez, Mulder saw the faces of the kind of monsters who thought they could order people off a menu: punch up the reflexes, please, double the obedience and hold the morality. One of those faces had belonged to Scully's college buddy, Wickham, who was cutting a less sympathetic figure with Mulder every minute.
Scientists, statesmen and generals never stopped trying to make people better. The inevitable was human wreckage on a scale that twisted everyone it touched. It turned witnesses into victims and victims into wraiths. There was no real justice here. Once again there were bloody fingerprints all over everything, but the doers exceeded both Mulder's reach and his grasp. All he ever got to see was the casualty list.
His father had been involved in projects like this.
There was a little beaten-up coffee table in front of the couch. He told them, "Leave your weapons here and go home. Do it now." He cleared his throat and glanced at Scully for a moment, feeling exposed. "Go to your families. Live your lives. Get help."
He felt Scully's eyes on him. She opened her mouth to say something and Mulder closed his hand on her wrist. Wait. The men broke down the weapons and put them on a table in the middle of the garage. One of them was Scully's neat little Sig Sauer. She watched it like it was a prize. She was ready to leap at them.
Wait.
He held his breath. The last one was Brinkman. He put his knife on the table.
"It's all right," said Mulder. "Don't pick it up again."
They did it. They laid their weapons down and left in a neat little line, closing the door behind them.
#
As soon as the latch clicked, Scully turned and inspected the bruise on the side of his head. She flinched. Then she was up and at 'em, assembling her gun in three quick moves. "Wait here. I'll be right back." She chambered a round.
He crossed his ankles on the table and paged through her notes. "Let 'em go."
"Have you lost your mind? Those men are dangerous and you've sent them back to their mothers and their girlfriends. For God's sake, Mulder, they could have children."
"It was the right thing to do," he said.
She scoffed. "For who? You?"
"The military sends them home." He held up her book and pointed at her own notes. Poss. Gulf War Syndrome. He raised his eyebrows.
She rolled her eyes. "That is not the same thing."
He pretended to read, not looking up at her, and spoke distantly. "Isn't it?"
"Oh please."
"Did they hurt you?" Mulder took out the little plastic burner phone. He thought of a number he'd memorized years ago, before he met Scully, when he was making some wise and prudent alliances with his father's friends in Congress. It was the kind of call you could only make once, and you'd better have a very good reason. He'd never planned to actually use it.
She folded her arms. "I think they just didn't think of it."
He stared at her over the edge of the book. "But they didn't. Hurt you."
"They frightened me. They committed federal crimes."
"OK."
"And they hurt you."
"Me? Nah. I tripped on the sidewalk."
She put one hand on her hip and lifted the other. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
He declined to answer. "Scully, there are two things I want right now: to see a newscast and tell you what happened. And in three minutes, that's what I'm going to do." He raised a hand to silence her. "Hold on."
"You look like you've been hit by a car," she informed him.
"You look great," he said. "I really missed you."
This time the phone only rang once.
"Red Line Industries," said a prim receptionist. "How may I direct your call?"
There was no Red Line Industries. There was a phone in a cloakroom, attended at all hours. Before the Berlin Wall came down, there were lots of those phones. One in the office of every committee chair. Now there were only two or three. The elaborate infrastructure of apocalypse prevention was slowly being consumed by the peace dividend. He cleared his throat. "This is Fox Mulder from the FBI. I'd like to leave an urgent message for Senator Claypool."
"F…B…I…" the receptionist murmured. "Regarding what issue, sir?"
"I want to know what provisions she's going to make for the military victims of the Waddington Superfund incident." A sentence that said, in the convoluted language of government: I know all about it and I'm willing to make a deal.
"Waddington… Superfund…"
"I have some suggestions," said Mulder. "Assuming the world doesn't end tomorrow, she needs return my call." He rattled off the number of his basement office.
#
And they waited.
The streetlight outside the diner was flickering, making a light clinking noise that they could hear from the booth. The rain that had threatened earlier was now coming down in sheets. An old amiable silence had settled between them, given form and structure by their relationship; in a partnership like theirs even silence was a conversation. Looking at her he wondered what it would feel like to lose it all like Alvarez or Brinkman. Not just the insight and instincts that made him a good agent—sharpened and organized and clarified, it had to be said, by a deep and gnawing anxiety that never quite left him—but all of the little surprises and tensions of life. He was keenly aware of every little sound and movement around him, of the solidity of things. What would it be like to feel it all go dull, and watch its meaning leak away? There was no peace in the idea. To lose your life was a risk, acceptable and even obligatory under the right circumstances.
To lose your humanity didn't bear consideration.
He was so focused on the moment that he heard the VW before it rolled around the corner. He lifted his head. "It's our cab," he told Scully.
She snapped out of a reverie. "Hmm?"
The VW van rolled around the corner, parked underneath the streetlight and idled. Scully recognized it and tried to hide a strained smile.
"Come on," he said. "Let's go."
Mulder paid, and they left the diner and hopped into the middle seat of the van. It was damp and smelled of burning electronics. The back of the van was crammed with radio and electronic equipment, some of it running. On the bench seat in front of them, Byers was choosing between identical handheld radios. In the front passenger seat, Langley was fighting with a road map and a flashlight. He turned the map upside down and frowned. "No, really," he told Frohike. "I'm not kidding. Where are we?"
Scully gave Mulder a skeptical look as she buckled her seat belt.
Frohike was at the wheel, one hand on the shifter. He glanced at them through the rear-view mirror. "I think we broke a land speed record."
"Thanks for coming," said Mulder.
Langley muttered, "Whatever. This thing redlines at sixty miles an hour."
Byers sighed. "It's a figure of speech, Ringo." He fiddled with a TALK button, filling the van with a sharp burst of static. "Ouch. Sorry."
"Everything's a figure of speech," Langley sighed.
Byers furrowed his brow. "You know—that's kind of true."
Langley chuckled darkly. "Kind of."
Frohike said, "So, do you want to go back to the city or do you have a place set up for us here?"
Mulder didn't answer. Scully chose for them. "The city. D.C."
Frohike said, "You know that's like five hours. It'll be dawn."
"What?" said Mulder. "You've got plans?"
Frohike shrugged and put the van in gear.
It sighed, and creaked, and shuddered, and went.
#
Mulder tried to talk with Scully about her part in the mystery: Wickham's death, her captivity, what she had seen and done and thought about. At first he thought her long silences and single-word responses were evidence of deeper trauma than he had first guessed. Then he realized she was going easy on him. A lively conversation would hold his attention. Deprived of it, he drifted, his thoughts winding down and down.
If it ever really did come down to the end of the world, Scully would be fine. She certainly wouldn't lack for things to do. All his skills were made for civilization. He wasn't even a very good shot. He'd have to learn how to roll bandages or something.
God. His head felt like an oyster with a pearl in it.
It tested the terms of their arrangement, but he rested his head on her shoulder. When she didn't push him off, he closed his eyes. He heard his own metronome heartbeat in his ears. "What do we do now, Scully?"
"Shh."
He fell asleep wondering what the world would look like in the morning.