Apex.
May 19, 2010.
Glasgow, Kentucky.
He woke with the feeling that he had been jogging through the night. Someone gave him a gentle shake, drawing him out of a blindly colorful dream and back into the dark cave. Everyone else was up already, though still tucked into their sleeping bags as they munched on a variety of snack foods. Gene was the one who had shaken him. His sleeping bag was much closer than it had been when Mulder had fallen asleep. He was watching him expectantly.
"Is it morning?" Mulder wondered.
Gene nodded, handing him half a protein bar. "Yeah. Want some?"
He nodded, wolfing it down before he had a chance to taste it. He drunk most of his water bottle. Gene was watching him cautiously.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
"Tired," Mulder admitted, rubbing his neck and looking up. "I had weird dreams. It feels like I was running around all night. Is it wet in here? I feel like I got dripped on."
"You don't remember getting up?"
He frowned. "What? No."
"You got up and you were using your tablet last night, right over there," Gene motioned to the other wall. "You said your head hurt."
Mulder stared at the spot, but he could draw no memory of it. He only remembered the dream about the river, and finding the passage in the journal. He had gone to sleep after that, hadn't he? It was disturbing to think he had been doing something without knowing.
"I must have been dreaming."
His companion remained cautious about it, insisting that he had seriously injured himself the day before, but Mulder convinced him to let it go. He felt fine now, only a little tired from his restless dreams. Whatever had come over him had passed already.
Soon they were moving again, forming a train with Mulder and Gene in the middle – the others were not amused by their lagging the day before. Only a few hours passed before they had to stop, because Mulder chanced a look back at Gene and the scientist had frozen, horrified, in his tracks. Mulder had a small laceration on his forehead, sending a stream of blood down his face. Russell hastily repaired it, muttering about specializing in animals, not people, while Marshall tried to teach him to duck.
"I think, at this point, I'm just marking my territory," Mulder said.
"I think you should just step over the debris on the floor instead of walking on top of it," Marshall responded. "Give those long legs some use."
He smirked. "Where's the fun in that?"
"Please try to avoid head-butting anything else," Helena said. "You look ridiculous. Your wife is going to think we bullied you."
"I'm not doing it on purpose."
Marshall was more amused than anything, patting Mulder on the back like he was trying to wean him off of his training wheels. "How about you join me in the front? Just mimic me and you should avoid most of the hanging crap." He looked over the others. "We're about to enter the area those people went missing from. Everybody stick close, hands on backpacks and hug the wall on the left side. Soon there won't be a right side."
His words were foreboding. Mulder followed his every movement, starting to feel claustrophobic as the walls leaned in on them. Suddenly the tunnel was not a tunnel, but a narrow passageway where they could barely put two feet side-by-side. The right side of the cave dropped away and the sound of running water became overwhelming. He felt it splashing up on his legs, but he didn't dare look down. He walked as straight as he could, taking baby penguin steps on the jagged ground.
"We're almost to the other side," Marshall said over the roar of the water. "Keep it up."
When the cavern finally widened out, Mulder released the breath he had been holding. His damp legs felt like they were set in ice. He could finally let go of the ranger's backpack, easing the sharp pain in his shoulders. He joined the others against a wall.
"So why didn't we take an easier route?" he asked.
"You know, the cave-in," Marshall responded simply.
"There was a cave-in?"
"It's why they shut the cave down for tourists," Gene cut in. "One of the easier routes is under tons of rubble now. It happened around the same time Sal went missing."
"We heard it happen," Marshall said, continuing the story. "We were down here, looking for one of those missing tourists, when the entrance came down. We were headed back to help when Sal disappeared. We were in the middle of a conversation. It was the damndest thing."
"Are cave-ins unusual?" Mulder said.
"Well, yeah," Marshall answered. "Tours are done in the most stable parts of the caves. The last cave-in was in the twenties. Those rocks have been standing for thousands of years and would probably stay that way for thousands more."
"So why didn't they?"
"Erosion is what they're saying."
"What are you saying?"
"It was the creature," Gene cut in, looking hard at Mulder. He still had the same liveliness he'd had when they'd met, but he seemed to have the same hidden exhaustion in his face that Mulder had. "It must have crashed into one of the pillars. The agent shot at it, right?"
"I heard gunshots, yeah," Marshall responded. "It happened just like the others, Gene. He was gone all of the sudden, and we started looking for him, calling out for him, and suddenly we could hear him screaming, and that soft moaning sound. He must have unloaded his whole clip after that, but we never found the gun, or any sign of him."
"That rules out the clumsy tourist theory," Mulder said.
"That could still be the case," Helena asserted.
"Oh yeah? Did he think his gun was gonna turn into a grappling hook?"
She smirked. "He could have been alerting them to his location."
"His location," Marshall huffed.
"What? He was a trained ranger. If he thought he was going to end up somewhere difficult to locate he would've used whatever he could to make noise."
"Look, you seem like a smart person," the ranger said, leaning over to look her in the eye, "And I respect your logic, I really do, but those people didn't slip and fall and misplace themselves." He shot a glance at Russell, "And it wasn't a cougar, or a bear." He looked at Gene. "I think his theory is the best we've got so far. So maybe it got shot and caused the cave-in."
"Maybe it knew we would have to come another way," Mulder added.
He was all over that idea. Perhaps this creature – if it was some sort of creature – was much smarter than they gave it credit for. If it had survived for thousands of years, as Gene proposed, it would have sharp survival skills. It had avoided humans, and preyed upon them. Perhaps it was picking up on human behavior. Perhaps it was channeling them, guiding them like cattle to the slaughter.
Marshall looked at him incredulously. "What do you mean, it knew?"
"It's just a theory I'm working on, forget about it." He popped a sunflower seed into his mouth and motioned ahead. "So we going or what?"
Marshall looked at him for a little while before he finally moved on. He seemed to want to question him further, but he let it go. In this part of the cave there was space to spread out, and much like in the forest they split into groups and walked in a cluster, adopting a slow, steady pace.
He ended up walking beside Gene again, using his flashlight to illuminate the ground while he walked. He measured the bumps with his peripheral vision, because his neck was beginning to ache from looking down. He kept an eye on his companion. Gene didn't seem to be tiring at all, and the two of them were the only ones not dragging their feet. Lack of sleep was starting to make him euphoric, giving him bursts of energy when he should have been drooling.
"So what is this theory?" Gene asked.
Mulder shrugged, spitting out his seed. He offered Gene the bag, but he turned it down. "I don't want to jump the gun. I just had a thought about what this might be."
"So you're abandoning the ghost thing?"
"I'm not abandoning it, I'm just putting it on the back burner."
"You agree with me about the creature?"
"I believe… that there could be a creature," he murmured, his low voice carrying despite his efforts to keep the conversation between them. He noticed the others' voices die down. "… There could be a creature, and if there were such a creature, it would be, potentially, thousands of years old. With that amount of time and isolation such a creature would be a master of its own environment, a true apex predator with every inch of this place as its territory. If such a thing existed it would have adapted to its environment to such a degree that it could hunt human beings, the apex predators of the surface."
Gene was listening intently, nodding to each point.
"But there's a hitch," Mulder said. "You think the creature caused the cave-in, but why would it destroy its own home and, subsequently, its source of food?"
Gene was prepared for this. "Perhaps the tour groups took another route that made victims more accessible. Marshall, we're visiting a location only visited by the longest tours, right?"
Marshall looked up. "Ten hours or more."
"So not a lot of people would have come into its hunting ground. That's why there aren't more victims. Maybe it finally realized how to get its prey into a more favorable position."
"Like this one?" Mulder asked.
Gene looked around, his headlamp moving over the cave walls. His voice dropped a little. "Yeah, like this one. Big cavern, lots of shadows to hide in. Our scent trail must be very clear."
"Okay, I vote that they both shut their mouths," Helena said from the front.
Mulder popped a few more sunflower seeds, shrugging. "It's just a theory. It's not quite there yet. Maybe it just got shot and ran into the pillar by mistake."
"Maybe there is no 'it,'" Helena responded coldly.
"That, too," Mulder said, glancing at Gene. "Tough crowd."
He nodded. "Welcome to the world of cryptozoology."
It wasn't long before they came upon the chamber in question. Mulder spun around to get a look at it, unimpressed by its rugged walls and honeycomb shape. Two passages led out of it, and along the side a porous wall of rock showed running water. Just on the other side the river was flowing ferociously, throwing water through the holes and encouraging lichen to grow on the cave floor.
"Fourteen of them went missing in this chamber, right?" Mulder asked.
Marshall nodded, pointing to one of the tunnels. "Tour groups come in through there, take a few pictures of the river through the holes, and then move on through there," his finger moved to the other tunnel. "Nobody quite knows how the people vanish… it's like they're all standing here, in a normal tour, taking pictures and chatting, and then there's one less person."
"Headlamps off," Gene said. He was pulling the campfire from his bag and setting it up near the middle of the room. When everything was dark, the light in Gene's hands popped on and illuminated the whole area.
"I guess we're sleeping here," Marshall said, setting his backpack down. He pulled out several retractable coils of wire and gave everyone their own. "If you want to explore, hook that to your belt loop and hook the other end to this stake." He pounded a metal stake into the ground. "I know it will get a little frustrating, but this is the easiest way to find home base again. We don't want anyone to get lost – I think there's been enough of that."
Mulder unrolled his sleeping bag, kicked off his shoes, and sat down, digging through his backpack for something to munch on. He felt like all of the nutrients he had absorbed from the protein bar that morning had bled out through his forehead. He was joined by Gene, who sat on the other side of the artificial campfire. They traded portions of their snacks, adding a little variety, and ate in silence. The others did the same, except for Helena, who became fascinated with the tiny crevices of lichen. She combed through them for bugs.
"What do you say we do a little exploring after we eat?" he said to Gene. "I want to get a better look at that river. If your creature does exist, that would be a good source of transportation."
"Exactly what I was thinking."