10 X 22: SYNERGY
Category: Mythology
Spoilers: Hellbound, William, The Truth, Resurrection/Reclamation, Audrey Pauley, 1-1-03; The West Wing
Rating:
R for language

E-mail : rossprag@fgi.net

Will Mulder, Scully, Doggett, and Reyes put the pieces together in time for a final showdown for future of mankind?

Kyle , S.D.

10:53 p.m.

Scully and Connie White Eagle looked up in shock as the front door banged against the wall behind them, jamming the rubber doorstop into the cheap plaster of the third floor walk-up. William, on the carpet, Lego in his tiny fingers, regarded the men curiously, but the toddler neither cried nor cooed.

“What do you want?” Scully demanded, leaping to her feet. She’d seen one of them – a grave young man with a black goatee -- flanking Spender a few times. Both he and his taller, older companion carried Glocks.

“Dr. Scully, you’re to come with us,” the Goateed Man informed her calmly. “The boy, and, I’m afraid, your guests, too.” He glanced nervously about. “Where’s the man? The Indian?”

Scully stared directly into his eyes. “He went for some ice.”

The intruder blinked once, impatiently. “We’ve had our eye on the door for the past two hours. Now, come on. We don’t want to make a scene here, and if you don’t fuck with us, at least you might make it to morning. Where is he, Dr. Scully?”

“Dr. Scully?” Connie inquired, glancing oddly at her friend. Scully glanced back warily, her eye darting momentarily toward the short hallway.

And that’s when Spender’s men heard it, a low, wavering voice behind the bathroom door.

“Down in the west Texas town of El Paso ,” Mike crooned, “I fell in love with a Mexican girl…” Goateed Man turned to his associate with a grim smile, and the taller man moved stealthily down the hall. As he braced on the wall opposite the recently repainted door, Connie yelled out.

“Mike, watch out!”

As his partner’s boot cracked into the wood of the door, Goateed Man leveled his weapon at Connie.

“What the—“ the taller, older man breathed. Then a form hurtled from Mulder and Scully’s darkened bedroom and caught him just below the diaphragm. The Goateed Man’s barrel swept up toward Michael White Eagle as the barrel of Scully’s nine-millimeter jammed into his windpipe.

“Drop it, now,” Scully barked. “You know I’ll do it. You know it.”

The Glock clattered to the braided area rug as Mike clicked his associate’s cuffs into place. The Native American sheriff smiled broadly, leaned into the bathroom, and pulled a small white box from inside.

“Good news, Dana,” he announced. “The door died, but the baby monitor survived.” Mike pulled a plastic walkie-talkie-like device from his belt and displayed the monitor transmitter for the Goateed Man. “You oughtta know we’re a crafty and devious people, friend. Hell, I don’t even like Marty Robbins.”

Walter Reed Hospital

Washington , D.C.

12:16 a.m.

Doggett nearly collided with a pair of residents as he slammed through the ICU doors. Skinner and Kersh looked up at the end of the corridor, where they were in consultation with a female Asian in a lab coat. Skinner peeled off, and met him halfway up the hall.

“Massive head trauma,” the assistant FBI director informed the disheveled Doggett, who’d hastily thrown on an NYPD sweatshirt and jeans when Skinner called. “The doctors have IDed a large hematoma, and Agent Reyes hasn’t regained consciousness.”

Doggett ran a hand through his uncombed hair. “But she’s gonna, right?”

Skinner’s face was grave. “She took quite an impact, John. It’s too early.”

“You said she was hit by a car.”

“A cab, John,” Skinner amended. His eyes flicked toward the waiting Deputy Director Kersh, 20 yards down the corridor. “She was coming out of a place in Northwest, and a couple of agents she’d been with came out right after the accident.”

“Accident,” Doggett murmured. It was a question rather than an echo. “A place in Northwest. You mean a bar.”

Skinner worked his jaw. “They’re doing bloodwork right now. I’d warn you not to speculate in that direction with the deputy director. Monica’s ‘problem’ already has come to the Bureau’s attention, and there’s even talk of a review board.”

Doggett’s eyes narrowed. “Look, I’m trying to help her through this. It hasn’t gotten in the way of her work y—” The agent’s mouth clamped shut.

“Yet,” Skinner finished quietly but with emphasis. “Let’s focus on the immediate, John , OK ?”

Doggett nodded grimly and continued down the corridor, Skinner close behind.

“John,” Kersh intoned with official solicitude. “I’m sorry.”

“She was looking into some cold cases at Quantico,” the agent stated, skipping the amenities. “Maybe she found something, raised some red flags…”

“John,” Kersh said more emphatically. “There’s no conspiracy here, no X-File. The cabbie’s green card was barely dry. The passenger was a pub musician whose only tie to subversive groups is a ballad he wrote about the IRA. Three highly trained agents on the scene swear no one could have shoved Agent Reyes into the taxi’s path. The street was completely empty. There was a distinct possibility Agent Reyes’ alertness and coordination were impaired.”

Doggett smiled dangerously. “Impaired, huh? That the way this is going to go down, Kersh?”

“This will ‘go down’ the way the facts indicate,” the deputy director said calmly. “As an accident. A simple, tragic accident. A.D. Skinner, I’d appreciate it if you’d arrange for the hospital to alert us the minute Agent Reyes regains consciousn—”

Kersh’s words were cut off as a trio of doctors crashed through the double doors and a nurse emerged, breathless, from the monitor station up the hall. Kersh and Skinner hugged the wall, Doggett remaining dumbly in the center of the corridor as the doctors flowed around him.

The crew disappeared into a doorway behind Kersh. Doggett shook off his shock and sprinted to the nurse’s station.

“What’s happened?” he demanded of a stern-faced young woman.

“Are you a rela—” The nurse’s head jerked back as Doggett jammed his ID at her.

“What happened?” he barked.

“She’s coded,” the woman sputtered. “She’s gone into arrest.”

**

“John?” Monica called out. She was in a place, and not in it. This place was not white or black or walled or out of doors. It was actually more a sense of a place. But Monica knew somehow that she was physically, palpably there. Wherever there was.

“John’s not in right now,” a rough, middle-aged voice responded, sympathetic but slightly puckish. “Not for another few more years, at least, but you don’t wanna hear about that. For that matter, what are you doing here?”

Monica caught a fleeting glimpse of the man, in the corner of her field of vision. A tall man, paunchy and bald, a bit brutish-looking but wearing a sad smile that approached a congenial grimace. He vanished as she looked full-on at him.

“Who are you?” Monica inquired, pondering vaguely why she was not frightened.

“Call me Clyde ,” the man’s voice offered. “And you are…?”

“Reyes. Agent Monica Reyes.”

“Ah, yeah,” he sighed, reappearing in the corner of her eye. “You know, the way those D.C. hacks drive, you shouldn’t even go outside without an enhanced life and casualty policy. ‘Course, the booze ain’t gonna help the premium situation.”

“What?”

“Sorry,” Clyde said glumly. “Occupational pre-occupation. Or, gee, maybe it’s a post-occupation, considering my current state.”

Monica tried again for a direct look at her new friend. “And just what is that condition?”

“I’m not sure,” he murmured. “I think it’s either some kind of energy flux or Purgatory, which if it is, is not at all like you see in the movies.”

Monica was beginning to feel like Alice on the other side of the mirror. “You’re telling me you’re dead.”

“Sure seems that way, either that or I’m in Iowa,” Clyde said.

Monica paused. “And that means…?”

“You are and you’re not. Sorry, don’t mean to be confusing, but I think you came in the wrong exit. You’re not due for…”

“Due? You know when I’m supposed to die?”

“Aah, it’s just a skill, like impersonating the president or bartending. Don’t ask.”

“Don’t ask?”

“You really don’t wanna know, trust me. It’s a real buzzkiller. But don’t sweat it, kiddo – your number ain’t up yet. So, long as you’re hanging out for a while, why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”

The Badlands

South Dakota

1:05 a.m.

The Badlands of the Upper Plains are nearly as primordial and unyielding a region of the planet as can be found outside the pressure-protected Marianas Trench and the forbidding heart of the Antarctic continent, where only ancient thermophilic microorganisms can exist naturally.

The barren, stony reaches also resonate with tens of thousands of years of lore and superstition kept alive by Native Americans segregated both by culture and the lingering force of the European-American presence. Every jutting bluff, every black crevice and crater, seemed to represent or conceal some animistic or Lovecraftian spirit beyond the ken of anyone but the people with whom these phantasms purportedly had co-existed for centuries.

In short, the place scared the living shit out of most white people beyond bikers and druggies too stupid or stoned to know better. Michael White Eagle thus knew it was the perfect – perhaps the only -- place to take a couple of hard-case tourists. What Dana Scully understood through years of Mulder’s behavioral tutelage, Mike understood to be the fear that had fueled the genocide of his fathers’ grandfathers and the containment of their children.

Mike also grasped very quickly that what Scully feared far more than these men was a genocide of planetary proportions, where no women or children would be spared, no old men left to die quietly on reservations. He had come to know and love Dana and Fox (the name’s irony continued to amuse the sheriff), and to respect their odd ideas. Hell, odd ideas and an acceptance of invisible worlds and beings were a part of his tradition. Although the story Dana had shared during their ride through the cloudless night had left Mike silent and contemplative for the final 20 miles toward their destination.

That final 20 miles had taken them off well off the road, over aeons-old stone and dessicated brush. Small living things evaded the wheels of Michael’s Cherokee as it kicked up dust and rocks, and Scully saw a coyote lope into the shadows 40 yards ahead as the Jeep crunched to a halt.

Michael hauled the men from the back seat with an almost reverent gentility. Their wrists were cuffed, and the lawman took pains to ensure neither gunman stumbled or fell to the sharp rock. A pair of equally battered jeeps pulled up behind Michael’s and unloaded a half-dozen men from town – all White Eagle’s cousins, brothers, and nephews, including one of Mulder’s favorite students, and all wearing expressions as primordial and unyielding as the promontories and gulches surrounding them.

Scully nearly grinned at the nearly over-the-top psychological scenario Michael had set up. If they all survived the night, she thought about his exploring a career at Quantico .

Michael shouted something in Sioux to his relatives, and turned to Scully. “I’m going to take this one over there and ask him a few questions,” he murmured, jerking his head toward the shorter of the two men. “You take this one, yuh?”

“Mike,” Scully breathed. “I know a lot more about this matter than you. I’ll come along.”
“No need,” he smiled crookedly, seemingly amused by this petite woman. “You got your methods, I got mine.”

“Mike,” Scully warned. Michael grabbed the Goateed Man’s arm and turned away. “Michael! We need these men! Don’t—”

“Don’t sweat it, Little Cousin,” Mike grunted.

“Michael!” Scully shouted as shadows retreated. The men drew closer to her and their captive.

“What the fuck is this?” Spender’s man rasped, glancing at the stone faces around him.

“Shut up,” Scully snapped. She turned imploringly to the “braves.” “You don’t understand what’s at stake here. We need these men, both of them. You can’t do this.”

A monolithically muscular young man chortled. “ There’s bodies out here from before the Civil War. The spirits eat the bones and the winter takes the rest.”

“No, no,” Scully persisted, frustrated. “You—”

The shot sounded sharply in the chilled night. Scully’s head whipped toward the inky darkness into which White Eagle and her potential assassin had disappeared. Now, a single shadow emerged. As Michael stepped into the headlights, the former agent’s eyes widened at the dark, shining, splattered wetness on the sheriff’s shirtfront.

“Goddamnit, Mike!” Scully shrieked, yanking her own weapon from the waistband of her jeans. She stepped in front of the second assassin. “We needed him. Alive!”

“He didn’t know nothin’,” White Eagle said casually. “Maybe this one’s smarter, yuh?”

“Michael, I mean it,” Scully growled, leveling her gun and spreading her feet in a solid stance. The men standing alongside her leveled their rifles without changing expression.

“Don’t fear, Little Cousin,” Mike said soothingly. “If he’s helpful, we’ll let him have his chance with the wolves. If not, well, then he’s learned a valuable lesson about Anglo-Native American relations. What do you think, friend?”

“I have no problem with you or your people,” the gunman grunted. “This is bigger than this bullshit. This is about survival – all of our survival.”

“And this,” Mike murmured impassively, “is about yours’. C’mon.”

“Mike!” Scully warned, bringing her weapon up a few inches. The men about her raised their guns correspondingly.

The man’s eyes suddenly darted about, and a gleam of fresh sweat shone in the moonlight. “You do what you have to, Sheriff. This won’t end with me.”

Mike was silent for a moment, then nodded respectfully. “OK, Brother. At least you act like a man. I promise I’ll make this quick and honorable.”

“Mike, I’m warning you…” Scully threatened. “Just leave him. I think I know how we can find Spender.” Mike regarded her momentarily, seized the gunman by the elbow, and led him toward the darkness. Scully took aim, and one of Mike’s friends stepped forward, poking the gunbarrel into her neck. The agent tightened her grip for a moment as Mike and his captive glanced back, then lowered her arm, glaring.

The pair disappeared into the shadows, and Jacob Moonrise, Mulder’s pet student and tribal skeptic, lowered his gun with a grin. “You oughtta win a Tony for that performance, Profess--, I mean, Ms. Scully.”

Scully smiled back weakly, reminded again of the deception she and Mulder had perpetuated on people for whom they had come to care. She tried to banish her anxiety about Mulder’s present well-being .“ Your uncle’s quite the thespian, himself.”

“Ah, Uncle Mike has a few secrets of his own. He worked military intelligence in the Gulf before he got on the department.”

Scully’s head came up warily, and then she heard a distant noise. Retching. The men around her were silent statues. Only Jacob smiled.

They emerged from the darkness moments later – the planes of Mike’s stone face shining in the moonlight, his prisoner’s face stricken, drained of any color.

“We tanked up, Hank?” Mike asked one of the men, who nodded. The sheriff turned to Scully. “We’ve got a ride ahead of us.” He handed the gunman off to Jacob, who pushed him into the lead Jeep. “Your friend Spender is in Cedar Rapids , but you don’t know the whole story. I’ll explain it, or have him do it, on the way.”

Scully inspected him silently. “And he just spilled this?”

“With the last two days’ lunch. Soon as he saw his friend.” His voice was devoid of mirth.

“What did you do?” Scully asked, feigning a light tone. “Knock him out? Kill a rabbit or something, spread some blood around? You must’ve been pretty convinc--”

Mike did not speak. His face was as impassive as ever, but Scully could see something sharp in his black eyes. Sorrow. For her.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Dear God. Mike…”

Mike nodded toward the Jeep. “The man said it. If what you’ve told me is true, this is all about survival. Sorry, Dana. I knew you wouldn’t go along with this, but its sounds like we don’t have any time left for bluffing. You OK?”

Scully nodded stiffly, numbly, looking off into the darkness. As the Jeeps fired into life, she lurched back into this world and climbed into the passenger’s seat beside Mike.

Oscagoula , Florida

5:23 a.m.

“Hey, Mulder?”

Mulder looked up from the intertwined bodies on the widescreen set. Skinner’s former DEA friend may have retreated years ago from the niceties and unpleasantries of civilized society – if indeed such a thing existed in Florida – but he hadn’t abandoned its technology. The satellite dish planted in the clearing of pines outside picked up a couple of hundred stations, including some of the finest and not so finest straight-to-video entertainment available.

Scully had finally gotten through, about 2 a.m. She’d outlined the events of her evening, strikingly similar but with a significantly different outcome than Mulder’s. She and Mike were on their way to Cedar Rapids . Connie had taken William to the reservation for safekeeping. Confident of Scully’s ability to watch both her back and Mike’s and the ability of his Native American friends to help William temporarily disappear, Mulder had settled down to ponder his next move. That move hadn’t yet come to him.

Face reddening, he grinned up at Chaim Silver as he reached for the remote.

“Don’t do that on my account,” the young linguist yawned. “The human body is a beautiful thing.” He glanced at the screen. “Unless you’re doing something like that, of course.”

Mulder switched the set off. Chaim flopped onto the couch next to him. He’d donned a new yarmulke – neat trick, considering they’d fled Ft. Lauderdale in the dead of night. Mulder suspected he must keep a stock in some deep recess of the baggy FUBU jeans the Talmudic scholar wore.

“What’s up, Chaim?”

“Well, being dead or whatever, I guess I must’ve been in shock or something when your weird buddy brought us back.”

“That would probably do it.” Mulder pondered momentarily on Jeremiah Smith’s cryptic departure after sharing some stunning revelations about the colonization and the link between mankind and the would-be colonists. “What? You remember something about Spender’s guys, the guys who shot you?”

“Not about them,” the bearded young man said. “About Larry.”

Larry Opps was rapidly recovering from his “fatal” gunshot wounds, but he was still far weaker than Chaim. His chainsaw snores had erupted a few minutes after his head had hit the pillow upstairs.

Chaim cracked his knuckles. “I little bit before those gonstermachers with the guns burst in, I went in to check how Larry was coming alone. He jumped about 10 feet in the air, almost freaked on me. Then he was like everything was cool. Larry was about to e-mail our data when I walked in, and he real quick sent the message with the data attachment and shut his machine down. I just got a brief peek at the message before Larry got it off, and I he was CC-ing it to somebody else. There were two addresses on the recipient line. I was gonna tell you when you got back, but then, well, you know, I got whacked.”

Mulder sat up. “Two? You sure?”

“Why I’m a kickass linguist – I’ve got like a photographic memory. Didn’t get me laid much.”

“You remember the other address?”

“pnegri@terralink.com,” Chaim recited, then smiled cryptically.

The agent’s head cocked. “Terralink. That’s a local server in the D.C. area.” Mulder jumped from his chair and located the phone next to the cabin’s PC. Skinner’s friend had applied his criminal and intelligence expertise to building a 99.9 percent secure home communications system. Mulder wondered just how “retired” this man was.

He answered on the first ring – Mulder knew someone was always awake at The Lone Gunman’s “editorial office.”

“Hey, wow, Agent Mulder!” Jimmy Bond exclaimed. “You’re alive! I mean, you’re alive again! I mean--”

“Jimmy, Jimmy,” Mulder interrupted, smiling at the image of the frat-faced former rich kid who now trafficked with cyberspace outlaws, conspiracy theorists, and freelance antiterrorists. “I need your help to stay alive.”

“Anything, man.”

“Think you could track an Internet e-mail address for me? The billing info, too?”

The line was silent for a moment. “Gee, those providers usually are firewalled eight ways from Sunday,” Jimmy murmured. “Kimmy’ll love the opportunity to hack in. What’s your number?”

“I’ll get back to you, Jimmy. By the way, I’m sorry about the guys. I wish I could have been at the funeral…”

“Hey, Agent Mulder, the guys, they would’ve understood,” Jimmy said gently. “They were like you, always after the truth, no matter what the risks. Like Agent Doggett…”

“How is the wild man, anyway?”

“Aw, he’s coming along – you just gotta get past that Dennis Franz mentality. In fact, he called yesterday, asked Yves to do some research.”

“What about?” Mulder queried despite himself. “I mean, if it doesn’t betray a confidence.”

“Aw, heck, Agent Mulder, Agent Doggett’s always talking about you, how to think more like you.”

“There’s the key to sustained sanity.”

“Anyway, he wanted to know two things: If there’ve been any suppressed news stories or reports of alien massacres over the last 60 or 70 years, especially in the Southwest, and about any UFO sightings or reported abductions in Southwest Texas, near the Mexican border.”

Mulder leaned back. “You mean massacres by aliens?”

“Naw.Massacres of aliens. Dead aliens, crashes that looked like foul play. Though if that happened, I’d think the government would’ve buried it deeper than Jimmy Hoffa.”

“Or maybe Roswell ,” Mulder murmured. “Hey, thanks, Jimmy. I’ll be in touch. Say hey to Ms. Harlow for me.”

“Will do,” Jimmy said cheerfully.

Maybe Doggett was coming around, Mulder thought as he hung up. Dead aliens. No, scratch that – alien massacres. The roof of his mouth tingled in pained recollection as he considered the possibility of anyone – or anything – capable of besting the “greys,” especially on their own turf.

And why the Southwest, Texas ? What was Doggett onto? Had he discovered some extraterrestrial Achilles heel?

“Chaim!” Mulder called suddenly, growing excited. The young man popped in from the kitchen, a grilled cheese sandwich in his hand and crumbs covering his T-shirtfront.

“’Sup?” Chaim asked.

“You mentioned some stuff you translated from Bales’ glossalaliac banter, about ‘fathers from the sky?’”

“Sure.”

“Despite variations in details and nuance, religious lore across the planet includes a number of common themes. Like deities from the sky. Were there any particularly messianic references in Bales’ babble?”

“Messianic? Jesus-type shit? I’m just a nice Jewish boy, Mulder. You need a goy boy. Seriously, though, there was something kind of second coming, if I translated the Aramaic right. Something about a super being who had the power to overcome the enemy. A criminal, maybe an evil man himself. Some such shit – I’m translating loosely and melodramatically. What?”

Mulder was smiling broadly, a look of utter enlightment on his face.

“Mulder, dude.”

The agent blinked and looked up. “Sorry. But I think maybe I’ve found, well, not Jesus.”

“Hallelujah, bro,” Chaim said, biting into his toast and Velveeta and turning back toward the kitchen.

**

“FBI agent, huh?” Clyde perked. Or at least his voice seemed to perk, microscopically. Monica had given up trying to define the figure just out of her field of vision. “Hey, maybe you could give my regards to a Dana Scully who works at your place? And the kid, too, the whack job.Mulder, yeah.”

Monica’s head snapped around. Or at least she perceived the act of snapping her head around. Or perhaps she merely recognized that such a revelation would cause her head to snap around. Clyde vanished. “You know Scully and Mulder?”

“Sure. We wound up in bed together. Scully, that is. But not the way you think. You pals with them?”

“Yes. Are they safe? They’re not….here, are they?”

“Jeez, you think I got time to personally meet everybody here, mano a mano? All however many billion of ‘em since the beginning of time? I couldn’t make that many contacts when I was pushing a sales quota. Sorry, kiddo; that ain’t my talent.”

“What is?” Monica ventured.

“Let’s talk about you for a change,” Clyde shifted. “Like this shirt?”

“Is this, ah, Heaven?” Monica asked. “Is this Hell?”

“I don’t know, and, as to the second question, I don’t know. You’re the wrong Monica, and I ain’t Della Reese. All I know is, it’s kind of an exclusive club here, know what I mean?”

“Exclusive?”

“Hey, gotta go. You see Agent Scully, you tell her I forgot the dog likes Kibbles and Bits. Ah, what am I talking? I’m sure the little guy’s just fine.”

“So you don’t have any idea what’s going on down there, Clyde ? Clyde ? Clyde ?”

He didn’t answer. Monica’s eyes darted toward the fleeting figure. Her heart leapt, or at least it seemed that way in the place that may or may not have been there.

“Well, hey there, Monica,” Calvin Welles drawled.

Cedar Rapids

4:12 a.m.

The trio of Jeeps crunched to the curb a half-block up the street. It was a rough part of town virtually interchangeable with any rough part of any medium or large city: A scattering of grim windowless factories grinding on amid long-abandoned warehouses and dying railyards – the few dinosaurs that had missed the last blast of cosmic radiation. A few cinderblock bars, festooned with Pabst and Bud signs, exhibited signs of low-grade life, and an adult “bookstore” wedged among the factories had a few customers in the hours before dawn.

Mike’s friends and relatives debarked silently, rifles and small arms in hand, tugging their prisoner along. Scully stared up ahead, hand on the grip of her own weapon deep in her parka. Mike patted her shoulder.

To the outside world, the caravan of jeeps on the desolate interstates drew little attention – a group of Native Americans, heading for some after-hours thrills in the city, or maybe to the tribal casino. The small redhead was the most conspicuous element in that picture.

But Scully was rapt in the story Mike and the abortive assassin told in turn. The “raid” in Oglala had been part of a three-pronged operation, along with the armed assault in Ft. Lauderdale that Mulder mercifully had averted and a third offensive here in Cedar Rapids. Spender had not been the instigator; he was, instead, one of the intended casualties.

Scully had ridden in silence for several moments until she got her head around it. The last dregs of the cultist group that had kidnapped William nearly two years before, only to die in inconceivable pain? She doubted one of those fanatics would have folded as easily as their captive had.

“The Syndicate?” Scully had ventured. The international cabal of alien collaborators, concerned for their own survival in the coming human apocalypse, had gone up in a burst of flame, ostensibly incinerated by extraterrestrial rebels, as Spender’s father and Mulder’s former partner Fowley fled the hangar/abattoir. “You’re what, their sons, the ones they were ready to leave here to their fate?”

Gunbarrel pressed loosely into his side, the sullen man in Mike’s back seat had opened his mouth, closed it, and then sighed. “Look, maybe we’ve gone about this in the wrong way. But your partner, you, you have no idea of the technologies and capabilities these peo-, they possess. You people propose using slingshots and cherry bombs to kill a T-Rex. Spender is a demented fool, a child, fueled by revenge. Ours’ is the only way, to be their guides, their allies. It’s not too late to recognize the future, to be a part of it.”

Scully’s weapon had come up swiftly into his face; her eyes blazed as the wind whipped her red locks. “You would have killed my son. He’s my future. That’s the future I care about.”

The man gazed directly into Scully’s eyes. Eyes locked on the road, left hand gripping the steering wheel, Mike placed his right hand on Scully’s shoulder. The fire had left her eyes, and she had pocketed her pistol.

“Strughold?” she asked quietly. “Is he in charge now?”

The man had looked silently toward the mountains and idled sunflower fields.

Now, the silent throng stood before the former electrical fixtures plant that served as Spender’s Midwest base of operations. Mike spoke in hand gestures; half the group split off and scaled the cyclone fence to the side of the factory.

The front security door hung open; the interior was black. Scully drew her weapon, Mike activated a halogen lamp, and Jacob prodded Spender’s treacherous employee along.

As Mike’s torch played along the cavernous operations center, the quartet caught glimpses of hellish carnage: Wide, dead eyes framed in coagulating blood; splintered computer screens; folders and printouts and reports blotted up the spreading, pooled blood of a dozen bodies.

Jacob muttered something in a tribal tongue, his post-adolescent cool gone. The room blazed into full, gory glory – a cousin of Mike’s was by the far wall, by the electrical box.

“Any of these people your Spender?” Mike asked calmly with an air of both urgency and reverence.

Scully tread carefully among the corpses, occasionally kneeling and exploring a face. Finally, she faced Mike. “He must have escaped. Or they took him.”

“The orders were no prisoners,” the assassin stated.

Scully sidestepped a gray-haired woman huddled fetally on the cold concrete and brushed past the man.

“I guess you’re the lucky one tonight, huh?” she muttered.

The men gathered up as many documents and files as possible, and they walked, again silently, along the cracked streets toward the jeeps.

“What is that?” Jacob suddenly asked, stopping dead and aiming his rifle down the block.

The streetlamps were few and far between in this part of town, and the Jeeps were parked between the orange spots they cast. The figure beside Mike’s Jeep was silhouetted against the next spot down, black and featureless. Mike tensed and signaled the group. Rifles raised, the men – and one woman – advanced.

“It may be some homeless guy,” Jacob cautioned. “Let’s not blow away some civilian.”

Scully nearly smiled at Mulder’s student – at both his TV-inspired jargon and his compassion in the face of potential planetary extinction. It was a reminder of who she was, what she truly hoped she was.

The figure shifted, and his arm raised. A few of the men leveled their guns, but the end of the arm erupted in flame, and a misshapen, incomplete face was illuminated by the glow of the Bic lighter.

Spender did not look up as Scully sprinted to the Jeep. His face, though gnarled and mutilated, was filled with despair.

“Jeffrey?” Scully prodded.

He glanced at her, eyes somehow old. Spender lifted the cigarette to his face, regarded it, and laughed bitterly.

“He probably would be pleased, wherever the son-of-a-bitch is now,” Spender reflected, dropping the Morley and grinding it into the cement.

William Kesey residence

Cincinnati , Ohio

8:32 a.m.

“No, I only met him the once, a few weeks ago,” Doggett informed Camille Kesey, a matronly, middle-aged woman with piercing gray eyes that contrasted sharply with her casual widow’s wardrobe. “Seemed like a nice guy, very sharp.”

They were upstairs in what passed for Bill Kesey’s den. It looked more like Mulder’s cluttered workspace, scattered with clippings, photocopied casefiles, and a selection of Field and Streams , covers alive with deer and trout and, most likely, the veteran agent’s dreams. Downstairs, Camille’s guests were quiet and reflective, sampling the casseroles friends and family had ritually delivered. Occasionally, brief laughter broke through the oppressive grief as an anecdote or notable quote was shared.

The atmosphere was strangely calming for Doggett, whom Skinner had assigned to assist in the Kesey investigation despite his anxiety over Monica’s condition. She’d been defibrillated, but Doggett’s partner remained in a deep, unresponsive coma, her EKG registering what one of the physicians had referred to as some “highly anomalous rhythms.”He suspected Skinner had dispatched him to Ohio as therapy, but he was too emotionally numb to fight him on it.

Camille smiled. “Not much got past Bill. Oh, he was a wonderful husband, very gentle, and a good father, but the Bureau, that was his obsession in life.” She glanced up from her hands. “Sorry, I hope that didn’t sound resentful. But I imagine Bill’s obsession most likely killed him. Do you or your colleagues have any indication who might’ve done this?”

Doggett shook his head, briefly. “Let me ask you this, Mrs. Kesey. Did your husband discuss any recent cases with you? Specifically, a pair of multiple homicide cases in Cincinnati and Mockridge?”

Camille placed her coffee cup on the table nearby. “I no longer have much to lose, Agent Doggett. So I’ll just ask you: What is going on here? Are you really here to investigate my husband’s murder, or do you know something about it?”

Doggett leaned forward intently. “I want to find out what happened to Agent Kesey. We were involved in something…unusual…and I want to know if he was killed because he’d discovered something about it. I want to know the truth. It may be important. Very important.”

The widow considered, then closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were clear and calm. “All right. Bill never kept anything from me, unless it was dangerous for me to know, and he told me about the flying saucer or whatever it was. It was almost inconceivable, but Bill is a very pragmatic man, and I believed him.

“They’d put the lid on the murders – both the Cincinnati and the Mockridge ones – and Bill said they were treating him strangely at the office, like they were sizing him up, seeing what he would do next. Then he got the call from the ‘reporter.’”

“Reporter?” Doggett inquired, brows rising.

“Well, she said she was a reporter. She wanted Bill to confirm a report she’d heard of an alien spacecraft crashing, of a massacre. How she could’ve gotten through the federal smokescreen, I have no idea. Bill never cared much for the media, but he was curious, and they talked for a long time.

“The next day, Bill had our number changed, unlisted. That night, she called again. And again. We started screening with the answering machine, and Bill wouldn’t tell me anything about what they’d talked about. Bill would sooner have lopped off his right arm than cheat on me, but I knew something had spooked him.”

“Did he say anything about who this woman might be?”

Camille considered, then sighed and rose. She pushed aside a folder to reveal an answering machine, its red message light blinking. “Listen for yourself. She left this last night – after the explosion.”

Her neatly manicured finger depressed the Message button. The machine beeped.

“Agent Kesey. It’s absolutely essential you answer me. I can’t call – it’s too dangerous. This is something you can’t turn a blind eye to. Please answer my next call.” Another beep, and the machine fell silent.

Camille looked up quizzically, then grew concerned as she peered at Doggett’s now-pallid expression. “Agent Doggett? Agent Doggett, what’s wrong?”

Doggett glanced at her and blinked. “Sorry. It’s just… well, I think I may have heard that voice before.”

Which was a lie. Doggett was sure he’d heard the woman’s refined but urgent voice before.

At Mulder’s trial.

Oscagoula , Florida

7:02 a.m.

Mulder and William were playing catch – that quintessential father-and-son ritual – in a park Mulder had driven past numerous times without ever stopping to picnic, read, or even doze under a tree. William’s face was split in a wide grin of pleasure. He didn’t squeal in delight; squealing was not a component in his son’s genetic makeup.

Scully was seated on a bench several yards away, hands clasped in her lap, smiling in utter serenity as she watched the comfortingly repetitive play before her. Mulder glanced her way and smiled in return.

“Mulder?” William called. Mulder turned curiously toward the oddly mature voice, his son’s oddly mature expression.

“Hey, that any way to talk to your old man?” Mulder demanded lightly.

“Jesus,” William snorted. “Wake up, dude.”

Mulder awoke to find Larry Opps hovering above him, eyes rimmed in red, the randomly selected T-shirt hanging loosely on his nearly skeletal frame, Mulder’s nine millimeter in his fingers.

“God,” Mulder yawned, “You guys sure are strict about breakfast around here.”

“Don’t fuck around,” Opps sighed lazily. “You know, don’t you?”

Mulder sat up in the armchair. The soft-core classic he’d been watching had segued into Babar the Elephant. “That you sold us out, Larry?”

Opps barked emphysemically. “Sold us out? Ship sailed on that when Spender sent a hit squad after us.”

“I’m not so sure it was Spender, Larry,” Mulder smiled, looking past the gun. “He went to an awful lot of trouble to translate Bales’ gibberish, to get to the truth, just to try and kill everybody who could help him find it. I think it was somebody else, somebody who wants to disarm our side.”

“What? An alien strike force?”

“Or more likely, some people who think they can bargain with the devil. Who are you pitching for?”

Larry rested one buttock on the arm of the couch. “Let’s just say I figured Spender for a loose cannon. But his fanaticism and inside knowledge have made him useful.”

“Two minds are better than one,” Mulder nodded. “You with the government, with the black ops folks? Ops, Opps, very clever.”

Opps sighed. “That’s my name, dude. You’re ‘way off. Let’s just say I work for a team with a little more firepower. Spender and his crew of misfits wouldn’t have known what to do with the shit we found out.”

“Ouch. Misfits. And I thought we were buds. By the way, where is our roomie?”

“Silver wanted pancakes, so he ran down into town to get some eggs. See what I mean? Bush league. But I guess it’s what saves him.”

“So why kill me?” Mulder asked casually. “We would seem to be playing for the same team, ultimately.”

“We’re going to do what we have to,” Opps explained. “I don’t think you’re ready to do that yet. We don’t need your ethics hanging around our necks.” He raised Mulder’s weapon.

“Don’t suppose if I told you to watch out behind you, I could make you peek?”

Opps shook his head. Then he jumped as a cold cylinder jammed into his neck.

“I’d drop it, son,” Walter Skinner suggested. Opps complied.

“Misfit, huh?” Mulder huffed. His cell phone trilled, and he forestalled his reunion with his former superior. “Mulder.”

“Yeah, it’s me, Jimmy,” Jimmy said. “This a bad time, Agent Mulder?”

Mulder glanced up at Skinner, who was cuffing Opps. “Naw, it’s good.”

“That e-mail address? Kimmy traced it to a Petra Negri in Georgetown . But the thing is, her service’s paid for by World Enrichment, which is like some kind of think tank research foundation. And that isn’t all.”

Mulder waited. “If that isn’t all, should you have stopped just now?”

“I guess it’s OK to tell you. Yves and I and Director Skinner and Agent Doggett had a run-in with SynerCom, the company that paid for most of World Enrichment’s research – they were doing weird genetic research, stuff with psychics, not fortune tellers or anything. People with psychic abilities.”

“Genetics,” Mulder echoed, looking at Opps. Opps face opened in surprise. “Petra Negri, huh? You up on your romance languages, Jimmy?”

“Heck, I just barely passed Spanish…”

Mulder laughed. Petra Negri. Black oil.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. Hey, thanks, Jimmy. Maybe I can buy you a beer when I’m in town next. If I ever get back to town.”

Mulder ended the call and looked up at Skinner. “You always just drop in like this?”

A smile played at the corner of Skinner’s mouth, then thought better of it. “I can always come back. Good to see you again, Agent. Where’s Scully?”

“We took separate vacations this year.” Mulder briefly summarized the events of the last few weeks. It took 35 minutes, and concluded with Scully’s quest to find Spender. “And Larry here, he’s been moonlighting for an old friend of ours’,” the agent concluded, turning to the sullen Opps. “What’s Marita planning on doing with the information? Who’s backing her?”

“Covarrubias?” Skinner murmured.

Mulder nodded. “I’ve heard some deep underground stuff about a corporate lab up in South Dakota the FBI had raided. The lab was owned by SynerCom, which went belly-up soon after this raid supposedly happened. Larry here was leaking information to Marita, who’s been operating under the nom de plume Petra Negri. Black oil? There was a 500-foot federal fence around the details of the raid up north, but I think Jimmy Bond just filled in a few gaps. Genetic research with psychics?”

“We think Covarrubias, or whoever she’s working for, was researching some kind of new offensive weapon against the colonists. Some drug that seemed to enhance individual psychic abilities.” Skinner paused. “Mulder, she was experimenting on some kidnapped kids. Including Gibson Praise.”

Gibson, a suspected human-alien hybrid with astonishing psychic abilities, had sheltered him in the desert while the ex-agent had searched for a defense against the genetically engineered “supersoldiers” that had been developed quite possibly as an advance army for the extraterrestrials who planned to take the planet from the species that according to Jeremiah Smith they had spawned. Mulder felt a sudden tightness in his chest. Gibson had been his only friend in the wilderness all those months, the only one who understood completely Mulder’s feeling of alienation from most of the human race.

“Is he OK?” he barely got out.

Skinner frowned. “He disappeared, apparently during the raid. Along with one of the other guinea pigs. A man named Calvin Welles.”

Mulder settled back against the cushions. “Lemme guess. Charles Manson with attitude. A mass murderer, maybe a serial killer, probably with some limited but acute psychic ability. I’m going to guess his body count has picked up considerably since his disappearance. And not just human bodies, right?”

Skinner’s eyes darted to the silent Opps, and the assistant director sighed. “Agent Doggett and I viewed a multiple murder scene in Ohio a few weeks ago, and talked to an agent who’d visited a similar scene near Cincinnati . One was a diner full of vics, some apparent suicides, some homicides. Bullets everywhere, as if the victims were trying to kill a small army that wasn’t there.”

Mulder’s eyes glittered in horror and wonder. “And the other crime scene?”

“I only saw a photo, and the crime scene got cleaned up before anyone could investigate. It was a crash with no survivors, Mulder, and I think everybody – everything – on board were dead before their ship hit the ground.”

“My God,” Mulder whispered. He sat back to absorb it all, to process all the pieces. “You think Welles did all this? He massacres the people in the diner, for fun, to flex his new psychic muscles, then he’s abducted. Whatever it is he does, whatever it is he’s learned to channel into this world, Welles discovered it works on tourists, too. Larry, you know anything about this guy? Were you one of the scientists who was studying Welles? C’mon, Larry; you know this is important.”

Opps took a long breath. “He wasn’t just a serial killer, Mulder. Calvin Welles is a mosaic, a psychopath with maybe a dozen disassociated personalities. But not just a ‘regular’ mosaic – his DNA’s, well, batshit crazy. Why he was picked for Covarrubias’ test group – he has chains working that we didn’t even know worked.”

“Junk DNA,” Mulder looked up at Skinner. “Like Gibson.”

“Yeah,” Larry said impatiently. “Like everyone in the test group. See, maybe 95 percent of the DNA in some human genomes is non-coding – it doesn’t seem to have any purpose. There has been some research lately with crytomonads – photosynthetic microorganisms – that shows junk DNA may play a role in the cell nucleus, but that doesn’t begin to explain things.

“Petrovsky was one of Marita’s network of scientists and doctors – she’d had some powerful connections through the World Health Organization. He’d done some studies on psychic tendencies in schizos and psychos – Mengele-type shit – and he had a DNA workup done on Welles. Marita already knew about Praise, but she felt Welles might have had as much potential for the project. You shoulda seen some of Welles’ chains -- weird crap. Like a mutational anomaly.”

“Or maybe an alien one that expresses selectively in humans,” Mulder suggested. “Did you look into Welles’ family history? Maybe any abductions?”

Skinner nodded soberly. “Agent Doggett was looking in a number of directions, including abductions and reported crashes in the Southwest and the deaths of what he believes to be Welles’ disassociated personalities.”

Mulder grinned despite himself. “Well, you go, John. Maybe there’s hope for Sgt. Friday, after all.” He turned back to Larry. “And where’d they get that Frankenstein drug they shot Welles and the others up with?”

“It wasn’t a drug,” Opps growled. “It was an enzyme. Covarrubias didn’t say where it came from.”

“I bet I know,” Mulder smiled. “I gotta meet this guy.”

“He’s a homicidal monster,” Skinner advised. “And he may be unstoppable, at least by us.”

“Actually,” Mulder corrected, “I think he may be a prophecy fulfilled.” He turned to Opps. “If Jeremiah Smith was right, and Jack Bales is our genetically-engineered Moses, then Welles…”

“Jesus,” Larry whispered, too stunned to appreciate the irony of his response. Then, all heads turned as the front door flew open. Skinner pulled his sidearm; Mulder leveled Opps’ pistol.

“Yikes,” Chaim breathed, dropping his grocery bag. “Hey, I got the Doritos, you goniffs!”

**

“What do you want, Calvin?” Monica asked calmly of the figure in the corner of her vision.

There was a smile in Welles’ menacingly friendly Texas drawl. “You ever in 4-H, Monica?”

“Girl Scouts,” she supplied without pondering the ludicrous nature of this small-talk with a madman.

He snorted. “Yeah, guess that’d be about right. Well, I was in 4-H – my old lady thought’d help us build character, before my old man decided it took too much time out of our chores and whomped the both of us.”

“That’s where this started, Calvin,” Monica suggested. “The abuse, the beatings.”

Welles sighed. “Jesus, Girl Scout’s harder to kill than a biker. Though I cleaned out a whole nest of ‘em a few months ago in Arizona . You still don’t get it. Shoulda figured old Doc Petrovsky wouldn’t get it right, the overeducated pussy. See, when I was in 4-H, I took electricity project a couple years. The 4-H leader, old goody-twoshoes vocational arts teacher, he was into ham radio big-time. Well, he knew I was interested in that shit – at least ‘til I discovered something a little more enjoyable, you know what I mean, Monica?”

She felt, or perceived feeling, a chill. A homicidal savant with abilities beyond his human peers, and he talked and acted like a redneck career felon.

“Well, old Mr. Wierhaus – that was his name – he told me about how all these used-up radio waves bounce around in the air and out into space, how maybe millions of years from now, some green alien with three eyes and five legs might just pick up Lynyrd Skynyrd on his saucer stereo. Old Wierhaus thought he was Albert Weinstein and Tommy Edison all in one. Told me you can’t make energy and you can’t get shed of it, no matter how you try. It just drifts around out there, lookin’ for someplace to settle. You read about somebody pickin’ up spy talk or Russian news shows on their TV durin’ a bad storm or shit.

“And I’m thinkin’, maybe that’s what I am – a ham radio for all that psychical energy that’s shootin’ around the atmosphere. Or maybe more like a Sears Diehard – storin’ up all that energy. What churchgoin’ people’d call the soul. I been storin’ up the stray energy of the dead, the souls of all these people, I’m guessin’, and every once in a while, a little electricity leaks out.”

Monica had to assemble her thoughts, her conceptions, before she could respond. She believed she knew where Welles was going, and she wasn’t prepared for it. There was something else, too.

“So you’re saying your multiple personalities, they’re actually the souls of the dead,” she drawled. “Those names you gave me, they were victims of heinous, violent crimes. I have…dreams…about being murdered, over and over, in different places, different times. It seems as if I’m pursuing whomever ultimately kills me. As if it’s my karma.”

“Karma,” Welles chuckled. “Monica, sweetie, you gotta quit burning candles and playin’ whale music or whatever. I could sense it about you, first time I laid eyes on your pretty little face. You’re a Diehard, too, a ham radio. Way I figure it, this has gotta be in the genes or somethin’, you know? Those Indian folk, ones in India , not the ones we fucked over, I figure that reincarnation stuff they believe has got to be a dominatin’ gene, like dark hair and brown eyes. Only they just have a feelin’ they been there, done that before. Same maybe for some of our Indians, ones that say they talk to their dead ancestors. If you got a strong genetical inclination, you probably pick up the signals of those dead folks, but like real staticky, like an AM station a couple hundred miles away. Or maybe poppin’ a few crazy ‘shrooms or some peyote – like the injuns do – boosts the battery charge.”

“Genetic expression,” Monica suggested numbly.

“But a few folks – the few, the proud – pull in a clear signal without havin’ to boost the charge. You only pull in the soul station – I like that, Smokey Robinson, that kinda shit – when you’re sleepin’, cause you ain’t getting’ interference from your own brainwaves. The good doctor, Petrovsky, had me thinkin’ I was a candidate for the whacky ward, when all the time I was just gatherin’ up a strong charge. Then the lovely Marita – sounds like somethin’ out of a Marty Robbins song, don’t it – gave me a dose of battery fluid, and I started pullin’ in WDED and a half a dozen other stations aside.”

“What do you mean?” Monica thought of John’s description of the victims in that Ohio diner, the melee that had occurred. People shooting at things that weren’t there. “What else do you see?”

“Let you listen in, Sweetcheeks, ‘cept the frequency don’t seem to be too good for next folks. Or aliens, that matter.”

Monica could hear the grin in his voice. The confession wouldn’t do much good, her in a coma, Welles drifting around the dimensional divide, and federal law unclear on extraterrestrial homicide.

“What I don’t get,” she finally said, “is why I only seem to pick up on the souls of policemen, of those pursuing murderers, pursuing evil. If that energy out there, free-floating, why would I only pick up those souls? And why would you only pick up murder victims?”

AM radio don’t pick up FM, darlin’,” Welles explained, simply. “I think different folks got different energy, and different folks pick up different energy. Those folks you see when you’re sleepin’, they must be on your wavelength. Maybe that’s why you’re who you are, a lawman. Law woman, pardon me. As for me, I mighta given you a slight misapprehension. That list I gave you?”

“Yeah?”

“Those weren’t my ‘personalities.’ My souls, they killed those souls. I just wanted you to ‘verify’ a few things for me, like you folks would say. And you did, didn’t you? Gotta make sure them voices in your head ain’t just your own bad wirin’, right?”

“That’s all you wanted from me?” Monica demanded. “For me to confirm those people were murdered, to verify that those ‘souls’ of yours were the murderers?”

“Not just that, Monica,” Welles said in a suddenly calm, serious tone that put her on guard. “I gotta feelin’ we might have somethin’ more in common. All the time I was in that monkeyhouse up in South Dakota, they kept askin’ me I had any memories about aliens, flyin’ saucers, if I ever ‘felt’ I’d been taken someplace strange. And the funny thing was , I had. Always thought it was cause I was an ‘imaginative’ child, like that fag elementary school counselor told my ma. But then I think about the time Ma told me my pop disappeared for near a week, ‘fore I was born. She thought – hell, probably prayed – that the motherfucker had decided to sleep it off on the railroad tracks somewhere. But he came back stone cold sober, didn’t remember a thing about what’d happened. Ma knew she asked where the hell he’d gone to, he’d whomp her somethin’ fierce, so she let it go. But now, I’m thinking they musta done some science projects with the sumbitch, maybe tinkered a little with his man juice, you know?”

Monica felt an abrupt chill. Welles’ indistinct figure shifted in her peripheral vision.

“Them folks down home, they’re Mex, right? You ain’t. You know who your real kin are?”

Monica’s heart seemed to be pounding. She couldn’t speak, or given her apparent state, think.

“’Cause you and I, we got a kind a’ kinship, you know? Be interested to know what kinda juice you got in your Diehard, huh, ‘Sis’?”

Walter Reed Hospital

Washington , D.C.

7:11 a.m.

“Doctor?” the plump blonde nurse inquired, concerned. “Dr. Rajid? You OK?”

“Yeah, yes,” Rajid coughed, recapturing his professional demeanor. “You’ve seen these EKGs?”

The nurse glanced at Agent Reyes, who without the monitors, abrasions, and IV might have been slumbering deeply. She peered at the electrocardiogram in his hands. “Jesus. What’s going on in this woman’s brain? You think she’s having an episode?”

“I think she’s having a party,” Rajid said with uncharacteristic irony. “Look closely at the pattern of impulses – the extreme peaks and valleys, alternating with more moderate readings. It’s as if there were someone in there with her.”

Cedar Rapids

7:20 a.m.

“My father,” Spender began, “was fanatically convinced that the only way to survive the invasion, the colonization, was to join forces with the aliens, appease them at any cost. Even if that meant offering up my mother, just as Mulder’s father was forced to offer up Mulder’s sister, as a means to exploring the hybridization necessary to make the planet their own.”

Michael White Eagle, Jacob Moonrise, and the other men around the scarred conference table were silent, whether in awe or out of some deep cultural acceptance of alternate truths, Scully could not know. They were in the back room of the relatively deserted diner, where some community club met weekly for Swiss steak and civic pride – Spender had put $100 on the counter and booked the private room and two pots of coffee, no waitress. If the owner had speculated on the nature of this meeting between the white couple and the Indians, he hadn’t exhibited any curiosity or concern.

“When the rebels burned the core Syndicate members and…the others…alive, I was convinced the movement had been eliminated. But remarks my father made to me…after…” Spender unconsciously touched his runnelled face, “suggested the Syndicate might have some hangers-on, those left behind, who went deep underground to plan the next phase, whatever that might be. Apparently, some new negotiations have been reached with the colonists, most likely including destroying us. I can’t reach any of my colleagues. It’s a wonder Mulder, Opps, and Silver survived.”

Scully had not explained by what wonder they had survived the apocalyptic attack on the Florida studio. She knew, now definitively, that she and Spender were working toward the same goal, but maternally, Scully was reluctant to fully entrust this man with her life, Mulder’s, or William’s, or even with their secrets.”

“The information is gone, the hard drives wiped and destroyed,” Spender said numbly. “To rebuild, find the right people to reinterpret the data, it’s nearly inconceivable.”

“I believe survival is the most pressing priority right now,” Scully interrupted. “I think we need to reconnoiter with Mulder. Skinner was heading to Florida; he can help us figure out the next move. When he called a while ago, Mulder thought he might be onto something – something to do with a case Doggett and Reyes were working.” Scully turned to White Eagle. “Mike, I think all of you should head back. Spender and I should be safe, and Connie has to be frantic with worry.”

“She’s a lawman’s wife, remember?” Michael said with customary casualness. Scully found his unflappable manner simultaneously stabilizing and maddening. “Naw, maybe the fellas ought to get back to town, but I got nothing better to do today than sprucing up speed traps.”

“Mike,” Scully implored, taking his rough hand. “I can’t begin to express how thankful I am – for all of us – and how sorry I am for the lies we’ve had to tell you and Connie. But you need to be with your family. It’s not…”

“My battle?” Mike asked, amused. “Dana, my grandfathers and their grandfathers saw their land taken, ripped from them over the bodies of their brothers and sisters, their wives and children. We have a saying, our people. ‘Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me.’”

“God,” Scully exhaled.

“Might’ve lost something in the translation,” Mike admitted.

Eulene Welles resident

Austin , Texas

11:23 a.m.

The house reeked oppressively of fried pork fat, poverty, and resignation, and the mildew-stained, scabbed walls were painted in hues Sears likely quit selling 30 years ago. It was a familiar environment, one that varied little from the battle-scarred tenements of Harlem and Brooklyn Doggett had once patrolled to the rural shacks of Alabama or Southern Illinois . The agent settled uneasily into a beaten, pilled-over armchair from which a feral-looking tom had fled with a murderous backwards glance.

“Hope y’all like your tea sweet,” Eulene Welles said in a toneless voice that conveyed the widow’s emotional depletion as much as her advanced age. It was the kind of defeated drawl that had inspired Faulkner and Steinbeck. Donnie Welles’ death had propelled her into what Doggett could only assume had been a binge of liberated consumption – Eulene was huge, and she waddled into the kitchen, her Dollar General housedress swishing over her expansive buttocks.

Doggett suppressed a shudder. “That’s fine, ma’am. Something cool would hit the spot.”

“So what you want with me, anyway?” she called in that dead tone, offering an atonal harmony to the sound of glass clinking. “Hoped you folks’d lost all interest in me once the governor’d buried my boy. Know the CNN folks did.” There was a tinge of wistful regret in her voice; the media attention had probably added some rare spice to her life of banal desperation.

Calvin Welles’ faked execution, covert removal from prison, and “rescue” from SynerCom’s South Dakota lab were deeply classified, and as far as Eulene knew, her son the mass murderer had been terminated with extreme prejudice by the state. But Doggett knew people like the Widow Welles – beaten souls powerless against and paranoically fearful of Big Brother.

“Just a few things the FBI wants to clear up, ma’am,” he said. “A few details to close out your son’s case – a few psychological details.”

“Yeah, everybody still wants to understand Calvin,” Eulene sighed, toddling back into the living room with a sloshing tumbler of tea. “Wasn’t anything to understand, Agent, you ask me – he got his old man’s genes and his old man’s natural-born meanness. The poison was in his blood, and you can’t get shed of that.”

Doggett accepted his beverage and took a swig of the syrupy liquid. Of course, heredity would have to be the primary component of Eulene Welles’ theory of where Calvin gone so cataclysmically astray. She’d stood by robotically as Donnie Welles had beaten his children into submission and eventually rebellion and homicidal violence. Eulene had to believe she had been subject to an immutable force of nature, not an accessory to abuse and cruelty.

Doggett could scarcely explain, even to himself, why he’d impulsively hopped the flight to Texas. Part of it was the nagging conviction that Calvin Welles was the epicenter of something large and dark. Marita Covarrubias had been involved with the SynerCom “project” in South Dakota , and she’s dogged Bill Kesey for, what, information, collaboration. It had to do with Welles. She was tracking the psycho. By all logic, she should have been hiding as deeply underground as she could dig, putting as much space between herself and Welles as she could. Although if Doggett could rely on what he had seen of the man’s abilities, he wasn’t sure there was enough space in the world.

Which merely raised a more nagging question. Why was Covarrubias still alive? Had she managed to elude Welles, or did he have a use for her, just as she had for him?

Beyond that, Doggett harbored a deepening suspicion that Monica was somehow tied into this. She had always professed a sort of low-grade precognition, similar to the stories the old guys at the local cop shop had told about young Calvin. The case at the slaughterhouse a year ago had plagued her on a profound personal level like no other X-File ever had. She’d taken to heart the killer’s implication that she was locked with him in some kind of eternal loop of past lives and retribution, just as Welles appeared to be home to a dormful of personalities. The Texas connection, well, that may be bush league deduction, but Doggett had learned to his frequent chagrin that fate was woven of stranger stuff.

Jimmy Bond had gotten back to him with a few more jagged fragments of information. He’d run across some underground rumors of a shipful of strange bodies being found in the desert 30 miles south of Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1923. The chief witness had died in a farm accident two weeks after he was deemed a drunken lunatic by the sheriff’s department, and the episode had faded into local urban – rural – lore.

The only other thing was a rash of Southwest UFO sightings in the summer of 1969 – a big year for the Yankees and, quite possibly, Donald Welles. The old-timer at the sheriff’s department had regaled Doggett with tales of Welles’ inebriated misadventures and domestic melodramas. In July 1969, a month before Man initially stepped on the moon, Eulene Welles had reported Donnie had been missing for three days – a new record absence. The sheriff’s department had greeted his possible disappearance as a blessing for Eulene and the county, and so had committed precious few resources to locating him.

“When he finally straggled home, he was stone cold sober and real quiet,” Eulene recalled. “A lot of the time, that’s when Donnie was most likely to whale me real good. So I gave him wide berth. But he came to me when I was in the kitchen, fryin’ some chicken up for his supper. He tells me this wild tale about being taken to this strange place, people pokin’ and stickin’ him and the like. It was crazy talk, but I just let it go, ‘cause I knew what was good for me.

“We never talked about it again – after the shock wore off, I think Donnie was pretty pissed off he’d ever told me it, maybe even socked me a few times more a week for awhile just for good measure. But after a bit, it just sorta faded away, except every once in a while he’d get these nightmares. It was pretty rough – he’d be hollerin’ for ‘em to let him be, to let him go. I’d just lay there in the dark an’ listen to him in agony, afraid for his life. I wonder now he wasn’t tellin’ me the truth all the while. If what happened to Donnie wasn’t part of why Calvin turned out the way he did.”

“You think they did something to him?” Doggett asked, scarcely believing himself. “Something he might’ve passed on to your son?”

Eulene Welles peered steadily at the agent, raising her tumbler to her lips. “Y’all know somethin’, don’t you? About what happened to Donnie. I’d almost think you folks took him, ‘cept Donnie never was worth stealin’. He never was worth much, period, which I guess don’t say much for me, huh? Only thing ever made him feel like a man was whalin’ the crap outta anybody weaker than him and bein’ a Texan. See, his daddy told him he had kin at the Alamo fought off the Mexicans side by side with Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett. Every time he had two pennies to rub together, he’d load us in the truck and drive us over to San Antonio to see the place. So you know what happened to my boy, what made him so wrong?”

Doggett drained off his thick tea, stalling his answer.

**

“So what do you want from me?” Monica challenged. “If you haven’t noticed, you and I are on just about as opposite sides of the fence as I could imagine.”

“Y’all are churchgoing folk, I know that,” Calvin Welles parodied himself. “You think you know all about God’s plan, Little Sis? I ain’t so sure, any more. Sure, I killed enough folk in my time to do a couple eternities in Hell.” The figure outside Monica’s vision chuckled. “Or whatever passes for it. But a couple weeks ago, I had what old Doc Petrovsky woulda called an epiphany. I figured out why my favorite gal pal Marita sprung me.”

“The shipwreck,” Monica said. “How did you kill those aliens? Those people in that diner?”

“Well,” he began. “Mr. Weirhaus taught me a lotta things ‘sides makin’ trouble lights and footstools. Like how there’s all kinda energy we can’t even see or hear or feel. Like ultraviolet or infrared light, them whistles only animals can hear. Only that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Sis. I seen shit make Stephen King get the terminal Hershey squirts. Just floatin’ around us like ghosts of things we never seen. Things I can’t even find a way to describe to you. Folks livin’ in the same space we’re livin’ in, ‘cept they can’t see us any more’n you can see them. Hell, I’m like that little shitter in that Bruce Willis movie – I see dead people, and the places they go after all that energy leaves their bodies. Some of those places, anyway. And that’s all I did to those little assholes in that flying saucer, all those folks at the lab-oratory up north. I gave ‘em a little peek at my new neighbors, and like the pussies most folks are, they couldn’t handle it.

“But then I realized something, Monica: This universe is just a one-horse shithole on a county road of existence. But you know what? I’m the mayor of Shithole now. I remember every once in a while, when he wasn’t shitfaced or beatin’ the shit outta us, the Old Man would haul our little asses over to San Antonio to see that shitty old fort. ‘ Cal,’ the old bastard would tell me, ‘You got greatness in your blood – the blood of men who fought here. But you also got somethin’ special in you, and someday, you’re gonna do somethin’ real special. Then we’d get home and he’d find some reason to whomp the shit outta me or ma, cause he knew there wasn’t jack shit special about him.

“But I think the old cocksucker was right about one thing in his mean little shitty life: I got somethin’ special in me, and I do have the blood of great men in me. There’s a reason for me, more’n just puttin’ folks outta their shitty existence. God put me here to do something great, I can feel that.”

Monica shuddered (mentally) as she thought of this psychotic, psychic, genocidal murderer as a self-styled Messiah, as Sam Houston defending Earth’s precarious fortress. At the same time, she realized she was in the unincorporated presence of Earth’s – potentially, the universe’s – most cataclysmic force. The recognition that Welles might just be right was even more chilling.

“How do you figure I factor into this grand destiny of yours’?” Monica managed. “I’m not certain, but I may be dead.”

“You got an energy block, girl – you’re hovering,” Welles informed her. “Likely the only way I could get you to sit still for two minutes without you tryin’ to lay old Calvin low. What I need from you, I don’t need your body for, though back in the day… No, I need to tap into that major mojo of yours’. You got five things nobody else’s got.

“You got the right kind of energy, so I know you can help me. Most of the folk got your kinda energy got psychic hotlines or lock it up in the back of their brain so they don’t end up in the loony hatch. Two, you know what kinda shitstorm’s comin’ down on this planet, and it ain’t made you loco or yet. You got faith, so there’s at least a passin’ shot you’ll know I ain’t crazy or full of shit, that there’s some kinda plan, an’ I might just be part of it. And you’re a Texan. You might not’ve been born there, but you got Texas blood through and through.”

Monica felt another chill. “You know who my parents were?”

“Focus, Sweetcheeks,” Welles chided casually but with an undertone of menace. “Oh, I forgot -- there’s Number Five, an’ it’s a big one. See, I may have some powerful mojo goin’, but a slug from a .45’ll still make a pretty good crease in old Calvin’s skull. And there are some folks out there’d like to do it – folks who’re bettin’ on our gray buddies in the playoffs. You got the -- what, the re-sources? – to help me meet my destiny before somebody makes a wall trophy outta my head. I figure I try to ask your partner, Mr. Semper Fi, for help, he’s gonna shoot first. I need you to sort of set the stage with him, you might say.”

“I hate to repeat myself, but how am I supposed to do that in my current state?”

“I’ve scouted out another Diehard. You and I hitch up the psychical jumper cables to him, and we oughtta be about to shoot off a message to your boyfriend. I’ve arranged a little tay-ta-tay with some folks, and Agent Doggett can help make sure I make it with my skin on.”

“And why should I trust you to be telling me the truth?” Monica inquired.

The dark shape in the corner of her eye shifted. “’Cause I’m about the only game in town right now.”

“Why would you care?”

“You’re a Texan. You ever been to the Alamo?”

“A few times,” Monica murmured.

“Then you oughtta understand. Right now, we’re all Texans, you capish?”

Monica was silent for a moment. “One last question. Did you do this to me? Like you put it, so I’d sit still for your pitch? Did you conjure up my nephew outside that bar, steer me in front of that cab?”

“Don’t do magic tricks, Darlin’ – my act’s flashy enough. You musta picked up some energy on your own, or that boy musta been tryin’ awful hard to get through on your line.” Calvin Welles paused. “Or maybe the boy, your nephew, maybe he’s part of the plan, too.”

Andrews, Texas

1:47 p.m.

“Dumbass little bastard came outta his mama makin’ trouble,” Gordy Rexmiller grunted, swabbing his last rib in hot sauce. “Troublemaker in school – ‘learnin’ disability,’ the teachers said, but I knew he was just an ornery little shit. Probably the reason Marge -- my wife – got that cancer. Fucked around with drugs, that devil worship crap, UFO bullshit. Matter a’ time ‘til he’d get some little tramp pregnant, so I was pretty overjoyed when he at least had the decency to run off to do it. Never looked back; good riddance.”

Doggett took a bite from his cheeseburger, which was bleeding grease. The working class bar – cinder blocks, wood floor, bar adorned with one lone Bud Lite sign – was virtually deserted, the local laborforce having returned to the company store. Dust motes floated lazily in the little light that shone through small and grubby windows. “UFO bullshit? How deep was he into that?”

The retired steel fabricator waved his calloused hand impatiently. “Just came home one night after bein’ gone for two days. I was ready to beat the shit out of him, but he was all dazed – probably drugged – and he gave me some crap about goin’ on a flyin’ saucer or somethin’. Said little green men was stickin’ him and some other folks with needles and goin’ up his bunghole and shit. I just let him sleep it off.

“Weird thing was, right after that, he quit wearin’ the black T-shirts and yappin’ about dark overlords and shit and started hangin’ around with some group of faggoty jaspers. MOFO, MUFFIN, some such shit.”

“MUFON.” Doggett’s inherited X-Files had extensively dealt with the UFO group.

“Yup. Didn’t care for that kinda silly bullcrap, but it was better than the satanic shit, so we let it go. Kid started bringin’ home Cs and Ds ‘steada Fs, and he got hisself that job at the ice cream parlor. But he kept to hisself, and I guess Marge and I maybe was a little relieved when he took off with that little slut.” Rexmiller huge, sunburnt head raised marginally from his bones and sauce. “You never did make it too clear what the FBI wants that worthless piece of shit for. He pop up somewhere, rob a minimart or somethin’?”

“Cold case files – I pissed off one of the bosses,” Doggett lied. “I’m up to the late ‘60s.”

Rexmiller nodded, showing neither belief nor skepticism. “Boy’s dead. Gotta be by now, way he lived. Probably got his throat sliced by some beaner or got a fatal case of the clap. Gotta be dead.”

“Well, then,” Doggett said, grabbing the grease-spotted check.

**

He couldn’t say why he spent the next 10 minutes up the street from the bar, under the shade of a dying cottonwood. Maybe it had been Rexmiller’s nonchalant but insistent conviction his son was dead. Maybe it was the lack of either any sadness nor angered disgust at the waste that had been his son’s supposedly short life. Maybe it was Doggett’s refusal to concede that a man could so easily shrug off the death of a son, even 35 years later.

Rexmiller emerged from the bar blinking in the Texas sunshine and limping rapidly toward his now-matte finished aqua pickup. The old man tore up gravel leaving the lonely lot, and Doggett had some trouble keeping a tail as the truck merged onto the freeway. Forty miles, a state road, and two county blacktops later, Rexmiller pulled into a scabbed wood-frame farmhouse flanking what had once been a cottonfield.

Doggett breezed by, turning back at the next crossroad. He crunched into the dry and weedy berm about 25 yards beyond the farmhouse, took the safety off his Bureau revolver, and eased the driver’s door shut.

“Guddamit!” a familiar voice shouted as he approached a side living room window. A shot crackled in the air, and Doggett whirled to see Rexmiller level a shotgun in his direction. Doggett’s weapon whipped up.

“Don’t even consider it, sir!” the agent shouted. “I’ll drop you right where you are!”

The old man kept his sights on Doggett, and Doggett his on Rexmiller.

“Dad,” an infinitely weary voice called from the front porch. A bearded, narrow, middle-aged face peered around a rain gutter – Doggett was able to make out the features from the sheriff’s 1969 file photo. “Put down the gun, Dad.”

Rexmiller held his stance for another second, then lowered the gun to the patchy ground.

“Guess you better come in, Mister,” Trey Rexmiller sighed.

**

“An FBI agent,” Trey marveled, shaking his head. “Guess the apple can fall pretty far from the tree sometimes. Right, Dad?”

Rexmiller continued to glare at Doggett, who was stroking the plush head of a large tabby that had settled on the couch beside him. If he was surprised or gratified to learn the fate of his granddaughter, it didn’t show.

His son, a painfully thin, dusty-looking man in his late 40s, was more genial, particularly given the circumstances, but Doggett suspected his attitude was the product of burnout – too much drugs, too much booze, too much of everything for too long. “Though I figure Monica – that’s her name? -- didn’t exactly fall off my tree. I never touched Karen – not that way, nohow. After what happened to us, she was kinda off, you know? On sex? But we was in love, though – I could feel it.”

“What did happen to you two?” Doggett asked quietly. He knew that whatever he found here, he’d never see his world the same way again. The thought of exploring this new world without Monica filled him with desolation and dread.

“They took us,” Trey smiled. Doggett knew without asking who “they” were. “It was ’69, you know, when we got to the moon? That’s what was such a hoot about it. ‘Cept at the time, we was scared about shitless. I’d been out at the lake, doin’ some weed by myself – Dad and I’d just had a big row, again, right, Dad?”

Rexmiller looked off toward the front window, and Trey continued. “Anyways, this ship comes over the lake – looks like one of those newer rigs, with all the lights, ‘cept it was like some kinda rig God himself might drive. All of a sudden, I feel it sucking me into the air, and I blacked out. ‘Cept I didn’t – it were more like somebody just ripped me outta time, like I just didn’t exist for a while there.”

Lost time. It was a recurrent theme in Mulder’s files. Doggett leaned forward as the cat leapt to the floor.

“When I woke up, they was almost a dozen of us – men, women, mostly pretty young. Mother-naked, strapped down, them stickin’ things in us and wavin’ tools around our heads. Some reason, I weren’t scared – I think maybe they did that. Only one makin’ a fuss was this one guy, kinda hardass-lookin’ character, cussin’ and screamin’ at ‘em. They didn’t pay him no mind – just kept workin’ on him.”

Donny Welles, Doggett guessed. “And these…these people.”

“Weren’t no people, not like us, anyway. They wanted somethin’ with us, and they did somethin’ to Karen.”

“They impregnated her.” It just popped out of Doggett’s mouth, ripe with revelation and horror.

“They took us back, and it was like that time-jumpin’ thing again. First, I thought I’s had some kinda bad trip. I just went home, but I didn’t tell my folks.” He glanced at his father with a sad smile. “I knew Karen from school, and when I saw her next day in the hall, she gave me this secret look, and I knew it weren’t no bad trip. I caught up to her after school, and we talked some about it. She didn’t tell her folks, neither, but we both started hanging out together and readin’ up on UFOs and such. We kinda felt like we oughtta protect each other, like if we was together, they couldn’t come back and get us again.

“I got involved with one a’ them UFO groups, but those folks was mostly just strange. Got me a job at the ice cream shop so I could keep a eye on Karen. That’s when she told me she was late. On her time, you know. Swore up and down nobody’d touched her, and I knew then they’d done it. Then, those folks started comin’ around.”

“The, the aliens?” Doggett had trouble with the concept.

Trey shook his head. “These was real people. Least, I’m pretty sure. Two of ‘em – some creepy, smiley younger guy, smokin’ like there weren’t no tomorrow, and another guy, nervous fella.”

Spender? Doggett’s mind reeled from too much input. “What’d these guys want from you?”

“They kinda danced around things, asked about why we was in MUFON, about the night we got taken. Said they was government, that we shouldn’t say nothin’ about them comin’ around. But I don’t think they was no feds. They wanted to know what got done to us on that spaceship, like they was afraid of somethin’. Like they knew them aliens. Like them aliens were their enemy.”

According to Scully, Spender the Older had been the front man, the hired gun, for a group of international scientists, intelligence folks, and shadowy types of uncertain identity. A few years ago, this Syndicate had tried to make a deal with the extraterrestrials – control of the human race, in exchange for their lives and their families. The satanic pact had abruptly went up in flames in an airport hangar, with only Spender and Mulder’s old partner, Fowley, escaping with their lives. Scully had told him a group of alien rebels had been responsible for the mass immolation – rebels who for some reason had opposed the takeover of Earth.

Were these rebels behind the abductions of 1969? Had they taken Rexmiller, Karen Bellefort, Welles, and the rest and impregnated Bellefort and maybe some of the others in an effort to fight their hostile brethren, to fight the future they’d laid out. At the time, Doggett had patiently heard Scully’s theories out, suppressed a smirk, and buried himself in a casefile. Now, reality was shifting before his eyes.

“That’s when we decided to go to Mexico ,” Trey said, breaking Doggett’s spell. “We was scared maybe they meant to hurt us, maybe kill Karen’s baby. We was gonna get across the border, have the baby, and come back under, what do they call it, under an alias.”

Trey fell silent then, his eyes filling with pain.

“She didn’t make it through the delivery,” Rexmiller grunted, his voice squeezed with suppressed and long-buried emotion. “They found a doctor in some little shithole village, some goddamn butcher, but after the girl came out, Karen started bleedin’.”

“Hemorrhage,” Trey whispered. He looked up at Doggett, eyes shining. “Buried her in a cemetery down there. Knew I couldn’t raise no baby, she’d have a worthless druggie for a daddy, so I took her to this orphanage on the Mex side. Figured she’d have to be better off with the nuns than on the road with me.” He paused. “Looks like maybe I was right. You her partner, huh?Monica’s?”

“Yeah.”

“An’ you care about her? I can see it plain.”

Doggett’s mouth opened, but he couldn’t force speech from it.

Trey smiled with sadness, discovery, and, Doggett thought, a possible touch of redemption. “You tell her,” he started, choking. “You tell Monica her daddy’s proud she made somethin’ outta herself, seein’ what she came from.”

Doggett nodded, still mute. He struggled for balance, somehow got out of his chair, and stumbled out into the arid Texas day.

Oglala Nation Federal Reservation

Kyle , S.D.

4:12 p.m.

Connie White Eagle slowly wiped the last of the lunch dishes, glancing out into the scrubby yard where William shrieked gleefully as he played with several of the reservation children. She pondered the weight Dana and Fox had borne, raising their child under a lie, and wondered vaguely and casually – as only a lawman or a career soldier’s wife could -- what Mike might be into at this point.

She felt little anxiety for herself or Dana’s son. Under the officiously protective but frequently apathetic eye of the federal government, the reservation was the perfect hiding place. Though Wounded Knee continued to throb dully within the heart of the Nation, Mike’s government badge had come to be viewed with respect and pride rather than fear or derision, and no one on the reservation had hesitated to provide refuge for Connie and the white boy the younger men had seen around the community college. It was the way of all people who’d struggled daily for dignity and, more critically, it was the way of her people.

“Mama!”

Connie’s head jerked up, and she squinted into the outdoor sun. Her cousin Joan hurtled toward the clutch of boys who’d been playing catch. The children were clustered about William, who was sitting on the ground with his head lolling. Connie banged through the screen door and rushed to her charge.

“Was he hit?” she asked the other boys gently, examining William’s cranium. The boy’s eyes were closed, but something moved frenetically under his lids. The other children shook their heads slowly, their gaze transfixed on their playmate.

“William?” Connie murmured, squeezing his shoulder. “Honey, can you talk to me?”

William’s wide forehead suddenly rose, and his clear eyes blinked at his mother’s friend. But the eyes were not William’s innocent orbs – they were curious, intense, adult. Connie felt a moment’s chill, but she calmed immediately as her cultural instincts kicked in.

“Who are you?” she asked the boy.

Knoxville , Tenn.

5:22 p.m.

Scully’s cell phone shrilled as Mike maneuvered the car between two semis and into an open stretch of interstate. Spender, who had been about to doze off in the backseat, leaned over Scully’s passenger headrest .

“Mulder?” she snapped into the phone.

“It’s me, Dana – Connie,” her friend said. “William…Ah, I have somebody you need to talk to.”

Scully frowned as Connie White Eagle passed off the phone.

“Dana?” the agent froze, heart pounding, as her son addressed her. “I need you to listen to me. It’s Monica.”

“Monica?” Scully whispered, uncomprehending. Spender grasped the headrest with a sharp intake of air.

“How’d they know we were—” the young man rasped before Scully cut him off with a gesture.

“What’s going on? Connie!”

“Dana,” William’s voice persisted. “I promise you, we won’t hurt William. You know I wouldn’t let that happen. But you have to listen. Where’s Mulder?”

Mike had pulled off onto the berm above Knoxville, and he stared intently at his friend’s alarmed expression. Scully swallowed several times, working to draw on the reserves of belief Mulder had slowly opened within her.

“All right,” she finally said. “What do you want?”

“You and Mulder need to go to San Antonio . Immediately. It may be the answer to everything.”

“Where are you, Monica? How are you doing this?”

“Goddammit,” William barked in a new voice, rougher, explosively impatient and with a blue-collar drawl. “You gotta haul your ass to the Alamo , you wanna have anything left for this boy!” Monica’s calmed tone took control – it was if there were someone sharing an extension with her. “I’m sorry, Dana, but this may be the only way we beat them.”

“Them?” Scully mumbled.

“Them,” Monica repeated emphatically. “You and Mulder need to get to the Alamo by 3 p.m. tomorrow. I’m going to try to get through to John, but I don’--” William’s voice dribbled off.

“Monica!” Scully shouted.

“Mommy,” William cooed gleefully.

**

Doggett was scanning the flat rural Texas landscape for some direction, some inspiration. The world had changed in Trey Rexmiller’s ramshackle farmhouse, and the agent was still struggling to re-orient himself.

Calvin Welles’ father, Trey Rexmiller, and Karen Bellefort had been abducted 34 years ago and Karen, what, impregnated? She’d given birth to a daughter – if Trey would submit to it, a DNA test would be able to prove Monica wasn’t his biological daughter, but without a sample of Bellefort’s DNA, that didn’t really prove anything…

Doggett leaned back on the baked metal of his rental car. Despite the staggering nature of what he’d found out in Texas, he was no closer to solving the murders in Ohio, finding Calvin Welles. Monica was perched on death’s doorstep, and a fat lot of good this information would do her. Doggett wasn’t even certain he would tell her if survived.

He slapped the top of the Nissan and fished out his keys. Doggett inserted the key in the driver’s door lock and was lifting the handle when he spotted the woman in the side mirror.

Doggett staggered back as Monica smiled at him. He whirled. No one was on the road but him. He slowly turned back to the mirror. Monica spoke silently to him. As his initial shock wore off, replaced by questions regarding his sanity, he tried to make out words.

“I can’t--” he whispered. “What?”

Monica looked frustrated, as if she could read his face, hear his words. She tried to round each syllable, exaggerate her mouthings, but her partner shook his head.

Then the face in the small mirror smiled. Doggett’s cousin Anita had had a congenital hearing disorder, and Monica knew that as a teen he’d diligently attended sign language classes so he could communicate with the lonely girl. Monica’s fingers rose to her face, and she began slowly to sign letters.

“The Alamo ?” Doggett questioned, peering into the glass. Monica gestured confirmation. “At three, tomorrow. What’s at the Alamo? What?” Monica re-signed with emphasis. “Welles? Calvin Welles? He’s gonna be there?”

“H-E-N-E-E-D-S-Y-O-U,” Monica signed. “F-I-G-H-T-C-O-L-O-N-I-S-T-S.”

“The aliens?” Doggett asked, realizing the words now sounded different in his mouth. His eyes narrowed. “Is that you, Welles? This some kind of game?”

Monica shook her head, sighing. “W-E-L-L-E-S-K-E-Y-T-O-S-U-R-V-I-V-A-L-W-E-A-P-O-N.” She studied the suspicion in Doggett’s face. “W-H-E-N-I-D-I-E-D.”

“When you died?” Doggett murmured.

“A-U-D-R-E-Y-P-A-U-L-E-Y.”

Pauley had been a mentally impaired patient at the hospital where Monica had been taken following a serious car crash. Monica had nearly been pronounced dead by a physician who’d been euthanizing patients for their organs, but Audrey had rescued her at the cost of her own life and, according to Monica, helped pull her back from the other side.

“S-H-O-U-L-D-H-A-V-E-C-O-M-E-I-N. S-H-O-U-L-D-H-A-V-E-L-E-T-M-E-I-N.”

Just prior to the accident, Doggett had felt something might have happened, that he and Monica were about to make a personal breakthrough. But the crash, the events at the hospital, had given him the excuse to pull back, to retreat from his feelings. When she’d been released from the hospital, he’d driven her home. Monica had offered him an opening, but he’d found he couldn’t cross that threshold yet.

“O-P-E-N-U-P. T-R-U-S-T. T-R-U-S-T-M-E.”

Doggett swallowed. “And what do I do once I get to the Alamo?”

Monica was silent.

“Great.” Doggett sighed. Then he touched the side of the mirror, absurdly, as if caressing Monica’s cheek. “Monica, are you…?”

Monica smiled, and then was gone. Her partner stood, dazed, for nearly two minutes. Doggett peered up at the house, but neither father nor son were visible in the window. He absently climbed into the driver’s seat.

“John, right?” Calvin Welles smiled.

Doggett’s gun was out in a split second, its barrel digging into Welles’ cheek.

“Whoa, John,” the murderer cautioned soothingly. “Don’t wanna kill the golden goose, now, do you?”

Oscagoula , Fla.

5:34 p.m.

“Goes to figure,” Mulder lamented as Skinner deposited two of his old friend’s automatic weapons under a blanket in the trunk. “I always miss the big moments in my son’s development, like his first big boy pottie or the first time he channels the comatose.”

“Comatose?” Scully perked. “Dear god. What happened?”

“Special Agent Reyes was hit by a cab in D.C. last night – nothing suspicious. Skinner just called to check – she’s stabilized, but she’s showing some unusual brain activity. The doctor said it was almost as if he was reading two individual sets of EKGs. I think maybe Agent Reyes is linked up somehow with a man named Calvin Welles. Welles is a pathological killer who suffers from multiple personality disorders and has reportedly unprecedented psychic abilities. Although to be charitable about it, he may just be mankind’s savior.”

“A psychotic Jesus?” Scully murmured.

“Probably more like the snake in the garden,” Mulder suggested. “I suspect our Mr. Welles is our Trojan Horse, genetically designed to wreak havoc among our gray-skinned friends. Some intelligence very likely has programmed the human race with the means to protect itself against the alien colonists. Somehow, this was anticipated, or at least planned for.”

“Or predestined?” Scully offered. “Data on secret weapons, defensive strategies incorporated into the human genome? This man Welles’ powers predicted? Mulder, perhaps this is evidence of more than the existence of psychic abilities and extraterrestrial intervention.”

“Whoa,” her partner said as Skinner slammed the trunk. “Let’s deal with the cosmic issues later, OK, Sister Dana Stigmata? Why the Alamo? Is it some kind of pickup point, a neutral meeting ground, a trap? And why the Alamo ? Welles is from Texas, so maybe the Alamo is representative – the place where the Texas militia made it’s major stand against General Santa Ana’s army. Skinner said Welles likes to play mindgames.”

“But you don’t think so.”

Mulder smiled despite the gravity of the situation. “I have a theory I asked an old friend at the U.S. Geological Survey to verify.”

“You want to share, Mulder? Never mind. But maybe you could tell me where Marita Covarrubias fits into this.”

“Got somebody working on that too, my little sweetie-poot.”

Prince George Estates

Washington , D.C.

6:11 p.m.

Like everything else in an increasingly feudal American society, the Prince George Estate condos were elegantly awash in security, from neatly barbered and pressed gate guards and brushed pewter keypads to cameras mounted not for discreet vigilance but for the high-profile assurance of the estate’s six/seven-figure tenants.

It took Yves Harlow 10 minutes to distract the immaculate guards, bypass the understated matte keypads, and evade the cameras. As she electronically disarmed the alarm on Petra Negri’s front door, the Lone Gunwoman felt a spur of irritation at the delay. Life with Jimmy, while not without its domestic and altruistic rewards, must be softening me, she thought.

Then her irritation gave way to curiosity as she stared back at the dead woman in the living room. The slim blonde’s striking cobalt eyes were wide-open, a look of almost hurt astonishment on her sculpted features. Yves had learned to spot a hundred types of death at a glance. This one was sudden violent, premeditated, unexpected.

The woman’s pinstriped black business suit was unrumpled. Every expensively coiffured hair was in place. But a cursory investigation revealed broken cervical vertebrae. She’d died just short of instantly, Yves deduced from her betrayed expression.

More interestingly, the woman in the leather wing chair was not Petra Negri, AKA Marita Covarrubias, although the build, the facial structure, all vital police statistics were a close match.

A silent alarm sounded in the recesses of Yves’ labyrinthine mind. The front door alarm had been armed almost certainly after the murder, if not by Covarrubias, then by some compatriot of hers’. Covarrubias was going underground, and didn’t plan on coming back. This woman was to take Covarrubias’ place on a morgue slab, but surely the DCPD wouldn’t be fooled by this imposter for more than a few minutes.

Unless… Yves moved past the dead woman and began to search for the bomb. It likely was on a timer, and that made it easier to find. It was expertly wired into an under-the-cabinet kitchen clock radio, its presence given away by an odd flickering of the digital numerals.

Careful dissection of the appliance’s plastic shell indicated Yves had a few ticks past seven minutes before the Prince George became a new parking structure. Not enough time for the cops – even if Yves had been so inclined – and despite her cynical view of humanity, she couldn’t permit the dozens, if not hundreds of deaths the explosion would incur.

Yves sighed and set about disarming the bomb…

Flathead, Texas

1:23 p.m.

Michael White Eagle flipped the lever on the Unleaded pump, waited for the old-fashioned dispenser to zero out, and squeezed the handle. Locking it into place, he surveyed the flat, brown Central Texas landscape, framed in the bruised rose-blue of sunset.

With roughly 70 miles left until San Antonio , Mike could feel the tension in the car. He’d sensed the single-minded obsession in the man Spender – during his intelligence years, he’d met many such men, consumed by anger or ego disguised as duty or passion. Such men were dangerous, because the world outside their obsessions had ceased to exist in real terms, and thus had no further value. Spender could be the death of them all.

Dana was more of an enigma. Though the weight of the world rested literally on her shoulders, Mike knew Sherman – Fox – and William were at the center of her universe. Dana longed to return to that center, and she knew the only conceivable way back was through San Antonio .

Mike himself felt a strange calm, though his own universe had been irrevocably altered. He had always known there was more to the world than it was willing to reveal, and any insights it chose to share brought him closer to the center of all things. Whatever role he was now to play in Man’s ultimate fate, he had always been destined to play it.

As he pondered the metaphysical, the teal Buick coasted into the island behind him. Two men, sunglasses, short sleeves – Mike’s eyes had barely shifted, but he had been well-trained in the ways of the fathers as well as Uncle Sam. His fingers tensed, ready to move toward the nine millimeter in the waistband of his jeans.

He hadn’t anticipated the black Ford van that screamed into the gravel gas station lot and spit up rocks as it hemmed he and his passengers in. Mike’s hand went for his weapon, and he felt fire in his right shoulder. His fingers instinctively tightened on the grip, on the trigger, and the weight of the world slammed into his chest as he spotted the automatic pistol emerging above the van’s drivers mirror. The lawman was propelled from his feet, slumping against the pump and collapsing into the dirt.

“Mike!” Scully shrieked, throwing open her door and coming out with her own revolver in both hands. “Spender, get down!”

A pair of black vans, similar to the first one, pulled into the station. Their side doors slid open, and a quartet of men surrounded the pumps with AKs aloft as another pair peeled off into the station/general store. Scully heard a single shot – the clerk.

“Agent Scully.” The voice from the main van’s passenger side was deep and Germanic. “As you can see, resistance is absolutely futile. Please drop your weapon, and we shall talk.”

Scully surveyed the men ringing the pumps and threw her gun into the dust. The main van’s passenger door opened, and an older man stepped out. His face – mustachioed, slightly jowly – was vaguely paternal. But the man’s piercing blue eyes belied any avuncular aura.

“Strughold,” Scully stated.

“You are a well-educated young woman,” he smiled, stepping up to the rear passenger window of Scully’s recently rented car. “You may be one of only five living people who can put a face to my name. Most of those able to do so have lived abbreviated lives.” Strughold bent down and peered at the stoic, disfigured young man inside. He rapped on the window, and Spender turned slowly to stare murderously at him. “Ah, I am sorry about your father’s demise, Jeffrey. He was a brilliant man – flawed, but brilliant, nonetheless. A man who helped shape the destiny of the race. You and your friend here would disrupt that destiny.”

“My friend,” Scully implored, straining to see Mike’s crumpled body over the car roof. “He may be alive. I’m a doctor.”

Strughold waved a dismissive hand. “You see, Jeffrey, where you see Man’s extinction, your father and I accept the transition of our species. This is evolution, Jeffrey, Agent Scully. The next stage of Man’s existence, with the help of our friends and their technology.” He turned to Scully, and indicated the men around him. “You see my colleagues, Agent Scully? They are the future – the melding of two worlds, the beginning of a new epoch for this planet.”

Scully’s chest tightened as she surveyed the men – the supersoldiers, genetically engineered with hybrid DNA, impervious to bullets and bombs. She recognized one of the “men” flanking her as Knowle Rohrer, some remanufactured version of one of Doggett’s old military pals and the man for whose “murder” Mulder had nearly been executed. If he recognized her, he didn’t acknowledge it.

“And what use do you believe you have in a new world of supermen, Strughold?” she mustered. “Do you honestly believe the colonists will allow you and the others in your Syndicate to survive?”

Strughold tapped his gray temple. “Information, it is power, correct? The men and women we have assembled, they hold more power and wealth than you can imagine. We have the science, the capital to tap the Earth’s most deeply hidden resources. Without us, this planet to the colonists is merely a lump of iron floating in the vacuum of space. We will broker our place in this new world.”

“Is that what they’ve told you, Strughold?” Scully demanded. “That this is about mining the Earth dry? This is about Man’s extinction – they’re coming to destroy what they helped to create. We’re an abomination to them, Strughold – no one will get out alive, no matter what they’ve told you.”

Strughold regarded the agent for a moment, and the smile disappeared. “Where is your Agent Mulder? We want the other one, this man Welles. Once he has been disposed of, we have no need to destroy you or your friend Mulder. You will be free to find your own place in the new world.”

Scully crossed her arms silently, staring straight into Strughold’s icy eyes. He nodded.

“So be it, then,” he murmured, turning on his heel and stalking back toward the van. Strughold’s leg was poised on the door sill as Scully heard the whirring, thumping sounds in the sky.

The first black chopper buzzed the station, followed swiftly by another, and then a third. Strughold’s men aimed toward the helicopters, pulling off a few rounds before the choppers returned fire.

Scully had seen these hybrid supersoldiers in action, and had little hope for a successful rescue. A tear gas canister bounced off the hood of the car and rolled to the feet of one soldier. He ignored it as it exploded in a flume of smoke. The grenades began falling to earth, dozens of them, and Scully hacked as the air filled with a thick, grainy dust. She leapt back into the car, slamming the door and peering through the clouds.

She jumped back as a face struck the passenger window, red and contorted. The face vanished in a shower of gristle and blood. Through the “smoke,” Scully could see Strughold’s men dancing, shaking, and, ultimately, exploding. As the smoke cleared, she surveyed a macabre tableau of cataclysmic death.

“Magnetite,” Spender whispered from the back seat. Barely registering the meaning of his comment, Scully shoved open the car door, rolled out, and located her revolver. She came up in a crouch as the helicopters touched down on the adjacent highway, aiming for the tinted window of Strughold’s van.

The door flew open, and Strughold’s arm emerged with an automatic. Bullets rang off the pole behind Scully’s head. Before she could fire, the van rocked with the impact of hundreds of rounds. The men in the helicopter emptied their weapons into the open van door. Scully, flattened against the side of her car, could see only Strughold’s legs, bucking, kicking, finally lolling limply over the reddening gravel beneath the door.

She didn’t move, until a firm hand clamped onto her shoulder. Scully looked up, eyes wide, at a familiar face she never thought she would be happy to see.

“At long last, Agent Scully,” Deputy Director Alvin Kersh said. His face, above the FBI flak jacket, was expressionless. “And your associate here, he’d be former Agent Spender?”

“How,” Scully breathed, “How’d you know?”

“Oh, we’ve had an eye on Mr. Strughold for a while now,” Kersh informed her. “We didn’t expect, however, that he would lead us to the Bureau’s prodigal fugitive. You may want us to check you out. The magnetite powder in those grenades could play temporary havoc with your respiratory tract.”

“I thought you…” Scully began, studying the face of her former superior.

The deputy director was silent for a moment. “Yes, well. Take a breath, Agent Scully. What do you smell?”

Scully stared at Kersh, unbelievingly.

Kersh glanced at the carnage of his own making. “‘ If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.’ Winston Churchill. That’s the smell of musket oil and powder in the air, Agent Scully. The revolution has begun.”

“And I can tell you who caught the first shot,” a weak voice chuckled from behind Scully. She turned to find Mike White Eagle, face gleaming with sweat, blood seeping from his shoulder. He registered Scully’s shocked expression and rapped his chest. Mike winced as he smiled. “Ancient Native American secret: Kevlar. Never leave the reservation without it, not with you crazy white folks out there.”

“Get this man some attention,” Kersh called to one of his agents. “And I want a team out here with a DNA kit to run every piece of tissue within 50 yards.” He turned to Scully. “Thought I saw our boy Rohrer watching Strughold’s back. You’re a physician, Agent Scully – is that conceivable behavior for a murder victim, or am I not open to the possibilities?”

Scully felt a flush of relief. She could afford to let Kersh have that one.

The Alamo

San Antonio , Texas

2:47 p.m.

Welles laughed harshly. “You look around this place, John. How many folks you spose come through here a day, googawin’ and ooh-awin’ and droolin’ over the fellas on those walls over there? Couple hundred, maybe?”

“You got a point?” Doggett sighed. The long drive and sleepless night at the Central Texas motel with this monster had left him edgy and irritable. Welles had regaled him with tales of mayhem and depravity, both inside and outside prison walls, and the agent wondered what he was doing not putting a pill in this man’s brain.

The weekday crowd at the historic fortress was relatively sparse, for which the agent was immensely grateful. It had gone against all his cop training to bring this unstable serial killer into a public setting, where anything was likely to erupt, without first ensuring the place was clear. But who could he have called? Doggett had been forced to drop his shield of healthy disbelief, and he prayed he wouldn’t regret the decision.

“History’s all the time rewritin’ itself,” Welles continued in a conversational voice as dead soldiers and statesmen looked down from the exhibition hall’s walls. “Half of the foundin’ fathers was doin’ the family slaves every time they got out in a stiff wind. How many deals you figure them dead presidents in your wallet made under the table to fuck over your four fathers. How many Native ‘Murricans you figure them dead presidents plowed under to get their faces in your wallet. James Bowie – the knife fella, shot hisself an assload of Mexes here? – hell, he got rich peddlin’ slaves and launderin’ money for Jean LaFitte, the pirate guy. He used that Bowie knife a’his to gut some fella in Louisiana one time.

“And Sam Houston? Man had a serious fucking substance abuse problem, old Doc Petrovsky mighta said. When he was a congressman, he whomped holy shit outta one a’ his learned colleagues. Shit, they run him out as governor in two different states. My point, John, is nobody thinks a’ Richard Nixon as the fella made pals with Mousy Tung and got the economy pumpin’ again. Bill Clinton’s just some fella liked a good hummer between speeches. Hundred years from now, your grandkids are gonna know Calvin Welles as the fella that saved the human race from extinction, the savior of mankind. It’s showdown time at the Alamo again, John – I’m Sam Houston and you’re Jim Bowie. Guessin’ that’s why they picked this place.”

“Well, not exactly,” amended a voice behind Welles. Doggett’s jaw dropped as Mulder tossed the tourist brochure he’d been reading into a nearby trash receptacle. “In it’s own twisted way, history may well view you as the second coming, Mr. Welles, but there was a very logical reason why they selected the Alamo.”

“Mulder,” Doggett murmured. “What are you doing here?”

The mass murderer gave the ex-agent the once-over. “Friend a’yours, John?”

“What do you mean, Mulder?” Doggett inquired. “Why’d they pick the Alamo ? And who’s they, for that matter?”

“I think ‘they’ are alien rebels, Agent Doggett,” Mulder said. “They view themselves as of mankind’s guardians. They see it as their mission to save us from their race. The key to our salvation was encoded into Man’s genetic makeup millennia ago, and Welles may be the agent of that salvation.

“As for why the Alamo was picked, I think that was a simple matter of chemistry and physics. I’ve got a friend at the U.S. Geological Survey who confirmed that much of the materials used to build the Alamo were mined and quarried nearby, right in the middle of one of the Western Hemisphere’s largest magnetite deposits.”

“Magnetite?”

Mulder grinned. “Alien kryptonite, Agent. Remember what happened to your buddy Rohrer at the Anasazi village, right before the place got leveled for a parking lot? The place was lousy with magnetite. It’s death to both aliens and genetically engineered terminators. As it turns out, the metal in most of the hardware here is at least 50 percent magnetite, and there are probably veins of magnetite throughout the fort’s walls. This is a safe house – nobody can touch Mr. Welles here.”

“Sumbitch,” Welles mumbled.

Doggett blinked, trying to take it all in. “Wait a minute, Mulder, just hold up. You say alien rebels wanna take Welles off to his destiny, whatever that is. But if the aliens can’t come anywhere near here without their heads blowing off, how’re they gonna take delivery?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. But I am afraid that if we try to leave here, we may find ourselves in a crossfire between the colonists, the rebels, and maybe what’s left of the Syndicate.”

“Syndicate? The mob?”

Mulder shook his head. “A group of people who’d just as soon Mr. Welles here never left here alive.”

“Why, if he can save all our asses?”

“Escalation.” The trio looked up to see a beautiful blonde woman 10 feet away, pulling a glock from her handbag. She leveled the weapon as she approached. A pair of families scurried away. The woman made no attempt to prevent their escape.

“Marita,” Mulder greeted with a smile. “When’d you hit town? Scully’ll want you to hit some nightspots with us.”

“Agents Mulder, Doggett, I need you to step away from Mr. Welles,” Marita Covarrubias instructed calmly. “You see, Mulder, if your friend’s allowed to enter the picture, all bets are off. Any chance of negotiating an accord with the colonists disappears, and Earth’s fate is sealed.”

“I was wondering why, if Larry Opps was secretly feeding information to you against Spender’s interests, the Syndicate tried to kill him along with Spender and the rest of us. You’ve been hedging your bets, watching which horse to bet on.”

“The Syndicate’s successors are as ham-handed and foolhardy as those original cowering thugs,” Covarrubias said. “They think they can deal with the colonists as if they were brokering a deal with Microsoft. But they are right about one thing: Resistance is futile. Every attempt we’ve made to fight the future with science, with technology, has failed miserably. We must use whatever leverage we have left to negotiate a deal.”

“That being the secret genetic code,” Mulder responded. “Larry Opps supplied you with the formula for fighting the colonists, and you hope to bluff the aliens – maybe offer to bury that knowledge.”

“And, unfortunately, you with it,” Covarrubias said with what seemed to be genuine regret. “Where are Spender and Agent Scully?”

“Never can count on the old ball-and-chain to keep a date.”

“We’ll find them.”

“Ms. Covarrubias,” Doggett advised, “you know this is a national historical site? Those people you just scared outta here will have a few dozen federal rangers and local cops here in minutes. You can’t make it out of here.”

“Agent Doggett, you of all people should understand that my life is small sacrifice for the future of mankind,” the blonde said calmly. “I don’t expect to leave here alive. The work will go on, regardless, however.”

“Hey, honey.” Doggett and Mulder turned toward Welles – they’d nearly forgotten he was there. The psychopath stepped toward Covarrubias, whose gun hand stiffened. “You ever looked into the mouth of hell, Babe?”

“Welles,” Doggett warned, resisting the temptation to go for his weapon.

Welles’ eyes rolled up, and his body grew rigid. Covarrubias’ gun wavered.

“Mulder!” Doggett barked. “Close your eyes!”

Mulder stood transfixed, watching intently as Welles’ eyelids began to pulse.

“Mulder, for God’s sake!” Doggett yelled.

It began as the air about them seemed to congeal into misty shapes, some vaguely human, some vaguely terrestrial, some utterly and indescribably alien. Then the mist started to take form, and Doggett felt a metallic shock of adrenalin and fear. He was rooted to the floor, as was Mulder, but his colleague wore an expression of awe.

Covarrubias broke the spell as she spotted the pulsating form at her feet, all teeth and stalks and colors that defied the known spectrum, shrieking and waving her gun at the shifting entity.

“Welles!!” Doggett yelled. Covarrubias’ screams had drawn some young stragglers from outside, as well as a pair of park rangers whose drawn guns lolled limply at their side. It’s all illusion, the agent told himself. Welles was a conman, a magician with a convincing schtick.

A second voice then told him what he knew must be the truth: That this growing multitude of oddities and outright horrors was real, that these things shared the same space with humanity, on a different plane or dimension. That epiphany did little to slow his mounting sense of panic: If our existence were as unknown to them as ours’ was to them, he wondered, then what would their reaction be if they were brought into our space?

But a measure of reason emerged as Doggett spotted one of the rangers leveling his gun toward a teenager paralyzed by a swarm of…something…spinning about his upper body.

The swarm then converged on the teenager, whose head disappeared in the midst of the alien organisms. His fingers jerked as a spray of blood erupted from within the midst of the swarm.

“No!” Doggett shouted, raising his own gun. Then he spotted the family, two adults and two young girls, huddled in a corner near a display case, menaced by a tentacled, eyeless, color-shifting creature. The children’s faces were contorted in sheer terror. The thing edged closer and reared up, swelling, toward the family. One of the rangers was swatting at something on his arm. His fear-addled colleague aimed for a shot that would take a potentially lethal chunk from the man along with whatever tormented him.

Mulder blinked. “John,” he murmured urgently. Doggett’s gun wavered between the family, the teen, and the rangers, and his face was bunched in an agony of indecision. “John, I don’t know if you can even kill these things. You have to send them back – they can’t be here. You know what you have to do.”

Doggett glanced sharply at Mulder. “But he’s the answer – you said that. He’s our only hope.”

Mulder grasped his arm. “If that’s true, John, then I don’t know if this is the right answer for any of us.”

Doggett looked into his friend’s eyes, pleading for some rational guidance, possibly for absolution in advance. Then an explosion rocked the room.

Welles’ body jumped as the bullet entered his chest and plowed out between his shoulder blades, and the psychic killer dropped to his knees. The whites of his eyes receded, and he stared at Mulder and Doggett inamazement . Blood then spilled from between his teeth as Welles grinned. He mouthed something, his throat rattling, but Doggett couldn’t make it out.

As Calvin Welles collapsed to the floor, the nightmarish menagerie he had summoned vanished.

Covarrubias fell to her knees with an expression of mindless shock, as the teenager across the room dropped, his stalk of a headless neck gouting blood. Doggett’s eyes tracked slowly to Skinner, whose face was filled with uncertainty as his freshly fired gun hung at his side.

Then, Skinner’s features began to fade, as the room grew brighter. The light intensified, and Doggett squinted to find its source.

“Jeremiah!” he heard Mulder shout. Doggett turned to see a figure approach. The man’s familiarly serene features were bathed in the harsh light.

“It’s time,” Jeremiah Smith informed Mulder, kneeling beside Welles’ body.

“He’s dead,” Doggett protested.

“Maybe not for long,” Mulder suggested. “I just hope this works.”

“Have you wondered why the timetable for colonization – 2012 -- is so precise?” Jeremiah asked, laying a palm on Welles’ bloodied chest. “It’s because there is a distinct urgency to their mission. Their astronomers have predicted the star that serves their planetary system will begin to go supernoval in roughly 15 terrestrial years. Their world will no longer exist, and without colonization, their extinction is certain.”

“And this is the only planet they can colonize?” Doggett demanded. “These guys are how many light years away? There isn’t any other place they can go?”

“They could the adapt environmental conditions of any of several thousand planets to their needs,” “Smith” replied as he ministered to Welles.

“But this is the planet they have to colonize, right?” Mulder said. “They can’t accept their own extinction while their inferior ‘children’ survive.”

“Children?” Doggett echoed.

“Mr. Welles’ abilities should help provide the ‘distraction’ necessary to ensure they cannot complete their mission.”

“And ensure we complete ours’?” Mulder said. “As Ms. Covarrubias once told me, ‘Not everything dies.’”

Smith paused and looked up curiously. Had he thought it was possible, Mulder would have sworn he had smiled. But before he could inquire further, Smith stood and disappeared.

Or appeared to. Smith and Welles simply were no longer in the room.

“What happened?” Doggett stammered.

“Don’t ask me,” Mulder murmured. “But I’d bet anything it happened in nine minutes.”

Doggett looked down at the spot where Welles’ lifeless shell had been. Then he heard the footfalls outside, the clamor the former Marine recognized as body armor and heavy ordnance.

“They’re coming,” Skinner stated.

“Agents John Doggett and Walter Skinner,” an amplified voice reverberated beyond the Alamo ’s walls, as if on cue. “This is the San Antonio Police Department Special Weapons and Tactical Unit. We need you to immediately surrender yourselves, Mr. Mulder, and Mr. Welles.”

“They’re awfully well-informed,” Mulder mused. “I have a feeling we’re all about to get our taxes audited, with extreme prejudice.”

Doggett looked to Skinner, then back at Mulder, his jaw tightening. “Uh uh, Agent Mulder. I let you down once, but I’ll be goddamned if I let them just put you down like a dog. Whatever it takes, I’ve got your back. We’ll see this through.”

Mulder smiled reflectively. “Nah.”

“What?”

“Nah. I think maybe this time, I’ll give fate a shot.”

“Mulder,” Doggett pleaded, “those people out there want you dead.”

Fox Mulder placed a hand on his successor’s shoulder. “John, I’ve been looking for something for most of my adult life. I thought it was the truth, but as you just witnessed, the truth is too vast, too expansive for any one of us – or maybe any of us -- to comprehend. The truths we have found, well, now it’s up to you – or whoever comes after you – to figure out how to deal with them. No, I think maybe I’ve been looking for something else all these years. Not vindication or proof or justice. I think I’ve been looking for faith.”

“I don’t wanna sound blasphemous, Agent Mulder,” Doggett said quietly, “but this is a helluva time to find Jesus.”

“I’m not going fundamentalist on you,” Mulder assured him. “But think about this: This place is loaded with magnetite – no alien can get within 100 yards. Why was Smith immune to it? I have a feeling he hasn’t been totally up-front with me. What if Jeremiah’s intervention is of the divine kind? Or at least on a more cosmic nature than we can understand? What if the extinction of one race is part of some greater plan? If they give birth to our race, then are we destined thousands or millions of years from now to give birth to another?

“We’ll never know, John,” Mulder shrugged. “But isn’t that kind of the definition of faith? C’mon – I think there’s a Starbuck’s down the block where we can split a Grande’ and talk about it.”

Doggett looked at Skinner. The assistant director glanced questioningly at Mulder, who smiled crookedly and nodded.

“Let’s go,” Skinner finally announced, hoarsely.

**

Doggett had half-expected he and his colleagues, and possibly the scattering of staffers and tourists who’d witnessed Calvin Welles’ abilities, to simply disappear from the face of the earth. But the cadre of local, state, and federal officers who’d commandeered the Alamo was curiously low-key. Beyond some consternation over Welles’ absence, their captors asked few questions, offered even fewer threats, and kept their handcuffs holstered.

When Kersh showed up, Doggett knew the other shoe was about to drop. But when he spotted a disheveled Scully in tow, his mental processes shut down.

“John,” Dana murmured as she pulled him to her. She released him with a small smile and damp eyes, and regarded Mulder, flanked by two burly ATF officers. Shaking her head sternly, Scully simply took him in her arms, her body finally breaking into racking sobs of relief.

“So what happens now?” Skinner asked Kersh.

Deputy Director Alvin Kersh surveyed the quartet of rogue agents. “We shall see, won’t we?”

Washington , D.C.

22 hours later

“Agent Doggett, Mr. Mulder,” The man who strode into the interview room was craggy, graying, and dour. An air of fatigue lined his hatchet face.

Mulder looked up with a wry grin. “Mr. Mulder? So that’s why I’m not getting the Bureau newsletter any more.”

The visitor looked down at Mulder with detached curiosity, then over to Doggett, who was expressionless.

The pair had been rushed from Texas on a military transport, sans explanation or even conversation, to makeshift quarters at the Pentagon, where they had been fed and then left alone and incommunicado for nearly 18 hours.

“I’m happy you can find humor in this situation, Mr. Mulder,” the hatchet-faced man finally breathed. “You’re an escaped federal fugitive with a military death sentence on his head, and somebody apparently tried to blow you to kingdom come in Ft. Lauderdale . Agent Doggett, the NSA has pretty strong evidence you and your partner helped spring Mr. Mulder here from federal custody, were involved in a subsequent firefight with a military helicopter, and have concealed information about Agent Mulder and Scully’s whereabouts for the last year-and-a-half. I’m not seeing a whole lot to chuckle about here, fellas.”

Mulder shrugged. “Well, I do find it a little amusing that a couple of misfits like Agent Doggett and I merit a house call from the White House Chief of Staff. You are Leo McGarry, aren’t you? You’ve been getting a lot of air time lately with the party going on in Qumar. Guess you know where all the bodies are buried.”

“Glad you kept up on current affairs while you were gone, Mr. Mulder,” McGarry said with a vaguely sharklike smile. “I assume that remark was intended as some sort of dig.”

“So what’s President Bartlett’s involvement in all this?” Doggett asked flatly before Mulder could reply sardonically on the administration’s recent revelation it had ordered the assassination of a rogue Qumari military honcho.

McGarry took a seat across the interrogation table. “How about a presidential pardon for your friend here?” He turned to Mulder. “Ah, I see I got your attention. And if you can answer a few questions for us, maybe you’ll get that ‘Agent’ put back in front of your name.”

**

“At about oh-twenty-two-hundred Aug. 4, NAS received some inside intelligence that a shadow military agency was conducting some blacker-than-black ops off the administration’s radar screen, on an oil exploration vessel several miles off the coast of Galveston. Lots of genetics data, beau coups electronics with jamming capabilities designed to keep God himself out.”

The corner of Mulder’s lip twitched. McGarry ignored it.

“We’d had a couple of unsolved homicides in the region, including a Naval Intelligence operative they found in a cornfield, decapitated in a disturbingly unnatural manner. After linking the murder to an Army colonel who’d vanished from the federal rolls two years ago, we launched a joint military-NAS raid on the operation. Three dozen of our guys died in hand-to-hand combat --” McGarry’s eyes were haunted. “—hand-to-hand combat reportedly with a single soldier.”

“Supersoldier,” Mulder corrected.

“We had to blow the goddamned thing out of the water. It got reported as an oil fire. To this day, we don’t know if we got…if we eliminated the enemy. We did take the colonel, who wouldn’t say anything for nearly two weeks and then started babbling about alien colonization and ‘hybridization’ before somebody managed to slip him a gun and he blew the top off his skull.

“We figured the operation was some sort of rogue anti-terrorism project, maybe even some run at a domestic coup. And then the president got a call from Ohio a few weeks ago. An aircraft of unknown origin that had crashed, killing all aboard,” he said, looking to Doggett for a measure of sanity.

“The UFO,” Doggett supplied, almost apologetically. “And the crash wasn’t what killed them.”

McGarry nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, we determined that. But not before you and Assistant Director Skinner visited the crash site, after the spacecraft had been removed.”

“Where is it now?” Mulder asked eagerly. “Have they autopsied the bodies?”

McGarry arched an eyebrow, and Mulder shrugged. “And here I thought we were developing a relationship of trust,” the ex-agent murmured.

The presidential aide sighed and turned back to Doggett. “Your buddy got murdered a few days later, and we put two and two together. The kill was too clean – deep cover stuff. This thing appears to go deep inside the administration, inside Congress. What isn’t clear is whether all this Frankenstein stuff in the Gulf was designed to get rid of the little green men or help them set up shop.”

“Gray,” Mulder amended.

McGarry turned back to him. “Eventually, all of this led to the murder of a military officer named Knowle Rohrer by former Special Agent Fox Mulder. A murdered military officer whom, I might add, has been spotted on at least three different occasions by the NSA since his demise. He one of those Bionic Boogeymen?”

Mulder nodded.

“We figure you two, along with Agent Scully, have been about as close to this thing as anybody. So, Agent Mulder, tell me: Is this Dec. 7, 1942 all over again?”

Dec. 22, 2012,” Mulder stated.

McGarry slumped back in his chair, looking to Doggett for confirmation. Doggett’s face was etched stone. “This can’t be happening.”

“I know the feeling, Leo,” Mulder empathized.

The White House

Washington , D.C.

13 hours later

At the conclusion of his friend’s somber recitation, President Josiah Bartlett sat silently, unblinking, seemingly not breathing. His fingers were templed under his lips, and his strong brow was cocked.

The chief executive finally remembered to inhale, and his hands found a place on his knees. Bartlett smiled – a reaction which may have seemed inappropriate for the occasion but which neither alarmed nor astonished Leo McGarry.

“’There are more things in Heaven and Earth…’” the president murmured. He looked up at his chief of staff. “But this one is a real curveball, Leo. It appears we will all have to redefine our notions of reality and humanity.”

“I hope we get the opportunity, Mr. President,” McGarry said. “We probably have a few more pressing issues to attend to first.”

Bartlett nodded. “Of course. What is our position here? What’s the game plan?”

McGarry shrugged. “Blind faith, I guess. All we have is the intelligence about these extraterrestrials provided by Agent Mulder and the translation of this supposedly genetically implanted message. It’s quite a leap, I gotta tell you. But given the events of the past few months, I think we have no choice but to make it.

“CIA intelligence has identified huge deposits of magnetite within the Arctic Circle above the Soviet Union , and in the Southern Andes . We think Putin’s people will be willing to clear marine extraction operations if we foot the bill.”

“That should be quite a tab to try to hide in military and intelligence appropriations next fiscal year,” Bartlett sighed. “And just how do we go about installing magnetite alien traps in every building and home on the planet?”

“We don’t. But if our timetable’s on line, every government building, school building, library, and metropolitan office building could be protected within four months. We’re developing scenarios right now – terrorist bomb and anthrax threats, regulatory inspections, hazmat ‘removal.’”

“Dirty tricks.”

“You see another way?” McGarry demanded wearily. “You want to go live tonight, interrupt Judging Amy to tell the American people and, by the time the satellite feed starts, the whole planet that not only was H.G. Wells right but that we may have to add a whole new volume to the Bible?”

Bartlett shook his head. “Tyne Daly worked too hard on the movie crowd last election. I wasn’t moralizing, Leo. I was merely reflecting on our ever-shifting sense of perspective and proportion. Within the last century, we’ve moved from a local society to a continental one, via telephone, radio, television. Within the last few decades, we’ve expanded to a global society. Now that global society must be rezoned to include the remote reaches of our known universe, and perhaps far darker reaches.

“That’s a bit much for mankind to try to chew on overnight. Could you imagine the panic, the collapse of economies and ideologies, if news of an impending alien invasion reached the public? Can you envision the potential religious cataclysm, the chaos if suddenly creationism and evolutionism had to go head-to-head with, well, with whatever it is we may be talking about?

“No, this has to be need to know at the deepest level. I know that won’t be easy, but you and I both are all too familiar with the illustrious tradition of subterfuge and skullduggery associated with this office. If you think the truth has taken a beating at our hands over these last 225 years, my friend, then you’d better prepare for a literal bloodbath.”

McGarry slumped back in his chair. “God help us.”

“That, I suppose, must be our hope,” the president murmured.

Long Island , N.Y.

One week later

Doggett tugged at the cuff of his tux shirt as the string quartet began to warm up. He would have preferred a nice acoustic ensemble, some Springsteen and Skynard, but he had learned the hard way you just had to go with the flow, sometimes. Look at the big picture.

Doggett had approached the wedding with feelings of deep apprehension. He’d been alone with himself, with his pain, for so many years that the thought of a new start, a new life, was jarring. But after all the walls he’d constructed had begun to collapse – his quest to find and deal with Luke’s murderer, his struggle to make sense out of that shattering crime and its consequences, his reluctance to open himself to Monica, hell, his reluctance to open himself to all possibilities, all things – the rightness of this had settled into his heart like a warm balm.

He felt a warm hand on his shoulder, and turned to the smiling bride, the lines of maturity in her face serving merely to emphasize the joy she’d finally allowed herself.

“Thanks for coming, John,” Barbara Doggett – the former Barbara Doggett -- said. “I know it had to be difficult, and I appreciate it.”

Doggett smiled. “You know I always wanted the best for you, for you to be truly happy. I just never knew how before. I thought it was about setting things straight, making things work. Well, you know.”

Barbara squeezed his forearm. “I know. Now, you know, and you’re ready to try something new.”

“That’s a little scary, isn’t it?” Doggett laughed, his voice breaking. “Speaking of which, what do you hear about Nathaniel?”

Barbara and her new husband, an affable building contractor named Len, had decided to adopt the day they’d set the date. Nathaniel was the abandoned son of an crack-addicted Brooklyn teen, and he’d captured Barbara’s heart the second they’d met.

“It’ll be a few weeks, but it’s a go,” she beamed. Then Barbara’s face grew serious. “How about Monica? Anything new?”

“The docs say she’s stabilizing, that there shouldn’t be any brain damage or anything, but she hasn’t come out of the coma yet,” Doggett swallowed and looked to the vaulted ballroom ceiling for an answer. Barbara pulled her to him, and he held tight.

“I know this isn’t really your style, John, but I’ll pray for her. For you, too.”

Doggett chuckled and pulled back. “You know, when Luke…well, when it happened, I decided that this whole thing must be pretty much a crap shoot. Double sixes or snake eyes – even odds every time. I guess that’s when I started shutting you out. Us.”

Barbara’s eyes filled with sympathy. “John…”

He smiled, quieting her with an uplifted palm. “When I found out about how Luke died, why Luke died, I guess my view of the universe changed. Life wasn’t a crapshoot; it was some kind of vicious cosmic joke. If there was a God, he must have a pretty dark sense of humor.” Doggett shrugged. “Anyway, the last few months have been a major education for me. I can’t even begin to explain what I’ve learned. But I guess this is my real wedding gift for you and Len and Nathaniel, Barbara: It’s not a crapshoot, and it’s no joke. Don’t ask how I know, but I do. There’s a meaning to all this. There’s a reason.”

Barbara was silent. Doggett shrugged.

“Crazy, huh?” he said.

His ex-wife smiled, and unconsciously reached out to touch his cheek. “Maybe. But I’m not so certain you should get into therapy any time soon.”

J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building

Washington , D.C.

8:23 a.m.

“Twenty-three minutes late the first day,” Mulder marveled as Doggett juggled the paper sack and searched for a place to hang his jacket. “I go underground for a year, and John Doggett turns into a wild man.”

Doggett smirked and surveyed the spacious new office with no small sense of alarm. The new paint smell (Bureaucratic Ochre) hung chemically in the air, and a small bank of file cabinets sat on an otherwise blank wall like a group of wallflowers at a prom. “Jeez, I think I liked the basement better. At least it had a kind of whack job character.”

“The Trading Spaces people are bringing over some folks from the Department of Commerce to do a makeover,” Mulder informed his “new” partner. “I don’t know if I can get used to reputable.”

“Yeah,” Doggett grunted. “See they sprung for all four desks.”

Mulder was silent for a moment as he stared at the desk he’d mentally earmarked for Agent Reyes, then at Scully’s, and then at the somber Doggett. “I got dibs on the cheap wood one with the sticky drawers. You oughtta see the sweet set-up we got. Direct connect into VICAP, the Interpol database, Army Intelligence, everything but Skinemax and Comedy Central.”

Doggett nodded. “And what are we suppose to do with all this digital firepower? I’m still not sure what our mission is here. I mean, Homeland Security’s stocking up on magnetite hats. Calvin the Trojan Horse oughtta be halfway to Alpha Centauri by now. It’s out of our hands, Mulder. I just don’t see the purpose.”

“The truth,” Mulder said, simply.

Doggett sighed at his smiling officemate. “Kinda thought we did that.”

“Tip of the iceberg. We’re out of the closet now, John – the official reality has shifted, and we’re part of it.”

“And what is this new reality, Mulder? Cause I don’t think I have the slightest idea what it might be.”

Special Agent Fox Mulder sat back and clapped. “Congratulations. That’s the new reality. That mankind is back to square one as far as understanding the reality in which he exists. Imagine what that first creature to crawl out of the prehistoric sea must have seen. Surrounded by an alien landscape of unrefracted light, vegetation fed by the Sun, a night sky filled with starlight.

“Man’s now on the verge of climbing out of the swamp, and we’re the first to see the shape of the landscape. I think they moved us out of the cellar because they want a scouting party to see what else might be waiting up on shore to take a bite out of us.”

Doggett regarded his repatriated colleague for a long moment. “And to think all I wanted was to catch a few bad guys.”

“Look at it as a perk,” Mulder suggested. “By the way, what’s in the bag?”

“Little something to christen the new digs.” Doggett retrieved the sack and withdrew a long, sleek green bottle with a French label. “I’m more of a beer guy than a champagne connoisseur, but the liquor store clerk promised this wouldn’t make us go blind. I thought we’d have a toast or something, but since Dana isn’t here yet…”

“Pop the cork on that sucker,” Mulder urged. Doggett’s brow raised in a particularly Scullian manner, and the X-Files’ former sole proprietor shrugged toward one of the cluster of desks. “Scully’s desk is sort of on spec. They’ve offered her back her old gig at Quantico, and she’s having something of a crisis of maternal responsibility. I’m trying to get her to re-up here, but it’s slow going.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt you’ll manage to persuade her,” Doggett smirked, untwisted the wires securing the cork. He recoiled as it shot over Mulder’s head, denting the newly painted plaster behind him. “Guess that’s where the poster’ll go.”

“Yeah, I saw you must’ve lost my old one,” Mulder said, eyes twinkling.

“Just drink, OK?” Doggett said, pulling a couple of plastic cups from the bag and pouring. Mulder accepted his champagne, and Doggett raised his cup, searching for an appropriate salutation.

“To the new reality,” he finally proclaimed.

Mulder tipped his cup toward Reyes’ desk. “To absent friends.”

**

William yelped with delight as he fell unceremoniously on his backside. Rather than shrieking or crying or sitting stunned by the incident, he got unhurriedly to his feet, wiped his pants, and rejoined the impromptu game of catch that had transpired before the eyes of the gathered mothers, nannies, and au pairs.

“He must be a very bright boy,” the woman beside Scully commented. “I mean, my Shawn starts bawling if I get baby shampoo in his eyes.”

Scully turned toward the woman, who was framed in morning sunlight. She was acclimating once again to Washington , to the bland and blissful domesticities of “normal” life, and to her maternal role. If William had suffered emotionally from his family’s months on the run, from the fear and paranoia his parents had been forced to endure as a part of everyday life, she couldn’t tell. Of course, William was a very unusual child, and Scully had no real barometer by which to judge.

Which she accepted. But, delusion or none, Scully was determined to do everything in her mortal, terrestrial, meager power to foster the usual in her son. Whatever secrets William bore, they would emerge without hers’ or Mulder’s coaxing.

“He’s just a happy boy,” Scully smiled.

“That’s all we can ask, right?” the woman said.

Scully nodded, still smiling, and turned back to the children, the sun’s warmth on her cheek. A man approached over the rise, and her smile widened as Mulder waved cheerfully at his beaming son…

**

Monica blinked three or four times as light flooded her brain. Her eyes were sore and dry, but eventually, the room came into focus.

She was surrounded by high-tech equipment, a periodically beeping monitor, an IV drip. Monica tried to sit up, but her muscles refused to cooperate, and she slumped back. She distantly heard the canned mirth of a sitcom, the exchange of medical jargon beyond the plastic curtain that separated her from the world.

How long had she been gone? Of course, while she had been on quite a journey, Monica knew a few hours, a few days, a month could have passed during her absence from this world. She could see the corner of a digital wall clock obscured by the curtain. Vertically, it read “De/1/20/We.”

Dec. 3. Wednesday. Some time this century, Monica mused. She tried to do the math. The accident had occurred Nov. 21, which had been what day? Monica’s brain failed to wrap around the calendar, and she struggled again to sit. She achieved that goal, managed to slowly nudge her legs out of the covers and over the edge of the hospital bed, and grasp the rail as she strained for the curtain.

Monica pulled the plastic sheet back on its track, inch by inch, until the glowing red readout came into full view. With a sharp intake of breath, she nearly lost her balance, retrieved it, and fell back on her pillow, heart pounding.

Then, panic, despair, loss gave way to a rush of joy and relief. I’m still here, Monica realized. We’re all still here. Maybe not all, but Man… Her heart slowed to a regular cadence. Monica wondered if John would come once it was known she had returned. On the one hand, she wanted to see his face, even if it were now lined and framed with gray. On the other, if John had learned what she had so desperately wished for him to learn, he would not have waited. He would come, but he would have moved on.

Or was John even alive? How high had the cost been of securing mankind’s survival? Perhaps they all were gone by now – Skinner, Mulder, Scully, John. Perhaps she was one of the few left who knew he caliber of the bullet Earth had dodged.

Monica’s speculation was abruptly interrupted by footfalls from the hallway. A pair of nurses and an Indo-Pakistani doctor in an Izod sports shirt, sneakers, and lab coat appeared beyond the plastic curtain.

“Jesus,” the older of the nurses, a plump but pretty blonde, exclaimed. The shock in her eyes quickly gave way to a broad, dimpled smile of gratification. “Glad you could finally join us, Sweetie.”

“I’m Dr. Rajid,” the physician sighed, apparently resigned to the nurse’s maternal manner. “No, please, just lay back.” He checked Monica’s pulse, nodded, inspected her pupils, and stepped back. “Could you please tell me your name?”

“Monica Reyes,” Monica provided, eager to get past the preliminaries. “Special Agent Monica Reyes. The capitol of Illinois is Springfield , tin is the major export of Bolivia , and the cheetah is the fastest-moving mammal known to man. Yet.”

The doctor’s brow rose at Monica’s disclaimer. “Well, I’m not sure other more recreational products haven’t overtaken tin by now, but I’m willing to stipulate that there seems to be no acute cognitive impairment.”

“John Doggett,” Monica demanded.

“Your friend,” Rajid nodded.

“Oh, Jesus,” the blonde gasped. “He wanted to know immediately. You want me to call him, Honey?”

Rajid’s eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “I’d like to do a few tests before…” He caught the imploring expression on Monica’s face. “Oh, all right. Call Ms. Reyes’ partner,” the doctor told the nurse, emphasizing his patient’s proper name. The blonde disappeared. A slight smile cracked his professional demeanor. “Sometimes, I swear she must have done her residency at Bob Evans.”

“Doctor, I need to know about my family,” Monica said, wondering suddenly how her father – Tomas Reyes – had taken this. Had her descent into this half-dead stupor sent him back to his bottle?

The doctor looked slightly confounded. “Your parents? The Reyes? Well, they were just here a few days ago, but I believe they’ve flown back to Texas. Is there reason for concern? They seemed very strong, healthy people.”

Monica looked up at Rajid, at the young nurse behind him. They stared at her for a moment. She glanced at the digital readout on the wall. Their eyes followed hers’. Rajid peered at it curiously, then burst into embarrassed laughter. The nurse closed her eyes and shook her head.

“I am sorry, Agent Reyes,” he finally said, regaining composure. “You must have fancied yourself Rip Van Winkle.” He turned to the nurse. “Cyndy, please call Building and have them fix this.” Rajid returned to Monica. “Some of the new diagnostic equipment plays havoc with the electronic clocks. I’m happy to say that you have not been in a vegetative state for the past decade. It is December 3, 2003, not 2013. The way the HMOs are heading, I daresay you would have been hauled away to a warehouse in Beltsville by then.”

Monica exhaled and laid back on the pillow, closing her eyes.

“Oh, my, what you must have thought,” Rajid murmured, now contrite. “I am terribly sorry. That was most insensitive of me.”

Monica smiled, then began to shake. Rajid appeared concerned. Then the first giggle escaped, followed by an explosion of laughter and tears. The doctor chuckled nervously.

“Are you all right?” Rajid asked quietly.

“Yes,” Monica managed before bursting into a new gale of laughter. “For…for…now, anyway.” She lapsed into a wheezing, giggling fit.

“Well,” Rajid finally stated. “We’ll let you, ah, rest.” He ushered the young nurse hastily from the room.

Poor man, Monica thought, her laughter subsiding. She alone could grasp the irony of the situation, the mingling joy and uncertainty wrapped up in it. God knows what might be ahead, she reflected. But whatever the future brought, at least she would be a part of it. With John.

Monica smiled, knowing somehow everything would be all right. It wasn’t precognition or any harmonic convergence with the universe. She just knew, somehow.

She closed her eyes, the smile still on her lips, and waited…