Fight the Future (9 page)

Mulder listened, staring down at his feet. Suddenly he stooped and ran his hand lightly over the tips of bright green there.

"This look like new grass to you?" he asked.

Scully tipped her head. "It looks pretty green for this climate."

Mulder knelt and dug his fingers into the thick carpet of turf. After a minute, he lifted up a corner of a new square of grass, revealing white root mass with chocolate-brown earth clinging to it. Under this the hard-baked sur-face of Texas dirt could be seen, brick-red and tough as sandstone.

"Ground's dry about an inch down," Mulder announced. "Somebody just laid this down. Very recently, I'd say."

Scully turned in a slow circle, looking at the brightly painted swings and seesaws. "All the equipment is brand new."

"But there's no irrigation system. Some-body's covering their tracks."

From behind them came a sound well-known from childhood, the whizzing of bikes on blacktop.

Scully and Mulder turned, gazing back at the cul-de-sac where their rental car was parked near the development. Four boys were riding there. When Mulder whistled loudly at them, they stopped, puzzled, and stared blankly at him across the distance.

"Hey," called Mulder. They said nothing, only stared and shielded their eyes from the sun as the two grown-ups approached.

"Do you live around here?" asked Scully.

The boys exchanged looks. Finally one of them shrugged and said, "Yeah."

Mulder stopped and regarded them. Pretty standard-issue middle America boys in buzzcuts and T-shirts. Two of them straddled brand-new BMX bikes. "You see anybody digging around here?"

The boys remained silent, until one of them replied sullenly, "Not supposed to talk about it."

"You're not supposed to talk about it?" Scully prodded him gently. "Who told you that?"

The third boy piped up. "Nobody."

"Nobody, huh? The same Nobody who put this park in? All that nice new equipment…"

Mulder gestured at the swing sets, then looked sternly down into the boys' guilty faces. "They buy you those bikes, too?"

The boys shifted uncomfortably. "I think you better tell us," said Scully.

"We don't even know you," the first boy sniffed.

"Well, we're FBI agents."

The boy looked at Scully disdainfully. "You're not FBI agents."

Mulder suppressed a smile. "How do you know?"

"You look like door-to-door salesmen."

Mulder and Scully pulled out their badges. The boys' mouths dropped.

"They all left twenty minutes ago," one of the boys said quickly. "Going that way—"

They all pointed in the same direction.

"Thanks, guys," Mulder called. He pulled Scully after him and hurried toward the car.

The boys stood, silent, and watched as their rental car spun out onto the highway, red dust billowing behind it like smoke.

• • •

Mulder hunched at the wheel, foot to the floor. The car raced on, passing few other vehicles. Beside him Scully pored over the map, now and then looking out the window in concern.

"Unmarked tanker trucks…" Mulder said as to himself. "What are archaeologists hauling out in tanker trucks?"

"I don't know, Mulder."

"And where are they going with it?"

"That's the first question to answer, if we're going to find them."

They drove on, the sun moving slowly across the endless sky until it hung, a crimson disc, just above the horizon before them. It had been an hour since they'd seen another car. Mulder eased his foot from the accelerator, and let the car roll to stop. In front of them was an intersection. Each road seemed to go absolutely nowhere: Nowhere North or Nowhere South.

For several minutes the car sat idling. Finally Mulder spoke, rubbing his eyes.

"What are my choices?"

Scully blinked in the westerly light, then grimaced. "About a hundred miles of nothing in each direction."

"Where would they be going?"

Scully looked out her window, to where the asphalt road angled off and disappeared into the twilight.

"We've got two choices. One of them wrong."

Mulder stared out his window. "You think they went left?"

Scully shook her head, her gaze unmoving. "1 don't know why—I think they went right."

A few more minutes of silence passed. Then Mulder pounded his foot on the gas. The car arrowed straight ahead, onto the unpaved dirt road. They bumped over rocks and gullies, dust flaring up all around them as Mulder drove, his expression unrelentingly deter-mined. Scully stared at him, waiting for an explanation, but he refused to meet her gaze.

Ahead of them the sun disappeared. Red and black clouds streaked the darkening sky, and a few stars pricked into view. Scully rolled down her window and breathed in the night: mesquite, sage, dust.

Twenty minutes had passed, when Mulder turned to her and finally spoke.

"Five years together," he said in a tone that brooked no arguing. "How many times have I been wrong?"

A few quiet seconds pass. "At least not about driving."

Scully stared out at the night, and said nothing.

Hours went by. Mulder drove quickly, the silence unbroken save by the occasional wail of a dog or coyote, the shrieking of an owl. Outside the night sky glittered, nothing but stars as far as you could see, nothing at all. When the car began to slow Scully felt as though she were being awakened from a dream, and turned reluctantly from her window to gaze at what was before them.

Clouds of dust rose and settled in the vel' vety darkness. A few feet in front of the car, a line of fence posts stretched endlessly to the left and right, looped together by heavy strands of rusted barbed wire.

Wild white roses choked the fence with briars, and prickly pear cacti were clumped everywhere. There was no gate, and as far as Scully could see, no break in the fence.

She opened the door and got out. After the car's air-conditioning, the hot Texas wind was like standing in front of a wood stove. In the distance a dog barked. Scully walked to where the headlights washed over the fence, and stared at a sign nailed to a post. Behind her, Mulder's door opened, and he stepped out to join her.

"Hey, I was right about the bomb, wasn't I?" he asked plaintively.

"This is great," said Scully. "This is fitting."

She cocked her thumb at the sign.

SOME HAVE TRIED, SOME HAVE DIED. TURN BACK—NO TRESPASSING

"What?" demanded Mulder.

"I've got to be in Washington, D.C. in eleven hours for a hearing—the outcome of which might possibly affect one of the biggest decisions of my life. And here I am standing out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas,
chasing phantom tanker trudis
."

"We're not chasing trucks," Mulder said hotly, "we're chasing
evidence
."

"
Of what
, exactly?"

"That bomb in Dallas was
allowed
to go off, to hide bodies infected with a virus. A virus you detected yourself, Scully."

"They haul gas in tanker trucks, they haul oil in tanker trucks—they don't haul
viruses
in tanker trucks."

Mulder stared obstinately into the dark-ness. "Yeah, well, they may in this one."

"What do you mean by that?" For the first time Scully stared directly at him, her face clouded with anger and a growing suspicion. "What are you not telling me here?"

"This virus-" He turned away from her, afraid to go on.

"
Mulder—
"

"It may be extraterrestrial."

A moment while Scully gazed at him in disbelief. Then, "I don't believe this!" she exploded. "You know, I've
been
here—I've been here one too many times with you, Mulder."

He kicked at a stone and looked at her, all innocence. "Been where?"

"Pounding down some dirt road in the mid-dle of the night! Chasing some elusive truth on a dim hope, only to find myself
right
where I am right now, at
another
dead end—"

Her voice was abruptly cut off by the clang-ing of a bell. Blinding light strobed across their faces.

Stunned, they whirled to stare at the barbed-wire fence.

In the sudden burst of light, a railroad crossing sign appeared to hang in the empty air. No swinging metal arms or gate, just that sign, an eerie warning in the wilderness. Mulder and Scully stared at it open-mouthed, then turned to gaze at a light burgeoning upon the horizon. As they watched, it grew larger and larger, until it resolved into the headlamp of a train speed-ing toward them.

Wordlessly they backed to their car, but stopped as the train rushed past. And saw then what they had been chasing through the waste-land: two unmarked white tanker trucks, loaded piggyback on the flatbed cars. In seconds it was gone, swallowed by the night. The railroad crossing sign faded into the darkness, and silence once again overtook the prairie.

As one, Mulder and Scully dashed madly back into their car. Headlights sliced through the darkness as Mulder swung the car into a hard turn, and the engine roared as they took off after the train.

They followed it for a long time, the rails glowing faintly in the headlights as they arrowed straight into the night. Around them the countryside began to change, prairie gradu-ally giving way to higher ground, stone-covered hillocks and shallow canyons covered with dense underbrush. In the distance mountains loomed dead-black against a sky starting to fade to dawn. Foothills rose around them, choked with low-growing juniper and devil's-head cactus; except for the twin lines of the rails, there was no sign that any human had ever set foot here.

Then, very slowly, the tracks began to fol-low a long sloping upward grade. The belly of the rental car scraped against rocks, the wheels jounced in and out of foot-high ruts; and still they drove on, chugging uphill. Until, at last, they could go no farther; the railroad tracks dis-appeared into the mountain, with not the slightest hint of what might lie on the other side of the tunnel. The car swung across the rails, tires spinning on the gravel bed, and came to a stop at the edge of a gorge. Scully and Mulder clambered out, pulling on their jackets against the chill bite of desert air. In the near distance, beyond the gorge on the other side of the mountain, a strange opalescent glow stained the air.

"What do you think it is?" Scully asked in a low voice.

Mulder jammed his hands in his pockets and shook his head. "I have no idea."

They started toward it, stumbling as they climbed down the rough hillside. Before them a great plateau stretched as far as they could see, and at the edge of this rose what was illuminat-ing the night: two gigantic, glowing white domes that seemed to float in the darkness. Rolling to a stop beside them was the train that bore the unmarked tanker trucks.

Mulder pointed. Scully nodded, and with-out speaking they continued down, sliding through loose scree and grabbing onto dried shrubs to keep from falling. Finally they reached bottom. Ahead of them stretched the high desert plateau. They moved more quickly now, just short of running as they made their way across the waste. In the near distance something shimmered and rustled in the cold wind, and there was a grassy odor. But it wasn't until they were nearly upon it that the eerie glow from the domes revealed what lay before them.

"
Look
," breathed Scully in disbelief.

In the half light stretched acres and acres of cornfields, as incongruous in that desert as fresh water or snow-capped hills. Wind rippled through the stalks, corn tassels whispered; and Mulder and Scully walked slowly until they stood at the very edge of the field.

They entered the field, walking one behind the other down a row lined with stalks that grew two or three feet above their heads. Scully shook her head. "This is weird, Mulder."

"Very weird." He gazed to where the twin domes rose cloudlike above the distant edge of the field.

"Any thoughts on why anybody'd be grow-ing corn in the middle of the desert?"

Mulder flicked a fallen husk from his shoul-der and pointed at the domes. "Not unless those are giant Jiffy Pop poppers out there."

They went on, the wind rattling the stalks as they passed row after row of corn like some landscape in a nightmare; but at last they reached the far perimeter of the field. Together they stepped out into the open air.

In front of them, more vast than they could have imagined, were the two glowing domes. There was no evidence that anyone was guard-ing them. No vehicles, so sounds, no signs warning off trespassers.

For a moment the two agents stood staring at the eerie structures. Then they hurried cautiously toward the nearer of the two.

A heavy steel door served as entrance—no lock, no alarm system. Mulder pulled it, slowly and with some effort. It opened with a sucking sound, suggesting that the interior was pressur-ized. He shot Scully a curious look, then stepped inside, Scully at his heels.

Immediately they both jumped, crying out as large fans overhead sent blasts of air down onto them.

There was a thunderous roar, and they lunged ahead, into the echoing stillness of the space beyond.

"Cool in here," said Scully, shivering as she tugged at her jacket. She blinked; the dome was so painfully bright it was as though day-light reigned here, though she could see no lamps anywhere.

"Temperature's being regu-lated…"

"For the purpose of
what
!"

Mulder let his head fall back so that he was staring directly overhead. A dizzying web of cross wires and cables was strung there, giving an overall impression of simplicity and some perfect, unknown, function. When he looked down he saw a floor that was the earthbound counterpart to this high-wire act: gray and flat, of metal or some sort of sturdy resinous com-pound, and utterly featureless. All around them the air was still, but as the two agents moved cautiously through the dome, they gradually became aware of a sound. A steady, resonating hum—almost an electrical hum, but with a slightly different vibration that Mulder couldn't quite put a name to, as though the air channeled some energy that pulsed at a higher or lower frequency than was humanly recognizable.