Title: Finding Rokovoko

Author: prufrock's love

Email: prufrockslove@yahoo.com

Rating: PG-13

Classification: Casefile, MSR, Horror

Summary: A case in the Florida Everglades takes Mulder and Scully on a terrifying journey nowhere. The air conditioning and the laws of physics won’t work. She wants dinner and not to die. He dreams of a boy on the beach and not being Captain Ahab. A love story of absolute evil and existential doubt and truth that isn’t found on the free map from the Visitor Center.

Spoilers: Through season 5.

Notes: With thanks to Mimic for beta-reading. Twice.

Archive: Mimic & Gossamer only.

Disclaimer: Not mine; don't sue. This isn't intended for profit.

****

January 16, 1997

32 miles west of Nowhere, Florida

****

Due to a convergence in the Earth's electromagnetic fields, many experts considered the Sedona Vortex the epicenter of mystical forces in the northern hemisphere. New Orleans, Louisiana, reigned as the queen of paranormal activity but, in Special Agent Fox Mulder's expert opinion, the recent ghost sightings in the Devil's Backbone made Texas a close contender. For unexplained meteorological and navigational phenomena, the prize went to the Bermuda Triangle, of course. Witches: Salem. UFO sightings? No question: Roswell. Alien abductions? Bellefleur, Oregon, and Skyland Mountain ran neck-and-neck.

In 1993, Fox Mulder had witnessed Max Fenig’s abduction from Townsend, Wisconsin, but that was a fluke. Wisconsin had more lake monsters than UFOs, and Max was a repeater: taken dozens, perhaps hundreds of times. Max existed on the fringe of society, a lonely, tortured soul who’d devoted his life to proving extraterrestrials visited Earth, and the government sought to both conceal and benefit from that visitation. Max Fenig was out there somewhere, wearing his NICAP hat and searching for the truth about aliens.

Mulder still wore a suit, carried an FBI badge and a weapon, and in 1997, was no closer to the truth than he’d been in Townsend, Wisconsin, in 1993. Or in 1973, when his younger sister vanished from his family’s living room on Martha’s Vineyard.

A little-known paranormal geographical fact: On the FBI’s dime, Agent Mulder had discovered the epicenter of Hell a couple dozen miles west of Nowhere, Florida, on a rural dirt road and in a rented SUV with the 'check engine' light on again. Winter blanketed the rest of the United States, but not southern Florida. The sun still blazed as it slid into the horizon in front of them. The Lariat SUV’s air conditioner hadn't worked right from the get-go, and the vents smelled of stale cigarettes. Mulder's dress shirt felt like damp Saranwrap.

His partner, Scully, sat in the passenger seat looking as cool and unreadable as usual. She wore one of her many, many navy blue pantsuits. She’d done something different to her auburn hair. A scabby bruise lingered on her forehead, but makeup now mostly covered the marks on her cheek. The swell of her right breast and the edge of a pale pink lace bra showed at the neck of her white blouse. Scully scrutinized their free Everglades Visitor Center map with the same intensity she reviewed lab results and autopsy reports.

They'd driven off that map fifteen miles ago and left the pavement eight miles before that. The only radio station had faded to static. Outside the SUV, cicadas buzzed and frogs called back and forth. Ahead, the wide evening sky burned like hot coals behind an endless sea of sawgrass. Mulder watched the road; Dana Scully watched the map.

In the years she’d been his official counterpart, Scully guarded the gates of science and justice with a 9mm pistol, a badge, and a medical degree. She made Einstein seem dim and the Venus de Milo look plain. Mulder respected her more than any other person on the planet, and she could infuriate him faster than anything in the universe, inclusive of Robert Modell, myopic NBA referees, and the numerous inaccuracies of the TV show Profiler. Together, he and Scully had solved or at least put to bed 141 X-files – the FBI’s catch-all term for any case with a paranormal tinge - and put 43 criminals behind bars. He’d take a bullet for her without batting an eye, and put a bullet in anyone or anything that threatened her. But until seventeen hours and thirty-five minutes ago, Mulder never considered that he might love her.

He had no fucking clue where he was.

Still, he had a shiny new X-file and a theory. A rented black Ford Explorer with a black leather interior, a faulty air conditioner and a malfunctioning engine or radiator. And a beautiful, skeptical partner who saved his life on a regular basis yet currently avoided making eye contact.

He adjusted his hand on the steering wheel and cleared his throat. "Scully, what mankind fears most is always the unknown. That which exists in the shadows or outside our comprehension. Stories of diminutive yet menacing 'others' appear in numerous cultures. Tales of pygmies date back to the ancient Greeks. Mysterious 'little people' show up in Indian petroglyphs. The Irish have the vanishing púca, while the Eskimo Ishigaq leave no tracks in the snow. The trow of the Orkney Island, the di sma of Sweden... In April 1977, in Dover, Massachusetts, over in a span of forty-eight hours and within an area of two square miles, three separate individuals witnessed a small, slim figure lacking a nose and mouth, but with long, spindly fingers and large glowing eyes. The Dover Devil."

With his right hand, Mulder demonstrated spindly extra-terrestrial fingers.

Scully stared at the flimsy map.

After a thorough study of his partner's profile and her reflection in the glass of the passenger-side door, he continued. "Are all these stories merely accounts of alien encounters? Are they architypes birthed by an innate sense that we are not alone? Or, Scully, have these 'others' always been out there, existing in the shadow of human society? Could the answer be 'all of the above?' And could our government be exploiting that? Sightings of 'others' have increased exponentially since the early 1950s. Coincidentally, we know the Consortium's alien-human hybridization programs date back to the Roswell crash in 1947. There's no ignoring that our government's secret experiments on soldiers span decades, or the exploitation of orphans and the insane," he reminded her. "What a perfect smokescreen."

Mulder awaited rebuttal. A scalpel-sharp verbal dissection, a scathing look. A brow raised in a perfectly-plucked, skeptical arch. The words "paranoid" and "crazy" and "are you kidding me?" Scully seldom missed a chance to whack him with her rigid stick of science.

The useless paper map expanded to fill the passenger side of the car. After a brief struggle and some muttering, in a series of exact folds, she triumphed and reduced the map to a neat, equally-useless eighteen-inch square.

"Scully, you yourself witnessed the nightmarish results of the Litchfield experiments. I have an X-file from the 1960s documenting creatures in the Everglades known locally as 'squallies' or 'squally kids,' due to their small stature. Some witnesses describe them as flat-faced while others report pig-like snouts." He gestured to his face, cupping his hand over an imaginary clown nose. "These have glowing red eyes, not unlike similar creatures spotted in Staffordshire, England-" He raised a finger to make his point. "- also a known UFO hotspot."

None of this got any response from the other side of the car. Not even the mimed snout.

Scully held the map with her right hand; her left hand rested on the car's center console. Mulder's right hand was on his thigh. He didn't need both hands to drive thirty miles an hour on a stick-straight rural road. He could just reach over and interlace his fingers with hers. Smoothly. Coolly. Confidently.

After a tense, nearly silent breakfast this morning, Mulder had set his cellular phone on the counter beside the restaurant’s cash register. He’d signed the credit card receipt, then handed the pen to Scully. After three steps, he remembered the phone and whirled around, bumping full-frontal into his partner. They'd both dropped their phones – Mulder’s slid across the tile floor, down some steps, and into pieces - and anxious, awkward apologies ensued.

He wasn't paranoid; the Waffle House waitress had given them a suspicious look.

Mulder moved his right hand only to smooth the leg of his slacks. On the dash, the engine's temperature gauge edged past the top of the green zone and neared orange. "The squallies - possibly thirty to fifty individuals - are said to be the result of a failed government genetics experiment abandoned decades ago. Either that, or years of inbreeding deep in the Everglades. A group of short, flat-faced, humans or humanoids reported outside Naples, Florida who-"

She interrupted. "Who, if they exist, might be possible suspects if Kelly Ann Fender's and Mindy Donaldson's last known location - and ours - was anywhere near Naples, Florida, Mulder." She gave the open map a sharp flick, making the paper snap.

A bead of perspiration trickled from the base of her throat, down her chest, and disappeared beneath the fabric of her blouse. Her breasts rose and fell. Mulder managed to look away a few seconds after deciding he should.

Her clothes covered the marks, but she still had contusions on her wrists and shoulders, and grab marks on one ankle. Scrapes on her knees and elbows. Last week, Ed Jerse, a man Mulder’s size, had tried his best to kill her, and Scully, who couldn’t reach the top of their filing cabinet in their basement office, had put up one hell of a fight.

Mulder spent the next mile in tense silence, alternating between watching the engine get progressively hotter, watching the narrow, unremarkable road, and not watching her.

"Until a few months ago, Edward M. Jerse…" Mulder cleared his throat again. "Edward Jerse had been employed at the same brokerage firm since graduating from Princeton. No history of drinking or drug use. No history of violence. Friends describe Jerse as a loving husband and father. No one saw the divorce coming except possibly Ed's wife and Ed's boss, who'd been having an affair since 1994. DNA tests proved otherwise, but his wife initially claimed Jerse hadn't fathered either of their children. At this revelation, a heated discussion ensued in which the Jerse's concerned neighbors called the Philly police - of whom Mr. Jerse's father-in-law is chief. Three guesses which spouse got arrested for domestic battery and which was granted a restraining order barring him from his house and children.”

Scully's profile didn't turn, but Mulder saw her watching him.

The check engine light began flashing.

Her lips moved to speak, stopped, then asked curtly, "Why is this relevant, Mulder?"

"I'm just saying-" The needle of the engine's temperature gauge was in the orange. Mulder's necktie felt like a noose. "Edward Jerse got dealt a lousy hand. Jack Willis was a respected instructor and, by all accounts, a good guy. I'm saying… Maybe your taste in men isn't terrible."

Her jaw broadened but she didn’t respond.

Mulder took and exhaled a slow breath. "It's a nice tattoo, Scully."

She said tightly, "Thank you."

After another mile, the temperature gauge reached the red zone. The gravel road through the tall grass barely had room for two cars to pass. They hadn’t encountered another vehicle in almost an hour. With no place to pull off, Mulder just stopped and shut off the ignition.

From her expression, this came as a surprise to his partner. She lowered the map.

"The engine wants to overheat," he explained.

"What's wrong with it?" She asked like he had a psychic link to the radiator and pistons.

"Everyone and everything is against me?" Mulder guessed. The engine’s problem eluded him, but he wasn’t a mechanic. He was, however, an Oxford-educated FBI profiler baffled by his diminutive partner’s decision last week to screw a handsome stranger who took murder requests from a talking tattoo. Then last night, an equally unexpected series of events transpired, precipitated by Scully suddenly deciding they should kiss goodnight and ending with Mulder, sweaty, sticky, and staring bewilderedly at the popcorn ceiling of her motel room at the Miami Holiday Inn.

In the car, Scully’s chest rose and fell. She folded the map using its original creases and tucked it into a crevice of the door. When she touched his wrist, he felt little sparks from her fingertips. Luckily, Mulder prevented himself from jumping, thereby preserving his cool exterior.

"Not everyone is against you," she assured him.

She'd been against him last night, but that seemed an unwise response. Even now, a forensic examination would find his hair, fibers from his clothing, his DNA on her body. His DNA in her body. Traces of her on his skin – make-up, saliva, her skin cells beneath his fingernails. From an evidence perspective, sex didn’t wash off as easily as people thought.

That seemed another unwise response.

Instead, he said, "It was nice," as a follow-up to the tattoo compliment and so belatedly he cringed inwardly. "But my work- Our work," he amended, "has to take priority. The gulag in Russia, the Samantha clones on that farm in Alberta. That Martian rock: we’re so close, Scully. Close to answers that I deserve, you deserve. Answers the American public deserves. I can't let anything distract me- Us," he corrected again, "from finding the truth."

Shit. By comparison, 'against me last night' would have been a better response.

Still, she nodded. "I know." Her hand returned to her lap.

He worried his lower lip between his teeth. He opened and closed his mouth a few times. What finally emerged was, "I'm sorry Big Blue ate your dog."

Her brows rose. "Mulder, that was nine months ago."

He shrugged his shoulder. After some thought, he followed his random apology with an equally arbitrary and unrelated concession. “You should have a desk.”

Her posture relaxed a little. “No, you’re right. There’s not enough room in your office.”

He corrected her. “Our office.” The steering wheel grew slippery beneath his palm. “Maybe I need a bigger office, then. A smaller desk. Less crap. Less something.”

Scully stared at her window, but he couldn’t tell if she was looking through the glass or watching her reflection. More awkward seconds passed. Rolling down the SUV’s windows wouldn’t make the vehicle any cooler, and the Florida mosquitos outside rivaled vampire bats in size and honey badgers in tenacity.

"It was nice," he said again. "Last night. Rather…" He hunted for words. "Unexpected, but nice." He had, inclusive of Quantico, the Violent Crimes Unit, and the X-files Division, now slept with every female partner, instructor, and close co-worker the FBI ever assigned him.

He kept waiting for Scully’s rational explanation of her actions. Her wordy treatise of self-justification.

On impulse – and in desperation - he took her hand. Her fingers felt cool. “It crashes and burns,” he said rapidly. “I’ve done this before, and it always does. Everyone agrees they’re adults and just letting off steam and for a while it’s nice. But at some point we have to leave this-” With his free hand, he gestured to their surface-of-the-sun, middle-of-nowhere surroundings. “-and return to the real world. Other people – people who aren’t us – have lives that exist outside of casefiles and motel rooms rented at the special government rate.” He squeezed her hand. “But it was still very nice.”

Mulder got a polite little nod, which he found encouraging.

“I need you, Scully. Despite my efforts to convince you and the rest of the world I’m a self-centered jackass, I can’t begin to articulate your importance in my life. Not just as my partner or to my work, but as my friend. I’m not jeopardizing that for a roll in the hay.”

Her words sounded like she’d rehearsed them in her head when she responded neutrally, “Mulder, you could have said no.”

His head moved in a slow, thoughtful nod. “That would have been tough with your tongue in my mouth. It would have come out-” He imitated speaking around a ball-gag, getting increasingly emphatic. “’-Oh ank ewe, Ully. Oh, Ully. Oh, Ully. Oh. Oh, oh, oh.’”

“I heard that. Oh my God, Mulder.” She sounded earnest and apologetic, but the corners of her lips twitched. “I’m so sorry. I did hear you articulate those exact syllables last night – as I overpowered you while flat on my back with your hands on top of mine. Sometimes I just don’t know my own strength.”

He arrived at either an epiphany or heatstroke: he did love her. In a way he couldn’t begin to articulate. In a way that terrified him as much as the thought of losing her.

“Last night, there was focused gasping. Focused, ecstatic gasping of ‘oh, Ully’ repeatedly implies consent – and approaching climax. If you encounter a blindly flailing ‘oh, Ully, oh, Ully,’ take your tongue out of my mouth and call 911 immediately.”

He squeezed her hand again, and got a Mona Lisa smile. For the first time in weeks, she seemed present, and the air in the stifling SUV became breathable.

He took a breath and asked, “You wanna talk HIV status and birth control like adults, or you wanna go with what we both know, call it ‘no fault, no foul,’ and just move on?”

Her pretty smiled changed to the expression people have as they wonder if they’ve left the coffeepot on.

He asked, “Scully?”

Now her face indicated certainty she’d left the coffeepot on, but also forgotten where she’d put her keys. She eased her hand from his.

A swarm of angry disbelief formed in his mind. Scully considered frozen yogurt decadent and insisted they arrive hours early for flights. She kept dental floss, tampons, sensible shoes, and an extra pair of pantyhose at work, and a list of his and her emergency contacts, drug allergies, and medical mishaps with her at all times. The woman Mulder knew as his partner did not have unprotected sexual intercourse with a stranger.

Her cheeks flushed. “Ed, Ed- He’s HIV negative. He was tested when he discovered his wife’s suspected infidelity. I was tested in the emergency room last week.”

“HIV can take months to show up. You’re a medical doctor, Scully. You know that. What’s wrong with you?” He opened the driver-side door. The outside air wasn’t cooler but it was different. “Oh my God. What were you thinking?”

Her jaw broadened. “I didn’t just transmit HIV to you, Mulder.”

He threw his left hand skyward. “I’m not the one I’m worried about. A little over two years ago, after praying to any god who might listen that I’d find you alive, I sat in an ICU with your mother and sister, with doctors telling us there was no hope. Then Donnie Pfaster wanted to chop you up and keep you in the freezer with his Tater Tots. The citizens of Dudley, Arkansas, tried to behead you. Six months ago, Gerald Schnaus offered you a free icepick lobotomy.” He turned toward her in the driver’s seat. “Now, you want to risk dying of AIDS? I’d like to refer to my earlier statement: you’re important to me, Scully.”

“I haven’t contracted HIV, Mulder,” she said icily. “Nor have you.”

He stared at her, his heart pounding, and perspiration covering his throat and forehead. “The last time I recited your medical history to an ER doctor, it didn’t include any sort of birth control. Provided you don’t waste away of AIDS in the next year, are you anticipating the birth of Ed Jerse, Jr?”

She blinked twice. Then blinked again. For once, she couldn’t manage a poker face. She hadn’t given pregnancy a thought; he could tell. Not with Jerse last week. And not with Mulder last night.

“Are you serious?” Now he was out of the SUV. Mulder stood on the road with his hands on his hips. He reminded himself that it was 1997. He shouldn’t have assumed birth control was her responsibility merely because she was the initiator and a medical doctor and the one who could get pregnant. Still, the Everglades buzzed and the sky boiled. “You’re telling me, nine months from now, my genetics may get to duke it out with some psychopath’s on The Jerry Springer Show?”

She stared at the dusty, bug-splattered windshield.

“Scully?” he demanded angrily.

A breeze bent the tall grass toward the dying sun and made Mulder’s damp shirt billow, but she stayed silent and still.

****

Mulder’s cell phone was a useless electronic jigsaw puzzle. An hour earlier, antenna extended and held high, Scully’s phone got one bar and had one flashing battery icon. Now her dead phone rested on the center console, Mulder sat on the SUV’s hood, and Scully stood beside him on the road. Ahead, in the west, the last scarlet arch of the sun lingered above the broad field of grass. The tall grass rippled in the breeze, and every bird imaginable sang from its unseen hiding place.

If the Lariat employee had understood what Scully shouted into her cell phone, a tow truck should have arrived twenty minutes ago. If not, another car would pass sometime. Eventually. Logically.

They waited another quarter-hour. Neither spoke, and no car passed. No planes flew overhead. No airboats or vehicle engines droned in the distance.

They would have spotted mushroom clouds from a nuclear annihilation. Mulder could rule out a rapture; Scully remained. A global electromagnetic pulse seemed reasonable, but their SUV’s headlights still worked, even if the engine didn’t. Despite appearances, barring a flu pandemic or alien colonization, they couldn’t be the only people left on the planet.

Mulder put his feet on the SUV’s bumper and rested his elbows on his knees. “The currently held belief regarding the squallies HQ – a remote, abandoned mental asylum - appears to confabulate the older legend of government genetics experiments gone wrong and stories of an isolated, highly-inbred clan. If the squallies were created purposefully, a la Litchfield, then they either overthrew their creators or were simply abandoned in the Naithlorendum Sanctuary under the care of a lone guard. Alternately, going with the legend that the squallies are the Peacock’s shorter, southerly cousins, they are said to have taken up residence in the abandoned Naithlorendum Sanctuary somewhere near DeSoto Boulevard and Oil Well Road. Don’t bother checking the map; neither road is listed on it.”

Scully, facing Mulder and the front of their vehicle, took a step sideways and craned to see down the gravel road. He turned and looked with her. Nothing approached except nightfall. She sighed tiredly.

The dying sun made her hair glisten, and the breeze blew her thin blouse against her breasts. Backlit by the darkening sky, she reminded him of a painting, with the red of her hair and lips a stark contrast to her fair skin and the delicate fabric. The urge to shake her and yell, “what the hell were you thinking?” competed with an impulse to put his arms around her. Assure her everything would be okay. Act like normal people do. Not like two people stranded in the middle of nowhere with everyone and everything against them.

Instead of doing either, he sat on the SUV’s hood and said, “No one knows if the old man who guards the asylum is trying to keep outsiders out or the squallies in, but he’s said to shoot to kill on sight. Which is far kinder than the squallies, who, if they capture anyone inside their asylum, will eat him or her alive. Both missing women were avid birdwatchers known to venture far into the Everglades on their own. Two women, three years apart, seem to have disappeared without a struggle or a trace, leaving behind vehicles and families expecting them home for dinner. It fits, Scully.”

Scully checked the empty road again. “As would being eaten by any one of the 200,000 hungry alligators in the Florida Everglades. Yet you went with-” She made a snout gesture. “-squallies.”

He shifted his feet. A fine layer of dirt coated the polished wingtips as well as the bumper. The temperature cooled, and his shirt and T-shirt had dried; now the fabric felt stiff against his skin. They had flashlights, spare magazines, evidence bags and the usual sundries, but their luggage was back at the Holiday Inn. Scully had a bottle of water, a useless map, and a pair of flat shoes. Mulder had his shiny new X-file and theory.

“How can no other driver pass us in over an hour?” she asked, apparently rhetorically. “It’s a county road, and even if it wasn’t, we can only get so far off the map before we hit Cuba, the Atlantic, or the Gulf.”

He raised his head to look at her. “Think of it this way, Scully: if we’re the last man and woman alive on Earth, we’ve already settled the ‘will-we-or-won’t-we do our duty to repopulate’ question.”

She crossed her arms. “Dibs on Neiman Marcus, the labs at Quantico and Johns Hopkins, a good steak dinner, and a long bath in an air-conditioned penthouse at the first abandoned Hilton we come across.”

“Of course.” He smirked. “Nothing but the best for you and our child.”

“Be nice. If the world’s ended, it’s me or-” She imitated the snout gesture again. Then, she smacked irritably at a mosquito and checked the road a third time. “Mulder, I’m starving.”

He slid down from the hood and walked a few steps from the vehicle, restless but without a goal or destination. “A steak dinner for two. Check.”

“Enough,” she said warningly. “Give it a rest.”

He shot her a withering look but kept his mouth shut.

Ahead, something long and dark lay cross-wise on the road. While it could have been a big stick, a snake seemed more likely. The creatures swooping overhead looked like bats. Every so often, from a patch of low trees in the distance, he heard a soft splat and splash that had to be an alligator entering the water.

Their forays into the wilderness seldom ended well.

If they had to spend the night, the SUV’s rear seats folded down, making a safe bed for Scully and a cramped one for Mulder. They had winter jackets in the car; Baltimore had three inches of snow when they boarded the plane yesterday morning. They started the day wearing suitcoats. Rolled up, those could serve as pillows. It wasn’t the Hilton, but it would keep them from becoming alligator kibble. If no help showed up, tomorrow morning, they’d start walking.

The vast swamp housed threats besides the squallies and hungry alligators, rattlesnakes and cottonmouths. The skunk ape, Bigfoot’s equally stinky cousin, was sighted last year. People released pet Burmese pythons into the Everglades, where, with few natural predators, the snakes grew to monstrous size.

He should pee in the bushes now, before the bushes got darker.

While he assessed his bladder and current hierarchy in the food chain, Scully had approached behind him. In a less bitchy tone, she said, “Mulder-”

He exhaled. “What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m the one who got us stranded out here.” He looked over his shoulder, at her. “Or is this a ‘it’s not you, it’s me,’ and ‘let’s just be friends’ speech? I’m good. Move along.”

“You’re not good. I know you. Regardless of what I say, you’ll worry.” She crossed her arms over her chest as if she felt cold. “I haven’t contracted HIV, Mulder, and pregnancy is unlikely-”

“It’s not that.” He rolled his shoulders and turned toward her. He shoved his hands in his pants pockets. “Am I thrilled? No, but whatever happens, it’ll be okay. You’re my friend, you’re my partner, and in a way, I love you.” He paused, hoping she’d say something. When she didn’t, he continued. “I trust your judgement. At least, I thought I did.” He stepped closer. “It’s-” He stood so close he smelled her skin. In a hesitant voice, he asked, “What’s wrong with you, Scully? Not just sleeping with me, not Jerse – for weeks you’ve seemed distant and distracted. Like you don’t care about-” He thought “me” but said, “-our work. Do you- Do you want to go back to Quantico? Do you not want to do this anymore – trying to bring cryptids to justice and uncover truths buried beneath miles of lies? Do you want a job where you aren’t abducted by aliens or asked to autopsy elephants? Is that it?”

A long moment passed. He studied her face for some clue. He thought of kissing her. Trying to shake the truth out of her. Promising pretty much anything.

She bit her lower lip.

He asked softly, “What’s wrong, Scully?”

Then, in the same calm, apologetic voice, she said, “There’s a malignant tumor growing in my nasopharynx. Leonard Betts, he... I have an advanced, aggressive nasopharyngeal cancer.”

He saw her lips moving but heard no other sound. Not the birds. Not the waving grass. Not the insects. He saw pink cheeks, smooth skin, bright eyes: she radiated health. There was some mistake. A mix-up in the lab. The wrong name on a file. Mistakes happened. Babe Ruth had nasopharyngeal cancer.

Babe Ruth died of nasopharyngeal cancer.

“So, so you’ll need surgery? Time off work?”

Her head moved side to side. “The tumor is inoperable.”

His chest hurt. All the air – the sweltering, still air of the day and the cool breeze that arrived with dusk – vanished. “Chemo, then? It’s treatable, right?” But he already sensed her answer.

She shook her head again. “Chemotherapy and radiation will just forestall the inevitable for a month or two.”

He stared at her. Once he could form words again, he asked, “Is it, is it the same-”

“The same cancer that’s killing the MUFON women in Allentown? Yes.”

She looked exactly like Dana Scully. Composed, professional. Effortlessly both beautiful and brilliant. But the Scully that Mulder knew wasn’t dying of cancer.

Hand shaking, he touched the bridge of her nose with his index finger.

Scully took his hand and slid his finger upward so it pressed between her eyebrows.

In a tight voice, he asked, “What do we do?”

She looked up at him with bottomless blue eyes. Then she looked away. Her chest rose and fell. “I say, unless another car comes along, we plan to spend an uncomfortable night in our rental car. Worst case scenario: when I don’t call Mom tonight, and Mom can’t reach you, she’ll panic and call AD Skinner. He’ll send a search party. We’ll be back in civilization by morning, at which time I expect air conditioning and a steak.”



“Okay.” Still shaking and unable to do anything other than follow her lead, Mulder shoved his hand back in his pocket. “Since when do you call your mother every night?”

Again, he correctly predicted her answer, which was, “Since I was diagnosed with cancer.”

****

Insects droned outside the SUV and a distant moon waxed silvery-white. In the back of the Explorer, with the rear seats folded flat, Mulder lay on his side and Scully lay on hers, with a narrow Neutral Zone between them. His watch read 10:50 PM. Earlier, he’d moved their things to the front seats or the floorboards and stowed his sidearm in a cubbyhole. His body craved rest, but his mind ran a labyrinth of what-if scenarios and guilt and helpless terror. Each time, his mental maze ended with him standing beside her tombstone.

Alone.

Mulder rearranged his legs. Theoretically, he should fit in the seventy-three by forty-one-inch cargo space – seventy-three by nineteen, allowing half for Scully and some for The Neutral Zone – but he kept bumping the front seat or the tailgate, or getting jabbed by a seatbelt buckle or a tie-down hook. The Explorer’s upholstery was rough and itchy. They’d discovered mosquitos the size of a Cessna could squeeze through a window cracked open less than a centimeter, so it was stifle or swat. With the windows rolled up tight, the glass fogged like this night was a repeat of the previous one.

“Scully, are you still awake?” he asked, though he knew she was. He’d been watching her not sleep for ten minutes.

Her head moved against a makeshift pillow she’d fashioned by rolling up her suit coat. “Yes.”

He shifted his feet again. Worried his mouth. He’d shed his dress shirt, and wore his suit pants and T-shirt. Except for her shoes, Scully wore what she’d had on since they landed in Florida earlier today, including her weapon and holster. “How long?” Mulder cleared his throat. “With chemo, how long?”

“My oncologist estimates about six months.” Her voice sounded small in the noisy darkness. The later it got, the louder Mother Nature turned up the volume.

His chest felt tight. As much as he wanted to say the doctor was wrong and she should get a second opinion, he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Seconds crept past.

“You don’t like people leaving you, Mulder. You’re right; we’re close to answers. After everything we’ve been through… Now we’re so close.” Even more softly, she asked, “How could I tell you I’m going to leave you?”

He reached over and found her hand. Her fingers felt small and cool and smooth. “I wish you would have told me before.” He swallowed dryly. “Before last night.”

Sounding like her usual self, she responded, “Mulder, an hour ago, you had me sit in the passenger seat while you folded down the back seats and made a place for us to sleep. We have half a liter of water, and you wanted me to drink it. It must be sixty degrees outside but you’ve asked three times if I’m cold. You tried to follow me when I went to empty my bladder.”

In self-defense, he said, “There are alligators. Really big alligators. Snakes. And squallies.”

“And I’m armed.” She shifted closer to him in the back of the little SUV. “I’m not dying tonight. Not any more than you are. Still, a terminal illness changes things.”

She was right. Even now, when she was healthy enough to be bitchy, a clock counted down in his head. Every second had a common denominator: her death.

The Smoking Man would have a cure. That bastard’s project caused Scully’s cancer. His project could save her. Mulder held Scully’s hand and listened to the frogs and insects as he contemplated a deal with the devil incarnate.

If Scully knew about a deal, she’d tell Mulder to let her die.

He said, “You wanted to be with me-” He inhaled. “You wanted that before…” The epiphany sent him spinning like a little carnival ride. He couldn’t tell if his heart hurt more or less. Emotional triage was tough when cancer ripped a gaping hole in his entire universe.

Her hand squeezed his, then her fingers began sliding away.

He tightened his hand around hers. “What if I want things to change, Scully? If you have six months- If I have six months with you-” His heart pounded. “Yes, I’m so married to my work on the X-files that my basement office and I should file a joint tax return. I want to discover the truth about what happened to my sister. The truth about the UFO abductions and experiments, but… I want to discover those truths with you, and if you have six months-” Now his throat hurt when he swallowed. “-what if I want things to change?”

She answered softly, “I don’t want you to change, Mulder.”

“Too late.” A painful quake began at his core and spread outward until his whole body shook with fear, with rage. He wanted to get the hell out of this rented SUV and miserable swamp, find Cancerman, and beat a cure for Scully out of him. “When I said I want the truth at any cost, I meant any cost to me.”

She pulled her hand away. Pushed up on her elbow. Moved closer to him. Then she lay down, fitting the back of her body against the front of his. When he put his arms around her, he found he wasn’t the only one shaking.

“I love you,” he whispered hoarsely, into her hair. He sniffed. “I’m not just gonna stand by and let you die.”

“Mulder, there will be a time when that’s exactly what I need you to do.”

“No.” Then, for the first time in hours, he got to stipulate a valid point. “Not tonight.”

“Not tonight,” she agreed, and let him hold her.

****

The SUV shifted as if someone or something nudged the back bumper, which woke Mulder. Which meant at some point he’d fallen asleep. Next to him, Scully inhaled.

Another bump, this time on the passenger-side fender.

A few seconds later, something nudged the rear door on the driver’s side, near Scully’s head. The little SUV rocked side-to-side.

In the darkness, Mulder eased his weapon from the cubbyhole and flicked off the safety.

“A bear,” Scully whispered.

He held his breath and listened. He didn’t hear any bear-like sounds. Rain drummed on the metal roof. Otherwise, he didn’t hear anything. Not frogs, not insects, not birds.

The vehicle shifted again. Not as if another car hit it or a large animal tried to get inside – as if someone braced their hands against the outside and gave it a push.

His wristwatch read a little after 4:00 AM.

Scully touched his chest, guiding him to lie down, stay below the windows.

He lay on his back beside her, holding his pistol and waiting. The Ford’s interior had cooled; the glass fogged again. They had no food in the vehicle. No toothpaste or fruity-smelling toiletries or anything a bear might try to get at. Somewhere, Mulder had an old bear safety Indian Guides badge. At least in 1972, the Indian Guides manual said bears went after an easy lunch.

Another bump. Mulder wouldn’t be getting his security deposit back on this SUV.

He was famished, and his equally hungry partner had cancer. If Mulder had to shoot this bear, they were skinning, roasting, and eating it.

Footsteps scampered around the SUV. Not a lumbering four-legged creature. A nimble creature on two legs. Maybe more than one creature. He turned his face toward Scully. “Skunk ape,” he whispered excitedly.

Even by moonlight, her scornful expression hurt. She was right, though. He didn’t smell anything except the interior of the car, the rain, and that they could both use a shower. The skunk ape took its name from its foul odor. In the accounts Mulder had read, witnesses described the scent as rotten cabbage and concentrated dead, wet dog.

The SUV still had a new-leather-interior scent. Scully’s shampoo smelled a little like vanilla.

The vehicle didn’t move, but he heard quick, light footsteps on his side. Then Scully’s side. Two, maybe three individuals. Creatures. Things. Whatever would want to play ring around the rosy with their SUV in the rain, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.

Something outside giggled, sounding childlike. Any enthusiasm about a skunk ape vanished.

Scully’s head turned; she’d heard it too.

The children’s laughter, like the footsteps, came from close to the SUV. A chill passed through him.

More mischievous giggles and another shove against the rear bumper. The door handle clicked beside Scully, but he’d locked the SUV earlier. He heard someone try the driver’s door. The back. After another peal of laughter, the feet seemed to scamper away.

Mulder stayed low and absolutely still. He heard his watch ticking. His heartbeat. Scully’s rapid breathing.

A tense minute passed. Then another. The SUV didn’t move. He heard nothing but the rain. No footsteps, no eerie laughter.

Without turning his head, he cut his eyes sideways at Scully. She wasn’t watching him. Still on her back, she held her weapon and focused on the window above Mulder. He followed her gaze. On the foggy glass, backlit by the moon and already partially washed away by the rain, he saw handprints in the dust.

Dozens of children’s handprints.

He looked at the rear window, and the glass of the driver-side rear door. On each, little hands had left overlapping prints halfway up the glass. As if they’d gotten close, trying to peer inside. The prints were no higher than a kindergartener could reach, but there were hundreds. All around them.

Mulder had never in his life wanted to be somewhere else so much. And he’d recently spent time in a Russian gulag and with a murderous pedophile. Moving as little as possible, he checked his watch again. Four minutes had passed since there’d been any movement or sound outside.

He reached above his head, found the keys, and handed them to Scully. She was smaller; she could stay lower. Last night the SUV had started only to immediately overheat, then refused to start at all.

She nodded. It was worth a try. Maybe there’d been some mechanical miracle as they slept.

He shifted so Scully could ease over him and between the front seats, keeping her head down. Shoeless, she maneuvered into the driver’s seat. He heard her turn the headlight switch so the lights wouldn’t automatically come on. The key slid into the ignition. Turned.

He had his finger on the trigger, ready.

The engine coughed to life.

The car’s wheels sprayed gravel as it made a rapid and expert 180-degree turn, then took off east, in the direction they’d come from yesterday. Scully was half a mile down the road before she switched the headlights on or raised her head above the dash.

A patchwork quilt of little handprints ringed the dirty hood.

She cranked up windshield wipers and told Mulder to climb over the seat rather than stopping so he could get out and move up front. He put his seatbelt on and kept his weapon out. Fields of tall, dark grass pressed against the road on either side of them.

Keeping one hand on the steering wheel and driving in her stocking feet, Scully holstered her weapon and fastened her seatbelt. “What the hell were those things?” Her brow furrowed. “A pack of animals?” She glanced at the driver’s side window. “Obviously, primates made these prints. Escaped chimps?” she guessed. “And that laughter. A kookaburra? Kookaburras are native to Australia. How would one survive in the Everglades?”

He opened his mouth.

Before he could speak, she said rapidly, “Oh my God, Mulder. Do not say squallies. Don’t you dare say the word ‘squallies’ again in this car. Seriously, what were those things?”

“Fine.” Mulder turned toward her, raised his right hand, and smugly mimed a pig snout.

In answer, she put her foot down, heading back to civilization as fast as possible.

****

His shoeless partner possessed a preternatural ability to speed and rationalize at the same time. Ten minutes and several miles later, her explanation was, “A feral child? We need to check the local missing person report for a child younger than-” She adjusted her hands on the wheel. “-five or six. Do you think the child was about six?”

For a woman speculating that they’d just encountered and then abandoned a small child alone in a swamp, she didn’t slow down. The rain had stopped. The windshield wipers still slapped back and forth at top speed.

Mulder compared his hand to a print on the passenger-side window. He’d put on his holster, but left his dress shirt folded in his carryon bag. “Accounts of the Black-eyed Children place their age between six and early teens, but they’ve never been sighted east of Texas.”

“Mulder, brown eyes are dominant. Individuals with dark brown, almost black eyes are found throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, and Jewish populations around the world. More than half the world has brown eyes.”

He tilted his head and focused his dark eyes on her. “Really?”

She huffed in annoyance, but didn’t put much effort into it. “What I’m saying is: a missing child would be far more likely to have dark eyes than any other eye color. How is that relevant?”

“The Black-eyed Children aren’t missing. According to most, they’re not even human children,” Mulder explained. “They’ve been theorized to be demons, vampires, or even aliens, though the encounters I’ve reviewed sound like a run-of-the-mill ghost. A group of black-eyed children approach an adult in a rural area, asking in a monotone voice for a ride home. Once the children are in the car, the adult unfailingly reports noticing something hugely wrong with the children’s eyes, and experiencing an overwhelming sense of fear. At some point on the ride home, the children vanish from the car.”

In the dim SUV, she glanced at him as she drove. Her eyebrow’s altitudes differed, indicating rebuttal was forthcoming. “Do these hitchhikers leave behind the very cashmere sweater they were wearing at the high school dance, just before they tried to walk home and were killed in a hit-and-run? I think I remember hearing that ghost story at every teenage girl’s sleepover ever.”

Mulder shook his head. “No,” he said scornfully. “That’s Resurrection Mary, and we’re not even in the right state. Not to mention she’s an adult female.”

“And your Black-eyed Children…” she prompted.

He settled back in the seat. “I’m proud; you skipped the air quotes.”

“I’m driving,” she said flatly, and finally turned off the wipers.

Two eyes, close-set and near to the ground, glowed ahead of them, then vanished into the grass. A raccoon or an opossum was making its nightly rounds. Mulder tried to radio again. Still static.

He reminded her, “I just said the Black-eyed Children speak in a monotone. They don’t giggle and play tag around rental cars.”

A front tire dipped, and both of them jumped. The rear tire hit the same pothole in the gravel road. Scully slowed down.

“Then what did we just encounter?” she asked. “Because kookaburras don’t inhabit southern Florida, escaped chimps don’t giggle, and a child – feral or lost – old enough to work a car door handle should be old enough to speak. What’s your theory?” When Mulder moved to make the snout, she sighed and pushed his hand down. “Finding a place to dump your murdered body would impede my progress toward the hot shower and soft bed awaiting me at the hotel, Mulder.”

For a moment, her hand stayed atop his.

The SUV hit another pothole. The stick-straight road through the tall grass seemed to narrow.

“Scully, how far have you driven?”

She glanced at the dashboard. “Just over eight miles.”

“You should be almost back to the blacktop.”

Mulder wasn’t imagining it. The two-lane gravel road became one lane. He hadn’t paid a huge amount of attention during the drive out this afternoon, but he didn’t recall driving through here.

She slowed further as the gravel road became a gravel center and two dirt ruts. “I am not almost back to the blacktop,” she said with certainty.

Grass and tree branches brushed the sides of the SUV.

“How could you have made a wrong turn?” he asked. The rural roads went north to south or east to west, connecting point A to point B and with nothing in between except swamp. This one ran east to west, and the SUV’s electronic compass had read ‘east’ since they peeled out of Squallyland.

“I didn’t-”

Mulder lurched forward as she slammed on the brakes. His seatbelt locked. The SUV skidded to a stop with the front inches from a wide tree trunk. Moss hung from the thick limbs. Beyond the big tree, Mulder saw a dark pool of still water. “Wrong turn,” he said with his heart still pounding.

“Wrong turn,” she agreed shakily. Scully took a slow breath, put the transmission in reverse, and eased backward. Again, branches raked the Explorer’s metal sides.

“Do you want me to get out and help?” he asked. She had no place to turn around, and accidentally backing off the road risked backing into a swamp.

“While I’m aware I’m being irrational, I’d really prefer you remain in the vehicle, Mulder.”

He chuckled. “Thanks. I love you, too.”

She continued creeping backward, watching the rearview and the driver-side mirrors. “Maybe I don’t want you eaten by an alligator.”

“Understandable.” He turned to look out the rear window, helping her watch. They’d backed far enough for the road to be gravel again, but still barely wider than Mulder was tall. “You’re dying and you’ve just discovered I’m good in bed.”

The SUV stopped. She didn’t shift the transmission. She didn’t adjust the mirrors. She just stopped. Her brow furrowed and her chin quivered.

“Jesus, Scully. I’m sorry.” His abdomen felt as if he’d vomited until he had dry heaves. “I’m sorry.”

She blinked quickly.

So did he. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “I don’t know what to do. And if there is a right thing to do, rather than doing it, I have us out here in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, hungry and lost and making pig snouts and air quotes at each other.”

He unfastened his seatbelt. Her shoulders rose but she didn’t shy away. He put his palm against her face. The top of her cheek felt wet. In unison, she moved forward, he moved forward, and he rested his forehead against hers. He felt the pulse in her neck, the smooth warmth of her skin. It would almost be easier if she was gaunt and weak and her hair had fallen out. She felt alive, just as she had the previous night.

The cancer diagnosis had to be a mistake, and Mulder wanted to punch the negligent doctor who’d made it.

Denial. A normal stage of grief.

“You’re sure?” he asked hoarsely. “How can you have cancer? What if there’s some mistake?”

Her chest rose. “I saw the scans. “

He stroked the fine hair on her jaw with his thumb.

“My oncologist is excellent,” she assured him. “She-”

“Your oncologist is shit.” Mulder sniffed and sat back. “You need a second opinion.”

Scully used the rational, slightly condescending tone he’d come to know and love. “Mulder, I’m the second opinion.”

“I’m getting my hands on those MUFON women’s medical records,” he announced. “If there’s no recognized treatment, then there are clinical trials somewhere. Alternative medicine. We’re getting you ancient herbal shit from China or some sort of Communist Bloc chemo.”

He fastened his seatbelt. Glanced at the dash. The SUV had half a tank of gasoline and no warning lights on. They were fine. Just lost.

“I don’t recall learning about ‘Communist Bloc chemo’ in medical school.” Her shoulders rested at their normal level, and she’d stopped crying.

He wasn’t saying the word ‘dying’ in her presence again. Ever. “It’s a real thing. I saw it. There were signs in the airport in Russia. Krasnoyarsk even had billboards. ‘Communist Bloc chemo,’ right beside the ads for Yugos and black market American blue jeans.”

He saw a very small, very tired smile.

“Maneuver us the hell out of here, Dr. Scully,” he requested, and the SUV crept backward again.

****

If Mother Nature could give directions, they’d be fine. Once the rain stopped, the darkness was a cacophony of insects and frogs. A few birds. They’d seen small mammals watching from the grass, and a snake slithering beside the road.

Scully had the high-beams on and drove twenty-five miles per hour as she kept an eye on the odometer. Mulder helped. Earlier, she’d had to back a quarter mile before the road widened enough to see-saw and turn around. They retraced their route west, watching for any side road. Logically, she probably veered off when they’d fled the squallies - or highly curious, giggling chimps with a pet kookaburra; it was still open for debate – before she’d turned on the headlights. They’d get back on the right road, and head to the hotel for a long shower and a good steak.

The dashboard indicated they’d driven seven, and now almost eight miles. On either side of the gravel road, the tall, dense grass spread for miles.

Scully scooted higher behind the wheel, rubbed the bridge of her nose, and slowed even more.

There were no turns. No side roads, no pull-offs, no paths. The road didn’t even curve. They’d driven eight miles west as straight as a ruler, and with no mile markers, no road signs, and no landmarks except maybe the opossum. Mulder hadn’t seen trees, even. The twin walls of grass rivaled the stone wall in China, and beyond them were no electric lights of any sort. Not a house, not a convenience store. Nothing.

Where they’d parked earlier, a footpath had led from the road twenty feet to a tree and a good place to pee. Mulder watched for any break in the grass.

“Maybe the odometer’s off,” Scully postulated.

“Maybe.” He could have run faster than she drove. Tonight summed up many of their cases. Tonight summed up much of his life, in fact: an exhausted, uncomfortable, frustrating attempt to get back to where he was originally lost. “As soon as it’s dawn, we should be able to see power lines or electrical towers. Some sign of civilization.”

The odometer registered eight miles from their previous location.

Eight-point-two.

Eight-point-four.

“Mulder, what’s the speed limit?”

He didn’t look away from his side of the road. “Why? There’s zero chance you’re exceeding it, and if a cop appears and pulls us over, I’m kissing him, then following him back to civilization.”

“Do you remember?”

He shook his head. “Probably thirty-five or forty, but I don’t remember seeing a sign.”

“We haven’t passed a sign. Not posted in either direction. Each state has its own guidelines for the distance between speed limit signs, but generally the higher the limit, the farther apart the signs,” she told him. “Even if the speed limit on this road is fifty-five, which would be ludicrous, there should be a sign every few miles.”

He shifted in the seat. “Please record my voice as I say skeptically: a valid observation, but not necessarily reliable evidence of paranormal phenomena. Road signs get stolen all the time. I had two hanging on my bedroom wall in high school.”

“You delinquent.”

“If Martha’s Vineyard wanted their signs left alone, they shouldn’t name places Horneytown and Goodhead.” He tapped her right shoulder with his hand. “My crime spree continued abroad. Yorkshire has a Butt Hole Road, and Oxfordshire was a treasure trove.”

As if she prayed emphatically, Scully recited softly, “Please don’t let me be pregnant. Please don’t let me be pregnant.”

He judged that as sarcasm, so he responded in kind. “There’s a Pull Out, North Dakota. Maybe I should have light-fingered that one.”

“I’ll remember that if there’s a repeat performance.”

That got him to turn his head. “Climax, Georgia. Atop, Pennsylvania. A Beaver Lick, Kentucky, a From Behind, Kentucky, and a Spread Eagle-”

He gasped as the front of the SUV dipped sharply, throwing him forward. The road vanished, along with the grass that had flanked it. Scully hit the brakes. Mulder grabbed the dash. Tires skidded, light flashed on the dash, and the antilock brakes engaged. She cursed. He cursed. For a millisecond, the headlights illuminated a black void.

Once they stopped, at a steep downward angle, he saw a wide pool of water. Gnarled trees and low brush flanked either side of them. The road was a wide cement slab rather than gravel. On one side, slimy-looking, grooved pavement sloped and disappeared into the water. The other side ended at an ancient floating dock. An alligator on the bank raised its head. Frogs croaked, insects buzzed, and somewhere wings flapped frantically. Mulder saw a frayed rope swing dangling from a branch and ripples where some creature just ducked underwater.

What Mulder couldn’t see was any way Scully might have passed where they stopped earlier, or accidentally ended up here. He’d watched. She’d watched. There’d been no place to turn or pull off. The road hadn’t narrowed and petered out. She’d driven eight miles due west on the same two-lane, gravel road they’d traveled earlier. The road probably went all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, except someone dropped this patch of swamp in their path.

In the distance, he heard faint children’s laughter.

Scully fumbled with the four-wheel drive controls, and then hastily shifted into reverse. “Mulder, I think we have a problem.”

He braced his hands on the dashboard and nodded. They’d somehow taken the road from Nowhere, Florida to Fucked, Colorado.

****

Forward wasn’t an option.

After some squealing tires, four-letter words, and tight maneuvering, Scully got the Explorer turned around and back up the cement slope. As soon they reached the top, she stopped, both hands on the steering wheel, mouth agape.

The steep road to the put-in and dock didn’t intersect with the two-lane gravel road. It was the end of the gravel road.

Scully had the presence of mind to turn off the four-wheel drive.

Yesterday, Mulder spent an hour sitting on the SUV’s hood, fuming, ruminating, and watching the sunset. The blazing sun had disappeared behind a broad marsh of pale green grass. There’d been no large trees in the distance, and no body of water. The road had continued west for miles. Their current location couldn’t be anywhere near where they’d broken down the previous evening.

His partner’s expression indicated she’d arrived at the same conclusion.

“Wait a second,” he requested. Mulder unsnapped his shoulder holster, grabbed a flashlight, and unlocked his door.

As the dome light came on, Scully asked anxiously, “Where are you going?”

“I love you,” he said solemnly. “If I don’t come back, tell our son I got the grizzly that got me.”

“There are no grizzly in the Everglades. What are you doing?”

He left the door open. “I’m just checking over our shoulder. Relax. I’m armed, and my squallies-” He made air quotes high above his head as he walked away. “-are entirely fictional, remember?”

Six feet behind the SUV, the gravel really did become a steep slope of concrete. Armed or not, he wasn’t walking down the ramp on anything less than a triple-dog-dare, but with the flashlight, he saw the water’s edge, the trees, the uneven dock. The fresh tire marks where they’d slid to a stop. He smelled the dense, decaying vegetative scent of the swamp, and felt the pavement beneath his shoes.

“Pull forward,” he called to Scully.

She let the Explorer roll forward a dozen feet. Mulder followed it.

“More,” he called.

With the passenger door still ajar, she idled another ten feet. Again, he followed.

“More.”

Her nature got the better of her. Scully shifted into park long enough to lean over and close the passenger door. Then she rolled down her window as Mulder walked beside the vehicle.

At about twenty yards, he called, “Woah.”

She eased to a stop. “Just stretching your legs?”

He’d already turned and switched on his flashlight. The white beam pierced the cool night, illuminating the place they’d just been. The breeze blew threw his hair and T-shirt, and chill bumps rose on his skin. After a slow breath, he said, “Check your rearview mirror, Scully.”

Behind them, rather than the drop-off, a gravel road continued due east. The trees had vanished. Once again, an uninterrupted wall of grass ran along each side of the road.

Scully stopped the car and got out, still shoeless. The Explorer’s headlights cut two swaths through the darkness ahead: a straight, gravel, two-lane road going east. Scully stood beside Mulder, staring as he showed her the same view to the west.

“Oh my God, Mulder.”

The night wind whipped her hair and blouse. A black blanket speckled with stars stretched from one horizon to the other. A hidden creature chattered excitedly, and another splashed through the marsh. Mulder and Scully had one bottle of water, no food, no idea where they were or how to escape, less than half a tank of gas, and one of them had terminal cancer.

He put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re right. We got a problem.”

Somewhere in the darkness, little voices found that hilarious.

****

Scully drove east on the gravel road at a snail’s pace, though Mulder had no expectation of getting anywhere. His neck hurt and his stomach was probably digesting itself. His head throbbed from lack of sleep. The darkness somehow grew blacker, and the sky threatened rain again. The road continued as before: straight, just wide enough for two vehicles to pass, and with a foot of firmament on each side before a wall of tall, marshy grass. He felt certain they’d passed the same opossum. It had started looking tasty.

While Scully watched the road, Mulder compared his wristwatch to the dashboard clock, checking for discrepancies. Both indicated 5:17 AM. Then he compared the watch, the dashboard clock, and the odometer.

She rolled her shoulders a few times and stretched her neck side-to-side. “Are we missing any time?” she asked tiredly. “Do the laws of physics still apply?”

“Depends on what dimension we’re in. Is Daylight Savings Time in effect?”

“I don’t care if Howdy-Doody time is in effect. How do we get off of this road, Mulder?”

“I’m working on it.” He switched on the SUV’s radio and turned up the volume so harsh static filled the speakers. He hit the ‘scan’ button.

“Lovely,” Scully called loudly.

“Mood music.”

“Only if you’re going for a homicidal mood.” She adjusted the volume until the static became white noise. “What is it you’re hoping to hear?”

“If this is a paranormal event, maybe we’ll pick up some sort of electronic voice phenomena. We might get a numbers station broadcasting a hypnotic or subliminal message. Radio mind control is extremely well-documented. HAARP’s ultra-high frequency experiments are said to disrupt weather patterns, while the impact of extremely low frequencies on the human nervous system is largely unknown.”

The skeptical expression he got would normally inflict third degree burns. Tonight, he couldn’t even have warmed his hands with her scorn. “Mulder, do you even have any idea how car radios work?”

He gestured to a backlit green button. “It’s on.”

The SUV’s interior was dark, but not so dark that he missed her weary eye roll. Drizzle collected on the windshield.

“It’s a stretch,” he told her, “but I don’t think we can rule out a connection to the Philadelphia Experiment and the Montauk Project. Some sort of multiverse or time loop.”

“Does this mean you’ve abandoned the squallies theory?”

“No,” he said haughtily. He tried rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck. It didn’t ease the ache the way a steak, a shower, and a soft bed would. “No, it just means I haven’t figured out how or why the squallies are doing this. Purposefully disorienting their victims isn’t mentioned in any of the eye-witness accounts.”

“Between my job, my family, and my recent acquaintance with the oncology department, I can attest that being referred to as ‘a victim’ gets old fast, Mulder.”

He studied her profile, trying to formulate an appropriate response. What he arrived at was, “Me too,” which sounded like he referred to himself either as a victim or a selfish asshole. He tried stretching his neck again.

She took her eyes off the road to ask abruptly, “Why a son? You said ‘tell our son’ about the grizzly. I always thought you’d want a daughter.” She cleared her throat, adjusted her hands on the wheel, and resumed watching the monotonous nothing illuminated by the headlights. The drizzle became more constant, less patchy. “If you ever decide you want a family, I mean.”

He worried his mouth. “I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to respond. That question’s like this road. No matter which choice I make, it’s gonna take me someplace I’m not happy about.” He leaned sideways, checked the odometer, and changed the subject. “How far now?”

“Eight-point-two miles.” She took her foot off the accelerator. The SUV idled forward. The wipers slapped back and forth. She sat up taller, scanning every piece of gravel and blade of grass. Tendrils of fog rose from the marsh and fine rain floated in the headlight beams. If a horror movie needed a road that led to The Most Ominous Place Ever, theirs should be in the top five choices.

“Scully, we’re not gonna plummet into some sinkhole or ravine. If they wanted us dead, they could have dropped that tree or pond a few feet closer. Something wants us contained or providing entertainment, not dead.”

Her profile looked unconvinced, but arguing his point would be fruitless. Also, to his knowledge, the Everglades lacked ravines and sinkholes.

As they crept through the misty darkness, Mulder reviewed the last few hours, trying to consider all the possibilities. “Can you think of any way to rule out some sort of shared hallucination or dream? Could we still be asleep right now?”

She drove like they traveled one of those treacherous cliff roads in Nepal or Bolivia. “Do I get an EEG machine?”

“Not unless you packed one.” Despite his “they don’t want us dead” hypothesis, her hypervigilance was contagious. Chill bumps rose on his forearms. He adjusted the temperature control a few degrees higher and started scanning the road as well.

The windshield wipers made another noisy pass.

“I have this dream,” he said like the four words were one. “Every few months for the past year or so.” His pace slowed from teletype to conversational. “In the dream I’m on a beach with a little boy. We’re building something out of sand, but the part we’re working on together is just a piece of something huge. I don’t know what it is; I can’t ever see all of it.” Now he watched his window rather than the road. Tiny water droplets beaded on the glass, as fine as a dusting of powdered sugar on a cake. “In the dream, I have the sense the boy’s my son…”

“Oh,” she said neutrally. If possible, she scrutinized the road even more closely, which conveniently precluded looking at him. “I was just giving you a hard time, Mulder. Pretending you’d climbed on some patriarchal bandwagon. I didn’t mean to-”

“He’s my son-” He took a slow breath. “-but he looks like you, Scully.”

Wisps of fog climbed from the marsh and rolled over the road. The headlight beams reached half their previous distance. Scully kicked the wipers up a notch.

When she didn’t respond, he said, “In Wales, old men speak of a fog that used to pass through their villages, making their sheep vanish. Fog often precedes a ghostly aspiration. Witnesses to the Philadelphia Experiment describe a thick green mist, while sailors report encountering fog banks that render their navigational equipment useless. It’s a common phenomenon in the Bermuda Triangle, and said to be related to the Hutchison Effect.”

The mist was standard-issue gray mist. They weren’t in the Bermuda Triangle, or Philadelphia, or missing any sheep. Either Scully was too tired to care or too kind to point that out. The silvery, foggy wisps gathered into a thick layer low to the ground. Mulder continued monitoring his side of the road – the ten feet ahead that he could see of it.

“There are the ‘preborn’ people,” Mulder told his window, “who believe they communicate with their child long before its conception – a belief which even I can’t get behind - and precognition, of course, but Jungians believe the children in our dreams represent some facet of ourselves. When I dream about Samantha, it’s not just the sister taken from me, but my own childhood, my innocence. When I dream of the boy…” He inhaled a slow breath, started to speak, then didn’t.

“What, Mulder? When you dream of the boy…”

When he turned his head, she’d left the foreboding road perilously unsupervised to look at him.

He worried his lower lip between his teeth. “If your cancer was diagnosed earlier, would that have made a difference? Would it have been curable?”

“This type of cancer occurs primarily in teenage or elderly males, and in Asia or Africa. In smokers or people who work in canneries or those with a family history. Nothing about me would make any doctor suspect a nasopharyngeal carcinoma.”

“So that’s a yes?” He fiddled with the vent, flipping the louvers up, down, left and right. “What if I knew? Subconsciously? A dream is an answer to a question we haven’t learned how to ask. I knew about those MUFON women, and I’ve dreamt of that boy ever since you found that implant. Maybe he’s not my son.” Mulder gave the vent an angry flick that made his fingernail smart. “He’s me, alone, seeing one piece of a larger picture I’ll never understand. I make the leaps, Scully, but you’re the one who makes them make sense. Without you, I’m-” He stopped just short of completely selfish asshole. Fox Mulder, FBI; semi-selfish asshole.

After a long minute, she asked gently, “How do you know he’s not your son?”

He stared at her with his mouth open. “You’re-” He almost said the D word. He tilted his head. “You have cancer. Incurable, inoperable cancer.”

A thick fog opened its arms and embraced them. Mulder saw the SUV’s hood and a glow from where the headlights should be. Scully stopped the vehicle. The engine idled and the wipers cleared the windshield. “I can’t see to drive,” she said, entirely unnecessarily. “The fog’s-”

The speakers squelched. The radio gave a few electronic shrieks, and then resumed static. Quickly, Mulder adjusted the volume and hit the scan button. Only static. He tried again. He checked his watch, the dashboard clock, the odometer.

The fog rolled past the SUV, on and on like a genie awakening, but didn’t dissipate. They couldn’t see someone five feet away from them. His partner sat behind the wheel with the ill-at-ease expression of a dog awaiting the vet. Mulder shook his head and turned the radio off.

“What exactly is the Hutchison Effect?” she asked.

“It’s not relevant unless we start to levitate.”

The windshield began to fog. They both reached for the defogger button, bumping hands. Scully got to man the button, but then put her hand over his on the center console. “What’s happening, Mulder?”

He had to admit, “I don’t know.”

Her chest rose slowly. “It’s almost dawn. The sun will burn the fog away. If we can’t figure out where we are, Skinner will send a search party.”

They had to be somewhere for a search party to find them. He wasn’t certain they were anywhere. “The gas gauge matches the odometer, right?” he asked. “You’re really driving somewhere?”

She looked down, then nodded. She interlaced her fingers with his. For a few seconds, they just sat there.

Then, with his free hand, Mulder opened the glovebox, pulled out the SUV’s owner’s manual, and thumbed through a few pages. The page numbers were sequential, and each sentence or diagram he focused on made sense. He replaced the manual and shut the glovebox. “We’re not dreaming,” he decided. “Not a normal dream. In dreams, if you open drawers, try to read books or gauges or analog clocks, the dream gets hazy. Our sleeping brain can’t fabricate such complex details.”

“Maybe we’re-”

He held up his hand in a stop gesture. Mulder turned his head to listen. His fingers slid from hers. He hit the button to roll down his window. A big breath of fog blew in.

Somewhere outside, he heard footsteps on the gravel. When he looked back at Scully, her blue eyes took up half her face. She shoved the SUV into park and reached for her holster.

The footsteps approached Mulder’s side, but he saw nothing in the mirror except a blur. Then he heard them passing. In the dark, rolling fog, he glimpsed the brim of a man’s fedora, tilted as if looking down. No face, but the sleeve and shoulder of an overcoat. “Sir-” Mulder bolted out of the SUV. “Sir! I’m an FBI Agent.”

He heard steps, but the figure moved forward as if gliding on rails. Mulder followed. The figure didn’t pause or look back.

“Sir, can you tell me our location? We were on a county road off of highway-”

At the front of the SUV, Mulder stopped. He watched the silent man glide through the headlight beams and vanish into the fog. If Mulder stepped away from the vehicle, he might as well have been blind.

He inhaled and stepped forward. He could see his feet. Feel the gravel road. Scully was right behind him. “Sir?”

Ten more steps, and he lost sight of the headlights. There’d been a moon earlier, but now he couldn’t make out the grass beside the road. He heard the engine, but also the heavy footsteps ahead of him. Drizzle covered his face and T-shirt. He kept a hand on his weapon and braved a jog. He told himself the Everglades didn’t have any ravines or sinkholes he could accidentally fall into.

Mulder’s dress shoes kept hitting gravel. He ran. Ahead, the fog thinned, and he caught sight of a tall, hatted male figure. Mulder closed in. Five feet. Three. He reached for the man’s shoulder.

Behind Mulder, a car alarm wailed. A chorus of birds shrieked and frantically took flight from the marsh flanking the road.

Mulder stopped and turned. He saw inky, foggy, blackness rather than distant headlights. “Scully?”

The alarm continued. Her voice didn’t respond. His heart, already pounding, redoubled its pace.

He followed the alarm. His first hurried attempt ended in a patch of soggy weeds alongside the road. He located the edge of the gravel and followed it.

The SUV’s headlights flashed, and the hazard lights and dome light blinked frenetically. The alarm continued. Every light in the vehicle seemed on and angry. Scully was behind the wheel, working knobs and buttons like a harried church organist.

Mulder yanked open the driver’s side door. The speakers blared static; numbers blurred as the radio scanned the dial. A Christmas tree of red and yellow warning lights flashed on the dashboard.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she yelled.

As quickly as it started, the alarm stopped. The headlights went dark. The engine died. The interior of the SUV went black and silent.

Mulder heard Scully try the key, but no sound from the starter or engine. Keys jangled again. The gearshift clicked as she pushed it firmly into park. She tried again. Nothing. “It’s dead. There must be an electrical issue,” she said in the darkness. “Maybe that was the problem with the engine earlier.” He heard her rooting around. A flashlight switched on.

“Maybe eight-point-four miles is a hard stop,” he said. “Neither of us get to pass that point. Alternately, maybe something didn’t want us separated or for me to catch up to that man.”

She pointed her flashlight at the dash. The new SUV had less than a thousand miles on it, but the trip odometer still read 008.4. “Who was that man, Mulder?”

“My guess?” He rested his forearm on the top of the vehicle and leaned toward her. Fine rain fell on his back and shoulders. “A shadow figure. The Hat Man: a tall, faceless man wearing an old-fashioned hat and a trench coat who seems to glide rather than walk. They’re associated with fog and a sense of foreboding. Silent, shadowy, hatted figures have been documented since the 1950s-”

Her flashlight momentarily blinded him. “As well as, if I recall correctly, a mid-eighties episode of The Twilight Zone.”

Despite being sore, exhausted, frightened, and soaked – lost, starving, and bug-bit - he grinned. “When Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 and the French made it into a movie in 1902, it was science fiction. Neil Armstrong still planted a flag in 1969.”

A freak event occurred in their partnership: Scully didn’t correct his omission of Buzz Aldrin’s role in the moon landing. She slouched behind the wheel, looking frustrated and exhausted. The flashlight switched off. Her weary voice said, “I want out of here. This fun house isn’t fun, Mulder.”

He blew a drop of rain off the tip of his nose, and nodded. “I know. I’ll find the guy in charge and get our money back. We’ll go on the Tilt-a-Whirl instead. After, you can win us a giant stuffed panda in the shooting gallery.”

“Cotton candy sounds divine right now.”

At first he thought that was sarcasm. Once he decided it wasn’t, he promised, “I will get you cotton candy.”

In the darkness, she leaned sideways so her head rested against his chest. That risked the rain and his thoroughly-wet T-shirt, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Thank you.”

After a second’s hesitation, he put his hand on her back. A second freak occurrence: she didn’t shrug away and insist she was fine. She wasn’t fine. He wasn’t fine. Acknowledging both seemed refreshingly bizarre.

“In 1976, while filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man,” he said for no reason other than to speak, “the crew discovered the preserved body of a man killed in a train robbery in 1911. The original owner of the sideshow purchased and displayed the corpse in the 1920s. The carnival changed hands several times, and at some point the corpse got posed as a hanged man in the haunted house – and left there for fifty years.”

Fog swirled around him. His T-shirt couldn’t possibly absorb more cold rain, but her head was warm and heavy. “Tell me something else,” she requested.

He stroked her hair, which curled in the mist. “At age twenty-five, P.T. Barnum began his career in humbug by purchasing and exhibiting a blind slave woman named Joice Heth, whom he billed as George Washington’s nursemaid and an impressive 161 years old. For fifty cents a pop, Heth shared her memories of little George with eager carnival goers throughout New England until her death in 1836.” He tucked some strands of hair behind her ear and smoothed them in place. “At which time, an examination of her body indicated she’d been no older than eighty. Barnum, however, insisted the body the doctors examined wasn’t Heth, who was on tour in Europe and, if Barnum is to be believed, may still be telling her tales.”

Leather creaked as she shifted in the driver’s seat, still keeping her head against his chest. “One more.” Her breath made the hair at the base of his neck rise.

He kissed her crown. “Saint Sarah is the patron saint of the Gypsies, a people more correctly called the Roma. The Romani believe Sarah was a Black Egyptian maid who accompanied Mary Magdalene, Mary Jacobé, and Mary Salomé – the mother of the apostles John and James – by sea to southern France in 42 AD. By the fourth century AD, the place the Marys came ashore was known as ‘Our Lady of the Boat,’ and by the ninth century, as ‘Saints Mary of the Sea.’ The church claims Sarah never existed, but in 1448, masons discovered four female decapitated skeletons beneath a church in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.” He stroked her cheek, her shoulder. “The Roma traditionally decapitate their dead to prevent their return as vampires, and these four heads had been arranged to form a cross. Even more interesting, to this day, in the crypt, an ancient statue of an unknown Black female accompanies statues of the three Marys.”

“I love you,” she said, and he could have stood in the miserable rain all night.

He kissed the top of her head again, and her brow, and her temple. She tilted her face up, he stooped, and her soft lips beneath his completed a perfect circuit. “We’re getting home,” he whispered, “and you’re getting a hot shower and a good steak and some cotton candy. And then I’m gonna make sure you get to love me until you’re 161.”

“I’m-”

“No, you’re not,” he insisted, and kissed her again. He melted into her, with his hands on her face, keeping her close. He could have been on another planet for all he cared about Hat Man and possessed rental cars and the mysteries of the Florida Everglades. “You’re not.”

Behind Mulder, from deep in the foggy marsh, a child giggled. Scully gasped and pulled back. Ahead, another little voice joined in, sounding mocking. A third voice, now in back of them.

Heart pounding, Mulder reached for his sidearm. He’d be shooting blind; fog obscured what little he could have seen in the blackness. And he’d be shooting a child. Or something impersonating a child.

Laughter rang from the marsh again. Then the first child, perhaps. Then from the other side of the road. The giggles surrounded them like menacing numbers on the face of a clock.

Then the laughter stopped. An eerie stillness remained.

He pivoted, ready, but nothing emerged from the mist. He felt the eyes watching, though. “We have an audience.” Each time he moved, the fog pawed him with ghostly hands.

Scully got out. She stood beside the SUV, hand on her holster, flashlight off but at the ready. “I’m not saying there’s anything out there not fully explainable by science, Mulder. Fully explainable.” She took a shaky breath. “But hypothetically, if there were, what the hell do they want?”

“There’s the ‘catch us and eat us alive’ hypothesis, which remains a contender.” He kept staring into the claustrophobic blackness. “However, predators don’t pause to laugh at their prey, especially when that prey is distracted by a romantic entanglement.” Seconds passed as he saw nothing, heard nothing, as if the night held its breath. “Kiss me,” he requested.

“Now?”

“It’s a verified FBI investigative technique.” He didn’t lower his weapon. “Kiss me.”

He got a peck on the cheek reminiscent of saying goodbye to Grandma, but their unseen audience giggled just the same.

“I’m going with door number three, Scully, though I’m not sure knowing they’re cheering for us makes them any less creepy.”

Another chorus of gleeful laughter encircled them.

“More,” Scully said. “Also, it makes them rude little eavesdroppers.” She slid behind the wheel. “Get in, Mulder.”

He made another fruitless visual inspection of the dark, foggy night. Her door closed. When Mulder reached the passenger side, he remembered he’d left his door ajar and the window rolled down. He sighed, shoved his pistol in its holster, and got in.

He heard Scully push a button, but the SUV’s doors didn’t lock. Keys jangled. His window didn’t rise.

The driver exhaled. “If we start taking our clothes off, do you think our mysterious spectators would get embarrassed, take their fog and vehicular malfunctions, and go home?”

That probably was sarcasm, but Mulder ran his fingers through his wet hair and said, “I think it’s worth a shot.”

****

Despite the exchange of “I love you’s,” they had as much sex as either of them wanted in an SUV while lost in the Everglades and being surveilled by possibly-evil, possibly pig-faced children – which was none. For a while, they’d held hands. Mulder hoped that rocked the squallies’ world.

Mulder woke to a foggy dawn, Scully asleep beneath her trench coat in the reclined driver’s seat, and feeling like he’d rolled in wet grass after a red-eye coach flight that hadn’t included meal service. Dew coated the windshield and hood and him. Greenish-gray light and drizzle filtered through the fog, creating a soft-focus yet stark landscape. His line of sight extended about thirty feet, but didn’t include the shore of a sea of sawgrass.

A storm approached. He felt it.

When he got out of the SUV, the ground squished beneath his shoes. Scully shifted but didn’t wake. Mulder left the passenger door open and waded through a white carpet of fog. He ventured away from the vehicle to relieve himself, but kept an eye on Scully. A large, dark bird passed hurriedly overhead. Mulder circled the vehicle, trying to get some sense of where they were. That Most Ominous Road Ever from last night – if it didn’t lead here, it should.

In the distance, he saw three small, pale figures in the fog. Perhaps children, perhaps stumps or animals. In the other direction, a path wove toward some large, sprawling building. He followed the path as far as he could without losing sight of the SUV, which wasn’t far. Still, he’d lay ten-to-one odds what that building was.

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

Mulder stood beside the open passenger-side door, forearms on the roof, as Scully blinked awake. He asked, “Was it good for you?” with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

She met the morning as though she prayed for a criminal, a clear shot, and an excuse to pull the trigger. “Have you figured out where we are?”

“In a manner of speaking.” He leaned in and handed her the bottle containing their only water. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

She set the water aside and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Her mascara had smudged into dark shadows beneath her eyes. “Start with our present location. Please tell me there’s a coffee shop.”

He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. She squinted at him, then straightened up to look.

Their SUV sat amid a dense swamp. The roots of the cypress trees poked upward like wooden icebergs through ponds of brown water. Like the dock, the air had a decaying, vegetative smell. Fog still covered the murky water, but the only solid ground was beneath their feet and the path between the trees. His watch indicated after 7:00 AM, but Mulder still couldn’t see fifty feet through the swamp or – on the off chance their vehicle started - any way to drive in or out.

Scully opened the driver’s door and got out. For every ten degrees her head turned, her puzzled expression grew. Mulder gestured as if waving away a waiter; rational thought wasn’t worth the effort. Last night, they stopped on a gravel road; this morning, they woke deep in a swamp. That might complicate Skinner’s search party.

Thunder rolled again. A breeze wafted through the fog and brought the scent of a storm.

Scully took a few steps from the vehicle, but stopped when her shoe sank into mud. “Are we trapped in an episode of Scooby-Doo?”

“If so, it’s not nearly as fun as I’d envisioned. Though you’re hot, Daphne.”

She made another visual inspection of the foggy swamp, then pressed her fingertips to the center of her forehead. “So what’s the good news?”

Mulder’s pants and T-shirt couldn’t get any more ruined, so he slouched against the SUV’s fender. “This would be the good news. It’s not without precedent. In 1915, during World War I, three soldiers witnessed a battalion of 250 men march into a fog and never march out. No bodies were ever found, and none of the men were reported as prisoners of war.”

“Seriously?”

“In 1950, a young man in Victorian clothing, with mutton chop sideburns, was struck and killed by a car in Times Square. Witnesses say he just appeared, seeming startled. His pockets contained Victorian era money, a letter dated June 1876, and other items all in mint condition and dating to the 1870s. A business card identified him as Rudolph Fentz with an address on Fifth Avenue.” Mulder crossed his ankles, warming to his tale. “Except the business on Fifth Avenue never heard of him, nor could the police find any record of Fentz even existing. The NYPD police finally tracked down the widow of a Rudolph Fentz, Jr. Junior died at the age of eighty-one, but had been a kind, loving family man. Just like her late husband’s father who, the widow said, at twenty-nine, went for an evening walk in 1876 and was never seen again.”

Her brows moved closer together. “Is the moral here ‘don’t cross against the light?’”

“More good news.” He threw his arms wide. “No traffic.

“Where are we?” she demanded. “How did we get here? Mulder, we need food and water and shelter.”

“In 1815, a prisoner in a Prussian gulag vanished in front of a dozen witnesses. His body faded away until his manacles and leg irons fell to the ground, empty. In 1901, the female principal and vice-principal of Hugh’s College, Oxford, were vacationing in France. While visiting in the gardens of Versailles, the women rounded a corner and encountered Marie Antoinette sketching. In 1950, a woman walking home at night on a lonely road near Dundee, Scotland, crossed paths with a group of Pict warriors with torches searching for their dead after a battle in 685 AD. In 1970, Jackson and Martha Wright entered the Lincoln Tunnel on an afternoon drive, and only Mr. Wright emerged; no trace of Mrs. Wright was ever found. There are dozens of well-documented time and reality slips.”

“Mulder, my head is pounding. I swear to God…”

“I have no idea how we got here, but there’s a path. Say, ‘Mulder, where does that path lead?’” he prompted. Her head tilted to an uncaffeinated, dangerous angle, so he answered with feigned bravado, “Why, it’s the only way out of here, and I suspect it leads to an old mental asylum, which means we’ve found Squally Central.” He made the arms-wide gesture again. “More good news. Now say, ‘what’s watching us through the fog?’”

“I’m gonna hurt you, Mulder.” She did glance at the path, though. “Quicksand? Rodents of Unusual Size? Lions and tigers and bears?” She held up a finger warningly. “Don’t say it,” she instructed sharply.

So he only mouthed “Oh my.”

She exhaled like a dying dragon. Lightning struck, painting the swamp bright white.

Mulder grinned and made the pig nose gesture.

A cool breeze blew and drizzle descended on her hair. “You think we’ve found the Naithlorendum Sanctuary? The abandoned mental asylum near DeSoto Boulevard and Oil Well Road?”

He put his hand over his heart. “You do listen.”

“Only when we can’t pick up an NPR station on the radio.” She crossed her arms. In her flat-soled shoes, she stood eye-to-chin with him. Then she turned, scanning the trees. The sky grew dark. “If this sanctuary has a street address, it’s locatable by the United States Postal Service, which means if we’re there, we’re locatable, too.” After a deep breath, she got her flashlight and weapon from the SUV, and dropped her badge around her neck. She shrugged on her trench coat. “Let’s go see what’s there, Mulder.”

He grabbed the bottle of water and his coat and carry-on bag. “Were you listening when I mentioned the cannibalistic squallies? When I described the crazy guard who shoots to kill on sight?”

Scully stopped twenty feet down the path, turned, and opened her coat to show him her pistol. “Would you want to get between me, breakfast, and some Extra Strength Tylenol right now, Mulder?”

“No ma’am.” He swept his hand ahead. “Lead on.”

Drops, then waves of rain reached them. Scully tied her coat closed and walked faster.

Mulder took a last look at the SUV sitting amid the cypress trees. “Do you have a plan for once we reach the Naithlorendum Sanctuary?”

She glanced back. “If Freddie Krueger comes after us, we only have to control our dreams.”

“That’s the Westin Hills Asylum and largely fictional. Scully-” He hurried to catch up with her. “Scully, you-”

“There are no squallies, Mulder,” she said over her shoulder. Two crimson streaks flowed from her nose. “There’s no Hat Man, no evil security guard. We-”

“Scully,” he called again. “You, uh… Your nose- Your nose is bleeding.”

She stopped and put a hand to her upper lip. Mulder rummaged in the pockets of his trench coat, hoping for a Kleenex. When he looked up, blood covered her fingers and the sides of her mouth. Her nose didn’t bleed; it gushed.

“Jesus, Scully.” He yanked open the carry-on bag and shoved aside latex gloves and notepads and evidence bags in search of tissues. A roll of gauze. A napkin. Anything. “Is it the tumor?”

Scully held her nose closed so hard her knuckles were white. Blood streamed down her chin and neck, turning pink when it met the edge of her blouse. She leaned forward to spit out a mouthful.

“Scully?”

“It will stop,” she said nasally. She braced one hand on a tree. She coughed, then spit again.

“When?” If anything, the bleeding seemed to worsen. Someone had turned on a spigot between an artery and her nostrils. His hands shook as he checked his pockets and the bag again. For an IV line. A pint of O-Positive. A paramedic.

She stepped toward Mulder. He looked in time to see her start to wilt. He grabbed her before she fell and guided her down to the damp ground. Mulder replaced her hand with his, pinching her nose closed as hard as he could. She coughed and frantically pushed his hand away. A fit of coughing, then retching, left him spattered with blood. If he held her nose closed, she choked. If he tilted her head back, she choked.

There was so much red the world had a scarlet tint.

Thunder crashed overhead. The heavens opened. He kept one hand on her shoulder and put one on her nose, pinching less firmly. Blood ran down his wrist. Scarlet covered her mouth and neck, but her cheeks became ghostly white. The rain stung like hail.

She shook, and Mulder shook with her. “What do I do? How do I make it stop?”

Because it wasn’t stopping. She’d bleed to death in a swamp in the middle of nowhere.

“Scully, answer me. What do I do?”

“Mulder,” she said, far more softly than the situation warranted. When she looked at him, her eyes didn’t focus. Her face went from pale to translucent.

He barked, “Scully!” again as her eyes closed. Her head lolled to the side and her body slumped against him. The nosebleed didn’t stop.

He knelt in the mud, holding her, one hand still on her nose.

Now the rain fell in cold sheets, slapping one after another. Lightning bit treetops so close an electric hum passed through him. Mulder put those old Indian Guides badges to good use. The human body – even a small female – could lose several pints of blood and survive. But a bolt of lightning could kill them. If lightning didn’t, hypothermia would. Alligators could detect blood, and he and Scully were covered in it.

Mulder let go of her nose, wiped the rain out of his eyes, and picked her up. The footpath had become a small stream. He slipped and slid as he carried her toward the SUV. Each time her head fell back, she choked, so he kept stopping to reposition her. That made carrying her unwieldly, but they hadn’t walked far from the Explorer. He’d get her in the vehicle, safe and flat and dry. Wait out the storm. Let Scully tell him what to do when she woke.

The path to the SUV ended in a brown pool. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed again. Mulder heard a tree sizzle, crack, and fall.

He adjusted his grip on Scully and searched for a way around. The water spread as far to each side and in front of him as he could see. He braved a careful step forward. His foot disappeared past the ankle without his toe touching the bottom. Even if – covered in fresh blood - he avoided whatever snakes and alligators lurked beneath the dark water, he couldn’t wade through a waist-high swamp while carrying her. Not and keep her head up, holding a 115-pound unconscious woman like he’d cradle a child. He could put her over his shoulder, if he wasn’t picky as to whether or not she could breathe or bled out.

A shred of sanity returned. The water covering the path wasn’t flash-flooding. He wouldn’t find a way around or through. Last night, this spot was a foggy gravel road. This morning, the high ground in a swamp. Just as the marsh grass had concealed the dock the moment they drove away, an endless pool now existed in place of their SUV.

Blood covered Scully’s face and neck, gushing from her nose as quickly as the storm washed it away. Her right arm hung limp. Her breathing had a gurgling sound, which was the only way Mulder knew she wasn’t dead.

A moment ago, she’d been fine. Hungry and cold and bitchy and lost, but fine.

A day ago, she’d been fine. He’d knocked on her hotel room door to see if her charger might fit his new cell phone. She’d let him use her charger and, as his phone juiced up, occupied herself by putting her tongue in his mouth and her hand down his pants.

He’d been with her once. Once. And he’d just promised 161 years. She was a thirty-two-year-old beautiful, brilliant woman with her whole life ahead of her and he needed her and he loved her.

This was not happening.

Lacking any other option, arms aching, rain stinging his eyes, Mulder turned and carried her in the opposite direction.

****

Whoever designed the Naithlorendum Sanctuary in the 1880s believed there was no such thing as too much red brick. Formidable red walls ringed a half-dozen abandoned little buildings, many missing roofs and open to the storm. Brick paths sprouting weeds ran at right angles through and across the rear courtyard. Just inside the long archway that had served as the back gate, an old bronze plaque screwed to an even older red brick wall reminded everyone ‘Patients May Not Pass Here.’ A stout gate – secured by a stout padlock until a few hours ago – enforced the sign. Just inside the asylum’s walls, to the left, Mulder saw a big cemetery of little graves. To the right, ancient playground equipment rusted in the rain, and swings moved in the mist as if occupied by ghostly children. Both areas connected to the main building via red brick paths.

Mulder had taken off Scully’s bloody blouse but left her pink bra on because it seemed dry and he valued his life. He put Scully’s trench coat between her body and the brick floor of the archway, positioned her on her side, and draped his coat over her. He used his T-shirt to wipe the blood from her face and neck, walked outside the archway and rinsed the shirt in the rain, then repeated the cycle twice more. He’d left the carry-on bag on the path, and lost their bottle of water somewhere. He found the SUV’s keys in Scully’s pocket, but Mulder had his wallet, his badge, a flashlight, a broken cell phone, his weapon, and a spare magazine. And that shiny new X-file and theory. And a partner dying of cancer.

Mid-morning passed. The vengeful storm didn’t. Scully didn’t wake.

Putting on his wet T-shirt seemed pointless, so he didn’t. For a while, he paced the length of the archway – fifteen steps each way. He shivered but a larger quake inside him ached. He kept checking on Scully: that she breathed and had a steady pulse. He had no idea what the hell to do if either stopped. Between thunderclaps, he listened as hard as he could for a car or plane or boat engine. He looked for powerlines or cell towers or any electric lights.

After another hour, Mulder slouched down just inside the archway, near Scully and out of the rain, and counted the graves. Then he started assigning names to the little wooden crosses. Reggie Perdue. Deep Throat. Duane Barry. Mulder’s father. Scully’s sister. The Thinker. X. All the people who’d died for his quest to discover the truth about Samantha’s disappearance.

The next grave Mulder was responsible for wouldn’t be Scully’s. Not a second time.

The Smoking Man must be behind Scully’s abduction and her cancer. Ever the great puppet master, now Old Smokey probably sat in an armchair beside a warm fire, enjoying his Morley and awaiting Mulder’s capitulation. If a cure existed, Mulder would make the deal - leave the X-files, abandon his search for the truth. Do whatever Cancerman demanded in exchange for Scully’s life.

If a cure existed.

In the dark doorway of a ruined little building far across the courtyard, Mulder spotted three small, pale children, squatting, arms around their knees, and watching him. Or an optical illusion. Or some beige rocks. He didn’t know or care anymore.

He moved deeper into the archway, and he maneuvered Scully so her head lay on his lap rather than the cold bricks. Her bare shoulder inside the trench coat cocoon felt warm. Mulder could still see the edge of the asylum’s cemetery. A little rabbit waited out the storm beneath a stone bench.

Even in the dim tunnel, he discovered the blood he’d missed with his T-shirt. In the fold in front of her ear. In her hair. In the creases of her neck. Beneath his nails and between his fingers. Without makeup, the scabby bruises showed on her face: mementos of Ed Jerse.

Two rats scuttled through the archway as if Mulder didn’t exist.

When Scully shifted, he wiped his eyes and sniffed. “Scully? Can you hear me?”

She made an affirmative noise.

He stroked her shoulder. “Just rest. You had a bad nosebleed. I think you went into shock.”

She corrected him, barely audible. “Hypovolemic shock.”

Her head remained on his lap. He pushed her damp hair back from her face. “Is this what’s gonna happen? Someday, the nosebleed won’t stop?”

“It’s more likely death will result either as the tumor presses into my brain or metastasizes.” She still spoke softly, but as if she discussed a patient rather than herself. “There will be vision changes. Difficulty breathing and swallowing, obviously. Problems with judgment and impulse control.”

He took all that in, weighed the implications, and asked, “Six months is the high estimate, isn’t it?”

She nodded her head.

“Rest,” he repeated. “We’re safe. Or, we’re what passes for safe around here.”

Beneath the coat, her hand reached up and took his.

Since her eyes were closed, Mulder dragged his forefinger below each of his eyes again, then passed off the motion as scratching the stubble on his jaw.

“In 1959, in the Ural Mountains of Western Russia, rescuers found the bodies of nine hikers,” Mulder told the bricks on the opposite wall of the archway. He heard his voice waver; he hoped she didn’t. “The young men and women were from a local university, all experienced skiers and hikers on a well-planned expedition. They’d wandered slightly off their planned route, and decided to set up camp for the night and backtrack the next day.” The bricks felt like rough ice against Mulder’s bare back, but her hand was a warm, velvet lifeline. “Twenty-four days later, rescuers found the tents cut open from t