December 20th 2012
C17 test sortie
En route to New York City
11:53 p.m.
They were
sitting in two of the foldable seats that lined the darkened cargo hold,
secured with nylon belts around their waists.
The powerful engines of the C17 military transport rumbled as Fox Mulder
and Dana Scully were bathed in the faint red glow of the security lights. The plane was flying at over thirty-thousand
feet.
Just before arriving at Andrews Air Base
they had been forced to abandon their sidearms and Father Jacobs’ modified
laptop. Scully had felt a spasm of dread
when their car rolled up to the security gate – knowing that if the personnel
at the base realized something was wrong their last chance at stopping
colonization would be snatched away. But
the guards at the front gate said they were expecting them, that the C17
Globemaster was minutes from take-off.
Their Vigil IDs were authenticated and verified. Scully glanced at Mulder and exhaled slowly
once the guard handed back their IDs.
They were immediately escorted by truck across the base to the waiting
military transport, boarded the cargo hold and were told by the pilots over the
intercom to secure themselves for take-off.
Minutes later the C17 began taxiing down the runway. It had been the most nerve-wracking take-off
Scully had ever experienced, expecting to be found out at any moment, but
Taskforce-Leader Janet Lessinger had apparently done an efficient job before
ODNI pulled the plug on Vigil.
Now, Scully glanced at Mulder in the
red-lit darkness of the cargo hold. They
were less than twenty minutes from JFK International, but they hadn’t had time
to call ASAC John Doggett at FBI New York Division and beg him for his help.
“This feels like we’re flying into God
knows what,” Mulder said gravely.
“Doggett will help us,” Scully told him,
gripping his hand.
“You sure about that? Even if he finds out that all Vigil members
are being interrogated as potential terrorists by Homeland Security?”
“He won’t believe that, Mulder. He’s a brilliant investigator and a good
man. He’ll figure out something is
wrong. He has to help us. He has
to.”
“I hope you’re right,” Mulder told her. “Because if NYPD or FBI is waiting to arrest
us when we land at JFK...then we’re screwed.
We might not even get the chance to ask for Doggett’s help. Even if everything goes smoothly I’m not even
sure if our IDs will get us past airport security.”
The thought made them silent for a
while. They sat listening to the
engine-rumble of the C17 Globemaster. Scully
was thinking about the awful shadow-apparition she’d seen standing over the
dead body of Rachel Marx. She was still
trying to summon the courage to tell Mulder about it. She didn’t quite know why she was finding it
so difficult.
She exhaled sharply and said, “I saw
something, Mulder. Just after Rachel let
herself get hit by the bus...”
Mulder peered at her in the red-lit
darkness. “What did you see?”
“I’m not sure, but it was some kind of
shadow.”
“A shadow?”
“Some kind of...shadow-entity. I know it sounds crazy, Mulder. But I saw
it. It was really thin, at least eight
feet tall, and hooded. It seemed to be
flickering in and out of sight, but...nobody could see it but me. It wasn’t my imagination. This thing was real. I...I got this
ancient, almost religious feeling from it.
It felt evil, Mulder...”
She could see Mulder frowning at her in
the semidarkness. “Why didn’t you tell
me this before?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t want to accept it, I guess. Or even consider it.”
“Scully, what are you saying to me? You’re saying you saw some kind of demon standing over Rachel’s body?”
“I don’t know what I saw. It felt almost religious...really, really
dark. But it also had this
incomprehensible quality that felt...I don’t know....alien? I don’t know what it
means, but I’m sure it’s connected to everything that’s happened today...and to
whatever’s coming.”
“I’m sure it is,” Mulder said, his voice
grim.
“You believe me?”
“Of course I believe you, Scully.”
She wasn’t sure why she felt so surprised
by his attitude. He may have had a
number of problems with religion and religious interpretations of the
paranormal, but closed-minded was the last thing he was. He had even prayed with her for the victims
of Hurricane Sandy back in October, and done it earnestly.
“Dana,” he said, “All we can do is take
this piece by piece. I know it’s
overwhelming, but once we land – if we’re not arrested – we need to find this
Dr Ryan Cohen and learn everything he knows about Pellucid. Hopefully it’ll lead us to this key that
everyone’s looking for – this Key of
Ages.”
“You think this key is even real, Mulder?”
“The insider said it has the power to stop
colonization, so I’m damn well praying it’s real.”
Beside him in the darkened cargo hold, she
placed her head on his shoulder.
“But back at the church, before he shot
himself, Father Jacobs said this key was supposed to unlock something that DOD
calls Triskelion. Whatever the hell that
is, I’m thinking it’s not good. It seems
like Diego Roberto Cielo’s murder was in retaliation for something. For this CIA Bedtime operation? Someone carved a Triskelion symbol into his
chest....and then those bees came pouring out of his mouth at NBACC. I think you were right, Mulder. Science and magic are blurring somehow. And it really, really scares me. It’s going to be December 21st in
less than ten minutes. Colonization is
almost here, and we’re running out of time.”
Mulder didn’t say anything. He simply squeezed her hand in an attempt to
comfort her.
*
December 21st 2012
John F Kennedy International Airport
New York City
12:18 a.m.
As the aft ramp
of the C17 transport was finally lowered, they didn’t know what they were going
to find. Mulder half expected to see an
armed tactical unit waiting for them on the darkened runway. But there was nobody. He glanced uncertainly at Scully, and the two
of them made their way down the ramp and onto solid ground. It was colder here than in D.C. The coastal air had a biting chill to
it. Off in the distance they could see a
commercial airliner taxiing down another runway. Beyond it the lights of the terminal and
control tower were glowing against the night sky.
“Ok,” said Mulder, confused, “I was at
least expecting some airport security…”
He realized he could hear a low throbbing
sound nearby, like the idling rotors of a helicopter. Scully tugged the sleeve of his suit-jacket
and pointed to their right. About a hundred
feet away a helicopter was indeed sitting on the tarmac. Mulder saw that it had the letters FBI
stencilled on the side in orange. A back-lit
figure was already striding away from the chopper towards them, tie and jacket
flapping in the downwash of the spinning rotors.
A few moments later Mulder realized they
were being approached by John Doggett.
Mulder was surprised and a little
unsettled. They hadn’t been able to
contact him before arriving at Andrews Air Base. How did he even know they were here? Neither of them had seen Doggett face to face
since the night he and Monica helped to break Mulder out of federal
custody. Even in the darkness of the
night Mulder could see that the grizzled FBI agent was looking a decade older,
but he still seemed lean and fit and capable, dressed like Mulder in a black
suit and tie. Scully glanced at Mulder
with a relieved smile. She ran towards
Doggett and threw her arms around him.
“It’s good to see you, Agent Scully,”
Mulder heard him say, with a tentative laugh in his gravelly voice. “It’s been a long time. Too long.”
Mulder closed the gap, watching as Scully
kissed Doggett’s cheek and glanced back with another relieved smile, her red
hair whipping around in the downwash.
“How did you even know we’d be here,
John?” she asked. “We didn’t get a
chance to contact you before we boarded.”
Doggett glanced at Mulder before answering,
his expression immediately growing serious.
“It was Monica. She and Janet
Lessinger managed to call me from Vigil Headquarters, gave me the flight
details and said it was really, really bad…”
Mulder looked back at the idling chopper
and saw the faces of two other agents peering at them from the rear of the
cabin. Mulder appraised the now senior
FBI agent and said frostily, “For a second I thought you were here to arrest
us, Agent Doggett.”
But Doggett ignored him and returned his
attention to Scully, his expression fierce.
“Dana, you need to explain to me what the
hell is going on. The line went dead
while I was talking to Monica. I tried calling
back and I couldn’t get through. Her
cell phone was blocked. The last thing
she said to me was that it was imperative that I met the military transport
when it landed – that six men had their throats cut at Vigil Headquarters, and
now all Vigil’s members are gonna be interrogated by Homeland Security as
potential terrorists, including Monica…”
“It’s Labyrinth, John,” Scully said
quickly. “Labyrinth engineered this
whole thing.”
“I don’t even know what Labyrinth is,
Scully,” Doggett replied with narrowed eyes.
“All I know is what you and Monica told me; that Vigil is some kind of
NSA-CIA taskforce. If you want my help
you need to tell me what the hell is really going on; what you and Mulder have
really been doing for the last eight months.”
He waited a moment and then added, “And please don’t say this has anything to do with the X Files…”
“It has everything to do with the X Files,
Agent Doggett,” Mulder told him. “But
you knew that already.”
Doggett grimaced and said, “I’m already
breaking protocol by being out here. I
spoke to airport security. They
eventually agreed to let me meet you right here. I convinced them that this military flight
was a matter of National Security, part of a crucial inter-agency counterterrorism
operation. So, we’re going to take the
chopper directly back to the offices, and then you’re both going explain every
single detail of this to me. Ok?”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Mulder
said.
Doggett glared at him. “And I don’t have a lot of patience,
Mulder. I managed to salvage my career
in the last ten years after the X Files.
I’m the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of New York’s Counterterrorism
Division. I’m not some renegade D.C.
agent with a death-wish. What Monica
said on the phone, it frightened the hell outta me. She was crying. She sounded terrified. So we’re going back to HQ and you’re gonna find the time.”
Scully looked up into his eyes and nodded.
“Ok, John. Ok.”
Mulder gritted his teeth but said
nothing.
He had an awful feeling of paranoia, a
sense that Doggett might actually have him and Scully both arrested the moment
they arrived at the New York field-office.
He tried to shake off the feeling, telling himself that Doggett had met
them here on the runway of JFK International because he genuinely wanted to
help them. But ten years had passed
since they last met face to face, and Mulder had no guarantee that Doggett was
still the same man. Mulder tried to
ignore his fear. He followed a few steps
behind as Doggett hustled Scully through the downwash of the spinning rotors towards
the waiting FBI helicopter.
*
Jacob K. Javits Federal Building
Manhattan, New York City
12:42 a.m.
The chopper took
them high above the night-time city.
Down below the city’s lights glinted like thousands of jewels scattered
across darkness. They passed the edifice
of the Brooklyn Bridge stretching across the East River, and carried on above
the maze of the Manhattan skyline. The
chopper pilots eventually landed on the helipad on the roof of 26 Federal
Plaza, where a small team of agents were waiting. Over forty storeys above the city, the
helicopter’s passengers exited the chopper as it powered down. Mulder glanced nervously at Scully and then
at Doggett as they were surrounded by the team of blank-faced FBI agents.
Mulder wondered if this would be the
moment the full force of the federal government came crashing down on them,
thwarting their final chance to stop an imminent apocalypse.
But it seemed his paranoia was just that,
for now.
Visitor-passes were clipped to Mulder and
Scully’s jackets and they were quickly escorted into the building, into an
elevator and down to the twenty-third floor.
When the elevator doors opened they were greeted with a plush reception
area, and the FBI seal on the wall behind the counter. Mulder glanced again at Scully. The entire floor of the building was occupied
by the FBI New York field-office. Mulder
was worried because the Department of Homeland Security might already be
looking for them, and they happened to have their field-offices in the exact
same building. So despite Scully putting
her trust in John Doggett, Mulder felt like at the very least they were seriously
tempting fate.
But they didn’t have any other
options.
They were led through the main bullpen and
a series of corridors, into Doggett’s well-appointed office. He didn’t bother to turn on the main
lights. He simply switched on the desk
lamp, casting the office in a dim half-light, and turned to peer at them both.
“So,” Doggett said quietly, “we’re alone
now. Please tell me that I haven’t just
aided and abetted two terrorists.
Because that’s kinda the antithesis of my job description.”
“Of course not, John,” Scully muttered.
“Well, I didn’t think so. So what the hell is going on? You haven’t told me much about Vigil since
July, Scully, but I’m betting Monica knows more than I do. So, Vigil is an
NSA-CIA taskforce…but I need to know more.
Make what Monica told me on the phone make actual sense. Because I’m very, very worried right now.”
Mulder was about to speak when Scully
touched his arm and peered at him.
Mulder realized that a censored version of the truth would sound better
coming from her. He nodded at her
intention.
“Ok, listen,” Scully began, “the Vigil
Intelligence Taskforce was created by a Presidential Executive Order. It’s comprised of around fifty members
including analysts and field operatives.
Most of them are ex NSA and CIA, and the work is extremely
classified. Or it was until a few hours
ago. The Office of the Director of National
Intelligence just had Vigil officially dissolved because of two major
security-breaches.”
“The
men with their throats cut?” Doggett asked.
Scully nodded. “Since April we’ve been gathering information
on a rogue faction hidden within US military-intelligence. This faction refers to themselves as
Labyrinth. They seem to be a domestic terror
network with huge influence and resources.
And the Oval Office believes they may have infiltrated almost every
government agency in the United States.
They’re planning to completely cripple this country, John. And they don’t care who they kill. Taskforce-Leader Janet Lessinger believes
they’re planning a massive terrorist attack on US soil in the next twenty-four
hours…something that could potentially kill millions
of American citizens. The dissolution of
Vigil is some kind of set-up. A preamble
to whatever they’re planning.”
Doggett’s expression was darker and
fiercer than Mulder had ever seen it before.
For a few moments he didn’t speak.
Eventually, in an almost trembling voice, he said, “That sounds made up,
Agent Scully. That sounds like…like a
boogieman that DOD would cook up for some kind of war-game scenario, not an
actual terrorist threat…”
But the quiver in his voice told them that
he didn’t actually think they were joking.
Mulder could clearly see the horror in the ASACs eyes.
“Listen to me, John,” Scully told him,
gripping his hands. “I of all people
know how crazy this sounds, but Labyrinth is real. They almost killed me and Mulder on more than
one occasion. They tried to mastermind a
bombing at FBI headquarters in D.C. last Christmas. They hung me out of the side of a moving
helicopter in Wyoming, for Christ’s sake.
These people are cold-blooded sociopaths, and they’ve infiltrated most
of our military-intelligence infrastructure. This boogieman is real, John.”
“Jesus,”
Doggett murmured. “Monica told me about
the bombing attempt at Christmas, but she said it was the work of a Christian
militia. The Scythe of St John.”
“The Scythe were created and controlled by
Labyrinth,” Scully told him. “Apparently
they’ve created or funded a whole bunch of extremist groups and militias and
cults.”
“But…for the love of God, we’re FBI counterterrorism. If this is true, how…how come the Bureau
doesn’t know anything about this
entire situation?”
Mulder finally spoke. “Because the FBI has probably been
compromised along with everyone else.
The Oval Office is trying to minimize the damage that’s already been
done. Or so they claim. Apart from the White House only a handful of
people within NSA, CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
know about Vigil’s true mandate. Or what
kind of threat Labyrinth really poses to the United States.”
Doggett
peered darkly at him. “And how does the
X Files fit into all this? You gonna
tell me that aliens and Bounty Hunters are a part of this too?”
“Yes,” said Scully, before Mulder could
answer. “John, you know I wouldn’t lie
to you. I know it’s been over ten years. But we both saw things on the X Files. You saw things you couldn’t explain. And as much as you might not want to admit
it, you know there’s truth to what we’re saying. Truth to everything we had to deal with back
then.”
Doggett sighed deeply and shook his
head. “I’m not an idiot, Agent
Scully. Just because I wasn’t ready to
jump on the alien bandwagon doesn’t mean I was ready to ignore my own
experiences.”
“You’re a gifted investigator, John. I wouldn’t have got Mulder back without
you. I wouldn’t have got through my own
grief without you. You saved me. And you saved Mulder.”
Doggett turned his fierce attention to
Mulder. “This potential terrorist
attack…it wouldn’t have anything to do with what you used to call colonization,
would it? With the substance you and I
encountered on the Galpex-Orpheus? What
you called Purity?”
Mulder stared back at him. “We think it does, John. No matter how ludicrous and nonsensical that
might sound to you. This is all somehow
connected to a faction within the Guatemalan D-2 that was running a
child-snatching operation in league with elements within the CIA. Something they called ‘Bedtime’ – recruitment
for a larger black project within DOD that was named Pellucid…which is some
kind of MK-Ultra experiment into lucid dreaming.”
“MK-Ultra?
Just slow down for a second, Mulder.”
Doggett sat on the edge of his desk,
pressed his eyes shut and ran a hand through his hair. Mulder could sense his desperation and fear.
“So, what you’re basically asking me to
believe is that all of this – Labyrinth and D-2 and MK-Ultra and kidnapped kids
– it’s all somehow connected to some kind of alien invasion? That alien colonists are gonna reveal
themselves to the world and begin taking over the Earth? Right? I mean, that’s what
you’re basically saying to me.”
“Yes,” said Mulder. “A full-scale invasion that’s going to begin in
twenty-four hours, unless we find a way to stop it.”
Doggett glared at Mulder, his expression full
of fear, anger and helplessness. Mulder
could see Doggett’s mind working furiously behind his pale blue eyes.
“Fox,” he said quietly, “do you have
any…any idea how bat-shit insane that
sounds? How ridiculous? Since Hurricane Sandy this whole city’s been
a disaster zone. Parts of Queens and
Brooklyn are still strewn with garbage and rubble. Some areas are still flooded. We lost over a hundred homes to a fire in
Breezy Point. All kinds of damage
throughout the city. We’ve got almost
ten thousand residents still without heat and electricity. And you come in here and want to talk to me
about an alien invasion? Do you have any
idea how insulting that is to
me? This city just suffered a
tragedy. A real tragedy. New York won’t
fully recover for a while yet, and what you’re saying makes a mockery of
everything these people went through. It
makes a mockery of all those folks who’ve had their lives ruined.”
Scully frowned, stepping between Mulder and
Doggett. “You know it’s more complicated
than that,” she said quietly. “We’re not
here to mock anyone. We’re here to try
and save lives. You really think Mulder and I have come all
this way just to spin you a tall tale? Damn
it, John, you know me better than that.
Something really, really bad is about to happen. I need you to put your skepticism aside and
really listen to us.”
Doggett grimaced and ran both hands through his hair with a careful
exhalation of breath.
He muttered, “I listened to you before,
Dana. And it nearly got me killed. Bounty Hunters and supersoldiers and alien
replacements…Jesus.” He stared hard at Scully. “I’m…I’m guessing Monica believes every
goddamn word that’s come out of your mouths about this Labyrinth faction, huh?”
“She trusts that we’re not liars,
John. She trusts her friends.”
“I don’t think you’re liars, Dana.”
“So what do you think we are now?” asked
Mulder. “Just completely delusional?”
Doggett chuckled humourlessly. “I think…I think you’re lightning rods for
weirdness. I think you’re both living,
breathing X Files. And that scares the
crap outta me.”
Scully gripped his hands again, pleading
with him. “Does that mean you’ll help
us, John? I’m begging you, as a friend.”
Doggett seemed to be studying Scully’s
face, and Mulder could suddenly sense his deep affection for her. That affection was still there all these
years later. It made Mulder bristle a
little despite there being much bigger things to worry about.
Doggett swallowed and said, “Of course I’m
gonna help you, Agent Scully. I don’t
abandon my friends. Ever.” He glanced over at
Mulder. “Even the ones that kinda piss
me off.”
Mulder couldn’t imagine that John Doggett
had ever seen him as an actual friend.
He was saying it for Scully’s benefit, but it still gave Mulder a little
flare of hope.
“Thank you, John,” said Scully. “I…I need to use the restroom, but I’ll be
back in a minute and we’ll go through everything we know, ok?”
Doggett nodded and gestured at the
door. “Right, then left, at the end of
the second corridor.”
Scully gave Mulder a pointed glance before
hurrying from the office. Mulder knew
what the look meant. Be honest with
him. Connect with him. Mulder already knew that wouldn’t be as easy
as Scully wanted it to be. Doggett
stared blankly at Mulder. He waited a
beat and said, “The only reason you’re both in my office and not in an
interrogation room right now is because of her.”
“I kind of figured that, John. You’ve taken us right into the lion’s den.”
Doggett fixed him with a cold,
uncompromising stare. “If Homeland is really looking for both of you, then I’m
putting my career on the line with every passing minute that I don’t arrest you. Do you have any idea how serious this could be?”
Mulder nodded and said quietly, “Of course
I do. I love this country. I’ve risked my life to protect it. And now Labyrinth might be trying to set us
up. As terrorists. That makes me
feel sick to my stomach, John. But I’m
praying that Homeland Security is going to realize its error once they finish
questioning everyone at Vigil.”
“If they don’t…I could go to jail for what
I’m doing right now,” Doggett muttered, and then almost as an afterthought he
added, “You know…after William was born…you just upped and left, Mulder. You just left
her.”
Mulder was quiet for a few moments, trying
to control the flush of guilt at Doggett’s sudden change in the topic of
conversation. “Are you remarried, John?”
Mulder asked eventually, a little flare of self-hate in his gut.
Doggett peered angrily at him, thrown by
his question. “No. I’ve…I’ve been seeing someone for the last seven
years, but we’re not married exactly.”
Mulder nodded with mock sympathy. “Sometimes it’s hard to put out the old
torches.”
“What the
hell does that mean?” Doggett practically snarled at him.
Mulder shrugged, knowing it was a low
blow. He hadn’t come here to argue with
Doggett like some possessive adolescent.
It was insane to bait and rile the man when he so desperately needed his
help. He sighed heavily and forced
himself to mutter, “Agent Doggett…I’m…I’m really sorry for saying that. I’m an asshole.”
“Mulder, I never tried to…”
“I should thank you,” Mulder said quickly,
before he lost his nerve. “No games, no
ego. In the chopper I told myself that I
honestly wanted to thank you.”
Doggett stared at him. “For what?
For helping you? Did you really
think I’d just let Homeland tear you both to pieces? That I’d look the other way because I want to
protect my career? Then you really never knew me, Fox.”
“No,” Mulder told him quietly, “I mean I want
to thank you for helping her. After my funeral…when…when I was in the
ground. That night with the gun, when
Scully asked you to kill her. She
thought she tried to kill our unborn child that night. But she didn’t. You took care of her. You saved her when I couldn’t. When she called you from Boston back in July,
and you told her the truth about that night…she was able to let go of a lot of
pain she’d been carrying for a long time.
The truth is…neither of us would be here if it wasn’t for you. I owe you my life, John. And I owe you Scully’s life too. That’s what a brave guy would say, because
it’s the truth. So…I’m…I’m really trying
to be brave right now.”
Doggett stared at him, clearly emotional
at what Mulder had just said. “Did she ask you to say all that?”
“No.
I’m saying it because it’s honest.
It’s the truth. And I’ll die
before the truth stops counting for something.”
Eventually Doggett let out an awkward sigh
and muttered reluctantly, “You don’t owe me anything, Fox.”
“Listen,” said Mulder, unable to look the
FBI agent in the eye, “Scully begged me to go underground when the
supersoldiers were threatening my life.
But I left because I was afraid, ok?
Afraid of not uncovering the truth…afraid of failing them both. It was a mistake, John. And I regret it. I’ve regretted it every single day for twelve
years.”
Doggett nodded. In a conspiratorial murmur he said, “The X
Files…all that craziness – it would’ve destroyed most people. But you’re still kicking. It’s impressive.”
Mulder just smiled sadly at the look of
relent in Doggett’s eyes. It was the
closest thing to a peace-making that either of them were comfortable with.
“Mulder, listen to me…December 22nd
is going to be just another day. It’s
not some Roland Emmerich movie. I know
you’re afraid, and I get it. I get why you’re afraid, but it’ll be a day
like any other. The sun will rise,
everything will still be here. Just as
shitty and broken as ever. No
apocalypse, no alien invasion.”
“Are you really so sure about that,
John? Seeing what you’ve seen on the X
Files unit?”
“I’m
not willing to consider the alternative,” Doggett said quietly.
There in the lamp-lit office Mulder
crossed the gap between them and gently gripped Doggett’s shoulder.
“When you and Barbara found out Luke was
dead, you realized that an apocalypse had occurred, didn’t you? And you spent every day after that stumbling
through the ruins, trying to make sense of that apocalypse. The world seemed the same to everyone else,
but not to you. You knew the world had
changed. You knew the End had come. You couldn’t save Luke. I couldn’t save Samantha. Scully couldn’t save Emily. The three of us, we’re same underneath. We’ve all walked in the real darkness, you know?
We’ve all seen the devil take away the things that mattered most to
us. There has…there has to be at least one
child we can save. I know that William
is somehow tied to all this…and if I fail, he dies. Apocalypses are real. You know that because you already lived
through one. And this time if I sit back
and do nothing…I…I don’t think the sun will rise again. I want to be the father that William
deserved, John.”
Doggett’s eyes were wet with tears now,
but so were Mulder’s. He nodded sadly
and muttered, “I dreamt about him a few nights ago, Mulder. About Luke...” His hushed words had the tone of a tentative,
dangerous confession.
“Tell me,” Mulder said simply.
Doggett couldn’t make eye contact
now. He peered at the office floor. “In the dream he...uh...he said that bad
spirits were coming....and that he’d come to tell me about it to make me stronger. He said...ah…Christ...”
“What?” Mulder urged gently. “What did Luke tell you in the dream?”
“He
said...that the bad spirits were coming to eat the whole world. He told me not to be afraid...”
Mulder stared into Doggett’s pale blue
eyes and could feel the pain and fear and uncertainty behind them. “And do you honestly think that was just a dream?”
Doggett glanced away, wiped his eyes and
shrugged. “I don’t know what the hell it
was.”
“I think maybe you do. I think maybe we both do, John.”
Doggett sniffed and took a deep
breath. “What do you need?” he asked
simply.
“I
need you to run a name through the system.
Dr Ryan Cohen. We’ve already got
an address but I want any other information we can find on him. Hopefully he’s got a criminal record.”
“What’s the address?”
“306c Malachi Street, in Brooklyn Heights.”
Doggett glanced sharply at Mulder. “Jesus…that’s…that’s my neighbourhood. That’s
only three blocks from my house.”
There was silence in the office for a few
moments.
Finally Doggett said, “I’m needed
here. Take Scully and find this guy. I wish I could give you an escort, one of my
agents, but–”
“I understand,” Mulder said
immediately. “No escorts, John. You’ve already put everything on the line
just by meeting us at JFK. I just need
one more favour, and then your hands are clean from here on in. Let me requisition a Bureau vehicle…and a
sidearm. Scully and I need to do this
alone, but we need you to cover our tracks.”
Mulder realized that he was asking a lot
from Doggett; access to not only a car but also a handgun that could
theoretically be traced back to this field-office.
Doggett grimaced and glanced away. “Listen to me very carefully, Mulder. If what Monica said on the phone is true…then
Vigil is being set up to take a very bad fall.
If Homeland decides that Vigil operatives are a genuine threat to
National Security…and if they learn that you and Scully are here in New York…if
ODNI learns that FBI Counterterrorism had both of you here in the building…and armed you before letting you both go……my…my team might be given orders to
hunt down the two of you.”
“I know, John. But I’m praying that doesn’t happen. We’re not terrorists. Hopefully they’ll figure that out before
Scully and I lose our last shot at stopping this.”
Doggett sighed, unbuttoned his suit
jacket, unclipped his holster and placed his own handgun on the desktop. “Take it.”
“I didn’t mean your own…”
Doggett waved away his inhibition. “If I’m gonna arm two fugitives who are also
two old friends of mine…then I’m gonna do it the right way, if such a thing is
possible. You and Scully are gonna have
to share. But file off the goddamn
serial number.” He took a long breath
and then added quietly, “There’s something else I have to tell you, Mulder.”
“What?”
“In the dream…when Luke told me that bad
spirits were coming to eat the world…I…I saw his eyes go black. I saw his eyes go black, Mulder.”
Mulder peered across the desk at the senior
FBI agent and saw his fearful, haunted expression – and saw the tears that had begun
welling in his eyes. Mulder didn’t know
what to tell him.
The chirp of a cell phone broke the
awkward silence. For a moment Mulder
thought it was his own, before recalling that he and Scully had destroyed their
phones back in D.C. after receiving the disturbing call from Janet Lessinger
detailing Vigil’s security breach and the brutal murder of six analysts.
It was Doggett’s cell that was
ringing. He pulled the phone from his
suit jacket, glanced at the screen and frowned.
He answered the call, listened for a moment before peering over at
Mulder.
In a low, worried voice he said, “It’s for
you.”
“Is it Monica?” Mulder asked quickly. “Did Homeland release her?” Doggett shook his head and offered the phone. Mulder took it warily, pressed it to his ear
and said, “Yeah?”
“I’ve been trying to reach you for the
last hour, Agent Mulder.” It was the
voice of the DOD insider that Mulder had met at the Lincoln Memorial, the man
who had given them information on the ritual-suicides at El Mirador and Father
Jacobs’ location at the church in Michigan Park.
Mulder growled into the phone, “You gave
us some dangerous intel, and it could’ve got us killed. You told me that Benjamin Jacobs was a member
of the Resistance, but he was a sick pervert who shot himself after we
questioned him. A goddamn child
molester.”
Doggett looked horrified at Mulder’s words
but said nothing.
The insider’s voice was firm and
unwavering. “I also told you he was a
dangerous man. You asked for intel and I
gave you the best I could gather. Now
you need to shut up and listen to me, Fox.
You and Dana are being hunted.”
The way the insider said it deepened the
sense of dread. “You mean by Homeland
Security? We already–”
“No,” the insider cut in. “Not Homeland. You’re being hunted by something
exceptionally dangerous…a man who’s no longer a man. His name is Lucien Farrow. He’s an ex special-forces soldier who was
recruited by the black-intel community within DARPA during the late nineties. He was their most valued field-operative, but
was supposedly killed three months ago when he was hit by lightning during a
black-op somewhere in Canada. Agent
Mulder, my contacts within DARPA claim that Farrow is somehow back from the dead…a rogue operative…that
he’s become exceptionally powerful and virtually invulnerable. They said he recently survived an explosion
in England that should have ripped apart a normal man. He’s acquired the Key that I told you
about. The Clavem Saeculorum. Labyrinth and the Apostles are both looking
for him. And now he’s coming for you.”
What the insider was telling him was
absolutely terrifying, but Mulder still found himself asking, “Why?
Why is this man hunting us? And
how did you found out about all this?
How did you know I’d be here in New York with Agent Doggett?”
Immediately the insider replied, “I’ve
been tracking you through the US Defense Department’s OSIRIS - an Artificial Intelligence network of
twelve Top Secret weapons-satellites in geosynchronous orbit.”
“OSIRIS?” muttered Mulder, aware of the
historical significance of the name.
Osiris was the ancient Egyptian god of death and the underworld.
“It’s an acronym,” replied the
insider. “Orbital Synthetic Intelligence
Reconnaissance and Information System. But
it doesn’t matter how I discovered information about this man Farrow. All that matters is that you realize he’s
coming for you and your partner. I don’t
know why he’s hunting you. All I know is that he may already be in NYC,
and when he finds you he’ll kill both of you.
If these rumors about his strength and his resurrection are true, then
you’re in unimaginable danger.”
Mulder swallowed. He could hear the genuine fear in the
insider’s tone. With apparent trepidation
the man on the other end of the line added, “My contacts also told me that this
rogue operative has taken to calling himself Abaddon. I don’t know if
you’re familiar with that name…”
“Yeah,” was all Mulder could manage in
response.
He immediately
recalled what Father Jacobs had mentioned a few hours ago – that the Angel of
the Abyss was hunting them. In Christian
mythology the Angel of the Abyss was an entity named Abaddon. The Destroyer, according to Scully.
Mulder couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t
utterly chilled by what the DOD insider was telling him. The insider’s final words were, “Don’t…don’t
let this thing find you, Agent
Mulder. I’m deeply afraid for you. I’ll contact you again when I can. Good luck and Godspeed.”
Once the call was over Mulder gently
placed the cell phone on the desk. He
glanced at Doggett’s worried gaze before closing his eyes. He was completely shaken by what he’d just
been told.
In the women’s
restroom Scully was standing before the mirrors, her hands gripping the sides
of one of the sinks. Her reflection
looked intense and fearful. She was
trying to gather her strength, but it felt like she was trembling inside. She couldn’t stop thinking about the
shadow-thing she had seen a few hours ago, standing over the corpse of Rachel
Marx, and the bees that swarmed her in the biolab at NBACC earlier in the
day. She didn’t know what it meant.
She didn’t know what any of it meant.
“Keep it together, Dana,” she warned
herself. “Keep it together.”
She took a long, tremulous breath as she
peered at her reflection. She turned on
the taps, leaned forward and repeatedly splashed cold water onto her face. It helped a little. She couldn’t afford to burn out now, so early
in the fight.
*
Brooklyn Heights
1:27 a.m.
Doggett had found
nothing on Dr Ryan Cohen. The address
they acquired from Father Jacobs’ laptop was registered under another name. There were several men named Ryan Cohen in the
State of New York, and a handful of them had doctorates, but the man they were
looking for could have been any or none of them. They had no further way to narrow it
down. Despite this failure Mulder was
still willing to hope that the address’s registered name would turn out to be
counterfeit – that the guy they were looking for was trying to conceal his
identity. Doggett had secured a Bureau
vehicle for them; a nondescript silver Ford.
They had crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, travelled up Old Fulton Street and
into the heart of the affluent neighbourhood.
Mulder was driving as they finally pulled onto Malachi Street. He glanced at Scully in the passenger
seat. The street was practically
deserted at such a late hour. Like much
of the area the street was lined with brownstones and elegant redbrick row
houses. It was picturesque even in the
darkness of the night.
They parked near a particular
building.
“Do you think Homeland Security is
interrogating Monica right now?” Scully asked quietly as she peered through the
passenger window.
“I think Homeland will be interrogating
everyone in the building, Scully. Monica
included.”
“How in the hell did Labyrinth engineer
this whole thing? How did they get an
assassin inside our building?”
But from the tone of Scully’s voice Mulder
knew it was a rhetorical question. It
was the work of Rachel Marx, or Rosa Maria Santos – Vigil’s chief
programmer. Their supposed former friend
had been an infiltrator the entire time, and had obviously compromised Vigil’s
systems and security-protocols in ways the other analysts could barely fathom.
And now six analysts had been murdered
inside Vigil Headquarters, Rachel was dead and the Taskforce had been shut
down. He and Scully were fugitives.
Mulder was well aware that Doggett was
risking his career by not arresting them.
In fact, by giving them an FBI vehicle and sidearm Mulder knew that
Doggett was wilfully aiding and abetting two potential enemies of the state.
But worst of all was the insider’s
confirmation of what Benjamin Jacobs had told them just before his death – that
an ‘Angel of the Abyss’ was hunting them; an ex special-forces soldier who was
apparently back from the dead. Mulder
had already told Scully about the call and what the insider said. Scully was also deeply unsettled by the news,
and had touched her little gold cross for comfort.
Now she asked, “This man Lucien Farrow –
Abaddon – he’s going to find us, Mulder, isn’t he?”
Mulder winced at the almost childlike fear
in Scully’s tone, yet he was feeling it too.
The religious resonances of everything that was happening had already
begun crawling under his skin like something malevolent.
Instead of answering his partner’s question
he reached across to the passenger seat and caressed her cheek. She closed her eyes at his touch, thankful
for the brief comfort. She seemed to
understand why Mulder hadn’t answered the question. Things seemed to be getting darker and darker
with each passing hour.
When they got out of the car and climbed
the small flight of steps to the row house's entrance they realized the
building had been converted into three separate apartments. 306c was the top-floor apartment. They buzzed the intercom repeatedly but there
was no answer.
“Do we break in?” asked Scully,
matter-of-fact.
“We don’t have a reason,” Mulder told her,
“Or probable cause.”
“Does the extinction of all mankind count
as probable cause?”
Mulder forced a smile at her grim little
joke. He gazed beneath the intercom and
saw a row of three mail compartments. He
grabbed the façade of the third one and tugged repeatedly until the cheap lock
finally snapped open. Inside were dozens
of flyers; junk mail for local businesses.
Several of them were for a local all-night diner called The Night Owl.
As Mulder peered at the flyers he said,
“If this guy Ryan Cohen knows things about colonization…then maybe he’s having
trouble sleeping, right? We haven’t
exactly had it easy recently either.”
“Yeah,” said Scully. “So…?”
He raised a couple of flyers for her to
see. “Worth a shot?” he asked.
She glanced at the flyers and nodded. “Always.
Now more than ever.”
*
1:46 a.m.
The Night Owl
was a small contemporary diner on an intersection. When Mulder and Scully stepped into the
establishment the two waitresses behind the counter glanced up briefly from the
magazines they were reading and smiled cordially at them. The place was decorated in dark wood and
steel. Atmospheric black & white
photos of Brooklyn hung on its walls.
There were only four customers.
Two of them were women sitting at a table as they drank coffee, chuckled
and watched YouTube videos on a shared laptop.
The other two customers were a grizzled old man in his late sixties,
with a newspaper and pot of tea in front of him – and in a window booth a man
in a zippered brown hooded sweatshirt.
He had his hood up, his profile concealed
from where Mulder and Scully were standing.
But they could see that his table was filled with several plates and
glasses, all of them filled with half-eaten food.
Mulder glanced at Scully, who nodded.
They approached his booth and Scully said,
“Dr Cohen? Dr Ryan Cohen?”
His gaze shot up to meet hers
immediately. Both Mulder and Scully saw that
despite the gluttony of food at his table, the bearded guy in the brown hoodie
was sallow-faced and unhealthy-looking.
He seemed to be in his mid-forties, maybe older. It was hard to tell because of his scraggly
beard and because he was so thin. His
eyes were slightly bloodshot, and filled with sadness.
He glanced back down at the table, tore
off a chunk of bread from one of the many plates and stuffed it into his mouth.
“Yes ma’am, Dr Ryan Cohen.” He waited a beat and then added, “You don’t
seem like mercenaries. I guess that’s
the idea though, right?” Mulder could
hear the mingled fear and disgust in his voice.
He gestured at the oblivious waitresses.
“Don’t hurt them. No more blood
than is necessary, ok?”
Mulder frowned and told him, “We’re not
here to hurt you, Dr Cohen. We just want
to talk to you.”
Mulder could sense the nervous, jittery
energy emanating from this guy. He
really seemed to think they were here to kill him.
“How’d you find me?” he asked bluntly, snatching
a half-filled glass of Pepsi and gulping it down. He wiped his mouth and forced himself to peer
up at Mulder and then at Scully.
“Well,” he muttered bitterly as he looked
at the redhead, “assassins are getting prettier every day, aren’t they? Are you going to shoot up the place, now that
the consequences don’t really matter?”
Mulder glanced worriedly at Scully and sat
down in the booth opposite the sallow-faced man. “Just who the hell do you think we are?”
Mulder asked him.
“Black baggers,” he replied immediately
without holding Mulder’s gaze. “DOD,
CIA, NSA, or privately contracted mercs.
Either way, you work for Labyrinth or the Apostles. Nobody else would know my real name. You know, I really thought I was gonna just
slide right under your radar.” He
grimaced and chuckled, peering down at his own hands. “You get so used to running and hiding, you
think it’ll always be that way.”
His gaze snapped up, fixing Mulder with an
almost psychotic intensity. “But I
outwitted you sick sons of bitches for twenty-two
years, didn’t I? And you come to me now,
you finally find me now…on the Eve of Occupation? What kind of victory is that? You don’t get what you’re looking for, and
you don’t get my soul.” He smiled
triumphantly, hatefully, and muttered, “You can kill me now.”
Mulder shook his head. “Listen to me very carefully, Dr Cohen. We’re not black-baggers. We’re ex FBI agents working for something
called the Vigil Intelligence Taskforce.
We’re trying to upset plans for
Occupation. We got your name and address
from a priest in Washington D.C.; a man calling himself Father Benjamin Jacobs,
who shot himself after we interrogated him.
He said that he’d known you were in NYC the whole time, but he enjoyed
watching you suffer.”
The man in the brown hoodie just peered
wildly at Mulder until tears began to roll silently down his face.
“Ben is dead?” he muttered finally. “That sick, degenerate pervert is dead? Then there is a God.” He continued to
peer tearfully at Mulder, as though trying to intuit his true motivations.
Eventually Ryan Cohen tilted his head and
smiled vaguely at Mulder, then up at Scully.
“If you’re not mercenaries here to kill
me, then what are you here for?”
“We need your help,” Scully told him. “We need to know what you know.”
He narrowed his eyes as he stared at
her. “Why?”
“So we might have one last shot at
stopping it.”
“You can’t stop it. Nobody can stop
it. Even the Rebels couldn’t stop
it. It’s already happening.”
Mulder glanced at Scully, then back at the
man on the opposite side of the table.
“What do you mean it’s already happening?”
“Occupation has already started. Several of the major cities already have
ships present in their skies. They’re
cloaked, but they’re waiting. DOD knows
it’s already begun. That’s why they
initiated the Eidolon Covenant.” He
smiled darkly at Mulder. “So, if you’re
not going to kill me, then go away and let me enjoy my banquet. I suggest you take the redhead, find a hotel
room, and screw each other’s brains out, while you still can.”
Scully sneered at Cohen and asked him,
“What is the Eidolon Covenant?”
“You know what it is.”
“No, Dr Cohen, we don’t. We’re not who you think we are.”
“The Eidolon Covenant is total
military-intelligence inaction with regards to Occupation. Up until yesterday certain groups within the
US government have been trying to stop what’s coming, for over sixty years. But now…everyone’s standing down. The occupation of this planet by a superior
alien race is now a mathematical certainty.”
“I don’t believe that,” Mulder said
sharply.
Cohen shrugged. “Then you’re either a liar or a fool. And you don’t look like a fool. You want to know what I know, but I’m not
going to tell you jack shit. So this
elaborate ruse is pointless. You may as
well kill me.”
“We’re trying to stop Occupation, Dr Cohen.
We don’t work for Labyrinth or the Apostles. They’ve been our mortal enemies for the last
eight months. We’re allies, Ryan, not
enemies.”
He chuckled darkly again. “And unless you can somehow prove that to me,
why on Earth would I believe you?”
“How can we prove it?” asked Scully.
Cohen chuckled and shrugged. He tore off another chunk of bread from one
of his plates and stuffed it in his mouth.
For a few moments Mulder peered at him, trying to intuit the
psychological terrain this man had been inhabiting for the last several years.
“My name is Fox Mulder, Ryan. Do you recognize that name?”
Cohen’s gaze shot upwards again, his eyes
wide with disbelief. He clearly did
recognize the name. “It’s…it’s a trick,”
he faltered.
“No, it’s no trick,” Mulder said
quickly. “But you know that name, don’t
you? You know who I am?”
In a sudden furious gesture, Cohen swept
all the plates off the table with a swipe of his arm. They went crashing to the floor at Scully’s
feet, eliciting a startled cry from her as she jumped back. The staff and other patrons were now peering
at the three of them with shock and fear.
“Don’t screw around with me!” Cohen
growled at Mulder, rising to his feet in the booth. “Death I can accept, but I’m so goddamn
tired of mind-games!”
Mulder stood up on the other side of the
booth, glancing at Scully before returning his gaze to the ill-looking bearded guy
in the brown hoodie.
“No games, Ryan. I’m Fox Mulder. And this is Dana Scully.”
Cohen narrowed his eyes and tilted his
head. “If you’re Fox Mulder, then you
can tell me some things, can’t you?
Who’s the mechanical angel?”
Mulder frowned. “I don’t understand…”
Cohen sneered and chuckled. “Tell me the angel’s name.”
After a few moments of silent thought Mulder
said quietly, “Gabriel. An Archangel
drone-prototype designed to protect US military infrastructure once the
invasion begins.”
Cohen seemed taken aback by his
answer. “And…and who’s the elder man?”
“What elder
man?” asked Mulder.
“The elder man who calls himself your
guardian, and lives on the edges of your dreams.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Mulder
hissed.
But to Mulder’s surprise Scully said,
“Albert. Albert Hosteen. A Navajo Elder.”
Dr Ryan Cohen frowned again, visibly
shaken by her answer. Mulder felt a
flash of surprise and admiration at his lover before the guy in the hoodie fixed
him with a piercing stare.
“And…and what did you carve into the tree
on your sister’s eighteenth birthday?”
Mulder inhaled sharply, a flood of
emotions rushing up from the pit of his stomach. He could suddenly feel the tears in his eyes
and glanced uncertainly at Scully.
Somehow this guy Cohen knew a secret that Mulder had never shared with
another living soul.
“How could…how could you possibly know about that?” Mulder murmured. “Nobody but me knows about that…not even
Scully.”
“Answer the question. What did you carve into the tree on
Samantha’s eighteenth birthday?”
In little more than a whisper Mulder
closed his eyes and said, “Never Stop
Looking.”
“Oh
God,” muttered Cohen, shaking his head.
“Ok. Ok, we need…we need to get
back to my apartment. I need to tell you
everything.”
*
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington D.C.
2:04 a.m.
He didn’t think
the end would come like this. Not like
this, with dread and horror twisting his guts – his body slick with sweat
beneath his suit, his heart screaming beneath his ribs. Garrett Moss was standing in the opulent Red
Room on the State Floor of the Executive Residence of the White House Complex,
its parlour walls decorated in a lavish shade of carmine. The Oval Office was less than a hundred yards
away from where he was standing, along the colonnade and into the West
Wing.
He couldn’t quite believe he was doing it,
but Special Agent Garrett Moss was now aiming his trembling sidearm at
something that appeared to be his mentor
and best friend of almost twenty-five years.
The senior agent had also immediately drawn his weapon, pointing it
incredulously at the younger man.
For a disturbing moment the stand-off was
completely silent, and then the older man said carefully, “For the love of God,
Garrett…what the hell are you doing…? Listen to me…I don’t know what’s happening,
but you’ve just crossed a very dangerous line.
But we can still…we can still make this right…”
But Special Agent Moss knew there was no
making anything right again. He had
drawn his weapon inside the White House Complex, and trained it on a fellow
United States Secret Service agent.
There was no coming back from that.
Even if he survived this encounter he would be painted as a rogue agent
who suffered an aberrant psychotic break.
It felt like his mind was indeed beginning
to fracture, but Garrett Moss knew he wasn’t suffering from some strange
psychosis. He knew the sky really was
falling. A hidden unholy reality had
been revealed to him, darker and more terrifying than any piece of
science-fiction. Several months ago an associate
in the Counter Sniper Team had whispered a bizarre, impossible rumour, and
later a contact inside Arlington had confirmed that rumour. The contact revealed that he was part of
something that DOD referred to as Blackflame; some kind of highly-classified
Special Operations annexe. For some
reason the contact had taken pity on Garrett, and had shown him a piece of the hidden
reality.
His friends were no longer his friends.
Their faces had been stolen, by things
made of oil and smoke and fire.
Monsters were secretly walking the Earth,
walking the halls of power inside Washington.
Things that belonged in nightmares had traversed some kind of veil, and had
made themselves as gods. They had been secretly
ruling our world for a very, very long time.
He wouldn’t have believed such madness if he hadn’t seen it for himself.
Special Agent Garrett Moss was convinced
that the thing pretending to be his friend had somehow sensed that he knew, and
had broken their detail and brought him into the Red Room to kill him. What did such an ostentatious high-risk execution
matter, now that the sky was falling? The
Blackflame contact from Arlington had shown him irrefutable evidence of the
unimaginable – that in less than twenty-four hours a demonic alien race was
going to begin a full-scale invasion of the entire planet. It sounded like the ravings of a lunatic, but
it wasn’t. Garrett swallowed his terror
and tightened his grip on his drawn sidearm.
“You think I won’t do it?” he hissed, his
voice shaking with violence. “You
brought me in here to kill me, but you think I won’t pull this trigger? I know about Blackflame, and the ships, and
the Chameleons. I know about all of it. I…I
love my country. I know what’s
coming. I won’t let you do this. YOU HEAR ME?”
The senior agent looked genuinely afraid,
but Garrett wasn’t fooled.
“For Christ’s sake, Garrett, it’s me. It’s
Mitch.”
“MITCH IS DEAD!” screamed Garrett, terror
and fury making his aim tremble.
Special Agent Mitchell Casey was his
mentor and best friend. They had first
served on close protection together in the mid-nineties during the Clinton
Presidency, when Garrett was eager to hone his craft and earn the respect of
the older men. Mitch Casey had taught
him true humility and true professionalism.
But
Mitch was dead. Garrett’s DOD Blackflame
contact had shown him the corpse, stuffed like garbage into an oil drum and
tossed into the Potomac River. Garrett
had seen it with his own eyes, and now the thing wearing his best friend’s face
was trying to get inside his head – trying to convince him that the nightmare
wasn’t real.
“ERT is gonna be through these doors less
than thirty seconds, Garrett. I’m
begging you, please don’t make me do–”
Special Agent Garrett Moss fired three
times in rapid succession, directly into the center of mass. The older man flinched and stumbled
backwards, blinking and staring in disbelief at his protégé for a few moments
before collapsing to the floor. A pool
of blood as red as the walls of the room began to spread around him,
immediately soaking into the antique rug.
Garrett had the vague realisation that it was arterial blood, that one
of the bullets must have pierced the imposter’s heart. Shocked at his own actions, oddly numb,
Garrett took a few steps towards the body, half expecting it to revert back to
its true form.
It didn’t.
And suddenly Special Agent Garrett Moss felt
his stomach clutch with a different kind of dread. A new horror began to roll through his
insides like sickening damnation, as the hideous truth began to dawn.
The thing lying dead at his feet was not a
Chameleon. It wasn’t a shapeshifter.
His DOD contact had staged an elaborate
set-up, and he had been taken in by it like a fool. He had just murdered his best friend in cold
blood within the most symbolic and powerful building in the entire United
States.
“Oh Christ,” he murmured as a fist of ice
seemed to close around his heart, “Oh
Jesus Christ….forgive me…”
The doors to the Cross Hall burst open as
the first wave of the Emergency Response Team flanked the doorway, weapons
aimed.
But Special Agent Garrett Moss had already
pressed his SIG P229 against his own right temple. For a split-second he locked gazes with one
of the ERT framed in the doorway before pulling the trigger. The self-inflicted gunshot blew apart the
left side of his skull in a burst of crimson and bone fragments as he collapsed.
For a few moments the members of the
Emergency Response Team in the doorway peered incredulously at the two Secret
Service agents lying dead on the floor of the Red Room of the White House Complex. It was nothing they had ever expected to
witness, but their elite training quickly reasserted itself.
The team-leader on the right-hand side of
the doorway tapped his throat-mic and said shakily, “This is Kessler on the
State Floor, Red Room. We have a Code
Black security-situ. Immediate SecDef
contact. POTUS advise. Initiate immediate lockdown. I repeat: We have a Code Black security-situ. This is not a drill. Standing-by…”
As the ERT leader peered at the two dead
Secret Service agents he couldn’t even begin to fathom what had occurred here,
or why, but he knew one thing with chilling certainty. Knowledge of the events that transpired in
this room would never leave the walls of the Executive Residence. Efforts to covertly neutralise the scene were
already in motion.
*
Brooklyn Heights
New York City
2:46 a.m.
The top-floor
apartment of the converted row house was luxurious and spacious, or it had been
once. But Dr Ryan Cohen possessed very
little furniture. Instead, countless
little stacks of books filled the open-plan space. There were dozens upon dozens of books in
small piles all across the floor. And
the far wall of exposed brickwork was covered with hundreds of newspaper
cuttings, magazine articles and printed images.
UFOs, crop circles, geometric patterns, structural blueprints and engineering
schematics covered the wall from floor to ceiling. At first glance it looked like the
externalised imagination of a delusional psychotic.
Neither Mulder nor Scully had expected what Dr
Ryan Cohen did next, but now as they watched him they weren’t too
surprised. They sat with him at the
little dining table as he cooked the heroin in a citric acid solution, holding
the spoon over the open flame of a Zippo lighter – preparing it for
injection. Scully watched with a faint
look of distaste on her face. As a
medical doctor she had seen what kind of terrible damage heroin addiction could
do to the human body, both inside and out.
Cohen glanced at her, seeing her
expression and said, “You judge me, but you have no idea.”
“I’m not judging you.”
“Don’t pity me either. I don’t need your pity. Look around you. It’s literally the end of the world.”
Mulder gestured at the wall of clippings
and images. “What is all that?”
Cohen kept his eyes on his task but said,
“That’s over twenty years of research and contextualization and paranoia. That wall kept me alive. I guess you think it looks demented, huh?”
“Actually,” Mulder said quietly, “My
office used to look just like it.”
The thin bearded doctor smiled darkly as
he continued heating the heroin. Scully
glanced at Mulder and then told Cohen, “Look, we’re running out of time. You said you were going to tell us
everything.”
He nodded.
“Over by the wall. One of the
floorboards is loose.”
Scully shot Mulder a quizzical look. He got up and navigated his way through the
stacks of books on the floor.
“You’re gonna have to move some stuff,”
Cohen told him.
Mulder crouched by the wall and moved some
of the book piles. He realized which
floor board Cohen had been talking about and eventually pried it up with his
fingernails. He reached into the dark
gap in the floor, his fingers found something, and he removed a thick manila
folder coated with dust.
But he could still read what was printed
across the folder’s front.
TOP SECRET//SAR-PELLUCID
– TEC-2971-3011-B6149.
Scully could see that Mulder felt the
thrill of anticipation and unease before he’d even opened what he held in his hands. He glanced over at her and then Cohen. “How did you manage to get a hold of this?”
Dr Ryan Cohen grimly held his gaze for a
few moments before answering. “Because men who were far, far braver than I
sacrificed their lives to protect it.
That’s the only file I was able to bring above ground. They sanitised everything and everyone…made it like it never
happened. What you’re holding in your
hands are some of the most dangerous documents on this Earth. And believe me, that’s not hyperbole. You have…you have no idea how exhausting that
burden was…to be the guardian of those pages…to live every day of your life in
absolute terror because it. It was
terrifying to bring even a fraction of those pages to the surface.”
“What do you mean to the surface?” asked Mulder, weighing the folder in his hands.
The thin bearded doctor glanced away from
Mulder, fear in his eyes. “I have a lot more
documentation, on DOD’s Triskelion, but I didn’t dare bring it to the
surface. It’s locked away, hidden in a
safe place underground.”
“You know about Triskelion?” asked Scully,
recalling the strange symbol that had been carved into the chest of Diego
Roberto Cielo – the three interlocking spirals in a triangular configuration
that she’d witnessed on his corpse at the National Biodefense Analysis and
Countermeasures Center. She added, “We’ve
been told about a key…the Key of Ages…a piece of ancient alien technology that’s
supposed to unlock this thing that the Department of Defense calls Triskelion.”
“That’s right,” muttered Cohen. “Triskelion is the US military-intelligence
elite’s most closely-guarded secret. They will kill anyone who presents a threat to its secrecy. The fact that you even know the name Triskelion
in this context means your lives are already in danger. But you need to focus on what’s right in
front of you, or none of this will make sense.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Miss Scully.”
Scully shared a look of worry with Mulder,
who brought the dusty folder back to the table and sat down with it. She didn’t bother to tell the bearded doctor
that a DOD insider had told them that a man named Lucien Farrow now possessed
this Key of Ages. Scully realized that
Mulder was afraid to open the folder now.
She suspected the thrill of anticipation was gone, replaced with the
nagging intuition that what he would discover in its pages would be just more saddening
horror.
The bearded doctor in the brown hoodie let
the heroin cool for minute before sucking it up with a syringe. He gestured at the unopened folder on the
tabletop. “You’re not actually scared of
the truth, are you, Spooky?”
“Just how the hell do you know so much about me anyway?” Mulder asked him,
eyes narrowed.
“Well…I’ve never actually seen your photo
but I’m friends with some truly gifted psychics and remote viewers. It keeps me alive. And you’re something of a celebrity within
the black-intel community, Agent Mulder.
Seeker of the Crossroads, they call you.” Cohen smiled sadly, stood up from the table
and began casually unbuttoning his jeans.
Scully frowned. “Uh…what the hell are you doing?”
“Finding a vein,” he murmured. He pulled his jeans down to his knees, sat
back down and searched his skin before injecting the syringe into his
thigh. He closed his eyes and let out an
exhalation of breath that sounded almost erotic.
When he opened his eyes again, instead of
the dreamy, drugged expression that Scully had been expecting Cohen’s eyes were
suddenly sharper and clearer. He got up
again from the chair just enough to button up his jeans. He then unzipped the front of his brown
hoodie, reached inside and casually placed a black semiautomatic pistol onto
the table.
Its barrel was pointing directly at Mulder
who tensed immediately, glancing uncertainly at Cohen and then at Scully. The atmosphere in the apartment was suddenly
as heavy as lead. Scully swallowed at
this sudden development.
“You’re running out of time,” Cohen muttered.
“What are you doing, Ryan?” Mulder asked
carefully, his eyes flitting from Cohen’s face to the gun resting menacingly on
the tabletop.
The thin bearded doctor wasn’t even
touching the gun now, but Mulder instantly knew that Cohen could grab it and
pull the trigger incredibly quickly if he wanted to – much faster than the time
it would take for he or Scully to try snatching the weapon away, or for Mulder
to reach into his suit jacket for the sidearm Doggett had given him.
Cohen leaned forward slightly and said, “I
don’t really know who you are, do
I? I mean, I learned about you from
psychics and remote viewers. How do I
know you haven’t done the same? Hell,
the real Fox Mulder might already be dead.
You might’ve killed him.”
Mulder took a breath and said, “Ryan, I can assure you…I am who I say I
am.”
Cohen nodded. “I hope so, otherwise I’m going to have to
kill you. I don’t really think you’re
faking, otherwise I wouldn’t have invited you up here, would I? But you can’t be too careful. Least not on the Eve of Occupation. So, start reading the file, ok? But if you try anything dumb…or I get the
feeling you’re not who you say you are…I’m going to shoot Miss Scully in the
face while you watch, and then I’m going to shoot you.”
“You don’t need to shoot anyone, Ryan,”
Scully told him in as measured and calm a tone as she could manage.
Cohen gently placed his right hand on the
black handgun. “That remains to be seen,
really, doesn’t it?”
Mulder shared a nervous glance with Scully
and opened the folder as she leaned in beside him. He attempted to focus on the task at hand and
ignore the gun that lay on the table. In
the folder there were pages and pages of lists and names and seemingly
meaningless statistical data, followed by photographs of the interior of some
kind of research facility. One of the
photographs made Mulder almost gasp. It
was an image of several rows of children standing in a large white medical
bay. There must have been at least sixty
or seventy kids in the photo, all of them with sad, haunted expressions. Mulder felt a twisting in his guts and a lump
in his throat. He swallowed immediately. The utter hopelessness in those children’s
eyes…it reminded him of certain images he’d seen of Auschwitz or Dachau. Some were crying, some were glaring defiantly
at the camera. But none of them were
smiling.
“Oh God,”
Scully murmured over his shoulder.
The next photo was filled with different
children but the same darkness, and the next, and the next. In the last image Mulder finally realized
that the kids were all standing on a large pattern that had been stencilled or
painted onto the floor – three interlocking spirals.
It was another Triskelion symbol,
identical to the one that had been carved into the chest of Diego Roberto Cielo.
“You were a part of this?” Mulder muttered
with barely veiled contempt, unable to look away from the photos. “Are you going to start talking, Dr Cohen?”
The bearded doctor nodded sheepishly, taking
his hand off the black handgun and resting it beside the weapon. He glanced away as though humbled by the raw
emotion in the eyes of the photographed children.
“Pellucid,” Cohen began, “was just the
modern form of an agenda that’s been a part of this country’s power-elite since
at least the late 1700s, from the time this country was first created – ‘the aggressive utilization of man’s occult
powers’, as they called it back then.
Today the military-intelligence community call it ‘the weaponization of human consciousness’. But it doesn’t matter what you call it. For over two hundred years the most powerful
people in this country have wanted to unlock and control the secrets of the
human mind – telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing, astral projection. The list goes on and on. But it wasn’t until the twentieth century
that they developed the technology to make that kind of control feasible –
reverse-engineered alien technology,
Mr Mulder. Do you want to know why the
FBI kept extensive records of unexplainable cases? Do you want to know what the X-Files really is?”
Mulder glanced quickly at the gun resting on
the table, and waited impatiently for an answer.
“It’s the most acceptable face of a vast
and covert data-gathering operation that’s been going on in this country since Majestic
and Seraph during the Second World War – the extensive mapping of every quirk
and detail concerning the mysteries of human consciousness, how that
consciousness interfaces with ‘unexplained phenomena’ and the alien presence
that’s been influencing human development since the very beginning. All the data-points locked away in the
X-Files since the forties…it all fed into their magnum opus; The Eight
Configuration. It’s an MK-Ultra
masterwork, Mr Mulder, orchestrated by factions within NSA, CIA, and other
alphabet agencies including your beloved FBI.”
Mulder sneered. “Beloved? The FBI and I were never exactly on great
terms.”
Cohen shrugged and continued, “Either way,
it’s what these elites have spilled so much blood to protect. High Weirdness meets hard science, the place
where theoretical physics and the human psyche interconnect – theoretical
time-travel, advanced telekinesis, enhanced PSI. This was a program with an
infinite budget and no oversight. These
people literally invented money to
fund this thing. Pellucid was the
central project of the entire T.E.C program.”
“Lucid dreaming?” asked Scully, still unconvinced.
The emaciated doctor chuckled emptily at
the disbelief in her tone. He put his
hand on the semiautomatic again, gripping it and sliding his finger around the
trigger ever so gently.
“Not just lucid dreaming,” he went on
casually. “Pellucid was about creating a
weaponized lucid dreamer…a
consciousness that could bridge the gap between dreams and the real world,
creating entire dreamscapes down to the smallest detail, and potentially
gaining access and similar influence to other people’s dreams. Think of the incredible power that could give
someone.”
Mulder just listened quietly, aware that
Cohen now had his finger on the trigger of the gun that was laying sideways in
his direction. He was afraid, but was
desperately trying not to show it.
Scully said angrily, “You’re telling us
this is all because of some Inception
nonsense?”
“No, no.
That movie was about using dreams to plant ideas for the purposes of
corporate power. Pellucid was about
using dream-consciousness to potentially alter the very fabric of material
reality.”
“Wait,” said Mulder, forcing himself to
look away from Cohen’s trigger-finger. “I
don’t understand. What the hell do you mean alter
the fabric of material reality?”
The sallow-faced doctor laughed again, but
there was still no humor in it.
“Pellucid wanted to know just how powerful human consciousness really
is. And we…we accidentally gave birth to
a god.”
A chill gripped Mulder at Ryan Cohen’s
words, deeper than the chill of having a gun on the table with this man’s
finger resting on the trigger. He
glanced uncertainly at Scully.
“What do you mean a god?” she asked, appalled.
“Are you talking about the Sleeper?
This thing that Labyrinth thinks is the Antichrist?”
Cohen smiled, wide-eyed. “There’s something I need to show you.”
He kept his right hand on the gun, reached
under the table and brought out a modified laptop. From the Apple logo Mulder could see it had
once been a MacBook, but it was now augmented with various pieces of technology,
much like Father Jacobs’ laptop back in D.C.
Cohen powered up the hybridized MacBook,
opened a particular file, turned the device round to face them and slid it
across the table. A video-file was
already playing.
Mulder shared a knowing, fearful glance
with Scully and then looked at Cohen again.
The bearded doctor in the brown hoodie had picked up the gun from the
table and was now pressing its length to his lips as though it were a toy.
He took the length of gun away from his
lips and told Mulder, “Look at the computer screen, not me.”
Mulder immediately did as he was
told. A young boy, no older than eleven
or twelve, was sitting on a chrome chair in a white medical bay whilst peering
dejectedly at the camera.
Scully inhaled sharply at the boy on the
screen. Although he didn’t look exactly
like William – like the photo the Van De Kamps had given her – the boy was also
dark-haired and about the same age as their son, with the same sad, soulful
eyes. The boy reminded her enough of
William to unsettle her more deeply than she was already.
From somewhere off-camera a male voice
said coldly, “Subject MK8C-247, please
state your name for the camera.”
“Caleb,”
the boy said quietly. “Caleb Altman.” His head was bowed slightly and he didn’t
raise his eyes to meet the camera.
“How
is it that you’re still alive, Caleb?”
“I don’t
know.”
“Please
tell the camera where you lived before you were brought here to Pellucid.”
A pause. “The
Bell-Ferrier Orphanage in Redhill, Oregon.”
There was a trembling kind of longing in the boy’s words that made
Scully’s stomach clench. She glanced at
Mulder and saw the sadness and horror in his expression.
“You’re
a very special boy, Caleb. I hope you’re
finally beginning to realize that. None
of the other dreamers survived this kind of repeated exposure. Somehow you have survived the process. Somehow you’ve thrived. I told you that you were different to the
other children, didn’t I?”
“Yes, Dr
Abrams,” the
boy said softly.
“We
all think that you’re going to change the world, Caleb.”
The young boy
finally lifted his head, fixing his haunting eyes on the camera. There was a brief moment of distortion as the
boy’s image glitched and flickered, and then Scully and Mulder were peering at
nothing but static.
They both turned to Cohen, deeply
unsettled and waiting for an explanation.
Cohen kept the gun in his right hand but
dropped it out of sight below the table.
He sighed and said, “In November of 1989, nearly ten months after that
video was taken, something happened at Pellucid – a miracle. We succeeded far, far beyond anything we’d
hoped for. The CIA and Guatemala’s D-2 used
an operation called ‘Bedtime’ to secretly recruit children for Pellucid, but– ”
“Recruit?”
sneered Scully. “No more goddamn
euphemisms. You mean kidnap…you mean snatch from their
families. The Guatemalan and United
States intelligence services were running a child-snatching operation, and you
were a part of it.”
“Yes,” Cohen admitted quietly after a
moment. He brought the gun back into
sight and slammed it down onto the tabletop.
Mulder and Scully both flinched at the action and glanced at one another.
“But all the other dreamers died,” Cohen
went on as if he had done nothing dramatic.
“One of the many goals of Pellucid was to massively augment and
weaponize the children’s PSI abilities, to enhance their lucid dreaming
capabilities. But we quickly realized
the program was too ambitious. The
children couldn’t withstand the clinical conditioning; the repeated exposure to
what many of us believed to be an alien energy-source taken from a crashed UFO. But twelve-year-old Caleb Altman was an
anomaly. His central nervous-system
didn’t completely collapse. He didn’t
die. He was changed. Somehow Caleb achieved what DOD referred to
as zero-point. The ramifications sent absolute terror through
Washington’s military-intelligence elites when they learned of our initial findings. They weren’t prepared for such a staggering
success. Neither were we. I quickly realized that what occurred with
Caleb was in some way connected to DOD’s Triskelion secret. Rumors started flying that day. They were afraid of what little Caleb had apparently
become. They realized they wouldn’t be
able to control him. So they tried to
kill him.”
Suddenly Cohen picked up the gun from the
tabletop again and dropped it into his lap, as though the threat of the weapon
was no longer necessary.
Mulder felt himself relax only slightly.
“That same night,” Cohen went on, “they
ordered that Pellucid be immediately shut down and dissolved. But they knew that the medical and tech teams
running Pellucid were going to refuse. They
were counting on it. We knew that we’d
inadvertently stumbled across perhaps the most significant discovery in all of human history. We thought that little Caleb was going to eventually
revolutionize not just physics and biology, but our philosophical understanding
of religion and spirituality. We thought
that what happened to Caleb Altman in November of 1989 was going to transform
every single paradigm in human existence.
But we were fools. We knew that
DOD would never allow such an unmediated truth out into the open for public
knowledge…at least not initially…but we didn’t realize the full implications of
that fact, and what it meant for our own survival.”
The emaciated doctor in the brown hoodie
glanced with wet eyes at Mulder. Tears
rolled down his sallow cheeks and into his scraggly beard.
“We ignored the dissolution order, as they
knew we would. Like idiots we thought
that if enough of us stuck together they couldn’t charge us all with treason
for defying them. We had literally no
idea how far they were willing to go.
They knew we weren’t about to destroy our own work – destroy a living
miracle. An external containment order
was issued. Several units of mercenaries
were activated. They had orders to
neutralize the entire site and everyone in it.
But their massacre didn’t…didn’t go according to plan. That little boy…he, uh…he slaughtered every
single member of the kill-teams that DOD sent that night…and then almost the
entire staff of Pellucid. He razed the
entire facility to the ground. Nearly
two hundred men and women died that night.
Only six of us escaped…and now Ben is dead that means I’m one of the
last. Three hours after the facility
came down DOD had the entire site buried and sealed, including the bodies. Today it’s just snow and ice. You’d never even know it had been there.”
Scully was extremely shaken and disturbed by
what the junkie doctor had just told them.
She didn’t want to believe it. And
she was well aware that he still had a loaded gun in his lap, though he seemed
less inclined to use it now.
Scully narrowed her eyes and snarled in
fear, “Ryan, how is anything you’ve
just described even remotely
possible?”
Cohen shook his head ruefully. “Because Pellucid gave birth to a god. One moment that little boy was dreaming, and
then the next moment he was awake. But,
impossibly, his electroencephalograph and neuro-imaging data showed that he was
still sleeping. Awake and
dreaming at the same time. Lucid dreaming. Do you understand? Listen to me, I think Labyrinth believes that
Caleb Altman is still alive…that he didn’t perish that night in 1989 like DOD
believed. I think Labyrinth believes
Altman is the entity described in their Sleeper prophecy; their interpretation
of an obscure legend concerning the return of the ancient Mayan serpent-deity
Kukulkan. The War Serpent.”
A cold black chill seemed to flood through
Scully’s entire system as she finally began to understand the context and
implications of what Cohen was saying.
She glanced nervously at Mulder, whose face was unreadable, and then
back at the ravaged doctor.
“What the
hell are you saying?” she muttered.
“You’re…you’re saying that Pellucid managed to unleash some incredibly
destructive telekinetic power in this child’s mind? And because of that Labyrinth actually
believed that this boy Caleb Altman was the Mayan serpent-god Kukulkan…the
biblical Antichrist?”
Cohen said quietly, “Not just the power of
destruction…the power of creation. The power to alter reality on an atomic
level, through an act of will. The power
of a god, Miss Scully. The power to
reshape and rebuild the world in his own image.”
“That’s
impossible,” Scully murmured, utterly horrified.
Mulder decided to finally speak, his voice
quiet, thoughtful and afraid. “The
ritual-suicides at El Mirador, Scully; those Mayan peasants were chanting about
the waking of the one who sleeps. It makes a kind of sense. The cult must have believed
that Kukulkan was returning to lead the Mayan sky-gods to rule in a new baktun
of time upon the Earth. And Labyrinth
must believe a Christian interpretation of something similar.”
Scully was still speechless and horrified.
Mulder focused his attention on Ryan
Cohen. Quietly he asked, “So you’re
saying a powerful military-intelligence cult began to form around the legend of
this telekinetic child? A fusion of
Mayan folklore and Christian extremism?”
Cohen nodded. Mulder continued,
“But a schism eventually formed between Labyrinth and the Apostles, right? A civil war.
So the Apostles must believe…”
“Yes,” said Cohen, intuiting Mulder’s
thoughts. “The Apostles have come to
believe the opposite of Labyrinth – that Caleb Altman is the physical
incarnation of Christ himself.”
“This is insane,” murmured Scully.
“This is completely insane.” She glanced wide-eyed at Mulder for
confirmation, but Mulder’s eyes were now lit with frightening new thoughts and deductions.
Scully snapped her gaze back to Ryan Cohen
and exclaimed, “No. No! I refuse
to accept this! Labyrinth and the
Apostles are high-ranking members of the military-industrial complex – part of
the intelligence community! They cannot
honestly believe any of this, can
they? That this kid Caleb is some kind
of Mayan serpent-god – the Antichrist or the Second Coming? It’s absolute lunacy!”
It was only then that Scully realized she
was fiercely gripping the little gold cross at her throat, clutching it in her
fist as though for protection against what the bearded doctor was telling them.
“You don’t understand,” Cohen said
quietly. “My father was Jewish and my
mother was Protestant Christian, but they were both non-practicing. We never really accepted religion. To my
family they were all fairytales. My
parents never forced me to believe anything in particular. Judaism, Christianity, Islam – it’s all the
same to me. But I was there.
I saw what Caleb did that night.
He did things that only a god can do.
I don’t know how else to explain it…”
“Are you saying you agree with Labyrinth?” Scully balked incredulously.
“No, of course not! I knew Caleb.
I talked with him countless times.
He was incredibly intelligent…a prodigy, really…but he was still just a
kid. A lonely, terrified kid who was
trapped in an unholy experiment he could barely understand. But I can understand why DOD would think that
little boy was some kind of god…some kind of messiah. I mean, he took those mercenaries apart on a
molecular level. He began to reshape
everything. He began to imagine things,
and those things came to pass. He was so
angry at what we’d done to him. He took
his revenge on all of us. I saw him literally
walk through walls, Miss Scully. I saw
him teleport and levitate, and fuse flesh with steel and concrete. I saw him disassemble and reassemble reality
on a whim. He eventually pulled the
whole facility in on itself. Our reality
became his dream. I ran. I just ran. I barely escaped with my life. Even before the change, that little boy was
the most powerful lucid dreamer we’d ever encountered. I guess that’s why he managed to survive the
conditioning process. Only six of us got
out alive. He collapsed the entire
facility. When Caleb was done the whole
place was nothing but a heap of smoking ruins in the snow.”
Scully glanced at Mulder. She was terrified. He looked very frightened too, in truth. Scully pulled her fearful gaze away and peered
at Dr Ryan Cohen once more. He was about
to speak again when the lights in the apartment suddenly dimmed and began flickering
strangely. The flickering was enough to
terrify the emaciated doctor as he glanced wildly at the lights above them.
“Oh God,” he murmured, “It’s
happening…they’re listening to us.”
Mulder shot a worried glance at Scully and
then peered up at the flickering apartment lights. “Who? Who’s listening?”
Cohen didn’t answer him. After a few moments the lights stopped flickering,
returning to normal. But Cohen pulled
his gaze away from the ceiling and suddenly lunged across the table, grabbing
Mulder by the lapel of his suit jacket with one hand, and shoving the black
semiautomatic into his palm with the other.
“Take this!” Mulder could only glance down
uncomprehendingly at the gun that Cohen had suddenly forced into his grasp. “Listen to me, if you want to know the truth
about DOD’s Triskelion you need to go underground. I hid all the surviving files and my journals
in a steel lockbox fourteen years ago.
You just better pray that nobody’s found it yet.”
Mulder shoved the doctor in the brown
hoodie away from him with a scowl, and looked down at the gun now clasped in
his own hand. Mulder had to fight the
urge to immediately point the gun at Cohen in retaliation for making him and
Scully think their lives were in danger.
“What the hell are you talking about, Ryan…?”
he muttered, glancing at Scully as she looked on with baffled surprise.
Cohen glanced up at the apartment lights
that had been flickering only moments ago, and then fixed Mulder with an almost
psychotic stare. For a while he didn’t
bother speaking. Mulder simply glanced
at Scully again and let the tension hang in the air.
Eventually Cohen began, “For…for the first
nine years after Pellucid was destroyed I went…I went literally underground. I lived among a specific subset of New York
City’s homeless community; what surface-dwellers called the mole people. We…we lived
in underground spaces beneath the city, in abandoned tunnels and subway
stations. People wrote newspaper
articles and made documentaries about us.
Amtrak evicted us from the Freedom Tunnel beneath Riverside Park in
1991. After that many of us moved on to
other underground places, but the Transit Authority kept trying to kick us out
whenever they found us…smashing up the shantytowns we’d built for ourselves,
making it hard for us to live our lives, such as they were. A handful of my friends eventually settled in
the lower levels of Bergen Street Station, just ten minutes away from here on
Boerum Hill. The lower levels of Bergen
Street have been abandoned and closed to the public since the mid-seventies. We eventually stumbled upon a series of
hidden rooms down there – storage rooms for construction equipment that had
been walled off just after the station was built. We called them the Nest. We made the Nest our home for many years,
hidden from the Transit Authority…until the shapeshifters found me in 1998.”
A particular kind of heaviness settled in
the air at Cohen’s mention of shapeshifters.
Mulder gave Scully a quick look.
“They posed as some of us, obviously…and
then they began murdering everybody. They…they
set my friends…on fire. Can you imagine? I can still remember the screaming…and the
smell. You never forget the smell of
burning flesh. They were looking for the
Triskelion files. But I’d already sealed
the lockbox in one of the hidden cavities down there. They murdered all my friends that night, but
they never found what they were looking for.
I barely escaped. They thought
I’d taken the files with me to the surface.”
“The lockbox is still down there, in this
Nest?” Scully asked tentatively, still shaken by his bizarre account of
Pellucid and Caleb Altman and by the gun he’d been toying with. Cohen nodded.
“Why haven’t you tried retrieving it since then?” she added.
“Those files are just…too dangerous…and
frankly I was too scared. I saw all my
friends get butchered down there. I
can’t…I can’t ever go back. If you want
to stop colonization you’ll need those DOD files on Triskelion. But I can’t go back down there with you. I can give you a map…I can guide you to the
lockbox, but that’s it. It got my
friends killed.”
“You want us to go traipsing through
abandoned subway tunnels for DOD files that you hid down there over fourteen years ago?” asked Mulder, with
an angry scowl. “Just tell me what the
hell is in those files and save us the trouble.”
But Mulder already knew that a second-hand
account of the files wouldn’t suffice.
He already sensed that he would need to physically possess the originals
if he wanted even the slightest chance of stopping colonization.
The bearded doctor grimaced and shook his
head. “The truth is…I only read a
fraction of what we stole from the Defense Department. And most of that was utterly terrifying, what
I did read. I didn’t…I didn’t want to
know any more, so I just sealed the files, and kept them as insurance if I ever
needed it. In the end I just wanted to
forget about Bedtime and Pellucid, all of it. All I could figure out from what I did read is
that our government believes Triskelion is the ultimate source of power…some
kind of tangible spiritual power. Look…I’ve
already said too much. They’re listening.” He raised a finger and pointed at the
ceiling, at the lights that had been flickering just minutes ago.
“The colonists are going to reveal
themselves to the entire planet – in less than twenty-four hours. The invasion is going to begin, and most of
the human race will be dead within the first six months. If you want even the faintest chance of
stopping them, then you’ll need those files.
If you have the courage to read them all, then you’re a braver man than
me, Mr Mulder.”
Cohen forced a self-deprecating smile onto
his face, but Mulder saw more tears roll down his cheeks and into his beard. Suddenly Mulder got the sense that Cohen
didn’t want them to realize just how wounded and emotionally scarred he really
was. But it wasn’t something the sallow-faced
junkie doctor could easily conceal anymore.
Mulder stared at him for a few moments
and said, “Benjamin Jacobs told us something before he shot himself. He said you couldn’t protect the children
from him, or from DOD. And that you’ll fail
to protect the Vessel as well. What is
this ‘Vessel’?”
A flash of panic played across Cohen’s
face and he averted his eyes. “The
Vessel is the last goddamn bit of hope that we have to keep Triskelion away
from the bad guys...” For a while he
didn’t speak, his eyes full of guilt, and then he said sharply, “Wait here.” He got up from the table and hurried away
into what Mulder assumed was the bedroom.
Mulder gazed at the gun in his hand and
then looked over at Scully. “This guy
knows things he’s not telling us, Scully.
Whatever the hell he went through, it seriously messed him up.”
Scully shrugged tiredly. “I…I know he’s holding something back…and
that frightens me. But I have this
horrible feeling that the stuff he is telling
us is true.”
“Yeah,” Mulder conceded. “Me too.
I don’t think threatening him is going to make much of a
difference. We might have to go looking
for this lockbox.”
Scully nodded. “If he’s telling
the truth about these Triskelion files then we need to find them. If this…this man ‘Abaddon’ doesn’t find us
first.”
Her voice was shaking at the mention of
Abaddon. Beneath the table Mulder took
her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed
back.
“We’re not giving up, are we?” he asked
sternly.
“No, we’re not,” she replied, forcing steel
into her tone. “Whatever it takes. To the ends of the Earth, right?”
“Right,” he replied and gave her hand
another squeeze.
Dr Ryan Cohen returned clutching a
collection of items to his chest, and dumped them on the table. An expensive-looking LED flashlight, a cell
phone and a hand-drawn map in a clear plastic sleeve. Scully ignored the items and instead gestured
for the gun in Mulder’s hand. He gave it
to her. Mulder was already carrying
Doggett’s sidearm in a shoulder-holster beneath his suit jacket. They were both armed now. She immediately assessed the gun’s sights and
weight and briefly unloaded the magazine to check it was full.
“Sig Sauer P250,” she muttered. Mulder nodded. It was a weapon they were both familiar with.
“You
got a permit for that handgun?” Mulder asked with a dark smile.
Cohen shrugged. “Not exactly.
Don’t worry, I’m not leaving myself unarmed by letting you have that. Sorry about that whole thing, by the
way. I had to be sure.” Mulder raised his eyebrows cynically. Cohen glanced away and tapped the cell phone
on the tabletop. “After you retrieve the
lockbox and get back to the surface…if you want to call me it needs to be from
only this phone. My cell number is the
only number on the SIM card. From there
we can organize a new place to meet, if you want.”
“We’re not sure we entirely trust you,
Ryan,” Scully told him gravely.
Cohen just shrugged. “The world is ending. But I’m offering you one of my guns. I’m offering to help you even though it’ll
probably get me killed. If you don’t
trust me then shoot me…because I want this to be over.”
Scully didn’t reply.
Cohen fixed Mulder with another intense
stare. “There’s just one thing I must
ask of you, Agent Mulder.”
“Yeah?
What’s that?”
“I’m not sure if ghosts are real or just
symbolic concepts, but…when you’re down there…tell my friends that Ryan says
he’s sorry. Tell them I’m truly sorry that
I got them killed.” Mulder saw tears in
the junkie doctor’s eyes again.
“Will…will you do that for me, Agent Mulder?”
Mulder had to look away from the pain in
Cohen’s eyes. He swallowed and nodded.
*
Bergen Street Station
Brooklyn
3:34 a.m.
The station was
less than ten minutes walk from Cohen’s apartment, on the border of Cobble Hill
and Boerum Hill. The walk was brief and they
encountered almost no-one on the streets at such a late hour. Tension, fear and a strange sense of expectation
were all swirling within Scully. They
were about to take drastic action, in a day filled with drastic actions. An entire career filled with them, she
thought ruefully.
Unlike the mass-transit systems of many
major cities, the New York Subway was open twenty-four hours a day. But as she and Mulder hurried down the steps into
the underground station they found the space to be practically deserted. The token booth at their end was apparently unmanned,
its little windows dark. There were no security
guards; only nearby full-length turnstiles to make fare evasion virtually
impossible. Above them harsh fluorescent
lights cast an unearthly glare on the white and green tiled walls.
Scully
glanced uncertainly at Mulder.
“Shouldn’t the booth be manned at all times?”
He shrugged. “Hurricane Sandy knocked this city for six,
Scully. That was just eight weeks
ago. Who knows what the hell is going
on.” He glanced around and added, “We’re
going to have to buy some Metrocards.”
He hurried over to a Metrocard Vending
Machine, Scully at his side, and began tapping away at the touchscreen. A few moments later he fished his wallet from
his suit jacket, pulled out a debit card and inserted it into the machine.
While Mulder finished the transaction
Scully glanced around nervously. She
noticed a young black guy in a Nike hoodie emerge from the stairwell and stroll
across the harshly-lit space towards the turnstiles. He was busy with the phone in his hands but
glanced up and caught Scully eyeing him.
He grinned, winked and blew her a kiss – but it was a gesture more humorous
than sleazy, and Scully glanced away with a half-smile as he swiped his card
and disappeared through the turnstiles.
Mulder pulled their newly credited
Metrocards from the machine, retrieved his debit card and muttered, “Ok, we’re good to go.”
Once they passed through the turnstiles
and made their way onto the platform they realized the station wasn’t entirely
deserted. There were three other people
waiting for trains, including the young black guy Scully had just seen. The other two were a young couple on the opposite
platform, standing close together with their hands around each other’s waists
as they smiled and kissed and whispered things to one another.
Scully tried to take in the
surroundings. The platform walls were
decorated in white tile with a dark green trim running along the top and
bottom, and large name tablets that read BERGEN ST. Dark green I-beam columns ran the length of
both platforms. The station was
relatively clean and well-lit, but the general lack of commuters still gave
Scully an eerie feeling.
The young black guy in the Nike hoodie was
leaning casually against one of the I-beams, apparently playing a game on his
phone. He glanced up, noticed that
Scully was with someone and quickly returned his attention to his phone The sound of an approaching train reached the
platform, swelling quickly in volume as twin points of light finally appeared
in the mouth of the tunnel.
Scully glanced over at Mulder and found
him studying the hand-drawn map that Ryan Cohen had given them. A few seconds later the train pulled into the
subway station on the opposite platform.
The couple got on but nobody got off.
The doors hissed closed. As the
train began pulling out of the station and back into the blackness of the
tunnel Mulder started walking a little further along the length of the
platform. Scully followed a few steps
behind him until they came to a set of stainless steel doors in the tiled wall. Scully could see electric light spilling from
beneath them.
“This is it,” said Mulder. “This is the old access to the abandoned
lower levels.” He glanced over his
shoulder at Scully and then up at the platform ceiling. “Tell me which way the cameras are pointing.”
Scully studied their surroundings. “There’s several cameras. One of them is pointing right in this
direction.”
“Well,” he muttered, “We better be quick
then, huh?” He unholstered the sidearm
that Doggett had given him and quickly slammed the butt of the handgun against
the protruding lock on one of the doors.
The metallic clang resounded through the underground space, causing the
young black guy further down the platform to glance up from his phone. He was peering curiously at them, a look of
vague amusement on his face. He shook
his head and returned to his phone like he couldn’t care less.
Mulder struck the lock a second time and
the stainless steel door suddenly popped open slightly. The young black guy didn’t even look up this
time. Mulder pulled open the door,
gesturing for Scully to move. She
slipped through, immediately followed by Mulder. The door still managed to close behind him
but the actual lock was ruined.
They found themselves in a dimly-lit
stairwell; graffiti covering the damp and peeling walls. Low-wattage security lights were spaced
through the stairwell, down into what appeared to be pitch darkness. But around them the graffiti tags adorned the
walls, some of them quite detailed and artistic.
“Who did these, Mulder?” asked Scully, “If
these levels have been closed since the seventies?”
“Urban explorers,” was Mulder’s
reply. “People who explore derelict and
abandoned places for a hobby. It’s all
illegal, obviously, but there’s an entire subculture online dedicated to it. Come on.”
They began descending the damp, graffiti-covered
winding stairwell, moving further and further down towards where the light of
the security lamps didn’t seem to reach.
As they made their way down Scully
muttered, “I shudder to think how many of these urban explorers disappeared
without a trace.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mulder.
“Well, you and I have explored more
abandoned and derelict places than I care to remember…and a lot of the time we
found things living in those
places. Things that were pretty
unfriendly.”
Mulder looked at her with a faint smile on
his lips but said nothing.
“If we find a clan of flukemen living down
here, Mulder, you’re on your own.”
He smiled a little wider at her grim
attempt at levity, but Scully knew that Mulder understood her humour was a
little forced. She was trying to make
them both smile, to give them strength.
The last eighteen hours had been exhausting, and they were both well
aware that the chase was far from over. When they finally stepped out of the
stairwell and into the abandoned depths of the station they found it was not a
complete darkness. A handful of security
lamps were aglow along the length of the stripped-down platform, casting the
barest illumination. But these were
different to the ones in the stairwell.
These lights had a bluish hue. There
was only enough faint blue light to make out the most basic details. Everything was still shrouded in darkness.
“Ok,” muttered Scully, “this is officially
creepy as hell.”
Mulder pulled the LED flashlight that
Cohen had given them from the rucksack, switched it on and pointed the powerful
beam of light at the ceiling. He moved
his face towards the beam and squinted, making his features appear
ghastly.
“Just like old times, Agent Scully,” he muttered
with a smile.
She returned the smile even though she
wasn’t comforted. She appreciated the
effort though. “So,” she said softly,
“we’ve got to find this hidden Nest that Cohen mentioned…and pray that urban
explorers or the Metropolitan Transit Authority hasn’t found it first, right?”
“Yeah.”
Mulder pointed the flashlight at the hand-drawn map in his hand. “This way.”
They moved along the darkened
platform. As Mulder swept the flashlight
beam ahead of them Scully noticed that all the tiles and signage along the
platform had been stripped away, leaving behind damp cement-colored walls
adorned with more graffiti. Among the
usual street-handles and urban slang Scully noticed a spray-painted inverted
pentagram on one of the I-beams.
Although she knew it was most likely done by some inane death-metal fan
with little regard for its occult significance the image still set a feeling of
dread in her stomach. She didn’t bother
to point out the satanic symbol to Mulder.
“We’ve got to get down onto the tracks and
head into the tunnels,” Mulder told her quietly. Scully had no idea why they felt the urge to
keep their voices lowered since there was nobody to hear them, and yet it
seemed like the right thing to do.
They went to the platform’s edge and
Mulder shone the flashlight onto the tracks.
An inch of water had collected in the center indentation between the
rails.
“This whole place is damp, Mulder,” Scully
said nervously. “You don’t think the
rails are still electrified do you?
Because that doesn’t look safe at all.”
“I don’t know. It might be partial flooding from Hurricane Sandy. But even if these tunnels have been abandoned
for over thirty years…Cohen’s map says they still eventually connect to Carrol
Street Station. I’m thinking the rails
are probably still live.”
“Then I’m not going down there.”
“I don’t think we have a choice, Scully.”
She knew Mulder was right, but the dread
was still slowly gathering in her stomach.
“I’ve…I’ve got a really bad feeling about this, Mulder. I’m not even kidding this time.”
Mulder looked at her in the darkness and
she could just about make out his profile in the ambient illumination from the
flashlight.
“I feel it too, Scully, but this is our
only lead. We’re running out of
time. If there are US Defense Department
files on Triskelion stashed down here, then we need to find them.”
Scully tried to swallow her dread, as she
had done countless times in the past.
“I know, Mulder,” she muttered, “I
know. Ok, ok, let’s just go.”
Mulder climbed down first, and wasn’t
immediately electrocuted. He helped her
down beside him onto the tracks. For now
they were unharmed. Mulder was still
wearing his suit and leather shoes. She
was still clad in the blazer, skirt and heels she had been wearing all
day. And now she was about to go
traipsing through dark underground tunnels in the most inappropriate footwear
possible. But it was either that or walk
barefoot, which with the potential combination of water and electricity at her
feet was out of the question.
“You ok?” muttered Mulder, sensing her
discomfort.
“Just wish I was wearing sneakers,” she
told him.
“If you can’t walk I’ll carry you myself,
Scully.”
“My hero,” she said softly, although she
knew that Mulder would actually do just that if he had to. He had once travelled to the Arctic Circle –
to literally the edge of the world – in order to rescue her. “I love you, Fox,” she told him suddenly,
determination in her tone.
“Where did that come from?”
“Because you actually would just pick me up and carry me through the darkness, wouldn’t
you? Even at the end of the world.”
“Of course,” he muttered boyishly, as
though he was almost embarrassed by the question.
“That’s why I love you. Let’s find this lockbox.”
They trudged into the mouth of the wide tunnel,
with Mulder holding the flashlight like a spear of illumination ahead of
them. They heard the sounds of a train
passing in the tunnels above them, but kept moving. Occasionally Mulder shone the flashlight at
the plastic-sleeved map he was clutching in his other hand.
“Should be about a hundred feet up ahead.”
They kept moving through the blackness of
the tunnel that was punctuated only occasionally by dim electric lights on the
wall. They stopped when they heard the
sound of another train passing in the tunnels overhead.
This one sounded conspicuously louder.
“Is that…?” Scully began, but the growing
rumble of the train immediately answered her question. A train was coming through this tunnel, despite the lower platforms
being abandoned.
“Christ,” said Mulder, alarm in his tone,
“it must be one of the express trains. Move it!”
They broke into a run as terror and
adrenaline immediately surged through Scully’s system. They had no idea which direction the train
was coming from. They didn’t know
whether to keep racing ahead or turn back, or leap onto the right-hand set of
tracks instead –and they wouldn’t know until it was too late. The rumble of the train swelled into a roar.
“Run,
Scully!”
Like a moment from a nightmare Scully suddenly
lost her footing as the heel of her left shoe twisted on the uneven ground
between the rails and she almost fell.
She cried out. Mulder caught her
arm, arresting her fall. The roar of the
train was almost deafening, almost upon them.
Light spilled all around, illuminating the tunnel walls. Scully only had time to glance over her
shoulder at lights like eyes right behind them – before Mulder grabbed her
waist and dragged her into a brick alcove, thrusting an arm across her chest as
he shoved her flat against the wall.
A split-second later the train blasted
past them with a sound like shrieking thunder.
The slipstream forced their eyes closed as
over a hundred feet of screaming metal swept by, mere inches from their faces.
The moment seemed to last forever, but
then it was gone as fast as it had come.
Scully’s heart was slamming in her heaving chest. Her ears were ringing as she stood pressed
into the tunnel alcove, held in place by Mulder’s forearm. She opened her eyes, peered down at his arm,
his clenched fist, and then over at his face.
“Jesus
Christ,” she panted in disbelief, but she could barely hear her own words
above the ringing in her ears.
He was peering at her in equal shock,
pressed beside her against the wall in the alcove. Suddenly Mulder was in front of her, his
hands in her hair as he cupped the back of her head and pressed a palm to the
side of her face.
“Are…are you ok?”
The ringing in her ears was already
subsiding. She nodded and swallowed,
shaken but relieved that they were both still in one piece. He kneeled and retrieved the still-lit
flashlight he had dropped at their feet in the alcove.
“Behind you,” he said breathlessly.
She turned in the alcove and realized her
back had been pressed against a rusted metal door. Because of the curved alcove the door was at
a slight angle, but it had no lock.
Mulder grabbed the handle. Scully
did a moment later and the two of them grit their teeth as they strained to
pull the door open. It moved slightly,
but years of rust and inactivity and made it seize in its frame. They kept pulling and tugging until it
finally came open with a metallic squeal.
It was pitch black inside. Mulder
shone the flashlight. It was a single
passage that stopped after ten feet.
There were skeins of rotted cables and junction boxes all along both
sides of the passage.
Mulder hustled Scully inside and then
dragged the rusted door closed behind them.
They stood in the narrow passage as Mulder
shone the flashlight at the far wall, where Scully had hoped another door would
be. Mulder turned the flashlight on the map
again.
“Ok…ok, it says here that the Nest is
beyond that wall; old storage rooms that were built when the station was first
being designed. It says those rooms aren’t
even on most of the old blueprints…that they found them by accident, by knocking
through that wall. Says here that some
of Cohen’s homeless friends were former engineers, and they built a hidden door
for easier access so they could hide the Nest from the MTA.”
“I don’t…see anything…that could be a
secret door, Mulder,” said Scully, her voice shaking. She was still trembling with adrenaline from
their encounter with the train just moments ago, but Mulder was already forging
ahead. She took a long breath in an
attempt to balance her equilibrium.
“It says here the last junction box.” Mulder went to the box in question and pried
open its cover. Scully followed. Inside were a mess of rotted fuses, switches
and cables – and tucked behind them a lever.
In the flashlight beam Scully could see that while the lever was somewhat
rusted it appeared far newer than everything else in the derelict junction
box. Mulder grabbed the lever and with
enough force he managed to pull it all the way down.
A series of heavy clicks and thuds seemed
to come from behind the wall to their left, and Scully realized that the entire
narrow wall at the end of the passage was a cleverly disguised door, made to
almost perfectly match the surrounding brickwork. It was now standing ajar, blackness beyond
the threshold.
“Come on,” said Mulder, “we can do this. We need
those files.”
Scully caught the distinct note of resolve
in his voice. She knew that tone all too
well. It was a tone that belied
something dangerous and unstoppable within him – a seeker that would never ever
quit until he held the truth in his hands.
Scully realized she was both afraid and grateful for the immediate
presence of that part of Mulder. It
meant they might actually find what they were searching for, regardless of the
cost they might be forced to pay.
Scully took another deep breath as she
followed Mulder through the disguised door and into the blackness beyond.
It felt as though they had entered a tomb,
which considering the massacre that Cohen claimed had occurred down here wasn’t
entirely inappropriate.
Scully said quietly, “Are you getting a
kind of bad juju feeling in here, Mulder?”
“Little bit,” he admitted.
“Mulder…you realize what we’re doing is
insane, right? Traipsing around in the
darkness, underground, on the vaguest of leads.
I mean, we were given Dr Cohen’s name by Father Jacobs…a goddamn child
molester. This whole day has been
psychotic.”
Scully knew that her partner could sense
she was just trying to talk herself down from the unsettling fear that had
gripped her.
“We’ve broken cases on far, far less,”
Mulder told her, trying to inject a soothing quality into his voice. “Me and you, we’re the King and Queen of
tenuous connections…and improbable successes.”
He glanced at her in the flashlight glare and added, “You think?”
Scully tried to smile. “I guess.”
What Ryan Cohen had referred to as the
Nest appeared to be a warren of passages and adjacent rooms with arched
doorways, all of them with doors still in place. The entire forgotten cavity seemed to be
built from a kind of brutalist concrete architecture unlike the brick subway
tunnels back the way they had come.
Scully was reminded that the space was intended to be purely functional
; temporary storage for tools and construction equipment, sealed and forgotten
as soon as the station was completed.
She noticed deep groove marks in the floor, presumably from where heavy
equipment had been repeatedly dragged back and forth.
As Mulder swept the flashlight around
Scully half expected the light to fall upon bones or the desiccated remains of
a human corpse; whatever was left of Cohen’s homeless friends who he claimed
had perished down here. Scully realized
she was holding her breath in anticipation of something ghastly. She exhaled gently, but what Mulder’s
flashlight found a moment later was unsettling in an entirely unexpected way.
On one of the dark cement walls a series
of words had been daubed in black paint.
The phrase was faded but still entirely legible:
AND NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP
I
PRAY THE LORD MY SOUL TO KEEP
IF
I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE
I
PRAY THE LORD MY SOUL TO TAKE
Scully glanced
apprehensively at Mulder in the spill of the flashlight and saw that he looked
just unnerved as she was feeling. The
phrase on the wall was a famous children’s bedtime prayer dating back to the
1700s. Most people were familiar with it
from one source or another. But its
presence here was chilling. They knew
from Special Agent Owen Cameron’s archived files that he had uncovered a CIA kidnapping-operation
of Guatemalan and American children, referred to as ‘Bedtime’ – recruitment for
Pellucid, the most highly classified MK-Ultra project in existence, according
to Ryan Cohen.
“Whatever they were trying to keep at
bay,” Scully said quietly, touching the little gold cross at her throat, “I
guess they failed.”
“The
Bounty Hunters,” Mulder replied grimly.
“Cohen said that shapeshifters infiltrated their group and burned
everyone alive down here. We need to keep
looking. We need to try some of these
rooms.”
They turned their attention to the
adjacent rooms, which were more numerous than they expected. None of the doors
were fitted with locks, and they immediately found evidence that the Nest had
once been inhabited. Scully was taken
aback at the sophistication and orderliness of what they found. There was actual furniture in most of these
rooms; beds and cabinets and dressers and shelves, all apparently manufactured
from scrap and discarded pieces of wood.
Incredibly detailed hand-crafted quilts were lying on the empty beds,
and equality intricate rugs lay on the concrete floors – items that had been
stitched with obvious passion and care. The
people who had lived down here had built themselves household essentials that
were functional but also surprisingly elegant.
There were framed paintings and poems that hung on the walls too. Scully was forced to fully recognize that
real people with real lives and real passions had been living down here in the
dark. The remains of candles sat in
plates beside beds and on dressers, and other candleholders had been affixed to
the walls of the various rooms. This had once been a thriving underground
community, living in candlelight like some Victorian colony existing outside of
time.
Scully felt the pang of genuine sadness. She could now feel a touch of the horror that
must have swept through this little community when they realized monsters had
found a way into their midst. The horror
and pain they must have felt when those monsters decided to burn them all to
death.
“Damn, Mulder,” Scully muttered
sadly. “I wasn’t expecting this…”
Mulder swallowed and nodded. “This was a real home. You can feel the warmth and the camaraderie
that was down here.”
“Yeah,” was all Scully could say.
“Let’s keep looking,” urged Mulder.
They navigated the warren of tight-knit
passages, finding rooms filled with more of the same. Several of the passages connected into a wide
central hallway, and when Mulder shone his flashlight at the floor they saw it
had been scorched completely black.
Scully glanced at Mulder and knew exactly what he was thinking. This was where the Bounty Hunters had rounded
up Cohen’s homeless friends. This was
where they had burned them. Cohen had been telling the truth. Based on the number of rooms in the Nest, and
the number of beds in each room, there could have been up to thirty people
living down here. Thirty lost souls.
Scully wanted to say something, but she
was overcome at the thought of the massacre that had occurred down here. Instead, Mulder tried another door and
wordlessly ushered her inside. What they
found within this particular room was enough to make them both inhale sharply. Mulder’s flashlight picked out writing scrawled
all over the walls. But not just
writing, there seemed to be images too.
Without saying it aloud they both realized this had been Cohen’s
room. Mulder entered the space, his
flashlight searching the walls, but Scully remained motionless in the doorway.
The
vibe in here was palpably stronger than anywhere else in the Nest. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but she
didn’t like it.
In the darkness Mulder made his way to the
bed. He dropped the flashlight on the handcrafted
quilt and picked up a box of matches sitting on the bedside cabinet, next to a
plate containing the stub of a red candle.
The box of matches was at least fourteen years old, but he took one out
and struck it anyway. It sparked briefly
before fizzling out. But the second
match sparked and caught aflame. Mulder
lit the candle stub beside the bed. A
faint flickering illumination grew in the room.
He noticed two candleholders on the wall, containing similar stubs. He went over and lit those too. Dim candlelight finally banished the darkness
and brought the room’s features into focus.
“Mulder…”
Scully said warily.
He turned at the sound of her voice and
saw what had drawn her attention. All of
the walls were covered with scribbled text, much of it chaotic and illegible. But there was also an image that was
instantly recognizable.
The spindly body, oversized head and
almond-shaped eyes of an alien Grey peered out at them from the wall. The image of the Grey was crude but
evocative. Scully then realized that the
writing which covered every available inch of wall space was actually just one
word repeated over and over again.
CATHEDRAL.
“Whoa,” Mulder said quietly, “This is
hardcore crazy-town.”
But it wasn’t the image of the alien Grey
or the word ‘cathedral’ repeated over and over that was most unsettling. It was the fact that on the right-hand wall
opposite the bed there was an image that stood over eight feet tall, dominating
everything else in the room.
A tall and thin figure in some kind of
hooded black cloak.
The drawing was composed of scratchy black
lines and scribbles, but the overall effect was deeply atmospheric. Scully could even make out the vaguest
suggestion of facial features in the shadows beneath the hood, except that those
features seemed inhuman and disturbing somehow.
“Jesus,”
said Mulder in obvious shock, “that’s…that’s what you told me you saw standing
over Rachel Marx’s dead body…”
The evocative image of the cloaked, hooded
figure seemed to exude a presence that was both demonic and strangely
alien. Scully couldn’t bear the thought
of staring at it for too long, and yet she couldn’t pull her eyes away.
“That’s what you saw, isn’t it?” asked
Mulder, fear in his voice.
“Yeah,” Scully managed weakly.
“Dana,” muttered Mulder, unable to take
his eyes of the image either, “I can see why you were so freaked out.” He added tentatively, “Do you…do you think
this is one of the things that Cohen said was listening to us back at his
apartment? When the lights started
flickering?”
“I think so, Mulder,” Scully told him gravely. She recalled how malevolent and ancient the
shadow-entity had felt when she saw it standing over Rachel Marx’s dead body
back in D.C. Even this image of the
thing seemed to exude the same touch of evil.
Just looking at it made Scully feel nervous and superstitious, like a
frightened Catholic schoolgirl. Like how
she used to feel as child when she first realized the world was a dark and foreboding
place – before Science and God had found an equilibrium to banish the shadows
from her imagination.
“The lockbox,” said Mulder, trying to
refocus on the task at hand, “it must be in here somewhere.”
He set about searching for it; hunting
through the bedside cabinet, under the bed and in the chest of drawers, while
Scully stood transfixed by the image of the tall hooded figure that dominated
the room.
“It’s not here,” Mulder finally hissed
through clenched teeth. Suddenly he
slammed a fist into the wall and cried, “GOD DAMN IT!” He cried out again in frustration and kicked
over the bedside cabinet.
Scully was startled by his sudden outburst
but immediately went to him, and tried to hug him. Mulder was resistant at first before
relenting and softening into the embrace.
“We’re going to find it, Mulder,” she told
him, trying to soothe him. “We just have
to keep looking. Ok?”
“We’re running out of time, Scully,” he
murmured. “And I don’t know what the
hell I’m doing. Colonization is just
hours away and I still have no goddamn idea how to stop it…”
Scully held him. “I believe in you, Fox. I believe in us.”
“That might not be enough.”
“It has
to be.”
“Ok, ok,” said Mulder, trying to inject
some optimism into his voice.
“Let’s…let’s keep looking. I
guess we’ll need to try the other rooms.
I really thought it’d be in here…”
Scully pulled away and found herself
peering again at the image of the tall hooded entity on the wall. She frowned, wondering. She left Mulder’s side and tentatively
approached the image, and found herself reaching out to touch it. As her hand touched the wall her stomach
tightened suddenly and she recoiled.
“You ok?” Mulder asked immediately.
“Yeah,” she told him, “but…”
She dug her fingernails into the black
paint that formed the chest of the hooded entity, and found the wall yielding
to her touch. At least part of the wall
wasn’t solid, she realized.
“I think I’ve got something here, Mulder,”
she said with surprise and sudden anticipation.
She began clawing handfuls of what
appeared to be soft black clay from the center of the image, from the place
where the figure’s heart would have been.
Mulder hurried over and began to help.
They quickly excavated the cavity in the wall that had been disguised to
appear solid like its surroundings.
Scully’s fingers brushed something cold and metallic within the
cavity. She shot Mulder a hopeful
smile. A moment later Mulder felt it
too. Together they both slid the
rectangular lockbox out of its hiding place inside the wall.
It was made of steel and was roughly the
size of a garage toolbox, but weighed a little less than Scully had been
expecting. It had a hinged carry-handle
on its top. There were metallic
Department of Defense seals in full color on both of its sides. Scully glanced briefly at the familiar depiction
of the United States eagle-shield clutching three arrows in its talons,
wreathed by laurels and stars. It was a
symbol very familiar to all Americans, but especially to US federal
employees. Mulder took the box by the
carry-handle and briefly weighed it in his grip. It wouldn’t be much trouble to carry back to
the surface. Scully saw that Mulder’s
eyes were lit with relief and gratitude.
He smiled at her.
She returned the smile and said, “Shall we
break it open right now, or….?”
“We’ve got what we came for,” Mulder said. “Let’s just get topside again. Then we can sort through whatever we…”
Mulder’s words trailed off, as though he
had heard something.
Scully felt her awareness sharpen
immediately. “What?” she murmured.
“I thought I heard…some kind of…”
“What?” Scully urged again.
“Some kind of low growling sound,” Mulder said quietly.
And then Scully heard it too. It was faint but there. A low, bassy growl. Scully was immediately afraid.
Both of their gazes fell upon the image of
the tall hooded entity on the wall, now with a large hole in its heart. In the candlelight it almost appeared as if
tiny flecks of paint were pulling themselves away from the wall and drifting
lazily in the air like dust. The
growling came again, much louder this time.
Scully gasped and took a few steps backwards, her stomach clutching in utter
dread. She glanced incredulously at
Mulder, and saw a look of fearful incomprehension in his eyes.
Flecks of paint were indeed pulling
themselves away from the image, in odd spirals that seemed to begin taking
shape in mid-air right in front of them.
“What
the–” Scully began, her words choked off by sheer disbelief at what they
were witnessing.
“Oh
my God,” murmured Mulder. “Scully…we
need to get the hell out of here. Right
now.”
Although Scully could barely comprehend
it, the image of the hooded shadow-entity seemed to be actually pulling itself
away from the wall and reassembling
itself in the room with them. The low
bass-like growling was growing in volume.
They could feel it in the floor through their feet, as though the entire
room trembled with it. The flames of the
candles that Mulder had lit began to dance and waver dangerously. Then, as one, all three of the candles went
out, plunging the room into darkness again.
“Run,
Scully.”
Mulder’s command seemed to break them free
from their horrified paralysis. He
grabbed her by the arm and they both bolted towards the door, abandoning the
lit flashlight on the bed. For a
terrifying moment Scully expected the door to be sealed shut by some act of
dark magic, but it opened easily and they ran through. Behind them the deep, bassy growling was
quickly growing in pitch, resolving itself into a monstrous shrieking sound.
That inhuman sound put the fear of God in
Scully as they raced through the tight warren of passages, towards the door
that would lead them back into the subway tunnel. Mulder was running at her side, the lockbox
clenched in his grip. The hideous shriek
was swelling behind them like something unholy, and neither of them dared to
turn around for fear of what they might see coming up behind them.
“DON’T STOP!” barked Mulder, but Scully
had no intention of stopping.
A moment later the awful shrieking ended
abruptly, as though contained somehow, but still neither of them dared look
back. They hustled through the hidden
door, out of the Nest and into the narrow passage lined with junction boxes and
skeins of dead cables – and then through the outer door and back into the
subway tunnel. Mulder slammed shut the
rusted metal door in the brick alcove.
Both of them were heaving for breath but gave each other only a brief
glance before turning left and hurrying back towards the abandoned lower levels
of Bergen Street Station.
Scully could barely process what had just
occurred back there, and yet she knew what both of them had seen. It was as though the image of the hooded
shadow-entity on the wall had begun to come to life. Her stomach was still tight with dread, disbelief
and confusion.
Suddenly Mulder grabbed her arm, halting
her immediately. They both stood there in
the space between the two tracks in the center of the wide tunnel, and Scully
knew her partner had seen something. She
squinted and tried to focus on what was up ahead – half expecting to see a
real-life manifestation of the frightening hooded figure. But instead Scully recognised the silhouette
of a man. He was standing perhaps sixty
feet up ahead, where the mouth of the tunnel opened onto the abandoned platforms. He was standing side-on, but then turned to
face them. He began walking casually
towards them, with no sense of urgency at all.
“Transit cop?” Scully muttered,
unconvinced of her own words.
“I doubt it,” Mulder said quickly.
They could both feel that something was
very wrong here. As the slowly approaching
silhouette passed a low-wattage security light on the tunnel wall they saw his
eyes suddenly flash green and reflective, like the eyes of a cat.
A new fear skittered across Scully’s
shoulders. She realized whatever was
casually approaching them was not entirely human. She sensed that Mulder recognized the truth
at almost the same moment.
The approaching figure called out to them in
a voice that was deep and resonant and frighteningly calm. “Hello again, Fox and Dana. You don’t remember me, do you? I held your whispering hearts in my hands
before either you were even born…and I put a promise inside each of them.”
“Oh God…”
Scully murmured involuntarily.
The figure in the tunnel up ahead was the
man their DOD insider had warned them about.
An ex special-forces DARPA operative named Lucien Farrow – a man who had
apparently died from a lightning-strike and yet achieved some form of
resurrection. It was the man that Father
Jacobs claimed had taken to calling himself Abaddon.
Scully tried to hold back a wave of cold
black terror.
The Angel of the Abyss had found them.
“And so we meet here now,” the figure
continued, “at the nexus of a billion worlds.
And you presume you can finally bind
the truth?” He chuckled. “Such vanity.”
Something in his words made Scully sick
with dread. She immediately backed up a
few steps, clutching at Mulder’s arm.
“What…what do we do?”
“Run,”
was Mulder’s immediate reply.
Scully was suddenly, horrifyingly aware
that she was wearing heels, but she spun round and began pounding along the
track as fast as possible into the depths of the tunnel. Mulder did the same, cradling the lockbox
against his chest.
“Where are you going, little weeping
gods?” Farrow called out to them.
Scully
knew the thing behind them was incredibly dangerous. If they allowed it to get anywhere near them it
would all be over. She could feel it in
her bones like a sixth sense. She was
frightened now in a primal, elemental way.
She knew in her gut that the entity in the tunnel with them was more than
something disturbingly inhuman. It was
something almost biblical. That
knowledge sent a cold black fear through her entire system, bypassing all
reason and logic. Her heart was already
slamming against her ribs as she ran, and she risked a glance back.
The silhouette was now sprinting along the
subway track with almost impossible speed, his eyes repeatedly flashing green
in the almost-darkness. Scully felt her
guts twisting with sheer dread at the image.
He was gaining on them.
There was no way she and Mulder were going
to outrun him.
“STARBUCK!” he suddenly roared in
fury. “DON’T RUN FROM ME!”
“Don’t look back, Dana!” Mulder cried.
Like a nightmare Scully felt the heel of
her right shoe suddenly snap as she ran, and with a sickening lurch she
realized she was falling. Her right arm
hit the track inches from the live rail, cushioning her fall, but pain still
surged through her shoulder as she grunted through gritted teeth. She could sense the faint hum of the
electrical current as it passed through the rail only inches from her.
Above her Mulder skidded to a stop,
turning and catching sight of how quickly their pursuer was gaining. He made a split-second calculation and
instead of reaching for Scully he unholstered the sidearm that Doggett had
given him and immediately fired three shots into the central mass of the
rapidly advancing DARPA agent. Each
impact made Farrow jerk back with concussive force but barely slowed him. Mulder couldn’t even tell if the bullets had
drawn blood.
He didn’t bother to waste more ammunition,
instead hauling Scully to her feet again as she kicked off her useless
heels. And then she was running again
beside Mulder, barefoot now, the soles of her feet slapping against the damp
and grimy subway track.
She wasn’t concerned about the possibility
of electrocution from the live rail. All
she cared about was making sure this man calling himself Abaddon didn’t catch
up with them. Sweat was already
spreading across her forehead and neck, spilling down the small of her back.
“We’re not gonna make it!” Scully gasped as they ran. She dared not glance back this time for fear
of seeing their pursuer right behind them.
“Just don’t stop!” Mulder managed beside
her, the terror naked in his voice.
The
darkened tunnel seemed endless. Scully
had no idea how far the next station was.
It was perhaps only moments before the thing behind them finally caught
up. She couldn’t take the horror of that
thought and glanced back instinctively.
The sprinting silhouette with the flashing catlike eyes was only twenty
feet behind them, and closing.
The sight squeezed Scully’s heart with
dread. Her chest was heaving, her thigh
and calf muscles burning from the strain.
“Oh God,” she gasped, realising there was literally
nowhere to go. Gruesome images of being
physically torn apart flashed through her mind as she ran.
Up ahead illumination and noise began to
fill the tunnel.
Another express train.
“Mulder…”
Scully gasped in warning.
The swelling illumination resolved itself
into the lights like eyes at the front of the train. It was heading right for them. Mulder was about to snatch Scully’s arm to
pull her towards the other set of tracks on the right-hand side of the tunnel
when he recognized another metallic roar.
Horrified, he snapped his gaze round and saw the approaching lights of a
second train surging through the tunnel behind them, backlighting their
pursuer.
They were trapped.
Both sets of track were about to be filled
with screaming metal.
Mulder snatched Scully’s hand, mentally
urging her onward and willing her not to break her stride yet. He tried to judge the width of the gap
between the tracks. He had an idea. A dangerous, insane idea. And he had literally moments to execute it.
Scully didn’t need to glance back to
recognize the fact that two trains were coming at them from opposite
directions. “We’re dead,” she gasped mid-stride.
Mulder glanced to his left and saw what
he was looking for. An alcove, much
smaller than the one that had protected them earlier. Both trains were howling through the tunnel,
almost upon them.
“Get flat in the alcove, Dana!” he cried.
“I’m not leav–”
“JUST DO IT!” he screamed above the
approaching roar.
The sheer violence in his voice made
Scully suddenly lunge to her left and throw herself flat against the alcove.
Mulder was surrounded by the monstrous
roar and bathed in light from both directions.
He had one shot. If he messed
this up he was dead. He slowed for just
a moment, before spinning round to find his inhuman pursuer within arm’s
reach. Mulder’s adversary made a
striking motion with his hand flat like a blade, but Mulder was already lunging
– the full force of the steel lockbox crashing into the side of Farrow’s head,
causing him to stumble sideways for just a moment.
It was enough.
Mulder stepped side-on into the gap
between the tracks and threw up his arms in a crucifixion pose. A fraction of a second later the first train
shrieked past less than an inch from Mulder’s face – slamming into his
disoriented adversary and instantly sucking him out of sight. A moment after that the second train screamed
past in the opposite direction, less than an inch from Mulder’s back. For a few horrifying seconds he was caught in
the slipstream between the two metal behemoths.
The noise was unholy and the wind forced his eyes closed. Mulder felt the edge of the lockbox in his
raised right hand clip one of the trains, as it was almost wrenched from his
grasp by the sheer force.
And then both trains had passed, shrieking
away into the distance, apparently unaware that there were people in the
tunnel, that they had hit someone.
Mulder’s ears were ringing badly. He could feel himself trembling in
shock. He forced his eyes open, finally
lowering his arms and letting go of the lockbox’s carry-handle. It landed in the gap between the tracks with
a heavy clunk. In the semidarkness he finally
took a huge inhalation of breath and saw Scully wedged into the alcove, peering
at him with incredulous eyes. She opened
her mouth to say something, but she was lost for words. She continued to stare wide-eyed at him for a
few moments before lunging from the alcove, stumbling towards him and throwing
her arms around him. She was breathing
heavily and began kissing his face over and over again.
“Mulder, I…I thought…I thought that second
train hit you…”
Her voice was slightly distorted and
muffled from the ringing in his ears but he took another deep breath and tried
to smile for her. Mulder could feel
himself shaking. His heart was still
hammering in his chest, his hands literally quivering with fear and the rush of
adrenaline. He pressed his face into the
curve of Scully’s neck. For a few
moments she held him, trying to soothe him.
Despite his shaken state Mulder knew a few soothing moments were all
they could afford.
“The trains,” murmured Scully in his ear,
“Why…why didn’t they stop? Didn’t they
see us?”
Mulder had no answer for her. Instead he pulled away from the embrace and
gestured shakily back down the track.
Scully followed his gaze.
In the scant illumination from the
low-wattage security lights on the walls they could see the subway tracks were
strewn with a mess of spilled blood and splintered bone and ragged chunks of
ruined flesh. The express train had
completely taken Lucien Farrow apart.
Mulder grimaced at the sight and the new coppery scent of blood in the
tunnel.
He stumbled along the trail of gore and
began shakily scanning the tracks for something in particular. He saw shredded bits of clothes amongst the
pungent viscera, and had to glance away when he spotted Farrow’s head over by
the wall, the left side of his skull completely crushed and missing his lower
jaw. It was a hideous sight, strands of
flesh still attached to the ragged stump of their pursuer’s neck. Mulder swallowed and tried to keep searching
despite the adrenaline still racing through his system.
“What…what’re you looking for?” muttered
Scully, and instinctively retrieved the DOD loxbox that Mulder had dropped.
“The Key.
Clavem Saeculorum. Our insider
said…said this man Farrow possessed it.”
In the darkness it was difficult to see,
but Mulder finally came across a ripped and bloodied section of a suit-jacket with
the inner pocket still attached. He
crouched and carefully prodded it with the tip of his little finger. There was something inside the pocket. Mulder carefully pulled it free in trembling
anticipation. He wasn’t sure what he’d actually
been expecting, but this legendary key that Labyrinth and the Apostles had been
warring to find for the last seventy years – it appeared almost ordinary.
It was a metallic circular disc about an
inch thick and slightly bigger than his hand.
Its center was inscribed with a Triskelion symbol, identical to the one
they had seen on the biohazardous corpse of Diego Roberto Cielo.
As Mulder held the disc in his palm its
edges seemed to soften impossibly for a moment, creating indentations to more
comfortably accommodate the grip of his fingers. He inhaled sharply at the sensation of the
shapeshifting metal. A strange energy
was radiating from the disc, through his hand and up through his forearm. It felt like the disc was thinking, adapting
to him. It felt like this thing was
somehow alive.
Scully was behind him, barefoot, peering
down at his discovery. “You found it,”
she muttered, a note of hope in her voice.
Farrow had unwittingly brought the thing
they were seeking right to them.
But Mulder knew there was no time for
celebration. They had to get out of the
tunnel and back to the surface. The
clock was still ticking. Colonization
was drawing ever nearer and they were literally still groping blindly in the
dark. They had no idea how to utilise
this legendary Key they had found. Mulder
carefully rose to his feet and slipped the strange metallic disc into the inner
pocket of his own scuffed suit jacket.
“Scully –” he began, before his words were
cut off by an odd sound. The sound of
metal violently clinking against metal.
For some reason the sound was deeply unsettling.
“What is that?” murmured Scully.
They followed the trail of gore along the
subway tracks for another ten feet or so.
There on the ground was what appeared to be an odd, spiky-looking piece
of metal. As Mulder crouched he realized
what it actually looked like. It looked
like two fused metallic vertebrae.
Mulder frowned, trying to understand what he was actually looking at,
when suddenly the chunk of metal began to spin on its axis.
Mulder flinched and heard Scully gasp just
behind him.
There was another loud metallic
clink. The spinning abruptly stopped and
Mulder found himself peering at a third fused vertebrae.
“Oh,” muttered Mulder as the horrifying
truth began to dawn, “Oh no no no…”
He was peering at a regenerating spinal
column. He felt Scully clutch his
shoulder.
“Mulder…we need to get out of here. NOW.”
The
section of metallic spine began a cycle of spinning and stopping, getting
longer with each revolution. Mulder
stared in horror, unable to tear his gaze away from the impossible sight.
“Mulder, come on!” cried Scully.
He came to his senses and they both
launched into a terrified run back the way they had come, towards the abandoned
lower levels of Bergen Street Station. They had to get back to the surface.
(To Be Continued...)
***************************