The X-Files: I Want to Believe

by Max Allan Collins

  He hung the phone up on her…even though he knew damn well she was right.

  But he knew just as well that the one with balls, SAC Fossa, wouldn’t have given Dana Scully any more relief than Drummy had been able to.

  Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital

  Richmond, Virginia

  January 12

  In the hospital corridor where she stormed down, Dana Scully had caught a few eyes and raised a few more eyebrows as she railed at her cell phone. Still moving, she punched in a number that was no longer on her speed dial, but one she could hardly forget.

  An operator’s voice said, “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Put me through to the assistant director,” she said, still on the move.

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Former agent Dana Scully.”

  And the next voice she heard was Walter Skinner’s.

  Chapter 14

  Rural Virginia

  January 12

  Despite the darkness of early evening, Tom Gibbons, proprietor of Nutter’s Feed and Animal Supply, on his way to the farmhouse where he lived, spotted a hole in a snowbank that did not seem the work of Mother Nature—not judging by the various tire gouges in the white stuff just off the gravel road. The story those fresh ruts told said a car had lost control and pushed through the bank, and Gibbons knew this countryside well enough to be aware of the drop-off on the other side.

  The big bald man in the insulated vest, plaid shirt jacket, and blue jeans got out of his pickup, trudged over to the roadside, and entered the doorway made by some unfortunate car, and peered down at the creek bed below, where the unfortunate car in question turned out to be that white Ford driven by that fool from the city who’d stopped in to ask a question and promptly disappeared.

  Gibbons shook his head. Hadn’t he warned that character about trying to drive in these conditions?

  Back in the pickup, Gibbons used his cell phone. “Jim? Yeah, this’s Tom. I’m out here on 154 looking at the bottom of a guy’s car hoopdy-do-dooed off the road. Probably killed the poor sumbitch.”

  Gibbons was unaware that the “poor sumbitch” who’d been driving that car was not only alive, but, starting several minutes before Gibbons had pulled up, was doing his best to stay that way.

  Fox Mulder had awakened to find himself hanging upside down, held tight by his shoulder harness and seat belt. He began working to free himself and finally did, dropping with an awkward whump on the overturned car’s ceiling.

  With the car half buried in snow, Mulder seemed trapped in the car, but he immediately started—through the driver’s-side window that he’d earlier rolled down—digging his way out.

  And finally, after clawing his way to freedom with his gloved hands, emerging like a gopher from the snow, he gulped frigid air, and the first thing he saw were headlights up above of a vehicle that, unknown to Mulder, belonged to the feed store man, Tom Gibbons.

  Mulder yelled, “Hey!”

  He was on his feet now, walking across the underside of his upside-down bug of a car to reach the creek bank. Then he was looking at a climb that was going to take a while, and he yelled, “Hey!” again just as those headlights disappeared.

  Face bloodied, Mulder stood there in the dark and the cold considering his options. He patted for his cell phone, but it must have been in the car somewhere, and he didn’t feel like going back down through the snow looking for it. What else was there to do but climb that steep, snowy embankment?

  He started up, finding branches sticking out of the snow to cling to, though sometimes they just snapped off, but he kept at it, picking his way back up to the road.

  While Mulder climbed, the Russian in the snow-plow truck was rolling along at a good clip, its driver feeling smug about dealing with that FBI agent (for to Janke Dacyshyn, who had come upon the FBI searching the Donor Transport Services offices, that was surely who Mulder was). Making a sharp turn, the Russian guided the old three-quarter-ton pickup off the gravel road onto an intersecting, unmaintained single lane that cut through white-daubed woods.

  The plow truck would have to clear the way, but that would be no problem, and the vehicle’s prow began its work, pushing piles of snow off the lane into mounds on its shoulders.

  And for a while the plow truck did all right, creating its own path, with snow-heavy trees on either side of the narrow lane. Then the vehicle came to a sudden, unintended stop, its oversize tires spinning as the engine roared like a wounded beast. Irritated, the Russian swung down from the cab to see what the hell the problem was…

  What he saw turned irritation into anger: The plow had cracked, from the effort of shoving that white Ford off the road, and now had sheered off. He cursed in his native tongue, voice echoing through the surrounding trees, another wounded beast complaining to a disinterested God.

  When Mulder emerged from the hole created in the snow by the Taurus, cold, exhausted, the blood on his face frozen, he stumbled to the roadside and leaned gloved hands on his knees, catching his breath. The country road stretched with an apparent emptiness in either direction that could not be confirmed because of the snow blowing across. He knew that the way he’d come from offered nothing but that little bump-in-the-road town, Christ knew how many miles back. So he headed in the other direction, hoping a car might happen along.

  But as he walked, the snowfall grew heavier and the wind got uglier. Staying on the road meant Mulder had to move sideways against the wind and weather, leaving him barely able to see, and his face was starting to get frostbitten.

  He had faced many dangerous situations in his years as an agent dealing with X-Files cases. He had encountered monsters human and otherwise, and he had been marked for death by government conspirators, and he had faced not only death but bizarre variations upon its fatal theme that no other human being on the planet had survived, and yet here he was, about to freeze to death on a country road in rural Virginia.

  When he came to the unmaintained lane that shot off in and through the woods, Mulder had no way to know that this was where his assailant, the Russian Janke Dacyshyn, had pulled in the plow truck—all Mulder could see was the part of the road that the truck had successfully plowed before it got stuck, the vehicle well out of sight from where Mulder stood, as he surveyed the fresh snowfall on what appeared to be a recently plowed path.

  Mulder did consider that the plow truck that had pushed his Taurus off the road might well have plowed this lane, but not necessarily. This country road he was walking down (up?) was major enough that someone would surely come along eventually; suffering the effects of the cold as he was, he knew he should not venture into the darkness of that lane going into those darker woods.

  So he chose the relative safety of the country road and again began to walk. For some reason, he remembered one time when he and Scully had been at a crossroads—turn right or left down a major road, that had been the question.

  But Mulder had instead gone straight through, onto a lesser traveled lane, and that was where they had found the answer they’d sought.

  So he turned around, a frozen figure somehow walking, and started down the dark lane.

  Through the darker woods.

  The Compound

  Rural Virginia

  January 12

  Bright light hit her face, startling Cheryl Cunningham awake, and the sudden illumination similarly disturbed the dogs in nearby cages, who began to bark and yap. Cheryl moved to a round hole in her wooden box and saw the male medical assistant holding the plastic curtain back for the female assistant to enter the kennel with him, letting in even more of the bright light from the room where they worked amid machines and laboratory equipment.

  Cheryl shrank back as the male assistant unlocked and opened the door of the wooden cage. The man’s hands reached in, and Cheryl could see the woman readying a hypodermic needle, giving it a little test squirt, and Cheryl knew just who that needle was for…

  “No! Get away from me! Don’t…”<
br />
  The male medical attendant’s hands were on the sleeves of the dirty hospital gown now, clutching at her.

  “Don’t touch me! Don’t you touch me!”

  The man and woman were conversing in Russian, unconcerned by her protests, their discussion purely clinical, as the shrieking Cheryl was pulled to the mouth of the cage, where the female jabbed her with the needle.

  Within seconds, Cheryl had gone both silent and limp, and the man and the woman in hospital white lifted her by either arm to haul her toward the brightness beyond the plastic curtain.

  Rural Virginia

  January 12

  Mulder had two thoughts.

  First, he thought he probably had made a mistake going down this dark wooded lane and ought to turn around and go back. Second, he wondered if he couldn’t just find a nice tree to rest underneath and maybe catch a little nap. That second thought, for a while, had inspired a third: You’ll never wake up. But that third thought had faded about ten minutes ago.

  Then he saw something that made him freeze and the weather had nothing to do with it: Up ahead, in the middle of the lane, was the plow truck.

  And now he ran. Seconds ago the notion of running would have seemed absurd, even abstract. Now he ran like a track star, pumping with adrenaline, and all the snow and cold in the world couldn’t slow him.

  That plow truck, no lights on, sat about a football field’s length ahead of him, an ungainly silhouette in a night lit only by a partial moon obscured by clouds. With no thought for safety, he ran right up to the driver’s side, without considering what trouble he might have been in had the driver been there, not a concern in his frostbitten, battered, exhausted state, the adrenaline still doing its job.

  But the cab appeared empty, an opinion verified when Mulder yanked open the door. That was when Mulder began to think he should take some care, in case Janke was lurking, and took perhaps a minute going all around the stuck vehicle and even letting his eyes search nearby trees not for a possible resting place, rather for any sign of the MIA brute.

  The Russian did not seem to be anywhere around, although the evidence of where he’d gone was apparent: Footsteps led off in the fresh snow into the darkness. Mulder’s first impulse was to follow them.

  His second and overriding impulse sent him back to the cab, where he rummaged around until he found a suitable weapon. Then, and only then, tire iron in hand, did Mulder follow the footprints into the dark.

  The Compound

  Rural Virginia

  January 12

  In the operating room, Janke Dacyshyn—dressed in a medical gown and cap—hovered over the person he cared about most in the world, Franz Tomczeszyn, who lay on a gurney under a white sheet, head exposed, under the bright light of a surgeon’s lamp.

  Janke leaned near the other man’s right ear and whispered lovingly to him, reassuring him, telling him in Russian, “It will all be okay, Franz. We will be together. We will be together.”

  Barely Franz whispered, “I am afraid…”

  “We are not going to let you die.”

  The male and female medical assistants rolled in the gurney bearing the unconscious Cheryl Cunningham, still wearing her soiled hospital gown, guiding it past Janke and the supine Franz and on to the gaunt doctor, who, in surgical scrubs, was taking a temperature.

  The old doctor was not taking the temperature of a patient, however: He was testing the water in a large plastic tub filled with slushy ice.

  Then the gaunt doctor turned to his two assistants and gave them stern, crisp orders in Russian as they conveyed Cheryl Cunningham from the gurney to the tub of murky cold slush, stripped her soiled hospital gown from her flesh, and put her carefully down in it, making sure her head was elevated from her body so that she could breathe.

  Heavily sedated though she was, Cheryl reacted at the extreme cold, sitting up; but the male and female assistant forced her back down, immersing her in the slush, but for her head, of course.

  The tall, gaunt doctor, who had seemed compassionate to Cheryl, had nothing in his expression now except businesslike determination. He moved to the gurney where Franz awaited and lifted the sheet back off, revealing sutures on his patient’s neck, a line of demarcation between the man’s head above and the woman’s body below.

  Monica Bannan’s body was still alive, but only technically. Her flesh was a discolored gray, the life draining out of it: The woman’s body beneath the thick, dark sutures binding it to the man’s head was dying.

  The gaunt doctor began to snip the sutures. The procedure was about to begin. That is, it would begin as soon as the remnants of their first failed attempt were removed and discarded—the headless body of a female FBI agent.

  Mulder’s footfalls crunched in the untrammeled snow, lightly powdered with fresh snowfall, as he followed the Russian’s path to a clearing.

  He could see an odd arrangement of structures up ahead. Beyond a chain-link fence, in the jaundiced cast of dim, yellow exterior lighting courtesy of a humming generator, yawned an ungainly, cobbled-together…what? Building? Facility?

  Mulder counted four weathered-looking mobile homes side by side with makeshift plywood structures added on, remote from civilization, but up to something…

  Staying low, tire iron at the ready, he moved closer.

  His thick surgeon’s glasses magnifying his eyes grotesquely, the tall, gaunt doctor focused intensely on his work, his scalpel poised at the neck of Franz Tomczeszyn. In Russian, he asked his female assistant for a tool and she handed him tongs, the sutured artery he was working on reflected in his glasses.

  Janke Dacyshyn, looking like another medical assistant in the gown and cap but really just intruding on the doctor’s space, leaned in over Franz on the gurney and again whispered in urgent Russian: “You are going to live, Franz. You are going to have a fine, strong body again…the body you have always dreamed of…”

  Franz weakly tried to respond, but the gaunt doctor—no sign of kindliness now—snapped at them in Russian, and the burly Janke backed off like a scolded child. As if by way of consolation, Janke sent his eyes to the tub of slush where the sedated Cheryl Cunningham was nakedly immersed, and considered the “fine, strong body” he’d been referring to.

  And right now Cheryl was being prepared, the male assistant painting a collar of yellow iodine around her neck, indicating the precise spot where her head would be surgically removed.

  Mulder climbed the fence, his coat and gloves protecting him from the upper layer of barbed wire, and dropped in relative silence to the snow on the inner ground outside the makeshift facility. Keeping low, he crept toward the trailers at the center of the fenced-off area. Movement behind him startled him, and he turned and saw the dark silhouette of a dog.

  The animal was growling. So was another dog, apparently nearby, but Mulder saw only the one beast, and he was thinking of heading back for the fence when the creature charged at him, more a dark shape than anything real, but the vicious growling, coming at him in stereo, seemed real enough. But where was the second dog?

  He braced himself for the attack as the animal, running low and fast, came at him full speed, leaving the ground to go for Mulder’s throat, and when the dog made its leap, it passed through yellow light and Mulder saw not one but two heads on the creature, two saliva-spitting, teeth-gnashing heads on a single canine body.

  In the operating room, the gaunt doctor—his magnified eyes focused intensely on the scalpel at Franz Tomczeszyn’s neck—was startled by the sound of barking dogs. The barking came from outside the building but set off an immediate chain reaction of noisy animals in the adjacent kennel, and the doctor screamed orders in Russian. His two assistants came immediately to his side.

  Then, to Janke Dacyshyn, he said in Russian, “You expect me to perform miracles in this madhouse! Do something!”

  Janke moved quickly from the operating room, through the curtain and into the kennel, while the gaunt doctor went to the plastic tub where waited Chery
l Cunningham, her inert body only faintly visible in the murky slush, though the painted yellow iodine at her neck was plain to see.

  The doctor touched her neck with his scalpel.

  In the meantime, Janke had rushed out a door into the cold air of the fenced-in compound, eyes searching the yellow-tinged night for the source of the commotion. The Russian, still in his medical gown and cap, could hear nothing, and saw nothing of note until finally his gaze landed on something brown and bulky over by the fence line.

  The Russian moved toward the shape until finally it became the brown coat that that FBI agent had been wearing! As he grew closer, he could see that the cloth was torn, ripped, and Janke figured one of the animals had got hold of the intruder.

  This assumption was borne out by the heaving shape in the snow that was a bloody, badly injured dog. The creature was literally half dead, one head panting, the other with its skull bashed in.

  The Russian could make out a trail of blood leading away from the fallen creature, footsteps apparent in the snow, heading toward the facility. He retraced the intruder’s path around the corner of the trailers, and they disappeared, blending into a muddy footpath.

  No sign of the intruder anywhere within the fenced-in area. But Janke would find him.

  And finish the job the two-headed beast had started.

  Chapter 15

  Rural Virginia

  January 12

  A tow truck was winching the battered white Taurus up out of the creek bed when the black Expedition came up the country road fast and pulled into a stop behind a police cruiser, whose light bar was painting white banks red and blue, like snow cones drizzled with bright syrup. But there was nothing festive about this grim scene.