The X-Files: I Want to Believe Page 7

  Glumly, Mulder said to Whitney, “You’re going to need resources.”

  The dejection in Mulder’s voice was in Agent Whitney’s expression, too. This might not be Monica Bannan, true. But it might be. In fact, Scully knew, it probably was…

  Whitney was snapping into action, however downcast she felt, yelling, “We need equipment! Concrete saws and a backhoe. I need forensics out here ASAP…”

  The agents were rushing now, scurrying back to the road and the waiting vehicles. In the midst of this, Mulder stood motionless. Scully wanted to comfort him, but after the words that had been exchanged, she wasn’t sure how to handle it.

  When he started off toward the road and her car, she didn’t fall in with him. She could tell he wanted to be alone.

  That was when she realized, to her jolting discomfort, that Father Joe was standing right next to her.

  His eyes were fixed upon her, unblinking.

  She said nothing, her upper lip peeled back over her teeth, feeling well and truly creeped out. She experienced a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold, and then this defiler of young boys spoke to her, his words coming as if from a distant place.

  “Don’t give up,” he told her.

  He continued to stare at her, and somehow she knew this, at least, was not an act. No affectation touched the concern in those unblinking, seemingly selfless eyes.

  She said nothing.

  Frankly rattled, she turned and strode off and then jogged a little, to catch up with Mulder.

  Twice she glanced back at the priest.

  He stood there pinned against the sky, as motionless as Lot’s Wife.

  Still staring.

  At her.

  Chapter 7

  Rural Virginia

  January 11

  In that no-man’s-land after midnight and before dawn, the country road threading through snow-packed terrain, reduced by weather to a single lane, could be a singularly lonely stretch. Many minutes, even an hour, might go by before a vehicle risked passage. Two A.M. was approaching when the old three-quarter-ton pickup truck with its oversize tires and mounted steel plow came rumbling along like a beast whose hide was too tough to be bothered by a little thing like inclement conditions.

  This vehicle, which hours before had run a woman’s small car off the road into the snow, made its way up a slope; then the driver stopped it right there—nowhere to pull off, really—and climbed from the cab. He was warm in his down-lined canvas coat and jeans and heavy boots, his hair long and dark and greasy, his features angular, a distinctive if harsh-looking man whose visage had inspired two women at two different times, linked only by the threat he had been to each, to flash on the same descriptive thought: Rasputin.

  His name, of course, was not Rasputin, though he was indeed Russian. This cold weather was nothing to him as he moved around to the back of the truck and hauled off a bulky plastic garbage bag. Earlier he had wrapped a young woman up in a black tarp—this cargo was something else again, though even at a glance the heavy plastic bag seemed filled with unsettling shapes, as if he had spent his afternoon collecting debris from a battlefield.

  As he dragged the bulky bag, his hands, despite the chill, were bare and strangely blistered, one freshly cut. Effortlessly he dragged his freight uphill, trudging through the depth of accumulation, steady in his pace. When he crested the hill, however, he pulled back immediately.

  Down there, mostly in black jackets labeled FBI in bright yellow, was a search team. The group, moving in a direction that put the Russian to their backs, included former agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, though of course the Russian did not know this, and even if he had, their significance would have been lost on him. His reaction to this official presence, though, was almost childish in nature: He cursed in Russian, kicked at the snow, and spit a wad of phlegm into a bank by way of expressing his displeasure.

  Had the FBI team encountered the Russian, their case might have come quickly to a head. But they did not. They did not see the large, threatening figure whose sharp-featured, dead-eyed face held an ugly malevolence mirroring his inner self.

  Cursing again, the Russian turned and headed back to his plow truck, dragging the heavy plastic bag after him, like a singularly sinister Santa Claus. No one saw him go. No other vehicle had come along this snow-lined lane. He was alone in a bleakness washed blue by moonlight.

  And when he roared off in his truck into the darkness, no one heard, except perhaps the FBI team over the hill, perceiving it as a distant, unimportant signal that life went on even after a blizzard. Life going on, though, wasn’t in this instance exactly right…

  Before long the plow truck approached a chain-link fence enclosing an oddly patched-together compound consisting of four well-worn mobile homes standing side-by-side with makeshift plywood structures tacked on, like something survivors had slapped together, post-Apocalypse. Dogs were barking indoors, stirred by the truck’s arrival. The Russian jumped down from the cab, the truck motor’s mountain-lion purr driving the dogs wild, and he quickly unlocked and opened a metal gate.

  Somewhere within the facility, Cheryl Cunningham was still trying to define the boundaries of her limited, and terrifying, new world. Upon awakening—and she did not remember exactly when she had lost consciousness—the first thing she’d realized was that her clothing had been replaced with a white garment that she supposed was a medical gown. They had left her only her own socks.

  Cheryl was in a wooden box or crate of some kind, not tiny, but not large enough to stand up in; the wood itself smelled new, plywood banged together to create this compact cell, with occasional round holes drilled to let in light and air, the way she had, as a girl, punched screwdriver holes in the aluminum foil over jars she’d kept captured fireflies in.

  Her hair askew, her ears filled with the cacophony of dogs barking over one another, she was sitting on her side, leaning at one these holes, trying to get a sense of where she was, her breath heaving with the uncertainty of her position, her eyes wide with fear. Not seeing a part of the puzzle that told her anything much, she moved to another hole, through which she could see other cages, not wooden ones like hers, but rusted metal rectangular boxes with bars for walls—holding cages, and here was the source of the barking: excited dogs, snapping at nothing, eyes wild, spittle flecking.

  Pit bulls.

  She scooched on wood to another hole within her own cage. A wall of plastic, as you might see in a walk-in meat locker, separated this kennel from a bright room behind; through the plastic, indistinct figures moved, shadows swimming.

  “Let me out of here!” she cried. She was already hoarse. She’d been at this awhile. “Please! Let me out!”

  But the vague figures behind the sheet of plastic showed no reaction, no sign they’d heard her at all.

  “I’m cold…please…”

  A figure pushed through the plastic curtain. At first all she saw was the white hospital gown and surgical cap and gray trousers and black shoes. Then the figure, a tall, skinny man, approached, and his well-grooved, high cheekboned, gaunt face came into view, with its wide-set eyes, hooked nose, and sharp chin. He was older, in his sixties anyway, but his expression was not unkind.

  For the first time, in these dire, bizarre circumstances, she felt a twinge of hope.

  A younger man also in a hospital gown and cap slipped through the plastic wall and joined the gaunt doctor; they spoke to each other in a language Cheryl didn’t know but thought might be Russian. They would glance her way, point at her.

  But when she tried to get the attention of these two apparent medical men who were discussing her, she might have been invisible.

  “Please! Let me out of here!”

  Nothing.

  Finally a woman emerged from behind the plastic, also in a medical gown and cap; she was carrying a blanket. The gaunt doctor took the blanket from her, with a nod and a little smile, then moved over to Cheryl’s cage, and knelt as if talking to a child or one of the caged dogs
(who were settling down, some).

  He spoke to her, and his tone was gentle, even comforting; but his Russian was Greek to her.

  “Help me, please,” she said. She latched on to those caring eyes and didn’t let go. “I don’t want to die!”

  He said something else in his kindly, incomprehensible way, and began to stuff the blanket in through a hole above her, a larger one than the little round ones she’d been spying out, this bigger aperture probably where food could be slid in.

  “Please…”

  The gaunt doctor said something meant to be reassuring, in that same language that was probably Russian. Then he gave her a country-doctor smile and got to his feet and turned and walked toward the plastic curtain, to disappear into the brightness behind it, becoming just another shadowy shape.

  The man and woman in hospital gowns remained on Cheryl’s side of the curtain, and approached her cage. She could hear the man unlocking something. The woman was helping.

  Were they letting her go?

  “I won’t tell anyone,” Cheryl said, her words tumbling on top of one another. “Just let me go…no one will ever know…”

  But they hadn’t unlocked her cage, rather some mechanism that allowed the pair to roll the entire box along, on wheels, removing her from the kennel, where the dogs had pretty much settled down now. After a few startled moments, Cheryl took advantage of the unexpected trip she was taking to see more of her surroundings, her eye at a drilled hole like a kid watching a ball game through a knothole in a fence.

  But even as she watched, Cheryl pleaded: “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Let me go and I won’t give you any trouble…I swear…”

  They were pushing her through the plastic curtain now, giving her glimpses as they glided by of lab equipment, gauges and dials for measuring…what?

  Then the rolling stopped.

  The woman—was she another doctor, or a nurse?—swung Cheryl’s box around to position it. And though the dogs had stopped barking, some humans were doing their equivalent, a commotion in progress in here, an argument going on in that same foreign language.

  Cheryl maneuvered to another spy hole and was not surprised to see the stringy-haired creep who’d kidnapped her, yelling at the gaunt doctor, clearly upset with the older man. The kinder, gentler of her captors just stood there and took it placidly as Rasputin angrily berated him.

  She moved to another of the circular holes, seeking a better angle, and saw something that made her catch her breath: a man right next to her!

  Or perhaps another captive, or maybe a patient, because he was on his back on a gurney under a sheet, only his head exposed. Cheryl had never seen the man before; but the other young woman who had been abducted, Monica Bannan, would have recognized him, because this “patient” bore the jagged, clawlike cut from her gardening tool on his right cheek.

  To Cheryl, however, he seemed a potential ally. His face, though rugged, was softened by light-colored, almost feminine eyes.

  And those eyes turned to her and returned her stare.

  She whispered: “Please…let me out…and I’ll help you…”

  His eyelids, his long lashes, fluttered as he apparently tried to bring Cheryl into focus; his lips moved, too. But nothing came out.

  “Get up off that thing,” she whispered. “You have to get up and help me…”

  The argument in the background continued in what she was now convinced was Russian. The older doctor was finally responding to the belligerent Rasputin in a stern, reasonable voice.

  “Please,” she said to the figure on the gurney, her eyes pleading as much as her voice.

  He tried to get up, or anyway to Cheryl it seemed that way. And he kept trying to speak, but somehow words wouldn’t come, no matter how hard he tried. She could see, in those pretty eyes, distress. Pain. Surely he, too, was a victim.

  And that meant he would be no help.

  She could feel tears on the way, but then he beat her to it.

  The face above the white sheet contorted in sorrow and he began to cry. To weep, sending tears rolling down his cheeks dripping onto the whiteness of the sheet, dotting it with red.

  The patient was shedding tears of blood.

  And Cheryl Cunningham, a captive facing God knew what, discovered that after all of it—Rasputin, the struggle, the dogs, the cage, the mysterious medicos—she still had the capacity to feel a deeper strain of terror.

  Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital

  Richmond, Virginia

  January 11

  White coats sat around the conference room table intermingled with the suits and ties of hospital administrators. The atmosphere was businesslike. A discussion might have been under way to consider new policies, perhaps whether to remodel the cafeteria or expand visiting hours or maybe explore where a new charitable donation might best be spent.

  But this was a discussion of an entirely different sort, which Dana Scully, just getting her lab coat on over her gray sweater and skirt, quickly gathered, coming in on the middle of a sentence.

  Father Ybarra was saying, “…can resolve, then, in good conscience and without objection, to relocate this patient to a facility better suited for and humane to his condition?”

  Taking a moment to compose herself, eyes searching out an empty seat, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  The skeletal Ybarra’s somber face took on an uncharacteristic frown of impatience as Scully settled into a chair. “As you and I discussed, Dr. Scully, I was informing the staff and doctors of the hospital’s decision on Christian Fearon.”

  She squinted at him, as if trying to pull him into focus. “What decision?”

  Impatience turned to petulance. “To remove your patient to a hospice that will manage his palliative care…”

  She half smiled, her incredulity at his presumptuous behavior apparent to everyone in the room, including of course Ybarra himself. “That was a discussion, Father. Not a decision.”

  The priest shrugged, then gestured to the men and women around him. “Well, it’s been discussed here at length, and with no objection from your colleagues.”

  “All well and good,” she said. “But I have an objection.”

  Ybarra closed his eyes. He opened them. He said, “You have, Dr. Scully, a patient with an untreatable condition. You requested outside consultation, and we sought and provided it, and that expert opinion mirrors our own. It is a sad situation, and unfortunate—no one disagrees with that.”

  “But he’s my patient.”

  Ybarra’s eyes narrowed in the long, solemn face. “Unless you’ve come here today with a cure for Sandhoff disease, we all respectfully request that you just let this boy go in peace.”

  She felt a flush of red. But she could make no reasonable objection. Logical, empirical evidence was against her.

  Ybarra smiled, barely. He nodded to her. “Thank you, Dr. Scully. I’d like to wrap this up so we can get to the day’s good work ahead of us. We have the final matter of a patient in intensive care. Dr. Willar’s patient, I believe…”

  As Ybarra led a discussion on this new subject, Scully sat in angry silence, the words around her a blur in her ears.

  Finally she said, “There is a treatment.”

  Scully had interrupted the hospital’s top administrator in midsentence, and Ybarra turned to her, stunned by her rudeness and dumbfounded by her assertion. The looks on the other faces around this table seemed to support Ybarra’s diagnosis.

  “Dr. Scully,” Ybarra said, in a gentle tone that nonetheless had a certain edge, “this matter is resolved.”

  “With all due respect, Father, it’s not. This disease can be treated with intercostal stem cell therapy.”

  A doctor across from Scully, a female colleague who’d always been supportive in the past, wore an accusatory expression. “Don’t put a boy that age through hell, Dana…”

  “Would you do it, Anna, if it were your son?”

  The blonde doctor did not reply.

  Ybarra sa
id, “Well, it isn’t her son. And he’s not yours, either, Dr. Scully. He is just another patient…”

  The father must have known he’d slipped, and seemed about to correct himself, but Scully beat him to it: “Is there such a thing, Father? As ‘just another patient’? I hope not.”

  “Doctor…”

  “This is not a decision for hospital administration. It’s his doctor’s decision. You all know that.”

  She stood, working to conceal two things: her anger and her fear. Maintaining perfect professional poise, she said, “If you want to challenge that, I’d suggest you take the matter to a higher authority.”

  God for example, she thought.

  But Ybarra had had the same thought, making her pause at the door with his words: “I have taken it up with the highest authority, Dr. Scully. As should you.”

  She did not reply, turning and leaving. But in the corridor she felt shaken by the priest’s words.

  Not that it made her any less resolute.

  Chapter 8

  J. Edgar Hoover Building

  Washington, D.C.

  January 11

  The giant block of ice held assorted body parts, as if floating only to be caught in amber, distinct shapes despite the cloudy view, and might have been a grotesque work of surrealistic art, a fancy of Salvador Dali, perhaps, in a particularly Hieronymus Bosch–influenced mood.

  But this bizarre sculpture hung suspended not in an art museum, rather in the FBI forensics lab, and was not really a sculpture at all, though it did represent the work of man in collaboration with nature, both at their harshest. The ice obelisk had been suspended from ceiling girders by block and tackle, held off the floor over a large drain by thick chains. And now a team of techs was at work on a grisly mission of recovery, painstakingly removing body parts, a head here, a forearm there, a foot, a torso, a hand, a leg from hip to knee…