*Fourteen*
"Mulder!" Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. "Are you in there?"
The door opened a crack, and a squinting eye peered out warily. "Gimme a second." Rustle, rustle. Zip. Clothing noises. I could not believe it – I know I'd told him to go home, but I meant alone. I thought he might suffer a little for failing to kiss me. Where does Mulder find these girls anyway?
He unlocked the chain and casually opened the door. I started to tell him why I was there, but he interrupted – "Scully, am I glad to see you."
"Why's that?" I asked, more perplexed than I let on.
"We're going back to Iowa."
"That's what I came to tell you – how did you know?"
He frowned. "How did I know – how did you know?"
"What?"
"I thought it was my idea. We're going to save the world."
Now I frowned. It's okay, Dana, he's prone to these sudden changes of mood. I handed him the plane tickets and explained that we'd been assigned to investigate a case that seemed somehow related to the murder. The AD had been vague about what constituted ‘somehow related,' but when he started saying words like ‘abduction,' I knew Mulder would leap at the chance to tie the whole thing together, however he was planning to do it.
Several Hours Later
I elaborated on my explanation on the plane. "Ten people. Six men, four women. They claim they were called to the Hayes/Jones residence shortly after midnight last night, Central Standard Time. ‘Called' in the sense that they awoke feeling an inherent compulsion to go there," I summarised. "Seven of the ten do not recall anything between arriving there and finding themselves back in their homes, but can all verify that there was a time loss of approximately nine minutes."
"There, what does that tell you about alien abduction statistics?" asked Mulder. "Only thirty per cent of the occurrences ever get out."
"That's a bit of an extrapolation, don't you think?" I flipped through the file.
"What did the three have to say?"
"After reporting the incident, they were individually questioned by authorities. They recalled bright lights, a sense of weightlessness, and the ensuing feeling that they were being operated on. Being injected with substances they could not identify."
"Have they been examined?"
"Yes. Each of the ten people had a small implant in the back of his or her neck, an unidentifiable metallic substance – " a look of alarm crossed Mulder's face, recalling the implant in my neck after I was abducted, and the onset of my cancer after it was removed – "found by X-Ray and not yet removed from any of them." He sighed, relieved. "It stands to reason that they were injected with something, although no needle marks were found, as a biological substance was discovered in their blood. This substance too had been labelled ‘unable to be classified' as of yet, but what we're not supposed to know ... is that it appears to be genetically altered blood."
"How do we know what we're not supposed to know?"
I smiled. "We dug a little deeper in search of the truth."
He smiled back at me. "Scully, you doll ... "
We arrived in Fort Dodge and reported to local authorities. Sheriff Carrie greeted us, chuckling, "Now aliens is where I draw the line." He was as sure as I was that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for these events – which is not to say we were entirely positive, just that we had a similar degree of skepticism. The abductees told us nothing new, but certainly put a lot of emotion into the recounting of their stories. On paper, the details seemed remarkable similar to my abduction and the multiple abductions of Cassandra Spender, but I soon realised that there are many kinds of lights, many kinds of tiny metal implants, and many other kinds of incongruities. I decided I'd best keep to myself my theory that the people of Fort Dodge were having a little trouble dealing with the fact that their fifteen minutes were up, and had thus staged an elaborate hoax. So here we were, indulging them.
Mulder was looking restless and unsatisfied with our findings. He told me to book our motel rooms (saying ‘room' in a stumble before adding the ‘s'), and then went off for a drive.
the rest