Charles Grant - Whirlwind

"Cults?"

They left the trees behind, and he felt the temperature already beginning to rise. Scully was still in her lawn chair; she was alone.

"What kind of cults you want, Mulder? We have New Age swamis communing in the desert. We have the Second Coming believers who wander around the mountains and then use their cellulars when they get lost. And we have the flying saucer nuts, who figure Roswell is the key to all intergalactic understanding." A sideways glance Mulder didn't miss. "That's kind of your territory, isn't it?"

The only answer was a noncommittal grunt, and Garson was smart enough to leave it alone.

Scully stood as they approached, a brief shake of her head when he looked her a question. At that moment he couldn't help a yawn, and turned away so the pale face in the trailer window couldn't see him.

He hoped he had been quick enough.

The one thing Mary Deven didn't need now was the sight of an FBI agent yawning at the site of her only son's murder.

Garson saw it, though. "We're going back” he told them both, not giving them an option to refuse. "You two get something to eat and get some sleep, or you're going to be worthless tomorrow."

"Why? What's tomorrow?"

He touched his hat brim. "Tomorrow, my friend, you're going to meet a genuine movie star”

Mulder couldn't sleep.

After a slow, almost lethargic dinner, he listened as Scully told him about the interview with the girl, which hadn't told her anything new, Patty had seen even less than her statement had implied. Almost as soon as the attack began, the branch club her brother had been holding spiraled out of the dark and struck her on the side of the face. She had fallen, dazed, and in that state thought she might have heard someone whispering, someone else laughing.

But it was all too muddled, and she had passed out shortly afterward. It was her father who had found the body.

"No ghosts, Scully," Mulder had said, walking her back to her room. "We're dealing with people here."

"You sound disappointed."

He hadn't answered then, and he had no answer now as he put on a jacket and left the room, glad now that he had listened to Garson— despite the day's heat, the desert was downright cold at night.

He walked through a short passageway between the rooms and the main building, and paused.

The back was a garden of cacti and now-closed desert flowers set in random circles ringed by stone, as it was in front. Stone paths wound between them and joined at the back to lead to a half-dozen benches that faced the river. Cottonwoods and willows were illuminated by miniature lanterns hanging amid their leaves, leaving patches of lazy shifting light on the ground.

He wasn't sure, but he thought he smelled honeysuckle.

When he was sure he was alone, he sat on one of the benches and watched what little water there was flow past his feet, electric lanterns on metal riverbank poles glowing just enough to turn the dark to gray.

The moon was out.

He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and watched it for a while, thinking of nothing in particular until a slip of a cloud gave the moon a face.

Patty Deven, or her mother, adrift in a darkness they would never be able to escape. Pale, only shadows for expression, only hints of what used to be behind their smiles.

It was an all too easy, and all too painful, jump from there to his sister, gone too many years now. Taken when she was eight, by someone, or something, hiding behind the glare of a light that even now he couldn't think about without shuddering, or squinting to shut it out.

To try to see what was behind it.

That was the foundation of his pursuit of the truths buried somewhere within the X-Files.

He looked away from the moon and wiped a hand over his face, then absently rubbed the back of his neck.

He would find Samantha, there was no question about it; until then, however, the best he could do would be to find the men who had murdered Patty's brother.

Again his hand passed over his face. When it slipped into its jacket pocket, though, a brief smile was left behind.

Tm okay” he said, shifting over to make room for Scully. "Just thinking."

"Out here, that'll get you pneumonia."

"Is that a doctor's truth thing?"

She stretched out her legs, folded her hands on her stomach. "No, it's cold, that's what it is. God, Mulder, why can't you ever have a mood someplace warm?"

They said nothing else for a long time, watching the river, listening to the rustle of the trees, once in a while listening to a dog bark or a car roar past the Inn. For a while the garden filled with diners having after-dinner drinks as they strolled among the garden islands, conversation soft, laughter sometimes loud; for a while the evening breeze stopped, and they couldn't hear a thing but their own breathing.

Then Mulder said, "Scully, has it occurred to you that maybe the people who mutilated those cows weren't the ones who killed Patty's brother and that couple?"

"No," she said at last. She looked over. "Why?"

"The history, Scully, the history. Animal mutilations of this sort aren't usually tied to murder. Particularly not brutal ones like these. The animals are assaulted, not people."

He watched her carefully as she looked away. He'd only been thinking aloud, but once the thought had been voiced, he had to make sure.

"No," she repeated with a slow shake of her head. "Whatever was used, however it was done, the timing's too close, the similarities too great. From what we've been told." She shifted uneasily. "I'll know more when I speak to the ME., but…" She shook her head again. "No." A quick smile.

"Besides, aren't you the one who told me that there are coincidences, and then there are coincidences? One is real, the other only an illusion?"

He returned the smile. "Yep."

"Okay. Well, this is no real coincidence, Mulder. The brutality itself is a strong indication of that. All we need to do is find the connection."

"Right. All we need to do."

"Then think about this, Scully," he said quietly. "Why? What's so damn important out here that both cattle and kids have to die?"

She didn't respond; he hadn't expected her to.

But he had a strong feeling, an unpleasant one, that whatever answer they finally uncovered, it would be one neither of them would like.

In the middle of the desert, they had been dropped into a nightmare.

"I am not crazy!" Mike Ostrand insisted from his hospital bed. He glared at Sheriff Sparrow, who returned the look without expression. "I did not imagine the accident. I did not imagine this goddamn cast on my goddamn arm. I did not imagine my brand-new car flipped over and left me hanging there like a goddamn Peking duck!"

Sparrow was patient.

"Okay." Ostrand shifted uncomfortably, lips pulling away from his teeth in a grimace. "Okay.

So I was a little drunk, I admit it. But that's not why I crashed."

"No, you crashed because some kind of mysterious vehicle, so low you couldn't see it out your window, deliberately forced you off the road."

Ostrand looked at him angrily. "That's right."

"And then it tried to kill you when you were hanging from your seatbelt."

The artist shrugged, winced at the pain that exploded in his shoulder, and sighed capitulation. "Okay, okay, so it was a stupid coyote, okay? So I was so damn scared it scared the hell out of me. It would have scared anybody. But it wasn't a coyote that ran me off the damn road!"

"Good." Sparrow nodded sharply. "Now we're getting somewhere." He glanced down at the small notepad he held in his left hand, chewed on the eraser end of his pencil for a moment, and said, "Now, about that invisible vehicle…"

The Coronado Bar was unoriginal in both name and decor. As Bernalillo inexorably changed from an outpost on the Rio Grande into an Albuquerque bedroom community, the Coronado just as stubbornly refused to change with it. A long bar on the right-hand wall, tables and booths everywhere else, and a jukebox that muttered country-western all day long. The TV on the wall in back never played anything but sports, minor league baseball tonight from Southern California. Smoke and liquor in the air, as many cigarette butts on the bare floor as in the aluminum ashtrays. It catered neither to the tourists nor the newcomers, and didn't much care that business didn't boom. It did well enough, which was well enough for its regulars.