| “You’ll freeze out there. Go change our of your pajamas and we’ll go when you come back down.” Piper ran upstairs. A few minutes later, she was in Jeans and a sweatshirt. She grabbed her jacket from a chair and yelled good bye to her father. She began walking out the door when she heard her father enter the parlor. “Piper, where are you going?” “Erin’s missing. I’m going to find her. I’ll call you later.” Piper hugged her father and walked out the door after Mulder. They drove to the lab in silence. Piper ran into Scully’s arms and they hugged for a few seconds. Mulder took a seat on a stool nearby and waited. When they finished embracing, Scully leaned against the wall and Piper took a seat on a chair. “Piper, on the phone you said something about a smoking man. What did you mean by that?” Scully asked her. Scully looked over to Mulder who knew what she was getting at. So many times they had met up with a man whom they knew only as the Cigarette Smoking Man. He seemed to pop up just when evidence came into the clutched of Mulder and Scully. “Well, it was about three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. I went to my bathroom window, which looks out to the front, and I noticed two cars outside. One of them drove off soon after I spotted it. In the other car there was a man smoking a cigarette.” Piper explained. “I don’t understand what this has to do with Erin, though.” “Piper, along our paths of investigating, we’ve come upon many people who have tried to slow us down when we come to a key point in our career. Every time we had evidence of aliens in our hands, someone took it away. These groups of people all seemed to work under one man. We don’t know his name but he goes by the Cigarette Smoking Man.” Mulder explained. “Do you think that’s who I saw?” Piper asked. “Someone is behind this, Piper. Someone who wants to destroy either our work or you or Erin or all three of us. But we will find Erin and she will be okay.” Scully said. “Why take her and not me? I was the one closest to the alien. Why not take me?” “Maybe they need you, Piper.” Scully said. Mulder thought for a moment. “Maybe it has something to do with your back yard.” “What do you mean, Mulder?” Scully asked. “Piper, you said something came over you back there. What causes wood to act like it’s glued together? What makes a crow die of unnatural causes but causes that we can’t figure out? What makes a teenage girl have a spell? What causes an alien to show up in someone’s back yard?” Mulder said. “What causes a grown man to fight with a teenage girl?” Piper asked sarcastically. “Mulder, those are questions that no one can answer.” Scully said. “No…someone can answer them. It’s just the question of who and I bet it’s the same person who took Erin.” “Yea…speaking of Erin. What are people saying when you come at them for not having the agents outside that you requested?” Piper asked. “They say we never asked agents to be out there.” Mulder confessed. “How can they deny something like that?” Piper asked. “They told us we didn’t need any paperwork here in Rhode Island, unlike DC when you need paperwork for everything. They don’t have us on record for asking for agents to survaill yours or Erin’s house.” Scully explained. “So basically, there’s no evidence, there’s no sightings of Erin, and there’s nothing we can do? Yea, this is a great case.” Piper said. “It’s two days to the new millennium. I’m having a huge party at my house but it won’t go on without Erin.” “We will find her, Piper.” Scully said. “We just have to wait.” “I’m tired of waiting!” Piper yelled. She knew that she shouldn’t have involved Erin from the beginning but Erin had begged to be in the loop. Piper thought to Max, who had known about the entire thing from the beginning. Could her life be in danger, too? Piper thought about it but then decided it wasn’t possible. If anything had been going wrong with Max since Piper called her, they would have had contact. “Maybe we don’t have to wait.” Mulder said. He stood up and walked out the door. “Mulder.” Scully said. He stopped and looked back at her and Piper. “Where are you going?” “To talk to someone who can find me the Cigarette Man.” Mulder said. He left the building, leaving Scully and Piper behind. Piper looked to Scully, who shrugged. “Let’s go get some breakfast and then we’ll check out Erin’s house.” Scully said. She stood up and Piper followed her out of the building. An hour later, Piper pushed the strands of beads away from the door. She walked into Erin’s bedroom and stared back at the door frame. The beads had been a present from Piper to Erin just a few years earlier for Erin’s thirteenth birthday. Piper walked past the bed, pressing her hand on it as she walked by. The bed squished underneath the pressure of Piper’s hand. It was a waterbed and though Piper never liked the feeling of water beds, it was a part of Erin now. “Erin’s parents say that they heard a thump downstairs, then heard Erin scream, and they ran downstairs and she was gone with her window open.” Scully explained. Piper looked to her window and walked over to it. She took out a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and looked at the window. She boosted herself up and stuck her head out the window and looked outside. “Whoever crawled through this window either had to be extremely small or a contortionist.” Piper paused. “Erin always leaves her windows unlocked just in case she ever forgot her keys. She was small enough to crawl through her bed room window and get into her house.” “And whoever did it, smokes.” Scully said wiping her gloved fingers over the sill of the window. She looked down at her fingers and noticed a black powder, unlike dust and dirt. “You should probably get some officers out her to dust for prints, though I doubt they’ll find any. They should try to collect any fibers or hair particles that they can but again I doubt anything will be conclusive.” Piper said. She turned towards Scully. “What do we do now?” Scully paused. “Piper, if the men really weren’t protecting yours and Erin’s house, then why did you see two cars outside?” Piper thought. “What if instead of trying to protect me, they were trying to keep me in and to stop me from spreading the word?” Meanwhile, Mulder was walking to his office in the basement of the FBI headquarters in Washington DC. He took out his keys from his pocket and opened the door to his office. He walked in, turning the lights on as he went. “Giving up, Agent Mulder?” Someone said. Mulder jumped slightly as a man turned Mulder’s desk chair. As he turned, Mulder noticed the man as the Cigarette Smoking Man. He had a cigarette in between his fingers. The smoke filled the air and it engulfed Mulder’s lungs. “How did you get in here?” Mulder yelled. He kept his distance from the smoking man and he his left hand was constantly on the butt of his gun. “I have my connections. Have you found Erin Pierce yet?” The Cigarette Smoking Man asked. “No, but it would make it a lot easier if you told me where she was.” Mulder said. “How about the alien? Have you found the body after we took it from you? You thought you had it made. You thought you had the proof that you needed to educate the world about extraterrestrials. The truth is, Mulder, man kind isn’t supposed to know about aliens.” “You put that alien there. You put that alien there to make Scully and I investigate it. You did it as a detour so we wouldn’t find something else. You put there alien there to make Piper’s life miserable.” “That alien was very real, Agent Mulder. But he’s gone now. Gone so that the world will never know what happened.” “What the hell landed in Piper’s backyard?” Mulder demanded to know. “A UFO, Agent Mulder. An unidentified flying object with an extraterrestrial biological entity inside landed in Piper Elizabeth Alexander’s back yard.” “Why her?” Mulder asked, angrily. “We knew she would call you and Agent Scully. We knew that if we landed the UFO in her backyard you would rush over there and come to her assistance. We also knew that as soon as we kidnapped Erin, you would run off to find her. We had time to destroy the alien before you could ever know the difference.” “You didn’t put the alien there on purpose. It was real. You just want me to believe that it wasn’t. We had a real alien in our hands and you took it away from us.” Mulder paused. “Where is Erin?” “She’s being protected, Agent Mulder, and I suggest you do the same for Piper.” “I’m done talking to you, get out!” Mulder shouted. He took his gun from its holster and pointed it at the Cigarette Smoking Man’s chest. He got the message and stood up, walking out the door and slamming it behind him. |