THE X-FILES
"ABSOLUTE ZERO"
By Alien Girl
mail to: comixgirl@juno.com
Classification: Adventure / Case, with a few sprinkles of angst and
romance and humor
Rating: G
Spoilers: None
Archive Info: Anywhere, Anyway, Anyhow!
Disclaimer: Scully and Mulder and Co. belong to CC, 1013 Productions and
the Fox Network, and they -unfortunately- aren't mine. All other minor
characters belong to me, although what you'd want to do with them I have
no idea. There's my disclaimer, so now I won't get sued...although if
Mulder was a real person, I'd think he'd sue Fox Network for using his
name...
Summary: Mulder and Scully investigate a case of extreme freezing in
Wyoming.
Author's Note: Once again...THEY STOLE MY IDEA!! (or pieces of it,
anyway...) My Scientific ideas with Absolute Zero may be incorrect, so I
apologize if they are, so don't go biting my head off, all you
Scullyists! I got the idea while sitting in Science class one day...plus
I just wanted to annoy my friend, Riva. This is also my first attempts at
angst and romance, although I still credit myself to being better at
writing humor.
On with the show!
---------------------------------
Absolute Zero
By Alien Girl
11:22 P.M.
Tuesday, November 18th, 1998
Wyoming woods
"Whoa! What was that?!"
"Shut up, man! We're almost there!"
"No, wait, Lars, I coulda sworn I saw somethin'."
"I said shut up! You're going to give us away totally!"
Lars Mackintosh and Josh Irving, his best friend, were on a
mission. They both lived in the nearby tourist's town of Jackson Hole,
Wyoming, and had been best friends for as long as they could remember.
Both of their parents worked as club owners somewhere on the opposite
sides of town. And both parents usually couldn't care less what happened
to the two boys, just so long as they didn't leave the state, as they
were too busy with their customers. So Lars and Josh basically did
everything together.
The pair had decided to join one of the many motorcycle gangs
that roamed the streets of Jackson Hole. They had chosen one of the
younger, wilder groups that lived downtown, with riders in their age
group, later teens and early twenties. However, in order to join, they
were told that they had to go through "initiation".
The "initiation" turned out to be rather difficult, almost
unbelievable. They had to travel through the forest to one of the many
hot springs and mud volcanoes that were spread all throughout Yellowstone
and Wyoming: and stop it up. The hot springs and mud volcanoes were
dangerous ground, literally. Sometimes the ground around the springs was
paper-thin, leaving nothing between a person and boiling hot mud in which
some unlucky people had been cooked alive. And if they tried to stop one
up, they never knew if the volcano or spring would suddenly erupt or
create a new spring right from under them.
Lars and Josh trampled through the thick underbrush as quietly as
they could, well aware that Rangers patrolling the area were on the
lookout. Josh grunted under the weight of the rocks in his backpack,
which they had brought along to stop up the spring. The area they were in
was right on the edge of the park, around the area where the big fire had
burned away most of the forest. The woods, which they had often gone
exploring through before, had after that seemed barren and silent. But by
now, all the wildlife and plant growth had come back, so the forest was
back to its usual overgrown, sometimes spooky self. The forest was alive
with the creatures of the night: bats, owls, crickets, frogs, and-
AHWOOOOOOOOOO
Lars cringed. Wolves.
Josh suddenly wrinkled up his nose in disgust. "I can smell it."
The unmistakable sulphurous scent drifted in on the night air.
The hot springs and all the other related natural wonders carried with
them a sickening, rotten-egg smell that clogged the nose and closed the
throat. Lars coughed and pretended not to notice.
"There it is again!" Josh said, pointing.
"What the heck do you keep looking at? Some Ranger's gonna find
us, and..."
"I saw something," Josh continued. "Like this flashing blue
light, from right over there. And I thought I heard this humming sound or
something..."
"Would you just shut up? Look, there's some steam coming from
over there, come on."
"It's cold."
"Oh..." Lars was just about to scold him again when he stopped.
He was right. It *was* cold.
*Very* cold.
Up here in Wyoming the weather could get to extremely low
temperatures, so the cold was not uncommon. But they were right next to a
hot spring, so they shouldn't have felt it as much.
But it wasn't just that. This cold was....*strange*. It had an
unusually chilling feel to it, almost forbidding. His teeth began to
chatter and he pulled his coat tighter around his body.
"What's that smell?"
"It's the springs, you-" Lars stopped again. No, it wasn't the
springs. The sulphurous smell was gone. Instead it smelled like dry ice,
or antifreeze, or something else he almost couldn't identify.
Then a strange mist rolled in. Josh swished it away from his
face, knowing that the wind had changed direction and was blowing the
steam from the spring in their direction. But the mist enveloped them and
kept swirling around them, as if concentrating on them only. The swirling
grew faster until it became something like standing in the middle of a
misty tornado.
"Lars!..." Josh tried to gasp, but the words froze right in his
throat. His legs buckled under him and he fell to the ground. The leaves
and twigs were tossed this way and that, and birds shrieked from the
treetops. His breath seemed to freeze right in his lungs, and he felt
like his entire body was going numb. Everything seemed to be quickly
paralyzing into an immovable position. He tried to reach out and grab his
friend, becoming completely petrified with horror. The mist clouded his
vision until he couldn't see anything else.
The howling of the wolves reverberated off the treetops into the
night sky.
10:13 A.M.
Wednesday, November 19th, 1998
Wyoming woods
Another red-eye flight.
Scully rubbed her eyes wearily as they slammed the doors of the
G-car and gazed up at the scenery. Mulder watched an eagle soar over the
tops of the seemingly-endless miles of pines, then turned his attention
back to the scene that was certainly not as tranquil.
Two Ranger trucks, three police cars and an ambulance sat on the
road at the border to the woods. Two cots had been placed out by the
ambulance, but no one was on them. Rangers and policemen kept swarming
around the cars, arguing, talking, and then heading back down the narrow
path that led off into the trees. As Mulder and Scully started across the
dirt road to join the crowd, a young male sheriff ran up to them.
The sheriff was quite unlike the usual pushy, overweight bozos
Mulder and Scully had encountered before. He was tall, muscular, and
rather demanding in appearance. His sandy-blond hair and sapphire blue
eyes that matched his uniform made him look like a perfect purebred.
"Agents Mulder and Scully, I presume," he said. "I'm Sheriff
Anderson." He leaned over and shook their hands heartily; first Mulder,
then Scully. Mulder couldn't help but notice that he seemed to clasp
Scully's hand a little longer and firmer. The sheriff smiled at her,
displaying a flawless set of practically bleached teeth. Scully managed a
small smile. Mulder glared.
"Sorry to call you on such short notice, but Celsius didn't want
to move them until you had got a look at them." The sheriff started for
the path.
"What's going on here, anyway?" Mulder asked.
Anderson glanced back at him as if noticing him for the first
time. "I'll show you. Follow me."
Mulder heard a crunching sound under his feet. He glanced
downwards.
Snow.
"First signs of winter," Anderson said importantly. "It's snowed
quite a few times over the past week. Wouldn't be surprised if there was
a storm coming soon."
Mulder and Scully were at the very front of the long line of men
that wound in and out on the narrow path through the pines. They had been
walking through infinite vegetation for the past 20 minutes with still no
sign of what they were looking for. Then Scully coughed and made a face.
"Are we near one of those hot springs?"
"Yes, there's a large batch of them right over there," Anderson
said, pointing. "Notice how the trees are thinning out." It wasn't until
after it had happened that Mulder noticed that the Sheriff had somehow
shoved him out in back of them and was now walking by Scully's side.
Mulder grunted with annoyance.
Mulder found a large clearing so he could go around them, then
began to walk faster. The pine trees rose high above the group, blocking
out most of the sunlight. He marched at a quickening pace, hoping to
finally get Scully to realize that he had gone on ahead of her. She broke
off from Anderson and ran to catch up with him. "Mulder..." she began to
ask.
"Scully..." Mulder stopped his partner. "I think we've found it."
The two agents stared for a moment at the scene in front of them.
Scully frowned. She should've known.
More corpses.
She instantly began analyzing the scene as her
Scientific-Analysis-self began to surface. There were two boys, probably
in their late teens, lying face-down, side by side in the dust, not
moving. The entire five yards of forest woodland that surrounded them
seemed as if it had been changed to glass; a peculiar glossy-white look
was on the plants. It looked as if a blast of ice had hit the entire
area, freezing everything in place. Nothing moved.
Mulder took a few cautious steps into the circle. He heard an
extremely loud cracking sound beneath his feet. When he lifted his foot
away from the spot he had stepped, all the grass beneath it had turned to
powder.
He glanced back at Scully, who was staring surprised at him.
Then, as an experiment, he brushed his finger against a nearby leaf that
hung from the surrounding branches. The leaf, as well as part of the
branch, shattered like glass into a million tiny shards.
"It looks like someone hosed this place down with ten gallons of
Liquid Nitrogen."
Scully eased into the clearing and studied the two victims. By
all outward appearances, the two boys only looked unconscious. Their skin
was still the usual healthy color, and they didn't appear to have any
wounds or injuries.
She tried to turn one over, doing so very carefully in fear that
the boy's limbs would break or go limp from contact. But his body stayed
stiff. She turned the first one over, feeling like she was lifting a
200-pound weight instead of a body.
The boy's brown eyes were still frozen wide open, a look of shock
and horror on his stiff face. She tried to get him to lie flat, but she
couldn't move any part of his body. But it was strange how he was frozen.
In fact, his hand was still frozen in a grasping position.
"Mulder, look at this! These people...they're like *statues*!"
Mulder finished his observation of the crime scene and looked at
the corpses. "It's obvious. They froze to death."
"No, Mulder," Scully argued. "Not like frostbite or anything like
that. They would die of lack of water before frostbite or freezing.
Besides, it's cold out here, but not cold enough. Whatever did this to
them did it to them *fast*."
"Liquid Nitrogen. That stuff works extremely *fast*. You saw what
happened to that leaf when I touched it."
"Yes, I did. But these boys didn't freeze by Liquid Nitrogen. His
body would have shattered when I turned him over, like that leaf.
Something froze them *unbelievably* fast...fast enough to literally turn
them to stone."
"How fast?"
"A second or less. Maybe even a few milliseconds."
"Something that works *faster* and *colder* than Liquid
Nitrogen?"
Scully stood up. She didn't answer for a moment, and listened to
the pulverizing of grass blades beneath her boots. "No...it's not
possible. Anything *that* cold and *that* fast could not exist in the
form of a solid or liquid. If it was a liquid it would freeze into a
solid, and then have such tremendous pressure it would shatter. A gas did
this."
"A *gas*?" Mulder said, puzzled.
"Yes...they must have inhaled it and then frozen."
"How could such a thing exist?"
"Certainly not in a laboratory. It would break the container.
It's something natural."
Mulder was about to answer, then he stopped and sniffed the air.
He caught a whiff of the mud volcanoes' odor and cringed.
"...The hot springs!" Scully suddenly cried.
"Scully, I thought those were supposed to be *hot* springs. These
kids weren't cooked like lobsters."
Just then, Sheriff Anderson walked up with Charles Celsius and a
gang of paramedics. He stopped at the border of the frozen circle and
swore at the two terror-stricken corpses.
"Holy.....! What in the heck happened here?!!"
Scully ignored the comment and began issuing orders. "We need to
corpse bags so we can get these guys out of here, on the double. Be
careful to *not touch anything*, the slightest movement could cause any
number of these trees to collapse."
Celsius came up to Scully. "Do you know what killed these
people?" he asked worriedly.
"I'll tell you when I find out," Scully said to him. "Sheriff,
Mulder, come with me..."
Men began to carefully file into the clearing, at first weary of
the fragile grass powder, then carrying out their orders quickly and
efficiently. Mulder stared at the two corpses for a moment as they were
wrapped up, then went to join Scully and Anderson.
The three started back down the forest trail, dodging more
policemen and paramedics as they filed into the woods. "We're treading on
thin ice here, Scully," Mulder leaned over to her and warned.
Scully looked at Anderson. "Alright, now can you please give us
the full story here? We get called out all the way from Wyoming in the
middle of the night to come and investigate a murder, with literally no
clue what's happened or why we're here. For one thing, this isn't murder.
It seems as if the two victims died from some bizarre natural causes."
"Key word: Bizarre," Mulder added.
Anderson sighed before answering. "The boy's names are Lars
Macintosh and Josh Irving. We haven't contacted their parents yet. Around
midnight one of the Rangers patrolling the outskirts of that area found
them there, just as you saw them. No one knows what they were doing there
and what happened to them. We figured it would be best if you came down
and gave us your opinion."
"I'm so happy to know that 'My Opinion' is recognized by
practically everyone in the country..." Mulder retorted.
"I'll have to do an autopsy on the two victims as soon as we get
back into town," Scully said. "We have any idea on what killed them, but
we're not sure yet."
"Well, I hope you find out," the Sheriff said, slowly
interlocking his arm with Scully's without her even noticing. "I would
hate to think that our hot springs had gone cold."
Mulder grunted and secretly wished that there were some
Sheriff-eating bears hiding somewhere in the woods nearby.
1:47 P.M.
Wednesday, November 19th, 1998
J.H, Wyoming
Mulder gratefully yanked off his coat as he entered the heated
hallway leading down to the autopsy bay, knowing that he would have to
put it on again as soon as he entered the freezing-cold room designed to
keep bodies from decaying in the heat.
'With a case like this', he thought, 'it doesn't seem necessary'.
Mulder had grown used to constant cold climate, but that didn't
mean he enjoyed it, either. A heavy snowfall had begun almost the moment
they had stepped in the car, and it had been getting worse ever since.
Scully was in a bad mood when Mulder entered the autopsy bay. She
sat at a desk by the autopsy table, looking at a stack of papers and
tapping a pencil impatiently.
"How's it going?" Mulder asked.
Scully stood up and tossed the pencil over her shoulder. "How am
I supposed to do an autopsy when I can't even open up the body?!!"
"Huh?"
"Mulder, this guy practically *is* a statue. Look at these
X-rays." she handed a stack of transparencies to Mulder. Looking at them,
he saw what looked like a white silhouette of a human body. Puzzled, he
handed them back to Scully.
"He's frozen completely through. Look at this, I can't even get
him to lie flat on the table. I've broken practically every single knife
and scalpel I have just trying to dent his skin."
"Any luck?"
"If you call chipping off three small pieces of skin any luck,"
she sighed, pointing to what looked like three shards of flesh-colored
glass sitting on the table. Mulder wandered over and observed the skin
pieces.
"Why don't you try just analyzing these? If the body is frozen
through completely, the skin will tell you as much about his death as the
rest of him."
Scully decided to take Mulder's advice. She stuck the smallest
skin shard on a slide and slid it beneath a microscope on the table with
the rest of the equipment. She focused it slowly and peered into the tiny
eye-lens.
"Well?" said Mulder impatiently.
Scully didn't answer for several minutes. But when she did, she
did so with obvious surprise. "They're *frozen*."
"Well, *duh*."
"No, Mulder, I mean these *cells* are frozen. There's no cellular
movement whatsoever."
"So?"
"There are only two things that could have caused this: frostbite
or Liquid Nitrogen, and we've ruled out both of those."
"What are you saying?"
Scully glanced back at the body, then at Mulder, then at the
shards of human skin. The refrigerated room sent shivers down her spine.
"I'm going to need an electron microscope."
* * *
It took almost two hours for Scully to finally get working again.
The electron microscope was almost as large as a telescope, and took a
full hour to set up. It was an old model, but Scully was very glad to
have it, as electron microscopes were expensive and rare. Mulder went out
into the hall to keep himself warm and think over the details of the case
while the equipment was set up. Finally, however, Scully called him back
in.
He walked into the autopsy bay and almost knocked over the
enormous object. Scully pointed to the eye-lens of the oversized
microscope. "Look."
Mulder got up onto an elevated chair to reach the eye-lens and
looked. "I see a bunch of gray and black blotches."
"Those are *molecules*, Mulder."
"He looked back at the microscope. "So?"
"They're *not moving*."
"You're the scientist here, Scully, not me."
Mulder, even when things are frozen, even when things are dead,
the molecules in the object still bounce around, even a little. There's
still kinetic energy. Here there's none. Something has frozen this boy so
well even his *molecules* have frozen.
Mulder began to get a queasy feeling in his stomach as he
realized what this could be leading up to. "What is this?"
"This, Mulder," Scully explained, "is what is known as *Absolute
Zero*. It's the zero on the Kelvin scale of temperature. A temperature so
cold that there isn't even enough kinetic energy for molecules to move."
"Those boys were frozen with a gas that was the temperature of
Absolute Zero?"
"They couldn't have been. Absolute Zero is only a theoretical
temperature. No scientist in the world has been able to drop the
temperature of something that low. And no such element exists in nature."
"Then how," Mulder said, "do you explain this?" He picked up the
shard of human skin and dropped it on the concrete floor. It made a loud
'thunk' and lay still. "This 'Absolute Zero' gas works so fast it doesn't
even give something time to shatter?"
"I-I don't know," Scully finally stuttered. "It can't be anything
else, but it just can't be. How, or why, would two boys wander into the
Wyoming woods and then suddenly be frozen solid by a substance colder
than Liquid Nitrogen?"
"Hey, anybody in there?" A loud knocking suddenly sounded on the
front door. Mulder opened it - and frowned with resentment. Standing in
the doorway, with an innocently curious look on his face, was Sheriff
Anderson.
"I just came over to see how things were coming along - woah!
What the heck is that?!" He walked in and caught sight of the electron
microscope.
"It's just a piece of lab equipment," Scully explained. "I
haven't gotten very far as far as autopsies go, but I think we may have
figured out what has frozen these boys."
"We have?" Mulder said with mocking curiosity.
"Mulder, you know what I mean."
Mulder grunted and turned on his heel. "If you need me, I'll be
out in the hall. It's too cold in here."
Anderson watched him go and sniffed disdainfully. "How on earth
can you stand such a guy?"
"I've stood him for five years. I consider myself an expert on
the subject. In fact, I think I've come to appreciate him sometimes,"
Scully answered coldly.
"Big deal," the Sheriff said, rolling his eyes. "What have you
discovered?"
"That the two victims were frozen with a gas at the temperature
of Absolute Zero. The problem is, no such temperature exists on earth. So
I don't know where such a strange gas could have come from. It just
doesn't seem right..."
"You figured this out all by yourself?"
"Mulder helped me."
Anderson sighed. He was beginning to get annoyed with that name.
"Is there anything else I can do to help?"
"I don't think so, at least not right now."
"Alright, then," he said, speaking in a rather annoyed voice.
"I'll be going now. Call me if you need me for anything." With that, the
Sheriff pulled the door open and exited the autopsy bay hastily. Scully
breathed out a sigh of relief. Soon after, Mulder reentered the room.
"Nice guy," Mulder chimed. "What'd he say?"
"Nothing important," Scully said irritably. "Not as important as
what we have to figure out. Where could that gas have come from?"
Mulder picked up one of the skin shards from the table and turned
it over in his hand. "What do you say we go on over and watch a little
show from Old Faithful?"
4:35 P.M.
Wednesday, November 19th, 1998
Yellowstone National Park
Scully was just about fed up with this guy. The tour guide they
had been following around for the past hour was used to speaking to a
senior audience, so he spoke in a loud, halting voice that drove both the
agents almost insane. The tour group continued along the wooden
boardwalk, walking through great clouds of steam and smoke that
originated from the dozens of hot springs and geysers that surrounded
them.
"...And here we have another example of the colorful patterns
found only in the Rainbow Pools of Yellowstone. The red color you see on
the outside is the coolest water, and the dark blue in the center is the
coldest," the guide explained, pointing at three multi-colored pits
blowing steam on one side of the boardwalk. "The temperatures of the
Rainbow Pools range from boiling in the center to freezing at the rim.
Scientists have yet to figure out how liquid in such a variety of
temperatures can exist in such a climate."
Mulder and Scully, who were at the very back of the crowd of
tourists, showed little interest in what things there were to see, they
only paid attention to what was said about them. Mulder leaned over to
Scully. "Do you think that could be the A-Z gas?"
"No, Mulder," Scully sighed. "I doubt this guy even knows what
he's talking about. Come on, we've wasted enough time here. Let's go."
The two agents broke off from the main group of tourists and
started back down the boardwalk. Mulder wiped sweat from his brow and
wrinkled his nose in abhorrence. He would never get used to the sulfurous
scent he had been breathing for the past hour or two. He and Scully had
come to Yellowstone and practically looked the place inside out for
anything that could have caused the strange mist which Mulder had
nicknamed the "A-Z gas". They had found plenty of trees, geysers, trees,
hot springs, trees, wildlife and more trees, but absolutely nothing that
could suggest a gas made of temperatures in the extreme lows.
Scully reached into her pocket, pulled out a brochure and studied
a map of the park. "Look", she said, pointing at an area on the map.
"There's a large batch of mud pots up north-"
"Scully, forget it," Mulder interrupted her. "Whatever we're
looking for, it's not going to be in a geyser, or a mud puddle, or a herd
of buffaloes."
Scully looked around at all the landscape encircling them. At
most other parts in Yellowstone the scenery was nothing but untouched,
close-knit trees and running streams. But all around the hot springs and
geysers, the ground was barren and the trees were uprooted and dead. The
scene was very eerie...and chilling.
"Mulder, what are we going to do? We have to find out what could
have caused that A-Z gas or whatever you call it. Those families are
going to want to know what killed their sons...and what if this strange
temperature drop kills someone again?"
"I think," Mulder answered finally, "what we're looking for isn't
going to be in your local tourist's brochure."
7:41 P.M.
Wednesday, November 19th, 1998
J.H, Wyoming
"Jer-e-mi-ah was a bull-frog..."
"Langley!..."
"Was a good friend-of mine..."
"Langley, take those things off!!"
Mulder waited impatiently as Byers finally forced Langley to
remove the headphones he had implanted on his ears. Frohike twisted the
camera so that it faced all three of them. A while ago Mulder and the
Lone Gunmen had set up a sort of video-phone so that they could see each
other as well as talk. Mulder appreciated it, although he knew that just
calling them cost as much as a long-distance call to the moon.
"Sorry," Byers apologized, "but he just got through watching
'Wayne's World' for the second time today, and he's kinda, well...not all
there..."
"Hey, is Scully there?" Frohike broke in excitedly.
"No, she's back there in that autopsy bay. Besides, if she knew I
was doing this, I'd never hear the end of it."
Frohike frowned with disappointment. "Where are you?"
"Jackson Hole, Wyoming."
"Ohh, Old Faithful, Yellowstone, the Snake River."
"Well, how did you figure that?" Mulder said sarcastically.
"I'm smart."
"Alright, if you're smart, then tell me everything you know about
Liquid-Nitrogen-like gases existing in the woods all around Wyoming."
Frohike backed away from the camera with surprise. "Hey, I'm
smart, but I'm not Einstein."
"I doubt even Einstein could explain this. Two boys were found
dead in the Wyoming woods, close to some of those hot springs from
Yellowstone. They were frozen completely through, and there was a
five-yard radius around them in which all the vegetation was frozen so
well it shattered like glass."
"Liquid Nitrogen?"
"Something faster and colder."
Byers appeared to be deep in thought. "I think I can
recall...yes, I have heard of something like this happening before."
"You have?"
"Yeah. I think the earliest case was in 1989, right after that
big Yellowstone fire. Two hikers were found somewhere in the woods, and
they were frozen solid, yet it hadn't been snowing. No one knew what had
happened to them. And then, a lone hunter was found frozen in the woods
sometime in 1992. And then another hiker in 1995."
Mulder became very interested. "Can you give me the coordinates
of those three cases?"
"Sure, now let me look...okay, the first one was I think was
44.45 degrees Lat. and 111 degrees Lon., the second was 44.12 degrees
Lat. and 111.53 degrees Lon., and the third was 44.32 degrees Lat. and
111.44 degrees Lon."
Mulder was looking at a map of Yellowstone as Byers finished his
statement. He took a pen and put three red dots in three places on the
map. Then he thought for a moment and added one more.
"All of these incidents seem to have occurred in exactly the same
area. Look on a map, Byers, and tell me if you know anything about that
neck of the woods."
Byers disappeared from the camera's view for a while as he went
off to find a map. When he returned, he had a recognizable look on his
face. "Well, there were reports that a UFO crashed somewhere in the woods
in that area..."
"I should've known..." Scully's voice came from the hallway.
Mulder turned around and cringed at the knowledge that Scully had
probably been listening to the entire conversation. "Let me guess: aliens
are abducting moose and destroying the evidence with A-Z gas."
Frohike smiled. "Actually, no. The crash did not seem likely, and
it didn't rise much media attention. The only interesting thing is that
it was said to have happened sometime in the late 80's, around the time
that huge fire burnt out a fifth or so of Yellowstone."
Scully rolled her eyes.
Byers broke in. "As it turned out, the military released a report
saying that the crashed UFO was actually just a piece of space debris
that got stuck in the atmosphere and then crashed into the woods."
Scully's annoyed look disappeared. Mulder frowned.
"However, there is something else, too. About a year or so ago
after this happened, the US military set up some kind of secret
underground base around in that area. Nobody knows if it's even still
there or what they're doing at that base."
Mulder and Scully exchanged glances.
"Anything else?"
"Well, I've heard there's this gift shop near the front entrance
that..."
"Langley..."
"Thanks, guys, I'll talk to you later," Mulder finished, waving
farewell and switching off the video-phone.
Scully gave Mulder a look. "No, Mulder. UFOs and
extra-terrestrials were not involved in this."
"But notice how all the incidents took place in almost the exact
same area. What about that military base?"
"No connection whatsoever."
Mulder's shoulders dropped. "Then we still have nothing to go
on."
"You were desperate enough to ask the Lone Gunmen for help?"
"What could I do? You can't even open up the bodies to do an
autopsy. We've decided that hot springs and geysers couldn't have caused
it."
"And why not?"
"Scully, you saw where those bodies were and how they were found.
A circle of frozen waste surrounded them, yet the rest of the forest is
untouched. If some strange gas had blown in from the hot springs and
geysers, don't you think it would have frozen other things before it
exploded around those two boys? Why then? And there?"
"I don't know, Mulder," Scully groaned. "But whatever it is, it's
not extra-terrestrial."
"We need to think of something."
"Like what?"
"We'll figure it out on the way."
On the way *where*?"
Mulder looked tired. "I got a letter from Skinner this morning,"
he sighed. "It seems we have a little makeup work to do..."
Schedules. Always it was schedules. Lowry had grown sick of it. But now
there were problems, and the normal schedule had been called off. Lowry
had at first been grateful for the change, but now he was beginning to
get worried. Things were starting to get out of hand.
Commander Thoreson strode purposefully over to Lowry's desk and
gazed at the image on one of the many video monitors that lined the walls
of the Control room. It displayed a lot of trees, then switched to a view
of a few more trees, then a view of the ground, then to what looked like
a large, futuristic garage leading underground, then back to the trees.
"Anything to report?" Thoreson stated promptly.
"No, sir," Lowry replied. "It's been quiet ever since they moved
the bodies."
Thoreson growled in silent musing. "They'll be back. It'll only
be a matter of time."
"How much do we have left to use?"
"Enough."
Lowry turned back to watch the screen. Back to schedules.
Thoreson turned to leave.
"Sir?"
The Commander turned around.
"What should we do if they find something?"
Thoreson answered with one word:
"Termination."
He'd show them.
Sheriff Anderson was no idiot. He could tell that the two FBI
agents were skeptical of him, especially the older male, what's-his-name,
Mulder. He couldn't care less for his opinion. It was the woman, Scully,
he cared about.
He had been taken aback by the beautiful young agent the moment
he had set eyes on her. Her simple beauty, red-gold hair and sparkling
blue eyes had entranced him like never before. But it was obvious that
she had no feelings regarding him whatsoever. Well, if this worked, he
would at least gain her respect.
Tromping through the woods alone was not exactly his idea of fun.
But the agents hadn't called him or anything, which meant that they still
hadn't figured out the mystery behind the strange deaths. They must have
overlooked something. If he could find just one clue, anything, the woman
agent would certainly be more grateful and respectful.
He was at least hoping that he would find something before
nightfall. In the north during the winter it got dark very early in the
evening. The last rays of the setting sun peeked over the mountaintops
and through the tree branches. The leaves and snow crunched under his
feet as he continued down the barely-visible path.
A chill wind came up. The Sheriff shivered and zipped up his
coat. The distant odor of the sulphurous pits mixed with the sweet resin
scent of the pines. Night was coming on.
CRUNCH.
Anderson glanced at his feet. He had stepped on something. He
stooped down to pick it up out of the snow.
It was a piece of blue metal.
There was something else nearby, lying on the root of a tree. He
picked that up, too.
A computer chip.
HRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...
Sheriff Anderson jumped at the sound. He though he had just heard
an engine starting up, but he couldn't be sure. And were those lights
somewhere within those trees?
Then, a new smell mixed with the sulphur and pines. Something
like antifreeze, something....something cold.
The Sheriff dropped the computer chip. The wind had changed
direction, and a strange mist was blowing towards him. He swished it away
from his head absently. He began to shiver uncontrollably. It was
*extremely* cold. The mist and steam swirled in a tornado around him,
flinging leaves this way and that.
Anderson realized that something was wrong. His hands, feet,
ears, everything seemed to be going numb at once. He tried to back away
from the mist. His breath felt cold and painful in his chest. Then, fear
overtook him like the wind. He glanced around alarmingly and started to
run.
The mist was faster. He suddenly couldn't feel his legs; couldn't
move them. He couldn't feel any part of his body. It was so cold! He
tried to scream, but the cry froze on his lips and no sound came out.
HRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM......
"I can't believe this," Scully groaned. "I just *can't* believe
this."
Mulder finished tying the belt around his waist and answered her
simply: "Believe it."
Scully gazed down at her outfit with disgust, then back at
Mulder. "Mulder, since when on earth did *Yoga* count as part of our
Physical Fitness requirement?!!"
Mulder straightened out his Yoga outfit, which Scully could've
sworn belonged to Luke Skywalker. Hers looked no better, except it was
trimmed a little neater. Her bare feet were practically freezing on the
cold metal floor.
"Mulder, we're in the middle of an investigation, and besides,
neither of us has a *clue* how to do Yoga! Why are we doing it *now*?!"
"Well, there were those four days when we switched bodies..."
"We had *amnesia*, Mulder."
"Yes, well, anyway, for those four days we missed last week, we
were supposed to go through some more training for PF. And since we're
here, and since Yoga is part of the PF requirement, we might as well get
is over with."
"I feel like a complete idiot."
"You look like one, too."
"Mulder!!"
"Come on," Mulder tugged on her arm. "We're already late."
Mulder and Scully left the dressing room and started down the
hall towards the main room. It felt pleasant inside the heated building,
especially since the snow had been falling without ceasing for quite a
while now.
The Yoga instructor had already started the other eight students
when Mulder and Scully arrived. They were all sitting cross-legged, eyes
closed, humming in some low tone of voice. Scully rolled her eyes
despairingly.
Mulder leaned over and whispered, "Simba, I know your father..."
"Mulder..."
"Ooh, Jonny, this is not good..."
"Mulder!..."
"Use the force, Luke..."
Mul-der!!"
Mulder was about to say something else when Scully angrily
slapped a palm over his mouth. All of the other students stopped their
humming and stared at them, surprised.
"Hi," Scully said, putting on the biggest grin she could muster.
"Please be seated, Dana and Fox," the instructor said without
opening her eyes. Mulder and Scully walked over and sat cross-legged in
the circle with the other people. Scully squirmed with obvious
discomfort.
"Now," the instructor began again, "I want you to relax, close
your eyes, and think of the place where you are most comfortable..."
Scully sighed and closed her eyes. 'Might as well go along with
this for now', she thought. The problem was that she couldn't really
concentrate. She kept seeing those two victims, frozen into solid statues
before they even realized it, their eyes still wide open with horror and
their hands grasping vainly...
"Now I want you to take a deep breath and let it out slowly..."
Mulder breathed in heavily through his nose and then out through
his mouth. The room was scented with some Gentle-Breeze-Spring Air
Freshener or other. It wasn't the best, but it was certainly better than
that awful sulfur smell.
"That's good, because now we're going to try an hold our breath
for a long time, say, two minutes. Now take several deep breaths, slowly,
that's good. Now, on three, take a long breath and hold it. Okay,
one...two...three..."
All ten people made a unanimous sound of sucking in air. Scully
closed her eyes, hoping she could concentrate this time. The first 30
seconds wasn't that hard, but then she could feel her lungs beginning to
ache. The muscles in her chest strained for air and she began to feel
dizzy. She was certain her face was turning purple 'I've got to hold it
for just a little bit longer...'
GAUGKHHH!!!
The silence was broken by Scully breaking into a horrible fit of
coughs and falling backwards onto the carpet floor on her back with
agony. The other students stared at her with shock as she coughed
painfully and gasped for breath with a disgusted look on her face.
For a moment, there was silence. Then Mulder burst into
uproarious laughter.
"AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHOHOHOHOHAAAA!!!!"
SLAM.
"I hope 20 minutes is enough time to make up for our
requirement..."
It was all Scully could do to restrain herself from landing
Mulder a good punch straight in the gut. The snowfall had started up
again as soon as they were kicked out of the Yoga class. They started
down the snow-covered streets back to their hotel. They both knew what
the other was thinking about.
"What now?"
In answer to Scully's question, Mulder's cell phone suddenly
began ringing. He picked it up and switched it on. "Mulder."
Scully watched Mulder as he listened to the caller. His walk
slowed and his tensed. "Alright. We'll be there."
"Who was that?" Scully asked.
"That was Charles Celsius, the lead paramedic. It's happened
again."
9:49 P.M.
Wednesday, November 19th, 1998
Wyoming woods.
"Oh, no..."
Scully's concerned face was instantly replaced with a frown. She
had been fearing this would happen again ever since she had seen the
first two victims. But this time it was much worse than before.
The Sheriff's body was frozen in a running position, his eyes and
mouth gaping wide in frozen horror. The heavy snowfall had covered most
of his body and the five-yard radius of glass vegetation.
Mulder stepped into the circle. The grass and leaves being
crushed beneath his feet sounded like gunshots. He knelt down by the
stiff figure and lifted him up so that he was standing.
"Look at this. This is definitely the A-Z gas. He was frozen in
mid-stride."
Scully stepped in and sighed with anxiety. "This is within at
least 30 yards of where the first two victims were found. But it's not
close enough to the hot springs for their steam to have reached him."
"Alright, let's move this guy out of here," Mulder ordered to
Celsius. The lead paramedic nodded to them and repeated the orders to the
others, and they started to carry the Sheriff out. Celsius hung back and
glanced at the two agents worriedly.
"I've known Anderson for quite a while. I've also worked as a
paramedic up here almost all my life, but I've never seen anything like
this before. I'm worried on what could happen. What if someone else gets
killed by this? We may have no way of stopping it."
"Don't worry," Mulder said confidently. "Whatever's going on,
we're going to find out what it is. No one else here is going to get
frozen."
"I'll have to do another autopsy," Scully added. "Now, let's get
this place sealed off..."
10:17 P.M.
Wednesday, November 19th, 1998
J.H, Wyoming
Mulder focused the microscope and studied it for a few minutes.
"It's no good, Scully," he sighed. "Nothing's changed. Still frozen."
Scully groaned. She had a good theory on how the bodies had
reacted to the gas, or at least how the affects could be reversed, but it
wasn't working out.
She had been hoping that if she heated up the shard of skin well
enough, the molecules within would unfreeze and begin to move again,
basically reanimating the tissue. And if it could be done to a piece of
skin, why not a full-grown person? Scully always like to imagine that as
a doctor she could bring people back to life. But no matter how high she
heated the temperature of the skin shard, the molecules remained frozen,
as if frozen in place forever; the body encased in a tomb of cold, cold
ice.
Scully shivered at the thought.
Mulder took off his glasses and stared at the three stiff,
horror-stricken corpses with despair. "We don't have time for this, we
need to investigate the place where the bodies were found, look for
clues, anything. There must be some reason all of the bodies were found
in the same place. What if someone else wanders into that area on
accident?"
"Mulder, we're not going out into the woods in the middle of the
night alone. It's far too dangerous. we should be trying to figure out
how to reverse this thing and cure it."
"And others are finding a cure for AIDS," Mulder shot back. "Face
it, Scully, those three people are dead. The moment they inhaled that gas
they were frozen into solid statues. We should find out how to stop this
thing before it even starts again. I don't think these deaths are
accidental."
"You *think*," Scully counterattacked. "Let's go over the facts:
1. Two boys and a Sheriff are found dead. Where? In the woods,
and in the center or a five-yard circle of frozen vegetation.
2. How? Apparently, they inhaled something that caused them to
freeze completely through."
3. What? Theoretically, a gas that can sustain a temperature of
Absolute Zero long enough to freeze a human body, then slowly thin out to
a Liquid-Nitrogen-like gas.
4. Possible causes or reasons? Hot springs or other such natural
phenomena.
5. How do we know it's Absolute Zero? The molecules in his body
have stopped moving."
"Alright," Mulder said, "what about this:
1. All of the bodies were found in almost exactly the same area.
2. Supposedly a US army base is built in that area.
3. A UFO may have crashed there.
4. You said so yourself, Absolute Zero temperatures do not exist
on earth."
"Mulder," Scully groaned, "we've practically gotten nowhere with
this case except the possibility that something - or someone - is using
an extremely lethal gas to kill random people who happen to be in the
woods. We wasted valuable time on that stupid Yoga class, and we're
wasting valuable time arguing like we are right now."
"Wait," Mulder held up his hand for silence. He was looking at
the body of the Sheriff, still frozen in a running position.
"What is it?"
Mulder stared. "He's grasping something in his hand. We need to
get it out."
Scully reached beneath the table that the body lay on and pulled
out a strangely-shaped knife. Then she placed it on the man's fingers and
began to saw them off with great difficulty.
"A diamond saw?"
"It was the only thing that wouldn't break."
Scully sawed off the Sheriff's fingers one by one, grunting with
exhilaration at the hard work. Mulder caught a glimpse of something shiny
beneath his fingers. After what seemed like hours of hacking and sawing,
Mulder forced the object out of the corpse's grasp.
"Look at this."
Scully took the object from Mulder and held it up to the light to
examine it. It was a small, shiny piece of blue metal. She was surprised
with how little it weighed. It looked as if it had broken off of
something larger...
"Can you tell what it is?"
"No....I don't recognize it at all. I've never seen anything like
it before."
Mulder didn't reply for several minutes. He looked at Scully, at
the metal in her hand, at the three bodies on the table, at the
microscope, then back at Scully. Then he grabbed up his snow jacket from
his chair.
12:46 A.M.
Thursday, November 20th, 1998
Wyoming woods
"We shouldn't be here, Mulder," Scully called ahead to her
partner. She didn't know how on earth Mulder had ever convinced her to
come out to the woods alone at night to look for possible causes of the
A-Z gas. It was absolutely insane. "We should have at least called and
told someone where we were going."
Mulder and Scully's flashlight beams swept back and forth, in and
out through the trees as they wound their way down the path, now almost
invisible by the layers of snow. The quarter moon was barely visible
through the heavy snowfall that poured down on them. To Mulder, the
forest was much more alive at night than in the day. The cries of
literally every creature imaginable made the forest seem even more
chilling and spooky than it already was. It would have been pitch-black
if not for their flashlights.
Ever since her close encounter with the black oil virus in
Antartica, Scully had come to dislike the cold. The snow and cold numbed
her cheeks and fingertips and made her teeth chatter, and it was not a
feeling she enjoyed.
"We're close," Mulder said, shining his flashlight down on a
small pile of glass grass powder.
"Mulder, I don't think this is a good idea..."
"Look," Mulder shined his flashlight off to his left. "Look!"
There was something...something hidden within the deepest part of
the woods. Scully studied it carefully. It was a building, looking
something like a garage, perhaps leading underground. There were three
large searchlights and an enormous outlet pipe on the top of the
structure. But the outlet pipe...
"Look!" Mulder pulled out the piece of blue metal from his coat
pocket. The pipe was the exact same material as the piece of metal.
Mulder and Scully stared at each other. They knew what they had to do.
Gripping their flashlights, they began to move towards the structure.
"Sir!!" Lowry cried. "Sir, they're heading straight for us!"
Thoreson gazed at the video monitor and swore at the two figures
growing larger in the camera's view.
"They know," he said simply. "Or if they don't, they will soon."
he looked down at a large, double-handled switch on Lowry's electronic
desk.
"Terminate them. Then remove the bodies."
"Yes, sir."
"I don't think they've noticed us," Mulder whispered to his
partner. Scully didn't answer. She was looking at the blue-metal outlet
pipe. It was now letting out a long, steady stream of a thick, steam-like
mist.
"Mulder, what is that? Smoke? Steam? What are they doing?"
Mulder watched. He suddenly felt his skin go cold. The mist wove
in and out through the trees and swirled towards them, its sheer coldness
seeming to spread everywhere at once.
HRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.....
Mulder's lower jaw dropped. "Scully, run! It's the A-Z gas! It's
coming! RUN!!!"
Scully took his advice. She and Mulder darted into the trees,
away from the building. The mist followed them, watching them, like a
stalking predator, picking up speed.
Scully could feel the pressure of the extreme low-temperature gas
breathing on her back. She could bearly see through the blinding snow and
trees, but she kept running, listening to Mulder's voice in front of her,
telling her to run and not look back. Her boots pounded against the snow
rhythmattically, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps of steam.
They didn't know how long they had run. The trees and snow and
darkness went on endlessly, offering no shelter from the enclosing,
silent destroyer. For a while, it seemed they would be able to outrun the
mist, when suddenly...
"OOOFF!!!"
Scully tripped on a tree root.
Mulder stopped and ran back to help her up. "Hurry, it's coming!"
Mulder yelled as Scully got to her feet.
"No, Mulder, run, get out of here!"
"Not without you!"
Too late.
The mist caught up with them and began to swirl around them like
a tornado. Slowly, slowly at first, then faster and faster, growing and
expanding.
"Scully, hold your breath!" Mulder screamed. "Hold your breath!!"
Scully sucked in what little air was left and knelt down, burying her
face in Mulder's chest. He wrapped his arms around her tightly and kept
shouting "Don't breathe! Don't breathe!"
The mist continued to swirl, trying to get inside her and drown
her in Absolute Zero. She felt her arms and legs and every part of her
body go numb. She could feel her muscles relaxing, her blood flow
grinding to a halt, her nerves shutting down. She couldn't sense anything
but the sheer cold, Mulder's arms around her, and the painful aches in
her chest as her lungs pleaded for air.
"Don't breathe!!!"
The mist enveloped them and swallowed them whole.
6:16 A.M.
Thursday, November 20th, 1998
Wyoming woods
At first he had only been a little concerned. But then he had
grown anxious. Now, Charles Celsius was downright frightened.
First those two teenagers. Then the Sheriff. Now the two FBI
agents.
The same Ranger who had found the first two victims had found
them in almost exactly the same spot about an hour ago, and he now stood
on the outskirts of the frozen circle. The head paramedic stepped into
the now-familiar frozen-plant-life ring. The bodies of the two agents
were almost invisible, completely covered by several thick layers of
pure white snow that had been falling all night. Looking at them, Celsius
felt a great sadness sweep over him. The woman had her head buried in the
man's chest and his arms still embraced her, as if he had tried to shield
her from the deadly mist.
He reached down and tried to pry the woman loose from the man's
arms. They wouldn't budge. It seemed as if even now the man was unwilling
to let go of his partner. Celsius tried again, and he slid her out of his
icy grip a little. It was hard work, and he practically pulverized every
single blade of frozen grass in the process, but he finally pushed her
over on her back.
Scully's skin was a ghostly sheet-white color and her lips were
tinged blue from lack of blood or air. Her hair, arms, legs, her entire
body was neatly coated in a thin layer of ice and frost. Mulder looked
the same, only his face and lips as well as the rest of his were covered
in frost. His arms were stretched out vainly to grasp his frozen partner
released from his grip.
Celsius was about to call for two corpse bags when he stopped. He
was just a little hopeful. He pressed two fingers against Scully's frozen
neck. Through the snow and frost had could barely feel a slight thumping
beneath it...
Celsius gasped with surprised excitement. Had they not been
frozen. He kept his fingers against her skin, and yes, he could
definitely feel a pulse, although it was slow and sluggish, as ready to
stop at any minute. The paramedic's hope began to build.
He reached over to the other side of him and felt Mulder's neck.
No pulse.
Celsius grew frightened again. Had only one survived? For some
strange reason, he began to feel a sense of horror and grief, although he
barely knew the man. He began pushing on Mulder's chest and doing
mouth-to-mouth. Mulder's frost-covered lips felt deathly cold against his
own. He had lived up in Jackson Hole and had worked on frostbitten bodies
all his life, but he had never felt such a coldness in a body before.
One of the other paramedics, who had seen the other three
frozen-solid victims of the strange ice-blasts, was surprised to see his
boss doing CPR on one of the bodies. "What are you doing? That guy is
gone, he's a frozen statue!"
"No!" Celsius cried out despairingly. He continued pumping up and
down until his arms ached. The frost, snow and ice felt freezing to his
hands, even with his gloves on. He did one last mouth-to-mouth breath and
then collapsed, exhausted, on Mulder's chest, admitting defeat.
"We need two corpse bags over here!" the other paramedic called
back.
"No, wait," Celsius stopped him again. He brushed two inches of
snow off of Mulder's jacket and pressed his ear against his chest. He
wasn't sure, but he thought he could hear a very faint thumping beneath
the layers of ice, clothing and tissue...
He became excited again, and he put to fingers against Mulder's
neck. This time, there was a faint pulse.
"They're alive! I need stretchers, blankets, two cots, and
support systems up and running! Now, watch the trees, don't touch
anything, easy, now..."
7:32 A.M.
Saturday, November 22nd, 1998
J.H, Wyoming
Mulder wasn't sure if he was dreaming again.
He was surprised with how warm he felt. He could feel his arms
and legs again, although he was too weak to move them. He tried to
remember what had happened, to piece things together.
He remembered that cold, swirling mist, and yelling at Scully to
hold her breath, repeating it over and over until he realized he should
be holding his own.
He must have frozen. There was no way he could have caught his
breath in time. He hoped that, at least, Scully had survived. As soon as
the mist had overtaken him, he had lost all sense of time and place and
feeling. He had had strange dreams, first of him and Scully lying in the
middle of that frozen circle, covered in snow. Scully wasn't moving. He
had wanted terribly to help her, to brush the snow off her face, but he
couldn't move his arms; they were frozen solid. All he could do was lie
there and watch snow cover up all of Scully's red hair.
And then he had another weird dream, although it had seemed very
real. He had dreamed that he was lying down in the snow, and that is
father was standing over him. Mulder wanted to get up and embrace him,
but every time he tried, his father would shove him roughly in the chest
and knock him back down. Mulder tried to get up, tried to talk to him,
but kept getting pushed back to the ground. He had kept doing this until
his robs and arms ached and he couldn't get up anymore.
Now, he was dreaming that a bright, white light was shining down
in his face, and someone was standing over him. Or was it a dream? No,
this time, it wasn't. He felt warm and pleasant, the cold and pain was
gone.
Somehow, he felt like he had experienced this before, or he could
at least recognize it. No more cold or pain, peacefulness, warmth....the
afterlife?
His eyes slowly came into focus. He could make out the face of
the person above him now...
"...Scully?"
Scully's face, silhouetted against the strong glare of the white
light, broke into a smile. She smiled as if expecting him to do
something.
"Scully..." Mulder moaned hoarsely, "I *told* you to hold your
breath!"
Then Scully did the strangest thing, something that Mulder had
never seen her do before. She began to laugh!
"Scully.....?"
She gazed down at him, blue eyes full of merriment "you think
I've frozen?"
"You mean I'm not dead?"
Scully giggled again sarcastically. "No, unfortunately, Mulder,
you're *not* dead."
Mulder tried to sit up, but Scully forced him back down. "Hold
on, you're still in a weak condition."
"When did you wake up?"
"Yesterday. I spent the entire night counting how many time's
we've ended up in the hospital because of you..."
Mulder lay his head back on the hospital pillow, taking deep
breaths. "I guess those Yoga lessons really worked, didn't they?"
"I know," Scully rolled her eyes. "I've never slept better."
"Scully..." Mulder said after a moment. "How come we're alive,
how come we haven't frozen? I thought they were going to put us up as
statues in D.C. Central Park or something..."
Scully smiled again. Mulder was definitely back to his old self.
"It was your quick thinking, Mulder. If we had just breathed in that
stuff as the other victims did, we would have been frozen. I think you
got a small whiff of it though, so you almost did.
Just contact with that gas gave us symptoms from extreme
freezing. We were under three inches of snow for six hours before anyone
found us. I'm still marveling over how lucky we are, Mulder."
"Or how *unlucky* we are..."
Just then, Charles Celsius and another nurse walked into the
room. The paramedic smiled at Mulder. "You're alright! She kept asking to
come and see you the entire night," he motioned at Scully. "We weren't
sure if you were going to make it."
"I wasn't sure if I was going to make it, either..."
"He'll get better soon," Scully said confidently. "If I can
survive a blast of Absolute Zero gas, so can he."
Mulder tried to sit up again. "We have to go back to that
building. There's no *telling* what's going on in there. What could they
be hiding? Where on earth could they get such a weapon as a freezing gas,
and how does it work? We have to find out. Come on, Scully, help me
up..."
"Mulder, no," Scully sighed. "Celsius told me that the minute
they got us in the ambulance, a whole troop of US military men came in
and closed off the area. I think that building, or whatever it was, is
going to be shut down for good."
"No," Mulder argued, "those military men were there to *hide* the
evidence. That building, or base, will still be operating. They're still
trying to keep something a secret. We *have* to go back and investigate."
"Mulder, it's *over*. The moment we get out of the hospital,
we're assigned to another case."
Mulder groaned. "Duty calls..."
He began to cough hoarsely. "Could we get some water over
here?..."
9:32 P.M.
Tuesday, November 25th, 1998
Washington D.C.
Scully's skin was still a little pale. Every once in a while she
would get these little cold spells and begin to shiver, but she had
pretty much gotten over the terrible freezing experience. Still, she felt
that she couldn't go outside anymore without her jacket.
Mulder and Scully had just stepped out of Skinner's office, and
were starting down the hallway towards Mulder's office. They didn't say
anything for several minutes. Skinner had skimmed through Scully's
report, handed them a folder and dismissed them, so there was little to
say.
"I don't think he buys it, Mulder" Scully finally said. "I don't
think I would, either. A strange gas existing somewhere in the Wyoming
woods that just suddenly appears out of nowhere and freezes people who
happen to be in a certain area of the forest?"
"We have proof, Scully," Mulder said. "Those three frozen bodies.
Physical proof that such a thing exists."
"No, we don't" Scully sighed. "I went back to that hospital as
soon as we were released. The bodies are gone."
Mulder groaned aloud. "So all we have to show from our efforts is
our own story, which is supported by next to no one."
"I'm starting to wonder if it even happened myself..."
"Scully, for goodness sakes! Look at you! You're still shivering,
and we haven't even gone outside yet."
Scully sighed wearily. "I'm sick of the cold. All the last couple
of days we spent in the north, tromping through snow, sloshing through
ice and getting buried by both. We need to go someplace *warm* for a
change."
Mulder wasn't listening. He was flipping through the folder
Skinner had handed him. "You're in luck, Scully," he said. "We're going
to California."
10:10 P.M.
Thursday, November 27th, 1998
Wyoming woods
it was no good. He was lost.
Barry Verheek had lost all sense of direction. This secretive
hunting game had not been a good idea in the first place. Barry and his
friend Ted Green had snuck into the vast forests of Yellowstone in hopes
of shooting some big game. They had split up an hour ago, and hadn't seen
any animals yet.
But now, Barry could tell he was lost. Every snow-covered pine
and bush looked the same. He tramped on and on through the snow, in
desperate hope of reaching someplace to rest or finding a spot of
civilization. But there was nothing but trees as far as the eye could
see.
Barry stopped by a large pine to catch his breath. It was then
that he caught sight of something within the woods...something that made
his heart leap for joy.
A building.
The large, bulky hunter began to race towards the building the
resembled a weird-looking garage. At first he was worried that no one was
home. Then he noticed smoke, or steam, pouring out of a large pipe on top
of the structure. Someone must have lit a fire.
He began to run forward again, then stopped. Something was wrong.
He could smell something strange, and the smoke...was it just him, or had
it suddenly gotten a lot colder? Even with his huge jacket around him, he
began to shiver. He tried to take another step towards the building, but
he couldn't move his leg. The mist began to swirl around him.
It was cold.
HRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...........
---------------------------------------------
THE END
Author's Note: And there you have it! Just your normal X-F junk.
Send all questions, comments, complaints and so-and-so forth to
comixgirl@juno.com. Thanks!
(
geocities.com/area51/underworld) (
geocities.com/area51)