Ground Zero (The X-Files)
GROUND
ZERO
KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Based on the characters created by
Chris Carter
To Katie Tyree
whose constant insistence and enthusiasm convinced me to watch
The X-Files
in the first place—at which point, of course, I was hooked. Without her encouragement, I never would have been able to do this book.
Contents
Even through the thick windows of his
laboratory building, the…
1
The security guard stepped out of a small prefab shack…
12
The thick outfit made Mulder look like an astronaut. He…
24
The safety technicians and radiation
specialists at the Teller Nuclear…
30
A boring routine in a buried trash can that somebody…
35
With his visitor’s badge firmly clipped to his collar, Mulder…
42
52
The key fit the lock, but Mulder knocked loudly anyway,…
Two days of maniacal asbestos-removal
construction—destruction, actually—had left a disconcerting…
60
Scully took the rental car and drove alone into Berkeley,…
66
Miriel Bremen led the way to a small
microbrewery and…
74
From the Coronado shipyards the ocean
sprawled westward, stretching toward…
82
As if playing a scene from an old John
Wayne…
90
Scully took her shift driving south from Albuquerque across the…
101
Before reaching the interstate on their trip back to Albuquerque,…
108
Sitting at his impeccably neat and carefully arranged desk in…
116
After an uneventful weekend—for
once—Mulder drove back to the Teller…
120
Scully returned to the headquarters of the Berkeley antinuclear protest…
127
Late afternoon in the Washington, D.C., area, hot and humid.
132
The body looked the same as the others, Mulder thought—severely…
139
After so much time on the road, Scully found it…
146
When Miriel Bremen went into the upper
floors of the…
154
A blind man has no need for lights. Alone in…
160
Following a hunch, Mulder went to see
Nancy Scheck’s “friend,”…
163
With a suitcase lying open on his bed,
Mulder dashed…
170
The atoll had recovered remarkably well in forty years. The…
175
Mulder and Scully arrived in the San
Francisco Bay Area,…
182
Leaving Pearl Harbor behind on a perfect picture-postcard morning, Scully,…
187
The weather grew even rougher, tossing and batting the small…
193
The pressure of the approaching storm felt like a psychological…
200
Mulder looked up at the angry skies.
Wistfully, he thought…
208
In the full darkness of early night, the roiling ocean…
216
As Scully looked on, the security officer used a jingling…
222
Scully had just returned to her own cabin for a…
229
As howling darkness engulfed the island, Scully and the others…
243
Mulder watched Bear Dooley stride over to the countdown clock…
247
Captain Robert Ives didn’t know how he
could possibly remain…
254
In the sudden black chaos following the power outage in…
259
“Don’t just stand there,” Bear Dooley
squawked. “Get that damn…
263
The storm spoke to him in its
power—dreadful voices against…
269
Facing into the storm, it was Mulder’s turn to keep…
272
Mulder’s watch had stopped, but he
suspected it had more…
278
The FBI Headquarters building in
Washington, D.C., was a concrete-and283
glass…
Other Books in the X-Files Series
Teller Nuclear Research Facility,
Pleasanton, California
Monday, 4:03 P.M.
Even through the thick windows of his laboratory building, the old man could hear the antinuke protesters outside. Chanting, singing, shouting—always fighting against the future, trying to stall progress. It baffled him more than it angered him. The slogans hadn’t changed from decade to decade. He didn’t think the radicals would ever learn. He fingered the laminated badge dangling from his lab coat. The five-year-old picture, showing him with an awkward expression, was worse than a driver’s license photo. The Badge Office didn’t like to retake snapshots—but then, ID
photos never really looked like the subject in question, anyway. At least not in the past five decades. Not since his days as a minor technician for the Manhattan Project. In half a century his face had grown more gaunt, more seamed, especially over 1
THE X-FILES
the past few years. His steel-gray hair had turned an unhealthy yellowish-white, where it hadn’t fallen out in patches. But his eyes remained bright and inquisitive, fascinated by the mysteries hidden in dim corners of the universe. The badge identified him as Emil Gregory. He wasn’t like many of his younger colleagues who insisted on proper titles:
Dr
. Emil Gregory, or Emil Gregory,
Ph.D
., or even Emil Gregory,
Project Director
. He had spent too much time in laid-back New Mexico and California to worry about such formalities. Only scientists whose jobs were in question concerned themselves with trivialities like that. Dr. Gregory was at the end of a long and highly successful career. His colleagues knew his name.
Since much of his work had been classified, he was not assured of a place in the history books. But he had certainly made his place in history, whether or not anybody had heard about it.
His former assistant and prize student, Miriel Bremen, knew about his research—but she had turned her back on him. In fact, she was probably standing outside right now, waving her signs and chanting slogans with the other protesters. She had organized them all. Miriel had always been good at organizing unruly groups of people.
Outside, three more Protective Services cars drove up for an uneasy showdown with the protesters who paced back and forth in front of the gate, blocking traffic. Uniformed security guards emerged from the squad cars, slamming doors. They stood with shoulders squared and tried to look intimidating. But they couldn’t really take action, since the protesters had carefully remained within the law. In the back of one of the white official cars, a trained German shepherd barked through the screen mesh of the window; it was a drug-and
2
GROUND ZERO
explosive-sniffing dog, not an attack animal, but its loud growls no doubt made the protesters nervous. Dr. Gregory finally decided to ignore the distractions outside the lab building. Moving slowly and painfully in his seventy-two-year-old body—whose warranty had recently run out, he liked to say—he went back to his computer simulations. The protesters and guards could keep up their antics for the rest of the afternoon and into the night, for all he cared. He turned up his radio to cover the noise from outside so he could concentrate, though he didn’t have to worry about his calculations. The supercomputers actually did most of the work.
The portable boom box tucked among books and technical papers on his shelf had never succeeded in picking up more than one station through the thick concrete walls, despite the jury-rigged antenna of chained paper clips he had hooked to the metal window frame. The lone AM station, thank goodness, played primarily Oldies, songs he associated with happier days. Right now, Simon and Garfunkel were singing about Mrs. Robinson, and Dr. Gregory sang along with them.
The color monitors on his four supercomputer work-stations displayed the progress of his simultaneous hydro-code simulations. The computers chugged through numerous virtual experiments in their integrated-circuit imaginations, sorting through billions of iterations without requiring him to throw a single switch or hook up a single generator. But Dr. Gregory still insisted on wearing his lab coat; he didn’t feel like a real scientist without it. If he wore comfortable street clothes and simply pounded on computer keyboards all day long, he might as well be an accountant instead of a well-respected weapons researcher at one of the largest nuclear-design laboratories in the country. 3
THE X-FILES
Off in a separate building on the fenced-in lab site, powerful Cray-III supercomputers crunched data for complex simulations of a major upcoming nuclear test. They were studying intricate nuclear hydrodynamic models—imaginary atomic explosions—of the radical new warhead concept to which he had devoted the last four years of his career.
Bright Anvil
.