Ground Zero (The X-Files) (29 page)

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GROUND ZERO

Mulder could see spittle flying from his lips. She flinched, but did not back away from him.

“This is your fault, Miriel,” he said. “You came to Enika of your own free will, and I welcomed you—but you performed some kind of sabotage, didn’t you? What did you do to the generators? How did you shut down all the power? You’ve been trying to stop this test since the very beginning.

“I thought you were at least honorable enough to be here and witness it with me for old time’s sake—but now you’ve destroyed Bright Anvil, ruined everything. What did you do?

Did you do something to Emil Gregory, too?”

“I did nothing,” Miriel said. “Or maybe I didn’t do enough. But we’ll see. The Bright Anvil test will not take place—not this morning, not ever. It’s out of my hands.”

“See? You admit it,” Dooley said, stabbing his finger at her. “What did you do? We have to get these diagnostics switched back on.”

“Talk to Agent Mulder,” Miriel said, her mouth a grim line above her long chin. “He’s figured it out.”

Mulder was surprised to hear her—a former weapons physicist—actually agreeing with his bizarre explanation for the events.

“So you’re saying
he’s
in it, too? He’s not smart enough.”

Dooley’s face crumpled into an expression of disgust, and he stormed away from her. “I want nothing more to do with you, Miriel. That’s it. Emil would have been ashamed of you.”

Miriel looked stung by the last comment, and her posture sagged, but still she held the edge of the control rack. “We’re all going to be obliterated,” she muttered. “The wave is coming, a flashfire, a wall of cleansing rage from the Enika ghosts. It’s already hit the
Dallas
, and it’ll be here next.”

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Mulder went to her side. “You knew about this? You knew it was going to happen?”

She nodded. “Ryan told me it would…but I have to admit—” She gave a short bitter laugh. “A good part of me never actually accepted it. Ryan can be very charismatic, though, and so I went along just to see what I could do to fight with more practical means. But now it’s…it’s just the way he said it would be.”

She drew a heaving breath. “At least Bright Anvil’s going to be stopped, one way or another. All the test material will be wiped out here, along with the project people. In the wake of this disaster, I doubt such a weapon will ever be developed again.”

Miriel closed her eyes, and a strong tremor ran through her body like a seizure that quickly passed. “I suppose I always knew there would come a time when I’d have to test my convictions,” she said. “It’s easy to decide to volunteer and hand out leaflets or carry signs. It’s harder to say that you’re willing to get arrested during a protest: that’s a line some people aren’t willing to cross.” She glanced sharply at Scully, who looked away. “But there are other lines farther down the path, more difficult still—and I think I just crossed another one.”

Her eyes wide, Scully looked at Mulder and then at Miriel.

“I can’t believe what you’re saying. You honestly think a cloud of atomic ghosts is going to come and stomp on the Bright Anvil test because they won’t condone another nuclear explosion here?”

Miriel just looked at her without answering, and Scully let out a long sigh of disbelief. She turned to Mulder in exasperation.

“I think that’s exactly what’s going to happen, Scully,” he said, surprising her. “I believe it. We’re sitting ducks if we don’t get away from here.”

The three fishermen from the
Lucky Dragon
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GROUND ZERO

stood up, looking extremely agitated. “We don’t want to stay here any longer,” their leader said, waving his hands in front of him as if trying to recapture a spare portion of courage that flitted just out of reach. “This place is a deathtrap. It is a target. We’re fools to stay here.”

A second fisherman pleaded with Mulder, as if the FBI agent were in charge. “We want to take our chances, get back to our boat.”

Scully said, “You can’t go out in a boat in the middle of a hurricane. It’s safer to stay here.”

All three of the fishermen shook their heads vehemently.

“No, it is not safer. This place is death.”

Mulder said, “You told me yourself, Scully, that their boat’s been heavily reinforced, designed to withstand travel through a heavy storm.”

Miriel Bremen nodded. “Yes, Ryan wanted to make sure we could make it out here. But I don’t know if he had any intention of going back. I don’t think he did.”

Bear Dooley stormed around, still looking for something to break. “Go on out in the storm—all of you—see if I care. Get away from me. We’ve got work to do. There’s still a chance we can bring this test off. The device is on the other side of the island, and the countdown is going to proceed, whether or not we get these diagnostics up.”

Mulder looked at Scully, and in his heart he felt an absolute certainty of what was going to happen—he realized it must be the same confidence that Miriel Bremen and some of the other protesters felt about their personal convictions. The fishermen went to the blockhouse door and worked the bolt to open it.

Dooley stood ranting at them. “You’re all insane.” Mulder knew that Scully probably agreed with him. 267

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“Come on, Scully,” Mulder gestured as he ran to the door.

“You’ve got to go with us.”

“Mulder, no!” she shouted, looking torn.

“Then at least help us rescue Mr. Kamida,” he said. Her expression changed to one of sudden uncertainty. The door finally blew open and the storm roared in—though the winds had already blown loose everything that it possibly could. Now, though, the voice of the whirlwind had a different quality, almost like human speech: wailing screams, whispering accusatory voices that lurked behind the gale, growing louder, coming closer. Mulder’s skin began to crawl, and he could see that Scully also felt the violent strangeness, though she probably wouldn’t admit it.

With the fishermen beside him, Mulder stood at the threshold, nearly blown back by the storm’s force. He looked out at the awesome clouds that hung like sledgehammers ready to pound the island. He could see that, far beyond the brooding presence of the typhoon, something terrible…truly terrible, was coming their way.

“By the pricking of my thumbs…” Mulder murmured. Scully still resisted, but Mulder finally dragged her close enough to the door so that she could look out. She protested again until she stared into the night and looked up at the sky.

Then all her objections evaporated on her lips. 268

THIRTY-NINE

Enika Atoll

Saturday, 4:54 A.M.

The storm spoke to him in its power—dreadful voices against those others, welcoming whispers for him. At last. Ryan Kamida was part of them, a member of their spectral group, yet he was the misfit. Not because he was blind or scarred, but because he was
alive
. He staggered away from the control bunker, bumping into winds that punched him with the force of a catapult, driving him back—but still he ran. His feet slipped on the rough rock and sand that the gale flung up around him like shrapnel.

Kamida stumbled, fell to his hands and knees, felt his numb fingers digging into the cold, wet beach. He wanted to let it suck him down, to draw him into the sand to become one with the ashes of his people, a part of the scarred atoll.

“I’m here!” he shouted.

The typhoon howled, and the voices of the ghosts grew louder, urging him on. He got up and

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ran again. A blast of rain-sodden wind with battering-ram strength snatched up his body, yanking his feet off the ground. He flailed his arms and legs in the air, floating like a ghost himself—but it was too soon. It was not completely finished yet.

Kamida fought the chains of the hurricane until his lungs were about to burst. His heart wanted to stop beating from sheer exhaustion, but he plunged ahead, seeking release to join his family, his people—those unseen companions who had appeared to him for decades.

Kamida called out to them wordlessly, trying to make his mouth form words in the tongue he had known as a child but had not spoken aloud in forty years. It didn’t matter how well he formed the language, because the spirits would understand him. They knew. They were coming.

High up on the beach, Kamida tripped over the barrel left there by the fishermen. Instinctively, unerringly, he had found his way to the metal drum filled with the ashes of his tribe, those bits of charred flesh he had painstakingly separated from the coral and the sand of the atoll. He embraced the barrel, holding it tightly, pressing his cheek against the curved, rain-slick metal that felt cool even against his insensitive scarred skin. He held onto it as if it were an anchor, sobbing, as the hurricane roared around him.

The eerie whispers and screams behind the wind grew louder and louder, drowning out even the storm in the congealing mass of clouds overhead. Ryan Kamida could feel the power growing in the accusing eye of the hurricane—a static electricity, a surge of energy.

Kamida raised his face up to feel the rain evaporating, the bright heat caressing his skin.

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GROUND ZERO

Though he was blind, he somehow knew that in the clouds around the island a searing light was building to a white-hot intensity—growing brighter as the countdown for Bright Anvil continued to zero.

271

FORTY

Enika Atoll

Saturday, 5:10 A.M.

Facing into the storm, it was Mulder’s turn to keep hold of Scully’s arm, to be sure they wouldn’t lose each other. They staggered through the blinding rain and clawing winds that threatened to tear their small group apart. The three fishermen led the way, pushing forward one step at a time, heads down, making their way toward the sheltered lagoon. The high coral outcropping behind the beehive bunker absorbed the brunt of the violence from across the island. Still, the wind was so heavy that it pelted them mercilessly with stinging sand and rocks. Mulder could not see Ryan Kamida anywhere.

“Mulder, this is crazy!” Scully shouted.

“I know!” he said, but kept going.

As they worked their way along, his own doubts asserted themselves: it was absurd and illogical to go out into such a storm. “Suicidal” was more likely the term Scully would have used—but given the

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situation, logical alternatives were in short supply, and she must have trusted Mulder enough to follow him. She could see with her own eyes the incomprehensible disaster about to strike. He hoped he wouldn’t let her down. Miriel Bremen plodded beside them, stunned, yet willing to escape—not so ready after all to die for her cause that she would give up this last chance to get away.

“No matter what else you believe, Mulder,” Scully had to yell in his ear just to be heard, “the Bright Anvil device is going to go off in a few minutes! If we don’t get far enough away, we’ll be caught in that shockwave.”

“I know, Scully—I know!” But his words were whisked away by the storm, and he didn’t think she heard him. He turned to look at the craggy outline of the black uplift behind the blockhouse. The Bright Anvil device was out of sight in its shallow cove on the far side of the island. The fishermen began shouting, their calls barely discernible in the ripping gale. Beyond the winds, the eerie voicelike chorus echoed, rising to a bone-jarring crescendo within the fabric of the air itself.

The rain and the gloom and the stinging sand made it difficult to see anything. Mulder couldn’t locate the reinforced fishing boat where they had left it anchored. For a moment he was terrified that their only chance at escape had been swept away from the lagoon, that they were all stranded and doomed on Enika Atoll without even the uncertain protection of Bear Dooley’s control blockhouse.

But a moment later he realized why the fishermen were shouting. Two of them waded out into the churning lagoon to where the winds had dragged the
Lucky Dragon
into deeper water.

The lead fisherman swung himself aboard, 273

THE X-FILES

grabbing handholds and climbing the wet rocking hull to reach the deck. He helped his companions get aboard, and they gestured for the others to wade out to them. Scully hesitated at the shore. “Mulder—”

“Come on in, the water’s fine,” he yelled and pulled her forward into the lagoon without a thought to their waterlogged shoes. “Don’t be afraid to get wet! Remember, this is our vacation!”

The rain had already drenched them to the skin, and there was no sense in delaying now. Whether or not Scully believed in the supernatural danger of ghosts from the Sawtooth blast, the Bright Anvil warhead was due to detonate on the far side of the atoll. They certainly didn’t have much time. Miriel, still silent, waded beside them until they all reached the fishing boat. She scrambled onto the deck of the
Lucky
Dragon
ahead of them, like a cat climbing a tree. One fisherman ran to the deckhouse and started the engines; Mulder felt the vibrations through the boat’s hull, more than he actually heard the sound. While the second fisherman ran to disengage the anchor and free the
Lucky
Dragon
from its perilous mooring, the third man helped haul Mulder and Scully to safety aboard.

Before Mulder could make sure that his partner had gotten her balance, the fishing boat’s powerful engines spun it about, churning up a waterspout of spray as the
Lucky
Dragon
headed directly into the heart of the hurricane. Mulder grabbed the deck rail next to Scully and Miriel and held on for dear life.

Turning back to look toward the island, Mulder shouted,

“Up there, Scully!” He gestured toward the crackling sky.

“That’s no ordinary storm!”

The clouds glowed and hissed and boiled with weird energy that made all the hairs on his arms and 274

GROUND ZERO

neck stand up. He glanced at his watch. Any moment now for Bright Anvil. Any moment now—and it would all be over, one way or another.

The boat crashed away from the atoll, threading through the rabid whitecaps that foamed around the treacherous reefs near the surface. The fisherman at the controls guided the vessel, swerving from side to side, searching for a safe passage. Finally, the waters opened up, deeper and bluer even in the storm’s gloom. The engine roared with renewed power, and the
Lucky Dragon
lurched ahead. Mulder looked out to sea, but could find no trace of the huge Navy destroyer, the
Dallas
. He saw only a roiling froth that could have been a secondary maelstrom caused by the hurricane itself…or it might have been the sinking remnants of a massive shipwreck.