That was how X ended up slogging through the mud. He had to park off River Road and circle through the woods to catch up to the kids without being seen.
Only, he wasn’t fast enough. By the time he reached the front of the run-down shack, Mulder’s friends were standing in the driveway, out in the open. Granted, X was wearing a pair of prototype night-vision goggles, but even without them, two blond teenagers weren’t hard to spot.
Where the hell was Fox Mulder?
A light switched on in the front room of the house, and X’s career flashed before his eyes—and if Mulder kept tempting fate, it would be a short one.
Because he watched Mulder open the front door of the sad excuse for a house and wave at his friends. The idiot must have a hero complex of epic proportions. X pictured Earl Roy pulling up in his truck and seeing the teenager standing in his living room.
Can this assignment get any worse?
The moment the thought crystalized in X’s mind, he regretted letting himself think it. Things could always get worse, and in X’s experience, they always did.
As he started to turn away, a hulking figure appeared behind Mulder and threw an arm around the teen’s neck. His friends froze in their tracks. They must have seen the guy grab Fox, too. What they couldn’t have seen without X’s night vision was so chilling that it made the hairs on his arms stand on end.
The man behind Fox looked like he was wearing a white mask, like a psycho in a horror movie.
Earl Roy turned to kick the front door with his boot, and X realized it wasn’t a mask.
It was paint.
X was ready to bolt for the door and go after the kid. But he couldn’t let Fox or his friends see him.
“Get in the damn car,” he muttered to himself, waiting for the other two kids to react.
But the girl recovered from the shock first and dragged the short kid toward the car. “That’s right,” X said. “Go get the cops.”
He watched the Gremlin start up and swerve toward the main road.
But the car turned left instead of right. X cursed under his breath. They were driving in the wrong direction.
Did it really matter? The nearest sheriff’s office was thirty minutes away—maybe more—and that was if you were driving in the right direction.
The second the Gremlin pulled away, X mobilized. He had to get Bill Mulder’s son out of that house without letting the kid get a look at him—a smart kid with a memory like Fox’s would recognize X from the DC police station for sure, and that wasn’t allowed.
He went in through the front door and did a quick scan of the living room before moving on to the kitchen. It looked neat and clean at first glance, but he’d been in a house like this before—nondescript and too generic. X had grown up in one of these homes. The secrets were all there if you knew where to look.
He opened the pantry, half expecting a body to fall out. Something moved, and X stumbled back. A black mass scurried toward him.
A rat king.
A writhing mass of rats—their tails knotted and twisted, transforming them into a monstrous creature.
Some people believed that rat kings were bad omens, a phenomenon so rare that only a few specimens existed in natural history museums. But X knew better. The specimens existed all right, but there was nothing natural about them. X was eleven, maybe twelve, when he read about them in a book he brought home from the school library. One night, the book went missing. He found it in the living room. His father was sitting in his stained armchair, drunk as usual, with the book in his hand. “You know this nonsense isn’t real, don’t you?”
X hadn’t moved.
“In this book, they asked all kinds of fancy scientists, and none of them could explain it.” His father laughed, a spray of spit showering X and the book. “Bet they didn’t ask a janitor.”
His father took a swig from the bottle in his hand. “Rats aren’t smart, but they’ll do anything to survive. You see this?” He pointed to the photo of a rat king specimen. Twenty rats, their tails tangled and intertwined in the center, with their heads facing outward. “If rats got twisted up like this in real life, you know what they’d do?” He took another swig. “They’d chew their own tails off to get themselves free.”
He jabbed at the photo. “People did this. Tied the rats’ tails together so they couldn’t get loose. Nature doesn’t create monsters. Only men do that.”
X watched the black mass of rats scurry into the living room, the pieces of string and yarn that Earl Roy had used to tie the animals together trailing after them.
Now X knew he was dealing with a monster.
Earl Roy would be holed up in the basement. When X tried the door, it was locked from the inside. He had two choices—break it down and protect Fox Mulder, the directive from Cigarette Smoking Man, or follow organization protocol and protect his identity. He knew which option his boss would expect him to make.