La Cocachina - An X-files Fan Fiction Story

Chapter 14: Desert Chase

Sam's Goodies turned out to be medium-sized convenience store with a one-column gas pump on the side of Route 402 at the edge of Clayton. To the South and West of it lay a reddish-orange desert. In front of it, the two FBI agents encountered a small siege.

A police cruiser was parked at an angle two-hundred feet from the store. Two policemen stood behind the cruiser. One was using a loudspeaker to advise whoever was in to come out with their hands up. The other, shielded by the cruiser, was pointing a handgun at the store with both hands.

"You won't need this," said Mulder indicating the gun as he and Scully flashed their badges. The armed policeman ignored him and kept his gun pointed.

The loudspeaker policeman tried to caution them as they headed for the store.

"Are you sure, agents? The kid may be armed."

"He is not," assured him Mulder. He headed for the front door, while Scully circled around the building to cover the back.

The store appeared to be deserted. A faint radio somewhere behind the empty checkout counter played a screeching oldie tune that Mulder couldn't quite place. On other side of the counter, on the floor, Mulder discovered  the body of an elderly gentleman, who lay peacefully on his side, his glasses at a lopsided angle on his nose. From his blue overalls and the baseball bat lying next to him, Mulder guessed that he was the store owner. He checked the man's pulse. The owner appeared to be alive, albeit unconscious. He appeared to have been tapped on the head just enough to knock him out, probably with his own bat.

Mulder advanced further into the store, checking carefully between rows of toilet paper and cleaning supplies. Motion towards the back of the room made him turn, but it was just Scully who had entered through the back door. She silently shook her head: He isn't back there.

Everything happened fast. With a scream, Dan jumped out from behind a wall of cereal boxes. He pushed Scully out of his way, and she flew back, knocking over a shelf of canned foods.

"You ok?" shouted Mulder.

"Yes. Go!" shouted back Scully.

Mulder sprinted after Dan who ran out the front door.

"Don't shoot at the boy!" Mulder shouted at the policemen outside, who, following Mulder and Scully, appeared to have reluctantly left the cover of their cruiser and had made it a third of the way towards the entrance of Sam's Goodies.

Both policemen stood in Dan's way, the armed one still pointing his gun forward with both hands. Dan didn't slow down. He leaped. The armed policeman fired, but missed him. Dan flew over the two of them, who ducked slightly, even though the boy cleared them by at least three feet. He landed near their cruiser. With his bare hands, he ripped off the cruiser's mirror and stabbed the cruiser's tire with the broken handle. The tire made a hissing sound and the cruiser tilted to one side. The boy tossed the mirror and took off into the desert to the South-West.

"Don't shoot!" shouted Mulder again.

"I shot in the air," grunted the second policeman as Mulder ran past him.

"That's exactly where the boy was!" shouted back Mulder without stopping. He ran past the crippled cruiser, jumped into his rented Ford, and sped up after Dan, who was already a tiny dot in the distance halfway to the horizon.

It took Mulder a while to catch up with the boy. In the red and orange dust of the desert, Dan was running towards a crimson sunset at a breathtaking speed. Mulder rolled down his window.

"Dan, stop! I know what you need. Stop! I can help you!"

But Dan was not listening. He was running with an insane look in his eyes. Mulder glanced at his car's speedometer. It showed 34 miles per hour. Screw the world record, he thought.

He tried to intercept Dan's path with his car. With ease, Dan jumped up, stepped on top of the Ford, and landed on the other side, continuing to run unhindered.

After a few attempts to block Dan, Mulder found himself at a loss. He could not stop the boy or trap him in any way. He could only drive behind or next to him. What I need is a lasso, he thought. Not that he knew how to use one. He tried talking to Dan again.

"Dan, listen to me! There is something that has taken hold of you. I know how to get rid of it. Let me help you! Stop!"

Without warning, Dan collapsed on the ground. Mulder swerved and hit the brakes.

In the red dust of the desert, Dan lay motionless. Mulder ran to him and held his wrist. The boy had no pulse. Mulder turned him on his back, breathed air into his mouth, and started performing CPR. One, two, three, four, five... He checked Dan's pulse again. There was none.

He took out his cell phone.

"Scully! Dan just collapsed, probably from exhaustion. He has no pulse. He needs medical attention now! I'm doing CPR, but it's not helping."

"They've dispatched another car," he heard Scully shout from the receiver. "This one needs a new tire. They are almost here. Actually, I see them! Where are you?"

Mulder transmitted his coordinates from the GPS app on his phone and jumped back into trying to resuscitate Dan.

He continued to perform CPR to no avail. After a while, he gave up and sat on the ground next to the the boy.

Sprawled in the orange dust in the desert, Dan looked frail and broken. His body appeared to have aged. He had shriveled and dried up like a mummy. His skin was stretched tight over his protruding cheekbones. His right foot was bare, and the bottom of it no longer had any skin. It was just a bloody slab of exposed flesh, on which the blood had started to congeal.

Gently, Mulder took off Dan's left sneaker. From it, he carefully removed the spiky barbed-wire object nested inside. It looked identical to the one he had found in Dan's other sneaker. Mulder inspected it. It would probably hurt a lot to have something so sharp in one's shoe, he thought. How would a person even come up with the idea to use a device like this? He turned the object in his hands.

And dropped it. The object had moved.

On the ground, it looked like a thorny plant. For a moment, it lay motionless. Then, very slowly, it untangled itself and started crawling toward Dan. Its goal was obvious -- it was heading for Dan's bloody foot.

It reached the boy's foot, and stuck several of its thorns in it. After a few seconds, it pulled them out. What it was looking for was no longer there. Dan was no longer alive to provide nutritious blood to it.

The spiky creature made one more attempt for survival. It crawled to Dan's pocket from which protruded a small empty plastic bottle of Coke. It stuck a few thorns in the plastic, but found nothing there to feed on either. After that, it stopped moving.

It lay in the dust, motionless. Mulder watched it with fascination.

Suddenly, the creature started to visibly fall apart. It broke in half, and then into more and more pieces. Mulder picked it up as it disintegrated away. He quickly took off his own shoe, and placed the pieces inside. He put his shoe back on, expecting to feel pain as the thorns would undoubtedly prick his foot. But the thorns didn't hurt him. They seemed to have become brittle. Mulder felt them break to dust under his weight.

Scully arrived soon after. She ran out of the new police cruiser, carrying a medical kit with her, but Mulder shook his head: It's too late.

He no longer felt the spiky object inside his shoe. He took off his shoe and looked inside. There was nothing left in there except for a small amount of sticky residue.