Crawling backward in the pitch blackness, Sydney tamped down waves of claustrophobia. She’d never dealt with the problem before. Then again, she’d never been plunked into an unlit, sludge-filled maze before and been told that countless lives depended on her finding a way through.
Hunting for antiquities might involved hidden traps, and mazes weren’t unheard-of. This was something else altogether. She just prayed there were no spring-loaded weapons, no concealed poisons, and no more abrupt drop-offs in the line. Who would have thought her most challenging and most frightening relic hunt would take place in the bowels of a gigantic metropolis?
Once in a while, she still caught a glimpse of illumination. Mulder kept his flashligh on. While she couldn’t pinpoint its origin, the minimal light offered her a desperate grip on her faltering sanity.
Her body ached with every movement, but she couldn’t let herself stop. "Talk to me, Mulder," she repeated for the thousandth time.
He obliged, "What do you want me to tell you? You want to know about the aliens?"
She chuckled. "Tell me about the aliens, sure." Hell, at this point he could have told her HE was an alien and she’d have welcomed it.
"They took Scully."
Sydney paused. Whatever else the man was saying, there was agony buried in the memory he recounted. "Go on," she urged. Her fingers encountered the carapace of another creature that skittered away and she sucked in her breath, gagging at the encounter.
"You okay?" Mulder’s voice floated up to her.
"Yeah," she replied faintly. "Go on. What happened with Scully?"
A moment later, Doggett’s voice drifted through her consciousness. "I read the case files. Agent Scully was abducted by a man named Duane Barry. We don’t know exactly where she ended up, but she was subjected to some very invasive procedures. She was nearly dead when she finally turned up, a month after she was first taken. It’s not a pretty history. I don’t think you really want to know all the gory details."
"I need to hear you talking to me. I need –" She paused to collect her wits. "I need to know you’re there, that I’m not the only person living in this god-forsaken hellhole." Please. "Tell me something good. There has to be something good about the X-Files, something funny. I know you guys work for the FBI. I know you deal with murder and mayhem. But isn’t there anything bizarre, a case where your suspect turned out not to be the killer or something?"
There was another pause and Mulder chimed in, "Well, I suppose it couldn’t hurt to tell you about Eddie Van Blundht. It’s public record, after all, and there’s no threat to national security. I guess you could say he was just small potatoes."
Go to Part Thirty Three.