Chapter 9: Bent
Shouldn’t be so complicated 
Just hold me and then
Just hold me again…
Can you help me I'm bent...

He drove along the highway until it became a grid road, and then traveled that until it became a dirt track. He forced the SUV over rough grass and weeds sprouting up in the middle of the path, and fir and other trees slapped their branches against the windows as he passed them.

He tried to imagine Mulder walking this way. He supposed that on the one hand, maneuvering the increasingly narrow path on foot would probably be easier, but it was still a few miles, and it appeared that Mulder had been injured somehow.

He knew he was keeping a sharp eye out for his lover’s body as well as any wildlife that might choose to be on the same path as he was on. He hated himself for it, but couldn’t stop doing it.

He stopped the truck with a rattling jerk at the site of a large pine that had fallen across the road.

“Dammit!” He jumped from the truck and approached the blockage, feeling frustrated and again coming perilously close to the end of his endurance.

Kicking at the tree failed to hurt it at all. Hitting it accomplished much the same thing, with the addition of driving splinters into his knuckles.  A little more reckless swearing on his part, and then he was peering more closely at the base of the tree. 

The break was fresh. Sap still oozed in places, shining in the late afternoon sun. And was that paint, stuck in two or three places there in the rings? He peered closer, decided that’s exactly what it was, and felt relief work its way up his spine like a mad pianist.

Suddenly, as though he were standing in the middle of the scene, he could see Mulder, clear as day, backing some sort of vehicle—he couldn’t imagine it, but he knew there had to be one—backing it up into this tree, forcing the old pine into it’s current blockade occupation. Determined that no one would follow him, determined to make it…

He couldn’t decide whether to cheer or curse. The choice was made for him when on his second examination of the tree he found more of those red stains like the ones on the steering wheel of the last vehicle.

“Aw, hell…” A brief touch and his finger came away wet, but from sap rather than blood. The trail was old, but not too old. 

“And it’s only getting older,” he told himself as he made his way back to the truck.  He thought he couldn’t be more than a mile away from Dirk’s old cabin now, and that, along with realizing that the reason Mulder had blocked the road might very well still exist, made the decision to walk all that much easier to make.

He went back to the truck, found his rucksack, and dumped the clothes and odds and ends from the house out in the back. Then he took a few minutes to go through all the things he’d bought, trying to judge their merit vs. their weight, and how much he could leave for now. As far as he was concerned, he would be coming back to drag away the tree and bring his truck in, but for now, it was best left as was, and he wanted to make sure he had everything he needed. More concern for Mulder and his potential injuries caused him to stock up on the medicinal end of things.  He didn’t think about the condoms and lubricant that he shoved into the bulging bag at the end, he just did it.

Adjusting the pack on his back, he found it not too heavy, but knew he wouldn’t want to do a thirty k in it either. His marine days were far behind him, he had to admit. But he wasn’t so out of shape for an old paper pusher, either.  Making sure the truck was secure, he pocketed the keys and walked around the fallen pine.

The sun beat down on him, but this far up the mountain, the air was crisp and cool, and the sweat he generated dried quickly.  He pushed as hard as he could, taking sips of water from one of the bottles he’d bought, concentrating now on just putting one foot in front of the other, not letting himself worry about what might be behind him, or worse, what might lay ahead.

Less than an hour later, he came to a clearing, and a queer sense of déjà vu stopped him in his tracks. It was impossible to pinpoint where it had come from. 

The clearing, which had been large and bare when he’d climbed up here in another lifetime, was now overrun with berry bushes and creeping weeds of all shapes and sizes. There was still gravel where a large yard had been cleared, but dandelions covered most of it, their seed motes flitting around in the breeze.

A black Tracker sat parked in the far corner of the lot, nestled under a large elm tree, which nearly obscured it from view. What he could see of it, though, looked worn and damaged. He could clearly see large dents in the bumper just above the Alberta license plates.

In what might have been a psychic flashback moment, he wondered with a mean grin what the tourists who had been admiring the Falls thought when they’d come back to the parking lot and found their car gone. Some small leftover FBI agent in him shook a by-the-book finger at him for finding the situation amusing, and he hushed it with a silent promise to return the car…sometime.

The cabin looked bigger, somehow. Maybe it was the large generator, now sitting idle on one side of the building. Or the rail along the porch, which he didn’t remember ever seeing. It seemed the far side of the cabin had been added onto as well; the beams on the small room looked newer—less gray and worn than the rest of the building. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but he knew it wasn’t this: the cabin looked well maintained, homey even. His mind reeled for a moment, and all he could do was stand and stare.

A mosquito buzzed by his left ear, emitting its eye-watering hum, and that seemed to break the spell. He slapped idly at it and got his feet moving again. Each step got easier, and he took the porch steps two at a time. 

At the front door he stopped again, this time, not from surprise, but for caution’s sake. He reached behind him, and pulled his gun. He’d clipped the holster to the back loop of his jeans, not so much from habit, as he used to, back in the day, wear it in a shoulder holster, or on the side. No, the back holster was a hold out from Marine days, when it was best to have two guns—one the Vietnamese could take from you, and one they couldn’t see.

He checked the load, made sure the safety was off and tried the doorknob. Locked. He wasn’t surprised, but it frustrated him just the same, made him turn the knob violently once or twice. He heard a sly shuffling sound from inside the cabin and froze. He strained to listen, but the sound didn’t repeat, and he went back to tugging futilely at the doorknob for a moment more. Then switching the gun to his other hand, glad to know he could still aim fairly well with his weak hand if he had to, and reached into his pocket for his keys.

Attached to the ring was a small pocketknife with several different attachments. It took him a moment to extrude the right tool, but once the thin steel shaft was out of the casing, he jammed it into the lock with a vengeance, nearly snapping it off in the lock. He jiggled the lock, swore a little, and heard another soft sound from inside.

He swore a little more, and the lock gave. He turned both makeshift key and knob at the same time, and nearly fell into the room.

Jumping back, he took up his shooter’s stance in the doorway, and peered forward intently, pushing the door open slowly.

The room was gloomy, but not dark. The last of the afternoon sun was pushing through blinds over the windows in the living room, and somewhere in the back a light was burning, but in a flickering, hazy way that suggested a lantern to Skinner, rather than electric light.

With great deliberation, Skinner entered the room gun first. He didn’t have to see the person to know he wasn’t alone. He could sense the presence of someone else immediately, and his gun wavered back and forth for a moment.

The sounds he’d heard outside were repeated, and he turned in the direction he thought they’d come from. He saw what looked like movement from the hall at the back of the cabin, and he remembered that the short hallway led to bedrooms in the back.

“Stop right there!” His voice sounded strained and too loud. “Identify yourself.” When there was no answer, he called out again. “I said identify yourself!”

“Walter?” The voice was low and raspy, as if an asthmatic was talking through a bag of flour, and he almost didn’t hear it. Almost…

“Puppy?”

A figure stepped out of the darkness.

At first, all Skinner saw was the gun. An old shotgun, sawed off and aimed at his chest. As he watched, though, the gun drooped and then rose, then fell again, as if whoever was holding it was too weak to keep it aimed.

The hands holding the gun were pale and ghostly in the half-light of the room, and here and there dark smudges that might have been gunpowder or might have been blood splotched the fingers. While the gun may have been swaying, the finger on the trigger never wavered from its place.

Another step forward.

Skinner made some small noise—part fear, part hurt—as he recognized the man.

His left cheek was torn open, and Skinner knew exactly how that had happened. As soon as he realized that the wounds were from an abduction that had been rudely interrupted, he knew that the bloody tears on the face were going to be the least of the injuries.

As if in response to that thought, his wide eyes took in the torso, covered with a torn and bloody white t-shirt, and the jeans, caked with mud and blood, and torn at both knees.

“Oh, God…” His voice squeaked out of him.

“Alex said you’d come.” Fox Mulder crumpled to the floor at his feet.