Agent of Chaos (The X-Files: Origins #1)(3)
“Will your dad be pissed about your grade?” Gimble asked.
Mulder snorted. “He doesn’t even know I had a test.”
“You’re lucky. The Major is always asking me questions. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a copy of the class syllabus.”
He’d never met Gimble’s dad, but from what his friend had told him, the man sounded intense. Most fathers wouldn’t make their sons call them “the Major.”
“Your dad can’t be that bad,” Mulder said. “Not many people have a wide-field reflecting telescope at home.”
Gimble grinned. “Okay … the telescope is pretty rad. A friend of the Major’s from the air force got ahold of it for him. It’s nothing like the amateur-grade models they sell in stores.”
“Seriously? I had no idea.” Mulder laid on the sarcasm. “I’m completely unfamiliar with Newtonian infinite-axis telescopes.”
“Show-off.”
Mulder laughed. “It would be nice to put my insomnia to good use and get an asteroid or Martian crater named after me like George Hale. Are you sure your dad won’t mind if I try it out?”
“I told you he said it was cool.” Gimble flicked his head to the side just enough to get the long hair out of his eyes—something he did at least fifty times a day. “Let’s go see a guy about a telescope.”
Mulder picked up his pace. As a kid, he’d wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. He was ten years old when his dad told him that it would never happen. Astronauts had to pass a vision test, and Mulder had protanopia—a type of red-green colorblindness. Most people thought it meant that he couldn’t distinguish between red and green, but protanopia only affected his ability to see red. One color. That was all it took to crush Mulder’s dream.
“There’s a bunch of other stuff I want to show you, too.” Gimble scrambled ahead and turned around to walk backward, facing Mulder. “I’ve got forty-eight Star Trek cards, not including doubles. No one counts doubles, you know? And I have the Dr. ‘Bones’ McCoy card that came out three years ago, in mint condition.”
“That’s cool.” Mulder was used to epic levels of Star Trek devotion. Phoebe, his best friend back home in Martha’s Vineyard, collected the trading cards, too, along with everything else related to the TV show or the movie.
“I’ve got something even cooler.” Gimble stumbled on a crack in the pavement but managed to catch himself. “Well, maybe not cooler, but almost as cool. Or equally as cool,” he said, as if the Star Trek gods had tripped him for making the comment.
“Like what?”
Gimble turned onto a residential street lined with brownstones. Instead of answering the question, he stopped in front of the second house. “This is it.”
“I hope you have good junk food.” Mulder followed his friend up the steps. “All we have at my dad’s is sunflower seeds.”
Gimble hesitated at the door. “The Major is kind of strange. I told you that, right?”
“At least a hundred times,” Mulder said. “Including thirty seconds ago. Whose dad isn’t?”
“‘Kind of’ is probably an understatement. And all the news reports about that missing kid are making him worse.”
Billy Christian—that was the little boy’s name.
For a moment, Mulder couldn’t catch his breath. It felt like someone was squeezing all the air out of his lungs, and then the feeling passed, like it always did. Gimble was still talking. “My mom’s death really screwed him up, you know?”
“I get it.” Mulder’s mother had never been the same after his younger sister, Samantha, disappeared almost five and a half years ago. Every night she would put on her apron and prepare one of her specialties—meat loaf or a casserole—in an attempt to make it feel as if their family wasn’t falling apart. She would sit at the kitchen table and read a magazine or clip coupons while she waited for the oven timer to go off. After the third time he found his mom staring into space, while the oven timer buzzed and a casserole burned to a crisp in the oven ten feet away from her, Mulder learned to listen for the buzzer.
One night, he made the mistake of taking a shower before it went off. By the time he made it to the kitchen, the alarm was blaring and a veil of black smoke had filled the kitchen. His mom sat in the midst of it all, her cheeks smudged with tears.
Mulder swallowed hard and pushed away the memory. “Are we going inside or what?”
“I guess.” Gimble took out his keys and unlocked the five dead bolts on the door.
Mulder followed him inside, but he stopped cold just past the front hallway. It opened up into what Mulder assumed was supposed to be the living room, but he wasn’t sure because every square inch of the space—except for a sofa, a recliner, and a small patch of shag carpet in the center—was covered with junk.
No wonder Gimble hadn’t invited him over before. Most people would’ve taken off the moment they walked in, but Mulder found his friend’s house oddly fascinating.
“The Major saves everything.” Gimble walked over to the television set and picked up a two-way radio sitting on top. He pressed the button on the side and spoke into it. “It’s me. I’m home.”
Static crackled through the speaker, followed by a man’s gravelly voice. “This is a secure line. Code words?”