Página PrincipalInternal Dating: No date given, but the forest is plenty green. Must be after Redux II, which is mid October. Interesting in that Mulder wears a medium-weight jacket and turtleneck, while Scully has on a light-weight jacket and thin top. (Make of that what you will....)
Across from him, his partner looks up, realizes the first man has vanished. Stumbing towards the place his partner just was, he is chased by something he cannot see. Leaping over a fallen tree, he hunkers down, breathing hard. As he tentatively pokes his head above the tree, he is grabbed and pulled downward, almost into the earth itself.
The credits roll: The Truth Is Out There
Close in on father and son, out in the woods possum-hunting with the family dog. The father urges the boy, Louis Asekoff, to let the dog go, and the animal runs off. The dog runs forward and stops over a bloody jacket laying on the forest floor. The woods go silent. Scared but trying not to show it, the father tells the boy to run back home, taking the dog with him. He loads his shotgun.
Louis begins running, but stops abruptly when he hears gunshots. He and the dog run off.
Route 43. Agents Kinsley and Stonecypher are in the front seat, relating stories from the last teamwork conference they attended. Bored to death, ("Kill me now," Mulder says to Scully), Mulder and Scully sit in the back seat. When the car is pulled over by a sheriff at a roadblock, Mulder seizes the opportunity and is out of the car in a second.
As he walks around the roadblock, a frantic woman runs up to him, begging for some information. It is Mrs. Asekoff, and it is her husband Michael lost in the woods, she says, and nobody will tell her anything. Mulder protests that he is not part of the search-and-rescue team, but eventually he accedes to her pleas, telling the woman he will try to find out something for her.
Mulder walks into the woods and comes upon a woman crouched over the spot in the woods. He identifies himself as an FBI agent, and Officer Michele Fazekas explains about the missing survey team. She says a bloody jacket has been found, and that this morning a boy and his father got separated in the woods. She calls it an animal attack, but cannot name a specific one, even when Mulder questions here. Fazekas goes on to say she has found two distinct sets of tracks, that she cannot identify as either man or animal. Mulder is clearly intrigued and asks Michele if there is a motel in the area. The officer is stunned; she says she and her team can find these men without the FBI's help.
Scully, who has come up to Mulder while he was talking to Fazekas, draws him away. He tells her that he wants to stay, and with a sigh of resignation, Scully says, "You want me to tell them that you're not going to make it to his year's teamwork seminar." Mulder takes her arms and smiles. "You see that?" he says. "We don't need that conference. We've got communication like that, unspoken. You know what I'm thinking."
That evening at the Asekoff house, Mrs. Asekoff tucks her son into bed, then goes downstairs. The dog is agitated, and claws to go outside.
In his hotel room, Mulder logs onto the Internet and scans through information on North American predators. Scully enters his room bearing a small tray with wine and cheese, since, she says, they will be missing the conference. "However, I must remind you that this goes against the Bureau's policy of male and female agents consorting in the same motel room while on assignment," Scully smiles. Mulder grins back. "Try any of that Tailhook crap on me Scully, and I'll kick your ass."
Mulder tells Scully what he has learned: that no known predator will choose the strongest from among its prey when the weakest is available. He believes they are not dealing with a normal predator in the woods. Scully is disbelieving --she has thought Mulder was using the creature in the woods as a ploy to get out of the conference. The description the boy gave sounds to Mulder like a primitive culling technique, a way to separate the weak from the strong. Scully replies, "Mulder, we're in western Florida. The closest thing to primitive down here is living in a beachfront retirement condo." Mulder argues that the woods here are "as old as anything in the South", then rises and says he is going out. Scully turns on him and says, not unkindly, "You know, Mulder, sometimes I think some work on your communication skills wouldn't be such a bad idea." Not taking offense, Mulder promises to be back soon and leaves.
Mrs. Asekoff lets her dog out, and the animal runs into the woods and begins barking. Mrs. Asekoff goes outside, and the door closes behind her. Anxiously, she follows the dog into the edge of the woods, calling for him. In front of her, two red eyes suddenly pop up, and she runs for the house, only to be stopped by the door, which has locked from the inside.
Frantically, Mrs. Asekoff begins calling for Louis, who runs downstairs to help his mother. In the darkened hallways of the house, a pair of red eyes chase him, and panicked, he runs. As he scrambles through the doggy door, a pair of arms grab him. Mulder.
The following morning at the house, Mulder and Scully investigate, along with local policemen. Scully finds a videotape of "The Invisible Man" in Louis' VCR, which she believes explains his story of what chased him. Disagreeing, Mulder calls her attention to some tracks in the kitchen. The tracks, which look human in that they have five toes and a defined foot, are clearly *not* human, as they are made by the ball of the foot only, not the entire foot. Michele Fazekas backs up Mulder's theory, and the three decide to go into the woods and attempt to identify the attacker.
In the woods, the agents and Fazekas are joined by Jeff Glaser, a young man versed in computer technology, who helps out the local authorities. He has a FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared), which uses infrared technology to track living beings in the woods. After cautioning Mulder and Scully to stay close, Fazekas begins leading them through the woods.
Glaser spots a creature on his readout, then a second one. They are heading around each side of the group, as if to attack them as one. Mulder and Glaser run off to the left, Glaser following after the thing by using the FLIR. Scully and Fazekas run to the right. Realizing that separating them is what the creatures intended, both groups stop running. Glaser loses the creature on the infrared readout.
Michele Fazekas and Scully turn around to head back, and Fazekas is grabbed from below, disappearing into the undergrowth. Scully brings up her gun and calls, "Mulder, I need help!"
The two men run towards Scully, none of them seeing any signs of Michele or whatever grabbed her. Mulder says the creatures separated them on purpose, to get at Michele, as they knew she was in the lead, and therefore the strongest. He wants to go after her, but Glaser is adamant that they leave the woods first and then get help. Mulder argues that they are wasting time by standing around talking, and they might not find Fazekas. Glaser counters by saying that if they don't leave the woods now they may never find *any* of them.
Scully speaks up, saying that Glaser is right. Fazekas had their water and food, and they cannot find their way through the woods without her. As she is speaking, she sees movement behind Mulder and Glaser. She tells the men to freeze, that she has seen something.
Glaser tracks the creature as it moves in front of them, and Mulder pulls his gun and runs after it. Urged on by Scully, Glaser calls out the creature's location, only to lose it.
Mulder steps carefully through the woods, stopping when he sees the outline of man etched against the trees. When it runs away he fires, but misses. The creature runs back toward Scully and Glaser, and she nearly empties her weapon firing at it.
Terrified by what is happening, Glaser runs away, the FLIR bobbing in front of him. With a cry, he goes down as something grabs him from below.
Separated by several yards of woods, yet within sight of each other, Mulder tells Scully not to shoot anymore, not to "waste the advantage we have. "What is it, Mulder?" asks Scully. "I don't know," Mulder replies. "But whatever it is, it's smarter than us. At least out here."
As she is looking at him, something grabs Mulder, pulling him down. He cries out for Scully, sounding scared and frantic. Scully runs forward, calling Mulder's name. Catching sight of him on the ground, she fires at the creature standing over him. She does not hit it, but the thing flees. Scully runs to Mulder, who has been badly cut by the creature in the shoulder and face.
That night, as Mulder lies shivering with cold and shock, Scully tries to build a fire. Scraping two rocks together does not work, and she falls back wearily against the fallen tree Mulder is laying against. Pulling her clip out of her gun, she begins taking apart the shells, hoping to find some powder she can possibly ignite to start a fire with. "Mulder, you need to keep warm," she tells him. "Your body is still in shock."
"I was told once the best way to regenerate body heat is to crawl naked into a sleeping bag with someone else who's already naked," Mulder says.
Smiling softly, Scully says, "Maybe if it rains sleeping bags, you'll get lucky."
Mulder can only gape at Scully.
"Have you ever thought seriously about dying?" asks Scully, intent on the shells.
"Yeah, once, when I was at the IceCapades," Mulder jokes back.
"When I was fighting my cancer, I was angry at the injustice of it, and its meaninglessness. And then I realized that that was a struggle: to give it meaning, to make sense of it. Like life."
"I think nature is supremely indifferent to whether we live or die," Mulder says.
One of the shells yields up its powder, and Scully carries it triumphantly to her pile of wood. She dumps it on the wood and resumes striking the rocks together. A spark flies, and there is a small explosion as the powder ignites, but no fire.
Resigned to a cold night, Scully crawls back to the log and pulls Mulder forward. "I don't want to wrestle," he says petulantly, but allows Scully to pull him down until he is laying with his head in her lap. "One of us has got to stay awake, Scully," he says as Scully strokes his arm.
"You sleep, Mulder," Scully replies. "If you get tired, you wake me," Mulder answers. Scully shakes her head. "I'm not going to get tired."
Mulder then asks her to sing for him, so he will know she is awake. She refuses, saying she can't really sing, but Mulder insists. Softly, Scully begins to sing "Joy to the World" ("Jeremiah was a Bullfrog.")
Next morning, Mulder wakes up to find himself alone. Panicking, he pulls himself up painfully and calls for Scully. A few yards away, she stands up, saying she has found some wild berries on one of the bushes. She heads back toward Mulder, only to disappear.
Mulder shouts her name, and gets to his feet, heading in the direction Scully was. A faint yell comes from the ground: she has fallen into a hole. As she explores the chamber, she literally runs into the body of Michele Fazekas, which hangs on the side of the cave. The officer is alive, but barely. Shocked, Scully sees more bodies, including Michael Asekoff and long-dead skeletons. From in the back corner, two red eyes glow at her.
"Mulder, I'm not alone," she whispers up. Reaching for her gun, she is dismayed to realize she does not have it.
Above her, Mulder drops his gun down to Scully, then looks up, startled, as the bushes behind him rustle. He drops down into the hole with Scully, landing badly and unable to get up for a moment. As Scully tries to help him up, the creature in the corner rushes at her, and she whirls around at the last second, firing several times.
She hits the creature, killing it, and Mulder and Scully creep forward cautiously, staring at the body. What Scully has killed looks like a man, yet one with bark for skin and who appears to have taken on characteristics of the trees surrounding him. "There has to be some scientific explanation for this," Scully says.
Attempting to get out of the hole, Mulder and Scully stack the dead bodies, hoping they will be able to reach high enough. Shouts sound from above, and Agent Kinsley peeks his head down. Mulder tells him there are injured people with them, and the agent runs to get the paramedics.
Michele Fazekas and Mr. Askeoff are alive, and they are carried away by two separate ambulances. Mulder is treated for his injuries, and ends up in front of a large cross-section of a tree, with small placards showing significant dates in history next to the ring formed that year.
Agent Kinsley walks up and Mulder points to a ring dated 1521. He tells Agent Kinsley about Ponce de Leon and his men, looking through these same woods, searching for the Fountain of Youth. Mulder speculates that perhaps the creature they found in the woods was one of de Leon's men who had found that Fountain of Youth, and in the intervening years between then and now had learned how to adapt to his surroundings so well he had taken on characteristics of the trees.
Agent Stonecypher walks up and says they have not found Glaser yet, or the other creature, as there were two of them. She says she thinks it might try attacking anything that was in the woods. Alarmed suddenly, Mulder asks where Scully is. Agent Kinsley says she went back to the motel to pack up hers and Mulder's things. Mulder takes off for the car, racing to get back to the motel.
Scully moves through the motel, pulling clothes from the closet and dresser. Mulder pulls up to the motel and pounds on the door next to Scully's room. Puzzled, she opens the door and asks Mulder what he is doing. Going into the room a little ways, Mulder looks around, then asks Scully if she is ready to leave. The two walk out the door.
From the darkness under the bed, two red eyes begin to glow.
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