Agent of Chaos (The X-Files: Origins #1)(4)

Gimble rolled his eyes. “Agent of Chaos.”

The radio crackled again. “Meet me at the extraction point at sixteen hundred.”

“He means four o’clock,” Gimble explained to Mulder before signing off. “Got it. I’m out.” He returned the two-way radio to its original location on top of the TV set, his shoulders sagging. “Sorry. If I don’t ‘report in’ when I get home, the Major will think I’m an intruder.”

“That could be interesting.” Mulder grinned to let Gimble know that he wasn’t judging.

Gimble perked up. “You don’t want to be the guinea pig in that experiment. Trust me.”

Mulder thought the whole code word thing was sort of cool, like everything else in the room. But dropping by after school wasn’t the same as living here. He took a closer look around.

In addition to books, a row of bookshelves held small cardboard boxes with masking tape labels, numbered VHS tapes, two shortwave radios, some kind of handheld transceiver or CB, a sextant, bowls of rocks, and boxes of cream-filled snack cakes. Mulder picked up a gray rock the size of his fist and tossed it in his hand like a baseball. Nothing special about it, as far as he could tell.

He moved on to the books, scanning the titles in some of the stacks: The Encyclopedia of Unexplained Phenomena, Breaking the Crop Circle Code, Evolution and the Human Brain, The Truth About Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination, Secrets of the Solar System, and Applied Astrophysics. There were a few titles he recognized—like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984, and The Martian Chronicles—and at least half a dozen paperback copies of a book Mulder had never heard of called Stormbringer. Judging by the long-haired albino warrior on the cover, it was a fantasy novel.

The room was jam-packed, but Mulder realized the Major had created his own organizational system. Newspapers and magazines were stacked against the walls according to publication and year, and the towers of books beside them were sorted by category, like physics, space exploration, natural disasters, American presidents, and … aliens?

But the Major’s taste in reading material wasn’t nearly as interesting as the wallpaper job he’d given the room. Newspaper clippings and photos of what resembled crop circles and UFOs obscured most of the blue paint, and a huge map covered the far wall, with pieces of yellow string crisscrossing between the colored pushpins.

“What is all this?” Mulder stared at the walls, transfixed.

“The Major is always tracking something—natural disasters, meteors, unusual weather patterns, shortwave radio transmissions. You name it.” Gimble’s cheeks turned red and he looked away. “Let’s head to my room before he comes up from the basement. That’s where he keeps his files.”

“What kind of files?” After seeing the walls, Mulder was curious.

“Who knows? Maybe he’s saving the ‘secret messages’ he decodes from the backs of our cereal boxes.” Gimble kept his tone light as he led Mulder through the kitchen to a back staircase. He sounded worn out and kind of embarrassed, so Mulder pretended not to notice a bicycle lock wrapped around the refrigerator door handles.

Gimble’s bedroom was at the top of the steps.

“This is it,” his friend said proudly as he opened the door.

When Mulder walked in, his first thought was how much Gimble’s bedroom reminded him of Phoebe’s. Books overflowed the shelves, and a miniature model of the Enterprise hung above a small desk. Handwritten lists and charts were taped on a wall next to a Star Wars movie poster that still had fold marks on it.

Another poster covered the back of Gimble’s door—Farrah Fawcett, wearing the red bathing suit that sent every girl at school to the mall to buy a red one-piece. Mulder had the same poster on his bedroom wall back home.

He pointed to Farrah. “Now I know why we get along.”

“Think she’s a Trekkie?” Gimble asked hopefully.

“Doubt it.” Mulder took a closer look at the miniature Enterprise. The model was meticulously hand-painted just like Phoebe’s, though Gimble had added a white G on the back of his ship.

Gimble sighed, still checking out Farrah. “You’re probably right. Nobody’s perfect.”

Farrah Fawcett is pretty close.

“Wait till you see this.” Gimble rushed to his nightstand and opened the drawer. He turned around slowly with one hand behind his back, and then made a dramatic show of revealing what he was holding.

A pamphlet.

“It’s an original zine from Lord Manhammer.”

Mulder shrugged. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

“Have I taught you nothing in the past three months? Lord Manhammer … the king of D and D?”

“Dungeons and Dragons?” Mulder asked. Most of what he knew about the role-playing game he’d learned from listening to Gimble talk about it. Even Gimble’s nickname—which everyone, including the teachers, called him—came straight out of the game.

“There’s only one D and D.”

“Not true,” Mulder said. “There’s drunk and disorderly and deuterium deuterium.”

“How could I forget deuterium deuterium?” Gimble groaned with an exaggerated head smack. “When most people hear ‘D and D,’ their minds definitely go straight to nuclear fusion.” He held up the pamphlet, undeterred. “This is a copy of Lord Manhammer’s Underground EP Strategy Guide. It outlines Manhammer’s strategy for accumulating experience points. He only printed four hundred copies, and I have one of them.”