- A man tormented by a piercing sound that could make his head explode unless he heads west as fast as possible takes Mulder hostage to drive for him, while Scully rushes to find the cause of this affliction that also killed the man's wife.
- Breaking news on a local news station in northern Nevada indicates a man driving a blue car with a second person in the back seat during a police chase on a rural highway.
Inside the car, a woman is lying in the back seat in obvious pain. The driver looks back at her, worried, while continuing to speed.
The police manage to stop the blue car by use of a tire-puncturing chain. The police pull both people out of the car, putting the woman into the back seat of a patrol car while they hold the man down on the ground. The man yells for the woman, calling her Vicky.
The news helicopter films as the woman in the backseat bangs her head repeatedly against the rear passenger side window. Suddenly, a burst of blood appears.
In Buhl, Idaho, Agents Mulder and Scully knock on the door of Mr. Virgil Nokes. They are investigating why Nikes ordered 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. While Nokes pulls up records of his sugar beet crops, Agent Mulder watches the newscast of the police chase on Nokes's television. He points it out to Scully, who is intrigued by the explosion of blood.
Mulder wants to visit the Nevada crime scene to investigate why the woman's head seemed to explode in the police cruiser. He also complains that they are being punished by being sent to investigate big piles of fertilizer and manure. Scully wants to stick to their orders to investigate the fertilizer in Idaho in order to get into the good graces of the FBI again, but Mulder convinces her that they can manage the Nevada investigation quickly. She relents.
In a jail cell in Elko, Nevada, the driver of the blue car is lying in a jail cell. He wakes to find his nose bleeding and yells to the guards for help. Meanwhile, Mulder and Scully arrive at the Elko police station. They learn the driver is a 40-year-old roofer with no record named Patrick Crump. Patrol Captain Van Gelder tells the agents that Crump had stolen the blue car and was speeding along the rural highways without giving a reason. Mulder talks to Van Gelder and learns that Crump had been driving in different directions in the car.
Scully joins the medical examiner, Dr. Mindy Seeger, during the autopsy of Vicky Crump. Scully looks into the wound, which looks like a large exit wound from a gunshot, but there's no entry wound. "It's almost like a little bomb went off in her ear, " says the medical examiner. Suddenly, as Agent Scully pokes at the wound, something explodes, covering the bib of her medical apron with a large blood stain.
At the same time, Mulder sees that Crump is being transferred from his jail cell by ambulance to a local hospital. He's not allowed to ride in the back with Crump, so Mulder follows the ambulance in his car. As he follows closely on the highway, the ambulance begins to swerve, then stops. Mulder stops behind it. Crump jumps out the back, having incapacitated the EMTs.
Scully calls Mulder on his mobile phone and tells Mulder she suspects whatever Vicky Crump had might be contagious and he should stay away from Patrick in case he's also been infected. Mulder explains that he can't really do that, and we see that Patrick Crump has a gun on Mulder, forcing him to drive despite the patrol cars following them.
Van Gelder puts up a roadblock while Mulder contacts the CDC to put up a quarantine. Crump continues to force Mulder to drive quickly. When he learns that Mulder is FBI, he tells Mulder, "That figures." He throws Mulder's phone out the window and orders Mulder to keep driving. The police following fall back as Crump threatens to shoot Mulder if they don't.
Mulder sees that Crump is in greater pain when the car slows, so he recklessly decides to drive past the police roadblock and loses the police.
After night has fallen, back at the medical examiner's office, the CDC pathologist indicates he hasn't found any indication of infection. FBI Assistant Director Kersh, Scully and Mulder's current supervisor, calls Scully to indicate that he is aware they veered from their original assignment. She sees another victim brought into the morgue, a meter reader. She wonders aloud if he had read the meter at the Crump's house.
In the car, suddenly Crump -- who tells Mulder to call him Mr. Crump -- begins banging his head against the window and yells at Mulder to change direction. When Mulder takes a U-turn, Crump calms down. Mulder confirms with Crump that they need to be heading west to keep the pain at bay.
At the Crump residence in Montello, Nevada, safe-suited investigators, including Scully, use flashlights to see if they can find disease factors. They find a chained dog, clearly in massive distress, and Scully suspects he has the same condition as the Crumps. They manage to hold the dog down to take a blood sample but before they can sedate him, the dog's head suddenly explodes in a burst of blood.
In the car, Crump explains his wife was cooking breakfast early that morning when her nose began to bleed. As he put her in the truck to take her to the hospital, her head began to hurt unbearably. He noticed her condition improved if he sped. Mulder says he's sorry. But Crump says it's the fault of the "ignorant Jewish FBI." He tells Mulder he and Vicky were government guinea pigs and the government made them sick and were walking around his house at night with lights. Mulder tells Crump they're almost out of gas.
At the Crump residence, the investigators do not find any readily apparent disease vectors. They walk to the Crumps' neighbor's house, where they find two parakeets dead at the bottom of their cage. Then they find an elderly lady watching TV in her living room, alive and well. Apparently she is deaf and didn't hear them enter her house.
Mulder has stopped at a gas station and is trying to fill the tank, but the attendant won't turn on the pump until they pay. Instead, Mulder desperately grabs Crump and drags him into a station wagon and steal it. Mulder has left a note in the wagon with Scully's name on it.
At the elderly lady's house, Scully takes off her safe-helmet and wonders why the deaf woman is fine but everyone else, who is hearing, around her is affected. As she is wondering this, Van Gelder calls her to say that Mulder and Crump have stolen a car. He reads the note Mulder had left for her: "Crump sick. Will die if stopped same as wife. Must head west to stay alive. No roadblocks!" She tells Van Gelder to let Mulder keep driving.
On the older lady's property, while the phone call is becoming more staticky, Scully finds a string of dead black birds leading her to a cement sign in the ground that says "U.S. Government Property. Tampering punishable by fine and incarceration."
In the car, with Mulder driving faster, Crump's attitude softens and he apologizes for saying "the Jew stuff" to Mulder and that he can't help how he was born. Crump is not sure if Mulder is part of a conspiracy against him. They cross the border into California.
At the Horizon View Naval Research Station in Wendover, Agent Scully meets with a Navy Lieutenant who seems to think she's with the FCC. He tells her that at 6:17am, during a test of their ground-conduction radio system, there was a power surge that interrupted TV reception in the four-state area. The radio system is classified, as are the possible side effects on living beings during such a power surge.
Dawn has broken and motorcycle police are following Mulder and Crump. Scully calls him to share her hypothesis, that low frequency radio transmissions from the power arrays under the Crump property may be affecting the inner ear and creating an unbearable pressure. Driving west right be compensating for the EMF-related pressure.
Mulder explains to Crump what might be his only chance of survival: when they meet with Scully, she will need to quickly insert a long needle into his ear. He may end up deaf but alive. Crump asks Mulder to drive faster.
In Loleta, California, seaside, Scully waits for the wagon to appear, a long syringe in her hand. An ambulance is also at the ready. As she runs to the car, she sees that she is too late. There's a large blood smear on the back window and Crump is dead.
Mulder silently walks to the shore, removing his tie as he looks out at the waves.
Back in Washington, Assistant Director Kersh is totaling up the unexpected costs of this unauthorized investigation. Mulder tells him that the Navy is closing the facility and that their work is saving lives. Kersh says that the closure is coincidental. Then Kersh says he doesn't care what lives she and Mulder save, the X-Files are closed. Scully mutters as she walks out, "Big piles of manure."
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