"The Five" Book 2 (1/4)

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 1 of 33)
By Somebody Else

SUMMARY: Having discovered that Samantha was taken as a hostage to be
exchanged for five survivors from the Roswell crash, Mulder and Scully go
looking for The Five.

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age,
please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for
that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers.

Disclaimer: All the truly interesting characters herein--the Mulder family, Dana
Scully, Walter Skinner, the Consortium members, Alex Krycek and the morphing
alien--are the invention and intellectual property of Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen and
Fox Broadcasting, as is the whole concept of the X Files. I swear I don't have any
money, and I'm not making any money off this, so there's really not much point in
suing me over it.

************************************************************************

A drunken man who falls out of a cart, though he may suffer, does not die. His
bones are the same as other people's; but he meets his accident in a different way.
His spirit is in a condition of security. ... Ideas of life, death, fear and the like
cannot penetrate his breast; and so he does not suffer from contact with objective
existence. - Chuang-Tzu

Transcript of interview with subject
Krycek, Alexander T.
6/14/96
Tape #AB286551

"...I got into it because of Timmy. We were out by the creek one day in the
summer. Catching crawdads or something--I don't remember--I must have been
about nine, I guess. Anyway it got dark before we realized it, and we started
home. But just before we got back up to the road, they came.
"I never told anybody. I never thought anybody'd believe me, or maybe they'd
think I did something to Timmy. So I just said we split up at the end of the block
like always and I didn't know what happened after that. But I knew.
"You know how this story goes, right? There was a bright light, and all that.
And they took Timmy. Oh, they brought him back, all right, about a week later.
But I don't think it was like with the little kid in *Close Encounters*. I think they
hurt him. He was never the same.
"And I was scared.
"When the Cancer Man approached me I was at the FBI academy. And when
he came and asked me to help throw the alien bastards off the planet, I thought
about Timmy and I was gung ho.
"Of course, that was before I knew Bateman was going to turn me into his
personal hitman. And it was before I ever met Mulder."

****

Transcript of interview with subject
Bateman, Shelby R.
8/9/96
Tape #AB286562

"Don't tell *me* about contempt of court, you justice department worm. I'm
already in jail, and if you think I'm going to tell you shit, you are even more of a
fucking moron than you look.
"And that's all I have to say to you assholes."

****

September 9, 1996
Sheep's Ridge, Wyo.

The power had been out for four days, and even some people who had
generators and water wells had come into town. For fuel, to keep running the
generators. But still, Sheep's Ridge was a small town, and the operation had
yielded only eighty-two subjects for assimilation. There were more humans out
there, if the morphs had wished to press it--humans who were too stubborn or too
remote to bother driving into the town. But this was just another test, the third in
which subjects actually had been taken, and it wasn't worth the trouble, so the
morphs left them alone. The remaining humans could be taken at leisure later,
hunted for sport.
The Warrior omni-morph overseeing the operation knew perfectly well that
another thirty-five subjects had not been handed over by the humans as had been
agreed. It knew those thirty-five had been spirited away to another place for
processing. They were to become the hybrids that the humans thought could
throw the morphs off their germ-ridden little planet.
The warrior thought the hybrids were interesting, but not particularly
threatening. They were considerably less delicate than humans and wouldn't be
damaged by exposure to the fumes in alien blood. Perhaps less likely to be ruled
by their emotions or hormones. But they weren't any smarter than the humans,
and they were a great deal more unruly than the grays. Would they be good
soldiers, effective fighters? Maybe. And if so, the warrior assumed that they could
be assimilated, too, at the appropriate time. After all, they were halfway there,
already.
Three assimilants wrestled a new subject through the door into the Sheep's
Ridge City Jail while the Warrior morph watched. The human, an old, heavy-set
male, shouted curses and struggled, but he was no match for his opponents, who
now possessed an alien strength. It occurred to the Warrior that assimilated
human bodies wouldn't last long being used by the Conjoiner Circle in this way.
They would need many more assimilants to bring the humans under control. Soon
they would begin gathering subjects in larger towns.
The assimilants held the human down on a crude bunk in one of the jail cells
while a Conjoiner, a small, slimy, shapeless creature, was placed into a container of
diesel oil. The oil seemed to work well; the Conjoiners could dissolve themselves
into it easily, and it was readily available on this planet, which saved the morphs
the trouble of bringing their own materials with them. They preferred using native
materials, whenever possible. It was efficient and preserved resources.
The human began to scream, and then gurgle, when the oil was injected into his
nostrils. His limbs convulsed, spasmed, and then went quiet. The assimilants
released him, then. He got unsteadily to his feet and stumbled out to take his place
with the rest of the slaves. The grays would take care of him now.
The Warrior wondered what the humans would do with the subjects who could
not be hybridized. There were always some who were unfit. It didn't care what
became of them, but like all things with intelligence, it had moments of curiosity.
And of boredom.
It walked outside, seeking diversion, despite knowing there was little diversion
to be had here. No one here had offered much resistance. The town was dark, but
the Warrior saw lightning in the distance. It lifted its head, smelling for water, for
rain. Yes, there--but very far away. Very high in the sky, there was water. But it
would not reach the ground. Strange planet, this Earth, with its motley climate.
Focused on its sense of smell, the Warrior scented the grays before it saw or
heard them come. Then it felt anger. Grays were not to gather in this way, not to
approach without permission. The Premises prohibited this. The Warrior let them
come--it would give them what they deserved for this arrogance. Then it
hesitated. They had an assimilant. They were hiding behind the old man who had
just been changed, using him as a shield.
The Warrior didn't care. The human would die, but the Conjoiner inside him
would not be harmed. The grays knew that; what were they up to? The Warrior
turned, flared radiation.
As it blazed white, just in that fraction of a second, as the man and the grays
burned, as its attention was concentrated on the kill, it missed hearing or smelling
the hybrid who plunged a long metal spike into the base of its skull.

****

Transcript of interview with subject
Morris, Ernest L.
7/2/96
Tape #AB286561

"...I didn't see him at first because it's dark back in those cargo holds. And then
he jumped out at me like some kind of ninja, out of the dark, and I swear I thought
he was going to kill me, even though he wasn't much more than half my size--God,
he was skinny. But he came at me like the marines landing on Guadalcanal, all
swinging fists and trying to kick everything he could reach. It was eerie, you
know, because he wasn't yelling or anything. He was real quiet, and all I could
hear was him panting with the effort...
"We got Valerie, the medical specialist in there, and Wayne and I held the kid
down so she could give him a shot. Man, he was in terrible shape. Like he'd been
beat up, starved and left for dead. He couldn't even talk. Valerie was pretty good
with him--she was real gentle, and it seemed like he was starting to respond to her.
I don't know why they didn't send him down to Earth with her, but somebody said
Dr. Curtis should go with him instead.
"I don't think the kid liked her. Some of the crew didn't like her, either, but I
thought she was all right. Kind of frigid, I guess, but I figured we were there to
work with her, not fall in love with her.
"Anyway, you know how sometimes your dog just takes a dislike to somebody,
for no particular reason you can figure? The kid was like that with Karen Curtis.
She'd walk into the infirmary, and he'd kind of shrink up against Valerie, like he
was scared of Karen. He just didn't take to her at all.
"And after they left, I never saw either of them again..."
"How he got up to Artemis? Hell, I wish somebody could tell me that. I
*know*, I was in charge of the cargo bays. And when we took off, there was no
twelve-year-old kid in there. How could there be? Everything was checked and
checked, a hundred times. I swear to God, that Mulder kid was *not* in those
bays when we launched.
"Aliens? On the station? You're kidding, right?"

****

Transcript of interview with subject
Casper, Dr. Karen E. Curtis
6/28/96
Tape #AB286557

"Before I tell you anything, I've got to have two things. First, guaranteed
immunity from prosecution. And second, you've got to protect my family.
Otherwise, it's my intention to exercise my constitutional right to remain silent.
"I do hope that's clear."

Continued in Part 2.

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 2 of 33)
By Somebody Else

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please
read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for
that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's
happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored.

See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary.

************************************************************************

Is it so that my persistence
Blocks the path of least resistance...?
--k.d. lang

September 11, 1996
Washington, D.C.

It had been a long, insane day, and Walter Skinner had not been
sleeping well since April. When he got home that night, he didn't want
even to turn on the lights, much less do the usual human things--fix
something to eat, pop open a beer, turn on the tube. He left the lights
off and headed for the bedroom, intending to dump his coat and tie on
the floor and collapse into bed. Focused on that and dulled to
everything else, he didn't notice the man standing in a dark corner of
his living room at first. And when he did, he realized suddenly he
didn't even have the energy to go for his gun.
Instead, he dropped his keys on the coffee table and said coldly,
"What the hell do *you* want?"
The last time Skinner had seen the tall, bearded black man standing
in the shadows in his living room, they had been trying to beat each
other brainless. Skinner had won that round, but he wasn't ready for
round two.
"You're about to get a phone call," the black man said, his tone
low and resonant. "It's a call you don't want to ignore, on a matter
you don't want to delegate. You don't have all the players yet." He
tossed a file folder on the coffee table, on top of Skinner's keys, went
past the assistant director and out the door into the night.
*Shit*, Skinner thought. *Circles within spirals, plots within
ploys.* He picked up the file. Unlabeled. His phone rang.
It was Kimberly, his secretary. "I'm sorry, sir," she said. "I
have a call for you from Steve Whitman in northwestern regional. He
sounds...exasperated. Shall I patch him through?"
Skinner blinked. Steve "unflappable" Whitman? Exasperated? That
was like Barney the dinosaur getting depressed--impossible by
definition. "Okay, Kimberly," Skinner said. "I'll take the call." He
waited for the connection. "Steve," he said. "What can I do for you?"
"Sorry to bother you, sir," Whitman started. By God, he *did*
sound hassled. "We're working a kidnapping case in Sheep's Ridge,
Wyoming, out of our Butte office, and we're running into some
jurisdictional problems I was hoping you could clear up."
"What kind of jurisdictional problems?"
"The Air Force is standing us off thirty miles out of the town."
"The Air Force? On what ground?"
"That's just it, sir. They won't say. They just won't let us in."
*Shit. What now?* "Okay, Steve, let me see what I can do. Who'd
you talk to with the military?"

****

September 13, 1996
Philadelphia, Penn.

He hadn't meant to sleep. Fox Mulder woke to find himself curled
up in the bottom of the closet in a hotel room in Philadelphia and swore
softly, resisting the temptation to bang his head against the same wall
he'd awakened leaning on. He had intended to watch a couple hours of
the baseball game and then make his escape, try to get out just long
enough to find some release in exercise. Instead, he had slept.
Dreamed. Sleepwalked into the fucking closet. Again.
The safe hotel in Philadelphia didn't have exercise facilities, and
the pool was outdoors, which meant that for a closely protected material
witness to take a dip in it required the sort of security precautions
generally laid on for a visit from the pope. From a distance, it must
have looked absurd--in the middle of the night, five or six G-7s
lounging in the pool furniture in their suits and ties and radio
headsets, trying to look nonchalant with .40-caliber Smith & Wessons
weighing down their belts. Yeah, sure, those guys were just out
catching some moonlight.
Looking at it close on, from the inside, Mulder found the whole
thing intolerable. He didn't want anybody watching him while he swam.
It threw off his concentration, ramped his self-consciousness up to max,
made him feel like what he was--a prisoner. All the security had been
welcome, at first. For the first few weeks, he'd actually slept well,
cocooned in the massive embrace of the holy mother federal government,
his back up against Uncle Sam's armored flank. God only knew why that
had made him feel safe--the people he was being protected from could
easily have minions among the G-men assigned to look after him. But
rational or not, he *had* felt safe. No nightmares, no waking up in a
cold sweat, no pacing the room for hours before he exhausted himself so
that he could even try to sleep. He'd been sleeping in an actual bed,
for God's sake, and sometimes even with the television turned off.
Christ, he hadn't been able to do that since Oxford.
It hadn't lasted, of course. Just about the time he and Dr. Heitz
Werber had gotten into the real work of trying to see what he could
remember about his childhood illness and abduction, the nightmares had
come back with a vengeance. Night after night he had dreamed of bright
lights and paralysis, of terrible cold and darkness, of being alone and
powerless in the grip of monsters he couldn't even see clearly.
And despite knowing it wouldn't help, would probably just make
things worse, he had fallen back into his usual script--trying not to
sleep, so he wouldn't dream. He knew he ought to ask for drugs. Werber
would prescribe them if he asked, had already offered more than once.
The dreams--and his efforts to prevent them--were leaving him ragged,
exhausted. Little by little, they had eroded his appetite and his
strength, and probably, if he were going to be brutally honest about it,
any hope he had of keeping his work with Werber in its proper
perspective. But Mulder no longer felt safe--he might not be actually,
physically at risk, but he was being attacked in his subconscious. The
last thing he wanted was to lie down in a stupor and let somebody--or
some *thing*--sneak up on him in the dark.
Then he had noticed that summer was going brown and letting the
fall gently blow it away. Realizing that a whole fucking season of a
whole fucking year had come and gone without his even having a chance to
experience it, Mulder understood clearly for the first time that he was
an inmate, not a guest.
Granted, as cages went, this one wasn't bad. The last time he'd
been held captive, there'd been no mini-bar, no ESPN. But cabin fever
was driving him crazy. He needed to move. He needed not to feel
trapped.
When swimming hadn't worked out, he had tried jogging in the
hallways, but the third time he ran headlong into a room-service
waiter's cart, he gave that up and turned to plotting his escape. There
was a park right down the street; it even had a sandy running path. He
could see it from his hotel room window.
He'd been spirited off to Philadelphia right after the morphs had
delivered their ultimatum. *Find The Five soon, or else.* No big deal,
right? Except that the morphs themselves had been trying for nearly
fifty years, and they didn't have a clue. And all Mulder had to go on
was the word of a lying son-of-a-bitch named Higginbotham, who--without
offering the least bit of evidence to back up his claim--had asserted
that Mulder knew where The Five were.
Mulder hoped Higginbotham was right about that, because beyond
Higginbotham's claim, he had no idea where to start looking for five
alien survivors held since the Roswell crash. For all Mulder knew,
Higginbotham was lying and The Five lay dead in that burned-out boxcar
in New Mexico. But he hoped they were still alive and that somewhere,
buried in his subconscious, he knew where to find them. Because if he
couldn't find them, two things were certain to happen: The morphs would
take their grief out on any humans they could get hold of, and they
would never, ever let Mulder's sister Samantha come home.
It was weird, though, wasn't it, that the morphs didn't seem to
think Mulder knew where The Five were. Mulder turned that over in his
mind while he laced up his Nikes, preparing for his first foray out of
the safe hotel.
Yeah. It was weird. And ironic--of all the individuals who knew
something about the story, it was the *aliens* who had been most willing
to accept his side it.
He took his glasses. The G-7s weren't used to seeing him wear
them. Then a generic black gimme-cap. He picked up the ice bucket,
waited while his watch ticked down the time to 8:52 p.m., then slipped
out into the hall.
He knew his protectors in the rooms on either side could hear the
door open and close. He knew the schedule on the cameras. They swept
constantly, but the screens in the control room switched on a staggered
schedule--the ones sweeping this hallway cut to the elevators
periodically. Seven minutes in the hall, three minutes on the
elevators; three minutes on the hall, twelve minutes on the elevators;
nine minutes on the hall... It had taken him days of watching to work
that out. If he had this just right, he'd make it look like he was
going into his room with the filled ice bucket just as the camera
switched to the elevators for twelve minutes.
He strolled toward the ice machine, resisting the temptation to
whistle. *Don't overplay it*, he ordered himself. He scooped ice,
glanced at his watch. Forty-two seconds. He returned to his room,
opened the door.
*Now*. He cocked his head, listening for any sign that anybody was
paying close attention to him. Nothing. He set the ice bucket down on
the floor inside the door and let the door swing shut while he stood in
the hallway. Then he walked very slowly and quietly to the stairwell,
slipped in and went down four flights to the ground. Just before he hit
the ground floor, he put on the hat and the glasses.
Adrenaline, now. What would they do if they caught him at this?
He'd get a long, Skinner-esque lecture, no doubt. He'd have to muster a
really hangdog look and promise solemnly never to try it again. He
could do that. Worse, if they didn't believe the promise, they might
make one of the G-7s stay with him all the time.
God, now *that* would be a punishment.
The stairwell opened into the lobby, and Mulder ducked his head as
he passed by another camera--one he hadn't had the opportunity to
observe. He cut through the bar, trying to keep people and potted
plants between himself and other cameras, then walked out past the pool
to the street.
He was doing it; he was pulling it off. He thought he might split
himself open, repressing laughter. *Ha, ha, you bozos--I'm off my
leash, like a dog that's slipped his collar, running from bush to bush
with his tongue lolling out.* He strolled on down to the park, spent a
few minutes stretching, breathing open air, tasting the salty, sweaty
rush of freedom. Oh, to be unchained, unwatched. He felt wonderful.
He thought about rolling in the grass. Instead he set his feet on the
sandy pathway and started off, a little slowly at first, to unkink
muscles that had grown unused to the work. After a few minutes he
settled into his stride, let his mind run at idle.
Poor Werber--he really was trying. But whatever Dr. Karen Curtis
had done to make Mulder forget, she had done one helluva grand job of
it. Mulder had been waiting for Werber to suggest that they ought to
take a break for a week or two. He'd known it was coming. It had come
this afternoon. Mulder had said he'd think about it. He was not
thinking about it. Not even planning on thinking about it. Werber
might be willing to take a break, but Mulder was not.
*Fucking masochist. Neurotic as the day is long.*
Oh, yeah, *that* was a news flash.
It wasn't as if there hadn't been some successes. Mulder was
retrieving bits, all right. But it was frustrating as hell--what was
coming back was the really early stuff, and he had not been old enough
at the time to make much of it. Didn't know enough now to see the
patterns in what had happened. Denied access to his best source of
medical information, his partner Dana Scully, he figured he hadn't much
hope of figuring it out. He had been keeping careful records, typing
them into his laptop, hoping Scully could piece it together later.
Actually, it was Scully's laptop, her fire-eating, whiz-bang
Powerbook, weighted down with its bells and whistles and sound card that
made a barking-dog noise when he screwed up something. Fucking Macs.
What was wrong with a plain old generic beep? And he'd bet his teeth
she was going to make him pay for sticking her with his 486. He didn't
know how they had managed to switch them, but they had--at the airport?
Had he stuffed the wrong machine into the wrong case when he packed up?
Well, whatever--he had set his teeth and figured out Microsoft Word and
had been keeping a journal. He had almost stopped jumping out of his
skin when the computer barked at him.
He had written that he now quite clearly recalled going to dialysis
treatments, starting when he was about two. He had *hated* dialysis.
Even now, the thought made his guts twist in revulsion. He could hear
the machine--*ka-thump, click; ka-thump, click*. Sucking his blood out
and replacing it with something that felt cold and foreign where the
fluid re-entered his veins. He'd had that *thing*, the tube thing,
planted in his arm so that the nurse could attach him to the machine.
He had hated having that tube inside him. He had dreamed that it was
growing there, extending its malevolent presence down his veins little
by little. It had stayed there for nearly a year, until the night when
he had almost died and Victor Klemper had given him a shot of something
that had made him better, at least for a while.
But what was that something in that needle? What had it done to
him? No matter how eidetic Mulder's memory was, he couldn't remember
something he had never known. One thing was for sure--he had not seen
The Five when he had gone to the hospital for dialysis. He didn't
remember ever being examined or treated by Klemper, either--couldn't
muster up an image of the doctor's face from that time. And so,
basically, he had spent damned near five months getting nowhere. The
morphs had said there wasn't much time. How long was a long time to a
morph? A week? A year? Mulder didn't know. Apparently it was more
than five months, because CNN hadn't yet rolled tape of the end of
civilization.
It occurred to him suddenly that he really ought to have a scar,
where the tube had been inserted. But he didn't. He wondered why not.
Another note for Scully.
The jogging path wound back into a grove of trees that lined a
pond. Nice track, with lamps puddling yellow light on the ground.
Mulder ran over a wooden footbridge, his steps sounding loud and hollow
on the planks. As he reached the end of it, he saw movement off to his
left--somebody in the trees. He skidded to a hard stop, swinging
around, reaching for his gun.
He saw hands rising, palms out in surrender. Mulder could barely
see the figure in the dark. He held his stance, and said breathlessly,
"Federal agent. Keep your hands where I can see them and come out of
there."
The figure moved slowly, but stayed in the dark.
"Out here," Mulder said. "Into the light."
The figure whispered, "I don't want anyone else to see me."
"Why not?" Mulder rapped out. "What are you doing back there?"
"Waiting for you, Fox."
He was hooked now--the guy knew his name, and Mulder wanted to know
how. He kept his distance, but he moved around, out of the light
himself, the weight of his Smith & Wesson comforting in his hand as he
held it trained on the dark figure.
It occurred to him that he hadn't been on a gun range in months.
*Probably couldn't hit the broad side of a battleship.*
"Who are you?" Mulder asked. "How do you know my name?"
"My name is Zachary," the figure whispered. "I am almost your
brother."
Mulder's eyes had begun to adjust. He could see the large head,
the big black eyes. Could see the long, slender fingers, the flat chin,
the thin, horse-like lips.
It looked like the thing in the train car in Iowa that the Japanese
had been so eager to export.
It was a hybrid.
Dear God.

Continued in Part 3.

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 3 of 33)
By Somebody Else

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please
read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for
that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's
happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored.

See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary.

************************************************************************

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is
obvious. - George Bernard Shaw

Transcript of interview with subject
Krycek, Alexander T.
6/14/96
Tape #AB286551

"...I don't think the oil thing that took me over knew very much.
It'd been in that downed fighter plane for a long time, so a lot had
happened that it'd missed, you know? It remembered the crash at
Roswell--I think it must've been on the ship when it went down. And it
was *desperate*, just desperate to get back to the rest of the aliens
that were on the ship. I don't know why. You can't really know what
it's thinking, just impressions. Just...images, I guess.
"I don't think the oil is the *thing*. I think it just uses the
oil to get inside you...
"You can feel it take you over. It doesn't hurt, but for a second
you just feel so *cold*. Like there's no blood left. You feel so
damned helpless. And then you're not really there anymore, except that
you are, back in some corner of your own brain, and you're screaming to
get out. But it's not going to let you out, because it just doesn't
care. You know what you're doing, but you can't stop it, and anyway,
it's not really you. Then after a couple of days you start to feel like
it's all there is, and you're just kind of fading away. If it'd had me
any longer than it did, I don't think there would've been much left of
me.
"You want to know why I went looking for Mulder? Because I'd
rather go to the gas chamber than have one of those oil creatures crawl
into my nose again. At least if I die, it'll be *me* dying."

****

September 13, 1996
Big Horn National Forest
Twelve miles east of Sheep's Ridge, Wyo.

"Look, things change," Dr. Michael Neeley said. "People get older,
they come down with illnesses. They smoke, they drink, they use drugs.
Their body chemistry changes over time. Some of these people were
tested for hybridization damned near twenty years ago. You can't expect
this process to be perfect--it's not going to work on everybody."
Tom Corvin turned a baleful eye on Neeley as he stood in the middle
of the hastily constructed Quonset hut, standing in what had become, in
effect, the Sheep's Ridge operation's morgue. Seventeen of the gurneys
held misshapen corpses. Corvin suppressed a desire to choke Neeley. "I
don't expect it to work on everybody, doctor," he said. "But you're
only getting fifty percent. Do you know how many people are going to
die if you don't improve that? How many the aliens are going to slurp
up like ice cream?"
Neeley glanced at the floor. He looked exhausted. Corvin supposed
that he probably was. But Corvin didn't have either time or sympathy to
waste on Neeley. The doctor, like Corvin, after all, was on the list of
humans the aliens had agreed not to take over. He was a member of the
select group the aliens had agreed would stay human and run things after
the processing had been completed. Corvin had been instrumental in
making up and maintaining that list, and he had made sure that nobody
got on it unless they'd sworn lifelong dedication to doing whatever it
took to save as many human lives as possible. Corvin knew Neeley had
spent four days doing just that, but still, he was alive and in no
danger. That couldn't be said for the rest of the population of Sheep's
Ridge.
"How many did they get?" Neeley asked, his voice near a murmur.
"More than eighty, at last count," Corvin answered, and suddenly he
felt exhausted, too. *Poor bastards*, he thought. More than eighty who
either never had been tested or had tested unsatisfactory for
hybridization, and so had been handed over to the aliens because they
were lost to humanity anyway. *Never knew what hit them, and never
will.*
"There can't be many left around here," Neeley said.
"No," Corvin agreed. "We're all done but the mopping up, here.
But our friends are starting to get nasty. They want to do a test on a
bigger town."
"God," Neeley said, closing his eyes. Corvin could hear the bile,
the nausea in the doctor's throat.
"Yeah," Corvin said. "Get rid of the bodies in the forest. Burn
them. Any of these have implants?"
"Just two."
"Take the implants with you. I don't want any electronics left on
the bodies."
Neeley nodded. "I understand."
Corvin went to the other end of the hut, where eighteen people were
undergoing the change that would make them hybrids. These were not the
sophisticated hybrids that Klemper had made all those years ago--these,
like Dr. Berube's friend Secare, didn't look alien and would remain at
least eighty percent human. But once the change was complete, they'd be
able to breathe underwater and withstand a release of alien retrovirus.
More importantly, their blood chemistry would kill any Conjoiner
attempting to assimilate them. And they could be easily and quickly
cloned, if need be, to build up the population.
Four of these had the implants in their necks. They were the
strongest and brightest of the bunch. Corvin would wait for them. Wait
to make sure they got packed up and sent off to Virginia in one piece.
Something more important was in store for them.

****
Durham, N.C.

It had never occurred to Dana Scully that she might actually miss
Fox Mulder. For one thing, it had not seemed possible that she would
ever have occasion to miss him--he had become so inextricably wound
around her existence that the idea of their being separated long enough
to warrant pining for him just never had entered her mind. She was
pretty sure he hadn't consciously meant to, but just by being who and
what he was, his personal and professional interests had utterly
commandeered her life. That he might, in effect, just vanish for
months--Jesus, had it really been five months?--hadn't seemed possible.
Oh, she'd known when he wasn't there, when he ditched her and ran
off to do something he didn't want her to see. She'd said, "Mulder,
where are you?" so many times the words had begun to feel as involuntary
as a sneeze, as automatic as breathing. But that was hardly the same
thing as actively *missing* him.
Well, she was missing him now. Sitting here in a hotel room deemed
safe by whoever deemed such things, she would have liked to grab him by
the throat and drag him here. Because somehow, in the confusion when
they had parted, they had managed to swap computers. Wherever he was,
he had her Powerbook. And he had left her with his misbegotten,
ratfucking 486 with its lousy 14.4 modem, running Windows version three-point-scum. He had
jury-rigged Netscape so the security wouldn't turn
off, and he had every-fucking-thing password protected and double-encrypted. She could've
e-mailed him to chew him out, but she feared
using the hotel's phone lines might give away her location, and his cell
phone cable wouldn't fit her phone. Scully was not prepared to risk her
life or his merely for the purpose of chewing him out. For the
privilege of strangling him with her bare hands, maybe, but not just to
berate him.
*I'm gonna find you, Mulder,* she thought. *And when I do, I'm
gonna make Eugene Victor Tooms look like a pussycat.*
In fairness, she suspected he was just as unhappy with her
Powerbook as she was with his 486. He was the only person she knew with
any real computer literacy who actually *liked* the Windows interface
better than the Mac. She suspected it was because Windows worked the
same way Mulder's brain did--every which way at once in some
indecipherable order that turned logic inside-out six times before
inexplicably producing a reasonable result. Well, sometimes it was
reasonable.
But she had never known Mulder's brain to throw up general
protection faults (although she might've argued there were times when it
should've), which Windows certainly did--usually about the time she had
downloaded ninety-eight percent of a big file. Which would have taken
half an hour on his crummy modem.
She was staring at an error message now. She closed Netscape,
logged off. Shut down Windows, rebooted the machine and started over.
It wasn't really the computer that was the problem. With computers,
like so many other things, she and Mulder were yin and yang. She liked
computers; he didn't really, but he was smart enough to yield to the
technology and to work out the basics...mostly. She thought about the
number of times she had been startled out of a workday reverie by her
partner's low growl: "Print, you stupid piece of shit." Actually, come
to think of it, it was the simplest computer functions that gave him the
most trouble. Like getting the machine to make a printout. He was
better at more complex, intuitive applications, and when it came to
massaging the Internet, he had The Touch.
No, that wasn't it. What he had was the *patience*. The *focus*.
Scully wondered how many times his mother had had to tell him to stop
picking at a scab--watching him on the Internet was like watching a
little kid keep scratching and scratching a mosquito bite. He'd keep at
it and at it, and when necessary, he'd get into a related news group and
wait like a spider for somebody to produce a FAQ or the address to the
mailing list he wanted. He understood the kind of arcane thought
processes that resulted in things like Usenet hierarchies. If he
couldn't find what he wanted the first time he clicked on a link, he'd
click everything else on a page until he *did* find it. He'd actually
read through all 250 entries the search engine produced. He wouldn't
stop at "No entries found," he'd just change search engines and keep
going until he got something. When it came to flat-out single-minded
relentlessness, Mulder was hell on a jet-pack.
Scully didn't have his endless, inexhaustible determination. And
she needed it for the task at hand--she was searching the federal budget
for fiscal year 1996. She sighed as Netscape launched again and wearily
typed in gopher://suny.stat-usa.gov.
Come right down to it, the real problem was, she was worried about
him. Worried he was chewing himself down to a nub because he didn't
know where The Five had been hidden. And Roy Higginbotham and Bill
Mulder had both asserted that *he* did know, although there was precious
little evidence it really could be true. And if somebody didn't find
The Five and return them to their own people, it might literally be the
end of the world.
Mulder was perfectly capable of driving himself into a
malnourished, dehydrated, sleep-deprived frenzy over a thing like that.
It would play right into all his guilts and terrors, all his pain and
self-doubt. Mulder was good at what he did precisely because he had no
fear of walking right up to the brink, of staring into the abyss and
letting it stare back at him. He did it every day in his job, with the
kind of rank, foolhardy arrogance of a man who'd already been to hell
and back and figured there was always just the off chance he might get
through one more time. And if this had been some run-of-the-mill,
everyday abyss, Scully would've bet he could get through. Sure, she
would've prepared to cope with some trauma. But he knew when he was
pushing the limits. When standing at the brink, he had the unerring
balance of a master tightrope artist.
But this was no ordinary brink, and the hell Mulder was staring at
was his own. And what if Higginbotham was right? What if Mulder
himself was the key to the whole mystery? If they lost him now--if he
lost himself...
Scully shook herself and focused on the laptop's screen. The only
thing she could do now to help him was to try in her own way to find
some clue to The Five. She was trying to figure out where Shelby
Bateman and his buddies had hidden the kind of money needed to reverse-engineer UFOs.

****

Philadelphia, Pa.

"You're a hybrid, aren't you?" Mulder asked. Zachary was dressed in
jeans and a black T-shirt. He wore Reeboks and a gimme cap almost
identical to Mulder's. A ridiculously incongruous get-up, like E.T.
decked out in a pearl necklace and dress in Gertie's closet. Mulder
found himself stuck hard between terror and fascination. He would have
liked to reach out, touch Zachary's walnut-brown skin--was it warm?
soft?--but he didn't dare.
"I am 47.239 percent human," Zachary said softly. "And 62.76
percent gray."
*Jesus.* Mulder felt light-headed, and his mouth seemed to be
having trouble wrapping itself into the shapes required to form words.
"You say...you say you're my brother?" He couldn't quite keep this last
word from coming out as a squeak.
"I like to think that," Zachary murmured. "But you don't have to,
if you'd rather not. If you find it upsetting."
"But...how...?"
"Some genetic material used to make me came from a sample drawn
from your mother."
He remembered his mother's words. *I volunteered for the
experiments. They took some samples.* Mulder nodded. "It was you--at
my father's house, when I went to get the cat."
Zachary looked at the ground in a reasonable facsimile of
embarrassment. "I didn't expect anyone to be there."
"Neither did I."
"I didn't mean to frighten you. I was trying to understand...what
he might have been like."
"Maybe you can explain it to me," Mulder said bitterly.
"I don't believe I arrived at any new insights."
"It was rhetorical," Mulder said. "Nevermind."
"You can put the gun down," Zachary said. "I only want to talk to
you. Anyway, if you shoot me, it'll hurt you more than me."
The retrovirus. "Your blood is..."
Zachary nodded. "Toxic to humans."
Mulder drew a deep breath for courage and holstered the Smith.
"How did you find me?"
"The morphs always know where you are."
Oh, now *that* was reassuring. Mulder swallowed hard. "Why are
the morphs watching me?"
"They like you," Zachary said. "The morphs won't hurt you. Not
now, not any more."
Mulder focused on that for a moment, but try as he might, he could
not detect any irony in Zachary's tone or manner. *They like me.
Christ!* "What did you want to talk to me about?" he said. "I have to
be back before they know I'm gone." He looked at his watch. It was
9:27; to slip back down the hall in synch with the camera, he had to hit
the door to his room by 10:13. He wasn't sure he had time for this.
And he wasn't at all sure he wanted to have a conversation with...it.
Not now, anyway, not with that "I'm-your-brother" business still
whirling around in his head.
Zachary frowned, his high, sharp brow ridges seeming to compress
against each other. "Will they hurt you, if they know you have
escaped?"
"Hurt me?" Mulder chuckled. "No. Yell at me some, I guess. Tell
me what a goofball I am."
"And that doesn't hurt you?"
*It might, depending on how they go about it.*
"No, I'll be okay." Strange, the thing really seemed to care--the
grays who had taken he and Samantha, all those years ago, had seemed
utterly indifferent as they plunged needles and blades into him. Hadn't
reacted to his screams. Maybe half-human was enough, to make this
hybrid understand what that had been like.
"What did you want to talk to me about?" he asked again.
"Your sister," Zachary said quietly. "And making a revolution."

Continued in Part 4.

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 4 of 33)
By Somebody Else

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please
read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for
that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's
happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored.

See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary.

************************************************************************

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. - Oliver
Wendell Holmes

September 13, 1996
Philadelphia, Pa.

"What do you know about my sister?" Mulder demanded.
"Not where to find her," Zachary said. "I have been mostly with
humans, until I escaped. The morphs don't entirely trust me yet." He
smiled, a human gesture that didn't quite work in a mostly inhuman face.
His lips bent stiffly at the corners, as if the motion hurt his mouth.
"Nor should they," he said. "They wouldn't let me know something like
that."
"Can you find out?"
"I won't promise that. I can't promise it, because there's no way
to be sure."
More alien ethics, like the morphs back on the Vineyard. Besides,
who did this asshole think he was, assuming he could just invoke
Samantha's name and get instant cooperation? Disgusted, Mulder shook
his head. "Then we don't really have anything to talk about," he said.
He turned his back on Zachary and took a step away.
"Please!" Zachary said, a note of desperation in his tone.
Mulder didn't turn around, but he stopped. The thing really
sounded as if it needed help. Maybe it did. *Fucking sucker,* he
cursed himself. He faced the hybrid. "What do you want from me?"
"Ten minutes," Zachary said. "Just hear me out. Then if you don't
want to do more, I understand. None of us have the right to ask any
more, not of you."
*You got that right*. He let Zachary lead him back into the trees,
and they sat down together on the ground, hiding out from passers-by and
anybody who might be looking for them. The night was cool and dry.
Mulder could feel the muscles in his legs tighten in response to his
suddenly aborted run.
"Do you know who the grays are?" Zachary asked Mulder, in his soft,
throaty voice.
"I don't think we've ever been formally introduced," Mulder said
dryly.
"They were separate once, until the morphs took them for the
Circles. It would have been about three hundred years ago, in Earth-time. And more than a
thousand years before that, the Circles took the
morphs, themselves. Now the grays and the morphs belong to the Circles
as if they were never separate, and before long, they will have all of
us--" He ducked his head. "You. All of you."
Mulder tightened his grip on his suspicion of this creature--if
there was anything insincere about Zachary, he was doing a damned good
job of concealing it. The apparently unintentional confusion about his
own place in human society, or lack of one, that was a good touch. Very
poignant.
*Don't let him get to you. He could be setting you up--Lord, how
easily he could be setting you up. And for goddamned near anything.*
The minions in the shadow government had given Mulder part of what he
wanted before, for the purpose of leading him around by the nose like a
donkey on a halter. Zachary's appearance could be the carrot held out
to quiet the beast while the harness went on.
"You're saying they're going to assimilate us, just like the
grays?"
"Yes."
"They promised not to. Not if we find The Five for them."
Zachary waited a beat to show he was serious, then said, "I do not
think that was what they meant."
Mulder felt his heart thud hard. "What do you think they meant?"
"That they will not eradicate you. The assimilation is coming; it
may already have begun. But if The Five are not returned, and alive,
they will do more than take you. Then they will punish, too."
Mulder thought of Krycek being taken over by the oil-based alien.
"Some of us would prefer the punishment," Mulder said slowly. "Look, I
have some idea of what they can do to us--"
"I know."
"I'll eat my gun first."
Zachary shook his head, hard. "It is not yet that hopeless."
"You just said it was."
"Not if we work together."
"Meaning what?"
"The hybrids are designed to fight for you, against the morphs and
the Circles. And many grays will fight for you, too, if you will fight
for them. The grays have been slaves for so long they have forgotten
what it must be like to be free. Now they see you, and they want what
you have."
Zachary had said he wanted to talk about revolution--*Jesus!* He
was asking for a declaration of war. Mulder's head had begun to spin.
"Why ask me this?" he asked. "I don't have the power to make that
decision."
"No. But you are the only one who has the power--and perhaps the
will--to force the question. Those who can make the decision have no
incentive to do so, not while the very existence of the grays and the
hybrids remains secret."
"You want me to get up on a mountain and shout, 'The aliens have
landed'? That's been tried before, you know. Hell, I've tried it
myself. It didn't work."
"Of course not. You must prove it."
"Why don't *you* prove it? Go to the mall in daylight, Zachary."
The hybrid laughed. A weird sound, a cross between a chuckle and
the honking of a goose. "You know better than that, Fox," he said. "If
I arrived alive--how likely do you think it is that I would?--I would be
spirited off before I could get three words out."
Mulder sighed. He was right, of course. Some of the main players
were cooling their heels in federal prison at the moment, but even
Mulder knew enough about the military to know it was the sergeants, not
the generals, who actually got things done. The sergeants were all
still on the loose, and he suspected there was little about the Project
that wasn't continuing to operate normally. It was normal to take out
any personnel who showed interest in exposing the Project's activities.
"No," Zachary went on, "it must have official sanction. And only
you can manage that."
*Oh, right. I'll go up to *Capitol Hill* and shout 'the aliens
have landed,' and that'll work better than shouting it from a mountain.*
"I think you're overestimating my clout," Mulder said. "For one thing,
I'm in protective custody myself. There's not a helluva lot I can do,
locked up in a hotel room in Philadelphia."
"I do not think you will be here much longer."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know that the morphs have been busy somewhere else."
"Doing what?"
He shrugged. "I'm not sure. And besides, you'll see for yourself
before long. Now I'll tell you what I *do* know of your sister. She is
well. They have treated her gently and done nothing to hurt her, not
even what little they did to you."
*What little they did to you.* What he remembered of it was
unspeakable agony. He knew now that part of what had started him on his
quest to find her was the subconscious fear that she was still enduring
the *little* they had done to him. Then he thought of the night on
Martha's Vineyard, when he had heard her voice in his head. He had
tried to get her to tell him where she was, and she had refused. *Not
now, Foxy. I promised.* What had she promised? Why would she promise
the aliens anything? Didn't she want to come home?
"Have they assimilated her?" he asked dully.
"No. But Fox, you must understand--if humans and hybrids and grays
succeed in driving the morphs off the Earth for good, there is always
the chance that they will take her with them. You must be prepared to
choose."
*Choose between Samantha's coming home and the safety of every
other living soul on Earth.* Mulder closed his eyes. As a professional
law enforcement officer he had pledged to put his own life on the line
for anybody, anywhere, any time. But this was not about *his* life; it
was about someone else's, Samantha's. He didn't have the right. This
was not a choice he wanted. It occurred to him suddenly that it was the
same choice his father had made.
And his father had made the wrong call.
He drew a long breath, opened his eyes and got to his feet,
trembling with anger. "I'm not giving her up," he said. "If her life's
not worth anything, then no one's is." He hadn't meant to start
shouting, but he was doing it. "You're asking me to be willing to die
for the grays, but you won't promise to fight for Samantha? You want me
to promise *not* to fight for her? If those are your terms, fuck you!"
"Fox," Zachary said softly.
"It's not negotiable, goddammit!" Mulder yelled. He ran back to
the hotel, ran like a demon, pounding into the building thoughtlessly,
without any regard for who might see him or what the response to his
leaving might be. He kept on running up the stairs, straight to his
room, slammed the door open.
And there, sitting on the end of his bed, was Assistant Director
Walter Skinner, wearing a particularly inscrutable expression--what
Mulder sometimes thought of as Skinner's cold-blooded lizard-eye look.
Before Mulder could gather his wits enough to stammer out a word,
Skinner said coolly, "Get packed. We're leaving."

****

September 14, 1996
Big Horn National Forest
Twelve miles east of Sheep's Ridge, Wyo.

The pile of bodies had grown large, and Dr. Michael Neeley was
tired and discouraged. He had set a small cadre of the Consortium's
hybrid troops to digging a trench behind the make-shift hospital where
the hybridization of the population of Sheep's Ridge had taken place.
The mound of dirt that had grown up had slowly but steadily acquired
half a man's height.
Eighteen. There were eighteen people who had not responded to the
process, whose internal organs had been corroded to a greenish-brown,
slimy goo by the infusion of alien DNA. They'd tested OK, but something
in their bodies had changed since then, and they hadn't made it.
Neeley had been a doctor for twenty-five years, and he knew all
about losing patients. But he had never lost eighteen of them at once
before. He had never lost them retching up the gelatinous remains of
their own lungs and livers before. And he had a horrific dread that
they would not be the last, or even close to the last. That before he
was finished, he would've lost count, lost track of their faces.
Someone should remember them, he thought. But no one would. His task
now was to make sure of it.
He sent the hybrid troops away, staying on alone to carry out the
final phase of the cleanup. He wanted no one around. He wanted, in
effect, to shoot his own dog, rather than let someone else take care of
the chore for him. He pulled a five-gallon can of gasoline from the
back of his Jeep Cherokee and headed up the mound of dirt, wearily,
resigned to what he had to do.
It occurred to him that the forest was tinder-dry. There'd been no
rain in months, nothing but dry lightning striking the ground out of the
thunderheads that formed in the late afternoons. He worried briefly
that the fire might spread--not that he cared about setting the trees
aflame, but because a big fire might attract attention. But he hadn't
much choice, so the worry fluttered away like a moth. He climbed down
into the stinking, gore-filled trench, opened the can and began
splashing the bodies--what was left of them--with gasoline.
He caught a glimpse of a hybrid standing up on the dirt mound when
he turned to move farther down the trench. Annoyed, he called, "I
thought I told you--"
This was not one of the cadre of troops that had been with him
before. This was an old-style hybrid, one of Klemper's originals from
the look of him. Then Neeley noticed the lighted cigarette in the
hybrid's hand.
"Hey! Get that away from here! There's gas all--"
The cigarette seemed to float down toward him as it left the
hybrid's hand. Smoke trailed dreamily into the trench, as if the world
had suddenly gone into slow motion. Neeley watched a ball of flame
ignite when the cigarette touched down; the glowing ball expanded toward
him. His mind did not work fast enough to get itself wrapped around
what was happening, and so he didn't run, and the gas can was still in
his hand when it exploded.
He was already dead before the flames consumed his body. Shrapnel
from the exploding can had sliced into his brain.

****

O'Hare Airport
Chicago, Ill.

*He looks like hell,* Scully thought.
She'd seen Mulder the moment she entered the crowded airport
departure lounge. He leaned up against a pillar, literally in the
process of going to sleep on his feet. Skinner, on the other side of
the pillar, cast him an occasional worried glance, then the A.D. saw her
and nodded. She could almost feel Skinner's relief at being able to
hand over the responsibility. Scully knew better than anyone what a job
it was to watch over Mulder.
She went to him. She couldn't see his eyes behind his Ray-Bans,
but she could guess the dark circles the glasses concealed. He had lost
weight since she'd seen him last--fifteen, maybe twenty pounds--his suit
hanging too loose. Under the best of conditions Mulder was all height
and no width--now he looked like a little boy whose mother had dressed
him up for the first day of school in clothes she figured he'd grow
into.
He had his hands wrapped around a tall cup of Starbuck's coffee.
Scully took it lightly just as it began to slip from his nerveless
fingers.
Then he woke, with a sharp breath and a jerk of his head. Saw her
and grinned.
She smiled back, indulgently, despite her desire to stamp her foot
and order him to *go to bed, goddammit*. Slap him silly for letting
himself get so run-down. It was dangerous for him to go out in the
field in such a condition, and he knew it. Dangerous to himself and to
her.
"Hey," he said softly.
"You'd better drink that," she said, inclining her head at the
coffee in her hands, "while you still can."
"It's for you," he said. "I figured you were going to make me
sleep on the plane."
She nodded, still smiling. "Give me my Powerbook, and nobody gets
hurt."
He handed it over. "Word document, filenamed 'Stuff.'"
"Original," Scully murmured. She handed him his laptop. "Windows
Write document, filenamed 'Money.'"
Then she gave him a look to strike fear into his heart, and said
sternly, "When we get there. It's three hours to our next stop, and
you'll sleep every minute of it if I have to club you over the head with
my gun-butt."

****

Bison, Wyo.

They had to stop in a town called Bison, fifty miles away from
Sheep's Ridge. The local police said there was a forest fire. As they
piled their bags out of the cars at the local La Quinta, Scully could
smell the fire on the breeze. She turned and looked toward the Big Horn
Mountains, where a full moon gleamed over the black, jagged peaks. Off
to her right, she could see a dull, angry orange glare in the sky.
Somehow it gave her an uneasy feeling.
In the dark, she felt Mulder behind her and knew he was looking up
at the fire, too.
"Did Skinner tell you anything about what we're here for?" he
murmured.
"Not a word."
"Well, one thing's for sure--we're not firefighters." The
eagerness in him was palpable, like the quiver of a hunting dog that had
caught the faintest hint of a scent. Scully knew just how he felt. She
drew a long, delicious breath of the smoky night air.
The game was afoot.

Continued in Part 5.

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 5 of 33)
By Somebody Else

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please
read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for
that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's
happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored.

See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary.

************************************************************************

The worldwide rumour about Flying Saucers presents a problem that
challenges the psychologist for a number of reasons. - C.G. Jung

September 14, 1996
Bison, Wyo.

The last thing Scully wanted was more hotel food--she'd had too
much of it lately. She had been good for months. Too good. She wanted
something tasty and sinful, and driving into Bison, she'd seen the exact
thing to ease that craving. So she gave Westin fifty dollars and told
him to bring enough back for everybody.
He returned with two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, all the
appropriate side dishes, and three six-packs of Michelob--that last
being his own contribution. Then the seven of them--Skinner; Westin,
who Scully surmised had drawn the unenviable assignment of Mulder's
bodyguard; Mulder; Scully herself; Steve Whitman, the northwest regional
director; and Rob Halstead and Kevin Tannet, two of Whitman's agents--all hunkered down in
Scully's room, eating like half-starved wolves, the
men intent on a Redskins game on TV.
Scully realized suddenly she'd been lonesome in North Carolina, and
she found herself taking a visceral, animal pleasure in the tableau, the
men flaked out around her, the cardboard containers, stripped chicken
bones piled up. Mulder--who she knew damned well hadn't had a decent
meal in weeks--tucked away two thighs, three drumsticks, a half-pint of
mashed potatoes and almost a whole pint of coleslaw. He had practically
shotgunned his first beer but was nursing the second, in part because he
was only half-awake. He lay sprawled across the foot of her bed,
languid and drowsy as a sated lion, eyelids at half-mast. Scully
figured he wouldn't make it through the next quarter of the game.
Even Skinner seemed uncharacteristically relaxed, flopped down on
the floor in front of the television with his tie hanging loosely.
Scully knew, then, for the first time, why it was her mother took such
pleasure in preparing big family feasts--the pride of the hunt. She had
found food for the pack.
And then, of course, there were the soporific effects of having
eaten three times the usual daily limit of fat in a single sitting.
The game was on the East Coast; it was over by nine-thirty, Wyoming
time. As the others drifted out, Skinner hung back a little, and Scully
finally realized he meant to make at least a show of helping her guide
Mulder next door to his own room. She shook her head at him.
*If this were my worst problem...* "I can handle it," she
whispered, and the A.D. nodded and left.
There was an electric teapot and individual packets of coffee and
tea in the room. Scully heated water and made two cups of decaf. Sure
enough, the smell roused him. He sat up and yawned hugely. "Where'd
everybody go?" he asked.
She shrugged. "The game was over."
"Who won?"
"Hell, Mulder, I don't know. I wasn't paying attention." She gave
him the coffee.
He made a face. "She doesn't know the score, and she wants me to
drink instant decaf," he grumbled.
"I have no intention of letting you keep me awake all night pacing
the floor over there," she said tartly. "Did you have a chance to look
at the stuff on your computer?"
"I glanced at it," he said, evading her look.
"But did you see anything that seemed useful?"
"Uh, not right off."
"What's wrong?" she asked. Then she thought she knew. "You've
already done the '96 budget," she guessed.
"No," he said. He yielded to the inevitable and told her what he
hadn't wanted to say. "Look, your impulse was right on. We *do* need
to find the money. But the approach won't work."
"Why not?"
"Scully, an agency budget is really just a planning tool. The
budget tells you what they *intend* to spend--or at least what they
claim they mean to spend. But it doesn't tell you anything about what
they *actually* did with the money. All year long they're making
amendments to the budget. Like the cost of staples went up, so they
have to use more money for staples and cut back on paper towels. And it
doesn't tell you to whom the money was disbursed. We could do what
you're suggesting with the 1995 budget, and it might work, but not '96."
She sat there, despair and exhaustion rising in her chest, fighting
back tears of frustration. She felt so *stupid*. She drew a long
breath for calm. Sometimes she forgot that "Spooky" Mulder could be
just this rational, this logical. This--goddamn him--*scientific.*
"And while I'm annihilating your balloon," he said gently,
apologetically, "I might also suggest that we don't start in the obvious
places, like the Department of Defense or NASA. I'd start with NIH."
"The National Institutes of Health?" Scully squeaked out, her
throat tight.
He nodded. "Lots and *lots* of files, Scully. Medical files.
And NIH materials are less likely to be classified. Who runs the Human
Genome Project and is therefore likely to have paid the grant money for
Purity Control?"
"I know why the guys in VCS hate you," she said.
He nodded, his look steady. "They've been sweating over a picture
puzzle for two-three weeks, and I'm the smartass son-of-a-bitch who
walks in, glances around and says, 'doesn't this piece go right here?'"
She shut her eyes tight. "Mulder, if you say you're sorry, I'll
slug you. Don't apologize for doing what you get paid for--besides,
that's exactly why I wanted you to see this. Look, I'd love to be the
one who finds the answer and takes all the glory. But I'm not sure we
have time for that. I knew I was missing something, and I also knew if
anybody was going to walk in and notice exactly what it was, it'd be
you."
She glanced up, her eyes stinging. He was wide-eyed, his look
stunned and grateful. He just stared at her for a moment, then he said
softly, "Jesus, Scully, could I paint your house? Refinish your floors,
or something?"
She laughed, then sobered and shook her head. "I think you're
carrying enough."
He shrugged. "I'm still on my feet."
Yeah, and clearly, his bizarre Brainiac mind was still in good
working order. "Mulder, if we don't solve *this* picture puzzle, it
could really be the end. For everybody, the whole planet. And if that
happens, it'll be because we've failed. Because we haven't found The
Five and punished Bateman and the others."
He grinned. "But, hey, no pressure."
"How can you find that amusing?"
"How can you not? Either I laugh or I lose it. Scully, it's not
going to be *our* fault, if the world goes up in smoke. We've done
everything we could. Besides, my world has already ended once. And
there are those who said it was my fault, then, too."
Scully felt a realization snap into place. He had never bought
it. That was what had saved him. Samantha's disappearance had left him
crippled, but it had not destroyed him because at some level he had
always known it was not his fault. That was what had kept him from
becoming a monster like Luther Lee Boggs or John Barnett. Mulder had
known he was a *victim*, not the perpetrator. He'd known he hadn't
deserved to suffer. Oh, he'd had his doubts, all right--his father had
seen to that--he'd endured survivor's guilt in spades. He had walked
right up to the line, stood there with his toes right on it, had even
occasionally picked up one foot and started to step over it, but he had
never crossed. Mephistopheles had tempted him, and Mulder had heard the
offer, but he had never closed the deal.
Into the silence, Scully whispered, "What do you think we're going
to find up there?"
His look was steady, serious. "A little glimpse of what the end
of the world is going to be like," he said. He paused. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she said, automatically. "I'll get on-line and start
digging for what NIH spent in 1995."
"It can wait until morning, Scully. You're tired, and so am I."
Scully lifted an eyebrow. Mulder? Admit he was tired? Wonders.
Nevertheless, he was getting up, heading for the door.
"I'm going to bed," he said. "I'll see you in the morning, okay?"
Suddenly Scully badly wanted not to be alone. She wanted to
share her space with somebody who'd already been through the end
of a world.
"Mulder," she said slowly. "Would you mind leaving the door
open?"
He shook his head gently. "No, I don't mind."

****

Mulder fell and fell, and fell some more. Fell forever, then
crashed in the dark, fetched up against something hard and painfully
cold to the touch.
God, it was so dark, as if all the light that had ever existed had
gone out forever. And so cold--an awful, enervating cold that made it
hurt to move, made it hurt to breathe.
He was alone in a way he'd never been alone before. As if
*everybody* were gone, winked out along with the light. He was
completely beyond rescue, not even knowing who or what it was he needed
rescue from, only certain that help never, ever would come.
He wanted to go somewhere else, but he was afraid to in the
blackness, afraid he might fall again. And then he heard something--no,
*someone*. Weeping. Then screaming.
And screaming and screaming--in terror, in agony, in desperation.
He struggled to move toward the sound, to find the other person out
there in the dark. But he couldn't see, and the sound was all around
him, and for a moment, he just curled up and huddled into himself, too
confused and frightened to do anything. And the screams wouldn't stop,
and they just frightened him more.
*Get away. Find her and hide. Get away, get away, GET AWAY!*
He began crawling, writhing along the cold surface he was lying on,
trying desperately to find *something*--a hiding place, a weapon, an
ally, anything.
*Shut up, shut up! They'll find us! You'll wake up Dad! Shut up,
shut up!*
He crawled and crawled, but there was nowhere to go but into more
dark, more cold. And he knew that he was the one screaming.
No one would ever find him.

****

September 15, 1996

Scully woke at a quiet sound and sat up. But she didn't hear
anything else, and for a moment, she wondered if she really had heard
anything at all. No, there it was--a muffled click, and then a thud, a
scraping sound. Not in her room, though.
*Mulder.* She got her gun from the night table and padded silently
through the connecting door. The bed was mussed; he had been sleeping,
or trying to. Dreaming? She couldn't see into the bathroom--too dark.
She wished for a flashlight, then noticed the closet door stood open.
She stood still and looked closely and caught a tiny movement. He had
huddled up in a ball on the floor, arms wrapped around his chest, his
face pressed up against the corner forlornly. "Mulder," she said
softly. He shuddered tighter into himself. "Mulder, it's okay. It's
me."
"Please don't hurt me," he whimpered.
It dawned on her suddenly that he hadn't awakened. He was still
dreaming. She didn't know whether she should wake him or not--if he
came out of it yelling, that likely would draw Skinner and the others.
Best to go slow, she decided. Scully put one hand lightly on his
shoulder. He shuddered again at the touch. "I'm not going to hurt
you," she said. "I won't let anybody hurt you."
He didn't move. Just huddled there, shivering silently. Scully
knelt beside him, her hand still resting on his shoulder. She stroked
his hair, then reached around him and took him in her arms. "No," he
moaned.
"Shh," Scully said, holding him as he tried to pull away. "It's
okay. No one's going to hurt you."
She held on, murmuring nonsense comfort words into his hair for
what seemed like a very long time. But finally she felt him start to
relax ever-so-little, slowly begin to unclench. As he let go, she
gathered him closer to her until he was leaning on her. Oddly, it felt
good to cuddle him--his head against her collar bone, most of his weight
resting on the back wall of the closet. He was warm, and solid, despite
his slenderness. *All bone and muscle,* she thought.
"Wake up, Mulder," she said softly.
For a moment, no response. Then he shifted his head slightly and
murmured, "Fi' more minnuss, okay?"
*Why not,* Scully thought. She gave him a little more time, then
repeated, "Mulder, wake up. Come on, let's get you back to bed." He
stumbled up and out of the closet, fell limply onto the mattress, face
down in the hollow between the pillows. Scully stood looking at him as
he lay there, dead out--she thought he still had not really awakened.
She considered curling up beside him to ensure he wouldn't dream again,
to make sure he really would get some rest. She'd done that once
before, and it'd worked. But he looked well-settled, and she didn't
want to take the chance that Skinner or somebody might catch them in a
clinch that looked less innocent than it was. She folded the bedspread
back over him.
"Scully?" he said suddenly, his voice muzzy.
"Yeah. It's okay. Go back to sleep."
"Uh," he said, into the pillow. "Thought you were Valerie." And
went to sleep.

****

In the morning Mulder seemed rested, if somewhat subdued. Over
breakfast, he subtly evaded her eyes, as if he wanted to avoid looking
at her but didn't want her to *know* he was trying not to look at her.
He remembered. Maybe he hadn't been quite as completely out of it
as she had thought. And he was embarrassed as hell about it, and if she
told him she hadn't minded bringing him down out of his dream she'd only
make it worse.
So she waited him out, trying to act as casual as he was, until
after they'd finished eating and she could get him away from Skinner for
a minute.
Then he surprised her by bringing it up himself, out in the parking
lot while they waited for the others to gather. "I dreamed I woke you
up last night," Mulder said softly. "At least I'm hoping it was a
dream."
She thought about telling him, yes, it was a dream--she hadn't
heard a thing. No. Come clean. She shook her head. "You went
wandering a little," she said.
"I ended up in the closet again, didn't I?"
"Yes."
"Shit," he sighed. "I'm sorry." He sounded miserable completely
out of proportion to the actual event.
Scully shrugged. "No harm done," she said. She figured it'd be
too much to reach over and touch him. Instead she went past him to the
car, making sure her sleeve brushed against his to let him know he had
not suddenly become a leper in her eyes.
"I hate that dream," he said, his voice low.
"The one where it's dark and cold, and you can hear somebody in
pain?"
He nodded. "It's never changed, not the least detail. I don't
know, Scully--it's like my subconscious is trying to send me a message,
but I can't read the code."
She shrugged. "Was it Freud who once said, 'Sometimes a dream is
just a dream?'"
"Not this one," he said. "This means something. I just don't know
what. I never have. The thing is, last night it was different. It's
never been different before."
"Different in what way?"
"It's always started with me being in that dark place. I never had
any sense of how I got there--I was just *there*. But last night I fell
into it. I don't even know how I knew I was falling--it's so dark I
didn't have any reference points, but I sensed somehow that I was
falling, and then I went crashing into something."
"Is the dark place somewhere on the Artemis station?"
He shook his head, helplessly, processing on the memory, and from
his look, not getting anywhere in the attempt. "I have no idea."
He snapped out of it. Gave her a hard, intent look. "What makes
you think it is?"
"Last night you said you thought I might've been Valerie. Do you
remember her at all?"
"Valerie Clendenning? The doctor who took care of me after they
found me up there?"
"Yes."
He shook his head again. "It's just an empty name--I can't think
of her, of what she looks like or who she is."
Scully shrugged. "It was just a thought. I'm not sure it means
anything, but under hypnosis, you said got separated from Samantha when
you fell, and Samantha let go of your hand. Between the two things, it
seems a reasonable hypothesis that you might be dreaming about Artemis."
"I don't know." Then suddenly he banged both fists down hard on
the trunk of the rental car. "*Dammit*," he raged. "*Why can't I
remember?*"
Now she took his arm to steady him. "It'll come," she said
quietly.
"Yeah, and if the story of my life leads me to any conclusion, it's
that it'll come too fucking late."
"You can't force it, Mulder."
"How do you know that?"
"Because you *are* forcing it, and it's not working."
He turned around, leaned on the car and craned his head back to
stretch tension out of his neck. "You're right," he said, sounding
exhausted. "The pressure is getting to me. Boy, you called that one
dead-on. It's just so fucking *frustrating.* I know I'm close to
something--I can feel it. I can *smell* it. But it's just out of
reach."
"I know," she said quietly. "Come on, Skinner looks like he's
ready to go."

Continued in Part 6.

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 6 of 33)
By Somebody Else

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please
read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for
that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's
happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored.

See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary.

************************************************************************

A good craftsman leaves no traces. - Zen proverb

September 15, 1996
Bison, Wyo.

Now, finally, they got a briefing. Whitman and Halstead outlined
the situation--a little boy missing, who had come up to Sheep's Ridge to
spend the Labor Day weekend with an aunt's family, then vanished. The
parents hadn't been able to reach anybody, not even the local cops--er,
scratch that, the local cop, singular. When Halstead and his partner
had tried to drive up and see what the hell was going on, they'd been
turned away by Air Force personnel.
The Air Force claimed it had a downed aircraft in the area, posing
some threat of radiation.
*Yeah, I've heard that one before,* Mulder thought.
Then Skinner took over the story. The military said it had already
handled the evacuation; they said the kid was probably shipped out with
the aunt's family. Yeah, there was some confusion, but he'd turn up in
a day or two. Trouble was, the Air Force had been gone now for a couple
of days, and the kid hadn't turned up.
And on top of that, a forest fire had broken out. Some reserve
firefighters in the area reported that the town of Sheep's Ridge
remained deserted despite the lifting of the evacuation order, and they
had found what they claimed was a very strange dead body.
"Strange in what way?" Scully asked.
"Burnt to a crisp, is the way I heard it," the county sheriff said.
He was a big guy named Bridges, middle-aged, blond and ruddy-cheeked,
just beginning to paunch around the middle. His office was decorated
primarily with football trophies and stuffed deer heads.
"Burned in the forest fire?" Scully asked.
"Forest fire's ten or twelve miles away from Sheep's Ridge and
headed in the other direction--at the moment."
"The Air Force say whether they ever found their 'plane'?" Mulder
put in.
"They didn't mention it," Skinner said, expressionless.
"Oooh," Mulder said. "Now there's a surprise."
"Look," the sheriff said, "is there something radioactive out
there, or isn't there? I got a family--if there's a busted up A-bomb in
Sheep's Ridge, I don't even want to head out that way without some kind
of special suit. I mean, I figure I owe it to my kids not to come home
glowin' in the dark, you know?"
"I wouldn't worry about it," Mulder said. He smiled. "Scully, you
brought the Buck Rogers intergalactic radiation sponges, right? We'll
just suck that stuff right up."
Skinner's look would've frosted a nuclear reactor. "If the Air
Force had thought a threat remained, sheriff, they'd still have the area
cordoned off," he said. "All right, people, let's move."
They headed out of the sheriff's office. Under his breath, Mulder
hummed, to the tune of *Feelings*: "Mutation...nothing but mutation..."
He slanted a glance at Scully, who gave him her ruler-wielding-nun
look, but couldn't quite conceal the fact that she was trying not to
laugh.

****

Sheep's Ridge, Wyo.

They flew in on a bureau chopper. Skinner reflected that he had
approached nearly every really nasty thing he had ever seen in a
chopper--Da Nang, for example--and wished, just for the sake of variety,
that they had been able to drive. They flew over the forest, across the
mountains, the smoke from the wildfire smudging the sky to the north.
He was trying to keep an eye on Mulder without letting the younger
agent know he was being watched, and Skinner suspected he wasn't pulling
it off. He was worried about Mulder because Mulder seemed normal, and
there was nothing normal about the situation. Of course, Mulder didn't
actually *know* anything about the situation. Skinner had deliberately
kept Mulder and Scully in the dark, withholding transcripts from
interviews with the other witnesses in custody. But Skinner suspected
Mulder must have some notion what to expect. Skinner had caught his
look when Whitman started to explain about the kidnapping, a look that
had transmitted, "And you desperately needed me for this?"
But Mulder had only two speeds: full-bore and dead slow. If he
really expected something, surely he'd be at least a little high on it,
right? Today he looked about as wired as a South American tree sloth.
Skinner himself was feeling damned twitchy. In a way it was reassuring
that Mulder wasn't reacting to the situation. Maybe it meant this
really *wasn't* a big deal. Surely, if there were extraterrestrials
about, Mulder would be the first to see the signs.
Skinner frowned, noticing some dark brown spots on the ground
below. The chopper had begun its descent.
Oh, shit. The brown spots were dead horses. Closer now, there
were white spots, too. Dead chickens.
Mulder gave the animals scant attention. Then suddenly, his gaze
locked on something like a laser sight. Skinner followed his look,
wondering what he had seen. Burned tree tops.
Mulder tapped Scully's shoulder. Pointed. Skinner watched her.
She saw the trees, and her jaw tightened.
Damn, Skinner thought.
God damn.

****

The smell of death hung on Sheep's Ridge--the sweetish, rotting,
half-digested stench seeming to have settled into every corner. They
all knew that smell, all too well, and they were used to it, but none of
them liked it.
Mulder said it for them, right up-front, get it out of the way.
"Yuck," he said, wrinkling his nose, his voice low and grim. It seemed
to sum things up efficiently, so nobody built on his remark.
They stood in front of a dark-red clapboard building that declared
itself to be the town hall, municipal court building, city jail--and
Kinney's General Store ("Feed - Tack - Fertilizer - Brisket sandwiches,
$2.49"). There was only one actual body, and when Bridges pulled the
tarp off it, Mulder saw that it was horribly burned--hell, incinerated,
like the ones who had been aboard the *Piper Maru*. But those men had
been alive. This one had been dead for days and smelled every minute of
it.
Scully hunkered down beside the remains. "I don't mind the body,"
she said softly, pulling on gloves. "But I'll never learn to like
maggots and pillbugs." She glanced up at lowering clouds gathering
overhead and gestured toward four patches of silvery ash on the ground.
"Somebody get me a sample of that before it gets washed away."
"I'll do it," Mulder said. "Can somebody photograph these?" The
ashy patches were vaguely corpse-shaped. Big heads. Long, slender
fingers. Grays or hybrids? Could've been either. He couldn't begin to
guess; maybe Scully could figure it out. Vestiges of human DNA or
something.
"Yes, sir," Halstead said, and started at it. Whitman had a Geiger
counter and was taking readings.
Mulder scooped ash into a vial.
"Male of indeterminate age and race," Scully said. A pause.
"These are radiation burns." A confirmation, not a surprise.
"Damn, I knew it," the sheriff said.
"Well, whatever burned him, I'm not getting any sign of it now,"
Whitman said. "No abnormal radiation readings anywhere--just a little
on the body itself."
Mulder capped the vial and carried it back to his partner.
"Help me turn him over," Scully said.
*Oh, swell. Delightful. Thanks for thinking of me.*
But Skinner was closer, and he beat Mulder to it. He carefully
gripped what was left of a shoulder and pulled the body over. A whole
new category of stink rose in a wave, and Mulder flinched, fighting down
nausea.
Black oil had pooled underneath the body. It gleamed, dully
reflecting the sky overhead. "What the hell?" Scully murmured. She
retrieved another vial from her case and reached to dip a sample from
the pool.
And the oil seemed suddenly to shudder, as if possessed by some
kind of spasm.
"Watch out," Mulder said.
Too late. The pool of oil gathered itself and leaped at Skinner.

Continued in Part 7.

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 7 of 33)
By Somebody Else

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please
read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for
that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's
happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored.

See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary.

************************************************************************

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is
the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. - Erich Fromm

September 16, 1996
Sheep's Ridge, Wyo.

Skinner scrambled backward and tumbled onto the ground, his face
pale and tense. Mulder reached to push the assistant director away from
the oil as it twisted, ropelike toward him. As if it had sensed
suddenly that Mulder was in the way, it recoiled, lost its coherent
shape and splashed back down in shower of lazy, greasy globs. It had
wanted Skinner, but not him. Mulder stared at it, thinking suddenly of
Zachary.
*The morphs won't hurt you. Not now, not anymore. They like you.*
"What in Christ's name is that?" Skinner asked, his voice hushed.
"I'm not sure," Mulder said, hearing his own voice a little
unsteady.
"I think we ought to try to get it to the lab," Scully said.
"How?" Mulder asked. *And how do we keep it from attacking anybody
else once we get it there?*
"Here," the sheriff said, handing Mulder an empty plastic oil jug.
Chevron fifty-weight diesel oil, according to the label. "My deputy
found almost a hundred of them."
Mulder caught Scully's look--*a hundred people.* Like Krycek. He
took the oil jug, forcing the thought out of his head. Later. He would
think about that later. He came around the other side of the body.
"Careful," Scully said.
*No shit.* But the oil didn't react. It just let him scoop it
into the jug and seal the top, almost as if it were trying to prove it
could be cooperative. *They like you.*
*Maybe. Don't get cocky.*
"There's something else strange over here," the sheriff said.
He looked at Scully and saw her draw a long breath. *Jesus.
There's more.*
They followed Bridges closer to the building. He pointed to a
blob, lurid green, like lime Jell-O with a lot of air bubbles blown into
it. And there was probably twenty gallons of it, whatever it was, in
rounded, pillowy globules. Mulder didn't touch it, but he leaned over
and saw what he expected--a long, thin metal spike glittered underneath
the gelatinous mass.
"I'm not touching that without an environment suit," Scully said.
Mulder nodded. The bubbles were likely to be loaded with the
retrovirus, the toxic fumes. Best not to disturb them without taking
the appropriate precautions.
"What do you think it is?" Skinner asked.
"I don't know," Scully said. "I just think we ought to be careful
with it."
Mulder read the message in her look at the A.D.--*Tell you later;
we need to keep a lid on this.*
"Can you show me where you found the oil jugs?" Mulder asked the
sheriff.
"Sure." Bridges led them into the jail.

****

Except for the plastic jugs, the room was unremarkable--it could
have been what passed for police headquarters in any of a thousand tiny
rural villages in America. Scully had been in a hundred of them. The
place was little more than an airless cubicle with a desk, on which sat
a radio, a pad of incident reports, pencil cup. A coffee mug, well-used, and an ancient, obsolete
computer, dusty. A Radio Shack TRS-80.
Not well-used. A space heater--there didn't seem to be any insulation
between the room and the outside, clapboard wall, against which the desk
had been pushed. The wooden wall was warped at the top and bottom.
And nearly the whole floor was covered with empty oil jugs, all
with the same label.
Mulder picked one of them up with his gloved hand and gave it to
Scully to bag as evidence.
The sheriff cleared his throat quietly. "I don't suppose you folks
would tell me if this was some kind of...I don't know. Secret germ
warfare thing? Nuke-ya-lar fallout?"
"Would you?" Skinner asked. "If you were me?"
"No, sir," the sheriff said. "I don't reckon I would. But what am
I supposed to tell folks? This ain't New York, but there are people who
live around here."
Skinner shot Mulder a glance. *Don't put your foot in anything--I'll be right back.* He
guided the sheriff out on the front porch of
the Sheep's Ridge town-hall-and-feed-store. Scully could hear them
talking from outside--the sheriff a little strident, Skinner cool,
rational. Scully looked around again and noticed nothing more than what
she'd seen the first time. "What do you think?" she asked Mulder.
He was staring at the warped edge of the wall, up in the corner,
near the ceiling, processing hard. "I think it's the end of the world,
Scully," he said faintly. He stepped carefully around and over oil
jugs, headed for the wall.
She looked, but she couldn't see anything. "What is it?" she
asked.
He stood right next to the wall now, nose almost touching the wood.
"I think I might've found the key to that code," he said.
She crooked an eyebrow at him. "By staring at a wall like some
kind of Buddhist monk?"
He put one hand up, palm flat, and slowly moved toward the wooden
surface. "It's not a dream," he said.
He touched the wall and disappeared.
She heard him yelp, "Ow!"
Then silence.
Scully bit off her shout before it got out of her mouth. She drew
her gun and eased over to the wall Mulder had vanished through.
"Mulder?" she called.
"I'm okay," he said, his voice faint on the other side. *Other
side of what?* "I hit my knee when I landed."
"Where are you?"
"Right here." His voice suddenly was right next to her ear.
Before she could think or answer, she saw his hand reach to take hers.
He pulled her through. She lost her balance, momentarily disoriented,
and fell against him. He caught her before she hit the floor.
Struggling back to her feet, she glanced over her shoulder. She
could see the room next door--the desk, the oil jugs, the old, dusty
computer. The whole view slightly curved at the edges.
"Oh, my God," Scully said. "What was that?"
"A perfect opportunity to rewrite Einstein again," he said,
deadpan. "Think of it in a line-up room, Scully--if you can patent it,
it'll beat the hell out of those trick mirrors."
She reached out toward it, but Mulder caught her hand. "Hang onto
something," he said, "or it'll suck you back through."
*How the hell did he know?* She holstered her gun, reached to hang
onto a counter behind him--and saw what lay on the counter. A body. A
body much like the ones she had seen buried in a mass grave at the leper
colony in West Virginia. But in this case, the deformities were not the
result of scarring, clearly not stemming from leprosy or any other
disease Scully knew of. Although it was human-like, she didn't think it
was human.
"Oh, my God," she said again.
"It's dead," Mulder said. "I think. I was hoping you could, uh,
verify that."
"I'm not sure how," Scully said. Gingerly, she touched it. The
skin was cold, flaccid. She tried the pulse point in the neck.
Nothing. Finally, she leaned down to put one ear against the thing's
chest. Dead silence. "Well," she said, "by the measures I know to use
on it, it's dead. Unless, of course, there's still some brain activity,
but I don't happen to have an EEG machine with me."
"Well, we need to figure a way to get it out of here without
Sheriff 'this-ain't-New-York' getting a look at it," Mulder said. "To
get it back to the lab in D.C."
"What do you think it is?" she asked. "Another mutant, like
Tooms?"
"It's a hybrid," he said, looking at it. "Part human, part alien.
Like the one in the train car in Iowa."
"Is that what you propose to tell Skinner?" she asked.
"I propose to tell Skinner nothing until we know more about it," he
said. He shrugged. "It's a body. It's a *strange* body that ought to
be autopsied. What more does he have to know?"
*Where'd he get this sudden attack of caution?* she wondered. She
slanted a glance at him, and noticed he was processing--staring briefly
off into space, checking memory, trying to fit pieces into slots. *He's
not sure what we've got,* she realized, *or what's the best way to
proceed--he knows something he's not ready to share.*
Still, what he was suggesting was a reasonable course of action.
She nodded, biting her lip as she thought through it. "You go divert
the sheriff," she said. "Make him take you on a tour of the town or
something. I'll talk to Skinner, and while you're gone we'll get the
body bagged and onto the chopper."
"Okay, but nobody else sees the body or this wonder-wall thing,
right? Just you and Skinner, and nobody else."
"Right."
"And watch out for the suction when you go through. Damned thing
can blast you clear across the room." He left, easing himself back
through the wall--invisible on this side. Scully watched him bang into
the desk on his way out, and suppressed a giggle.
Then she turned back to the body for a moment. Nut-brown skin,
large eyes. Strange, Neanderthal-like brow ridges around the eye
sockets. Struck with a sudden impulse, she lifted its head and felt its
neck.
Her fingers touched something, and she recoiled, dropping the head
with an unintended violence.
It had the scar.
Just like the scar on her own neck, where the implant had been
placed.

Continued in Part 8.

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 8 of 33)
By Somebody Else

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age,
please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in
abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little
angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything
that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored.

See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary.

************************************************************************

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight
of the shore for a very long time. - Andre Gide

September 16, 1996
Sheep's Ridge, Wyo.

In a daze, Scully helped Skinner get the odd, brown body
bagged and onto the chopper. Mulder came back with the sheriff
after about twenty minutes, wearing a glazed-eye expression that
said the local football hero had bored him shitless. Then he
looked at Scully and frowned, eyes narrowing slightly, brow
puckering--he knew she was having trouble. But then Skinner
approached him, and he went blank again.
*God love him,* Scully thought. *I don't want to have to
explain what I'm feeling to an A.D. Not yet.*
She managed to avoid saying anything to anybody on the flight
back. She overheard the sheriff continue to brag about his
college sports exploits and Mulder continue to pretend to be
interested because as long as Bridges was ranting on about that he
wouldn't be asking questions Mulder didn't want to answer.
As if through a fog, she heard herself tell the others that
she wasn't sure what had happened in Sheep's Ridge, but that she
would get back to them when she had something. And then she held
herself together, somehow, until they got back to the hotel and
she could flee into her room. Into the bathroom, where she heaved
up everything she'd eaten for approximately the last week, in
great convulsive retches. After a moment, she felt a cool hand on
her forehead and another gently pulling her hair away from her
face. She would've liked to object, but she was too busy
vomiting.
Finally the spasms eased. She left her eyes squeezed shut
but sat up weakly, to find herself leaning against a strong, hard
body. Sound of the handle being pulled, the toilet flushing. The
squeak of the faucet, then water running in the sink, into a
glass.
"Here, rinse your mouth out with this." Mulder.
*Well, of course. Who else?*
She did as she'd been told, rinsed and spat. Then twisted to
wrap her arms hard around his neck. She knew she should have sent
him away, told him she was fine. But she needed the animal warmth
of him beside her, the lulling rhythm of his breath, his
heartbeat. He held her close, one hand on her head, the other arm
around her waist, rocked her a little, said nothing. Any living
human would have served her purpose, but she was glad it was
Mulder--he at least knew better than to *say* anything. He
wouldn't tell her it was all right or that she was safe--better
than anyone, he knew that wasn't necessarily the truth.
Then, when she calmed at last, he said softly, "Tell me."
"It's nothing," she whispered.
"Oh, come on, Scully--you made me tell you about my worst
nightmare." He was still rocking her gently; she didn't want him
to stop, not for a long time.
"That thing...the...hybrid, or whatever." She paused; he
held his silence. "It has a scar on its neck. Right where mine
is, where the implant was."
Still silent, still rocking, waiting her out.
"Do you think..." She drew a long, trembling breath. "Maybe
they were trying to...turn me...into--" She couldn't finish.
"Do you think they could?" he asked. "Is that possible?"
"I don't know. Supposedly they did something to Dr. Berube's
friend, Secare, but we never found Secare, so I--I just don't
know."
"Well, we don't know exactly what the implant was for,
either. You said Pendrell thought it was recording your memories?
I don't see how that would aid in changing you physically in some
way."
She mulled that over for a moment, then said, "Why is it that
just when I start to see things your way, you go all rational on
me?"
"Well, Scully, it's kind of like taking out the trash.
*Somebody's* got to do it, and when you abandon the task--"
She pulled away from him at last. "Oh, Mulder--only you
would turn taking out the garbage into a metaphysical analogy for
the usefulness of reason."
"Sorry. It's an Oxfordian influence. I've been carefully
trained to submit everything to the test of becoming a
metaphysical analogy for something. My family paid a lot of money
for that."
"And I bet they regret it, in hindsight."
"Yeah." His look was loaded, and she recalled suddenly how
much of his own family's dirty laundry his investigations had
uncovered. "I bet they do, too."
She ducked her head, wishing she had not raised the matter.
"Look, Scully," he said. "I know what those MUFON women told
you. But did they actually offer any concrete evidence that their
cancers were in any way related to the implants? I mean, how did
they know? Are we sure they're not living above another Love
Canal or something? Don't look at me like that--I learned this
shit from you."
"Okay, I deserve that," she conceded. "And you could be
right. It could be nothing. But somebody put that thing in my
neck for a reason--not just for fun. And I don't know why."
He pulled her into his arms again. "I know," he said. "I'd
be scared, too."
"Your turn," she said, muffled into his shoulder.
"Huh?"
"There's something you haven't told me. Give."
He tensed--yeah, he'd been hiding something, all right. She
thought for a moment he was going to deny it. But then he sighed.
"I'm having second thoughts," he said finally.
She backed away so that she could look at him. "About what?"
"Neither one of us is objective about this stuff any more.
Especially not me--in retrospect, I'm not sure I ever was, but
hell, nobody else was going to pursue it."
"Nobody else was going to take the trash out," she said
softly.
"Yeah. But now I think..."
"What?"
He shrugged. "I think it's too late, Scully. I think
whatever happens is going to happen, no matter what we do. Jesus,
they took a whole town out here. Those people are just gone. And
I'm as clueless today about what happened to those people as I was
ten years ago before I ever even heard of the X files. Listen,
you're right about the budget--what it would take to finance this
motherfucker! It's got to be *huge*, on the order of mind-boggling. But we can't find it."
He looked at the floor, his face settling into a deep, heavy
sadness. "I'm starting to think we're just beating ourselves to
death. And for nothing." He closed his eyes and rubbed the
bridge of his nose. "Christ, you know, I'm ready to find myself a
morph and say, 'Fine, just get it over with--take me now.'"
"You don't mean that," Scully murmured. "I don't believe you
mean that. What about your sister?"
"She's gone." She heard death in his tone; worse than death--a wish to die, just for the cold
numbness of it. "And there's
not a fucking thing I can do about it. I'm just sorry you ever
got involved, because now you're probably fried, too, and there's
nothing I can do about that either."
"I thought you came to cheer me up," Scully said.
"Yeah, and quite typically, fucked that up, too. I'm sorry;
you're right--hell, we can't stop now. Somebody's still got to
take out the fucking trash."
"You're tired, Mulder."
"You're goddamned right about that."
"And you still haven't told me what you're keeping to
yourself."
"That's because I'm trying to cheer you up." He levered
himself up onto his feet, extended a hand to help her up. She
took it. "Look," he said, "we'll go back to D.C., we'll have a
look at the dead hybrid--and its implant--maybe that'll tell us
something. I'll take on the budget shit. I've got an idea about
that."
"What kind of idea?"
He sighed. "I know how this is going to sound. The
conspiracy literature is all full of how alien projects are being
funded by money from drug and weapons trafficking. I concede some
of those people are so 'out-there' they make me look like a
Republican, but there's usually some grain of truth in their
material. It may be nothing, but we're not finding anything
anywhere else."

****

Bison, Wyo.

Mulder woke to see a shadow pass by the window--a man's
shadow, and on the inside of the drapes. He went for his gun,
then a voice said, "Don't shoot--it's me, Zachary."
In the dim light, he could just make out the misshapen face.
"Keep your voice down," he said, and got up to push shut the
connecting door to Scully's room. "Jesus, Zachary, how did you
get in here?"
"I'm sorry," the hybrid whispered. "I didn't mean to
frighten you, but I was afraid to knock, and you were asleep. I
opened the lock."
"How?"
"With a credit card."
"You have a credit card?"
"I took it from a man who was killed in a traffic accident.
Before the police arrived." He ducked his head, looking
embarrassed. "I did not charge anything to it," he said quickly.
"That would've been wrong. I only wanted it to open doors with,
when necessary. It would hardly have done the man any more good."
*Jesus!* "Right," Mulder said slowly.
"Even you have said there are times when it is necessary to
break rules."
*Damn. I didn't expect to have it come back at me like
this.* "Yeah, uh, just don't let anybody catch you with it,
okay?"
"Okay."
"What are you doing here?"
"I have realized you were right. Of course, we must try to
find your sister."
"Uh, yeah," Mulder said. "Look, there's something else--"
"Yes. The bodies in the woods must be found."
"What?"
"The ones who were hybridized, but who did not survive it.
They have been dumped in the woods and set on fire. That's why
the forest is burning, because of the bodies on fire. You and the
others must find those bodies, too."
"Where?"
"East of the town. Where the fire was started. Go there."
"Easier said than done, Zachary. How the hell am I going to
explain a trip out there to my boss? There's nothing in the town
that points toward--"
"Use this." He handed Mulder a sheet of fax paper with a
satellite photo imprinted on it, a photo that showed blackened
woods, a burned truck and the body of a little boy. "It is the
missing boy," Zachary said. "I regret moving his body from the
grave, but I did not want him burned with the others, and so I
removed him before the fire caught. Then I put him here, so that
the satellite would take his picture when it passed overhead."
*Okay, he's weird-looking, but he's either smart as a whip or
one sick puppy or both. And sneaky.* Mulder sat down on the bed,
and Zachary followed suit.
"Zachary," Mulder said slowly, "you'll forgive me for the
inference, but how do I know you didn't kill this kid?"
"Your partner will be able to tell what killed him, and I did
not."
"Speaking of my partner, do you know what they did to her,
when they took her?"
"Not specifically, no. They would have tested her."
"Tested her for what?"
"To see if she could be hybridized. You were tested, too,
when you were very young."
*Shit. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck.* "Then why didn't I get one of
those implants?"
"You were tested before it was known they were needed."
"Do the implants turn somebody into a hybrid?"
"Oh, no. If someone is strong enough to be a good hybrid,
the implant will be placed to restore their memories after the
process has taken place. After the change, sometimes people don't
remember the skills they had that made them valuable in the first
place. And so their knowledge can be retrieved from the implant,
so that they don't require retraining."
*Oh, Jesus-fucking-Christ.* "What do you mean by 'a good
hybrid'? Like you? Are you 'a good hybrid'?"
"Ah," Zachary said, smiling his board-stiff smile. "You are
worried she will get to be as ugly as me."
"I don't think you're ugly. Well, I did at first, but I'm
kind of getting used to you now. You're just different. But
Scully..." He trailed off helplessly. *Hell, no, I don't want
her looking like you.*
"Does not need changing," the hybrid supplied. His look was
knowing.
"I like her the way she is," Mulder agreed.
"She would not look like me, when hybridized. She would look
the same. Inside, she would be changed."
"She doesn't want to be hybridized *at all*. Can it be
stopped?"
Zachary blinked in momentary confusion. "But it has not
started. She has only been tested."
"So if we don't do anything, she'll be a hundred percent
human?"
"Yes, of course."
He thought of the MUFON women. "Does the testing sometimes
make people sick?"
"Oh, yes. It made you very sick."
"But I got better. Some people aren't getting better."
"If the process is not completed, then they become sick after
a while. I have heard that many die."
*Shit shit shit.* "So if Scully doesn't become a hybrid,
then she'll die?"
"Oh," Zachary said, looking troubled. "I see what you mean.
I'm not sure. Perhaps I can find out."
"Yeah," Scully said from the doorway. "Why don't you see if
you can find that out?"

Continued in Part 9.

"The Five," Book 2 (Part 9 of 33)
By Somebody Else

Classification: XA

WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age,
please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in
abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little
angsty.

International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything
that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored.

See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary.

************************************************************************

Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where
thought and rational communication have broken down. - Thomas
Merton

September 16, 1996
Bison, Wyo.

She was furious. She'd never been as enraged with anyone in
her life as she now was with Mulder--how long had he had this
liaison with this...creature? When had it first occurred to him
to ask about the implant, about what the people running the
project had done to *her*? What else had the thing shared with
him that he hadn't bothered to pass on?
*Goddammit, how long has he been holding out on me?*
Mulder's reaction telegraphed guilt--he vaulted up off the
bed as if to be ready to run from trouble. The other thing, the
deformed being, just sat there, wide-eyed, seeming stunned.
"Scully," Mulder said, "uh, this is Zachary. He's
my...brother. Sort of."
"Hello," the creature said, his voice soft, pitched low.
"Cute," Scully said coldly. "Will you excuse us for a
second, please, uh...Zachary?" She gave Mulder a look that meant
*right now and no bullshit*, and inclined her head toward her own
room.
Mulder's look was defensive, a little warning. Scully didn't
care.
"I'll be back in a minute, Zachary," he said. He followed
her and pulled the door to behind them.
"Look, Scully--"
"Shut up, goddammit. It's my turn. I'm sick of this crap,
Mulder. You go running off to do things your way every five
minutes--you keep stuff from me and then expect me to just accept
your story and bitch about it when I don't. How long have you
known about that...that *thing*?"
She should have taken a cue from his lack of expression, his
too-still body language. If she had, she might've known that she
was too far over the edge, and that he was too unnerved to find a
way to pull her back. She was too angry to see him.
"Since Friday," he said evenly. "He found me the night
before we left Philadelphia."
"And so in the last day and a half you could have fucking
told me at any time?"
"You might keep your voice down," Mulder said. "Apparently
these walls are paper-thin."
"I don't care!" Scully yelled. "Why the hell didn't you tell
me?" It inflamed her even more that he wasn't yelling back,
wasn't fighting back. He didn't want this fight, but she did--badly.
"Because I didn't know if he was for-real. I still don't.
And if it turned out he was a plant, I didn't want to lead him to
you."
"But you knew he would follow you here, didn't you?"
"How would I have known that?"
"I'm asking the questions, you son of a bitch!"
"Scully, calm down."
"Don't tell me to calm down!"
He took a deep breath, and glanced away, just for a second.
And she lost it. She drew her fist back, and in the moment when
he looked at her and saw it coming and did nothing to stop it, she
hit him, right in the face, with all her strength--with all the
power of the fear and rage she'd been living with ever since her
abduction.
He slammed against the wall with the force of it. And then
just stood there, dark eyes wide in pain and shock. She half-expected him to lunge at her and take
some revenge, and when she
realized that was not his plan, she wished he had. Instead, he
just held perfectly still, braced against another blow, and she
understood that if she'd intended to beat him to death, he'd have
stood there and taken it.
*God. Oh, God, what have I done?*
Suddenly there was a hammering at the door. Skinner's voice,
bellowing her name. Scully dropped her head and stared at the
floor, horrified.
"If you don't open it, he'll break it down," Mulder said.
His voice was muffled. She looked up. He had one hand up to his
face. There was blood on his fingers.
*My God.*
Numbly, she went to the door. "It's all right," she called.
"I'm opening the door."
Skinner and Westin swept through into the room, guns drawn.
"It's my fault," Scully said weakly. "We were having a
disagreement--it was entirely my fault." Thank God she had gone
to bed wearing sweats for warmth. Mulder had on jeans and a T-shirt, socks. She hoped at least
it didn't look like a lovers'
quarrel.
"Some disagreement," Skinner said, looking at Mulder.
"Could somebody please get me some ice?" Mulder said
miserably. His nose was bleeding, swollen.
*Please, God, don't let it be broken.*
Westin grabbed an ice bucket and went out.
"I...I hit him," Scully said. "Entirely unprovoked. I
just...I lost my temper."
"You want to tell me why?" Skinner said.
"It hardly seems important now."
"Five minutes ago, it was important enough to assault your
section chief over it. I'm going to have to ask him if he wants
to file a complaint."
"No, I'm not going to file a complaint," Mulder said,
disgusted.
"You should," Scully said.
There was a heavy silence. "Talk to me, people," Skinner
said. "I'm losing sleep, and I'm likely to get testy."
Scully swallowed hard. "I thought he had withheld evidence
from me," she said. "I now believe I was mistaken."
Skinner glared at Mulder. "Did you?"
"Not without cause."
"And that cause would be...?"
"I wasn't sure it was legitimate. Or even related. Now I
think maybe it is, but I didn't know that until today."
Westin returned with the ice bucket, went past the three of
them to fetch a wash cloth. Mulder wrapped the cloth around some
ice and held it to his face, flinching when it touched.
"What evidence?" Skinner asked.
"I've seen...people like that body in the jail in Sheep's
Ridge before," Mulder said carefully. "There was one in that
train car in Iowa last year."
"The body here," Scully said, "has an implant like the one
that was removed from my neck. I found that very...disturbing,
and I just...went ballistic. I'm sorry."
"Look," Mulder said, "you've had us in cages for five months.
I keep expecting people to start throwing peanuts at me through
the bars. Are we on edge? Hell, yes. Fuck, yes. Sir. We'll
work it out."
Scully looked at him, but he was focused on Skinner. *He
doesn't really want to work it out--he's just trying to get me off
the hook.*
The assistant director nodded, clearly not altogether
persuaded everything was all right, but willing to let everyone
take a time-out and see if that would cure it.
"Okay," he said. "Everybody go back to bed. We'll all be
calmer in the morning." His tone said, "Or else."
Mulder took the ice bucket and returned to his room, closing
the door firmly behind him as he went. After Westin and Skinner
left, Scully lay down on her bed and cried herself to sleep.

****

September 17, 1996

In the morning, Scully figured she owed it to herself and to
Mulder to hold her head up and go to breakfast--the only hope of
squashing a new round of office gossip about "Mr. and Mrs. Spooky"
lay in putting a cool face on it now.
Mulder had an evil, painful-looking shiner only partly hidden
under his Ray-Bans. He ordered toast and coffee and nibbled
listlessly at the toast. Scully went for her usual cereal with
skim milk. Westin was kind enough to raise the subject of college
football. Scully endured a not-particularly-enthusiastic
discussion of whether Texas could beat Notre Dame. Westin thought
so; Mulder thought not. Skinner got a telephone call about five
minutes into the conversation.
After he hung up the cell phone, he looked at the three of
them and said, "We're not leaving. The missing kid's body has
been found."
Mulder said nothing.
"Where?" Scully asked.
"A few miles east of Sheep's Ridge. We'll head out there as
soon we've eaten. Pick up the chopper at the same place as
yesterday."
That put the kibosh on any more football talk, and they all
finished eating in a morose silence. Just outside the restaurant
door, Skinner stopped and sent Westin to warm up the car. Then he
looked Mulder and Scully up and down, and said, "Okay, I'm going
to give you two exactly ten minutes to get straight with each
other. And then you go to work. If you can't work together, I
need a reasonable-sounding explanation of why not."
"That won't be necessary, sir," Mulder said. His voice
sounded dead.
"See to it," Skinner rapped out.
"Yes, sir," they said, in unison. The assistant director
followed Westin across the parking lot.
Scully waited until she was sure he was out of earshot. She
stared at the pavement; she couldn't look at Mulder. "What I did
last night was unforgivable," she said. "I know...about your
father. Your friend Jannie told me."
"Okay," Mulder said, his tone cold and hard. "He wants us to
get straight--by God, we'll get straight. You don't hit me,
Scully; it's not allowed. Not ever, not for any reason. And
saying you're sorry is not enough. My dad was always sorry, too.
Next time, goddammit, I *will* file a complaint." He waited a
beat, then said, "Do not test me on that."
"How do I make this up to you?" she asked, miserably.
"You leave it the fuck alone. I need some time to cool off."
"Okay," she whispered.
"Now, for your information, I remain unpersuaded that Zachary
is exactly what he says he is. I need to know what happened to
that kid--I need to know if Zachary lied about that. I didn't ask
him about the implants when I met him in Philadelphia because
until you told me the body out here had an implant I didn't make
the connection. Zachary told me Klemper put him together from
scratch back in the '70s, using genetic material taken from
volunteers like my mother. There was no reason for me to connect
that with you."
"I understand."
"So get off my back about Zachary, tell me what killed that
kid, and everything will be fine. Does that work for you, Agent
Scully?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good. Let's go."

****

So much worse than she had thought.
In the chopper, on the way to the site where the body had
been found, the situation gnawed at Scully continually. Mulder
had never expressly, overtly pulled rank on her before--sure, he
was technically her section chief, but up to now he had wielded
that authority rarely and indifferently, as if he thought it would
be just too damned much trouble to give her orders. He had
certainly asked for and listened to her honest opinion more often
than any other superior she'd ever had, and had usually respected
her right to disagree with him. Now, with seven words, all that
had gone right out the window.
*Does that work for you, Agent Scully?*
She wished again that he had hit her back. It would've been
so much cleaner, so much easier to heal.
If nothing else, his behavior the night before cleared up one
thing--why he was always getting sucker-punched in a brawl. He
didn't want to believe anybody would really hit him. He'd let
that split second go by, give the other person every possible
chance not to do it, and in the process, inevitably let some
scumbag get the first shot in. Oh, he was perfectly capable of
getting back into the fight once he'd been popped, but take the
first swing? Mulder? Not likely.
Now he was keeping his distance from her--needed his
distance, so he'd said--not looking at her, staying always a few
feet away from her, in the car, now in the chopper. Scully
suspected that, in fact, it was not distance he needed, but rather
a tenderness that he could actually believe in. But she doubted
he would trust any comfort she offered. She wondered whether his
father had ever given him a hug to try to make up for causing him
pain.
*We'll never be the same,* she thought. *He'll never really
trust me again.*
The hell of it was, she wasn't sure why she had done it.
She'd never struck someone in anger that way before. In self-defense, sure. But she'd never really
wanted to hurt someone, and
there was no getting around it--she had *wanted* to do Mulder
damage. Yes, she'd been tired, on edge. Yes, she'd been plagued
by anxiety and the stress of trying to unravel the meaning of
events over the last few months. But she'd been stressed out and
fatigued time and again in her life, and it had never made her
want to hurt anybody.
What the hell had come over her? She couldn't fathom it.
And that, more than anything, made her afraid of what was to
come.

****

Big Horn National Forest
Twelve miles east of Sheep's Ridge, Wyo.

The smell here was even worse than in the town. This was the
stench of mass death, heavily overlaced with the sweet smell of
wood smoke and the acrid tang of burned grass and gasoline. Ashes
lay everywhere among the charred trees. A thousand yards from the
clearing where the chopper landed, Scully saw twisted metal--some
kind of structure that had gone to the flames.
"Jesus," Westin said. "What happened here?"
"Do we have a photo of the kid?" Mulder asked.
Wordlessly, Skinner passed it to him. Mulder glanced at it
and handed it to Scully without looking at her. Handsome boy--blond with bright blue eyes, with
the kind of long, sweet
eyelashes that had made girls in Scully's high school swoon.
Bridges, the local sheriff, stood beside a burned-out all-terrain
vehicle, its tires now hardened puddles of melted rubber. The boy
lay a few feet from the truck, his legs bent at the knees, head
leaned back.
It didn't take rocket science to see that the body had been
moved there after the fire--no burns. Scully did a quick
examination and noticed that he had dirt in his nose, mouth and
eyes. He'd been buried somewhere, then exhumed. And the pose did
look like someone had carried him to his present location.
Quietly she relayed that to Mulder, who stood over her, looking
down at the boy.
She felt behind the neck, then frowned, lifted him to look.
"He had an implant," she said, feeling suddenly a little light-headed. "But it's been removed.
Recently, from the look of it."
Mulder nodded, staring into the distance. "They didn't want
us to find it. Any sign of violence?"
"Nothing overt. I need to get him to a decent lab to be
sure, but this looks like a massive vascular collapse. It could
have been chemically induced, or it could be the result of
disease."
"Rapidly progressive glomerular disease, for example?"
The kidney disease Mulder'd had as a child, which Zachary had
said he'd contracted because of the tests Klemper had conducted.
"It's one possibility, yes."
Mulder nodded. "I'm going to have a look around."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him head for the metal
structure, occasionally sifting the ashes on the ground with his
foot to see what lay underneath. Scully looked again at the boy's
body as Westin and Halstead slipped it into a bag. The kid had
needle tracks in his arm--the kind left by a long-term IV.
Something green, dried now, had oozed out of the opening in his
skin. Scully made a mental note but didn't touch it. She'd need
a respirator when she did the post-mortem on this one.
Then she heard Mulder, his voice low and sick, say, "Oh,
shit."
She looked up. He had drifted behind the remains of the
metal building, up onto a curving mound of burned dirt. Scully
got to her feet.
"Mulder?" she said. "What is it?"
She saw his shoulders drop in resignation. Whatever it was,
it was bad.
"You'd better come have a look at this, Scully," he called.
"Brace yourself."
She climbed up the mound, Skinner right behind her, and then
stood there stunned, staring.
"Mother of God," Scully said.
Below, in a shallow trench, were fifteen, maybe twenty
bodies, sprawled out as if they had been dumped there from the top
of the mound. Some had been incinerated down to skeletons, others
still had seared flesh clinging to their bones. Two, a little
ways apart from the others, were naked and singed but mostly
intact.
"What the fucking hell," the A.D. said.
"Good question," Mulder said.

Continued in Part 10.