<![CDATA[From: RivkaT <RivkaT@aol.com>
Date sent: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 00:37:29 EDT
Iolokus II: Agnates
Authors: MustangSally and RivkaT
Summary:What do you do when you find out your entire life has been a lie?
The horrific saga begun in Iolokus continues in the barren landscape of
Texas. Mulder and Scully delve deeper into the genetic experiments done
by the Project on the Mulder family. When the innocent, and
not-so-innocent, legacies of the experiment are murdered because of who
and what they are, Mulder and Scully are forced to face terrible reflections
in a mirror broken into ten distinct pieces.
Rating: NC-17 Classification: XA(R) (Mulder/Scully sexual activity)
Spoilers: Fifth Season through Emily
Disclaimer: We don't own them, which may be why we ride them hard and put them
away wet. Please don't take offense.
Agnates 1/20
And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them
And such that it is to be these more or less than I am
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself
Walt Whitman
Imagine my joy when Zippy was waiting for us back in DC.
I walked into the office and he was sitting in my chair, feet up on my desk,
looking up at Scully. She was standing a few feet away from him, not quite as
close as she stands to me but overall the picture was enough to make me want
to bite his throat out. Couldn't he smell that this was all my territory? I'd
drawn the line at actually urinating in the corners since it would only irritate
Scully more than some of my other bad habits.
"What are you doing here?"
"Hello to you too, Spooky. Sorry to hear about your ulcer, is that why you
were such an asshole in Texas?" he cocked his head and smiled one of his
halogen
smiles at me to show that this was all in good fun, but I just wanted to break
his teeth.
Supposedly the cauterization had solved my immediate problems but I was
obviously going to revisit gastrointestinal hell in the near future. And the
reason was grinning at me from behind my desk with its hideous Tom McCann shoes
on
my blotter.
"I repeat: what are you doing here?"
"Agent Zipprelli wants us to consult on a case," Scully answered for him.
"It's an investigation into the disappearances of a number of young women down
in
Texas."
The part of me that is always screaming struggled to the forefront of my
consciousness. No, no, no, not again.
"It's right up your alley, Spook. Hot chicks missing without a fucking clue.
That's what you're into, right? Who knows you might even get lucky and find
yourself
the Klingon of your dreams."
"Fuck off," I said and gestured to him to get the hell out of the way so I
could sit at my own damn desk. He, of course, moved not an inch.
"The disappearances are centered around Austin," Scully said and, though Zippy
would not have been able to catch the slight emphasis on the last word, I did.
I realized that I'd never asked what other information Marita had given her.
Roush had a large amount of property in Austin.
They looked at me expectantly. Scully seemed to think that I'd accept turning
X Files leadership over to her without going through any of the annoying
paperwork to make her AIC, and though I'd said that I could do that when we were
in
Arizona, things seemed very different if her first executive decision was
going to be to follow Zippy back to his stomping grounds. Maybe my presence
would be
superfluous anyway.
"Do you really want to do this?" I appealed to Scully. She just raised her
eyebrow, which that morning apparently meant, Mulder, you fuck, get with the
program.
Zippy watched the two of us, amused by the silent communication. When he
could tell that I'd caved, he decided it was safe to chime in. "What's your
damage, Spooky, anyway?"
"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."
Scully gave me the dog-poop-on-her-shoe look, and I whined, "Oh, come on,
Scully. You have no idea how many years I've waited to say that to him."
She crossed her arms and Zippy smirked. Another long-held fantasy shot to hell
once realized. I should have learned better when Samantha was returned, but
I'm not that trainable.
I sighed. "Get out of my chair, grab a stool, and give us what you've got."
He didn't move.
"This is the deal," Zippy started, flipping open a case file, "after the shit
from the Roosevelt Center died down I started going through the old case files
to see
if anything we'd picked up lately could relate back to Abrams. Turns out that
one
of his co-workers from the Phone Company took a powder about nine months ago.
This is the killer, he had been dating the woman, I figured that this was the
external stressor that started his trip down insanity lane."
How easy it was to forget that Zippy had been in ISU until he started talking
like a profiler and stopped talking like a hick cop. I hated to admit it, but
he
had actually had an awful lot of promise in ISU, from a strictly analytical
perspective - he never lived the cases the way an inspired profiler did.
Cases left him
without a stain, just like his teeth. Lucky bastard.
"Then I got to thinking that he had been talking about people manufacturing
babies. Nine months. I talked to a buddy down at the Austin PD and another
one in San Antonio. Turns out that between the two cities, no less than
twenty-four young women between the ages of eighteen and thirty went missing
about
nine months ago. Given the fact that both Austin and San Antonio have a
fairly large population of transient workers in the tourist trade, waitresses
and the
like, not much was made of it at the time since people come and go at will.
But
four women missing at about the same time without as much as a body found
anywhere is suspicious."
"Think they got picked up by the Mothership, Spooky?"
"You're doing waaay too much peyote, Zip."
"I've seen you go off on a wild E.T. hunt for less."
"Do you want to countersign the request to consult before I take it up to
Skinner?" Scully asked, her face and voice like liquid paper.
I scrawled my name on the dotted line and let her go.
"What the fuck is with you?" I demanded, the moment her footclicks were
swallowed by the elevator, "you X-File happy all of a sudden?"
"Fuck you, Spook, I'm doin' my job. Somethin' you never took seriously."
"This is from the guy who'll wave his dick at anything with tits?"
"Hey man," he was out of my chair and snarling down at me where I sat, his
eyes glowing like neon, his spit hot on my face, "you can sit here in your
fucking
burrow and pick and choose what bullshit cases you want while the rest of us
are out on the fireline every day. We're working cases you think you're too good
for. We're putting the bad guys in jail while you're chasing after lights in the
sky."
He grabbed his briefcase from my desk, sending a flurry of case files to the
ground.
"I've got three seats on the nine o'clock to Austin tomorrow. Be on that
plane with your full attention or I'm going to leak to the press that the X-
Files
are a vanity project and a waste of taxpayers' money."
I had his arm before he made it to the door and I spun him around until his
solid back slammed into the hollow door. Strong as a bulldog, he shoved at me
and
forced me back half a pace.
"You do not come into my office, turn my partner against me and then threaten
me *fuckhead*."
"Do your fucking job, Fox. Get your head out of your ass and work for a
change."
The door bounced shut behind him.
I kicked the trashcan across the office but it only made my foot hurt.
****
Zippy caught up with me on the second floor landing. When I heard his
footsteps I turned, reaching for my gun, just in case, but I relaxed when I
identified
him. Even if he was an enemy, his plans didn't involve assault in the concrete
embrace of the Hoover building.
He shook his head and smiled at me. "You know how you can have a history
with a person, and everyone who sees the two of you together for the first
time wonders what could possibly be the problem and why you overreact to every
word the other person says? And you know you're overreacting, but it's not the
one sentence, it's the whole history, every interaction you've ever had." He
cocked his head and blinked, his dark eyes and Maybelline eyelashes flirting
with me in the dimness of the stairwell.
"I think I know a little about that," I replied and he smiled widely.
"I know it's not all Spooky's fault, but he...well. Pushes buttons, you
know?"
I nodded and began climbing again.
"Should I come see the AD with you first or just come back later?"
"I'll handle this, he can be..brusque...to people he doesn't know and I don't
want any more male posturing clouding the issues." He nodded contritely, face
falling like a pancake. His pout was nowhere near as exaggerated as Mulder's;
his face
flattened and his eyes widened but his lips stayed pretty much in place.
"I'm gonna go buy some snow globes with the Washington monument in them
for my kids," he said and shrugged.
"You have children?"
"I don't. The Artist formerly known as Mrs. Zipprelli and her new husband do,"
he shrugged, "didn't work out."
Oh, hell. "You should try some pretty rocks from the Natural History Museum, I
sent them to my brother Charlie's kids last year and he said that went over
well."
He nodded. "Should I meet you back at Mulder's office? Or is yours easier to
find?"
I winced. He really had an instinct for weak spots and I'm sure it served him
well.
"Come to the basement around five, we'll talk. I'm sure you've got friends in
the building you can visit with until then."
****
During the lunch hour I picked up a pack of Trojans to go with the Rolaids. I
didn't think about it until I was back in Casa Hoover.
Did I want Scully to get pregnant? Did I want that not to happen?
We'd never used condoms before; the chances of either of us dying from HIV
were minimal. So because I knew she was infertile I hadn't paid any attention
to "protection," as it's called these days. As if anything could protect me from
sex with Scully.
If she got pregnant she'd have to leave me. Leaving me could keep her safe,
but leaving me this way would make her more vulnerable than ever. Let's be
honest,
she could have Zippy's child, hell she could have Cancerman's child (would
that make me a brother? a first cousin once removed?), and a threat to it would
still bring me to my knees.
So no, I didn't want her to get pregnant. And maybe I didn't trust her to go
back on the Pill now that pregnancy was a possibility. She'd used it before; she
was never ashamed of it and took it with lunch every day, which is why I know it
was her method of choice. But she wouldn't start up again without a full checkup
first, not my methodical calculating darling, and she might not return to it at
all.
Now that she'd been a mother, for a few short days, she'd want that again, not
right now but eventually, and when that happened I'd have to figure out how to
dissuade her. I couldn't prevent her from going out and finding some idiot in
a bar to be daddy or even from using a sperm bank. I could try to spend every
waking minute with her, and that way she'd kill one of us well before nine
months was out.
Maybe if I was lucky I could use her sex drive to combat her reproductive
drive. I know this isn't true of my other sexual partners, but I am, without
serious
competition, the best lover Scully has ever had. None of the others' lives or
mental stability depended on pleasing her in every cell, and none of them, I'm
sure, studied her every move, in bed or out, to ensure total attention to her
needs. She thinks that she doesn't need me, and in a way it's true. Scully's
will is strong enough to let her leave me behind without ever looking back. But
I
don't think she's aware of what it would cost her. She could do it, but she will
never be indifferent to me, because I've bypassed that judgmental, convoluted
cerebellum of hers and trained her body and her reptile brain what to crave.
As a strategy, it would definitely have its benefits.
Then there was one question that hung in the air like a bad smell - what if
she wasn't interested in having sex with me anymore?
What would I do to make her stay?
2/20
You villain touch! What are you doing? My breath is tight in its throat.
Unclench your floodgates. You are too much for me.
Walt Whitman
Mulder wasn't in *his* office at five; I'd forgotten that he had a
checkup for his stomach, an appointment I'd scheduled for him. He'd come
back when he was done, but I didn't know if I wanted to be waiting there
for him.
Zippy had a filing cabinet open and was paging through a thick casefile.
I got closer and saw that it was my own. The first one, as Mulder
wouldn't hesitate to remind me. The one now supplemented with the latest
revelations concerning my cancer and my child.
"Find what you're looking for?" I asked sharply, and he spun on his heel
and had the courage to look unashamed.
"I've heard rumors," he admitted, "but I didn't really understand.
It's..."
"Unbelievable?"
His grin was as loud as a gunshot in the dim office and I thought about
the fact that the teeth are the only visible bones of a healthy body.
"Hard to believe, maybe. Harder to understand. Why would anyone do
this?"
I shrugged. "Why do people go to Star Trek conventions?" This comment
earned me a more serious smile. "So," I continued, "Mulder's at the
doctor's, he'll be a while."
"So you want to get something to eat?"
Haven't we done this before, I thought, but what came out of my mouth
was, "Sure."
I think the last time Mulder bought me dinner was tomato soup and
grilled cheese sandwiches at a truck stop in Iowa where the jukebox was
playing both country and western music. But Zippy and I went to the
Ebbett's Grill where the atmosphere was as mellow as the dark wood
paneling and the waitstaff were both attentive and discreet. There were
real fabric napkins too. We ordered drinks and waited for dinner to
come.
"So what's your deal with Spooky?" he asked, over the civilized
tablecloth.
I looked at him. "Deal?"
"I mean, are you two an exclusive thing?"
The substance of the question rattled in my head for a moment.
Exclusive? Technically, there was no one else left alive with whom I'd
had sexual relations in the past five years. I think Mulder could say
the same. Did that count? Why was Zippy thinking that-
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Zippy sipped at his beer and sat back in the booth.
"Ah, come on, Dana, I see the way he looks at you. The boy's got it
bad."
"You know, there are people in the world other than Fox Mulder," I said,
feeling the vodka sting in my bloodstream, my body, so unused to
alcohol, was reacting like a college student at her first dorm party.
In the dim light, Zippy was actually attractive since the shine from his
teeth as muted and he wasn't shouting down Mulder. His foot brushed my
calf underneath the table and it may have a genuine accident. He looked
at me with his deep walnut eyes and ran his fingers up and down the
sweaty sides of his glass.
"So tell me about Dana Scully then," he said in an affable tone.
I chased an ice cube around the glass with my swizzle stick.
"Not much to tell, went to college, went to med school, went into the
FBI," I drank the remainder of the vodka and tonic, enjoying the cold
trail it ran to my stomach.
"Was abducted, had cancer, had a child that died. Isn't that a story?"
he pressed, and it surfaced where in my mind that he had trained in ISU
with Mulder and that he had, in fact, been a profiler.
Hard to believe that either of them had been when they carried on like
children on a playground. But Zippy's tone was too light and frothy for
reality.
Was I being questioned?
"Doesn't that change you somehow?" he pressed.
"It changes your perspective."
"And what's your perspective now?"
"Very distant," I said and offered him the most barely polite smile.
"I can take a hint," he said and shook his head," so what subjects are
open for conversation?"
"How 'bout them Redskins?"
"Now you see, that's one of my forbidden subjects, I'm a Dallas fan."
Maybe the joke was funny or maybe it was the vodka but I did laugh. The
waiter came and brought our dinners and for a half an hour we talked of
normal things - department gossip who was sleeping with who and if
anyone at all was sleeping with Skinner. We talked about budget cuts,
the impossibility of getting good cannoli below the Mason Dixon line and
the general decrepitude of the entire Lariat rental car fleet. He told
me about his divorce, about how Anne Marie had finally run out of
patience with the insane schedules, the last minute trips and the black
moods from seeing one too many dead bodies. His sons and ex-wife were
now living a normal life with her new husband who was a vet and only got
called out of bed at night for emergency calf-births. The best thing
about the late night bovine midwifery was that cows don't try to shoot
the vet.
I lost track of how much I drank, but when we walked through the cool
cavern of the parking garage and Zippy put his arm around me I didn't
protest. The kiss was pleasant, and it was nice to kiss a man without
getting a cramp in my neck, but pleasant was as far as it got. He
failed to ignite any passion in me whatsoever, as compared to Mulder who
could almost make me come with one blatant look.
My lack of interest must have been obvious.
"No good, huh?" he asked with a sad little smile.
"Zippy-"
"Yeah, I know, I know 'my heart belongs to Spooky', right?" he unlocked
the car door and held it open for me, "But if he does you wrong even
once, let me know and I'll kick his ass."
In a way, it was terribly charming.
****
"Take me home."
If my head snapped up any faster I was going to find out the hard way if our
heath care package stretched to chiropractors or not. She had broken a rule,
no talk in our oft-bugged office.
"I had too much to drink," she admitted and walked carefully to the chair and
sat with equal care.
"Zipprelli ply you with alcohol and make an assault on your virtue?" I sighed
and began gathering papers into their original case files, more or less.
She snorted something like a laugh and tossed her hair back; the liquor was
making her slow and languorous, and making me nervous.
"Something like that," she pulled her key chain out of her pocket and tossed
it on the desk, the brass of the Apollo emblem glowing gold in the light, "and
I'm
not about to further endanger my career by picking up a DUI."
"Might be a nice change from speeding tickets."
I have been asked why I rarely let Scully drive in the field and the answer is
simple, my deliberate little darling has a size six shoe and a lead foot. To
avoid the hassle of dealing with local highway patrols, I drive. The speeding
should
have been a clue to me all those years ago that something demonic lay under
her carefully groomed exterior.
"Come on, you little lush, the drunk bus is leaving,"
Sitting in the passenger seat of her own car, Scully watched the lights of
Washington go past, past the usual diplomatic tags proving that foreigners
really shouldn't be permitted to drive on US soil, past the stretch limos, past
the
river and into Virginia. From her statement in the office doorway, I wasn't
sure if
she wanted to go to her home or my home, and since my apartment was closer the
decision was simple. I was also gripped with a serious hunger for her skin.
Parking in Old Town Alexandria sucks, as a rule, and tonight was no different.
All the slots for my apartment building were full and we had to walk three
blocks in the night. Passing by the coffee cafe where I used to pick up my
morning
caffeine fix before getting to the Metro station, back when I could drink
coffee, a small, strong hand caught mine and fingers entwined with mine. I
could have
died happy right then and there, except for the nagging fear that the
affection was alcohol-induced.
Scully plunked her briefcase next to mine on the coffee table and wandered
into the bedroom with a boneless walk that could have made me hard if I'd let
it.
I went through the usual routines as though she wasn't there, checking my e-
mail, getting the scores from ESPN while I sorted through my paper mail. The
only
good thing was a letter of confirmation from my brokers (the thought that I
had stockbrokers still made me want to laugh) that they had, in fact, sold all
my
Roush stock as per my request. They had re-invested the money in a variety of
computer companies that allegedly gave about the same yield. At least I could
look at myself in the mirror in the morning when I shaved.
I also now owed Danny a hundred bucks on the last Yankees game.
When I finally went into the bedroom, it was after midnight and I almost
stepped on the puddle of Scully's clothes on the floor. From the light coming
through
the drapes that never quite shut tight, I could see that she was already in bed,
sprawled over more than her fair share wearing one of my old dress shirts.
She was also breathing so loudly that it was a borderline snore.
I took off my clothes and got in next to her. She snuffled into the pillow
when I touched her, but she went soft again and leaned up against me.
****
Mornings are dangerous times in my world. Waking up Scully is like sticking
your hand in a bear trap, only worse. This time I was prepared. I had coffee.
"Hey, " I said and poked at her hip.
She made an unattractive grunting noise and burrowed deeper into the pillow.
"Go 'way."
"Wake up sleepyhead, it's time for school."
Rolling over, she looked up at me and I watched the play of the last night's
events run through her eyes. Yes, Scully, we did share a bed last night and
didn't have sex. Mark that down on your calendar, it has to be an event. I can
take care of you and still let you make the rules, an arrangement that you've
never made available to me.
Naturally I said none of this.
She sat up and rubbed at her face.
"What time is it?" she asked.
"Just after seven," I said and handed her the covered cup that I had brought
her from Starbucks.
Taking the coffee, she pushed hair out of her face and I could see her
struggle to form rational thought.
"When are we supposed to get the plane to Austin?"
"Nine, that gives you enough time to go home and pack."
"Right," she muttered and started drinking the coffee.
"Be back in a minute," I said and went back into the living room to finish
setting up my laptop to get my e-mail on the road. I was fighting with the
codes when
someone started knocking at the door.
"You know, that damn partner of yours has a hell of a nerve," Zippy complained
as he marched in, "I don't know where the fuck she is. I called her apartment
this morning and all I got was the answering machine."
"Good morning Agent Zipprelli, and how are you today."
"She shot me down again last night."
"Maybe you should quit asking her out. The lady is not interested."
"Fucking genius."
"I know I am. So what did you try to call Scully about?" I asked,
straightening my tie.
"The flight was moved to ten."
"So you should have more time to get a coherent report together that I can
review on the plane," Scully said, coming out of the bedroom and tucking her
blouse into the top of her pants, "as opposed to that incoherent drivel you
tried to pass off yesterday."
She handed me her empty coffee cup and shrugged into her jacket.
"I'll see you two at the airport at nine thirty, then."
Picking up her briefcase, she left, leaving Zippy with his mouth open and me
with an empty paper coffee cup in my hand.
"You are so whipped," Zippy said once her footsteps had been swallowed by the
sound of the elevator.
"Fuck you," I said and threw the paper cup at the trashcan in the kitchen. It
bounced off the rim and rolled across the floor.
"Didja' ever stop to think exactly how big of a shitload of trouble you can
get in for sleeping with your partner?" he asked and flopped down on my sofa.
"Repeatedly."
"And?"
"What's your point, Pin-head?"
"I think it might be worth a pair of those Redskins tickets you're always
giving Danny for me to forget about it," he gave me one of his ultrabrite
smiles,
"and extortion is such an ugly word."
This was farcical, just a routine round of sniffing and growling, the flash of
canine teeth. I knew the only thing he was serious about was the fact that he
wanted
the tickets. If it hadn't been the threat of exposing Scully and me, he would
have found another way to weasel the tickets out of me. Was it really going to
be
that easy? Were we just kidding ourselves and the rest of the world that this
was
a clandestine affair? Or did people honestly not give a damn?
One thing was certain. Short of my being abducted by aliens and having my
brain sucked out with a straw, I couldn't give her up. If exposure threatened,
she'd have to be the one to take action.
If I were analyzing myself, I'd wonder what kept me following her around. On
the surface, she was getting the milk for free, which was sorely depressing the
market for cows. Love as cow, I thought--what a moo-ving metaphor. But Zippy
wouldn't get the joke.
In any event, as always with us, surface appearances were deceiving. I had
excellent reasons to nurture this strange attraction. With Scully, I could
open up--because I knew she'd never admit to noticing my most painful
revelations. I
could follow words that came out flecked in my heart's blood with a sly
innuendo, and she'd treat both statements the same way: she'd give me a blank,
almost
disapproving stare and change the subject. If she ever tried to draw me out,
I'd pull back, and I could count on her to do the same.
"There's a Starbucks down the street," I said. "You buy me some tea, we'll
figure out what you're going to tell Scully. There will be a test later, this I
can
guarantee."
"Tea?" Zippy shook his head and grabbed my bag. "You are a lunatic."
"On the contrary, the phases of the moon have nothing to do with it. I am mad
but North by Northwest. I can tell a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is
Southerly."
"I wouldn't quote too much Hamlet were I you, man. Think too much about the
parallels and you'll end up on somebody's floor bleeding from multiple
puncture wounds."
He had a point.
Zippy's request for our help was not altogether implausible, though it would
have made more sense if I'd had coffee instead. Twenty-four women gone, all
young
and probably fertile, high-risk victims whose disappearances should have been
noticed. Abductions tended to target young healthy women, whereas run-of-the-
mill serial killers, particularly the savvy ones, stuck to people whose
absence would not be particularly surprising. Unfortunately if you're running an
illicit breeding program a subject's heroin addiction really cramps your
experimental
options, which might be the only good thing about shooting smack.
Zippy had actually made a rather brilliant deduction, though I didn't say that
because he'd just insult me for patronizing him. He'd worked out the girls'
menstrual cycles through interviewing friends and family--he was aided by the
fact that fifteen of them lived in dorm situations, and women living together
often find their cycles synchronizing, it's something to do with pheromones that
Scully probably even understands. In any event, the girls were all taken a few
days
before their peak fertility periods, just enough time to get them transported,
cataloged and drugged into oblivion before...whatever.
Of course, Zippy thought our target was a lone psycho who wanted to
impregnate as many victims as possible. Real men don't believe in
conspiracies, they like things that can be shot, fucked, or trampled, not
necessarily in
that order. I didn't debate the point with him.
However, I would have given my left nut to see Zippy questioning college girls
about their menstrual cycles. I bet he left all of those dorms with a
pocketful of phone numbers.
The loud clanging of a metal milk pitcher made me look up at the girls behind
the counter. Three of the fresh-faced college students that I vaguely
recognized
from my frequent flyer program were clustered around the blonde who was
blushing redder than a cranberry. Zippy also looked up, looked at the blonde
and smiled.
The hormones in the air were thicker than steamed milk.
Zippy and the girls - doing the mating dance of the eyes.
I felt very old and very tired.
3/20
And there will be any more inception that there is now
Nor any more youth no age than there is now.
And there will never be any more perfection than there is now.
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now
Walt Whitman
"I can't believe that son of a bitch rates a window," Mulder said, looking out
the architectural marvel that was Zippy's.
"Well they're not going to hide Top Gun in the basement, right?"
"I chose that office, good privacy."
"Obviously it wasn't for proximity to the women's room."
"We've got a lead!"
I was going over the stack of Missing Persons reports piled up on Zippy's desk
when the man himself came into the office waving a fax sheet like it was an
Olympic Gold Medal.
"Holly Keene was spotted by a Good Samaritan over in the warehouse district.
They called into the local TV station when they ran the missing person report
last night."
"Let's go," Mulder said and I shrugged, it looked like we were just going to
do grunt work, and not of the kind that Skinner would condemn. Now *there* was
some grunt work I wouldn't mind starting again, I thought, and almost forgot
to follow Zippy before he lost us in the maze of corridors that led to the
elevator.
The cops were holding back pending our arrival, tightening around the target
warehouse like a noose. Anyone with about a day's work in security would have
been able to spot their presence for all their attempts at subtlety. This was
Texas, I reminded myself, and subtlety was not really a premium.
Zippy had respect here though; they hadn't made a move until he arrived.
"Spook," he said, casually throwing an arm around Mulder's shoulders just to
make him flinch, "whaddaya think? Guns blazing or not?"
"It's a tough call," he said, looking at me and seeing the Eleanor Roosevelt
Daycare Center, where blazing hadn't made a whit of difference. "I doubt our
target is a lone man with a lot of women in chains."
"You think he's got an accomplice?"
Mulder sighed and looked away. I recognized the signs of compromise in him
and was mildly displeased with them, though I should have been joyous. Mulder
was trying to color within the lines so that they wouldn't treat him like
Cassandra; technically we were just consulting and Zippy was in charge of the
case. "I
think he's not alone and might attempt to resist an armed penetration."
Zippy eyed Mulder the way I look at food I find in Mulder's refrigerator.
"Man, if you're going to start bullshitting me now, you can just go home."
Mulder's upper lip twitched in a snarl. "All right, hotshot. I think these
women are being used for experiments by someone or something who's being
systematic
about it. However you go in there will be gunfire and people will die. If
you're lucky most of the deaths will be goons and some of the girls. If not both
sides are going to be hit hard. Go in as a UPS delivery truck first; they'll at
least
check it out instead of just opening fire."
"Yeah," Zippy said and looked up at the flat blue sky, "I guess FedEx would be
too obvious."
"And those brown UPS uniforms are pretty flattering." Mulder gave me a grin
that was like a child's drawing of his normal smile.
On him, it was. Mulder has beautiful legs, perfectly proportioned with well-
defined calves and quads, even his big feet look good at the ends of those
legs. He wouldn't wear a vest because it looked too strange underneath the
short-
sleeved rayon of the uniform. But he had to add a brown baseball cap and a
pair of sunglasses to complete the disguise. I was surprised he didn't go for a
rubber nose and a false mustache as well.
UPS had been very cooperative, even lending us a DIAD (one of their high-tech
pads that could record signatures electronically), along with real packages
with real tracking numbers. Zippy, whose attention to detail I was beginning to
appreciate, had the packages labeled with the return address of the company
that supplied the security system for the warehouse, whose identity he'd
picked up by using binoculars to read the little sticker stuck on the window.
I began to suspect a Mulder-plot when I was informed that there were no
uniforms in my size--it was difficult for small women to meet the lift-and-
carry requirements of the delivery job. I was reduced to waiting with Zippy's
colleagues inside the truck, our Trojan horse in case things got hairy. At least
this
required Mulder to go in with Zippy, so he couldn't just gloat about it.
***
I felt flop sweat in every crevice of my body and wondered how many undercover
operations had been blown by nervousness on the part of the officer.
Zippy had a friend in Research who was almost as good as Danny. As we were
suiting up, he told me that the warehouse was owned, indirectly, by a big
pharmaceutical company. Three guesses as to the name, and the first two don't
count.
We couldn't pull the shirts out of the shorts to cover up our guns because
that looked too strange and there was obviously no use in trying an ankle
holster wit the shorts unless we wanted to look like we had matching
deformities. Instead we ripped open two of the small, flat boxes we'd gotten
from UPS--they were stuffed with balled-up paper for verisimilitude--and put
our weapons inside. If we kept them tilted just the right way the guards at
the doors wouldn't be able to see that the boxes were open.
"What are we waiting for?" Zippy asked and I shrugged and hopped into the
truck. The drive took about a minute and a half. We were a little early for
the real UPS delivery truck, but not so much that alarms would immediately
go off. Zippy had the radio tuned to some horrible top forty station and the
guards at the warehouse must have heard us before we rounded the corner.
I get knocked down
But I get up again
You're never going to keep me down
I get knocked down
But I get up again
You're never going to keep me down
The guard standing stiffly at the gate waved us through. "What kind of
warehouse has guards around its gate in the middle of a city?" Zippy asked
over the music.
I shrugged. "Maybe they're shy."
The building was as grey and solid as a nightmare. The few windows were
frosted glass. I wished again that there had been a better excuse to keep
Scully out of the TAC team, but she'd had more field experience than half of
the regular team members and they'd all been really impressed when she
recounted the story of our raid on the white supremacists last year. That's
my girl. Brains, beauty, balls, and bravado.
The guard at the door looked us over more carefully. He didn't recognize us
and that made him nervous. Zippy hopped out of the truck and swaggered over
to him, carrying his package underneath the thick electronic clipboard. I
followed, blessing my unresponsive face; I had no trouble looking
uninterested.
"I'm going to need a supervisor's signature on this," Zippy was saying as I
arrived next to him.
The guard frowned. "That never happened before," he said.
"Yeah, well, I guess this stuff is pretty expensive," Zippy replied, pulling
his clipboard to one side so he could pretend to look at the label. "I guess
Security Systems Limited just likes to make sure everything goes where it's
supposed to. Or maybe there's been a 'wastage' problem recently, you know
what I mean?"
The frown was now a snarl. "Look," I said, "we've got a whole route left to
run. If you want we can say 'delivery refused' and you can send the
supervisor down to our office to pick it up during business hours, or we can
return these to the sender."
The guard paused, considering the ass-chewing he'd get if they really needed
this package and his boss had to leave work to wait as UPS rummaged through
its dead-letter pile. "You come inside," he ordered me, "and bring both the
packages." He ran his card key through the door. He wasn't very good at
hiding his code; I saw Zippy's eyes track and hoped that the electronics
specialists in the truck could fake the card key better than Frohike had
been able to do.
Zippy carefully put the package and clipboard on top of my own box. His eyes
were flashing like stoplights, but he knew it was futile. I could almost
hear Scully screaming at me to refuse, make up some excuse, come back later.
I get knocked down
But I get up again
You're never going to keep me down
I get knocked down
But I get up again
You're never going to keep me down
The guard held the door for me and I stepped inside, bringing the boxes
close to my waist so that he wouldn't see the guns in the open boxes as I
passed. I could smell myself; maybe I needed a new deodorant.
"This way," he pointed down a small dark hallway framed by corrugated metal.
"The supervisor's office is at the end of the hall."
****
"We're losing him," the agent manning the electronics said, with the thin
pinched look of a person watching a disaster unfold. "They must be jamming
to protect the building."
Zippy opened the back of the truck and pushed past the fake boxes. I was in
his face immediately.
"Give me the warrant," I said.
"We already agreed we couldn't take that chance. Mulder insisted--"
"Does anyone *hear* Agent Mulder's opinion of the situation right now?" My
voice was irritatingly high, I needed authority and not hysteria. "Give me
the warrant."
"What are you going to do if I don't, Dana, draw down on me?" His voice was
soothing, like the tone you'd use with an abused pet, and that made the dark
interior of the van blaze red to my eyes. I noted that my hand was straying
perilously close to my weapon and that the other agents were shifting
nervously, readying for a confrontation.
"No," I pushed past him, knocking empty cardboard to the ground as I jumped
down. The guard's eyes widened and he held up a hand to stop me.
"Federal agent," I said as if that would explain everything and showed him
my badge and my gun, in that order. I felt Zippy behind me, waving the
warrant and shouting, but the world had slowed down and his voice didn't
make any sense.
The guard had time to raise his gun and squeeze off two poorly aimed bullets
before I shot him.
For a moment the world began to run at the proper speed again. I heard
another agent shouting into a cellphone, saying that it was going down all
wrong and that I'd gone crazy. Zippy was kneeling at the downed guard's
side, feeling for a pulse and then rifling through the dead man's pockets.
There was a terrible cracking noise from inside the building, the sound of
something large falling apart, and Zippy was at the door fumbling with the
guard's card key and we were in.
I get knocked down
But I get up again
You're never going to keep me down
I get knocked down
But I get up again
You're never going to keep me down
The music continued to thump from the truck radio, covering the sounds of the
TAC squad deploying.
4/20
Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I ignored the room at the end of the hall and looked around for other exits.
There was a stairwell to my right, an industrial-sized door that could have
let in all sorts of complicated medical machinery. There were drag marks in
front of it, the floor was discolored and worn as it wasn't down the rest of
the hallway.
I reached for the door and it swung open easily, on well-maintained hinges.
The main part of the warehouse was just one big room, several stories tall
and filled with rows and rows of wooden crates. In a firefight it would be a
maze of killing corridors. Up at the top and off to the side I could see a
balcony. The lights were dim and indirect but I could see the slow steady
pulse of monitors, red and green lights winking peacefully.
There was a metal staircase running from the warehouse floor up to the
balcony, I couldn't quite see where it came down through all the boxes so I
headed in the general direction.
It was like a topiary maze in there. I was considering whether the confusion
was the result of actual planning when I heard the door, several twists and
turns behind me now, clang open, and a voice shouted, "Where are you?" The
sound of safeties being clicked off carried well.
I glanced up again at the balcony and noted that the lights at one side were
now all red and yellow, the green washed away. The guns came free of the
boxes easily and I shoved the empty containers into a crack between two
crates. I began to run through the narrow artificial corridors, turning each
time the direction that was closer to the stairway.
The footsteps behind me sped up. As soon as I got above ground level they'd
be able to see me, I'd be a perfect target.
With the thought I heard the crack of a shot and a chunk of wood exploded
off a crate behind me. I pressed myself into the crate opposite the one that
had gotten attacked and looked around its corner--someone had come to the
railing of the balcony and he was firing at me. From above it would be like
shooting foxes in a barrel.
"Hold your fire, I'm a federal agent," I yelled with more optimism than
confidence and the crate I was braced against shuddered as it took a bullet
for me. I snuck around the corner, scraping against the rough wood and
acquiring a truly nasty splinter, and fired just to keep him on edge.
Hunching my back, I darted around the next corner, less than twenty feet
from the staircase. The closer I got, the less cover the crates would give
me. It was simple geometry, angle of incidence and angle of reflection.
It sucked.
I spun around as a burly blond man appeared from the way I'd come. He had
his gun raised but he wasn't too well-trained, I had a bullet in him before
he could aim properly and his shot went wild, flaring off into another
crate. I panted relief when I realized that he had been a person and so his
blood wouldn't blind me.
Moving again, adrenaline flowing in my veins instead of blood, I could hear
the hiss and scuff of the man's shoes as he shifted on the balcony, looking
for a good shot.
Death rained down from above once more and this time the crate beside me
shook and rattled like pit bulls were fighting inside. I felt heat and
dropped and rolled away just before the sides burst in perfect cartoon
fashion, popping open in four perfectly distinct directions. The heavy wood
fell on me like a slap from a giant's hand. I heard, above the hiss of the
fire, the pop of glass bursting and louder sounds that I couldn't quite
identify. Flames were chewing at my flammable protection and I squirmed,
trying to get my guns above my head so that I could come out shooting.
The concrete floor was still chilled from the air conditioning, cold enough to
make
me shiver even as I felt the first blister-precursors rising on my forearms.
The fire was spreading rapidly when I pulled myself out; the maze of crates
had turned into a wilderness of firelines, and I was standing on stained
concrete trapped between flames. The fallen crate was behind me; there was
no way to go but forward. Channeling Indiana Jones, I muttered, "Fire, why
does it always have to be fire?"
At least the man on the catwalk wasn't shooting at me any more, if he could
even see me through the leaping flames. Some of them were the seductive
orange-yellow of candleflame but others were chemical blue and green,
probably poisonous. The short-sleeved shirt and shorts, while designed to
make UPS workers charmingly sexy, did little to shield me from
the heat and the living grasp of the fire, whose thick fingers seemed to
reach out for me, coming closer on each pass. The hair was melting off my
legs.
I could feel myself begin to hyperventilate, no doubt worsening whatever
damage the toxic smoke was going to do. The fire had faces, faces with large
eyes and sharp little chins.
I wanted to curl up into a ball until Scully came and saved me. Only the
thought of the crates breaking apart and tumbling into the narrow corridors
on the warehouse floor kept me moving.
Three more turns and I was there, the thick peeling black paint on the first
step as inviting as a luxury hotel. I leaped for the step, the metal railing
blistering my hand, as the building shook under the assault of the fire.
If Scully had arrived with the cavalry, I couldn't hear it. Two, three steps
at a time I rose out of the flames like a phoenix, borne up on the waves of
hot air now hitting me with solid fists.
My mind told me that going *up* in a burning building was a very bad idea,
yet there were still those orgiastic lights winking at me, now uniformly as
red as my eyes in the morning.
A figure appeared at the top of the stairs and I almost took its head off
before I registered exactly whose head it was.
A Kurt.
He barreled down, heedless of my gun, panting and sputtering.
"It's all over," he yammered, "we've got to get out of here!"
I caught his arm, crushing a gun against him hard enough to bruise. "What's
going on?"
He looked at me funny. "The building is on fire."
Only sheer terror kept me from rolling my eyes.
No shit, Crawford.
"Do you know a way out?"
He gestured underneath the stairs, where the flames hadn't yet spread. "Back
door."
I kept a firm grip on him as we descended into Hell, still not convinced
that he hadn't been shooting at me earlier. Or, maybe, shooting at the
crates so that he could start the conflagration himself.
Nonetheless he did know a way out, including the access code that opened the
door onto chokingly bright cool air. My eyes burned as uniformed SWAT
officers buzzed around us, grabbing the Kurt and spitting questions at me
like nails.
A small familiar hand was at my back, checking me over for burns and other
damage. Scully felt me all over in a way that would have prompted me to say
something snide if we hadn't been surrounded by men who'd take it the wrong
way. One thing I'd learned over the years, most male cops would either
harass Scully themselves or they'd get in my face and tell me to pick on
someone my own size.
I zoned back in, Scully's inspection complete, as they were cuffing the
clone. He had the wide-eyed lunatic look that I'd too often seen in my
morning mirror. His sweaty hair was clumped together in spikes and the cops
weren't being too careful of his comfort as they searched him for weapons.
"Don't break the skin," Scully ordered. "He has...a rare condition, it could
be dangerous for you."
She was learning, I had to admit, skepticism had been tempered with the
tonic of wild speculation in the past few months.
She stalked past him and headed toward the pops that might have been gunfire
or plain old combustion. I would have followed her but the Kurt's mutterings
caught my attention.
"Had to die," he was chanting," had to, had HAD had *had* to had to *die*.
Yes, they had to finally die. All dead, had to die. Dead because they had to
be."
I stepped up to him. His breath stank just like a person's. The two cops,
responding to my nonverbal signals, held him towards me like waiters
bringing today's special.
"Who had to die?" Speaking slowly, calmly, the way they always wanted me to
do during my residency, the one time my affectless drone has been praised
rather than mocked.
The Kurt looked up at me and shuddered. "You said you wouldn't anymore," he
whimpered.
"I won't," I reassured him. "I just need to know who had to die, and why."
He essayed a smile. I've seen more accurate representations from emoticons
on a screen. Then he jerked against the cuffs and nodded his head. "I know,"
he burbled, shifting from sad to happy in the wonderful way of psychotics.
"They-had-to-die-because-they-were-bad-girls. They-were-sluts-and-I-made-
them-clean?"
No, that didn't sound rehearsed or anything. Jesus, I'd heard parrots that
sounded more genuine. I wanted to pat him on the shoulder and tell him that
he'd undoubtedly do better on opening night, they always say that a bad dress
rehearsal makes for a good show, but I thought it might be perceived by my
colleagues as inappropriate.
"Who are those men firing at the officers inside?"
He blinked. No one thought to explain that to him, I guess. "They're...mine."
"Did you hire them?" We could do this slowly if necessary. The cops were
shifting impatiently, anxious to get into the shooting gallery like the good
Texans they were. I ignored them.
"Yes?"
I didn't tell him that was the right answer as he'd hoped; instead I rubbed
my temples with my left hand, trying to suppress the urge to grab him and
shake him until he told me who'd fed him this cockamamie story.
"Agent Mulder?" The question had the careful tone of someone soothing a lion
with a thorn in its paw.
"What?"
"I think you'd better take a look...upstairs."
The sprinklers had belatedly kicked in and firefighters were busily foaming
the remaining flames to ashes, the chemicals had burned hot and quickly and
there wasn't much left on the floor. The metal staircase had sagged in a few
places and burned my feet through my shoes--another superb pair ruined, damn
it--but it was still stable and I mounted it with minimal trouble. At the
top the steps were slippery with thick liquid as if the fire had melted the
paint. Then I got a better look and I knew what had really happened.
It was an abattoir.
Literally, ankle-deep in blood, I walked through the second level of the
warehouse, its side open and exposed to the smoke and gun-muzzle flashes
coming from below. Downstairs the TAC team was cleaning up whatever
resistance the goons were offering. I could hear Zippy screaming at his
men. I lost sight of Scully in the mess upstairs, her hair hidden under the
baseball cap, and I was glad. I didn't want to see her face when she saw
this. I'm not that strong.
Two dozen women, on hospital cots, lying in neat rows in tidy beds with IV
bags running into their arms, and their abdomens opened like paper bags with the
contents spilling out. The contents were near-term infants. Blood leaked
along the uneven floor in thick rivulets. It hadn't happened all that long ago,
my
higher brain told my lower, the blood hadn't coagulated yet.
My lower brain moaned and curled up into a ball.
"Jesus Christ," one of the agents hissed next to me.
"Julius Caesar, to be correct," Scully's voice came from one of the farther
pallets, her tiny flashlight searching face by face, touching each woman to
check for
signs of life, "the legend has it that he was delivered from his dead mother
by cutting through the abdominal wall and removed. The story is most likely
apocryphal but it has given us the term Caesarian section. Although this is
hardly the correct manner, the general--"
A thin sound, like that of a kitten whose tail has been stepped on, cut
through the darkness.
Holy fuck, one of them was alive.
You have to give the men credit, they moved fast, moved from bed to bed,
examining big and little corpses to find the source of the sound. As I made
my search, I caught a glimpse of the agent at the next bed over, a man of about
fifty with a face that would stop a rampaging elephant. There were tears on his
face as he touched a lifeless little body.
"Over here!"
Moving fast, Scully raced over to the man who was holding a bloody baby. The
baby was moving. She stripped off her flak jacket and her blazer underneath,
wrapping the baby in it. I have to admit that I cringed since the jacket was
one of the hideously expensive ones I'd paid for in Arizona. Oh well. . . With
the
baby wrapped in the jacket, Scully began examining the infant for any signs of
harm
from its ordeal. The infant made a pair of fists and let out a louder wail.
It seemed that all systems were working.
"It's a girl," Scully told me, as if it mattered.
Nodding, I went downstairs to find Zippy, listening to my own pulse drum a
dance beat in my head.
****
My hands were shaking when I pulled the infant out of the dead woman. I'd
autopsied a pregnant woman once and after I was finished, I spent the rest of
the afternoon in the ladies' room at Quantico until I was vomiting thin traces
of bile.
Macduff had been ripped from his mother's womb. No child born of woman
could undo the evil that Macbeth and his wife had wrought upon Scotland, they
had broken the natural chain of being, the connection that ran from God to the
stones in the ground and they had to be punished by a preternatural being.
This baby didn't seem as much preternatural as pathetic. Still covered with
blood and fluid from her untimely delivery in the room filled with death, she
kicked
her feet and wailed in a weak little voice. Other than her extremities being
colder than I would have liked, she seemed un-traumatized by her harsh entrance
to
the world. There wasn't a speck of green anywhere on her body, just wrinkly
red infant skin and an accumulation of crusty drying blood. I wrapped her in my
jacket and headed back down to the entrance where the EMT's were waiting for
larger victims.
How was it that I had been able to stand and set fire to what would have been
my own children while this one was making me shake and sweat as if I'd
contracted malaria? Probably a natural reaction caused by the hormones running
freely in my body once again. Men like to chalk up a woman's emotional
response to anything to hormones. This isn't entirely true as they are just as
ruled by the chemical cocktail coursing through their bodies as we are. I had
a pre-med instructor who claimed that men had their own cranky calendar, only it
ran on a cycle of three hours rather than twenty-eight days and was linked to
their feeding habits.
Feeding.
Somebody was going to have to feed the baby.
My lungs hurt for a minute as I breathed in the memory of smoke, of fire, of
toxic fumes coming from a small body.
Feeling absurd with the infant cocooned in DKNY, I pushed past the men
crowding the stairway and went out the now-broken front door. The EMT's took
one look at the baby and myself and went pale seafoam with shock. Pretty
much the same color that Mulder had gone.
I didn't want to think about that too closely right then.
****
Outside the warehouse the assorted local cops and robbers were swarming in
and out, county coroner vans were pulling up and the local law enforcement was
having a hard time keeping the news vans at bay. Zippy handed me a scribbled
sheet of notes on what they had found inside and went off to smoke. Scully, I
knew, had gone to the hospital with the baby she had found, a score of tiny
handprints in blood over her white blouse.
A black sedan pulled into the thick of it all, darkened windows giving nothing
away. There was, I noticed, a Roush Corporate parking sticker on the window.
The singed hairs on the back of my neck snapped to attention. In my lovely
UPS uniform, I wasn't exactly making an impressive fashion statement, but at
least
I felt prepared. I knocked on the back window on the passenger side.
The black glass rolled down, exchanging one reflection of my face for another.
"Jason Lindsay, I presume?"
You had to give the guy credit, he didn't flinch much when I thrust my uglier
version of his face into the back of the sedan and showed him the mug shot on
my ID.
"Fox Mulder, FBI, I want to ask you a few questions about your company's
ownership of this property."
His/my mouth opened for a moment and then shut again.
"I'd be glad to answer any of your questions, " he said in a warm, hospitable
tone that didn't make it up past his perfect nose to his/my hazel eyes.
It was one thing to see someone with something very like your own face on a
computer monitor and on videotape but in person, to have him looking back at
you and the smell of his aftershave in your big ugly nose was downright --
spooky.
Hopefully he found me equally unnerving, although that wouldn't be a new
experience for me.
"Did you know that several men with identification from your company had any
connection with this facility?"
"No, I didn't."
"Let me paint you a very broad picture here, Mister Lindsay. Twenty-four
women have been missing in this general area over the course of the last year.
Fortunately, Holly Keene was spotted in this area a few days ago. Agent
Zipprelli managed to track down her movements to the warehouse. When the
Bureau raided the warehouse earlier this morning we found, amazingly enough,
twenty-four women who had been murdered by having full-term fetuses cut from
their abdomens."
Lindsay winced.
"I assure you, Agent Mulder, that other than clinical trials under FDA
approved conditions, Roush does not test human subjects."
I leaned down until our noses were practically touching.
"There was a Kurt Crawford clone in there with them."
He blinked, and I watched the lie form. Was I that transparent? I hoped not.
"Who?" he asked in a voice that was more artificial than Anna Nicole Smith's
boobs.
"There are things that we have to talk about, Mister Lindsay."
He actually smiled and it looked better on him.
"Including the obvious?"
"Including the obvious."
He extended his hand, and I noted French cuffs on his shirt and gold cufflinks
in the shape of Roush's corporate logo. He handed me his engraved and
embossed business card.
"When you're free from this . . . tragedy, come to my office tomorrow and we
can discuss this in a more civilized atmosphere."
"Sounds like fun," I deadpanned.
"One other thing," from the plush interior of the sedan he produced a
videotape, "you might want to take a look at this. It came from one of our
facilities in
Arizona."
****
The women's bodies showed signs of long-term sedation. I was angry for them,
the usual anger I feel for the victims increased exponentially by the ruthless
uselessness of it all. Didn't They (the ubiquitous, invisible them) know that
sedation would damage the fetuses? What kind of Nazi science were they
practicing, that they couldn't figure this out? Maybe Emily would have had a
better chance if they'd used a healthy, premenopausal woman's body to produce
her rather than a vessel that had to be drugged into readiness with a
warlock's
brew of powerful hormones.
God only knew what damage had been done to the miracle child. Most people
think that the story is over when the rescue ends, but doctors know better.
The
rescue is where the story begins.
I felt like I was running in place. Cataloging the bodies, filling out forms
and doing my job like a good little Fibbie. Mulder had hared off somewhere and
I
wasn't sure that I wanted to follow.
No, wait, I'd hared off. To the hospital. Mulder was still at the warehouse,
any journey he was taking was in the privacy of his own mind. I called just to
check, and he was there with the drone of TV cameras and sirens in the
background.
He sounded distracted and curt, situation normal, all fucked up.
Mulder said he'd meet me back at Zippy's office. I didn't have anything better
to do, so I went.
5/20
Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixed with cedar and branches of lilac,
This is the lexicographer, this the chemist, this makes a grammar of old
cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through unknown seas,
This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is a
mathematician.
Walt Whitman
"I think I'm getting sick of seeing you among all these dead children," Zippy
said.
"Jesus, you asshole!" I nearly screamed at him, but it was too late. The words
had cut her like flying glass and I saw the blood begin to flow from her eyes,
like tears but more final.
She shook her head. "He's right, Mulder. I'm the kiddie angel of death. You've
seen," reminding me of Arizona, of the images in the grainy surveillance
video--what would Zippy think of that? She wafted from the room and I knew she
was
returning to the hospital, to sit by the heated glass chamber encasing that
little girl-baby.
Zippy stared at her dissolving back. I looked at the blood on my shoes and
realized that it had dribbled onto my suit when I'd gotten back into my own
clothes. Another perfectly good suit shot to hell.
"You know, Spooky," he remarked, as if continuing a conversation, "I thought
you were lucky to have found her, you were so miserable in ISU. But is it worth
it? Is what you're looking for worth all the struggle?"
"Bite me," I said.
I didn't want to think much about what I had seen on the videotape Jason had
given me, Scully breaking the sides of the glass vats with a fire axe, Scully
pouring gasoline. The lab going up in flames, Marita burning, and Scully
watching it all before I ran in like the moron I am and dragged her out. Time
had put a thin layer of scar tissue over those images for me, but watching the
tape made my face burn with the remembered heat of the fire.
"Yo Zip."
"Yeah?"
"Gonna need some beers to put these flames out."
"Right on Fox-man."
****
The baby was doing as well as one might expect a premature baby to do under
such circumstances, which is to say there was some respiratorial distress,
uneven hearbeat, lack of oxygenation in the extremities. Nothing life-
threatening now that she was wrapped in the mechanical arms of the preemie ward,
sealed
away from human contact.
I ran the PCS myself this time, because I had to know. Mulder hadn't
questioned the need for a drop of his blood and, though my nose was no longer a
blood
faucet, I had plenty of my own available.
The girl, the one they were calling Miranda because she was a little miracle,
a shining star amidst the ugliness of her emergence--she was mine. The same
telltale markers that had identified Emily as my daughter blazed in the test
results.
Meet the new baby, same as the old baby.
Is it mine, or is it Memorex?
And, more incredibly, she seemed to be Mulder's.
No, not that incredibly after all. Mulder's bedtime story about multiple
Mulders was beginning to seem increasingly plausible, Mulder had never mentioned
giving sperm samples to anyone and his paranoia made it unlikely. If his
narrative about Jason Lindsay was right we were probably looking at Jason's
child. Which raised the interesting question: Did it matter? Miranda was as
related to Mulder as to Jason or any other genetically identical father; she
was indistinguishable from his child. From an evolutionary perspective, he
should
be just as devoted to her as if he'd sired her on me directly.
This, Mulder didn't need to know. Another advantage to running the PCS myself
was the ability to make the results go up in a puff of blue gas flame.
It wasn't an irreversible decision. I could always tell him later. (Like he
told you about your eggs? a dissenting voice complained, but I cut its throat
and no
one else dared speak up.) We did *not* need a discussion of unplanned
parenthood.
We weren't capable of taking responsibility for ourselves, much less a child.
****
With Scully gone back to stand vigil at the hospital, Zippy and I did the
manly thing -- we went out drinking.
"Why?" he asked, tracing shapes in the beer puddle on the tabletop.
"That's the eternal existential why, right?" I asked, hating every mouthful of
club soda that I was pouring into my sore stomach.
"No, that's the very pertinent 'Why would the freak of the week gather up all
those women, impregnate them and then lose his testicular fortitude at the
last minute and open them all up like microwave dinners? Why.' I just don't get
it.
Freaks fuck women and kill them or they fuck children and kill them, they
don't fuck women to get children and then kill both," he groaned and rubbed at
the
pointy spikes of his hair.
"This is making my brain hurt," he admitted, "the only psycho-dude from hell
scenario I can come up with is that our freak du jour was thinking that he was
going to create some kind of master race in his own image. But why keep them
unconscious or whatever they were? Why hire a little army, you'd think that
one of them would have freaked out and called in the cavalry no matter how well
they were being paid. It seems like lots of high-tech trouble when he could
have
just taken the girls to a ranch out in the desert and kept them corralled there
-
like horses. We've got some weird-ass cult shit going on out in the badlands,
new
age bullshit and the stuff that goes on out there. . . Lots of drugs and sweat
lodges for people looking for quick answers."
"There are no quick answers, to life or to whatever this guy has been up to,"
I said, knowing that I was giving a rationalization for not telling him
anything.
He looked up at me, and for a moment I saw Krycek's face.
"I know you know what the fuck's going on and you're not telling me," his face
toughened up, "I don't like being kept in the dark. You got Reggie Pardue
killed, Krycek went apeshit, I've heard stories about other agents whose stars
are on
the wall because of your conspiracy theories, I don't want to mention what
happened to Bill Patterson, and you've almost killed Scully a couple of times.
If my ass is on the line here, I want to know."
"Take the position that your ass is on the line as a fact. The rest is
bullshit," I waved at the waitress who undulated over and I told her I wanted
beer after
all, "I could sit here and tell you everything, which you would not believe and
you'd
only get pissed off at me."
God I was looking forward to the alcohol, the uneasy thought of AA meetings in
my future notwithstanding. Scully wasn't watching and Zippy had never heard
the doctors' lectures, he wasn't going to tell on me. Supposedly when the
sutures
healed I'd be cleared to drink alcohol again, there was no solid clinical
evidence that alcohol created ulcers even though it did aggravate them once
they'd
appeared.
"More pissed than usual?"
"Yeah, more than usual. Let's just boil it down to the fact that there are
some really bad guys out there, Zippy, who think nothing of taking women,
stealing
their ova, and then using the ova for some really fucked up experiments,
okay?"
"Stealing ova?" one of his eyebrows reached for the sky, "how the fuck do you
do that? Come after them with a vacuum cleaner or something?"
"Beats the shit out of me. Some super-ovulation and laproscopy procedure.
Scully can explain it."
The beer, when it came, tasted like the nectar of Olympus and the coldness of
it numbed my stomach. Maybe if I just quit drinking hard liquor and stayed with
beer. After all, beer was mostly water, and the dark lagers like this one
were high in protein. I lost myself in the Guinness for a moment.
"Scully knows all about it, doesn't she? She knows something else besides,
which is why she's hovering over that incubator like a hen with an only
chick," he looked down at his glass before continuing to speak, "does this have
anything
to do with the kid that she lost? Was that kid yours?"
"Fuck no." I wouldn't let it be. There was no remaining evidence and so it
could not be. Why had she insisted on drawing my blood before going to the
hospital
this time? That train of thought was derailed by its head-on crash with
another: What the fuck was Scully doing talking to Zippy about this when she
could
barely say Emily's name to me? While sexual congress with the divine Miss S. was
pleasant, I'd stick to my tapes for the next five years in return for one
honest conversation about this whole mess. And Zippy seemed to have gotten the
story
for the price of a Bud.
Good to know where you stand, isn't it?
Zippy brightened as he watched the storm form on my face. "You gonna tell me
what happened?"
"Fuck no."
"I'll figure it out, eventually. I may not have gone to Oxford but I'm not a
moron."
"Okay bright guy, you buy the next round."
****
I had only been back at the hotel for about twenty minutes, just long enough
to wash my face and crawl into a nightgown, when the connecting door opened. I
looked up from my laptop where I was finishing up my expurgated report on the
day's activities to see Mulder leaning against the closed door with a peculiar
look on his face.
"I met Jason today."
As a conversation starter it was a motherfucker.
"What?"
"He came to the warehouse in the corporate sedan with a driver. He claimed not
to know anything and invited me to his office for a meeting tomorrow."
Despite the weight and import of the words, Mulder was as casual as if he were
discussing his shoes. Maybe not. Mulder's shoes are greatly important to
him.
"You think he's involved with this?"
"He's Roush, isn't he?"
"Offering no explanation for your resemblance to one another?"
"It wasn't exactly the time or the place."
After saving my report file, I closed down my laptop and put it on the bedside
table. Mulder reminded at his position leaning against the door, watching me
like a dog who is seeing his dinner made -- wistful and hungry at the same
time.
"I like the glasses with the lingerie. It's a look."
The lingerie was one of the spoils of our trip through Scottsdale, a jade
green slip sheath with straps as tiny as an afterthought and a hem that barely
covered my
ass. I can't handle bustier and garterbelts -- I'm so short that it makes me
look like an underage porn star. Which would probably thrill Mulder to no end,
but
he can wear the damn itchy things next time.
Men don't make passes at girls who wear --
I folded up my glasses and put them in the case.
"So I take it that you're going to go see Jason tomorrow?"
"Naturally. It's a fucking shame that the disk we took from his office in
Bethel wasn't anything more than a Power Point presentation about marketing
projects
for the next quarter."
His suit was wrinkled to rags and his hair matched in terms of wear and tear.
And there was blood on his tie.
"Where were you?" I asked.
"Out. Where were you?"
"Out."
Sighing, he looked down at his scuffed and bloodstained shoes for a moment.
"Why don't you love me?"
"Oh Mulder," I groaned.
"No, do I smell or something? I just don't get it, to borrow one of Zippy's
phrases. We work well together, we've actually had fun a couple of times, we
trust one another, and the sex is nothing to sneeze at. Why not?" he finally
gave up the door and ambled over to the bed, his movements were unusually
graceful
and careful.
I smelled a rat. Actually the closer he came the more I smelled a bar. With
the way my cancer had destroyed the odor-receptors in half my nose he must have
reeked for me to be able to smell him. I hoped he hadn't driven. Damn Zippy.
"You're drunk."
"Zippy plied me with drinks and made a pass at me."
"And you fought him off?"
"Barely."
The mattress dipped underneath his weight and in the yellow light I could see
where my hairdresser had almost matched the original color of his hair to
cover the darker Jason tone. The thought of him meeting with Jason in the
morning
made my stomach squirm. I had no reason, other than the fact that he worked
for Roush, to dislike a man I had never met. But, as my father used to say, I
didn't much care for the cut of his jib.
Mulder dragged his fingertip up my arm from wrist to shoulder and my skin
danced underneath, sending a glassine shiver between my legs and making my
nipples tighten. I wanted him. I needed him. I needed him to wipe the
thought of the baby Miranda in the incubator out of my head, to erase the tell-
tale bars
of amino acids from my mind, telling the story of two sets of DNA combining to
make another one. I needed him to wipe out the memory of the cold little baby
feet against my hands in the ambulance, the women split open like insect egg
cases, and the sandbag-filled coffin in San Diego.
The finger continued over my shoulder to my thoracic notch, paused, and
proceeded to push the loose straps away from my shoulders, so the fabric clung
of its own free will to my breasts.
"What happened to your cross?" he asked.
Naturally it had taken him no less than a month to notice that it was missing.
"I lost it."
The tip of his index finger was rough against my lips and when I drew the
finger into my mouth he tasted salty. With my teeth eased back from his finger,
I
sucked on it like it was his cock. He murmured something under his breath and
shut his eyes.
"What?" I asked around his fingertip.
"You distract me."
I distracted him? That was the pot calling the kettle purple considering the
fact that he had his hand half up my leg and was stroking the skin on my inner
thigh with fingers that felt like they were covered in suede. My entire body
felt
like it had been rubbed with sandpaper and the buttons on his shirt were digging
hard
and fast into the skin of my breasts. It had been weeks since we'd had sex
and I was starving for the feeling of his body in and against mine. Long thin
fingers circumvented the microscopic panties that went with the nightgown and
headed
for home deep inside me.
"You talk to Zippy," he breathed into my ear and sent a shudder through my
bones.
"So?"
"You talk to him and you keep secrets from me."
His thumb pressed hard against the alert nerve endings of my clitoris and I
jumped as the jagged pleasure/pain flashed through me. His canines grazed
the back of my neck, where the scar was. I felt like gelatin with a loose
framework of overcooked pasta. Hot gelatin, hot pasta. Grabbing at the dark
fabric of his shoulders was the only way that I could stay upright. The heavy
dark sweet smell of lust washed over me like oiled water in a bathtub. The
stubble on his hard cheeks scraped against my forehead.
"Don't do it," he said in a voice of coal.
I started to protest again, but he thrust three fingers into my mouth and the
other three went to ground between my legs. Skewered above and below, I writhed
like a lip-pierced fish while uneven jerks of hot light pulsed along my bones.
Oh God, how long had it been since-
All the fingers withdrew and I sagged back into the mattress, in a puddle of
my own mind. Mulder reached around and started fumbling with something from his
pocket.
An inquisitive sound escaped my chest.
"Let's be modern about this, shall we?" he quipped and threw the condom
wrapper onto the floor.
I didn't complain. It was a small price to pay.
My panties joined the condom wrapper a moment later. There on the hotel bed,
he on his knees before me, me with my legs wrapped around his bony hips while
the silk of his tie danced along my breasts, I dug my fingers into the dark
fabric of his jacket and moaned when he pierced me.
The connection was as invigorating as a blood transfusion but I couldn't hold
myself still enough against his thrusts, braced only against the bed, and so
we crabwalked backwards, me pulling and him pushing and the bedspread snarling
around us, until I had my back against the headboard. Each thrust made my
head connect with the solid wood behind me. I wanted to keep him inside me
forever. I sucked at his throat; heedless of the marks I was making. It felt
like his cock was banging at the top of my skull -- he was so deep.
He pinned my wrists to the wall. I could feel how close he was from the
swelling of the veins in his neck, why did he have to be so fucking polite, it
wasn't
politeness but just another form of dominance--and I screamed, screamed louder
than when Duane Barry took me, threw my head back, howled and fell apart like
a shattered windshield.
6/20
This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.
I really needed to get another job. The basement office in the Hoover Hen
House was a slum compared to the Roush corporate building. Something like eight
glass-fronted floors of corporate rabbit hutches rising into the brilliant
blue sky of Austin. At least I had a good suit on for a change. You always
have to go
visiting family in your Sabbath best. I got into the glass elevator along
with a very pretty little blonde who gave me a winsome Western smile and asked
for
the third floor when I pushed the button for the top floor. I smiled back at
her, and up we went.
Best Sabbath clothes.
I remember being taken to my great-aunt Sophie's funeral when I was nine,
which meant Samantha would have been about four or so. I had my hair wet-
combed to my head and I was trussed up in this amazingly ugly blue suit with a
striped tie that only came out for weddings, funerals, and the infrequent
occasions we went to Temple. (If you think your life is hard, try being a Jew
in New England.) Samantha kicked me in the shins the whole ride there.
Naturally, I started screaming at her, I told her that I wished she were dead.
Then I
pulled the head off her Barbie doll and that finally shut her up.
Yisborach, v'yistabach, v'yispoar, y'yisroman, v'yisnaseh, v'yishador,
v'yishalleh, v'yishallol, sh'meh d'kudsho, b'rich hu--
Someday I really have to forgive myself for that.
The reception area was nice, lots of dark wood, crystal and gold awards, and
fresh flowers. It looked like a high-tech funeral home more than anything
else. The woman sitting behind the desk with the big Roush R carved in gold
behind
her was so perfect and smooth that she could have been generated by her
computer. I smiled and handed her my card. She must have been briefed since
the smile she gave in return had no reaction to my resemblance to her lord and
master.
"Just a moment," she crooned and pressed a button.
While I waited, I looked out the window at the city around me. The glass was
so clean that I started to feel the pull of vertigo. It would have been so easy
to think that I could just step outside and walk over to the building across the
street. Chances were that I'd only break something rather than being killed by
the
fall. It would be so easy.
"Pretty impressive, huh?"
Jason's voice was only remotely like mine. It was the voice that I had
imitated the day that Scully burned the monster-children and Marita. Jason had
a
smooth and wonderfully inflected voice under a barbecue honey Texas drawl. He
also
was wearing a suit that would have cost me six months' pay to buy -- I could
have done it, though, if I were willing to live off of the additional cash I
got from my investments in his company.
"Nice view," I commented, trying to sound as blase as possible, even though my
heart was bounding like a bass line in an Abba song.
"I'm sure you get to look at the Washington Monument all day."
If I was a gopher and tunneled around the Metro line, under the street; past
all the CIA underground surveillance and didn't get stomped on by a Park Ranger
in
a bad mood, maybe. Please, ma'am, don't pet the gopher, they can bite.
Gophers are more dangerous than Congressmen are, as they have no partisan
alliance and don't give a fuck if they bite a Democrat, Republican, or Civil
Libertarian.
Foxes bite, too.
"What do you intend to do with the videotape?"
He blinked as though I had made a socially unacceptable digestive noise.
"Nothing."
"Nothing? I'll save you the trouble of looking up the information. The
Assistant Director I work under is Walter "Boom-Boom" Skinner and you can send
him the
videotape at --"
"I'm not going to send it to the FBI. I think we can keep this between
ourselves. There's no need to let the world know that your partner destroyed a
multi-
million dollar research facility."
"Is that what you call it?"
I wanted to grab him by his custom-tailored shirtfront and shake him until his
teeth fell out. But I didn't want to touch him. I had a sneaking suspicion
that my hands would go through him like a hologram or else I'd plunge my hands
through
silvered glass.
"Let's go into the conference room. All right?"
The Conference Room had a dark wood table big enough to play full-court
basketball on, all polished to a sheen that reflected four of me back up from
the glassy surface. Jason showed me a seat with a neat stack of classification
folders piled on the table before it. I was reminded of the exams at Oxford.
All that was missing was the exercise books and the smell of fearsweat from the
students.
"You must have noticed our resemblance," he began.
"I like the nose job."
"From what I've been able to find out from the archived files that the company
has kept since Roush was started in 1806, the company has been working
closely with the government on many health-related projects." He began in a
smooth presentational mode that must have been like cream to the fat cat
captains of investment and the starving dogs of the media.
"Like biological warfare?"
"Like vaccination programs and aid to victims of natural health disasters such
as outbreaks of yellow fever, influenza and typhoid."
"How altruistic."
"We've also been involved in the study of human genetics since the early
nineteen-forties."
"Purity Control."
I really enjoyed the surprise that flitted across his face.
"I know about the Project. I know about Purity Control, I know about the
biological experimentation to produce human/alien hybrids. I have seen the
Bee Girls, I have seen the Kurt Crawford clones, the Samanthas, and the others.
I have seen the Bounty Hunters and I have been injected with the black cancer
while in Siberia," my words came out in a bitter rush, as though I was once
again vomiting coffee, "and all I got was this fucking T-shirt, so what I want
to
know is what the fuck were you doing in Bethel."
"It doesn't matter. That project was run by another division that has been
shut down. I was thinking of another project that started in 1960. You and me.
We aren't the last two of our kind, Fox, there are more."
"More?" I echoed, sounding like Oliver Twist.
"Eight more. Of us."
"Why the fuck would anyone want to make more?"
"They didn't expect all to live to adulthood," the woman said as she shut the
door
behind her.
She smiled.
"Fox."
I stood with my mouth open while my sister hugged me.
I wouldn't have known Samantha. I could have walked past her on the street or
picked her up in a bar and fucked myself silly (Scully would have killed me
but that's another problem). She had changed so much since I had seen her last,
since Scully had lain dying in the hospital and I'd agreed to let the bastard
she called her father metaphorically fuck me up the ass. My little sister with
her wilderness of brown curls and her flowing skirts was now a prim high-tech
sophisticate with a charcoal trouser suit, hair clipped razor-close to her
head and the color of anthracite. Her earrings, spinning silver spirals, fell
almost
to her shoulders. Samantha was so cold, hard, and bright that she made Scully
look
like Scarlett O'Hara.
"What are you doing here?" I asked, feeling myself go rigid as a storefront
mannequin.
"I work here. I'm head of the genetic research division."
Too fucking convenient for words.
Okay, there was a possibility that she wasn't my Samantha, but rather one of
theirs. But then was I my me or theirs too? It was giving me a headache.
"Explain."
"You know about the experiments?"
"Human DNA and alien combined, I read the back of the videocassette."
"There are eight others like you and Jason. The company has been trying to
keep tabs on them for years, ever since Jason was appointed head of PR."
My evil twin gave me an orthodontist's tuition bill smile.
"He found the case files and, naturally, took an interest. We had a record of
the social security numbers the boy-infants were issued when they were farmed
out
to their adopted families."
"Was I adopted?"
"No, you stayed with our parents as the control group while the others were
adopted. Normally it wouldn't be scientifically sound to attempt to make
contact with the others but--"
"They're being killed." Jason interrupted.
"What?" my voice came out as a falsetto squeak.
"We think," Samantha began, drawing me closer to the table, her hand with
short silver fingernails sparkling on the dark cloth of my jacket, "that in your
professional capacity that you can make contact with the others and bring them
to us where they will be safe."
"The Federal Badge does have some clout, you know," Jason added.
It doesn't do shit when you have overdue tapes at Blockbuster.
"All the information we have is here," Samantha made a graceful gesture at the
table, "you need to review the information and make it clear to these men that
their lives may be in danger."
"Who would --" I started.
"We don't know, that's why we need you."
Jason thumbed a button on the telephone.
"Alice, can you bring Mr. Mulder a cup of coffee? What do you take in it,
Fox?'
"Nothing. And don't call me Fox."
I opened the first file and looked down, the words on the page began to dance
and fade. I didn't realize what was wrong until Jason took his glasses out of
the case and handed them to me. As the words shot into focus, I felt myself
step
through the silver mirror into the other side of the Looking Glass.
"Samantha?"
She looked at me, her eyes like polished stone.
"What was great-aunt Sophie's number?" I asked.
The numbers she recited were not the phone number that Great Aunt Sophie
had when she died, she recited the numbers tattooed on Great Aunt Sophie's
arm. I knew, with a sick feeling, that this was Samantha.
"I'll take the files and get back to you," I head my own voice come out of my
mouth, surprising me with the composure.
The open casket showed the dried apricot that had been Aunt Sophie in her
favorite aqua dress. Samantha wouldn't look at the body, she screamed and ran
away. I found her in the bushes outside the Temple, digging in the ground
with her fingernails.
"They put you in the ground when you're dead," she told me with the authority
that only a four year old could muster.
"So?"
"You're going to die before I will, you're bigger than me."
With stiff formality, she put her shiksa blond Barbie in the hole she had
carved out of the ground with her fingernails and began to pat dirt over the
plastic
body.
7/20
Space and time! Now I see it is true, what guess'd at.
What I guess'd at when I loafed on the grass
What I guess's while I lay alone on my bed
And again as I walk'd the beach under the paling stars of the morning.
Walt Whitman
The folders were scattered all over my hotel room, reminding me of the stock
certificates and the afternoon we had hurt one another so badly. Scully,
incongruous in another one of her nightgowns, was slitting on the floor next
to the bed, her glasses slid down on her nose, looking at one of the files.
Stepping on the papers, I padded to the honor bar and got the bottle of Scotch
that I
wasn't allowed to drink any more. I put the bottle and glasses on the floor
and poured a healthy slug into each. Give her credit, Scully didn't sing the
care
of an ulcer aria when she reached for her glass.
As she finished one file, she handed it to me. Or maybe it was the other way
around. Either way it was an education, a ten-ply biography.
We were an anti-Semite's wet dream.
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief we were not.
Our cast of characters (no points off if you can't tell them apart; there will
be captions for those of you who are a bit nearsighted):
Arlen Petrovsky, who'd been caught and incarcerated at the child
molesting/pyromaniac stage, before he graduated to killing his victims.
Baylor Francis, owner/operator of a gay bookstore in Philadelphia. A nice
enough guy, apparently, and his rap sheet consisted solely of citations for
public nuisance during Act Up! demonstrations. He had actually beaned
Archbishop
Bevelaqua with a condom water-balloon on the front steps of the Basilica of
Sts. Peter and Paul.
Christopher Farber, the small-time pimp and suspected murderer from
Schenectady.
Darien Klein, his occupation was listed as "consultant" and he had an address
in the better part of Los Angeles. God alone knew what he really did, but other
than a few speeding tickets there was nothing worthwhile in his folder.
Emerson Goldberg, a virtual recluse living in a high-tech compound in the
woods of Montana. He made a killing in Internet software and it was rumored
that no
one had seen him in years. What was his story? No information available.
There wasn't a photo of him on record, and he'd never held a driver's license
in any state.
Fox the G-man, of whom the less said the better.
George Naxos, the serial murderer.
Hal Rothman, the coordinator for most of the major drug deals in the Northeast
corridor. He brought the Colombians together with the Chinese and it's rumored
that "heroin chic" was his idea.
Ian Dubler, the man of a thousand cuts, whose extreme bipolar disorder had not
responded well to meds. From his history, Scully explained to me, it was
obvious that he'd been misdiagnosed at first with depression, and it turns out
that
giving the new antidepressants to a bipolar patient is a *major* no-no. After
the
initial fits of self-destructiveness, things had deteriorated until he was on
twenty-
four hour restraints, tranquilizers, and a liquid diet, and even then he managed
to
think of new ways to hurt himself. Ian lived at the bottom of a dark sea, and
he saw things crawl by him whose horror only Lovecraft could have conveyed.
Jason Lindsay. Jason had the benefit of oil-money breeding and a nose job for
his eighteenth birthday. And here I'd thought only nice Jewish girls did that.
Jason, therefore, was the only one of us who actually looked pretty much like
his own man. Funny, that, because he was also the one who had a clue to what was
going on.
Oh, and, did I mention? Arlen and Christopher were dead, both in the last two
weeks. Arlen had been stabbed in a lunchroom altercation; the shiv used had
yet to be found. Christopher's body was discovered stuffed into a dumpster
behind
the Chinese restaurant he patronized, when his whores went looking for him to
give him the night's take.
And then there were eight.
Eight *is* enough.
Sitting there, I felt my brain bleed into the carpet. Naturally I didn't want
word one of it to be true, who would? But there it was, in laser print and
photocopy for the world to see.
****
He shouldn't have been drinking the Scotch, but considering what was laid out
in front of us, I suppose we were both lucky he wasn't drinking Drano.
"How could this happen?" I heard my own voice ask, as thin and pitiful as the
voice of Miranda wailing as she lay in the abdomen of her birth mother.
Mulder looked up, blasted and lifeless as the rocky deserts outside the city
limits.
"Technologically, I mean. Creating multiple fetuses from a single oocyte
wasn't possible in the early sixties."
"Alien technology," he said with something like a normal smirk.
I took off my glasses and rubbed the sore places on either side of my nose.
Alien technology, my ass. More like those bastards at Roush had started their
work earlier than anyone had thought. The fact still remained that these --
twins, brothers, whatever--of Mulder's and Jason's were walking around out there
in
the United States, and it was beginning to look like someone was killing them
off.
Strange, wasn't it? Most of the people who know Mulder routinely thank God
that there is only one of him and more than one is inflicting entirely too
much misery on the world.
Skinner, for example, was likely to give birth to a large and healthy Holstein
when he found out that there was more than one Fox Mulder.
"Scully?"
Needy. He was needy in the extreme. Not that I blamed him, but I had issues
(issue, I believe is the correct term) of my own currently sleeping in an
incubator in a hospital miles away. Was it too much to ask that someday, if I
have my
own child, the old-fashioned way, that Plexiglas not separate the child and me?
Is that too much to ask?
But right then the only needy one I could touch was Mulder. As much as I would
have liked to fall apart in his arms as I had in that hotel room in Arizona,
it seemed as though it was my turn (again) to nurture.
I crawled across the files to him and the skin on his face was hot and dry as
the winds outside.
"Tell me that I'm not like that. Tell me that I'm not like them," he pleaded.
I continued to smooth the hair away from his face, away from the tiny,
circular scars scoring his hairline.
"I'd be lying if I said you were a saint," I said.
His skin was so soft when he wept, fragile as tissue paper underneath my
fingertips. Fragile, no wonder They'd felt the need for backup copies. The
past few months had made me forget all my carefully-hoarded knowledge of the
care
and feeding of Fox Mulder. I'd skimped on the regular maintenance and this was
the result, the carburetor was falling out and the engine was missing strokes.
I tilted my forehead to rest against his and with my palms at his cheeks it
was almost like holding myself. "If you were a saint you'd have to try to redeem
me, I'm hardly pure, and you know how I hate a superior attitude." Like sunlight
through rain, the smile flitted over his wet face. "You made yourself, Mulder.
You save lives and you live for the truth. You're the only one I trust--no
matter
how many strangers borrow your face."
I pushed him over and onto the bed; he went without protest. Then I undressed
him, enjoying the build-up of tension in my body and the way he lolled
underneath my hands. He chuffed softly as I loosened the tie, scraping my
knuckles against the cartilage of his throat. He relaxed and I watched the
unhappy wrinkles on his forehead hide themselves.
The jacket and shirt would need to be cleaned if not thrown out so I just
tossed them onto the floor. His undershirt was soft combed cotton, thick with
his
scent. I always imagined that smell was olive green in color, like his eyes in
low
light. I bent my head to breathe him in before I stripped the shirt from him,
and he
sighed happily as I nuzzled his armpit. His hand flopped up to stroke my back
and then fell away as I rose to bare his chest. Carefully, cradling his head
with my free hand so he wouldn't bounce his head against the headboard, I pulled
the shirt over his head and tossed it back over my shoulder.
I touched the sick rose of the bullet scar I gave him. That pallid cicatrice
is like a whiplash on my own skin every time I uncover it. It was abnormally
smooth
under my fingers, dry even as I saw the sweat growing across the span of his
throat
and shoulders because the scarring had destroyed the pores.
The guilt was familiar enough that it didn't affect the arousal. I dipped my
head to trace his collarbones with my tongue, then followed the centerline of
his body
down between his pectorals and over the finely cut ridges of the top of his
abdomen. God or man, whoever thought up this body was at least an artist, if
perhaps also a criminal.
The thin leather belt was next, then pants and boxers together as I grew
impatient, pausing only to make sure I didn't unman him. I had plans for that
manhood. He moved slowly underneath me, undulating like a cat stretching, his
cock wobbling up and down with every hitching breath and his hands thrown up
around his head. My centerfold, my prisoner, my albatross.
I opened the condom packet with more haste than dignity. He made a sweet
surprised sound when I raised the gown and lowered myself onto him. His hands
slid over the satin, going in all directions and sending frissons through my
body like lightning strikes. The hot-through-cool feeling of his fingers tugging
at
me through the thin fabric made me shudder.
I rode him into oblivion.
When I woke up the next morning I wasn't surprised to see that he had gone,
and taken all the files with him.
Typical, I thought and swore under my breath as I called the airport to book
the next flight to Massachusetts. I used his credit card, mine wouldn't stand
the
eight hundred dollar charge.
He'd also cleaned the remainder of the cash out of my wallet -- which he had
never done before. I supposed sleeping together had given me the job of human
MAC machine. Why be surprised, I'd been running errands for him for years.
This was beginning to seem like marriage, except without the tax penalties.
While I had the airport on the phone I found out that Mulder had booked his
own flight at six that morning. Which meant that he was two hours closer
towards
his goal. I was throwing my clothes into my suitcase when there was a demure
rap
at the door. Not caring that I had an advanced state of bed-head and that I
was wearing Mulder's shirt from the night before (complete with tie) I yanked
the
door open. In the brilliant Texas sunlight stood Zippy with a paper cup of
coffee
in each hand. The hotel room must have reeked of sex, the fermenting odors of
body fluids and shed skin cells. With my permanently damaged sense of smell,
I never would have noticed, but Zippy was sniffing the air like a hunting dog
hot on the trail of a rabbit. He blinked at me.
"What the hell do you want?" I asked, embarrassed.
"Spooky left me a voice mail message at the office that I was to bring you
coffee and if I touched you he'd break all my fingers."
"Thanks for the coffee," I said and noticed that he was staring at my bare
legs, which were covered with bruises from bumping into the crates during the
warehouse raid.
"They're from the raid, " I said.
"What the fuck is going on?"
I gave him the Cliff's notes briefing (aliens and clones and twins, oh my!)
while I threw the rest of my clothes in my suitcase. He made no comment, merely
shoveled my folders and my laptop into my briefcase and averted his eyes while
I struggled into a pair of jeans.
"The practical upshot of all this is that he has taken all the files and
information that Jason has given him and left."
"Where did he go?"
"To see his mother. It's his standard MO. I have to follow him -- that's my
MO."
Bless his moussed little head, Zippy merely nodded and handed me my least-
wrinkled suit jacket.
"I'll drive you to the airport."
Zippy's own car was a truck, and I sat with my suitcase and my briefcase
between my feet as we bumped along. Do car companies always skimp on the
suspension on pickups? It was probably part and parcel of the great
conspiracy. I had a brief, ironic fantasy of investigating the Ford motor
company where
the assembly line was manned by somnambulistic Kurt Crawford clones and Mulder
screaming in the boardroom about how the company was in cahoots with the
HealthCare system to promote bad backs among the American public and
waving his gun around like an armed Michael Moore.
"What's the status on the suspect?" I asked.
Zippy stopped at a light and looked at me through his Ray Bans.
"Dead. Or at least we think so. It's hard to verify that a person is dead
when all you have for forensics is a puddle of green goo. I don't suppose you
care to
explain."
I didn't care to but I did anyway, and Zippy merely shook his head at the
insanity of it all. I guess he wouldn't have believed word one if he hadn't
seen the
debris left by the clone's passing with his own eyes.
"What are you going to do?" he asked as we pulled into the parking lot of the
airport.
"The first order of business is to find Mulder and prevent him from doing
anything stupid. Them I suppose we'll start trying to track down what happened
to the
other twins."
Naturally that was what Mulder would want to do, provided that he wasn't in
Massachusetts trying to suck bullets out of his own gun. I didn't even want to
think about it.
"What can I do to help?" he offered.
"Just stonewall Skinner until I get the chance to tell him myself."
Zippy made a face. He knew the AD well enough to be assured that
stonewalling Skinner was one of the hardest things he would ever do in his
life.
"Take care. Call me and let me know what's going on."
I let him kiss me on the cheek, and for a moment it was nice, nice and normal.
But just for a moment. I grabbed my bag and my case and started hotfooting it
through the airport.
Twenty minutes into the flight I realized that I was still wearing Mulder's
shirt and tie. Underneath, my torso was naked. The clothes still smelled like
him.
The businessman next to me gave me a strange look whenever I sniffed the shirt.
Iolokus II: Agnates
8/20
That I could forget the mockers and insults!
That I could forget the trickling tears and blows of the bludgeons and hammers!
That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and crowning.
Walt Whitman
Mulder's mother met me at the door of her tastefully understated home. "Fox is
waiting for you. I've spoken with Jason, and we agreed that I should explain
some things to the two of you."
"How do you know Jason?"
"In good time, dear. Oh, by the way, you wouldn't happen to have any pictures of
my granddaughter...would you?"
The world greyed alarmingly with my rage. I don't hit women who only assault
with words. But I considered it.
And wasn't Mulder going to love that? His own mother was apparently closer to
Jason than to him, willing to share all the well-kept family secrets with the
man who Mulder almost was.
She led me into the damask-coated living room and I sat down in a stiffly padded
chair which quickly made me remember why New Englanders always looked so
unhappy. Mulder was glowering at the end of an eggshell-white couch. We waited,
carefully not speaking, for over five minutes as she puttered around in the
kitchen, making enough noise so that we were sure she hadn't had another stroke.
I had no doubt that she was delaying for effect. The woman should be in charge
of running interrogations. She could have extracted confessions from the most
innocent of men by cranking up the tension like this.
And Mulder and I weren't very innocent. As a matter of fact there were a couple
of things I could tell her about her son that would probably send her into
another stroke.
When she finally sat down, I almost wept from the sheer relief of it. Her teacup
and saucer rested on the elegant coffee table in front of the couch as she
crossed her hands in her lap and began to speak.
"I always knew that I wanted to work for a greater cause than my own
advancement."
Mulder's face twitched. I'd seen firsthand that it wasn't a good idea to mouth
off to his mother, and I think only the memory of her slap and the fact that
she'd finally agreed to talk kept him from saying any of the three nasty things
he'd automatically thought up.
"It certainly didn't hurt to be a young, attractive woman at the time when so
many serious, patriotic men were looking for a way to make America strong for
the troubles we all could see were ahead.
"You have to understand, the German doctors were obsessed with their twin
studies. Like many great scientific discoveries, our success at twinning and
cloning was serendipitous, a result of their difficulty obtaining a suitable
number of twins." Tina Mulder took a sip of her rapidly cooling tea.
Obtaining. I almost got up and left right then, but the raw hurt in Mulder's
eyes stopped me. I couldn't make him do this alone.
Tina shifted her body towards me and sniffed audibly. "Don't turn up your nose
at me, Miss Scully. I knew what they were and I didn't like it any better than
you do. Their eyes crawling over my body like slugs, and behind my back I could
hear them whispering, Jewess. Juden," she said, her voice deepening, the foreign
word cutting like a lash. "I know that's what they thought of me. But it was my
children who would grow to rule the world, in the end."
"Besides," she added with a little smile, "I was wide awake during every
indignity that they subjected me to. I remember every moment."
My face was burnt by her scorn. What the hell did she know about it? She, at
least, had raised one child when all was said and done, and what tender care she
had given him! A grown man who can't sleep in his own bed alone because he
fears the Boogey-Man.
"Bill was so proud that we were chosen. When Fox was born and then tested, he
was so disappointed." *He* was?, I thought and gave her a look that should have
stopped the motion of the atoms in her cells. Lady, you delivered this man to me
in more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle.
"The fertilization was in vitro, of course," she continued, looking out the
window as if the answers were written in invisible ink on the glass. "Complete
ectogenesis was not yet possible--that's the complete development of a fetus
outside the womb, Fox," she said to Mulder's blank look.
In the midst of all this, he'd forgotten that his parents had met when his
mother was running part of the research project for Operation Paperclip. In
retrospect the office references should have called it Operation Ditto.
"When the blastula reached the four-cell stage it was split. This created four
identical organisms which again began division. When they reached the blastula
stage they were split again, which made sixteen."
I knew what was coming, but I don't think that Mulder had figured it out yet.
"At that point we stopped, because we were worried about the consequences of
repeated splitting and because of a shortage of suitable hosts. Of sixteen
implanted blastocysts, we achieved twelve successful pregnancies. Even today,
that's a remarkable rate. When the babies were delivered, they were injected
with what I was told was alien DNA, in viral form. I knew, from the previous
experiments, that this would cause...alterations, but we thought that we had
them under control, and we were right. Only two of the infants died."
That explained why only the first ten letters of the alphabet had been used. I
watched Mulder add six more deaths to his conscience. I always knew he had more
lives than a cat, but I had no idea how right I was.
"Oddly enough," Tina continued, "there were some variations in pigmentation and
hair coloring--your mole, Fox, I could always pick you out when I came to get
you." Mulder flinched. "Five left-handed and five right, which simply means that
you were all double recessives in terms of handedness. Your experience suggests
that something in the cell division process itself may affect the expression of
handedness among recessives. I've always regretted not being able to write that
up for publication. The recessive handedness itself isn't that surprising,
because it's associated with intelligence, creativity, and emotional
instability."
She finished her tea and set the cup down. It rattled against the thin porcelain
saucer. I noticed that the pink roses on the sides of the cup were beginning to
flake off, revealing the white below.
"When none of you tested with more than minimal sensitivity to the Greys, we
went back to the drawing board. Jonathan--we were lovers by then. When Fox and
the others tested so poorly, hearing the Greys but unable to talk back to them,
Bill became bitter and withdrawn. He felt a failure as a man, and he thought I
was a failure as a woman. Jonathan made me feel--he respected me as a scientist,
and that can be a very attractive thing." Why did that feel like another jab in
the side?
Mulder continued to sit silently on the sofa, his fingers pressing into the
flesh around his eyes until the skin turned white underneath.
"In a way, when he got the approval to use his sperm for the new version, it was
an act of courtship, one of the most tender gestures he ever made. And this time
we were confident enough to inject the virus at the same time as the blastocyst
was implanted in vivo. More of the DNA was absorbed. There was an enhanced rate
of fetal loss as a result, and in fact Samantha was the only baby delivered
live. The one I carried was stillborn at eight and a half months," her voice
shook slightly, even after all this time, "but Jonathan and I still had some
clout and I got Samantha to raise."
Jonathan, I watched Mulder's mind chew the name.
"Samantha tested quite well and soon after she reached the age when she could
understand commands of moderate complexity she was taken. The older-appearing
Samanthas you met were true clones, fast-grown from nuclei implanted into donor
eggs that had been stripped of their own nuclei. The clones have toxic blood and
are fragile in a variety of situations, and the Greys dislike them intensely,
which has caused its share of trouble. You've also met some younger clones, and
those are the next generation, without the modifications necessary to make them
grow to adulthood in under three years."
"So instead you take the long route through which you can mold your test subject
through an alarmingly complex series of behaviors until they're catatonic,
paranoid, masochists, pimps, drug dealers of the legal and illegal kind, or God
forbid, government employees." Mulder's voice cracked in the middle of his
statement and he gave his mother a hard little smile.
"Did you love us at all, mom? Or were Sam and I just another Science Fair
project?"
She should have said something, but she didn't.
Standing, he crossed over to where the grand piano filled the area in front of
the lace-curtained windows.
"You knew all along what happened to Samantha and you humored me. My whole life
has been nothing but a lie. You were upset because They took Samantha, your
successful experiment and left you with me, the reject. And you punished me
every day since then. All this time I thought Dad was to blame, and it was you
from the beginning," he was shouting, in that oddly flat way of his, loud enough
for the entire street to hear.
"Fox --"
"Well I'm sorry, Mom. I'm sorry I was such a fucking disappointment to you."
The house jumped when the door slammed shut behind him. I sat there on the
chair with my hands folded in my lap because it was the only way I could keep
from grabbing Tina Mulder by the back of the head and pounding her face into the
wall until she bled.
She finished her drink and put the cup down on the table just a little too hard.
"Fox will be back," she pointed out, "but before then I think we should talk. I
hope you'll listen and try not to judge me so harshly, though forgiveness hardly
seems to be your strong point."
Great, the Wicked Witch of the Northeast was knocking off personality points
from my score. So I wouldn't win the fucking Miss America contest, I wasn't
trying to charm her.
"What exactly do you wish to discuss with me?"
"I made a mistake with Samantha. I became over-invested. Please understand, I
had two children before I heard the words 'women's liberation.' I hadn't thought
through the consequences of participating in the Project. With Bill and Jonathan
it was just sperm, it proved their virility. But even the children I didn't
physically bear made me a mother in their eyes, made me someone who was a
subject rather than a controller. From the most exciting work I could ever
imagine, I was suddenly stuck in an enormous house that seemed to get dirtier by
the hour with one babbling infant and then another, not long after the first
learned how to read. I'd supervised fifty technicians, fifty men with
doctorates, and then like that" she snapped her fingers "the only one I was
supervising was the maid.
"I was ill, there's no denying. I consumed my weight in pills every month, I
drank, it's amazing I didn't accidentally overdose."
I wished she had.
"And I thought that Samantha would be my future. When they took her and left the
one they didn't care about in my charge--it got much worse.
"You must suspect that Jonathan had a healer attend to me when I had my stroke."
I blinked, revealing my surprise. I'd thought her recovery amazing, truly on the
upper edge of the bell curve, but I hadn't in fact made the connection between
her lucidity and the Man of a Thousand Faces.
She smiled her razor grin again. "He did me more of a favor than he knew. I
don't pretend to understand the mechanism, but if you can repair myelin sheaths
it's no great deed to purge twenty-five years of habituation from a patient's
system. And that's what happened to me. When I'd thought through the
implications of my miraculous recovery I decided to underplay my acuity for a
while, but I did track Jason down--I wouldn't let my boys out into the world
without *some* way to look after them, would I?"
I was beginning to think some fairly ugly thoughts, compared to my previous
distaste for Tina. "About how long ago did you contact Jason Lindsay?"
She shrugged gracefully. "Approximately nine months ago. And yes, Miss Scully,
that does correspond with the timing of the Austin group. I'm sorry that so many
promising avenues of investigation were terminated, but that's what makes R & D
so much of a gamble. Jason, unlike Fox, always knows when to cut his losses."
The bile rose in my throat. "When this is over," I said, "I think I'll come back
and hurt you."
The crepey flesh around her jaw trembled slightly. "It's a good thing for me
that this will never end, then."
I went to look for Mulder.
****
Scully was trotting out the door as I came back from the car, I pushed past her
none too gently and headed back into the living room. Mom was still sitting in
her chair like Queen Victoria at Albert's deathbed.
"I think you ought to look at these. You need to see what a stellar success
your precious project really was. It's a cavalcade of the dregs of humanity.
You should be very proud of your project," I dropped the files in her lap and
went outside, pushing past Scully who was standing like a rock in the doorway.
Give her credit, Scully let me cool down for ten minutes before she came out.
By that time my vision had slowed and the world was no longer shimmering through
a red haze of fury. But I was shaking while I was taking off my sidearm and
putting it in the trunk of the rental car.
"What are you doing?" she asked in an even tone as though I were making a chain
out of rubber bands.
"Just saving another life or two. I can't trust myself," I unhooked the ankle
holster and dropped it into the trunk, gun and all, and locked the trunk.
My fingers trembled when I handed Scully the keys, but I felt astonishingly
clear-headed despite the crap that Madre Mio had just laid on me. I should have
guessed. It should have made sense, why not? It explained so much, it explained
why I had always felt like I was pretending to be someone else, fooling
everyone. Fooling myself. No wonder Michael Valentine Smith had been my idol.
I was a Martian, a stranger in the strange land of my own life.
"Mulder?" she asked with the old edge to her voice, the edge she has when I've
filled her ears with the latest round of insanity that passes for my logic.
"I'm fine, Scully."
The sun went through the death throes of an overcast New England autumn and the
lights went on up and down the residential street while we stood there, not
talking, not touching, leaning against the car, watching nothing happen.
The front door opened and my mother poked her head out.
"I'm making dinner. Will spaghetti be all right with you two?" she asked.
"That's great, Mom," I said and Scully followed me back into the house, looking
at Mom and I as though we belonged in the zoo.
No wonder she didn't understand, she'd had a normal family, not mine.
****
After Mulder's mother went to bed, we sat up in his old bedroom in what could
laughingly be called pajamas. He in ratty sweatpants and an old T-shirt
underneath a flannel bathrobe and me in leggings and an oversized Navy
sweatshirt Bill had given me for Christmas. Despite the funeral air of the
house and the subject matter, the whole proceeding had a certain shabbily
comfortable collegiate feeling.
"Mulder," I said. "I think I've figured something out." I'll admit, I was
terribly proud of myself. I had a gift for him.
He stumbled over to the ramshackle desk I was using in his childhood room, the
one he'd suggested I sleep in rather than the guestroom. I'd spread ten pictures
out, including the picture I'd cajoled the MIT alumni office into e-mailing me.
"Look," I said.
For a moment he didn't see it. I'd missed it the first few times, too, tending
to group the men into the quick and the dead. It had only been a whim that had
made me put them in alphabetic order.
Mulder drew in a deep breath. Slowly, as carefully as if he were undressing me,
he moved the sets of pictures closer together. Arlen and Baylor, Christopher and
Darien, Emerson and Fox, George and Hal, and Ian and Jason. Matched pairs,
mirror images. Emerson's mole was even on the opposite side of his face.
I think Mulder's mother helped me figure this out, with her offhanded (no pun
intended) reference to the handedness and its potential relationship to the cell
division process. Jason's information on the twins was fairly complete from a
medical perspective, though lacking in biographical detail. Of course Roush had
access to the records of the many tests the twins had undergone in their callow
youth. The conclusion was inevitable: Each of the pairs contained one right-
handed and one left-handed twin.
Is biology destiny? I didn't want that to be the case, it made the success of
the Consortium seem more likely, but poor Mulder didn't seem to have good
prospects even if environment was crucial. We're taught in medical school that
environment interacts with genetics in ways both simple and complex--with the
best nutrition in the world, I couldn't make it much past five feet, but I could
have been four foot seven if I'd been significantly malnourished.
I do not know what it is that makes a man. I learned in church that the soul is
incorporeal, that we are more than meat and electrical impulses. I learned that
we had free will, despite the many constraints concrete history can clamp upon
us. But so many of our cases defied this simple platitude. All around us there
were men who seemed to have no choice at all in what they'd done and other men
who appeared to command those results, free of any guiding demand of God or
conscience.
The supposedly carbon copies had all turned out differently, despite the
depressing trend. Surely there was room for variation within the limits set by
biology and environment. Mulder had chosen time and again to turn back to the
light and the quest. Hadn't he?
Now there was Emerson, the unknown quantity--if he was Mulder's true twin, he
could make or break the argument. Was Emerson going to be a good twin or an
evil twin? He was, I realized, the integer X and we had to solve for X.
I looked again at the picture. The face wearing a pair of Ray Bans and a
supercilious smile could have been Mulder's circa 1983. '80's hair with fluffy
bangs, hair dripping down to the collar of his Hawaiian shirt, and a skinny tie,
he could have been Mulder. Except for the fact that Mulder had dyed black hair,
torn sweatshirts and two studs in his ear at that point -- the Oxford
Intellectual look. The skinny tie was the killer. I almost snickered. The
skinny tie dated the picture as much as a beehive had dated his parents' (and
they were his parents after all) wedding picture.
"Well, look at it this way, at least you know that Bill Mulder was your father."
The look he gave me could have eaten a hole in cement.
"I'm so relieved," he said, crossing over to the window and looking out at the
quiet streets with their bleeding foliage, "we haven't had any cannibals yet, we
really need a cannibal--or a necrophiliac to round out the freak show."
I began shuffling the photographs into the folders again, looking at the
tightness of his robe between his shoulder blades, knowing that he had retreated
into wherever it was that he went to think. It was a place I wasn't allowed. A
stab of anger made my eyes swim for a moment. Why was it that he accused me of
being emotionally distant when he habitually did the same thing? I knew it was
just a matter of time before his inner furies built a fire under his feet and I
would wake up one morning alone, again, and have to haul his ass out of whatever
trouble he had sought out. Again.
Sharing works both ways, Mulder.
I shut my briefcase with more force than was necessary and sat on the bed, the
old mattress springs squeaking underneath my weight. He continued to look out
the window and I looked around the room that had been his as a teenager. I
hadn't imagined that it had been much different that Bill and Charlie's shared
room in base housing. Actually, either one of them would have killed the other
for a little privacy. But Mulder had his room all to himself, and I could
picture him here with his books and his music loud to drown out whatever the
adults were doing downstairs.
****
Scully looked around my child's bedroom, forever frozen in 1973, one of the
punishments I'd invented for myself when Mom and Dad couldn't be bothered. Mom
moved to this house and I packed everything up and put it perfectly in place,
just like it was when Sam was taken. It all looked smaller than I remembered,
the bed narrow and sagging and the spots on the walls where the posters had been
removed.
"Baseball was your sport?" Scully asked, fingering the one trophy that had
survived Mom's housecleaning. I'm not sure why she kept that one, junior year
was no better than the others, and I hadn't been captain of the team that year.
Maybe she just picked at random, figuring each was as good as any other.
"One of them," I said, "I did track and basketball too." God, Mulder, she's not
some cheerleader you can impress with your varsity letters. I turned away and
looked at the dust-covered rows of books. Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, A.E. Van
Vogt...optimists all, thinking that humanity was likely to make it into the next
century.
The bed creaked as Scully settled her slight weight down on it. I fleetingly
wondered whether it would fall apart if we used it. The thought caused an
immediate response in my autonomic nervous system.
"My mother takes enough pills to sleep that she wouldn't hear a firefight," I
said.
Her face twitched and I wondered, not for the first time, what Mom had said to
her before she'd come running onto the streets to find me. "What are you asking,
Mulder?" The little vixen was going to make me say it out loud. Her cool marble
face suggested that she was going to slap me down when I did try. But she was
going to slap me around anyway, I might as well enjoy it.
I sat next to her.
"Did I just strike out?"
She put her hand on my knee. "Not yet. But with enough balls you can walk me
home."
"First base?"
That earned me a tiger's grin, Scully is capable of imitating the larger cats
when it suits her mood. "You're not very ambitious, are you, sport?"
I was quickly losing my ability to banter as the blood left my head for my cock,
so I wrapped my arms around her and eased her down onto the bed. She was
perfectly sized for it; her feet barely brushed the pillow even though her head
was well clear of the baseboard.
I'd had my first wet dreams in this bed. It was about time that the goddamn
thing saw some duo action.
Around my torso, her arms were hard and muscular while her stomach was agreeably
soft against the promontory of my rapidly hardening cock. There was something
to be said for having such a willing wench while your mother was out cold in the
next room. I had some ghosts that I wanted to exorcise. She moved underneath
me in that yielding but determined way that she has. My heart began a
jackhammer beat. Like any of Hal's customers, I was a junkie and I knew it.
Against my lips, her collarbones were hard as driftwood and as strong as rebar.
Her hands moved hard and fast under my shirt, thumbs running down each of my
vertebrae as if she were counting them. Her legs were around my hips and her
feet in her silly thick violet socks were rubbing up and down the insides of my
thighs. With the bulk of our clothes between the two of us, all I could do was
grind against her like a teenager at a high school dance. Groaning, she
adjusted her pelvis for maximum contact, the junction between her legs hot as a
teakettle.
Outside the katydids sang slower and slower as the night closed in around them.
Their short season was over and they were dying.
With a snort of frustration, she rolled out from underneath me, sitting upright
and flicking her hair back from her face. Impatiently, she pulled her sweatshirt
up over her head, her stomach and ribcage lengthening like a stretching cat's as
her coral-tipped breasts sprang free of the fabric.
Can I just say here that it is an illustration of Scully's separation of
intellect and emotion that she could find out that I had been part of the
eugenics project that has ruined her life and she still wants to fuck me?
She's either the sanest or the most insane person that I know. But there she
was, wriggling out of her long leggings and panties while I was fighting the
same battle with my own clothes, undressing one another is romantic but time-
consuming.
Finally we were both naked and twined on the faded quilt.
****
Mulder's hands were hot and hard over me in the thin chill of the boy-child's
bedroom. Fingers knotted in my hair and pulled my head back so he could gnaw at
my throat like a feeding vampire. Some of the most famous vampire case files he
had made me read had taken place not far from this room. His free hand squeezed
my breasts and pinched at my nipples until I sliced my fingernails into his
shoulders at the sheer bliss of it all. His cock branded my thighs. Moving
down my body he sucked my breasts, sending a direct line from the blood-rich
tissues of my nipples to the hot and swollen tissue of my clitoris. He suckled
me like a baby.
I had a baby, another baby under glass in a hospital in Texas. My baby, his
baby and I--
The hard insistence of his finger inside me snapped my brain from the place
where thoughts are made of words to where being is nothing but sensation. He
raised his head so that he could see my face, his eyes inches away from mine as
if he'd fall into my skull if he could. He always likes to watch, more even than
he likes to touch.
"Please," I hissed into his open mouth.
"Now?"
"Oh yes."
My feet still clad in purple socks, on his shoulders. He grabbed at his
sweatpants, still sharing the bed with us, and thin foil ripped. He fumbled for
a few moments down at his cock and then plunged into me harder and deeper than
ever before. I was tight around him and he rubbed back and forth against me
with heavenly purpose. Shivers of neon silver danced across my vision. I
moaned, I tossed, I kissed his mouth, his eyes, and his forearms on either side
of my head. The tired old bedstead gave off a squeak with every thrust.
The light from the street lamps outside made his eyes black as he stared down at
me, his mouth hard with lust, and the tendons like harp strings in his throat.
"MinenooneelsesNosubstitutionsNochanges," I hissed.
And saw why Mulder always watched. His pupils were rainbow oilslicks rimmed by a
razor's edge of deep brown. I expanded in his gaze, my heart growing three sizes
like the Grinch at Christmas.
Mine. No deposit, no return.
My eyes were open when the first climax hit me like a nightstick across the back
of the head.
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