by Justin Glasser
Walter Skinner sat in the bunker of Wilkes Land Research Center listening to the pop and crackle of the radio, and fighting the urge to drift into fitful sleep. It reminded him of Vietnam, of nights spent listening to the static broken by distant voices, voices of men who would soon be ghosts.
Let them be all right, he thought. They had no business being here, and he had no business coming after them, but he would help them for as long as he could. He supposed he had made that decision a long time ago, when Mulder had come back from Mexico, and again when he, Walter, had made a deal with the devil to save Agent Scully's life. And again, now, sitting by this radio, hoping beyond--
"Unit three to base."
Skinner groped for the send button, swatting away the hand of the radio tech.
"This is base. Go unit three."
"We've found them, sir, on our way back from--"
"Are they alive, three?"
"Sir, yessir. MDs are with--"
The voice went on for a few minutes more, but Skinner heard almost none of it. Almost none of it mattered, anyway. They were alive.
He rubbed his hand over his bald pate, and went to get some sleep.
*****
It was a real quarantine, this time, one with about a hundred different doctors, and television and a phone, and an address that Skinner visited almost daily, waving gruffly to them through the glass. They still slept in the same room (mostly because Mulder, who had been the most exposed, demanded it during a semi-conscious shock-induced rant) and she still beat him at Hangman or Gin almost everyday, but at night, listening to the dim murmur of Mulder's television and the faint rasp of his snoring from his hospital bed by the door, it seemed as if her own bed had grown too wide for one person, and she felt a little lonely.
*****
September 5, 1998
Washington D.C.
I saw her coming from across the plaza, hips moving in that black skirt I love her in. She wears it with high heels, really high heels, and she reminds me of one of those Hollywood starlets from the forties, the ones with the really red lipstick and the tweezed brows. She looked so good I wanted to scream, because it was time for her to go, really go this time, to leave without looking back.
I wanted to be happy to see her, but all I could think of were the lies they were already spinning to snare us. Hanta virus, bomb threats, Nazi experiments, crop cultivation . . . I wanted to be happy to see her.
I folded the paper and handed it to her as she came up.
"There's an interesting work of fiction on page twenty-four. Mysteriously, our names have been omitted. They're burying this thing, Scully. They're just going to dig a new hole and cover it up." We had already gotten the reports from the units sent out to investigate the sites we told them about, but aside from a really big hole in the snow, they found nothing. I don't know why I'd expected anything different, but I had.
This time had been different. This time Scully and I had both believed, and I had allowed myself to think for one moment, the justice could prevail, that truth could conquer fact, that I would be vindicated by the government as I had been by my partner in a twelve by twelve room.
"I told OPR everything I know," she was saying, "what I experienced, the virus, how it's spread from the bees from pollen in transgenic crops--"
I almost laughed at the irony, but I couldn't look at her, so I did what I have always done when Scully confronts me with a piece of myself. I walked away.
"You're wasting your time," I said. "They'll never believe you, not unless your story can be programmed, categorized, or easily referenced." I spat the words at her, words that I had teased her with in a time almost before I could remember.
"Well, then, we'll go over their heads."
"No." I whirled on her. "How many times have we been here before? Right here. So close to the truth? And now, with what we've seen, we're right back at the beginning, with nothing!"
She didn't back away from me--Scully never did. "This is different, Mulder."
"No it isn't!" Why couldn't she get it? Why couldn't she go? Why wouldn't she just leave me alone? "You were right to want to quit. You're right to want to leave me. You should get as far away from me as you can. I'm not going to watch you die because of some hollow personal cause of mine. Go be a doctor. Go be a doctor while you still can."
There. Done. That was all I could say to her. All I had left.
"I can't," she said, and I heard the steadiness in her voice. I felt her refusal. "I won't. Mulder, I'll be a doctor, but my work is here with you now. That virus that I was exposed to, whatever it is, it has a cure. You held it in your hand. How many other lives can we save?"
I felt her hand touch mine, fold around it. How many other lives can we save, Scully? You mean after mine?
"Besides," she said, "if I quit now, they win."
No one throws lines back into my face like my partner.
She smiled up at me, the faint lines of fresh windburn already beginning to heal. She meant it. Scully never says things she doesn't mean.
In that second I wanted to grab her and clutch her tight to my chest, to beg her to never ever leave me, but she had already made that promise, hadn't she?
And what good had it done?
Instead, I smiled back.
"C'mon," I said, and we walked back toward the office. I kept her hand, and she allowed me to have it. Everything was fine. Scully was fine, I was fine, and we were going to get the X-files back with Skinner's blessing. We might as well have been riding off into the sunset.
Except, as we headed back to the Hoover building in the late afternoon sun, I couldn't stop the shadow dancing on my heart, or the black thought it trailed the way a girl trails a ribbon on a stick:
Scully, what if they're winning anyway?
*****
Report 1 of �
Operative 7477109S
1734 hours
Operative N terminated.
16 hour random M and F subject surveillance re- activated. Infiltration of M/F circle of influence initiated.
Awaiting further orders.
Operative 7477109S
*****end 10/10*****
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