by Justin Glasser
Somewhere in the Antarctic
Day Five
0800 hours
They came in with only the noise of their boots and their panting breath, guns held at their chests, modern incarnations of death. They said nothing.
They grabbed Mulder off her bed, one of them for each of his arms and legs, and then someone was holding her back and another one was pulling out a needle and bending his head to the right, injecting him while he and Scully shouted out in protest.
The effect was instantaneous.
As she leapt toward him, abruptly free, Mulder collapsed, his spine bowing until Scully thought his head and feet would touch behind him. His hands were claws of pain. Every tendon bulged in his neck. There was no sound as she dropped to her knees next to him, tried to pull him straight. Even the storm troopers seemed shocked, and stood for a moment like trees, their camouflage uniforms forming a forest circle around her and her partner.
"Mulder!" she screamed. "Can you hear me? Mulder?"
He writhed in hissing agony.
"What did you give him?" she demanded, searching their masked faces. "WHAT DID YOU GIVE HIM?"
Her words seemed to break their paralysis. They filed out, one by one, subdued.
Mulder began to scream.
*****
He looked down at them through the cameras, stunned into silence.
He hadn't thought it would be this bad.
He'd heard the stories, of course. They all had. The subject who tore his own wrists open with his bare hands, the one who beat his head against the wall until he actually cracked his skull, the one who'd lapsed into a catatonia so deep that he couldn't even feed himself and had to be changed like a baby. He'd heard of trial subjects who begged for death, who struggled with the MPs for their weapons, who impaled themselves on chair legs. They were the urban legends of the complex, and he'd always suspected that the guys made at least some of that shit up just to have something new to brag about at chow. He hadn't blamed them: in a shithole like this one, you took all the status you could get.
But he'd never actually seen a trial before.
Mulder squirmed on the screen, his voice hoarse already. He rolled and twisted, tendons stretched into ridges while Scully tried to hold him still. She wanted him on the bed, but he thrashed away from her hands and her words, voice roaring over the mics. What must that sound like in the room, he thought.
*****
I'M BURNING *****
He'd watched for five minutes and Mulder was still screaming, although his scream were broken by sobbing and gasping, an indication not that the pain was lessening, but that the subject was succumbing to exhaustion. Some of the luckier ones had passed out according to the guys at breakfast.
Mulder had never been lucky, he thought, lips stretching over his teeth in a thin smile. Almost never.
He watched for another minute, twisting idly in his office chair, turning away from the screen and back. Away. Back. Away . . .
No, Mulder was never lucky. He'd seen that in his two years above the agent's head, if nothing else. No one who cried in his sleep and spent so much time bouncing a basketball against the was could be considered lucky, Scully or not. Mulder was a sad and lonely man.
Of course, if Mulder was sad and lonely, what did that make the man whose only job was to watch sadness and record lonely?
Fuck.
It was no good thinking like that. His job was too observe. To provide information so that dangerous elements like Fox Mulder and his partner could be controlled, removed from the game if necessary. No point in questioning that, no point in doubting it, because questions and doubts only got you one place around here.
Back. Away. Back. Away. Back . . .
Mulder still thrashed on the scream, and his screams had taken on that irritating rasp that meant the subject has strained his vocal cords. Why didn't the idiot just pass out? Why didn't he just give up?
So, two things: Mulder never had any luck and he never quit. Quite a combination. Never got what he wanted and never stopped trying to get it. Sorry bastard.
But then, he thought turning back and forth in his chair, when was the last time anyone got what he wanted?
Away. Back. Away.
It was hanging where he left it, on the rack near the metal door, like an empty bag of skin. His parka. They had to walk from the barracks to the ops building above ground and he didn't like leaving his stuff in the common room, even if it was just a standard issue parka that everyone and their brother had. That had unnerved him a little on the first day, walking across the snow with some of the men from his barracks, all of them looking like misshapen bears, all of them looking exactly the same.
Exactly the same.
He turned back to the screen. Mulder still writhed on the floor, still struggled against Scully's hands. There was a puddle under the subject now, he noticed.
He turned his chair away from the screen.
*****
She didn't realize someone else was in the room until the gun came down hard and fast on Mulder's skull.
"HEY!" she screamed, swinging and making contact with a powerful thigh. "What the hell--"
He crouched, clutching his thigh, and his voice was low and fast. "It's the only way. Help me."
The man, dressed entirely in winter gear, bent and lifted Mulder's torso. Bewildered, Scully grabbed her partner's ankles.
"To the bathroom," the man said when she tried to pull Mulder into the bed.
"Take off his clothes," the man ordered, dropping Mulder into the tub. "Fill it with cool water. Cool, not cold. And keep changing it."
Scully grabbed his arm as he turned. "Wait! What is it? What did they give him?"
The man pulled away from her, stalking toward the external door.
"Dammit! Wait!" She ran after him, grasping at his jacket. "I'm a doctor. Tell me what they gave him so I can help him!"
She couldn't see his face from behind the ski mask, but his eyes when he turned to look at her were blue. Cerulean blue, she thought, disjointedly. Eyes that knew.
"You can't help him," he said.
She darted around him in front of the door. "Tell me. You came here to help me, so *help* me."
The man stepped forward, pressing against her. He was thick with the padding of his coat and she could feel her knees shaking from the anxiety, from the fear of not knowing. No heat came from him, no impression of size or bulk. He was no one, anyone.
"Tell me," she hissed.
"You can only keep him alive. The effects may last twelve hours, maybe sixteen. If they inject him again, he will probably die."
"What was it?" she demanded, clutching at the front of his jacket, burying her fingers in soft padding. "Was it poisonous? Was it a toxin?"
Then, abruptly his breath was hot on her ear and she thought *this is it* and that was fine, whatever it took, if it would save him, but he didn't push her back against the wall and shove his knee between her legs, he just whispered.
"It was your blood."
Later, it would seem as if the man had simply vanished. She would recall nothing about the next few moments except the floor slamming against the already-bruised flesh of her knees.
*****
When she started thinking again, she was in the bathroom, tugging Mulder's t-shirt over his head. The water rushed from the tap. In another time and place this might have been amusing, even titillating, she thought, struggling to yank the urine- stained sweatpants down over his legs without dragging his head underwater. For a moment she considered his army-issue briefs, then yanked them down too, throwing them into the sink with the rest of his clothes. She pulled a thin cotton towel from the rack above the toilet and tucked it around his hips.
She put her hand in the water. Cool, but not cold.
She folded another towel and tucked it behind his head. Then she reached out and took his hand and held it until her own fingers grew pruny and water- logged.
She might have cried a little.
*****
Report 23 of --
Operative 7477108N
1131 hours
M subject still unconscious from--
He heard the pneumatic door slide open as he typed, but he did not look up. There was no point. The fucker would come in whether he looked up or not, so he might as well pretend he was working on the goddamned report.
He heard the bastard approach and stand behind him, heard the click and swish of the lighter, the smooth gasp of the inhale.
�How are you this morning, Captain Neill,� the man said, his voice light and smooth, almost unmasculine.
�Fine, sir,� he said, almost without thinking. The man was a civilian, but Neill always called him �sir� anyway. The old bastard seemed to get a kick out of it.
�Are you sure, Captain? There seems to be a bit of a . . . discrepancy in your reports.� The soft whoosh of cigarette smoke filtering back into the room.
Neill turned to face him. �What do you mean, sir?�
�I spoke to the men assigned to the room, Captain. They report finding Agent Mulder in the bed this morning.�
Neill waited. There was no point in giving this bastard the ammunition to shoot him with. That had been a mistake, not including the sleeping arrangements somehow, but he hadn�t known the trials were going to start this morning. He hadn�t known anyone would see but him, and . . . Neill felt his breakfast solidify in his stomach.
Fuck.
Had they reviewed the tapes? Had this fucker Smith (and if that wasn�t a bullshit name then Neill had never heard one) and his team reviewed this morning�s tapes? Had they *seen* him?
�With Agent Scully, Captain Neill. Why wasn�t that in your report?�
Neill started speaking before his mind had a chance to work.
�I�m sorry, sir, I was going over the surveillance for the last couple of months. I wasn�t sure if this was something unique to the relationship at this time, sir, or if it had occurred during my hiatus. I was going to do a complete work-up of the situation.�
�For what purpose, Captain?� Another whoosh of smoke filled the room.
�To determine the possibilities provided by it, sir.� Neill looked up.
Years ago, in basic training, Benjamin Neill and nineteen of his best buddies had been subjected to a motherfucker of a drill sergeant--Sergeant Andrew Curapt. Sergeant Crap, they called him when he wasn�t around. One day, when they were fucking around in the barracks waiting for inspection, one of Ben Neill�s buddies--Johnny Sawyer--had said something about Sergeant Crap, when said Sergeant was standing outside the door. In the dressing down and KP duty that followed for the next seventy-two hours, Neill and his compatriots had learned the benefits of the stone face. Show weakness and Sergeant Crap would shit all over you. At this moment, staring up into those blank eyes, Neill was absurdly grateful to Sergeant Crap and his idiot buddy Sawyer. His face didn�t move.
�In the future, Captain Neill, your reports will be comprehensive, is that understood?�
They hadn�t reviewed the tape. They didn�t know he had been *in* the room. No one was observing the observer, for a change. He had gotten a break. But the proof was on the tapes and all they had to do was look.
�Sir, yes sir.�
�Good. You are an asset to this project, Captain, but that doesn�t mean you can�t be replaced.�
Captain Neill turned back to his screen and didn�t breathe until he heard the whoosh of the door behind him.
They hadn�t seen him, they didn�t know, but the proof was on the tapes and the tapes were in the control room, the locked control room, locked in the room, the controls, the tapes, and all they had to do was look, just look.
Ben Neill propped his elbows on the table and rested his face in his hands, gasping for air, words spasming in his head.
He was fucked.
***
