Something was wrong.
Back up. Back up and think what it could be. Skinner heard all the sirens and alarms in his head going off, but he could take no action because he could see no danger. He only knew it existed, and it was deadly.
He stood on the road to town, watching as a young man approached him from a silver truck and walked across the hard packed snow towards him. "Are you okay?" the young man was calling. His teeth showed in a smile. "Car break down?"
Skinner's mind was racing back over the events of the past few hours. He had lain awake most of the night thinking. He would have resisted sleep in any event, knowing that it would be the last time he held Scully like that, lying beside her with his arm around her, feeling her breathe softly in and out and letting her heat seep into his bones and change him forever in small secret ways. Last night that had seemed to take precedence over all rational thought.
When daylight came it was early and intense. It poured into the room through the fluttering curtain in full buckets of brilliant sunshine that gave even the silly cartoon dogs a certain rakish charm. Worried as Skinner was, a man would have to be dead not to have his spirits lifted by such dazzling light. He adjusted Scully's clothes around her as best he could and eased out of the sleeping bag, though it was obvious he needn't have bothered; Scully was sleeping so heavily nothing would disturb her.
He had gone outside to relieve himself, but stayed out to look around. The full sun felt unbelievably good on his face, and the blue, blue sky smiled down on a beautiful white world innocent of all storms and sorrows. The snow was hip deep but powdery; it was just a matter of wading through it with wet crunching strides until he got to the road. To his surprise, he found it had not only been cleared, but tire tracks of other vehicles showed there had been recent traffic. Skinner narrowed his eyes and turned in a slow circle, scanning his surroundings. The building was a hundred yards away, lost in the white glare, almost buried under the snow that had stacked itself on the roof and was now inching downwards in compressing drifts. Tall firs behind the structure spread their snow laden branches over it, and the sun had already begun to thaw them into long crystals that glittered and stung the eye with their brightness. A small bright blue bird had settled on one of the branch tips, and it whistled a cheerful melody overhead.
Skinner knelt to examine the tiretracks on the road. If it had been cleared this quickly, only hours after the storm subsided, then it must be a thoroughfare, and people must live nearby and need immediate access to the town. This was the good news. The bad news was that the next car down the road was just as likely to hold a happy family of four on their way into town for breakfast as it was a cold blooded killer who would dump a man's body in the trunk of a car and then cut the brake linings.
Either way, the suspense was soon to be abated; he heard the ragged sound of a car engine coming from the south. From town, unless this road went as far as the main highway and someone had doubled back...As Skinner looked up and down the horizon, he realized there were a million places a man could hide just by lying down in the snow, but if he did, he'd miss the chance to flag down a ride. There was nothing for it but to face the danger and hope for the best.
A silver truck rattled around the bend. Skinner stood tensed, his hands in his pockets, and in one of those hands, hidden by the bulk of his parka, he held the butt of his gun. The bird fell suddenly silent. Skinner could hear the creak and groan and slide of snow on the roof of the shack, the crack of high up branches beginning to thaw, the purr of the engine as the driver slowed it to an idle.
The driver put out one hand to wave, while the other rested on the steering wheel. Skinner watched closely as he got out of the car; he had no weapon. He walked to the truck as the driver came around, calling to him to ask if his car had broken down.
That was the point at which Skinner had paused, a strange sense of unreality whispering over him again, dreamlike, or nightmarish; something here was really, really wrong.
The young man was somehow...wrong.
He was not much beyond twenty years old, wearing a brown snowsuit with a yellow and brown striped ski hat, work boots laced almost to his knees. He was slight of build, but wiry rather than fragile, and he moved with a familiar kind of stride, a walk Skinner would recognize anywhere. From under the sides and front of the ski cap bright red hair glistened in the sun. His chin had a very slight cleft in it. His cheekbones were high, freckled, the mouth generous and curved a little, and there was a very slight overlap from his upper to his lower lip. His eyes...
Skinner pulled the Sig out of his pocket and took a step back.
"Hold it right there, son."
The young man in front of him was not Scully, of course, but if Scully had been male, and twenty years old, this would be Scully. The mouth, the arch of the eyebrow, the features he'd so tenderly memorized in the night, were now on someone else's face.
The boy came to a stop and raised his hands to show he was unarmed. "Whoa up," he said. "The keys are in the truck. I don't have any money on me, sir."
Voice: male. Skinner's mind scrambled to find purchase in this slippery place. Wait. Didn't Scully have a brother? Not the big one...a little one, somewhere. Had they been twins? No, he'd have known a thing like that. Maybe...maybe...
Maybe, shit. No coincidence could explain those eyes, that particular shade of blue he could pick from a palette of millions of inferior colors, the irises flecked with just enough hazel so that in some lights they looked the color of sea foam. No. This boy and Scully were directly connected and this meeting was no coincidence and this was not good.
Skinner raised his gun aggressively and spoke in his most dangerous voice. "Who are you?"
"You mean, who am I?" The boy touched his fingertips to the breast of his jacket. "My name is Kurt Crawford."
"You know what I mean. What are you doing here?"
Those spooky Scullylike eyes searched his, and like Scully's they had a kind of bedrock integrity, a goodwill towards men that couldn't be faked. Whoever else Kurt Crawford was, he was an honest young man, and his eyes were as clear a reflection of his character as Scully's were of hers. They showed the lie coming, and they showed the minute he abandoned it for the truth.
"I'm here to help you, Mr. Skinner," he said. "Or rather, I'm here to help Dana."
"How do you know Scully?"
The boy blinked rapidly, his Adam's apple bobbing, as if trying to edit his words as they came out, nervous about getting it right. "She was part of an experiment about five years ago. Well, I guess you know that." His eyes darted past Skinner, searched the area, and then returned to Skinner's face. Not good. This kid was either looking for Scully or expecting trouble.
"Look, there's no way I can explain all this in just a few minutes," Crawford said. "Just let me tell you that Dana is in extreme and immediate danger."
"From who?"
The boy moved backwards, towards the truck, and Skinner moved forward to keep the distance equal between them. He suspected the boy wasn't trying to get away, but to move them both closer to cover.
"Where is she now?" Crawford asked.
"I'll ask the questions. What are you doing here?"
Crawford tried again. "Dana was part of an experiment that involved cloning. Her ova was removed and...things were done to it. Hybridizing, splicing. Like with Fox Mulder's sister. But you know that already, right?"
Skinner thought of all the sketchy reports he'd read, how he'd demanded Scully always make some kind of rational sense of them, even if they had to remain unfinished and added to the unsolved stats, in preference to some garbled Mulder explanation of events. Things happened, but the author was always ultimately in command of the "truth," if it came to that, and Skinner knew that the hardest part of Scully's job had always been being the liason between that "truth" and whatever really happened on their cases. He saw for the first time the tightrope she must have always walked, trying to satisfy both the men in her job as well as her own personal sense of integrity. The fact was, there was a lot Skinner didn't WANT to know, that he was too much a coward to even look at, like a child watching movies in the dark with his hands over his eyes. Now he wished he had listened harder, read between the lines, been more of a man for her.
Crawford was still talking. "Most of the hybrids have been destroyed, even the drones, at least in this country, as far as we've been able to tell. But there are still some left, some that weren't activated until later, like Mulder's sister. They could just take her out and activate her in adult form when they needed to."
"They who?"
The boy looked at Skinner carefully. "These people don't have names, do they?" he asked.
"You tell me."
"Look..." Crawford rolled his head miserably. "You know Dana had a tumor, right?" He pointed at his own forehead, between the eyes, like a child pantomining suicide with a finger gun. "Right there. In her head."
"I know she had cancer, but she's in remission now." If Skinner's voice was unusually harsh, it had to do with the dryness of the air, and not his unwillingness to accept Scully's mortality.
"SHE is, yes," the boy said, his words increasing in urgency, "But only her. Because, see, they made computer chips to stop it in the first set of subjects. We think...we think that WAS the experiment, see, and not the cloning at all. Because they could do clones fifty years ago. But to see if they could make a chip to fix whatever might go wrong in the process. When Dana got sick, they gave her the chip...THE chip...to make her immune system really, really powerful. But the clones, the hybrids, anything that was built with the same DNA, that obeyed the same commands of that DNA, they got sick too and there was just the one real chip, for the one real person. Just Dana's chip. Anything else created from the ova...even the hybrids...would eventually get sick and die."
He was blinking rapidly again, and Skinner wondered if he was fighting back tears. Some intuitive part of him recognized this boy as a part of Scully, and as such, he felt a strange responsibility towards him.
"So what you're saying is that there's a clone of Scully with a brain tumor running around here trying to kill her." His voice, clouded in vapor, seemed to be reading the words; it expresed neither belief nor disbelief. However insane it sounded, as he stood on the icy road with the engine of the truck rumbling quietly a few yards away and the cold already numbing his feet, whatever information Kurt Crawford had must be used somehow to save them.
He said, "Was this clone the one who shot Mulder?"
Crawford nodded eagerly. "That clone...that...hybrid...thing...she shot Mulder. He must have figured it out. She was in love with him. I've got some papers, letters, some pictures, too. I can show you. You've got to believe Dana had nothing to do with that. The other one, she...I think she must have been planning this for a long time, because her rate was so slow..."
"Her what?"
"The rate of her tumor growth. It has to do with environmental influences, too. Especially if there's hybrid DNA. "
"I saw scans that showed the growth to be almost incapacitating," Skinner said. "How could anyone that far gone be smart enough to set up a plan like that?"
"No, no, no. That's not what I'm talking about. Those scans were not Scully's. I mean, they..."
Without any warning at all, the boy attacked Skinner. One minute he was talking, and the next he was flying through the air with his hands out, grabbing at Skinner's parka. Skinner brought his pistol up, but long training kept him from firing on an unarmed man, or at least he thought it had. There was the sound of a gunshot and the boy grunted and fell forward, his clasping hands missing the parka and grabbing air instead.
He fell to his knees, clinging to Skinner's waist, and his weight dragged them both to the frozen ground. When the second shot skittered a path in the snow, Skinner realized what was happening. Someone was shooting at them. He grabbed the boy and fell on top of him, then pulled him over, and they rolled over and over to the safety of the truck. The third gunshot passed so close to Skinner's ear he actually heard the thunder of the air tunnel closing behind it before he heard the sound of the shot.
He risked a look over the fender of the truck. Up ahead, just past the bend in the road, was a woman dressed all in white. She could have walked right up on them and they might not have seen her. She held a rifle like a long black stick and she walked towards them with faltering steps that were oddly measured, the way someone might come down the aisle of a church at a wedding if they were very, very drunk. There was something so wrong with her that even at a distance it was obvious. Her face was as white as if she had been frostbitten, or floured. She carried the rifle at waist level, the fingers of her white gloves clenched around barrel and stock.
Skinner glanced down at the boy, who was lying curled up, breathing in a fast, shallow way that meant shock. "Hang on, kid," he said.
He came up in a shooter's stance, head and shoulders above the fender, pointing the Sig at the woman.
"Drop your weapon!" he commanded. "NOW."
Crawford was tugging at the cuff of Skinner's pants. "Not her, not Scully," he panted. "Not Scully."
From twenty yards Skinner could see that when the woman got close enough she was going to look so much like Scully that he was not going to be able to shoot her. It was now or never. When she raised the rifle again, he took careful aim. She fired, and the bullet smashed through the windshield of the truck, making a glassy spiderweb on the passenger side.
"Dana!" she screamed. "Dana, come out of there!"
Her step faltered; she looked like a mechanical toy in the middle of a malfunction, breaking down before his eyes. Skinner took a quick deep breath and fired, calmly, deliberately, shooting her in the upper left thigh, outside, away from the femoral artery.
He saw the bullet hit, saw the tear in her clothes, the puff of wadding from the insulated ski pants. But she never even paused. She fired the rifle twice more in rapid succession, and without hesitation Skinner shot her the way he'd shoot a target at practice, dead center.
She flew backwards, arms in the air, the rifle making a parabola in the air, and lay still.
As he started towards her, he saw that the boy's eyes were clenched shut, and he leaned over, wondering if he could put pressure on the wound. But as he bent forward, his eyes suddenly began to sting as if from ammonia, and he felt an intense rush of nausea. He took a few staggering steps away from the truck and threw up into the snow covering the ditch by the side of the road.
For a long dizzy moment he held still, hands on his knees, doubled over, until he could breathe normally again. Then he wiped his mouth, disgusted, and with a quick glance to make sure the woman was still down, he scooped up a handful of snow and bit into it, rinsing out his mouth. He spat, looked at the boy, looked again at the woman in the road.
But the woman in the road was gone.
*******