"The Five," Book 2 (Part 1 of 33) By Somebody Else SUMMARY: Having discovered that Samantha was taken as a hostage to be exchanged for five survivors from the Roswell crash, Mulder and Scully go looking for The Five. Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Disclaimer: All the truly interesting characters herein--the Mulder family, Dana Scully, Walter Skinner, the Consortium members, Alex Krycek and the morphing alien--are the invention and intellectual property of Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen and Fox Broadcasting, as is the whole concept of the X Files. I swear I don't have any money, and I'm not making any money off this, so there's really not much point in suing me over it. Feedback sent to will be forwarded to the author. ************************************************************************ A drunken man who falls out of a cart, though he may suffer, does not die. His bones are the same as other people's; but he meets his accident in a different way. His spirit is in a condition of security. ... Ideas of life, death, fear and the like cannot penetrate his breast; and so he does not suffer from contact with objective existence. - Chuang-Tzu Transcript of interview with subject Krycek, Alexander T. 6/14/96 Tape #AB286551 "...I got into it because of Timmy. We were out by the creek one day in the summer. Catching crawdads or something--I don't remember--I must have been about nine, I guess. Anyway it got dark before we realized it, and we started home. But just before we got back up to the road, they came. "I never told anybody. I never thought anybody'd believe me, or maybe they'd think I did something to Timmy. So I just said we split up at the end of the block like always and I didn't know what happened after that. But I knew. "You know how this story goes, right? There was a bright light, and all that. And they took Timmy. Oh, they brought him back, all right, about a week later. But I don't think it was like with the little kid in *Close Encounters*. I think they hurt him. He was never the same. "And I was scared. "When the Cancer Man approached me I was at the FBI academy. And when he came and asked me to help throw the alien bastards off the planet, I thought about Timmy and I was gung ho. "Of course, that was before I knew Bateman was going to turn me into his personal hitman. And it was before I ever met Mulder." **** Transcript of interview with subject Bateman, Shelby R. 8/9/96 Tape #AB286562 "Don't tell *me* about contempt of court, you justice department worm. I'm already in jail, and if you think I'm going to tell you shit, you are even more of a fucking moron than you look. "And that's all I have to say to you assholes." **** September 9, 1996 Sheep's Ridge, Wyo. The power had been out for four days, and even some people who had generators and water wells had come into town. For fuel, to keep running the generators. But still, Sheep's Ridge was a small town, and the operation had yielded only eighty-two subjects for assimilation. There were more humans out there, if the morphs had wished to press it--humans who were too stubborn or too remote to bother driving into the town. But this was just another test, the third in which subjects actually had been taken, and it wasn't worth the trouble, so the morphs left them alone. The remaining humans could be taken at leisure later, hunted for sport. The Warrior omni-morph overseeing the operation knew perfectly well that another thirty-five subjects had not been handed over by the humans as had been agreed. It knew those thirty-five had been spirited away to another place for processing. They were to become the hybrids that the humans thought could throw the morphs off their germ-ridden little planet. The warrior thought the hybrids were interesting, but not particularly threatening. They were considerably less delicate than humans and wouldn't be damaged by exposure to the fumes in alien blood. Perhaps less likely to be ruled by their emotions or hormones. But they weren't any smarter than the humans, and they were a great deal more unruly than the grays. Would they be good soldiers, effective fighters? Maybe. And if so, the warrior assumed that they could be assimilated, too, at the appropriate time. After all, they were halfway there, already. Three assimilants wrestled a new subject through the door into the Sheep's Ridge City Jail while the Warrior morph watched. The human, an old, heavy-set male, shouted curses and struggled, but he was no match for his opponents, who now possessed an alien strength. It occurred to the Warrior that assimilated human bodies wouldn't last long being used by the Conjoiner Circle in this way. They would need many more assimilants to bring the humans under control. Soon they would begin gathering subjects in larger towns. The assimilants held the human down on a crude bunk in one of the jail cells while a Conjoiner, a small, slimy, shapeless creature, was placed into a container of diesel oil. The oil seemed to work well; the Conjoiners could dissolve themselves into it easily, and it was readily available on this planet, which saved the morphs the trouble of bringing their own materials with them. They preferred using native materials, whenever possible. It was efficient and preserved resources. The human began to scream, and then gurgle, when the oil was injected into his nostrils. His limbs convulsed, spasmed, and then went quiet. The assimilants released him, then. He got unsteadily to his feet and stumbled out to take his place with the rest of the slaves. The grays would take care of him now. The Warrior wondered what the humans would do with the subjects who could not be hybridized. There were always some who were unfit. It didn't care what became of them, but like all things with intelligence, it had moments of curiosity. And of boredom. It walked outside, seeking diversion, despite knowing there was little diversion to be had here. No one here had offered much resistance. The town was dark, but the Warrior saw lightning in the distance. It lifted its head, smelling for water, for rain. Yes, there--but very far away. Very high in the sky, there was water. But it would not reach the ground. Strange planet, this Earth, with its motley climate. Focused on its sense of smell, the Warrior scented the grays before it saw or heard them come. Then it felt anger. Grays were not to gather in this way, not to approach without permission. The Premises prohibited this. The Warrior let them come--it would give them what they deserved for this arrogance. Then it hesitated. They had an assimilant. They were hiding behind the old man who had just been changed, using him as a shield. The Warrior didn't care. The human would die, but the Conjoiner inside him would not be harmed. The grays knew that; what were they up to? The Warrior turned, flared radiation. As it blazed white, just in that fraction of a second, as the man and the grays burned, as its attention was concentrated on the kill, it missed hearing or smelling the hybrid who plunged a long metal spike into the base of its skull. **** Transcript of interview with subject Morris, Ernest L. 7/2/96 Tape #AB286561 "...I didn't see him at first because it's dark back in those cargo holds. And then he jumped out at me like some kind of ninja, out of the dark, and I swear I thought he was going to kill me, even though he wasn't much more than half my size--God, he was skinny. But he came at me like the marines landing on Guadalcanal, all swinging fists and trying to kick everything he could reach. It was eerie, you know, because he wasn't yelling or anything. He was real quiet, and all I could hear was him panting with the effort... "We got Valerie, the medical specialist in there, and Wayne and I held the kid down so she could give him a shot. Man, he was in terrible shape. Like he'd been beat up, starved and left for dead. He couldn't even talk. Valerie was pretty good with him--she was real gentle, and it seemed like he was starting to respond to her. I don't know why they didn't send him down to Earth with her, but somebody said Dr. Curtis should go with him instead. "I don't think the kid liked her. Some of the crew didn't like her, either, but I thought she was all right. Kind of frigid, I guess, but I figured we were there to work with her, not fall in love with her. "Anyway, you know how sometimes your dog just takes a dislike to somebody, for no particular reason you can figure? The kid was like that with Karen Curtis. She'd walk into the infirmary, and he'd kind of shrink up against Valerie, like he was scared of Karen. He just didn't take to her at all. "And after they left, I never saw either of them again..." "How he got up to Artemis? Hell, I wish somebody could tell me that. I *know*, I was in charge of the cargo bays. And when we took off, there was no twelve-year-old kid in there. How could there be? Everything was checked and checked, a hundred times. I swear to God, that Mulder kid was *not* in those bays when we launched. "Aliens? On the station? You're kidding, right?" **** Transcript of interview with subject Casper, Dr. Karen E. Curtis 6/28/96 Tape #AB286557 "Before I tell you anything, I've got to have two things. First, guaranteed immunity from prosecution. And second, you've got to protect my family. Otherwise, it's my intention to exercise my constitutional right to remain silent. "I do hope that's clear." Continued in Part 2. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 2 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Is it so that my persistence Blocks the path of least resistance...? --k.d. lang September 11, 1996 Washington, D.C. It had been a long, insane day, and Walter Skinner had not been sleeping well since April. When he got home that night, he didn't want even to turn on the lights, much less do the usual human things--fix something to eat, pop open a beer, turn on the tube. He left the lights off and headed for the bedroom, intending to dump his coat and tie on the floor and collapse into bed. Focused on that and dulled to everything else, he didn't notice the man standing in a dark corner of his living room at first. And when he did, he realized suddenly he didn't even have the energy to go for his gun. Instead, he dropped his keys on the coffee table and said coldly, "What the hell do *you* want?" The last time Skinner had seen the tall, bearded black man standing in the shadows in his living room, they had been trying to beat each other brainless. Skinner had won that round, but he wasn't ready for round two. "You're about to get a phone call," the black man said, his tone low and resonant. "It's a call you don't want to ignore, on a matter you don't want to delegate. You don't have all the players yet." He tossed a file folder on the coffee table, on top of Skinner's keys, went past the assistant director and out the door into the night. *Shit*, Skinner thought. *Circles within spirals, plots within ploys.* He picked up the file. Unlabeled. His phone rang. It was Kimberly, his secretary. "I'm sorry, sir," she said. "I have a call for you from Steve Whitman in northwestern regional. He sounds...exasperated. Shall I patch him through?" Skinner blinked. Steve "unflappable" Whitman? Exasperated? That was like Barney the dinosaur getting depressed--impossible by definition. "Okay, Kimberly," Skinner said. "I'll take the call." He waited for the connection. "Steve," he said. "What can I do for you?" "Sorry to bother you, sir," Whitman started. By God, he *did* sound hassled. "We're working a kidnapping case in Sheep's Ridge, Wyoming, out of our Butte office, and we're running into some jurisdictional problems I was hoping you could clear up." "What kind of jurisdictional problems?" "The Air Force is standing us off thirty miles out of the town." "The Air Force? On what ground?" "That's just it, sir. They won't say. They just won't let us in." *Shit. What now?* "Okay, Steve, let me see what I can do. Who'd you talk to with the military?" **** September 13, 1996 Philadelphia, Penn. He hadn't meant to sleep. Fox Mulder woke to find himself curled up in the bottom of the closet in a hotel room in Philadelphia and swore softly, resisting the temptation to bang his head against the same wall he'd awakened leaning on. He had intended to watch a couple hours of the baseball game and then make his escape, try to get out just long enough to find some release in exercise. Instead, he had slept. Dreamed. Sleepwalked into the fucking closet. Again. The safe hotel in Philadelphia didn't have exercise facilities, and the pool was outdoors, which meant that for a closely protected material witness to take a dip in it required the sort of security precautions generally laid on for a visit from the pope. From a distance, it must have looked absurd--in the middle of the night, five or six G-7s lounging in the pool furniture in their suits and ties and radio headsets, trying to look nonchalant with .40-caliber Smith & Wessons weighing down their belts. Yeah, sure, those guys were just out catching some moonlight. Looking at it close on, from the inside, Mulder found the whole thing intolerable. He didn't want anybody watching him while he swam. It threw off his concentration, ramped his self-consciousness up to max, made him feel like what he was--a prisoner. All the security had been welcome, at first. For the first few weeks, he'd actually slept well, cocooned in the massive embrace of the holy mother federal government, his back up against Uncle Sam's armored flank. God only knew why that had made him feel safe--the people he was being protected from could easily have minions among the G-men assigned to look after him. But rational or not, he *had* felt safe. No nightmares, no waking up in a cold sweat, no pacing the room for hours before he exhausted himself so that he could even try to sleep. He'd been sleeping in an actual bed, for God's sake, and sometimes even with the television turned off. Christ, he hadn't been able to do that since Oxford. It hadn't lasted, of course. Just about the time he and Dr. Heitz Werber had gotten into the real work of trying to see what he could remember about his childhood illness and abduction, the nightmares had come back with a vengeance. Night after night he had dreamed of bright lights and paralysis, of terrible cold and darkness, of being alone and powerless in the grip of monsters he couldn't even see clearly. And despite knowing it wouldn't help, would probably just make things worse, he had fallen back into his usual script--trying not to sleep, so he wouldn't dream. He knew he ought to ask for drugs. Werber would prescribe them if he asked, had already offered more than once. The dreams--and his efforts to prevent them--were leaving him ragged, exhausted. Little by little, they had eroded his appetite and his strength, and probably, if he were going to be brutally honest about it, any hope he had of keeping his work with Werber in its proper perspective. But Mulder no longer felt safe--he might not be actually, physically at risk, but he was being attacked in his subconscious. The last thing he wanted was to lie down in a stupor and let somebody--or some *thing*--sneak up on him in the dark. Then he had noticed that summer was going brown and letting the fall gently blow it away. Realizing that a whole fucking season of a whole fucking year had come and gone without his even having a chance to experience it, Mulder understood clearly for the first time that he was an inmate, not a guest. Granted, as cages went, this one wasn't bad. The last time he'd been held captive, there'd been no mini-bar, no ESPN. But cabin fever was driving him crazy. He needed to move. He needed not to feel trapped. When swimming hadn't worked out, he had tried jogging in the hallways, but the third time he ran headlong into a room-service waiter's cart, he gave that up and turned to plotting his escape. There was a park right down the street; it even had a sandy running path. He could see it from his hotel room window. He'd been spirited off to Philadelphia right after the morphs had delivered their ultimatum. *Find The Five soon, or else.* No big deal, right? Except that the morphs themselves had been trying for nearly fifty years, and they didn't have a clue. And all Mulder had to go on was the word of a lying son-of-a-bitch named Higginbotham, who--without offering the least bit of evidence to back up his claim--had asserted that Mulder knew where The Five were. Mulder hoped Higginbotham was right about that, because beyond Higginbotham's claim, he had no idea where to start looking for five alien survivors held since the Roswell crash. For all Mulder knew, Higginbotham was lying and The Five lay dead in that burned-out boxcar in New Mexico. But he hoped they were still alive and that somewhere, buried in his subconscious, he knew where to find them. Because if he couldn't find them, two things were certain to happen: The morphs would take their grief out on any humans they could get hold of, and they would never, ever let Mulder's sister Samantha come home. It was weird, though, wasn't it, that the morphs didn't seem to think Mulder knew where The Five were. Mulder turned that over in his mind while he laced up his Nikes, preparing for his first foray out of the safe hotel. Yeah. It was weird. And ironic--of all the individuals who knew something about the story, it was the *aliens* who had been most willing to accept his side it. He took his glasses. The G-7s weren't used to seeing him wear them. Then a generic black gimme-cap. He picked up the ice bucket, waited while his watch ticked down the time to 8:52 p.m., then slipped out into the hall. He knew his protectors in the rooms on either side could hear the door open and close. He knew the schedule on the cameras. They swept constantly, but the screens in the control room switched on a staggered schedule--the ones sweeping this hallway cut to the elevators periodically. Seven minutes in the hall, three minutes on the elevators; three minutes on the hall, twelve minutes on the elevators; nine minutes on the hall... It had taken him days of watching to work that out. If he had this just right, he'd make it look like he was going into his room with the filled ice bucket just as the camera switched to the elevators for twelve minutes. He strolled toward the ice machine, resisting the temptation to whistle. *Don't overplay it*, he ordered himself. He scooped ice, glanced at his watch. Forty-two seconds. He returned to his room, opened the door. *Now*. He cocked his head, listening for any sign that anybody was paying close attention to him. Nothing. He set the ice bucket down on the floor inside the door and let the door swing shut while he stood in the hallway. Then he walked very slowly and quietly to the stairwell, slipped in and went down four flights to the ground. Just before he hit the ground floor, he put on the hat and the glasses. Adrenaline, now. What would they do if they caught him at this? He'd get a long, Skinner-esque lecture, no doubt. He'd have to muster a really hangdog look and promise solemnly never to try it again. He could do that. Worse, if they didn't believe the promise, they might make one of the G-7s stay with him all the time. God, now *that* would be a punishment. The stairwell opened into the lobby, and Mulder ducked his head as he passed by another camera--one he hadn't had the opportunity to observe. He cut through the bar, trying to keep people and potted plants between himself and other cameras, then walked out past the pool to the street. He was doing it; he was pulling it off. He thought he might split himself open, repressing laughter. *Ha, ha, you bozos--I'm off my leash, like a dog that's slipped his collar, running from bush to bush with his tongue lolling out.* He strolled on down to the park, spent a few minutes stretching, breathing open air, tasting the salty, sweaty rush of freedom. Oh, to be unchained, unwatched. He felt wonderful. He thought about rolling in the grass. Instead he set his feet on the sandy pathway and started off, a little slowly at first, to unkink muscles that had grown unused to the work. After a few minutes he settled into his stride, let his mind run at idle. Poor Werber--he really was trying. But whatever Dr. Karen Curtis had done to make Mulder forget, she had done one helluva grand job of it. Mulder had been waiting for Werber to suggest that they ought to take a break for a week or two. He'd known it was coming. It had come this afternoon. Mulder had said he'd think about it. He was not thinking about it. Not even planning on thinking about it. Werber might be willing to take a break, but Mulder was not. *Fucking masochist. Neurotic as the day is long.* Oh, yeah, *that* was a news flash. It wasn't as if there hadn't been some successes. Mulder was retrieving bits, all right. But it was frustrating as hell--what was coming back was the really early stuff, and he had not been old enough at the time to make much of it. Didn't know enough now to see the patterns in what had happened. Denied access to his best source of medical information, his partner Dana Scully, he figured he hadn't much hope of figuring it out. He had been keeping careful records, typing them into his laptop, hoping Scully could piece it together later. Actually, it was Scully's laptop, her fire-eating, whiz-bang Powerbook, weighted down with its bells and whistles and sound card that made a barking-dog noise when he screwed up something. Fucking Macs. What was wrong with a plain old generic beep? And he'd bet his teeth she was going to make him pay for sticking her with his 486. He didn't know how they had managed to switch them, but they had--at the airport? Had he stuffed the wrong machine into the wrong case when he packed up? Well, whatever--he had set his teeth and figured out Microsoft Word and had been keeping a journal. He had almost stopped jumping out of his skin when the computer barked at him. He had written that he now quite clearly recalled going to dialysis treatments, starting when he was about two. He had *hated* dialysis. Even now, the thought made his guts twist in revulsion. He could hear the machine--*ka-thump, click; ka-thump, click*. Sucking his blood out and replacing it with something that felt cold and foreign where the fluid re-entered his veins. He'd had that *thing*, the tube thing, planted in his arm so that the nurse could attach him to the machine. He had hated having that tube inside him. He had dreamed that it was growing there, extending its malevolent presence down his veins little by little. It had stayed there for nearly a year, until the night when he had almost died and Victor Klemper had given him a shot of something that had made him better, at least for a while. But what was that something in that needle? What had it done to him? No matter how eidetic Mulder's memory was, he couldn't remember something he had never known. One thing was for sure--he had not seen The Five when he had gone to the hospital for dialysis. He didn't remember ever being examined or treated by Klemper, either--couldn't muster up an image of the doctor's face from that time. And so, basically, he had spent damned near five months getting nowhere. The morphs had said there wasn't much time. How long was a long time to a morph? A week? A year? Mulder didn't know. Apparently it was more than five months, because CNN hadn't yet rolled tape of the end of civilization. It occurred to him suddenly that he really ought to have a scar, where the tube had been inserted. But he didn't. He wondered why not. Another note for Scully. The jogging path wound back into a grove of trees that lined a pond. Nice track, with lamps puddling yellow light on the ground. Mulder ran over a wooden footbridge, his steps sounding loud and hollow on the planks. As he reached the end of it, he saw movement off to his left--somebody in the trees. He skidded to a hard stop, swinging around, reaching for his gun. He saw hands rising, palms out in surrender. Mulder could barely see the figure in the dark. He held his stance, and said breathlessly, "Federal agent. Keep your hands where I can see them and come out of there." The figure moved slowly, but stayed in the dark. "Out here," Mulder said. "Into the light." The figure whispered, "I don't want anyone else to see me." "Why not?" Mulder rapped out. "What are you doing back there?" "Waiting for you, Fox." He was hooked now--the guy knew his name, and Mulder wanted to know how. He kept his distance, but he moved around, out of the light himself, the weight of his Smith & Wesson comforting in his hand as he held it trained on the dark figure. It occurred to him that he hadn't been on a gun range in months. *Probably couldn't hit the broad side of a battleship.* "Who are you?" Mulder asked. "How do you know my name?" "My name is Zachary," the figure whispered. "I am almost your brother." Mulder's eyes had begun to adjust. He could see the large head, the big black eyes. Could see the long, slender fingers, the flat chin, the thin, horse-like lips. It looked like the thing in the train car in Iowa that the Japanese had been so eager to export. It was a hybrid. Dear God. Continued in Part 3. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 3 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious. - George Bernard Shaw Transcript of interview with subject Krycek, Alexander T. 6/14/96 Tape #AB286551 "...I don't think the oil thing that took me over knew very much. It'd been in that downed fighter plane for a long time, so a lot had happened that it'd missed, you know? It remembered the crash at Roswell--I think it must've been on the ship when it went down. And it was *desperate*, just desperate to get back to the rest of the aliens that were on the ship. I don't know why. You can't really know what it's thinking, just impressions. Just...images, I guess. "I don't think the oil is the *thing*. I think it just uses the oil to get inside you... "You can feel it take you over. It doesn't hurt, but for a second you just feel so *cold*. Like there's no blood left. You feel so damned helpless. And then you're not really there anymore, except that you are, back in some corner of your own brain, and you're screaming to get out. But it's not going to let you out, because it just doesn't care. You know what you're doing, but you can't stop it, and anyway, it's not really you. Then after a couple of days you start to feel like it's all there is, and you're just kind of fading away. If it'd had me any longer than it did, I don't think there would've been much left of me. "You want to know why I went looking for Mulder? Because I'd rather go to the gas chamber than have one of those oil creatures crawl into my nose again. At least if I die, it'll be *me* dying." **** September 13, 1996 Big Horn National Forest Twelve miles east of Sheep's Ridge, Wyo. "Look, things change," Dr. Michael Neeley said. "People get older, they come down with illnesses. They smoke, they drink, they use drugs. Their body chemistry changes over time. Some of these people were tested for hybridization damned near twenty years ago. You can't expect this process to be perfect--it's not going to work on everybody." Tom Corvin turned a baleful eye on Neeley as he stood in the middle of the hastily constructed Quonset hut, standing in what had become, in effect, the Sheep's Ridge operation's morgue. Seventeen of the gurneys held misshapen corpses. Corvin suppressed a desire to choke Neeley. "I don't expect it to work on everybody, doctor," he said. "But you're only getting fifty percent. Do you know how many people are going to die if you don't improve that? How many the aliens are going to slurp up like ice cream?" Neeley glanced at the floor. He looked exhausted. Corvin supposed that he probably was. But Corvin didn't have either time or sympathy to waste on Neeley. The doctor, like Corvin, after all, was on the list of humans the aliens had agreed not to take over. He was a member of the select group the aliens had agreed would stay human and run things after the processing had been completed. Corvin had been instrumental in making up and maintaining that list, and he had made sure that nobody got on it unless they'd sworn lifelong dedication to doing whatever it took to save as many human lives as possible. Corvin knew Neeley had spent four days doing just that, but still, he was alive and in no danger. That couldn't be said for the rest of the population of Sheep's Ridge. "How many did they get?" Neeley asked, his voice near a murmur. "More than eighty, at last count," Corvin answered, and suddenly he felt exhausted, too. *Poor bastards*, he thought. More than eighty who either never had been tested or had tested unsatisfactory for hybridization, and so had been handed over to the aliens because they were lost to humanity anyway. *Never knew what hit them, and never will.* "There can't be many left around here," Neeley said. "No," Corvin agreed. "We're all done but the mopping up, here. But our friends are starting to get nasty. They want to do a test on a bigger town." "God," Neeley said, closing his eyes. Corvin could hear the bile, the nausea in the doctor's throat. "Yeah," Corvin said. "Get rid of the bodies in the forest. Burn them. Any of these have implants?" "Just two." "Take the implants with you. I don't want any electronics left on the bodies." Neeley nodded. "I understand." Corvin went to the other end of the hut, where eighteen people were undergoing the change that would make them hybrids. These were not the sophisticated hybrids that Klemper had made all those years ago--these, like Dr. Berube's friend Secare, didn't look alien and would remain at least eighty percent human. But once the change was complete, they'd be able to breathe underwater and withstand a release of alien retrovirus. More importantly, their blood chemistry would kill any Conjoiner attempting to assimilate them. And they could be easily and quickly cloned, if need be, to build up the population. Four of these had the implants in their necks. They were the strongest and brightest of the bunch. Corvin would wait for them. Wait to make sure they got packed up and sent off to Virginia in one piece. Something more important was in store for them. **** Durham, N.C. It had never occurred to Dana Scully that she might actually miss Fox Mulder. For one thing, it had not seemed possible that she would ever have occasion to miss him--he had become so inextricably wound around her existence that the idea of their being separated long enough to warrant pining for him just never had entered her mind. She was pretty sure he hadn't consciously meant to, but just by being who and what he was, his personal and professional interests had utterly commandeered her life. That he might, in effect, just vanish for months--Jesus, had it really been five months?--hadn't seemed possible. Oh, she'd known when he wasn't there, when he ditched her and ran off to do something he didn't want her to see. She'd said, "Mulder, where are you?" so many times the words had begun to feel as involuntary as a sneeze, as automatic as breathing. But that was hardly the same thing as actively *missing* him. Well, she was missing him now. Sitting here in a hotel room deemed safe by whoever deemed such things, she would have liked to grab him by the throat and drag him here. Because somehow, in the confusion when they had parted, they had managed to swap computers. Wherever he was, he had her Powerbook. And he had left her with his misbegotten, ratfucking 486 with its lousy 14.4 modem, running Windows version three-point-scum. He had jury-rigged Netscape so the security wouldn't turn off, and he had every-fucking-thing password protected and double-encrypted. She could've e-mailed him to chew him out, but she feared using the hotel's phone lines might give away her location, and his cell phone cable wouldn't fit her phone. Scully was not prepared to risk her life or his merely for the purpose of chewing him out. For the privilege of strangling him with her bare hands, maybe, but not just to berate him. *I'm gonna find you, Mulder,* she thought. *And when I do, I'm gonna make Eugene Victor Tooms look like a pussycat.* In fairness, she suspected he was just as unhappy with her Powerbook as she was with his 486. He was the only person she knew with any real computer literacy who actually *liked* the Windows interface better than the Mac. She suspected it was because Windows worked the same way Mulder's brain did--every which way at once in some indecipherable order that turned logic inside-out six times before inexplicably producing a reasonable result. Well, sometimes it was reasonable. But she had never known Mulder's brain to throw up general protection faults (although she might've argued there were times when it should've), which Windows certainly did--usually about the time she had downloaded ninety-eight percent of a big file. Which would have taken half an hour on his crummy modem. She was staring at an error message now. She closed Netscape, logged off. Shut down Windows, rebooted the machine and started over. It wasn't really the computer that was the problem. With computers, like so many other things, she and Mulder were yin and yang. She liked computers; he didn't really, but he was smart enough to yield to the technology and to work out the basics...mostly. She thought about the number of times she had been startled out of a workday reverie by her partner's low growl: "Print, you stupid piece of shit." Actually, come to think of it, it was the simplest computer functions that gave him the most trouble. Like getting the machine to make a printout. He was better at more complex, intuitive applications, and when it came to massaging the Internet, he had The Touch. No, that wasn't it. What he had was the *patience*. The *focus*. Scully wondered how many times his mother had had to tell him to stop picking at a scab--watching him on the Internet was like watching a little kid keep scratching and scratching a mosquito bite. He'd keep at it and at it, and when necessary, he'd get into a related news group and wait like a spider for somebody to produce a FAQ or the address to the mailing list he wanted. He understood the kind of arcane thought processes that resulted in things like Usenet hierarchies. If he couldn't find what he wanted the first time he clicked on a link, he'd click everything else on a page until he *did* find it. He'd actually read through all 250 entries the search engine produced. He wouldn't stop at "No entries found," he'd just change search engines and keep going until he got something. When it came to flat-out single-minded relentlessness, Mulder was hell on a jet-pack. Scully didn't have his endless, inexhaustible determination. And she needed it for the task at hand--she was searching the federal budget for fiscal year 1996. She sighed as Netscape launched again and wearily typed in gopher://suny.stat-usa.gov. Come right down to it, the real problem was, she was worried about him. Worried he was chewing himself down to a nub because he didn't know where The Five had been hidden. And Roy Higginbotham and Bill Mulder had both asserted that *he* did know, although there was precious little evidence it really could be true. And if somebody didn't find The Five and return them to their own people, it might literally be the end of the world. Mulder was perfectly capable of driving himself into a malnourished, dehydrated, sleep-deprived frenzy over a thing like that. It would play right into all his guilts and terrors, all his pain and self-doubt. Mulder was good at what he did precisely because he had no fear of walking right up to the brink, of staring into the abyss and letting it stare back at him. He did it every day in his job, with the kind of rank, foolhardy arrogance of a man who'd already been to hell and back and figured there was always just the off chance he might get through one more time. And if this had been some run-of-the-mill, everyday abyss, Scully would've bet he could get through. Sure, she would've prepared to cope with some trauma. But he knew when he was pushing the limits. When standing at the brink, he had the unerring balance of a master tightrope artist. But this was no ordinary brink, and the hell Mulder was staring at was his own. And what if Higginbotham was right? What if Mulder himself was the key to the whole mystery? If they lost him now--if he lost himself... Scully shook herself and focused on the laptop's screen. The only thing she could do now to help him was to try in her own way to find some clue to The Five. She was trying to figure out where Shelby Bateman and his buddies had hidden the kind of money needed to reverse-engineer UFOs. **** Philadelphia, Pa. "You're a hybrid, aren't you?" Mulder asked. Zachary was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. He wore Reeboks and a gimme cap almost identical to Mulder's. A ridiculously incongruous get-up, like E.T. decked out in a pearl necklace and dress in Gertie's closet. Mulder found himself stuck hard between terror and fascination. He would have liked to reach out, touch Zachary's walnut-brown skin--was it warm? soft?--but he didn't dare. "I am 47.239 percent human," Zachary said softly. "And 62.76 percent gray." *Jesus.* Mulder felt light-headed, and his mouth seemed to be having trouble wrapping itself into the shapes required to form words. "You say...you say you're my brother?" He couldn't quite keep this last word from coming out as a squeak. "I like to think that," Zachary murmured. "But you don't have to, if you'd rather not. If you find it upsetting." "But...how...?" "Some genetic material used to make me came from a sample drawn from your mother." He remembered his mother's words. *I volunteered for the experiments. They took some samples.* Mulder nodded. "It was you--at my father's house, when I went to get the cat." Zachary looked at the ground in a reasonable facsimile of embarrassment. "I didn't expect anyone to be there." "Neither did I." "I didn't mean to frighten you. I was trying to understand...what he might have been like." "Maybe you can explain it to me," Mulder said bitterly. "I don't believe I arrived at any new insights." "It was rhetorical," Mulder said. "Nevermind." "You can put the gun down," Zachary said. "I only want to talk to you. Anyway, if you shoot me, it'll hurt you more than me." The retrovirus. "Your blood is..." Zachary nodded. "Toxic to humans." Mulder drew a deep breath for courage and holstered the Smith. "How did you find me?" "The morphs always know where you are." Oh, now *that* was reassuring. Mulder swallowed hard. "Why are the morphs watching me?" "They like you," Zachary said. "The morphs won't hurt you. Not now, not any more." Mulder focused on that for a moment, but try as he might, he could not detect any irony in Zachary's tone or manner. *They like me. Christ!* "What did you want to talk to me about?" he said. "I have to be back before they know I'm gone." He looked at his watch. It was 9:27; to slip back down the hall in synch with the camera, he had to hit the door to his room by 10:13. He wasn't sure he had time for this. And he wasn't at all sure he wanted to have a conversation with...it. Not now, anyway, not with that "I'm-your-brother" business still whirling around in his head. Zachary frowned, his high, sharp brow ridges seeming to compress against each other. "Will they hurt you, if they know you have escaped?" "Hurt me?" Mulder chuckled. "No. Yell at me some, I guess. Tell me what a goofball I am." "And that doesn't hurt you?" *It might, depending on how they go about it.* "No, I'll be okay." Strange, the thing really seemed to care--the grays who had taken he and Samantha, all those years ago, had seemed utterly indifferent as they plunged needles and blades into him. Hadn't reacted to his screams. Maybe half-human was enough, to make this hybrid understand what that had been like. "What did you want to talk to me about?" he asked again. "Your sister," Zachary said quietly. "And making a revolution." Continued in Part 4. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 4 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. - Oliver Wendell Holmes September 13, 1996 Philadelphia, Pa. "What do you know about my sister?" Mulder demanded. "Not where to find her," Zachary said. "I have been mostly with humans, until I escaped. The morphs don't entirely trust me yet." He smiled, a human gesture that didn't quite work in a mostly inhuman face. His lips bent stiffly at the corners, as if the motion hurt his mouth. "Nor should they," he said. "They wouldn't let me know something like that." "Can you find out?" "I won't promise that. I can't promise it, because there's no way to be sure." More alien ethics, like the morphs back on the Vineyard. Besides, who did this asshole think he was, assuming he could just invoke Samantha's name and get instant cooperation? Disgusted, Mulder shook his head. "Then we don't really have anything to talk about," he said. He turned his back on Zachary and took a step away. "Please!" Zachary said, a note of desperation in his tone. Mulder didn't turn around, but he stopped. The thing really sounded as if it needed help. Maybe it did. *Fucking sucker,* he cursed himself. He faced the hybrid. "What do you want from me?" "Ten minutes," Zachary said. "Just hear me out. Then if you don't want to do more, I understand. None of us have the right to ask any more, not of you." *You got that right*. He let Zachary lead him back into the trees, and they sat down together on the ground, hiding out from passers-by and anybody who might be looking for them. The night was cool and dry. Mulder could feel the muscles in his legs tighten in response to his suddenly aborted run. "Do you know who the grays are?" Zachary asked Mulder, in his soft, throaty voice. "I don't think we've ever been formally introduced," Mulder said dryly. "They were separate once, until the morphs took them for the Circles. It would have been about three hundred years ago, in Earth-time. And more than a thousand years before that, the Circles took the morphs, themselves. Now the grays and the morphs belong to the Circles as if they were never separate, and before long, they will have all of us--" He ducked his head. "You. All of you." Mulder tightened his grip on his suspicion of this creature--if there was anything insincere about Zachary, he was doing a damned good job of concealing it. The apparently unintentional confusion about his own place in human society, or lack of one, that was a good touch. Very poignant. *Don't let him get to you. He could be setting you up--Lord, how easily he could be setting you up. And for goddamned near anything.* The minions in the shadow government had given Mulder part of what he wanted before, for the purpose of leading him around by the nose like a donkey on a halter. Zachary's appearance could be the carrot held out to quiet the beast while the harness went on. "You're saying they're going to assimilate us, just like the grays?" "Yes." "They promised not to. Not if we find The Five for them." Zachary waited a beat to show he was serious, then said, "I do not think that was what they meant." Mulder felt his heart thud hard. "What do you think they meant?" "That they will not eradicate you. The assimilation is coming; it may already have begun. But if The Five are not returned, and alive, they will do more than take you. Then they will punish, too." Mulder thought of Krycek being taken over by the oil-based alien. "Some of us would prefer the punishment," Mulder said slowly. "Look, I have some idea of what they can do to us--" "I know." "I'll eat my gun first." Zachary shook his head, hard. "It is not yet that hopeless." "You just said it was." "Not if we work together." "Meaning what?" "The hybrids are designed to fight for you, against the morphs and the Circles. And many grays will fight for you, too, if you will fight for them. The grays have been slaves for so long they have forgotten what it must be like to be free. Now they see you, and they want what you have." Zachary had said he wanted to talk about revolution--*Jesus!* He was asking for a declaration of war. Mulder's head had begun to spin. "Why ask me this?" he asked. "I don't have the power to make that decision." "No. But you are the only one who has the power--and perhaps the will--to force the question. Those who can make the decision have no incentive to do so, not while the very existence of the grays and the hybrids remains secret." "You want me to get up on a mountain and shout, 'The aliens have landed'? That's been tried before, you know. Hell, I've tried it myself. It didn't work." "Of course not. You must prove it." "Why don't *you* prove it? Go to the mall in daylight, Zachary." The hybrid laughed. A weird sound, a cross between a chuckle and the honking of a goose. "You know better than that, Fox," he said. "If I arrived alive--how likely do you think it is that I would?--I would be spirited off before I could get three words out." Mulder sighed. He was right, of course. Some of the main players were cooling their heels in federal prison at the moment, but even Mulder knew enough about the military to know it was the sergeants, not the generals, who actually got things done. The sergeants were all still on the loose, and he suspected there was little about the Project that wasn't continuing to operate normally. It was normal to take out any personnel who showed interest in exposing the Project's activities. "No," Zachary went on, "it must have official sanction. And only you can manage that." *Oh, right. I'll go up to *Capitol Hill* and shout 'the aliens have landed,' and that'll work better than shouting it from a mountain.* "I think you're overestimating my clout," Mulder said. "For one thing, I'm in protective custody myself. There's not a helluva lot I can do, locked up in a hotel room in Philadelphia." "I do not think you will be here much longer." "How do you know that?" "Because I know that the morphs have been busy somewhere else." "Doing what?" He shrugged. "I'm not sure. And besides, you'll see for yourself before long. Now I'll tell you what I *do* know of your sister. She is well. They have treated her gently and done nothing to hurt her, not even what little they did to you." *What little they did to you.* What he remembered of it was unspeakable agony. He knew now that part of what had started him on his quest to find her was the subconscious fear that she was still enduring the *little* they had done to him. Then he thought of the night on Martha's Vineyard, when he had heard her voice in his head. He had tried to get her to tell him where she was, and she had refused. *Not now, Foxy. I promised.* What had she promised? Why would she promise the aliens anything? Didn't she want to come home? "Have they assimilated her?" he asked dully. "No. But Fox, you must understand--if humans and hybrids and grays succeed in driving the morphs off the Earth for good, there is always the chance that they will take her with them. You must be prepared to choose." *Choose between Samantha's coming home and the safety of every other living soul on Earth.* Mulder closed his eyes. As a professional law enforcement officer he had pledged to put his own life on the line for anybody, anywhere, any time. But this was not about *his* life; it was about someone else's, Samantha's. He didn't have the right. This was not a choice he wanted. It occurred to him suddenly that it was the same choice his father had made. And his father had made the wrong call. He drew a long breath, opened his eyes and got to his feet, trembling with anger. "I'm not giving her up," he said. "If her life's not worth anything, then no one's is." He hadn't meant to start shouting, but he was doing it. "You're asking me to be willing to die for the grays, but you won't promise to fight for Samantha? You want me to promise *not* to fight for her? If those are your terms, fuck you!" "Fox," Zachary said softly. "It's not negotiable, goddammit!" Mulder yelled. He ran back to the hotel, ran like a demon, pounding into the building thoughtlessly, without any regard for who might see him or what the response to his leaving might be. He kept on running up the stairs, straight to his room, slammed the door open. And there, sitting on the end of his bed, was Assistant Director Walter Skinner, wearing a particularly inscrutable expression--what Mulder sometimes thought of as Skinner's cold-blooded lizard-eye look. Before Mulder could gather his wits enough to stammer out a word, Skinner said coolly, "Get packed. We're leaving." **** September 14, 1996 Big Horn National Forest Twelve miles east of Sheep's Ridge, Wyo. The pile of bodies had grown large, and Dr. Michael Neeley was tired and discouraged. He had set a small cadre of the Consortium's hybrid troops to digging a trench behind the make-shift hospital where the hybridization of the population of Sheep's Ridge had taken place. The mound of dirt that had grown up had slowly but steadily acquired half a man's height. Eighteen. There were eighteen people who had not responded to the process, whose internal organs had been corroded to a greenish-brown, slimy goo by the infusion of alien DNA. They'd tested OK, but something in their bodies had changed since then, and they hadn't made it. Neeley had been a doctor for twenty-five years, and he knew all about losing patients. But he had never lost eighteen of them at once before. He had never lost them retching up the gelatinous remains of their own lungs and livers before. And he had a horrific dread that they would not be the last, or even close to the last. That before he was finished, he would've lost count, lost track of their faces. Someone should remember them, he thought. But no one would. His task now was to make sure of it. He sent the hybrid troops away, staying on alone to carry out the final phase of the cleanup. He wanted no one around. He wanted, in effect, to shoot his own dog, rather than let someone else take care of the chore for him. He pulled a five-gallon can of gasoline from the back of his Jeep Cherokee and headed up the mound of dirt, wearily, resigned to what he had to do. It occurred to him that the forest was tinder-dry. There'd been no rain in months, nothing but dry lightning striking the ground out of the thunderheads that formed in the late afternoons. He worried briefly that the fire might spread--not that he cared about setting the trees aflame, but because a big fire might attract attention. But he hadn't much choice, so the worry fluttered away like a moth. He climbed down into the stinking, gore-filled trench, opened the can and began splashing the bodies--what was left of them--with gasoline. He caught a glimpse of a hybrid standing up on the dirt mound when he turned to move farther down the trench. Annoyed, he called, "I thought I told you--" This was not one of the cadre of troops that had been with him before. This was an old-style hybrid, one of Klemper's originals from the look of him. Then Neeley noticed the lighted cigarette in the hybrid's hand. "Hey! Get that away from here! There's gas all--" The cigarette seemed to float down toward him as it left the hybrid's hand. Smoke trailed dreamily into the trench, as if the world had suddenly gone into slow motion. Neeley watched a ball of flame ignite when the cigarette touched down; the glowing ball expanded toward him. His mind did not work fast enough to get itself wrapped around what was happening, and so he didn't run, and the gas can was still in his hand when it exploded. He was already dead before the flames consumed his body. Shrapnel from the exploding can had sliced into his brain. **** O'Hare Airport Chicago, Ill. *He looks like hell,* Scully thought. She'd seen Mulder the moment she entered the crowded airport departure lounge. He leaned up against a pillar, literally in the process of going to sleep on his feet. Skinner, on the other side of the pillar, cast him an occasional worried glance, then the A.D. saw her and nodded. She could almost feel Skinner's relief at being able to hand over the responsibility. Scully knew better than anyone what a job it was to watch over Mulder. She went to him. She couldn't see his eyes behind his Ray-Bans, but she could guess the dark circles the glasses concealed. He had lost weight since she'd seen him last--fifteen, maybe twenty pounds--his suit hanging too loose. Under the best of conditions Mulder was all height and no width--now he looked like a little boy whose mother had dressed him up for the first day of school in clothes she figured he'd grow into. He had his hands wrapped around a tall cup of Starbuck's coffee. Scully took it lightly just as it began to slip from his nerveless fingers. Then he woke, with a sharp breath and a jerk of his head. Saw her and grinned. She smiled back, indulgently, despite her desire to stamp her foot and order him to *go to bed, goddammit*. Slap him silly for letting himself get so run-down. It was dangerous for him to go out in the field in such a condition, and he knew it. Dangerous to himself and to her. "Hey," he said softly. "You'd better drink that," she said, inclining her head at the coffee in her hands, "while you still can." "It's for you," he said. "I figured you were going to make me sleep on the plane." She nodded, still smiling. "Give me my Powerbook, and nobody gets hurt." He handed it over. "Word document, filenamed 'Stuff.'" "Original," Scully murmured. She handed him his laptop. "Windows Write document, filenamed 'Money.'" Then she gave him a look to strike fear into his heart, and said sternly, "When we get there. It's three hours to our next stop, and you'll sleep every minute of it if I have to club you over the head with my gun-butt." **** Bison, Wyo. They had to stop in a town called Bison, fifty miles away from Sheep's Ridge. The local police said there was a forest fire. As they piled their bags out of the cars at the local La Quinta, Scully could smell the fire on the breeze. She turned and looked toward the Big Horn Mountains, where a full moon gleamed over the black, jagged peaks. Off to her right, she could see a dull, angry orange glare in the sky. Somehow it gave her an uneasy feeling. In the dark, she felt Mulder behind her and knew he was looking up at the fire, too. "Did Skinner tell you anything about what we're here for?" he murmured. "Not a word." "Well, one thing's for sure--we're not firefighters." The eagerness in him was palpable, like the quiver of a hunting dog that had caught the faintest hint of a scent. Scully knew just how he felt. She drew a long, delicious breath of the smoky night air. The game was afoot. Continued in Part 5. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 5 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ The worldwide rumour about Flying Saucers presents a problem that challenges the psychologist for a number of reasons. - C.G. Jung September 14, 1996 Bison, Wyo. The last thing Scully wanted was more hotel food--she'd had too much of it lately. She had been good for months. Too good. She wanted something tasty and sinful, and driving into Bison, she'd seen the exact thing to ease that craving. So she gave Westin fifty dollars and told him to bring enough back for everybody. He returned with two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, all the appropriate side dishes, and three six-packs of Michelob--that last being his own contribution. Then the seven of them--Skinner; Westin, who Scully surmised had drawn the unenviable assignment of Mulder's bodyguard; Mulder; Scully herself; Steve Whitman, the northwest regional director; and Rob Halstead and Kevin Tannet, two of Whitman's agents--all hunkered down in Scully's room, eating like half-starved wolves, the men intent on a Redskins game on TV. Scully realized suddenly she'd been lonesome in North Carolina, and she found herself taking a visceral, animal pleasure in the tableau, the men flaked out around her, the cardboard containers, stripped chicken bones piled up. Mulder--who she knew damned well hadn't had a decent meal in weeks--tucked away two thighs, three drumsticks, a half-pint of mashed potatoes and almost a whole pint of coleslaw. He had practically shotgunned his first beer but was nursing the second, in part because he was only half-awake. He lay sprawled across the foot of her bed, languid and drowsy as a sated lion, eyelids at half-mast. Scully figured he wouldn't make it through the next quarter of the game. Even Skinner seemed uncharacteristically relaxed, flopped down on the floor in front of the television with his tie hanging loosely. Scully knew, then, for the first time, why it was her mother took such pleasure in preparing big family feasts--the pride of the hunt. She had found food for the pack. And then, of course, there were the soporific effects of having eaten three times the usual daily limit of fat in a single sitting. The game was on the East Coast; it was over by nine-thirty, Wyoming time. As the others drifted out, Skinner hung back a little, and Scully finally realized he meant to make at least a show of helping her guide Mulder next door to his own room. She shook her head at him. *If this were my worst problem...* "I can handle it," she whispered, and the A.D. nodded and left. There was an electric teapot and individual packets of coffee and tea in the room. Scully heated water and made two cups of decaf. Sure enough, the smell roused him. He sat up and yawned hugely. "Where'd everybody go?" he asked. She shrugged. "The game was over." "Who won?" "Hell, Mulder, I don't know. I wasn't paying attention." She gave him the coffee. He made a face. "She doesn't know the score, and she wants me to drink instant decaf," he grumbled. "I have no intention of letting you keep me awake all night pacing the floor over there," she said tartly. "Did you have a chance to look at the stuff on your computer?" "I glanced at it," he said, evading her look. "But did you see anything that seemed useful?" "Uh, not right off." "What's wrong?" she asked. Then she thought she knew. "You've already done the '96 budget," she guessed. "No," he said. He yielded to the inevitable and told her what he hadn't wanted to say. "Look, your impulse was right on. We *do* need to find the money. But the approach won't work." "Why not?" "Scully, an agency budget is really just a planning tool. The budget tells you what they *intend* to spend--or at least what they claim they mean to spend. But it doesn't tell you anything about what they *actually* did with the money. All year long they're making amendments to the budget. Like the cost of staples went up, so they have to use more money for staples and cut back on paper towels. And it doesn't tell you to whom the money was disbursed. We could do what you're suggesting with the 1995 budget, and it might work, but not '96." She sat there, despair and exhaustion rising in her chest, fighting back tears of frustration. She felt so *stupid*. She drew a long breath for calm. Sometimes she forgot that "Spooky" Mulder could be just this rational, this logical. This--goddamn him--*scientific.* "And while I'm annihilating your balloon," he said gently, apologetically, "I might also suggest that we don't start in the obvious places, like the Department of Defense or NASA. I'd start with NIH." "The National Institutes of Health?" Scully squeaked out, her throat tight. He nodded. "Lots and *lots* of files, Scully. Medical files. And NIH materials are less likely to be classified. Who runs the Human Genome Project and is therefore likely to have paid the grant money for Purity Control?" "I know why the guys in VCS hate you," she said. He nodded, his look steady. "They've been sweating over a picture puzzle for two-three weeks, and I'm the smartass son-of-a-bitch who walks in, glances around and says, 'doesn't this piece go right here?'" She shut her eyes tight. "Mulder, if you say you're sorry, I'll slug you. Don't apologize for doing what you get paid for--besides, that's exactly why I wanted you to see this. Look, I'd love to be the one who finds the answer and takes all the glory. But I'm not sure we have time for that. I knew I was missing something, and I also knew if anybody was going to walk in and notice exactly what it was, it'd be you." She glanced up, her eyes stinging. He was wide-eyed, his look stunned and grateful. He just stared at her for a moment, then he said softly, "Jesus, Scully, could I paint your house? Refinish your floors, or something?" She laughed, then sobered and shook her head. "I think you're carrying enough." He shrugged. "I'm still on my feet." Yeah, and clearly, his bizarre Brainiac mind was still in good working order. "Mulder, if we don't solve *this* picture puzzle, it could really be the end. For everybody, the whole planet. And if that happens, it'll be because we've failed. Because we haven't found The Five and punished Bateman and the others." He grinned. "But, hey, no pressure." "How can you find that amusing?" "How can you not? Either I laugh or I lose it. Scully, it's not going to be *our* fault, if the world goes up in smoke. We've done everything we could. Besides, my world has already ended once. And there are those who said it was my fault, then, too." Scully felt a realization snap into place. He had never bought it. That was what had saved him. Samantha's disappearance had left him crippled, but it had not destroyed him because at some level he had always known it was not his fault. That was what had kept him from becoming a monster like Luther Lee Boggs or John Barnett. Mulder had known he was a *victim*, not the perpetrator. He'd known he hadn't deserved to suffer. Oh, he'd had his doubts, all right--his father had seen to that--he'd endured survivor's guilt in spades. He had walked right up to the line, stood there with his toes right on it, had even occasionally picked up one foot and started to step over it, but he had never crossed. Mephistopheles had tempted him, and Mulder had heard the offer, but he had never closed the deal. Into the silence, Scully whispered, "What do you think we're going to find up there?" His look was steady, serious. "A little glimpse of what the end of the world is going to be like," he said. He paused. "Are you okay?" "I'm fine," she said, automatically. "I'll get on-line and start digging for what NIH spent in 1995." "It can wait until morning, Scully. You're tired, and so am I." Scully lifted an eyebrow. Mulder? Admit he was tired? Wonders. Nevertheless, he was getting up, heading for the door. "I'm going to bed," he said. "I'll see you in the morning, okay?" Suddenly Scully badly wanted not to be alone. She wanted to share her space with somebody who'd already been through the end of a world. "Mulder," she said slowly. "Would you mind leaving the door open?" He shook his head gently. "No, I don't mind." **** Mulder fell and fell, and fell some more. Fell forever, then crashed in the dark, fetched up against something hard and painfully cold to the touch. God, it was so dark, as if all the light that had ever existed had gone out forever. And so cold--an awful, enervating cold that made it hurt to move, made it hurt to breathe. He was alone in a way he'd never been alone before. As if *everybody* were gone, winked out along with the light. He was completely beyond rescue, not even knowing who or what it was he needed rescue from, only certain that help never, ever would come. He wanted to go somewhere else, but he was afraid to in the blackness, afraid he might fall again. And then he heard something--no, *someone*. Weeping. Then screaming. And screaming and screaming--in terror, in agony, in desperation. He struggled to move toward the sound, to find the other person out there in the dark. But he couldn't see, and the sound was all around him, and for a moment, he just curled up and huddled into himself, too confused and frightened to do anything. And the screams wouldn't stop, and they just frightened him more. *Get away. Find her and hide. Get away, get away, GET AWAY!* He began crawling, writhing along the cold surface he was lying on, trying desperately to find *something*--a hiding place, a weapon, an ally, anything. *Shut up, shut up! They'll find us! You'll wake up Dad! Shut up, shut up!* He crawled and crawled, but there was nowhere to go but into more dark, more cold. And he knew that he was the one screaming. No one would ever find him. **** September 15, 1996 Scully woke at a quiet sound and sat up. But she didn't hear anything else, and for a moment, she wondered if she really had heard anything at all. No, there it was--a muffled click, and then a thud, a scraping sound. Not in her room, though. *Mulder.* She got her gun from the night table and padded silently through the connecting door. The bed was mussed; he had been sleeping, or trying to. Dreaming? She couldn't see into the bathroom--too dark. She wished for a flashlight, then noticed the closet door stood open. She stood still and looked closely and caught a tiny movement. He had huddled up in a ball on the floor, arms wrapped around his chest, his face pressed up against the corner forlornly. "Mulder," she said softly. He shuddered tighter into himself. "Mulder, it's okay. It's me." "Please don't hurt me," he whimpered. It dawned on her suddenly that he hadn't awakened. He was still dreaming. She didn't know whether she should wake him or not--if he came out of it yelling, that likely would draw Skinner and the others. Best to go slow, she decided. Scully put one hand lightly on his shoulder. He shuddered again at the touch. "I'm not going to hurt you," she said. "I won't let anybody hurt you." He didn't move. Just huddled there, shivering silently. Scully knelt beside him, her hand still resting on his shoulder. She stroked his hair, then reached around him and took him in her arms. "No," he moaned. "Shh," Scully said, holding him as he tried to pull away. "It's okay. No one's going to hurt you." She held on, murmuring nonsense comfort words into his hair for what seemed like a very long time. But finally she felt him start to relax ever-so-little, slowly begin to unclench. As he let go, she gathered him closer to her until he was leaning on her. Oddly, it felt good to cuddle him--his head against her collar bone, most of his weight resting on the back wall of the closet. He was warm, and solid, despite his slenderness. *All bone and muscle,* she thought. "Wake up, Mulder," she said softly. For a moment, no response. Then he shifted his head slightly and murmured, "Fi' more minnuss, okay?" *Why not,* Scully thought. She gave him a little more time, then repeated, "Mulder, wake up. Come on, let's get you back to bed." He stumbled up and out of the closet, fell limply onto the mattress, face down in the hollow between the pillows. Scully stood looking at him as he lay there, dead out--she thought he still had not really awakened. She considered curling up beside him to ensure he wouldn't dream again, to make sure he really would get some rest. She'd done that once before, and it'd worked. But he looked well-settled, and she didn't want to take the chance that Skinner or somebody might catch them in a clinch that looked less innocent than it was. She folded the bedspread back over him. "Scully?" he said suddenly, his voice muzzy. "Yeah. It's okay. Go back to sleep." "Uh," he said, into the pillow. "Thought you were Valerie." And went to sleep. **** In the morning Mulder seemed rested, if somewhat subdued. Over breakfast, he subtly evaded her eyes, as if he wanted to avoid looking at her but didn't want her to *know* he was trying not to look at her. He remembered. Maybe he hadn't been quite as completely out of it as she had thought. And he was embarrassed as hell about it, and if she told him she hadn't minded bringing him down out of his dream she'd only make it worse. So she waited him out, trying to act as casual as he was, until after they'd finished eating and she could get him away from Skinner for a minute. Then he surprised her by bringing it up himself, out in the parking lot while they waited for the others to gather. "I dreamed I woke you up last night," Mulder said softly. "At least I'm hoping it was a dream." She thought about telling him, yes, it was a dream--she hadn't heard a thing. No. Come clean. She shook her head. "You went wandering a little," she said. "I ended up in the closet again, didn't I?" "Yes." "Shit," he sighed. "I'm sorry." He sounded miserable completely out of proportion to the actual event. Scully shrugged. "No harm done," she said. She figured it'd be too much to reach over and touch him. Instead she went past him to the car, making sure her sleeve brushed against his to let him know he had not suddenly become a leper in her eyes. "I hate that dream," he said, his voice low. "The one where it's dark and cold, and you can hear somebody in pain?" He nodded. "It's never changed, not the least detail. I don't know, Scully--it's like my subconscious is trying to send me a message, but I can't read the code." She shrugged. "Was it Freud who once said, 'Sometimes a dream is just a dream?'" "Not this one," he said. "This means something. I just don't know what. I never have. The thing is, last night it was different. It's never been different before." "Different in what way?" "It's always started with me being in that dark place. I never had any sense of how I got there--I was just *there*. But last night I fell into it. I don't even know how I knew I was falling--it's so dark I didn't have any reference points, but I sensed somehow that I was falling, and then I went crashing into something." "Is the dark place somewhere on the Artemis station?" He shook his head, helplessly, processing on the memory, and from his look, not getting anywhere in the attempt. "I have no idea." He snapped out of it. Gave her a hard, intent look. "What makes you think it is?" "Last night you said you thought I might've been Valerie. Do you remember her at all?" "Valerie Clendenning? The doctor who took care of me after they found me up there?" "Yes." He shook his head again. "It's just an empty name--I can't think of her, of what she looks like or who she is." Scully shrugged. "It was just a thought. I'm not sure it means anything, but under hypnosis, you said got separated from Samantha when you fell, and Samantha let go of your hand. Between the two things, it seems a reasonable hypothesis that you might be dreaming about Artemis." "I don't know." Then suddenly he banged both fists down hard on the trunk of the rental car. "*Dammit*," he raged. "*Why can't I remember?*" Now she took his arm to steady him. "It'll come," she said quietly. "Yeah, and if the story of my life leads me to any conclusion, it's that it'll come too fucking late." "You can't force it, Mulder." "How do you know that?" "Because you *are* forcing it, and it's not working." He turned around, leaned on the car and craned his head back to stretch tension out of his neck. "You're right," he said, sounding exhausted. "The pressure is getting to me. Boy, you called that one dead-on. It's just so fucking *frustrating.* I know I'm close to something--I can feel it. I can *smell* it. But it's just out of reach." "I know," she said quietly. "Come on, Skinner looks like he's ready to go." Continued in Part 6. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 6 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ A good craftsman leaves no traces. - Zen proverb September 15, 1996 Bison, Wyo. Now, finally, they got a briefing. Whitman and Halstead outlined the situation--a little boy missing, who had come up to Sheep's Ridge to spend the Labor Day weekend with an aunt's family, then vanished. The parents hadn't been able to reach anybody, not even the local cops--er, scratch that, the local cop, singular. When Halstead and his partner had tried to drive up and see what the hell was going on, they'd been turned away by Air Force personnel. The Air Force claimed it had a downed aircraft in the area, posing some threat of radiation. *Yeah, I've heard that one before,* Mulder thought. Then Skinner took over the story. The military said it had already handled the evacuation; they said the kid was probably shipped out with the aunt's family. Yeah, there was some confusion, but he'd turn up in a day or two. Trouble was, the Air Force had been gone now for a couple of days, and the kid hadn't turned up. And on top of that, a forest fire had broken out. Some reserve firefighters in the area reported that the town of Sheep's Ridge remained deserted despite the lifting of the evacuation order, and they had found what they claimed was a very strange dead body. "Strange in what way?" Scully asked. "Burnt to a crisp, is the way I heard it," the county sheriff said. He was a big guy named Bridges, middle-aged, blond and ruddy-cheeked, just beginning to paunch around the middle. His office was decorated primarily with football trophies and stuffed deer heads. "Burned in the forest fire?" Scully asked. "Forest fire's ten or twelve miles away from Sheep's Ridge and headed in the other direction--at the moment." "The Air Force say whether they ever found their 'plane'?" Mulder put in. "They didn't mention it," Skinner said, expressionless. "Oooh," Mulder said. "Now there's a surprise." "Look," the sheriff said, "is there something radioactive out there, or isn't there? I got a family--if there's a busted up A-bomb in Sheep's Ridge, I don't even want to head out that way without some kind of special suit. I mean, I figure I owe it to my kids not to come home glowin' in the dark, you know?" "I wouldn't worry about it," Mulder said. He smiled. "Scully, you brought the Buck Rogers intergalactic radiation sponges, right? We'll just suck that stuff right up." Skinner's look would've frosted a nuclear reactor. "If the Air Force had thought a threat remained, sheriff, they'd still have the area cordoned off," he said. "All right, people, let's move." They headed out of the sheriff's office. Under his breath, Mulder hummed, to the tune of *Feelings*: "Mutation...nothing but mutation..." He slanted a glance at Scully, who gave him her ruler-wielding-nun look, but couldn't quite conceal the fact that she was trying not to laugh. **** Sheep's Ridge, Wyo. They flew in on a bureau chopper. Skinner reflected that he had approached nearly every really nasty thing he had ever seen in a chopper--Da Nang, for example--and wished, just for the sake of variety, that they had been able to drive. They flew over the forest, across the mountains, the smoke from the wildfire smudging the sky to the north. He was trying to keep an eye on Mulder without letting the younger agent know he was being watched, and Skinner suspected he wasn't pulling it off. He was worried about Mulder because Mulder seemed normal, and there was nothing normal about the situation. Of course, Mulder didn't actually *know* anything about the situation. Skinner had deliberately kept Mulder and Scully in the dark, withholding transcripts from interviews with the other witnesses in custody. But Skinner suspected Mulder must have some notion what to expect. Skinner had caught his look when Whitman started to explain about the kidnapping, a look that had transmitted, "And you desperately needed me for this?" But Mulder had only two speeds: full-bore and dead slow. If he really expected something, surely he'd be at least a little high on it, right? Today he looked about as wired as a South American tree sloth. Skinner himself was feeling damned twitchy. In a way it was reassuring that Mulder wasn't reacting to the situation. Maybe it meant this really *wasn't* a big deal. Surely, if there were extraterrestrials about, Mulder would be the first to see the signs. Skinner frowned, noticing some dark brown spots on the ground below. The chopper had begun its descent. Oh, shit. The brown spots were dead horses. Closer now, there were white spots, too. Dead chickens. Mulder gave the animals scant attention. Then suddenly, his gaze locked on something like a laser sight. Skinner followed his look, wondering what he had seen. Burned tree tops. Mulder tapped Scully's shoulder. Pointed. Skinner watched her. She saw the trees, and her jaw tightened. Damn, Skinner thought. God damn. **** The smell of death hung on Sheep's Ridge--the sweetish, rotting, half-digested stench seeming to have settled into every corner. They all knew that smell, all too well, and they were used to it, but none of them liked it. Mulder said it for them, right up-front, get it out of the way. "Yuck," he said, wrinkling his nose, his voice low and grim. It seemed to sum things up efficiently, so nobody built on his remark. They stood in front of a dark-red clapboard building that declared itself to be the town hall, municipal court building, city jail--and Kinney's General Store ("Feed - Tack - Fertilizer - Brisket sandwiches, $2.49"). There was only one actual body, and when Bridges pulled the tarp off it, Mulder saw that it was horribly burned--hell, incinerated, like the ones who had been aboard the *Piper Maru*. But those men had been alive. This one had been dead for days and smelled every minute of it. Scully hunkered down beside the remains. "I don't mind the body," she said softly, pulling on gloves. "But I'll never learn to like maggots and pillbugs." She glanced up at lowering clouds gathering overhead and gestured toward four patches of silvery ash on the ground. "Somebody get me a sample of that before it gets washed away." "I'll do it," Mulder said. "Can somebody photograph these?" The ashy patches were vaguely corpse-shaped. Big heads. Long, slender fingers. Grays or hybrids? Could've been either. He couldn't begin to guess; maybe Scully could figure it out. Vestiges of human DNA or something. "Yes, sir," Halstead said, and started at it. Whitman had a Geiger counter and was taking readings. Mulder scooped ash into a vial. "Male of indeterminate age and race," Scully said. A pause. "These are radiation burns." A confirmation, not a surprise. "Damn, I knew it," the sheriff said. "Well, whatever burned him, I'm not getting any sign of it now," Whitman said. "No abnormal radiation readings anywhere--just a little on the body itself." Mulder capped the vial and carried it back to his partner. "Help me turn him over," Scully said. *Oh, swell. Delightful. Thanks for thinking of me.* But Skinner was closer, and he beat Mulder to it. He carefully gripped what was left of a shoulder and pulled the body over. A whole new category of stink rose in a wave, and Mulder flinched, fighting down nausea. Black oil had pooled underneath the body. It gleamed, dully reflecting the sky overhead. "What the hell?" Scully murmured. She retrieved another vial from her case and reached to dip a sample from the pool. And the oil seemed suddenly to shudder, as if possessed by some kind of spasm. "Watch out," Mulder said. Too late. The pool of oil gathered itself and leaped at Skinner. Continued in Part 7. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 7 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. - Erich Fromm September 16, 1996 Sheep's Ridge, Wyo. Skinner scrambled backward and tumbled onto the ground, his face pale and tense. Mulder reached to push the assistant director away from the oil as it twisted, ropelike toward him. As if it had sensed suddenly that Mulder was in the way, it recoiled, lost its coherent shape and splashed back down in shower of lazy, greasy globs. It had wanted Skinner, but not him. Mulder stared at it, thinking suddenly of Zachary. *The morphs won't hurt you. Not now, not anymore. They like you.* "What in Christ's name is that?" Skinner asked, his voice hushed. "I'm not sure," Mulder said, hearing his own voice a little unsteady. "I think we ought to try to get it to the lab," Scully said. "How?" Mulder asked. *And how do we keep it from attacking anybody else once we get it there?* "Here," the sheriff said, handing Mulder an empty plastic oil jug. Chevron fifty-weight diesel oil, according to the label. "My deputy found almost a hundred of them." Mulder caught Scully's look--*a hundred people.* Like Krycek. He took the oil jug, forcing the thought out of his head. Later. He would think about that later. He came around the other side of the body. "Careful," Scully said. *No shit.* But the oil didn't react. It just let him scoop it into the jug and seal the top, almost as if it were trying to prove it could be cooperative. *They like you.* *Maybe. Don't get cocky.* "There's something else strange over here," the sheriff said. He looked at Scully and saw her draw a long breath. *Jesus. There's more.* They followed Bridges closer to the building. He pointed to a blob, lurid green, like lime Jell-O with a lot of air bubbles blown into it. And there was probably twenty gallons of it, whatever it was, in rounded, pillowy globules. Mulder didn't touch it, but he leaned over and saw what he expected--a long, thin metal spike glittered underneath the gelatinous mass. "I'm not touching that without an environment suit," Scully said. Mulder nodded. The bubbles were likely to be loaded with the retrovirus, the toxic fumes. Best not to disturb them without taking the appropriate precautions. "What do you think it is?" Skinner asked. "I don't know," Scully said. "I just think we ought to be careful with it." Mulder read the message in her look at the A.D.--*Tell you later; we need to keep a lid on this.* "Can you show me where you found the oil jugs?" Mulder asked the sheriff. "Sure." Bridges led them into the jail. **** Except for the plastic jugs, the room was unremarkable--it could have been what passed for police headquarters in any of a thousand tiny rural villages in America. Scully had been in a hundred of them. The place was little more than an airless cubicle with a desk, on which sat a radio, a pad of incident reports, pencil cup. A coffee mug, well-used, and an ancient, obsolete computer, dusty. A Radio Shack TRS-80. Not well-used. A space heater--there didn't seem to be any insulation between the room and the outside, clapboard wall, against which the desk had been pushed. The wooden wall was warped at the top and bottom. And nearly the whole floor was covered with empty oil jugs, all with the same label. Mulder picked one of them up with his gloved hand and gave it to Scully to bag as evidence. The sheriff cleared his throat quietly. "I don't suppose you folks would tell me if this was some kind of...I don't know. Secret germ warfare thing? Nuke-ya-lar fallout?" "Would you?" Skinner asked. "If you were me?" "No, sir," the sheriff said. "I don't reckon I would. But what am I supposed to tell folks? This ain't New York, but there are people who live around here." Skinner shot Mulder a glance. *Don't put your foot in anything--I'll be right back.* He guided the sheriff out on the front porch of the Sheep's Ridge town-hall-and-feed-store. Scully could hear them talking from outside--the sheriff a little strident, Skinner cool, rational. Scully looked around again and noticed nothing more than what she'd seen the first time. "What do you think?" she asked Mulder. He was staring at the warped edge of the wall, up in the corner, near the ceiling, processing hard. "I think it's the end of the world, Scully," he said faintly. He stepped carefully around and over oil jugs, headed for the wall. She looked, but she couldn't see anything. "What is it?" she asked. He stood right next to the wall now, nose almost touching the wood. "I think I might've found the key to that code," he said. She crooked an eyebrow at him. "By staring at a wall like some kind of Buddhist monk?" He put one hand up, palm flat, and slowly moved toward the wooden surface. "It's not a dream," he said. He touched the wall and disappeared. She heard him yelp, "Ow!" Then silence. Scully bit off her shout before it got out of her mouth. She drew her gun and eased over to the wall Mulder had vanished through. "Mulder?" she called. "I'm okay," he said, his voice faint on the other side. *Other side of what?* "I hit my knee when I landed." "Where are you?" "Right here." His voice suddenly was right next to her ear. Before she could think or answer, she saw his hand reach to take hers. He pulled her through. She lost her balance, momentarily disoriented, and fell against him. He caught her before she hit the floor. Struggling back to her feet, she glanced over her shoulder. She could see the room next door--the desk, the oil jugs, the old, dusty computer. The whole view slightly curved at the edges. "Oh, my God," Scully said. "What was that?" "A perfect opportunity to rewrite Einstein again," he said, deadpan. "Think of it in a line-up room, Scully--if you can patent it, it'll beat the hell out of those trick mirrors." She reached out toward it, but Mulder caught her hand. "Hang onto something," he said, "or it'll suck you back through." *How the hell did he know?* She holstered her gun, reached to hang onto a counter behind him--and saw what lay on the counter. A body. A body much like the ones she had seen buried in a mass grave at the leper colony in West Virginia. But in this case, the deformities were not the result of scarring, clearly not stemming from leprosy or any other disease Scully knew of. Although it was human-like, she didn't think it was human. "Oh, my God," she said again. "It's dead," Mulder said. "I think. I was hoping you could, uh, verify that." "I'm not sure how," Scully said. Gingerly, she touched it. The skin was cold, flaccid. She tried the pulse point in the neck. Nothing. Finally, she leaned down to put one ear against the thing's chest. Dead silence. "Well," she said, "by the measures I know to use on it, it's dead. Unless, of course, there's still some brain activity, but I don't happen to have an EEG machine with me." "Well, we need to figure a way to get it out of here without Sheriff 'this-ain't-New-York' getting a look at it," Mulder said. "To get it back to the lab in D.C." "What do you think it is?" she asked. "Another mutant, like Tooms?" "It's a hybrid," he said, looking at it. "Part human, part alien. Like the one in the train car in Iowa." "Is that what you propose to tell Skinner?" she asked. "I propose to tell Skinner nothing until we know more about it," he said. He shrugged. "It's a body. It's a *strange* body that ought to be autopsied. What more does he have to know?" *Where'd he get this sudden attack of caution?* she wondered. She slanted a glance at him, and noticed he was processing--staring briefly off into space, checking memory, trying to fit pieces into slots. *He's not sure what we've got,* she realized, *or what's the best way to proceed--he knows something he's not ready to share.* Still, what he was suggesting was a reasonable course of action. She nodded, biting her lip as she thought through it. "You go divert the sheriff," she said. "Make him take you on a tour of the town or something. I'll talk to Skinner, and while you're gone we'll get the body bagged and onto the chopper." "Okay, but nobody else sees the body or this wonder-wall thing, right? Just you and Skinner, and nobody else." "Right." "And watch out for the suction when you go through. Damned thing can blast you clear across the room." He left, easing himself back through the wall--invisible on this side. Scully watched him bang into the desk on his way out, and suppressed a giggle. Then she turned back to the body for a moment. Nut-brown skin, large eyes. Strange, Neanderthal-like brow ridges around the eye sockets. Struck with a sudden impulse, she lifted its head and felt its neck. Her fingers touched something, and she recoiled, dropping the head with an unintended violence. It had the scar. Just like the scar on her own neck, where the implant had been placed. Continued in Part 8. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 8 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. - Andre Gide September 16, 1996 Sheep's Ridge, Wyo. In a daze, Scully helped Skinner get the odd, brown body bagged and onto the chopper. Mulder came back with the sheriff after about twenty minutes, wearing a glazed-eye expression that said the local football hero had bored him shitless. Then he looked at Scully and frowned, eyes narrowing slightly, brow puckering--he knew she was having trouble. But then Skinner approached him, and he went blank again. *God love him,* Scully thought. *I don't want to have to explain what I'm feeling to an A.D. Not yet.* She managed to avoid saying anything to anybody on the flight back. She overheard the sheriff continue to brag about his college sports exploits and Mulder continue to pretend to be interested because as long as Bridges was ranting on about that he wouldn't be asking questions Mulder didn't want to answer. As if through a fog, she heard herself tell the others that she wasn't sure what had happened in Sheep's Ridge, but that she would get back to them when she had something. And then she held herself together, somehow, until they got back to the hotel and she could flee into her room. Into the bathroom, where she heaved up everything she'd eaten for approximately the last week, in great convulsive retches. After a moment, she felt a cool hand on her forehead and another gently pulling her hair away from her face. She would've liked to object, but she was too busy vomiting. Finally the spasms eased. She left her eyes squeezed shut but sat up weakly, to find herself leaning against a strong, hard body. Sound of the handle being pulled, the toilet flushing. The squeak of the faucet, then water running in the sink, into a glass. "Here, rinse your mouth out with this." Mulder. *Well, of course. Who else?* She did as she'd been told, rinsed and spat. Then twisted to wrap her arms hard around his neck. She knew she should have sent him away, told him she was fine. But she needed the animal warmth of him beside her, the lulling rhythm of his breath, his heartbeat. He held her close, one hand on her head, the other arm around her waist, rocked her a little, said nothing. Any living human would have served her purpose, but she was glad it was Mulder--he at least knew better than to *say* anything. He wouldn't tell her it was all right or that she was safe--better than anyone, he knew that wasn't necessarily the truth. Then, when she calmed at last, he said softly, "Tell me." "It's nothing," she whispered. "Oh, come on, Scully--you made me tell you about my worst nightmare." He was still rocking her gently; she didn't want him to stop, not for a long time. "That thing...the...hybrid, or whatever." She paused; he held his silence. "It has a scar on its neck. Right where mine is, where the implant was." Still silent, still rocking, waiting her out. "Do you think..." She drew a long, trembling breath. "Maybe they were trying to...turn me...into--" She couldn't finish. "Do you think they could?" he asked. "Is that possible?" "I don't know. Supposedly they did something to Dr. Berube's friend, Secare, but we never found Secare, so I--I just don't know." "Well, we don't know exactly what the implant was for, either. You said Pendrell thought it was recording your memories? I don't see how that would aid in changing you physically in some way." She mulled that over for a moment, then said, "Why is it that just when I start to see things your way, you go all rational on me?" "Well, Scully, it's kind of like taking out the trash. *Somebody's* got to do it, and when you abandon the task--" She pulled away from him at last. "Oh, Mulder--only you would turn taking out the garbage into a metaphysical analogy for the usefulness of reason." "Sorry. It's an Oxfordian influence. I've been carefully trained to submit everything to the test of becoming a metaphysical analogy for something. My family paid a lot of money for that." "And I bet they regret it, in hindsight." "Yeah." His look was loaded, and she recalled suddenly how much of his own family's dirty laundry his investigations had uncovered. "I bet they do, too." She ducked her head, wishing she had not raised the matter. "Look, Scully," he said. "I know what those MUFON women told you. But did they actually offer any concrete evidence that their cancers were in any way related to the implants? I mean, how did they know? Are we sure they're not living above another Love Canal or something? Don't look at me like that--I learned this shit from you." "Okay, I deserve that," she conceded. "And you could be right. It could be nothing. But somebody put that thing in my neck for a reason--not just for fun. And I don't know why." He pulled her into his arms again. "I know," he said. "I'd be scared, too." "Your turn," she said, muffled into his shoulder. "Huh?" "There's something you haven't told me. Give." He tensed--yeah, he'd been hiding something, all right. She thought for a moment he was going to deny it. But then he sighed. "I'm having second thoughts," he said finally. She backed away so that she could look at him. "About what?" "Neither one of us is objective about this stuff any more. Especially not me--in retrospect, I'm not sure I ever was, but hell, nobody else was going to pursue it." "Nobody else was going to take the trash out," she said softly. "Yeah. But now I think..." "What?" He shrugged. "I think it's too late, Scully. I think whatever happens is going to happen, no matter what we do. Jesus, they took a whole town out here. Those people are just gone. And I'm as clueless today about what happened to those people as I was ten years ago before I ever even heard of the X files. Listen, you're right about the budget--what it would take to finance this motherfucker! It's got to be *huge*, on the order of mind-boggling. But we can't find it." He looked at the floor, his face settling into a deep, heavy sadness. "I'm starting to think we're just beating ourselves to death. And for nothing." He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Christ, you know, I'm ready to find myself a morph and say, 'Fine, just get it over with--take me now.'" "You don't mean that," Scully murmured. "I don't believe you mean that. What about your sister?" "She's gone." She heard death in his tone; worse than death--a wish to die, just for the cold numbness of it. "And there's not a fucking thing I can do about it. I'm just sorry you ever got involved, because now you're probably fried, too, and there's nothing I can do about that either." "I thought you came to cheer me up," Scully said. "Yeah, and quite typically, fucked that up, too. I'm sorry; you're right--hell, we can't stop now. Somebody's still got to take out the fucking trash." "You're tired, Mulder." "You're goddamned right about that." "And you still haven't told me what you're keeping to yourself." "That's because I'm trying to cheer you up." He levered himself up onto his feet, extended a hand to help her up. She took it. "Look," he said, "we'll go back to D.C., we'll have a look at the dead hybrid--and its implant--maybe that'll tell us something. I'll take on the budget shit. I've got an idea about that." "What kind of idea?" He sighed. "I know how this is going to sound. The conspiracy literature is all full of how alien projects are being funded by money from drug and weapons trafficking. I concede some of those people are so 'out-there' they make me look like a Republican, but there's usually some grain of truth in their material. It may be nothing, but we're not finding anything anywhere else." **** Bison, Wyo. Mulder woke to see a shadow pass by the window--a man's shadow, and on the inside of the drapes. He went for his gun, then a voice said, "Don't shoot--it's me, Zachary." In the dim light, he could just make out the misshapen face. "Keep your voice down," he said, and got up to push shut the connecting door to Scully's room. "Jesus, Zachary, how did you get in here?" "I'm sorry," the hybrid whispered. "I didn't mean to frighten you, but I was afraid to knock, and you were asleep. I opened the lock." "How?" "With a credit card." "You have a credit card?" "I took it from a man who was killed in a traffic accident. Before the police arrived." He ducked his head, looking embarrassed. "I did not charge anything to it," he said quickly. "That would've been wrong. I only wanted it to open doors with, when necessary. It would hardly have done the man any more good." *Jesus!* "Right," Mulder said slowly. "Even you have said there are times when it is necessary to break rules." *Damn. I didn't expect to have it come back at me like this.* "Yeah, uh, just don't let anybody catch you with it, okay?" "Okay." "What are you doing here?" "I have realized you were right. Of course, we must try to find your sister." "Uh, yeah," Mulder said. "Look, there's something else--" "Yes. The bodies in the woods must be found." "What?" "The ones who were hybridized, but who did not survive it. They have been dumped in the woods and set on fire. That's why the forest is burning, because of the bodies on fire. You and the others must find those bodies, too." "Where?" "East of the town. Where the fire was started. Go there." "Easier said than done, Zachary. How the hell am I going to explain a trip out there to my boss? There's nothing in the town that points toward--" "Use this." He handed Mulder a sheet of fax paper with a satellite photo imprinted on it, a photo that showed blackened woods, a burned truck and the body of a little boy. "It is the missing boy," Zachary said. "I regret moving his body from the grave, but I did not want him burned with the others, and so I removed him before the fire caught. Then I put him here, so that the satellite would take his picture when it passed overhead." *Okay, he's weird-looking, but he's either smart as a whip or one sick puppy or both. And sneaky.* Mulder sat down on the bed, and Zachary followed suit. "Zachary," Mulder said slowly, "you'll forgive me for the inference, but how do I know you didn't kill this kid?" "Your partner will be able to tell what killed him, and I did not." "Speaking of my partner, do you know what they did to her, when they took her?" "Not specifically, no. They would have tested her." "Tested her for what?" "To see if she could be hybridized. You were tested, too, when you were very young." *Shit. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck.* "Then why didn't I get one of those implants?" "You were tested before it was known they were needed." "Do the implants turn somebody into a hybrid?" "Oh, no. If someone is strong enough to be a good hybrid, the implant will be placed to restore their memories after the process has taken place. After the change, sometimes people don't remember the skills they had that made them valuable in the first place. And so their knowledge can be retrieved from the implant, so that they don't require retraining." *Oh, Jesus-fucking-Christ.* "What do you mean by 'a good hybrid'? Like you? Are you 'a good hybrid'?" "Ah," Zachary said, smiling his board-stiff smile. "You are worried she will get to be as ugly as me." "I don't think you're ugly. Well, I did at first, but I'm kind of getting used to you now. You're just different. But Scully..." He trailed off helplessly. *Hell, no, I don't want her looking like you.* "Does not need changing," the hybrid supplied. His look was knowing. "I like her the way she is," Mulder agreed. "She would not look like me, when hybridized. She would look the same. Inside, she would be changed." "She doesn't want to be hybridized *at all*. Can it be stopped?" Zachary blinked in momentary confusion. "But it has not started. She has only been tested." "So if we don't do anything, she'll be a hundred percent human?" "Yes, of course." He thought of the MUFON women. "Does the testing sometimes make people sick?" "Oh, yes. It made you very sick." "But I got better. Some people aren't getting better." "If the process is not completed, then they become sick after a while. I have heard that many die." *Shit shit shit.* "So if Scully doesn't become a hybrid, then she'll die?" "Oh," Zachary said, looking troubled. "I see what you mean. I'm not sure. Perhaps I can find out." "Yeah," Scully said from the doorway. "Why don't you see if you can find that out?" Continued in Part 9. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 9 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Violence is essentially wordless, and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down. - Thomas Merton September 16, 1996 Bison, Wyo. She was furious. She'd never been as enraged with anyone in her life as she now was with Mulder--how long had he had this liaison with this...creature? When had it first occurred to him to ask about the implant, about what the people running the project had done to *her*? What else had the thing shared with him that he hadn't bothered to pass on? *Goddammit, how long has he been holding out on me?* Mulder's reaction telegraphed guilt--he vaulted up off the bed as if to be ready to run from trouble. The other thing, the deformed being, just sat there, wide-eyed, seeming stunned. "Scully," Mulder said, "uh, this is Zachary. He's my...brother. Sort of." "Hello," the creature said, his voice soft, pitched low. "Cute," Scully said coldly. "Will you excuse us for a second, please, uh...Zachary?" She gave Mulder a look that meant *right now and no bullshit*, and inclined her head toward her own room. Mulder's look was defensive, a little warning. Scully didn't care. "I'll be back in a minute, Zachary," he said. He followed her and pulled the door to behind them. "Look, Scully--" "Shut up, goddammit. It's my turn. I'm sick of this crap, Mulder. You go running off to do things your way every five minutes--you keep stuff from me and then expect me to just accept your story and bitch about it when I don't. How long have you known about that...that *thing*?" She should have taken a cue from his lack of expression, his too-still body language. If she had, she might've known that she was too far over the edge, and that he was too unnerved to find a way to pull her back. She was too angry to see him. "Since Friday," he said evenly. "He found me the night before we left Philadelphia." "And so in the last day and a half you could have fucking told me at any time?" "You might keep your voice down," Mulder said. "Apparently these walls are paper-thin." "I don't care!" Scully yelled. "Why the hell didn't you tell me?" It inflamed her even more that he wasn't yelling back, wasn't fighting back. He didn't want this fight, but she did--badly. "Because I didn't know if he was for-real. I still don't. And if it turned out he was a plant, I didn't want to lead him to you." "But you knew he would follow you here, didn't you?" "How would I have known that?" "I'm asking the questions, you son of a bitch!" "Scully, calm down." "Don't tell me to calm down!" He took a deep breath, and glanced away, just for a second. And she lost it. She drew her fist back, and in the moment when he looked at her and saw it coming and did nothing to stop it, she hit him, right in the face, with all her strength--with all the power of the fear and rage she'd been living with ever since her abduction. He slammed against the wall with the force of it. And then just stood there, dark eyes wide in pain and shock. She half-expected him to lunge at her and take some revenge, and when she realized that was not his plan, she wished he had. Instead, he just held perfectly still, braced against another blow, and she understood that if she'd intended to beat him to death, he'd have stood there and taken it. *God. Oh, God, what have I done?* Suddenly there was a hammering at the door. Skinner's voice, bellowing her name. Scully dropped her head and stared at the floor, horrified. "If you don't open it, he'll break it down," Mulder said. His voice was muffled. She looked up. He had one hand up to his face. There was blood on his fingers. *My God.* Numbly, she went to the door. "It's all right," she called. "I'm opening the door." Skinner and Westin swept through into the room, guns drawn. "It's my fault," Scully said weakly. "We were having a disagreement--it was entirely my fault." Thank God she had gone to bed wearing sweats for warmth. Mulder had on jeans and a T-shirt, socks. She hoped at least it didn't look like a lovers' quarrel. "Some disagreement," Skinner said, looking at Mulder. "Could somebody please get me some ice?" Mulder said miserably. His nose was bleeding, swollen. *Please, God, don't let it be broken.* Westin grabbed an ice bucket and went out. "I...I hit him," Scully said. "Entirely unprovoked. I just...I lost my temper." "You want to tell me why?" Skinner said. "It hardly seems important now." "Five minutes ago, it was important enough to assault your section chief over it. I'm going to have to ask him if he wants to file a complaint." "No, I'm not going to file a complaint," Mulder said, disgusted. "You should," Scully said. There was a heavy silence. "Talk to me, people," Skinner said. "I'm losing sleep, and I'm likely to get testy." Scully swallowed hard. "I thought he had withheld evidence from me," she said. "I now believe I was mistaken." Skinner glared at Mulder. "Did you?" "Not without cause." "And that cause would be...?" "I wasn't sure it was legitimate. Or even related. Now I think maybe it is, but I didn't know that until today." Westin returned with the ice bucket, went past the three of them to fetch a wash cloth. Mulder wrapped the cloth around some ice and held it to his face, flinching when it touched. "What evidence?" Skinner asked. "I've seen...people like that body in the jail in Sheep's Ridge before," Mulder said carefully. "There was one in that train car in Iowa last year." "The body here," Scully said, "has an implant like the one that was removed from my neck. I found that very...disturbing, and I just...went ballistic. I'm sorry." "Look," Mulder said, "you've had us in cages for five months. I keep expecting people to start throwing peanuts at me through the bars. Are we on edge? Hell, yes. Fuck, yes. Sir. We'll work it out." Scully looked at him, but he was focused on Skinner. *He doesn't really want to work it out--he's just trying to get me off the hook.* The assistant director nodded, clearly not altogether persuaded everything was all right, but willing to let everyone take a time-out and see if that would cure it. "Okay," he said. "Everybody go back to bed. We'll all be calmer in the morning." His tone said, "Or else." Mulder took the ice bucket and returned to his room, closing the door firmly behind him as he went. After Westin and Skinner left, Scully lay down on her bed and cried herself to sleep. **** September 17, 1996 In the morning, Scully figured she owed it to herself and to Mulder to hold her head up and go to breakfast--the only hope of squashing a new round of office gossip about "Mr. and Mrs. Spooky" lay in putting a cool face on it now. Mulder had an evil, painful-looking shiner only partly hidden under his Ray-Bans. He ordered toast and coffee and nibbled listlessly at the toast. Scully went for her usual cereal with skim milk. Westin was kind enough to raise the subject of college football. Scully endured a not-particularly-enthusiastic discussion of whether Texas could beat Notre Dame. Westin thought so; Mulder thought not. Skinner got a telephone call about five minutes into the conversation. After he hung up the cell phone, he looked at the three of them and said, "We're not leaving. The missing kid's body has been found." Mulder said nothing. "Where?" Scully asked. "A few miles east of Sheep's Ridge. We'll head out there as soon we've eaten. Pick up the chopper at the same place as yesterday." That put the kibosh on any more football talk, and they all finished eating in a morose silence. Just outside the restaurant door, Skinner stopped and sent Westin to warm up the car. Then he looked Mulder and Scully up and down, and said, "Okay, I'm going to give you two exactly ten minutes to get straight with each other. And then you go to work. If you can't work together, I need a reasonable-sounding explanation of why not." "That won't be necessary, sir," Mulder said. His voice sounded dead. "See to it," Skinner rapped out. "Yes, sir," they said, in unison. The assistant director followed Westin across the parking lot. Scully waited until she was sure he was out of earshot. She stared at the pavement; she couldn't look at Mulder. "What I did last night was unforgivable," she said. "I know...about your father. Your friend Jannie told me." "Okay," Mulder said, his tone cold and hard. "He wants us to get straight--by God, we'll get straight. You don't hit me, Scully; it's not allowed. Not ever, not for any reason. And saying you're sorry is not enough. My dad was always sorry, too. Next time, goddammit, I *will* file a complaint." He waited a beat, then said, "Do not test me on that." "How do I make this up to you?" she asked, miserably. "You leave it the fuck alone. I need some time to cool off." "Okay," she whispered. "Now, for your information, I remain unpersuaded that Zachary is exactly what he says he is. I need to know what happened to that kid--I need to know if Zachary lied about that. I didn't ask him about the implants when I met him in Philadelphia because until you told me the body out here had an implant I didn't make the connection. Zachary told me Klemper put him together from scratch back in the '70s, using genetic material taken from volunteers like my mother. There was no reason for me to connect that with you." "I understand." "So get off my back about Zachary, tell me what killed that kid, and everything will be fine. Does that work for you, Agent Scully?" "Yes, sir." "Good. Let's go." **** So much worse than she had thought. In the chopper, on the way to the site where the body had been found, the situation gnawed at Scully continually. Mulder had never expressly, overtly pulled rank on her before--sure, he was technically her section chief, but up to now he had wielded that authority rarely and indifferently, as if he thought it would be just too damned much trouble to give her orders. He had certainly asked for and listened to her honest opinion more often than any other superior she'd ever had, and had usually respected her right to disagree with him. Now, with seven words, all that had gone right out the window. *Does that work for you, Agent Scully?* She wished again that he had hit her back. It would've been so much cleaner, so much easier to heal. If nothing else, his behavior the night before cleared up one thing--why he was always getting sucker-punched in a brawl. He didn't want to believe anybody would really hit him. He'd let that split second go by, give the other person every possible chance not to do it, and in the process, inevitably let some scumbag get the first shot in. Oh, he was perfectly capable of getting back into the fight once he'd been popped, but take the first swing? Mulder? Not likely. Now he was keeping his distance from her--needed his distance, so he'd said--not looking at her, staying always a few feet away from her, in the car, now in the chopper. Scully suspected that, in fact, it was not distance he needed, but rather a tenderness that he could actually believe in. But she doubted he would trust any comfort she offered. She wondered whether his father had ever given him a hug to try to make up for causing him pain. *We'll never be the same,* she thought. *He'll never really trust me again.* The hell of it was, she wasn't sure why she had done it. She'd never struck someone in anger that way before. In self-defense, sure. But she'd never really wanted to hurt someone, and there was no getting around it--she had *wanted* to do Mulder damage. Yes, she'd been tired, on edge. Yes, she'd been plagued by anxiety and the stress of trying to unravel the meaning of events over the last few months. But she'd been stressed out and fatigued time and again in her life, and it had never made her want to hurt anybody. What the hell had come over her? She couldn't fathom it. And that, more than anything, made her afraid of what was to come. **** Big Horn National Forest Twelve miles east of Sheep's Ridge, Wyo. The smell here was even worse than in the town. This was the stench of mass death, heavily overlaced with the sweet smell of wood smoke and the acrid tang of burned grass and gasoline. Ashes lay everywhere among the charred trees. A thousand yards from the clearing where the chopper landed, Scully saw twisted metal--some kind of structure that had gone to the flames. "Jesus," Westin said. "What happened here?" "Do we have a photo of the kid?" Mulder asked. Wordlessly, Skinner passed it to him. Mulder glanced at it and handed it to Scully without looking at her. Handsome boy--blond with bright blue eyes, with the kind of long, sweet eyelashes that had made girls in Scully's high school swoon. Bridges, the local sheriff, stood beside a burned-out all-terrain vehicle, its tires now hardened puddles of melted rubber. The boy lay a few feet from the truck, his legs bent at the knees, head leaned back. It didn't take rocket science to see that the body had been moved there after the fire--no burns. Scully did a quick examination and noticed that he had dirt in his nose, mouth and eyes. He'd been buried somewhere, then exhumed. And the pose did look like someone had carried him to his present location. Quietly she relayed that to Mulder, who stood over her, looking down at the boy. She felt behind the neck, then frowned, lifted him to look. "He had an implant," she said, feeling suddenly a little light-headed. "But it's been removed. Recently, from the look of it." Mulder nodded, staring into the distance. "They didn't want us to find it. Any sign of violence?" "Nothing overt. I need to get him to a decent lab to be sure, but this looks like a massive vascular collapse. It could have been chemically induced, or it could be the result of disease." "Rapidly progressive glomerular disease, for example?" The kidney disease Mulder'd had as a child, which Zachary had said he'd contracted because of the tests Klemper had conducted. "It's one possibility, yes." Mulder nodded. "I'm going to have a look around." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him head for the metal structure, occasionally sifting the ashes on the ground with his foot to see what lay underneath. Scully looked again at the boy's body as Westin and Halstead slipped it into a bag. The kid had needle tracks in his arm--the kind left by a long-term IV. Something green, dried now, had oozed out of the opening in his skin. Scully made a mental note but didn't touch it. She'd need a respirator when she did the post-mortem on this one. Then she heard Mulder, his voice low and sick, say, "Oh, shit." She looked up. He had drifted behind the remains of the metal building, up onto a curving mound of burned dirt. Scully got to her feet. "Mulder?" she said. "What is it?" She saw his shoulders drop in resignation. Whatever it was, it was bad. "You'd better come have a look at this, Scully," he called. "Brace yourself." She climbed up the mound, Skinner right behind her, and then stood there stunned, staring. "Mother of God," Scully said. Below, in a shallow trench, were fifteen, maybe twenty bodies, sprawled out as if they had been dumped there from the top of the mound. Some had been incinerated down to skeletons, others still had seared flesh clinging to their bones. Two, a little ways apart from the others, were naked and singed but mostly intact. "What the fucking hell," the A.D. said. "Good question," Mulder said. Continued in Part 10. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 10 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Infinitely more important than the answers are the questions, the choice of them, the inner form of them. - Oswald Spengler Transcript of interview with subject Mulder, Laura E. 6/25/96 Tape #AB286555 "The vaccinations started in 1956. In fact, I was one of the first to get one. Victor had-- "Sorry, yes, Victor Klemper, I meant. I was working with him in the old Newton Hospital in Boston, a few years before I married. I was an office manager, supervising the records clerks who kept track of all the entries and tissue samples from Florida, Georgia and Alabama. Victor said that the samples were only going to be used in case of a nuclear disaster, to identify victims. But I knew it wasn't true. Sometimes a sample would come up missing, and I always knew I could find it in his lab. He would take them before they went to storage, and sometimes by the time I located them and shipped them, they'd have an augmented file attached. "What was in the augmented files? I don't know. We were never to look at them. You have to remember how secret this all was--we were told that to speak of it to anyone was treason. But augmented files were thicker--they had more documents in them. That's all I know. "So it was clear to me that Victor was using those samples for something--I just never knew quite what it was he was doing with them... "Of course, I knew about the UFO that crashed near Roswell. I was there with Shelby Bateman when the survivors were brought in to the Air Force Base. At first I thought they were grays like the earlier ones--they looked like grays. But then Shelby said something about one that could convert itself to a fluid--he said it had almost sunk a navy ship. And he said these were like that one, only they had been stuck in a form that looked like the grays... "I got paid by the hospital, not the government. ... Yes, I do know what you're saying, but my checks had the name of the hospital on them, and they were signed by the hospital director. We all knew we were working for the Department of Defense, but none of the paperwork was ever identified that way. Shelby said that the consolidation of the war and navy departments into the Defense Department came about because of the alien threat..." **** September 17, 1996 Bison, Wyo. "I believe I'd like to know what's going on now," Skinner said. Scully heard the strain it cost him to keep his voice even--to state, not to command. She could see that the A.D. was tired, sick inside at what they had found in the forest. They all were. Even Mulder, bruised face still concealed behind the sunglasses, seemed too horrified even to open his mouth. Scully knew all too well that Mulder did not get the horrors easily. They had returned to the hotel after the bodies that could be readily separated from each other had been bagged and removed. There were still more in the trench, but some would need careful handling, and Scully had not wanted to take the risk of rushing the process, misidentifying body parts. It had been harrowing, awful work. The three of them were covered in ashes; their clothes reeked of burned flesh and gasoline. She was mildly surprised when Mulder just said, "Okay." Skinner was surprised, too--he crooked an eyebrow at Mulder. "But I think we need to get these bodies to the nearest lab and find out whatever we can about what killed them first," Mulder went on. "You know how our evidence tends to disappear--let's move now, before anybody upstairs knows we were here and what we found. Scully can work on the autopsies, and I'll fill you in on what we've got so far." Scully swallowed. These were not autopsies she was eager to do. Mulder went on, "And that'd give us a couple of hours on the road to do a little consulting and consolidating with each other. We need to do a quick review ourselves, and get organized. I don't know about Scully, but I'm suffering from cerebral overload. This thing's got more moving parts than a fucking aircraft carrier." "All right," Skinner said. "We'll pack it up and head back to Butte regional." Mulder nodded. "Look," he said, "you might as well know right now that we don't have the kind of case you're going to be able to sell up the chain of command. For one thing, we don't know yet where the money's coming from to finance this...operation." Skinner straightened his tie. "Why don't you let me worry about what I can sell up the chain of command, Agent Mulder?" Mulder shrugged. "Fine," he said evenly. Scully suspected Mulder would have liked to object, but she doubted any of them had the strength left to argue with each other. "One more thing," Mulder said. "If it's all right with you, sir, I'd like to invite agents Westin, Halstead and Tannett to join us. And R.D. Whitman." "You're kidding," Scully said, stunned. She'd have said Mulder was about as likely to go public as to dye his hair purple. "No. Look, we need to start distributing this information around. As it is, one man in this room with a Saturday night special could blow the whole goddamned case and still have enough bullets left to rob a convenience store. And if we're going to pursue it much farther, Scully and I need some freedom of movement--we need not to be the only targets on the range. The more of us there are who know, the less likely it is any one of us will get gunned down in an alley somewhere." Skinner considered this. Then he nodded. "All right," he said. "We'll share the risk." **** September 18, 1996 Northwest Regional Headquarters Federal Bureau of Investigation Butte, Mont. Scully started with the boy who'd been found in the forest. He'd been the easiest to identify. His body was in a sealed room, and she had to step through a telescoping plastic tunnel into an environment suit so that she never would be exposed to any pathogens the body might harbor. She stood over him, with her stomach in knots, then cut him open. And then, because she couldn't vomit in the suit, she'd had to back out of the room and hurry to the nearest sink. Basically, the boy simply had no internal organs left. She took a few minutes to compose herself, then returned to the corpse. She took samples of the fluid inside the body and examined what she could. She wasn't surprised to find two hard, spongy masses where his kidneys had been--red blood cell casts that had formed in the glomeruli. Just as Mulder had guessed, part of what had killed this boy was the same disease he had mysteriously contracted in his youth. It was whatever Victor Klemper had miraculously cured. But obviously, that was not all of it. Mulder had not had his innards reduced to mush. There was no sign of the implant, just the incision where it had been removed. The kid was too young to have a smallpox vaccination scar; if he had been genetically tagged, Scully didn't know where to look for it. She took tissue samples from around the incision where the implant had been removed, hoping it might be there. Then she took a scraping of the greenish material she had seen on his arm and sent the samples off to the lab down the hall with the appropriate warnings about how to handle them safely. On the autopsy report, she wrote: "Preliminary findings suggest casue of death as complete collapse of physiological function as a result of sudden, acute degeneration of vital organs, including brain, lungs, heart and gastro-intestinal organs. This degeneration is similar to that experienced by victims of hemorrhagic illnesses. The agent of said degeneration may be chemical, viral or bacteriological." She looked up from her laptop and wondered how Mulder was doing with his dog-and-pony show. Then she climbed back into the suit and went to the body of the hybrid they had found in the jail in Sheep's Ridge. **** "Okay," Mulder said. "The obligatory preface goes like this: 'I know how crazy this is going to sound.' Hell, you boys don't call me 'Spooky' for nothing." A subdued, nervous chuckle went around the room. Mulder didn't smile--his face hurt when he smiled, and besides, the "Spooky" thing wasn't all that funny to him. Halstead, Tannett and Whitman looked expectant, wary. Mulder shrugged. He had decided to work the timeline backward, start with the stuff the others in the room had seen for themselves--there wasn't much of it, but what there was would lend credence to the rest. And he had decided to stick to the evidence rather than lead them along to his own theory about why things had happened. He planned not to use the words "alien," "UFO," "EBE" or "extraterrestrial" any more than absolutely necessary. "I believe the bodies in the forest have been genetically altered," he said. "I believe Agent Scully's post mortems will confirm that. At least two of the victims in Wyoming had implants like the one placed in Agent Scully's neck when she was abducted..." He told them about the creature on the train in Iowa. About Krycek's story of the oil-based alien. "Like I said, 'I know how crazy that sounds.' But given Agent Krycek's testimony, I find the presence of so many oil jugs at the scene in Sheep's Ridge--and the absence of any normal residents in the area--uh, intriguing." *Fucking fascinating.* He told them about the DAT tape. The bodies in the refrigerator car in New Mexico, with their lurid vaccination scars. The files in the mine shaft, what Higginbotham and Klemper had said about their work. He told them about Purity Control, the clones, the retrovirus. "I think it's fairly clear," he said, "that something on this massive a scale would require government participation. Government funding, as well, I suspect, though I can't pinpoint the source of the funding at this time." Then he shut up. That was enough, he figured, to get them going. A moment of deafening silence. Whitman, Westin and Tannett were frowning; Halstead just looked stunned. *Not buying it,* Mulder thought. *Sorry, Zachary--I don't think it's gonna work. The smokescreen the government's laid on is just too thick.* And, then, to Mulder's everlasting astonishment, Skinner got to his feet and described the UFO that had landed on Martha's Vineyard in April. Verified the existence of the DAT tape, and said that Albert Hosteen had corroborated the story about the bodies in the refrigerator car. He told them about the hybrid body in the jail in Sheep's Ridge. In the silence that followed that, Westin piped up. "I saw that UFO, too--my whole team did. It was real." *At least I won't be alone in the loony bin,* Mulder thought. Silence yet again. And then Whitman, the northwest regional director, said, "So...what do we do now?" Skinner shot a look at Mulder. *This is your show, hotdog.* Mulder shrugged again. "Until we know what killed those people, we don't really know what we're up against. What we do now is wait for Agent Scully." *And now that we've hung ourselves out to dry, I hope to hell she finds something.* **** Mulder never thought Scully really looked bad--even grunged out in sweats, even when she wasn't feeling well or hadn't showered, she had an ethereal internal beauty. But when he walked into the morgue that night, she looked as bad as he had ever seen her. She sat with her shoulders hunched over her laptop, her pose exhausted, as if merely sitting up was almost too much effort to be borne. He thought she was paler than she'd been in a coma, and it seemed to him some of the light and fire had gone out of her. "Bad, huh?" he said softly. She drew a long breath. "I sent some fluid samples for analysis," she said wearily. "It'll be an hour or two more." He nodded. "There's one from the forest that was normal," she said. "Except for the external charring from the fire and the shrapnel through his brain." She held up an X-ray that showed a skull with a bright, sharp sliver of metal embedded in the bone. "Ouch," Mulder said, looking at it. "That would hurt." "Not for long. And it probably saved him from ever knowing about the fire." "Uh. I see your point." "The one from the town jail died of radiation poisoning." Mulder looked up. "He didn't have any radiation burns." "No. And he should've, and I don't know why he didn't. But he died of cerebral radiation syndrome. He got a high enough dose to kill him within a few hours, likely more than three-thousand rads." "So he would've lived long enough to walk away from where the body that did have burns was, long enough to get back into the building." "Yes." "Huh." "You think that means something?" "No. Just trying to put together a sequence of events, that's all. What about the one that was outside? Did he die of radiation poisoning, too?" She nodded. "Of course, he would've died of the burns, eventually, but he'd had such a massive dose of radiation that there no hope anyway. What are you thinking?" *I'm thinking you don't want to talk about the little boy for some reason.* "I'm thinking the hybrid killed a morph, and the other guy just got in the way." She considered this. "Maybe. But that doesn't explain the oil. I found traces of oil in his nose and throat, by the way." Mulder thought of Krycek's description of the oil-alien slithering out of his nose, mouth and eyes. "Ugh," he said. "You're telling me all these people died in a way that wouldn't be my first choice." "There's more," she said softly, and he thought, now, at last, she would tell him about the kid. But she didn't. "The hybrid in the jail had internal organs that are at least roughly humanoid. But its blood is green, like the morphs' blood. And several cancer-like growths appear on the lungs, liver and kidneys." She took another long breath. "Only I don't think these 'cancers' are pathological. I think they're supposed to be there--it's as if, for this creature, they're normal. The ones on the lungs were almost like a fish's gills." "Like Secare--he would've been able to breathe underwater. Like the ones in the tanks in the warehouse." Scully nodded. "I think the ones on the kidneys probably serve as filters of some kind; they're almost like auxiliary kidneys, probably filtering something besides normal human body waste. I haven't figured out what the ones on the liver might be able to do." "Damn," Mulder said suddenly, as the connection snapped together in his mind. "The son of a bitch on that train in Iowa was telling the truth--they *are* a weapon." Scully blinked in confusion. Mulder said, "They can breathe underwater; their bodies can process toxins ours can't. The guy stuck in the train car with me said the Japanese were trying to build an army of these things. Soldiers that could withstand radiation and poison gas. And Zachary said the hybrids were designed to fight for us against the morphs." He could see in her eyes that she got it. "Klemper and the Consortium were building an army of these things to fight off the aliens," she said. "Right, so they genetically tag and test everybody and his dog, and then they wait for the right moment to call up the troops, which apparently is right now--" "And for the MUFON women, it went wrong somehow. The extraneous organs got triggered somehow before they were meant to, and-- Oh, my God." "What?" Mulder asked. She had gone paler still. "I think it's still going wrong." Continued in Part 11. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 2 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. - Francis Bacon September 18, 1996 Butte, Mont. "Say so now if you don't want to know what your kidneys would've been like if Klemper'd had the chance to finish what he was up to," Scully said, her tone dire. *So now,* Mulder thought. He held his hand out, and she gave him a photo--black-and-white, thankfully, but with the stark clarity only a police photo could boast. There was just enough left to vaguely make out the rough bean shape of the original organs, but they were ringed by cauliflower-like growths protruding from masses of gray, gelatinous goo. "What am I looking at?" he asked. "What does this mean?" "See this black material, here?" He nodded. "That's what's called a CBC cast. It's blood that has...well, you can think of it as curdled blood." He grimaced. "Do I have to?" She went on, apparently undeterred by having grossed him out. "That's what causes the kidneys to fail in RPGD--the tiny blood vessels that make up the glomeruli get clogged up with these casts." She pointed at the photo. "That's one of the little boy's kidneys. And the rest of him was worse. There's not much left. Just...fluids. Most of the ones we found in the trench are like that." He got it. "They tried to hybridize these people, and it didn't work. So then they burned the bodies to get rid of the evidence." "Like the leper colony in West Virginia." "Shit," Mulder said. Angry, and needing movement to release his anger, he got up, paced across the room. "The fucking bastards." He sighed heavily. "We've got to stop them, Scully. Before they turn us all into something inhuman." "That's exactly what we can't do!" He heard something shrill in her tone, and whipped around, suddenly defensive, suddenly awash in an irresistible, primal terror. He'd heard that shrill note in her voice last night, too, and hadn't taken it seriously enough. This time she noticed his alarm, and dropped her head, struggling to hold on to her composure. He held a moment of silence while she tightened her grip on herself. His heart was galloping; he did not want to go through another violent episode with her. Didn't want to hit her back--and this time, he knew he would, if she pushed him. "Why not?" he said harshly. "Mulder, I know you don't want to hear this, but I'm sor--" "Say what's on your mind, dammit. Stay over there where you are, and just say it. That's what this was about last night, anyway, wasn't it? Just get it out, damn you!" Quietly she said, "Think about how many people they tested. Apparently a lot of them are either going to be hybridized, or they're going to die if they're not." That was it--the thing she'd been aiming at when she'd hit him--that she was facing a choice between becoming something like Zachary or dying in agony of cancer. It wasn't fair, and he knew it must be a terrifying, infuriating thing to have to look in the eye. Understanding didn't help, though--the little-boy panic that had caught him up seemed to flow out from his bones and muscles, involuntarily. He fought to hang onto his own cool now--she needed him to understand what she was feeling, and he needed to end the incident peacefully, one way or the other, so that he'd know there didn't have to be pain between them. She went on, "If we stop it, how many will die? Do we really have the right to do that?" "There's a way to prevent that," Mulder said, between his teeth. "I know there is because Klemper found a way to stop it for me. We just have to figure out what it is." He went for the door, the fear in his blood drowning him, desperate to escape. He was light-headed with it. As he got out into the hall, he heard her call, "Mulder, wait." But he didn't stop. **** She found him at the hotel, hours later, after the results had come back from the lab. This time there was no connecting door, so she had to stand out in the hallway and knock, painfully conscious that someone might hear. "Mulder," she called softly, "are you up?" He opened the door a crack, and said, "I'm not feeling very well, Scully. Go away." "Are you sick?" "I have a headache. I'm going to sleep." He pushed on the door, trying to close it, but she put her hand out to stop him. "Did you take some aspirin?" "No. I'm going to bed. I'll be fine." She inclined her head, glaring. "Mulder, don't make me call 911." He sighed and stepped away to let her in. "I'm not kidding, Scully. I feel like shit. Leave me alone." He had his shoulders hunched up a little, as if he were braced against a blow. For the first time, she could see the bruise on his face without the sunglasses. It was black and purple; his eye had swollen shut. It hurt Scully just to look at it. "I'm a doctor, remember?" she said, struggling to keep her tone light. "Where does it hurt?" "In my head," he said, his tone suggesting, *well, duh.* "Sit down." "Why?" He wasn't backing away, but it was clear from his pose that he would've liked to, however subconsciously. *God, he really is afraid of me.* Sometimes the brutalized 12-year-old he had once been came very near his surface; now Scully could see that child and all his pain and terror very clearly. Softly, she said, "Because I can't reach your head unless you sit down." "It's just a headache, for God's sake. I'm not having a stroke." Her turn to sigh. "Look, I need to say this, whether you want to hear it or not. I'm sorry I hit you. It was wrong of me, and I wish like anything I could take it back, but I can't. I know you're angry and hurt and afraid, and you have every right to be. I want very much to make it up to you, and I know that's hard for you, to let me. And I don't have any right to demand it of you, so if you really want me to leave, I'll go." He looked so sad, staring at the floor, his mouth held in a tight line. He didn't say anything, but after a moment, he went over and sat down on the bed. Scully closed her eyes briefly, let herself have a moment of relief--he wanted to heal the wound between them as much as she did. "Do you have some aspirin?" she asked. "Advil," he whispered. "In my shaving kit." "I'll get it." She laid her hand lightly on his head; he flinched hard at the touch but didn't pull away, and she left her hand there for a moment before she went for the pills and a glass of water. He swallowed the capsules, then said softly, "I don't want to hurt you back." "Do you really think you would?" "I did my Dad," he said miserably. "Do you want tell me?" He leaned his head back, trying to release tension in the muscles in his neck. Scully reached and held the back of his head, massaged his neck lightly. "You've got a muscle knot the size of a walnut here," she said. "No wonder you've got a headache. Can you feel that?" "Uh, yeah." "Try to let go of it." There was a silence while she rubbed steadily, gently. "He was always pretty quick to pop me one," Mulder said. "Usually he didn't hit me very hard, just kind of slap me upside the head so it startled me more than hurt." Scully kept rubbing, kneading the hard, tight muscles between her thumb and fingers. "After Samantha...after she was gone, he was drinking a lot, and that was when he really started on me." Scully took his shoulders in her hands and started rolling them up and down in a circular motion. She saw the tight place between his eyebrows relax. "Oh, that feels good," he said. "But he was remorseful afterward," she prompted gently. "Always swore he'd never do it again. But I knew he couldn't stop himself. The worst was, I'd have those nightmares and wake up screaming, and I couldn't help it, but that just drove him crazy. Once he yanked me out of bed by the throat, and he was shaking me with one hand and punching me with the other. And he was screaming, 'you're the lucky one.' I thought he was going to kill me." He was trembling. "I got so I'd pretend to sleep when I was staying with him, to make sure I didn't dream." Scully stopped massaging. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him. Muffled against her collarbone, he said, "I'm sorry. I'll stop." "Not unless you want to," she said. "I just really need to hold you right now." He was quiet for a moment, leaning on her. Then he whispered, "I know I should've told someone. But I never did. My mom would have made it so I'd never see him again. I couldn't have stood it." Scully couldn't imagine what it must've been like--to love someone so much that terrible beatings would have been preferable to not being with him at all. God knew she had loved her father, but she couldn't imagine. "When I was sixteen, I made him stop," Mulder whispered. "I stayed with him over spring break, and he'd wailed on me with that goddamned belt three nights in a row. The next night he came at me, and I said, 'you're not doing this to me anymore.' And he was too drunk to know what I was saying, and he just kept coming. So I hit him. "I think I must've been running about ninety percent adrenaline. He just got all this rage, right in the face. I broke two fingers and didn't even feel it until the next day. Broke his jaw, knocked him right through the plate glass window, flat on his butt out on the deck. He was in the hospital a week with a ruptured disk in his back. I just left him there and walked home to my mom's house in Chilmark." *Ten miles.* "He never really touched me again, after that," Mulder said. "Not until that night when I thought he was killed, and God--I was so out of it, I'm not even sure that was real." Scully heard it in his voice--not just that Bill hadn't ever hit again. He hadn't ever *touched* him again. Not a hug or a handshake or a pat on the back. God, how that must have ached. *You mounted a heroic self-defense, and he used that against you, too.* She rubbed his back. "That's not going to happen with us, Mulder," she said softly. "I'm not going to hit you again. You're not going to have to hurt me, and I won't turn you away just for defending yourself." He was trembling again. "I want it to be like that," he said. "It is like that. I know it's hard for you to trust it and feel it all the way down to your bones, but in your head you know. All the times we've depended on each other when there was nobody else; all the things we've risked for each other and endured for each other." "Why did you hit me?" She sensed that he desperately needed some reason. "Because I was afraid, and thinking that you knew things you weren't telling me made me feel very alone and vulnerable. And then you looked away. Just for a second, and it was...it was as if you just weren't paying attention. I wanted to get your attention." "I didn't mean to make you feel that way," he whispered. "I know. And even if you had, you didn't deserve to be popped in the face for it. It was unforgivable." "I forgive you." She had felt him start to relax. "Why don't you lie down now and try to rest? Is your headache any better?" "No," he sighed. "Lie down. I'll rub your back some more," she said. "You just need to relax, that's all." "I'm not sure I can." He stretched out on the bed, facing away from her. Scully sat down beside him and massaged gently, rhythmically. Despite his protestation, he was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes. Scully left him snoring softly through his battered, swollen nose. Continued in Part 12. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 12 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events not of words. Trust movement. - Alfred Adler September 19, 1996 Redding, Calif. "This town," the morph said, in a tone that brooked no resistance. Tom Corvin drew a long breath. The idea was crazy--Redding had a population of more than 150,000. It was a far cry from the gradual ramping-up of the process that had been the plan all along. It was a long jump from processing a couple of hundred people in a remote area like Sheep's Ridge, Wyo. Processing Redding, Calif., would require massive coordination. "I'm not getting through to you somehow," Corvin said to the morph. "Look, we're not ready to take on an operation this big. You're going to create a panic." The morph glared. "You are delaying unnecessarily. Why?" "If we push too hard, people will flee. They'll go into hiding. They'll--" "Let them," the morph said. "There is nowhere for them to go. We will wait no longer. It is to be done. Here, in this town. You will start immediately." Corvin sighed. *Maybe it's for the best. They'll take a lot more for their side, but so will we, for ours. Maybe we should just get it over with.* "All right," he said. "I'll assemble the team." He turned to pick up the phone, but the morph said harshly, "There is more." Corvin faced it again, barely able to conceal his revulsion for the thing he was pretending to cooperate with. "You have made half-humans," it said. "One has killed a member of the Warrior Circle." "I don't know what you're talking about," Corvin said. Half-true--he didn't know about the dead morph in Wyoming. "This will stop," the morph said. "We were content to allow it at first, but no more. We will have no more of ours separated from the Circles. We will permit no half-humans. Such as there are must be destroyed. Do you understand?" This could be useful. Corvin had been looking for a way to get Bateman out of federal clutches--he was one of only four people who knew where The Five were being hidden, and Corvin had been having nightmares about what might happen if Bateman somehow were persuaded to talk. "The orders have been given," Corvin said. "If you want to change the arrangements now, I'll need help to carry out your wishes." The morph considered. "What help?" "I need Bateman. Some of his people only answer to him. Can you get him back for me?" "He can destroy the half-humans?" "Yes." The morph turned to leave. "He will be restored to you." Then it was gone. Corvin looked out the window at the lights of Redding and wondered how many of its residents could be saved. **** Butte, Mont. "Here," Mulder whispered. "Take this." He handed Scully an airline ticket. They were standing just outside the departure lounge, waiting for a flight back to D.C. that had been delayed because of weather. It had started to snow heavily outside, and Skinner was pacing restlessly back and forth, chafing at the wait. "I've already got my ticket," Scully said. "We're not going to D.C.," Mulder said. "What are you talking about?" "We've got to get to Boston, Scully. The old Newton hospital." She blinked in confusion, then got it. The hospital where Mulder had been treated for RPGD. Where Klemper had done...whatever it was he had done. "You think there's anything left there to find?" "Doubtful. But who knows? There's always something left when you move out of an apartment--closing down a hospital is a lot bigger move than that, so they might've overlooked something. And this could be our last chance to find out." He was right about that. Skinner was ready to take Higginbotham at least to court--nobody'd actually said what the arrangements might be, but the unspoken presumption was that she and Mulder would be stashed away in some kind of safe house. Stuck there, they'd never get away. "And when we're done in Boston, I want to rent a car and go back to that mine in West Virginia." He arched an eyebrow dramatically. "We've got to move, Scully--my Visa gold card expires the end of this month." She thought about saying no, or at least trying to. But the truth was, it was such a relief to be back in Mulder's confidence again that she knew perfectly well she would go along with it. Nuts--he was nuts, and she was nuts, too, for not simply wrestling him to the ground and handcuffing him to something for his own protection. She glanced at Skinner. "He's going to be seriously pissed," she said. "If we find something, he'll get over it pretty quick. Besides, what's the worst he can do--shoot us?" Mulder shrugged. "I've been shot before." They started easing down the hall, toward another gate where people had lined up to board a flight to Boston via Chicago. As if they were just stretching their legs, or hunting for someplace to get coffee. It ran through Scully's mind that she was about to get separated from her luggage, which was tagged for D.C. The crowd waiting for the Washington flight now stood between them and the gate for the Boston flight. Mulder sauntered up, handed over his boarding pass, with Scully right behind them. If Skinner or Westin noticed they were gone until after it was too late, Scully couldn't tell it. **** September 20, 1996 Boston, Mass. Mulder had said the locals called Newton Hospital "bedlam," and Scully could see why when they arrived. Built of solid concrete, it had few windows and looked like a bunker. Long rust lines extended from the roof down the sides of the drab, gray concrete. Everything about it shouted "institution." It had been closed for ten years, the property taken over by the city for nonpayment of taxes, and pretty much had been left to rot ever since. Only the emergency room was in use--a free clinic had opened up there, sponsored by a charitable organization called "All Brothers." They decided to go in through the clinic--though they'd hoped to get in and out without attracting any notice, there were too many people around to try a break-in. As Mulder and Scully walked in, early that morning, about twenty people were waiting in a reception lounge that had five chairs. Scully mentally categorized them--diabetes here, hugely pregnant there, guy who could hardly hold his head up probably in the early stages of AIDS. A bloody handprint on the wall next to a poster in Spanish advised against reusing needles. They walked up to a grimy wooden counter, where a pudgy, older woman held court with a lanky teen-age girl whose blond, indifferently clean hair sported a bright blue stripe. The older woman looked the two agents up and down, then crooked an eyebrow at Mulder. "Which part of the alphabet are you two?" she said. "Excuse me?" Scully asked. "DEA? INS? CDC?" "FBI," Mulder said, falling into her cadence. He flashed his badge. "Whoa," the teen-ager said. She cracked her gum. "*Serious* cops." "Who's in charge here?" Mulder said. The older woman sighed. "Dr. Monsho, but she's delivering a baby." She hooked a thumb at Mulder. "Unless you're the father, you'll have to wait." "Look, we're not really interested in the clinic," Scully said. "Well, in case you hadn't noticed, there's nothing else here." "We'd like to take a look at the rest of the building," Mulder said. "Can we get into it from here?" "Are you kidding? We've got all the doors bolted against the rats. And if I were you, I'd get a rabies series before you go in there." The teen-ager leaned forward, chewing furiously on her gum. "Is there, like, some major serial killer hiding out back there?" Scully started to say no, but Mulder beat her to it. "I'm afraid we're not at liberty to say," he said coolly. "Shut up, Hosanna," the older woman said to the girl. She glared at Mulder. "Just what is it you're looking for?" "We just want to take a look at the old administration suite." "And the pathology lab," Scully put in. "Really, we don't want to be any bother to you. If you have a key, you could just let us borrow it for an hour or so. That's all." The woman sighed again. She rummaged in a drawer under the counter. "Well, I think you're wasting your time--there's nothing back there but dust and cockroaches." She produced a key, pointed toward a double door secured with a heavy chain and a padlock. "And if you find any fire code violations, you can take *that* up with the city." **** Inside, the building was dark as a tomb and smelled of mildew, wet carpet and urine. Mulder flipped on his flashlight and noticed some small, brown pellets on the floor. "Bad news, Scully," he said softly. "She wasn't kidding about the rats." He shined the flashlight around in a circle. Nothing about the place really looked familiar, but he had a feeling--an itchy sense that told him he had been in this place before. Just that vague sense, like the near-inaudible sound of something breathing in the shadows of his mind. On board the spacecraft that had landed on Martha's Vineyard, he had simply wandered along the wisps of his own memory to navigate to the right place. It had worked then; maybe it would work again. He stood still for a moment, let his deja vu coalesce. "This way," he whispered, going purposefully off down a hallway to the right. "Are you sure?" Scully asked, following. "Did you remember something?" "Not exactly." "What does that mean?" "It means I don't know." "Well, that explains it," she said dryly. "Do you have any idea what we're looking for?" "None." He stopped, a red-and-white plastic sign screwed into the concrete wall catching his attention. He went over to the sign, blew dust off it, then coughed. The sign read, "Authorized personnel only." "However," he said, "I think I'd like to start here." "As good a place as any," Scully agreed. He tried the knob. Locked. Mulder withdrew his wallet from a pocket and ran his Visa card into the space between the door and the jamb, jiggled until the door swung open. "Don't leave home without it," he murmured, and stepped into an office. There was some sparse, old furniture remaining--a metal desk painted institutional sea green, its top thick with dust, a wooden chair on casters wound with cobwebs. Behind the desk, another door, with another sign. "Buzz for entry." Again Mulder tried the knob. This one turned and opened, which led him to believe there probably was nothing to find. But when he shined the flashlight in, the scrabbling at the back of his mind suddenly got louder. The room was huge, nearly the length and breadth of a basketball court. Two stairs led up into it. When Mulder went in, his steps sounded hollow on a wooden floor. He turned, training the light. The mental flash was blinding when it came--a blast of intense, vivid memory. Bright lights overhead and a hundred humming, whirring machines with rows of little blinking, colored indicator lights. Boxes of cards, sheets of green-ruled paper chunking through big impact printers. Tape drives, keypunch machines. For a split second, he could see them as clearly as if they were all still there. "Computers," he murmured. "This room was full of computer equipment." "Yeah," Scully said softly. "That's what the raised floor was for." He looked down. She was right--back in the days of big mainframes, cables had run under floors that were raised to accommodate them. But now there was no sign of the tape drives and printers and terminals, just a couple of abandoned keypunch machines in the far back corner. Mulder went to them. "What the hell are these things?" Scully muttered, looking at them. "O ye innocent child of Macintosh," he said. He explained. "The cards go in here, and holes are punched according to what keys you push, and they run through that track and come out the other side. I think they shined a light through to read them, or something like that." "Oh," she said. "Punch cards. I've heard of that." She reached past him and pulled out some that had been left in the machine's outgoing bin. "Do you know how to read these?" she asked, turning her flash light on them. "Right, and I learned to drive in a Model T," Mulder drawled. He took the cards from her, looked to see if there were any more, then stuck them in the inside pocket of his jacket. "Probably a bill for somebody's gall-bladder operation twenty years ago," he said. He shrugged. "Let's see what other wonders of medical history this place holds." They went back out into the hall. The next door had an "authorized personnel only" sign, too, and it led to a room nearly as large as the computer room, but with no raised floor and full of large wooden tables. One whole wall was covered with wooden pigeonhole boxes, like rows and rows of interoffice mailboxes. Mulder didn't get any mental flashes out of this one. "Help me drag this table over," Scully said. "Why?" Mulder asked. He was ready to move on. "There might be something left in one of these boxes." "Jesus, Scully, you want to check them all? It'll take all day, and Christ knows what might be living in there." "Just this one on the top, where I can see something sticking out," she said, sounding annoyed. Mulder shut up and moved the table, then boosted her up on it so she could reach. "What is it?" he asked. "A little strip of microfilm," she said. She put her hand on his shoulder to steady herself as she jumped down. Then she shined her flashlight on the black plastic strip. "Oh," she said, triumphantly. "Names and numbers--coded just like that printout I used to figure out the genetic tagging." "Bingo," Mulder muttered. "They were here, all right." Continued in Part 13. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 13 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present? - D.H. Lawrence September 20, 1996 Boston, Mass. Mulder ran the flashlight up and down the remaining pigeonholes. There were no more strips of microfilm, but he leaned in to look closely at a brass tag left attached to the bottom of one of the shelves. "Tulsa," it said. "What do you make of this?" he asked Scully. "Maybe it was some kind of sorting system," she guessed. He looked around for another tag and finally found one at the opposite end of the room. "Derby," he said. "There's a Derby, Kansas." "It makes sense, Mulder--if they were collecting data from all over the country, they could've been sorting it geographically at some stage of the operation." He turned, then noticed that each table had two drawers. He went through them, methodically, feeling into corners he couldn't see. Nothing. His mental scratchiness had returned. There was something; he knew something about this. But he searched all the drawers and found nothing, and still there'd been no mental image sparked. They moved on to the next room, with the same result. Then a third one. More tables, more pigeonholes. One of the shelves carried a label that read, "Tallahassee." Now he got the mental flash he'd been expecting. This room, full of old-style microfilmers, their brilliant lights flashing on and off as documents were copied. His mother, thirty years younger, standing beside one of the machines as it processed one sheet after another, the light strobing against her face, ghostly white in its glare. Something touched his arm, and he started hard and banged his hip on one of the tables. "You okay?" Scully asked softly. His heart was racing, and he was panting. "Yeah," he said, breathlessly. "This place is giving me the creeps, that's all." He started in on the drawers. Two per table, forty tables. Near the back of the room, in one of the drawers, he found a torn scrap of paper. A heading at the top read, "--rofilm Recordist's Log." Six columns of numbers. Mulder studied it. The first column, he thought, was dates, though that edge was torn. He could read the days and the year--1959--all the way to the ripped bottom edge of the sheet. The next column was clearly time of day, then the remaining columns were labeled "TCI," "V#," "Cab." and "File No." Carefully he folded the scrap and put it in his pocket with the punch cards. They moved on. The next door opened onto another small reception area. Behind a tall counter, a short hall with cubicles on either side of it extended into the darkness. "Exam rooms," Scully said, pushing ahead of him to look inside the cubicles. He heard her searching one of them and turned to take on another. As he went in, he saw something glitter on the floor, and hunkered down to pick it up. It was a tiny bit of silver foil--the foil insert out of a pack of cigarettes, he thought. Still sitting on his heels, he directed the flashlight up and around the room. And got another flash. No itchy feeling to warn him this time. Just suddenly there, in technicolor. Victor Klemper, as the doctor bent to twist his head and look in his eyes. The bright flash of a long needle. A tall blond woman whose name he didn't know stood behind Klemper, waiting. Her voice, asking about tissue. The sharp stink of cigarette smoke wafting in the room. Pain. Oh, God, such pain... "Mulder," Scully said, close to his ear. He shuddered hard and yelped in startlement. "Are you okay?" she asked. "What did you remember?" "Klemper," he said, between his teeth. "Sticking me in the back with a big needle. What does Karen Curtis Casper look like?" "She's tall," Scully said. "Light blue eyes. Silver hair now--might've been blond when she was young." "I think she was here, too. She was with Klemper. They were talking about tissue classification while he was working on me." "What kind of tissue?" He shook his head. "I don't know; I couldn't have been much older than 6. I thought they meant, like, Kleenex tissues." He got up and took a closer look at the foil in his hand. Dusty, crumpled, but he could read the raised letters stamped into the foil--Morley. *Of-fucking-course.* Bateman, who left ashes and butts everywhere he went, like an animal left its spoor in its own trail. Scully said, "Mulder, I think we should get out of here and let a team--" "No." "Mulder, you're shaking." "I know that. Scully, I need to remember. I need to know. *You* need to know." He headed back out into the hallway. Out the corner of his eye, just as he turned to continue down the hall, he saw the beam of another flashlight. Mulder whirled, training his own flashlight on the approaching figure and reaching for his gun at the same time. He could feel Scully do the same. It was Skinner. *Shit,* Mulder thought. *Busted again.* **** Silver Spring, Md. Federal Maximum Security Containment Unit In a laundry truck three morphs approached the prison where Shelby Bateman was being held. Two were in the front, one dressed as a laundry service employee and the other in a prison guard's uniform. The third one hid in the back, in one of the laundry carts, wearing inmate's garb. Several hours earlier the three had taken shapes and clothes from the humans they were temporarily replacing. They passed through the gate easily, using the identification they had removed from their respective human molds. Then they parked the truck in its usual spot. The morph in the laundry uniform wheeled the cart into the building. It worked its way through the cell block, distributing clean laundry and collecting dirty, ignoring prisoners' complaints that they had received the wrong sizes. Followed by the morph posing as a guard, it stopped at Bateman's cell. There the guard unlocked the door. Bateman's look was wary. The morph hiding in the laundry cart climbed out and went into the cell. The other two held the human until after the morph dressed as a prisoner had touched him and taken his shape. Without ceremony, they dumped the unconscious Bateman into the cart. And they left the prison. The morph who now looked like Bateman remained in his place. It stayed only a few hours--just long enough for the others to get away. Then it removed its clothes and resumed its invisible form. **** Boston, Mass. "He is not amused," Mulder said, his voice low. "No surprise there," Scully said grimly. Skinner hadn't actually locked them in the New England regional director's office, but he had made Westin stand guard at the door. Same thing, in effect. Skinner had started reading Mulder the riot act a few minutes ago, but he hadn't gotten warmed up good before a telephone call had come in and he'd had to leave the room. "I've never been unemployed," Mulder said. "Have you?" "No, and I doubt either of us will enjoy it." "Well, don't worry about it. Just keep quiet, and I'll take the fall. I'll tell him I told you I cleared it with him, or something." "Mulder," Scully said slowly, "chivalry's dead. Didn't you get the memo that went around when it was announced?" Truth was, she was more worried about Mulder's state of mind than about losing her job. The closer he seemed to get to concrete details of what had happened to him and to his sister, the more vulnerable he became. She thought of his expression when she had walked in on him in the old exam room--staring at something that wasn't there, his eyes wide, panic-stricken. The way he had started when she touched him, the raw fear in the yelp he had bitten off when he came out of his reverie. But now he was making nothing of it; as if it hadn't happened. Mulder was moody and mercurial at best; the events of the last few days seemed to have amplified those qualities a hundred-fold, and Scully wasn't sure she had the inherent stability at the moment to counter-balance his swings. She thought it had helped the situation with Skinner that they had found some actual, concrete evidence connected to the case. Although he probably would give them hell for violating protocols and procedures, he couldn't argue with the results, and Scully doubted he would try. The odds were good he wouldn't actually fire either of them for ignoring protocol. Yell at them, yes. Terminate them, no. Nevertheless, she felt her heart skip a beat when she heard the A.D.'s footsteps at the door. But Skinner seemed to have lost his will to fight. Instead, he held his silence for a moment, leaning up against the door. He looked exhausted. "Are you all right, sir?" Scully asked, frowning. "Shelby Bateman has escaped from federal detention," he said. "Oh, my God," Scully murmured. "Fuck," Mulder said. "That crafty fucking son of a bitch." Skinner sighed heavily. "He'll kill you two in a heartbeat, if he gets half a chance." "He's not exactly your best friend," Mulder pointed out. The A.D. glared back at him. "You two go back into protective custody right now," he said, in his drill-sergeant voice. "And you'll goddamned well *stay there*, this time!" Mulder flinched at the shout, and Skinner hesitated, realizing he had drawn more reaction than he'd planned. "Let's go," the A.D. said coolly. **** Skinner couldn't sleep. He had taken a suite for the night for the three of them; without a vote he and Mulder had given up the bedroom to Scully. Now Skinner sat at the table in the kitchenette, reading by a dim light shining in the bathroom. Mulder had drifted off more than an hour ago now, lying on the open sofa bed still mostly dressed, his jacket and tie draped across a chair. But the younger agent had slept fitfully, shifting position, twitching, his breath ragged. Skinner had always felt ambivalent about Mulder, and never so much so as now. Hell, the kid was in the process of breaking the biggest case in history. But he had done it about as much by sheer tenacity as by any great investigative genius. And he was the single largest pain in the ass Skinner'd ever had the misfortune to oversee. *You have to give him credit for dedication.* *Yeah, fat lot of good that'll do if he gets his fool head blown off.* Mulder was just reckless, that was all there was to it. The goddamned stupidity of using his personal credit card to book a flight to Boston--as if he'd been *trying* to draw Bateman or one of his lieutenants out. Clearly, Skinner thought, I'm going to have keep Mulder and Scully a little more tightly under my thunb if I'm going to get them through this alive. Yeah, that was it. Stuff those two in a foxhole somewhere. **** Mulder ran down a long, curving hallway. Ran and ran, with no idea where he was going. The floor seemed too far below his feet, as if his legs were somehow not quite long enough to reach it. Samantha tripped and fell, and he stumbled as he tried to help her up. She took his hand and they ran again. Then it was as if a terrible darkness sucked him into it. Samantha screamed and let go of his hand. Falling, helpless to stop himself, with no idea what he might be tumbling headlong into. Then crashing into something hard and cold. So dark. So cold. So afraid. So alone. And someone, somewhere, was weeping. He reached, and his hand hit something. The light came on then, and they were there. The aliens, their ghostly pale faces tinged green behind glass, their huge eyes wide, staring at him. *NOOO! Get away, get away!* Flinging himself backward in terror. Falling. **** Mulder moaned softly, brows knit, and drew his knees up as if he were trying to hide from someone. Twisted his head back and forth and moaned again. Skinner got up, intending to go and wake him, but Scully beat him to it, suddenly appearing in dark blue pajamas, her hair sleep-skewed. "Mulder," she said softly, and touched his shoulder. "No," he wailed. "It's okay; it's okay." She had one hand on his shoulder, the other on the back of his head, holding him lightly. For a moment, Skinner thought that would do it. Just for a second, he thought he saw Mulder's face relax, just a little. But then Mulder thrashed away from her, flung himself backward. Scully couldn't hold him, so Skinner reached to catch him, keep him from falling off the bed. "Easy," Skinner murmured. And then, Mulder began to scream. "*NO*! GOD, LEAVE ME ALONE!*" Still dreaming, he was struggling now, not aiming any blows but just thrashing madly. Skinner hung on, doggedly, one arm wrapped around Mulder's chest, not knowing what the hell else to do. "*They're in there!*" Mulder screamed. "*They followed me--they're in there!*" Scully climbed up on the bed, and held his head against her shoulder. "You're safe," she said. "It's okay, Mulder, nobody's going to hurt you." "*NO!*" "Hush, hush," Scully said. "I won't let anybody hurt you." Abruptly the screams wrenched into tears, great heaving agonized sobs. "I'm sorry," he wept. "Please don't hurt me." "I won't hurt you. Shh. You're safe now." He wept and wept. Skinner could have let go now--the fight had all gone out of him--but he didn't want to. He wanted to help Scully comfort him, so he held on, hoping that at some level the touch would communicate security to the younger man. "They hurt me," Mulder whimpered. "I know," Scully said. "They can't hurt you now. You're okay now. Shh." After what seemed like forever, he cried himself back to sleep, and they settled him into bed. Scully looked exhausted. "He do that often?" Skinner asked softly. "It's never been this bad before," Scully whispered back. "He's remembering things about his childhood--it's getting worse. I don't think he ought to be alone at night. Not until this is over." "It certainly goes a long way toward explaining why you two have been so damned cranky," Skinner muttered. Mulder drew a sharp breath, and they both turned to look. He was sitting up in bed, eyes wide. "I know where they are," he said. His tone was stunned conviction. "The Five--I know where they are!" Continued in Part 14. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 14 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ A man is on the highway, yet he has not left his home. Another man, who has left his home, is not on the highway. Which of these two should be respected? - Zen koan September 20, 1996 Trinity National Forest Twenty miles northeast of Redding, Calif. "Glad to have you back, Shelby," Tom Corvin said into his cell phone. "Good to be back," Bateman said amiably, on the other end of the connection. "You're running an operation?" "We've lost a hundred thousand," Corvin said. "Had a little earthquake, and more people came out to the shelters sooner than we expected." Bitterly, he added, "The local police were *very* cooperative about rounding them up. Of course, they had no idea what they were cooperating with." "Damn," Bateman said. "How many have we processed?" "About fifty thousand." He didn't want to think about the fact that, again, nearly half had died while being processed. "Listen, Shelby, we have a little problem that I need you to take care of. The morphs have a bug up their asses about the underground." Even over the phone, Corvin could hear the soft scrape of Bateman's cigarette lighter. "The underground's nothing. A pack of rats scrabbling around in a hole." "They killed a morph, Shelby. God knows why, but they did." There was a pause while Bateman took a drag on his smoke. "Unfortunate," he said finally. "You want me to get rid of them? "Yes." "Then they're gone," Bateman said. **** Boston, Mass. "They're on Artemis," Mulder said. "Higginbotham was right--I saw The Five up there." "Mulder, are you sure?" Scully asked. "How do you know?" "That's why the dream wasn't changing, Scully. It's not a dream at all. It's a memory that's been trying to work its way out to the surface. They're up there--I know they are." "No, they're not," Skinner said. "I already thought of that. Quietly we got the shuttle crew that went up in July to check it out. We've got photos of every compartment on the Artemis station, and they're not there." "That's impossible," Mulder said. He sounded stunned. No, crushed. "Maybe they were there at one time," Scully said, trying to sound soothing. "Maybe they've moved them." "How the hell would they move them off a space station? Look, I did see them there, back in '74. They were behind glass. It was dark, but then I accidentally touched something and the light came on. That's why I was so scared--because I thought they'd found me again and I hadn't gotten away at all, and on top of that, somehow I'd gotten separated from Samantha, too." He was set on this; Scully could see it in his eyes. Mulder filled with the light of conviction was a force of nature. She wondered if there was any way he could manage to stow away on a shuttle flight and get the crew to divert to search Artemis again. If there was a way, she knew he'd do it in a heartbeat. Skinner had a conviction of his own. "I'm not questioning what you saw in 1974," the A.D. said sternly. "But The Five were not on Artemis in July 1996." *The irresistible force meets the immovable object,* Scully thought. She wondered if she ought to take cover against an implosion of the universe. "Then the astronauts--or whoever did the search--missed something," Mulder insisted. "Every compartment was covered. I've got photos and a plan of the station, and--" "Oh, they've doctored those," Mulder said, exasperated. "Where did that plan come from? The NSA? Of course it *looks* like they're not there. Bateman and his pals are virtuosos at fabricating that kind of crap. You think he was going to give up, just because he was in a federal prison? No way." Scully could see Skinner straining to remember that Mulder had been under a lot of pressure, that he hadn't been sleeping well--phenomena with which Skinner himself was intimately familiar. "I'll let you see the photos when we get back to D.C.," Skinner said evenly. "And if you see anything that suggests something's been overlooked, I'll go to bat for another search. But it's going to take more than a screaming nightmare to make that case." He didn't say, "and you know it, damn you," but it was in his tone, and Scully figured he had every right. No implosion. Mulder yielded, falling sullenly silent. But Scully was sure he would spend a lot of time over the next few days processing on a way to get around Skinner. **** September 21, 1996 Redding, Calif. The traffic on the interstate was still being re-routed, and a mournful silence had fallen over the little city. It was seven o'clock in the morning, when children should have been on their way to school, parents should have been going to work. Instead, nothing moved but a cool, damp breeze off the Pacific. Even the birds had abandoned Redding. A Warrior morph stood in what had been downtown and stretched its hearing. It wanted nothing and no one left behind. No one must escape. The morph stood still in the silence and listened. And heard. Oh, so quiet, so stealthy. Soft breaths--a whisper. A shuffle. The sounds came from a school, where so many had taken shelter when the alarm had sounded. The morph focused its hearing and went toward the sound. Most of the humans had gathered in the cafeteria, and the sounds were strongest there, at the back of the large room, where a dark red, velvet curtain hung over a stage. The morph stood before the stage and cocked its head, listening. Behind, underneath. The morph studied the structure, silently so as not to alarm the humans hiding there. Yes, a trap-door, just there. They'd climbed under the stage through that door. It listened. Two of them. It went silently up to the trap-door and focused carefully on exactly where they were beneath its feet. Then it flung open door, jumped down and grabbed both of the humans. The morph didn't know or care anything about human ages and couldn't have estimated how young or old these were. But it knew they were small, not yet half-grown. A male and a female, frightened and dirty. It had them both by the neck, and both howled furiously, the boy's voice hoarse, the girl's a high keening that rather pleasantly reminded the morph of a feasting song. Children often made better assimilants than adults--though they had few skills and required more training before they could serve the Circles, their smaller bodies took less effort to control and they had fewer memories to suppress, less independence to squelch. The morph took the children, still squalling, back to the town hall. Unlike the adults, the Conjoiners could not simply be poured into children. Their noses were too small. The morph had to help hold them while a tube about half an inch in diameter was forced down their throats. They coughed, then gagged, then the tubes filled with viscous, black fluid. They writhed and struggled, then were quiet. They looked at the morph, a black film floating on the surfaces of their eyes. The morph went back out into the street and listened again. It wanted nothing left. **** Washington, D.C. Mulder went through the photos one more time. There was absolutely nothing that looked anything like the image he'd had in his mind of The Five on Artemis. Not even remotely like it. And there were in fact, at least three photos of every compartment shown on the NSA's plan of the station, each picture carefully labeled. If there were compartments on Artemis that had been left off the plan, he couldn't remember them. There was absolutely nothing to warrant another search of Artemis. Except that he knew damned well The Five were there. He couldn't prove it, couldn't even explain how he knew. But they were there, all right. Nothing else made sense. He actually remembered only the infirmary. Looking at that photo, for the first time, he had remembered Valerie Clendenning. Recalled her as a warm embrace, a soft, reassuring voice telling him over and over that everything would be all right. She'd been wrong, of course, but he supposed she had meant well. And he remembered Karen Curtis Casper, too. Tall, frosty, impatient. He recalled her holding his chin firmly in her hand to force him to look at her while she pressured him to tell her how he had gotten there. Nevermind that he hadn't had the vaguest notion how he had gotten there. The Five were up there, all right. He could feel it all the way down into his bones, as if, not being able to hold that memory in his brain, he had moved it to a more visceral kind of storage, a sort of muscle memory. The body remembered, if not the mind. He turned the photos over and started looking at them again. Command module, all gauges and dials and levers. Infirmary. Cargo bays. He'd been found in one of those, so everyone said, but he didn't remember it, and none of these photos had brought on any sudden new insights--except that looking at them made him feel tense, anxious. They were places where he didn't want to be. Didn't even want to look at them. Then there was the crystal lab, where station staff had been trying to grow germanium crystals. Hydroponics lab, for food. Neither of those rang any bells, either. But The Five were up there. He just had to remember where. **** Scully slanted a glance at Mulder across the basement office. He was still going over the photos. She figured he'd already been over them at least ten times. She'd been over them with him the first three times. They had arrived at the Hoover building about noon after a mid-morning flight from Boston, none of them having slept enough to make much difference. Skinner had handed over the photos without comment, and Mulder had retreated to his basement Fortress of Solitude to search for signs of The Five. Now, finally, four hours later, he was beginning to show signs of fatigue, under the basic veneer of manic persistence. His shoulders had slumped a little. He picked the photos up, sorted them, stacked them. Started again. She waited, pretending to review the files she'd made on Krycek's reappearance months ago. She expected those Artemis photos to go flying across the room any minute now. He was getting frustrated. She could feel his tension expanding in the air. She was hungry. They hadn't eaten on the flight, and Mulder had been too focused on work to bother with lunch. Scully realized she actually hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast. She fumbled in her handbag for some change, found three quarters and got up to head to the vending machines down the hall. And then the room seemed to tilt, and her vision blurred, then dimmed. And she was not sure where she was. **** Alexandria, Va. Bateman sat in a black van parked in an alley, waiting for his contact. He lit a Morley. God, what bliss, to be able again to light up whenever he felt like it instead of having to wait for some lard-assed prison guard to give the okay. That was almost enough to make him forgive the fact that that bastard Nelson was late again. He turned his head and blew a plume of smoke across the van, then the side door scraped open, and Nelson was there. He was one of the few men Bateman knew who looked as dangerous as he was--even bent to telescope his height under the van's roof, Nelson looked the part of Lucifer. A dark black man, bearded, tall and powerfully built. Schooled as a cold-blooded killer, he had graduated with honors. If you needed somebody murdered, Leon Nelson was your man. "You're late," Bateman said coldly. "Mulder and Scully are back in Washington," Nelson said. "The assistant director's got them under his thumb--word is he's got a safe house in mind, but he's not saying where, even to his own people." Bateman shrugged. "The process has begun. Nothing Mulder can do now can stop it. He's become irrelevant." Nelson's eyes widened a little. "It's begun? When? Where?" "You don't need to know that." Bateman didn't know himself, but he had no intention of letting Nelson know that. He didn't really trust Nelson anymore--he'd gotten a little cozy with Higginbotham, and for that matter, with Mulder--and Bateman found he now enjoyed making Nelson feel insecure. In their business, a man's value was judged as much by how much he needed to know as by what he was willing to do. "I want you to clean out the underground," Bateman said. "Start at the Strughold site. All of them, you understand? Grays and hybrids. They're making trouble, and the morphs are giving us grief about it. We do not need grief." Nelson nodded. "Use our hybrid troops. We want the morphs to think they can trust us when we say the hybrids are useful to keep order during the completion of the process." "All right." Bateman handed over a photograph. "This one's the ringleader. Calls himself Zachary. Make sure he doesn't come out of those tunnels." Another nod, and the photo went into Nelson's coat pocket. Bateman blew another plume of smoke for emphasis, then said, "Don't screw this up, Leon. The morphs are not in a forgiving mood, and neither am I." Continued in Part 15. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 2 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. - Albert Einstein Transcript of interview with subject Higginbotham, Roy A.-B. [Note: Name believed to be alias.] 7/22/96 Tape #AB28669 "There is nothing very mysterious about the files in the Strughold mine. As I told Agent Mulder, they were collected for use in identifying bodies in the event of a nuclear holocaust. If that is to be regarded as a 'conspiracy to overthrow the government,' so be it. "The project was kept secret only because we believed such a comprehensive record would be politically disadvantageous--Americans are so sensitive about their privacy. Nevermind that even more delicate records can be found in the microfilm vaults of virtually every bank in the country. Apparently privacy is only regarded as important as long as it doesn't interfere with the convenience of purchasing a new microwave oven without having to carry about a great wad of cash... "All right, I concede that I dealt rather harshly with Agent Mulder. There is little point denying it in the face of numerous eyewitness accounts, is there? In retrospect, I regret the incident, and I am greatly relieved that he was not permanently or seriously injured... "I don't recall having asked Mulder about The Five. Why would I? I know very little about aliens, save that unpleasant business in Massachusetts a few months back. Perhaps you should ask Agent Mulder. After all, he is the one who appears to have studied the subject--claims to have encountered them as a child, if I recall it right. "But then, you know what is often said about genius and lunacy being essentially two sides of the same coin..." **** September 21, 1996 Washington, D.C. "Scully, can you hear me?" She was dizzy, disoriented--the room still seemed too dim. "Mmm," she got out. "Scully?" "What?" She felt desperately tired and wished to hell he would just leave her alone, let her go to sleep. "I think you had a little seizure," Mulder said carefully, gently. *Nonsense.* "I was hungry," she said. "Guess I must've fainted." "I think it was more serious than that," he said. *Thank you, Dr. Mulder.* "No, I'm okay. Just hungry and a little dizzy. I was going to to the vending machines to get something." She started to get up, but he held her. Behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes were dark with worry. "Look, Scully, I did my clinical work at St. Alban's--they have a very good head injury unit. I know a psychomotor attack when I see one. You were staggering, making unintelligible sounds." "I don't have a head injury." "No, but something's wrong." "Yes. I need cookies. Now." He sighed, gave up, gathered the quarters she had dropped. "I'll get them. You sit right here." Here was on the floor, leaning up against a file cabinet. "The vanilla ones, in the green package," she said. "I know." He had seen her eat them a hundred times. He came back a minute later with a cup of instant chicken-and-noodle soup from the coffee bar. "It's better for you," he said solicitously, hunkering down beside her. Mulder as Jewish mother--now *that* was a concept. Still, whether she had fainted from hunger or something worse really had happened, he was probably right about the soup. She sipped, wondered idly how far off the chart the stuff would shoot her salt intake for the day. *I feel all right now,* she thought. A little sluggish, maybe. The soup would help that. "You don't have to sit there and watch me," she said. "Go back to work. I'll just drink this, and I'll be fine." "It's okay. I'm not getting anywhere with that anyway." She waved at him as at a pesky gnat. "Shoo, dammit." "Oh, Good Lord, all right. But don't go anywhere." He retreated to his desk. **** Roy Higginbotham had lost some of his perfectly groomed polish in federal prison. The ill-fitting inmate's uniform looked out of place on his patrician figure, and his silver hair had been cropped short. Skinner faced him across the interrogation room, straining to keep his temper under wraps. The mere sight of Higginbotham was enough to set Skinner's temper simmering. "So," Higginbotham said, "you think you are ready to put me on trial." "Yes." "But you really haven't got much against me, have you? This conspiracy charge--it really isn't very solid." "We have more than you think," Skinner said coolly. "I have assets as well," Higginbotham said, producing a thin-lipped, oily smile. "I have friends..." He glanced upward. "...in high places--a great deal higher than you think." Skinner smiled, too. "All the way to the planet Zenon?" he shot back. There--just a tiny tic of surprise. The eyes widening ever-so-slightly. Skinner decided to press whatever weakness might hide under the surprise. "You made a deal with them, the aliens. What was it? I've seen some of your 'project's' work. Did you agree to give up half the population, in return for the safety of the rest?" Higginbotham's smile deepened. "Whatever you've seen, you haven't understood it. Anything that happens in your court room, do you think that'll change anything? This trial you're proposing is irrelevant--there are forces in motion beyond your comprehension." He fell silent, then, holding his expression to make it clear he had no intention of saying anything else. Skinner played the best card he had. "Did you know Bateman's free?" Higginbotham's smile died. "He's out, and you know his reputation for dealing with potential witnesses." "It's your job to protect me," Higginbotham said evenly. But there was fear in his eyes now. "Yes, and we'll do it, to the best of our ability. But that's never stopped Bateman before, has it? He has those same 'high' friends. Very powerful friends, aren't they?" "What is it you want from me, Mr. Skinner? If anything, you've given me all the more reason *not* to tell you what I know." "Why did Bateman try to telephone former secretary of defense Tom Corvin?" The old man's eyebrows rose. "Well, now," Higginbotham said. "That *is* interesting." "Yes, I thought so, too. Why do *you* think it's interesting?" "Because it means Shelby Bateman is afraid." "Of what?" Higginbotham inclined his head. "You'll have to ask him that--assuming he should be foolish enough to let himself get within your grasp again. All I know is that Bateman afraid can be very dangerous." "Even more dangerous than you?" "Much more so. If you really wish to see me go to trial, you had best take precautions." "Is Corvin part of your unholy alliance?" Corvin had been secretary of defense about the same time Skinner had been learning to walk. He hadn't held the post long and had resigned--because of a family illness, so he had said--and had basically disappeared off the government radar screen afterward. "Tom Corvin is a very careful man. Very discreet. He and Bateman are old friends." "Do they have mutual friends? Friends in very high places?" "Government service is so incestuous, don't you agree?" Higginbotham said. "Don't we all know each other, sooner or later, one way or another?" "Yeah," Skinner said. "Don't we, though?" He turned on his heel and left, to put out an alert for Tom Corvin. He had some questions he wanted to ask the former secretary of defense. **** Falls Church, Va. "Well," Scully said, looking around. "This is charmingly domestic, isn't it?" Skinner had set them up in a pleasant, two-bedroom apartment--quiet neighborhood, elementary school down the block. Apparently he had taken seriously Scully's suggestion that Mulder ought not to be left alone at night. It had not occurred to her at the time that the A.D. would take her suggestion as an offer to volunteer herself for the duty. She appeared to have been volunteered, nonetheless. "Careful, Scully," Mulder said. "You should bear in mind that you're basically the only woman I've actually seen at close range in about six months. You go making remarks about how we're living together now, and you're likely to upset what feeble control I have left over my delicate hormonal balance." Normally she would have regarded this as a joke, pure and simple. But these were not normal conditions, and she had detected a flat note of seriousness in his tone. Not, of course, that she suspected she was in any real danger of having Mulder leap at her like a hungry wolf. And come right down to it, her own hormonal balance could've used some work, too. She decided to act normal--take it as the joke it probably was. "Remember, Mulder," she said lightly, "I carry a gun." "I know. I've been on the wrong end of it once." "Besides, what about blondie in Boston? With the blue stripe?" "You're unfamiliar with the concept of statutory rape?" "In some quarters this whole conversation would be regarded as sexual harassment." "I can plead temporary insanity." She chuckled. "I going to have a long, hot bath. And I'm locking the door. If that television has cable, I suggest you check for the Playboy channel." "It's not the same," he groused, as she headed for the bathroom. *Who do you think you're telling, hormone-boy?* She lay in a tub full of bubbles for about twenty minutes, letting her mind run at a pleasant idle. Then she smelled something. Either the place had caught fire, or Mulder was cooking something. When she had climbed out of the bathtub and put on her sweats she opened the door and smelled it clearly--something roasting in the oven. A wave of dizziness washed over her. *Not again*, she thought, clinging to the doorjamb. It passed, and she released a long sigh of relief. She padded out to the kitchen. Mulder was standing in front of the television, but it was CNN he was watching, not the Playboy channel. There was chicken in the oven, a pot boiling rice on the stove, and he had been cutting vegetables for a salad before he had wandered off to frown at the television. "What's up?" she asked. He switched to the Cartoon Network. "Oh, nothing much. Pre-election bullshit, mostly. Campaign rhetoric, photo ops, like that." Scully inclined her head toward the stove. "This is not something I would've expected of you," she said. "Now who's being sexist? Roasting chicken parts isn't a mysterious female ritual--you stick chicken in a pan, put it in the oven and turn on the heat." He returned to the kitchen and resumed chopping celery. "So you're denying that you subsist primarily on take-out pizza?" Scully asked, fishing a piece of tomato out of the salad bowl. "Yes. I subsist primarily on take-out Chinese food. However, that doesn't mean I don't know how to survive without Wa Hong's Dumpling Deluxe." He paused. Sighed. "Of course, life might not be worth living under such conditions." She nodded, chewing tomato. She liked Wa Hong's, too. "Besides, you've missed the point. Although, regrettably, this has nothing to do with sex--" She chuckled. "--I am, in fact, trying to soften you up for something." "And that something is...?" His look was serious as death. "I want you to see a doctor." Automatically, she said, "Mulder, I'm fine." "Scully, as your partner, there's only so much bullshit I'm required to overlook. Besides, if you really are all right, then it won't hurt anything, will it? Just put it down to my paranoid, alarmist nature--or whatever else you want to put it down as--and go to the damned doctor." She didn't want to. But he was right. She hadn't been feeling well the last few days, and it wasn't like her to come down with dizzy spells. It was probably nothing, but she ought to have it checked out. "All right. You're going to find out you've been dead wrong, but if it'll make you feel better, I'll see a doctor." "Good. Now eat your salad." The chicken was good--he had sprinkled some lemon pepper on it before baking it--plain but tasty and nourishing. He jealously guarded the remote control all evening, surfing for a while, then settling on a re-run of *Back to the Future*. Scully went to bed without knowing that every living soul, more than 150,000 of them--had disappeared from Redding, Calif. Continued in Part 16. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 16 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must remain silent. - Ludwig Wittgenstein September 22, 1996 Washington National Airport "You knew about this last night, didn't you?" Scully asked. "Why the hell didn't you tell me?" They were waiting for a flight again--sometimes it seemed to Scully she spent half her life in one airport or another, waiting for one airplane after another. It had been left to Skinner to break the news about Redding, Calif., to her. She'd been fuming ever since. "Because I don't think you ought to go," Mulder said. There were times when he could be as obstinate as a granite boulder; this clearly was going to be one of them. "I think you ought to stay here and see a doctor like you promised me you would." She had fainted again earlier in the morning, awakening spread-eagled on the carpet in the bathroom. She didn't think he knew about that one, and she damned sure wasn't going to tell him. "This is my case, too, Mulder." "Well, excuse me for wanting to be sure you're still alive when we make the case." She shook her head hard. "You're not going to make it without me." She saw Skinner glance at them and retreated into a medical journal she had brought to read on the plane. Mulder radiated irritation. "Look," she said, "California's not entirely uncivilized. I'm sure they do have doctors there, too. If I have a problem, I'll see one while we're out there." "You're goddamned right about that." He got to his feet. She was seized suddenly with the notion that he would try to persuade Skinner to leave her behind. "Where are you going?" she asked sharply. "Men's room. You mind?" She turned to her journal again but didn't read it. Instead, she sat there, fretting that he would find a way to go to California without her. **** "Psst. Mulder. I'm in here." Frohike, peering through a crack in a stall door like a troll hiding in a cave. Mulder rolled his eyes. "Yeah," he whispered back. "And if you think I'm coming in there with you, guess again, sweetie." He hadn't been sure Frohike would be here--he'd had no way to know whether the little man had gotten his hastily sent e-mail. Mulder sauntered over to the urinal, peed, then rearranged himself and his clothing. Frohike met him at the sink, never making eye contact. Mulder slipped an envelope into the little man's pocket on his way out--copies of the shreds of evidence he and Scully had found at the hospital. He would have preferred to check that material out himself, but he couldn't, not right now. Having the Gunmen rummage around was the next best thing. Mulder went back out to the departure lounge and sat down beside Scully. He could've sworn her sigh was relief, but he couldn't imagine what for. **** Redding, Calif. Redding had been cordoned off. At its outskirts, there was activity--a lot of flashing lights, a lot of state and federal law enforcement personnel scurrying about. National Guard trucks rumbling by. Past the yellow tape, it was like a bad movie about the aftermath of nuclear winter. The buildings and parked cars looked as if they were in a state of suspended animation--everything patiently waiting for its owners to return. Mulder found himself thinking of scenes from *Escape from New York.* "This is the goddamnedest thing I ever saw," said Curt Quentin, the bureau's western regional director. He was leading Skinner, Scully, Mulder and Westin down a broad, empty thoroughfare. "And I have to say I'm not much reassured by the fact that you people don't seem shocked by it." "We've seen something like this before," Skinner said carefully. "Just not on this large a scale. And I'm not sure we've put together what might've caused it yet." "Did you find any empty diesel oil containers?" Mulder asked. Quentin threw him a sharp look. There was fear in the R.D.'s eyes. "Yeah," he said. "They're in the high schools." "You didn't find anyone at all? Not even corpses?" "Yeah, there are some corpses. Some were already dead before... whatever happened. We've got twenty or thirty in funeral homes, hospital pathology labs, the local morgue. And a total of about two hundred that appear to have been patients in the hospitals. All of them dead now." "I'd like to have a look at them," Scully said. "Okay." "What was this place like when you got here?" Mulder asked. "Has anything been disturbed?" "As little as possible. We turned the power back on." "The city was blacked out?" Skinner asked. "Yeah. And not just the power. Everything was off--gas, water, phones. When we first got here, even our radios and cell phones weren't working. My laptop computer wouldn't even turn on. Like there was some weird kind of interference. But that went away after a few hours." Mulder stopped suddenly, bent to retrieve a sheet of paper that had caught his attention. At the top was the seal of the City of Redding. "Evacuation order," it read. "Earthquake shelters have been established at local high schools for all residents..." "There was an earthquake?" Mulder asked. "Three, four days ago," Quentin said. He shrugged. "It was just a little one, though. Nothing like what you'd normally evacuate for." They stopped in front of John F. Kennedy High School, then Quentin led them inside, into the gymnasium. The entire floor was covered with plastic oil containers, just like the ones in Wyoming. "Oh, my God," Scully said, the reality sinking suddenly into her bones. "You know what this means?" Quentin asked. "No," Mulder lied. Quentin wasn't buying it. "You don't have any idea what happened to all these people?" "I wish I did." There was that caution again. Scully remembered a time when Mulder would've simply blurted out his theory. He had made a total damned fool of himself doing just that, more than once in the past. All of a sudden he had gotten damned closed-mouthed about what he thought. Or perhaps he had just gotten tired of making a damned fool of himself. Nevermind that, in this case, his theory was dead right. "Look, Curt," Skinner said. "I know this is upsetting. But if we jump the gun with some theory, we're likely to cause a panic. For now, I think we ought to be real cautious about this." They left the school, and Quentin took them to the nearest hospital, directed them to a semi-private room where a body had been found. The corpse didn't look unremarkable--just another dead body. Scully took a quick look, then Mulder heard her sigh. "You want to do a post mortem?" he asked. "I don't need to. Look." She pointed. The body had a dark drop of oil glistening under its left nostril. "Jesus," Mulder breathed. "These people aren't coming back, are they?" "Even if they did, they're not human anymore, Scully." "What do you suppose the aliens are doing with them?" He shook his head. "I have no idea." **** Portland, Ore. Tom Corvin looked out over the Columbia River from a hotel room facing Vancouver, Wash. Between the two cities, Portland and Vancouver, the population here was more than a million and a half. "What's the count on the hybrids?" he asked Bateman. "Just over 750,000," Bateman said. "All of them available except a platoon getting ready to go into the underground, clean it out." Corvin nodded, contemplating the awful thing that was the logical, necessary next step. "Enough," he said. "That's just about enough." "Easily," Bateman said. *Overconfident,* Corvin thought. *You're always overconfident, Shelby--one day it'll be the end of you.* "Set it up," he said. "At the rate the morphs are moving, we have no choice but to accelerate our pace, too." "Might as well," Bateman agreed. "Quick and quiet, my old friend. We need to come in, get it done, and be gone before the morphs get wind of it." "Absolutely." "Quick and quiet," Corvin said again. **** September 23, 1996 Falls Church, Va. There'd been nothing else left to find in Redding, so they had returned to Washington, tired and depressed. Scully went to the doctor mid-morning, leaving Mulder alone in the apartment; Skinner dropped by about noon to drop off a pile of transcripts of the interviews with their witnesses and defendants. Mulder had started with the thinnest file first. Bateman's. "If you think I'm going to tell you shit, you are even more of a fucking moron than you look..." Mulder laughed. Yeah. That was Bateman, all right. Arrogant to the end. The trouble was, none of the files really contained much of anything he didn't already know. Mostly they just confirmed his worst fears. He started making a list of what he still didn't understand, heading off the list with: "What's happening to the people who get assimilated? Where are they?" Then, "Where's the money?" He thought for a while, then, wondering why Higginbotham had seemed willing to find The Five, maybe even give them up to the aliens, while Bateman had seemed terrified that the aliens might get them back. Weren't those two playing on the same side? If not, what did that mean? About mid-afternoon, he started to get worried--Scully'd been gone for hours. That didn't seem like a good sign. But there seemed nothing he could do about it. He just kept poring over the files, pacing around the apartment, trying to keep a corrosive, rising anxiety at bay. She finally arrived just after four o'clock in the afternoon. She looked numb, as if her whole face had been shot full of novocaine. Moving like an automaton, she sat down on the edge of the couch. "What happened?" he asked. He perched on the edge of the coffee table, facing her. She looked at him, blankly, her eyes empty. Mulder felt a cold, awful dread rising in his chest. "They found a lesion in the temporal lobe." *God. A brain tumor.* "Are they sure?" he asked. "There couldn't be any mistake?" "I saw the scan myself. There's no mistake. I start radiation therapy in a couple of days." He reached to take her hand, but she held up a hand of her own to stop him. "I need some time," she said, and she got up and went into the bedroom and shut the door. **** Alexandria, Va. Leon Nelson watched while the hybrid soldiers climbed up into four troop carriers. He was ready to have this over with. He had never been comfortable around hybrids--they reminded him of a future he feared, a future where there'd be nothing but hybrids. Maybe he'd be one himself. It would be over tonight. They would go in, slaughter anything that moved, and be gone again. Nelson climbed into the first truck. A sergeant began distributing live ammunition, copies of the photo of Zachary and small silver cylinders from which a long, thin, sharp spike would spring out at the touch of a button. He took his equipment issue and settled himself on the bench in the back of the truck. He was ready. **** Scully slept a little, both physically and emotionally exhausted. She woke just at dusk, let herself drift, half-asleep, for a few minutes, then got up. She found Mulder in the living room, dressed all in black, shrugging into his black leather jacket. His nylon traveling bag sat at his feet. "Where are you going?" she asked. He started, whirled around with his eyes wide. "Jesus, don't sneak up on me like that, Scully." "I didn't sneak up on you. Where are you going?" "Out for a walk," he lied. "With your crash bag? Is that the newest thing in power walking?" He sighed. She had him, and he knew it. "I'm going to West Virginia. Back to the Strughold mine." He had no real reason to go back to the mine now, except the thin hope of finding something that would help cure her. "Not without me, you're not," she said steadily. "Do you honestly think you're up to that?" *I'm dying, and we both know it.* "I'm all right," she said. "They gave me an anti-convulsive at the hospital--I won't have any more seizures. But I don't know how much longer I will be all right." She shrugged. "I want to do this, and I don't have much time." He nodded. "Get your stuff and don't waste any more of it, then," he said gently. Continued in Part 17. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 17 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things under ground, and much more in the skies. - Miguel de Cervantes September 23, 1996 Falls Church, Va. Westin had been driving Mulder's car so it wouldn't just sit somewhere, with the oil in its crankcase turning to tar, which Mulder had thought was damned nice of him. Especially since it now meant he could drive to West Virginia in his own wheels, without having to rent a car and risk having somebody find out he had slipped his leash again--at least not until he had finished what he meant to do. As their bodyguard, Westin occupied the apartment next door, but Mulder didn't think he'd be able to hear the Mitsubishi's alarm beep as it disarmed. He and Scully climbed out the second-story window and down to the ground along a drain-pipe, then slipped into the carport. Mulder punched the button on the clicker, and the car obediently chirped and blinked its lights. They climbed in and were gone. **** Rural West Virginia The front of the abandoned Strughold mine looked even more evil in the dark than it had in daylight, when Mulder and Scully had approached it the first time. Its stark exterior loomed out of the night like whitened bones, like the gigantic carcass of a long-dead animal whose flesh little by little was being eaten off the skeleton, a monument to slow, inexorable entropy. Nothing had really changed in the year or so since they'd been there last, but the building exuded rot and corrosion. Mulder suspected that the site had been chosen for just that uninviting quality. Nobody in his right mind would *want* to come out here--except, of course, somebody who knew that behind the grim, decaying facade lay heavy doors made of bright, shiny stainless steel, leading the way into an underground vault not subject to broken windows and dry rotted beams. Something *was* different about it, though--the door where they'd had to enter Napier's constant the first time stood open a crack when they arrived. Scully shot a glance at him--*lock and load*--and they both drew their guns before easing in. Both of them heard it at the same time--a shuffling, scratching sound, like a cat pawing in its sand box. Mulder whipped around and caught a small dark shape scurrying away from the beam of his flashlight. "Fucking great," he muttered. "More rats." "But only the four-legged kind," Scully murmured. "It could be worse." They went down into the tunnels. They didn't turn on the overhead lights--Mulder thought somehow, someone might know if they did, and Scully mercifully seemed in no mood to argue with his paranoia. Mulder remembered exactly where they had found Scully's file. They retrieved it, then went and got Samantha's file, too. As he'd suspected, there wasn't one for him, where it should've been in 1961. Then he noticed the label on the drawer. "V3," it read. "Cab. 56743221." "Hey, Scully, look at this." He pointed. "The microfilm recordist's log I found in the hospital had columns for 'V' and 'Cab.' It's the same filing system. They must've copied the documents and put the files together in Boston, then shipped them here." She shined her flashlight along the tops of several cabinets. "They all say 'V3,'" she said. He snapped. "'V' as in 'vault,'" he said. "Logical. And these cabinets are in numbered order--56743220, 56743221, 56743222..." "There were columns for something called 'TCI,' too, but I don't see that on the cabinets." She studied the files in her hands for a moment. "No, it's here, in the files themselves. On the tissue sample containers. Mine says 'TCI alpha-one,' and Samantha's says 'TCI beta-three.'" She looked up at him. "You said Karen Curtis and Victor Klemper were talking about tissue classifications?" "Yeah. Oh. You think the 'TC' stands for tissue classification?" "It might--it makes sense." "But then what would 'alpha-one' and 'beta-three' mean?" "I don't know. Maybe if I can get these samples back to the lab and have a look them, that'll tell me something. Maybe I can see what it was they were classifying." "Whether you'd make a 'good hybrid', would be my guess," he muttered. "Maybe, but we don't really know what *that* means, either." "Shh--Scully, did you hear that?" he whispered. He had heard... something. Voices, muffled in conversation? He wasn't sure. "I didn't hear anything." Nevertheless, she held her silence, cocked her head, listening. There it was again, a soft, high-pitched murmur echoing through the tunnel. Silently, they eased toward the sound, leading with their guns. The murmur began to take on an urgent tone, then, higher and a little louder. Closer on, it sounded like a resonant squeaking. Mulder's puzzle-box memory tugged at him, itching at the back of his mind--he had heard this before somewhere, sometime. What the hell was it? Something about the shapeless, unformed memory made him nervous. Whatever the sound was, wherever he had heard it before, it was triggering his half-buried little-boy panic again. He wanted to stop, get away from that sound. But Scully, a few steps ahead of him, kept going, and Mulder was afraid to say anything to her, afraid to do anything that might attract the attention of...whatever. Then he saw something move, up ahead in the dark. *Grays--that sound is grays.* He froze, knowing it was the wrong thing to do and utterly unable to stop himself. Scully had seen it, too. "Hey!" she yelled, in a drill sergeant tone she must've learned from her father. It jolted Mulder out of his paralysis--just about put him through the roof. "Halt!" she shouted, and before he could stop her, she took off running after the pale, retreating figure. "Scully, wait!" Mulder yelled, but she was in hot pursuit and didn't stop. He had no choice but to go after her. She followed the ghostly figure around a corner, and for a moment he lost sight of both of them. Then the lights came on overhead, and he was half-blinded, squinting as he skidded to a stop with one hand trying vainly to shade his eyes. They had run into an enormous underground chamber. And there were grays and hybrids everywhere. Must've been hundreds of them. **** Leon Nelson swore under his breath as the trucks approached the mine. There was no mistaking that car--that sumbitching black Mitsubishi, sitting there looking as if were going ninety even at a dead stop. Mulder. Goddammit, it was Mulder's car. What the fuck was he doing here? Nelson didn't want to have to kill Mulder--hell, he was just doing his job, and it wasn't his fault he'd been better at it than the Consortium wanted him to be. Still, Nelson had his orders. Nobody who wasn't working for the Consortium was to come out of these tunnels alive. There was no more he could do to protect Mulder--not and come out alive himself. He jumped down out of the truck and flipped the safety off his pistol. **** Portland, Ore. Josiah Jones stood at the end of the 1100 block of Pine Street and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. He was a hybrid, and the change took but a moment. He studied the manifest and assigned the troops, a group of four to a house. As they started off, he examined his own squad's assignment, 1121 Pine Street, home of the Putnam family. The manifest specified that the family consisted of two adults: one male, Timothy, and one female, Linda; two children: Louis, aged 7, and Carla, aged 9. One dog: beagle, named Molly. Kept in the garage at night--it would be no trouble. Jones waved his troops forward, continuing to study the information on the sheet. The man and the children were suitable for hybridization; the girl, Carla, had an implant. The woman had tested poorly. Too bad, he thought. Jones used a small, hand-held laser to cut through the Putnams' deadbolt lock. It was alien technology and cut through the steel as if it were tissue paper. He and the troops went directly to the bedrooms--they had a map of the floorplan--and found the couple asleep, Timothy snoring loudly. Jones waited until one of his companions had shoved a rubber mouthpiece between the sleeping man's lips. Then he put two silenced bullets through Linda Putnam's head. A moment later, the appropriate chemical substances had been injected into Timothy, and Jones went to check on progress with the children. The boy had had his shots; a hybrid soldier was gathering up the girl, who would be taken to get her implant replayed into her mind. The dog, Molly, barked and barked, and scratched frantically at the garage door. Jones ignored her. Finished here, he and his compatriots went to their next assignment, at 1142 Pine Street. In the morning, Carla Putnam had been returned to her bed. Timothy Putnam rose and went to let the dog out. Molly went into the yard, snarling at him as she passed. She wouldn't come back in, no matter how much he called, just stood out in the yard, growling. Timothy gave up and shut the door. He fed the children their breakfast and took them to school, then went to work as usual. When he arrived at his job at the insurance agency, he called the police to report that he had awakened to find his wife lying dead next to him with two bullet holes in her forehead. The police sergeant who took the call, Doris Whitehead, wasn't surprised. She had awakened to find her husband in a similar condition. "Too bad," she said, as she arranged to have Linda Putnam's remains quietly disposed of. When Doris Whitehead returned to her own home that evening, she discovered her son having a bad reaction to his shots. He was vomiting up a greenish-brown substance. Too bad. **** Rural West Virginia Mulder stood there, frozen in place, staring at the aliens and hybrids. He felt as if he had awakened in the middle of a terrible nightmare, only to find it hadn't been a nightmare at all, but an awful reality. He could hardly breathe and vaguely recognized that he was hyperventilating. A familiar voice sounded nearby, low and gentle. "Fox," it said. He *could* move, after all. He whipped around toward the one who had spoken, leading with his gun. Only after he had done it did he realize his hand shook so badly it was dangerous for him to hold the gun at all. Besides, it was Zachary--shoot the hybrid, and he'd kill himself and Scully. Scully came slowly toward him, eased the gun away from him. He let her take it. She stood beside him and circled his waist with one arm to steady him. He got a fistfull of her sweater and held on so hard it hurt his hand. He couldn't do what he wanted to do--run away as fast as his legs would carry him. He couldn't leave Scully alone with them, and she wasn't leaving. "No one here will harm you," Zachary said. "That's right," Scully said. Her tone had the quality of a mother cat standing off a predator from her kitten. Mulder found his own voice at last. "I...don't...trust them," he said, looking at the grays. The hybrids weren't so bad, but the grays--*God, oh God, GRAYS.* "I know," Zachary said simply. "That will require learning." *Never. Never-fucking-ever.* "What are you doing here?" Scully said. "What are you hiding from?" "We are not hiding. We are waiting." "For what?" "Until there are enough of us. Enough hybrids, so that we can fight back against the morphs." The grays had started making their soft, squeaky sounds again. Mulder couldn't stand it--it turned his guts to ice, and every fiber of his every muscle shuddered with the desperate wish to *get away*. His brain couldn't function; his head would explode at any second. "Make them stop!" he yelled, and they went quiet again. He was panting like a dog, and suddenly he was seized with a horror that he might wet his pants out of sheer terror. Not yet, thank God. "Fox," Zachary said. "They are sorry they hurt you. They didn't know." "Bullshit," Mulder said, through his teeth. "They don't know what 'sorry' means, and how the fucking hell could they not know?" "Because they are not like you." "Can't they talk?" Scully asked Zachary. "Not as you and I do. They can only communicate with you directly by--" "No!" Mulder yelled. "Scully, don't let them touch you!" He pulled fiercely toward the opening in the chamber. Despite her efforts to hang on, he dragged her a few feet. "Mulder, let go!" she cried. He heard pain in her tone, and it stopped him. "Fox," Zachary said. "They can soothe as well as hurt. You know that." He knew. He didn't have the least motherfucking notion how he knew, but he did. He didn't want to be soothed. He hadn't wanted to be soothed when they took him. He wanted *Samantha*. He wanted to *go home*. "They can let you talk to your sister," Zachary said. "Where is she?" Mulder ground out. "Not here. But she is always with them. If she tells you, you will believe." *No no no no no.* But he knew he had to. No matter how much his inner twelve-year-old needed to get away, he could not refuse Samantha. He had told her he would not leave her. He had told her they would get away together or not at all. *You left her, you son of a bitch. You got away, and she didn't make it, and you couldn't find the way back.* They were gathering, four of the grays, coming slowly toward him, hands upraised, long fingers extended. He felt tears on his face, stinging hot as they slid down his cheeks. "Please don't hurt me," he whispered. "They will not," Zachary said. The fingers touched his face. Continued in Part 18. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 18 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ ***WARNING***: Character dies, but trust me, it turns out all right. Death never takes the wise man by surprise, he is always ready to go. - Jean de la Fontaine Transcript of interview with subject Mulder, William L. 7/17/96 Tape #AB28667 "The aliens were doing reconnaissance during World War II. They were just checking us out. And they claim they had decided not to take us over. But then one of their ships crashed near Roswell. It was a big ship, and there were more than a hundred survivors. "At first we thought they were all grays. The order came down to kill them, and so they went into that train car. But six of them survived the gas. That was when we decided to study them for a while. We wanted to know how the hell they had survived the gas. It seemed like it could be useful, you understand, in the next war. And there was a Japanese scientist, Ishimaru, who had some good ideas. So we sent one of the survivors to Japan. But the plane went down in the Pacific before it arrived... "We didn't know about the morphs or the Circles back then. It was only after we tried to kill all the grays that the morphs showed up... "I don't know whose idea it was to hang onto The Five. We were supposed to give them back--the morphs said they'd go away and leave us alone if we did. "Maybe if we do, they still will leave us alone. I don't know. I'm not sure I ever really believed it..." **** Rural West Virginia The sensation was a pleasant, numb lassitude, like the gentle, drifting sensation of floating halfway between sleep and alertness. Mulder could still feel Scully's arm around him, but he felt it as if from some distance away. He knew where he was, but he wasn't really there--he was...everywhere. In all of their heads, all of them seeing him, he seeing himself through their eyes, all of them seeing themselves through his eyes. As if suddenly he and all the grays were sharing the same brain, the same sensory organs. From a long way away, he heard Samantha's voice, speaking softly. Still a child's voice. How could she still be a child? *Samantha, where are you?* *Tell me where. I'll come for you--remember I promised I'd bring you home? Tell me where you are.* A giggle, floating oddly in his head. *Finished with what?* *No, they're not. Samantha, they're hurting people--lots of people. Some of them even worse than they hurt me. I want to bring you home--I want you to be safe.* Was she really still eight years old? Still too young to grasp the difference between a promise and a convenient, reassuring lie? A little annoyed now. *Great--so it was all my fault.* A silence in his head, suddenly. *Samantha!* *Sorry. For a second I couldn't hear you.* *I don't believe it. I can't. God, Samantha, *please* come home. Tell me where you are.* *No! Wait, Samantha--* And she was gone. **** Scully had been watching carefully, alert to the least sign of distress in her partner as the four grays stood there with their fingertips pressed lightly against his face. He was still trembling, but it seemed to her that some of the grinding, awful terror in him had eased. It only lasted a minute or two. And then the grays backed away and let go, and Zachary stepped forward to help her catch Mulder as his knees unlocked and he went down. Scully smoothed his hair back off his forehead. "Are you okay?" "Yeah," he said, breathlessly. "I'm all right." He was pale, sweating and shaking hard, coming down off an adrenaline flood. He still had a rigor-mortis grip on her sweater. Zachary cocked his head, listening intently, and the grays around them began chattering again. "Someone is coming," Zachary said. "Samantha said there was danger," Mulder whispered. "Yes. Oh, this is bad." Zachary got up. "Come with me, both of you," he said. "We must have you gone now." "Why?" Scully asked. "What's wrong?" "Men come," Zachary said. "They will kill you, too, if you are found here." He crossed the large room, and as the grays fell back out of his way, she saw a metal locker up against the wall, olive drab in color, with the words "Property of U.S. government" painted on it in yellow. He opened the locker and withdrew two gas masks, then brought them over. "Put these on," he whispered urgently. "If our blood is spilled..." He didn't have to finish the thought. They knew. The retrovirus. Scully gave Mulder his gun back. "Who would kill you?" she asked Zachary. "Why?" "There isn't time to explain." "Which way?" Mulder asked, pulling the mask down over his face. "I will show you," Zachary said. "Now hurry, hurry." Footsteps echoed in the tunnel. Some of the hybrids went toward the sound, carrying the sharp icepick weapons; the grays began to melt away into other tunnels. The three of them ran, Zachary leading, then Scully, then Mulder. Down one tunnel, then another, turning first left and then right. Behind them, they heard screams, some that sounded human and some like the screeches of dying animals. Suddenly Zachary skidded to a stop, jerked and fell backward. Scully couldn't get out of his way, and she went down underneath him. Her gun hand hit the floor and she couldn't hold on. She struggled, trying to wriggle out from under Zachary, but the hybrid was heavier than he looked. She was trapped. She heard Mulder coming up behind her, running hard--with those long legs, he could really run when he was motivated, and he was coming like a runaway train. When shrlifted her head, she saw his gun coming up as he ran. A look of pure murder in his eyes. What was he meaning to shoot at? She turned her head and saw Leon Nelson drawing a bead on her. Mulder got his shot off first. But even as she heard his Smith boom, Scully knew he'd been a split-second too late. As Nelson's bullet struck her, she had at least the satisfaction of knowing he wouldn't be around to gloat. **** He didn't have to go any closer to know she was dead. He collapsed where he was, just let his legs go out from under him. He was numb, dead himself but for the fact that his heart was still beating, his lungs insisted on continuing to suck air in and out. The question was why--why didn't they just stop and let him die, too? It was over. Even if he won now, even if he could manage to bring the aliens and the Consortium to a dead halt, it wouldn't mean anything. What was left? The only family he had that he still wished to claim was Samantha, who was all right where she was, by her own testimony. She didn't want to come home, not now, so she said. And Scully dead. Let the world come apart. Let human civilization cease to exist. It could be argued the stupid bastards had brought it on themselves. It no longer mattered whether there was a world to wake up to or not. He would've liked to raise the gun still in his hand and fire it just one more time, but he didn't have the strength left in his arm to lift it. If he could just get his hand up and lift off the gas mask, the retrovirus would take of the rest. He couldn't move. Couldn't do anything but breathe and hurt. Strange, that he wasn't crying now. All his life he'd had that release--that if nothing else could be done, at least he could cry himself to exhaustion, for whatever healing effect that had. But not now. It was as if he had already used up all his tears, and there were no more left now, when he needed them most. When they were most indisputably appropriate. Lord, what would he tell her mother? That sweet, understanding woman, who had comforted him when Scully was gone, who had never blamed him for what had happened to Melissa. She wouldn't blame him for this, either, and that would be simply unendurable. He had no idea how long he sat there, unmoving, staring off into space in a stupor. Finally he did lift the gun, feeling as if the effort was nearly beyond him. Then strong brown hands took hold of him, took the gun away from him. He offered no resistance. He just didn't care what they did to him now. Three of the hybrids held him, and a tall, pale-skinned hybrid approached Scully's lifeless body. "Leave her alone," Mulder said weakly. The pale hybrid ignored him. He lifted Zachary away from her, then knelt beside her. "Leave her alone, damn you," Mulder said, with a little more strength now. The hybrid turned to look at him, his expression stern. "I am mostly morph," he said. "I don't give a damn if you're mostly giraffe," Mulder said. "Just leave us alone. Take Zachary if you want to, but not Scully." The hybrid turned Scully's head, and Mulder could see the gaping, gory exit wound. A hole in the back of her head as big as his fist. He looked away, nauseated. "For God's sake," he whispered, "please leave us alone. There's nothing more I can do for you." "Perhaps not," the hybrid said. "But there is one thing I can do for you." In his peripheral vision, he saw the hybrid put both hands on either side of Scully's head. He glanced--his curiosity at least had not gone entirely--and as he watched, the hybrid reconstructed her. Stunned, Mulder watched as blood, brain and bone impossibly flowed back where they belonged. It was as if someone had filmed Scully being shot and now simply ran the film backward to restore the damage. "How...?" Mulder breathed. "How can you do that?" "It's what I do," the hybrid said. He gave Mulder a steady look. "You need her. And we need you. So she is not to suffer the last death, but only the first. That is the way of morphs." The hybrid got to his feet. "Zachary does not need me to bring him out from his first death. He can bring himself." He pointed at the black man's body. "His last death is not my concern." "What do I do now?" Mulder whispered. "Stay with them until they are ready." The hybrids who had been holding Mulder let go, and then he was alone again. After a few minutes, Scully moaned softly and shifted her position on the tunnel floor. Mulder crawled over to her, took her hand. It was warm. She looked fine. Perhaps a little paler than normal, but just as if she had merely fallen asleep there. He mustered the strength to gather her up in his arms, hold her against his chest as she slept. And then, finally, he wept. Continued in Part 19. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 19 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Power is always charged with the impulse to eliminate human nature, the human variable, from the equation of action. - Eric Hoffer September 24, 1996 Rural West Virginia The Strughold Mine Scully woke to find herself cradled against Mulder's chest, one of his arms around her shoulders and the other draped over her waist. Whatever his flaws--and she knew them all--he was one world-class snuggler. She wondered whether he had cuddled up with Samantha as a child or had practiced this art with some woman he'd never found it necessary to name. She felt deeply, intensely sleepy and closed her eyes again for a while, content to soak up the warm safety of his embrace. Then suddenly it occurred to her that she ought to be surprised to be awake at all. She was pretty sure she'd gone to sleep dead. At the moment, though, that didn't seem very important. All that really seemed to matter was that they were warm and dry had a moment to rest. **** A rich, warm aroma woke her again. She opened her eyes and saw Zachary smiling, a strange smile that looked as if it must hurt his mouth to bend that way. "I have made coffee," he said, sounding inordinately proud of himself. Good coffee, from the smell of it. Scully gently disentangled herself from her partner, who didn't even twitch as she unwound his limp arms. She took the coffee, tasted. It *was* good. She nodded approvingly and took another sip. "I have never made coffee before," Zachary said. "Most of us do not like it. But I thought that you would want it." "Good thought," she murmured. Zachary studied Mulder, who still had not moved a muscle. "He sleeps well," Zachary said. Scully nodded. "When he goes out, he goes dead out." When it came to sleep, Mulder lived at both ends of the spectrum--an inveterate insomniac most of the time, but the rest of the time he slept like a rock. She'd seen him sleep through things she would've expected to rouse the dead. "I think we should wake him," Zachary said. He'd said "we," but Scully heard in his tone that he meant "you." He ducked his head. "I am afraid to wake humans. Sometimes they are not...happy at that time." Strange creature, so oddly innocent and delicate. She smiled indulgently. "Let me show you how to do it," she said. She blew across the top of her coffee cup so the scent of it would reach Mulder. He *was* really asleep--she had to blow three times before he even stirred. But then, when he looked at her, she saw it in his eyes. Yeah, she'd been dead all right. **** Zachary had apples for them for breakfast, along with the coffee. Mulder appreciated the effort, but the very thought of food was enough to twist his stomach in knots. He sipped at the coffee instead. "How many of you did they get?" he asked the hybrid. "None," Zachary said happily. "But they think they have killed us all." "How many of them did you kill?" Scully asked. "None." He glanced away, toward a bloody stain on the stone floor a few yards from where they sat. "Fox has killed one." "Line of duty," Scully said coolly. "Righteous shoot. Pretty nifty marksmanship, on the run like that." Mulder said nothing. "I am sorry," Zachary said, "but they have taken your car." Mulder shrugged. "They usually do, in such situations." "We could not stop them because we were dead." Mulder nodded. "Dead people don't usually fight to keep cars from being stolen. It's okay, Zachary. Scully and I have walked out of this place before. We'll manage." "We must go to Oregon, and it is too far to walk. We will fly there." "Why?" Scully asked. "What's in Oregon?" "Something you must see. So that you will understand." "You have a plane?" Mulder asked. "It is better than a plane." "Let's go, then." He rose, and held his hand out to help Scully up. "Zachary," Scully said, "will you give us a minute, please?" "Certainly," Zachary said. He pointed. "I will be at the end of this tunnel when you are ready." She waited until he was out of earshot. Mulder knew what she wanted--he just wasn't sure he could give it to her. "I was dead, wasn't I?" she asked. He didn't look at her. "I don't want to talk about it, Scully. What difference does it make now?" In his mind, he was seeing bits of bloodied, shattered bone. Brain mattter. He couldn't tell her that. He could hardly stand it himself. She would want to know how it was cured, and he couldn't tell her that, either--he didn't know. "I have a right to know what happened." He shook his head. "I don't know what happened." "You mean you didn't see it, or you don't know what you saw?" "I don't even know if I believe what I saw. Look, Scully, I know you probably thought you'd never hear this from me, but I could've imagined the whole thing. I was pretty upset. And I don't care whether it was real or not." He pushed past her, headed after Zachary. Scully gave him a few yards head start, giving him his space, before she followed him out. Then she caught up with him. "I just want you to know that I feel really good," she said. "Better than I have in weeks." *Yeah, right,* he thought. He gave her a weak smile. "I'm glad," he said. They walked through the woods for about a quarter of a mile, then Mulder saw it. The pointed nose poked through the trees, a sharp-edged black delta shape. The same shape in the photo he had bought in the Flying Saucer Cafe. The same shape Krycek had described seeing in the missile silo. It looked like a stealth fighter, but smaller and meaner. It was a UFO. "Oh, my God," Scully said softly. Mulder laughed. That was what she always said, when she finally saw the truth for herself. Then he sobered. "Uh, Zachary, are we going to be okay in this thing? I heard it's kind of hard on humans." "Oh, yes," Zachary said. The hybrid smiled. "I will not stomp on the gas pedal." **** He might not have stomped it, but it was uncomfortable nonetheless, the wild acceleration of the thing smashing Mulder back into his seat so hard his vision blurred and he couldn't see anything outside. Inside, the controls were like something out of *Star Trek*--flat plastic faces that Zachary simply slipped his fingertips over as he lay in his acceleration couch. Zachary had called the thing a "flightcraft," saying it could fly into space as well as in the atmosphere. "It is a kind of fighter," he had said. "It is equipped with conventional cannon and pulse lasers, and it is just as maneuverable as the morphs' attack ships." The seats Mulder and Scully now occupied, he had explained, in combat would accommodate a gunner and an engineer. He smiled again. "But for a flight this simple, I will not require assistance." "This is how you got from Philadelphia to Wyoming before we did, isn't it?" Mulder asked. "Oh, yes. It does not appear on conventional radar screens. I can go anywhere." "What powers it?" Scully asked. Ever the scientist. "Ionized particles," Zachary said. "It is a magneto-aerodynamic design." Mulder was impressed that she seemed to know what that meant. "Using superconducting magnets?" she asked. "Yes." "Wow," she said. And then the hybrid strapped them in, and they were on their way to Portland, Oregon. Mulder had never minded flying, but this time, he was glad it was a short flight. They landed in Oregon two hours later. **** Clackamas County, Ore. Three miles east of suburban Portland Zachary landed the UFO in a little valley, deftly guiding it down into a clearing in the trees. Then they climbed up on a hill and stood beside a cell phone transmission tower and peered down toward the city through binoculars. "I don't see anything out of the ordinary," Mulder said. "What am I looking for?" "The ordinary," Zachary said, shrugging. "That is how it is supposed to be--you should not be able to know the difference." "Well, it's working, then." He handed the binoculars to Scully. "All is different, however," Zachary said. "Meaning what?" Scully asked, training the binoculars at the city. "By this time, roughly two-thirds of all people there are no longer true humans. They are hybrids." She lowered the binoculars and gave Zachary a sharp look. "How is that possible? How can they do that without anyone knowing?" "You will see tonight. Nothing important will happen until after sunset." So they waited for it to get dark before hiking down into town. And then it got really dark, just about the time they reached the first houses. Suddenly the power went out. Automatically Mulder reached in a pocket for his flashlight. "It will not work," Zachary said. And it didn't. "My God, my watch has stopped," Scully whispered. "How can they do that?" Zachary shrugged. "It is an electromagnetic field, distributed from broadcast towers. That one we stood by earlier, for example." "Jesus," Mulder said. "Not only does that shut down cell phone service, but it'll shut down everything else, too. In Redding, Quentin said he couldn't get his laptop to work." Scully nodded. "The whole city's incommunicado, and they can make it look like some fluke of the technology." "It will be off for a few hours," Zachary said, "and then come back on as if nothing has happened. There is precedent. No one will question." "Is it dangerous?" Mulder asked. "The EM field?" The hybrid shrugged. "No more so than sitting before a computer for several hours, as is commonly done. Such fields are all around you, all the time. We should not stay in one place for long." They followed him, creeping along in the shadows of a little dim moonlight. It was cold out; Mulder shivered inside his leather jacket, and wished for his big, insulated anorak. In the distance, they heard a dog howl. The dark was disconcerting--accustomed to street lights, Mulder found himself feeling his way with unusual care. The scenario reminded him of his dream of Artemis, that terrifying, impenetrable darkness, the cold, the fear of falling. He fought it off, tuned it out. Zachary seemed just to wander, as if he were not sure himself exactly where he was going. Finally, he stopped in the space between two houses and pointed. "We must be very quiet now," he breathed. "They are hybrids and have very acute hearing." Mulder said nothing and looked where the hybrid had pointed. In the moonlight he could see dark figures climbing out of an army-style truck. Zachary put something hard and cold into his hand--the binoculars. When Mulder lifted them to his face, he realized they had starlight amplification--suddenly he could see what was going on. The figures were moving into a house. Then he noticed four of them coming for the house on his left. "They're coming this way," he whispered. "Yes," Zachary said. "Follow me." He led them around back, next to a window. "Give the binoculars to her," he said. "It will be easier for her to recognize what is happening--it is a medical procedure." Mulder did as he was told. Then silence for a moment as Scully watched. "They're injecting a woman with something," she breathed. "I can't tell what it is." Then her sharp intake of breath, and from inside the house, a muffled sound of gunshots. She thrust the binoculars at Zachary and drew her gun. "No!" Zachary whispered urgently, catching her arm as she headed for the back door of the house. "They just killed that man!" Scully said. "There is nothing you can do," the hybrid said sorrowfully. "He would have died from the hybridization process anyway--he is better off. This way, he will not suffer." "That's not the point--" "Scully," Mulder whispered. "There are forty of these guys on this block alone, and they're armed like Rambo. We go in there without backup, and we're going to end up on a slab. There's a better way." "They are coming," Zachary said. "They have heard us. Run!" They ran across the back yard. Zachary went over the chain-link fence in a single quick leap. Scully was too short for that, she had to climb it, and Mulder waited to help her. Just as he went up for his own vault over the fence, someone grabbed his foot from behind him, and he fell on the other side, head first, the leg of his jeans caught on a wire point at the top of the fence. And then, suddenly, he was pinned by the brilliant glare of several flashlights that somehow were working. He couldn't move, and even if he had been able to, there was nowhere to go. *Shit,* Mulder thought. Continued in Part 20. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 20 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ ...death and life are not serious alternatives. - Robinson Jeffers Transcript of interview with subject Mulder, William L. 7/17/96 Tape #AB28667 "The whole idea behind creating hybrids was to give us some way of fighting back, if the morphs didn't live up to their promise to leave us alone. The hybrids are a fighting force. They're not the kind of perfect soldiers the Warrior Circle can field, but they're a helluva lot better than nothing. The morphs would go through a human division like shit through a goose, armor and all. We had to do something--what would you have wanted us to do, just give up the planet for assimilation?... "Look, we drafted thousands for Vietnam. Was that any more humane than forcible testing for hybridization? We knew lots of those guys would die, too--it was assumed; it was a given... You know, the main difference is, either you're still partly human or you're not. If the aliens get you instead, you're gone. It's not like the worst thing that could happen if you refuse is that you'd do a couple of years in minimum security. *You* try refusing a morph..." **** Portland, Ore. Scully started to turn, to go back for Mulder, to cry out. But Zachary hoisted her over his shoulder and carried her away, running like a hunted animal. She struggled against him for a moment, then reason kicked in. He was right. There was nothing she could do for Mulder now but get herself caught, too--from the outside it was just barely possible she could help him. When Zachary finally stopped running, he set her feet down on the ground and said, "Stay here. They will think nothing of finding a hybrid in the area, but they must not find you or they will hybridize you or kill you." Here was a particularly dark field behind a day-care center's playground, where the grass, now dead for the winter, had grown up tall along a fence line. "Mulder," Scully said, helplessly. "Yes, I know." "They'll hybridize him, too." "I do not know. They may not have his records, and it would be pointless to proceed without them." "Then they'll kill him." "Only if they do not recognize him. I know one of them who took him; he will help Fox if he can. Stay here and be very quiet. I will go and see what can be done, or if it is already too late. Even if they have changed him, we must get him away from them somehow." Scully would have liked to ask him what difference it made whether someone recognized Mulder, but the hybrid was already gone. **** Five miles above Portland, Ore. The Planner morph aboard the transport ship scowled furiously and pointed out the viewscreen toward Earth's night side. "There," the Planner said. "This darkness does not belong. It is not on the schedule, and we have no knowledge of it. It is not part of the plan." The Warrior squinted at the dark spot. "This is a city?" "Yes--there should be lights, and there are not. Have you proceeded without permission? Without being placed on my schedule?" "Never," the Warrior said. "It is Corvin, no doubt. We Warriors have said repeatedly that he cannot be trusted." "This is not permitted. Go and see what the Corvin is doing. If necessary, explain it to him. You may take no more than twenty assimilants." The Warrior inclined its head in agreement and started toward the flight deck. As it left, the Planner was muttering. "I will have to change my timelines, adjust the placement of the milestones..." **** The guys who had captured Mulder didn't look like hybrids. They had the aspect of your basic garden variety MIBs. Big guys in black combat fatigues with guns and no sense of humor. At first sight, they weren't very scary--Mulder had spent most of his adult life dealing with bozos in uniforms, men with more testosterone than brains. They had hauled him into a truck and driven him to what he thought was an elementary school, although the building was obscured by bright lights. Mulder wondered again how these guys could have lights and power, but nobody else did. A couple of the MIBs stood him up against the truck and went through his pockets. They didn't even blink an eye at his gun, but one of them studied his badge with some interest. "Where did you come from?" he asked, glancing up from the badge. This man was a good three inches taller than Mulder and probably outweighed him by thirty pounds. Mulder noticed the man's uniform didn't bear any insignia. "What authority do you have to ask me?" The MIB hit him, an open-handed slap across the face designed to intimidate, not to hurt. Mulder had been intimidated by professionals--this little tap was only enough to annoy him. "Who the fuck do you think you are?" he demanded. "I'm a federal agent, fuckhead--you're the one who ought to be doing the talking. Why don't you start with why you put two bullets in a man back in that house?" The MIB held up a Mac 10 machine pistol. "This is my authority, you smartass little shit. This area's under military control, so you can shove the 'federal agent' bullshit. You're out of your jurisdiction, FBI. Now where did you come from, and what are you doing here?" "Military control? *Whose* military? I see some ID, buddy, or you can take your questions up with Janet Reno." "What the hell's going on over here?" Mulder noted the way the two who'd been searching him suddenly snapped to at the sound of this voice. An older, balding man in a trench coat was headed toward them. Light blue eyes, deeply lined skin. Mulder figured him for about his own father's age. Vaguely familiar--he focused his memory and retrieved a name--Thomas Corvin. He'd been in government service at some point, when Mulder was too young to care in exactly what capacity. "We found him watching through the window of a house," the MIB said. He handed Corvin Mulder's badge. Corvin didn't even look. "Yeah," he said. "I know who he is." "What should we do with him?" "Take him out back and shoot him. I'm tired of his bullshit." "You can't get away with that," Mulder objected. He was too stunned to be frightened. Corvin smiled. "Why, yes, I believe I can. By the time we're through here, there'll likely be six-hundred thousand or more dead. I really don't care about making it six-hundred-thousand-one. All of you killed in the line of duty, you might say." "Murdered in the line of duty," Mulder shot back. "I've no time to debate semantics with you, Mulder." He tossed the badge back; Mulder caught it, reflexively. The MIBs got both his arms and started dragging him across an expanse of dead grass, toward the back of the building. "I've already filed my report," Mulder yelled. "You think this is going to go over well in an election year?" "There's not a working fax machine in a hundred miles," Corvin said. "Sorry, kid, but you've had more than your share of second chances. It's going to piss the morphs off when they find out, but hell--it's time the war was declared anyway." He was plunged into darkness again as they dragged him around the building. Then suddenly he felt himself shoved roughly to the ground, and in the dark above him, he heard sounds of a struggle. He scrabbled madly to get up, get away, and had almost regained his feet when someone grabbed him and pinned him back down to the ground. "*Quiet,*" a rough voice growled in his ear. "I'm with the underground." Whoever was holding him let go then, and Mulder sat up. In what little light there was from the front of the building, he could vaguely see the MIB who had slapped him, now tying up his companion, who lay limply on the ground. "Is he dead?" Mulder whispered. "Don't be an asshole--I can't kill him without releasing the retrovirus." "You guys are hybrids?" "Yeah. Not bad looking for aliens, are we?" Mulder said nothing. His eyes had begun to adjust, and when he looked around, he noticed a huge trench had been dug in the middle of the school yard. He couldn't see in the dark, but he could smell it--blood and shit and rotting flesh. That murder-smell with which he had become all too familiar in the course of his professional life. *Six-hundred thousand.* This trench, some fifty yards long and seven feet wide, wasn't big enough for so many. Mulder didn't want to know where the others were. As his eyes continued to adjust to the dark, he could dimly see the bodies, stacked in like firewood. The trench was about half full. His guts went into a hard knot. "We've got to get moving," the hybrid said, and Mulder jerked out of his horrified reverie. "He's going to wake up and start thrashing around in a few minutes. Come on. I'll help you find Zachary--he can get you out of here." "Wait," Mulder said. "I need a sample of that stuff they're injecting into these people. Can you get some of it?" The MIB thought for a moment. "Yeah, maybe. For what tissue type do you want it?" "Huh?" Then he got it--that was why they were so careful about cataloging everybody. Different tissue types, different mixtures for hybridization. He thought a moment. "Alpha-one," he said. Scully's type. "All right, I'll see what I can do. You get back over there, behind the trash dumpster. Lie on the ground and act dead, just in case somebody comes by." Mulder did as he'd been told. The MIB screwed a silencer onto a government issue semiautomatic pistol nearly identical to Mulder's gun, then fired two rounds into the dirt at his own feet. Then he holstered the gun and sauntered back around front. Mulder lay on the ground, silent and unmoving, for what seemed like a long time, getting colder and damper by the moment. He wondered where Scully and Zachary had gone--he thought they had gotten away; surely they would've been brought to the same place where he was if not. He wondered what had happened to his MIB rescuer. No sign of him. Then suddenly he heard footsteps and held his breath, stopped blinking. "It's me," the MIB hybrid said. "I have the sample you asked for. You can meet Zachary on the other side of baseball field." Stiffly, Mulder got up. The MIB handed him a small bottle of fluid. "There's a whole cocktail of stuff they give people," the MIB whispered. "But tell your doctor friend this is the active hybridization agent. The rest of it is supposed to ease the transition." "But it doesn't work, does it?" "We're losing a little less than half. Go, will you? I can only cover you for so long." Mulder put the bottle in his pocket, turned up the collar of his jacket to cover his neck and headed off across the field. **** They returned to the UFO without further incident, arriving just before sunup, Mulder and Scully both cold and exhausted, Zachary seeming no worse for the wear. Whatever else he was, the hybrid clearly had impressive stamina. "We will stay here until full light," the hybrid said. "Too many of their ships are in the air at night--we would be spotted." Mulder collapsed into the same acceleration couch he'd been in on the way out to Oregon. "What happened?" Scully asked, perching on the side of her couch. He handed her the bottle and told her. "My God," she said. "Six-hundred thousand?" "The hybrid said they're losing about half the people who go through the process. What's the population of this city?" "I don't know. But my God--six-hundred thousand, in a two-day period." "Makes the Nazis look like amateurs, doesn't it?" "Well, Klemper'd had a fair amount of practice," Scully murmured. "You were right, Mulder--we've got to stop them. The incidence of cancer that might be caused by this is nothing compared to the risk of going through with the process. At this rate, my God, they'll decimate the country." "How do we do that?" he said. Scully looked at him--he looked as if he had aged ten years in the course of a night, his expression drawn, his eyes tired. She had never noticed those lines at the corners of his eyes before. "I'm open to suggestions," he went on. "Maybe," Scully said slowly, "it's time we introduced Zachary to Skinner." "Yes," Zachary said. Mulder narrowed his eyes at the hybrid in surprise. "I thought you wanted for there to be more hybrids--more soldiers against the morphs." "Yes. It is needed--there is no other way for any of us to be free. But being free is about choosing, is it not? Your people should be able to choose. I will go and speak to Mr. Skinner." "Yeah," Mulder said, then fell silent, thinking. "What?" Scully asked. "I keep trying to picture my father in that light, and it's...hard. I mean, I know he's no saint--he has a brutal streak a mile wide, and I'd know it if anybody would. But the idea of him being involved in this kind of mass killing is...it's just beyond me, Scully." "Maybe they thought they'd be saving people, not killing them. If they really were trying to create an army to fight against the morphs, then it could have been viewed as a necessary sacrifice. Mulder, the aliens are killing people, too." "Corvin said he thought it was time the war was declared." She shivered. "I don't like the thought of a hot war with the morphs," she said. She gestured around at the interior of the UFO. "Think about a squadron of these things bombing D.C." "Yeah. I've got to find some way to prove that The Five are on Artemis." She leaned over and laid a hand on his knee. "Right now, you need to get some rest," she said. Mulder's cell phone went off suddenly, just about sending the three of them into cardiac arrest with its shrill electronic whistle. It was Frohike. "Foxman, where the fuck are you? I've been trying to get you all night." "Even you wouldn't believe it," Mulder said. "What've you found?" "Nothing I want to broadcast," Frohike said. "You'd better get back to D.C. pronto, my man." "Why?" "I don't want to alarm you, but you've got family trouble." "What are you talking about?" "They took your Dad to Bethesda last night. Overdose. Looks like an attempted suicide." Continued in Part 21. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 21 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does so not for some noble object but to escape some ill. - Aristotle September 25, 1996 Portland, Ore. "He's still alive," Scully said, holding Mulder's shoulders in her hands. "Focus on that." Her partner had gone pale as ice at the news and dropped the phone. When Scully had picked it up, Frohike had told her that Bill Mulder had swallowed an overdose of pain medication he was taking for an old back injury. The agent staying with him had found him unconscious in a chair in his bedroom. She wondered if it was the same back injury he had incurred when his son had punched his lights out to keep himself from getting beaten half to death. Mulder was breathing too fast, too shallow. "He's alive," Scully repeated. "I will take you home," Zachary said. "We can get there in a couple of hours." Mulder flashed him a look of intense gratitude. "I...I want to be there," he said. "Mulder, they probably won't let you see him," Scully said softly. "It'd be a conflict of interest, a--" "I don't have to see him, Scully. I just want to be there. I need to be there." He drew a long, shuddering breath. His eyes were wide, dilated--dark, panicky holes in his face. She relented. Damned little would have kept her from her own father in a case like this. "Do you want me to come with you?" she asked. "Oh, Christ, yes." **** Josiah Jones knew he had to get away--the hybrid he had knocked out when he had helped Mulder would be found before long, and then the remainder of his life would be short and painful. But there was someone he had to take with him, someone he had promised to look after. In the commotion as the hybrid troops mustered after the night's operation, he found his friend Troy. "Time to go," he whispered. "We have to get out of here." Then he and Troy lost themselves in the crowd, and slipped away in the gathering light, through the quiet streets. They melted into the forest to the east. Jones had left without much of a plan except to get into the trees and keep going until he could find someplace to contact others in the underground. He and Troy walked quietly along, about twenty yards apart, in case one of them was spotted. They'd gone several miles before Jones saw them--a group of ten or more assimilants a short distance ahead. He froze, hoping they hadn't seen him. Then one of them pointed at him, shouted. Damn, Jones thought. "Run!" he yelled to Troy. They could outrun assimilants, who were not much faster than natural humans. But then Jones saw a morph racing toward him from the left and knew he was lost. He ran anyway--it was better than surrendering--but he hadn't gone far before the morph got him and knocked him flat. The ground came up and hit him in the face, and then everything went black. **** The Warrior stood over the creature it had caught in the forest and was pleased. This half-human would reveal what was happening and what Corvin was planning to do next. Perhaps the other one would show them where to find more in this pitiful resistance movement. "Follow that one," the Warrior said, to one of the assimilants. "See where he goes." **** Bethesda, Md. Skinner would've liked to brain him. Seeing Mulder come rushing into the hospital, the words that came to the A.D.'s mind were: "Where the fucking *hell* have you been, you goddamned moron?" But he bit them off. Mulder was pale and sweating, and Skinner was trying to hold in his mind what he might be feeling if it were his own father lying in a hospital bed. Instead, while Mulder went to the nurse's station, he pulled Scully aside. "Where have you two been?" he asked, trying to keep his voice too low for Mulder could hear at a distance. She told him. The Reader's Digest version, fifty words or less. Then she handed him the vial. "Tell Agent Pendrell that I believe this substance contains, among other things, extraterrestrial DNA. He'll find a matching formula in my laptop, in a file labeled purity10." Then she dropped the bombshell. She told him Zachary was waiting to meet him back at the safe house. **** The initial news wasn't good. At the nurse's station, they learned Bill Mulder had been admitted in poor condition, and not upgraded since. "I'll tell Doctor Wynant you're here," the duty nurse offered. "You can wait over there, if you like." "Thank you," Mulder said. Scully looked at him, standing there with his hands jammed into the pockets of his scuffed leather jacket. He looked like he'd been on the run for days--which, of course, he had. But aside from that, he seemed almost normal. A little pale, edgy, nothing more. Mulder sometimes seemed to have a bottomless reservoir of cool, especially when it came to his own personal crises. He'd yowl like a wildcat over the personal problems of someone like Lucy Householder, but when it came to his own problems, he tended to grieve quietly or not at all. Or to ignore the trouble and bury himself in his work. Still, Scully knew by the way he had his hands crammed into his pockets that he was not as calm as he looked. When he got tense, his hands went icy. They went into a waiting area, a typical alcove full of cheap orange vinyl chairs, tables covered with dog-eared magazines, silk plants. Mulder paced the length of it, then reversed his direction. "I think I'm going to hunt up a coffee machine," Scully said. "Bring you something?" He stopped, sighed, leaned his head back. "Three ounces of Scotch would be good." She sighed, too. "Yeah, I heard that." She went down the corridor to where she had heard dishes clattering in the cafe. She bought him a cup of decaf--if nothing else, he could hold it in his hands to warm them. They waited for more than an hour before the doctor could get away. Scully thumbed through a Newsweek, two weeks old. Mulder never left off his pacing. He went back and forth across the waiting room, down the hall and back, then again and again across the waiting room. He didn't say anything, didn't seem to see anything. "Jesus, Mulder," Westin said finally. "Will you sit down? You're driving me nuts." "Agent Westin," Skinner said. "Go sit in the cafeteria if you're uncomfortable." His tone would've frosted a blast furnace. Mulder didn't say anything. He paced. Finally, a middle-aged, balding man in surgical greens stuck his head in and said, "Mr. Mulder?" Mulder froze in place. For a split second, he had the look of a baby bunny confronting a cobra. He tapped that reservoir of *sangfroid* again. "Here," he said, going toward the doctor. Stepping out from behind the doctor, Scully recognized Angie Harmon--a D.C. police victims' services officer. "Hey, Mulder," Angie said. Something in Mulder's shoulders seem to unlock when he saw her. "Hi, Angie." "How you doing?" she asked. "I've been better." He turned to the doctor. "My father--" "It's a little early to be sure. He took an overdose of Norgesic--do you know what he was taking them for?" Mulder swallowed. "An old back injury. It still gives him some pain, now and then." "Oh," the doctor said. "Well, we've got him stabilized now, but we won't know until tomorrow whether there will be any lasting effects. As for right now, he's resting comfortably, and I suggest that you go home and do the same." Mulder closed his eyes briefly and let go a long sigh. "I appreciate your efforts. Thank you." "No sweat. We'll call if there's any change." The doctor patted Mulder's shoulder. "I gather you know Officer Harmon?" "Yeah." "Okay. My name's Carl Wynant--you have any questions, just call this number. Get some rest, and don't worry." He handed Mulder a card, then headed off to a nurse's station. "I need to ask you a couple of questions," Angie Harmon said. "Yeah, I know," Mulder said. He looked and sounded exhausted. "I was out of state when it happened; my partner can vouch for me. As far as I know he's never tried to kill himself before, and I have no idea whether he was depressed or not because I haven't seen him or talked to him in--" His voice caught. "--about six months," he grated. Longer than that, really, Scully thought. It wasn't as if they'd had much chance to talk on Martha's Vineyard the night the aliens had brought Bill to the house. "It could've been an accident, you know," Harmon said. "He's been taking Norgesic for his back for ten years. He's never had an accident before." "He's not as young as he was ten years ago. People get older; they get forgetful." "Thanks for the thought, Angie." Now she held out a card of her own. Mulder shook his head. "Hey," she said. "Real cops have policies and procedures, too, you know. Mine don't say to give my card only to people who are not fibbie psychologists. Just take it and shut up. If you need it, use it. I might surprise you--I might turn out to be pretty damned good at my job." "I know you are," Mulder murmured. He took the card. She squeezed his shoulder. "Do what the doctor said. Go home and get some sleep. You look like you could use it." Scully came up behind him. "I'll make sure he does," she said. Harmon smiled--a gently sad smile--and left. Scully gave him a minute, then pulled on his arm. "Come on, let's go," she said. To her surprise, he didn't fight her. "Okay," he said dully, and went where she pulled him. It crossed her mind that even he knew he just didn't have much left. **** She wasn't looking when it happened. She had gone into the apartment ahead of Mulder and Skinner, and she was shrugging out of her coat when she heard it. A soft sound, a swish of fabric. She turned and saw Mulder go down. His knees let go, and the rest of him caved in on top of them. Skinner caught him just before his head hit the stone floor. Continued in Part 22. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 22 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ It is better to master the mind than be mastered by mind. - Zen saying September 25, 1996 Falls Church, Va. "Couch," Scully said urgently. "Get his feet up on the arm of it." She had sensed he was hyperventilating--she had been expecting this anxiety attack but thought he'd manage to keep it under control until they were alone. The A.D. lifted Mulder--God, he was dead out, so limp--and laid him on the couch with a gentleness Scully wouldn't have guessed Skinner had in him. "Get me that quilt off the bed in there," she said. Mulder had started to come out of it, his eyes open but unfocused. He struggled weakly to sit up. "Lie still," Scully ordered. He got his head up. "Mulder," she said, "if I have to sit on you, I'll make it hurt." He let his head fall back. "I'm, uh...I'm okay." "The hell you are." Skinner came back with the quilt, spread it over him. Scully looked at his eyes. Still not quite focused. She felt his pulse--racing. His skin was so dry--how had she not noticed that? She thought back, trying to remember the last time she had seen him really eat anything--night before last, here in the apartment. So he hadn't eaten in more than a day; he'd been sleeping hard, and she had been grateful for the peace of it. But of course, that was not normal for him. "How long have you been feeling nauseated?" she asked. "Not much," he said. "I haven't been throwing up." "How long?" she pressed. "Since the night in the mine. I'm okay, really." "Should we get him back to the hospital?" Skinner asked. "No!" Mulder said. It was the first thing he'd said with any strength behind it, and now he struggled in earnest. Scully was having trouble holding him. "Mulder, knock it off!" Skinner said sharply. He froze, then relaxed. "Please," he whispered. Scully heard desperation in his voice. Skinner was right--they ought to take him to the hospital. Softly, she said, "Mulder, you're badly dehydrated, and I can't run an IV here." "Don't." A sob without tears. She sighed. He had flipped into brutalized 12-year-old mode again, that terrified child who'd had to deal with dialysis at three years old and was afraid of needles because too many of them had been shoved into him. The one who'd gone ballistic and had to be sedated over a dental X-ray on Artemis. The hospital would make him crazy, and the last thing he needed was more stress. He'd had no time to recover from meeting up with the grays again, from seeing her die, from the huge pile of bodies in Portland. And now, his father, terribly ill at his own hand. After taking an overdose of the medicine he used against pain from an injury Mulder had inflicted. Scully was pretty sure the fact that Mulder had hit him in self-defense wouldn't be uppermost in her partner's mind. She remembered suddenly what Valerie Clendenning had said: *He wouldn't eat anything but chicken broth.* Chicken broth. It had been his prescription for her, when she'd fallen ill--as if at some primal level, he half-believed chicken soup would cure anything. "Okay," Scully said. "Here's the deal, and it's not negotiable, you understand?" He gave her barest nod, his eyes wary. "I'm going to make you some of that microwave chicken soup you like. You're going to drink every drop. You throw it up, you go to Bethesda. Period." "Okay." To Skinner, she said, "See that he stays put there. If he moves off that couch, handcuff him to it." "That'll be my pleasure, believe me," Skinner growled. "I'll be good," Mulder breathed. "I swear." She microwaved the soup, then strained out the noodles. When she came back, she found Mulder sitting up, shedding bits of metal and leather--gun, keys, wallet, badge, cell phone. His expression was distracted, unfocused. He gave the soup a look of dread, clearly resisting the temptation to curl his lip, when Scully held out the mug. But he didn't argue, just took the cup and blew on the surface of the liquid to cool it. "Go slow," she suggested. "Just sip it." He sipped, eyes closed. Swallowed carefully. A moment passed, then she noticed a fine sheen of sweat had broken out on his upper lip. "Okay?" she asked. "Yes, mother," he said, not unkindly. Took another sip. He was forcing it down at first, but after a few sips, it seemed to get easier. And it worked better than Vallium--seconds after he handed Scully the empty mug, he put his head down on the couch and was fast asleep. Scully gave Skinner a look that told him she could handle it from there. "Call if you need anything," he whispered, then left. Scully tucked the quilt around Mulder and settled in with a book to wait and watch. **** Skinner went cautiously outside, not knowing exactly where the hybrid Scully had called "Zachary" might be. As he went around the side of the building, he saw a movement in the shadows and stopped, not breathing. "Hello," a soft voice said, and Skinner fought off the urge to reach for his gun. The hybrid came out where Skinner could see him. It ducked its head after a moment, and Skinner realized he had been staring at it mutely, in shock. *Acting like an asshole,* he thought, embarrassed, as if he had caught himself gaping at someone in a wheelchair. He had been expecting something more normal--or perhaps a great deal less so. This thing was so...human. And yet so alien. "Are you Zachary?" he asked. "Yes. I am sorry if I startled you." "It's all right," Skinner said. "No one really told me what to expect. You'd better come in--Agent Scully said you had something to tell me." "Yes." Skinner led him upstairs to the apartment where Westin was staying. **** Mulder slept for about two hours, slept like death, unmoving, even his breath seeming hardly there. Then suddenly he shuddered awake and burst into helpless, convulsive sobs. He didn't move, just lay there weeping with all his strength. Shivering. Scully thought again of Karen Curtis' film, of Mulder as a tortured, terrified child, clinging desperately to his father. She knelt beside the couch, leaned over him and wrapped her arms tightly around him, murmuring nonsense comfort words. She doubted he heard her, doubted it mattered what she said. What mattered was that he knew she was there, that he knew he wasn't alone. She had to shelter him, somehow lend him a little safety, a little warmth, while he released his grief. She let him cry, hoping he could discharge enough of it to recover and stabilize himself. Or at least exhaust himself and rest through the night. She lost track of the time and had no idea how long he wept. It seemed like hours, and she found herself becoming fatigued, too. By the time he finally began to quiet, she felt limp, feverish. "Shh," she whispered. "Hush, hush." Then she fell silent, stroking his hair to gentle him. "Can't," he whispered. "I can't do it anymore." She heard the plaintive helplessness in his tone. He was feeling overwhelmed--not at all unreasonable; the situation was simply overwhelming. "Hush," she said again. "Just rest. You can rest now. I'll keep you safe." "It's too hard." Get him focused, she thought. Normalize the situation so he can grapple with it, one step at a time. She reached for her handbag, fished out a tissue. "Here," she said. He took the tissue. She'd meant for him to wipe his face, but he swiped at the tear-spotted pillow under his head instead. "I'm making a mess," he said, sounding remorseful. "That doesn't matter," Scully said. "Can you drink some water?" "Uh... Yeah." He struggled up, moving as if it hurt him. She handed him the remains of a bottle of water she had started. He drank thirstily, chugging it down. "That seems to have gone over well," she murmured. "Want some more?" He shook his head. "'Nuff," he said. "Come to bed. Let's get some sleep." He followed her into his bedroom, collapsed onto the bed. Scully kicked off her shoes and crawled in next to him, molded herself against his back. She wanted him to be able to feel her there. He sighed heavily in relief and went to sleep. **** September 26, 1996 Scully woke to find him gone. In a wash of fear, she sat up, then heard the shower running and relaxed, rolled over and looked at the clock. Five-thirty--early for the King of the Insomniacs. She frowned, intuition prickling at the back of her mind. She shoved it away. *He* might be running enough adrenaline to be awake at five-thirty, but she was not. She let herself doze for a while. But the shower kept running, and she couldn't go back to sleep. She lay there, listening to the water for a few minutes. Finally she couldn't stand it anymore. She got up, opened the door a crack and peeked in. Mulder lay on the carpet, on his side with his back to her, wet, naked and shivering. God, Scully thought, fear gripping her. "Mulder," she said, forcing her voice soft to keep from startling him. She saw his bathrobe tucked into a towel rack, retrieved it and covered him with it. "Are you okay? What happened?" she asked. He sighed and lifted his head a little. "I was in the shower," he said dreamily. "But I got kind of dizzy. Thought I should lie down." "Do you still feel dizzy?" "No... 'M cold, but that's all." "Can you get up? Come back to bed." "No, I'm okay. I'm just going to get dressed now." He sounded fuzzy, out of it. "Mulder," she said, exasperated, "you've had two dizzy spells in less than twelve hours. You're not going anywhere--you're not well enough." He shook his head. "I'm going to the hospital, Scully. If I don't show, my dad will know he's getting to me. I'm not gonna let him have the satisfaction." She heard the resistance in his voice, but she noted that he wasn't really making any effort to get up. She didn't want a fight out of him. "Just to get warm," she said, soothingly. "You're shivering. Just get under the covers for a minute and get warm. Then you can get up whenever you want to. Come on." "Uh... Okay." He struggled up, wrapping the robe around himself awkwardly, staggered into the bedroom and folded in on himself into bed. Scully tucked the blankets around him. "I don't want to be late," he muttered. "Just get warm. Just for a minute. He slept. **** Ten miles east of Portland, Ore. The Conjoiner had dissolved in the oil, and the Warrior kneeled on Josiah Jones' chest to hold him down while it carefully poured the oil into his nostrils. The half-human coughed and choked and tried to retch up the mixture of oil and alien, but the Warrior held on until the Conjoiner took hold and Jones quieted. Then it got up and waited. Before long, the Conjoiner would tell it what it wanted to know. But a few minutes later, Jones began to retch again. Strange. The Warrior had never seen this happen before. The half-human managed to turn over, and then Jones vomited up a great wad of a tar-like substance, out of which a shriveled Conjoiner writhed across the ground in its death throes. The Warrior stared, confused and alarmed. Josiah Jones lifted his head and smiled, tar dripping from his lips. Then the Warrior understood. These half-humans had the ability to reject the Conjoiners, even perhaps to kill them. It would have to employ other means of learning what it needed to know. It went to Jones warily, expecting a fight. But Jones just lay there, seeming exhausted. The Warrrior lifted one of Josiah Jones' arms and studied it briefly. Yes, just about there. The Warrior tapped Jones' arm midway between the wrist and elbow. Both bones snapped, and Jones screamed. It would take longer this way, but the Warrior supposed this method would work as well. Continued in Part 23. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 23 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Dead men have no victory. - Euripides September 26, 1996 A mile and half east of Muirkirk, Md. "What did Mulder say?" Langly asked as he ran a metal detector across the walls of an old, empty farmhouse. Frohike snorted. "You think I was going to tell him about this over a *cell* phone? What kind of moron do you think I am? Fucking cell phones. Tools of the military-industrial complex." Frohike had noticed some Japanese characters on the microfilm Mulder had copied from the material at the hospital in Boston. The characters spelled out "Ishimaru." Then Langly had remembered that Ishimaru had been one of the doctors in Unit 731, a Japanese military outfit that had committed atrocities--in the name of science--in China during World War II. And that had illuminated things considerably. Ishimaru, Klemper. Working together? Frohike had warmed up his computer and searched some databases, finally coming up with a deed record. Ishimaru and Klemper had been both been part owners of this property. Byers frowned as he aimed a flashlight up into the attic. "Mulder's a damned fool for using a cell phone. Cellular telephony is to the MIBs what candy is to a little kid. Everybody from the CIA to the KGB to a Louisiana ham radio operator can hear every word he says. He hasn't even got encryption on his phone." "Why bother?" Langly said. "It's a snap to crack it. Hey, I think I've got something." Frohike and Byers gathered around him, listening to the whine of the detector as Langly passed it back and forth across the fireplace mantel. "Oh, yeah," Frohike said. "Come to daddy, baby." Langly put the metal detector down, tucked his long blond hair behind his ears and bent to look into the chimney. "It's a safe. Digital lock," he said. "I thought this fireplace looked suspiciously clean." Byers reached in a rucksack and handed Langly a small electronic device. He and Frohike hunkered down to wait as Langly attached the device to the lock and let it run, working its way through all the permutations until it beeped and displayed the combination. "Ah," Frohike said. "Ain't technology grand?" "When it comes to security," Byers murmured, "high-tech giveth and it taketh away." Langly came out of the chimney holding a book bound in red leather. "You guys read German?" he asked. **** Falls Church, Va. "How is he?" Skinner asked. "All right, I think," Scully said. It was about noon, and Mulder had fallen into that deathlike sleep again, motionless, dreamless, nerveless. Scully had been sifting through the files Skinner had dropped off while she was at the doctor, on a day that now seemed as if it had been months ago. "He's exhausted, that's all. At least he's sleeping--that's a good sign, I think." Actually she wasn't so sure it was--he was medicating himself in sleep, anesthetizing himself. Skinner nodded, but his look was pensive, evasive. He had something on his mind. "Should I wake him?" Scully asked. "We found a suicide note," Skinner said, although that didn't directly answer her question. "It was in Mulder's e-mail." "E-mail?" Scully asked. She'd never heard of sending a suicide note via e-mail before. The assistant director shrugged. "Bill may have thought it was the only way to get it to him. Problem is, there's no real way to be sure he actually wrote it. He's got the technical literacy and an Internet account, but there's no handwriting to compare, no fingerprints on it..." "You suspect foul play?" "No, not really. Agent Costanza was there the whole time, and there's no way into that bedroom except the interior door." Skinner sounded as if he were trying to reassure himself. Scully could sympathize; how much nicer it would be if the incident could be wrapped up neatly. Skinner sighed heavily, and got to his real point at last. "Scully, this thing's not going to stay quiet for much longer. We got some really nice satellite shots of Portland after I talked to you. Including one of those trenches full of bodies." He fell silent. "We go to the press, and things are going to get crazy in one big hurry. If we leave it for the press to discover on their own--" "You want to trot out the suspects we've got in custody," she guessed. "Including his parents." *Jesus, he's miserable enough, without having to watch his mom in manacles on CNN.* "If we open this up, we'd better be prepared to say what we're doing about it," Skinner said. "Hell, it's the X files section's case, and you two are the section." Was he kidding? They weren't doing shit about it. What could they do? "Are you proposing to send troops into Portland?" she asked. "Or is it just going to be a dog-and-pony show--Mulder and I go up in front of the cameras and claim we've got the situation in hand? 'We're from the government, and we're here to help you?'" "It looks to me like it's a bit late to bother sending troops into Portland," Skinner said dryly. "You have any idea where they'll strike next? If you do, yeah, hell, I'll call out the National Guard. For all the fucking good it would do." Scully sighed. She needed reinforcements. "I'll go wake Mulder," she said. "He's the section chief--by rights, it's his call." She went to Mulder, shook him. She saw one eyelash twitch, but beyond that, no response. "Mulder," she said softly, and shook him again. "Five more minutes, okay?" he muttered. She hated to refuse him. "Skinner's here," she said. "He's waiting." "Mmm... Okay, I'm getting up." He wasn't. He lay like a corpse. Scully waited. "Mulder," she said again. She ruffled his hair. "I know you're tired," she said. "Want some coffee?" "Yeah. I feel like a zombie. What time is it?" "About twelve-thirty." It took a moment for this to sink in. He snapped up like a spring. "Jesus," he said, scowling. "Why didn't you wake me?" She sighed. "Because I care more about you than I do about what your father thinks of you." His look softened. "Have you heard anything from the hospital?" He grabbed jeans and a T-shirt out of his suitcase, his motions rushed, jerky. "I called earlier--they've upgraded his condition to fair." He went into the bathroom to dress, but left the door open a crack. Scully turned her back. "What does Skinner want?" he asked, through the opening. She decided to let Skinner be the one to break the news about a possible press conference. "They found your father's suicide note." Silence for a moment. Then, "What does it say?" "I don't know. I guess Skinner's got it, but he didn't show it to me." He came out, then, running his hands through his tousled hair, and began a somewhat abstracted search for his glasses. "Behind the alarm clock," Scully said. He retrieved them, put them on. "Okay," he said. "Let's do it." That sounded normal--the old steel, the usual vigor. Scully let herself relax, ever-so-little. She didn't really think he was back to normal, but he had collected himself enough to fake it. She followed him out to the living room. Skinner had fetched himself some coffee, but he wasn't drinking it. He hadn't even taken his coat off. He was pacing slowly, free hand thrust deep into a pocket, looking at the floor as he walked. Mulder put his hands in his pockets, too. "What's up?" he asked. Skinner retrieved a sheet of paper--printout of the note, Scully guessed--from his jacket, handed it over. Scully's stomach twisted in anxiety. Mulder scanned the sheet, his frown of concentration impassive, unemotional. If there were any bombshells in the words on the page, his expression didn't reflect them. Gingerly, Skinner started, "Does that sound..." "Yeah," Mulder said. Tone a little too cool, too even. "I'll buy that he wrote it." "Fogarty wants to call a press conference." Mulder frowned in confusion. "About my father's suicide attempt? What f--" Skinner's cell phone went off. He grimaced in annoyance. "Excuse me?" "About Portland," Scully whispered, while the A.D. spoke into his phone. Mulder crooked an eyebrow at her. "Seriously?" She nodded. He shook his head. "And roll tape of what? A bunch of hybrids who look as human as you and I going about their normal business? We'll end up looking like idiots. We need to catch them in the act first--and that's going to be tough in an area where a videocamcorder won't work." Skinner hung up the phone. He looked at Mulder. "Karen Curtis Casper says she's ready to talk. To you." **** Silver Spring, Md. Mulder reminded himself that Karen Curtis had grown older and he had grown taller--the odds that she could overpower him physically had shifted dramatically in his favor in the intervening years. Nevertheless, he was trying to tamp down a gnawing anxiety as he went into the interview room--a fear born in a time when he might not have been able to fight her off or run away. And he suspected this was a case where anxiety would not serve him well. She was a psychiatrist, with a whole bag full of mind tricks. He could play that game, too, but only if he kept his wits and stayed focused. If he didn't let her start punching his buttons. Trouble was, he was walking into the interview with some of those buttons already activated. He worked his shoulders to release the muscles, breathed to steady himself. This was a federal prison. There were guards all around, and they were on his side, not hers. Behind the trick mirror, Skinner and Scully were watching. Scully wouldn't let Karen Curtis do anything to him. She'd come racing in, gun drawn, all red-headed Irish flaming fury, if Curtis tried anything. *This time she's the one who can't run away.* The interview room had a table and chairs, and normally, Mulder would have sat down, would have put himself on the same level as the interviewee in an effort to gain his or her confidence. But he didn't want to be that close to Karen Curtis. He stayed on his feet and leaned against the wall, waiting for her. He was expecting his eidetic memory to give him a flash when she entered the room, and it didn't disappoint him. She'd been a blond ice princess in her younger years, and for a moment his memory showed her to him--a tough woman, a la Lauren Bacall. Tall, cool, in complete control. It crossed his mind that he had unconsciously patterned some of his own professional behavior after her, after the first psych practitioner he had ever known, in part because her demeanor had suggested there was a level of control he had wished for desperately. He had never attained it, and he wondered now if Karen Curtis ever really had either. Maybe it was just a useful facade. She did not look in control now. In fact, her body language was all suppressed panic. Muscles locked up in a way that robbed her movements of grace, her classic features hardened by worry. Still, old habits die hard, and her look at him was professional, sizing up *his* body language just as he had done hers. And having done so, she went to the table and sat in the chair, not looking directly at him, now. Folded her hands on the tabletop, submissively. *Oh, she's good, all right,* Mulder thought. She'd read him like the morning paper, and she was letting him play his own mind game on her. Mulder couldn't resist the temptation to use her own act against her, to match her Bacall with Bogart. "I'm not sure we've ever been formally introduced," he said coolly. She laughed bitterly. "No," she said. "You never did tell me your name--it was the one thing I never could get out of you." And he found, amazingly, that he still wished not to tell her. Somewhere inside he still possessed a reservoir of hot resentment toward this woman. He was not sure where it had come from, but it was there. *Bitch,* he thought. *Fucking bitch. I'm not telling you my name.* "What is it you want from me?" he said, fighting to keep his tone even. *Don't let her piss you off,* he told the angry 12-year-old in his head. *You can scream and throw things later. I promise.* She smiled a little, still not quite looking at him. "These bozos think your father tried to kill himself. I suspect you know better." Appealing to his intellect, his ego. *You and I are the only ones who really know what's going on.* "Maybe," he said. "What makes you think it wasn't attempted suicide?" "I know Shelby Bateman. Bullets are his answer for everything. And he can get to anybody, anywhere--you know that." She was right, there. Mulder shrugged. "You're suggesting that he might get to you?" "Hell, yes. I'm surprised he hasn't already. And you, too, for that matter. What your father knows won't screw up the operation as it stands now. It's what *you* know that Bateman's afraid of." *She's afraid Bateman will kill her to shut her up.* Not unreasonable, actually--if he did, she would't be the first. "And you want me to protect you, beyond what's already being done to protect you in federal confinement? Why should I?" "Look," she said slowly, "you may not want to believe it, but I saved your life. Tom would've killed you outright if I hadn't convinced him I could make sure you wouldn't remember anything." "Tom Corvin?" She nodded. "He doesn't care about anything except killing the aliens. One of them took him over for a day or two, while he was just a kid fighting in Korea. He hates them so much he'll mow down anything, just to stop them. You'd been up there on Artemis--if you had started talking about what you saw, you could have blown the whole operation. He could've ripped you open like a salmon, and his conscience wouldn't have troubled him for a second." Mulder thought of Portland and knew she was right about this, too. "What do you know about the operation?" "I was Tom's mistress, not his executive assistant. Beyond his pillow talk, which wasn't terribly artful, I didn't get much of the details. I know the general plan was to use The Five survivors to hold the aliens off until we had some way to fight them. For him, it was war, right from the beginning." "Talk sense," Mulder said harshly. "You were on Artemis, too. If you were just his mistress, what were you doing up there?" "He sent me to get you." "Oh, come on--just for that?" "He said he needed somebody he could trust. Somebody who'd make sure you didn't blab everything before we could figure out what to do with you. I went up there with a whole suitcase full of drugs. If I'd had to, I could've kept you in a coma for a month. In the event, it wasn't necessary--you were already so out of it, I didn't have to do anything. Then when I got you back down here, I told Tom I could make sure you'd never remember any of it." "So I'm supposed to believe *your* conscience wouldn't have let you gut a 12-year-old? You didn't have any objection to mind-fucking me big-time, did you?" She looked at him, a hard, steady look like a predatory animal's stare. "No," she said coldly. "You're right. I didn't give a damn about you. But I got a lot of good data out of the experiment." He nodded. "You really are that heartless, aren't you? You weren't trying to save my life. You just wanted to prove it would work, because if it worked on me, then you could use it on all the other people who were being abducted and tested." "Look at it this way, Mulder--whatever my reasons were, you're alive to deliver that high-and-mighty judgment." "Alive for how long? The aliens want The Five back, and I can't tell them where they're hidden. And the morphs are starting to get pretty pissed off. They're going to kill us all. They've already started--on the ones your friend Corvin hasn't already put down like sick dogs." She laughed. "You don't get it, do you? Tom would kill The Five, too, to keep the aliens from getting them back. And that's why he'll kill me, if he can--because I can tell you where The Five are. They're right where you saw them last. They're on Artemis." "No, they're not," Mulder said, and watched her expression dissolve into horror. "We sent a shuttle crew up to look, and they're not there." "That's impossible," she said. "They couldn't move them." "Apparently they could." She fell silent for a moment, fear sinking in. Suddenly she said, "I want to be hybridized." There was an edge of hysteria in her tone. "Right now--and my family, too. I tested well; we all did. I've still got my implant." "What good would that do?" The fear she'd been trying to keep suppressed had burst out. "Don't play stupid with me, Mulder!" she shrieked. "I saved your life! You've got to help me! You owe me that!" "I don't know how to arrange to have you hybridized," he said. "And I'm not sure I would do it even if I did know--do you realize that only half survive the process?" "*What!* You're lying!" She got up out of the chair, backing away from him in terror. He could see in her eyes that she was still reading him--she knew he was telling the truth. "Oh, *God*!" she wailed. She backed up against the wall opposite him, then slid down it until she was sitting on the floor in a heap. "Oh, God," she moaned. "They've killed us all. Those stupid fucking bastards have killed us all." Continued in Part 24. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 24 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control. - Cyril Connolly September 26, 1996 Silver Spring, Md. "Well," Scully said. "That was useless." "Not entirely," Mulder said. "Not necessarily. You got any idea why, facing the prospect of the annihilation of the human race, anyone would want to be hybridized?" He was headed down the hall toward the prison's front gate, with Skinner and Scully on either side of him--restored to man-on-a-mission condition, and not cutting her short legs any slack at all in his haste. Skinner was keeping up, just barely. "No." "Know anybody who might?" "Have an idea, or want to be hybridized?" "Idea." "No." She thought as she hurried along, half a step behind him. "Oh. Yeah, actually. Zachary." "Uh, huh." "You still think The Five are on Artemis?" the A.D. said. "My gut sense is, yeah. But I can't prove it." "I suppose you think we ought to go back up there. You have any idea what that costs?" "No. But I have got an idea about a cheaper way to get there." He stopped, abruptly, facing Skinner--Scully nearly ran into him. "Look, it's the morphs who want them back, right?" "Right," Skinner said, obviously having as much trouble keeping up with Mulder's train of thought as Scully had been trying to keep up with his pace. "But the morphs have spaceships of their own, right?" "Oh," Scully said again. "The flightcraft." "Even easier than that," Mulder said. "We just find a morph, and tell *them* to go and look." "And you know where to find a morph?" Skinner asked. "No, but I bet Zachary does." **** Austin, Texas Tom Corvin stood on the Mansfield Dam and looked west, toward the blue glittter of Lake Travis. The lake lay in a deep river bed carved into the stone hills. Massive electrical transmission lines stretched away from the dam--Corvin couldn't hear their hum over the roar of water rushing down the spillway, but in his mind he could almost feel it. "Beautiful country," Shelby Bateman said. He lit a Morley and blew a long plume of smoke into the warm fall air. "It's almost too bad." "It's a fucking tragedy," Corvin said coldly. "But that doesn't change what has to be done." Bateman shrugged. "Where do you think you'd like to live, once it's over?" "I don't give a damn. Truth is, I don't expect to survive it." "I was just thinking I might come back here." Corvin wanted to change the subject. "You're going to be able to shut all this down tomorrow night?" "Absolutely. And as soon as we have, we'll start on the state and local power base. Police, firefighters, municipal officials, the honchos in the state agencies. We'll have total cooperation from the authorities by morning." "Such of them as live through the night," Corvin reminded him. "The dead ones are even more cooperative than the living," Bateman smirked. "You know the expression--'lead, follow or get out of the way.'" "You wouldn't like living here," Corvin said peevishly. "I'm told it gets hot in the summer, and you're one cold son of a bitch." Bateman's eyes narrowed, but he said nothing. **** Falls Church, Va. They returned to the apartment to find that, next door, Westin was teaching Zachary to play Windows solitaire on the computer. "I am getting my butt kicked," Zachary said, grinning and sounding delighted as a child on Christmas. "I am getting suckwad cards every time." Despite himself, Mulder laughed. "Westin," Scully said, wearing her ruler-wielding-nun look. "Would you teach a little kid how get past the safety on a cigarette lighter, too? Zachary, that game is addictive. It'll rot your brain faster than crack cocaine." The hybrid's eyes went wide. "She's joking," Mulder said quickly. "It won't hurt your brain. But you'll waste a lot of time with it. Besides, you're right. Those cards suck--I can see it from here." "I will turn it off," Zachary said. "No, it's okay. You can just leave it for right now. The screen saver'll kick in, in a minute, then you can go back to it. We need to talk to you." "Is your father all right?" Zachary asked anxiously. "Yeah, he's okay," Mulder said, glancing away. "Listen, why would somebody want to be hybridized? What are the advantages?" "There are many. We are stronger and hardier and less susceptible to certain toxins--for example, we can be exposed to the aliens' retrovirus without suffering harm." "What about radiation?" Scully asked. "Can you withstand exposures to radiation that we couldn't?" "Yes. We can be hurt by radiation, but only at much higher levels than humans." "But there's more than one kind of hybrid, right?" Mulder said. "Yes. Actually, there are several kinds, depending on the genetic nature of the person who is to be hybridized." "Right, but do they all have the same advantages?" "No. The radiation-tolerance is only for those of us who were made from scratch, as you put it, in Dr. Klemper's lab. And I have heard there were some Japanese hybrids, too--though I have never met one. I do not think the Japanese made very many." "Ishimaru," Scully breathed. Her tone suggested that if Ishimaru were not already dead, she would have liked to tear him limb from limb. "Yes. Dr. Ishimaru and Dr. Klemper worked very closely together at one time, but it was before I was...born, so I did not know Dr. Ishimaru myself." "Okay," Mulder said, "but what about the hybrids that look like regular humans? Can they withstand the retrovirus?" "Oh, yes. That is a major part of the reason for them. But more than that--they cannot be assimilated by the Circles." "That's what she was afraid of," Scully said. "She's more afraid of being assimilated than of being hybridized." "Oh, yes," Zachary said. "So would I be, if I were subject to assimilation." "Why?" Mulder asked. "Even if you knew you had a fifty-fifty chance of dying in the hybridization process?" "Because assimilants have no choices and no secrets. All that they know is known, and nothing belongs to them. They become the Circles and must do what the Circles wish, no matter what it is. I do not think it is a pleasant way to live." Mulder thought of what Krycek had said--*At least if I die, it'll be *me* dying.* "But you said that the grays belong to the Circles, too. So how can some of them be in your underground, fomenting a revolution against the Circles?" "Some of the grays have learned to keep things from the Circles. Things that they know in their heads." "I don't understand," Scully said. Mulder did. He remembered the grays in the mine, the way it had seemed for a moment that he and they were sharing the same brain. "We are talking because there are things I know that you do not," Zachary said to Scully. "Because you are not inside my head, you can only know what I know if I tell you, is that not true?" "Sure, but--" "Those who belong to the Circles know everything that all know and cannot keep the others from knowing unless they learn to keep it to themselves. And if they can prevent physical contact with others who may not know how to keep things to themselves." "But what does that mean?" "Forget it, Scully," Mulder cut in. "It has to be experienced, not explained. Look, Zachary, do you know how to contact the nearest morph?" "It will take time to learn where to find one, but yes, I can. They will not be far from you, for they expect you to find their colleagues for them. You want me to tell it something?" "Yes. Tell it that I think The Five are still on Artemis. It should go and look for them there." "Oh," Zachary said. "Do you really think so?" "Yes." "In the meantime," Skinner said, "do you know where the morphs are going to strike next?" "No. But you are in luck--there is someone here who might." "Who?" "My son," Zachary said, beaming. "He arrived while you were gone." "You have a son?" Scully asked. "He is my clone," Zachary said. "His name is Troy." **** On board the transport ship The Warrior had finished making its report, relaying everything it knew about the half-human it had captured and where the one it had let escape had gone. "Most annoying," the Planner said. "This will upset everything. What do you propose?" "Attack," the Warrior said simply. Naturally, the Planner thought. That is always what the Warriors propose. "Attack where? When? With what strength? Really, if you expect me to provide the appropriate support, you must be more specific about what it is you mean to do." "We must teach these humans what it means to defy us. We must teach them that Premises do not permit this treachery. Wherever they move next, that is where we must attack, whenever it occurs. We must decimate the numbers of them that are capable of it." "That's better," the Planner said. "The half-human told you there were three-quarters of a million of these so-called hybrid troops?" "Yes. There is no doubt he told the truth of it." "Now what of the Inquestor, this Mulder? Do you suspect treachery from him, as well?" "I do not know. I would not have guessed it. But why else would a half-human go to him in this way?" The Planner didn't know of a reason. "He has sworn to find The Five. Send one of your Circle to learn what he knows, and what the half-human wants with him." The Warrior inclined its head. "It will be done." **** Falls Church, Va. After Zachary and Troy left to see what they could find out about what the morphs were up to, Mulder went to sleep again. Scully thought he was hiding in sleep, trying to hunker down in a foxhole so he wasn't thinking about what might happen next. Not a bad solution, actually, she suspected--it was a more harmless painkiller than alcohol or a narcotic. It was all-natural, and he couldn't OD on it. Scully left him alone and supposed she ought to be grateful for the peace and quiet. She'd had damned little peace and quiet, lately, and it didn't seem likely there was much forthcoming, either. Mulder had left his father's e-mail suicide note lying on the kitchen counter. She resisted the temptation to read it for a while, then rationalized that it was evidence she ought to know about--*yeah, right, Dana*. It was addressed to Mulder's personal Internet account. It read: "You have fought the good fight--far better than I ever did or ever could--but there's no hope now. The Five are lost, and so is Samantha. I'd have stopped you years ago, before you were hurt anymore, but for the chance you might find her somehow. Forgive me. Try to forget what you've lost and what can't be changed." Try to forget? Scully sighed and the note back down where she'd found it. Forgetting was the one thing Mulder could *not* do. She made a cup of cocoa and curled up on the couch. She had missed the radiation treatment she'd been scheduled for--she should have gone the day they'd been in Portland. She knew she ought to reschedule it, but she couldn't quite persuade herself it was really necessary. She felt better, and in a whole lot of small ways that she might not have noticed at a time when she wasn't expecting to feel bad. Her emotional balance seemed to have settled again, for one thing. And just in time, too, with Mulder crumbling under the strain despite his best efforts not to. He kept bouncing back, somehow, catching his own balance time after time when the circumstances demanded it. Scully couldn't imagine how he did it. Yeah, right now, a radiation treatment just didn't seem like a priority--at some level, she knew it was irrational to wait, but she simply couldn't muster a sense of urgency about it. She got drowsy while watching a special about a theory that some American had enabled Hermann Goering to kill himself in Spandau prison after the Second World War. As she drifted off to sleep she thought of the Nuremburg Trials--Hitler's minions brought to justice before the world, accused of crimes against humanity. Then she dreamed of Bateman and Higginbotham and the others in a Nuremburg-style defendants' box while she and Mulder testified against them. She woke later to the sound of a hoarse, throat-ripping scream. Mulder, caught up in another one of his godawful nightmares. She went to him, but before she reached him, he had curled tightly into the space between the bathroom sinks, a huddled ball of shivering misery and terror. Scully hunkered down beside him. She couldn't get in with him, couldn't hold him; there wasn't room. "Mulder," she said softly. This drew a wail, and he curled himself more tightly. "Shh. It's me, Dana. I'm not going to hurt you." *I'm not your father; I'm not going to beat you black and blue just for dreaming.* "Nobody's going to hurt you. I won't let them. Hush." She reached in and stroked his back until finally he began to unwind himself and she could pull him out, draw him into a hug. "Tell me what you dreamed," she said. He shuddered hard. "I don't want to." A twelve-year-old's voice, to go with the childish sentiment. "Tell me." Shivering convulsively, he got out, "I dreamed...Samantha was dead." Scully squeezed her hug a little tighter. "It's just a dream." "They were killing her. She was lying on a table, and The Five were all around her, with tubes, sucking the life out of... Oh, God," he moaned. He buried his face against her shoulder, desperate for comfort, for human contact. "They were in big canisters, with tubes running in and out. Running in and out of her." "It's just a dream," Scully said again. "What if it's not? What if I'm remembering something?" "She said they didn't hurt her. Don't you believe her?" "No." Muffled, his face still pressed tight to her shoulder. "Why not?" "I don't trust them--I don't trust the grays. They could've brainwashed her or something. They don't care how much they hurt us." "They just want their own people back." Another wail: "I don't know how to bring them back." Then, more softly, "I don't know how to bring her back. She doesn't even *want* to come home." "Shh," Scully said. He was dissolving into tears. "I tried to bring her with me. I really tried to get her out, too..." "I know you did. I know. Shh. Come back to bed." "I don't want to go back to sleep. I'm... M'fraid to sleep." "I'll keep you safe. We'll be safe and warm. Come on." She helped him struggle up. He muttered something she couldn't make out. "It'll be all right," Scully said. "I'm here; Westin's here. He's right next door." "We just have guns," Mulder mumbled. He sounded old, exhausted. "Guns can't hurt them. They can hurt us, but we can't hurt them." He slipped out of her hands into bed, too emotionally drained, too physically limp to do anything else. She fished the covers out from under his legs and tucked them around him. Then she stood looking at him in the dark, tears sliding out from under her own eyelids, hot and stinging. She hadn't felt them coming, but there they were. Who had she thought she was kidding? They weren't safe; no one was. And nobody knew it better than he did. Continued in Part 25. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 25 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ A windmill is eternally at work to accomplish one end, although it shifts with every variation of the weathercock, and assumes ten different positions in a day. - Charles Caleb Colton September 27, 1996 Falls Church, Va. In the morning, it was as if none of it had happened. Mulder got up, went for a run, showered. Ate a scrambled egg and a piece of toast while reading the paper. And then started to work, lounged on the couch with his legs sprawled across the coffee table and his laptop on his thighs. CNN on the tube with the sound turned down low, and a mug of coffee beside him. Intent, focused, brows knit behind the frames of his glasses. Scully tried to tune out the television and the tapping of his long fingers on the keys. Tried not to think about what he was doing, the exhausting previous night. He was looking for Samantha again. He'd never stop. Couldn't stop himself, even when he wanted to. She was tired. Even when she had slept she hadn't rested. She knew she ought to go back to bed--he was all right, and in fact probably wouldn't welcome an interruption now. But she couldn't make herself do it. Worry kept at her like a cat after a moth, wouldn't let go. A familiar beep-bip sound told her had powered down the laptop. A moment later, he was beside her suddenly. "If I handcuff myself to something heavy, will you go get some rest?" he asked lightly. She wondered if all this normalcy was a show, put on for her benefit. But he was pawing through her briefcase. That looked like the real thing. "No," she said. "What are you looking for?" "That file of stuff on Artemis. I want to look over Ernie Morris' statement again." He could have recited it in his sleep. What did he want to look at it again for? She was too tired to argue. "In my big black case," she said. Maybe she *would* go take a nap. Let him sift through the evidence until he dropped. "Thanks." He went away, looking for it. Scully didn't think she could keep her eyes open another second. He came back and took her by the hand, led her into the living room without saying anything. "Sit," he said. She sat on the couch. "Now curl up there. Here, you want this pillow?" Scully gave him a wry chuckle, but he had pegged what was going on perfectly. "Anybody ever tell you you're good at that psychology stuff?" "Not recently, no." She took the pillow and lay down where he had put her. "Now where'd you say those handcuffs are?" "Oh, no. You had your chance to handcuff me, but you spurned my generous offer. Go to sleep. I promise to be quiet." He turned off the television. She drifted off almost immediately. Just before she fell into a deep sleep, she was vaguely aware of a blanket settling over her. **** It was mid-afternoon when she woke, and she looked up to see Mulder standing beside the coffee table, staring down at the Artemis photos, one hand abstractedly at his mouth, processing. Like a computer screen freezing momentarily while the system accessed its hard disk. The uneasiness she had felt earlier in the morning lingered, like a fly buzzing in another room, barely audible but annoying nonetheless. "Anything?" she asked. "I don't know," he said. "Probably not." But he was still frowning. He picked up his father's note. "Did you read this?" he asked. She felt heat on her face. "Uh, yeah." He didn't seem to have noticed her embarrassment; it occurred to her that he had left it on the counter with the intention that she should read it. "Does it strike you that he thinks The Five are dead?" "How would he know that?" "I can't imagine. But it's in the tone, the wording. 'The Five are lost, and so is Samantha,'" he read. She shrugged. "I suppose so. Maybe. But just because he thinks so, that doesn't necessarily mean anything, does it?" "It might explain why they're not there anymore." "I thought you believed they *are* still there." "I don't know." He stared off into space, for a moment, trying to put something together. "Higginbotham doesn't know where they are. But Bateman acted as if he did. Karen Curtis at least *thought* she knew. Presumably, based on what Curtis said, Tom Corvin knows where they are. My father claims he doesn't know." She wasn't sure where he was going, but she joined in anyway. "Yeah, and Curtis said it was your testimony--not your father's--that Corvin and Bateman are really afraid of." "Oh, she was fucking with my head. Telling me I already knew it all. That's crap, Scully. It's the same bullshit line my Dad used to hand me." "Huh?" She frowned in confusion before she could stop herself. He looked away, realizing he had said more than he intended to, casting about for some way to retract it. "What did he say?" Scully asked. Mulder turned his back on her and stared out the window, holding himself as if against a blow. "He seemed to think I knew more about Samantha's disappearance than I was telling him." She filled in the blank. "And when you denied it, he beat the hell out of you." He looked at her and said nothing. His eyes had gone dark. Dangerous ground. She knew how hard it must have been to hold on to the knowledge that he was not to blame for what had happened to his sister. It could be devastating to reverse that course now. Carefully, she said, "Well, it now appears that you did know more than you were able to tell him." "Yeah, but if I could've told him, I would've. That wasn't my fault." "I know. And he doesn't appear to have known that your memory had been tampered with. But are you throwing out Karen Curtis' testimony now because it resembles what your father used to accuse you of?" "Maybe," he said, his voice low. She recognized the signs of an emotional wall crumbling, fine cracks of doubt running along its surface. He rebuilt it. "It doesn't make sense, Scully," he said firmly. "Even if I had been where The Five were, where are they now? They must've moved them. I mean, that explains it, doesn't it? Why we never found them; why the morphs never found them. Every time somebody got close, they moved them again." "But moving them would've been a risk, too." "Sure, but look at the resources they're able to pull." "And the number of people who'd have to know about it," Scully persisted. "Nobody has to know about it. Crate them up, dummy up a manifest, a good cover story. Military transport, where people are conditioned not to ask questions--" She shot him a look, her knee-jerk reaction to defend military personnel against his knee-jerk tendency to assume all military personnel were robots. He ducked his head. "Okay, where part of their job is not to talk to outsiders, except under special circumstances," he said. "The same can be said for the bureau," Scully said mildly. He sighed. Grinned suddenly, his eyes shading green in amusement. "She shoots, she scores," he murmured. She smiled back. She'd always appreciated his willingness to admit he'd been wrong--when he was sure had been, which sometimes required a battle. She shrugged. "It's problematic either way. How do you keep them in one place for almost fifty years without having them figure out how to get away? How do you move them without creating opportunities for escape? It's very puzzling, how Bateman and his friends could've pulled this off. Then again, look at whose story we're analyzing--you don't suppose it's possible they acutally killed The Five at the time and just claimed to have them to keep the aliens in line?" As soon as she'd said it, she wished she hadn't. It produced an awful, hopeless sadness in his face, that terrible, lonely misery he had lived with so long it had seeped down into his core. "Yeah, I do," he said softly. "In fact, I think it's a lot more reasonable theory than either of the others. I just don't want to buy into it." He didn't say *because that means Samantha's never coming home and the aliens are going to eat all our brains*, but then, he didn't have to. And she knew that if Samantha didn't come home, no matter how hard he slam-dunked Corvin and Bateman and Higginbotham and their minions, the victory would resound hollow. Perhaps not entirely meaningless--after all, the fate of the planet hung in the balance. But the overarching objective had always been Samantha. It was time to break the tension. Scully sat up and looked over the photos scattered on the coffee table. "What were you looking for?" she asked. "Canisters," he said. She looked up, blinked in surprise. "Canisters?" "In my dream last night, The Five were in big canisters. But there's nothing there in the photos." He pulled his glasses off with one hand and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I think I was just trying to reassure myself she's not dead." "Did it work?" "As much as anything short of having her actually be here to kick me in the shins ever will, yes." Scully nodded, scanning over the photos. "The thing is..." he started, then trailed off. When she looked up, he was processing again. He drifted over, stood and stared at the photos. "Ernie Morris said he found me in this hold." Mulder pointed. "SC-22. But I don't think that's where I landed when I fell." "Then where?" "I don't know." He shook his head slowly, his expression haunted. "It was so dark--unbelievably dark. And cold." "Maybe the lights were out." "I don't think so. Because SC-22 was warm. This other place was so incredibly cold. And I have some vague memory of Valerie Clendenning saying something about a 'freeze burn.' But I think she'd already given me a shot by then, so I can't be sure I heard her right." "What do you think this other place was?" "I have no idea. I couldn't see anything. Nothing but that impenetrable darkness. I don't know how I got there or how long I was there or how I got out. But it's that damned dream, Scully--counting last night, I've had that same dream a hundred and twenty-four times. It's changing some now, but I don't know if that's because I'm starting to remember more, or if it's just some weird fluke of my subconscious. It's like I'm trying to send myself a message, and it's just getting garbled in transmission." "Well, at least you're not trying to tell me someone else is sending you a message in your dreams," she said mildly. He chuckled, worked his shoulders to release the muscles. "Ever the skeptic," he sighed. **** Scully always expected the Lone Gunmen to show up like the Three Stooges, one by one sticking their heads in the door--"Hello, *hello*, HELLO..." They never did it, but she continued to think it would've been appropriate, and to wish they would. This time, they had descended on the apartment as Mulder was making grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. Frohike settled himself on a bar stool overlooking the kitchen, and Byers stood beside him with a studiously distracted expression. Langly immediately started to check the place for bugs. "How the hell did you guys find us?" Mulder demanded. There was an awkward silence, then Langly laid one finger alongside his nose and shook his head. Mulder rolled his eyes. "And people call me paranoid." "Cooking for the little woman, are we?" Frohike said. "Up yours," Mulder shot back, but there was no heat in the remark. To Scully, Frohike said, "I would have cut the crusts off for you." "She likes the crust," Mulder said. True, but how the hell Mulder had guessed that Scully couldn't imagine. "And crimped the edges to seal in the cheese," Frohike continued. He shot a look at Mulder--*top that, Oxford-boy.* Enough, Scully thought. "Are you three geeks here for some reason, or did you just drop in for a snack?" "Now that you mention it," Frohike said, "I am a little hungry." "We're here to save your investigative butts," Langly said smugly. Continued in Part 26. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 26 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. - Joseph Conrad September 27, 1996 Falls Church, Va. Byers dropped a large, red-leather-bound diary on the bar. "Cool," Mulder said, unimpressed. He flipped a sandwich in the skillet. "What is it?" Langly joined them, appearing to have satisfied himself that there were no electronic listening devices hidden in any lamp shades. "Only the personal reminiscences of one Victor Klemper, M.D." Mulder dropped his facade of uninterest. "Yeah?" he said. He crossed to the bar, sandwich forgotten, and eagerly flipped open the book. Then he passed it to Scully. She wiped melted butter off her fingertips and frowned down at it--German. That was why he had handed it over so quickly. "What does it say?" "Well, first," Byers said, "it details his escape from the shattered remains of Nazi Germany--" Frohike hopped off the bar stool, headed for Mulder's abandoned sandwich. As he went, he said, "The way he tells it, it's a compelling tale of courage and fortitude under harrowing conditions, with--" "Yeah, yeah, my heart's bleeding," Mulder growled. "Sing to me, boys." Langly now. "So he arrives here, under the auspices of the U.S. government--" "I know this chorus," Mulder said. "And your point is...?" "The point is," Byers said, "he brought a whole bank full of baggage with him. Doubtless the melted-down remains of a lot of hapless Jews' gold teeth and whatnot. Which was then used to play the stock market, to fund his experiments and various other projects having to do with a plan to create a super-race of alien-human *uber-menschen* he viewed as likely to take over the world and leave us mere mortals crawling in his evolutionary dust. Incidentally, I'd be curious to know just how much of this you two already knew." "The stock market?" Scully said. She shot a look at Mulder. *No wonder we couldn't find the money--it never really occurred to us it might have been private money all along.* "These guys," Langly said, "make Michael Milken's insider-trading manipulations look like a little kid playing with electric trains." "Remember the Great Crash of 1987?" Byers said. "Tuesday, October 20," Mulder said. "The Dow Jones Industrial Average collapsed by 508 points, or about 23 percent. More than twice as much of a drop as the Black Thursday crash in 1929 that set off the Great Depression." "These guys engineered the 1987 crash. It was getting too expensive to buy on the markets, so they blew them out. And not just our stock market--" "Hong Kong dropped by 11 percent, London by 10, Australia by 12," Langly put in. "Then," Frohike said, chewing, "they bought securities cheap all over the globe and made a bundle when the prices came up." "And that's just the most spectacular example," Byers said. "This has been going on for fifty years." "But what did Klemper say about what they doing with the money?" Mulder asked. "Well, there's not much here in the way of lab notes," Byers said. "But it seems he started out working with a Japanese scientist--" "Ishimaru," Scully said. "Right. And then they fell out in the mid-50s--Klemper was under pressure from U.S. officials to broaden the range of his test subjects to encompass a larger percentage of the population." "Looks like they took a chunk out of everybody who was born after about 1953," Frohike said. "But Ishimaru," Byers went on, "imbued with some kind of *samurai* ethical considerations, only wanted to use tissue samples from the best and the brightest. He didn't want to be bothered with the genetic material of common folk, and he was troubled by the notion that children were being tested--" "Not because he had any tender feelings for children, but because they were too young to have proven their worth," Langly said. "Swell guy, huh?" Frohike said. "He got what was coming to him," Mulder said. "So the rest of the diary," Byers said, "is mostly about efforts to keep the Japanese--and the rest of the world--from finding out how far along Klemper had gotten, on the theory that if other kids knew we had these toys, everybody on the block would want some, too. Did you know there's a United Nations directive ordering the destruction of any extraterrestrial being found on Earth?" "I heard that somewhere," Mulder said evasively. "Well, apparently," Langly said, "our government's only strictly obeying it if the E.B.E. in question is found somewhere besides the contintental U.S., and then only if they think somebody overseas knows about it. Otherwise, they're keeping them and using them for these tests, this project." "Get it?" Frohike said. "We Yankees will have the *uber-menschen*, and we'll be the ones that get to take over the world. And God knows what these characters are going to be like--mindless drones, maybe, with bionic eyes or some shit like that." Not quite, Scully thought. "Okay, Mulder," Byers said. "Now just what the hell do you know? Do we need to be hiding out up in Montana, armed to the teeth? What's going on?" "I'll have to get back to you," Mulder said. "Horseshit," Frohike said. "You're in the middle of this up to your skinny ass. Give." "You just gave me this, guys--I need some time to figure out what the ramifications--" The three of them started on him, then, all at once in an incomprehensible three-part chorus of objections. Scully counted to ten, to give them a chance to air some of their feelings, then stuck two fingers in her mouth and blew an earsplitting whistle. Silence. "First," she said, "Montana is not far enough to do you any good, so you might as well stay put in D.C. As for the new master race, think *Invasion of the Body Snatchers*, not *Night of the Living Dead.* If you see any mindless drones with bionic eyes, don't shoot them. They're just our fellow government employees." She shooed them toward the door. "And now you know approximately as much as we do, so just go home, lock your doors, and leave the rest to the professionals. Thank you very much for your cooperation, and now, good night." Grumbling, they left. She turned to look at Mulder, who was standing just where he'd been, eyes wide, one eyebrow crooked at her. "Scully," he said, "am I to believe you've actually seen *Night of the Living Dead*?" She put her fists on her hips. "You," she said sternly. "Eat." "Yes, mother," he said, suddenly all meekness. She took Klemper's diary and settled on the couch to read it. **** September 28, 1996 Five miles above Austin, Texas "This place was dark last night, and should not have been," the Planner said. "Another city the humans are attempting to keep from us. This is where you will want to attack." The Warrior morph studied the viewscreen, then touched a control and switched to a tactical map. "The terrain is poor for a ground assault," the Warrior said. It pointed at the map, which showed the city, clustered along the banks of a river, sprawling from there into steep, wrinkled hills to the west. "The ground is uneven, and will give an advantage to anyone who can get above our troops." It pointed again, this time at a thick stand of juniper trees. "The vegetation will interfere with our advance and offer many places to hide. Also there are waterways that will have to be forded. These cliff banks are too steep for easy crossing." "You'd prefer an airborne approach?" the Planner asked. "It would be much preferable, yes." "We have only a few fighter ships available in this sector." "Many will not be required. The humans' aircraft will be no match for them." The Planner considered this for a moment. "How long will you need them?" "A siege will not be necessary. The humans are poorly equipped, and if we launch our attack at night, they will be additionally hampered by darkness and communications difficulties of their own making. Twelve hours, at most." "Then it will be arranged," the Planner said. **** Mulder would have guessed that Troy was a clone of Zachary even if the hybrid had not said so. Troy looked so much like Zachary that if he hadn't clearly been the younger--and much the quieter--of the two, it would have been impossible to tell them apart. They arrived back at the apartment at mid-morning. "There is news," Zachary said, "but it is not all good news." "I would've been stunned if it had been," Mulder said. "The morphs say they will not go to the Artemis station. They say they do not trust you anymore. This is my fault, I think. They have seen us together and fear we are conspiring against them. I think they may have some idea that Mr. Corvin has betrayed them, and of the number of hybrids that have been made. They are thinking their conquest of Earth has hit a snag, and they suspect that you have had something to do with it." "If only it were true," Mulder said. "It's not your fault, Zachary. You've helped us a lot. What else?" Troy's turn. Slowly, hesitantly, he said, "Our underground says that Corvin is in Texas. They say he felt the western part of the country was becoming too 'hot,' and because of various factors having to do with the shape of government and the transmission of electrical power, he chose a place called Austin. He has already begun to hybridize the people there." "It's already started?" Scully asked. "Yes, and it will go on for several nights. The process takes place in stages. First, they must gain control of the civil infrastructure. Then they will go after the general population." "Jesus," Mulder breathed. "They start with the mayor and the chief of police, and then there's nobody to stop them. If you don't want to wake up hybridized, there's nobody to complain to." "Yes," Troy said. "That is how it works. They were very successful with this method in California and in Oregon." "Yeah, we know." Scully picked up her cell phone and dialed Skinner's number. "He's on his way," she said, a moment later. "What do you suppose we can do?" "I don't know. I know what I'd like to do--get my hands wrapped around Corvin's throat and squeeze." "But what if he's right, Mulder? What if it's true that our only option is between hybridization and assimilation?" "Look, Scully, if he put out a call for volunteers to fight off the morphs, that'd be different. Hell, I'd give it some consideration myself--I don't *like* the fucking morphs, and I don't want to be assimilated. But as it is, he's unilaterally determined who goes and who doesn't, who lives and who dies, and in what form they're going to live. It's like Zachary said, being free is about being able to make choices, and there's just no choice more fundamental than the one you make about what you are." Agitated, he paced across the room and back. "Besides, if only the U.S. has hybrids, then what? After we're all hybridized, what happens next? We declare war on the rest of the world? Today the U.S., tomorrow the solar system. Do we lob nuclear bombs at the rest of the planet? Why not? We'll all be hybrids; we can withstand a little radioactive fallout. Who the hell died and made Tom-fucking-Corvin God? I don't remember him being on the ballot the last time I voted for world despot." "Mulder," Scully said softly, "your rant is frightening the children." He glanced over at Zachary and Troy--the older hybrid's eyes had gone wide, and his clone was practically cringing. Mulder drew a long breath for calm. "Sorry," he said gruffly. "It's not you guys I'm mad at." There was a long silence, then, while they waited for Skinner, Mulder pacing continually, his frustration contagious. When the A.D. finally arrived, they had Zachary and Troy explain the situation again, and then asked the hybrids to go wait next door with Westin while they tried to decide what to do. "I don't know what else we can do, except go in in force and try to shut them down," Skinner said. "But it's not going to be easy unless we can get the military's cooperation--" "I wouldn't bet on it," Mulder said. "Yeah. I can rally a decent-sized task force out of our people in Dallas, San Antonio and Houston--we have to assume anybody who's already on the ground in Austin is compromised. But still, if they've got three-quarters of a million troops, the best we can do is round up the big cheeses. If we can find them in one place, and how do we pinpoint that place, without communications on the ground?" "Do we have any satellite photos from last night?" Mulder asked. "In Portland, they had lights at their command center. If we've got a photo that can show that, we've got a set of coordinates to start with." "I'll find out," Skinner said. "Okay," Mulder said. "We'll get packed." "Whoa," Skinner said. "Slow down. You two are not going anywhere." Continued in Part 27. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 27 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ We were running out of passion We were running out of time There's a face to fit the future There's a face to fit the crime Now the truth is on the table And the ghost is plain to see... - Mike Rutherford September 28, 1996 Falls Church, Va. "Like hell, we're not going," Mulder said, seething. Skinner sighed, but his look told Scully he was planning to hang tough. "Look, a couple of weeks ago you said one guy with a .38 could blow this case right out the window, and you were right. It's still true, Mulder. I'm not going to send the only two people who know where all the pieces fit into a fucking war zone so they can get their heads blown off." "No way!" Mulder yelled, furious. "This is my case. It was mine when nobody else would even acknowledge it *was* a case and said I was nuts for pursuing it. There's a reason why Scully and I are the only ones who know the ins and outs of it--because you never backed us up with the kind of manpower we needed to do it right! I'm not going to let you chuck us out of it now, just because you didn't want to be in it at the outset!" "That's enough," Skinner said harshly. "The hell it is! I've earned the right to be there--we both have, seven times over--and you know it!" "*Stop it!*" Scully yelled. Then more quietly, "Both of you... just...cool it." She let the silence hang in the air for a moment, then said, "You're both right, and there's only one reasonable solution." She hooked a thumb at Mulder. "He goes; I'll stay." "Scully, are you feeling all right?" Mulder asked. "Headaches or anything?" "I'm fine. That's not the point. The point is, yes--you ought to be there. You ought to be the one who clamps the handcuffs on Corvin and Bateman, for a lot of reasons. Besides, I'm not sure our task force would get two feet inside the city without access to what you know. But we can't both go without jeopardizing the case. If the two of us go out there and get shot up, it's over, Mulder. We've been through too much to risk that." In the quiet that followed, Skinner drew a long breath and let go of whatever it was he had been thinking of saying. Scully shrugged. To Mulder, she said, "Go get your crash bag, and get out of here. I'm going to finish reading Herr Klemper's diary." "I'll meet you out in the car," Skinner said, forcing his tone even. When he had gone, Scully said lightly, "I don't envy you that ride to the airport." "I don't want to go without you," he whispered. He had that lonely, helpless sadness in his eyes again, that hurt-puppy look that Scully regarded almost as his signature, a defining quality, the real thing that lurked at his core. "I'll be fine," she said. "You just keep your head down, okay?" She went to him and gave him a little light hug. To her surprise, he hugged her back, long arms tight around her in a way that, while hardly erotic, was rather less brotherly than she expected. She didn't think he had ever hugged her back before, as if that somehow was a line he couldn't quite afford to cross. And then he held on, and she realized he was afraid to let go, though she couldn't imagine why he would be. She pulled away, and he avoided her look as he headed for the bedroom to fetch his bag. **** Austin, Texas The lights on the satellite photo showed that Corvin and his cronies had set up their command center in a plaza out in front of the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library. Mulder, Skinner and thirty-four other agents met at the airport in San Antonio, then took a convoy of panel trucks into Austin, sailing through the light Saturday afternoon traffic into the capital city. They arrived just before sunset at the campus of the University of Texas. And then they parked the trucks here and there around the library, each within a short walking distance, hoping it looked random, and waited for dark. Mulder felt a little as if he were walking around with a missing limb--it wasn't as if he hadn't ditched his partner before, but this was different. Usually he had left Scully behind because he hadn't wanted to expose her to danger, either to her person or to her career, or because he had wanted to move about without having to explain himself in the ever-so-rational terms explanations to her required. Or because he knew she just wouldn't go where he wanted to be. This was not at all like that, and he felt...strange about it. And a little nervous. He would have preferred coming into this situation knowing he could call on her courage and resourcefulness--not to mention her marksmanship. Thirty-six agents in four trucks. Mulder had a nagging sense that it wouldn't be enough--but at least they were reasonably well-equipped. Submachine guns, respirators, body armor. It was almost as if Skinner had taken to heart his complaint about not being supported and wanted to make sure he had no reason to complain now. Or maybe the A.D. just wanted to make sure neither of them got his ass blown off. Once they parked the trucks there was nothing for it but to wait for darkness, wait until the bulk of the hybrid troops dispersed, leaving Corvin and his lieutenants lightly guarded. For now, the area was peaceful, with lots of big trees nestled around the university's buildings. The weather was hot, and big puffy clouds drifted by overhead in a hazy blue sky. Sitting in the truck with about an hour before dark, Mulder felt sweat beads form between his shoulder blades and run down his back, itchy. The library was an imposing monument, several stories tall, with curving walls of white marble. Behind it to the south, an impressive football stadium stretched toward the sky. Clever placement for this operation--anybody who saw the lights from the darkened freeway to the east would just think there was something going on at the stadium. He wondered what Corvin and his friends were doing with the bodies of the people who didn't make it. Odds were good they weren't dumping them anywhere near here--the university was nestled right beside the downtown area. Pretty urban, densely populated. Through the mirrored window in the side of the panel truck, he tried to keep an eye on the plaza. There was no sign of Corvin or any hybrid troops, not yet. Just the heat and a humid breeze and the soft patter of a fountain. He wondered where they went during the day--obviously they weren't hanging around. He resisted the temptation to fidget and wished Skinner would quit grinding his teeth. They waited. Finally the sun went completely down. Mulder climbed into the back of the truck and shrugged into his vest and gear, checked his rifle. Focused on his breathing for calm. He was nervous--strange, he'd never been nervous on a bust before. Even on his first one, as a rookie, he'd been excited but not afraid. He'd certainly gone into other situations as dangerous as this one before, and sometimes with a lot less backup. Maybe it was just that he'd had the long flight to think about it. Maybe it was just that the stakes had never been higher. Or maybe that, for the first time in years, he really felt he had something to lose if this didn't work. Unbidden, the thought that he wished Scully were here popped again into his mind. He really wanted to get back to her after this was over. He couldn't quite pin down why. "There," Skinner whispered, pointing. In the dim glow of street lights, Mulder could see dark-clad figures moving across the plaza. "Just about show-time," the A.D. said. "Yeah," Mulder said. He wiped the sweat off his palms. Then the lights went out. **** Falls Church, Va. Scully had nearly finished reading Klemper's diary. It wasn't late, only about 8 o'clock, but she was tired. She thought about going to bed, but she doubted she could sleep. She was worried about Mulder, about what might be happening in Texas and when she might hear something. She'd been trying not to think about it, but it was impossible to avoid it. *Keep your head down, Mulder.* But since when had he? If he did tonight, it'd be the first time. The man had the heart of a lion--and all the prudence of a maddened bull. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, Scully thought. Mulder was both fool and angel, in roughly equal parts. *Lord, don't let him get this close and not be able to see it through.* And then there was the meaning of that unexpectedly tender hug to sift through. Had he meant anything by it? Was it just that he, too, knew they were near some conclusion to this long, grueling investigation? Had he had some sudden intuition of danger? She had learned to trust his intuitions, even when they were absurd by every measure she knew. The universe was passing strange, and Mulder was often proof of it, all on his own. Or could it actually be that he felt something more than friendship for her, something that hug had, accidentally or intentionally, ever-so-subtly communicated? It was a possibility she had never seriously considered before. She weighed the evidence. Never once had he stepped over the line that separated colleague/friend from lover. Oh, sure, there'd been the occasional wry joke. "If there's an iced tea in here, Scully--could be love," he had said in the middle of the Tooms investigation. But it had been all too clear that he was teasing her. He had claimed, in jest, to be "turned on" when she had recognized a P-51 fighter plane on a videotape. But if he had been, in truth, turned on, he had given little sign of it. In fact, he had been so engrossed in his examination of the tape he had hardly seemed to know she was there. And it wasn't as if he hadn't had opportunities to cross the line. They'd spent more time together, sometimes in more intimate circumstances, than many married couples Scully knew. But about the closest he had ever come was to take her elbow gently as they crossed a street, and there'd been nothing sexual about that--it was mere civility. Based on her own observation of the women who caught Mulder's attention, she had rather assumed she was just not his type. He seemed to lean toward leggy, svelte, busty brunettes. Phoebe. Bambi Berenbaum. That dizzy detective in Comity--Scully was sure her blonde had come out of a bottle, and maybe Mulder had sensed that she was actually a brunette, though if he could detect that, he was the first man Scully had ever known who was perceptive enough or knowledgeable enough about the tools women used to stoke their vanity. No, it was pretty clear that a petite redhead with an unimpressive bra size was not on Fox Mulder's menu. Still, there were men who fantasized one sort of woman and actually courted another. And there were times when he'd been downright affectionate, without ever directly introducing a sexual element. The night she had slept next to him in Massachusetts--just at the moment he had started to wake up, he had murmured, "Touch me all over." She was pretty sure he had been talking in his sleep. Most men awakened with an erection--what she'd felt at her back that morning hadn't meant anything. And for all she knew, he had been dreaming of someone else. She knew he cared about her, and not just in the sense that he would kill to protect her--though he had proved that time and again. It went even deeper than that. She thought of what he'd said said when she'd been shaken by her first encounter with Luther Boggs: "Did Boggs say something to you?" Implying that if Boggs had, big brother Mulder would go and beat him up. His banter had that quality sometimes, too--sibling rivalry without the actual bloodline. Yes, that was it. In some ways he had adopted her as a surrogate for Samantha, a substitute for the sister he had lost. And in most ways, he'd been a damned sight better brother to her than either of her actual male siblings. That was what that hug had been about. As to why he had never hugged her back before, well, his emotions were running high now in a way they hadn't been before. Once the situation got back to normal and he had time to settle himself, they would both be able to forget all about it. She poured herself another Coke and sat back on the couch, resolved to push through to the end of the book. Before she'd finished the next page, she heard something at the front door. A faint rattle. Zachary or Troy, coming back, maybe. She got up to go see. Just above the doorknob, she saw a bright yellow flare of light, and a curl of smoke. Continued in Part 28. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 28 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery September 28, 199 Austin, Texas After everything had gone dark, Mulder and the other agents had crept out of the trucks and taken up positions Skinner had outlined earlier. Mulder figured Skinner would have been a darned good military officer, if he hadn't gotten burned out on the army in Vietnam--he had the tactical mind for it. Mulder wasn't thrilled with the position he'd been assigned--in some shrubs behind a road construction barricade across the street from the presidential library. If somebody spotted him here, he'd have a job extricating himself from the foliage. Still, he had a decent view of the plaza, which was something. The building's layout put the plaza up above most of the surrounding terrain, so there weren't many places from which surveillance could be conducted. As yet, however, there was nothing to see, even through the night-vision binoculars he had borrowed from Zachary. The hybrid troops, like the FBI agents, were hunkered down, hidden. Waiting, though for what, Mulder couldn't imagine. Skinner was just at his right, and Mulder thought the A.D. was trying to keep him on a short leash. Not that there was anything wrong with that. Mulder suspected that Skinner would be a pretty good man to have at his back in a brawl, and he didn't object to being leashed at the moment--as long as Skinner didn't get between him and that rat-bastard Corvin, the collar wouldn't chafe much. Then suddenly, there was movement. Some of the hybrids came out of the building, wheeling along their special generator. A few more produced the light standards and began setting them up. And in the darkness, a bright yellow flicker, followed by a glowing orange dot. A cigarette. Mulder smiled to himself. Corvin *and* Bateman. Two rat-bastards for the price of one. **** Falls Church, Va. Scully went for her gun, but even as she did so, she figured it was useless--that light at the door had been some kind of cutting laser, which probably meant that whoever or whatever was breaking in was not human. Or at least not entirely human. She heard a shout, out in the hall, and then the front door came crashing in. Westin, struggling with a smaller man. As they toppled over onto the floor, Scully shouted, "Federal agents! You're under arrest!" Neither of them seemed to hear her, and all she could do was keep the muzzle of her Smith pointed at the smaller man, although she doubted she could take a shot at him without risking killing Westin. Then Zachary pushed through from behind them and came toward her. "Come with me!" he said. "Quickly!" Scully hesitated--she didn't want to run off and leave Westin grappling with...whatever. Then Zachary flung himself at her and knocked her over, down behind the kitchen's service bar, and for a moment she thought she had hit her head, because the whole world seemed to go blue-white, in a blinding, dazzling glare of light. *Westin*, she thought helplessly. She shoved the hybrid off, and scrambled up, gun still in her hand. On the floor, the smaller man lay crumpled on his side, gasping in agony, horribly burned, his blackened skin already cracking away from the flesh. His badge lay on the floor beside him, and in the photo Scully recognized him--Agent Costanza, who had been guarding Bill Mulder before the suicide attempt. Westin stood over him, and as Scully looked, she saw a strange black film float across his eyes. *Oh, my God*, she thought. Zachary thrust himself between them. "I will not let you take her," he said. Westin said nothing. He turned and walked away, out the door and down the hall. Scully went for the telephone to call it in--they needed an ambulance, and fast. "We will go, before it arrives," Zachary said firmly. "I can't do that. This man is--" "Beyond your help, or mine. Westin knows what is planned in Texas, and he has been assimilated. He will not be able to stop himself from revealing what he knows to the morphs. Fox is in danger, and we must go to him. Now." **** Austin, Texas More waiting. Mulder was sweating hard inside his body armor, at least as much in suppressed tension and excitement as from the heat. He flexed stiff leg muscles and tried to be quiet, tried to stifle his wish to race out onto the plaza, now bathed in light. He could see Corvin and Bateman walking around out there. He wanted them so bad he could taste it, like acid in his mouth. Squad by squad, the hybrid troops were dispersing. Mulder waited for Skinner to pick his moment, the moment when he figured they had the best chance. While he waited, he occupied himself by counting the troops--some 30 groups of about 10 each. Three hundred or more, he figured, and then he realized that there must be others already out there, in the city. Doing what, he did not want to consider. Disposing of the bodies, maybe. Taking care of things in areas that already were under hybrid control. The number of troops moving around in the plaza had decreased significantly. Now he could see only about fifteen or twenty still down there, though there might well have been some left in the building that he couldn't see. Skinner shifted beside him, and Mulder tensed. "You want Corvin or Bateman?" he breathed. "Bateman." Corvin was the ringleader, but Mulder had one helluva score to settle with the Cancer Man. If that son of a bitch got away, Corvin's arrest would be cold comfort. "You go left, I'll go right." Mulder nodded. Then Skinner stood up and blew an eardrum-shattering whistle, and all thirty-six of them leaped up and raced toward the plaza. Mulder wrenched free of the bush he'd been hiding in and ran, full-tilt like a panicked deer, all his adrenaline and anxiety suddenly unleashed. He could feel the rest of them around him, all running and screaming like banshees. He felt as if he were playing out a scene from *Braveheart*--at the moment when the troops just broke ranks and charged. Somebody--probably Skinner, Mulder thought--remembered that there were actual prescribed words to be shouted. "Federal agents! Hands in the air! Get down on the ground! On the ground! *NOW*!" Corvin, to Mulder's right, froze, his eyes wide. He put his hands up. But Bateman ran, darting toward the fountain, and Mulder was glad. He ran harder, every nerve in his body screaming. Bateman would *not* get away, and Mulder did not want to shoot him--he wanted him to live and suffer in prison through myriad appeals until the son of a bitch finally got what he'd been arranging for everybody else, a lethal injection. Mulder pictured himself running over Bateman, slamming his ugly face into the concrete at their feet, and he ran harder. Ran with everything he had. Inches away from the fleeing man, he put his arm out and touched the back of Bateman's trench coat. And then Mulder felt as if a clap of thunder had sounded all around him, right on top of him. A huge crack opened in the pavement under his feet. The fountain seemed to explode, water and steam erupting in a wet, hot geyser bursting in all directions. He went flying toward the fountain as if a tornado had sucked him off the ground and then dropped him. He went down in a heap, and just got his arm up in time to keep his head from hitting a marble wall as he and Bateman fetched up against it. He had managed somehow to hang on to the handful of fabric he had grabbed before he fell. He looked, and behind him, the LBJ library was exploding in a huge, white ball of flame and hot gas. Shattered glass and chunks of white marble rained down all around him. He was dimly aware of a painfully loud mechanical shriek from overhead, like the scream of an air raid siren but not as regularly rhythmic as a siren. Dimly, stunned, he sensed Bateman struggling and tightened his grip. But he couldn't hang on. "Fucking morphs!" the older man shouted, and then he jerked free and scrambled away. **** Skinner picked himself up after the library exploded to find that in the confusion Corvin was rabbiting across the plaza just as Bateman had, and covered by four of the hybrid troops. Skinner looked around wildly for help, but most of his own people were either down or staggering to their feet as blankly as he was, stunned by the blast. He resigned himself to letting the former secretary of state go--running after them alone would have been suicide. And suddenly there were aliens all around him, the short, thin gray ones he had seen on Martha's Vineyard. They swarmed all over Corvin and the escaping hybrids, and a cool, blue glow surrounded all of them. The hybrids fell, and behind them the little aliens had Corvin's limp body. They carried him back to where Skinner stood and dropped him, unconscious or dead, on the ground at the A.D.'s feet. He stood there, staring at them in astonishment, without least idea what to say or do, and then they formed up at the edge of the plaza, in what looked to Skinner's military-trained mind, for all the world like a perimeter. **** Approaching Austin, Texas, at about 40,000 feet They were almost there. Almost close enough. And then Scully heard Zachary gasp, and say, "Oh, dear." And the UFO stopped. Hovered. "What's wrong?" she asked. She couldn't really see forward through the cockpit, only to either side. And then she saw something, too--off in the distance, a long flash like lightning with a ball of flame erupting at its bottom end. "Good God, what was that?" "It is the morphs," Zachary said. "They are attacking." "Why?" "They do not want Corvin to make any more hybrids. They want to stop him, even--apparently--if it means destroying the city and denying themselves the assimilants they might've gained. I did not think they would go this far," the hybrid said mournfully. "Do you have gun cameras in this thing?" "Yes, but I cannot operate them or the weapons systems from here. You are sitting in the gunner's position. And if we go any nearer, it is likely we will be fired on." Scully studied the controls in front and on either side of her. She hadn't paid much attention before, thinking she'd leave the flying to Zachary. "All right," she said, "how do I work this thing?" "You will serve as my gunner?" "What choice do I have? Look, I don't know if I'm going to be any good at this, but I'm goddamned well going to give it the old navy try." Her father had been a gunnery expert in the navy--maybe he had passed on some of his natural aptitude, the necessary instincts. In any case, it seemed clear she had no option but to make the attempt. The consoles in front of her suddenly lit up. She wondered what she had touched, then Zachary said, "I have restored power to the systems. You will find the camera controls near your left hand." Scully touched a part of the flat plastic face labeled "tactical video," and an icon of a videotape glowed red. Above it, a small display appeared--black sky lit up with bright flashes of white, yellow and orange, the red glow of fires burning out of control. "Okay," she said, "cameras on." "Can you see the mouse pad? It is touch-sensitive." Flat black surface about a foot square. "Yes." "You are right-handed, are you not?" "Yes." "Use your right index finger on the mouse pad to aim," Zachary said. "The system will fire when you have locked on a target and touch the trigger pad to the left of the mouse surface. Do you see it?" "Yes. What am I shooting with?" "You can choose pulse lasers or cannon--the pulse lasers are designed for high-speed dogfights, where cannon would not offer a fast enough rate of fire. I do not plan to get into a dogfight under these conditions--it would be foolish. But I would prefer to use the lasers now, as well, because any spent shells will fall on the city and there is no knowing who might be hurt." She was not going to argue with the only person around who knew something about the system. "Lasers it is." "Here is your tactical display." In the air before her, suddenly, a three-dimensional air show appeared. In the dark, through the windows, she had not been able to see the aircraft zooming over the city--now she could see exactly where they were. Fluorescent orange delta shapes moving in the night. "How the hell...?" "It is a holographic display," Zachary said. "The icons will glow red when the morphs' ships are within range. Are you ready?" *Hell, no.* She tightened her jaw. "Let's go." **** Mulder jerked himself up and went after Bateman. He felt bruised all over, and the arm that had banged into the wall hurt a lot, but he blocked it out--*just get the son of a bitch*. He would feel lots better then, no matter what might be injured. The older man was limping south, down the hill toward the stadium. Winded and still a little stunned, Mulder followed. The fountain was spilling water down the sloping ground; Mulder slipped on wet grass and fell, then rolled down the hill. He would've liked to shout "halt" at Bateman--technically, procedure required that--but he just didn't have the breath. That strange shriek sounded overhead again. Mulder couldn't see anything. Bateman flung himself onto the ground with his hands over his head, as if he expected something to fall on him. And another explosion--this time from the stadium. Mulder thought for a moment that lightning had struck it. He saw the jagged, blinding bolt, then the elaborate lights on the top of the grandstand vanished, vaporized. And in the glare from it, just for a moment, he could see the morphs' ship--a dark, triangular shape much like the UFO Zachary had used to fly them to Portland, moving so fast it registered on Mulder's mind as a black, pointed blur. The blast wave hit him, and he fell. *Good God. The morphs are bombing us. But why?* This time, farther from the blast than Bateman had been, he was able to get up first. And now he was gaining in earnest, as the older man's age and lifetime of abusing his lungs began to tell. Mulder caught up and simply flung himself at Bateman--they went down together in a tangled mass of thrashing limbs. Mulder managed to land on top. He grabbed Bateman's head and held it down, then caught a flailing arm and twisted it, eliciting a grunt of pain. But he couldn't manage to bend his own left arm far enough to get to his handcuffs, and all he could do was hold on while Bateman squirmed madly to get away. The morph ship struck at the stadium again, and an enormous section of the looming grandstand disintegrated above them. Mulder saw tremendous chunks of debris headed straight for them. "Shit!" he yelled, and ducked his head. Continued in Part 29. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 29 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ I was borne this way and that on the wind, like dry chaff or leaves falling from a tree. In fact, I knew not whether the wind was riding on me or I on the wind. - Lao-Tzu September 28, 1996 Approaching Austin, Texas, at 25,000 feet Scully thought Mulder would have been a better gunner for a UFO. He had the reflexes for it, honed by hours of video games--Scully had seen him lay waste to whole virtual star systems. It occurred to her suddenly that wasting just a *few* hours learning to play "Doom" wouldn't have killed her--but then, how could she have anticipated that it might've saved her life? She had only managed to land a single glancing blow on one of the morphs' ships as they approached the city center. She actually figured Zachary was doing a better job of defending them, just by trying to steer clear of the other flightcraft. She frowned at the tactical display, tracing her finger along the mouse pad as one of the morphs' ships swooped toward them. *They're too fast,* she thought. *I can't keep up with them.* The morph ship fired, Zachary whipped the UFO into a turn that kept them from being hit. Scully realized the hybrid had started that turn a split-second before the morph had fired, and then, as if she were hearing him say it, she suddenly recalled her father teaching little Bill to shoot skeet: "Lead the target." *Yes, of course. Don't shoot at where they *are*--shoot where they're *going* to be.* Another ship bored in. Scully didn't bother tracing its path this time; instead, she watched it maneuver, then slipped her finger to a point ahead of it and then tapped the firing pad. The red icon shattered. "Wonderful!" Zachary exulted. "Now you are kicking some butt!" Not enough, though--a third morph ship came at them, and she did not have time to react. This one did hit them. Scully felt the flightcraft buck with the impact. Zachary shouted something she couldn't make out. The flightcraft nosed over and zoomed toward the ground, and then she thought she knew what it was that he must have said: "Hold on, we're going in!" She braced herself, her heart racing. They were going to crash. **** It seemed as if debris rained down forever. Mulder felt as if he were being pummelled by a thousand huge fists. He hoped his helmet and body armor would protect him from any serious injury, but neither of them did much to keep the onslaught from being painful. He just kept his face pressed into dirt, eyes closed, trying not to feel anything. He found himself mentally repeating the same mantra he had used as boy, when his father had been whaling on him: *It'll stop in a minute, it'll stop in a minute.* And then it stopped, and there was an odd, blessed silence. A siren wailed in the distance, and this time it really was a siren--fire truck, he thought. A little nearer, some gunfire, but not close enough to be an immediate threat. For a moment he just lay there, trembling, panting. Bateman wasn't moving anymore. Mulder struggled to sit up, then got the handcuffs on him, and finally, felt for a pulse. A little slow, but there. He was unconscious, not dead. A little blood at his temple--something had hit him, and unlike Mulder, he had not had a helmet. Mulder looked up the hill and wondered what had happened to Skinner and the rest of the FBI agents. A fire was raging in the library, lighting the black smoke boiling up from the building with an evil red glare. He had mixed feelings about what to do with Bateman now--wake him up or be grateful for the quiet. Awake, he'd undoubtedly struggle, and Mulder didn't want to deal with it. On the other hand, he didn't think he had the strength to carry the other man back up that slope. He considered handcuffing him to something else, then decided he didn't want to take the risk that troops loyal to the cancer man might spring him. No, he was stuck with the motherfucker, one way or the other. He heard that terrible shriek overhead again, and looked up. Another ship--but this one looked like there must be something wrong with it. It had a red streak of flame spouting out from under one side. It was coming straight for the stadium, and a second before it hit, Mulder threw himself on the ground again, waiting for the impact. The screeching sound buffeted him, then he heard a long scraping, ripping sound, then yet another terrible explosion and once again relative quiet. Mulder sighed in relief. It was time to be gone from here--there was too much shit flying around for his taste. Sooner or later something nasty was going to befall him if he stayed. He got up, steeled himself to the task and heaved Bateman up over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. When he turned to go up the hill, he saw five or six grays coming down toward him and froze. He turned to head away from them, and saw hybrid troops, like shadows darker than the dark, creeping up behind him from the other direction. He was trapped between them. **** "I did not say we were crashing," Zachary said. "I said we were going to land." "Some landing," Scully said, studying the long gash in the ground behind the flightcraft, gouged out of a parking lot covered with chalky, white gravel. "It was complicated by minor damage to the wing," Zachary said. *Wing*, Scully thought. The flightcraft didn't look to her as if it had wings. "Come, we have work to do." He led her down a steep embankment toward a building. She looked to her left and realized they were standing at the bottom of a massive dam. "Zachary," she said, "what are we doing here?" "We will turn the power back on," he said. "I thought you said Mulder and the others were in danger," Scully said. "How is turning the power back on going to help them?" "There will be a battle here, Dana." "There already is one." In the distance, she could hear more explosions and the terrifying screech of flightcraft diving to fire on the city. "No, the real battle has not yet begun. This battle will be between the morphs and our hybrids and some of the grays. Fox and the others do not need to be part of it--there is little they can do, in any case. But unless we turn off the electromagnetic field that has made things stop working, they will not be able to escape." They had reached the small structure at the top of the dam. Zachary gave the steel door a hard kick, and it buckled and banged open. "God," Scully said. "What?" Zachary asked. "Nothing." *Just making a mental note never to make you mad,* she thought, as she drew her gun and pushed past the crumpled door. **** Mulder stood frozen in indecision at the bottom of the hill. He had no way of being sure whether the hybrids behind him were friend or foe--some or all of them might've been with the underground, but how was he to know? He retreated into the nearest shadow and hoped neither the hybrids nor the grays had seen him. The grays went past him, and if they knew he was there, they gave no sign of it. They seemed focused on the hybrids. They came the down hill in complete silence, their feet seeming too light to make any sound. In some back corner of his mind, Mulder recalled that the grays somehow could move around without making any sound he would've called footsteps, and the recollection brought on a cold, awful feeling of dread. He forced himself to relax, not to let himself sink into a shivering pool of anxiety. As the grays approached, he saw the hybrids retreat a little, as if they were backing into what they hoped were defensible positions. Then, from behind him, he heard someone call his name, in a stage whisper. It was Skinner, crouching a few yards away. The A.D. motioned at him--"come on." *Delighted to,* Mulder thought. *And for once, I am damned glad to see you, boss.* He hefted Bateman up on his shoulder again, and followed Skinner back to the plaza. They hurried past the burning library in silence, as if in mutual agreement that there wasn't time to discuss the situation around them. The fire raged and crackled on, throwing long tongues of light and evil-looking shadows. "Where's Corvin?" Mulder asked finally. "In the truck." A moment later, they had reached it. Some of the agents who had been in the truck with them were clustered outside, guns at the ready. Two lay stretched out inside the truck, injured in the blast. Corvin was sitting up, and as Mulder approached, he gave him a baleful look. "You told them, didn't you, you little bastard," Corvin said. "You told the fucking morphs where to find The Five, and now they've got no reason to hold their fire." Mulder dumped Bateman unceremoniously into the truck and said nothing. But his guts went into a knot at the thought of it. After all, Corvin might've been right. If the morphs had lied to him, that might be exactly what was going on. "You stupid little snot," Corvin went on, "you--" "Shut up," Skinner said harshly. "You have the right to remain silent, and if you don't start exercising it, I'm going to tape your mouth shut." Mulder unchained himself from Bateman. "What now?" he asked Skinner. "Now we get the fucking hell out of here, if we can." "This truck's not going to start," Mulder said. Skinner said nothing. He went around the front of the truck and turned the key. And nothing happened. **** Scully hadn't been to a power generating facility since the time her family had visited the Hoover Dam when she'd been eight years old. But immediately she knew that something was wrong--it was too quiet inside. She remembered the heavy thrumming of the turbines vibrating the floor under her feet. There was no sound here except a low, electrical hum. Outside a door marked "Control Room," Zachary paused. "These will be humans," he whispered. "Corvin would not trust hybrids with such a task. You can shoot them, if it becomes necessary." She nodded. Zachary used the same technique on this door that had been so successful earlier; it splintered and fell inward. Scully charged in behind him, gun in one hand, badge in the other. "Federal agent!" she shouted. "Hands in the air, all of you!" There were three of them, and they'd been sitting around a console playing cards when she came in. Now they gaped at her, eyes wide in astonishment. Nobody moved. "Put your hands up!" Scully yelled. "You're under arrest!" "Is this a joke?" one of them asked. "Do you hear anybody laughing?" Scully shot back. "Get your hands up right *now*." Finally they decided she was serious and slowly moved to put their hands up--cards fluttered to the floor. "Who's in charge here?" Scully asked. "Uh, I am." The same man who had spoken before, a short, rather chubby guy with thick glasses and a pocket protector in his shirt. "Zachary, you watch the other two. You--" she motioned with her gun at the chubby guy. "Very slowly, I want you get up and turn everything back on." He stared at her. "Look, it's only eleven-thirty. That's way off schedule--it's not supposed to go back on until four in the morning." "Change of plan," Scully said coldly. "Move." **** There was something going on down at the bottom of the hill--Mulder could see a bright blue glow through the trees. Like the silent footpads of the grays, that glow reminded him of...something. Something that made his skin crawl. Made him want to run like hell. "You have any idea what they're up to?" Skinner asked. "Not for sure. Zachary claims that some of them want to fight off the morphs--get out from under their control." "Nice of them to pick our planet as their battleground," Skinner growled. "Yeah. They're a bunch of sweethearts, all right." Above their heads, a street light suddenly made a fizzing sound and flickered. The truck's engine started. "What the hell?" Mulder said. "I don't know, and I don't care," Skinner said. "Let's move." They climbed into the truck. Skinner drove back to San Antonio like a bat out of hell. Continued in Part 30. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 30 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. - G.K. Chesterton September 29, 1996 Falls Church, Va. Scully and Zachary returned to the apartment to find it festooned with crime scene tape. Scully pushed it aside and walked in. There was a nasty, bloody stain on the carpet in the entrance, and Westin sat on the couch, staring mournfully at the floor. He had a black smear on his upper lip. "Westin?" Scully said carefully. "Are you all right?" "It is all right now," Zachary said. "He is a hybrid, and the Circles could not hold him for long." Westin? A hybrid? He looked up at Scully, and there was agony in his eyes. "I killed Costanza," he said. "I couldn't stop it." "It was not your fault," Zachary said firmly. "The Conjoiner killed him--you did not." The agent held up a plastic evidence bag. "You'll want this," he said to Scully. She approached him, and saw that inside the bag there was a nasty, blackened thing like a large worm. "That's what came up when it left me," Westin said. "What is it?" Scully asked. "A Conjoiner," Zachary said. "The thing that assimilates." Gingerly, she took it. "It is dead, separated," Zachary said. "They cannot survive inside a hybrid--the blood chemistry will kill them. It cannot hurt anyone now, but it may be instructive to examine it." Westin looked numb, dazed. "Are you okay?" she asked him again. "I'm tired," he said. He closed his eyes, swallowed hard. "I can't believe I killed Costanza," he said. Zachary took his arm gently. "Come with me," he said. Then to Scully, "I will take him next door. He can get clean and rest. He will be all right." *Maybe physically,* she thought. She nodded at the hybrid. Zachary at least understood more about hybrids than she did. Maybe there was something he could do for him. They hadn't been gone long when Scully heard a crash, and the sound of running feet. *Jesus,* she thought, reaching yet again for her gun. *What now?* And then a familiar voice. "Scully!" Mulder, sounding panic-stricken. He skidded to a stop in the doorway, staring blankly, in terror, at the stain on the floor. "Scully!" he yelled again, then looked up and saw her. "You look terrible," she said. His hair was all askew, his clothes smeared with dirt; he looked exhausted and strained and had a big bruise on his right cheek. And then he grinned, and the sudden light in his eyes blew her whole theory about being a surrogate sister right out the window. "You look great," he said. **** She made him eat and shower before letting him sit down to tell her the story of what had happened. He hadn't wanted the delay, and she had known he wouldn't--Scully figured that if breathing weren't an involuntary function he would've asphyxiated years ago. He would've just forgotten to inhale. Then she let him pour it all out in a rush, and only then did she tell him she had been there, too. And she gave him the videotape out of the flightcraft's gun camera system. "What's that?" he asked. "Our press conference," she said. He seemed deflated, looking at it. But she had expected that, too. Mulder didn't like going on TV. She thought, at bottom, he had a little stage fright. He'd be okay once he got going, she thought, and if necessary, she'd step in. "You know," she said, "we're going to be in court for months." "Shit. Years. This is going to make the O.J. Simpson trial look like a long weekend. By the time we're out of court we'll be too old to go into the field, and they'll have to bump us up into management." His tone left no question about what he thought of becoming a manager. "Yeah, maybe. What do you think the aliens will do now?" "I don't know. With Corvin out of the picture, it's pretty clear there won't be any more hybrids coming up--but we still don't know where The Five are, and I guess the real question is, how much longer will the morphs wait for us? Corvin said he thought they'd attacked in Austin because I told them where to find The Five. But I don't know--if that were true, then why would they stop after Austin?" "Have they stopped? Do we know that for sure?" "No, not for sure." He looked away and shook his head heavily. "Hell, except for having our prime suspects in custody, we're really no better off, are we?" His adrenaline rush was dying away, and it was leaving him sad and tired. "Yes, we are," she said. "We know a lot more--and as you said, there won't be any more new hybrids. That means a lot of lives saved, Mulder. Go get some rest." "I don't think I can sleep." She smiled indulgently, got up and put on her coat. "I think you're going to be out like a light the second you get horizontal." "Where are you going?" "Hoover. Down to the lab," she lied. "Well, all right," he said, a little peevishly. "I'll go to bed." She ruffled his hair on her way out. Then she went to her doctor to try to confirm a theory she had. She was right. The scans came back completely clean. Whatever the aliens had done to her in the tunnels in the Strughold mine, along the way, they had healed her brain lesion. She returned to the apartment to find Mulder hadn't quite made it into bed--his feet were still on the floor, as if he had sat down on the mattress to undress and then lain back just for a moment and fallen asleep there. He had managed to get his sweat shirt off before he crashed; Scully picked it up from the floor where he had dropped it. It held the crisp apple scent of the shampoo he used. She thought for a moment of waking him to tell him what she had found out in her visit to the doctor, then decided to wait. The relief, the peace she was feeling at her reprieve--those were hers for now. She sat on the other side of the bed and studied him. She'd always found a quiet pleasure in watching him sleep and had told herself it was because, while he was easy on the eyes, when awake he an enormous capacity to be a pain in the ass. Both were true, of course, but Scully wondered now if she had been fooling herself. She remembered that there'd been a time when she had told her friends she found him attractive. She realized that since then, she had blocked that out--there were so many reasons not to think of him that way. She and Mulder--now *that* was an extreme possibility. But over the last few months, as the pressure of their work had built up, she had found herself seeking his physical presence more and more. Snuggling up to him at night, consciously or unconsciously seeking excuses to touch him, put her arms around him. She had regulated her thoughts, controlled her "delicate hormonal balance," as he had put it. But she thought her heart had always known there was something more in it--the trouble had lain in trying to define what that something was in terms acceptable both to the bureau and to the nature of what she and Mulder had to accomplish together. She still was not sure what that something was, or when they might have some chance to explore it. She just knew that she hoped they would figure it out some day. **** October 4, 1996 Skinner had been right about the craziness that was to ensue after the news went public. It turned out that only a few thousand had been affected in Austin, but the news about the hybridizations in Wyoming, California and Oregon was electrifying. Frightened, people bought out supermarkets, fled cities and staged protests. In Newark, there was a riot at a shopping mall. Nobody was killed, but dozens were injured. In Des Moines, a coalition of churches held a marathon tent revival and invited the aliens--more than a thousand people attended. If any aliens showed up, they didn't identify themselves as such. The people who did come stood out in a field, lining up in a formation that spelled out "We can be friends" in fifteen-foot tall letters. Every conspiracy and UFO theorist Mulder had ever heard of was on television--including some he knew to be just plain delusional. He and Scully, on the other hand, were sheltered from the bulk of it. They'd done their bit on television--Mulder actually thought it had gone fairly well--and were snugged away in their safe house afterward. He had rather savored the shocked, excited reaction when Zachary had walked out to face the reporters. Meanwhile, since then, the wheels of government were turning at their usual geologic pace. There was talk of appointing a special prosecutor, debate about whether the prosecutions should occur in federal courts or in Congress. Skinner had somebody come in and clean up the carpet in the apartment. Mulder installed a new deadbolt on the front door. Useless against the morphs, of course, but effective against the garden-variety human lowlife. He found that he was enjoying playing house with Scully. He hadn't had a roommate since Oxford, and he'd never really pictured himself in a domestic setting with a woman. He and Phoebe, all those years ago, sure--but there'd been nothing domestic about that. He and Scully, in this apartment on D.C.'s outskirts--it felt right, comfortable. She knew when not to bother him. She knew when *to* bother him, when he was pushing too hard and the pushing itself was blocking progress. He was eating; he was sleeping. She had imposed a normalcy on him that he had not had in decades. He had never thought much of normalcy--it was boring. But not so bad, perhaps, if it were shared. He found himself oddly wishing it might last for a long while. Not bloody likely, though, he figured. His life had never been normal for long. **** October 10, 1996 Skinner sighed out frustration. "I owe you an apology, Agent Mulder--your talent for making me crazy is clearly genetic and beyond your control." "My father's making trouble again," Mulder guessed. "He now says he has changed his mind about testifying against the others in the Consortium. He says if he does, Corvin will kill The Five. He claims you know where they are." "He's mistaken." There was a cold, dead note in Mulder's voice. "He wants you to explain why you won't say where they are." A muscle twitched hard in Mulder's cheek. "Okay," he said. The word was calm; the tone was like steam exploding. "I'll be happy to do that." He started for the door. Scully moved to block him. "Mulder, you don't really want to do this," she said. "Not like this, in a rage. I know you think you do, but--" "Okay, Scully, you've done your duty. You've tried to stop me. Now get out of the way." In her peripheral vision, she saw Skinner unlock his knees, ready to fling himself at Mulder if things got ugly. Scully didn't think Mulder would come at her. He knew who he was angry with, and it wasn't her. "No," she said firmly. He slammed his hand against the wall. Skinner took a step forward, then stopped. "Look, I'm sick of this crap!" Mulder yelled. "It's not my turn to be rational and understanding!" "I know that," Scully said. "You want to go beat the living shit out of him? Hell, I think you have every right. If I thought that was really what you wanted, I'd hold him for you while you did it." She had him stopped now. He was still enraged, still flushed, but he was stopped. "I just don't want you to do something you're going to beat yourself up for later," she said quietly. "Believe me--I know I how I felt when I did it to you. It's bad enough that he hurt you--don't do it to yourself. You've been hurt enough." He let himself fall back to lean on the wall, his adrenaline rush fading fast. He rubbed his forehead. "Damn him," he said. "He just won't stop." *Like father, like son,* Scully thought. "I know," she said. "And it's rotten of him, and you don't deserve it." He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, he looked at Skinner. "I'm sorry, sir. There's...there's some history between my father and I on that point. I'll behave myself." "I think maybe it would be best if we all go down to Hoover and do this in a controlled environment," Skinner said. "For one thing, if there is some possibility that Corvin could get to The Five, I think we're obligated to do whatever we can to get there first." "I don't know where they are," Mulder said, his voice low. "I didn't say you do. I just think it can't hurt anything for all of us to sit down together and go over it one more time." "Yes, sir," Mulder said. Continued in Part 31. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 31 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler. - Albert Einstein October 10, 1996 Washington, D.C. Poor planning, Scully thought as she walked into the conference room. The way they'd all sat down around the table--Skinner, his secretary, Pendrell and Bill Mulder--the only empty chairs were two between Pendrell and Bill. Scully moved to grab the one next to Bill, hoping she hadn't been too obvious in her effort to run interference between father and son. She saw in Mulder's look that she hadn't succeeded in making it look unintentional, but his look was grateful, appreciative. She wondered if he had let her beat him to that chair. Everybody else seemed relaxed and alert, but a palpable tension crackled between Bill and his son. They didn't look at each other, but there might as well have been an electric charge, a force field, running from one to the other. It made Scully's skin prickle. "Okay," Skinner said. Ever the let's-get-down-to-business professional. "Let's start with where they were the last time you knew where they were." Mulder looked up, but Skinner meant this question for Bill. Bill looked at his son. "Why won't you just tell us?" he asked. Mulder drew a long breath, trying one more time to tap his reservoir of unflappability. "Because I don't know," he said, between his teeth. "I am acutely aware that you don't believe me, but that doesn't change the fact that...*I...don't...know.* Why the hell don't you believe me?" Bill had gone pale, whether in pain, fear or anger, Scully couldn't read. "I begged Shelby to tell me, and he wouldn't. He said, 'ask your son.'" "So what?" Scully could hear in Mulder's voice what it cost him to keep from screaming at his father. Mulder continued, "Shelby Bateman is a devious, lying sack of shit with all the morals of an elephant in musth. And you know it. But yet you believe him and not me. What is it you think, Dad? You think they took me on a fucking tour? 'Ladies and gentlemen, we're now passing the supersecret hiding place of five stranded aliens. Please keep your hands and feet inside the tram.'" Bill stared down at the blank legal pad in front of him. "Fox," he said softly. But Mulder was rolling, and nothing was going to stop him. "Don't you think that if I had known, I would've told you, seven times over, twenty years ago? Believe me, if I had known *anything* that would've kept you from laying that belt on me one more time, I would've told you. But I didn't lie about it then--I didn't lie about it when you hurt me so bad I wished I was dead. What the *fucking hell* makes you think I'd lie about it now?" He caught himself suddenly. Scully couldn't tell whether he had said all he meant to, or just exhausted himself. He leaned back in his chair. "I can't make you believe me," he said. "I really don't give a damn anymore whether you do or not." Bill was still staring at the legal pad. His mouth had drawn into a tight, pale line, and a muscle twitched along his cheek. After a moment, he looked at Skinner. "I last saw them in Roswell, in '68," he said. His voice sounded choked, tight. "Klemper said he didn't need any more samples from them. He wanted to dispose of them. But Tom didn't want them killed. He seemed to think The Five might be...useful in some way. He wanted to keep them around, and he didn't want the other members of the Consortium to know we had them. So he and Shelby started talking about moving them somewhere. Somewhere they'd be safe and nobody'd ever find them." "So you're saying they've had these aliens for fifty years, and no one ever found out where--not even people on the inside, like you and Higginbotham?" "Yes." Skinner shook his head. "I'm finding this a little hard to buy," he said. "Fifty years. And they don't get loose, they don't cause problems, send out a message in a bottle--nothing?" Bill shrugged. On the other side of Scully, his son slowly, methodically, began shredding a sheet on the legal pad in front of him, tearing off tiny pieces and rolling them between his fingers to form even tinier balls. "Were you in on any of their discussions about the move?" Scully asked. "Did you get any idea what kind of place they might have moved them to? What direction? What preparations they were making--rail transport, trucks...?" "It was under very high security," Bill said. *Now that's rocket science,* Scully thought. "I'd guess rail," Bill said. "A lot of trains moved east from Roswell in those months." "'East from Roswell' is a damned big chunk of real estate," Skinner said mildly. "Don't I know it." "And even if we did know where they went, there's no guarantee they're still there." "The plan was to move them just the once, to someplace so safe they'd never have to move them again." "There's no such place," Pendrell said. Mulder spoke up, his voice low and even, without looking away from his pad. "Apparently there is." Bill flicked a glance at him, then toyed with the edge of his own legal pad, as if he would've liked to shred his, too. "Look," Bill said, "I've already told you everything I know." Scully suppressed a flash of anger. *You didn't let your son off the hook when he told you that.* "I was a courier," Bill went on, "a diplomatic liaison. I didn't need to know." Mulder's hand jerked, and a larger piece of paper tore off. The ripping sound was loud in the quiet room, and Bill started. "Who did need to know?" Skinner asked. "Just Tom and Shelby." Mulder had left off tearing up his legal pad. Now he had the pictures from Artemis again, spreading them out on the table. "Somebody else had to know," Pendrell said. "Somebody's been bringing them food every day and changing out the sand in their litter boxes, or whatever." "Those details never came up in the main office," Bill said. "They turned it over to Bateman. He had total discretion." When Scully looked over at Pendrell, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that Mulder was staring at the photos, his hand poised over them as if he had meant to turn one over and just forgot he was holding it there. Even in profile, she could tell he was tranced out, processing, completely oblivious to what was going on. "Mulder," she said, "what are you looking for?" "Canisters," he murmured. Frowning. Processing hard. "They're not there," she reminded him. "I know," he said. "I'm obsessive, not psychotic." She didn't think he was going to find anything, but she knew better than to dismiss his impulses out of hand. "What kind of canisters?" she asked softly. "What do they look like?" "Like...big cylinders." His hand drifted toward a shape on one of the photos. "Like these, except these are too big, and they don't have...windows." "Windows?" "Sort of...portholes." "Cold," Scully said suddenly, remembering what he had said about the dark room he had fallen into on Artemis. "Cryogenics?" "Shit!" Mulder said, snapping out of it. "What a fucking *moron* I am!" He shuffled photos frantically. "Put them to sleep, freeze them down. It's perfect. They don't yell; they don't move; they don't befriend the guards. God-*damn*-it." Scully got one arm around his shoulders and with the other caught the hand he was using to flip photos. "Easy," she soothed. "Go slow. You don't want to miss anything." *You're not a moron,* she thought. *You were a scared little boy, and you didn't understand what you were seeing.* He closed his eyes and drew a long, shuddering breath. Opened his eyes and started through the photos again, one at a time. Scully felt Skinner's gaze on her and looked up. He wasn't sold--his glance at Mulder was anxious. "We checked Artemis," he said. Mulder reached the bottom of the stack. He dropped the photos and slumped forward, burying his face in his hands. "They're not there," he said. Scully squeezed gently with the arm still around his shoulders. "I think they went down with Skylab," Bill said, his voice choked. Scully would have liked to smack him. Mulder did not need right now to hear theories about how his last hope of getting Samantha back had come crashing down over Australia years before he had been able to pick up her trail. She glanced over, drew breath for a scathing remark, then saw Bill's face and couldn't follow through. His look was despair. This was the despair, the inescapable helplessness that had made him beat his son. His dark eyes were red-rimmed, wet. Carefully, she said, "What makes you think so?" "More of it came down than was supposed to," Bill said. "Shelby laughed about it--he said there was no point looking for what was left. That's why I gave up." Pendrell was studying the plan diagram of the Artemis station. "Well, there's something here labeled 'liquid nitrogen storage.' Nobody inspected it--it's a hard vacuum area. They use liquid nitrogen for cryogenics." Skinner held his hand out to take the diagram. Mulder lowered his hands from his face and rummaged through Scully's black briefcase. He pulled out a blueprint that showed the layout of the piping and ventilation ducts on the space station. "There's no way in or out of it from inside the station," he said, after a moment. "Not even a conduit for wiring. But it's in the right place." "In the right place?" Skinner said. "It's right next to the SC-22 cargo hold, where Ernie Morris found me." Mulder explained about thinking he had been somewhere else before he had ended up in the cargo hold. "If they've got The Five in there in cryo-sleep, that could explain how I supposedly got a freeze burn." "But it doesn't explain how you got there from SC-22, much less how you could've survived in hard vacuum." "What I'm suggesting is that maybe it's *not* a hard vacuum area. Maybe it's just labeled that way to keep people out." Skinner held his look for a long moment. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, steepling his thick fingers. "At the risk of sounding mercenary," he said slowly, "if we go to the expense of sending another team up to Artemis, there'd better be something for them to find." He let that hang in the room for a moment. "I'm not unwilling to take a risk on this," Skinner said, "but I'd be a lot more comfortable about it if we had somewhat more solid probable cause." Mulder was quiet, processing again. "At the moment, sir," Scully said, "you have what we've got." "All right," Skinner said. "Let's get something else, then. Scully, call Dr. Clendenning and see if she knows anything about this 'nitrogen storage area.' Pendrell, you talk to Morris. Same question. Get back to me within the hour." Continued in Part 32. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 32 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. - Rainer Maria Rilke October 10, 1996 Washington, D.C. FBI Headquarters Valerie Clendenning wasn't answering her phone, so Scully sent an agent to her house. He came back an hour later with bad news--Clendenning had been murdered. Shot execution-style in her home, probably had been dead for a day or two. Same with Ernie Morris, the cargo technician who had found Mulder on Artemis. "Oh, my God," Scully said, the realization sinking in. "Mulder was right all along--they are still on Artemis. Corvin's trying to kill off everybody who was up there." She went racing down to the basement of the Hoover building, looking for him, to tell him he'd been right. But he wasn't there. She searched the whole building, then went back to the apartment, and she still couldn't find him. And then suddenly, she knew where he'd gone. **** Approaching the Artemis space station As Zachary maneuvered the flightcraft toward the space station, Mulder felt his pulse racing. On top of the anxiety he had expected on returning to the station, he also had a sudden unavoidable fear that he might've been wrong--what if The Five weren't here? Not, of course, that he hadn't been on wild goose chases before, and he supposed this one was no worse than any of the others. But if, in fact, he didn't find the Roswell survivors on Artemis...well, hell, he just didn't have any idea about where else to look. In any case, it occurred to him, as they drew near the spindly collection of metal struts, broad solar-collecting wings and rounded modules hanging in space, that there was a poetic justice in ending here--in many ways it had started here, after all. Started here when he was just a kid, and then again, in Massachusetts, that night he had found the newspaper in his father's house, folded back to reveal an article about Artemis being spotted by a Japanese astronomer... *Hey, wait a minute,* he thought. "Zachary," he said, "you knew all along that they were up here." "No," the hybrid said, sounding surprised. "How would I know that?" "That was you in my Dad's house--you left that newspaper article for me to find, didn't you?" *Sneaky little bugger--you're not nearly as dumb or naive as you pretend.* "Ah." The hybrid gave his odd crooked smile. "No. I knew only that *you* had been here. It was that, that I wished you to know." "Why?" "Because it was what you wanted to know. Because I believed you had a right to know. Because I was curious what you might do." Mulder laughed. Yet again, he was an alien experiment. Maybe it was just his fate. "Have I lived up to your expectations--satisfied your curiosity?" "My curiosity is quite satisfied. I do not know what you mean by 'expectations,' though. In truth, I did not know what to expect. I still do not." "Yeah," Mulder said, looking out at Artemis again. "Me either." "I often find true humans very confusing." "That's okay. We do, too." "You should put your suit on now," Zachary said. "We will be docking in a few minutes. I have not practiced this, and if I do not get it right, there is a small risk that the ship would be damaged such that it would lose pressurization." "Okay." Mulder unhooked his seat harness and floated out of the acceleration couch. It should have felt strange, to be weightless, but it didn't--he realized suddenly that it didn't feel strange because he had been here before, albeit a long time ago and that he didn't remember it clearly. They struggled into their spacesuits and then Mulder let Zachary check him to make sure he had his all sealed right. The air in the pack tasted a little like plastic. Then the hybrid guided the flightcraft up to the abandoned space station. There was a gentle bump as the docking rings met, then a hard metallic thud as they locked together. He might not have practiced it, but he had made the docking look easy. Mulder's stomach twisted in anxiety and anticipation. "You'd better stay here," he said. "Just in case something happens, one of us ought to be in a position to get away." The hybrid's high brow ridges compressed in a frown. "You are expecting trouble?" "Always," Mulder said. He drew a long breath and went to the airlock. Zachary helped him unseal it--the inside lock, on the Artemis side, was sticky. Hadn't been opened in a long time. And then he turned on his helmet lights and went through into the station. It was dark, but not the total dark he had been half-expecting. There were small, dim yellow lamps glowing along the passageway. Without even thinking about it, Mulder reached up along the top of the wall and found the handles--put there so that people could pull themselves along in zero-gravity. Good old puzzle-box memory--it was still working for him, even when he didn't know it. He consulted it for directions to SC-22, closing his eyes briefly to focus on the mental image of that plan diagram of the station. SC-22 was off to the right, down the next passage. Hand over hand, he pulled himself along. He had just reached the door of the cargo hold when Zachary's voice sounded in the suit radio. "Fox. That trouble you were expecting--I believe it may have arrived." "What is it?" "A morph ship. What shall I do?" "Nothing, unless you have to defend yourself. We can't really take all five out of here, can we?" "No." "Okay, so let them pick them up. It's all right, Zachary. Remember, they claim they won't hurt me anymore." He pulled on the door latch. It, too, stuck briefly, but then it gave and he floated in. The cargo hold had no lamps, and it was really, terribly, frighteningly dark, except for the dim glow cast by the lights on Mulder's suit. But he was sure this was not the dark place that had haunted his dreams. It was empty now, but he had a sudden memory-flash as he walked in--this place had been crammed to the rafters with stuff. Dehydrated food, spare parts, miscellaneous equipment. This was not where he had landed when he fell. He looked at the bulkhead that separated SC-22 from the nitrogen storage area. It was just a wall. *A wall.* According to his dream, he had seen The Five in the canisters, and had flung himself backward in terror. His memory came through for him again--*and then he'd been almost literally *sucked* out of the room.* Mulder went toward the wall, then turned his suit lights up toward the ceiling. There. A faint curve along the edges. Barely visible--nobody who wasn't looking for it ever would have noticed. Mulder thought his heart would explode in excitement. He put his hand out, then just before it touched, it occurred to him he'd better do something first. "Zachary," he said to the suit radio. "I might be about to blow myself straight out into space. If you don't hear from me again in five minutes, take off without me." "Fox, I will come and help you," Zachary said. "No, it's okay. Look, I'm not suicidal, I'm just trying to be cautious. Where are the morphs? "They have docked on the other side." "All right, then--just do what I tell you. Wait five minutes, and if I haven't called you back, just go. And..." He swallowed hard. "Tell Scully I love her madly." He blinked. What weird, crooked corner of his psyche had that popped out of? Nevertheless, once said, it occurred to him it was probably true. He let it stand. "Why? Does she not know?" "Uh...I don't know. Maybe. Probably. Tell her anyway, okay?" "I think you should tell her that." "Oh, for God's sake. If I make it back, I will." He touched the wall and let it pull him through. And, naturally enough, landed right on his face, then bounced off whatever he'd hit, floating in the weightless darkness, even his suit lights not revealing anything but black space. He'd been expecting the total, awful blackness, and the suit kept him from being cold. But he shivered anyway, and felt again the yawning, endless terror he had felt the first time he had come to this place. It was abysmal--this helpless, sightless fear, and he suddenly had a whole new appreciation for what it was that had driven him almost into catatonia as a child. *Cool it,* he ordered himself. *You're not twelve now--use your fucking brain--it's the only tool you have.* He'd have to feel his way around, hoping to find again the switch that would turn on the lights. He put his hands out, but there was nothing. Twisted around, hoping the helmet lights would show him something--*anything*. *There*. Finally, the dim glint of something shiny and cylindrical. He couldn't quite reach it. There was a safety valve on his air pack--maybe if he tripped it for a second, it would blow him toward that cylinder. He twisted his arm up, keeping the helmet lights directed at the cylinder so he wouldn't lose sight of it, wouldn't get disoriented. A sharp hiss of air, and he found himself floating slowly down and forward, toward the cylinder. A minute more, and he was able to grab it. He eased himself down toward the bottom, and the suit lights revealed a control panel with gauges showing temperature, pressure, some other information he couldn't fathom. It crossed his mind that he had been stupid not to bring Scully with him--she probably could've figured this out. But he had been afraid, and he had not wanted to risk losing her. *So it's all up to you, now, boy-genius.* He touched a button labeled "VISUALS." And a light shined out from inside the cylinder, through a round window. And there it was, a frozen gray in a canister, staring blankly out into the room. Mulder's heart sank--it looked very dead. He went to the next canister, found the button and pushed it. This one looked dead, too. *Oh, God. What will the morphs do to us if we've killed them?* He was afraid he knew the answer to that question, and he went to the next canister, praying for some sign of life. He pressed the button, and the light came on. And there was Samantha, in the canister, wearing that same, dead stare. Continued in Part 33. "The Five," Book 2 (Part 33 of 33) By Somebody Else Classification: XA WARNING: NC-17 for VIOLENCE and PROFANITY. If you are under-age, please read something else. UST and Mulder-angst are present in abundance--for that matter, pretty much everybody gets a little angsty. International readers: No fourth season spoilers. Everything that's happened after *Talitha Cumi* has been gleefully ignored. See Part 1 for disclaimer and summary. ************************************************************************ Anything more than the truth would be too much. - Robert Frost Transcript of interview with subject Corvin, Thomas V. 10/22/96 Tape #AC000308 "If it had been up to me, I'd have stuffed both those Mulder brats into canisters and left them there--goddamn, I wish I had. But we only had six cylinders. I had arranged for them to be returned. I negotiated that with the morphs myself, and I was going to give the girl back to Bill, to keep him quiet. She was safer--she was younger, and the boy had that damned photographic memory. The morphs turned them over on schedule, and after that I don't know what happened. Next thing we knew, the boy was out somehow. Shelby said the two of them made some kind of escape attempt, and it got botched. And then, hell, I would've pushed him out an airlock except that Clendenning and the others had seen him. "Jesus, I wish now I had." **** October 11, 1996 Aboard the Artemis space station Mulder screamed, "*Samantha!*" He beat on the canister in despair, hanging on with the other hand so he wouldn't float away, and screamed her name again. It wasn't possible--she had *talked* to him in Massachusetts and in the Strughold mine. He hadn't imagined that. Oh, God, what if that had just been the aliens manipulating him again? No, she couldn't be dead. She just *couldn't* be. He slammed both fists against the canister and let the force of the blow push him away. He could hear Zachary calling frantically for him in the suit radio, but he ignored it. "*Samantha!*" he screamed again. her voice said in his head. "Oh, God," Mulder gasped. He squeezed his eyes closed, sobbing helplessly. Either the morphs were playing with him, or he had simply lost his mind. "She is not dead," a flat, dry voice said. The morphs had found him. Mulder didn't care. He floated, wept. Hands caught him and held him. "Dead," he choked out. "I'm sorry. They're dead." "This is ours," one of the morphs said. "They have copied this machine from us." "I keep telling you that they are smarter than you think," another one said. "Let go of me," Mulder mumbled. At some level he knew it was his inner twelve-year-old speaking now--the part of him that had never forgotten or forgiven or recovered. That little boy had taken him over yet again, and would not be denied. "I want to go home," he mumbled. "I know you're going to vaporize the Earth or something--I don't care. I just want to be at home when it happens. I tried to find them for you--please just let me go home." A hand grabbed the front of his suit. "Mulder," the arid, monotonous voice said. He opened his eyes wide, snapped his head up, afraid. It was the hard-faced morph--the one he had tangled with before repeatedly. From experience Mulder knew he could be a tough character. "I told you in Massachusetts that if you found them I would bring your sister to you," it said. "And I will, if that's what you want. You're free to go and wait for her. But it will be better for her if someone is here to help her--for a short time, the transition may be uncomfortable. I will make it as easy as I can." "She's dead," Mulder whispered. "I can see she's dead." "No. Calm yourself. That is the problem with you humans--it is so easy for you to let yourselves become overwrought. The gauges clearly show that all are still living." The morph let go. Mulder floated a short distance away from him. "Are you sure?" he asked, hearing his voice shaky in his own ears. "There is no doubt of it." He floated there while the morphs worked. He chewed his lip, trembling, nervous and excited at once. "Why didn't you come up here before, when I asked you?" "Because you would not come yourself," the hard-faced morph said. "We have known for some time that wherever you found your sister, you would find The Five. We knew she was with them. When you appeared unwilling to go, we doubted you knew for certain--some of us suspected you were deceiving us." "Oh," Mulder said. The morph was right--if he'd thought for a moment that he might find Samantha here, he would have asked Zachary to fly him up instantly. "Do you know how she got here?" "You were both here." It looked quizzically at him. "You do not remember?" "No." The word was like acid in his mouth--that he couldn't remember, that it kept coming back to him in fragments, like a broken film with big gaps burned out of it, that ate at him. "We brought you back to the Responsibles," the morph said. "After that, I don't know." Part of the broken film flashed into his mind--he and Samantha running down a long, round tunnel. He had always assumed they were running from the aliens. But now he recalled a glance over his shoulder as he ran, and behind them, in his mind's eye, he could see Shelby Bateman chasing them. Bateman, the rotten son of a bitch. He had been the one they were running from when Mulder had fallen and Samantha had let go of his hand. He fell silent for a long time while the morphs continued to work at the canisters. "What will you do now?" he asked the morph finally. "Now that you have them back?" "We will leave," the hard-faced morph said. "You're not going to kill us?" "No. It would consume resources to no purpose." "Or assimilate us?" "We have had poor experience with human assimilants. It would--" "--consume resources to no purpose?" Mulder put in. "Yes. The purpose of assimilation is so that those brought to the Circles will belong. Humans do not...belong well." Mulder laughed. The morph gave him a curious look. Mulder said, "You're going to leave us alone because we're ornery, bloody-minded miscreants who don't fit in?" "It is worse than that," the morph said. "We have learned recently that your bloodiness has infected us--it has turned many of our own against us. You are dangerous. You are..." It thought a moment. "I believe your expression is 'more trouble than you're worth.' If I did not think so before, knowing you, Mulder, has persuaded me completely." "I'm glad to have provided you with that particular insight." Several hours passed before Samantha's canister opened, with a hiss of gas. The morph lifted her out and handed her to Mulder. She felt so small in his arms--the last time he had held her, she had been much nearer his own size. She shuddered, gasped in a breath, and then cried out in pain. Mulder felt as if that cry stabbed him through the heart. His eyes stung with tears again. "Hold her near to warm her," the morph said. "I will ease it if I can." Mulder tightened his hug, awkward in the space suit and with no real idea whether any heat was actually getting out through it. "It's okay," he whispered to his sister. "It'll be over in a minute. Shh." The morph closed its eyes and put its hands on her, just as Mulder had seen the hybrid do to Scully in the mine. Samantha began to quiet. "She is all right now," the morph said. "Your planet's gravity will be difficult for her at first, as it was for you when you returned to Earth. Take her and go." "Thank you," Mulder whispered. The morph extended its hand. Mulder blinked in surprise at the human gesture, but he put his own gloved hand out and shook. "Farewell, Mulder," the morph said. "We will not see each other again." **** Washington, D.C. Night had fallen, and Scully'd had no word on what was happening. She doubted anyone else knew either. Not anyone else on Earth, anyway. She paced back and forth across the apartment, in a stew, worried sick, angry at being ditched yet again. When the phone beeped she snatched it off the hook as if to take her frustrations out on the machine. She drew a long breath, trying to calm herself. "Scully," she said carefully into the receiver. "Agent Scully, it's Kim Cook in the assistant director's office." *Finally,* Scully thought. "He'd like to see you, please. We're sending a car for you." "I'll be ready," she said. *Sending a car?* It was strange, and where the bureau was concerned, strange happenings always meant trouble. She waited about twenty minutes, even more agitated than before, until an agent knocked on the door and identified himself. He drove her to the Bethesda naval hospital, and Scully steeled herself. Something had happened--maybe something very bad. She went in and asked for Skinner and was directed to the high-security ward, but Skinner was nowhere in evidence. Instead, when she arrived, she found Bill and Laura Mulder waiting in a private room with four federal prison guards stationed inside and at the door. Bill looked dull and dispirited. Laura sat at the farthest point in the room from him, as if there was just no way she could get far enough from him to satisfy her. She looked up when Scully came in. "Do you know why we're here?" Laura asked. Scully shook her head. "I'm afraid not." She was afraid she might--one thing for which Skinner might call all three of them together was to tell them Mulder was dead. She thought perhaps that thought had occurred to his parents as well. "I'm sure the assistant director won't keep us waiting long," she said. She heard her voice come out right, in the cool, measured tones of a professional law enforcement officer, but her heart was thudding heavily in her chest. *Please don't let him be gone. I couldn't stand it. First Melissa, and now Mulder... Don't let it be that, please.* She sat there with his parents, waiting, her insides turned to ice water, for about ten minutes. Then she said softly, "I'll go see what I can find out." Scully went out into the hall and looked both directions, didn't see anyone she recognized. She let the door swing shut behind her and approached one of the guards, intending to ask if he knew what was going on. Then she heard a voice, too distant and muffled to make out the words, a little girl's voice with a velvety under-note in it that made the hair at the back of her neck prickle--at once completely unrecognizable and yet unmistakably, intimately familiar. *Oh, my God,* she thought. Skinner came out of a room down the hall, his look unreadable. Behind him, Mulder, carrying his sister. Scully recognized her instantly from the photos. Long, dark hair, as delicately, classically pretty as her brother was enigmatically handsome; she had her mother's light eyes. For a moment Scully couldn't make out what was behind Mulder's expression: his mouth tight, brows knit in hell-bent determination as he came down the hall toward her. Then she saw it--triumph was in his eyes, a quiet victory of reassurance and validation. More relief and affirmation than celebration. In that moment, she was sure she knew what he was thinking. *By God, I did it. I goddamned fucking *did* it.* *Yes, you did,* she thought, and she meant to remain in the hall and give him his moment with his mother and father. But when Skinner opened the door to the hospital room, Mulder threw a look at her--*you *are* coming, right?*--and she followed him as if he had pulled her on a string, feeling both flattered and awkward. Laura gasped, and then cried out, "Samantha!" Mulder went to his mother, and then Scully knew he had wanted her there because he had more truly hard things to do, and wanted her at his side if he failed now. She knew--Samantha had been found, and now he must do one of the hardest things he had ever done--however briefly, he must let her go. Scully couldn't see him trembling, but she could almost feel it, could hear the near-inaudible shudder in his breath as he put the little girl in his mother's arms. Laura took her, for a moment too stunned to weep. "Oh, God, my darling, are you all right?" She hadn't even looked at Mulder; all she'd been able to see was her daughter. Scully fantasized kicking her teeth in for her ingratitude, then she looked at Mulder and realized he had not even noticed. It was not for his mother that he had done this. Bill got slowly, numbly to his feet and then just stood there, as if he were not sure any of it was real, and didn't dare move to find out it wasn't. Scully saw Mulder steel himself for something and then go to his father. "Dad," he said softly. "It's okay. It's over." Bill's face dissolved in tears. Hesitantly, awkwardly, Mulder moved to put his arms around him. And Scully found herself weeping, too, as Bill hugged him back, one hand at her mouth in a vain effort to stop it. She glanced at the floor to blink tears away, and when she looked up again, Mulder was looking at *her*, over his father's shoulder. Eyes dark, a look of gratitude so intense it made her heart skip a beat. Still holding his father with one arm, he held the other hand out to her. **** Bethesda, Md. Samantha was to stay in the hospital at least overnight, until her tests came back, and Mulder wouldn't leave her. He remembered how it felt to be a child alone in a strange hospital at night, and he had no intention of putting her through that. On the other hand, it was better for him, this way--lots of other people around. If he'd had to take her home, stay with her and protect her by himself, he was not sure what he might've felt. Terrified, most likely. He had side-stepped the issue when she'd asked where their parents were going when they left. He figured she didn't need to know that the answer was federal detention, not just yet, and so he'd said only, "Not far," which was true. Of course, they hadn't been far away the night he and Samantha had been taken, either. It was best that neither of them dwell on that too much, he supposed. And then he wondered whether Samantha really felt the same fear--she didn't seem to, not that he could detect. Only once, so far, had she appeared to have a sense of the time she'd been gone, when she'd looked him up and down and remarked, "Foxy, you got so tall." He didn't think she had any idea of the terror and agony that had occurred down on good old planet Earth after she had departed. *She thinks the aliens are nice.* She looked exactly the same. It seemed impossible, but here she was, still eight years old, still blue-eyed and dark-haired, still so young and innocent and adorable. He thought that he could've sat there in that room and just looked at her forever. He would've liked to hold her forever. When Scully offered to go and talk to Samantha's doctor, he seized on the excuse to be alone with his sister for the first time. He had wanted not to hound her for answers, but she was the only one who had the only answer he cared about now, and he found he simply couldn't wait for it any more. When Scully had gone, he sat on the edge of the bed, took his sister's hands in his and said quietly, "Samantha, why did you let go of me?" "They were hurting you," she said. "Yeah, but we could've gotten away together, if you had just held onto me. I know I fell, but--" She shook her head. "You didn't fall," she said, and just for a moment, in her expression, he saw a conniving beyond her years. Except it hadn't ever been beyond her--she'd been every bit as smart and twice as cunning as he from the start. Always planning something, always thinking ahead, thinking on her feet. "I tripped you," she said. She grinned. "You did not," he said, irritated, as if she had tripped a switch that unleashed a heretofore unknown reservoir of sibling rivalry--a floodgate that had just been waiting for her to get back before it opened. "Did, too," she shot back. Then she got serious again. "I didn't want them to hurt you anymore. So I promised, and then I had to do what I promised." "What did you promise?" "That I'd stay. I told them I'd stay with the grays if they let you go. But just until somebody found us." Suddenly she leaned forward and wrapped her arms fiercely around his neck. "I knew you'd come for us," she whispered. "I knew you would." He realized that she had no concept whatever of what it had cost him, and he supposed it was just as well. He fought to hold back tears, told himself it was all right now. And what the hell. Maybe it was. Only time could answer that question. **** EPILOGUE October 22, 1996 Silver Spring, Md. Federal Detention Facility, Maximum Security Wing If one had pull, and Shelby Bateman did, one could arrange certain things. Nothing was going to stop him from spending the rest of his life in prison--he knew that now, and he was, more or less, resigned to it. But he had one last card left that he could play, and he meant at least to have just that tiny soupcon of vengeance. So he had arranged to have just a few minutes alone with Bill Mulder--after all, if that goddamned son of a bitch had had the guts to stand up to the morphs in the first place--if he'd had the balls to tell them to go to hell instead of caving into drink and maudlin grief when they had taken the kids--none of it would've happened. But Bateman figured he knew the way to take the gloss off the successful return of Samantha Mulder. So he and Bill were alone, in the gym together, after Bateman had bribed a guard with a bit of information about another prisoner who was bringing drugs into the prison. Bill looked defensive, his eyes narrowed nervously. Bateman figured that was only right. *Yeah, that's right--I'm a scary bastard, and you know it.* He lit a cigarette--that had been part of the deal with the guard, that he could smoke in here. "Relax, old friend," Bateman said softly. "I'm not going to hurt you." "What do you want?" Bill asked coldly. "I guess you're pretty damned proud of your boy, aren't you?" "What's it to you if I am?" "I just want to make sure there's credit given where it's due," Bateman said, savoring the moment. "Are you all that sure he *is* your boy? I've always thought he kind of looks like me--and you know as well as I do, that I was Laura's first love." Bill nodded. "I've always known you thought he was yours," he said slowly. "That's why you didn't just kill him, isn't it? Because that's what you thought." "He is mine," Bateman said. "Takes after me in so many ways." "I never told you," Bill said, "because I figured if I did, you *would* kill him. But you see, after I found out about Klemper's experiments, I needed to know. Was he yours? Mine? Some hellpup Victor mixed up in a test tube? I had a DNA test done, Shelby." Bill Mulder grinned for the first time in months. It felt wonderful. "You lose, asshole," he said. THE END