Title: Bootleggers 
Author: adhokk7 
Feedback: caryrain@aol.com
Distribution: Archive anywhere, Gossamer
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Up to and including Existence (TXF), Good-bye
To All That... (Millennium), All About Yves (TLG).  Knowledge of
Millennium beyond the TXF episode is helpful, particularly the
episode Maranatha, but not necessary to understand the plot of 
this story. 
Keywords: A, Post-col, X
Summary: It's 2021 and for the last ten years no one has seen or 
heard from Fox Mulder... Until now.


Disclaimer: The X-Files, The Lone Gunmen, and Millennium are all the
property of Chris Carter or 1013 or Morgan&Wong or FOX or someone
other than me.  All I own are some rubber bands and junk.
This story was inspired, in parts, by Frank Miller's book, The Dark 
Knight Returns.


          
          
                                  Bootleggers


"Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves
only those who would douse the flame of memory in order to put 
out the dangerous fire of truth."
          -- Albert Hosteen

"Sometimes I think my memories were taken by the doctors, but 
not all of them.  I remember faces.  I think I had a brother..."
          -- Samantha Mulder's diary

                     

11:30 p.m., October 1, 2021 
Outside of Atlanta, Georgia, North American Continent

  "...and public opinion polls are rating the standard of living
across the world at all time highs.  Here in downtown Atlanta,
businesses report soaring profits and there is virtually no
unemployment.  In fact, the last ten years have seen this city
become a model city in every aspect," the woman on the television
said as images of the Atlanta reconstruction in 2011 and 2012
flashed across the screen.

  Scott Ashby zipped up his backpack after stuffing the last cd
inside.  He picked up the remote control and started to turn the
television off, but stopped, instead turning the volume up. 

  "...as badly as some parts of the rest of world did.  Instead, the
extraterrestrial virus had a very limited area of impact here.  Most
of the damage the city suffered, in human terms, was as a result of
the rioting inspired by rumors of alien invasion by flying saucers
and whatnot."

  "Yeah, right," Scott whispered and turned the television off.  He
paused on his way to the shed behind the house only long enough to
twist the front door's deadbolt into place.  He watched his hand
twisting the key and guessed it was true after all that old habits
die hard.
  
  The wind picked up as he ran from the house into the shadow of the
wooden monstrosity behind it.  It had been falling apart, he had
been told more than a few times, since before he was born and
keeping it up had been a royal pain in the ass.  He needed it though.  
He needed it because he was a very private person anyway, but he 
also needed it because in his life there wasn't a question of whether 
someone was watching.  There was simply the question of when
they watched.

  Scott had seen it coming, as had most Americans, but it still pissed
him off when the fucking government Nazis passed the motor laws five
years ago.  It happened the exact same day that the Environmental
Protection Agency became the Ministry of Environmental Protection. 
The television news shows and national morning updates, generously
sponsored by said fucking government Nazis, were awash in safety
experts praising the "bold" and "courageous" laws and were already
attributing the saving of thousands of lives to the new laws.
Scientists were quoted in e-zines and on web sites forecasting
monumental decreases in toxins and emissions and thanking the
government for saving the world from the evils of prewar
transportation.

  Scott entered the shed through the mandoor on the side.  He left the
door open, using only the light of the moon and stars to see by.  If
they weren't watching him, there was no sense in drawing their
attention just yet.  He set his backpack down and pulled the light
green tarp off the car.

  It had been over three years since he had driven it on his fifteenth
birthday, but now it felt like he had driven it only yesterday. 

  With the backpack in the floorboard on the passenger's side, Scott
started the ignition of his 1974 Chevelle.  It roared into life.  He
revved the engine a few times, listening to the perfectly tuned
motor, then reached over to the glove compartment.  He opened it 
and pulled out a small black triangular object.  He set it on the seat
beside him and backed out of his driveway, stopping at the end to
take one last look at his house because if things went the way he
had them planned, he wouldn't ever be coming back here.

  His headlights split the night as he travelled, his eyes checking
the sides of the road moreso than the road itself.  He knew he would
see them soon because the damn things were practically inescapable.
Soon he was vindicated as the first one zoomed into view on the left
side of the road.  Then they dotted either side of the road, light
green metal columns, each one foot square, silent sentinels
monitoring the night and keeping the peace.  They were radar
stations, designed to read a signal from the hard drive of any
postwar vehicle.

  He grabbed the triangular device from the passenger's seat.

  "Oh, yeah," he said and pressed the silver lever forward.  A red
light began flashing beneath the surface of the device.  He held the
steering wheel steady with his left hand and flicked his right from
side to side quickly, rhymthically.  As the Chevelle passed each
radar station, the light on the device flashed green until finally
he had passed them all.

  "Land of the free, motherfuckers!" he shouted and put the gas pedal
on the floor, flying through the night with the speedometer's needle
pegged at 120.

  Five minutes later, he used the device to avoid another series of
radar stations and then climbed the remaining hillside, gripping the
steering wheel and tapping an erratic rhythm on the brakes until he
was at the top and then he pulled the Chevelle onto the side of the
road and got out.  In the valley below him, the night was washed
white by the lights of the city of Atlanta and to a lesser degree by
the lights of the small military camps outside the city.

  He looked at those lights for long seconds before he broke the
silence. 

  "Gotta talk to a man about some money.  Gotta talk to a man about
some money."  He said it over and over as he got back in the car and
pulled back onto the road. 

  He was five minutes down the backside of the mountain when he sped
through a sharp turn and headlights appeared in his rearview mirror.

  He hit the accelerator again, moving quickly back into triple-digit
speed, but the headlights closed.  Within seconds, they were right
behind him.

  "Motherfu-" he heard two gunshots and a rear tire blew out.  The
front of the car spun and crashed into the rock wall on the far side
of the road.  The Chevelle exploded, a rush of orange fire billowed
into a cloud and turned to black smoke and blew away, leaving the
raging flames and the burned out body of the relic hot rod and as
two black vans drove slowly past the wreckage, Scott's world turned
to ashes and the night was silent again.


Midnight, October 13, 2021 
near Rixeyville, Virginia

  If anyone had been closeby, they would only have seen a man lying
still on the hood of a car.  They would not have been able to divine
his thoughts.  They would not have not known if the smile on his
face, had they been able to discern that smile through the black
night, was born of pleasant reminescences of something so common 
yet endearing as a family picnic or perhaps he had brought his
sweetheart here many years ago and had gotten down one knee and
asked her to marry him.  Or maybe the location meant nothing and it
was the stars he seemed to be staring at which were important.  Stars
which shared a memory of something or someone.  Maybe it was
something else that brought him here.  Maybe this place reminded him
of another place, a place visited in youth, but now too far away for
him to ever see again.  Maybe it was a song that brought him here.
Maybe a rumor of something he was now awaiting rather than something
he had unknowingly outrun.  They would not have been able to know
the path the man had taken, the years he had journeyed, to come to
this spot and to look at these stars and to think whatever thoughts
he provided a harbor for on this lonely night.

  They would only have seen what the two thugs who approached him 
saw, a tall man in his late fifties, alone, looking up into the night sky.  
They approached him with the confidence of the well-versed despite 
the fact that they were on officially sanctioned government property.  
They had done this before. 

  "Hey old guy, on your feet!" the first one screamed at the man as
they broke from the treeline.  The man was obviously startled,
nearly jumping as he turned to face these intruders.  

  Two white males, early teens, both under six feet tall. 

  The one doing the talking, probably the leader, carried a Louisville 
Slugger like an amateur and the other one had a small caliber 
handgun.

  "I said for you to move!  Or do you want some of this, old man?" 
the batter asked and slapped the bat against the ground.

  The man said something as he got on his feet, but neither of the
thugs understood him. The batter looked at the gunner and back at
the man.

  "What the fuck did you say?" 
 
  "I said that it's my birthday.  I guess this is my party," the man
said, shrugging, and smirked at the thug with the bat.

  The gunner stepped forward, but the one with the bat stopped him.
"No, baby.  Old man think he be tough.  Old man say it's his birthday. 
Figure I gots a present for this old man who think he so tough."

  As the gunner stepped back, lowering his weapon, the man rolled his
shoulders back, brought his hands up with the backs of them facing
the thug with the bat, and he started moving his fingers forward and
back.

  "Bring it on," he said and smiled, his eyes narrowing and his lips
drawing into a tight sneer.

  The batter's eyes grew comically wide.  He tightened his grip on 
the bat.  "I don't believe this.  Let's do it," he said and raised the 
bat as he started running toward the old man.  The old man was 
surprised at the boy's speed, but he was ready.  He knew he 
was faster than either of the thugs could be expecting, so he 
waited until the boy closed into swinging radius, and then he 
lunged.  He closed the distance between him and his assailant in 
a split-second, his fist crashing into the boy's face with the full
weight of his body behind it.  The way the boy immediately slumped
to the ground, dropped the bat and threw his hands up to cover his
bleeding nose, the man realized that this was perhaps the first real
blow the punk had ever taken.

  He turned toward the gunner. 

  "You gonna shoot me?  You gonna fucking shoot me?  Come on then!" 
He was screaming and waving his hands as he moved toward the boy
with the gun, but his heartbeat was steady. His breathing was
measured and controlled.

  He felt good. 

  The fear that was written across the boy's face may as well have
been plastered there in red neon lights.  The man took mental note
of the boy's shaking hands, hands which twitched to the boy's right.

  It's time this kid learned what a real man is, a voice whispered
behind the man's eyes.  It was a dark voice, a voice he had only
come to know in the last ten years of his life.

  Get that gun out of his hands and then open that nose up, show 
him some of his own blood. The kid's a pussy like his buddy and the
sight of his blood...  He needs to see it.

  I need to see it. 

  The boy's scared, and he should be.  He doesn't know if he can hit
me.  That's what he's waiting for, evidence that I'm human and can
be brought down with a single bullet.  He's wondering what he'll do
if he hits me once and I don't stop coming for him.

  It's not a stupid thing to be thinking.  Especially not tonight. 

  I wait until just before I would pull the trigger and then I  move, 
planting the knuckles of my left hand into the gunner's right
tricep.  My right hand, balled into a fist, goes to his nose and he
falls, dropping the gun.  Not quite so quickly.  I want to make sure
you don't forget this night.

  The man reached down and pulled the boy up by his collar. 

  "What... what are you going to do to me, man?" the boy asked as 
the man dragged him over to the batter, who was still crying with
his hands over his face.

  "I'm gonna make you the lead role in a story your friend here is
sure to tell over and over," the man said, and crashed his forehead
into the boy's face.  The boy fell back against the car.  The man
then pulled him back up with his left hand and began slapping the
boy's face wildly, savagely, until minutes later the boy fell
unconscious.

  Letting the boy fall to the ground, the man turned to settle 
matters with the batter, but the batter had passed out as well.  He
retrieved the .9mm, lit a cigarette, and waited.  It took all of three 
more minutes before he saw the red and blue lights of a police car 
approaching.  It came to a dramatic stop and two officers jumped
out, guns pointed at the man.

  "Hands where we can see 'em!"  It was the driver barking the orders.

  The man raised his hands over his head and grinned.

  The driver stepped away from the police car and walked slowly toward
the man.  When he was nearly half the distance to him, fifteen feet
or so, he turned on his flashlight and aimed it at the man's face.

  "Wanna tell me what's going on here, sir?" 

  "They attacked me," the man said and pointed to the gun on the trunk
of his car.  "Run it.  You'll see."

  The second officer had walked to where the boys had fallen and
examined them.

  "They're alive.  They need an ambulance, but they're not going to
die," he reported to his partner.

  The first officer glanced at the boy by the car and grimaced.  He
looked back at the man in the beam of his flashlight.  "And you did
that?" he asked, nodding toward the boy.

  The man opened his mouth as though he was prepared to offer a
passionate defense of his actions, but stopped, answering only,
"yeah".

  The policeman looked at his partner again, an unspoken message
passing between them.  This one was hiding something.

  "Go ahead and call 'em out here," he said and turned back to the
man.  "What, are you some kind of badass or something?"

  "No," the man said, laughing.  "They were idiots.  You could have
taken them down," he said and pointed toward the policeman's large
waistline.

  "Wait a minute."  The policeman turned to his partner.  "Harris,
come over here."

  The other one, Harris, finished his call for the ambulance, 
muttered something under his breath and came to stand beside 
his partner.

  "You recognize this man?" his partner asked.

  Harris looked at the man's face.  Nothing familiar registered 
for him, so he too raised his flashlight at the man's face, as 
though the additional light would help clarify the mystery.

  "What am I looking for?" he asked.

  "Fox Mulder, ain't you?" the first cop asked the man.  "I saw a
documentary about you! You are Fox Mulder!"

  "No, that is not my name," the man answered.  "My name is-"

  "Oh bullshit!  You are Fox Mulder!"  The policeman swatted his
partner's shoulder.  "Look at this.  Fox fuckin' Mulder as I live
and breathe."

  "I told you that isn't my name," the man insisted.

  Just then, the ambulance, presumably from the park's medical
facility, arrived.  The medics loaded the boys into the back of the
ambulance while Harris filled them in on how the boys arrived in
their present conditions.  Harris' partner was silent as he stood
watching, the expression on his face changing as the light from the
ambulance's interior washed over the faces of the boys on the
stretchers.

  After a brief and private consultation, it was apparently decided
that Harris would ride with the ambulance, leaving his partner to do
the paperwork, which, if Harris' partner's theory was right, meant
reporting that a dead war hero, an old dead war hero, had kicked the
hell out of two young healthy punks who happened to be carrying a
baseball bat and a handgun.

  "So, look pops," the policeman said as he walked back to the old
man, his tone of voice decidedly less enthusiastic than it had been
moments before.  "Here's what my report's going to say: an old man
was accosted by some strung out dope fiends from an outlaw
encampment.  The old man ran and hid in the woods from the bumbling
junkies who wound up turning on each other until we arrived.  End of
story.  That ok with you?"  He started walking back to his car, not
waiting or interested in the man's answer.

  "And what if I am Fox Mulder?" the man asked.

  The policeman opened the driver's side door of his car and looked
back at the man.  "Fox Mulder died in the war, right?  Go home,
grampa.  It's late," he said and got into the driver's seat of the
car and drove solo back to the station.

  The man got back into his car and dialed the airport on his cell
phone.  He booked a flight to Massachusetts and tossed the cell
phone into the passenger's seat.  He had started to look forward, 
to start the car, to drive away, but something stopped him.  A glint 
of light, a reflection of the moonlight in the seat beside him.  He
looked back at where he had just tossed the cell phone, and there
beside it was a small gold cross on a gold chain.  He picked up the
necklace, letting the cross dangle freely, its golden glow the
reflection of the moonlight fighting the darkness of the car.  The
reflection of the moonlight... and the starlight.

  He set the necklace back on the seat and started his drive back 
down the mountain.  The people on the radio were debating the
virtues of centralized government as the man drove through the
darkness down the mountainside.  He lit another cigarette and smiled
a distant smile as he passed the large sign which read NOW LEAVING
SKYLAND MOUNTAIN. 
--

Bootleggers (02/21)

2:05 a.m., October 31 
Chilmark, Massachussets

  Mulder looked around the room, the realization of where he was 
and what he was doing slowly setting in like he was coming to from 
a deep sleep brought on by a raging drunk.  He was in his house, in
his basement...  He was working and he hadn't been sleeping and he
hadn't been drinking.  He remembered coming downstairs, like he did
every night.  He had meant to go into the other room.  He had meant
to work out in there like he did every night, but instead he had
stopped in here and he had come to his computer and he had been
working.

  He clenched his right hand into a fist and hit the desk, then 
stood up and walked away from the computer, but it was too late. 
The voice he had fought every day for the last ten years was back
and it was telling him that it was all his fault.

  Again. 

  He had been too late.  He had been too late in realizing the 
errors he had made.  He had been too late in coming to realize the
alliances he should have made and to learn the lessons that had been
staring him in the face since he had first discovered the X-Files.
He had been too late to stop them and he had been too late to save
Scully.

  He opened his eyes and looked for the fish swimming around in 
their little world like no harm greater than themselves could ever
come their way.  They were there in their aquarium, just like he had
known they would be.  They comforted him.  He watched them swim 
past the Buddha and through the fake leaves of the fake plants lining
their fake ocean floor.  He watched them swim the length of the tank
until they were looking at the computer.  His eyes darted to the
monitor where there were digital photographs of charred bodies
filling the screen.

  He closed his eyes again, knowing that when he opened them, the
bodies would still be charred and he would still be looking at them.

  Again. 

  He had to turn the damn thing off and turn it off now.

  Mulder opened his eyes and walked back to his desk.  His hand moved
toward the computer's power button, but detoured at the last minute
and passed his overflowing ashtray, shaking, as it reached for his
cigarettes.  He fumbled with the pack until managing to pry one out
then he dropped the pack on the floor.  He lit the Morley with a
match and took two quick deep drags on the cigarette.  The smoke
filled his lungs and he felt slightly more at ease.  He was glad he
had started smoking again after he had "died".  It relaxed him.  It
made him feel normal.

  He reached out toward the computer again and this time he did turn
it off.  The monitor went black and he looked around the room.  His
eyes roamed over his filing cabinets and his stacks of cardboard
boxes, each filled with files and documents and taped interviews
from cases he had worked on way back when.  Way back when he was 
a younger man.  Then his eyes stopped on the glass display cabinet.

  The trophy case.  
  
  He walked over to it, took a drag on the cigarette, and blew the
smoke up into the still air of his basement.

  His trophies were small, simple souveniers: John Lee Roche's cloth
hearts, Reggie Perdue's unfinished novel, a wedding ring he used to
wear on undercover assignments, a shot glass Arthur Dales had given
him when he and Scully visited him in Florida, a baseball from Home,
Pennsylvania...

  And Scully's cross.

  He put his forehead against the glass and tried to remember the 
last time he had seen her wear it before...

  It was beautiful with the light shining on it like this, he thought,
distracting himself.


Fifteen miles outside Austin, Texas

  The flat dry night was deathly silent except for the sound of the
prewar Camaro's large motor and the squealing of its tires as they
dug into the asphalt and kept the car from overturning or careening
into the dirt as it came through the last turn before the
hundred-mile straightaway into Austin.

  Inside the car, three teenagers, Phil Dherliss, Buck Creed, and Amy
Fitzgerald were also deathly silent, each with their eyes locked on
the dark night in front of and surrounding them.  Phil was driving
and Buck was in the passenger's seat.  Amy was in the backseat,
leaning over with her head and shoulders between the two boys, one
of several bags full of compact discs in the floorboard between her
legs.  They were on their way to meet a friend of a friend of Phil's
he knew from the internet and they had been driving for hours.

  Yesterday morning, Buck had hacked into what he thought was a local
television station's dedicated news server, but it turned out to be
a cached site (with security from the prewar Microsoft days, easily
hacked by his automated bots) housing a huge electronic directory of
databases.  Most were anonymous, or not obviously relating to
anything, but then there were those clearly belonging to the old
guard - the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department Of Energy, 
the State Department, the C.I.A., the Treasury Department, the 
F.B.I., the Millennium Group, branches of the former U.S. military, 
and the Social Security Administration.  In each of these, there 
were links to files, records of activities before and during the 
invasion.  There were records of alien abductions and government 
operations against American citizens, secret campaigns using 
biochemicals or stealth weapons, records of what could only be 
called torture in the name of research, and it went on and on.

  When he found the F.B.I. records of their operations during the
invasion, he began to rip the site, downloading the code so he could
reconstruct it on a standalone machine.  For the next four hours, he
recoded the site on his standalone, copied it and then logged back
on.  It took all of two minutes to replace the site, allowing him to
bypass all further prewar security measures he might encounter.  He
began reading everything he could get his hands on, downloading file
after file.  Phil finally arrived in response to an e-mail Buck had
sent him and a half-hour later, Amy arrived.  Buck logged off and
told the others about everything he had found, becoming especially
excited when he told them he had found evidence of the lies about
the invasion.  "We're gonna fuck 'em," he told them, "because we got
that and so much more.  We're gonna have enough to really fuck those
bastards.  Phil, see about hooking us a date in Austin."

  After that, Amy and Phil took turns logging on and logging off 
using stolen accounts, switching out every fifteen minutes to avoid
being tagged by the government's goons and their Nazi software.  
The conventional wisdom held that it took the pigs at least twenty
minutes to track stolen accounts or hacking or snooping or whatever,
but both Phil and Buck claimed the pigs could do it in seventeen
minutes or less.  Then two minutes to notify a black ops unit, ten
to twenty minutes response time and then everyone's dead meat.  Of
course, everyone Amy knew knew someone who knew someone this very
thing had happened to and, of course, Amy didn't know anyone it had
happened to.  But the fact was that she had known Phil and Buck her
whole life and she wanted to believe them (especially Buck).  And
she didn't want to die for fucking around on the net, so she logged
off faithfully every fifteen minutes, giving Phil his turn at the
controls.

  Buck slept on his cot in the corner, resting up for the drive and
while Phil did his stuff, Amy would watch Buck and wonder what he
was dreaming about.  She'd wonder about their future and if there
would ever be time for just the two of them.  She wondered what
glorious surprises tomorrow held and while Phil worked, Amy dozed
off. 

  The sound of Buck's voice woke her up and she watched while he and
Phil talked.  Phil had apparently been working while Amy slept, which
was cool since he probably had enough stolen accounts in his book to
work undetected for a week straight.  Buck stood behind him, looking
over his shoulder at the material he was downloading while Phil
explained that he hadn't set anything up yet.  It was then that Amy
stood up and said she was ready to work again when they needed her
to.  Phil sent an e-mail and logged off, Amy logged on and Buck went
back to sleep for another couple of hours.

  Soon, Phil was running his mouth again and Amy read and downloaded
and pretended to listen while he went on and on about how he knew a
guy, a frequent poster from an anarchy message board on the web, who
had connections to a resistance group in D.C.'s underground and also
claimed to know "h@X0r", a legendary internet terrorist.  His voice
became white noise while Amy scanned F.B.I. records of the invasion.

  "-this shit into the right hands.  Mark my words," Phil said and
walked over to the computer, ready for his turn.  He logged on after
she finished and checked his e-mail.  His contact had agreed to
collect their package and float it all upstream to h@X0r.

  According to Phil, the guy was a hacking genius from back in the
day.  He said that the rumors had him being one of the key players
when it had all gone down and Phil believed those rumors.

  When Buck woke up again, Phil told him he had set up the deal and
then the three of them started packing and planning.  After this,
they were headed to Washington state, where the resistance was
rumored to be gaining strength.

  Near the end of the straightaway, trees began to appear. 
Interspersed among the trees were radar stations.

  "Here it comes," Buck announced, insisting that everyone "be cool".
He picked up the blocker in his right hand and steadied it, aiming
across the street for the first radar station coming up on his left.
Three seconds later, he began zigzagging his hand from left to
right.  There were a lot of them planted in the trees, more than
Buck had ever seen in one place before.  As they passed by them,
Buck handling the driving and blocking duties, Phil reached over the
seat and grabbed for one of the bags.  Amy pushed his arm away, and
Phil's hand bumped Buck's shoulder.

  "Fuck, man!"  He threw the blocker at Phil.  "You made me fuck up,
you fag!" 

  Phil watched the last radar station go by on his right before
replying, "Fuck it, man.  That was the last one anyhow.  They ain't
interested in one blip on the screen."
 
  Buck didn't say anything else and neither did Amy.  All three were
quiet as they approached Austin's city limits.

  Suddenly, the car was bathed in a bright white light shining from
above.

  "What the fuck?" Amy shouted, twisting her body so that she could
look up out of the rear window.  It was a helicopter, she saw and as
she twisted back around to inform the others, she saw headlights
behind them.

  "They got us! They got a bear in the air and rollers behind us," 
she said as she grabbed the bags out of the floorboard and put them
in her lap.  She squeezed them close to her, watching Buck and
trying to picture them making it safely into the city.

  And then what? 

  The thought exploded in her head as she involuntarily looked back 
at what she could tell now were two large black trucks.

  "Get off the road, Buck!  Get off the road now!"  She screamed the
warning, but it was too late.  Another two black trucks blocked the
road in front of them.  Buck slammed on the brakes as soon as they
entered the beams of his headlights and the Camaro skidded to a
stop, perpendicular to the road.

  No one moved and no one spoke - not in Buck's car and not
outside Buck's car.  Amy squeezed the bags tighter, as tightly as
she could, and then the silence was broken as shadowy figures began
to pour from the backs of the trucks.  As they came closer, Amy
could see they wore military uniforms, soldiers' uniforms, and they
surrounded the Camaro and levelled their rifles at the car.  The one
closest to the driver's door ordered them out of the car.  Buck held
his hands up, moving slowly, and with his right hand he turned the
car's ignition off. 

  Phil watched, also with his hands in the air, wondering if Buck had
done that out of habit or if he had something planned. 

  Amy could barely breathe.  She thought she might be going into
shock.  She kept trying to remember if they had logged off before
they left and she kept being certain that she had logged off.

  "Every time," she whispered, wide-eyed, eyes going back and forth
between the boys who were getting slowly out of the car.  "Every
time.  Every time.  Every time..."

  They had come so close.  They would have made it if they had had
another two minutes, one fucking minute and they could have made it
into the trees, maybe caught a break and found a dirt road back up
to the mountain and then...

  They couldn't have gone back to their homes, but they didn't have
to.  They could have driven on and driven on and... and...

  It made her angry that for them, the end would be here, on the side
of the road outside of Austin.  She then followed Phil out of the
car, knowing that she was only doing the soldiers' work for them,
but doing it anyway. 

  When all three were side by side, the apparent leader of the
soldiers told them to move facedown on the ground.

  Amy looked at Phil and then at Buck.  Phil was staring straight
ahead, but she sensed in his posture that he was about to move, to
do what they wanted.  Buck, though...  She looked at him and she
knew he was beyond being scared now.  He was getting pissed off 
too.

  "No, fuck you!", he screamed as he jumped onto the one giving
orders.  Buck and the soldier fell to the ground and Phil went into
motion.  He lowered his torso as he lunged at the nearest three
soldiers to him, engaging one and challenging him for control of his
rifle.  He drove two extended fingers into the man's throat and then
the rifle was his.  He thrust the end of it into the gasping
soldier's stomach and told the others closeby that he would kill the
man if they didn't "cut the shit, right now."

  Buck then pulled his opponent's rifle away from him and stood
wild-eyed, pointing it at random soldiers.

  Phil ordered his victim to his feet and with the rifle in his back,
they backed toward the car and the other armed soldiers stood at
bay, rifles pointed and fingers ready for the slightest fuckup.

  Amy thought she was going to have a heart attack as she felt 
urine spread through the crotch of her blue jeans.  During the 
melee, she had tried to run, but she was frozen.  She knew that 
at any second, there would be a rifle blast and a smiling soldier 
would then turn and do it to her.  When that didn't happen and 
she saw Phil rise with the rifle in his hand...

  She thought she was going to have a heart attack.

  Then she moved.  She opened the car door and grabbed two of 
the bags of compact discs and was reaching for a third when 
she heard Phil screaming, "Go!  Amy, get out!  Go!"

  And she ran.  She ran through the line of soldiers, feeling their
deadly gazes as she broke their barrier.  As she got close to the
treeline, she heard the shots, three of them.  She stopped, turned
around, and for a split-second thought she should wait, that those
shots were fired by Buck and Phil and they would be running this way
soon, rifles in hand, but when she turned, her foot found a rock she
hadn't expected and she fell backward on her ass, dropping the bags.

  Just as she fell, she also heard a rifle fire and the sound of the
bullet splitting the air was incredibly close to her face.  She
screamed, knowing that the next one would find her if she didn't
move and move now.  She grabbed for the bags and she ran, waiting
for the next bullet to hit her, but much to her surprise, she made
it into the trees and she kept on running.




-ad
--
Bootleggers (03/21)

Chilmark

  He picked the crumpled pack of Morleys up off the floor and lit
another one.  Then he poured another shot.  "Here's to me, and you
sonsofbitches can kiss my ass because I was right," he toasted and
swallowed the vodka.

  The invasion had come.  Despite the demise of the collaborating
syndicate and despite the opposing alien rebels, the invasion had
come and it was the shitstorm of all time.  The alien colonists
began their overthrow of Earth in 2011. There were viral outbreaks
across Canada and Asia.  It hadn't come in the form of bee swarms. 
It was never determined how the black oil was transmitted, but it
was and in response, whole villages and cities were destroyed,
families and neighbors were killed side by side, their bodies placed
in piles and burned, as was the policy in the event this ever
happened.  It spread to and throughout Europe and the United States
and then Central and South America.  As Canada fell to the virus,
the United States took action.  A state of emergency was declared on
July 4th, 2011 and martial law was instituted.  The Federal
Emergency Management Agency was empowered to take whatever 
measures necessary to control and manage the outbreak.  The National 
Security Council issued official statements of support to the growing 
idea that the military should be at the ready to face and stand against
attacks and threats to American stability from both within and
without.  The Centers for Disease Control admitted early on that
fighting this virus successfully was beyond their current capabilities.  
They needed access to highly classified research done exclusively 
overseas, specifically in Russia and Tunisia.  By the time the President 
gave consideration to their position, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had 
persuaded most of the President's advisors to join them in urging him 
to authorize the military to respond to the threat by acting under the 
blanket authority of the United Nations, which was now managing the 
crisis in a growing number of nations on other continents.

  In those parts of America seemingly unaffected by the virus,
strangers and friends began to gather spontaneously, usually at
night.  They arrived in droves, not knowing why they were there only
to be stolen from these places, these alien lighthouses.

  The networks and cable news channels and news web sites all began
carrying stories of the disappearances, but never were the mass
abductions, the unexplained disappearances of the hundreds of people
officially missing, attributed to aliens.  Not in the "legitimate"
press.

  The stories, the ones linking the disappearances to
extraterrestrials, did get out though.  They surfaced like the truth
does as it crawls upward through the sands of deception so that men
may know it and all those people the world had thought were howling
at the moon were suddenly given something of a credible voice.

  Seemingly coincident to the rise in popularity of the "alien
abduction" explanations, news stories began to run which claimed
that the disappearances were not disappearances at all, but murders.
 Bodies had been found, they said.  The conspiracy theorists called
them "the bodies of the returned".  No causes of death were
immediately given, but the press readily pushed the idea of multiple
mass murderers or mass murderer cults.  Almost overnight, that 
story changed to one in which these healthy men and women were 
dying of exposure or starvation and that perhaps these people, the 
missing and dead, were members of cults themselves.

  The abductions took place largely in the western United States -
Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah primarily - and a large percentage of
those victims were Navajo.  The government responded by sending
military squadrons a shadow government had secretly trained to fight
the extraterrestrial threat, assassins whose mission it was to
locate, identify, and execute shapeshifters or any new life forms
gestated from human bodies or any humans under the control of the
black oil.  They knew to pierce the base of the neck and they knew
to not breathe the air in the vicinity of a terminated target.  They
knew the blood was toxic and the kill squads had been armed with
everything they needed to do their jobs.

  The government's response, the deployment of the kill squads,
prompted a backlash which gave fuel to the sweeping resistance to
such defensive measures growing in India, China, remote parts of Africa,
and Egypt.  It was in Asia and the middle East where the movements
were strongest and increasingly it was Egypt who hosted the
strongest factions of the rebellion.  They came from many different
walks of life, different cultures and different faiths to a country
whose religious faith was manifested in the landscape, both natural
and manmade, and permeated the very air they breathed.  Many of
those who made the journey were followers of the Judeo-Christian
faiths, bringing their own fundamentalists, middle of the road, and
liberal sects.  They lived and fought and resisted side by side,
along with the zealots and lunatics and the neo-Christian doomsday
cults who came claiming the Rapture had come and that the abductions
had been prophecy fulfilled.  The abductions were the acts of angels
taking the faithful to Heaven, they said.  They said the aliens had
been sent by God to prepare the way for the return of Jesus Christ
as prophecied by John.  They, the faithful, had come to Egypt to
keep the faith and to await the return of the Messiah as they had
been instructed to by God.

  There were others who came following similar paths of conviction.
They didn't await the arrival of a Messiah. These were the followers
of pagan arts, astrologists, believers in the ways of nature and the
animal spirit, all too believing in, if not an end, a change.

  And others were anarchists and outlaws fleeing from whatever
frustrations and punishments life in their homelands held for them.
A pact arranged by a Russian diplomatic delegation made sure that
large numbers of criminals - murderers, rapists - flooded into Egypt
from Iraq.

  Within weeks, as America was inundated by a growing number of
reports of the kill squads destroying homes and small communities,
the infected alongside the uninfected, Americans began to leave
their country in droves.  They followed rumors they had heard in
church or from their family or from a neighbor or had read on the
internet.  They came in groups and they came alone and if many were
to be believed, they came following divine instruction.  They left
the United States and they gathered in Giza and Aswan City and the
great melting pot was no longer America.  It was Egpyt.

  To the east of Egypt, a proclamation was issued by the Israeli
Parliament, approving extreme terminal force to finally put an end
to the war between Israel and the Palestinians fighting for a
homeland.  Their final solution prompted Palestinian refugees to
flee to Egypt and all but guaranteed a final showdown between Israel
and Libya.

  And while Nevada and Utah were being cleansed and Palestinians 
were fleeing Israel, Krycek reappeared (confirming several of 
Mulder's suspicions about the former corpse's role in the project) 
with an offer.  He explained to Mulder exactly what was happening, 
how the virus was being transmitted, and offered him a plan he called 
"the only chance we've got."  After hearing what Krycek had to say,
Mulder knew that he was right and an alliance was formed.

  Using Mulder's credentials, meetings were arranged with top level
government officials and in those meetings, in each one, things went
exactly the same way: Mulder introduced Krycek as they entered,
Krycek shook the hand of the person they were seeing while Mulder
pulled his gun and pointed it at that person's head.  He made sure
they knew that if they screamed or resisted he would kill them and
then Mulder stood guard while Krycek infected the person with
nanobots.  Before ending each meeting, Krycek used his Palm Pilot to
illustrate the full depth of the postion he and Mulder were leaving
that person in.  The two of them managed to infect all their targets
over the course of four days and used their newfound power to assure
that a message was sent, a message forcing the President to suspend
the kill squads and to ally with and import scientists from Russia.

  While Krycek's plan was put into effect, Russia gladly entered 
into discussions with the American government and issued a promise
that this show of faith and friendship would not go unrewarded.  The
power of the Russian bear to stand behind that promise grew every
day, in the face of problems of their own.  The country was falling
into internal unrest caused by a perpetually failing economy.  On
the borders, the fighting was approaching nuclear and in the days
and weeks prior to the viral outbreak, the whole country had all but
fallen into anarchy.  Almost coincident to the outbreak, an angry
Russian diplomat named Sergie Stepanovich stepped into the
international spotlight by staging a coup, killing all of the
Russian cabinet, and taking over the country.  He demanded an
audience with the American President.  He came alone, promising to
have an offer which would be hugely beneficial to both parties and
to the world and at that historic meeting, a deal was made.  Russian
scientists would be brought over to confer with American scientists.
Stepanovich promised that they had what America needed and together
they could end the outbreak and in exchange, he would receive full
political support from America in his efforts to end Russia's border
wars. 

  With America behind him, Stepanovich flew to Latvia and led the
first in a series of attacks directed solely on high-ranking
government officials.  After leaving Latvia, he proclaimed would
unify the Russian people.

  In America, the President took the next step in Krycek's plan.  
He issued an Executive Order placing all jurisdiction over federal
efforts to combat the virus with the Federal Bureau Of
Investigation, specifically with a task force to be appointed and
supervised by Walter Skinner and making Skinner answerable only 
to the President.  The Order mandated whatever resources the 
Bureau needed be made available and guaranteed military assistance 
to the effort.  The Centers For Disease Control were placed under 
Bureau supervision and Scully was appointed to lead the research 
teams.

  It was during this time when Mulder and Scully had parted 
company. They had argued about the plan to save the world and 
the tactics Mulder had used.  They had argued about loyalty and in 
the end, their difference of opinion was too great and she resigned 
from the F.B.I.

  The plan to release the bees, spreading the vaccine, went into
effect starting in those parts of America most heavily stricken by
the virus.  Swarms descended on small towns in the midwest and 
then in the south.  After the intial release of the swarms, reports 
of the virus began to drop.  The vaccine was working.  Thousands 
died from the bee swarms, but in the end millions more were saved.

  The third and final step of Krycek's plan was taken and above the
planet missles were launched from three space stations at the crafts
of the alien invaders, damaging each of their huge ships, but not
destroying them.  When the aliens began releasing smaller crafts and
sending them toward Earth, first-strike laser defense system
satellites destroyed most of them and the few that did penetrate our
defense afterward either crashed or were shot down. 

  By the time what was now being called "a viral epidemic" was under
control, the world had changed.  The U.S. was now awaiting
incorporation into what was rapidly becoming the one world
government headed by a suddenly strong and vibrant Russian center,
as per the terms of a U.N. Resolution.  One by one, the world was
joining hands, and it had begun with the revolution in Russia.

  Within days of his final visit to a bordering country, he marched
into Leningrad and Sergei Stepanovich wrapped his fist firmly around
his claim to power by announcing to the world that the treaties
establishing the peace in Russia were finalized.

  When the U.S. ambassador and the Russian ambassador to the 
United Nations sat side by side and signed their allegiance to the
embryonic and ambiguous new alliance placing the world's countries
under one central authority, immediately programs were initiated to
make both countries compliant.

  Predictably, there was resistance to this new alliance in parts 
of Europe and the middle east and in America.  Riots spread across
the U.S., escalating to what basically amounted to a civil war, but
it was over in days.  The government divided the country into
offically sanctioned cities and then the military closed those
cities off from everything else.  People on the inside were given a
new census and people on the outside were told they were to come 
into the cities or be considered traitors. 

  Under Russian guidance, peace quickly came to most of Europe and
Asia, but not to the middle East.  Israel and Libya rattled their 
swords nearly every hour and Egypt, now home to a massive 
population of doomsday cults, ufo cults, religious sects, Coptic 
Christians and Sunni Muslims living in makeshift encampments around 
the sphinx and nearyby complex of pyramids in Giza and near the 
Aswan Dam in Aswan City, refused to join the new international 
alliance.

  Their visitors posed a unique problem for the Egyptian government. 
If not for them, the country would already have been pledged to the
alliance.  The protection that would afford them, given the problems
with Libya and Israel, would have decided it for the government and
for many natives, but the believers had taken root in sites of
immense historical value and any efforts to remove them would
endanger these cities and the treasures they held.  Egyptian
diplomats finalized their intentions in a ceremony held at the U.N.,
announcing that Egypt would not be a part of the new alliance, and
were arrested.

  Sergei Stepanovich demanded a personal audience with Egypt's
President, but he was denied.  The world was assured that Egypt 
was trying to remove the rebels, and if successful then Egypt 
would concede to the rest of the world's wishes, but it had to be 
done carefully and it was the Egyptian people's responsibility to 
solve this problem on their own.  The truth was that the situation 
was too complex for the government to solve and their failures in 
repeated engagements against the rebels made this clear to them 
and to Stepanovich.  Successes were minimal, the high point coming 
when three rebels were captured in three separate raids.  The rebels 
were executed, the government claimed great success, and still the
resistance held.  Stepanovich issued statements praising the
resistance and labelling the Egyptian people as incompetent.  In
response, the Egyptian military was authorized to destroy the rebels
in Giza and Aswan City, but Palestian, Libyan, and Iraqi squads led
the rebels against them and won.  It dealt Egypt a truly
unpredictable humilation.

  While Egypt stumbled, tensions were also mounting to either side
between Libya and Israel.  The United Nations was officially
favoring Libya and the view that Israel acted unfairly against the
Palestinians.  Israel was declared an outlaw nation and Egypt was
trying to conduct a bloodless war with itself and its tourist
contingent and the rest of the world waited for the true dawn and
the peace promised by the new alliance.  When Egypt continued to
fail to rid itself of rebels, the United Nations prepared to take
control of the situation.  The U.S. was the last nation to support
the move, but the President acknowledged his agreement that this
affair had to be resolved if the rest of the world were to ever move
forward and so the vote was cast.

  Within minutes after the U.S. voted to intercede, Egypt made it
known they would stand against these measures at all costs.

  The attack came at night.  A night which found the faithful 
gathered together, true believers all, regardless of denomination. 
They gathered by the lights of torches and communal fires under the
gaze of the sphinx and behind it in and among the pyramids.  They
explored and mapped the insides of the great structures.  They held
Bible classes and sang hymns while astrologers predicted various
futures and loners contemplated their life's journey or their next
meal and families slept under ragged blankets in tents or directly
underneath the stars and along the Nile mothers were washing clothes
or taking much needed baths they hadn't had time for until the dead
of night and at other points along the great river, parties were
held by people wishing for a more solid way to lighten the burden of
their nightmares than what discussions of God or Cydonia may offer
and all around soldiers marched with the pride of knowing they were
fighting on the side of righteousness, their makeshift army
protecting these disciples of God, these familes and these women and
these children who had come to Giza because there was nowhere else
to go and those who didn't were happy simply not to be in prison.

  Aswan City's night held a much quieter version of a similar 
picture while over their heads and over the earth, two GPS
satellites responded to commands sent from Cape Kennedy.  They
rotated to align with the flights of planes whose mission it was to
deliver their cargoes of two 20 kT nuclear devices designed for
implosion like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.  They were
delivered in the dead of night by four F-117s out of Iraq.  They
flew in formation, proud and unafraid through the silent sky.  As
they entered into Egyptian air space, they ceased radio
communications.  Two members broke off five seconds into Egypt,
having a different date to keep from the other two who, when flying
at 7,000 feet directly over the rebel encampment at the base of the
great pyramid, delivered their payload.  As it fell after its
release, the eyes of the sphinx kept their focus, never breaking
their stare at whatever future or past the great head was witness to
and soon it was all destroyed, each city gone in a flaming mile-high
mushroom cloud.

  The world held its breath, humbled and frightened to see these 
twin suns abruptly risen in the night sky.  We had met our greatest
challenge, defeated our greatest enemy and though we had prevented
Armageddon, still the apocalypse had come.  It had come with the
air-burst over Giza and with the surface-burst in Aswan City, each
explosion causing a high-pressure pulse and blast waves were sent
across Mother Earth, eminating from her womb and poisoning her
lifewater.  The Nile River and Lake Nasser had their hearts ripped
from them and they were turned into deathly columns of scorching gas.



-ad
--

Bootleggers (04/21)

  On the land, the effects of each explosion were immediate.  One 
wave destroyed buildings and the retraction wave caused a flood of
wind-lifted debris to fly through the skies where it was all sucked
into the mushroom cloud.  An incredible wave of heat rolled over the
beach, the sand was turned to trinitite, the shores now marvels of
black and green glass which stretched on for miles in either
direction.  Every human being within three kilometers of either
Ground Zero died almost instanteously from the blast pressure and
the heat.  Although this was the highest concentration of deaths,
there were continuous reports of deaths from injuries sustained,
mostly from flying debris, from distances up to twelve kilometers.

  This was the song of the dual attacks, the symphonies of 
destruction conducted by twin nuclear demons, each designed to
achieve an optimal blast radius and with their triumphant debuts,
they opened for a moment the gates of Hell and while the earth
cooked, a pale horse went forth. 

  Those nearest Ground Zero who didn't die immediately lived the 
final moments of their life in sheer agony.  They were burned alive
by the flash, their bodies charred dark brown or black or were
turned to ash.  Others had their limps ripped off or their bodies
devastated by flying debris.

  The first wave of victims all died within minutes.

  Then came the radiation.  Those affected by the fall-out took ill
within two or three days, starting with coughing up bloody chunks of
their lungs and moving on to bloody diarrhea.  All told, over
200,000 people were dead within a week.  The bodies were destroyed
in mass cremations.

  People who had been at a greater distance from Ground Zero 
weren't affected for up to a month after the blasts.  Their slower
declines were marked by loss of appetite and bleeding gums and then
an uncontrollable fever which eventually took them as well. 

  The devastation to the environment was beyond comprehension.  A
half-hour after the explosions, the black rains came and the world
would never be the same again.

  The images which began the symphony would be the ones most 
vividly remembered.  The sphinx, its tranquil face keeping watch
over Egypt for so long, and the great pyramid surounded by its
lesser brothers and the wall of Aswan Dam, replaced with mushroom
clouds.  The very blocks of these structures were taken by the wind
or melted by the blaze and the sphinx was gone and the pyramids were
gone and the Aswan Dam crumbled and the water it had held back
flooded the valley beneath it and poisoned the air above it.

  These were the images which stayed, the images of these things
taken for granted as permanent parts of our world yesterday and now
these things were gone forever.  The explosions were simulcast from
servers on satellites to web sites and the world watched.

  This was the end of the free press as well.  It led to the new
government officially commandeering servers and arresting system
administators around the world.  Laws were passed allowing only
government-licensed programmers to design software and
government-licensed sysadmins to supervise servers.  The 
government began to monitor every account for suspicious 
behavior which could lead to any disruption of the fragile stability 
the world now enjoyed.  These laws, in turn, led to the explosive 
growth of a massive worldwide computer piracy underground.  
Sport, and even social status in the unsanctioned encampments 
outside cities were derived from one's ability to steal accounts.  
The more "blurbs" in your "book", the more impressive and 
therefore important you were.

  Temporary web sites, some lasting only twenty minutes or less 
became the standard homes for message boards and mailing lists
accessed with blurbs.  The net, the one not sponsored by the
government, became a swampland of conspiracy theories, giving 
rise to legends, rumors, myths, lies, and millions of shades of the
truth.

  The last hurdle the world faced in the race for peace had been 
the looming war between Israel and Libya, but after the attack on
Egypt and a meeting between Stepanovich and the outlaw Israeli
Parliament, a treaty was signed.  The terms of that treaty were
never made public.  The agreement was sealed and in a press
conference, Steponavich said that Russia stood in Israel's defense
against Libya and the rest of the world would follow Russia's
leadership in this matter.  He said that if the world wanted true
peace, they had no choice.  He ended by telling the cameras that
Libya's hostility toward Israel would cease immediately and it did. 
For the first time in history, there was finally peace in the world.

  The United Nations, in preparation for the dissolution of all
independent governments, began a campaign to rebuild all of the
world's historical sites damaged in the invasion and the invasion's
aftermath.  As part of Israel's peace agreement, the U.N. also began
to rebuild Israel.

  Again the world was witness to meetings by its leaders.  This 
time, they gathered to plan for the future.

  "You may ask, 'What if some madman has lied to us and his 
deceit holds destruction for us?' and I tell you that you are wise
for asking that question," Sergei Stepanovich began his televised
address to the world.  "This is the reason I have outlined to my
staff a series of initiatives I believe will secure our future.  The
first of these will be to restore a sense of dignity among those
traditionally less valued in our world.  It is in the defense of
these people we must act first, to right old wrongs and to heal
wounds which have been left to fester for far too long.  Hopefully,
these initiatives and their fruits will foster a sense of
brotherhood and community the world has been without for far too
long.

"Secondly, we must remove the fear we all are left with in the 
wake of the events of the last year.  We must take action.  The 
time is now."

  The second steps he had alluded to were the first taken and that
began with enforcing a nuclear testing ban in all international
waters.  The worldwide network of infrasound microphones was
replaced with new technology which had the potential to record and
identify sounds beneath the ocean's surface with over ten thousand
times the accuracy of what had come before.  This was done, it was
said, pre-emptively defeating the potential threat of rogue nations
exercising any nuclear capability because the good guys would be
watching their every move.

  The world became a place of rebirth, rebuilding, settling old 
scores and making as big an umbrella as possible above and as big 
a safety net as possible below.

  In the U.S., the government began the Slavery Reparations Program
for descendants of slaves in the name of justice for crimes
perpetrated against their ancestors by the former United States
government and the Native American People's Reparations Program for
crimes perpetrated against their ancestors by the former United
States government.  The movements met with enthusiastic and sweeping
support.  Surprisingly, according to the news reports, the second
program moreso than the first, it empowering the new government to
consolidate lands for Native American tribes.

  The process of repatriating the Native Americans cost the life of
nearly every male Navajo living in New Mexico, Utah, Nevada,
Colorado, and Arizona who was old enough to speak.

  Similar outreach programs were initiated for other marginalized
parts of the American society, each with varying degrees of scope
and intended effectiveness.

  Stories of the great leaps in the progress the brotherhood of man
was making spread across the world and a new relationship was formed
between the media and the establishment.  So too was a new
relationship formed between society and schools, society and
churches, society and business.  And all of those changes naturally
came into the homes and changed the very flow of life for every
human being.  Most weclomed the change, happy for the promises each
new tomorrow held.  With each day, more advances were announced
insuring more safeties and securities and while the costs were
explained in the most generous and complimentary of terms, steps
which would improve the ease and quality of life for every citizen,
the costs were sweeping nonetheless.  With no way to keep certain
aspects of the war secret, and when what our scientists already knew
of the aliens' technology tripled after the war, the changes began
to come in leaps instead of tiny sidesteps culminating with the
Human Defense Initiative.  It was justifed as a set of necessary
measures to prevent the introduction of alien life forms into our
world.  Period.  DNA would be taken at birth and mixed with the
vaccine.  It was then computer-coded and placed in a microchip.  The
identification chips would be placed in the palm of the left hand at
birth and they would be read by radar stations.

  The war had not destroyed the world, but it had.  It had given 
birth to what was, in many ways, a totally new world altogether.  A
new world whose origins were a pantheon of anonymous dead gods 
- the group of men who conspired with the invading aliens in a world 
where aliens were merely fantasy until 1947.  For over fifty years 
these men conspired against their own race, while at the same time 
trying to save it - a contradiction born out in the deaths of these men 
and their familes, when in the end they could not even save 
themselves.

  They did not live to see themselves both defeated and victorious. 
They died, bequeathing their survivors ignorance of the coming
Armageddon and yet humankind survived.  The planet was not
repopulated and victory was exhilarating but it had been exhausting
for Fox Mulder.  He had confirmed, if only for himself, time and
again the existence of the paranormal.  He had found closure to his
search for Samantha.  He stalled an invasion, perhaps twice, and
then when it happened a third time, he had led the charge and then
it was finally over.  The war had been won.  His efforts, his work
on the X-Files had been heroic, they had said.  Thanks to him, and
to the others, they had not only stopped the viral outbreak, but
they had destroyed nearly a thousand of the shapeshifters and had
shot down three of their crafts, while destroying more off the
planet.  If it hadn't been for him, they wouldn't have known what to
expect nor how to fight it and the world owed him a huge "Thank you".

  But, the world could never know how big a hero Fox Mulder really
was, because the world could never know the truth about the threat
they had truly faced.  The world knew, and could be allowed to know,
that they had been threatened with a viral plague spawned by a
biological hazard, an extraterrestrial biological hazard yes, but a
biological hazard nonetheless.  It had been dealt with through bold
and heroic scientific measures, possible only through the mutual
cooperation of the nations of the world, and which resulted in a
lasting federation of all humanity under one government sworn to
protect, defend, serve, uplift and enlighten its people.  They told
him that this was the future they could insure, but it meant that he
had to disappear.  Fox Mulder had to be a part of history in order
for it to happen, in order for the new Powers That Be to be able to
insure a world where everyone would be safe, not only from any
future alien threats but from all threats.  A world so closely
monitored and managed, that everyone could sleep safe and sound 
and not have to worry about their sister disappearing in front of 
their eyes.

  The first round of negotiations had been with the United Nations. 
He had been the only one to resist, and he tried to hold out, but as
the others went and the world continued to move and the negotiations
took on increasingly darker tones it became harder to resist. 

  Yes, after it was said and done, he could play ball.  He could and
he did.

  Mulder closed his eyes and he pictured Scully and tried to 
imagine what she would tell him, what she thought of how things had
worked out.  He saw himself kneeling beside her headstone as
Charles' car pulled away and he heard his words all over again.  He
heard the explanations, the interpretations, the denials, the
apologies.  He heard himself say that it won't have been in vain.  He
heard himself promising her that but the clarity of it all soon
faded and he turned the light off and slowly climbed the stairs.


Washington D.C.

  The night's darkness was rudely and gaudily broken by lights
which glared brightly upward from their places on the ground, and
called the gods' attention to the Washington Monument.  The once
majestic tribute was now a scarecrow sentinel, watching over
abandoned porn shops, diners, newstands and homes left behind when
it was decided D.C. would be torn to the ground and rebuilt.  Those
trespassers here who could still look upon the Monument, or any of
the District's former treasures, and feel to any degree inspired
were few.

  Mostly those who passed through here waited only for its 
inevitable destruction.

  It saddened the man approaching the pay phone.  It saddened him 
to be here, where what had been the cradle of so much that had been
right and just and honorable was a ghost town.

  He came to stand in front of the pay phone on the corner in front 
of the Museum of American history.  Of course, now both it and the
Holocaust Memorial Museum were abandoned buildings and from where 
he stood, all the buildings were dark except for one two blocks away. 
It had lights on inside and out because it was where the government's 
mechanics made repairs to and performed maintenance on military 
vehicles.  They worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  Ants, he thought.  Faceless automatons.

  Puppets. 

  They meant nothing in this thing he was here to do.  He was after
the big guys.  He didn't want the little people.  He wanted the
giants.  It was a ridiculous thing to think, he knew, but it was what 
it was.  He didn't make the rules.  He just played by them and he 
was here to slay some giants and if they were Goliath, then by
God he was David.  He nodded and reached into his pocket for his
stone and loaded his slingshot as he pushed the four quarter pieces
into the pay phone.  He held the receiver in his hand, hearing the
obstinant buzz of the dial tone, and looked again at the Monument.

  If anyone had been on the line, they might have heard the curse 
he whispered through his beard, but he was still alone as he reached
down and rubbed his leg.  He had known the three mile walk would
hurt, but he hadn't been completely prepared for the pain from
limping the distance.

  He breathed out heavily, in a rush, and shook his shoulders.  He
looked again at the building where the mechanics were at work and
then dialed the number, pausing when he came to the last button.  He
checked his watch. 

  10:12 

  10:12 
  
  10:13
  
  The man then pressed the last button and held the phone to his 
ear. After two rings, a female voice answered.  He was very happy 
to find that the rules were being observed even at this late hour.

  "Giants walk the Earth," he said and held the phone toward the 
auto repair shop as it exploded.  Then he let the phone drop and
knelt on the sidewalk.  His hand was steady as he reached into the
pocket of his trenchcoat.  He pulled a can of spray paint from his
pocket and made two light green lines on the sidewalk before walking
away into the night leaving only the letter "X" to mark his passing.



-ad
--

Bootleggers (05/21)

November 14, 2021 
Annapolis, Virginia

  The light of the day had died many hours before, but still 
Mulder could read the inscriptions on Scully's headstone.  From 
his place in the grass beside her grave, the words were, in fact, 
all too clear.

  "Scully, I..."

  He had started the sentence a few times, but there was really
nowhere for it to go after that.  Each time he had tried, it was
because he had wanted to tell her how lost he felt - without her by
his side, without a place in the world, with his guilt.  He wanted to 
speak to her and to feel her beside him.  She would have helped
him made sense of things and he had sent her away.

  He had sent her away to die and he wanted to tell her again he was
sorry for that, but he could never find the words no matter how many
times he tried.  There was so much to apologize for and to start at
any one point, to trivialize the excrutiating tragedy that had been
the life of Dana Scully and to minimize his own responsibility in
that tragedy by even trying to put it all into words was a sin
requiring a degree of skill Mulder didn't possess in his old age.

  He closed his eyes and let his head hang. 

  If he could have found the words, he would have started with 
her sister, Melissa.  The death of Scully's own sister because 
of Mulder's search for his sister.  There were nights when that 
alone would send him into the basement, to the bottles.

  And he was sorry for that son of a bitch, Duane Barry.  
Sometimes he could still feel Barry's throat in his hands and 
if he had squeezed just a little bit harder for just a little bit 
longer...  Even now, he could see Barry's burned face looking 
up at him, wild-eyed, unable to breathe.

  And for Donnie Pfaster.  He hadn't seen what she had.  He had
dismissed her and for that, she had been taken and hurt by 
Pfaster and she had to be the one to put him down.

  And none of that could ever compare to what had been done 
to her during her abduction.

  Tears fell from his eyes as he looked again at her headstone and 
he suffered memories of testimonies and reports from abductees.  
He heard the voices of the regressed, recounting the experiences, 
the tests.  He saw a kaleidoscope of images of things he had 
witnessed, beginning with Samantha and then Max who had been 
taken only feet in front of him and then there were the jagged 
flashes of his own abduction.


  The chair.  He can feel it against his flesh and he see the light,
feel the straps, hear his screams as the hooks begin to pull on 
his cheeks. 

  He can see Scully on a table and they're opening her. They're
stealing her eggs and her memory.

  For years, he tried to imagine her world afterward and the
otherworldly fear she must have felt in Allentown when she met 
the women of the MUFON group and it started coming back to her. 

  It never had for him, but for her it began to come back in huge
pieces in the form of Betsy Hagopian and then later with William. 
For Scully, simple memory became the holy grail, the map which 
would guide her back to the road of a life's natural course.

  Mulder looked up at the moon, and as he cried a soft moan escaped
from his throat.  He wiped his face with the back of his hand and
looked around him at the grass and at the trees.  It was a clear
night and the moonlight hit the trees striking hard lines of darkness 
across the cemetery.  As he scanned the trees, it was easy to 
imagine the smiling Cheshire shadow-face of Krycek looking back
at him.

  It was him.  It was Krycek who had started the war against 
Scully.  Mulder knew he had worked with Cardinal and was responsible
for the hit on Melissa.  She died while Mulder and Scully ran in
circles around a DAT filled with the MJ documents, the Department of
Defense records of the crash at Roswell and everything from then
through the seventies.  And while their search led them to Nazi war
criminals and government files, all their work gave them nothing and
Scully lost her sister.  Melissa died and Scully swore, in the room
her sister had died in, to never stop trying to find the truth.
Later, she had been the one to believe Cassandra Spender.  He could
remember her telling him during his deluded moment of doubt that 
she had followed him on the strength of his belief in his memories 
of Samantha's abduction but she couldn't follow him in his doubt
without her own memories.  It was her search for the truth, not his,
which had served the greater purpose and his...  His was a joke now
and she was the one in the ground and tonight wasn't the first time
he had thought he deserved to be as well.

  He certainly had not deserved her loyalty.  She was too good for 
his bullshit.

  She never wanted it be her life. 

  "I don't believe that you can hear me.  But if you're in a place
close to here and you are listening, I want you to understand that I
never meant for any of this to happen."  The words came and he
didn't stop whatever force was delivering them.  It felt right.  "I
was blind and I was a fool and I took you for granted.  The answers
I wanted may never have been there for me to find, but your answers
were there and I always...  I always imagined there would be time
later."

  He cocked his head and looked again at her headstone. 

  "Is there peace where you are, Scully?  Did you find your ans-"

  A sharp human sound silenced him.  Quick look over his right
shoulder, then over his left shoulder and he saw them. 

  Three of them.  White.  Teenagers.  Two with weapons - axe 
handle and machetti.

  Punks. 

  "No, not here," he whispered.

  He felt the adrenaline dump into his system and the raw energy flow
throughout his body.  It charged his senses and he was electric.  In
his muscles, his bones, his anger sang a song and his soul responded.

  The cemetery whirled as he stood and turned to confront the punks
and reality swirls before him.    

  He hears their demand for his money and is happy when the voice of
the one issuing the demand cracks at the sight of the crazy old
psycho they hadn't bargained for.

  A quick grab with both arms, each toward a weapon-bearer, and he
slams their foreheads together, one falling unconscious immediately,
the other very soon after his partner.  The third one has moved
quickly though.  He has moved nearly behind Mulder.  Mulder ducks,
but knows he was too slow.  It was a knee, not an arm.

 It crashes into his ribs, possibly breaking one and he knows he
deserves it.  He knows anyone could have seen it coming as he
crouches, doubled over and the pain scorches his insides.  His
attacker laughs as he puts his gun to Mulder's head.

  Pussy.  You should die, fuck yes, but not like this. 

  He puts the pain away and tries to remember his training.  There 
are seven working defenses from this position.  He remembers that
three of them disarm your oppponent with minimal contact.  He
remembers that three of them kill.

  The last one, he remembered with a type of joy, hurts and he 
ducked, arcing his left foot into the soft underbelly of the thug's
right side.  The gun fell away, but the boy stayed up.  He coughed
as Mulder got to his feet, then he rushed the old man, slamming his 
own forehead into Mulder's nose.  They both howled from the pain and
Mulder fell back, his head missing Scully's headstone by mere inches.

  C'mon.  You're old and you got lucky those other kids were 
pansies.  This guy's gonna chop you up.  You have to do better than
this.

  He pushed himself up on his hands and rolled over onto his elbows. 
The boy had the machetti and Mulder felt himself reaching down,
pulling his gun from his ankle and pointing it at the boy's head.

  Do it!  Fucking do it!  Make that asshole pay.  Make them all pay!

  His finger wrapped around the trigger and he felt his teeth 
clench in what had to be a smile.  Sweat was running down his
forehead and his heart was beating harder than usual and he 
wanted to pull the trigger to see the look on the boy's face as 
the bullet tore it open.

  "Yeah," he heard himself say and didn't know why he said it, but 
he didn't pull the trigger.  He waited and then the punk was running
away.

  Mulder's trigger finger relaxed and his arm dropped back down on 
the grass beside him.

  The other two were still unconscious so he was left alone again,
staring up at the stars with his gun in his right hand and its
holster strapped around his ankle, wondering when he had gotten 
them out of the safe.


November 15 
Chilmark, Massachusetts

  "...with crime at an all-time low, residents of our continent's
cities feel safer with scheduling nighttime activities in their
communities.  All over the place, like in Montgomery, Alabama,
people like Edwin Hilburne are going to movies in the park,
nighttime carnivals, and in this case, a production of Shakespeare's
Hamlet at, or rather, in the local community pool," the voice behind
him on the television droned as Mulder pressed the barbell into the
air over his chest again and that voice began to speak again.

  Scully would have hated this.  She would tell me I'm a fool for
being out of bed, let alone trying to lift weights.  She would tell
me things about damage to internal organs and the body's ability to
restore itself having limits and she would tell me I'm not a young
man any more.

  She would be right. 
  
  I add twenty more pounds to the bar.

   "...re-enrichment efforts in third world countries.  Well," the 
talking head laughed, "lets ask Edwin Hiburne."  Hilburne was there
again, in the ragged lawn chair he had watched the play from.

  "I never figured, you know, before," he nodded at the camera, 
"stuff like feeding the hungry and stuff would get so dang much
popularity.  I think it's that crap what brung us to a place where 
we can sit out like this at night and all and watch us some art."

  The newscaster's voice returned as Mulder leaned back on the 
bench and started pressing the barbell.  

  "Despite reports of more terrorist attacks, such as the one two
nights ago in Washington D.C. which took the lives of fifteen
employees of an auto repair shop, Americans all over have truly got
it good.  And now for your local weather..."

  She would tell me to stop, but I wouldn't because despite my
injuries, I'm in the best shape of my life and because this is what
I have to do.  It's what's kept me from going nuts.

  "When we come back from commercial break, David Ellers has the 
story of how four fugitives were captured in an outlaw encampment
outside of San Diego..."

  He set the barbell back on the stand and sat up, his ribs 
screaming in agony.  It did no good to grab at his side, so he
resisted, but it was hard.  Instead, he stretched, making it worse
for a moment, and then he stood up.  The pain died some and he
turned off the television.  For what must have been the ten
millionth time, he reminded himself that the basement would look
much better with a bed or a mattress or something and slowly climbed
the stairs.  At the top, he looked once more into the basement, able
to see just a corner of his trophy case.

  "I thought we had an understanding."  Mulder recognized the voice
behind him long before he turned and saw the face of Alex Krycek.


Washington D.C.

  In a dark subterranean hallway, the routine silence of the night 
was broken by the hard and insistent echo of boots on stairs as
three men marched toward a long abandoned basement.  Their uniforms
bore the insignia of the new government's military, the stripes of
two men signifying their subordinate positions to the third man, who
signalled them to stand guard while he went alone into the first
room on the right at the bottom of the stairs.  The third man, the
leader, moved his flashlight in front of him, the beam of light
making momentary celebrities of stacks of cardboard boxes and filing
cabinets.  Not immediately having seen what he was hunting for, he
began a more hands-on search.  He investigated the drawers of every
filing cabinet, tore open and emptied boxes, ran his hands along
every shelf in every cabinet and then did it again before giving up.
He picked up his flashlight and was leaving when he saw it behind
the door.

  He breathed a quick and amused sigh of relief.  It was a 
cardboard tube with a white plastic cap stuck in one end.

  Both ends, he saw when he picked it up.  He set the flashlight on 
its end on the floor so that the light pointed toward the ceiling
and then pulled a thin roll of paper out of the tube.  It was small
and light.  He unrolled it, his eyes wandering slowly down it until
he came to the bottom, where it read in large white letters, I WANT
TO BELIEVE.

  One of the other soldiers leaned into the room and told the man 
that Evac wanted to know how much longer.

  "Tell them we're on the way," the man said, rolling the poster 
back up and sticking it back in the tube as he left the room and
closed the door behind him, momentarily pondering the irony of this
old habit not wanting to die.

  "Now exiting.  Notify demolitions unit," the second soldier said
into his radio as he and the third started up the stairs.  He
stopped at the landing and looked back down at their leader, who
seemed to be staring at the door of the room he had just exited.

  "General Doggett, is everything ok, sir?" he asked.

  "Fine.  Let's go," General Doggett answered, and began to climb 
the stairs.

  The three men came out on the roof of the building where a
helicopter was waiting.  The two subordinates ran to either side of
the helicopter's passenger door and stood at attention.  General
Doggett walked to the front of the building and looked over the edge.

  "Captain," he called toward the helicopter and one of the two
subordinates ran to him.  "Tell the pilot to wait.  The trucks
haven't left yet."

  "But sir, Evac-" 

  "We will wait because I said we will wait.  I want visual
confirmation of the departure of those trucks.  That is all,
Captain."

  "Yes sir!"  The Captain saluted and ran back to the helicopter.

  Doggett turned back toward the edge of the building and pulled 
his binoculars from his belt.  He looked over the trucks below him,
scanning the length of each one and then scanning the surroundings.
When his attention came back to the trucks themselves, he saw his
soldiers loading the backs of the trucks with boxes of files and
documents.  They stood in a fireman's water line, passing their load
from one to the next until each truck was full.  Doggett watched
until both trucks drove away and then he went to the helicopter.

  When he climbed into the passenger's seat, the pilot saluted 
him. Doggett nodded silently and the pilot started the helicopter.
He waited until the last soldier was belted in and gave the thumbs
up before he lifted them into the air.  The helicopter rose slowly
and then the tail whirled around to the right until they faced East.
It missed the nearest of the roof's radar stations by less than a
foot.

  "Must protect the Aerial Defense Network," Doggett whispered,
thinking again of the irony of these old habits which die hard.

  Two minutes later, on a laptop computer, General John Doggett
watched the J. Edgar Hoover Building explode, his hands clutched
tightly around the cardboard tube.


  Fifteen miles east of Washington D.C., the two trucks were stopped
by two blackclad figures who emerged from a prewar van parked on 
the side of the road just past a sharp turn.  The two pointed M-16s 
at the drivers of the two trucks and fired, shattering both windshields.  
In under a minute, they had disarmed the soldiers and had them out of 
the trucks and in a line facedown on the ground.  One of the gunmen 
collected the soldiers' rifles and loaded them into the van.  Then he 
went to the first truck and began moving boxes to the van while the 
other stood watch over the soldiers on the ground.  When he was 
finished, the mover reached into the front seat of the van, retrieved a 
can of spray paint and on the sides of the trucks, he painted a light 
green "X".

  "Have a nice night," he said and the two thieves moved quickly 
back to their van.  They got in, closed their doors and as they
started to back away, the one on the passenger side fired his M-16
into the dirt beside the road.

 Once their victims were out of sight, the passenger flipped the
laptop computer open and typed in a password.  He looked at the
driver and then quickly back at the monitor.  "Time, 45 seconds till
evasive disengage.  Home base, connect."  He hit the CONNECT button
and a man's face instantly appeared in a window on the screen.

  "Give me a report, agents," the bearded man with the eyepatch said.

  "Yes sir," the agent answered and begin his summary.  "There were 
no casualties, friend or foe.  As we expected, the building was
destroyed.  Your source was right, sir."

  "That's sad news.  Go on."
  
  "We bagged a shitload of arms.  We retrieved a cache of boxes.  
No idea of the value of their contents.  There were no wounded and
no casualties to report.  Mission accomplished, sir."

  "Very good. That's all," the man said with an air of expectant
finality. 

  "The eagle is on the way home and we're out."  He closed the 
window and turned the computer off.  He and the driver exchanged
high-fives and the van disappeared into the night. 




-ad
--

Bootleggers (06/21)

Chilmark

  Alex Krycek sat across from Fox Mulder and stared out the window
into the night sky.  The way he sat, the way he held his head, it
felt to Mulder as though he belonged there and all was right with
the world.  He had stayed in good shape from the looks of it and the
grey in his hair lent him a dignity Mulder knew he didn't deserve.
He hadn't worn his prosthetic arm and Mulder guessed he probably
hadn't worn it in years.

  After locking the basement door, he had told Krycek he didn't know
what he was talking about and had come into the kitchen, staring at
his visitor while he walked, and got two glasses from a cabinet.

  "I keep the good stuff down stairs.  I break it out when my 
friends come over," he said, holding up the cheap whiskey before
pouring the two drinks.  He handed Krycek his and sat down across
from him while Krycek cooly stared at him.

  "What do you do with your time these days?" he asked Mulder before
taking a drink.  "You have any hobbies?"

  Before Mulder could answer, Krycek looked back out the window,
probably staring at the same star as before.

  "Oh, you know.  Same old shit.  Saturday night I was downtown,"
Mulder said flatly looking into his drink.  "Working for the F.B.I."

  Krycek continued to stare out the window. 

  "You should get yourself a woman, Mulder.  Maybe that would help 
you work off some of that excess energy you seem to be filled with
as of late.  You had a run-in with some punks last month at Skyland
Mountain.  Word gets around.  Is that your idea of keeping a low
profile?" he asked without turning his head.

  "That could have been anyone," Mulder whispered.  "And I think 
whores are more your speed."

  "Sure it could have," Krycek said, now turning to look Mulder in 
the eyes.  "But it wasn't just anyone who got identified and then
did it again in Annapolis.

  "When did you start carrying a gun again?" 

  "Must have been around the same time it became fashionable to 
break into my goddam house again.  How do you know about that stuff?"

  "Like I said, word gets around." 

  Mulder slapped the table.  "You sent spies after me?  You sent 
them to follow me to Scully's grave?  You piece of shit.  Get your
sorry ass out of here!"  He stood up too quickly, accidentally
knocking his chair over behind him, and pointed to the front of the
house.

  "After what we've all been through, we have no choice about these
matters.  We have to keep an eye out, to protect our investments." 
Krycek laughed and pointed at Mulder's chair.  "Sit back down. 
Listen, the people up top wanted a more permenant solution.  It's
like they think it's all as fragile as an egg.  I don't know.  Maybe
they're right.  Maybe things call for that type of action.  I talked
them into waiting.

  "But can you imagine what it's like to be called in only to find 
out it's about you?"  Krycek laughed again.  "Imagine the irony."

  "Oh fuck you, Krycek-"

  "No, fuck you, Mulder," Krycek lashed back.  "Fuck you because we
won, Mulder.  You and I, we beat them.  Together we beat those
bastards and now you just want to piss it all away."

  "How is that?  Not that it's any of your business, but in both of
those instances I was attacked by those thugs.  I was keeping to
myself and I was keeping a low profile.  What do you expect? 
There's never a cop when you need one."  Mulder sat back down in his
now upright chair.

  "It was a cop who identified you.  And if he can, anyone can.  
If people know you're alive, they'll put together the rest.  This
ridiculous witness protection program was a stupid idea anyway.

  "I'm here to tell you, Mulder, that we're closing shop on this 
shit.  What happened to you does happen in sanctioned areas, but 
that stuff's mostly outside the city.  That's where they all are - 
the criminals, the anarchists, the drug addicts, whatever.  We're
reigning them in, but it takes time.  Until then, it doesn't much
matter what happens out there."  He pointed out the window.  "Not to
you.  It can't."

  Krycek stood up. 

  "Next time you get the urge to go out," he said, winking, "stay 
at home."

  After Krycek was gone, Mulder unlocked the basement door and 
went back downstairs for a cigarette.  He found his pack beside the
computer and lit one, breathing the smoke in deeply.

  While he smoked the rest of the cigarette, he idly logged onto 
the internet.  He checked his e-mail, not expecting anything 
because, as Krycek had so bluntly reminded him, he was dead, 
but there was one message.

  Still shaken from his earlier surprise, he opened the e-mail.

  "If this message has reached the former F.B.I. Agent Fox Mulder,
after you read this erase it immediately.  I have not shared your
secret.  I have something for you and I have to give it to you. 
Cross the waters, tell no one, and by the former wife we'll meet. 
There will be two ams."

  He deleted the e-mail, turned the computer off, checked his watch
and ran upstairs.


  The drive to the mainland only took a few minutes.  Finding the
"former wife" took a little longer, but with five minutes to spare,
Mulder found it and pulled into the parking lot of the grocery
store.  He parked the car next to building, beneath the large black
X he suspected hadn't been there this afternoon.

  The earlier events of the evening were still bouncing across the
basketball court in his head, but he couldn't see the nets anywhere.
 He rolled his window down and let the night air fill his lungs and
his car and tried to put all that away for now.

  He tried to imagine what shape his new informant would take.  
Would he be an old man?  A younger woman?  Would he be white, black,
oriental?  Would he be a high-ranking government official and if so
what dark secrets would he bring?  What adventure would he offer?

  Or would he be one of Krycek's people, sent to tempt Mulder into
getting back out in the open as part of some twisted game ending in
his death?

  Or would he be just another jerkoff, the latest in a long line of
jerkoffs, getting his kicks simply by fucking with Mulder?

  That last thought made him reach for the radio, scanning until 
he found a blues station, and then he lit a cigarette.  He took one
drag and hung his arm out the window, watching the smoke rise from
between his fingers.

  There being only so much profundity that can be inspired from
watching smoke, especially sitting a car, alone, at - he looked at
his watch - 2:10 in the morning, Mulder thumped the half-burnt
cigarette into the parking lot and rolled the window up.  He
stretched in his seat, trying to twist just enough to get the
perfect squeeze on his lower back, when he saw through the
passenger's side window a girl step forward from the shadows of 
the small businesses across the street.  She walked to the sidewalk 
and motioned for him to come to her.

  A rush went through him.  His heart started beating faster and as 
he pulled his keys out of the ignition, he saw his hand was shaking.
He took one final look in the rearview mirror and both side mirrors
and got out of the car.  The girl had moved back into the shadows 
and Mulder followed her lead, moving quickly across the street and 
into the darkness.  She watched him approach with wide eyes, 
striking several sympathetic chords in him.  She was someone's 
daughter, maybe someone's sister, and here she was in the dead 
of night initiating clandestine meetings with dead men.  She should 
be home in bed, he thought.  Not here.  Not with me.

  He knew she would have come from either a broken home or no home 
at all.  He could see that she was comfortable in her ragged clothes
and that she was very much afraid.  Whatever had brought her here
had to be connected to her fear

  -he walks out of the shadows, his flat blond hair hanging over his
eyes, and he looks over his shoulder as he explains he was trailed
by assassins and hands Mulder a digital audio tape-

  but was that because she was being chased or because she was being
watched?

  The thought hit him hard and even though she was someone's 
daughter and even though she seemed as legit as she could be, he had
to ask.

  "Who sent you?" 

  He watched her eyes and her face, searching for a reaction he could
use to...

  To what?  We gonna rough her up too? 

  The girl crossed her eyebrows and tilted her head up at Mulder.  
She looked like he had slapped her and in that act not only hurt her
but betrayed her.

  "I'm sorry," he said quickly.  "It's just... This is a pretty 
big risk we're both taking.  How do I know I can trust you?"

  Her shoulders slumped and she started talking.   "My name is Amy
Fitzgerald and they killed my friends, Phil and Buck.  They killed
them for what I want to give you.  It's-"

  "Whoa, whoa.  Who killed Phil and Buck?" Mulder interrupted.

  "I don't know who they were.  They were military.  All I know's 
they were soldiers.  They had uniforms with that fucking one world
symbol on them.  Buck found a site on the web, old site, full of
government shit.  Phil knew a guy.  We were going to see a guy in
Austin.  Figure he thinks we scratched him."  She shrugged and 
Mulder could see she wasn't jerking him off.  Or, if she was lying, 
he didn't think she knew it.  "Figure they got us when we aged a 
blurb past ripe."

  "Just so I'm clear, you're saying that since you hacked into a
prewar site full of records you don't even know are legitimate, the
government sent the military to kill you and that they tracked you
down through your stolen internet accounts?"

  "Yes!  That's what I'm saying!  And the military is the government! 
The goddam government and they won't stop there.  Killing them 
was nothing.  It's what they did it for.  It's what they're trying to
hide.  Total control over everything.  Figure that makes what we
snagged legit.  They want to erase the past and they want total
access to every second of every day of your life so they can weed
you out if you don't buy their lies.  They won't stop until every
road is covered in radar stations and every house is wired and
there's a camera in every corner and everyone's on their knees
sucking dick."  She began to walk back and forth, pacing in front of
Mulder as she spoke.  "You know how everyone knows about the 
cameras on the rooftops of every building?  They say it's part of 
the 'Aerial Defense Network'.  Yeah, that sounds like a crimefighting
name.  So they tell us it's to help fight crime, but it's for riot
control.  I read about this while I was downloading stuff.  It's to
monitor sniper fire when the cities are cleansed.  This isn't
science fiction, Agent Mulder.  This isn't some maniac's dream of
the future I'm fighting here.  They're already doing it.  It's part
of the anti-crime defense or whatever label they're giving it today.
 It's aerial surveillance.  You can shut down a city and watch the
rats run with cameras in the sky."

  Mulder shook his head.  "We already know about the cameras.  
They're not really a secret.  I hope you've got more than that." 

  "How do you think I found you?  It's not like I can just ride 
around and hope to find a big 'X' on your house or something.  I
read enough about you to track you, man.  Here."  She held up the
bag. "It's all in on these cds."

  Mulder took the bag.  "What about you?  Where will you go?"

  She smiled.  "You're kind of sexy for an old man," she said lightly
and then she ran.


  He was getting excited again.  He sat in his basement, back home 
on the Vineyard, amazed at his pitched breathing and his thumping
pulse and the flush of his face.  He knew this was a sure sign that
he was officially crazy and he laughed at the thought as he stuck
one of the compact discs into the disc drive of his computer.  The
icon, a folder, appeared on his desktop and he opened the folder. 
His screen went black and then white and rows of small paper icons
appeared.  There were probably a thousand documents, he guessed as
he scrolled down, making mental notes of the names of random ones
and then he stopped scrolling.

  "Stark raving mad," he whispered and opened a filed labelled
"Skinner, W.S.".

  It was an electronic copy of an original which had been scanned.

  Skinner, Walter Sergei 
  DOB: 06/03/52
  EDUCATION: BA, University of Texas
  MILITARY: United States Marine Corps (Vietnam, 1970-71) 
  Subject is currently employed as an Assistant Director with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, supervising over 80% of the
Bureau's agents, including the Violent Crimes Unit.  As of 04/30/94,
Assistant Director Skinner will be assigned the division investigating 
cases known as X-Files.  These fall outside the widely accepted 
scope of the Bureau and currently the division consists solely of 
Agent Fox Mulder.  After he is installed, all agents involved with 
this division will report directly to Walter Skinner.

  At the bottom of the brief document, there were signatures.
According to this file, Skinner's appointment to supervise the
X-Files had been approved by C.G.B. Spender and Section Chief Scott
Blevins, and had been planned prior to Scully being assigned.

  Mulder closed it, unaware that he was nodding.  Then he started
reading the names of all the other files in the directory.  One by
one they went by until he found another one he could decipher.

  DKS111013-NRMTPB

  He lit a cigarette and stared at the screen, at the letters "DKS",
and the idea that maybe it was her final report floated in the back
of his mind. 

  She had worked apart from him, spending her days in laboratories 
and her nights on cots where instead of sleeping she read medical
journals and test results while Mulder and Krycek worked their end
of things.  Once during that time, Mulder found her asleep in the
office at the Hoover Building with the report Krycek had filed on
Duane Barry in her hand.

  During one of their last arguments, she told him that she wasn't 
his "little sidekick anymore" and that there were people in the
Bureau who would listen to her now.  She had told Mulder that he had
become someone she didn't know anymore.  He had become someone 
she was scared of and she blamed Krycek.  She said that it was insane
for Krycek to be the savior of the world and that if Mulder clung to
his loyalty to his former enemy, she would have nothing else to say
to him.

  When she left, he hadn't tried to dissuade her.  Instead, he 
started poking around and what he discovered didn't surprise him. 
Shortly after Krycek reappeared, Scully had filed a request for the
Bureau to re-examine several cases, all of which Krycek had been a
part of.  She wanted him behind bars and had found an audience 
fairly high up the chain of command.  Resources had, in fact, been 
allocated to monitor Krycek, but from what he had been able to 
learn, she was actually getting nowhere with her efforts.  It was not 
surprising to Mulder, all things considered.  What was surprising, at 
least somewhat, was that Krycek's protection came in the form of 
orders from the United Nations, specifically from a memo from the 
Russian delegation.

  Mulder arranged a secret meeting with Scully and as they stood 
under the stars by the Vietnam War Memorial, he told her what he had
found out.  Impotently, he watched her invaded by first anger and
then acceptance.

  The next day, Scully told Skinner she would be working from home. 
She then accessed the Bureau's C.I./X-F database and signed for a
memoranda number.  Her request was immediately approved.  She 
opened a file template and began to type what she intended to be her 
final report before she quit the Bureau.  She turned it and her notice 
in the following afternoon.  The last time Mulder had spoken with her,
she told him she was going home to take a shower and then she had
some errands to run.  As she was hanging up, the line clicked twice.

  He had found her in her doorway missing the back of her head.

  He took a long slow drag on his cigarette, double-clicked the icon
and opened the document.  It was dated January 5, 2012.




-ad
--

Bootleggers (07/21)

To: Deputy Director Kersh
Federal Bureau of Investigation

Re: XF-AK111013DKS

  Pursuant to my request for the Bureau to re-examine the 
apparent good standing of former agent Alex Krycek, and in
conjuction with the previous reports I have filed in this matter, I
offer the following addendum.

  Assistant Director Walter Skinner became my supervisor near the 
end of the first year of my assignment to the X-Files.  I had been
directed to file my initial reports with the office of Section Chief
Blevins but in May of 1994, I was directed to file those reports to
the office of Assistant Director Skinner.  These reports were
scientific analyses of our work on the X-Files, intended to help
debunk the work itself, with the ultimate goal of closing the
division.  It is a matter of record that Special Agent Fox Mulder's
dedication to the X-Files led to the discovery of the
extraterrestrial plan to invade Earth and to the discovery of the
men who secretly aided the engineers of the invasion.

  It is also a matter of record that Alex Krycek was one of those 
men. 

  In the sixth year of my assignment, Agent Mulder and I were
reassigned and were placed under the supervision of Deputy Director
Kersh, who was unknowingly being used by the conspirators to stop
Agent Mulder's efforts to expose them.

  In January of the following year, 1999, A.D. Skinner received an
injury to his ribs, while boxing in a local gym.  He was admitted to
Saint Katherine's Hospital, examined and released, but hours later
the bruise had deepened and appeared to have spread.  Agent Mulder
was of the opinion that there was a connection between A.D.
Skinner's injury, a phone call A.D. Skinner had received which
warned the Assistant Director he only had twenty-four hours to live,
and the X-Files.  I shared the Assistant Director's opinion that the
two were seemingly unrelated.  The connection, however, was made. 
That connection began to become clear when Agent Mulder confirmed 
my discovery of what he called "nanobots".  A.D. Skinner had become 
a host to these nanobots, thousands (perhaps millions) of them
residing in his blood as a result of the boxing injury (his opponent's 
glove being tainted with the transmitting substance or solution).  
These nanobots are microtechnology, designed in part by physicist 
Kenneth Orgel and were part of a planned exporting of medical 
supplies to third world countries.  This was to take place with the 
passage of Senate Resolution 819, sponsored by Senator Richard 
Matheson.  Officially, it would license the World Health Organization 
to distribute advanced medical technology to third world countries, 
primarily the nation of Tunisia.  The U.S. Senate Subcommitte on 
Ethics and New Technology was prepared to release the bill for a vote, 
but they were waiting for it to pass a security clearance check from 
A.D. Skinner.  This technology, widely considered to be theoretical 
technology, microtechnology, was used on Assistant Director Walter 
Skinner, compromising him, rendering him vulnerable to and exploited 
by Alex Krycek.

  Mulder's initial suspicion that the infection of A.D. Skinner 
was because of his association with the X-Files and with Agent
Mulder and myself, proved to be correct when Alex Krycek began to
employ the microtechnology in 2000 and 2001.

  In closing, I will also remind the Bureau that Alex Krycek is 
still a suspect and is officially considered "AT LARGE" in the cases
of several deaths, including a tram operator in Virginia and William
Mulder (Agent Fox Mulder's father).  These cases have been
represented to the Bureau by this agent in my previous reports of
the last four months.

  In filing these reports, I realize the likelihood they will be 
met with a degree of skepticism in that I am familiar with these
events I cite in accusation of Alex Krycek, and in that I am a
personal witness to some of these events and bear either a personal
relationship to the case or was of such a state of mind at the time
so as to render my judgement questionable.  Despite the role Alex
Krycek has played in the defensive actions taken during the viral
outbreak, as a law enforcement agent, I can only conclude and advise
that this man should be considered a criminal by the government of
this nation, in whatever form that government may take.  I can only
reiterate my professional opinion that Alex Krycek should be
apprehended and made to pay for his crimes, and until this occurs,
justice will not have been served and those seeking it will be
denied the resolution of matters it is our sacred duty to provide.


  It was signed, "Dana Katherine Scully".  Mulder closed the file 
and rubbed his reddening eyes.  It had been a damn long day, the
longest one he had seen in quite some time, and it didn't seem to
want to end.  His bones complained when he stood up to get another
drink.  His hand wasn't particularly steady as he poured the scotch,
his knuckles singing brief but bright arias of pain.  He didn't try
to put the cap back on the bottle and, from his side of the upturned
tumbler at his lips, his basement was slightly out of focus.

  Calling himself an "old man" and chuckling, he wiped his mouth 
with the back of his hand and walked across his work area to one of
the filing cabinets.  He kept them locked, but he also left the key
to each one in the lock.  In the bottom drawer of the second cabinet
from the corner, he found the leather case he knew would be there.
He pulled it out, unzipped it, and withdrew the eyeglasses it had
held for ten years or more.

  Mulder stood up, blinked his eyes a couple of times, and put his
glasses on.  The prescription was obviously way out of date and the
basement was a warped, dizzying experience.  With a momentary
sadness, he put the glasses back in their case, zipped the case
closed and put it back in its home in the bottom drawer of the
filing cabinet.

  Another tumblerful of scotch in hand, he rebooted the computer 
and hopped online.  The next hour was spent scanning the officially
sanctioned news sites and internet search engines, reading one
meaningless story after another until, close to giving up and burned
out on the taste of the scotch and the cigarettes, he found
something.  It was on a temporary site, a story about the coming
demolition of the Vietnam War Memorial with a sidebar about
terrororists from the D.C. underground.  There was a chart of thefts
of government property, armed robberies of military vehicles, and
the deaths of an increasing number of soldiers and military
employees all attributed to a secret organized rebellion.  The main
story linked the destruction of places like the War Memorial to the
rise in anti-government acts, and of course showed a bias favoring
these rebels.

  Mulder read through the story and the sidebar a couple of times, 
his eyes wandering from the text to the accompanying photograph of a
government building recently destroyed by a bomb.  Beneath the photo
was the caption: TOO BAD WE DIDN'T HAVE A VIDEO FEED!!

  The shot of the destruction had been taken from several blocks 
away, a familiar point of view for Mulder.

  He read the main story one more time and then gave in to his urge 
to simply stare at the photograph.  He gazed at the rubble of the
destroyed building, the way the sun fell making the time of day
around 3:00 p.m., the trees lining the sidewalk on the opposite side
of the street, the payphone near the photographer.  There was
something about the scene, something calling to him.

  It wasn't...

  He couldn't...

  There was something...

  He zoomed in and panned until he was able to make it out clearly 
on the sidewalk in front of the pay phone.

  Mulder turned the computer off and went upstairs to sleep for a
couple of hours.


November 16

  The next morning at sunrise, Mulder's plane arrived at Dulles
International Airport.  Despite the inevitable unsolicited slew of
assurances and promises of efficiency (which, to be fair, were
honored most of the time), his arrival was over an hour later than
scheduled and he was moderately pissed off about it.  Or, he would
have been, he reconsidered as he stood at the carousel, waiting for
his luggage to drop, if not for the extra winks the delay had
afforded him.

  Dulles was busy this morning, the sounds of maybe hundreds of 
other people filling the inside of the airport and Mulder's ears
with a relentless undeniable enthusiasm.  Even here, while he
waited, losing his faith that his stuff would ever show up, they
were all around him.  They too were waiting too long for luggage
they needed.  They stared, alternating between near lifeless and 
near ecstatic states each time a bag would fall from the chute, 
making one of them a big winner and the rest repeat losers.  They 
were reading paperbacks and newspapers and magazines while 
standing against walls or sitting in the few chairs the airport 
generously called a "lobby", or surfing the net at commercial web 
stations, or gathered in clusters by water fountains and outside the 
gift shops' entrances.  Some were bored or at worst slightly 
frustated, but most were happy.  As Mulder turned his head to his 
right, taking in the last of the panorama, he thought he might even 
use the word "carefree".

  It was as though, for these people, life could not be better.  
They were on their way somewhere where they would be reunited with 
a loved one or taking a break to get away from it all or attending a
meeting where they hoped to seal a big deal or going off to college
or they were waiting for a loved one or a friend or someone
otherwise a part of their life who had been away but was now coming
home.

  Tension began to creep across Mulder's shoulders.  He felt his 
upper lip tightening and his eyes growing narrow.  A part of him
wanted to take his gun out and shoot blindly and wake them up, make
these braindead jerkoffs understand what had happened, what he had
saved them from, how close they had come to losing it all, to losing
fucking everything.

  His breath had begun to come in hard blasts and as the sight of 
his suitcases brought him out of his bitter reverie, he noticed that
the people around him had moved a few steps further away than they
had been five minutes before.

  Suitcases in hand, Mulder walked through the airport toward the
exits.  Every twenty feet, he would pass beneath one of the many
signs hanging from the ceiling, signs with messages like, "A BETTER
TOMORROW BEGINS WITH YOU" and "KEEP OUR CITIES CLEAN" and "YOU 
ARE HERE WITH FRIENDS".  He slowed down as he passed a gift shop 
and decided to take care of his shopping before he did any business.  
He needed one item from a tiny section in the back corner.  At the
register, he charged it to his UAC (Universal Access Card) and eased
into what was now a throng of people between him and the outside
world. 

  Five minutes later, he lit a cigarette and stepped into the
revolving door.

  Outside, the cold air felt good on his face and hands.  He flexed
his elbows a bit, enjoying the empty space around him.  The sun had
shown brightly through the windows of the plane on the flight here
but the formerly omnipresent orb was hiding now, cowed by clouds
riding in from the west and, from their looks, promising rain.

  Something inside him relaxed.

  After three unsuccessful efforts to hail a cab, he left the 
sidewalk and darted into the street, dodging cars in two lanes until
he was able to jump in front of an approaching cab which, much to
his relief and joy, stopped for him.

  He hefted his suitcases up, ignoring the beginning of a cramp in
either arm, and walked around the car.  It was obviously postwar and
was definitely sporting the standard-issue satellite guidance
systems.  He opened the rear passenger's door, remembering bits of
the story he had read the night before, the story which had brought
him here.

  ...last few months...

  ...rise in terrorism...

  ...deaths of soldiers...

  ...government assurances...

  He could almost hear Amy Fitzgerald's voice as he looked first 
at the driver and then at the dashboard, taking a brief inventory of
the computerized devices he didn't understand.

  "Where to, sir?" the driver asked.

  "D.C.," Mulder answered as he closed the door.

  "Yessir.  Where in D.C.?"

  "Just uh," he wavered, his faith that the appropriately snide and
amibiguous response would come to him shattered.  "I'll let you know
when we get there."

  "Yessir." 

  They pulled away from the airport and the rain came.  It beat 
softly against the roof of the cab, offering a subtle but insistent
score to this leg of Mulder's journey.  He wanted to lean back
against his seat, to let his neck relax and to let his head tilt
back just a little bit and to close his eyes if only for just a
moment...

  He snapped his head back up and straightened his back.  He 
couldn't start down that road.  Instead, he rubbed his eyes and
fixed them on the world in motion outside his window.  He watched
that world pass him by and he tried to disappear into the comfort of
casual and harmless memories of his destination until once again he
rode the familiar streets of Washington D.C. and would have to
emerge guarded and charged.

  The time passed that way until he was brought back to reality 
by the cab driver's sudden cursing fit.  Ahead of them, he saw the
rapidly approaching traffic light go to red and he felt the cab come
to a very quick stop.

  As he looked again through the window at a vacant lot where he 
had expected to see the first of many missing landmarks of
yesteryear, he began to understand that his trusted familiarity was
now, in fact, limited.

  "...sir?"  The cabbie had asked Mulder something, but it hadn't 
all come through.

  "What's that?" 

  The cabbie cleared his throat and repeated loudly, his voice 
booming through the holes in the plastic window separating them,
"I asked if you was here on business or pleasure?"

  Business.

  "Pleasure," Mulder answered and met his gaze in the mirror.
"You don't know who I am, do you?"

  The light turned green and the traffic began to move.  He watched
the cabbie's reflection in the rearview, the man's eyes now watching
the cars and the road.

  "No, should I?"

  Mulder leaned forward and tried to sound ominous.  "My name is
General John Doggett.  You'd do well to remember that name,
citizen."

  "Hey, now!"  The driver jerked the steering wheel, cutting into 
the next lane to make room for the car cutting over on him and
barely missing the front bumper of the previous inhabitants of the
space he now occupied, then issuing a declaration of ownership to
the previous inhabitants via the middle finger of his left hand. 
"This lucky cabbie can call an end to his cursed run o' luck because
I got a friggin' celebrity to slob around today."

  He looked over his shoulder, smirking. 

  "Yeah, whatever," he said and shrugged before turning his 
attention back to the task of driving his cab.

  Mulder leaned back against his seat, mildly satisfied, and watched
the rain fall outside the car.  Large heavy drops clung to his
window and beyond them he watched the landscape transform and 
become populated by some of the residents of his memories.  They 
were there now, these buildings he found an unanticipated reassurance 
in seeing, but where others had once stood (and should still stand, his
instinctive memories screamed) there now stood only the former
buildings' bones surrounded by piles of ash and crap.  When he saw
the vacant lot where Craddock Marine Bank had stood, he turned away,
shaking his head.  This weakness was indulged only for a second or
two though.  Again, through the window.  It didn't surprise him to
see that he hadn't noticed that the rain had died away.  Pennsylvania 
Avenue was only a partial road, the fact of which manifesting itself 
in the detour they were forced to take, a detour leading down roads 
once jammed with cars, the sidewalks awash in busy people having 
busy days and now the only human traffic the sidewalks were seeing 
were overly sentimental tourists and vagabonds.

  The cab turned back onto Pennsylvania Avenue, this section a
two-lane with the other lanes blocked off by yellow tape apparently
to prevent drivers from thinking they could maybe drive through the
piles of rubble which had spilled out onto the street.  Through the
front window moreso than the one beside him, Mulder saw the remains
of the J. Edgar Hoover Building and, almost comically, his jaw
dropped.

  Without being told, the driver stopped the cab.  Mulder looked at
him in the rearview mirror, nodding his thanks, and turned to the
wreckage again, this time looking over what was still standing
instead of what wasn't.  On this side, there were whole offices near
the corner which appeared wholly intact.  Overall, there were places
were the explosives apparently did no damage and he thought he 
could almost make himself believe it could... it was going to be
reconstructed.  A slight shift in the angle of his gaze and the
reality was all too clear again.  In some of the emptiness, the
exposed foundation was cracked and sections of it jutted upward 
like craggy cliffs.  There were monstrously huge piles of rubble 
and debris and he followed it again into the street, staring vacantly
before looking back at offices half exposed, and one place where 
the huge columns had been destroyed and a section of the floors it
supported had simply dropped to the ground.  There was a large
meeting room with three walls standing proudly and a large dividing
wall of decorative glass, only a portion of which had been broken
off in the fall.  Mulder thought that if the sun had been shining,
the glare from the razor sharp edge of the glass would be blinding
even at his distance.  Minutes passed while he sat and quietly took
it all in.

  "Ok," he finally called to the driver when it had been enough.  "I
know where I want to go." 



-ad
--

Pt. 08/21



  Afternoon in Washington D.C. was a quiet and empty time, and no
place moreso than at the Vietnam War Memorial where the random 
few (who were either haunted or swept up in historic novelty) walked
slowly past the mute reminder of lessons long since deemed
irrelevant and dismissed by a world at peace.  This was the scene
any normal day and today was nothing if not normal, from the mostly
empty streets to the sounds of heavy machinery clearing property to
the trademarked sad expressions on the faces of the people shuffling
through their lives down to the man setting his suitcases on the
sidewalk beside the cab which had brought him here.  Although the
rain had stopped, the dark grey clouds still hung heavy and
threatening in the sky overhead and the man knew it was only a
matter of time, it was an academic ticking off of the seconds, until
he would be soaking wet.  He pulled the money for his fare out of
his wallet and handed it to the driver.

  "No way, pal.  Nothing prewar," the man barked, shoving the green
bills back at Mulder.

  "Yeah," he said, staring distantly at the paper in his hand before 
pulling his wallet back out and handing the cabbie his UAC.  After 
signing for the minimum tip and checking the sky once more, he
put the card back in his wallet and hopped not quite quickly enough
away from the tires of the cab splashing water onto the sidewalk 
and his pants and shoes as it drove away.

  Suitcases in hand, he moved slowly but purposefully past empty 
park benches and unused trash cans and scrawny trees, their limbs
naked and brittle.  No children ignored the signs warning against
walking on the grass and as he turned a corner, it took a long
disappointing moment for him to realize that what was missing was
the sight of the three soldiers looking into the distance.  He soon
realized he was equally unprepared for discovering that where the
American flag had flown above the Wall, now the flag of the new
world hung limply against the grey sky.

  Taking a deep breath, he set about his business.  The Wall grew
larger beside him as he walked past the panels, the rows of names
disrupting his reflection until finally he stopped.  He didn't need
to, for his memory was as clear and potent as if the events he
remembered had happened only the day before, but he picked an
arbitrary point on the panel before him and started reading the
names.  They passed, one after the other, each with a story to 
tell.

  When he came to the name he had known he would find here, he 
looked quickly over his shoulder.  He nodded in reverence as he
looked back at the Wall and at the name of Nathaniel Teager.

  "I remember," he whispered.  Then he looked once more over his
shoulder and pulled the new roll of masking tape from the pocket of
his trenchcoat.  He tore off two long strips and stuck them to the
Wall, crossing them, making the letter "X" over the names in front
of him.  Just then it started to rain again and he picked up his
suitcases and walked away.  He started walking a little faster, past
an old woman pushing a baby in a stroller and then an oncoming
bearded man with a limp and an eyepatch.  The rain didn't stop and
he walked until he was able to flag another cab for a ride to 
Alexandria and to a motel where he signed in under a false name 
and went to his room to get some sleep.




-ad
--

Pt. 09/21



  It was completely dark in the motel room when Mulder was 
awakened by the sound of hard rapid knocking on his door.  
He blinked a couple of times, trying to force his eyes to adjust 
to the darkness, but that went nowhere.

  "Yeah," he called to the person banging on his door and fumbled 
for the lamp on the table beside the bed.  When he finally managed
to get the light on, he saw that he was still in his clothes and
hadn't even bothered to take his watch off.

  It was five minutes after midnight. 

  He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.  
Throughout his back and from the centers of both of his 
knees, pain screamed the increasingly familiar song of 
resistant nerves being shocked into service.

  Another eruption of knocking came from the door and he 
stood up, trying to ignore the pain, and limped across the 
room.  He looked through the peephole and pulled back, his 
eyebrows now drawn close and his lips moving silently.  He 
unlocked and opened the door, looking once more at the man 
from the Wall, the one with the beard.  That beard, long, full 
and richly grey, climbed up the man's cheeks and disappeared 
close to his ears, leaving only the black leather band of the 
eyepatch to frame the face of Walter Skinner.

  "Why am I here?" he demanded and pushed past Mulder, looking
awkwardly at Mulder's extended hand and bypassing the handshake.

  "Well, good evening Walter.  Won't you come in?" Mulder asked, 
the doorknob of the open door still in his hand.  "I wasn't sure
you'd be able to find me."

  "Sergei Walters," Skinner repeated the name Mulder had checked 
in under.  "It's not the most subtle of clues.  You want to close
the door now?"

  Mulder thought there was something jagged, something stressed 
hiding in the man's voice.  Maybe some kind of nerve damage.  He
tried to remember what he knew of Skinner's work during the invasion
as he turned and closed the door.  Suddenly he was flattened against
the door, Skinner's body pressed against his and Skinner's gun
pressed against the back of his neck.

  "I will pull this goddam trigger if you even twitch.  Now you are
going to turn around slowly.  Do it."  Skinner's voice carried the
appropriate amount of hostility necessary to make Mulder believe
him, but beneath that Mulder could hear fear.

  Fear and desperation.

  I can take him from here.  He knows it and he knows I know it.  
I can put him down and down forever.

  Nothing to it. 

  Mulder did what he was told, turning slowly until he faced 
Skinner, the gun now pressing against his throat and he 
motioned with his eyes that he was ready for whatever 
Skinner wanted next.  Skinner's face was red, a mix of 
seething messages, his one eye wild and angry and his lips 
quivering as though he wanted to, was ready to say ten 
different things at once but was aborting the effort each 
time.  He stepped back one step, his gun still squarely pressed
against Mulder's throat and slid his other hand into the pocket 
of his trenchcoat and then removed it, producing a large knife.  
He flicked the blade open and handed the knife to Mulder.

  "I want to see you bleed.  Now!" 

  Mulder was expressionless as he stared at Skinner and then looked
down at the knife in his hand.

  "Do it!"

  He pressed the blade against his palm and drew it slowly 
across, opening the skin.  A thin film of blood ran from the 
wound, spilling down his palm and onto the motel room's 
floor.  He grimaced both from the pain and from the 
apparent depth of the wound, but he also saw the relief 
spreading across Skinner's face.  He watched him put the gun 
in its shoulder holster and then Skinner took the knife back.

  "I... I'm sorry, Mulder.  I just needed to see you bleed."  He 
said it as though it sufficiently explained the whole incident and
signalled that they could now get to business.

  Mulder pulled the pillowcase off one of his flat pillows and 
began wrapping it around his hand.

  "What the hell for?  What were you looking for?"  He asked 
it with conviction, but he knew the answer.  Right now though,
something inside him demanded to hear Skinner say it.

  Across the room, Skinner stood with his back to Mulder, his
reflection in the mirror in front of him toying with a pencil he 
had found on the desk beneath the mirror. 

  "I..." he started to answer, but hesitated.  Mulder allowed him 
his time and when he faced Mulder again, he seemed somehow 
a smaller man than he had been before.

  "Red blood, ok?  I needed to see red blood," he answered and 
pulled the chair out from under the desk.  When he sat down, 
it was a heavy move, the move of a man who had been walking 
for a long time.  "Look, you know what it is.  You were gone.  We 
were all gone and no one's heard from you for ten years.  Then, 
now, one day you want to pop up out of nowhere and you think 
I'm just going to blindly believe it's really you?  So sue me if I'm 
suspicious."

  "What's suspicious?  We're just a couple of dead men talkin' 
'bout old times."  His hand now tightly bandaged, Mulder had 
taken a seat on the corner of the bed closest to Skinner.

  "So how about it, Walter?  How have you been?"  He reached 
across the short distance between them and squeezed 
Skinner's knee with his good hand.

  Skinner bristled.  "You didn't go to all this trouble just so you
could hear me recount my amusing permanent vacation stories 
and I damn well have bigger fish to fry than attending sentimental 
midnight reunions.  Now spill, and this had better be good."

  "Fair enough," Mulder said, withdrawing his hand.  "I have a 
little story to tell you, but even though it has a couple of
interesting chapters, it's woefully incomplete."  He finished his
setup and reached into his pocket for his pack of Morleys, pulled 
a cigarette out and placed it between his lips, found his lighter 
in another pocket, looked hesitantly at Skinner, and lit the 
cigarette.

  "When did you start that?"  Skinner couldn't have hidden his 
disgust even if he had wanted to, which he didn't.

  Mulder blew his smoke toward the door.  "Are you going to be 
a Nazi about it, Walter?"

  The former Assistant Director shrugged.  "It's really a damn 
shame they haven't outlawed those things yet.  It's beyond me 
why they haven't."

  "Et tu, Skinman?" Mulder asked and set the burning cigarette 
in the ashtray and then clapped his hands together.

  "Ok, here's the deal," he began and filled Skinner in on the 
events of the past couple of months, going light on his
confrontations and ending with his visit from Amy Fitzgerald 
and what he found on one of the discs.  "Like I said, it's missing 
some chapters and so I don't have a good conclusion.  Not one 
of my better pitches, huh?"

  Skinner arched the eyebrow over his eye.  "You've brought me 
weaker, but not much."

  Mulder nodded.  "I don't really have anything to fill in the 
blanks yet.  No trademark monsterboy brainstorms, but there's
something going on.  Amy Fitzgerald..."  He looked away, blocking
off a mini-avalanche of memories.  "I know they're doing something
and I have the strongest feeling that I should be doing something
too."

  They were both silent, Skinner looking at his folded hands in 
his lap while Mulder contemplated the glow of the dying cigarette
between his fingers.  It was the last of the last of the pack and 
he gave it the final dignity of taking one last puff.  Then, as 
he crushed it into the overflowing ashtray, Skinner broke the 
silence. 

  "There's always something, isn't there?" he asked, almost 
grinning.  "Ok, you are not going to have to work very hard to 
make me believe this new world order is using some horrible 
methods to get what they want.  I saw what happened in Egypt.  
I know about the death squads.  What I'm not seeing is what 
greater evil you think is behind all this.  The tyranny of these 
bastard cocksuckers is out in the open.  What could be so bad 
that they feel the need to hide it?"

  "Oh, it's all there, Walter.  They're trying to make everything 
never have happened, not to you and not to me and not to Scully."

  "So it's just that they're rewriting history?  That is what 
you're talking about?"

  "No, no," Mulder answered quickly.  "Well, yes, but that's only a
part of it.  It's a first step or an early step in something..."  He
struggled for the right word, but it escaped him.  "I don't know
what."

  "What do you want from me?" Skinner asked, pointing the pencil 
he had found on the motel room's desk at Mulder.

  "I want to make sure the world knows.  I want them to know
everything and I want to make sure they never forget what 
really happened."

  "And my role?  You want me to get this information out to 
the people?  That's it?"  Skinner stood up and started for 
the door.  "You should have looked up those three stooges.  
I'm not your Paul Revere." 

  "Walter!"  Mulder was on his feet when he shouted at Skinner's 
back.  "I don't know how we're going to do this, but we are going 
to do it.  We have to and you know it."  He waited, not knowing 
if Skinner would come back or if he would leave, but he was out 
of trump cards either way.  When Skinner did turn around, 
Mulder felt muscles in his neck and throughout his back relax.

  "If I know you're here, they know you're here," he continued. 
"You're already a dead man.  How long do you think it'll be before
they get around to wrapping up that loose end?  If we can find 
out what they're after, and I believe you and I together can 
find out, then we can shut them down for good.  We can stop 
the bastards." 

  It was Skinner's turn and he spoke as he walked slowly back 
across the room.  "I'm not complaining about this feeling, but 
I do get the distinct impression that some of this about 
revenge, Mulder.  Is this about revenge?"

  Mulder's first instinct was to deny the accusation, to ascribe 
a higher nobility to his motives yet again, but the subtle 
enthusiasm he thought he detected in Skinner's voice stopped 
him. 

  "Obviously, given what we both know already, unless you know
otherwise, it wouldn't surprise me for any of this, maybe a lot 
of this, to lead back to John Doggett," he said. 

  Liar.

  He would have been surprised if anything but one event could 
be traced back to Doggett.  He didn't think Doggett smart enough 
to be behind very much at all.  Doggett was an order taker.  He 
was no leader.

  Mulder's implication about the man did seem to have some 
effect though.  The look on Skinner's face made Mulder 
believe his lie had satisfied some secret requirement and had 
earned him, at least in part, approval from Skinner.

  "All I'm asking of you is whatever it is you've got going, let 
me tag along with that for now.  I know that whatever it is that's
happening, whatever it is I'm looking for, I will only be able to get 
that through you."

  Skinner sat back down in the chair and put his head in his 
hands.

  "Are you ok, sir?" Mulder asked, leaning forward.

  "Yeah," Skinner answered and looked up from his hands.  "I've 
just had a long day and, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm too old to
be doing this shit," he sneered.  "When it was over, the goddam
alien invasion, I was ready to retire.  Man, I was so out of there. 
You can't imagine, Mulder.  You can't imagine.  Even under normal 
circumstances an Assistant Director at the Bureau..."  He 
laughed, looking back into his hands.  "We put up with a lot of
shit.  And I was blessed with having you and Scully and a fucking
race of aliens come here to kill us all.  You're goddam right I was
ready to turn in my badge and gun and live the rest of my life 
not doing inordinate amounts of asskissing and paperwork and 
running operations against terrorists and being responsible for 
every damn security check Uncle Sam needed done and trying 
to wrap my brain around reports from you two about genetic 
freaks and monsters and little green men.  I was ready to kick 
back and relax, you know?  Take it easy, you know?  I was ready 
and I had every reason to expect to live out those years in 
relative comfort, but I never had the chance.  Dammit, I fought 
the good fight too.  Other people lost much more than I did, 
but I did pay my dues."  He looked across at Mulder.  "I cheated 
death and I don't mean I came close to dying.  I cheated death.  
Twice.  Once in Vietnam and once here.  You saw it.  I fucking 
cheated death, man, and I deserved to be treated better than 
this.

  "I was a hero, goddammit!"

  He was quiet for a moment, and Mulder didn't interrupt him.

  "Anyway, that was my future I had planned, but they stole it.  
They just stole it all.  After the orders were passed down ending
our work in phases, it began to sink in that we weren't going 
back to the way things were.  I started to see which way the 
wind was going to blow and it scared me.  I wandered around in a 
haze.  I lived in D.C. for a couple of months because, frankly, I 
didn't know what else to do.  The invasion was over, the F.B.I. 
was being dissolved, and the world...  I didn't know what was 
what.  And then the U.N. called.

  "I knew it was coming before it was official.  They approached 
me early on, before the rest of you, but I resisted their offers, 
not sure of the right thing to do and then one day there we all 
were and you...  You were their weapon.  They used you, Spooky 
Mulder," he nearly spat the name, "against us.  You gave them 
such a big target though, I knew they would.  Yeah, the infamous 
Spooky Mulder.  You played it mysterious, but it was a loud kind 
of mysterious.  When the U.N. Subcommitte brought us in, you 
were the one who laughed that smartass laugh of yours.  'Sure 
we're criminals,' you said.  'We've always been traitors and 
criminals.  We have to be.'  That's what you said, Mulder, and 
they came after us.

  "I got tired of walking around waiting to be shot at.

  "You know what?  I almost threw a party when they finally did 
shut you down.  I thought they'd finally leave me alone and let 
me get my head on straight after you were out of the picture.  
They did.  They kept up their end of things and I tried to live 
like a normal anonymous unremarkable man.  I managed, for 
a while, but at night I could never forget.  I'd lie in my bed 
somewhere between awake and dreaming and things would 
come to me.  Names and faces.  Accounts and testimonies 
and theories and accusations.  I saw everything in every 
goddam one of the files you and Scully would bring to me that 
I never believed.

  "My daylife quickly lost its appeal and I wasn't sleeping.  I 
wasn't doing anything because there was nothing to be done.

  "Later, one morning I left home and walked to the Vietnam War
Memorial, sat down on a bench and tried to come up with reasons 
not to eat a bullet.  I was out, man.  I was out.

  "So there I am at the Wall, sitting on this bench and thinking 
and watching these people go by.  You know, old women with
grandchildren, families, of course vets.  People.  I watched them
and I tried to imagine their lives.  I tried to imagine how happy
they would be in their homes, and when I looked at the kids I tried
to imagine how much safer a world their tomorrow would be but 
all I could see were folders and case files and photographs of 
crime scenes.  I closed my eyes.  I tried to fucking just scratch 
it all and go back to my own problems, but when I closed my 
eyes I saw a world where people were murdered in their homes 
by liver-eating freaks.  I saw labs where scientists worked with 
the alien DNA obtained during the invasion, experimenting with 
generations of reptiles which had been exposed to the nuclear 
devastation in Egypt.  Their work, their genetic experimentation, 
would require subjects which meant abductions which meant an 
eternity of UFO stories.

  "And man, I saw a world where people were slaughtered by 
witches and trickster dogs or were eaten by giant underground 
mushrooms or simply beaten to death by humans coming from 
either far up or far down the evolutionary ladder and babies 
were ripped from mothers' wombs by demons or fucking just 
grabbed and swallowed by the monsters in their closets or 
under their beds.

  "Then I saw what was behind it all.  I saw the curtain fucking 
torn down, man, and I saw the angels and devils with their brilliant
swords, their war raging beyond this life and I swear to you, 
beyond that I saw God.

  "No matter how hard I tried that day, I couldn't shut these 
visions out and they always came back to you and my decision 
to play the middle, to sell my loyalty.

  "I gave them my obedience and my invisibility.  They let me live. 
They made me aware of certain medical opportunities only they 
could offer me.  For three weeks, I underwent the treatments, 
ineffectual treatments which only left me worse off in new ways."

  Mulder nodded, understanding what Skinner was telling him.

  "I tried to..."  His lips continued to make little movements, but 
no sound came out.  It was nearly a minute later before he regained
his direction.

  "Needless to say, I still couldn't sleep at night and when I did 
it was for shit.  I decided to quit shuffling around during the day,
killing time until time could kill me, and I started lifting weights,
reading books, doing anything to pass the time but whatever I did, 
I did knowing that you'd do it all over again because nothing mattered
to you except your holy war.  Knowing that despite everything, you 
were the one who saved us all.  And knowing that somewhere, you 
were laughing at us.

  "I could never escape that. 

  "I could never escape you, escape the fact that I never believed,
never wanted to believe all your stupid stories of little green men.
 And then they took you.   And then we lost Scully.  I knew it was 
over for us all when she died, when Doggett..."  Again, Skinner fell 
silent and it was an uncomfortably long time, for Mulder at least, 
before he resumed his story.

  "Anyway, after that, I knew you were screwed because there was 
no way you would ever be able to pursue it.  Not outside of a chance
encounter with him out on the streets somewhere.  They promoted 
that son of a bitch completely out of reach and it was then that I 
knew they had you, that they'd sucked the life out of you and 
without you, there was no chance I was going to be able to resist 
them.

  "When I made the call, they told me you had just left.  I've
wondered about you every day since then.  What you were doing, 
how you were.  I had hoped you were doing well and I take it you 
know I've stayed busy.  Four years ago, it was like I just snapped 
out of the fog I had been in.  I got my shit together and now I do 
what I can to be as big a thorn in their side as I possibly can.  
I'm not talking about anything major.  Just, maybe shit here or 
there as it comes.  But, on the plus side, I am helped by the fact 
that with an operation the size of what they're doing, it's not like 
they didn't plan for shit like this.  It's to be expected.  No real 
harm done."  He exhaled bitterly.  "I've suspected they know of me 
and tolerate me because killing me would mean admitting I exist to 
too many people.  So, I fuck them up.  I'm pissed off and I rock the
boat.  It's not much," he said and shrugged, "but it is something.

  "And now you think a storm is brewing again and you're coming 
to me for help.  If we fuck up, if they get the smallest whiff of 
you, they'll have to kill us both, but I suspect you know that 
already."  He turned his eye away from his host and focussed 
on his right hand, twirling the pencil between his fingers.

  Mulder nodded.

  "Ok, but one thing.  When it comes down, I want a piece of 
Krycek too.  For old times' sake," Skinner said and tapped his
eyepatch with the pencil.  "For good this time."

  After Skinner left, Mulder turned on his computer, logged onto 
the net, and began searching for something he was sure he could
find. 



-ad
--

Pt. 10/21



  Not very far away from where Mulder had found what he was 
looking for and had printed it out and then left his motel room, 
John Doggett sat in the darkness of his silent apartment and 
stared at the screen of his computer.  He was watching a live 
feed of a military unit cleansing a non-authorized zone.  They 
were completing the final leg of a sweep of the southeastern 
states, this operation taking place in Alabama between Birmingham 
and Huntsville.  He watched as the buildings formerly occupied by 
squatting anarchists and drug dealers and whores were burned and 
the squatters made to stand in a line before being put down by an 
execution squad.

  Silently, from the dark shadows of his dining room beyond his
computer, a darker shape moved toward him.

  On the screen in front of him, a small group of people (teenagers
and young adults mostly, Doggett thought) huddled together on the
sidewalk in front of an abandoned Wal-Mart.  In the front of the
group, one boy with long red hair caught Doggett's eye.  He was
wearing a white t-shirt bearing the image of a rebel flag on the 
front and then he was lost in the push and shove.

  Two soldiers who had been standing several paces away from 
the  other members of their unit stepped forward on command 
and levelled their flamethrowers at the people on the sidewalk.  
Dual streams of fire sailed toward them, cooking the skin and 
hair of  heads and faces and exposed arms and hands and 
transforming the people hit into roiling columns of flame.

  The shape moved slowly but steadily behind the row of potted 
plants - a fern flanked by an African violet and a Spanish Angel -
on the dividing half-wall behind the desk.  They were placed and
arranged so that he could easily see them while working at the
computer.  If the setting was just right, which was usually as the
sun was going down, he would look away from the computer and 
at the residents of the half-wall and he would sometimes be able 
to find a small measure of comfort in them, in their shades of 
passively despondent green and softly majestic, if sorrowful, 
purple.

  Doggett closed his eyes and turned his head away from the feed 
of the cleansing where now only three of the group were dancing 
and flailing around and dying.  He blacked the sight away from him 
and when he opened his eyes again, where he had expected to see 
only the possibly comforting sight of his plants, there also appeared 
the face of Alex Krycek.

  "I thought you were dead," Doggett said, staring intently at the
unwelcome intruder.  He didn't move.  He didn't reach for a gun,
although one was closeby.  Instead, he simply stared, partly in
disbelief and partly in impotent outrage.

  "You thought wrong."  Krycek stepped around the half-wall and 
into the light of the computer's monitor and now Doggett was able 
to fully take in this unwelcome ghost of the man who had largely 
been responsible for stopping the invasion.  It wasn't much of a 
surprise how much he hadn't changed, aside from the streaks of 
grey in his hair and a very slight gathering of wrinkles across his 
forehead.  When Doggett saw the empty sleeve of the black leather 
jacket, it somehow sent not only the obvious message that he wasn't 
wearing his prosthetic arm, but also that he hadn't worn it in a long 
time.

  He didn't need it. 

  Doggett would never admit it, not to himself or anyone else, but 
he was relieved because he knew Krycek had come to kill him.

  "Well, what the hell do you want?" he asked, expecting this to 
be the final time he was able to look at his plants and turned his
computer off.  When no gun was fired and no bullet put a hole in
him, he pulled the string on his desktop lamp.

  Krycek was indeed in much better health than the last time 
Doggett had seen him.

  "I'm here to remind you of your duty to your government, General
Doggett.  I've been watching you taking in the field reports and I
wonder what you must be feeling.  Does it ever bother you, these
campaigns you approve and sign off on?  It has to."  He smiled, his
eyes almost glowing with the undeniable pleasure he was getting 
from this meeting.

  "What's your point?"

  "My point is that I don't blame you if it's getting to you," he
answered.  "It should be.  Those are American citizens you're
murdering."

  The accusation stung, but Doggett resisted the urge to defend
himself against it.

  "They used to be ordinary people, a lot of them, and of course 
this isn't what anyone would ever want.  This business you conduct
is dirty business and that's a fact.  Some of our friends thought it
would be in your best interest to remind you that you were aware of
the potential responsibilities you were accepting when you agreed to
wear a General's uniform.  So any indications or outright acts of 
sympathy for these people on your part would be considered an
intense indiscretion and would be dealt with accordingly."

  "Yeah, yeah, I know all that.  Is that all you came for?  To stick
your dick in my face?  You can leave now, errand boy."

  Krycek continued as though Doggett hadn't spoken.  "I 
should also remind you that in these encampments, they 
live in self-imposed squalor and anarchy.  Their lives are 
sheer chaos.  They live in fear, those who aren't part of a 
pack.  Nothing is sacred to these people.  That's why they're 
out there.  They have no gods, no sense of morality, no civil 
or social obligations-"

  "Sounds like someone I know," Doggett sneered.

  "They whore their children," Krycek spat back.  He saw  
immediately on Doggett's face that he had hit his target.  
"How many times have you prayed for a storm to come and 
for the rain to wash that shit away or for the wind to blow it 
out of existence and out of memory?  To change it all?  They 
used to walk among us, but they were never us.  They fear 
their monsters, but they are monsters.  They are our 
monsters and to show them pity, to allow for, to tolerate 
their lunacy now, after all we've been through, would be to
allow their contagion to re-infect our world.  If that infection 
sets in and is allowed to fester, it will be the ruination of 
everything, Doggett. Everything!"  His eyes were locked with 
Doggett's as he walked through the room toward the front 
door.  "If we aren't able to stop it now, we'll be again facing 
what happened in Egypt.  You do remember what happened in 
Egypt?  It'll happen again, but this time it will happen here."

  Doggett continued to listen, remaining silent while Krycek 
disarmed the locks on the door.

  "One more thing," Krycek said as he stepped outside.  "You 
owe me."  He flashed Doggett another smile and closed the 
door and then he was gone.

  Doggett felt his shoulders slump and the tension he carried 
with him like a set of keys evaporated.  When he finished 
rubbing his eyes with his fists, he leaned back in his chair and 
gazed again at the African violet.

  "I do remember Egypt."

  The night drew in around his plants and he disappeared into 
a memory - one of many which he revisited on a daily basis.

  It was the day after The Powers That Were had issued the 
official worldwide declaration of victory.  The invasion had been 
stopped and the invaders defeated, they had said, and now he 
had been called to a meeting with the President. 

  The two men had shaken hands across the desk in the Oval Office 
of the White House and after they were seated and the formalities
were out of the way, the last of the American Presidents looked 
John Doggett in the eye.  Although he hadn't actually been able to 
see the President's eyes because of the infamous cowboy hat, he 
sensed them and it would be the only time during the meeting this 
would happen and Doggett knew then he would remember it for the 
rest of his life.  The President briefly went over Doggett's record,
stopping to make passing acknowledgements for his service in the
Marines, his time in New York, and then his joining the Bureau and
being placed on the X-Files.  Slightly more attention was paid to
his return to the Marine Corps and his recent promotion to General
and then there was silence.  When the last of the American
Presidents spoke again, Doggett thought he could detect a slight
drunken slur.

  "I'm guessing you'd like to know the reason you're here, son.  I
can't say as I blame you.  I'd be wondering too.  Hell, I'd probably
be pissing my pants wondering what could be next.  Let me tell you
now, I just brought you here to talk.  I like just talking man to man 
sometimes.  A man in my position can get lonely, son.  He starts
to miss the buddy talk.  You know what I mean?  Plus, I try to make
it a point to get to know all of my high-ranking officers, especially 
those in or near your position.  I like to think of us all as friends.

  "Son,  it can fuck you up what life has in store for you.  See,
you're still a young man, but I bet you remember the days when it
was only hippie faggots talking about unity and world peace.  Me,
I'll never forget when President Reagan addressed the United
Nations.  That man changed everything.  I can still see him there,
behind the podium telling all them damned turbanheads and assorted
cocksuckers how if we faced some real badasses like a bunch of
goddam aliens coming to fry us, we wouldn't waste time for shit and
we'd get together and put our gripin' aside and kick some alien ass.

  "And you know what, son?  By God, President Reagan was right.  
When the time came and our world faced that alien threat, the
invasion, all those oh-so-important world leaders couldn't wait to
join hands with the U.S. of A.  Those bastards fucked with us, the
people of Earth, and we responded by forming the greatest alliance
in history.  That's what we did, son.  They counted on us to be
passive.  They counted wrong.

  "I wonder what President Reagan would have thought if he could 
have seen all this.  I wonder what he'd say today in this era that 
is the promise kept - the promise of peace made real throughout 
the whole sonofabitching world.  Whatever he said, it'd be the right
thing.  I'm sure he'd be grateful and humble, but I'm thinking he'd
also have some little warning to give us too.  Smart man, that
Reagan.  He would have told us to keep our heads out of our asses 
and to not get comfortable.  Yessir, it's great all this peace we 
have here, but the truth is that this is a never ending war and I'll 
tell you why.  A century ago, in 1918, a German soldier named 
Adolf Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross for capturing four French 
soldiers singlehandedly.  Four days later, the Allies broke through 
The Western Front, forcing Germany to send as many units as they 
could to halt the Allies.  It was during this time that Communist
rebellion began to spread throughout the country's people and its
military.  Communist spies spread rumors and caused chaos.  
There were riots, led by Communists, which caused problems with 
the country's economy and its ability to feed its soldiers.

  "One soldier in Adolf Hitler's unit began spreading the Communist 
message.  Hitler was angered by this and confronted his fellow 
soldier, the confrontation leading to a fistfight between the two 
men.

  "After Hitler was blinded in October of that same year, he 
had visions which led him to, in his eyes, clean up Germany.  
Hitler believed the German effort had been undermined by the 
propaganda of the Communists and it was this belief which 
fueled his efforts to end Communism in Germany.

  "Dissension is our true enemy, son, and in that regard, man 
doesn't evolve.  He doesn't change.  Treachery is the inevitable
result of all affairs, but where there is faith, there is order.  We
must protect that faith, nurture it and defend it from those who
would betray us, son.  This calls for us to take control and to
reign in the anarchy and the chaos.  We must stomp out that which
would destroy us.  We've faced anarchy, son, and to put it plainly,
people damn well just don't want that in their lives.  They've had
enough of that.  They want a return to normalcy.  That's what the
whole last century was about.  We tried to give them that, starting
with the League of Nations, which our own people aborted.  Then,
after the Nazis were out of the picture, it was just us and the
Communists, the only two giants left in the world and for a while 
it was very easy to identify the good guys and the bad guys, but 
soon any dime-store punk in any third world country could drink 
at the bars reserved for the bad guys.  The return to normalcy 
was then assigned to the United Nations.  So we have the 
beautiful face of diplomacy while behind it is a brain plotting the 
not-so-selective annihilation of leaders ranging from podunk 
mayors to high-level elected officials to princes and kings so we 
can slap our own people in there.

  "The peace must be preserved.

  "Now, of all the times man has seen, this all has never been 
more true.  I know much of it is seeming contradictions, but 
that's nothing new.  It's no great secret or shocking revelation 
that we all sleep soundly and safely because of all that and that's 
the trade-off we all have to agree to.  Most of us have the luxury 
of not having to face up to that, but we, you and I, do not enjoy 
that luxury.

  "America has always protected her citizens, and she'll continue 
to, but that protection sometimes comes through violence and the
threat of violence and through lies and misconceptions.  It always
has, and it will continue to now.  That's our job as soldiers and
patriots, son.

  "I know it's not perfect, but it's never been a perfect world.  
We're doing the right thing."

  Doggett turned off his computer and went to bed, where he 
suffered strings of thoughts of fate, destiny, karma, luck, virtue, 
and the random and when he slept, in his dreams he came home 
from work after his first day on the X-Files and gave his own son 
the speech the President had given him while Luke wrote over and 
over on the walls of the house, "I WANT TO BELIEVE". 


--

November 17 
Outside of Washington D.C. 

  Mulder thumped his cigarette butt onto the gravel road and 
pulled his jacket closed against the bitter fall night's wind.  As he 
had crossed the D.C. border, and many times before that, he had 
seen the signs warning against travelling at night but tonight, as 
always before, he hadn't given them much thought.  They were 
just a part of the way things were until the government was able 
to open the rest of the country back up.

  This particular "outlaw encampment" he was visiting had been a
suburb of Arlington, itself a suburb of D.C.  According to the small
bits of information he was able to find on the net after Skinner had
left, there was a very good possibility that another source, someone
who was rumored to be very well connected, might be found here.

  That possibility seemed very slim now because tonight, in this 
little corner of Arlington, there appeared to be no one home.

  The area was the rough equivalent of maybe four city blocks, 
mostly populated by small apartment buildings but there was one
strip mall on the southeastern end where Mulder now walked, slowing
to peer as far as he could through the doors of the mall and into
its dark and empty depths.  At least, from where he stood, it looked
dark and empty and he thought it best to cover some more ground
before wandering around in abandoned clothing stores and arcades.

  His feet had been hurting for the last twenty minutes, but now 
they were starting to revolt and he tripped as he tried to turn 
what he expected to be another dead end corner.  But he didn't 
fall.  He simply froze except for his arm which rose too slowly to 
shield his eyes from the unexpected glare of lights.

  It appeared to be a festival of sorts, lit by blazing fires in
trashcans and populated by dozens of people, but there was 
an eerie silence to it.  He walked on, passing first one, then 
pairs of hookers and then various beggars.  They all came on 
to him, but with nods and eyes that widened only for a second 
or two.  Near the end of the first populated block, he was 
approached by short heavy woman wearing a small dirty white 
skirt and a thin white top which was mostly netting.  Through 
the fabric he could see the dark circles of her nipples, both of 
which were pierced with the breasts weighted down by large 
gold rings.  The netting became solid fabric near the shoulders, 
with extremely long sleeves.  He suspected they hid bruises or 
needle tracks, or maybe both, on her arms.

  "Hey honey, you want to let Sweet Prissy give you something 
you can't get nowhere else?"

  "Yes, I think I do," he said.  "I need to know if you've seen this
person"  He showed her the picture he had printed out in his motel
room.

  "Oh, you talkin' 'bout Sister Mary.  You a first-timer?"  She 
opened her eyes wide in mock surprise and laughed loudly.  "You
don't look like no first-timer to me."

"Yeah, well, I, uh..." Mulder smiled, honestly at a loss for words. 

  She leaned closer, now with a deadly serious expression on her 
face.  "You know something?  I think I done you twice last week,
myself."  She let her accusation hang in the air between them for 
two full seconds before breaking into another fit of loud laughter.  
"Listen, I dont work for her so it ain't really right that I be giving 
her referals, but I tell you now you ain't her type.  Her type ain't
walkin' men."  She laughed loudly again.  "See that third building
down there?  Go in there and straight down the hall.  That's her.
Now, if she is home, she gonna serve you so cold you'll be goin'
home all soft and with your pride hurt, honey, but if she ain't
home, you just come on back to see me.  I'll do you real good.  
You can trust Sweet Prissy," she ended her pitch with a mostly 
toothless smile.

  "Thanks.  I won't forget." 

  He took the picture back and walked the short distance to the
building the hooker had pointed out.  He sat on the porch of the
building across the street, consumed by the shadows, and for what
seemed like hours, he watched business.  



-ad
--

Pt. 12/21



  They came in cars and they came for sex and those who didn't 
come for sex came for drugs.  Then a car different from the 
others approached.  It was large, and soon he could tell it was a 
limo, definitely post-war.  It stopped in front of her building, one
person got out, and it pulled away.  Mulder could see in the soft
glow of the rear lights that it carried a government tag.

  Across the street, where a former passenger stood, he saw a 
nun who appeared to be looking back at him.  If she was, they 
stared at each other, his eyes straining until he saw her face 
and was certain of her identity.

  She disappeared into the building and he bolted across the street
after her, praying that he wouldn't trip again and maybe break a rib
or a hip.  Inside the building, he felt his way through the dark until 
his eyes adjusted again.  It was his fingers who were tripping now 
as they encountered various sized holes in the wall behind him.
Most were empty, but some were covered from the insides of the 
rooms with what felt like cardboard.

  When he came to what he hoped was her door, he knocked lightly 
and waited but there was no answer.  He twisted the knob and 
pushed. The door opened and he stepped into what was a 
surprisingly clean apartment, but it still had the air of being a 
total wreck.  There was no furniture in the front room.  Between 
this room and the kitchen, a sheet hung on a string which was 
tied to nails in the opposing walls.  The sheet was gathered at one 
end, exposing the kitchen and there she stood at the sink, drinking 
water from a glass she had filled from a plastic bottle.

  "Marita."

  She didn't look at him, or even acknowledge that she had heard 
him until she set the glass back down on the counter.  Then she
said, still staring down at her glass, "I haven't heard that name in
years."

  Mulder smiled when she then turned and looked across the dark 
and empty apartment at him.  In the light of the candles standing 
in the window behind her, she seemed almost electric with her pale 
skin and her shocking grey hair falling against the black and white 
of her robes.  He could almost accept her as a new world's nun but 
the illusion was ruined by the crucifix, which to his surprise made 
him vaguely uncomfortable.  It was large, maybe a foot high, made 
of gold and trimmed with diamonds.

  Behind the robes and crucifix, she was older, certainly, but 
still very beautiful and still possessed of a definite cutting air
of sophistication.

  "Fox Mulder?"

  "Yes, it's me.  How are you, Marita?"

  "How did... How did you find me, Fox?"  She stepped forward, the
uncertainty on her face betraying more than mere confusion.

  He followed her lead and closed the distance between them with 
one more hesitant step.  "Believe it or not, I was in the F.B.I. once.  
I used to do this kind of stuff for a living."

  Her stare was unwavering, but her tone was more confident now.
"You're not with the F.B.I."

  "Yeah, my retirement plan's a joke too.  I think everyone's
retirement plans got shaken up for a while there.  It looks like 
that was more drastic for some than for others," he said, 
clearly acknowledging her clothes.

  "You don't want to know," she said.  "Give me just a couple of
minutes."

  In her dark bedroom, she pulled the chain over her head and held 
the crucifix in her hand, looking first at it and then into the dark
mirror.  Then she undressed, thinking of the man in the other room.
She wondered for one slightly frightening second if anything could
kill him, but reality chased the thought away.

  With the belt of her robe tightly cinched around her waist, 
Marita returned to Mulder, still thinking of him before...  When 
they were both younger...

  He watched in silence while she poured and handed him his wine.  
His eyes moved steadily across her hand and back up to her face.
Though she had changed out of her working clothes, she was still
wearing her rings and earrings and she saw that he noticed.

  "I'm going to explain everything right now to get it out of the 
way.  My life requires that I maintain a relationship with certain
people.  The most effective way to do that is through the market. 
In exchange for certain... things," she looked away for a moment. 
"I provide certain services for people who can help me.  There.  I
don't know how you spend your nights, but here were are, Fox 
Mulder, and who could have guessed we would end up like this?"

  Mulder thought there was a small plane of hysteria in her voice.

  No shit, Einstein.

  "I got lucky finding you.  I guess we all got the name change,  
huh?"

  "Except mine's somewhat voluntary.  Like you, I enjoy a certain
degree of anonymity.  I'm officially dead and it's better if things 
stay that way."

  "But these people..."

  "Fox, what did you come here for?"  She interrupted tersely, 
setting her glass on the table just a little too hard.  She closed
her eyes and bowed her head.  "I'm sorry.  I don't mean to be rude,
but I'm very surprised to see you and I know you have a reason 
for being here," she said, raising her head and finally looking back
up into his eyes.

  "I understand.  I thought we could just talk for a while before
getting to business.  After all the shit we've seen, what could it
hurt?"  He reached across the table and put his hand on hers.  
"For old times' sake."

  "Old times' sake!  Ha!" she nearly screamed as tears flooded her
eyes.  "Look at me, Fox.  This is my life now.  This," she moved 
her arms around, gesturing toward the walls and everything within, 
"and this is as good as it's ever been for me."

  With that, she broke down and the tears came hard.  Mulder 
went to her and held her in his arms.  She cried into his shoulder,
squeezing him and whispering garbled parts of thoughts.  Her 
breathing soon began to come less labored and she had quit
whispering.  Still, she clung to him and he didn't resist.  He
looked down at her, at her long grey hair and at her hands 
gripping his trenchcoat.  Then he saw the large dark bruise on 
her right wrist.  Instinctively, she pulled the sleeve of her robe 
down to cover her wrist and then led Mulder by his hand toward 
the bedroom, but he stopped her before they got there.

  "It's ok, Marita.  I'm just here as a friend right now," he whispered.  
They stayed there in the hallway for a long moment and then she 
followed him back into the kitchen.  He sat back down and she 
poured more wine while he lit a cigarette and set the pack of
Morleys on the table between them.  "I've always wondered how you
came into things," he said and thanked her for the ashtray she had
gotten him from beside the sink.  He set it in front of him and
thumped the growing clump of ashes from the end of his cigarette 
into it.  "Of course, I wondered that same thing your predecessor 
as well as the man before him, but they're not here."

  Marita considered his question before answering.  "I'll answer 
your question, but you must answer mine first.  Fair?"

  "Fair.  Go," Mulder said and settled into his chair, crossing his
right leg over his left and putting his arms behind his head.

  Marita sipped her wine and arched her eyebrow at Mulder.  "How 
much of the whole story do you know?"

  He laughed before answering, "I don't know.  I never knew the 
whole story.  I... I think the whole story died with the
cigarette-smoking man."

  "C.G.B. Spender?"

  "Yeah," Mulder put his hands back on the table.  "I know that they 
came, the colonists came and my father and the smoking man and 
their group struck a deal with them.  They agreed to help prepare 
the way for the invasion in exchange for letting them and their 
families live.  I know that each member of the group had to give up 
a member of their family to the colonists.  My father...  The man I 
called my father, Bill Mulder, didn't want to do it that way, but it 
was done.  The smoking man ordered it done.  He had been a friend 
of my family and there have been times I've thought he and my 
mother...  I've thought he might have been my father."  Mulder 
swallowed the rest of his wine and Marita refilled his glass.

  "Fox, he was your father and he spared your life.  He gave them 
your sister.  They were supposed to take you, but he stopped them."

  "How do you know that?  How can you know that... that's the 
truth?"

  "I'll tell you what I do know about it.  I know that your mother 
and her husband had been having problems for a couple of years
before you were born.  They had seen counsleors.  C.G.B. Spender 
was a friend of the family and when things were at their worst, he 
and your mother...  He had no family and he envied what Bill Mulder 
had.  He and your mother agreed after she became pregnant to 
end it but when the colonists came and demanded their ransom, he 
was forced to act to protect what he saw as his.  He convinced Bill 
Mulder that you could be guided to continue what he had begun, a 
resistance.  I learned of these things during my association with 
those men and with Spender."

  The lines of the wrinkles which now comprised the majority of 
the landscape of Mulder's face seemed to swirl as he processed 
what she had told him.  "I knew that a choice had been made...  It 
doesn't change anything.  I'm not... I wasn't looking for my father.  
I was looking for Samantha, looking for my sister."

  "Yes, your famous quest.  And did you find her?  Did you find
Samantha?" Marita asked.

  "No, I never did.  I did find an answer I thought I could believe
in.  I think back now...  I think what I was told is true, at least
in effect, and that effect is that she's dead.  She's been dead 
for a long time now.  A man led me to a diary she kept while she 
was gone.  I've read it a million times, memorized every word, 
every passage.  She was returned sometime after the aliens 
were finished with her, I guess, and she spent the rest of her 
time in this world as C.G.B. Spender's guinea pig.  This man who 
led me to her diary believed that she had been taken to another 
place by... by benevolent spirits.  It's been an answer I could 
believe.  I saw things...

  "I don't have anything which confirms or refutes the explanation,
but I do have her diary and I come back to it again and again.

  "She kicked Anne Frank right in the ass." 

  Marita's expectant silence was more than message enough that 
his attempt at humor had failed. 

  "But you know," he pressed on, "whatever place my search led me 
to, there were always people there to help me.  People willing to
risk it all to help me and to provide me with information.  You were
one of those people and you helped me.  What did you know?"

  "I'm sorry.  I don't understand."

  "What really happened to my sister?"

  "I don't have that answer.  I never knew," she said, refilling both 
of their glasses.  "I do know that she was the female protype for 
the hybrid slaves that would survive the invasion while the rest of 
humanity gestated the new race.  I heard Spender say once that 
the colonists' plan to return the hostages was the only thing 
anyone could trust, but I never knew what he meant by that.  
There was a timetable and I know that, at times, it seemed like 
the timetable was Spender's sole reason in living.  He was by no 
means the leader of that group but there was a sort of silent 
understanding that he was the most resourceful, the most 
dangerous, and the most determined of them.  He made it no 
secret, his respect for the scientists and other brilliant men he 
had met and worked with at the onset of the project, and the 
others knew his every decision, his every vote, was based on that 
respect.  There was a respect for him among these men and it 
led to great and horrible fights among them.  Do you remember 
when you first came to me, the picture I gave you?"

  He nodded.  

  "The girl was Samantha Mulder and the boy's name was Kurt 
Crawford."

  The name transported Mulder to a room where he knelt in front 
of a filing cabinet and he spoke into his cell phone, then to a 
fertility clinic where he leaned over a young man's shoulder trying 
to guess the password for a locked database.

  "He was the son of one of the men I worked for," Marita continued. 
"The son of a man I believe you were familiar with.

  "Spender had brought me into his wing of the group and I was 
working through the U.N. for various field activites here and there, 
but never anything with any direct relationship to the project and 
never anything I was to discuss with the others.  They all kept many 
secrets from each other, so naturally I was kept in the dark about 
most everything.  I was allowed access only to what they deemed 
necessary for me to do my small job.  It was sheerly by accident 
that I discovered you and your quest and I was fascinated.  You 
were the cause of so many arguments between those men, 
arguments I had previously not understood.  It drove them mad 
trying to decide how to deal with you.  This was before you were 
even given permission to open case files, but high priority was 
given to the task of monitoring you and your work.  About a year 
after Scully was assigned to work with you, a leak was discovered.  
Once they knew the scope of the betrayal and eliminated the traitor, 
the job of watching you was divided among several people, including 
the man who sent you to me.  When his own deceptions came to light, 
I took his place.

  "Despite what I was supposed to do, the way in which I was to 
serve the project, I really was proud of the fact that now I was 
one of the trusted.

  "I don't know what finally happened to Samantha, but all the time 
I was moving into the inner circle, I was watching you there at the
Bureau, taking enormous risks in the Violent Crimes Unit, 
investigating these useless irrelevant cases and fighting crime like
a comic book superhero," she said and took another drink of her
wine.  He thought he could see it working in her eyes when she
looked back into his over her glass.  "And all it would have taken
was just one bullet."

  Mulder thought she had really been asking a question rather than
making a statement.  "Well, I-" he began but was interrupted.

  "No, I mean about those men," she said.  "You have to understand,
there was never one simple ideal or philosophy guiding all of these
men.  There were always alliances being made within the alliance,
projects being pursued within projects.  One faction never 
accepted you.  They wanted you dead.  They always wanted you 
dead.  One faction believed you were to be our savior, but only 
through exposing the conspiracy and allowing humanity to fend for 
itself.  And still another faction, a much smaller faction than the 
others, listened to the superstitions of the Navajo.  They claimed 
that you were our saviour because you were fated to be our savior.  
You were a messiah.

  "Spender, despite whatever shortcomings the man had, was a 
firm believer in covering every angle.  He paid attention to the 
claims of those sympathetic to the Navajo beliefs, believing their 
warnings to be a possibility, if not in every detail certainly in 
principle.  He thought you could be the one to save us all, yet there 
you were at the Bureau and we all could have died from just one 
bullet.

  "That amazes me.

  "My story...  Now that's not so easy."  She laughed and drank 
more of her wine.  "No, that's not true.  It is easy to tell.  Sadly 
easy because I... I never had a choice.  This was all forced on me, 
in much the same way it was forced on you.  I don't know...

  "I was in college.  There was a man.  A very important and 
unfortunately very married man and after I graduated, I worked 
for him.  I was his secretary.  It wasn't what I wanted, but it was a 
wonderful job and I believed it was only a matter of time before he 
would leave his wife.  It took some time before I realized that he 
was living his life without me and intended to keep doing so.  But 
then there was talk of a divorce and we went to Greece for a 
month and the next month we got an apartment together and the 
next day, I got a call from his wife.

  "I was caught completely by surprise when they reconciled.  
Fearing that I would seek revenge or retribution or... I don't know.  
He told me he had a friend at the United Nations and he would do
everything he could to get me a job if I wanted it.  I knew he was
trying to get me as far away from him as he could, but I didn't
mind.  I was excited at the prospect of working in my field, and at
such a high level.

  "My interview was arranged and I met with my former lover's 
friend.  We had a very nice dinner, went dancing, all the stuff, 
and I got the job.  Soon afterward, I was approached by a man 
who said he knew of my previous relationship and was prepared 
to reveal the details of it to the press.  He explained how it would 
not only ruin several lives, but it would be done in such a way that 
would make me seem responsible for spreading the information."

  "You have to admit, that's pretty clever," Mulder said and 
chuckled.

  "Eh, I suppose.  This man died alongside his colleagues, my
employers, at the hands of the rebel aliens," she said icily and
refilled first Mulder's glass then her own.  "He had blackmailed 
me into working for him.  He brought me into this world where 
for years I was thanklessly used as a tool to further their agenda 
to collaborate with the engineers of mankind's demise and if I 
refused or if my loyalty was suspect at all, I would be killed 
without a second thought.  I was a hired gun, so to speak, until I 
was promoted.  Then, like I said, I was given a clear and 
frightening view of the larger picture, the full extent of the 
project.  But by then, I had seen enough and been party to enough 
to have been actually traumatized.  It changed me.  I was a 
different person.  I was a person wholly unlike the person I had 
been before.  I didn't like it.  I didn't like any of it.  And here I was, 
now charged with aiding the monsters come to kill us all.  I knew it 
was wrong and although my mind was open to treason, I didn't know 
where to start."

  Mulder feigned shock and Marita did laugh this time.

  "No, I knew where you could be found, of course.  What I didn't 
know was how to leak anything to you.  I wasn't the only one
watching you.  Defense had eyes, Intelligence had eyes, God only
knows how many of the people I worked with were watching you at 
any given time.  My hands were tied, but then I found a way to make 
a difference, a way I could help stop this thing, a way I could help
you stop this thing and then I was infected.  There was nothing I
could have done.  They found me and you know what happened then.  
It was the one time I really tried to break out for myself, to do the
right thing, and I never had a choice.

  "Jeffrey Spender found me at Fort Marlene after Cassandra 
Spender had been taken and he got me out.  I learned soon 
afterward that only C.G.B. Spender had survived the rebel 
attack. The strict schedule had been destroyed and there was 
no way to know what waited for us out there.  It was just him, 
ruling with his thugs until he had the surgery."  A look passed 
between them acknowledging all that needed to be acknowledged.  
"Death was on its way for him.  Finally.  God was ready to send 
that one back to Hell.  I continued to work for him and assisted 
him until Alex pushed him down a flight of stairs.  So now 
everybody's dead and I spend my time wondering where I fit into 
this world.

  "See, after it was over, I stayed in D.C. and New York to wrap up
various loose ends I maintained an interest in, things the invasion
had provided no resolution for, and ironically, no resolution was
what I found.  For anything.  I think I told you once that not 
everything dies.  Some things just live on into perpetuity; one evil
gives way only to another until everything in opposition is whittled
away and the evil is left unmolested, unchallenged in its bid to
live forever.

  "And now here I am, doing what I do, but isn't this the role I
played all along?  I lie in my bed unable to sleep because I know
this isn't the life I should have had, this isn't the place in the
world I should occupy, and I do this all the time, for days and
nights at a time until I can't take it anymore.

  "Does that ever happen to you?"

  Mulder's eyes went comically wide and he answered, "Me?  No. 
Never."  

  When their weak shared laughter turned into an extended silence, 
he knew that the small talk was over and it was time to get to
business.

  "Ok, you were right earlier.  I didn't come here by accident.  I
need information."



-ad
--

Pt. 13/21



  "And what do you think I know that can help you?  What are you
looking for?"

  "I don't really know.  I think I'm looking for a schedule of pickups 
and deliveries.  The buildings in D.C., and presumably all over the 
continent, are being cleaned out.  I need some of idea of when 
that's happening and where the stuff's going.  Is that something
you can do?"

  "We can try," she said and Mulder followed her to her computer 
in her bedroom where she logged on and accessed a government 
search engine.  "From here, I should be able to find vehicle 
maintenance records for the military.  It will take a little while, 
but we should be able to track down some of what you're looking 
for based on that."

  "You don't have to worry about being traced?" Mulder asked, 
knowing the answer but hoping for an explanation.

  "No, I don't.  I have a satellite connection and I don't have to 
use terrestrial servers.  Our scientists and engineers haven't
bothered to look into any off-planet applications for the 
technology they acquired ten years ago.  But they aren't the 
people writing software.  I may not be the legendary Fox 
Mulder, but I am not without resources.  Surely you know that 
by now."

  Their hunt took slightly over an hour and ended with Marita 
waking Mulder up and handing him a compact disc which she said
contained everything she had downloaded.

  At the door, he looked back at her, into the eyes of Marita
Covarrubias, and wondered if it would be the last time.  He was
going to go back out into a world where he played the role of a
superhero, a world where just one bullet could end it all, but he
wanted very badly to see her again.

  "Goodnight, Marita."

  "I wish you well, Fox," she said and kissed him, pressing her 
lips quickly and tightly against his for only a quick moment and 
let him go.  She watched him walk away as long as she could and 
then she closed her door.


  Back in the wreckage of a world he had left outside, Mulder stood 
in the cold and looked into the sky.  The stars looked back at him 
from their nearby corners of the universe and-

  Look.  Do you see her up there?

  Fool. 

  Unable to block the voice out of his mind, he closed his eyes but
all he could see was Samantha's face looking back at him.  He
swallowed hard and opened his tired and watering eyes.  He needed 
to go to his car, to drive back to the airport, to go home but now 
that seemed too heavy, too thick a set of tasks.  He breathed in 
and looked around, pleasantly surprised that the night seemed to 
have suddenly taken on a glow.  A pale blue light surrounded 
everything and far to his left, he began to hear what sounded for 
all the world like a child's laugh.

  He watched, waiting, a sense of pleasant patience and satisfaction
filling him while beneath it all that dark voice began to complain. 
He tried to remember... where he had been, but...

  "Marita," he whispered, as the laughing voice came closer and 
became clearer.

  He had left her house... her apartment... he came outside... 

  The other voice was screaming but he couldn't hear it.

  He wondered if this was a fugue state and if Marita had drugged 
him, and then he saw her.  She was a young girl, early teens, 
running slowly toward him.  The glow of the night made it easy 
for him to see her face.  She ran until she was close to him and 
slowed into a fast walk until she was in front of him.  Their eyes 
locked and he felt himself smiling and he felt his arms reaching 
toward the fourteen year old sister returned to him here, this 
night, on this street, under these stars.

  "Samantha?" 

  She started laughing and ran again, past Mulder and down the
sidewalk.  Unaware of his distant smile, he followed her down the
sidewalk and out of reach of the lights from the now distant fires. 
He followed her around the corner of the building, but she was gone.  
She was gone and where she should have been stood a short stocky
man, naked, with long grey hair running in stringy streams past his
shoulders and onto his back.  Mulder stared at the man, a new and
markedly different sense of calm washing over him.  He reached out
and pushed some of the hair away from the man's face and knew him
immediately.

  "Harold Piller?  Is that you, Harold?"

  And it was Harold Piller, the man who had come to help with the
Amber Lynn LaPierre disappearance and had led Mulder to the 
truth about Samantha.  He looked back at Mulder, but he showed 
no signs of recognition.

  "Little..." he said, his voice getting deeper and rising sharply back 
up as he finished, "raindrop!"  Mulder shook his head.  A sound
from around the corner sent an alarm through him, his immediate
defensive instinct to hide himself and Harold because that noise
could only be someone-

  Alex  
 
  -come to kill the two of them.

  And Marita.

  He quickly looked around, but there was nowhere to run.  He 
waited, his heart pounding in his chest, for the assassin to come,
but it was only a couple of hookers passing by on their way to the
next block.  After they had passed, he looked back at the face of
Harold Piller.

  "This is not happening," he said, looking up at the stars and 
all around him in amazement.

  There was a distant explosion of laughter, two female voices.  
These final sounds of the hookers passed and then they were 
alone.

  "Harold, do you know where you are?" he asked the man, not 
quite knowing what to expect.

  "They're all wet!" Harold shouted, smiling and clapping like an
excited child.

  Mulder took Harold's arm in his hand and began to lead him to 
his car.  When they left the alley and had begun to walk along the
sidewalk, Harold stopped walking.  He looked up into the sky, quiet
until he turned his head to look at Mulder.

  "I heard you calling me.  I've come to help you, old friend," he
said in a sort of sing-song which further convinced Mulder that he
was drunk or on some kind of high.

  "Come on."  Mulder led him by the shoulder to the car and they 
left.


  Back home in Chilmark, Mulder led Harold through the house and 
into the basement.  At the bottom of the stairs, he flicked the
light switch and finally got Harold seated, which was good on
several levels, not the least of which being that Mulder was
beginning to get totally creeped out by the man's voice in his 
ears, whispering and laughing and chanting nursery rhymes.  
He ran back upstairs for a minute and when he returned he 
dressed Harold in some sweatpants and a t-shirt.  After his 
guest launcehd into another whispering fit, Mulder gave up and 
went to his computer.  He booted up, retrieved and started 
the software Skinner had e-mailed him and immediately a 
window opened, revealing Skinner's face.

  "Wow.  That was quick." 

  Skinner looked like he had been asleep.  He didn't say anything.

  "Anyway, after you left, I ran down a hunch and it paid off.  
It's not a hell of a lot, but it is some quality stuff.  I'll e-mail 
that to you in the morning."

  "That'll be fine," Skinner said, his tone indicating he was ready 
to end the call.

  "Before I go, I have a surprise for you.  Does the name, Harold
Piller, ring a bell?"

  "Yeah, I think so.  He was...  He was involved in the LaPierre 
case, right?  He explained what happened to your sister, didn't 
he?"

  "I don't know, but I'm going to find out.  Later."  Mulder ended 
the connection and turned the computer off.  He leaned back in 
his chair, folding his arms behind his head, and staring at Harold.  
If anyone else had been there in the basement with them, they 
would have thought his gaze seemed somehow focussed, as 
though if he looked hard enough, he could actually see into the 
man.  He thought about a life following in the wake of walkin-ins, 
the old souls in search of new homes who, according to Harold 
and a woman named Kathy Lee Tencate, come to children who 
are destined to suffer horrible painful deaths and take them into 
the starlight before it can happen.  They leave a trail of lost 
children, children presumed dead, but for Harold Piller they were 
everywhere.  He was surrounded by them every day of his life.  
Mulder knew he could never truly understand what a life like that 
would be like, especially for a father.


  Over the next couple of weeks, the two men spent every waking 
moment together.  At the start, Mulder attempted repeatedly to 
press questions about Harold's gift and the events leading up to 
his seeing Samantha for what had been the final time until the 
reunion outside Marita's.  He asked what had prompted Harold's 
arrival during the investigation.  He argued with himself about the 
extreme possibility of coincidence and demanded that Harold tell 
him who had sent him to Sacramento.  He explained that he at 
least deserved to have the sleight of hand involved in how he had 
directed Mulder to April Air Base and to the house where she had 
lived with the smoking man as her father and his son as her brother 
explained to him.

  How had he known about the diary Samantha had kept?

  What did he know about the smoking man?

  He begged to know more about the children.  He repeated again 
and again his insistence of having seen her, having seen Amber 
Lynn LaPierre, having seen Harold's own son, but to no avail.  The 
only lucid response Harold gave was when, in the midst of a soft 
crying fit, he came to Mulder and touched him on the shoulder.  
When Mulder looked up at him, he whispered, "I'm sorry, Agent 
Mulder.  I don't remember."

  It was then that Mulder gave up, instead merely watching and
observing Harold, making notes of his impressions of Harold's 
power and the mystery of its psychic nature.


  One night, alone in the dark of his basement with only the light
from his trophy case allowing him to move, to walk the length of 
the room, he stopped thinking about Harold Piller.  He couldn't 
think about the man any more.

  He had to talk to someone.

  "Hey Scully!"  He stopped, frowning at how ridiculous that 
sounded, and tried again.

  "So, Scully, about Harold."

  She can't hear you, you dumb motherfu-

  "He's got this power.  I don't know exactly what it is, but it's got 
a strongly empathic quality.  It originates in his ability to sense a 
person's loss.  It's as if he's able to...  I don't know, but he knows 
the tragedies in people's lives.  I believe it's a gift, or a curse, 
even he doesn't understand.

  "But I'm not dealing with a reasonable man.  Maybe there was a 
time when he did understand.

  "Given the most generous scenario, he was, as he told us, a man 
who only wanted to help.  We know he claimed the disappearance of
his son was what drove him to seek out these scenes of tragedy. 
It's what he claimed drove him to seek us out in the investigation 
after the arrest of Ed Truelove.  What drove him to come to help 
us find or explain the disappearance of Amber Lynn LaPierre and 
what had driven him to the aftermath of earthquakes and train 
wrecks in Afghanistan and Pakistan and India and Myanmar and 
the Khyber Pass may also have induced his schizophrenia, or 
maybe it has an intensifying effect on his illness.

  "He is drawn to people who lost someone, presumably someone 
young, and he can reach inside and find the face of that loss and 
he's able to give it form.  He's able to create the lost one in the 
mind of the hurting person.  The greater the tragedy, the more 
young people lost, the stronger the pull.

  "What he does is beyond any one powerful trait.  Its thrust is 
like a psychic push.  It's a power similar to that of Bob Modell.

  "As for the rest...

  "What I have witnessed would normally be described as ghosts. 
Something akin to 'residual hauntings' or the replaying of a tragic
or violent event.  These ghosts, or hauntings, can be interactive,
as can most psychic phenomena.  Usually, these hauntings are 
from events which are believed to have been destined to occur.

  "There's also a type of clairvoyance being manifested here in 
his seeing psychic patterns or energy shapes.

  "This all comes to him rather easily, with no apparent way to 
stop it.

  "What's that?  'Theres a problem', you say?  You're right, 
Scully, and I'm glad you pointed that out.  About the walk-ins. 
Everything I've ever read about walk-ins says that they only 
jump into adult bodies, bodies which have been spiritually 
abandoned.  Like what you and I witnessed at the Church of 
the Red Museum in Wisconsin.  I've never seen any literature 
asserting cases of walk-ins abducting children and turning 
them into starlight.

  "Hmm?  You're right again.

  "If I'm right, and this phenomena is a product of something within 
Harold Piller, that may explain why the sightings are limited to 
children instead of a wide range of ages.  It would explain the 
apparent bigotry of the walk-ins against adults.  I think Harold is 
capable of producing phantasmic adults, maybe even you, Scully.  
I also believe that if not for the discovery of Samantha's diary, I 
would have seen her that night as an eight year old.  I would have 
seen my sister the way I saw her in the field and in the commune in 
Canada that Jeremiah Smith showed me.  But I didn't because Harold 
was there beside you and he heard Arbutus Ray describe Samantha's 
disappearance.

  "I'll say it before you do.  I've been down this road before.  Of 
course I remember Samuel Hartley, but it was Harold Piller's
story that led me to Samantha's diary, so I don't discount some
obvious psychic ability on several levels here.  The man has a 
gift.

  "It's undeniable.

  "Aliens, vampires, werewolves, mutants, ghosts, we saw these 
things, Scully.  I saw them.  You saw them, but you'd never let
yourself admit it.  You saw them," Mulder pointed at the cross and
heard his voice getting argumentative.  "I have evidence here, in 
my hand, in my house, of...  I don't know, Scully.  I don't what.   
Evidence of the paranormal?  I don't even know what that means
anymore.  I know that Harold's upstairs asleep and he's obviously
insane and I do know what I'm talking now."  A very brief and bitter
laugh escaped.  "I... I am a psychologist.

  "Anyway, I should have seen that when I first saw him outside of
Marita's.  That doesn't change anything I've seen here over the last
couple of weeks, but what I have seen has left me with questions. 
Not only what we've already discussed, but stuff like how all this
power was sparked by the disappearance of Harold's son.  And none 
of this addresses the precognitive visions of the parents or people 
close by.  The testimonies of these people, their descriptions, 
never speak of phantasms or spirits.  Their visions are consistently 
clear and vivid, bearing no similarity to the images of the children in
the starlight, which, I guess, lends some credence to Harold's story.

  "But Harold's story doesn't explain how I came to write 'April
Base'.  This is possibly yet another face to this talent of Harold's. 

  "We also have the account of Arbutus Ray, which we never 
questioned.

  "And the timing of the death of my mother.  How can I even 
believe that was suicide now?  I have no reason to believe any of
Harold's story.  That night, in my room, he brought my mother 
to me to talk to me.  He brought her to tell me something.  He 
brought her... to tell me about April Base.

  "Why wouldn't he bring my father, Bill Mulder?

  "When this all happened, I wasn't the man I had been when I started 
on the X-Files.  That man was a beaten down and weakened version 
of the man at the beginning and I so wanted to believe Harold's story 
because in it, whatever happened to Samantha, she never stopped 
fighting them.  Her words tell me of her struggle, how she never let 
them break her spirit.  If I believe Harold, she defeated them when 
the walk-ins took her because she was a precious soul, too precious 
to carry on the fight.  She was taken from that hospital room to 
prevent C.G.B. Spender from carrying on what that old bastard had 
begun with her.

  "She beat him and I... 

  "I don't know what I'm trying to do, Scully.  I don't know who I'm 
fighting.  I don't know why I'm fighting.  I don't even know what I'm 
fighting for.  Have I deluded myself into thinking there's still a 
reason to fight?  Do I just want to believe so... so badly that the 
sky is still falling and the truth is still out there that I'm willing to 
give up my walker and oxygen mask to run around playing good 
guys and bad guys games with Alex Krycek and Walter Skinner?  
Do I think there's still a place for me in the shadows beside Marita 
Covarrubias?  Scully, am I insane?  Is this all an inescapable fate 
or the wild dream of a sleeping lunatic?  I need your help, Scully.  I 
need you and you're not here and... and..."  Mulder closed his eyes 
and pinched the bridge of his nose.  He kept his eyes closed and 
his fingers tight as he finished what he had to say.  "And I have to 
go to bed.  It's been a long day."

  The next afternoon, Mulder found Harold in the backyard, 
surrounded by silent children holding hands in a circle around 
him.  From the back porch, he watched, amazed, his eyes 
fixed on Harold and the children who were barely visible, but 
were visible nonetheless.  

  Mulder stepped hesitantly forward.  It seemed like he had been
walking for hours when he finally walked among them into their
circle.

  "Aren't they perfect and beautiful?" Harold asked Mulder and 
Mulder could only silently nod in agreement.  "But they are not
whole because only whales and dolphins know no separation from 
God."

  "Harold, who are they?"

  "I don't know.  They're somebody," he answered, tears beginning 
to pour down his cheeks.  After they were gone, Mulder led Harold
back inside, where he locked down the house for the night and
ordered a pizza for their dinner.  For the next forty-five minutes,
he sat in the living room, listening to the stereo and writing while
Harold sat in the floor and stared at the ceiling and sang nursery
rhymes.  When the pizza came, Mulder rushed Harold into one of 
the bedrooms until he got rid of the delivery girl and then they ate.

  After dinner, Mulder cleaned up and introduced Harold to the 
rocking chair.

  "You sit here, Harold," he said, easing the old man down.  Then 
he sat crosslegged on the floor.

  "Show me.  Let me see her again."



-ad
--

Pt. 14/21  



  I can't count the years since she was taken.  It happened here, 
in this house.  In this room.  I've waited a lifetime to speak with
her again and finally, now, I'm ready.


  It's 1973 and she's here with me.  She is my sister, Samantha, 
and she's eight years old and I'm twelve.  We're alone and I'm in
charge of the house.  Dad told us both that this morning and man 
did I watch the clock, counting the hours until I could be in charge
again.  Of course, things kept coming up for mom and dad all
afternoon, but now they're gone and they won't be back until late.
We're playing Stratego in front of the television and a news update
of the Watergate hearings is on and she's bitching because she 
wants to watch something else, but it's my television night anyway 
and besides that I'm in charge of everything including the television
until mom and dad get back and I think it's so funny to remind her 
every time she says anything about it.  She starts screaming and 
saying that mom told her she could watch something else.  We're 
standing in front of the television, arguing, stepping on the board 
and knocking a couple of the gamepieces over and the power goes 
out.  She is scared and I try to use that to my advantage, but the 
impulse only lasts a second.  I want to calm her down.  I don't want 
her to be scared.  Then a shock passes between us and the 
gameboard and the pieces are shaking and then the house starts 
shaking and I am frozen.  I think it's an earthquake at first, but it's 
all happening so fast and I don't know and then lights are flashing 
through the windows, red and green, and they're everywhere and 
now the noise has stopped and the house and the gameboard and 
the pieces have all stopped shaking.  The quiet feels like a blanket 
or a wet sweater over everything and I feel like I'm underwater.  
Time feels like it's come to a total stop.

  I look around for her, for my sister.  I see her floating toward 
and then through the front window.  A ray of amber light is 
centered on her chest almost like they're targeting her, and then 
she's moving up, into the air and I know what's happening.  Oh my 
god, I know what's happening and I know they're going to take her 
and I can't stop them oh god please, I can't stop them I can't do 
anything and I know...

  I know.

  They're taking my sister away and they're going to do such 
horrible things to her.  They're going to hurt Samantha so bad.

  Something inside me snaps and I run to the bookcase and step 
onto the chair I had the Stratego box on.  As I reach for the 
wooden box on top of the bookcase, as my fingers make contact, 
I hear it.  I hear the voice stopping me, telling me things and I see 
the box fall slowly to the floor.  The lock breaks and the top swings 
open.  Things fall out - change, folded papers, and my father's gun.

  Samantha is calling me, screaming my name, over and over and then
she stops.  She's gone.

  Now. 

  I am an old man and I sit in the floor of the house in front of 
the place where a gameboard once sat and there, across from me, 
she comes through the door.  She is my sister, Samanatha, and she 
is fourteen years old.  She is taller and she is becoming a woman.  
Her blue sweater and long skirt seem right for her as she walks 
toward me.  I hug her close to me, feeling her arms around my ribs 
and her hair on my chin and throat.

  We are here again, together, and I can say to her all of those
things I've prayed for the chance to say.  I can tell her anything I
want.

  I want to believe.
  

  Mulder closed his eyes.  He wanted to believe it was her, but now 
it felt too easy.  It felt good to call this ghost his sister, but
it wasn't her and he couldn't pretend it was.

  Beside him, in the rocking chair, Harold began to scream. 

  "They, they," his eyes got very wide and he stood up and started
bouncing on the balls of his feet.  "They needed to see each other's
faces through the night and we stole their faces.  God's army won
while Cydonia watched.  We beat them!  Oh sweet God, we beat them. 
Oh sweet God," he whispered it over and over as he slumped to his
knees and began to cry.

  Good-night, Harold, Mulder said, patting the man on the back, 
and went downstairs.  With shaking hands, he fished a cigarette 
from the pack on the table.  Then he started to hunt for his 
lighter, but stopped.  He pulled the cigarette out from between 
his lips and stared at it for a long moment before wadding the 
pack up and throwing it in the trash.

  "Fuck you," he whispered to another ghost and turned the 
computer on.  His mailbox held one e-mail and it was from Skinner.


Washington D.C. 
December 2

  "Holy shit!"

  The sound of squealing brakes and the blare of a horn destroyed 
the quiet of this sunny winter's day as the driver of the
standard-issue military cargo truck brought the vehicle to a sudden
stop.  He stared straight ahead at what had made him hit the brakes,
which was something the man next to him couldn't see at all.

  "What the fuck's the problem here?" the passenger demanded.

  "Them!" the driver screamed and pointed.  "Them!  They're what 
the problem is, man!  Damn, they're all fucked up, like they jumped
off a building.  Goddammit, look!  Fucking dead kids, man!  What the
fuck?  You don't see-"

  "Out of the truck!  Now!"  Mulder pressed the end of his rifle
against the side of the driver's head.  The two men, both soldiers,
exited the truck.  While the passenger and Mulder's partner were
walking around the truck to the driver's side, the driver twitched
nervously, suspiciously eyeing his surroundings, particularly toward
the front of the truck.  When the other two joined them, Mulder made
the soldiers stand side by side in front of him and then continued
issuing orders.

  "Great job, men.  And now I want you to lie facefirst on the 
ground.  Now!  C'mon, move it!  No one here's getting any younger." 
The soldiers complied and while Mulder's partner kept watch over
them, Mulder moved around to the back of their truck and pulled
aside the curtain over the tailgate.  The cargo was large cardboard
boxes, maybe a dozen or so, each one marked with what appeared 
to be some sort of inventory tags - small sets of letters and 
numbers.

  Merchandise. 

  Mulder pulled his knife from his pocket and cut the tape binding 
the nearest box.  Inside were dozens of old unmarked videotapes.  
He found the same in the next four boxes he opened.  In the last 
one, he found bunches of folders overflowing with documents, 
x-rays, and photographs.  After examining the contents of each 
box, he walked back to where the soldiers were lying in the street 
and knelt beside the driver.

  "Where were you taking this stuff?" he asked. 

  There was no answer.

  "C'mon guys, my boss sent me out here to score and I gotta have
something to tell him.  Cut a guy some slack, huh?"  Neither of the
men seemed ready to answer any questions, particularly the driver.

  "No?  Ok fine."  Mulder then moved the cardboard boxes into the 
van while his partner kept his watch over the soldiers.  When he was
finished, he signalled to his partner.

  "We're leaving now, gentlemen.  If anyone asks you what happened, 
and you know they will, tell them Kilroy was here.  Jerks."

  As Mulder and his partner got back in their van, the phantasmic
bodies of the seven dead children returned and surrounded the men
lying in the road.  Both soldiers saw the children this time.  They
were horrified and they didn't see the rear door of the van open or
the face of Harold Piller laughing hysterically as the van pulled
away.

  Mulder watched in the side mirror until the men and their truck 
had disappeared and then he opened the laptop and hit CONNECT.  A
second later, Skinner appeared in a window.

  "Mission accomplished," Mulder reported.  "Now who do I talk to
about getting a raise?"

  "Are you going to tell me about the merchandise?"

  Mulder winced.  "Mostly home movies, it looks like.  Some files.  
I didn't have time to do any reading, but I bet they're all real
page-turners." 

  "Your source gave us reason to believe they will be.  Travel 
safely," Skinner said. 

  "Will do," Mulder answered and turned off the computer.


Chilmark 
December 8

  The light from the computer's monitor washed most of the 
basement's work area in a ghostly pale blue glow, diluted only by
the weak light of the aquarium, which to his left sliced through the
monitor's light but to his right, like the computer's light, failed in 
its bid to penetrate the inky blackness alive and pulsing just 
beyond the trophy case.

  With Harold (hopefully) sound asleep upstairs, he waded through 
a standard series of mindless perfunctory tasks - checking his
e-mail, reading some useless news, and downloading a new web 
browser from a temporary web site - and then he logged off and 
went to work.  Folders were pulled from filing cabinets, X-files 
revisited, each case striking chords Mulder had thought dead but 
which were easily revived.  He worked hour after hour organizing 
files, making notes, writing down his thoughts about each case.

  This became his practice every evening after he was finished with
Harold and whatever miscellaneous surprises the days may have 
held.  This was his life until he got the next e-mail from Skinner.


Washington D.C.
December 12

  "Nice afternoon, isn't it gentlemen?  I want you to put your hands
on your head, lace your fingers together and stay right where you
are."

  They were in a building which was officially a processing center 
for Universal Access Cards, but Skinner believed otherwise.  He 
believed the real work being done here involved transcribing 
medical data from genetics labs.  Based on that belief, they had 
been sent to collect a sample of the work being done to confirm 
Skinner's suspicions ("they" being Mulder and his new partner, 
Seth).  He had resisted being paired with a boy, but Skinner had 
reassured him, both of the ease of the job due to a total lack of 
security and of the boy's ability to handle himself like a man.

  Right now Mulder was hoping that Skinner was right on both 
counts because he was getting a very bad feeling as he stood, 
M-16 ready, looking at the various wide-eyed people sitting at 
their workstations and wondering if they were about to die. 

  You're looking at the real traitors.

  Mulder lowered the M-16 and motioned for Seth to stay by the 
door.  With any luck, there would be absolutely no surprises.  He 
wanted this to be over as soon as possible but with each passing 
second his suspicion that something was destined to go wrong 
grew stronger.

  But so far everything was dead on the money.  The key codes, 
the fingerprint scans, the layout, the population.  There was no 
way he could truly see this going bad unless...

  No, nothing.  They were supposed to be in and out in twenty 
minutes and if the next thirteen went the way they were supposed 
to, they would get out clean.

  "Oh, I'm sorry.  Ladies and gentlemen," he corrected his earlier
mistake and held the bag across the counter to the woman who had
been blocked from his original line of sight by the huge man in the
green suit next to her.  She took the bag and began putting the
papers stacked on her desk into it, her eyes darting back and forth
between her task and Mulder's eyes.  He was wearing a ski mask, but
her eyes made him feel like she was looking at his bare face.  She
looked like maybe she knew him, although that was impossible.  But
she did, and she looked pissed off about it.

  She moved on to the drawers of her desk, removing whatever she 
could find and putting it in the bag.

  Mulder looked quickly back at Seth and then at the other people. 
There wouldn't be time for all of them, and maybe not even another
of them, but they didn't know that and their fear was almost
tangible.  He felt it begin to crash softly into him and when he
looked back at the woman in front of him, she quickly pulled her
hand from underneath her desk.

  You let her hit the alarm. 

  Their eyes locked and a dark snarling chasm yawned open before 
him.  From somewhere far away, he heard Seth's voice telling him
there was no time but Mulder didn't hear Seth saying it.  He heard
Scully.  He saw a digital countdown flashing across the woman holding
the bag out to him now.  Behind her he saw a building explode and
then a limousine, and he saw Scully with a tube in her throat and he
heard Duane Barry's voice telling him, "They drilled holes in my
damn teeth!"

  She's one of them. 

  He felt the M-16 rise before him as a cold wave coursed through 
him.

  Do her.

  He pulled the trigger, feeling the gun vibrate for seconds and 
hours and days and he watched the woman explode as the bullets
opened her and opened her, bleeding her in eruptions spraying all
the way to counter until he let go of the trigger and she fell.

  Spooky Mulder. 

  Without hesitating, he turned to the others.  "I'm not lying to 
you people.  Download your hard drives and put all of your papers
into this bag."  He held the bag out with his right hand as he walked 
from desk to desk and he was calm and he was cool and he went
one by one until he was finished collecting the loot.  When he was
finished, he stopped where Seth had stood guard and spraypainted 
an "X" on the wall.

  As soon as the building in the van's side mirror was out of sight, 
Mulder pulled his mask off and turned on the computer.  A window 
opened, but it remained black.  Skinner wasn't answering.

  Wildeyed, Mulder turned to Seth.  "Dick isn't home.  I say we wait 
for his lazy ass.  How about it?"

  Seth nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. 

  "Well, it's about time!" Mulder said when Skinner did appear soon 
afterward.  "You can't imagine how long we've been waiting.  I think 
you pissed my partner off."

  Skinner's voice was tense.  "Were you waiting long? Just how long 
were you waiting for me?"

  Mulder looked at his watch, but he knew he didn't know.  
  
  Five... 

  Ten... 

  "Click the triangle in the border of the window beneath me.  
Now!"

  Mulder did it and beneath Skinner, in red, 00:00 appeared. 

  "We're fucked."

  He closed the laptop and told Seth to stop the van.  He jumped 
out, set the laptop beneath the rear tire and screamed "Go!" 

  Seth nailed the accelerator and the van lurched forward.  When it
stopped, Mulder got back in and his partner asked if he got it in
time.  Mulder didn't answer.  He stayed quiet for the rest of the trip.



-ad
--

Pt. 15/21

  Their return entrance into Skinner's warehouse hideout was a far 
cry from what any of them had anticipated upon leaving earlier that
day.  After they had parked down the street and walked back and 
gave the coded knock on the door, they were greeted by the 
predictably furious Skinner.  He stepped aside after staring coldly 
and silently at the both of them and they came in with the few 
boxes they had been able to carry.

  They set their loads down and as Skinner relocked the door, Seth
shot a now familiar look at Mulder. 

  "Did we make it?" Mulder asked Skinner, who still hadn't turned 
away from the door although it was now securely fastened.  He had
only seen Skinner's face as he was passing him on the way in, but he
thought it was possible, based on that one look, that he had never
seen him this angry.  The intensity of his gaze had been magnified 
by the sweat on his clenched cheeks and beaded above the leather 
band of the eyepatch across his forehead and in the lines of his face 
broken together into a near-snarl.

  "Easy Mulder.  We're safe.  Whatever you did worked." 

  Seth stood near Mulder, his eyes going back and forth between the
other two until Skinner exploded. 

 "Goddammit, we have to talk!  In private!" 

  Now Seth looked at neither Mulder nor Skinner.  He simply left and
Mulder thought it was very likely that he wouldn't return.  Then the
two men walked further into the warehouse, past a generator and a
table covered with maps and blueprints.  Skinner turned by the next
table, on top of which a television attached to a prewar vcr showed
a white male

  -early thirties, blond, blue eyes-

  giving muted testimony, and kept walking past a weight bench,
finally stopping in front of the treadmill.

  "I want to know what the fuck you were thinking out there!  Are 
you trying to get us all killed?  If you're pulling some bullshit, I
swear to god I'll-"

  "You'll what?" Mulder shouted back at Skinner.  "Are you going to 
fire me, Walter?  Are you going to give me a lecture about my
irresponsible behavior and tell me I'm a four-bagger?"

  "No," Skinner hissed.  "I won't even bother trying to explain it 
to you.  I'll put a fucking bullet in you instead.  How about that?
Now, I'm only going to ask one more time.  What were you thinking
out there?"

  Mulder turned and started to walk away but couldn't.  He turned 
back around and pointed at Skinner.  "You sorry son of-"

  "Look!  Fuck you, Mulder!  I am sorry if I'm being a major league 
asshole, but you could have gotten us killed today.  All of us!  It's 
not just your ass, Mulder.  It's not just you and Scully putting 
knives in your mouths and swinging from the masts of pirate ships 
out there.  You're damn sure not some idiot who isn't up to this.  I 
don't know.  What has you, Mulder?  What is going on here?"
  
  Mulder stood, listening to Skinner, but the sight of the dying 
woman was starting to replay on the computer monitor in his head. 

  "I don't think this raping and pillaging gig is for me after all.  
We're getting our hands dirty as hell and we're not getting
anywhere."

  "I would have thought you'd be used to that," Skinner answered, 
his anger still radiant.

  "This is just a game to you, isn't it?  You think you're doing
something, but you're just jerking off here!"  Mulder looked away
from Skinner, needing to see anything else right now.  Anything.  
The weight bench, the guy on the television, the treadmill, the 
table between them. 

  "I am the person running this show and you came to me.  You 
played the cloak and dagger and you asked me to take you in.  There
was no confusion and no question about what you were getting into. 
Don't come in here-"

  "Hey, fuck you, Skinner," Mulder interrupted, nearly shouting 
again.  "You want to know?  You want to know why old Spooky's a 
big bad liability you might have to put a bullet into?  Fucking fine!
Junior and me, we're in there playing Robin Hood and threatening to
kill these people for their computer discs and they're looking at
us...  The normal people... They're just looking at us scared for
their lives.  They're at work, man, and we come in there with guns
blazing talking about shooting them all and this one woman.  There
was one woman there and she reached under her desk.  She could 
have been scratching her leg and I killed her.  I just killed her.  I
just..."  He raised his hands in the air, palms up. 

  Blondie's lying. 

  Skinner stared at Mulder and Mulder found it hard to decode his 
expression.  Even his tone was somewhat neutral when he began 
to respond. 

  "I see.  All I can tell you is what you did was right.  She triggered 
the silent alarm.  I saw the call on the dispatch log online after we 
talked.  You did what you had to do.  That's all there is to that."

  "Yeah," Mulder said, obviously unmoved by Skinner's reassurance. 

  "You had no choice and think about the people you saved!  They
matter too or can't you see past your self-righteous guilt?  You
didn't betray anyone.  You were loyal. 

  "She was the real traitor." 

  She was nobody.

  "What people are those, Walter?  Where are these people I saved
today?  I think it's about time they knew who they owed for their 
fucking happy lives.  I think it's time these assholes knew who the 
real heroes are and they should know about these heroic measures 
we're willing to take in their defense.  Oh yes, there's some stuff I 
need to discuss with them, so please, tell me who they are."  Mulder 
felt something inside him yield to the pressure it had been resisting 
and he slumped against the wall, sliding slowly to the floor where he 
then sat with his elbows on his bent knees and his hands covering his 
face until he spoke again. 

  "There used to be this voice inside of me that I heard all the 
time.  I know.  I'm nuts, right?"  He wiped the new tears off his
cheeks with both hands.  "That was the voice that told me what 
to ask and it was the voice that made the connections.  It was 
the voice of a man who believed and was excited and amazed by 
extreme possibilities. 

  "Do you remember me back then?  Back when you first got the 
bullshit job of babysitting me?" 

  They both laughed then, Skinner quite to his own surprise. 

  "It died.  The excitement or the charm or the wonder or, fuck, I
don't even know.  It's gone though, man.  It's gone."  He was crying
harder now, the rhythm of his words becoming disjointed.  "I think it
died with Scully.  Now I hear a voice and it's not the same.  I hear
these things it says and they're coming from a demon lying in wait.
All he wants is to hurt people and he doesn't care who.  Any people.
Maybe all people.  Everyone. 
 
  "I think you hear him too.  We both hear him and we're listening 
to him now. 

  "I remember one time, Scully and I were investigating the death 
of this really young kid.  Walked out onto some railroad tracks and 
got smacked.  She thought it was open and shut accidental.  I 
thought there was something else no one had considered.  Turns 
out...  Maybe you remember this.  Turns out the kid's older brother 
had a dead twin, died at birth, and that twin's ghost was back here 
from Hell...  From Hell, Walter.  From Hell..."  He stopped talking 
and laughed for a second but it was broken by an also soon broken 
sob.  "The men who exorcised the demon, one of the men, he told 
me that since I had looked into its eyes it would recognize me in 
the future.  I wonder how hard a time it would have these days. 

  "Walter, what did we do?  What did we do to become these people? 
How did this happen?"

  "It doesn't matter," Skinner answered, frowning again.  "We are 
who we are and we do what we have to do.  It's right...  It's our
duty to be doing this.  This isn't the world we tried to make and we
can't give up now.  No matter what, we can't give up."

  There was no argument offered, no real response at all except 
an incredulous dropping of Mulder's jaw before he shook his head 
and stood up.

  "I'll try to keep that in mind, sir." 

  Skinner followed him silently through the warehouse and 
maintained his silence until Mulder had left and was on the next
block.

  "Stay in touch, Agent," Skinner said and closed the door.
  

  With his hands firmly jammed into the pockets of his trenchcoat,
Mulder began to walk heavily through the newly fallen snow back to
his car but the hard crunch of his boots wasn't making it to his 
ears.  The sounds of his own walking and the sights of D.C.'s snowy 
world were nothing because he was seeing a woman dying in his 
eyes and he was hearing the echo of the shots and it kept 
happening over and over while he was driving, the world going past 
but barely within his realm of awareness.  Mostly all he could see 
were her eyes changing shape as the bullets plugged into her - one, 
one, one, bam, bam, bam - and her head, her eyes, the shock on 
her face. 

  After a while, he didn't know how long, his surroundings began to
force themselves through the visions of the woman's eyes and, 
soon after, those surroundings became familiar.  He started to 
recognize some of the abandoned cars and the intersections where 
people had set fires in large garbage cans and warmed themselves 
by those fires.  He parked and crossed the street and began to 
move quickly down the sidewalk toward a place where he believed 
he too could find some measure of warmth. 

  A tall woman was coming toward him and although there was 
nothing in particular which set her apart from anyone else he had 
seen around here, he felt compelled to stop and wait for her.  As 
she drew closer, he could see that she was carrying a Bible.  Less 
than four feet away from him she started screaming without 
making eye contact and she kept right on going, walking past him 
without the least acknowledgement, and still screaming,  "The 
evil one has risen!  The evil one has risen!" 

  Mulder pulled his hands out of his pockets as he walked up the
stairs and entered the dark building.  This time he had his
flashlight and wasted no time in turning it on.  Everything was 
the same as he had imagined it on his first visit.  Only the smell
seemed different, something had burned nearby recently, and 
that was a subtle and temporary thing. 

  Wake up.   
  
  Halfway down the small hallway, he stopped and took another 
look around.  Something else was different. 

  Something wasn't right at all.

  He moved slowly the rest of the way to her door, twisted the 
knob and pushed and the door opened.  He put one foot inside and
panned his flashlight around.  The place was a wreck, the glass from
her broken windows twinkling atop piles of clothes and overturned
furniture.  He took another couple of steps and saw her across the
apartment in the floor of the kitchen. 

  "Marita," he whispered and ran to her.  She was on her side, nude, 
with her hands and ankles tied behind her.  Several of her fingers 
were broken and sticking off her hands at extreme angles.  He 
quickly untied her and stretched her legs out before examining
her face.  The whole left side of her face was bruised and her nose
was a bloody mess.  Her left eye was swollen shut, but he was 
afraid to turn her any further.  A small white piece of paper was 
pinned to her left breast with the word "WHORE" written on it in 
blood. 

  He could only shake his head and breathe out deeply.  He looked
around the kitchen and that's when he saw her guest, someone else
who had been turned into a dead body.  Mulder crossed over to this
one and recognized him as a former Congressman from Utah.  He 
had been slit across the throat and again below the fat of his 
stomach.  From what Mulder could see, he thought that if he turned 
the former Congressman over, the man's intestines could easily 
spill out of him and it was hard enough avoiding the blood that was 
still gathering into two pools on the floor as it poured from each 
wound.  Besides, Mulder chided himself, there wasn't anything else 
to see there. 

  He stood up and put the table back on its legs, carefully avoiding
stepping in either of the growing pools of blood, and took a deep
breath before looking around the wreck of an apartment again.  
There would be- 

  "Fox..." 

  It was Marita.  He practically dove to her and now she had turned 
her head up toward him on her own.  He saw that both of her eyes 
were nearly swollen shut and she was barely hanging on.

  Do her a favor, Einstein. 

  And he had been certain she was dead.  "Alex... Alex Krycek..." 
she whispered, the pain Mulder thought had to be incredible making
her stop and squeeze her free hand into a mangled fist.  "He's not
dead.  He was here."

  "I know, Marita.  I know.  It's ok, he reassured her and brushed
her hair out her face as lightly as he could, and wondered if it had
ever been possible for her to have died another death.

  "No...  you...  He's insane, Fox.  I... should have let...  
die... Tu... Tunisia.  I tried...  tried to tell..."

  And the already dim light in her bruised and swollen eyes began to
fade. 

  "He wants... you... think maybe Steponavich... sent him to kill  you.  
I... I have an address for you."  She gave him the address and then 
Mulder sat with her and held her head up so that she could breathe 
and stay conscious just a little longer.  He watched her fading and 
he tried to feel more than he did about this dying woman.  He tried 
to look beyond her complicity in the crimes committed against him 
and think only of those times she did assist him - their introduction 
when she gave him the picture of the Samantha clones, her phone 
call to him when she had the infected boy from Russia, her betrayal 
of the syndicate to Jeffrey Spender.  He tried to feel as though he 
was losing an old friend, but he didn't.  He didn't shed a single tear 
as he held her head in his hands until she was gone.  He stared at 
her lifeless face, not thinking anything more about her until he had 
to stand up and then he moved quickly through her apartment, a 
search he knew would be hopeless and he was right.  Her computer 
was gone.  After silently cursing Krycek, Mulder pulled his lighter 
out and set fire to the sheet on the wire and then the cardboard 
patches on the walls and then the curtains in the kitchen.  He went 
back into the bedroom and when he came out the whole apartment 
was engulfed in flame.  He walked through the blazing apartment 
confidently, purposefully.

  Outside, he tried to concentrate on his breath turning to steam 
as he ran to the car because he thought if he didn't, he might start
screaming and never stop.  He drove the car several blocks away 
and then parked and opened the laptop computer.  He looked at his 
watch because he wanted to make sure his resignation- 

  suicide

  -letter was dated as accurately as possible.

  There was one message in his mailbox and although he didn't want 
to open it, a voice inside him was demanding otherwise and right now
that voice was the one that made the most sense. 

  You pussy.  You fuck. 

  The e-mail was an address followed by the simple message, 
"Tomorrow night.  It's over."

  Mulder read it a few times, each time pondering the weight of each
word, and then forwarded the letter to Skinner, turned the computer
off and drove home.



-ad
--

Pt. 16/21



  Skinner turned his computer off and filled a glass tumbler with 
ice and whiskey.  He held the tumbler under his nose, finding
reassurance in the fact that he obviously was not an alcoholic
because he did not, by any stretch of the imagination, drink solely
to get drunk.  He also drank because he liked the taste.  And the
smell.

  And the feel of the glass in his hand, the way the ice would shift 
against it when he lifted it to his lips.

  And he liked the way drinking was so damn good for killing the 
pain which, unfortunately, now seemed to be an everyday part of 
life for him.

  He turned the tumbler up, eyeing the whiskey bottle over the rim 
while taking another introductory sip of the long familiar companion.  
He felt it burn past his throat and into his stomach as he sat down, 
his leg singing what he planned to be the last few lines of the opera 
it began every time he got out of bed.  In tribute to the opera's end, 
he raised a toast to the leg and to the missing eye and to the shit in 
his blood and to everything else he had managed to hang on to.

  "At least there's that," he whispered and looked apologetically 
at the picture of his wife, Sharon, while the tumbler hung frozen 
in his hand before him.  She would not have been pleased to find 
what a drinking man he had become.  After her father's death...

  He emptied the toasting tumbler of its whiskey with one swallow 
and then he filled it again.  As he twisted the cap back onto the
booze, his regularly scheduled routine of getting smashed and
beating himself up was interrupted by the sudden and grating sound
of a car's horn blaring outside.  In the same way a devoted dreamer
will vainly attempt to resist the unyielding buzz of an alarm clock,
or an empassioned writer will wage a worthless war against the
inevitable chaos caused by noisy neighbors, Skinner tried as best he
could to block out the sound of the horn.  He closed his eyes and 
tried to be nowhere until it was over, but it didn't end and his nerves
began to whisper that it might go on forever.

  With his right hand gripping the empty tumbler tightly, and his 
left balled into a fist, he counted off five and when "one" had
gone, he went to the front of the warehouse and reached into the
corner beside the row of bookcases and grabbed the M-16 he kept
there for special occasions.

  Something was telling him that tonight was special.

  He checked the weapon, making sure it was ready, and he moved. 
Despite his attempts at medicating himself, the leg still hurt like
a bitch as he limped to the door and fell against it.

  His knuckles started to ache and he was bombarded by images he
carried in a mental briefcase.  They were the innocents - the
victims of war and terrorism and he had seen them in photographs 
and moving pictures when he had led the fight against the bad guys. 
They were the dying and the wounded who had been caught in the
crossfire.  Their bodies were missing limbs, their heads were either
gone or split open.  They were mangled and when their faces 
remained, those faces were the faces he saw now, lying on the 
sidewalks and in the streets of Belfast where they were victims 
of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Irish National Liberation Army, 
or the Irish Republican Army or in the middle East where they 
suffered and died because of skirmishes between the P.L.O. and 
Israeli soldiers.

  Or in America. 

  The invasion. 

  The images coalesced into one.  It was a kid loaded down with 
hand grenades.  He felt the tightening of his finger around the
trigger of the rifle and the fresh beads of sweat running across 
his scalp.  His breath started to come in short blasts as he relived 
the moment he had, in many ways, never escaped from.  The rifle 
coughed and he sent one to the kid right through his head.

  "Jesus, no, no, no..." he whispered and opened his eyes as he
twisted his neck and surveilled the street through the window, left
to right, a quick horizontal sweep.  He took a one second inventory
and dropped back down out of sight.  There hadn't been anything
there.  There was just the street and the dead car across the way
that had been there for over a year.  The soldier knew that didn't
mean the enemy wasn't there.  It meant only that the enemy 
couldn't be seen from this location and the horn still blared. 

  A sharp twist and a jerk and the door was open.  Skinner tucked 
and rolled across the floor, rising into an extremely painful
kneeling position with his rifle pointed at anyone or anything that
might have been waiting, but there was only an envelope.  It had
been propped against the door and now lay across the threshold.  
He rose and kicked the enveloped inside and closed the door, 
keeping the rifle aimed and ready.

  Just before he could close the first deadbolt, he heard the sound 
of a motorcycle disappearing into the distance.

  After he reset the rest of the locks, Skinner retrieved his drink
and opened his package.  A compact disc slid out of the envelope
followed by a slip of paper with a message which read, "Hope it's
what you wanted.  X".  He put the disc into a standalone hard drive. 
After confirming what it held, he began downloading the first of
several programs into the Palm Pilot he had stolen many years
before.  A simple cable connection, a series of short easy 
commands, a twist of plastic and a tilt of a bottle and he started 
to get lost staring at the download completion bar.

  He grinned.  It happened with such ease sometimes.  He had to be
careful.  Now was not the time to be a drunk old fool.  He still had
work to do, easy though it was.  He checked the data transfer rate
again, which was really all he could do besides stay awake while
things ran along. 

  He considered that the whiskey was doing its job, by god, and 
that's all you can ask of any soldier, then he closed his eyes and
almost instantly he was in the backseat of a taxi, relieved to be
out of the sun for what felt like the first time in hours.  There
were still a dozen potential apartments and houses to look at and 
it was already over eighty-five degrees out.  He knew he should 
have worn a hat, but he didn't.  He gave the driver the next address 
and when he felt her hand on his, heard her voice lightly whispering 
in his ear, and when he turned and looked at Sharon for what felt 
like the first time that day, the animal inside him (the one Mulder 
knew was there; the one who heard the voice) sensed the shift in 
the air, a human shape, an arm in motion, but couldn't react before 
he felt a gun's barrel against his scalp.

  "Whoever you are, you better kill me now, you stupid 
motherfucker," Skinner spat angrily.

  "I'm here to warn you, Skinner," the intruder said and pulled his 
gun away from Skinner's head.  Skinner turned slowly to face John 
Doggett.

  "Well, whatever you're selling, I don't want any and you couldn't 
have picked a worse time to-"

  "That's ok, because I'm not selling anything.  I'm giving something 
away," Doggett said.  "I'm giving away free advice.  Get used to 
staying at home."

  "Thanks, asshole.  Now get out."

  "Listen to me.  You're fucking up-" 

  "I'm fucking up?  You sonofabitch!  Look at you!  Look at yourself.  
Think about how you spent the last three weeks and you want to 
come here and point a gun at me and tell me that I'm fucking up?  
You have some goddam nerve, Doggett.  You should have killed me 
just then when you had the chance.  But now...  Now I'm going to 
fucking kill you!"  Skinner bit back the impulse to lunge at the 
bastard, to go for his gun and then for his throat.

  Doggett held his gun steady and looked strangely at the man in 
front of it.

  "Maybe you're right.  Maybe this wasn't the best time to do this.  
You have to believe me though.  I'm trying to help you.  You and 
whoever you're working with."

  "F-f-f-f-f-fuck you," Skinner seethed.  "I'm not stupid.  I know 
who you are and you killed Agent Scully and I'm going to kill you!"
Again he resisted the impulse to lash out at Doggett, but his
ability to resist that impulse was fading.  Quickly. 

  "My hands are pretty much tied here," Doggett said.  "I don't 
know what else I can do.  As for what you think you know about 
my sins, it's not about truth with you is it?  This isn't that same
world we used to live in where the truth would set us free, man. 
This is a different world, a different ball game, right?  In this
great fucking world we live in now, we just grab conviction out of
the air and God help any poor bastard who gets in the way of that,
right?"  He looked around, halfway expecting some of Skinner's
helpers to be popping out of the shadows and if not them, someone
else.  "Well, that's fine, Skinner.  Those are the rules then and
Agent Scully wasn't stupid.  She was smarter than any of us and 
she knew the rules.  I think she knew them before anyone else really 
did."

  Skinner smacked his fist against his leg, exactly in the spot he
thought of as the "pain headquarters" and a very small yelp escaped
from the back of his throat.  "You killed her because she was going
to go public with what she knew.  You killed her to shut her up and I
am going to love putting you down.  Oh fuck yeah!"

  "She died to protect what she and Mulder had been fighting for!" 
Doggett seemed to be more comfortable with his argument now.  
"If she had let the world know how close it had come to being wiped 
out by aliens, that would have been the end for us all.  The world 
can not know that.  Not now.  Not ever.  Remember, Skinner, you're 
not the only one who can grab easy convictions out of the air and 
expect the rest of the world to bow down and kiss your ass under 
threat of death.  I'm not here because of the man you are.  I'm here 
because of the man you were.  You used to be a good man."  Doggett 
stopped and gave a slight disapproving shake of his head.

  "Doggett, you're a dead man." 

  "Yeah, that may be, but I won't be the only one if you keep this 
up.  I could have tracked you down whenever I wanted.  I haven't. 
After I leave, you think about that.  But whatever you've got 
planned for the next little while, or if you get the urge to make 
plans, pass on it.

  "That's it.  I got nothing more to say."

  He stepped away from Skinner, moving backward until he came to 
the table with the maps and blueprints and he scraped them all off
onto the floor.  Then he motioned for Skinner to get up on it.

  "I'm going to kill you, Dogget."  Skinner limped to the table 
and hefted himself onto the end nearest Doggett. 

  "Lie back on the table and put your legs up.  In the air."  Doggett 
was getting close to the front door.

  "I'm going to shoot your brains out."  Skinner called to him and
raised his legs into the air which made him cry out from the pain. 
When he caught his breath, he said, "You might as well kiss your
fucking ass good-bye."  He smiled widely and looked again at his
intruder but Agent-turned-General John Doggett was gone.

  Within seconds, Skinner was on his feet and across the warehouse 
and he had the M-16 waving in his hand outside as he ran down the
street firing it into the night's sky and screaming, "You're mine,
Doggett!  Mine!  You fucking hear me, you son of a bitch?  You're
mine!"

  He fell asleep later, sitting upright in a chair in front of the 
map table which was covered with bullets, clips, various tools, 
and two small vials he had stolen when he had been a different 
man. 



-ad
--

Pt. 17/21




6:35 a.m. December 17

  Mulder and Harold walked side by side, two men strolling casually
down the sidewalk with the full sunrise to their backs and in their
immediate future perhaps a coffee shop for a hot cup and a doughnut
or two.  Had they been ordinary men, perhaps they would have stayed
on the sidewalk and they very well could have found themselves
sipping hot coffee over glazed doughnuts and enjoying each other's
company.  They were not ordinary men though, and because they 
were not oridinary men they did not stay on the sidewalk.  They 
strayed from it into an alley, dark from the shadows of the tall 
buildings to either side.  Soon, all that seemed to remain of the day 
was a small blue square of sky over a narrow break between the 
buildings to their right.  Inside the break and back to the right, a 
dark green awning hung off the building and over a set of concrete 
stairs going down toward what had probably been a staff entrance 
before the invasion. 

  A Harley-Davidson motorcycle was parked on the other side of the
stairs.  It seemed out of place, but Harley-Davidson was one of the
few giants to survive the changes in the world and lots of people
rode them.  This one looked prewar and that was very unusual.

  Mulder walked past the stairs to inspect the bike.  On the back,
instead of a government-issued plate, there was a fake which read
"h@X0R".  He patted the seat and grinned.  This motorcycle could
only belong to one person and that person had to be inside. 

  He walked back to the stairs and put his hands on Harold's 
shoulders and tried to make eye contact with the man.  "Ok, we're 
here on business," he said slowly.  "We're here to see someone 
very important.  He's an old friend of mine, like you.  I need you to 
be my friend, Harold, and behave, ok?  No children, Harold.  Keep 
them outside, ok?  Do you understand?"

  "They don't want anyone to suffer," Harold whispered.

  "Great," Mulder said and they walked down the stairs and he 
knocked on the door.

  "Identify yourself or fuck off!" the voice came from very close
behind the door. 

  "F.B.I." he answered.  "Open up." 

  The sound of several padlocks being unlocked followed the sounds 
of several chains being unchained before the door opened to reveal 
a tall, skinny, old bald man with thick glasses in big black frames
wearing blue jeans and an AC/DC t-shirt.

  "Mulder!" Langly greeted him loudly and happily, hugging his old
friend.  Mulder hugged back and smiled.  He pulled back slightly,
ending the embrace and he rubbed his hand over his old friend's 
bald head.

  "Easy come, easy go, huh?" Langly said, standing aside and 
motioning Mulder and Harold inside.  The place was one room, lit
only by the lights of a bank of fifteen computer monitors of 
varying sizes and shapes.  The sound of hard rock whispered 
furiously from the headphones of a very old miniature cd player.

  "We aren't interrupting anything important, are we?" Mulder asked 
as Langly walked back to where he had been working and turned the 
cd player off.

  "No, I wasn't doing nothing.  Just recoding a retro release of
Dungeons and Dragons.  I got tired of always beating Ravenloft 
with my eyes closed.  Who's the old guy?" 

  "His name's Harold.  Give him something to play with and he'll 
leave us alone."  Langly pointed out a stool to Mulder and while he
got Harold situated on top of it, Langly retrieved and placed a lava
lamp on the table in front of him.

  That seemed to be enough, Langly judged by Mulder's now relaxed
posture, and he went to a nearby table littered with computer parts
and tools and turned on a lamp, which allowed Mulder his first really 
good look at Langly since 2010.  The man seemed to be in as good a 
shape as he ever was, which wasn't really saying much.  But, aside 
from the hair loss, he had aged well.

  Langly then sat down in a folding metal chair across from Mulder,
crossed his legs, and started leaning the chair back until it was
braced against the wall beneath an American flag.  Mulder thought
then that the bald head spoke more of the time passed between 
them than any other reminder could have. 

  Dismissing any further deep ponderances of sentimental symbols, 
he began the conversation.  "Is it safe to speak openly here?" he 
asked Langly, already sure of the answer.

  "Of course.  There's no future in letting the spooks know my
business.  The place is lead-lined.  Only ears hearing anything from
this room are in this room.  Can you dig it?"

  "Good thinking," Mulder said, looking around.  "Do you run all this 
from a generator?"

  "Nah, I'm way to good to have to get my hands dirty with that 
shit.  I have a direct link-up to a pirate satellite.  From that
server, it was a piece of cake to file the proper paperwork
certifying that I live in a government storehouse for toxic
biological waste which has to be refrigerated all times.  I'm wired
in on their dime.  Fuckin' idiots."

  Mulder laughed.  "Right under their noses."  He was truly amazed. 

  "You know me - I can't stay away from the action."  Langly 
smirked.

  "Are you alone?" Mulder asked.  "I halfway expected the other two 
to be here with you."

  "No, it's just me, you, and Catatonic," Langly answered, nodding
toward Harold who was staring, obsessed, at the lava lamp.  "It
makes sense that you wouldn't know if they froze you out.  That's
what I thought happened.  There was no way you could have known
then, I guess.

  "I'm all that's left and it has just been me for years.  Byers
disappeared during the invasion.  Most likely abducted and never
returned.  When it all started to go down, he went after that
Modeski chick.  He tracked her to a Navajo encampment in Arizona 
and his last call to us, he talked about how the skies at night were
full of lights and then they started to disappear.  We'll never have
a fully accurate count, but as near as I can tell America lost around 
400,000 from the mass abductions, including one John Fitzgerald 
Byers.

  "And then Frohike's heart attack." 

  Mulder grimaced sympathetically.  "Damn," was all he could of to 
say in response to the news of the two lost men.

  "The world went nuts.  It wasn't the same without the others.  I
lost everyone.  Yves, Jimmy...  Gone."

  There was quiet between them until he knew it was time to go on
again.  Mulder reached into his pocket and pulled out a keyring with
a couple of keys hanging from it and handed it to Langly.

  "I've done what I could to get all my shit together," he said and
laughed a small laugh.  "They're all ordered sequentially and my
notes are attached.  It shouldn't be that hard for you.  I don't 
know how much I have.  All of my stuff that I didn't leave at the 
Bureau.  That's there.  There's other stuff.

  "I know the cities are overrun by rumors, conspiracy theories,
superstitions and lies, but in the last few months I've seen some
things, bad bad things, and it gets to the point where it's not hard
to put other parts together, you know?"

  He leaned forward toward Langly.

  "It's not over.  They're...  There's something going on, possibly
even genocide." 

  "Yeah, well, that's not surprising and not without modern-day
precedent," Langly said, switching seats to a rolling chair in front
of the bank of computer monitors.  "Of course there's the big
obvious Hitler in Germany and that little bastard Lladoslav
Miriskovic in Bosnia.  We've even had a taste of it here in the U.S.  
I'm sure you remember the little mess Clinton made of the Branch
Davidians near Waco."  He turned around to a keyboard while he
talked and began to type in commands.  "Most recently there was 
the rise of Stepanovich-" 

...and to him was given the key... 

  "-in Russia, where during that revolution it was common for whole
communites to be slaughtered.  The stories were that Yaponchik,-"

...one woe is past... 

  "-the anti-Christ,-" 

...knock, knock...

  "-walked the earth, but superstitions aside, it was clearly a
cleansing of the populace at the hands of a military led by an angry
new leader with something to prove.  They always want to silence 
the dissidents.  It's the same story throughout history."

  "Maybe that's what this is.  I don't know.  I can't explain it all," 
Mulder said, looking at the ground and shaking his head.  "I don't 
know what they hope to accomplish, what their damn goal is.  The 
one sure thing I do know is that they want to make everyone forget.  
They want it never to have happened.  That was the first step and 
I should have seen that then.  Now they're...  With the power they 
have now, I don't think it will end there.  Who knows?"

  "Eh, what the hell," Langly shrugged.  "At least they're not waging 
some kind of holy war.  With that shit, any hope of understanding 
flies right out the window.  This way, at least we have reason to 
believe there's a comprehendable plan or something."

  Mulder held up the index finger of his right hand as he stood up. 
"I'll be right back." 

  While Mulder went to the car to get the cloth bags, Langly tried 
to ignore Harold and put a few things away, but that wasn't to be.  
He gathered various small screwdrivers and ratchets together and 
behind him a ten year old he had seen run over by a bus when he 
was in fifth grade walked slowly past Mulder's chair.

  Langly bent down, set the tools in a box underneath the table, 
stood up and turned around, and screamed as loudly as he had ever
screamed.  He moved quickly backward away from the boy until he 
ran into the wall and still he tried to keep going, to get away from
this ghost-child come a-knockin'.

  "I need new clothes.  I need new clothes.  I need new clothes,"
Harold's voice came softly from somewhere beyond the boy who 
was now reaching for Langly but disappeared as the door opened 
and Mulder came back in. 

  Langly bolted across the room to Mulder, the expression of shock 
and fear on his face telling Mulder everything.

  "It was a kid...  A kid... I knew him.  Dead.  Dead boy, right here!  
He was right here, Mulder!  I saw him!"  Langly looked like he was 
ready to run in fifteen different directions at the same time, 
Mulder thought.

  "Yeah, he does that," Mulder said and glared at Harold, who was 
now leaning over with his nose pressed against the lava lamp.  
After briefly explaining Harold to Langly, he carried the bags on in 
and they sat back down in their previous seats.

  "It's hard to believe anyone knows what the hell is going on in 
this world," Langly said, looking nervously back at Harold.

  Mulder nodded in agreement.  "But someone is always paying
attention," he said as he pulled the bags off the floor and set 
them on the table.  "This stuff was given to me by a girl whose 
friends were killed by government soldiers.  The truth is out there 
and its in the hands of these bootleggers of government files.  
They're out there and they're in danger, these bootleggers, 
hackers, whatever.  They're out there and they're fighting the 
fight, but they need our help."

  "My turn to show you something," Langly said.  He slid a compact 
disc of his own into a harddrive and pointed to a monitor to his left.  
"This is Las Vegas, former vacation paradise first for the mob, 
then for flat-out party animals, and in its later incarnations, 
families.  You know the routine - get a swank room, get bombed on 
comp drinks and watch titties while the wife and kids are down the 
street watching the magicians.  But this year's happy-go-lucky 
vacationers are being beaten and chained and herded into a 
single-file line.

  "These people are hackers, techno-anarchists, your basic 
post-war geeks," Langly said.  "I knew some of them.  You're looking 
at some real geniuses.  They're being led out to the street where 
they were forced onto a bus which took them into the desert about 
five minutes after this was recorded.  There were over fifty people 
executed after being forced to dig their own communal grave.  
Efficient, huh?"

  Mulder looked away from the monitor for a moment and shook his 
head.  He only looked back up when Langly started speaking again.

  "Here's another one that you may also find of interest.  These 
'feed the hungry' programs are a load of bullshit.  I mean, they
always have been, right?"

  Mulder arched his eyebrow and nodded once.

  "But this is really bullshit.  All over the world, particularly in 
northern Africa, there are millions of people starving.  This new 
government is letting them die off, while telling the rest of us 
about how many people they're saving.  How stupid do they think 
we are?"  Langly opened a new window on the monitor.

  "Death certificates, filed by on-site medicos.  People are dying 
by the truckload and it's not the same old shit.  The truth is, it's
worse than ever in these regions.  Egypt, Libya.  There is no food,
diseases run rampant.  There are efforts to provide medical care,
real efforts, but they can't keep up.  They're seeing shit theyve
never seen before and more of it pops up every day.  It could be
extraterrestrial or some hybrid spinoff.  There's just no way to
tell anymore and that particular war will be lost soon enough.

  "Whatever does survive, will be mutated beyond recognition. 
After the nukes were blown, the water and the land and the gene
pools should have been written off forever as fucked.  Every day,
the scientist are discovering new viruses, arenaviruses, both Old
World and New World strains.  They're similar to the hantavirus, 
but they're transmitted by aerosol transmissions, rat turds, and 
rat blood and with the rats...  It's one big pot of disease and if 
that's not bad enough even the newest viruses are exhibiting signs 
of mutations.

  "Then there are others that start, for us, when naturally infected
birds get bitten by mosquitoes who bite humans and there ya go.
Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

  "The animal life there is starting to become accepted as normal,
with all the genetic mutations...  What you see here," he said and
pointed again at the monitor, "are everyday frogs born missing legs,
trying to hop around on little stubby legs, sporting extra legs
where there shouldn't be legs, legs split down the middle.  Amazing
shit.  These kinds of things are, usually, in non-nuked settings,
early warnings that the species the deformities appear in are soon
to die off in that area.  In other cases, these deformities are
sometimes attributed to holes in the ozone layer.  The ultraviolet
light shines through the holes onto the little froggie embryos,
cooking them.

  "Of course, these theories hardly apply in light of the Night of 
The Twin Suns.  Shit, with every day that passes there, life can
hardly even be worth living, ya know?"

  "Let's see what we can do to start fixing that," Mulder said and
stood up, nodding toward the bags he had brought from the car. 
"It's up to you now.  Spread the word, Ringo.  Don't let those
bastards win."

  Langly heard the change in tone in Mulder's voice and knew the
reunion was coming to its end.  Part of his mind started racing for
topics he could use to stretch their time together, but the part of 
his mind which always made the decisions had long ago come to 
accept the fact that all things must end. 

  "I have to go take care of some business now and I need a favor 
for something I got going on tonight," Mulder said and looked Langly
in the eye, trying to fix one more pleasant and lasting memory of
the man into his bank of memories.

  "Anything you need, man.  Anything.  You name it."

  Mulder offered a very vague summary of his plans and when he 
was finished, Langly started rambling.

  "This fucking shit," he said, looking at the bags and at Harold and 
at Mulder.  "I look back and wonder about it all, you know, man?  
It's just all so... I don't know."  His right hand was shaking in his lap 
and his voice had begun to shake as well.  "You guys went off with 
your people.  Frohike went into the ground.  Byers went to the 
stars.  I don't have anyone anymore.  I still sit here and wait for 
that door to open."  He pointed limply at the front door, then his 
arm fell back in his lap.

  "I hate this, Mulder.  We never got to just hang out and be friends, 
man.  We never..."

  Mulder gave Langly time. 

  "I know one cat from back then is still around, but he's an 
asshole and I try to avoid him as much as I can.  He's whacked. 
What about you?  You see anyone from the old school?"

  "I can't tell you that.  You know, what if they find you?"  Mulder 
grinned sympathetically and told Harold to get ready.

  "But..."  Langly's face wore his confusion, but then it also showed 
that confusion clear.  "Oh," he said and they shook hands.  They 
walked to the door, gathering Harold on the way, and in their final 
looks and words, everything, all the times over all the years that 
had passed between them, came down to this, their final parting.

  "It was good knowing you," the Lone Gunman said, unable to look 
away from his old friend.

  "Goodbye, Langly," Mulder finally said and turned to leave.

  "Goodbye, Mulder," Langly answered and then looked at Harold.  
"Freak."

  Langly closed the door behind them and walked back into the 
depths of his room.  He opened one of the bags and pulled a cd 
out.  He slid it into a drive on a standalone computer and soon he 
was spreading the word.

  On another computer, he began to adjust the settings on the 
software he'd have to use later.

  It will be fifty hours later when he finds the fourth bag Mulder
left for him.  He will at first be puzzled as he goes through the
bag's contents, laying them out on a table and wondering just what
he is looking at.  With equal parts curiosity and sense of duty, he
will read the pages of Reggie Purdue's novel, and he will not break
the seal of any of the plastic bags holding the cloth hearts, and 
he will toast Mulder and Scully again and again with the shot glass
from Florida, and when he makes deliveries on the motorcycle which
will replace the Harley he will always wear a wedding ring on his
finger and until the day he dies, he will wear Scully's cross around
his neck.


  Outside, the sun was shining brightly in the square of sky above
them.  They stood there in the cold while Mulder first finished his
good-byes and then listened to a voice giving him instructions.  
They walked to the end of the alley and stopped at the street.  
Mulder looked at his watch.  It was just after two o'clock and while 
Harold watched the traffic, his friend continued to listen to a voice 
only he could hear.  When that voice had said its piece, Mulder turned 
to the man beside him.  He had to make him understand.

  "Harold," he said, and put his hands on the insane old man's
shoulders.  Neither his personal address nor his touch had drawn 
the man's attention, had not been enough to make him turn his 
eyes from whatever spectres they were focussed on.

  "Harold, I need you to listen to me.  I need a favor from you.  I
need you to go back to Skinner's and I need you to go there alone. 
I need you to look at his face and I need to you to tell him 
something.  Can you do that for me?"

  A sharp biting wind tore through them and when it died, Mulder 
saw that Harold not only hadn't been affected by it, but despite it 
he had turned to face Mulder.  He seemed almost lucid and stared
intently into Mulder's eyes and said, "No one shoots at Santa 
Claus."

  Mulder felt his eyes getting wider, an involuntary rush of
desperation beginning to overwhelm his senses.  He didn't know 
how much longer he could repeatedly beat his head against this 
brick wall.

  "You were my friend," Harold started again, his voice cracking and
his head beginning to shake violently.  "My touchstone.  You helped
me."

  The true owner of the voice inside Mulder began wondering if any 
of this bullshit was even worth the effort, when Harold stopped
talking and stood up straight.  He looked at Mulder, clearly still in 
deep struggle with the demons running his brain, but he was in
control now.

  For the moment.

  "I will help you," he said and Mulder felt his world start to spin.  
He held on though, took Harold by the shoulders again and told him 
what he needed him to do, where he needed to go, and hoped it 
was enough.

  He watched Harold walk until the old man was out of sight, 
and looked back down the alley at the motorcycle, considering 
one last favor Langly could do for him. 




-ad
--

Pt. 18/21

Midnight

  Walter Skinner sat alone in a dark and mostly empty office with 
his back to the remains of a wall, and thought about life.  The
atmosphere of the room, considering his reasons for being here, 
was not compromised by the exposed metal beams where the 
sheet rock had been ripped away, nor was it compromised by the 
exposed wiring hanging from the empty places in the ceiling where 
overhead lights and acoustical tiles once hid these guts.  He found 
the way things were to be a fitting contrast to the way things had 
been - appropriate for his state of mind tonight.

  He ran his hand across the smooth soft carpet beneath him and 
then he picked his M-16 up from off the coil of rope beside him.  
He thought for a brief moment more about the various business 
which would have transpired in this room, would have been 
conducted at this very desk in the corner to his left, and he kept 
his eye on his weapon. 

  "The M-16 was introduced in 1964 during the early stages of the
conflict in Vietnam.  It is a superior weapon capable of firing up
to eight-hundred 5.56 mm caliber rounds per minute when fired in
automatic mode.  The weapon's length is 99 centimeters and it 
weighs close to seven pounds.  The M-16 suffered from a bad 
reputation because of initial difficulties encountered by soldiers 
which were attributed to the weapon but in reality were due to 
poor quality ammunition.  In reality, the M-16 is... a superior 
weapon."

  He looked once more through his telescope, saw nothing new, and 
let his thoughts wander back to a day not so long ago, when he had
gotten his first taste of war and his rifle had been a constant
companion, friend, and ally as important as eating - as it had been 
for many boys, boys who had travelled to a faraway place to kill 
and die for their country, boys who had left their homes and 
families and lives and futures behind because of their deep 
conviction that patriots don't turn a deaf ear to their country in 
its time of need, or because they believed in the cause or because 
they were unfortunate enough not to have been born to wealthier 
parents.  The reasons they were there, he had quickly come to 
learn, didn't matter because once they landed they were warriors, 
each and every one.  They were warriors and they fought and they 
fell like warriors, these boys and these men, and he too had tried, 
twice, to give his life for God, for country, for family...

  In the end, none of that mattered.  What mattered was that he 
had survived the danger only because God sometimes pities fools 
and because it became easier to pull the trigger but he had never
escaped the danger because every life, every day, is in danger.

  That's just life. 

  Aborting what would have been a routine inventorying of a 
lifetime of bad choices, he examined the burns on the palms of 
his hands and then shot a bitter glance at the rope lying coiled in 
the corner with one end stretching into the darkness behind him 
where it was secured around one of the exposed I-beams framing 
the fourth floor.

  Of course there were no working elevators in this building any 
more (the thought caused him to touch his hand to his forehead
without his being aware of it) and of all of the various stairwells 
the building had once been home to, only one was still partially 
functional and that had taken him only as high as the second floor.  
At the top of those stairs, the building's west wall gave way to 
open night.  From the landing, he had slung the weighted end of 
the rope over the beam and fired the remote control opening the 
metal attachment's arms and by the time he had finished the climb 
up, he was sure that he didn't want to have to make that same 
climb back down.

  Again, he looked through the window with his telescope, saw only
empty black night, and continued to wait for the storm to come.


  The Harley-Davidson cruised through the dark night, its headlight 
off and its rider leaning into the handlebars.  In the dark of the 
night, he was darker still, moving against the winter wind until his 
destination was in sight.  He switched the  motor off and coasted 
silently through the last intersection before he had to start 
walking.  With the barely passable skill of the thoroughly unversed, 
the rider eased one leg up and over until he was running and guiding 
the motorcycle until it slowed enough for him to let it fall to its 
side.  Then he adjusted the packages on his back and crouched as 
he continued toward his meeting place on foot.  Forty feet from the 
corner of Pennsylvania Avenue, Mulder stopped.  Something in one 
of the piles of garbage and debris had caught his eye and he knelt 
to examine it.

  It was a striped corner of the American flag.


  Alex, I believe there is a poet inside you.  You told me once that 
you love this country.  I didn't believe you then, but as I look 
around at this place where what was the nation's capital now rests 
in shadow like a magnificent graveyard, I think maybe we just have 
different definitions of 'love'.

  If you're here already, are you looking at my face?  Can you see 
it?  I've lain awake at night picturing it... planning it, endless nights
pressing weights into the air, running until I couldn't breathe,
sitting in the dark and considering every possible method, savoring
each imaginary moment of a night not those nights.  A night this
night.

  It's over, Alex.  That's what you said and you were right.

  It is over.


  Mulder's steps were slow but confident here where he had once 
walked through a different world on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania
Avenue and there, across the street, in the J. Edgar Hoover 
Building where he had been one of the good guys.

  Goddammit, you're a loser.  You've always been a loser, you 
fucking joke.

  He stopped before he came to the corner of the remains of the
building beside him and ran through his mental checklist one more
time, starting with his shoelaces and then the device Skinner had
given him... a month ago?  Two?  It seemed so long ago now as his
hand began to shake and he pulled the headset from his belt and
pulled it over his head.  Then he adjusted his M-16 on his shoulder
and checked the clips in his belt.

  Then the .9mm on his waist and the .38 on his ankle.

  He twisted his wrist up, checking his watch and, right on schedule, 
the streetlights and the few lights on in the remaining buildings 
died.

  "Welcome, Agent Mulder," Skinner's voiced crackled through the 
headset.

  "Thanks.  How's tricks?  Run into any surprises yet?"

  "All clear so far.  Just us chickens," Skinner answered, while he 
tried to locate Mulder in his telescope.

  "Did you bring everything?" 

  "Everything I knew about.  Asking about anything in particular?" 
 
  "Did Harold find you?" 
   
  "That crazy son of a bitch.  Yes, he found me while I was packing 
up.  I took care of him." 

  Mulder laughed, imaging what that scene must have been like.  
A hollow and tense quiet rang softly in both headsets until Mulder
pressed Skinner.  He wanted him to keep talking.

  "I'd love to know what you're thinking, old man," he said. 

  "I'm just wondering how many eyes are on us," Skinner answered, 
panning back up Pennsylvania Avenue.

  "Funny you should mention that.  Hang on."  Mulder ducked low and
sprinted to the corner of the building near the intersection at
Pennsylvania Avenue and inside the doorway.  He reached behind 
him, pulled a small black sphere from his pack and pressed it 
against the brick wall.  The sphere bit into the brick with a loud 
crunch and Mulder let go.  It remained in position and he checked to 
see that it was secure and then set the timer, before wishing he 
had chosen a better angle for the camera and wondering how much 
the video feed would pick up.  He decided it wouldn't matter 
because if the video was a problem, there was still the audio and 
as long as that made it through to Langly, things were- 

  fucked up

  -good. 

  "Did you get everything else taken care of?"  He shook his head,
realizing again that he had no idea how much Harold had been able 
to remember or to pass on to Skinner. 

  "We're locked down.  Grid's been disabled and manual response 
time to here should be over an hour.  Anything that happens at 
street level should go unnoticed anyway though," Skinner 
answered.  He felt something distinctly uncomfortable in the 
silence that followed, finding no more comfort in Mulder's voice 
when he finally spoke.

  "Walter?" 
  
  "I know, Mulder.  Let's finish this up." 

  "Ok," Mulder answered his former boss as two men came into the 
light half a block or so beyond the intersection to the west.  "I 
have two bodies approaching.  One is obviously on the guest list. 
Any ideas about who his date is?"

  "You're looking at Alex Krycek and John Doggett.  I'm following 
your lead."

  "Good.  Keep your eyes... eye open.  Sorry about that." 

  Mulder stayed in his crouch at the corner of the building.  As the 
two men came closer, he recognized the older General Doggett  
The man was in full uniform and carried an AK-47, lowered and,
Mulder assumed, open for business.  He stared at the man, unable 
to see his face until they were under the comatose traffic light 
where Doggett and Krycek stopped.

  The silence was broken by Krycek. 

  "Show yourself, Mulder!" 

  The echo of his voice rang through the streets and Mulder looked 
up at the stars and stepped forward.  "You put this party together
because of some bizarre need you feel for me to indulge your
voyeuristic side, Krycek?"  He walked slowly into the intersection 
nearest his end of the block.  "Well, whatever the reason, it's good 
to see you again, buddy!  Pal!"

  "You made this happen, Mulder.  It's because of you that we're 
here.  No one wanted this," Krycek called back, his voice calm. 

  "Why?  Because you think I won't shut up about what really 
happened?  You think I'm going to cause the end of the world?  
That's your story, but it's horseshit and we both know it!  I 
know why you want me dead!"

  "We don't want you dead.  You're already dead.  We've come to 
make sure you stay dead, Agent Mulder and you know why," 
Doggett answered. 

  A voice only Mulder could hear began whispering in his ear and he
started walking slowly toward Doggett and Krycek. 

  "Oh, and good evening to you, John.  What a nice surprise.  I'm
flattered to be in the company of the only other living X-Files
veteran.  This the best gig you could scare up tonight?"  He
continued to walk as he talked, each step slow and sure.  
"Really, you can tell me the truth about why you're here, and I 
think you know what a poor excuse 'the devil made me do it' 
is."

  "Who the hell are you to question me?  Who are you to question 
my motives?"  Doggett's voice had changed.  He was angry now. 

  He was pissed off, Mulder thought, wanting to nod but resisting. 

  "You're right," Doggett continued.  "I did work on the X-Files and 
it shouldn't surprise you that I've read everything in there and, 
since then, I've read everything about you.  Everything!  I've seen 
the reports.  How much innocent blood is on your hands, Mulder?  
If I'm a killer in the employ of tyranny, you're no better.  How many 
people died when the bees carrying the vaccine were released?  
How is that different, huh Mulder?  I know who I work for and what 
I'm here for."

  "No sale, Doggett.  Your bosses are, and always have been, wrong.  
They've just passed the torch to a new generation.  Meet the new 
boss," Mulder said, pointing at Krycek.  He had just passed the 
halfway point.  "Same as the old boss.  These people aren't any 
better than the men we fought, and they were every bit our enemy 
too.  It wasn't just aliens.  But with these guys in charge, those 
men might as well have won.  The aliens might as well have won."

  "So what is the answer, Agent Mulder?" Doggett called back.  "You
want the world to know how close it came to dying?  You want people
to live in fear of when it will happen again for every minute of every 
day of their lives?"

  "Not yet.  Not yet.  A little bit further," Skinner's voice 
whispered. 

  "That's politics you're talking, Doggett, and you know it," Mulder 
countered.  "If you truly believed that, if you truly believed that 
was the price of the truth, you'd have brought the cavalry.  Where 
are the tanks?  Where are the snipers?  It doesn't make sense!  
None of this makes sense, Doggett!  Krycek set you up.  You're 
cannon fodder.  You're here to distract me while Krycek gets his 
damn revenge.  He knows you'll probably die tonight, but he doesn't 
care.  He's here to kill me.  He killed my father and now he's ready 
to finish the job.  Don't be a fool, Doggett."

  Doggett looked at Krycek and then back at Mulder. 

  "That may be," he said, "but I think if I'm being set up by anyone, 
it's you!  I know about you and Skinner, about how you blame me 
for Scully's death.  This is about revenge alright, but not the man 
next to me's revenge.  This is about Fox Mulder's and Walter 
Skinner's revenge.  Now, I'm asking you, please don't make this 
any harder than it has to be.  Put the gun down and let us take 
you in.  You don't have to be put in the ground over this, Fox."

  "I've already been in the ground," Mulder said, a chill crawling over 
his voice.  "I'm not going back any time soon.  Step aside now, 
Agent Doggett.  There's no reason for you to be here.  Go home.  
This is about me and Krycek.

  "You hear me, Krycek?  Me and you, Krycek!  This is just about us
now and you know why?  Because the truth is out there now, so it's
not about badges or guns or causes any more.  Not for me and you. 
For us it's about fate, Krycek.  Our fate.  Right here, right now."

  "Mulder, no!" Skinner's voice exploded in his ear.  Mulder took the
headset off and threw it away as he started to run toward Krycek. 




-ad
--

Pt. 19/21



  I have no illusions about tonight, about the way this will end.  This 
afternoon, I spent a lot of time thinking about us, you and I.  
Earlier, I spoke to you of fate, our fate, but that was false.  A
lie.  We had no fate.  Not together.  You or I could have walked
away.  We could have turned our backs on each other after the
invasion.  Instead, I always felt you behind me, always just out of
sight, lingering, lurking like a vampire hiding from the sunlight but 
full and whole and watching from the shadows.  Even when I 
believed you were dead, I felt you.  Still, if this date was written 
in stone and I had to be here tonight with someone, with anyone, 
it should have been with another man, a man who died years ago, 
but obviously that is impossible.

  You can't always pick the dog you find.

  So it's me and you and we're close now, like we've always been 
and we dance the dance one last time.  Your one arm is quick, as I
knew it would be and I barely dodge your swing.  The wind blows my
hair in the wake of your miss and then you're against me, your body
forcing mine to the ground, your forehead butting into mine.  Your
attack is measured, expert.  You've stayed in practice and getting
out from under you is harder than I expected it to be.

  A push and a roll, using my shoulders for leverage, and finally 
I'm away from you and we're on our feet again.  I close the 
distance this time, at the last second feinting to my left, thinking 
you won't have expected it, but your knee is there in my nuts and 
the back of your hand hits hard against my face.  Stings.  Wakes 
me up a little.

  Ok, you have my attention. 

  I let you grab the back of my neck, rolling limply with your 
momentum, but before you can break my nose with your knee, I 
drive my fist into your stomach and then quickly into your solar 
plexus when you let go.  That should take your wind right out of 
you and when it does, I throw my weight into a chop to the back of 
your neck. 

  Now that the introductions are over, let's get to business, boy. 

  It's my turn to slap you around and I enjoy the feel of your hair 
in my one hand as I hold your head up and in place while I repeatedly 
slap the shit out you with my other hand.  Yes, I do have the 
advantage Alex, but not because I have two arms.  I have the
advantage because I'm smarter than you, but I've given up on you
ever accepting that.

  That doesn't mean I can't beat it into you. 

  Stand up, Alex.  Let's work on those ribs. This would have an
ordinary on his knees in tears, but not you. You're not the kind to
give up, are you Alex?  No, not you. 

  I feel you getting ready to strike back.  I know you've been
absorbing each blow like a battery absorbing a charge and your
pathetic little man's ego has nearly had enough.

  Before you can do it though, before you rise back up, I look, maybe 
for the last time, into your eyes and I see it.  I knew it was there.  
Your fire is so strong and you're so stupid.  There's something 
there that saddens me though.  I see the flames burning as brightly 
as ever and I feel your hatred radiating off your body in waves, but 
there's something missing.

  You haven't fallen, but you seem weak. 

  Don't give up, Alex.  Not yet.  I have so much planned for you
tonight, my old friend, and it has to end here.  Here, where the
story, the real story, has always happened.  Here, the true killing
field of my holy war. 

  That's what Skinner called it, and there's so much truth in that. 

  Pull you close. 

  Face to face. 

  Can feel your breath on my skin. 

  I feel young, like I'm thirty again.  Like I'm twenty-five.  What
should be agony for me is rapturous.  I'm born again and this man,
this old man in front of me, seems to be losing interest.  I tighten
my hold on him and put my face less than an inch from his. 

  "Welcome to hell," he says and slams his forehead into mine. 

  Dazed, I begin to swing.  I throw all of my weight into my fist once, 
twice, three times into his face.  I'm hitting him as hard as I can, 
harder than I've ever hit anyone or anything before and it's 
beginning to take a toll on me.  My breathing has become sharp 
and lightning is shooting through my chest and my left arm. 

  When I miss, he laughs and puts his fist into my armpit, making
nerves explode and my heart skip a beat.  He uses his knee, his
elbow, he ducks and crouches and lunges and he is sharp again.  
Back and forth, we exchange blows, each dominating in our own 
turns, but always he is mocking me. 

  I feel puny and hollow.

  Enraged now, I've lost control.  Behind my next connection, I feel 
the crunch of bone, maybe his cheekbone and maybe something in
my own hand.  I don't care which.  I like the way it felt. 

  I'm on top of him, falling, the ground stopping our fall.  I feel his 
heart beating against my chest.  He is bleeding and I imagine I must 
be too.

  His lips are moving, but I can't hear what he's saying.  I think he's 
begging.  I smile at the thought of him begging.  Whatever he's 
saying, I can't hear it, so it doesn't matter.

  Can you hear what I'm thinking, Alex?  I'm thinking about how you
said you were my friend and my brother, but you sold us out.  You 
sold us out for a world of order and safety, but this ain't it, 
friend.  This is a world fashioned in response to the belief that 
survival is the answer to all of life's questions.  This is your 
answer, Alex.  Survival.  This is the answer your childhood brought 
you, your birth under the shadow of a nation built on the slaughter 
of tens of millions of people.

  If survival is the answer, then perhaps you are the hero.  Perhaps 
the glory you find in this brave new world is justified because it was 
your reaction to the threats you faced which sealed your path, 
decided your destiny.

  But my childhood was different and taught me different lessons. 
Mine was a world shaped by the looming shadow of the Communist
threat, but that was distant like Mars or the Old Testament.  In the
little picture, my world was a world of summer afternoons, riding
bikes down to the beach, games of pick-up under the sun and being 
so content that I could have stayed out there until the stars 
blinked out and fell from the sky.  My daydreams were filled with 
throwing curve balls and the smell, the feel of a baseball glove and 
the crack of a bat knocking a baseball over a wooden fence, 
drinking root beer late in the afternoon on the Vineyard, my mom 
and my dad and my sister and me.  Those were my daydreams, but 
they were real and that was my world until the aliens showed me a 
different world.  They stole my childhood and made it into a twisted 
funhouse mirror. 

  But no matter what followed, I will not forget... 

  I will not be made to forget, not for you.  Never.

  Can you understand that, Alex?  I hope you can.

  What I knew then, and what I know now... 

  This goes past the ideologies.  It goes beyond the ideologies. 

  It is the flame that burns solely inside each person and lives and 
grows and dies with the birth, life, and death of that person. 

  We matter, Alex.  Each and every one of us.  Is learning that
lesson, finally, still impossible?  Too extreme a possibility?  Out
of reach for the only man who ever had the answers? 

  Why didn't I ever come to you for the truth?  You...  You knew 
the truth, because you knew...  You always were the one who knew 
what to look for.  Sometimes, I used to think you were the hero.

  I know you tried and in some ways I think I should be asking for
your forgiveness.  You brought me the truth and finally I had no
choice but to believe you.  Despite all the evil, all the bad shit
you did to me, to Scully, to Skinner, to Diana, I believed you.  And
you and I...  You're right.  We changed the world.  We changed the
world and now look at that world.  Look at us.  I'm still a
political liability and you've become a joke. 

  God damn you, Alex. 


  "Krycek..." Mulder gasped, trying to fill his lungs and empty them 
at the same time.


  The idiot starts laughing, insane, wanting to let me know that 
he can take it.  He could always take it.  I hear the gun.

  You missed, Alex.  The bullet bounced by my ribs.  It took some 
meat with it.

  I'm tempted to call you a coward.
  

  Skinner stayed in position, his telescope trained on Doggett.  He 
was watching the man's face, picturing the various possible
results of different angles' bullet wounds.

  He zoomed out a click. 

  Doggett too had remained in position, watching Mulder and Krycek,
stonefaced.  Skinner tilted the telescope slightly downward, drawing
Doggett's shoulders and chest into view.  Skinner flinched when he
saw Doggett's right shoulder move and then his right hand moving
upward to the radio microphone clipped to the left shoulder of his
uniform.

  "Don't do that, you pussy," Skinner whispered.  "Don't you dare."

  Doggett's head leaned slightly to his left and his mouth started 
to move as the sound of Krycek's gun being fired rang loudly 
through the night.

  "Motherfucker!"  The voice was a shout this time followed by the
sound of gunfire and the shattering of glass.  The three men on 
the ground shielded their eyes from the shards raining down on 
them followed by the shape of a man, Walter Skinner, former 
Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and he 
flew through the night like the angel of death.  He was barechested, 
wearing only a camouflage bandana tied around his head, and 
electronic headset, combat pants and boots.  His face was painted - 
dark black stripes under his eyes and on his forehead, and with the 
rope in his left hand and his rifle in his right, he swung down the side 
of the building firing on Doggett as Doggett ran across Pennsylvania 
Avenue.


  Mulder ducked into the shadowy wreckage of the J. Edgar Hoover
Building, turning his back on Krycek to save himself from Skinner's
reign of bullets.  He stumbled in the dark, tripping over debris, but 
he didn't fall.  He made it to one of the few standing columns on 
this side of the building and hid behind it. 

  Except for his slightly labored breathing, the night around him 
was now silent.

  He felt his side, checking the depth and size of the wound 
Krycek's bullet had left.  There was blood, but nothing too bad.  
He was bleeding some, but he was not dying, not yet.  He slid down 
to a sitting position, M-16 still in hand, and continued to catch his
breath.


  Doggett turned into an alley half a block away, running down the
alley until he came to a small break in the building, likely the empty 
home of a long gone dumpster, and he ducked in and put his back
to the wall.  His heart was pounding in his ears, brutishly blocking
out any other noises he might have need to hear - Skinner's boots,
Mulder's gun, Krycek's voice.  He didn't think there was anything,
but he couldn't tell for sure.  After Skinner had appeared, they 
had all split in different directions, and he thought he had ditched 
the maniac.

  He thought the maniac had followed Krycek across Pennsylvania.

  Doggett thought he was alone. 

  Still, he wasn't sure.  He didn't know if Krycek was even still
alive and he couldn't risk either scuttling Krycek's plan or giving
away his position by trying to use the radio. 

  So here he was, alone, in the dark, assigned the incredible mission 
to kill a couple of heroes, that mission crapped by a crazed marine, 
and now he was probably going to die because of some stupidshit 
age-old grudge held between the two men who had saved the world.  
Not even at the most desperate stages of the invasion, could he 
have imagined this.  Yet here he was now.  He had come here
prepared to kill heroes and now he was stranded in a D.C. alley
with no way to contact the assistance that waited less than half 
a mile away.

  This was no way to run an operation, not against Mulder and 
damn sure not against Skinner. 

  A memory of Mulder telling him that he was the only credibility 
the X-Files had made him ashamed and Doggett, for one of the 
very few times in his life, thought about running, just ditching the
whole thing.  But if he was haunted by the ghost of the man he 
had been sent to kill, he was also haunted by the words of the 
President who had sat across from Doggett with his face hidden 
in the shadow of the wide brim of his cowboy hat.  While they had 
talked, Doggett had tried repeatedly to see his face, but he was 
only able to see his mouth as he gave the thousand dollar speech.

  He had done his part, he thought, looking up into the sky and
entertaining small and vague hopes that a stray god would hear his
thoughts.  He had been a good soldier, a good cop, a good agent, a
good father and here he was, fucked, with the future of the planet
still hanging in the balance. 

  He closed his eyes and saw the poster he had taken from 
Mulder's office.  He saw the words, "I WANT TO BELIEVE". 

  And there it was, goddammit.  He did want to believe.  He wanted 
to believe that he was doing the right thing and that the world
needed him to do the things he had done.  He wanted to believe he 
had made the world a better place.

  He wanted to believe in the post-war dream. 

  Ultimately he wanted to believe that the cost - the loss of
countless lives, the damage to the planet and the environment - 
had not been paid in vain and he couldn't let everything they had 
done be lost.  Not now.  Not ever.

  Doggett stepped back into the alley, holding his weapon and ready 
to fire, and looked around, again seeing no evidence of anyone alive
but himself.  Then there was an echo of footfalls, running.  The
sound exploded all around him and then immediately faded.  He
couldn't tell who it had been but he knew they had gotten close.

  "Fuck this," he whispered and reached for the radio on his 
shoulder and across the alley, something moved in the shadows.

  He clenched his teeth and drew his rifle against his shoulder,
taking aim and preparing to kill his enemy.  Instead of Fox Mulder
or Walter Skinner, kids began to come forward into the moonlight. 
Children, boys, ten of them, maybe more.  For some reason, it 
was hard to tell.  He squinted, trying to focus but still things 
were wrong.  It was like he was dreaming - slow, otherworldly.  
The boys walked into the alley and stood facing him.  At this 
distance, he was able to discern the similarites they all shared.  
They were almost identical, he saw, wearing the same clothes, 
wearing the same sneakers.

  Doggett lowered his rifle and stepped forward, staring intently 
at the dark blue shirt on the nearest boy.  His eyes...  No...

  His eyes were working, except the light made it wrong. 

  He tried to focus again, to shake this feeling that he wasn't 
even here anymore. 

  He looked again at the boys, and looked through them.  His
subconscious screamed, telling him they were ghosts but he didn't
listen because he knew they weren't.  He knew something else now 
and as they got closer, he could see they all had the face of his 
son. 

  "Daddy," they called.

  They were all his son, his dead son.  

  They were all Luke. 

  "Daddy", they whispered with translucent lips as they walked 
toward Doggett.  "Daddy". 

  "Nononono..." Dogget whispered as he closed his eyes and turned 
his head away from the children. 

  Before they could turn to ash.
  

  Mulder stood and pushed himself off the column. 

  Alex.


  Skinner held still, squatting and surveying the landscape beneath 
him.  With his rifle nestled in the artwork of the fire escape's railing, 
he again pressed his telescope to his eye. 

  After he had landed, he had tried to follow Doggett, be he quickly 
lost sight of the man.  He had run down the sidewalk to the rear of 
the building where he thought Doggett had probably gone, but 
there had been no sign of him.  Skinner then crossed the street 
and disappeared into that block's alley.  He listened to the voice 
that kept telling him to stay high and he climbed the first fire 
escape he had come to.

  Now, twenty-five feet above the alley, he watched the shadows of 
the night.  His telescope fully extended, he searched the shadows,
back and forth, waiting for something, anything, to move.  
Something did catch his attention, making him freeze and readjust 
the telescope's focus, and there, on the fire escape across the 
street, he spotted the package he had brought, the one he thought 
Mulder was asking about earlier.  It sat outside the fourth floor, 
beside the window, crosslegged on the fire escape.

  Skinner lowered the telescope and refocussed, looking as far as 
he could into the alley and finding John Doggett.  He was standing
still and Skinner thought he could make out the man's lips moving.
He thought maybe Doggett was praying.

  Quickly, Skinner switched back to the fire escape and saw a 
shadow moving behind the window until he recognized it as Krycek. 
He pulled away and looked down at the asphalt beneath him and 
then back at Krycek.  The telescopic image made no sound as it 
approached the giggling old man in the blindfold.  It carefully raised 
its gun and shot a bullet into Harold Piller.


  Doggett stood frozen, paralyzed by the place he had withdrawn 
into, able only to move his lips in denial of what his eyes had shown 
him.  This place was in a chained and locked recess of his mind and 
was home to only a twisted storehouse of dark memories - the
memories of days and weeks and hours and seconds of an 
investigation long past the point of hope or reason.  Memories of 
voices, long since silent, telling him he had to carry on, he had to 
move, he had to be strong, his son was counting on him.

  His eyes flashed open and the kids were gone. 




-ad
--

Pt. 20/21  



  As Harold was falling to the floor, Skinner jumped from the fire 
escape and landed on both feet in the alley below.  He started
running as fast as he could, completely oblivious to the pain,
focussed on this one opportunity.

  "Don't you fucking move!"  He had closed the distance quickly,
arriving before Doggett had sufficiently recovered from the vision
of the children.  "On your knees, now!" 

  Doggett looked at Skinner, his face blank, and lowered himself 
to his knees. 

  "I've waited a long time for this."  Skinner looked around quickly, 
looking for Krycek but he wasn't there yet. "Dana Scully deserved 
better than getting shot in the head," he said, "and history will 
know you only as her assassin, the one who finally stopped her 
with a bullet.  I'm going to make damn sure of that."

  He looked all around again, scanning once more for Krycek, and 
then back down at Doggett.

  "You were a man once, Dogget.  You were a good soldier, a good 
cop, and a good F.B.I. agent.  You traded all that in to be a thug.  I 
wonder what that must have felt like to know you were selling your
soul.  You would have approached her, as a friend, right?  Made her
an offer.  Did you tell her they were after her but you could stop
them?  That you knew what they wanted and how far they would 
go?  Man, she had your fucking number.  She would have seen right 
through you because she didn't ever trust you and I know she 
wouldn't have bought whatever bullshit you were peddling.  Say 
good-bye."

  "You're dreaming, Skinner!  It wasn't like that!"  Doggett exploded. 
He looked wildly at Skinner, catching his breath before continuing.  
"She wasn't who you think she was, Skinner."

  "Lies," Skinner hissed. 

  "Ok, look," Doggett said, easing back until he was sitting on his
butt.  He moved his legs slowly in front of him and sat back against
a broken plate of 1/2" thick glass which was practically all that
was left of what was once a corner office, the razor sharp jagged
edge forking downward over his head and to Skinner it looked like
lightning striking.  "Yes, I stayed with the government, but not
because I was a bad guy.  You know that.  I did it because I was a
patriot and I thought you were too.  No, I don't like everything
that's going on, but have you got a better plan?  Do you?  No.  Hell
no, you don't.  Scully didn't either.  I am not lying to you.  I know 
what Scully releasing that report would have done.  We have no
defense against that.  I didn't kill Scully, but I know that it had to 
be done.  We have to play it like this...  We have to play it their 
way right now, because there is no other way."

  Skinner seemed slightly distant and Doggett watched for an
opportunity to move.  

  "I'll never buy that shit.  I'll never buy the idea that killing innocent 
civilians is what's in the best interest of us all." 

  "Innocent?  What has that got to do with anything?  We're talking
about keeping people from going nuts and killing each other.  That's
what we fought against with the invasion, right?  Genocide?  
Skinner, sir, we can't go that way."

  "Genocide?  You're talking about genocide and you're telling me 
this would have been started by Scully, Doggett!" 

  Doggett watched, certain that Skinner was breaking and he would 
have to move real soon or he would die.  "I have access," he said
and started to push himself up slowly on his hands.  "I'm inside and
I know everything, Skinner.  I know everything and I'm telling you,
Dana Scully, Agent Dana Scully, was not loyal to you and she 
wasn't loyal to Mulder.  It tore her apart, I admit, sure.  It tore her 
apart when she came over.  We needed her to make the vaccine 
work, to make it workable.  She helped us save the world, Skinner, 
but she saw the same future we all did and she accepted that.  I 
don't know what changed, but when she decided to bolt she made 
it a no-win game for us all."

  "You killed her!  That's what you told me!" 

  "I said that, yes!  Yes, but I lied, Skinner.  I lied and you know why.  
I don't know how much electronics you assholes have planted 
around here.  How many eyes you got watching us tonight, huh?  
How many microphones you have hidden at your place?  Huh?  You
don't know what I had to do to negotiate this.  I had to fight for
this... hard... because I believed there was a reasonable chance to
bring you in.  And when I saw the chance, I had to take it.  So yes,
I did humor you with your accusations.  I thought that I could play
into your delusion long enough to make you careless.  To make you
give this shit up and to come after me.  That would have gotten 
them off your back for long enough for us, you and I, to come to 
some kind of terms.  For me to show you the truth.  You have to 
believe me."

  "You can take this sitting on your ass on you can take it on your 
knees.  Your choice."  Skinner's finger tightened on the M-16's
trigger.

  "I told you I know everything, Skinner.  I know the story and the
true story is no one knows who killed Agent Scully, but it wasn't 
me and it wasn't our government.  She was not a political liability. 
She was loyal to-"

  "You're the political liability," Skinner interrupted, his teeth 
clenched now.  "You're the joke, General Doggett.  Whatever it was
you wanted, she would have told you to go to hell and that's when
you killed her.  That's when you took a great woman's life.  Now I
want to know if there's a reason I shouldn't send you to Hell right
now."  He raised the rifle toward Doggetts head. 

  "I did what I had to do.  I did the right thing," Doggett answered.

  "Die, you son of a bitch!" Skinner sneered and squeezed the 
trigger.  There was a small explosion of sound and light and then 
red blood splattered against the wall behind Doggett.  His face had 
not been destroyed.  The only sign of his handiwork Skinner could 
see was a simple hole in Doggett's forehead, a break in the skin 
which was only now beginning to bleed as Doggett's body fell 
forward onto the ground at Skinner's feet.  It was that simple.  
He had done nothing more than aim his rifle at the man's head and 
then with one squeeze of the trigger, General John Doggett was 
dead.

  Forever. 

  Skinner smiled down at the dead body, relishing the sight of
Doggett's life shattered into pieces.  He wanted to live in this
triumphant moment for a few more days, but behind him a shadow 
fell over his head and the leatherclad arm it belonged to tightened
around his neck as Krycek forced them both into a dark area 
completely beneath a section of the remaining structure.  With a 
snap of his neck, the back of Skinner's head crashed into Krycek's 
nose.  He let go of Skinner, grabbing his face as the dark red blood 
covered his mouth and chin. 

  Skinner darted back for his rifle, which he had dropped when 
Krycek attacked him, and when Krycek's eyes opened again, he 
spat and ran, pushing Skinner until he was leaning backward over 
the small brick wall, the top of his head barely an inch over the
remains of the broken plate of glass.  He felt the pounding of
Skinner's legs against his as they tried to wrap around him.  He 
pushed harder, the strain against his shoulder increasing
exponentially by the half-second.

  Beneath Krycek, Skinner began pulling as hard as he could on the 
full sleeve of Krycek's leather jacket.  He pulled himself up, defying 
Krycek's resistance, and soon his face was next to Krycek's and 
he twisted his neck and slung his head forward, sinking his teeth 
into Krycek's throat, immediately drawing blood, when Krycek's
knee slammed into his crotch twice and then Skinner fell backward
over the wall, landing flat with his right side against the plate of
glass.  He raised his head instantly, but he felt disoriented.  He
shook his head, blinking his eyes, trying to break the cold dizziness 
that was beginning to wash over him and that cold dizziness was 
dispelled as a hot flash seared through his nervous system.  He 
closed his eyes against the wave crashing over him and tried to 
remain conscious.  When it passed, he opened them again, but he 
didn't see Krycek.

  He looked around for his rifle, found it, and thanked God as he
pushed himself up into a sitting position with his back against the
glass.  It was slick, with his sweat he assumed, but he couldn't
think about that now.  Krycek.  He had to locate Krycek.  His life
and so much more depended on it, but he just couldn't...  The pain
in his right arm began to shout and he looked to see if maybe had
broken it or had taken an... 

  There was no right arm.  There was only a pie of blood surrounded 
by stump, ragged flesh the wrapping for raw bleeding meat, and a
shaft of bone coated in strings of muscle tissue.  As he stared, 
his insides changing from fire to ice and back again, he thought 
the remaining flesh had begun to crawl.

  He turned away, his eye stopping again when it saw his arm on 
the ground beside him, his fingers still gripping the M-16.  The
still of the winter's night in Washington D.C. was broken then by a
howl of agony unlike anything anyone who could hear it had ever
heard before.  It erupted, furious and terrible, from the mouth and
soul of Walter Sergei Skinner as he sat limply in the cold, alone and
bleeding to death.

  "Your enemy is my enemy," Krycek said to no one and turned to 
face Mulder.


  From the sidewalk, Mulder ran at Krycek full on.  The collision
forced Krycek backward until a wall stopped their run.  Krycek's
breath was coming in great gasps, sweat and blood covering his 
face and staining the white t-shirt beneath his jacket.

  Their bodies pressed together, Mulder raised his left forearm 
across Krycek's throat and kept his right locked on his rifle, and
it was here that, despite the maelstrom which had carried them 
here and which now only rested in the shadows and in the blood all 
around them, Mulder looked into his eyes, searching not for 
indicators of motive or the subtle traitors any man carries while 
keeping a secret in times of desperation, but for a familiar fire he 
knew would be there because it burned inside his own soul and it 
knew its own kind.  When he saw it, that brilliant vibrant flame, a 
piece of the world stopped and he was breathless, stunned by how 
beautiful it was, how beautiful it always had been and now how 
brightly it still managed to burn.

  He threw Krycek to the ground while, not ten feet away, Skinner 
lay dying in a pool of blood. 

  Mulder pointed the M-16 and smiled. 

  "I saw what you did to Marita."

  "So what?  And now you want revenge for that whore too?  Let 
me tell you something," Krycek said.  "Covarrubias got what was 
coming to her.  And which one of us is the one going around beating 
the hell out kids, huh?  Fuck you."

  "I'll tell you the truth, Krycek.  She's the least of the problems I 
have with you.  We have other business tonight.  For too goddam
long, you've gone unpunished for your crimes and tonight you're
going to pay and I don't care if there isn't a single drop of red
blood left in your sorry ass."  He smirked.  "Looks like that's not
a problem though."

  "My crimes?" Krycek laughed.  "What do you think it is you're so
honorable you're qualified to judge me for?"

  "You tried to kill me.  You tried to kill Scully.  You tried to kill 
Skinner.  You killed my father, Bill Mulder, and Scully's sister, 
Melissa!  You shot them both!  Admit it!"

  "Your father," Krycek laughed.  "Yeah, Mulder.  I killed him, but I 
didn't kill Bill Mulder.  I tried to save Bill Mulder."

  "You lie!"  Mulder's voice was breaking.

  "Spender," Krycek answered, trying to sniff back the blood and 
snot running down his face.  "He was worried because he knew you 
had the MJ files.  He knew you would decode them and there was 
no way to know what Bill Mulder would tell you.  Bill Mulder was a 
great man.  I had come there to warn him.  I saw him through the 
front windows and I saw you there with him, talking.  I knew about 
what was being done to your water.  I knew what kind of condition 
you were in and there was no way you would have listened to me.  
I went around to the side of the house and broke in through the 
bathroom window.  I stood in the bathtub, behind the shower 
curtain, waiting and hearing the two of you talking.  I couldn't 
make out most of what you were saying, but it wasn't hard to fill 
in.  Then he came into the bathroom and was getting some pills 
from the medicine cabinet.  I watched from behind the shower 
curtain, waiting to make sure you hadn't followed him, and that's 
when the shot came.  Spender had sent a sharpshooter, as I 
suspected he would, and that's who killed Bill Mulder.  There was 
nothing I could do."

  He took a couple of quick deep breaths.

  "You have an answer for everything, don't you?" Mulder snarled. 

  "You don't have to believe me, Mulder.  Let's make this just like
old times.  I'm offering you the truth and you won't have it.  You
believe whatever you want.  You always have.  I killed them all.  I
killed everyone.  Now, do it, Mulder!  Get on with it if that's what
you're here to do!"

  "That is what I'm here to do."  Mulder threw the rifle down.  "I'm 
going to kill you with my bare hands."

  As he lunged at Krycek, Krycek pulled and pointed his .9mm at 
Mulder and squeezed the trigger twice.  The first bullet hit Mulder
in his right shoulder.  The second hit him in the chest just below
his heart.  He fell to his knees, eyes wide and fixed on Krycek as
Krycek stood and walked to where Mulder had now fallen over onto 
his side.

  "You lose, my friend," Krycek said and spat on Mulder's forehead.



-ad
--

Pt. 21/21



  A journey which began over half a century ago, with its roots 
going back nearly that much further, ends here as the light begins
to fade.

  I watch as Walter puts Alex down again, this time with a spray 
from his M-16.  The nanobots have already sealed his wound just 
like they were programmed to do.  He is weak and he has to stop 
to catch his breath, to stay conscious.  He has dropped the rifle 
and now he's talking into the radio he took from Doggett, and now 
he's crawling away.  Skinner will continue the fight.  He's a good 
soldier.  Despite the toll tonight will take on him, this was good for 
him. 

  He was worth the whole damn lot of us. 

  And Langly.  Like a wizard sitting in his tower waving his hands
over crystal balls, this genius moved the fight forward and if he
never lifts his finger to help again he owes us nothing. 

  There will be no way to determine how many witnessed what 
happened here tonight on temporary websites, but they are out 
there and they will spread the word and they will be the ones who 
help prepare their world for the next thing.

  I too must move to the next thing and so as my long familiar 
journey ends here, another journey begins here.  It is an ending I
have fought and run from and escaped time and time again, but 
now, feeling the journey begin regardless of my willingness to 
follow, I accept it.

  I accept it and if it means that the fight will go on, if it means 
that I pay that price so that others may know, so that others will 
know the truth and will spread the word, so that what happened
will not be washed away, so that the memory will live on, then yes,
I accept it because I know that tomorrow the stories will begin.
People will know the truth and they will rise up.  People will tell
others of Reggie and how he made it all possible because he was
smart enough not to stand in the way.  And of the undying loyalty
and dedication of Agent Pendrell.  People will tell others the story
of Max.  And when people tell the stories of Fox Mulder, they will
also tell the story of Chuck Burk and Albert Hosteen and the
stories of Byers and Frohike and Langly.

  And people will tell stories of the life and death of Dana Scully and 
she will not be forgotten and people will hear the screams of the 
dead buried alive and they will keep the darkness at bay.

  Once, when I was a child, I was playing in the woods, climbing trees, 
when what I thought was a leaf began moving, walking toward me.  
It was a praying mantis, an insect marching toward me, its huge
eyes glaring at me, hating me, yet claiming me as its own.  I 
screamed, frightened and outraged, confronted with the existence 
of a before unknown monster inhabiting my world.  I began to see 
the ugliness of nature and man and everything around me in 
patterns that would repeat and recycle themselves and I became 
convinced that we each spend our lives charmed by snakes eating 
their own tails.

  Maybe the boundaries are tighter than we have ever imagined. 

  At the time though, I only knew that the mysteries of the natural 
world had been revealed to me, but instead of being amazed, I was 
horrified.  I was repulsed.  The power, the evil I saw in this tiny 
creature made me see myself as hollow, puny, small... 

  So I screamed.  I wanted to make it disappear with just the power 
of my voice, but my voice was too weak - my screams ineffectual.  
It did not go away until I shook my arm and jumped out of the tree 
and started running as fast as I could. 

  Maybe that is when I was born. 

  The time has come for me to give up my ties with this world that 
I bequeath to all those who come after me and in my final moments 
make peace with you, the abyss I have stared into after being born 
from it.  When you first came to me, you were small and conquerable, 
but that was your first act of deception.  Your face changed, and I 
should have seen you as a liar, but having already sensed the power 
of the evil in my world, I had faith that you would always be small 
and conquerable and I was momentarily seduced and dazzled by 
you, but for all your majesty you were merely a thief in the night 
bathed in the glow of your own confidence and arrogance and I, 
bathed in mine, made you nothing more.  I know now I was wrong.  
Impossibly, you came across time and space into this reality and 
into the world of a little boy and is there any way I can look back 
now and believe it was not also part of your design that I would 
follow in your wake?  The irony of you forcing me to witness your 
plundering, not of a treasure, but of my sister is not lost on me 
now and has not been for many years. 

  You became God.  You moved in mysterious ways and no matter 
what I did, nothing could kill you.  Every time I closed my eyes you 
were there, your lights taking her and your voice in my head asking 
for my trust and I do trust this voice which is not your voice, yet 
your voice all the same, telling me not to be afraid but how could I 
not live the rest of my life in the fear you taught me with this one
act?  Was your decision not made knowing it marked a path I would
follow, determined a life I would not have chosen for myself?

  When I slept, I lived in dreams of being alone on a planet left
abandoned, no one but me, and I would feel so much guilt as though
this were all my fault, as though I made this happen or I could have
stopped it somehow but when I awoke from these dreams only to 
hear the sound of my father, awake and running from his own 
demons, the world did begin to move again. 

  The world kept moving and I kept living and no one disappeared 
any more and one day years later I woke up paralyzed and knowing 
that I would be walking into a little girl's empty bedroom for the 
rest of my life.  Maybe it was in this moment, in my late teenage 
years, when my path was finally decided.  It might have been then, 
but if it was, it was merely the beginning of the path I took to war, 
but the war itself, my war, my holy war, did not begin for some time 
to come because I was not ready then.  No, my war began over a 
decade later, as a twist in the road of my investigation, a charting, 
turned inward on itself to reveal the dark agents of fortune hidden 
in my own memories, in the deepest recesses of my own soul.  I 
was the adult-child of the child-adult and I had come to myself 
seeking the answers to the questions you had asked of me.  And 
despite the intensity of the fires which fueled my determination, 
those fires didn't burn brightly enough to prevent the cobwebs 
from growing over my eyes and they didn't light my path, but 
they distracted me until now when I finally come to behold you, 
the architect, the planner, the creator and the trickster, the 
author of the play into which I was cast in the lead role and I come 
with an offering.  Naively, I spent those many years of my life 
thinking I could withhold what was rightfully yours through wit and 
skill, but I failed to recognize you for what you are. 

  If I didn't offer you that tribute then, I offer you that tribute
now, in the only gift I have left to give.

  Then...  Then I only knew that an enemy had begun to take shape.
I believed you were something I could one day touch, one day grasp,
one day force to deliver the answers I so arrogantly believed I was
entitled to.  I knew only that you were behind the mystery, or that
you were the mystery.  I knew you were out there behind 
everything I was seeing and everything I had witnessed in my own 
life, but I knew nothing more.  Even in my ignorance though, I found 
some measure of comfort, some measure of clarity in believing 
that although I could not yet and had not yet grasped the truth, 
the truth, nonethless, was out there waiting for me to find it and 
to know it.  My faith, my desire to believe, was my relief, not my 
discomfort.  It was my satisfaction, not a magnification of my 
hunger.  I stood on the doorstep of God, comfortable, not asking 
for salvation, but demanding answers.  I was a damn schoolboy and 
there I was, daring to issue the challenge and believing with all my 
might that I had what it took see it through and to come out on top, 
that I had the heart.

  But in the end, I didn't have the heart.  I didn't have the heart and 
I didn't get the answers and I lost sight of it all and I lost it all.  I 
surrended to the temptations and demands in the names of causes 
not my own and beyond my ability to influence and I didn't save the 
world or my sister or Scully or myself.  Instead, my war began in 
the rejection of convention and science as answers to the fantastic 
and ended in a twisted myopic game of revenge.  I let myself lose 
sight and I lost everything.  I gave you a good fight, but I didn't ever 
win.  I ran, I backtracked, I gave in and I lost, but in the end I don't 
think the fight was mine to win.  In fact, I don't think we can win 
against you.  I think all we can do is hold you at bay and hope our 
screams are loud enough to wake the others, but my time to sceam 
is over and now I'll stay quiet. 

  I take the first steps of a new journey tonight.  I take in one last 
breath which seems to last the length of a lifetime and I watch as 
the stars blink out of the sky one by one until the sky is black and 
dark waves crash silently on the shore and I walk confidently
forward on this beach toward a spaceship made of sand, the same 
sand beneath my toes, and the silent sound of the ocean is filling 
my ears and I can see the boy again.  He is waiting for me and we 
are alone.

                                  The end.



-ad
--
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"Sigh, where have all the really great nutcases gone?" -- ToM