One - the oracle

And that day the hot wind blew down through the burning rocks, and over the ground of sand. The wind, a still breath of Hell, smelling of ovens, smelling of dust. A stray wisp of dust-smoke whipped along the gravel ground and curled at my feet as I stared into the sun. Above me, the sky was the color of molten bronze and a dark bird circled overhead. Behind me I could hear the women weeping. Knotted together beneath the metal sky, the women's faces were torn and wet.

Mybabymybabymybaby. My baby's blood. My baby.

The heat dried my eyes, but the women's tears outpaced the sun. Swallowing in a dusty mouth I felt the wind lick my face like the tongue of a lizard before I followed her.

I hate Texas. If there's anything more stubborn, obstinate, hostile, and ignorant than a Federal Marshall, it's a fucking Texas Ranger. Rangers with their goodamned cowboy boots and bolo ties looking at us Feds like we're going to rape all their cattle and daughters before we piss on the Alamo.

"In here," the head honcho Ranger yanked open the door for us. I felt as though I was part of the invasion of Munchkinland rather than the Eleanor Roosevelt Day Care Center for Federal Employees. As I walked through the hallways, I smelled the ghosts of cookies, of hamsters in aquariums, of wheat paste, and disinfectant, breathing in the smells of a hundred children.

As always, Scully moved at my left. Even with the wrinkles in her suit, her face was as freshly pressed as ever.

I followed her into the room marked Nursery 1 underneath a banner of smiling teddy bears cut from brown paper, each teddy bear marked with a child's name. In the tot-scaled room, set up on tables that barely topped their knees, the Hostage Negotiation Unit was busy with files and phone lines and a blueprint of the building.

A tall African-American woman rose from a tiny chair and held out her hand. I blinked with recognition. Agent Kazdin, the woman who ran the Hostage Negotiation Unit from the Duane Barry case, the gestation of the dark odyssey. She was a bitch without a doubt, but she was good at her job and it had only taken a month or so for my ass to grow back after she had chewed it off.

"Agents Mulder and Scully, it's good of you to get here so quickly," she said in a voice as crisp as her clothes.

"How did you beat us here from Washington, Agent Kazdin?" I asked and shook her dry hand, "did you beam down?"

"Budget for emergency transportation," she said.

Yeah, they had a fucking budget while I was trying to scavenge paperclips from VICAP. They could fly down on a fucking Lear Jet. I, however, sat in coach with my knees pressed into my chest. At least they had to use the kiddie desks now.

"What exactly is the situation?" Scully asked, looking around the room with a sharp, assessing stare.

Yeah, that's Scully, down to the bone.

"At eight-fifteen this morning, William Abrams walked into the Day Care Center with an AK-47, he shot three of the workers, killing two, and then barricaded himself in the third nursery with twenty children under the age of four. He called the White House and demanded to speak with the President, the call was traced back here. At ten twenty-eight, three shots were fired in the nursery, and Abrams refuses to talk to anyone," Kazdin recited with the passion of someone giving street directions.

"So why are we here?" I asked.

"He said the magic word, the word that makes Spooky crawl out of his hole," rapped out a voice with Bronx consonants, "he said aliens."

Fuck, I thought.

"Zippy," I said.

"Spooky."

Agent Mike Zipprelli was encased in the kevlar and Velcro carapace of the SWAT unit, which suited his sly dark eyes and gleaming black hair. He stared at me for a moment, measuring. I'd seen him bare-assed in the locker room at Quantico and unless he had a transplant . . .

"You left Investigation Support?"

"Party was over after you shot down Patterson," he shrugged, "I'd rather blow the heads off these sick motherfuckers than try to think like them. Anyway, asshole in there calls the president and tells the White House operator that he has important information about the invasion of earth. Now since he's been here, he hasn't said shit about aliens, hasn't been saying much of anything since we re-routed his phone so it comes in here."

"How far have you gotten negotiating with Abrams?" Scully asked Kazdin, ignoring the fact that Zipprelli was looking at her as though he wanted to know what she tasted like.

I wasn't going to tell him.

Kazdin grunted, interrupting my staredown with Zippy before we actually whipped out the rulers. "Not very far. He hangs up whenever we call into the nursery and all he will say is that he wants to talk to either the President or Dan Rather."

"Dan Rather? He must be insane," Zipprelli snorted.

"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" I asked.

No one got it. I sighed, and was rewarded by one of Scully's tight-ass teacher faces.

"I don't want to minimize the seriousness of this situation, there is a man in there with an unknown amount of ammunition and twenty children. We lose even one of those tykes and we are going to be up shit's creek with the men in HQ," Kazdin rubbed her eyes for a moment and then stared at me. "Since you're the alien man, go talk to Abrams about aliens, get his confidence, promise him you'll take him back to the Mothership if you have to, but get those kids out of there."

"Right," I agreed. "What do they call him?"

"What?" Kazdin frowned like I'd just asked her what color her underwear was.

I pulled my snidest tone out of reserve and used it. Fuck you, I have a psych degree too. "His friends. Colleagues. What name do they use when they wish to speak to him? Is he William, is he Bill, or maybe Abe or Spike? I'm supposed to be his friend and if I get the name wrong he could decide I'm getting signals from the Dark Side of the Force."

She snapped her fingers and one of the agents whispered something frantically into his headset. Moments later, he looked up. "Bill."

I nodded and Zipprelli stepped forward with a bulletproof vest.

Naturally, Zippy had tightened the vest too much and in a matter of moments, I was sweating like a cold beer on a hot day, and I couldn't quite draw a deep breath. I hoped that my sweat wouldn't short-circuit the small headset and microphone Zippy had clamped on my head. The Texas Ranger who had followed us into the room gave a bovine snort while I struggled into the TAC gear; the Ranger wasn't wearing kevlar. Real men don't wear kevlar.

"She's cute," Zippy remarked after the door shut behind us.

The kevlar wouldn't help him much if I decided to break his nose.

I followed Zippy to the intersection of two hallways where the SWAT team had set up a barricade of black plastic and fiber panels designed to deflect gunfire. The men in their black clothes and their black hats were like a murder of crows waiting in a cemetery. Wiping sweat-soaked hair back from my face, I let Zippy lead me to the edge of the barricade and pointed to indicate the door behind which Abrams had the children. This door was surrounded by construction paper balloons labeled with the names of the children.

Akira Anna Connor Dakota David Devon Jamal Kevin Pat Shane Tamika

Those were the names that I could read from where I stood and I wondered if the balloon children were alive beyond the happy door, or had Abrams killed any of them. There was a movie that they had showed when I was a child, something about a red balloon that got away and had all kind of adventures. I couldn't remember the name of the movie but I remembered that the balloon was alive. If only I could open the window and let the children float free, caught by the hot wind.

God, what if I screwed up? Negotiation was hardly my forte; I couldn't even get the right order at McDonald's half the time. I wasn't a fool. I knew I had an irritating effect on people. If that wasn't the understatement of the year . . .

Now there were twenty little lives counting on me to boot. Oklahoma City flashed through my mind, images imprinted in the consciousness of the nation. Small bodies carried out by weeping firemen. Behind the door of the Nursery, there was silence. No whining or weeping children. My experience with children was limited, but I knew that they should have been crying. The silence made my blood turn to sand my bones to stone.

"Bill. Can I talk to you?" I called.

"Fuck off," the man suggested from the other side of the door.

"I want to talk to you about the aliens," I continued.

"Did you miss the memo?" Abrams asked in a dry shade of irony, "Didn't they tell you that I was crazy?"

"Then we have something in common. Tell me what you know."

"Why should I?"

"I've seen things," I said and began to slide along the wall towards the door.

Zippy's hand plucked at my shoulder, but I threw off the grip and continued to slide to the arc of balloons, the wall cool against my cheek. The earpiece crackled in my brain, picking up voices from the command center. I stopped to listen. "We have something," a man said, " air duct. Runs from the roof, through the main system and into the nursery."

"Gas?" Kazdin asked.

"Would flood the whole building. Might be toxic to the children. It's geared for adults. I'm thinking a sharpshooter."

"Why are you telling me this and not doing it?"

"The duct is too small for any of my men."

"Will I fit?" Scully's voice asked.

I held my breath, shut my eyes.

Shit fuck.

"Every single one of these children are not real. They have been created to destroy us," Abrams said in a calm, collected voice, sounding as though we were having this conversation over coffee rather than through a door with guns on both sides, "they aren't human. We're holding the source of our own destruction close to our breast. They will weaken us from the inside and destroy us."

"Who are they, Bill?" I asked, my fingers touching the purple pulpy paper of a balloon marked with Tamika's name. She can't do that, she can't crawl through the vents, she can't get caught in the dark, she can't try to sneak up behind this fuckhead and she can't take him out. I won't let her. I can't.

"The ubiquitous, invisible them."

"How?"

"I was changing the junction box out on Jonestown Road. I heard the conversation between two men. They mentioned a plan, merchandise."

Merchandise. The word was like a rock in my gut. A rock on a bruise.

2
The dark cloud of her lamentations
Is just beginning.
Soon, I know, It will burst aflame as her anger rises.
Deep in passion and unrelenting,
What will she do now, stung with insult?

Merchandise?

I heard Mulder gulp air as Abrams said it.

The word crackled through my earpiece and my brain as I followed the quartet of Rangers up the stairwell. Why choose that word? Was it at all possible that Abrams knew?

I had been merchandise.

They (the ubiquitous, invisible them) had stacked me and stored me and returned me to sender.

Postage due.

The Rangers all frowned at each other, none of them liking the idea of sending a tiny little thing like me in to do a man's job. Fuck them all, I thought, and took the rifle that one of them handed to me. They were damn lucky I hadn't turned my gun on the one who had held the door to the roof open for me. I checked the rifle, looked along the sights and saw that it was aimed well and stocked with ammunition. I wasn't planning on getting in a firefight with Abrams, but I wanted more than one shot.

"Can you handle that? Looks a little big for you," Zippy asked.

One of the Rangers snorted and a patch of color brightened Zippy's olive cheekbones.

"What I meant was, would you rather have a pistol?"

"I learned to shoot with a shotgun."

"You blow this motherfucker's head off and we'll stand you for as many rounds as you can drink at Parrothead's in town," a blonde crewcut in FBI Tac pret a porter offered.

"If this young woman wastes Abrams, we'll pick up the bar tab," the oldest ranger grumbled.

And then they would see who has the worst hangover in the morning and continue the male posturing. Zippy started helping me into the kevlar vest which was designed for a man, and painfully flattened my breasts against my ribcage.

Under my high tech armor, I started to roast in the chimney air on the roof. A helicopter chattered overhead and sent up waves of sand the color of crushed cork. An access panel was unhooked and a section of roof peeled off. A black rectangle plunged into the interior of the building. A small black rectangle. A very small black rectangle.

I started unfastening the bulletproof vest.

"Put that back on! Do you want to get shot?"

"Look, I won't fit in the shaft with this on. I won't be able to maneuver, and there's a good possibility I'll get heat stroke. Can we just get the harness, please?"

The harness in question was a standard mountaineering one, a man's harness and even with the buckles pulled tight by Zippy's capable if friendly hands, it barely fit me. By that time I had discarded my shoes and trouser-socks as well as my jacket. The hot air dried the sweat on my body. Finally, with the harness in place, the headset over my head, and the rifle gripped in both hands, I let them lower me into the hole.

The air vent was metal and hot on my bare feet. Without a light, my eyes quickly accustomed to the dark as I was lowered foot by foot into the stomach of the building.

****

Goddamnit, I thought as I heard what was going on above my head. I have a hard time concentrating at the best of times, but listening to Scully breathe in my ear while I was trying to talk to Abrams was almost more than my brain was able to handle. It's just that the breathing pattern she had taken up in the airshaft was almost identical to the one she adopted when we had sex. It was a little bit like having a phone-sex call at your desk while your boss was in the office. If I walked away from the nursery door with a hard-on a whole new "Legend of Spooky Mulder" was going to be born that day.

"Bill, look here, you can't stay in there with the children, there's a whole SWAT team outside who will shoot you into Swiss cheese if you screw up. Why don't you put the gun down and come out before the situation gets out of control."

"And it isn't out of control now?"

The bitter and salt of his words tasted too familiar to me, I'd had them in my mouth more than once.

"It's not too late," I whispered into the sticky wood door.

"If the SWAT team doesn't kill me, then They will, if They don't I'll be executed. Give me a good reason to give up like a good boy."

I didn't have one and Kazdin began growling some trust bullshit into my head and I had to turn down the sound of the headset until I couldn't hear Scully breathe anymore.

I shut my eyes and the words were so clear in my head that I can't honestly tell you if I spoke them aloud or not.

Don't let them take you alive.

There are worse ways to die than sucking on your own gun.

I know.

Do it, Bill.

The scalpel in my stomach dug a little deeper.

****

There was light at the end of the tunnel. Literally. I could see the light from the grate over the vent in the nursery, could hear a man's voice muttering to himself. Since it wasn't echoed in my ear, I knew it wasn't Mulder. I crawled forward like a snail on a hot sidewalk, leaving parts of my body cooked to the side of the vent. They don't make non-stick venting. The rifle was pushed under my arm and squeezed the hell out of my left breast. No wonder the Amazons performed mastectomies to perfect their archery.

"In position," I hissed into the tiny microphone.

With my nose up against the dirty grating, I could see Abrams' head and shoulders above a row of plastic shelving full of bright, happy stuffed animals. Sesame Street characters grinned at me with their empty placid smiles. Ernie looked particularly vapid that day. In the corner of my seriously restricted field of vision, I could make out what looked like two small bodies on the carpet by the window. The room was so quiet. He must have killed the children; there was no other explanation. I dragged the rifle out from underneath my body and relaxed into a comfortable position, my cheek alongside the stock and looked down along the sights.

Like shooting fish in a barrel.

The crosshairs lined up at the back of Abrams' head.

The bastard had killed the children.

My sweaty finger stroked the trigger and waited for the order.

****

I wondered where Scully was, if she was waiting somewhere with her gunsights on the back of Abrams head, or my head for that matter.

"How do I know you're not one of them?" Abrams asked me.

"You don't," I admitted, "you're going to have to take my word for it."

That and a quarter will buy you a nice house with a great view of Love Canal.

"You're right, I don't."

A rifle makes a particular noise when the bolt is drawn back, even something like an AK-47. Despite rumors to the contrary, I actually do not have a death wish as such.

I dove for the linoleum as the fire poured over my head.

Wood splinters and unidentifiable gore rained down from the ruined door onto my throbbing head. All I could hear was my heartbeat and a strange underwater gurgle that might have been voices. I raised my head and wood chips and bloody chunks of Bill Abrams fell to the floor. Abrams' head, looking like a Jack-O-Lantern left out on Mischief Night, bobbed through a hole in the door big enough for a man to crawl through. But Abrams wasn't going to be crawling anywhere again, not unless he could manage to do it without a brain.

I stood up and what might have been a hunk of cerebellum the size of my fist fell to the ground with a wet plop.

>From inside the room came a metallic clanging sound and I looked through the hole in time to see Scully drop from the air vent high in the wall with a rifle slung over her shoulder like a soldier. She picked her way across the floor in her bare little feet to the first of the small bodies on the carpet. I saw her touch the fragile neck to feel for a pulse. I saw her lift the hair from the back of the child's skull and look at the nape of the little creature's neck.

I knew what she was looking for.

I didn't want her to find it.

The pain almost made me double over. I made it to the shrunken bathroom and leaned over the miniature sink and gave up what was left of the airline breakfast and several cups of coffee. Afterwards I rinsed my mouth out and crunched a pair of Tums between my molars.

A moment later, Zippy was leaning over the other bathroom sink heaving up whatever possum pancakes passed for breakfast out here. Only then did I feel better.

Bill Abrams was dead on the scene from a self-inflicted wound. The wound inflicted by Agent Scully from the ventilator shaft cleanly pierced his heart and would have killed him had he not blown the fuck out of his own head a millisecond before.

Abrams left behind no family (none that wanted to claim him) and nineteen dead children. It looked like--not that I wanted to take Scully's job, but just eyeballing it--he'd strangled sixteen after he found the first three gunshot wounds too draining. Too much blood on the scuffed tile floor; he would have slipped and slid in it. Scully found the twentieth child hiding underneath a pile of stuffed animals in the coat closet. I wouldn't want to have to foot the bill for Jamal's mental heath care for the rest of his life.

While Scully was coaxing a near-catatonic Jamal out from the closet, I looked at the neck of the closest child. He was one of the lucky ones--shot right off, instead of having to stand in line as his classmates were slowly executed. There was nothing out of the ordinary, except for a lot of blood and the fact that the kid was a stiff as a dried cod.

The kids hadn't been merchandise.

Even while the Rangers and the other Fibbies pounded Scully on the back in congratulation, her lips thinned and she stared at me with gas flame eyes over a pile of dead bodies.

****

3

Let Innocence, the gods' loveliest gift,
Choose me for her own;
Never may the dread Cyprian
Craze my heart to leave old love for new,
Sending to assault me
Angry disputes and feuds unending;
But let her judge shrewdly the loves of women
And respect the bed where no war rages.

"While the Spookster here processes all this, you wanna go grab a beer?"

I nodded. It was all over but the paperwork. Mulder had, uncharacteristically volunteered to write up our end of it while I collected the gratitude of the Rangers.

"You'll be sorry," Mulder chanted in his toneless singsong from the desk.

Zippy's eyes rolled like marbles and he jerked away, making a 'crazy' circle in the air next to his left ear. I probably shouldn't have laughed.

The bar was charming. Beer signs, CD jukebox playing both Country and Western and a potpourri of domestic beers on tap behind the counter, they had Coors, Budweiser and, Bud Lite. The women eyeballing Zippy's House of Fed suit had big hair and bigger bustlines. The Rangers and the Fibbies can be friends provided that there's enough to drink. Pretty shortly, the glasses were getting emptied and the conversation was getting loud.

"So, " Zippy began, lighting a cigarette," how do you like working with the Spookster?"

"It's far from dull."

He nodded and flashed me a brilliant smile.

"Y'know he was the youngest one in our class at Quantico, and a total dork besides."

"And you were the star?"

"You know it babe," he gave me the orthodontist's fantasy smile again.

Zippy flagged down the barmaid for my third beer while he was waiting for her to fill the mug from the tap, he pulled down his tie and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his dress shirt. There, against the arabesques of his collarbones rested a heavy filigree crucifix, catching the light from the neon over the bar. I stared at the buttery light. Of course he was Catholic, he was Italian and naturally he would wear a cross and he probably had a St. Jude medal on his key chain, the patron saint of policemen and hopeless causes. When he pushed the beer towards me, his bright denim eyes caught my gaze.

"Gift from my Grandma, I was an altar boy," he said with a self-deprecating little smirk.

I wanted to reach out and touch it, but instead I clamped my hand down around the cold glass and let the ice-brew flow down to my own cold center.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

I almost spit beer all over his nice shirt.

"What?"

"You look so sad."

"I'm fine, Zippy."

The palm of his hand was warm on my cheek, Mulder's hands are always so cold, and I wanted to just roll over and surrender, touch something normal, touch something simple, uncomplicated that wouldn't poison me afterwards. I saw Ed Jerse's face over Zippy's for a moment, and I jerked out of his touch so fast that I knocked over my beer.

"Autopsy tomorrow," I babbled, realizing that I'd taken the same witless staccato tone that Mulder gets, "I have to go."

I rose and he didn't stop me. I felt his molten eyes on me as I left.

****

I was nearly finished with the case files when Scully returned, mad as a cat after its yearly flea dip. She marched over to the tiny table where I was and slammed the laptop's screen down, forcing it into sleep mode.

Scully was by no means ready for sleep mode.

When she bent down to kiss me I could taste Zippy's sweat on her, but she didn't smell like sex, just beer and cigarette ashes.

Normally she's fully feline, never giving more than the subtlest clues to her desires, the flicker of an expression, tilt of an eyebrow, all tiny bits of information to be assembled into a coherent whole. It's my job, and with Scully I can still get it wrong. I can still blunder, a slow-witted mongrel, into her roomful of cut glass and cut myself to death. But this time she was tossing me a big-ass hint that she wanted to get laid.

I'd have to think about it.

The fact that I was her creature didn't mean that she should be too confident of that fact. Zippy had touched her, she'd let Zippy touch her, which constituted loitering with intent as far as I was concerned even if she hadn't followed through on it. Obviously something hadn't clicked and she was back to her good ol' standby, fucking Fox Mulder. (And I mean "fucking" as a gerund, though she probably thought of it as an adjective.)

I hoped that she'd led Zippy on until he'd gotten the world's worst case of blue balls and then laughed at his pencil-slim dick. Scully wasn't averse to taking the easy shots.

I was ready to hurt her now.

"Did you have a good time?" I asked as though she hadn't just tried to suck my tonsils out of my head.

She shrugged. She knew I'd imagine the two of them--the rest of the agents were paper dolls, irrelevant--in the smoky bar, listening to the stupid wails of some heroin-glazed singer pretending to be in love, the amber bite of the alcohol and how it would erase the edges of the day. Bodies moving at the edge of their vision, reminding them that they could just go back to Zippy's place and fuck like lemmings.

Bunnies, I mean.

I wasn't done yet. "I just don't want you to be hung over. What with the autopsies tomorrow morning? Less room for error with children, isn't there?"

"Apparently not where you're concerned."

Yep. Straight to the balls. I guess she was too jet-lagged to bother batting me around the hotel room for fun before she administered the killing bite.

The mouse bites back.

"You either, for that matter." Blinking like a cat too close to a candle flame, Scully stared at me for a moment. I stared back the best that I could but with those eyes of hers it sometimes feels like staring into the moon for too long. I reached for her, wanting to make her apologize, admit that she had been wrong to go drinking with Zippy, and to punish her for it. She tasted of salt when I ran my mouth over the sweat-damp landscape of her throat. Her fingers twisted into my hair as though she was trying to open my head like the top of a Snapple bottle.

"Be *nice*," I warned her.

I got a bitten lip for that one.

I slapped her hands away from my head and she gave me a poisonous glare. I swear to God if I ever hit a woman, it's going to be Scully. She can get me from mellow to psychotic faster than a Porsche on a test track.

Yanking on her wrists, I pulled her down onto my lap. One of the things that I frequently forget about Scully is that she is so tiny and so delicate that I could probably snap her neck with my hands, provided that she didn't blow my head off first. I sucked on her neck, tasting her hot skin and deliberately leaving a possessive mark. She didn't complain at the scraping of my teeth, only arched her back against me and dug her fingers into my shoulders. I slid down her throat, pulling her shirt up with fumbling, stiff hands and caught her breasts through the framework of her bra. She must have been planning to fuck Zippy since she had a no-nothing cradle of black cobweb and wire hanging onto her breasts like a bad memory.

Asshole that I am, I backed her down onto the tiny table which wobbled dangerously under our combined weight. She shimmied out of her trousers and her panties, which ended up somewhere over my left shoulder, and I have no idea what happened to her blouse and bra. But she was lying there gold, pink, white and glowing in the yellow light from the bedside lamp, her head dripping off the edge of the table and her legs tight around my hips. Scully grabbed the tongue of my tie and pulled me down onto her.

Lines of control were getting thinner and harder to maintain.

Her mouth was like a pencil sharpener, grinding away on my lips and tongue on the pleasure/pain border. Fingers scrabbled at my back, my ass, the fly of my pants, and finally reached for my cock and decanted it with more enthusiasm than grace. Her breasts were under my hands, I was buried in her up to what felt like the base of my spine and she was rocking underneath me. God, she was too much, too tight, too wet, too active around me, and it had been months since she let me touch her.

I lasted about five minutes, if that, until I came with a sloppy thunderclap and slid on top of her. She gave a little moan of disappointment and I moved to make amends with my mouth and hands. Eventually she snapped taut as a fishing line with a ten pound bass at the other end, and I heard her triumphant gasping through the surround of her thighs.

Somehow, we made it into the bed and I lay there with her curled around me like the most innocent of kittens snuggling with a favorite toy, while I tried to figure out why I was markedly NOT HAPPY. As a matter of fact, I was feeling drained in a way that had little to do with sex.

My lovely little vampire love, she bleeds me.

Literally, sometimes.

Not long ago, she almost bled me to death.

San Diego. I never want to go back there again. I spent too many hours at that damn hospital watching the child/not child dying muscle by muscle, watching Scully's face get thinner and more transparent moment by moment. She became her own reflection in the glass of the isolation chamber. Then I was banished, sent outside like a bad puppy to wait. I sulked on one of the standard hospital-issue plastic chairs until my brain went as numb as my ass. Or my ass went as numb as my brain, whatever.

Finally, she wafted out of the isolation chamber, a Sarah Bernhardt Hamlet with her cropped amber hair, her black suit over narrow shoulders and slim legs, her face made of eggshell. I stood up. Her lips were pressed into a red ink line. Hardly slowing her pace, she pulled at my coat sleeve and clipped along while I loped to keep up. The final destination was a handicapped accessible bathroom off an empty conference room, I'll never know how she knew it existed. With a hard hand at the small of my back she shoved me into the dark box of the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind us. For a moment it crossed my mind that she might have been one of the shape-shifters, until she grabbed the hair at the back of my skull and dragged my mouth down on hers. I'd know her taste in my dreams, on my deathbed, in the deepest unconscious state, and the worst of soap-opera amnesia. Pulling at me, ripping her blouse out of the waistband of her pants, dropping her jacket on the floor, biting at my lips, and pulling my hands onto the hard heat of her breasts.

I don't have that much self-control. The second my sluggish neurons made the connection, I was groping her like a teenager out of sight of the chaperons. My cock was harder than a fifteen-year-old's, when she slithered up onto the washbasin, her naked ass in my hands, and my pants at my ankles, I surrendered.

Like she had to twist my arm.

Frantic, she was, heaving against me, in a jagged rhythm, her breath hot and wild in my ear, squeezing my cock inside her, wet and endlessly tight around me. Her heels bit my spine, her fingers pierced my rib cage and she rocked back and forth. The only sound she made was a series of sharp pants, like those of a person in pain, and when she would climax, her entire body would seize up and vibrate like a struck tuning fork. I think she must have come three times in that bathroom and I know it had more to do with her frame of mind than my prowess. I'm not that naive. When the orgasm finally hit me and turned my spine and my brain into a pulsing laser beam of sensation and cleansing mindlessness, I felt a strange sense of gratitude that she'd let me come at all.

The moment that my exhausted member fell out of her, she wiggled off the washbasin and began to feel around for her clothes. Throbbing and brain-dead, I listened to her move around the little dark room.

"W-what the hell?"

"She's dead."

I heard a zipper hiss shut.

"Emily is dead. I have to get all the hospital paperwork and make the funeral arrangements. I'll call you once the particulars are planned."

She shut the door behind her, leaving me in the darkness. When I could think I washed my face and rinsed my mouth from the thin warm stream from the tap. California has a water shortage and the water was sluggish and metallic and I spat again and again until my mouth was dry.

I could still taste her.

In the artificial air-conditioned Austin hotel air, so dead and distant from San Diego, I could feel the pain all over again, like I'd just discovered it. A thousand pounds of pressure and silver knives. Something was in my spine, pulling apart each nerve fiber, shredding axons and dendrites.

In California I'd learned that I'd made a terrible mistake. The Scully I carried around inside me, whispering logic and somehow still managing to drown out all the other voices in my head, the one who'd eaten me whole and accepted it all--she was my own invention. I needed her, and I thought I'd found her. She needed a quick fuck, and she thought she'd found it. The only difference was, she was right.

The sad thing was that I understood her reasons with more clarity than I could discover for my own.

****

The next morning, I was sitting at my borrowed desk, trying to write a coherent profile and waiting for Scully to return from the autopsy bay where she was checking personally to see whether any unusual scars or lumps had been missed on the victims.

"You should have warned me," was the first thing Zippy said to me when he walked in.

Shit, someone should have warned me.

I shrugged. I guess he meant that I should have encouraged him; that way he would have known that Scully was, how shall I say it, difficult.

"I know you two are sleeping together."

I looked up at him, genuinely surprised. "What gives you that idea?"

"I saw it in your eyes when she walked out of that schoolroom," he said. My eyes, not hers. My lover's eyes are nothing like the sun; they are black holes and no light escapes them. "I'm not as smart as you are but I've got good instincts."

"Your good instincts didn't keep you from taking Scully to a bar last night."

"Yeah, well, the little head and the big head disagreed on that."

"Which is which for you?"

"Fuck you," he said, but his heart wasn't in it. "Here's a list of the families if you want to go ask them how many times they've seen 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.'"

****

There was an instructor at Quantico who thought that Robin Williams was funnier than nitrous, and he'd start every 9am class off with the rousing cry, "I love the smell of formaldehyde in the morning!"

I, on the contrary, hate the smell of dead people. The only good thing the cancer did for me was deaden my sense of smell. The various salves that most people use make me break out, and I refuse to walk around with a little red mustache all the time. So I deal with the smell like I deal with everything, I get through it.

We did the children first, like on a sinking ship.

Bill Abrams suspected that the children at the Roosevelt center were hybrids just as Emily had been.

He was wrong.

None of the little corpses revealed the green tumor's growth at the base of the skull or any of the strange pseudo-capillaries that Emily had exhibited. Not that I knew for sure, the bastards had stolen her body as well. But these dead children were terribly normal -- as normal as can be expected when a high-powered rifle bullet passes through immature tissue and organs or when strangulation blackens the face with blood, causing petechial hemorrhages under unwrinkled skin so young and fresh adult women would kill to have it. There were going to be nineteen closed coffins.

When we finished with them, despite all the care I'd taken, there was blood everywhere. Nineteen bodies adds up, even if they're just kids. Blood on the floor, on the outdated porcelain tables, dripping thickly down the scales used to weigh organs, smearing across the chalkboard used to record data. The chalk was so bloody that I had to break a piece in half to get something that would actually write, and even then the blood had soaked in a pink ring around the white center.

The children, contrary to Abrams' claims, were just ordinary dead American kids. On the other hand, Abrams himself exhibited many of the strange scars left on Duane Barry's body. Naturally. I found no implants.

Naturally they had covered everything up with a thin veneer of normalcy.

So I covered everything up with my own thin layer.

But what if those children had been merchandise? What if they had been like Emily, captive by their own misbegotten conception? What if they had been my children?

The children whose possibility had been stolen from me.

The ova that They had harvested from my senseless body were in the world somewhere open to any abuse or misuse that They decided.

I had to stop that. I had to get back what had been taken from me or prevent Them from using my ova by destroying each and every reproductive cell that had been stolen from me.

No short and painful Emily-lives anymore. I'd rather have no progeny than another child suffer the way she had.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

Stripping off the gloves and gown, I dropped them into the biohazard bin in the Morgue and headed outside. The Texas sun warmed the death chill out of my flesh as I stood next to one of the clerical workers who was smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. She looked over at me and took in the splashes of blood on my sneakers and the bottoms of my scrub pants.

"The kids?" she asked

"Yeah."

She held out a pack of Morleys and I almost laughed.

Twenty little bodies. It was a new record.

The smoke tasted better than I remembered and it cleared the formalin taste out of my mouth, replacing it with the taste of incipient death.

One of the rental fleet cars pulled up and Mulder got out his blackened sunglasses catching a flare of sunlight, his dark suit blowing in the hot wind.

"Anything?" he asked me, staring at the cigarette in my hand.

"Nothing. And you?"

"Nothing. None of the children were adopted. Abrams must have had a few wires crossed."

I shut my eyes and the sunlight burned flame orange through my closed lids.

"Are you all right, Scully?" he asked in a soft voice.

"I'm fine, Mulder."