fic: Wotan's Day 12/16
Title: Wotan's Day
Fandoms: Highlander, X-files, Invisible Man
Rating:NC-17 overall, PG-13 this chapter.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.
Background:The year is 2023. Methos, the oldest of the Immortals in Highlander, was living as a corporate lawyer in Denver. Alexander Krycek, the double-dealing ratboy of the X-Files, was living there as an art dealer, running a gallery in Aurora, Colorado. Mulder was retired, somewhere suburban.
Summary: Mistakes are made, and two secrets revealed. Maybe three.
Warning: From here on out, some very bad things happen, and people start to die.
Chapter 1
(Chapters link sequentially from there.)
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
"Marriage is a psychological condition, not a civil contract and a license. Once a marriage is dead, it is dead, and it begins to stink even faster than a dead fish."
To Sail Beyond the Sunset
My phone rang. In the peephole I saw Johnson's face, dirt-smeared and grim.
"How sprang the trap?" I asked as a greeting.
"Too bad we got your warning too late."
"Corrivubias said she did it so you would know what you were up against."
"I hate to say it," Johnson sighed, a mix of anger and resignation, "but she may have had a point. We only had two Immortals to absorb over twenty Quickenings."
That would exhaust even me. Perhaps Corrivubias had been telling the truth. "How's Mulder?"
I could see her shrug. "Too calm, which I assume means he'll snap any minute now."
"Did MacLeod agree to take him as a student?"
"No," she said. "He still won't take students."
"Yes, well, the last time I killed one of mine, it took quite a while to take another."
"And how long is quite a while?"
Despite the situation, I smiled at her. "I was a Watcher too, you know. I know your tricks, and damn if you haven't gotten me to admit that Adam Pierson wasn't a new Immortal."
"I knew that just from watching you fight Blaise Edwards.” She paused and added, “Joe Dawson trusted me enough to hint broadly. MacLeod asked for you before he recovered himself from the clones, but he passed it off as Mathias. I don't think anyone else noticed."
I looked at her small face on the screen of my phone. It looked as if she were trying not to spook a skittish horse. I said nothing, wondering if she could see that the blood had drained from my face.
"I think Joe felt someone should know that you were still alive." She took a breath and said my name. "Methos. Your secret is safe."
Even through the phone, I could hear the reverence, and it stuck in my throat. It was unpleasant, being treated like a Holy Grail. It was just a cup, after all.
She seemed to realize that she had pushed into areas I would not welcome. "Don't worry. MacLeod has already told me what he will do if I reveal you to the Watchers." She returned to the disciplined agent. "I can’t raise Gantt. What's your situation, Mr. Bierce?"
"Krycek and Gantt are in an underground bunker, looking for Kaos. We have about a dozen dead, thanks to a truck bomb, and Gantt said six were Immortals. Corrivubias is here, keeping company with a former federal agent named Bobby Hobbes. Where are you?"
"On the road to Mund's Canyon. MacLeod is driving."
"Don’t come here," I said. “Hobbes’ truck bomb has caught the attention of local fire and rescue. We'll meet you back at the hotel."
There was a jolting in the picture as MacLeod grabbed the phone. "Are you all right? What is Krycek doing?" Before I could answer he went on, "Mulder says he's a rat bastard who can't be trusted."
I could tell he was quoting. MacLeod never used such language. "That should make us soul mates, then, shouldn't it?"
"Methos," he began.
Damn nursemaid. "He's already killed me once today. I won't let him do it again. See you in Sedona."
I closed the phone on his impotent fury.
Mulder's assessment of Krycek did not surprise me. I took a sip from my camelback and thought back to the evidence before me. In two minutes I had exhausted the alternate conclusions and settled on what I had not let myself think.
In two more minutes I saw a light down the stairs. I knelt down to where I could see, ready to withdraw should it not be Krycek and Gantt. Sounds reached me of low voices, of dragging, then Gantt said, "You want to help me get this thing up the stairs?"
I came down. Krycek and Gantt were dragging a tarp that held the charred body of what must be Aleister Kaos. It looked like no body I had ever seen, scabbed in shades of green and brown without a hint of red. I took Krycek's side of the tarp, and Gantt handed off his flashlight as we started to drag the thing up the stairs. Four steps up, Gantt slipped and dropped his end. The body rolled, and he jumped away from the body and the tarp.
"Sorry," he said.
Krycek explained, "The blood is toxic to humans. It probably won't kill you, though."
"Probably?"
"It contains a retrovirus."
A momentary image rose of a rough back room, of myself in a sling, with the smell of sex and Crisco overlaying everything. I'd been exposed to retroviruses before. "Should be all right."
I was going to have to carry the thing and if the ichor--a stilted word these days, but there was no other--contaminated my clothes, it would be a hazard to the mortals. I took off my coat and handed it to Krycek, then stripped everything but my shorts. He hung my bloodstained coat on his prosthetic, knowing it would not fold given the swords, and slung my camelback of water over his shoulder. He mimicked a coat rack as I laid my empty back holster on his arm, and the humor struck me as out of place, but in character. I piled my clothes on the ground, intending to burn them, bloody as they were from the incident of the opened jugular vein. I ended by adorning Krycek further with the knife in its arm sheath. It also struck me that he looked at me, standing near naked, with no desire at all. That was almost a mistake.
To Gantt I said, "Can you find water? An outdoor spigot that still works or a barrel. I'll need to clean this stuff off when I'm done."
The thing was heavy, man shaped, and ugly. I pulled it onto my shoulders, in a calf carry, what we called it before there were firemen. I shuddered under the weight, the alien smell, and the realization that something about him affected me. My mind slipped around time and experience, refusing to stay here and now.
I staggered up the stairs and toward the car, the sounds of a dozen battlefields in my ears, the memory of trying to save too many fallen comrades with the same weight, the same burns, the same slick feeling of blood. I heard myself groan, protest and shout orders in an ancient tongue I did not know to soldiers long dead in a battle fought at the beginning of history, in battles that were not in my memory. I carried that thing through five thousand years of heavy clubs, black knives, beaked nulla-nullas, smooth anastasis, fletched arrows, curved kopesh, long spears, bright swords and loud guns.
I had never held a nulla-nulla, but I knew how to make one, how to hunt with it, paddle with it, make fire with it, fire that would dance across the dark, tattooed arms and faces of my Anangu brothers. I looked at my hands, shocked to find them bleached white like a bone on the sand.
"That, my friends, is one ugly customer. I can't believe it's still moving." Corrivubias and Hobbes were waiting at the car, and Hobbes' voice gave me a thread of connection, but I couldn’t be sure if it was yet another Quickening somewhere within me. I felt lost, fragmented, but with the voice coming from outside myself, I had a moment of awareness. Only then did I realize that the body I held was putting up a feeble protest. A figure ran up with a tarp. Tall. Gantt.
"Put him in the back seat," Krycek said. “If he regenerates, he'll be able to let himself out of the trunk." That didn't make sense. I would close the trunk with a padlock and stow it in the hold of the ship.
A woman's voice spoke like a long-delayed echo. "Why haven't you killed him yet?"
I could hear the smile.
Looking back, I must assume that Gantt spread the tarp on the seat, and Hobbes had some instinct that I needed him to talk me through the motions of putting the body down.
I heard Gantt say he had found water, and Hobbes took up a stick and herded me after him, knowing I was incapable on my own. Part of my mind knew he did not dare to touch me, and other parts remembered the prods of the overseers, waited for the whips, expected to know nothing but pain and labor.
The touch of the water jolted me, and I wondered if they were cleaning me for sale. Then the fragments began to fall back together. Gantt had found a hose connected to one of the out buildings and sprayed me down. As the green slime washed off, I remembered where I was, became one awareness again, standing in a scrub forest in the canyons. I turned and let him spray off my back and shoulders, then reached for the hose to finish the job myself. I pulled off the shorts, walked over toward the house, gathered my clothes and boots, and threw everything but the boots in the fire.
Gantt had gone on ahead, but Hobbes stayed close, carefully not looking as I stalked nude through the grounds. I skirted the dead and the parts of the dead, not wanting to get blood on my feet.
Krycek had laid my change of clothes on the hood of the car, but not my coat, the empty holster, or my PlaSteel knife in the forearm sheath. I dressed while everyone else stood discreetly on the other side. I heard noises of conversation, anger from Corrivubias, and what might have been a strangled groan from inside the car.
“You have to kill it!” Corrivubias said as I walked up to the group. “It’s healing itself. You’re the only one with the weapon that can do it.” She, Gantt and Hobbes were facing Krycek, who ignored them to look at me.
“Hello, Matt. Ready to go?”
“We won’t all fit in the car. Where’s my knife?”
“It’s in the trunk. You won’t need it.”
“Ah, but I feel naked without it. You wouldn’t want me to be uncomfortable, would you, lover?"
He reacted ever so slightly to the word, and smiled insincerely. “No. I’ll get it for you.” My coat and the camelback were in the trunk as well, but he only handed me the knife. I decided not to push it. My gun, I could see, was in his waistband. I slid up my shirtsleeve and strapped the blade into place. “Let’s go,” he said.
He reached to close the hood, and I stopped him. “Let me get the water. I’m thirsty,” I said, and grabbed the camelback. He was tense until he saw I wasn’t reaching for my coat and the swords.
Krycek slammed the hood hard enough that everyone looked our way, and then he drew his gun. “We’ll be leaving now,” he said as he brought up his arm to aim at them. “Nice working with you people.”
There was a noise, and Gantt fell, a bullet to the head. By the time he hit the ground, Hobbes was aiming a .357 at Krycek, and Corrivubias was holding something like a modified .22 pointed at me. I didn't want to test the innocent-looking gun. Anyone with access to alien technology, I decided, probably had more secrets than I did.
The thought struck me as weirdly normal. It seemed I was adjusting to life post-Tuesday.
I looked at the scene, and came to a decision. "Let them go, Sasha," I said. "Weapons down everyone." I had commanded armies, and I commanded them, even Krycek with the use of that name. "Let them walk back to town,” I said.
He considered for a long moment before dropping his gun. “Gantt was the only real threat,” he said, as if justifying himself to someone, perhaps himself. He was wrong.
I handed the camelback to Hobbes. “Wear this.” He looked at me and I narrowed my eyes a bit, the only gesture Krycek couldn’t see. “It’s water.”
“Thanks,” Hobbes said, and set the pack on his shoulders.
"Get the keys,” Krycek ordered.
I bent down and felt Gantt’s pockets, remembering how little it once affected me to search the dead, but now finding myself discomfited. I looked at the neat bullet hole in his head and thought about Krycek’s scar, wishing suddenly that Gantt had the benefit of PlaSteel overlying his skull. Right now, I liked him better than my husband. I found the keys and held them out to Krycek, my face showing none of my regret.
"You drive," he said to me. To Hobbes and Corrivubias he said, "Turn around, and do not look back until you can't hear the car any more. If you do, I'll shoot you."
He opened the door to the passenger seat, and I took the wheel and started the car. Hobbes and Corrivubias turned their backs, facing the burning house. Krycek shot them both in the back. I didn't flinch at the noise. They sprawled forward, a red stain spreading on the back of Corrivubias’ khaki jacket, water from the camelback darkening the dry earth next to Hobbes. Krycek did not seem to notice that it wasn’t blood.
The car dipped under Krycek's weight, and he closed the door. "Let's go."
Mindful of how close Gantt lay to the car, I backed slowly and turned around. Krycek, turned toward Kaos, and in the rearview I could see that the body was becoming less of a corpse and more of a trauma victim. The ruined eyes were trying to open.
"Why did you kill them?" I asked.
"Gantt was no DCI agent. He wouldn't have gone along with the truck bomb killing innocent people. Corrivubias is poison, always has been. Hobbes was an unknown, and I didn't trust him."
I didn't like the answer. If nothing else, Krycek hadn't even considered that fact that Hobbes worked for me when he shot him. That was his second mistake. "Where are we going?" I asked.
"Find a back road, and park."
"We're on a back road."
"One that doesn't lead right to the compound."
"What are we waiting for, the authorities to go by? They'll start searching the area. If that helicopter comes back, they'll probably find us.”
"We’ll move on as best we can. He should be back to normal in an hour or so, if he holds true to type."
"Right." Even since Tuesday, some things were harder to take than others.
"Their blood kills. It’s a good thing you weren’t affected by it."
That was his third mistake. I almost said What do you mean, I wasn’t affected? but when I looked at him, he was turned toward Kaos. He had not noticed what Hobbes and Gantt had seen, that mere contact with that thing had begun to shred me. I didn’t know if it was the thing’s blood, or if in self-defense it was trying to use its power to take apart my Quickening, but it was not going to touch me again if I could help it.
Krycek had seen none of it, had not seen me since he put that spike in my throat. I closed my eyes for a moment, and closed off my feelings. All that mattered was surviving this.
~~~~~
Mulder drove the car, following the Jeep that carried Johnson and MacLeod. He was surprised when they did not protest his choice to travel alone, but now he wondered whether they were talking about him. Maybe it had been a bad choice, to give up the time to ask MacLeod questions. He pulled out his phone, but it was as dead as MacLeod had predicted, and he found himself wondering what his wife the physician would make of the electrical nature of Immortality.
He hated taking a case without his partner, falling into familiar routines without the balance of her step and wit beside him. He missed Scully.
It hit him that he missed his partner, but at that moment, he hated his wife. Who was the biological father of their children? Did she even know? Was the clinic crooked? The questions threatened to take him in circles, and he pushed his mind onto other problems.
He wished he felt different in his body, but it all felt normal, not much more than the tired and energized feeling he remembered from other cases.
He ran a fingernail down the back of his hand on the wheel, but didn't press hard enough to break the skin. An abstract knowledge that he was supposed to heal couldn't override the aversion to pain, to self-injury. The need to do the experiment was strong however, so he put his teeth on a piece of cheek, something he'd done enough by accident, took a breath, and bit down hard. It hurt. He tasted the expected blood, but also electricity and in seconds the inside of his mouth was perfectly smooth.
Next he looked at his right eye in the rearview mirror. He looked his age, with the marks of a very large crow's feet, and a nest of gray hairs as his eyebrows. He hadn't noticed age creeping up on him, on his face, and now that he would look this way until something killed him, he took an interest. He'd have to start running again, get in shape and figure out a way to avoid the whole sword-fighting thing. No, he was enough of a realist to believe Johnson, Gantt and MacLeod when they intimated that he could not avoid it forever. If he had to fight, he had to learn how to win. The sword MacLeod had taken from the clone lay on the seat beside him. The design looked like a serious weapon, but from the edge of an era where swords became decorations. Civil War era, he thought, or earlier.
Mulder drove, rehearsing in his mind how to adapt the formal moves of fencing to a true blood duel. Some of it probably held--present the smallest possible target, use the least movement necessary to parry an attack, attack under the guard. He should probably forget the rules of the fencing strip, he thought. No one else was likely to follow them. MacLeod had said something about a game, and that implied rules. What kind of rules?
An increase in the buzz in the back of his head made him pay attention to his surroundings, and he looked around as if on instinct. They were driving into town, past the turn to Mund's Canyon. Mulder spotted another driver also scanning nearby cars, and he forced himself to face forward, eyes on the tailgate of the Jeep, face neutral. He didn't think there would be sword fights in traffic--if there were, he would have learned about Immortals a lot sooner--but he didn't want anyone to mark him. Not yet.
He followed the Jeep to the parking lot of their hotel. Johnson and MacLeod ahead of him and already emerging from their car. He parked and got out, grabbing the sword by the scabbard, his thoughts leading to questions without preamble. "So what are the rules of this game?"
MacLeod blinked, and Johnson snorted once, having had enough time with Mulder to be amused by the context, or lack thereof. Mulder had seen both expressions too many times for it to bother him. "The Game," he said again, feeling himself capitalize the word. "What are the rules?"
"No fighting on holy ground. No interfering in other people's fights. No shooting someone and taking their head."
"Penalties for breaking the rules?"
MacLeod grinned. "For the last two, people like me will hunt you down."
Mulder felt the certainty in those words. "And the holy ground rule?" Mulder's lips twitched with the near-pun.
"No one knows for sure, though I'm told the last place it happened was in a city in Campania, off the Apian Way."
"Pompeii?"
"Rumor has it."
Mulder decided it was the kind of thing they told all the new recruits. "Don't tell me there was a shrine on Mount St. Helen's, too?"
"No, that was just a volcanic eruption. They happen." Mulder didn't like MacLeod's grin.
"Any other tips you want to give me?"
"Sure. Don't lose your head."
Mulder rolled his eyes and consciously shifted gears. "So, what do we think about that little scene back on the mountain?"
"I spoke to Bierce," Johnson said. "They saw the Corrivubias woman. She told them she did it so we would know what we're up against."
"She had a point."
"That's what we think, too," Johnson said, glancing at MacLeod.
"Do you know where the clones are?"
"We don't, and now Bierce isn't answering his phone."
"Well, if he took a Quickening, wouldn't that have shorted it out?" Mulder said, pulling his phone off his belt and chucking it toward a nearby trashcan.
"Could be."
"So, the next thing to do is go to Mund's Canyon, which is where I thought we were going?"
"Bierce suggested we not join them. When we talked, Kaos' compound had just been destroyed by a truck bomb."
"Truck bomb? Where did they get one of those?"
"We don't know," Johnson said, "but when we spoke, Bierce said that Gantt and Krycek were retrieving Kaos."
"Does Gantt answer?"
"No."
Mulder jumped two steps toward a conclusion. That Krycek was in the equation only speeded the usual pace. "Nield? Have you been able to contact her?"
"No," Johnson answered, "And no one has seen her on campus either." Johnson held out her cell phone. "Do you want to call your wife, Agent Mulder?"
Mulder looked at the phone, but did not reach for it. He was not prepared for the questions he had to ask, and felt numbness where he knew hurt and curiosity should be.
"No. Thanks." He gripped the sword in his hand, the edge of the scabbard pressing into his palm as if it were the knife that had cut away his entire idea of his life.
"Are you all right?"
"Well, it's too bad Elizabeth Kubler-Ross isn't alive to discuss the stages of Immortality."
He could feel himself veering off course, and wondered if stage one of accepting Immortality was Dissociation. There was still the problem with Kaos, and he forced himself back to that. "We have to find the clones. To do that, we probably have to find Nield. I have a bad feeling about her. Johnson, get her background. Look for any ties to Olympian Chemical or its subsidiaries. Have someone find her and follow her. If she's left town, I want to know where."
Johnson nodded, and seemed relieved that Mulder had refocused on their shared problem.
He turned to MacLeod. "I know you're not taking students, whatever that means, but would you mind giving me a few quick pointers with this thing?" He lifted the sword in its scabbard, stiffly.
Something softened in MacLeod's face, and he touched Mulder's white knuckles. "First thing, relax your grip."
Chapter 13
Fandoms: Highlander, X-files, Invisible Man
Rating:NC-17 overall, PG-13 this chapter.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.
Background:The year is 2023. Methos, the oldest of the Immortals in Highlander, was living as a corporate lawyer in Denver. Alexander Krycek, the double-dealing ratboy of the X-Files, was living there as an art dealer, running a gallery in Aurora, Colorado. Mulder was retired, somewhere suburban.
Summary: Mistakes are made, and two secrets revealed. Maybe three.
Warning: From here on out, some very bad things happen, and people start to die.
Chapter 1
(Chapters link sequentially from there.)
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
"Marriage is a psychological condition, not a civil contract and a license. Once a marriage is dead, it is dead, and it begins to stink even faster than a dead fish."
To Sail Beyond the Sunset
My phone rang. In the peephole I saw Johnson's face, dirt-smeared and grim.
"How sprang the trap?" I asked as a greeting.
"Too bad we got your warning too late."
"Corrivubias said she did it so you would know what you were up against."
"I hate to say it," Johnson sighed, a mix of anger and resignation, "but she may have had a point. We only had two Immortals to absorb over twenty Quickenings."
That would exhaust even me. Perhaps Corrivubias had been telling the truth. "How's Mulder?"
I could see her shrug. "Too calm, which I assume means he'll snap any minute now."
"Did MacLeod agree to take him as a student?"
"No," she said. "He still won't take students."
"Yes, well, the last time I killed one of mine, it took quite a while to take another."
"And how long is quite a while?"
Despite the situation, I smiled at her. "I was a Watcher too, you know. I know your tricks, and damn if you haven't gotten me to admit that Adam Pierson wasn't a new Immortal."
"I knew that just from watching you fight Blaise Edwards.” She paused and added, “Joe Dawson trusted me enough to hint broadly. MacLeod asked for you before he recovered himself from the clones, but he passed it off as Mathias. I don't think anyone else noticed."
I looked at her small face on the screen of my phone. It looked as if she were trying not to spook a skittish horse. I said nothing, wondering if she could see that the blood had drained from my face.
"I think Joe felt someone should know that you were still alive." She took a breath and said my name. "Methos. Your secret is safe."
Even through the phone, I could hear the reverence, and it stuck in my throat. It was unpleasant, being treated like a Holy Grail. It was just a cup, after all.
She seemed to realize that she had pushed into areas I would not welcome. "Don't worry. MacLeod has already told me what he will do if I reveal you to the Watchers." She returned to the disciplined agent. "I can’t raise Gantt. What's your situation, Mr. Bierce?"
"Krycek and Gantt are in an underground bunker, looking for Kaos. We have about a dozen dead, thanks to a truck bomb, and Gantt said six were Immortals. Corrivubias is here, keeping company with a former federal agent named Bobby Hobbes. Where are you?"
"On the road to Mund's Canyon. MacLeod is driving."
"Don’t come here," I said. “Hobbes’ truck bomb has caught the attention of local fire and rescue. We'll meet you back at the hotel."
There was a jolting in the picture as MacLeod grabbed the phone. "Are you all right? What is Krycek doing?" Before I could answer he went on, "Mulder says he's a rat bastard who can't be trusted."
I could tell he was quoting. MacLeod never used such language. "That should make us soul mates, then, shouldn't it?"
"Methos," he began.
Damn nursemaid. "He's already killed me once today. I won't let him do it again. See you in Sedona."
I closed the phone on his impotent fury.
Mulder's assessment of Krycek did not surprise me. I took a sip from my camelback and thought back to the evidence before me. In two minutes I had exhausted the alternate conclusions and settled on what I had not let myself think.
In two more minutes I saw a light down the stairs. I knelt down to where I could see, ready to withdraw should it not be Krycek and Gantt. Sounds reached me of low voices, of dragging, then Gantt said, "You want to help me get this thing up the stairs?"
I came down. Krycek and Gantt were dragging a tarp that held the charred body of what must be Aleister Kaos. It looked like no body I had ever seen, scabbed in shades of green and brown without a hint of red. I took Krycek's side of the tarp, and Gantt handed off his flashlight as we started to drag the thing up the stairs. Four steps up, Gantt slipped and dropped his end. The body rolled, and he jumped away from the body and the tarp.
"Sorry," he said.
Krycek explained, "The blood is toxic to humans. It probably won't kill you, though."
"Probably?"
"It contains a retrovirus."
A momentary image rose of a rough back room, of myself in a sling, with the smell of sex and Crisco overlaying everything. I'd been exposed to retroviruses before. "Should be all right."
I was going to have to carry the thing and if the ichor--a stilted word these days, but there was no other--contaminated my clothes, it would be a hazard to the mortals. I took off my coat and handed it to Krycek, then stripped everything but my shorts. He hung my bloodstained coat on his prosthetic, knowing it would not fold given the swords, and slung my camelback of water over his shoulder. He mimicked a coat rack as I laid my empty back holster on his arm, and the humor struck me as out of place, but in character. I piled my clothes on the ground, intending to burn them, bloody as they were from the incident of the opened jugular vein. I ended by adorning Krycek further with the knife in its arm sheath. It also struck me that he looked at me, standing near naked, with no desire at all. That was almost a mistake.
To Gantt I said, "Can you find water? An outdoor spigot that still works or a barrel. I'll need to clean this stuff off when I'm done."
The thing was heavy, man shaped, and ugly. I pulled it onto my shoulders, in a calf carry, what we called it before there were firemen. I shuddered under the weight, the alien smell, and the realization that something about him affected me. My mind slipped around time and experience, refusing to stay here and now.
I staggered up the stairs and toward the car, the sounds of a dozen battlefields in my ears, the memory of trying to save too many fallen comrades with the same weight, the same burns, the same slick feeling of blood. I heard myself groan, protest and shout orders in an ancient tongue I did not know to soldiers long dead in a battle fought at the beginning of history, in battles that were not in my memory. I carried that thing through five thousand years of heavy clubs, black knives, beaked nulla-nullas, smooth anastasis, fletched arrows, curved kopesh, long spears, bright swords and loud guns.
I had never held a nulla-nulla, but I knew how to make one, how to hunt with it, paddle with it, make fire with it, fire that would dance across the dark, tattooed arms and faces of my Anangu brothers. I looked at my hands, shocked to find them bleached white like a bone on the sand.
"That, my friends, is one ugly customer. I can't believe it's still moving." Corrivubias and Hobbes were waiting at the car, and Hobbes' voice gave me a thread of connection, but I couldn’t be sure if it was yet another Quickening somewhere within me. I felt lost, fragmented, but with the voice coming from outside myself, I had a moment of awareness. Only then did I realize that the body I held was putting up a feeble protest. A figure ran up with a tarp. Tall. Gantt.
"Put him in the back seat," Krycek said. “If he regenerates, he'll be able to let himself out of the trunk." That didn't make sense. I would close the trunk with a padlock and stow it in the hold of the ship.
A woman's voice spoke like a long-delayed echo. "Why haven't you killed him yet?"
I could hear the smile.
Looking back, I must assume that Gantt spread the tarp on the seat, and Hobbes had some instinct that I needed him to talk me through the motions of putting the body down.
I heard Gantt say he had found water, and Hobbes took up a stick and herded me after him, knowing I was incapable on my own. Part of my mind knew he did not dare to touch me, and other parts remembered the prods of the overseers, waited for the whips, expected to know nothing but pain and labor.
The touch of the water jolted me, and I wondered if they were cleaning me for sale. Then the fragments began to fall back together. Gantt had found a hose connected to one of the out buildings and sprayed me down. As the green slime washed off, I remembered where I was, became one awareness again, standing in a scrub forest in the canyons. I turned and let him spray off my back and shoulders, then reached for the hose to finish the job myself. I pulled off the shorts, walked over toward the house, gathered my clothes and boots, and threw everything but the boots in the fire.
Gantt had gone on ahead, but Hobbes stayed close, carefully not looking as I stalked nude through the grounds. I skirted the dead and the parts of the dead, not wanting to get blood on my feet.
Krycek had laid my change of clothes on the hood of the car, but not my coat, the empty holster, or my PlaSteel knife in the forearm sheath. I dressed while everyone else stood discreetly on the other side. I heard noises of conversation, anger from Corrivubias, and what might have been a strangled groan from inside the car.
“You have to kill it!” Corrivubias said as I walked up to the group. “It’s healing itself. You’re the only one with the weapon that can do it.” She, Gantt and Hobbes were facing Krycek, who ignored them to look at me.
“Hello, Matt. Ready to go?”
“We won’t all fit in the car. Where’s my knife?”
“It’s in the trunk. You won’t need it.”
“Ah, but I feel naked without it. You wouldn’t want me to be uncomfortable, would you, lover?"
He reacted ever so slightly to the word, and smiled insincerely. “No. I’ll get it for you.” My coat and the camelback were in the trunk as well, but he only handed me the knife. I decided not to push it. My gun, I could see, was in his waistband. I slid up my shirtsleeve and strapped the blade into place. “Let’s go,” he said.
He reached to close the hood, and I stopped him. “Let me get the water. I’m thirsty,” I said, and grabbed the camelback. He was tense until he saw I wasn’t reaching for my coat and the swords.
Krycek slammed the hood hard enough that everyone looked our way, and then he drew his gun. “We’ll be leaving now,” he said as he brought up his arm to aim at them. “Nice working with you people.”
There was a noise, and Gantt fell, a bullet to the head. By the time he hit the ground, Hobbes was aiming a .357 at Krycek, and Corrivubias was holding something like a modified .22 pointed at me. I didn't want to test the innocent-looking gun. Anyone with access to alien technology, I decided, probably had more secrets than I did.
The thought struck me as weirdly normal. It seemed I was adjusting to life post-Tuesday.
I looked at the scene, and came to a decision. "Let them go, Sasha," I said. "Weapons down everyone." I had commanded armies, and I commanded them, even Krycek with the use of that name. "Let them walk back to town,” I said.
He considered for a long moment before dropping his gun. “Gantt was the only real threat,” he said, as if justifying himself to someone, perhaps himself. He was wrong.
I handed the camelback to Hobbes. “Wear this.” He looked at me and I narrowed my eyes a bit, the only gesture Krycek couldn’t see. “It’s water.”
“Thanks,” Hobbes said, and set the pack on his shoulders.
"Get the keys,” Krycek ordered.
I bent down and felt Gantt’s pockets, remembering how little it once affected me to search the dead, but now finding myself discomfited. I looked at the neat bullet hole in his head and thought about Krycek’s scar, wishing suddenly that Gantt had the benefit of PlaSteel overlying his skull. Right now, I liked him better than my husband. I found the keys and held them out to Krycek, my face showing none of my regret.
"You drive," he said to me. To Hobbes and Corrivubias he said, "Turn around, and do not look back until you can't hear the car any more. If you do, I'll shoot you."
He opened the door to the passenger seat, and I took the wheel and started the car. Hobbes and Corrivubias turned their backs, facing the burning house. Krycek shot them both in the back. I didn't flinch at the noise. They sprawled forward, a red stain spreading on the back of Corrivubias’ khaki jacket, water from the camelback darkening the dry earth next to Hobbes. Krycek did not seem to notice that it wasn’t blood.
The car dipped under Krycek's weight, and he closed the door. "Let's go."
Mindful of how close Gantt lay to the car, I backed slowly and turned around. Krycek, turned toward Kaos, and in the rearview I could see that the body was becoming less of a corpse and more of a trauma victim. The ruined eyes were trying to open.
"Why did you kill them?" I asked.
"Gantt was no DCI agent. He wouldn't have gone along with the truck bomb killing innocent people. Corrivubias is poison, always has been. Hobbes was an unknown, and I didn't trust him."
I didn't like the answer. If nothing else, Krycek hadn't even considered that fact that Hobbes worked for me when he shot him. That was his second mistake. "Where are we going?" I asked.
"Find a back road, and park."
"We're on a back road."
"One that doesn't lead right to the compound."
"What are we waiting for, the authorities to go by? They'll start searching the area. If that helicopter comes back, they'll probably find us.”
"We’ll move on as best we can. He should be back to normal in an hour or so, if he holds true to type."
"Right." Even since Tuesday, some things were harder to take than others.
"Their blood kills. It’s a good thing you weren’t affected by it."
That was his third mistake. I almost said What do you mean, I wasn’t affected? but when I looked at him, he was turned toward Kaos. He had not noticed what Hobbes and Gantt had seen, that mere contact with that thing had begun to shred me. I didn’t know if it was the thing’s blood, or if in self-defense it was trying to use its power to take apart my Quickening, but it was not going to touch me again if I could help it.
Krycek had seen none of it, had not seen me since he put that spike in my throat. I closed my eyes for a moment, and closed off my feelings. All that mattered was surviving this.
~~~~~
Mulder drove the car, following the Jeep that carried Johnson and MacLeod. He was surprised when they did not protest his choice to travel alone, but now he wondered whether they were talking about him. Maybe it had been a bad choice, to give up the time to ask MacLeod questions. He pulled out his phone, but it was as dead as MacLeod had predicted, and he found himself wondering what his wife the physician would make of the electrical nature of Immortality.
He hated taking a case without his partner, falling into familiar routines without the balance of her step and wit beside him. He missed Scully.
It hit him that he missed his partner, but at that moment, he hated his wife. Who was the biological father of their children? Did she even know? Was the clinic crooked? The questions threatened to take him in circles, and he pushed his mind onto other problems.
He wished he felt different in his body, but it all felt normal, not much more than the tired and energized feeling he remembered from other cases.
He ran a fingernail down the back of his hand on the wheel, but didn't press hard enough to break the skin. An abstract knowledge that he was supposed to heal couldn't override the aversion to pain, to self-injury. The need to do the experiment was strong however, so he put his teeth on a piece of cheek, something he'd done enough by accident, took a breath, and bit down hard. It hurt. He tasted the expected blood, but also electricity and in seconds the inside of his mouth was perfectly smooth.
Next he looked at his right eye in the rearview mirror. He looked his age, with the marks of a very large crow's feet, and a nest of gray hairs as his eyebrows. He hadn't noticed age creeping up on him, on his face, and now that he would look this way until something killed him, he took an interest. He'd have to start running again, get in shape and figure out a way to avoid the whole sword-fighting thing. No, he was enough of a realist to believe Johnson, Gantt and MacLeod when they intimated that he could not avoid it forever. If he had to fight, he had to learn how to win. The sword MacLeod had taken from the clone lay on the seat beside him. The design looked like a serious weapon, but from the edge of an era where swords became decorations. Civil War era, he thought, or earlier.
Mulder drove, rehearsing in his mind how to adapt the formal moves of fencing to a true blood duel. Some of it probably held--present the smallest possible target, use the least movement necessary to parry an attack, attack under the guard. He should probably forget the rules of the fencing strip, he thought. No one else was likely to follow them. MacLeod had said something about a game, and that implied rules. What kind of rules?
An increase in the buzz in the back of his head made him pay attention to his surroundings, and he looked around as if on instinct. They were driving into town, past the turn to Mund's Canyon. Mulder spotted another driver also scanning nearby cars, and he forced himself to face forward, eyes on the tailgate of the Jeep, face neutral. He didn't think there would be sword fights in traffic--if there were, he would have learned about Immortals a lot sooner--but he didn't want anyone to mark him. Not yet.
He followed the Jeep to the parking lot of their hotel. Johnson and MacLeod ahead of him and already emerging from their car. He parked and got out, grabbing the sword by the scabbard, his thoughts leading to questions without preamble. "So what are the rules of this game?"
MacLeod blinked, and Johnson snorted once, having had enough time with Mulder to be amused by the context, or lack thereof. Mulder had seen both expressions too many times for it to bother him. "The Game," he said again, feeling himself capitalize the word. "What are the rules?"
"No fighting on holy ground. No interfering in other people's fights. No shooting someone and taking their head."
"Penalties for breaking the rules?"
MacLeod grinned. "For the last two, people like me will hunt you down."
Mulder felt the certainty in those words. "And the holy ground rule?" Mulder's lips twitched with the near-pun.
"No one knows for sure, though I'm told the last place it happened was in a city in Campania, off the Apian Way."
"Pompeii?"
"Rumor has it."
Mulder decided it was the kind of thing they told all the new recruits. "Don't tell me there was a shrine on Mount St. Helen's, too?"
"No, that was just a volcanic eruption. They happen." Mulder didn't like MacLeod's grin.
"Any other tips you want to give me?"
"Sure. Don't lose your head."
Mulder rolled his eyes and consciously shifted gears. "So, what do we think about that little scene back on the mountain?"
"I spoke to Bierce," Johnson said. "They saw the Corrivubias woman. She told them she did it so we would know what we're up against."
"She had a point."
"That's what we think, too," Johnson said, glancing at MacLeod.
"Do you know where the clones are?"
"We don't, and now Bierce isn't answering his phone."
"Well, if he took a Quickening, wouldn't that have shorted it out?" Mulder said, pulling his phone off his belt and chucking it toward a nearby trashcan.
"Could be."
"So, the next thing to do is go to Mund's Canyon, which is where I thought we were going?"
"Bierce suggested we not join them. When we talked, Kaos' compound had just been destroyed by a truck bomb."
"Truck bomb? Where did they get one of those?"
"We don't know," Johnson said, "but when we spoke, Bierce said that Gantt and Krycek were retrieving Kaos."
"Does Gantt answer?"
"No."
Mulder jumped two steps toward a conclusion. That Krycek was in the equation only speeded the usual pace. "Nield? Have you been able to contact her?"
"No," Johnson answered, "And no one has seen her on campus either." Johnson held out her cell phone. "Do you want to call your wife, Agent Mulder?"
Mulder looked at the phone, but did not reach for it. He was not prepared for the questions he had to ask, and felt numbness where he knew hurt and curiosity should be.
"No. Thanks." He gripped the sword in his hand, the edge of the scabbard pressing into his palm as if it were the knife that had cut away his entire idea of his life.
"Are you all right?"
"Well, it's too bad Elizabeth Kubler-Ross isn't alive to discuss the stages of Immortality."
He could feel himself veering off course, and wondered if stage one of accepting Immortality was Dissociation. There was still the problem with Kaos, and he forced himself back to that. "We have to find the clones. To do that, we probably have to find Nield. I have a bad feeling about her. Johnson, get her background. Look for any ties to Olympian Chemical or its subsidiaries. Have someone find her and follow her. If she's left town, I want to know where."
Johnson nodded, and seemed relieved that Mulder had refocused on their shared problem.
He turned to MacLeod. "I know you're not taking students, whatever that means, but would you mind giving me a few quick pointers with this thing?" He lifted the sword in its scabbard, stiffly.
Something softened in MacLeod's face, and he touched Mulder's white knuckles. "First thing, relax your grip."
Chapter 13