From: nevdull Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 23:29:30 -0400 Subject: xfc: NEW: One One-Thousand (1 of 1) by nevdull Source: xfc From: nevdull Title: One One-Thousand Author: nevdull Rating: R (language & violence) Category: XA Keywords: mytharc Archive: Yes, anywhere. Notes: At end. Summary: Waiting for the last ball to drop. I'd sworn that this year things would be different. Instead I found myself spending another New Year's Eve watching Dick Clark with the sound off. It's the same way I liked to watch porn. Best not to think about the comparisons there. When the power went off after the ball dropped, I was startled but not completely surprised. When it failed to come back on right away, I was a little worried. When giant fucking spaceships descended from the skies, I screamed just like everyone who hadn't known it was going to happen. Sprinting through the back streets of D.C., I thought about all the colonization scenarios I'd played through my head while killing time at the office. Panic sweeping through the cities. A swarm of paralyzing bees. Armies of faceless aliens setting the population aflame. Colonization was here, but it seemed after the initial outburst of terror, none of those predictions was coming true. The city, bathed in still beams of unearthly light, was silent. Breaking down the front door to Scully's apartment was painful and, I soon realized, entirely unnecessary. It had been left open. I paused a moment before entering -- my senses would've been on alert even without the extraterrestrial crafts hovering overhead. This was simply not a town in which locals habitually left their homes unlocked. I found the careless neighbor lying just inside the foyer, a bag of groceries spilling away from her prone form. Who needed that many grapefruit? She wasn't dead, although the throbbing pulse under my fingers caught me by surprise. Unconscious, comatose, sleeping -- something -- incongruously laid out in a hallway, her last act unfinished. Sounded vaguely familiar, but really, wrong hallway, wrong girl. I left the neighbor behind and raced upstairs. The right girl was asleep, too. In front of the TV, as I had been -- the screen displaying what I had left behind in my apartment. White noise and gray static. If she'd had time to diagnose herself, there'd been no one here to appreciate it. After the ritualistic sobs and wails and attempts to shake her from her unnatural slumber, I laid her down on the sofa and walked to her window. Not the most expensive view in the city, but I could see well enough. I could see that nothing was moving. There were no man-made lights. There was no sound. It was as if I were the last man on earth. Scully may look small, but she's fucking heavy after carrying her for seven miles. I guess it was payback time -- she'd carried me for seven years. I carried her because I couldn't leave her, but it wasn't as if I knew where I was going. I was walking the streets -- silent at 3am the way small towns are silent at 3am. D.C. is never silent -- ever. If anyone was watching me, their eyes were on stalks and they were staring down from those ships. But there was no way to tell. The ships just hung there, mute, their beams of light spotlighting our world. More often than once I'd wished that Scully would shut up. Now I wished she'd say anything -- that anyone would say anything. The only thing that spoke to me that night was a mangy-looking dog who stared at me as I staggered down Wisconsin Avenue. It looked at the pair of us, me with Scully in my arms, and let out a whimper. "That is the way the world ends," I said to the dog, and moved on. All that was four weeks ago. The power never came back on, and Scully is still silent in my arms. I'm watching the rain through the window of the Oval Office. "If you're going to go mad, do it in style." That was me just there. I've taken to talking to myself. It's better than what I was doing those first few days. It would've been hard to keep track of time even if I'd hadn't been battling insanity. The light from the ships never went out, and that light was as bright as day. The sheer number and width of those mottled discs in the sky blocked out the sun, if there was sun beyond all the rain. I'd lost my watch too, and of course there was no one I could ask for the time. Well, that's not true. I asked lots of people, but most of them just slumped over at my touch. So I can only guess that it was around day four or five when I realized that colonization wasn't actually beginning. That's when I realized that the people of Earth weren't in stasis, weren't metamorphosing, weren't incubating. They were just dying, from dehydration I guess. Sleep, sleep, sleep. I found plenty of supplies. I found Scully amenable to liquid feedings. I found Skinner face down on his desk -- at work on New Year's Eve for chrissakes -- but I left him there, breathing evenly into a pile of expense reports. You could call it negligent homicide, but who here would arrest me? I screamed laughter at my own joke, and ran down the halls of the Hoover building, my footsteps and flashlight beam echoing through the dead world. The rain is coming down harder. I'm pleased -- not only do some of the clouds block out the alien light, but the water washes away the frankly nauseating smell that now hangs over the city. Out on the White House lawn, the President and his Cabinet are rotting, rotting away, in the pornographic poses I left them in when I dragged all of the bodies out of the building. I'd considered at first moving into FEMA, but instead I blew it up. Scully showed her appreciation of my irony by not spitting up that night. By the middle of week two, everyone I encountered was dead. It finally occurred to me to wonder why I wasn't. I selected a half-dozen bodies at random and brought them to the city coroner's office. The FBI forensics lab would've been better equipped, but I now couldn't go within several blocks of the Hoover building without going into dry heaves. I'd like to think it was just the smell. I brought Scully to the coroner's lab with me so she could observe the procedure. She slept through my autopsies like a little trooper -- the way I'd slept through hers. "Patient 1," I said into the microphone. My words floated into the powerless tape recorder and then were airborne, away, up into the sky. "Cause of death appears to be some kind of sleeping sickness from space. Approximate time of death: New Year's Rockin' Eve." Scully slid a little further down in her seat. I knew I might have to adjust her before she fell bonelessly to the floor, but there was work to be done. I caught my slack-jawed reflection in the metal handle of the hand saw. I looked like I needed an autopsy more than I needed to perform one. The rain has stopped. The other thing I like about rain is that it makes sound -- any sound is good. I miss the dog with its T.S. Eliot recitation and haven't seen any other animals since then. Maybe they went mad from the silence, too. I'm stroking Scully's hair but I keep getting caught in tangles. I want to wash it for her, but there's no power for a hairdryer and I'm afraid it's so cold now that she'll catch pneumonia if I let her go around with a wet head. At first I talked to her, and sometimes even answered for her, but the little part of myself that stubbornly refuses to shut down found the whole scenario too unbearable. Now I just talk to myself. For the first time in weeks, I say something unexpected. "What the hell is that?" I hear sounds from outside. It is not the rain. It was raining the day that I finished the autopsies. I went outside naked, and washed myself of the blood. In my hand were the implants I'd recovered from the bodies. All of the bodies. Every last one. The devices were much smaller than Scully's -- presumably more recent, more advanced models. Funny, she was always on top of the latest fashion. I didn't recall a rash of metal detector alerts, so I can only presume that these were too small to be picked up. I think it's safe to assume that each person in this country, and maybe in the world, had them too. Everyone thought I was paranoid, and yet I hadn't even been close to paranoid enough. Everyone had also thought I was insane, and here I have to concede the point. I lay Scully down gently on the bed (imported from the Lincoln Bedroom), and move to the windows. At first, I can't see it -- the source of the sound. A shadow sweeps across the lawn, and then I understand. Chicken Little says the sky is falling. Week three I tried to burn Georgetown to the ground, but it started raining again. It rains a lot now. I was at least successful in my campaign to eradicate all the Starbucks. I prop Scully up in some kind of SUV I find parked down Pennsylvania Avenue. Well, not parked as such. It's partially buried in the back of a Honda Civic; the Civic owner seems to be one of the view New Year's Eve revelers not killed by the colonists. He was killed, presumably on impact, by the unexpectedly somnolent SUV driver. My first forensic investigation. Scully must be so proud. The SUV sustained almost zero damage, although I can't say that for its desiccated owner. I buckle in the two of us live ones, and head for the highway. Giant demented shadows slide across the ground, and the sound from above is building to a roar. Time is running out. Week four was when the active hallucinations started. Expectations, things that would happen if my life were a movie, events that should follow so naturally from this catastrophe that I couldn't believe they hadn't actually happened. One of these was that Krycek, the deus ex machina of the conspiracy, dropped in out of nowhere to explain all this, perhaps to fix it or maybe to end it. To give it, as they say in therapy, some "closure". He leaned against a cherry tree, leaden with all the rain. "Remember your drunken rant in the bar that night?" I did, but there's no reason he should. He wasn't there, and I don't think they were keeping that close an eye on me. "Forget that," Krycek said, waving his arm. The real one, I think. "The point here is that you were right -- you were the key figure. You and a handful of others were the only ones not to receive the implant, people who had already received the vaccine and thus could survive the retribution when the colonists discovered some of us did not sleep." Scully had the vaccine, I thought. "But she had an implant, too." Krycek smirked. "Now who was it who gave that to her?" If you kill your own hallucination, is that suicide? Navigating out of the city is easier than I feared. Not too many people had been on the road at 12am. Lucky for me the apocalypse came without advance notice, or traffic would be a bitch. Scully's the one with the implant but I'm the one driving on autopilot to this haunted place. Bridges, cable cars, the echoes of screams -- strangers' and my own. I mean, this is Skyland Mountain. We're right back here on Skyland Mountain. It was the next day, and we were walking alongside the reflecting pool like he was a figment of my dearest informant rather than a figment of my worst enemy. I tried not to look into the water -- it only reflected back the silent hell that waited above me in the heavens. "What went wrong?" I asked Krycek. It felt good to address someone aloud. He scoffed and gestured around us. "Is that some kind of a joke?" "Not with us, with them." I thought I saw some movement in the water, but it was only the beginning of more rain. How many more days until it's been forty? I was picturing Krycek beaming up into the alien ship with his Powerbook and his vaccine, infecting the mother ship with a mouse click and silencing the invaders. He had stopped moving. "That's as good a guess as anything," he said, and just to rub it in, walked effortlessly across the water. "Hey, you think Scully'd get a kick out of this?" I concentrated and winked him out of existence. I was wrong -- he was no savior. And we all wore crowns of thorns. Without power for the gondola, I have to go up the mountain the long way this time -- by driving the SUV around hairpin turns. Once, Scully falls onto my lap, and as tempting as it is to leave her there, I prop her back up. There's only so many undignified journeys up this precipice one woman should make. The following day it wasn't Krycek who visited me, but Scully, and it wasn't a manufactured dialogue but a real memory. One weird 3-D smell-o-rama memory, but a real one. The calendar in Scully's kitchen said December 24th, but it was one day late. She hadn't had time to change it because she'd been screaming and sobbing for the last 30 hours, with occasional breaks to go into the bathroom and vomit. Our insular little world had gone crazy. We thought it was the entree and had no idea the main course would follow soon enough. I don't know when it was exactly that I'd lost my only three friends, but it had been awhile since I'd last talked to the Gunmen. The file folder in Scully's hand was proof that I could no longer turn to them. Inside the folder were two pieces of paper; one of them was a note. Agent Scully, We thought you should have this. Mulder asked us to keep it safe and secret, but we no longer believe that to be right. We don't know how we can say we're sorry. -- TLG The second piece of paper was a report on some cell samples, and the lab name and vault ID where the vial of her ova have been stored for two years. When she read the note, she became completely unhinged. I suppose she must have called me, but in my memory, it was the sound of her hysterical cries that sent me running. Who knew Arlington was just a short sprint away? When the projectionist in my head started the memory, it was the point at which she was trying to force past me. She wanted out, to go to the lab, to destroy the cells. I was seeing red, storming about her apartment like Skinner on angel dust and a tankful of adrenaline. "You can't fucking do it," I thundered. "Not after what I went through to get it, to keep it safe. I won't let you." "You have no right!" she screamed, but there were sobs there too. I was wearing her down, and the cruelest part of me approved. "I have every right. What would you do with them? I know you don't plan to study them. This is too important -- it's bigger than both of us." Her arms flew at me and I reacted instinctively. No need -- she was exhausted, and her blows incited rage rather than pain. "It is my body! How can you stand there and not realize you are no better than they are? How?!" She grasped my wrists together and twisted them. "Who are you anymore? Why did this have to happen to me?" I pulled my arms away and pushed her back, enough to make her stumble but not enough to make her fall. "You think you're the only one with the ruined life?" I hissed. "That was your fucking choice!" "You have always had a choice, Scully. I've told you to leave. You didn't." "Because I wanted to find them -- to punish them for what they did to me." "By destroying the evidence?" Something in her response -- that agonized wail -- something in the sudden defeated slump of her shoulders, ignited a small spark of compassion. Ignition, but it didn't burn clean. Like swamp gas. "Let me take it back, to keep safe for you," I said quietly. I wanted to sound gentle, but the argument had scoured my voice down to its sharp edges. I think I sounded patronizing. "I want to take it for when you're ready to talk about this -- some other day." I tipped her chin up, to look into her eyes. I saw only burning. "Take it," Scully screamed into my face. She shoved the file at me. "Just take it. Take all of it. YOU TAKE EVERYTHING FROM ME!" This wasn't quite true. There was one last thing I could take. Her lips tasted of bile. I pull over at one of those scenic overlooks, facing across Virginia towards the sea. The rain has stopped, but it's overcast and the sky is bleached-blue-white like Scully's skin. She's still breathing shallowly, but she's terrifyingly light these days. At least she's easier to carry. Over the pine trees and clear-cut hills, the suburbs begin and race towards the cities. Anything that isn't a tree is dead, and those are fading fast under the relentless rain. Across the horizon, in infinite variations of size and a single variation of incomprehensibility, the ships hang at curious angles. Their beams of light seem to tether them to the ground, or maybe they hold them aloft -- like spinning plates on skillfully-wielded poles. Not-so-skillful now. The largest ship, off to my left, teeters a bit. Seconds later, I hear the corresponding rumble. Like counting before thunder, except the distance here is a lie. How can you count up to light years? Another ship, and yet another -- tilt and then rumble. Winding down. Time is winding down. Space ships are falling down. My fair lady. I stroke Scully's twisted hair and replay that night again. This time, it ends in dignity. This time it ends without those last few days on Earth wasted being away from her, hating her, hating myself. The ships are sliding past each other now, scraping their sides. Friction sends plumes of black smoke into the white denim sky. Did they run out of fuel, or will? Once I read that before the first atomic test in Los Alamos, the scientists feared that they would ignite all the hydrogen in the Earth. When the sky falls, will the flames engulf us? When the last ship falls, will she wake? Which is worse? -- "So dreadful a Tempest that all the People attended therein the very End of the World." - Ray, _Disc._ (1692) To JET, who most certainly does not need more brains. Thanks as always. There are happier moments at: http://nevdull.tripod.com/