From: Chaelysq <chaelysq@aol.comeherefox>
Date: 24 Jun 1999 19:54:12 GMT
Subject: Out of Reach (1 of 16) Amanda Finch 

TITLE: Out of Reach
AUTHOR: Amanda Finch
FEEDBACK: chaelysq@aol.com (or hit reply)
CATEGORY: XRA
RATING: R (Violence, Language)
KEYWORDS: Alternate universe, MSR, Mytharc, casefile
SPOILERS: Mytharc, FTF, Sixth season characters, but no US6 spoilers after 
The Beginning. Minute spoilers: Fallen Angel, Young at Heart, Grotesque, 
Oubliette, Paper Hearts and The Field Where I Died
DISCLAIMER: Raise your hands if you think they're mine. <hands don't raise> 
See? That's what I thought. (The ones you don't recognize, however, are mine 
oh mine.)
SUMMARY: Fourth story in the "Out of..." cycle. Mulder, in the center of the 
vortex, thought he knew how to play the game until a new contender changes 
the rules. ARCHIVE: Yes. Pertinent info attached.

You're going to be terribly lost if you try to read this without at least a 
cursory knowledge of the previous stories: Out of (1) Sorrow, (2)...Patience 
and (3)...Focus. These three stories and any missing parts of the following 
story can be found at my archive:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Chamber/7335/ficlist.html

Author's notes follow story.

xxxxxxxxxx
"Can't run no more
with the lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me."
-- Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"
xxxxxxxxxx

(01/16)

Washington, D.C.
02/07/99
6:34 A.M.

She woke me up as she crawled back into bed.  My eyelids sensed a brightness 
outside that suggested dawn, so I didn't open them.  She should know by now 
that the quickest way to wake up a paranoid person was to sneak around. 
Apologizing for waking me, I felt her soft pull at the bedspread.  These 
sleepy dropped consonants and half-words were a comfortable second language, 
and sometimes even they were extraneous to communication. She'd gone to bed 
with wet hair again, and I vaguely remembered having something to do with the 
fact. I leaned my face towards the scent of her shampoo on the linens, 
towards her smell, anticipating hair.  She made a soft sound.  It caught my 
ear once and then took on uneven rhythms.  She was wheezing.  My eyes flew 
open then, concerned.  A cold blue stare fixed on me as her blood ran out 
through
her mouth in a sputtering flow, exhaling something that smelled more like 
betrayal than blood.

I reached for her, an inarticulate cry tearing from me as I got her blood on 
my fingers.  It marked her smooth forehead as I touched her face.  The wet 
warmth of it felt so *real* against the chilled damp of her skin -

Shocked, I echoed the movement as I reached across the emptiness for someone 
who wasn't there.  I was the one wheezing. A bright red stain had spread onto 
the pillowcase.  I matched it to the coppery taste on my tongue.  The 
darkness spread in me, and I put my face back down in my own blood.  I was 
use to nightmares yanking me out of sleep to a reality that was a relief in 
comparison.  Now the nightmares waited for me to wake up.

Get up, I told myself, and obeyed.  Muscles, bones and joints retaliated.  I 
stumbled across the bedroom, caught myself on the sink.  I didn't look at the 
mirror.  It wasn't worth it to frighten myself with my unrecognizable face. 
Three handfuls of water later, the taste in my mouth was gone, but still 
clinging to some inaccessible place at the back of my throat.  My painkillers 
looked tempting, but they made the dreams worse, and my sleep deeper.  I 
rose, the water still dripping from my face as a soft shuffle beyond the wall 
caught my ear.

Someone was in the house.

I took my gun from the nightstand next to the bed.  The change of events was 
almost a relief.  How nice of them to come to me instead of my having to make 
a trip out of shooting him.  Or her, I reminded myself.

(Yes. Or her.)

I heard them walk in and out of the bedroom-turned-office we used for work.

They were close now.  I raised the gun and rounded the corner.

Maggie Scully's coffee mug shattered at my feet as she screamed.  I yanked my 
aim hurriedly, arms up and pulled back.  I shoved the gun wordlessly into my 
waistband and walked around her to get a towel out of the kitchen.  She 
watched me for a minute, before dropping down to gather the pieces in her 
hand.  I dropped the towel on the spreading stain, kneeling down next to her 
to soak it up.

"I'm sorry - I wasn't expecting you until noon."  I wadded up the towel in my 
hands, not meeting her eyes at all.

"I have keys...I just let myself in.  Why don't you sit down?"  She reached 
for the towel.  "And I can - "

"It's fine."  I moved past her quickly, limping slightly, head down.  I threw 
the towel in the hamper and came back, running my hand through my too-short 
hair.  They'd had to cut it close for the stitches.  I don't know what had 
startled her more: me or the gun.

"You didn't tell me you were hurt, Fox."  It was said like an accusation, 
addressed to the tape around my ribs, pull tightly around my shoulder, still 
aching from the dislocation.

Like that would've come up in the course of the conversation.

She put her hand up, towards my shoulder, and I flinched before her fingers 
even touched down, taking one step back.

"Are you on something?"

I shook my head. "Not right now."

"You shouldn't even be at home," she said angrily. "You should be in the 
hospital - "

"Mrs. Scully - "

She kept walking, and the ceramic shards of the mug all clinked together into 
the trash can. "What doctor in their right mind would discharge you looking 
like - "

"I'm alright."  I grabbed her arm as she walked by, looking her hard in the 
eye now.  "How are *you*?"

For a split second, she just stared at me.  I should've known what would 
happen next.  She made this sound in her throat, like the beginning of an 
apology, and started sobbing.  Just like she had on the phone when I called 
her and told her the news.

("Mrs. Scully...Dana's gone again.")

(I can't do this.)

She sank down onto Scully's couch and half-hid her face with one hand.  I 
pulled several Kleenex out of the box, but she didn't take them.  Sitting 
down next to her, I wondered what to say.  The darkness spread a little more. 
 I could only imagine how a mother felt in circumstances like these, from 
having watched my own mother.  I was just the partner, the person Scully 
worked with, who had become more in the last few months, or maybe the last 
few years. Maybe they weren't sure.  Her pain had to be greater than mine, 
and I was dying.

It was my fault.  I wondered if she was thinking that.

She took the Kleenex and wiped frantically at her face with all of them. 
"Charlie's going to be here with the kids in an hour.  And Bill's supposed to 
be flying in tonight with Tara - "  She watched my face.  She found nothing 
there.

"I don't plan on being around, Mrs. Scully."

"I'll talk to Bill - "

"No. I'm not going to be here."  The words were sufficiently firm now.  "I 
can't be."

"In your condition?"

"I look worse than I feel."  That was a lie.  I wanted her to tell me it was. 
 I wanted her to accuse me of not wanting to face Charlie, and Bill, and 
their wives and kids with my responsibilities and explanations.  Maybe I was 
unsupportive.  But I think she knew that the only woman - the only person - 
who could get through to me right now was -

I clenched my jaw.  Hard.

"Will you call me here if you find something?"

"Of course."

"Even if it's not - "

I intervened quickly.  "I'll call."

She watched me cross the room intently.  The aim now was to get to the 
bedroom before she thought of a good way to phrase what it was she wanted to 
say.

"Fox?"

I sighed, and regretted it instantly, holding my lungs in like they might 
spill.  I didn't turn all the way around.

"Don't you want to talk about this?"

She did.  She asked the question and I just heard please, please, please. Who 
was going to listen?  Charlie?  Bill?  No one.  Maybe I knew and understood.

Or she was mistaken.

"I want to find her first."  I held my ribs, feeling as if I was protecting 
myself.  I would *not* break here.  She couldn't make me.  I knew what a 
nervous breakdown felt like, and if I slipped away too long, I felt one 
knocking on my brain like it wanted in.  I couldn't afford to collapse.  
Precious time had been lost in the hospital, on the flights.  Time was being 
lost here, right this minute.

And time would lose her, little by little, if I didn't get off my ass and fix 
what I fucked up. I was still standing there, immobilized by pain and thought 
from leaving her scrutiny.

"Where are you going to go?"

I had no ticket on the nightstand.  I had no answers in my head.  I didn't 
know where to begin or how.  No leads, no avenues of investigation to 
exhaust. I'd been to the airport in Nebraska.  I'd been to the airport in 
Minot.  I went to that silo as far as the fences and guards would let me.  I 
didn't have one ounce of instinct to tell me what my next move should be.  
That scared me almost as much as the fact that I didn't know where Scully 
was.  Like a connection had been lost.

I let my arms falls to my sides.  "I'm going to a funeral."

x

St. Michael's Church of the Ascension
8:03 AM

I hate funerals.

The notices crossed my desk every morning at work.  They were mostly for the 
parents and children of fellow agents.  Occasionally, it was an aunt or 
uncle. It was expected that a show of solidarity be put forth by the mourning 
agent's unit.  It didn't always happen, though.

Actual agent or ex-agent death notices were on a thick yellow paper.  Reggie 
had told me once, only half-jokingly, that for him to consider attending a 
funeral with my name on the notice, "It would have to be *your* dumb ass in 
the box."  I'd thought about that years ago when I hefted up one corner of 
his coffin on my shoulder and walked it to the ground.  Agent down, 
permanently.

I hadn't been to one since.

I got out of my car and slammed the door.  Only a handful of cars were 
already here, probably just those belonging to the priest and staff 
themselves.  It was early.  From my own vague, nondenominational brushes with 
religion, I was prepared to just stand by his grave and gather my thoughts.  
But then, Catholic burial grounds fenced in their dead like they feared they 
might abscond.  I could see the backhoe parked up on the hill, its gaudy 
orange making the ornate mausoleums around it seem that much grayer.  An 
angel stood, solemn-faced, mottled by rust and tarnish, arms seemingly weary 
at the weight of what he regarded.

(The world...rapidly godless.)  I felt my skin draw up with unchecked anger. 
Let the godlessness begin with me.

I spotted McGrath's double-cab truck, gleaming bright red with its too-big
tires.

("I'm telling you, Mulder - that truck is responsible for the reanimating of 
my sex life. We get in that baby and she - ")

("This violates the sniper-client agreement.")

("What sniper-client agreement?")

("The one I'm going to draw up that says you can't talk to me about your sex 
life.")

I winced at the brightness of the memory, reading the sticker on his back 
bumper.  Right next to the sticker that declared his kid could beat up the 
reader's honor student was the harsh white text on black, declaring they 
could have his gun when they pried it from his cold, dead fingers.  The 
sudden image of his thumb, rigored around a trigger that he'd never gotten a 
chance to pull, burned itself forever into my memory.  Involuntarily, I sank 
heavily against the front end of my car and buried my face in my hand.  One 
foot on the brink and a bad sense of balance, taunted a voice in my head.  I 
scowled. Patterson use to say that.

No, I couldn't do this at all.

"Mulder?"

(Scully?)

I reeled around before I could catch myself.

A woman in a black suit removed her sunglasses to reveal red-rimmed brown 
eyes.  She was pale under her short black hair, and the stark sunlight 
beating down on the uncovered lot did nothing to illuminate her, just as it 
did nothing to make it warmer.  "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you."  
She extended her hand.  "April McGrath, Ray's wife. We talked on the phone."

The call to Scully's mother had been somehow easier to make.  Three rings and 
a kind hello had bought April McGrath just this side of hell.  With McGrath's 
two kids shrieking happily in the background, she'd absorbed the news the way 
a body absorbed a snakebite.  The kids had grown very quiet as her voice  
grew more terse.  What did I mean he was dead?  Who in the hell was I to say 
such a thing?

God, I wanted to talk.  I wanted to ask her if she could feel temperatures, 
or if her body felt numb and neutral like mine.  I clenched my fists and 
couldn't feel the strain of muscles.  I got angry and couldn't hear the blood 
in my ears.  Until the night before, I hadn't slept, and I stumbled off that 
plane like it had all been one long walk since.  I didn't *want* to be awake. 
 I didn't *want* to make contact.  But my eyes were taped open, and I was 
tied down to the chair and forced to watch the damned Clockwork Orange my 
life had become.  Is this what it was like?

I took her offered hand firmly, but didn't shake it.  "I'm - "  The words 
refused to come out.  I cleared my throat.  "I'm so sorry..."

She just nodded, and I released her hand.  She put her sunglasses back in 
place.  "I was just... back there."  She gestured at the landscaped grounds 
at the other end of the parking lot.  "Trying to pull myself together.  
Thought it might be in bad taste to smoke at the visitation.  I saw you park 
and the federal permit in the back glass.  Put one and one together."  She 
rubbed her temple inquisitively.  "Does that hurt?"

I touched the area she meant, bruised under my fingers.  "Yeah."

"You're early."

"I just wanted to - go."

She nodded.  It required no further explanation.  "Do you care if I smoke?"

"No."

She dug cigarettes and a silver lighter out of her purse.  "This is *not* how 
Ray wanted it.  Cremation and visitation, that's what he always said, but he 
never signed anything legal so..."  She shrugged.  "I deferred to his mother 
on this one, but he would hate it.  Burial, I mean.  He thought it was 
wasteful, and kind of perverse."

"I don't like them either."

She exhaled a shaky sigh of smoke.  "You get the notices in the interoffice 
mail every day, too, huh?"

I glanced up.  She was Bureau?  It would make sense -- she was reserved, 
succinct.  The picture of the token woman on the recruiting brochure.  (Hi, 
I'm completely focused, and plan to do a good job.)

"I'm ATF," she answered.  Her hand trembled and ashes fell to the asphalt. 
"You know...Ray really liked you."  She bit the inside of her lip and the tip 
of an incisor showed as I waited for the blood.  "He, uh...not as an 
employer.  As a friend."

"Somehow," I mumbled, kicking a rock and steeling myself.  "That makes it 
worse."

She was going to cry too.  Goddammit, all this crying.  Like it remedied 
anything!  I turned angrily on my heel and then right back around, pacing 
slowly.  Was it so fucking selfish to want to be alone?

(You have plenty of time to be alone when you get home.)

This pain spread in my chest, and my jaw dropped, making it an audible sound. 
 An aborted howl, barely stifled in time.

She wiped self-consciously at her eyes, checking for tears.  "Shit. I'm 
sorry."

I shrugged, feeling the common ground.  I couldn't say anything, and she 
didn't expect me to.  As if a mutuality with McGrath himself was all that was 
required to communicate, like veterans with their shared war stories, their 
afterimages of what they'd left behind in foreign places.  The dialogue of 
grief was silent.  For now.

"This Madeline Roark,"  she said finally.  "Did you know her?"

I tilted my face halfway down towards her.  "Thought I did."

"Is she the one who took your partner?"

A kick in the groin would've been more tolerable.  "How did you know about my 
partner?"

She stepped back, tactically, and I pulled myself back in, not realizing how 
threatening I must look on approach.  "Ray's dad - he's a Section Chief with 
the Bureau.  He mentioned it."

Section Chief?  My eyes widened.  McGrath... Section Chief Joseph McGrath. He 
stood up from the other end of a long table in my memory, telling me Max 
Fenig was found in a cargo container like he had a Bible verse to back it up.

I shook my head at her.  "He never told me that."

"He didn't want you to know."  She squared her shoulders stiffly.  "He met 
with you after the Senator died, but he'd brought up your name before that 
around Joe.  It made his father angry even to hear your name.  Ray was 
mortified that you'd ask him if he was any relation and refuse to hire him, 
so he never brought it up.  He wanted you to like him.  Said you were 
paranoid about stuff like that."

I wished I'd known.  Maybe if I suspected him of having some suspicious 
connection outside of us, I'd have watched him more closely.  I'd rather have 
a live, somewhat suspicious friend than a dead, perfectly reliable one.  I 
sure as hell wouldn't be standing here talking to his wife outside a cemetery.

(It all comes back to you, doesn't it?  Everyone caught standing outside of 
the tunnel vision suffers because of you.)

I fought to breathe.  "I'm sorry, April."

She accepted it curtly.  Why, I had no idea.  "Are you going to find her?"

My partner?  That was the question, wasn't it?

"The bitch who shot Ray,"  she clarified.  Any tactful introduction now 
capsized between us, and like our affiliation with McGrath, this too was 
shared.  "You're going to find her?"

Not waiting for my answer, she shoved her purse under her arm. "Visitation's 
started."

That look on her face. (You're going to find her.) I heard the unspoken 
fragment of it. (Because it's your responsibility to do so.)

(You did this.)

My eyes went from the church door to the backhoe sitting over the empty plot 
to the angel and his sagging wings out among the tombstones.  No, I couldn't 
do this at all.  What would McGrath say?  If he were standing right here? 
He'd ask me what I was doing, fucking around outside a church when I could be 
on a plane, any plane.

Besides, he didn't want to be put in the ground.  Told her so himself.

(Excuses, excuses.)

But I wasn't going in.  If I stopped to mourn the dead, the dead would 
increase. Wasn't that right?

No one else was going to die because of me.

xxxxxxxxxx
End 1 of 16.


Out of Reach (02/16) Amanda Finch. Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part. 


9:32 AM

All I needed was some time to myself. A few moments in our office at the 
apartment to put my hands over my ears and *think* would've been just fine. 
The drive back from the church had been punctuated with dazes and dozing off, 
and every step felt like it was being forced at gunpoint to propel my body 
forward. 

I opened the door and groaned inwardly. Not just Maggie now, but Charlie, 
Charlie's wife, Charlie's two well-meaning but insane children. Wonderful. 
Just duck out, I told myself. Just say your hellos and goodbyes in your best 
asshole tone and get away from these people. But who in the hell was - ?

The man stood, nodding. "Agent Mulder." 

He was vaguely familiar, and my mind wasn't working at even a somnambulistic 
speed. 

Maggie stood as well. "He said he needed to speak with you. We told him you'd 
be right back." Her look said, Is that okay? 

I didn't answer. So that's who it was. McGrath. Section Chief McGrath. I 
fought to not roll my eyes in frustration. "Sir." 

"You're not going to Ray's visitation?" Still standing, he looked pointedly 
at his watch.

Torn between giving him my condolences and giving him the kind of 
professional hostility that passed for the norm now, I thought about asking 
him the same question. 

"The NSA told us we could have the body Friday. I went to visitation then." 
There was no defense in his voice, but almost a neutrality, as if he were 
trying to dissuade a bad dog from biting. "I do, however, want to attend the 
funeral mass, so if we could have a word." 

NSA got my attention. I dug my fingers into my palms. More wasted time. 
Ignoring the looks of Maggie, Charlie, his wife and the kids, I raised my 
chin at S. C. McGrath. "The door to your left is the office." 

To his credit, he acknowledged he was on my turf now, and didn't take any 
seat of superiority once I had closed the door. It didn't matter. I only saw 
him as an extension of the bastard at the other end of that long table 
anyway, giving me the what-for years ago about how useless it would all be 
now. The last five years hadn't been good to him, and his dark hair had gone 
completely white, but the laser-quality of his stare hadn't waned - that look 
could probably still cut glass with less-seasoned agents. Now I knew where 
his son got it. 

 His impatience was palpable as I scooped the mail that had collected on 
Scully's desk over the past week or so, shoved it into my portfolio, and sat 
down in a swivel chair, opposite him. "NSA?"

"That's what I came to talk to you about."  He matched my posture nervously, 
and I suddenly realized that he wasn't going to bite my head off at all. 
"When was the last time you saw Ray?" 

"Alive?" 

The stare dulled by a few watts and I instantly felt like the shithead I was 
being. Dammit. I cleared my throat, felt coughing coming on, and forced it 
down. "The last time I saw him alive was the evening of January the 27th. I 
left him out in the Jeep he and Jonson had rented for the trip. When I 
returned to the house on what I believe was the evening of February the 1st, 
he was dead. My suspicions are that he died on the 27th." 

He nodded slowly, almost imperceptibly. "Jonson... Mike Jonson. Behind this?"

"Behind Ray's death? No, Sir, not to my knowledge."

"But involved in Agent Scully's disappearance?" 

It took me longer to answer than I intended. "Yes, Sir. Directly." 

He examined the office, as if lifting things up that were none of his 
business and peering under them. "She lived here too, didn't she?"

My relaxed posture went south quickly. "She *lives* here, Sir." 

"Ray had it down as *your* address." 

"It is." I knew where this was going. "Is this important to you?" 

"I'm not here to lecture you, Agent Mulder." He paused, as if apologizing 
with silence. "The official Sheehan police report, faxed to me by Captain 
Bartusiak himself, states that Ray was found on the morning of the second. A 
Tuesday. I understand the woman's house was under the jurisdiction of a 
federal facility, which only confuses the issue as to why the NSA wouldn't 
release Ray's body until Friday morning or what in the hell they were doing 
there in the first place." 

"What are they ever doing, Sir?" 

He ignored that. Probably classified information anyway. "I put two of my 
agents on the case immediately. They weren't allowed entry into the house." 

Now I was listening. 
 "In fact, I called Bartusiak about why the report was so...vague. Turns out 
his officers didn't get any farther than my men did." 

I sat back now, swivelling in quarter-spins. "What's the NSA's official 
report?"

He swallowed, angry. "That my son killed Pam Wyeth in cold blood, and that 
his accomplice, as of yet unnamed, killed him."

"Pardon me, Sir," I said coldly. "But that's complete bullshit." 

"I found out as much this morning." He swept the room with his gaze again. 
"How secure is this room, Agent Mulder?"

Considering I'd been away from the apartment for nine days, I picked up a pen 
and Scully's steno pad, scrawling, "Not very." 

Beneath it, he wrote: "I have received some video footage from the crime 
scene." 

The words had the same effect as if he had shook me hard by the shoulders, 
but he couldn't know, could he? I didn't ask how he'd obtained the footage. 
The answer would've been the same as I'd heard before: he had friends, 
contacts. I knew fathers could sell out their sons. Knew it like my own last 
name, in fact, but the senses I had that could spot insincerity and even the 
best-masked malice from miles away were either not going off or no longer 
functioning. 

"I've received a concerned call," he replied, voice appropriately clipped. 

A concerned call from the NSA usually entailed informing one how they were 
going to die. They wanted their incriminating footage back, and they wanted 
it now. 

He dropped his voice so completely that I almost couldn't hear him. "I'd be 
interested in speaking with this woman." 

My lack of surprise was the reply to his unspoken question. Yes, I'd seen the 
footage, and I wasn't going to share information. Why would I? There was no 
love lost between me and anyone whose name was currently being prefixed by 
Section Chief. I scribbled on the steno pad, preoccupied. He wanted to speak 
to that woman on the footage? He didn't know what want was. 

Voice still low, he added, "There's something I'd like to offer you." 

I didn't speak. 

"I'd bump you up from GS-12 pay to GS-13. I'd expunge your personnel file of 
reprimands, except for the two most serious ones -- your attack on A.D. 
Skinner and your negligence with Roche - but the rest..." He straightened. 
"In addition, the X-Files will be re-opened again. I just want you to go back 
and investigate, and I'll cover for you here." 
 I'd been this close to feeling pity for the sorry bastard, and didn't take 
note of what was on Scully's desk as I swept it off in his direction, rage 
compounded by what felt like the definite taste of blood in the back of my 
throat. He didn't jump up startled like I wanted him to, but examined the 
notebooks, pens and bits of glass there before mournfully looking up. 

After a few moments, I looked up from her cleared workspace. "Agent Scully 
is, first, above other things you may have noticed, my partner. *Sir.* Ray 
McGrath was my friend. You walk in here and imply that I'd require anything 
*you* offered in exchange for finding the truth about what happened to them?" 

He stammered. "I was just - "

"Do you know where my partner is?" 

Nothing, just stunned silence.

"Can you bring her back to me?" 

Again, nothing.

I rose from my chair. "Then I'm not interested in anything you have to 
offer." I walked to the door. "I am sorry about your son. I'm angry about 
your son. I'm catching a jet plane out of this city as fast as I can to 
answer my own questions about what happened out there. But I'm not going to 
let you or anyone else buy me in the process. That's what happened to Mike 
Jonson, if April hasn't told you." 

"She told me." He stood too, and stared at me for a moment. "Your mouth is 
bleeding."

Well, *something* was bleeding. I wiped it away, like sudden weakness could 
be vanished from his mind so completely. 

I opened the door and he walked out ahead, turning slightly, voice still low. 
"You'd be clearing him of murder." 

I smiled, and the way my smile looked currently, I doubted any friendliness 
could be read into the gesture. None was intended. "Seems you and I are now 
even on the validity of *official* reports, Sir." 

The Scully family pretended not to notice that anything was out of the 
ordinary as he lowered his head, all the more plainly to be heard. "You and I 
will be even when you bring that woman back to D.C. Got it?" 

I cocked my head to one side. "Sure." 

He didn't say which woman, and I didn't ask. My agenda was my own. 
 x

Office of "The Lone Gunmen" 
11:19 AM

I heard the voices from outside before anyone moved to come to the door. 

Frohike, closest to the monitor by the door: "Who in the hell is that?" 

Byers then. "That's... Mulder? It's Mulder." 

There was, I thought, a scared pause after that. 

"Holy shit," breathed Langly, and I counted the seven lock twists and pulls 
before the door opened and the three stood there, aghast. 

"Hospitality, boys," I muttered, hands in my pockets. 

Byers hustled everyone away and opened the door. I passed through, resenting 
the inspection of bruises and stitches and stiff walk. "You find anything?" 

I'd called them the minute the flight out of Minot touched down in D.C., woke 
them up actually. I put a trace on any activity involving Alex Krycek or Mike 
Jonson, or any subsequent credit card or records information. Krycek was 
smarter than that, but I hoped Jonson was new enough to the fugitive detail 
to fuck up royally any day now. 

As if trying to create the illusion that there was something to find, Byers 
busied himself at the computer. Frohike, unable to contain himself any 
longer, just stared. "You look like you went dancing with a train." 

A pain that had been looming inside my head chose that moment to seize 
control. God, why couldn't they all shut the hell up?

"We don't have anything," Byers said finally. "We've had the traces running 
ever since you first called. We even have traces running on variations of the 
names, added an 'h' to both names just in case that's a ploy used. All we 
know is that the car signed out to the two of you was found at the airport. 
Scully signed it in." 

I walked around the table to look at the screen, to read her name on the 
terminal. It was the tail end of a very cold trail now. There were records of 
her getting on the airplane in Lincoln, but no records of her getting off in 
Minot, North Dakota. According to the records, there hadn't been any stopover 
flights for her to have gotten lost on, which would've been in the database 
too. 

I tapped the glass on her name. "Put a trace on hers. Anything comes up with 
her name, tell me." 

 Langly chuckled. "They're gonna kidnap women and use their credit cards?" 
Byers glared at him and he shrugged, straight-faced. "I mean, just kinda 
seems like a long shot." 

"Long shots are all I have right now." A cough I'd been holding back all 
morning refused to be stifled and tore through my lungs like a razor. What in 
the hell was that? 

Frohike backed away, anxiously. "Why don't you let us handle some of this 
Mulder?" 

"Handle it?" I looked at all three faces in one swing, coughing hard enough 
to have to lean on the edge of their table. "I can handle it fine. I just 
need your help on this end of it." 

Then I saw what they were staring at. When I had coughed, I'd blocked it with 
my hands, which were now a bright crimson with blood. My teeth tasted like 
copper, and a flood of life was threatening to flow right out. 

"What - ?" Byers shook his head. "What happened to you out there?" 

I raised my eyes. I couldn't stand the thought of there being blood on my 
mouth, and kept my sleeve wadded up over my knuckles to wipe it away. "I 
found my sister." 

I think I would've split them or myself if they'd asked. I couldn't have told 
that sad, sordid story to save my life - not until I knew the ending. 

This *couldn't* be the ending. Glancing up at Byers, I asked silently, Could 
it? 

I stood outside in their hallway, sleeve to my mouth. The yellowed florescent 
lights flickered like a dying strobe. The door had been locked behind me 
slowly, leaving time for me to change my mind and come back in, if need be. 
Giving me an opportunity to take them up on their offer of help. 

They should've known better. 

The seventh lock snapped into place. Frohike, voice only slightly muffled by 
the door, asked, "How's he going to find her if he's dead?" 

Byers made an edgy, shushing noise. In my mind I saw him, seeing me outside 
still well within the sight of their monitor. "He'll hear you!" 

Frohike snorted. "I hope the sonovabitch does." 

x

Blue Federal Clinic
1:03 PM

 I sat on the edge of what could only pass for a bed in some dark level of 
hell and protectively tucked one arm - the one the nurse had just 
exsanguinated with her somewhat debatable bloodletting skills - against the 
thickness of the bandages. 

Fifteen minutes later, the doctor, named Wexford, had walked in, believing 
he'd been given some bad information. The form said 'coughing up blood' (what 
would *that* be called, Scully?) and when he looked up from the page, he saw 
what Frohike saw: a collision. His cursory diagnosis was either a punctured 
lung or an infection of the lungs. Either way, I ended up in the hospital. 
How bad could it be really? My body coughed in response and I almost gagged 
on the answer. Fine. That bad. 

"It's still puzzling to me," the doctor declared without provocation as he 
walked back in. I started and jerked my ribs back out of place. Dammit, just 
like my mother, suddenly verbalizing a conversation she'd been having with 
herself and expecting me to know what the hell she was talking about. "Your 
blood, I mean," he clarified. "I don't know why they wouldn't have done 
bloodwork." 

"Maybe they did," I said cryptically. 

"Well yes. These things do get lost sometimes." 

Sure, yeah. Lost. That's what I meant. 

"At any rate, that's what we were waiting on." He threw the file down at the 
edge of the bed and put his hands in his pockets. "It's not a lung condition 
at all. You've got some irritation to the back of your bronchial tube - 
almost as if something has corroded the tissue. The blood was kicked-up by 
the coughing, which is being caused by the pneumonia. Not just *any* 
pneumonia though - chemical pneumonia." 

"Chemical?"

"Yes. This isn't the first time I've seen a case of it by any means, but 
under the circumstances, I'd say it was odd." He sat down in the guest chair. 
"Most of the cases I've run into involved industrial environments - where 
there was a high toxicity in the air due to the primer used to coat surplus 
steel, or the pressurant in large-sized sprayers for high-gloss paint." 

I nodded. "Do I look like someone who paints a lot of surplus steel?" 

"No, that's why I said it was odd." He rubbed the side of his nose 
thoughtfully. "Any ideas on how you might've been exposed to something like 
this?" 

"Nerve gas," I replied matter-of-factly. 

 He frowned almost instantly. "Yes, that was -" He sighed. "We were put on a 
new database at the beginning of the year. All federal employees, of any 
stripe, are on the database. You can search by symptoms, diagnosis or just 
name and find another federal doctor in the area who's handling some of the 
same symptoms with a measure of success. The doctor that came up when I put 
your symptoms in is contracted out to OSHA - no doubt for industrial work, 
and recently made an attache' to the Health Department for - "

I finished. "Veterans of the Gulf War." 

He concurred gravely. "You fight in that war, Agent Mulder?"

"Right after I painted all that surplus steel." 

He stood up, and I followed suit. "If you come into my office, I can give you 
the man's name and fill out these prescriptions."

I put my shirt back on. I never knew it could be painful to button a damn 
shirt. Arm still absently tucked in, I followed him to the alcove off the 
side of a hallway that served as his "office." He sat down in front of the 
screen. "I had the information *on* the screen. Someone's played with this 
thing. You've got a minute?" 

No, but I nodded anyway, smirking at the Run to Be Fit poster directly above 
his work area. I glanced over his shoulder at the program itself, at the 
fields that could be utilized for a search and - 

My instincts were back, dammit.

I double-checked the name plate on the desk from the corner of my eye. 
"Doctor Wexford." I crouched so that my stare was even with his as he sat 
down. "That database - any federal employee would be listed in there, for the 
name search you told me about, correct?" 

"Anyone with federal insurance," he answered. "Retired, active, civilian or 
dependents. Why?" 

"So if you put a name in there, it would tell you if that person's insurance 
had been used for any recent medical expenses. Couldn't it?" 

He narrowed his eyes at the terminal. "Suppose it could."

"Try Michael Jonson. J-O-N-S-O-N."

The doctor cleared his throat. "I'm not sure if I can just... I'm not sure 
how ethical that is. The database is closed. We usually have to have some 
kind of waiver to release 
the - "

I wasn't going to haul out the badge as anything but a last resort. "It's for 
a criminal investigation, Dr. Wexford." 

 "But usually when the Bureau needs something off the Mednet, Data Resources 
fills out the form and it's signed by - " 

I just stared.

He huffed in frustration at the monitor. "Is Michael Jonson the man who did 
that to your face? Is he why you're coughing up blood?" 

(Lie, boy! Lie like your bastard father taught you to!) 

"Yes. That's him." 

He was vindicated now, angry at the name. He typed it into empty fields and 
ran the search. There wasn't even a Michael Johnson, much less the other. 

"Nope," he said. "Nothing there." His whisper was almost conspiratorial. But 
he didn't want to abandon the cloak and dagger just yet. "Have you got 
another name?" 

I stared hard at the screen. "Yes I do." 

xxxxxxxxxx
End 2 of 16. 


Out of Reach (03/16) Amanda Finch. Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part. 

St. Joseph's Hospital
Phoenix, AZ
7:49 PM

I froze at the directory marquee outside the elevator. Children's Ward. Those 
words would never sit the same with me again, not without the punctuation of 
that hydraulic door and the subsequent screams. I stopped the shudder before 
it hit my shoulders and pushed the button for the eighth floor. They weren't 
going to let me go anywhere near her room or even near the hallway where her 
room was. So I just found an open-air break area that veered off the lobby 
and sat under the shot bulb on the left side of the door. The faint streaks 
of purple on the skylight had been swallowed up by total darkness. 

Twenty minutes later, I heard the clanging and thudding coming down the 
corridor. A blonde girl, braces wound around her legs and a walker in front 
of her, was guided outside by a nurse. The nurse wanted her to make steps 
without the benefit of the walker, and the very thought made the girl cry 
desperately real tears. She did walk a bit without it, but the pain was so 
excruciating that the rage of powerlessness seemed to rise off of her in 
waves. 

"Oh, Kim..." said the nurse when the sobbing started. "Now Kim..." 

All of the facts I put into the search fields - Kimberly Jonson, age seven, 
spinobifida - sprang to three-dimensional life. I rolled the soda I bought at 
the vending machine unopened between my hands, pretending that I wasn't 
watching. Her father couldn't be far behind. 

But minutes later, I was impatient to act. All it involved was me flashing 
that badge, or, hell, admitting myself for treatment. The nurses kept looking 
at me like I'd snuck out of my room, especially when the coughing started. 
But if Jonson so much as heard the letters FBI or my name, he was up and 
running. For good reason, too. 

It wasn't long after that when he walked out. I held my mouth open and 
breathed through it to helm the coughing. But he didn't notice me. He moved 
over to the railing, looked down and dug cigarettes out of his jacket. I 
couldn't remember if he had smoked before or not. The lighter's flame 
trembled in one hand and the cigarette shook in the other. Two nurses on 
their Diet Coke break pointedly and flirtatiously tried to engage him. I 
don't think he even saw them. Good, because I was waiting for them to leave. 

Their quarter-hour break was up. Jonson hadn't strayed from the edge. His 
badass attitude was nowhere in sight except maybe in the square of his 
shoulders. I envisioned myself coming up behind him, my gun drawn, jamming it 
into his side like I was trying to deflate him. Before I had even unsnapped 
the holster, he turned around and looked directly at me. My hand froze.

The cigarette fell out of his fingers, but not from surprise. His hands were 
just shaking so badly that he couldn't hold it any longer. "Not - " He swept 
the area with his eyes. "Not here." 
 I thought about dashing his head against the wall several hundred times. 

I had thought about that *a lot* actually. 

"I saw you out there - in the lobby." Sheer panic had control of him now. "I 
know why you're here, and I'm going... I'm going, but - " He fought for some 
leadership over his hands, over his voice, but it was long gone. "I just... 
needed to - "

"Get your story right?"

A little anger now underneath the fear. Good. "My story *is* right. It's been 
right."

"I would hope so," I said coldly. "You've had ten days to fabricate one."

"I can explain everyth - "

"They always say that," I intoned boredly. "And they never can." 

He couldn't stay in the answering role for long, and struck out like a kicked 
snake. "You want to hear the fucking story or not?" 

For a moment, I suspected I might have clenched my teeth so hard that my jaw 
was locked permanently. "Sure." I stood and motioned to the edge. "Let's talk 
over there." 

Putting his hand on the rail, he stopped to sigh into the night air. Before 
he even had a chance to inhale his breath, I slammed him face first into the 
metal handrail. "Not a *sound*!"

He howled deep in his own throat and started coughing. I didn't have his 
bulk, but he didn't have a gun. That was all that made this possible. On a 
bad day, he could've kicked my ass. 

"Let it be *me* who tells *you* the story." I yanked his face back and pushed 
him into a chair. "McGrath, Scully, me - we went to the library and left you 
watching Madeline Roark from the Jeep. And you did. But you saw him there, 
didn't you? Krycek. Hell, maybe you *knew* him from the very start, I don't 
know. I don't imagine you would've mentioned to Senator Matheson that you 
were a member of the Black Ops - "

"Now wait a minute - "

I held the gun steady now. "You saw him and he cut you some kind of deal for 
Scully, right? Twenty thousand dollars, just to make sure she got where he 
wanted her. Only I was supposed to be on that plane, too." I laughed 
bitterly. "I can't believe this. McGrath *warned* me about you - "

Sudden hurt filled his angry face. "He what?"

I tried to tell myself this could be a manipulated emotion. They could all be 
manipulated, but something about how this alone overwhelmed him cast a doubt. 
"What?" 

"Ray warned you about me?" 

"Not vehemently enough, obviously." 

He shook his head as if he were trying to lull himself. "Jesus, it's finally 
happened. I've been set up." He blinked incredulously. "They're fucking 
setting me up." 

I lowered the gun, almost in disgust. "Ten days to sit here and think about 
it, and that's all you can come up with?"

He waved one hand dismissively, as if erasing the moment. "Look, I never saw 
Krycek. Not once. You can shoot me, you can beat the shit out of me, you can 
leave me in that desert with the crows but I am *not* going to cop to that." 
For a second, he appeared to be genuinely nauseated. "If he so much as showed 
up around the corner or - I would've shot him on sight. That was my *job.*"

I yanked a chair out from under the table and straddled it as people passed 
by the doorway, veiling the gun with my trenchcoat. "Convince me then. Tell 
me I'm wrong." 

"You've only got two things right." He held the corresponding fingers up like 
it took all his strength to do so. "Yeah, someone approached me while I was 
on watch at Roark's place." His middle finger went down. "Yeah, that same guy 
offered me twenty thousand dollars to task for them, but I was given *no* 
reason to suspect that the task involved Agent Scully." 

"What guy?"

"He, uh, uh - " Jonson tried to tap out the name with one finger on the 
plastic table, almost panting. "He uh - "

"Breathe, okay? Breathe. Did he give you a name?" 

"Maynard," he said quickly and took a deep breath. "John Maynard." 

"What about him?" 

"He came up to me, right? He said I was parked where he usually parked. He 
noticed the duffel case on the seat. He said, You a sharpshooter? I said, 
Hell yeah, D.C. Tactical Squad, answerable to the President in times of 
crisis." He smiled briefly and it died at the sight of my face. "He said he 
did some rooftop surveillance with the Secret Service when he first started 
out. We talked a little, you know. Said he worked with, he didn't actually 
say. I'm guessing CIA. Had the *look* you know."

If my impatience had been any more apparent, it would've given him a 
flashburn on the side of the face.

"Right. Anyway, he told me he'd been looking for someone to do an odd job for 
him. Just to deliver some documents. I got kinda pissed off then - I ain't a 
fucking courier. They got the little pantywaists g-men who just courier stuff 
back in forth in their stupid little pouches. But he said this wasn't just 
any courier detail, that it was twenty-k per confirmed delivery. 20-k. Shit, 
you know. I - " He shook his head violently. "But I told him I, that I had to 
watch this house. He just gave me this ...like he was saying, Your loss, you 
know. Told me I could park there and went back to his car." 

"He left then?" 

"He left right after that."

"But you must have seen him again. When?" 

He swallowed. "At the airport, waiting for the next flight out to Minot. He 
was sitting there too. Scully had left to go get something. He was sitting a 
few seats down and I recognized him when he put his newspaper down. He asked 
where I was going and I told him. He asked me if I remembered what we talked 
about. And then he told me that he could arrange for someone to meet me in 
Minot, and it wouldn't take but ten minutes. I told him I was in charge of 
Scully, and he said he could plan for her to stay with me while I - " He saw 
my face. "What?" 

I glowered, holding my temper only loosely in check. Of course he'd arranged 
for the charge. The charge being who he was after. "Continue." 

"He handed me two boarding passes and I told him we weren't getting on a 
plane. He said we'd used them just to get *to* the plane, but not get on the 
plane. I would hand the guy the package, the guy would hand me the other 10 
thou. Done deal."

"And you told Scully about this?"

"I uh - " He surveyed the back of his hand. "I didn't tell her anything until 
we were in Minot. After the flight came in early and Ray went into the house 
to find you - "

"Wait, wait. Back up. McGrath did what?"

"We told you there was two more hours till the flight, but it came in on 
time. I didn't know if Scully had heard them announce it, so I called Ray and 
told him. He said the two of you wouldn't be able to make it, but that it was 
about time for you to be done searching the woman's house. So he went in 
there to find you."

"What time was that?"

"It was - " He looked at his watch now as if this would help. "I can't 
remember." 

"Try." 

"A few minutes after eight maybe. Eight-thirty."

Unfortunately, that was about right. "What did Scully say about us not being 
able to make it?"

He shrugged. "She wasn't all that surprised."

In other words, she thought I'd ditched her again.  "And what did she say 
about your little project once you were in Minot?" 

He cast his eyes down. "She just assumed I was doing something you asked me 
to do."

"She assumed or you told her that?"

"She assumed, and I didn't say otherwise." 

I raised the gun again. "Then what?" 

He made this sound, like a sob canceled in mid-breath. "Then everything fell 
apart." 

"Who's got her, Jonson?" I asked fiercely. "Where is she?" 

It was like he hadn't even heard me. I was no longer integral to the story. 
"We landed and I told her she would have to come with me. She knew that. She 
didn't say anything. I had to leave my guns and permits at the front so we 
could go through security to get to the gate. They put the package through 
the metal detector and told us to go ahead. So I gave the woman the boarding 
passes and told Scully to wait. She waited right there at the opening of the 
gate enclosure. There were these two guys at the door of the plane. Like 
guards. I told them I had a pouch they were expecting. They moved aside and 
this woman stepped out from between them to talk to me - "

"Wait. A woman?" 

"Yeah, it surprised me, too." 

I leaned forward. "No, no - what did she look like?"

"Short curly hair. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Plain, average height. But she was 
beat up really bad, like she'd been just...severely ass-kicked you know and 
that's - " He sniffed. "Then she and the guard both looked over my shoulder. 
Scully looked over at about the same time and the woman tried to walk out, 
but the guards held her back. She knew Scully's name, and was screaming for 
help. Scully came out and - " 

 "Spit it out, Jonson." 

"They pushed right past me and they *took* her." The words came out in a 
rapid flow, as if he wanted them out of his system. "One of them hit me in 
the stomach, hard, and I just slid down the wall. That's - " He caught 
himself with his hands up, still sliding down that wall somewhere in his 
memory. "I got up and they were closing the gate. The plane jerked back and I 
fell out of the gate enclosure and hit the ground. I... blacked out." 

Because Scully's last impression of Madeline Roark was of a woman who had 
been beaten severely in her kitchen, the ruse had worked. Never mind that my 
sister didn't know me, but Scully knew her. No way in hell she would've 
questioned running to help her. And Jonson had never seen the woman he'd been 
surveilling. He didn't know that there was a hoax until they'd knocked the 
wind out of him. But who the fuck was Maynard?

No. 

"Maynard, Jonson. What did Maynard look like?" 

He held his head in his hands. "Our age, maybe. Short brownish hair, our age 
but...like he was trying to look older. Prematurely gray, real... dark 
eyes..."

("That's just going to ruin my year.") Him, the Doctor. 

I gritted my teeth. "The kind of face that might inspire one to spill his 
life story?"

He froze. "Sometimes when someone acts like they want to hear it, it's easy 
to tell it."

It all came together. Maynard outside the Roark house with Jonson. Maynard 
with a direct line to Krycek, Krycek inside the house with - 

My sister?

(Quit calling her that! She's not Samantha. Not anymore.) 

Oh shit. She *knew* Krycek was inside the house. He was inside the house when 
we were there, like Scully had suggested. She rushed us out for that very 
reason. She knew he was the man driving Pam Wyeth, her supposed *friend*, to 
insanity, and she didn't do a damn thing. Well, of course she didn't. As far 
as she knew, Krycek was another colleague. As she should've *expected* from 
the sort of company she kept, he walked towards her one day, dollar signs 
flashing, and played her like a fucking wild card.

I looked up, slowly. "And you - you!" 

I pushed the table away and I knocked him to the ground.

 "Mulder!" 

"You took the money and you ran, you stupid motherfucker! Twenty thousand 
dollars!" I kicked him hard in the side, and I didn't care who came running 
now. 

"Ten!" he wheezed. He was instantly sorry for saying so.

"What?"

"I never got the other half," he said resentfully, holding his side, trying 
to sit up and away. "You think they slipped it in my pocket before they 
kicked my ass or something?" 

"This is supposed to make me feel better?" I aimed my foot at him again and 
he waited for the blow with his eyes squeezed shut. I kicked a chair instead. 
"Ten thousand dollars for Agent Scully's life? Did that sound like a good 
price to you?" 

"She's - " If he hadn't feared for his life before, he did now. "She's dead?" 

"You'd better *pray* to whatever it is you believe in that she isn't, or I'm 
offering you up." I kicked him again. "You hear me?" In the doorway, three 
people in scrubs stood and I started towards them threateningly. "You can 
have him when I'm done. Move!" They beat a retreat down the hall and I turned 
to Jonson again. "The man you so eagerly went into business with already has 
two casualties to his credit, and I'm not handing him anymore." I stalked 
around the tables again. "However, he's welcome to you. I'll carry your dead, 
sorry ass right to his fucking door. How that's for courier detail?"

He was off in his own little world for a minute, keeping the blood out of his 
nose. He drew his hand back with the blood, and as if effected by a different 
set of principles for the speed of sound, finally heard my words. 
"Casualties?" He went pale. "Who died?" 

He didn't know. Dammit. "Pam Wyeth." I walked around the table, trying to 
catch my breath. And the speed of pain chose that moment to sneak up on me 
like the bad news had Jonson. "Ray's dead, Jonson."

The man who'd walked out here with some degree of repentance, who was willing 
to be taken out to the desert and shot, was no more. 

"Ray's dead," he said carefully.

Nodding, I sank into the most immediately available chair. I couldn't think 
of a part of my body right now that *didn't* hurt. 

"How?" Jonson asked.

"A bullet to the back." 
 "Who?" 

I answered that the simplest way I knew how without advancing my theory of 
the government's covert alien-human hybridization project. Jonson would've 
killed me after the first sentence. "That woman you saw on the plane." 

His jaw fell like he was going to rise up and bite. "And who the *fuck* is 
she?" 

I stopped wincing long enough to stare him dead in the face. "She's my 
sister." 

Glacial formations had been warmer than his speculative question, thrown out 
like it was casual, but spoken like the wail before a bombstrike. "And you're 
looking for her?" 

"I'm looking for Scully." I sat up as straight as I could. "You were the last 
one who saw her. What was on that plane? Were there passengers? Cargo? What?" 

"I didn't *see* anyone else." 

"Meaning?" 

"I did a brief stint in the Persian Gulf." His look assured me that the story 
had a point. "I would ride back and forth on the medical planes - the 
surgical transports... these dignitaries, anyone else who was anyone in the 
political world... they'd wanna get their little photo op among the carnage, 
right? 'Here I am fighting for America.' *Whatever.* But that's... that's 
what this was." 

"A medical transport?" 

"Made like one, with the harnesses in the walls where they'd have the gurneys 
tethered to it. The tread on the floor so they wouldn't roll around so bad. 
But I didn't see any gurneys. I just heard people screaming. That's - that's 
the first thing that I knew was wrong, and then that woman - your sister - 
she called Scully's name."

"Screaming." Any hope I had drained out into my stomach and died there. 
"People screaming?" 

"Women screaming."

I picked myself up. "I'm wasting time. I have to go find her." I straightened 
my coat and my clothes, as if this would somehow make me look less like one 
of hell's messengers. 

"Mulder." He fought to get to his feet. "Mulder! Wait!" 

"I've got everything I need from you." He didn't even seem worth kicking now. 
"I hope that ten grand did some good for your daughter, because that's about 
as far as it goes." 

 He grabbed my arm, and I anticipated a fist in the face that didn't arrive. 
"It maybe paid for today, Mulder. Look, I'm sorry. I don't expect you to 
accept it. I'd hit you for accepting it. I - She's going through this 
physical therapy bullshit now. Sometimes I think it'd be better if we just 
let her live the rest of her life in a wheelchair, because ever since we 
started with these fucking braces on her legs, it's one thing after another. 
You know what it is this week? A kidney infection. She's on dialysis, they're 
trying to walk her through the halls. You know what it costs? $5,372 a *day,* 
and before you ask, that's after insurance. So no...what I did isn't going to 
save any fucking body." 

I smarted at the price, which was about five hundred bucks shy of what he 
made in a month working for me. "How are you covering that?" 

He dug his cigarettes out again, mouth twisting around the filter as he lit 
up. "My wife is fucking her boss." He exhaled the smoke and watched the wind 
carry it away. "He's very generous." 

Speechless, I just cursed to myself. He was letting one happy life, one happy 
marriage, go by - to save his daughter. But he sold my partner, regardless of 
how unwittingly, into that same slavery. Anything standing outside the realm 
of that singular goal had dried up and died.

(Sound familiar?) 

I jerked at the realization. "I've gotta go." 

He held the smoke in for a moment, and let it go. It burned my nostrils and 
felt like it was working its way behind my eyes. "You're going to need a gun 
on you, Mulder." 

"Jonson - " I glanced down the hospital corridor in front of me. "No. I'm not 
going to let you." 

"What the hell good am I doing here?" He shrugged both shoulders at the night 
sky. "It's been done without my help or my support for a long time." Under 
his shoe, he flattened the half-smoked cigarette. "You're going to need a 
gun." 

I scoffed, holding onto the glass door's handle. "Not pointed at my back, I'm 
not." 

"I'm not the one shootin' people in the back." He lifted his chin at me 
defiantly. "Am I?"

Slouching down before I could even stop myself, I stared into the harsh 
fluorescent lights as if it were the entrance back into the larger world. I 
held the door open and waited for him. 

xxxxxxxxxx
End 3 of 15. 


Out of Reach (4/16) Amanda Finch. Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part. 

Flight 929
En route to Sheehan, Nebraska 
February 9, 1999
4:41 PM

Early morning when the light was just seeping through the blinds, we would 
take fifteen speechless minutes to let our surroundings download themselves. 
I'd lightly touch the side of her face, call on my expensive Oxford 
education, and come up with "hmmmm." Or I'd feign short-term memory loss and 
be surprised to see her there. "Scully? What have we done?" The joke was 
getting old now. She smiled anyway. 

I touched my knuckles softly to her forehead, down over one eye, down the 
line of her stubborn profile. She smiled into my hand, and I lightly traced 
over the other eye and again...

(I can't open my eyes - ) 

(Well then don't, honey. It's not time to go to work yet.) 

(No, I - Mulder, I can't open my eyes...)

Where my touch had fluttered across her face, blindness and bloodlessness 
remained. My knuckles had sealed the eyes, had drained the skin. 

(What in the - Scully?)

I reached for her face again. Scully! I touched her face, and I felt her skin 
crawling with corrosion under my fingertips. 

(Mulder...stop this. Stop this.  Stop this.  Make it stop, Mulder.  Make 
it...) 

But I couldn't stop. I couldn't quit. She drained and she died and cried out 
until my touch had sealed her mouth and taken her voice. I couldn't stop. I 
couldn't -

"Mulder? Hey! ...Mulder!" 

I snapped to on the plane with a gasp that yanked my spine straight and 
whiplashed the back of my neck. "What?" 

Jonson pulled himself back as much as the confines would allow. "You okay? 
You were...I thought you were about to talk in your sleep or something. We're 
about to land."

I just nodded, embarrassed. The medicine Wexford had given me for the cough 
was like drinking a double NyQuil three times a day. I yawned towards the 
empty window seat. Jonson hadn't asked about the third ticket. He mistook it 
for optimism. Let him. Meanwhile, tired had graduated into merciless fatigue. 
I'd been walking around with a perpetual headache. Two thumbs of pressure 
pushed against the back of my eyes. For maybe the third morning in a row, I 
regretted putting my painkillers down the garbage disposal in the kitchen, 
and for the third day in a row, I hated myself for the regret.

Maybe I had expected to find her. Our search of the airport in Minot had 
produced nothing. 

I mapped out the small, North Dakota airport in my mind, reliving the past 24 
hours.

The ticket desks were in front of me, the security monitors and metal 
detectors to my left. Baggage claim was to my right. I thought of how the 
thirty-odd passengers milling about at 2 AM, waiting for red eyes to arrive, 
had sat reading papers or gift shop paperbacks, maybe sitting in the coffee 
shop or the frozen yogurt place. A trio of pay phones gleamed dully against 
the back wall. 

Thirty people oblivious to the screams in Hangar 10 just sat there. The 
copper sharpness of Scully's hair snagged the eye of a man standing at the 
phone booth - a man I fabricated in my memory to keep myself from casting 
random hate on those thirty passengers for not hearing. I didn't see her, but 
I saw a distorted, fractured image of her on the black of his pupil. I heard 
him tell the men on the plane that she was there, but he didn't call her she. 
He didn't see a human being. He never would. 

I imagined her as tired. She seemed so strange, moving there alone. 

She'd watched the monitors for the next flight into Minot. It would be 
another forty-five minutes before it was in, assuming we'd caught it. Jonson 
waited in fear for her to call me on her cell phone, but her battery was 
recharging. He was saved from having to explain what was then only a conflict 
of interest. 

On that night, Jonson had to relinquish control of his weapons quickly, even 
though they weren't planning to catch a flight out. An airport security 
officer, Jared, corroborated this. It hadn't been the highlight of his week 
like I might've thought. His daddy had gaming rifles that were *this* big. 
Illegal ones, I suspected. The clearance papers were what piqued his 
interest. Obviously he had some quarrel with the local mayor and had hoped 
Jonson was there to "take him out." 

The baggage claim people remembered her. One of the security guys, judging by 
the look on his face as he dimly recalled her, had gotten close enough to 
smell her and briefly want her. The urgency had vanished as soon as she had, 
but it had been enough to burn into recent memory an afterimage of her face 
that matched the photo.

The landing staff were even less helpful. A manifest for the cargo plane 
could not be found, though I received from a night clerk the empty, polite 
promises of a follow-up call. That's all that was on it, they insisted, 
having seen only a skeleton crew of functional staff. No, they didn't know 
what kind of cargo; the plane was there to refuel only. 
 
One of the handlers, handbeams glowing, had been approached by a man who 
asked him to refuel the craft. The only reason he remembered it was because 
that simply wasn't his job. He was a handler, dammit. Did he remember the 
man's face? Could he tell me anything about the man? He described someone so 
vaguely that it could've been himself, or me, or Jonson. 

What about the man who *fell* out of the gate enclosure, I asked. Did he 
remember that? He did, but what did that have to do with it? He instantly 
backed away, angry, and now fearing a pending lawsuit.

How dare I come into his pad and ask him to remember something? All twelve 
gates of it, I thought sarcastically, thinking of how Dulles would pick him 
up in its frenzy, crush him and use him to cushion an emergency landing. 
Jonson pulled me away soon after, sensing unrest, the way anyone could hear a 
rope snapping and unraveling when the silence betrayed it.    

(Come on *profiler*.) 

I kept a cast of voices in my head from over the years. Not by choice, but by 
habit. Each spurs a different reaction, by the sheer power of its negativity. 
My father's echoing claim that I was a useless piece of shit worked in these 
instances too. 

(You've been out of practice. You've no more got this scene mapped out than 
you do your goddamned head on straight. Do you?) 

This, however, was Patterson. 

I thought of the skeptical sneer on the face of the afternoon shift 
Lieutenant with Minot's police department. When Jonson had left the man's 
office, Lt. Quinlan cocked his bald head to one side and asked, You believe 
that bullshit story of his, son? It was Quinlan's theory that Jonson and 
Scully had something going on, or maybe just Scully. 
I sidestepped this neatly, discussing how, if we could have access to the 
terminal's security footage, his men and I could go over times and match 
faces up to passenger manifests. 

He snidely told me that this was just a small North Dakota airport, not 
Dealey Plaza in 1963. I thought he had time for this? Obviously, I'd gotten 
the one police contact who had a cousin injured in the whole Ruby Ridge 
melee. Great. Besides, he enlightened me, women just leave sometimes. I 
examined his ham hands and lewd smile, thinking, I *bet* they do. I'm not 
your *son*, motherfucker, and you'll be hearing from my ASAC. I didn't tell 
him that I didn't have one. It was just nice to see him almost piss himself. 
I could've pulled some major rank and *ordered* him to hand over the footage, 
but he was just the kind who'd call Kersh, and I'd have a one-way trip back 
to D.C. in the bureaucratic slingshot. 

So, more than twenty-four hours later, I was no closer to finding her now 
with Jonson as I'd been without him. A cold trail had just gotten colder. 

xxxxxxxxxx
End 4 of 16.



Out of Reach (05/16) Amanda Finch. Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part. 

Sheehan, Nebraska
NeuroMast Headquarters
5:31 PM

I looked at NeuroMast and I saw a large beige box, more of a rectangle than a 
square, with a lower level jutting out of one end that gave the building an 
L-shape. The windows were there to allow for a modicum of sunlight, and were 
glazed with a dark, slightly reflective tint. The only thing I saw if I 
peered into one of them through the binoculars was a panorama of the trees 
and hills we were standing in. Our focal point matched-up with a fifth floor 
view, and the small mirror image of myself with sniper glasses was unnerving. 
Someone could be watching me there, and I'd never know. I felt eyes on me. 
But that was paranoia, not divination. 

Behind me, Jonson paced. Twelve feet out to the edge of our evergreen 
camouflage, then twelve feet back, a military cadence apparent in his step. 
I'd mistaken it for a show of anger, but I realized now he was just trying to 
keep himself awake. He wasn't much on coffee, and even No-Doz knew when it 
was time to hang it up and quit sending adrenaline fireballs to the brain. 
I'd forgotten that some people need sleep simply to remain tolerable, and in 
Jonson's case, the more the better. Slinging his bagged rifle from hand to 
hand in a sort of ROTC exercise, he waited. What could we possibly 
accomplish? He hadn't asked the question, if only because our talk in Phoenix 
still sat prominent in his memory. 

He didn't have to ask. It was a good question that I was currently trying to 
answer myself. 

"D.C. Tactical officer." I remarked, offhand. 

He stopped. "Yeah. Made the cut when I was twenty-six. I put in ten years 
before I joined the Command Unit."

"Hmm."

"What?"

I lowered the binoculars and looked at him sideways. "'A good tactical 
officer can map a maze without looking at it, can stand outside a source and 
render walls and constraints transparent.'"

"That's the federal PR," he said suspiciously.

"Hmm." I raised the glasses again, scanning the well-manicured expanse of 
green on all four sides of the building. "You'd at least need some sort of 
architectural blueprint..."

"That's the idea."

I nodded slowly. "You ever done any rappelling?"

"I did the training drills but -- " His dark eyes suddenly compressed into 
slits as he bounced his glare from me to the roof of the building. 
"Ohhh...you are out of your fucking mind."

"So they tell me."

The duffel landed on the ground next to where I was crouched like he'd just 
thrown down the gauntlet. Limp or no limp, I was on my feet in seconds as if 
he'd just pulled the pin from a grenade.

"The safety's on," he grunted, and stalked twelve feet perpendicular to the 
path he'd worn in the brush. "You put any dope on a rope around that 
building, you go ahead and make the funeral arrangements now. It'd be like 
dangling weak meat over fucking *sharks*, okay?"

"I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about me."

He interrupted the pace again, his sneering face only inches from mine. 
"That's what I meant by dope on a rope." 

I dropped halfway to one knee like I was going to resume my crouch, put down 
the binoculars and calmly punched him in the face. My shoulder sang with 
pain, but the shrill shock of it was currently falling on a deaf system. I'd 
been numb the moment I walked out of the Minot police department and 
realized, with the trenchcoat shoved under my arm, that I couldn't feel the 
cold. 

Jonson wiped at his mouth, regarding the blood that dripped lethargically 
down his fingers like it was battery acid. I only caught the last misstep of 
his surprised stagger. 

Now it was I who stood inches from him. "My forgiveness in this situation is 
very tentative," I replied evenly. "Whether or not you hold the gun, whether 
or not you ultimately feel sorry about what went wrong, we wouldn't be here 
if it weren't for you, if it weren't for me. You're at least partly 
answerable to the consequences."

Wiping at his mouth again, his countenance and posture both faded into 
neutrality. "Only partly?"

"I'm the one who entrusted you to keep her away from the very scenario you 
walked her into, so yeah, only partly." I was aware of what the words twisted 
in him, and I hope they twisted it thoroughly. He retrieved his duffel from 
the ground and started his pacing anew. Anger would keep him from being 
sleepy now. 

Until I'd found McGrath dead and rigored under the bed in Pam Wyeth's 
bedroom, I'd assumed his betrayal just as tangibly as I had Jonson's. That 
speculation had been as misguided as my own belief that my profiling could 
discern the liars from the altruists. Serial killers were one thing, but once 
Scully and my family had been dragged in as variables, my objectivity was 
null and void. I couldn't even tell the McGraths from the Jonsons, much less 
the Spenders from the Smoking Men or the sisters from the Syndicate. Distrust 
was the only failsafe. 

"It's getting dark," Jonson pointed out. 

"So?"

"So I hocked my night-vision goggles and I'm tired. Let's -- "

I froze in his sudden silence. "What?"

He raised his hand sharply. Listen, he mouthed soundlessly. 

At first I patiently listened, hearing nothing. Then came the unmistakable 
footfall against the winter ground, a boot flattening a nest of dry vines 
under the brown carpet of pine needles. That step brought with it the sharp, 
involuntary inhale of a hunter who'd just given himself away to the hunted. 
The power had just exchanged hands. I drew my gun and waited for the attack. 

xxxxxxxxxx
End 5 of 16. 


Out of Reach (06/16) Amanda Finch. Disclaimers, etc. with first part.


Jonson tore his rifle from his duffel bag, and when he pressed forward with 
his hands, he speared one of the two men who stood there with the muzzle. A 
Sig Sauer almost identical to the one I was holding clattered at my feet. His 
was maybe a bit newer than mine. Without compromising my aim, I picked it up, 
my eyes never leaving the two of them. I shoved it between my jeans and my 
stomach, scraping my skin, and dug the small flashlight out of my inside 
pocket, flashing it from one face to the other. Brown eyes squinted bravely 
into the glare and green eyes looked away. 

The dark-haired one on the right had dropped his weapon. Not that I could 
much criticize *that.* I'd expected rage and anger as the light hit him, but 
from the roundness of his eyes, it was more likely that he'd soiled himself. 
The black man at his left still held a weapon, but it was defenselessly slack 
in his raised fingers. I motioned to Jonson with the flashlight to take it 
and realized they were both a good decade younger than either of us. Both 
were wearing black, but at first glance, the dust and dirt staining their 
clothes made the color uncertain. 

The one on the left, only recently unarmed, was swearing in the cold air like 
he'd just sprung a leak. "Don't shoot us," he pleaded, winded, closing his 
eyes as if we were about to do just that. 

Any theory I had about them being NSA evaporated. "Who the hell *are* you?"

"These guns are federal issue," Jonson mumbled, holding the confiscated 
weapon on its owner.

The dark-haired man carefully lowered on hand. "I'm getting my I.D." His 
partner followed suit. 

I shone the beam from left to right as they stood there. The black guy was 
Calvin Essary according to his FBI identification. The dark-haired kid -- and 
he wasn't much more than that -- was Eric Griffin. Light gleamed off badges 
for a moment before I turned it off and shoved it back in my jacket. 

"You know them?" Jonson asked.

"Do you know all the other snipers?" I hissed. "No, I don't know them!" I 
lowered my weapon but didn't change my aim. "Who sent you here?"

Essary spit it out rapid-fire. "I'm with VCU. Griff's with Fraud. We're on 
Special assignment by order of the D.C. main office."

Jonson laughed in exasperated confusion. "They train D.C. green Fraud brats 
to come creeping through the woods like that?" He spat on the ground 
disparagingly close to Essary's hiking boot. "Yeah. Right."

Essary took a step back. "We thought you were NSA! We saw the duffel bag and 
thought you were about to make a hit!"

"FBI, D.C.," Jonson said shortly, not even bothering to back himself up with 
documentation as he gave his name. "Tactical Command."

I snapped mine off my holster. "FBI, Fox Mulder -"

"Mulder!" Griffin explained to Essary. 

(Okay, what did I do now?)

"You're the one who was supposed to meet us here and brief us on this damn 
thing!" Essary stalked off into the trees angrily, temper forcing his 
shoulder blades out as he walked away. 

"On whose orders?" I asked Griffin. 

He turned to watch after his partner. "Section Chief McGrath."

Jonson looked at me for verification. "Ray's old man?"

I nodded and turned back to Griffin. "When did he tell you that?"

"Sunday morning."

"That's strange -- since he didn't *ask* me until Sunday morning. I told him 
no, by the way." I tallied up the hours they'd been waiting. "If you've been 
expecting me since then, why aren't you back in D.C.? Two days pass and you 
think I still might show?"

Turning aside, Griffin spoke softly. "Ess'ry? You tell it."

Stepping out of the trees, he rejoined the fray next to his partner. "We 
tried to go back. We knew something was wrong when we went to the Omaha field 
office to run an errand. They told us our names were put on a list as having 
counterfeit credentials. Like we were only impersonating federal agents."

"It sounds crazy," Griffin added. "But I think we've been kill-filed."

Jonson shook his head in disbelief. "Kill-filed? Meaning what?"

"That's sort of a CIA, Pentagon term," I explained. "If it was declared 
dangerous or risky to have someone return to duty from a high profile or 
highly classified assignment, the agency would dump their personnel file."

"Oh yeah?" Jonson chuckled derisively. "And you know this how?"

I smirked. "You've never read Victor Marchetti?"

He rolled his eyes dismissively. "I've seen some weird-looking shit, okay? 
I've seen politicians talking to mob leaders and I've seen mob leaders become 
politicians. You've got two agents -- " he rolled the word on his tongue 
skeptically. "Two guys you've never seen before in your life who look like 
they just slam-danced with a fucking sewer, and smell about the same -- "

"We been running from our own people!" Griffin interrupted with a yell. 
"Don't you *get* that?"

"Yeah, Jonson," I concurred coldly. "Don't you?"

Whatever he started to say dissipated before it reached his throat. He closed 
his mouth and tried again. "Alright. Fair enough. If this is their story, 
though, why were they about to come out of those trees and kill us?"

"So you couldn't kill us first," Essary replied wearily. "Look, I don't want 
to believe it could be done either. This wasn't in the fucking brochures at 
Quantico." He fixed his brown, bloodshot eyes on me. "I don't know what kind 
of work you do, Agent Mulder... but is it possible we only pulled a Special 
Assignment because we -- " He considered Griffin for a moment. " -- aren't 
that important?"

"You mean, do I think you may have been sent here to die?"

First Essary nodded, then Griffin. 

"That depends," I said. "I can't figure out why he would simply assign you 
the case and then abandon you. He'd have to be afraid of something you know, 
or you would've had to finish something for him that he didn't want known." I 
searched their faces. "Anything like that?"

Neither said anything until Griffin spoke. "We got here on Saturday. We went 
to Wyeth's house check things out, just like he asked himself. The NSA told 
us that they were the ones handling the case, that it had happened just that 
morning or we could've saved ourselves the trouble. We were 
disappointed...we'd never been on a Special Assignment before." He raised 
some dust with the toe of his boot. "All we did was get that box from him and 
-- "

I interrupted. "Box? What box?"

"He said it was case notes and some personal effects of Pam Wyeth's that had 
to be returned to the S.C.," Essary responded. "We called him and told him we 
had it and would bring it back with us after we tried to wrap some things up 
here, but he told us to go ahead and send it overnight mail so we -- what?"

"How large was this box?"

They both tried to show the dimensions with their hands. It was a wide, flat 
box. Griffin swore it had a slight rattle, like someone had to wrap something 
small in a slightly larger box. 

Sounded like the size of a few reels of security footage to me. The same 
security footage that S.C. McGrath had believed to be worth the lives of two 
FBI agents. The father face he'd shown me had alluded to its importance as 
simply a tool of investigating who had killed his son. But it was my sister 
-- that woman -- who he was trying to protect. 

Griffin frowned. "The only reason I remember the stupid box is because when 
we described it to him after we sent it, he chewed our asses out about not 
getting everything we were supposed to get from the NSA."

"And it was when we took the other damn box down to Omaha to get a 
federal-priority code that we found out we didn't have *jobs* anymore," 
Essary chimed in. "Then that NSA guy ran our car off the road -- "

It dawned on me then. "The *other* damn box?"

They simply didn't understand the importance of the boxes, and impatiently 
showed dimensions again. 

"You know that stupid box the personnel office gives you when you have to 
change offices?" Griffin offered. "The one all your stuff is supposed to fit 
into? That size."

The Adios box, we called them at the Bureau. Because if you resigned, were 
suspended for any amount of time or fired, they gave you that same damn 
unmarked box with a smile that seemed to say "don't let the door hit your ass 
on the way out." I knew that box well. "Where is it?"

Jonson made a sound of disgust in his throat, pointedly looked at his watch 
and walked away. 

"We've been hiding out in this storm cellar," Essary told me. "Back when they 
had cellars set in the ground outside the house, only the house isn't there."

"Like an underground bunker," Griffin said. 

"It's *nothing* like an underground bunker," his partner argued. "You've 
never even *seen* one before -- "

"Whatever's inside that box," I broke in, "is probably why they've been 
trying to track you down. I need to see what's in it."

Griffin lead the way. I hung back and waited for Jonson. Finally, he was 
trudging a few paces behind me with resentment. Frankly, I would've preferred 
he walked in front of me. I kept my gun held down as I walked quickly and 
quietly after them. They stood a few yards ahead and waited for us to catch 
up. 

It wasn't a storm cellar *or* an underground bunker, but a root cellar. It 
still had the strong mildew-and-earth odor of one, too. I could just now pick 
up that smell on the two of them, and thought of them sleeping down there at 
night, prematurely buried in more ways than one. 

Essary climbed the makeshift ladder down to the bottom and disappeared from 
sight. He came back within seconds, but not before I thought of every cellar 
like this I'd ever opened. The news was never pleasant, and the secrets were 
never content to be revealed, be it Lucy Householder reliving her sixteenth 
year or a would-be prophet and his seven wives. 

He pushed the box up first and then climbed out himself while I found my 
pocketknife and yanked it across the brown packing tape that was wound around 
it. Obviously, they hadn't sent him *all* the videos they were supposed to, 
and I wanted to see why the others were so important. 

But they weren't tapes at all. 

There were several parcels all arranged together. There was a legitimate 
evidence log on top that said they were Pam Wyeth's clothes. I shoved the 
paper under my knee and pulled the cellophane-wrapped packages out one by 
one. 

A pair of white Nike running shoes, laces removed, trimmed in dark green. 
Size seven and a half. 

A pair of white crew socks, rolled up like tennis balls. 

A pair of size 6 Levi's, slightly faded black denim. 

A thick-knit, long-sleeved pullover, its dark green washed-out to a pale mint 
color. One of the three buttons on the collar was missing. Through the clear 
wrap, I could see the telltale deep brown of dried blood, deeply soaked 
within the knit. My heart was beating faster and faster. 

A warmly-lined black windbreaker with silver snaps and a small FBI insignia 
on the left breast pocket, size large. It had hung off of her, but she swore 
it fit fine. It had been mine back in my leaner, greener days. It too had 
blood on it, this time one the inside lining. There wasn't much, but it was 
there. 

Jonson was at full panic beside me. 

Five smaller packages were in one loose bit of cellophane together. I didn't 
have to unwrap them to know what they were. 

The smallest one was her gold cross. Her tiny gold hoop earrings were in 
another. Her badge and wallet. Her watch. And the fifth one was -- 

(Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay -- )

Well, I had no idea. It was wrapped so thickly and carefully that it was 
hard to tell. I could feel it was cylindrical though, about the thickness of 
a can of soup. I perforated the cellophane with the tip of the knife until 
the metal touched something solid. I worked my finger under the tear and 
peeled the cellophane away. After five or six layers, there was something 
adhering the cellophane to the container, as if it had gotten wet. 

Essary picked up some of the discarded, cut-away cellophane and curiously 
raised it to his nose. He dropped it almost instantly. "Oh shit! Oh...god!"

I raised my eyes. "What?"

"Smell it. I mean, I've only smelled that a couple of times before, but 
that's enough..."

Formaldehyde.

"You know, that stuff they use to preserve biological evidence."

(Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay -- )

I stared in horror at what floated inside. 

(Oh god. Oh my god. Oh no no no -- ) 

It was a flat, round disk, slightly misshapen. By the strange texture of the 
bottom of the pliable disk, which was an angry red, I recognized it as skin, 
excised from the body. When I turned it over in my hands and shook the 
liquid, the black and red icon punctured into its pale, dead surface spun in 
my vision.

An Ouroboros. A snake eating its own tail. 

xxxxxxxxxx
End 6 of 16.


Out of Reach (07/16) Amanda Finch. Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part. 

I'd never thought much about it before: the way formaldehyde acted as ice, 
preserving anything submerged. Like cryology, it suspended animation. The 
liquid buoyed the tattoo up, and the skin floated to the top as if it still 
moved of its own volition. I'd sat in on enough autopsies to know when to 
turn the nausea off and just focus on the information being presented. But 
this wasn't a corpse uncovered on a cold metal table. This wasn't an autopsy, 
unless the clothes could make three-dimensional the story of a woman's last -

(No!) I dropped the cylinder in with her things, and it sloshed faintly 
against the soft bundles. Hurriedly, I tucked the flaps down, and Essary 
handed me the evidence log that I'd left out. The wind blew it out of my 
fingers, and it landed print-side down a few feet away from me. On the back, 
penned neatly with a fountain pen and smudged by rain, formaldehyde or 
fingers were two words.

WANNA PLAY?

For several minutes, the world didn't make a sound. 

They didn't see the page. It wasn't meant for them. But they asked their 
questions. I can't be sure that I answered them. Biological evidence, I think 
I said, when they asked. Jonson wasn't entirely assured of what had just 
happened, but I think even he knew, federal employee or not, that Pam Wyeth 
hadn't had an FBI field jacket. 

That box couldn't have been more meant for me if it had To: Fox Mulder 
printed across the top flap. I closed it like I was trapping what was inside. 
Still they asked questions. They knew I'd be out here eventually. They knew 
I'd find Essary and Griffin, or that they'd find -

I woke up mentally now, and Griffin jumped back at my unholstered gun like 
he'd been sliced through the middle. Essary barely kept himself from falling. 

The box was clenched tightly to my side like a football. "Anyone want to 
modify their stories while they have a chance?" 

"We're telling you the truth," Essary said hollowly. "The God's honest truth."

"This box contains Agent Scully's belongings." I let that sink in. "S.C. 
McGrath might've asked for it, but he didn't get it. There's a note in here, 
meant specifically for me. I was supposed to come here and find this box. All 
I can assume is that my location was somehow known beforehand."

Beside me, Jonson shook his head. "I would've been the first one to notice if 
someone was tracking us, Mulder. Especially if it was these two right here."

I cocked the gun to include him in its range. "Bad idea, because that leaves 
you."
 
Only his adam's apple moved before he spoke. "You told me how you found Kim. 
How hard could it be to find you?"

Okay. Think. We'd done nothing trackable. Since M.F. Luder had unwittingly 
destroyed a hotel room in Pasadena and George Hale had committed criminal 
trespass in Arecibo, Frohike had refused to hack me anymore fake credentials, 
so I carried lots of cash. The tracking would've only been accomplished 
manually, on site. Even then, that put the box ahead of us, waiting here for 
me to find it. 

I'd given S.C. McGrath no reason to believe I was staying in D.C. He asked me 
if the room was "secure" when he was probably wearing a wire the whole time. 
If he knew, so did the NSA. If they knew, so did the doctor. He knew first, 
didn't he? This was *his* game. Like any predator, he wasn't content to just 
kill his prey outright. He wanted to play a bit first. 

That meant McGrath and the NSA both wanted this box. I suddenly regarded the 
woods with a fearful respect and put the gun away. "Then we're all moving 
targets." I thought of piano wire pressing into my skin, feeling the cord 
tighten around my constricted throat as the blood dripped down in response. 
My breathing mocked the sensation now. "McGrath sent you here to die. He sent 
me here to die, too. All of us."

"He wants to pin Ray's murder on me," Jonson argued. 

"A dead scapegoat's as good as any," I contested bitterly. "Dead scapegoats 
can't talk."

I'd caught something in Griffin's face -- a bit of shame that had passed over 
his sharp features as Essary had announced he worked in Fraud. I recognized 
it because I'd felt the same indignity myself. But now I knew he'd kill to be 
sitting at that table again, headset too tight, transcribing that wiretap 
surveillance. He looked from Essary to me. "So how are we gonna get out of 
here? Where are we gonna go?"

"First, we have to get out of the woods." Jonson spat on the ground. "No way 
I can surveil in the fucking trees. You know a path out?"

"I *made* a path out," I answered flatly. "The sooner we get close to bright 
light and conspicuous locations, the better." 

"Assuming we get that far," Essary said dully. 

I hitched the box even closer to my side. I would die for that box. It was my 
only link to her now, my only means of finding her. "You boys wearing your 
Kevlar?"

They both nodded. 

"Keep your guns at the ready and be prepared to hit the ground." I returned 
Griffin's gun to him and Jonson gave up Essary's. "This is all we've got."

"What then?" Griffin asked. 

"Then we fly back to D.C. and stand in McGrath's office like the four 
horsemen of his personal apocalypse." I primed the trigger, and in the 
silence it sounded like a bone snapping. "You game?"

As they nodded, I remembered the note. WANNA PLAY? 

It was play or die. 

x

Flight 1229, Gate A12
Lincoln-Alliance Airport
10:43 PM

Let the three of them breathe their sigh of relief. We hadn't made it yet. 

We'd picked up my trail about fifty yards from the west fence of NeuroMast. I 
wondered if there was still evidence of my having been there, bled there. But 
the experience, made more vital and vivid by the four missing days of 
decontamination that had preceded it, was still real enough. I didn't need a 
refresher. 

I had half-expected there to be a blood trail, too. I'd lost enough blood to 
make one, for sure. We diverged from the path three-quarters of the way to 
avoid Pam Wyeth's neighborhood, probably crawling with NSA lackies, 
manufacturing evidence. I thought of how ironic it would be if I died here, 
in these woods. Like maybe I had come back to do just that. 

We ended up on a two-lane road that seemed to be warring with the woods. It 
was more gravel than asphalt, and weeds poked through the cracks. Jonson 
moved in a circle around us, a prowler in his natural element. Essary had 
acquired something itchy and poisonous, and every snap of a twig made Griffin 
bolt out of his skin and hide. I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was 
better than running, which I wasn't sure I could do if I tried. 

If there was one thing Nebraska had in abundance, it was truck stops. When we 
finally found a road, the three of us had ducked into one while Jonson caught 
a cab back to the hotel to get the car and make four changes of clothes out 
of what the two of us had in our suitcases. We might've been the most 
clean-shaven individuals in the place, but I was still the only one who 
looked like a pit bull's missed meal. I forced a sandwich on my system that I 
didn't pause to taste. Griffin and Essary sat on their side of the booth and 
shakily discussed the basketball players' strike and what might or might not 
have gone on under the president's desk as if desperately trying to lend 
something, anything, familiar to the weirdness of the night. 

They were discussing much of the same on the plane as I sat there clutching 
the box. I might as well have had a target painted on my shirt. 
 
Essary sat directly in front of Griffin, who had the window seat next to my 
place in the aisle. If they were going to talk, they might as well have sat 
beside one another, but it was too late to make everyone play musical chairs 
now. Jonson sat a couple of rows back, watching everyone. Every minute that 
the flight didn't take off as scheduled was another level appended to my 
fear. I dimly recalled a movie where a shot had been fired inside the cabin 
of an airplane, and had taken a large piece of the craft's hull with it. I 
wasn't going to feel any relief until we were airborne, and it was probably 
still premature relief at that. 

I realized, after years of traveling with Scully, that I was spoiled. Scully 
and I hardly said a word to one another on airplanes, and only because the 
boredom lent itself to strange conversations that ended up either nauseating 
or frightening nearby passengers. And if we were slightly turned towards one 
another after the seatbelt light went off, talking or not, it cut down on 
those who would attempt to save our souls or sell us something. Finally the 
engines roared and the cabin vibrated with the hum. 

And while I didn't think Griffin was going to talk Jesus or cheap land in 
Iowa, he wanted to talk nonetheless. I caught Essary's glance towards me, and 
the slight smile was simple. ("YOU deal with him, man.")

"I heard you use to be in ISU." 

Here we go. I closed my eyes. "That was a while ago." 

"What'd you have to do to get in there?"

I sighed heavily. Could I be sending *more* nonverbal "fuck off" cues? "Well, 
first I had to be interviewed, then I had to display a talent for it. After 
that, it was just a matter of making the cut in the swimsuit competition."

"I'm just thinking it might be a place I want to work someday," Griffin said 
over Essary's chortling. "I think I'd be good at that sort of thing."

"He's read _Mindhunter_ three times," Essary taunted, turning around in his 
seat. "Think he's ready?"

While they squabbled back and forth, I retrieved my portfolio from between my 
feet. It was treated black leather, old now. Scully had gotten it from her 
parents as a graduation gift when she finished med school. It smelled faintly 
of happier times. I'd found it when I was moving in, and sort of took it over 
and made it mine. Hoping that wasn't a metaphor for anything else, I pulled a 
wad of papers and mail out of it, hoping the preoccupation would make me 
immune to Griffin's idle chatter. 

Bills, bills. More bills. A card. Couple or not, "in this thing together" or 
not, I wasn't going to open her mail. I guess I could still brag about my 
sensitivity towards her privacy when the utilities were cut off. (Like this 
matters.) I swallowed, wondering when something mundane like handing her the 
mail had become so far-fetched an action. 

I stuffed the stack of it back in when I realized the letter-sized manila 
envelope on top was actually addressed to me. At first I thought it must be 
the results from my initial physical with the Bureau. Then I remembered I had 
my mail sent to a post-office box. 

I slipped my thumb under the flap, dragging it across quickly. It looked like 
federal mail. But the paper didn't have the sharp scent of a dot-matrix 
printout. 

It was a sheet of copier paper, folded in thirds at odd angles. What was 
this? Another cryptic evidence log?

I unfolded it by the ends, afraid to commit to it by touching it. Black ink 
had skipped across the page in a misled hand that was familiar and unfamiliar 
all at once. 

My hands started shaking, and the words hit me in small doses, making no 
sense in their fragments. I felt the cough building in my chest, tasted the 
blood in my throat. 

"they let me do it finally I remember your name and I remember your face I 
remember my name and I know why I'm here but I only have five minutes and 
maybe not even that and I cant write it down or they're going to give me the 
treatment again so I know I know I know please help me please"

The words hit a snag and plunged down, like the same half-thought sung 
through her brain over and over again.

(It is her, isn't it? Is this her?)

At the bottom, the round cursive straightened itself out again, lucidity and 
subconsciousness winding together, in and out of one another.

"come soon I don't know how long these things can go on"

Images hit me, rapid-fire. Scully in their gowns, eyes bloodshot, drained 
from crying, throat sore from screaming. They had bandaged the new, bleeding 
skin left from where the Ouroboros was removed, or maybe they hadn't. It 
wasn't just a vivid bloody patch on her lower back now, but a hole in her 
side. I fought the image, tried pushing it away, but she simply stood there, 
and the hole in her side went straight through. I was looking straight 
through her, and the aperture grew. Even now as I wrapped my arms around her, 
it grew. 

I started to open my eyes wide, and realized they'd never been closed. A 
sharp pain passed like ice across the back of my neck. I'd seen it all like a 
neural firing, spilling chaotically across my vision. 

If Griffin or Essary tried to talk to me, I didn't hear it. Physical pain was 
now pale in comparison to an unidentifiable ache that couldn't be traced or 
alleviated. It had moved, taken over, whipping through every nerve and cell. 
My eyes felt hard-boiled in the stale, pressurized air. Skin crawled at the 
small of my back, a somatic call to action. And I was stuck on the plane. 

x

Dulles Airport
Washington, D.C. 
2:35 AM 

"You know what we need to do?"

My head snapped up. Who was talking? Jonson. That was when it occurred to me 
that I was standing in an airport concourse. I didn't even remember getting 
off the plane. What was the question again?

He didn't wait for an answer. "That Lt. Quinlan guy -- we could put the fear 
of God into him. We could. He'd cough up some airport security footage in a 
hurry. We'd get the tail numbers off the plane, do a little tracking --"

I walked quickly, stiffly, to keep pace with him, while Griffin and Essary, 
who no doubt thought they'd never see a Starbucks again, made a beeline 
towards the smell of espresso and baklava. "What makes you think it *has* 
tail numbers?"

"It would make sense, wouldn't it?"

"No, actually, it wouldn't make any sense at all." I caught myself with my 
arm tucked in and self-consciously dropped it to my side. "And even if it 
did, I'm sure they abandoned it, or changed the tail numbers. At any rate, 
the FAA is not at my beck and call for tail-tracing on cargo planes."

"But if you could trace that one, even if you only traced it to where it was 
last 
logged --"

"It wasn't logged in Minot. What makes you think it was logged anywhere else?"

"They have to log to refuel, don't they?" Jonson continued doggedly. "Look, 
we trace the path they took from one plane to another --"

"Okay, now they're running the operation from the air," I muttered irritably 
as Griffin and Essary rejoined us, now caffeinated.

Jonson exhaled angrily. "They have to fill up those other beds. They gotta 
fly to do that."

"Beds?" I asked, shaking my head as Griffin thrust a covered Starbucks cup 
under my nose. 

"Nothing fancy," he said kindly. "Black, nothin' in it. Like you ordered it 
at the truck stop. "

I took it now. "Thank you." I turned back to Jonson. "What do you mean, beds?"

He waved his hand dismissively. "Not beds. Meant gurneys. You know, the 
medical bays inside the plane... or the places where they could hook one up."

Okay, I was listening. "What if they hadn't made all their stops yet?"

"Right," he agreed, almost relieved. "That's what I'm saying."

"How many medical bays are we talking about here? Ballpark estimate."

"It's about as big as the ones I flew on." He squinted, humming under his 
breath. "They gotta have enough room to roll the crash carts and the 
equipment in and around 'em, so they're not close together or anything. Six 
along each side of the plane, with a sort of emergency room set up in the 
back of that plane that holds two. If I'm remembering."

You'd better be, I thought. "So the screams you heard... how many women on 
the plane?"

"You're asking me about stuff that happened right before I fell out of the 
airplane gate and hit the pad on my ass," he complained. 

"And I'll fix the margin of error accordingly, so how many women?"

"Three." He furrowed his brow, looking down. "Or four."

"Maybe five?" I prodded wryly. 

"Well... no." Absently, he yanked at his shirt, the way a poker player might 
clear his throat or touch his earlobe. "Not until... uhm. You know."

"Scully makes five," I confirmed, mostly to myself. 

("Mulder... I'm starting to believe hell is an airport.")

("Not really in the Jesuit doctrine, is it?")

("It should be. People waiting for flights that are never going to come, or 
that they're never going to make. Or worse, that they *do* make. Only to be 
shot through the air to *another* airport, just as bland and mechanical as 
this one.")

("And Satan is the air-traffic controller.")

Idle chat. Up for forty hours straight without a solid lead or a good meal to 
our names chat. That tired smile on her face...

("Satan is whoever lost my luggage in Dallas.")

("So what's heaven, Scully?")

("Home, in my bed.")

("I'll drink to *that*.")

("Sleeping, Mulder. In my bed, sleeping.")

I smiled, in spite of myself, at the hazy vividness of the words, of her 
face. Best now not to think about what hell was or could be. I caught up with 
the three of them. 

Essary waved casually at a small knot of men in suits. "Harper, what's 
happening?"

Harper, the fortyish man in question, blanched considerably and averted his 
face. He had something silver in his hand. Handcuffs, and he was just holding 
them in his hand. The group dropped any seeming nonchalance and pushed 
through the crowd towards us. 

Oh, shit. The closer they got, the more the truth became apparent, with the 
presence of every hand-held radio, the vague unsnapping of their holsters, 
the hands reaching blandly into the insides of their suits. The first muzzle 
to show itself plainly in the light called up the hue and cry of panic from 
the people spilling by us, who scattered like frightened birds. 

"Run!" I shouted to no one in particular, backing up. Griffin's coffee hit 
the floor and he spun out and away from me. Jonson had hauled ass in a hurry, 
and I couldn't even see him now. I jerked Griffin in another direction, 
opposite me. Six of them, four of us. Let them work for it, I growled 
silently. Essary was the problem, Essary who just stood there dumbfounded 
holding his coffee with his _Washington Post_ tucked under his arm. The 
bastard -- he was in on it too! But he turned to watch Griffin disappear, to 
look at the puddle of coffee where his partner had once stood. His eyes were 
glazed, horrified, and moments later he was yanked upright, and a gun was 
pressed into his side. 

Fuck! I couldn't just run out now, and Griffin, glancing over his shoulder, 
had stopped dead at the sight of Essary. 

The man who held the gun to Essary said, coldly and plainly. "Ask him to come 
here, Calvin."

Not worth his last name, I noted angrily. Not worth his title. Calling him 
Calvin like he was just a schoolboy, disrupting class from the back row. 
Essary swallowed. "Come on, Griff. Griff?"

The helpless, trapped look on Griffin's face showed his age. Twenty four, 
twenty five. Not even on his second year at the Bureau. His green eyes teared 
up. His arms rose dutifully as he walked towards his makeshift partner, the 
guy he'd been forced to run with through the wilds of Nebraska. No one was 
supposed to know this much of the truth so young. I was sure of it. 

"What can you charge us with?" I demanded. 

A brown-jacketed arm grabbed Griffin as he came close, pulled him next to 
Essary. An anonymous buzz of one of the radios sent two of the agents 
spilling off in the direction Jonson had taken. No one answered me. 

"What are the fucking charges?" I realized now that I stood there, unstopped, 
unchecked. No one had *me* by the arms. No one had a gun in my side. 

"Should we be charging you with something, Agent Mulder?" asked Essary's 
captor. "Besides the commendation for apprehending three wanted fugitives, I 
mean?"

Griffin stared like he'd never seen me before in his life. 

"This is a Bureau matter," I said quietly, discreetly. "Fugitives are people 
who don't have a damn federal badge. Let them go. Let OPR take care of this." 
I looked from the four remaining faces, to Essary and Griffin. "They're good 
for it. They won't run. Let 'em go."

"Fugitives?" Essary asked, voice weak. The word prodded him to action. "What 
in the *fuck* do you mean? We're not fugitives! We're federal agents! We did 
what they told us to!"

The man stabbed hm with the muzzle of the gun, and as he wheezed in shock, 
the man looked at me in confusion. He didn't understand how I would care if 
the gun wasn't on me. "Actually, these two men aren't federal agents. Omaha 
clued us in after their names lit up the alert."

But he'd just *called* them by their names.

"Harper!" Essary yelled, kicking and pushing against the man who held him, 
pushing against Griffin to see the still-pale man who stood behind him. "I 
know Harper. C'mon Harper! We worked the Cheney investigation together! All 
those rapes in Northampton! You remember! We spent three months on that case! 
I'm not impersonating anyone! Griff...he isn't either!" Essary laughed, 
maniacally, straining against the cuffs digging in his back. "This is a 
fucking joke, right?" He looked at me, licked his lip. "It's all about that 
fucking box!"

The box. Dammit! I backed away. 

"The... box?" asked one of the men carefully, innocuously. The key to the 
locker I'd rented dug into my side, as if I was afraid they could make out 
the shape of it through the pocket of my jeans. "What do you know about a 
box, Agent Mulder?"

I ran too. I got the fuck out of there. 

It scared me more that no one attempted to catch me. 

xxxxxxxxxx
End 7 of 16.

Out of Reach (08/16) Amanda Finch. Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part. 


It was... the strangest feeling. 

Happiness. Completion. I smiled down into her face. She smiled back. The blue 
of her eyes made it almost impossible to look anywhere else. We stood against 
a flat pane of glass, almost as large as the wall it was set in. Outside, the 
ocean arched against the rocks and sand, making the hum and fury of the water 
seem like silence. I couldn't see any other signs of land. And I didn't care. 

But she was looking away, around my arm. Like the ocean, I couldn't see an 
end of the room in sight. But that didn't immediately concern me either. Not 
as much as the snake in the room with us, curled on the floor. I told her it 
was okay, that *this* snake only devoured itself. We were in no danger. I 
pushed her behind me anyway, and I stood. Go ahead, I ordered it without 
words. Take me. I'll go. 

It loosed long, curved fangs out of its flesh, and hissed, bonelessly jerking 
to peer at us with one eye, then the other, then head on and - 

"Agent Mulder!"

And bonelessly, I aimed my Sig Sauer at Skinner, waking up slowly. Bits fell 
into place as I blinked. I had been asleep, the snake thing was only a dream, 
I was holding my gun on an assistant director and I was in my old office. At 
FBI headquarters. I let that be absorbed. What the hell? I glanced at my 
watch for a moment. 5:38 AM? I shook my head in disbelief, only dimly 
remembering how I'd gotten here, recalling the sparse expressway traffic. But 
that could've been any early morning commute from Dulles. What was in this 
shit Wexford had given me anyway? Codeine?

Skinner stood in front of the desk, only mildly fazed. "You can put the gun 
down, Agent Mulder."

I did, and sat back. I remembered sitting here, dealing Spender in just to 
deal him out. Permanently. The sun was just beginning to rise through the 
high basement window. Even then, running through these halls, playing the 
game. It was *easier* than this. 

Taking a chair, Skinner sat down. "I was going to let this whole health leave 
violation thing go, but you don't even look like you're supposed to be 
alive." He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "What are 
you doing here? This isn't your office anymore."

Spender was dead, Diana had tearfully resigned. "It's no one's office." 

"It was my third guess," he said, and the words died in the dry basement air. 
"You want to fill me in?"

I looked up defiantly. "Fill you in on what?"

"Don't jerk me around, Mulder," he growled, rolling the chair closer to the 
desk's edge, any similarity to Spender ending there. "Maybe start by telling 
me why I got a call at 4 AM about one of my agents being celled in Customs 
down at Dulles, or why when I got there, the place was swarming with federal 
SRT guys, all suited up like they were going to church?"

Of course he meant Jonson, the only "genuine" FBI agent in detainment. I 
tried to remember if Jonson had seen me pick the locker and shove the box in 
it, or if he knew which locker. I couldn't, it was all so blurry. "What's he 
saying?"

"He saying that you can corroborate his story. He's leaning hard on you." 
Skinner waited. "I'm not sure you realize the immensity of that."

I put my thumb in my eye, pressed down hard, trying to wake up so all my 
words didn't slur. "Pam Wyeth, Jonson - that's FBI. McGrath - that's the 
Pentagon. McGrath's wife - ATF. And the NSA, telling you not to do anything 
about it." My vision cleared as I glanced up. "Unless someone's cheating on 
their income tax, I'd say that covers it."

"That's the abbreviated version," he said gruffly. "All four of my phone 
lines have been burning red for the past three days, so maybe you'd like to 
enlighten me on what you're doing."

"You *know* what it is we're - what we were doing." I tried to focus my eyes 
on the desk calendar under my spread fingers, and only got a jolt to the back 
of my head when I strained to see what day it was now. "You handed us this 
case - "

"I'd rather you kept your voice down about that." He ignored my glare. "And I 
sent you to find Krycek. What you came back with was a possible security 
breach."

Muldergate, I thought bleakly. I'd always wanted a National Incident named 
after me. "Why did you give us this? Why did you want us to find him?"

"You're saying you wouldn't have gone to find him on your own?"

"No. I'm just trying to put *this* together, too. Had to be a reason, right?"

"The reason was that it crossed my desk, and then promptly *un-crossed* my 
desk. I knew it would be covered-up, so I made copies of everything and gave 
them to you. I just passed it on."

I smiled faintly. "Just another innocent courier."

He jerked his chair closer to the desk. "Sure, Mulder. I gave you a case and 
put you out in Nebraska so I could sit here, now, with my ass on the line for 
going over Kersh's head. Because I *wanted* this huge wad of red tape that 
you've brought in with you. That makes sense. You think I want Agent Scully 
missing? You think I want you sitting there, shaking like a psych dismissal 
waiting to happen - "

Shaking? I was shaking? Dammit.

" - or Krycek on the loose? Or Agent Jonson drawn up on murder charges?" His 
voice was flat, disgusted. "Not everyone has an ulterior motive. Not everyone 
is out to get you. Maybe if you could make that distinction, you could find 
Agent Scully."

As if I'd been brass-knuckled in the spinal column, I snapped upright. I 
remembered listening to S.C. McGrath talk about wanting to find his son's 
killer. It was unimaginable that I didn't innately sense this paternal 
treason. No alarms had gone off with him, so the silence of my instincts now 
only made Skinner's motives more clouded than they already seemed. 

"I have no idea what it is you want, Sir," I admitted quietly.

"Who really killed those two?"

"Krycek killed Pam Wyeth."

"And Ray McGrath?"

The walls were bare. It had just registered with me. The place was cleaned 
out and sanitized. I bet the filing cabinets were empty too. It all felt like 
an empty shell now. 

"Mulder?" He prodded. "Ray McGrath?"

"I'd rather not answer that."

He sighed tiredly. "Was it Jonson?"

"No," I said firmly. "Proof would bear that out. Not that this investigation, 
if you choose to call it that, is concerned about the evidence." My laugh 
sounded harsh and sad all at once. "What's the goddamn point?"

Skinner leaned in, as paranoid of the purported listening parties as ever. 
"This case is going to dissolve in one of two ways. One, Jonson's going to 
swing for killing S.C. McGrath's son. Two, it's all going to be filed away 
and gag-ordered and we'll never hear about it again. And there's only one way 
you can botch both plans."

"Find the real killer?" I asked bitterly. 

"You have any other ideas?"

Jesus Christ, he was greener than Griffin if he believed that. "Sir, Scully 
is *missing.*"

"Yes, I know that. The entire Bureau knows that. But I also know that you 
didn't find her the first time, and I don't think you'll find her this time 
either."

"You think I can't?" I took the dare, clenched my teeth. "Really?"

"No, I think you can. I think you will. But I also think that won't happen 
unless they want it to." He moved back now, just out of my range. "Do you 
understand what I'm saying?"

Loud and clear. "And just sit on my hands and wait until she turns up dead in 
some ditch somewhere, impossible to identify, dumped out in some Potter's 
Field somewhere because I gave up the chase."

He dropped his voice to its lowest pitch. "Jonson told me what was in the 
box."

"Fuck." I brought my hand down on the top of the desk, pushing my chair into 
the shelves as I got up. The sting in my palm was the first valid physical 
sensation I'd had since we left Sheehan. I let it crawl up my arm as I paced, 
and felt the pain dissipate when it  met the codeine. "I'm going to kill him. 
I hope they *do* cover this up and say nothing about it. Just so I can kill 
him."

"He only said this to me."

"What's your point?"

"I'm the only one who heard him say it."

I stopped mid-pace, scoffing incredulously. "Do you *really* believe that?"

"How do you know Agent Scully's still alive?"

"How do you know she isn't?"

"Answer the question, Mulder."

I shook my head. 

"Everything Agent Jonson told me... only points to the fact that it's 
possible she's dead. Or like you said, impossible to identify." He spoke to 
my back now as I stood under the window. "So how do you know?"

I turned. "Because I would know."

"Don't confuse wishful thinking with instinct."

"Wishful thinking?" I strode back towards him. "Wishful thinking is me 
believing - hoping - that the tests they're doing on her are only mildly 
annoying and not excruciatingly painful." I let all the air out of my lungs 
and, leaning against one of the filing cabinets when the floor started to 
spin. "I think it's just a matter of getting to her in time."

"Before they kill her?"

(Before she gives up on me and loses hold. She wants to die. She wants to die 
and she's waiting to hear that there's a reason to do otherwise.) Oh God. 
Where had *that* come from? I swallowed hard, not budging from leaning there. 
"I got a letter."

"A what?"

I made my way back to the chair, picking the portfolio up from the floor 
where I'd either left it (*that* was brilliant) or where it had fallen. If it 
wasn't there, I was going to - there it was. I took the envelope out, pulling 
the letter free by the corner. "Try not to touch it."

He let the paper fall in front of him onto the desk, and used his ink pen to 
keep it flat. When he was finished, he cleared his throat. "This is Scully? 
This is her handwriting?"

Lifting my face from my hands, I mumbled, "Think so."

"But you're not sure?"

I found my voice and bearings again. "The first time she was returned, she 
didn't remember much more than a few vague details, nothing concrete. I can 
only 
assume - " I was fading out again. "Some pharmaceutical assistance. Which I'm 
sure would impact her writing and impede her motor functions. Even if this 
was written during a lucid moment."

His eyes dropped from my face to the scrawled, sprawling lines. "Who do you 
think sent it to you?"

I spoke through my hands. "Unmarked envelope, addressed to me. Plain dark 
manila. Privately-paid postage, with a number on the front, right under the 
label. I thought it was the results of my primary physical - the one I had 
right after I came back, but there's no reason it should've or would've come 
to Scully's address. Just yanking my chain, Sir."

"And you're letting them."

I threw his previous question back at him. "You have any other ideas?"

He pushed the letter towards me again with his ink pen. "Yeah, I do. You give 
me this letter and I'll run a very tight, very discreet forensics test on it."

"No. The letter stays with me."

 "You've got the box." He folded his hands on the desk, voice almost 
inaudible. 

"It doesn't prove she's alive," I pointed out. 

"Neither does the letter unless you let me help you." He hadn't moved his pen 
from the page. "I *did* hand you this case - "

"Yeah. Thanks for that."

Ignoring it, he forged on. "Let me do some of the work. Let me take some 
responsibility." 

"Ask me again when I'm not medicated." I carefully edged the paper from under 
the pen, found an evidence bag in the side drawer of the desk, and put the 
letter in it. "The fewer people I drag into this, the better."

"I'm not being dragged in. I'm asking you to trust me."

"You're asking a lot." 

"Were you planning on having it analyzed by the labs?"

I closed my eyes, wanting desperately to go back to sleep. "Not a Bureau lab."

"Then it would be inadmissible." He leaned back in the chair. "And, since 
you're on a health leave, and off-duty entries aren't permitted, you would 
have to have it entered through an active agent."

(Who ya gonna call?) I groaned inwardly. "Alright. You take it. Have it 
analyzed. You stay with it during the entire duration of the analysis. You do 
not tell anyone else about it, especially S.C. McGrath. I'm just as certain 
that you shouldn't trust him as you're certain I should trust you."

Skinner frowned, and I realized I'd just given him a direct order, in the 
appropriate "direct order voice." He took the evidence bag from my fingers. 
"You're telling me he had his own son killed?"

"He may as well have." I thought about the letter leaving the room with 
Skinner, and all the factors and variables that I couldn't control. "He knows 
who really did it. Admitted to me outright. If we hadn't gotten out of 
Nebraska when we did, we'd be dead right now. He's who I came here to see." 

"Good luck," Skinner said dryly. "He's canceled all his meetings for the next 
month. And he's only got two months left before he retires. And if he's the 
problem you say he is now, he's only going to be more of one in two months." 
He paused. "He's an acting Senator. You heard Richard Matheson died, right?"

I went entirely cold. Fading out again as I stared down at the desk, I didn't 
notice that he hadn't moved from where he was standing. Senator Joe McGrath. 
Sounded strangely similar to Senator Joe McCarthy. 

Skinner slipped the letter inside his jacket. "Listen, Mulder." 

I raised my face. 

"I know it's a lot to ask. I know the X-Files have always been a search for 
you. But you can't treat this case like a pilgrimage, no matter how badly you 
want to find Agent Scully." He walked slowly to the door. "Regardless of the 
people involved, this is a criminal investigation. Start running it like one."

x

Those words were still ringing through my ears more than two hours later. 
Back to basics with the Quantico textbooks I had scanned into memory a 
decade... no, thirteen years ago. I paused to think about that for a moment. 
Thirteen years. How ominous that milestone sounded. 

I stood in Quantico now, passing a glassed-in corridor that ran parallel to 
the track. A few go-getters ran for their lives, bundled up in sweats and 
sneakers, stopping to time themselves. Hell, it'd been two years since I 
tried to run a six-minute mile. Of course, in my current condition, it would 
probably take half an hour to lope the full distance with a leg that might 
never be the same again. I emptily promised myself that I would give it a try 
once I was better, and things were back on an even keel.

In an hour or so, these hallways would be deluged with cadets, teachers and 
reserves, so I hit the communal showers fast, relieved to be the only one 
there. After Skinner had left, I planted myself next to a coffee maker in the 
VCU bullpen, empty except for the cleaning people and one devoted soul who 
ignored me as he worked. I called the D.C. MUFON chapter, left a message and 
drank a pot and a half of stolen coffee. Of course, my nerves had been dead 
and it was just now dawning on me that I hadn't let it cool off. The inside 
of my mouth felt cauterized. In the same fashion, I stood under the scalding 
water in the shower until I could actually feel it on my skin. The codeine 
had to go. Like Scully had months before, I stood over a toilet and watched 
the pills get sucked down into the blue water and disappear. The antibiotics 
would have to do. 

I stood in front of one of the mirrors and splashed cold water on my face. I 
didn't look *as* bad as I remembered. Half of my neck was still dark purple 
and the skin was so cut and bruised around my hairline that it looked like 
someone had tried to scalp me. The inside of my lower lip was still split. I 
pressed my tongue into it. It tasted raw and open. 

After I struggled into change of clothes, I replaced my bandages with new 
ones pilfered from a first aid cabinet, pulling the thick elastic nylon over 
the gauze. I barely made it out one of the back entrances of the training 
academy before someone arrested me in fear. 

 As I stood outside the Bureau mailroom almost an hour later, it was 
debatable whether or not the drugs had worn off. The coffee was working 
though, winding through my system like high-octane gasoline. 

I was studying the envelope the letter had arrived in when my phone rang. It 
startled me at first. I'd forgotten it was there. "Mulder."

"Agent Mulder, Drake Fischer - from MUFON. You left a message on the machine."

This sounded much more polished than my calls to MUFON in the past, when a 
kid would pick up the phone and yell to their mom that someone was calling 
"about the aliens." Drake Fischer had been one of those kids. "Drake, I need 
a favor."

"Name it."

"Are you on a database where you can talk to the other MUFON chapters?"

"More or less," he answered. "We don't have all the bugs worked out yet. But 
we're online. We all know how to contact one another."

"How hard would it be to compile a list of women who have been reported 
missing for the past two weeks or so from all the chapters?"

"Depends on the criteria."

I'd made the list in my head, but had forgotten to write it down. "All repeat 
abductees, all taken at least once before, all reported missing from late 
January to the present."

He was typing it in. "That'll narrow it down. We're still talking about a 
long list. We have chapters overseas now."

This wasn't said with pride, but resignation. Necessity had bred expansion. 
"My guess is that these women are going to be those who are in remission from 
the cancer."

No typing now, just silence. "You probably just shortened the list 
considerably."

"I know," I said hollowly. 

"I should have a list of names and descriptions for you tonight, and I can 
call you if anything comes up." The typing stopped. "I sent it to all the 
other chapters. That all?"

"I'd report a missing person to you, just like I would to the police. Right?" 

"Yeah. You're reporting someone?"

 "It's Scully," I said shortly. Don't make me tell the story, I silently 
pleaded.

Drake's voice lost some of its public relations polish. "All I need is hair, 
eyes, height, weight, full name and blood type if you have it. Also, where 
she was last seen."

Like I had to the Bureau, and to the police in D.C., Sheehan and Minot, I 
reeled off the wanted information and hung up. It sounded so basic, so 
routine, until I gave her full name. I hung up a minute after he had gone to 
task on making the report.  

It was a few minutes after eight. There was no reason the damn mailroom 
shouldn't have been open. 

Not that I could much blame them. Like Domestic Terrorism and General 
Assignment, the Mailroom and the other bland FBI functions were the Bureau 
equivalent to being handed a toothbrush and told to buff the latrines. The 
expression on the face of the female agent who eventually showed up didn't 
refute this. She was pale, ash blonde hair fading to white, probably in her 
fifties. By putting her here, they almost guaranteed she would retire like 
they'd suggested she should. Like a lot of them, though, she had a few months 
to a couple of years left until pension. 

I tried to look friendly, but gave up soon enough. 

"Bomb squad," she guessed tonelessly. 

"Not after yesterday," I said wryly. "Can you look at something for me?"

"The staff doc works on the next floor up."

"An envelope."

She unlocked the door and snapped all the lights on. As she fished her 
glasses out of her pocket, I noticed her gun strapped to her side. Just in 
case someone tried to steal the interoffice mail. But it felt wrong to not 
snap the holster on in the mornings. It was habit. She didn't offer me a seat 
and I didn't take one as she sat down behind her desk. "Alright."

I handed her the envelope. "I know you probably see millions of these 
everyday, but I'm interested in the number on the front."

She turned it over in her hands once, then again. "Why? You get something 
threatening in it?"

"Something strange."

She handed it back. "Then tell Security. It's not my department."

I absently ran the frayed edge of the torn flap across my palm. "Could 
Security tell me where the envelope came from?"

"They couldn't even tell you where their own mothers are."

That was reassuring. "So what you're saying - " I glanced at her wood grain 
name plaque. " - Agent Dade, is that I should hand the envelope over to 
Security, so Security, with their mother-finding problems, can subsequently 
hand it over to you. So you can answer this query maybe a week from now while 
I wait a couple of months for them to get back to me on what you told them." 
I smiled vaguely and stared. 

Sighing noisily, she held her hand out. "Give me the envelope, smartass."

Flattening it out on her desk blotter, she typed the number string into the 
computer in front of her and three beeps later, tapped her fingers on the 
wrist rest. "It's what I thought it was. Just a generic number sequence. 
There's about five hundred of them. It's just an accounting reference."

"So it's not from this office?"

"Why would we send bulk mail to our own office?" She concurred bluntly. 
"Besides, it didn't come through us at all if it went straight to your 
residence."

Etiquette be damned, I sat down. "In other words, it would've come from 
anywhere but here."

"Smarter than you look."

I let that pass. "And there's no way you can track the shipment."

"That would be the company's doing."

"Who's the company?"

"I don't know."

If this maddening bullshit didn't stop quickly, she was going to have to call 
the Bomb Squad to come and defuse me. "Can I see a new envelope like this 
one?"

Opening a desk drawer, she produced one identical to what I held. I turned it 
over in my fingers, nudged the flap up. There was a piece of peel-away white 
tape underneath. Self-adhesive, goddammit. No possibility of a DNA hit on the 
flap. "So you're telling me that any field office flunkie from Customs to the 
DEA could send us death threats and ransom notes, and we wouldn't be able to 
tell where they came from?"

"Don't complain to me," she said wearily. "It's all departmentalized - "

 I laughed mirthlessly and threw the new envelope down. "If they ever learn 
how to build a bomb the size of a form letter, we're going to be 
departmentalized into flaming bits and pieces over a ten-mile radius."

"Look." Finally, she understood that I wasn't going to back down. One hand 
danced deftly over the number pad and she twisted the monitor around so I 
could see. "A package we can track. A letter we can track. A bulk letter we 
can't. That's all I know to tell you."

"The bulk mail is sent how?"

"In bundles. Banded together. When there's that many."

I swiveled around to face a wide sliding door that seemed to open out into an 
unloading area where several people sorted through packages. "And the 
bundles? How are they sent?"

She knew where I was going with that. "In a big vat made out of hard plastic, 
not a box."

She picked up an unused package, turned it over and showed me a piece of 
translucent white tape on the side. Lifting one edge of the tape with her 
thumbnail, she yanked the tape up and away. "See that? If it doesn't have the 
barcode on it, we can't track it. I don't know where you got this idea about 
tracking devices. We're the ones who have to scan each number in."

It stuck to my fingers when I took it. I scowled. The brief, vague memory of 
Alex Krycek's face made my muscles tense. A tracking device.

Like a microchip. 

xxxxxxxxxx
End 8 of 16.


Out of Reach (09/16) Amanda Finch. Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part. 


Lone Gunmen office
10:37 AM

"Drake? Mulder. Listen, there was an e-mail I sent you over a year ago about 
putting the chip back in. Depending on the number of people on your list, I 
need you to tell those who are safe for the moment to take the chip out. I'm 
convinced it's not what I previously believed it was, and that its presence 
is no longer beneficial. 

I hated voicemail, but I flagged this one as urgent. 

Byers looked up from the pages I'd given him. "Is this all you have?"

It was the hard file that Scully and Agent Pendrell had compiled back when 
she'd first discovered the implant. There might have been more information on 
her computer at the apartment, but I'd been lucky enough to show up while 
none of her family were present. Like Pam Wyeth's neighborhood, it was a 
no-fly zone. The Scullys in one, the NSA in the other. 

I sat straight in the backless chair across from them, feet still touching 
the floor. I held onto the brackets under the table to steady myself, to hide 
the fact that it was necessary to hold on. "I'm not sure how much help it's 
going to be - it was for the previous chip, not the one she's implanted with 
now."

Spreading the pages like a deck of cards, Langly, highlighter in hand, picked 
out manufacturing information and encoding data that might later be used to 
access what I hoped was a database. Capping the marker, he pushed his hair 
behind his ears once again. "You're talking about a needle in a haystack."

"Actually a microchip," I offered drily. "Smaller than a needle."

Frohike stared at me through the mounted magnifying lens, serious expression 
almost amusing on his suddenly gargantuan head. "And something a lot more 
involved than a haystack."

"We're searching the federal databases first, right?" Byers asked. 

"I want you to start with NeuroMast before you do anything else. Then the 
federal databases, and whatever you can springboard into from there."

"Dedicated mainframe or open?" Langly prodded. 

"Nothing's dedicated anymore," Frohike replied, yanking the glass from in 
front of his face. "Not if we can trap someone's user I.D. and password."

 Trying to understand their geekese even contextually was making my head 
hurt. "Dedicated... means you can't access it from the outside, right? No 
dial-up modems you can tap into, no link-ups? In other words, what we don't 
want."

"He *has* been listening when we talk," Frohike muttered. 

"But we're dealing with a microchip that acts as a transmitter," Byers began. 
"You know what that means. Satellite, radar. We just trap the signal and -- 
what?"

He was staring at me. I realized I was shaking my head. "I don't... think 
this is moving cargo."

The room was silent for a moment. Half of the noise I'd attributed to their 
office was actually droning through my head. Byers spoke up first. "You said 
you thought she was being moved via transportation. Planes and trains."

"I do. But there's also the possibility that she's at one stationary 
location, and only scanned. My point is, I don't know if this microchip is 
supposed to be a sort of cataloging device, a transmitter or both. If she 
*can't* run or move, what's the point of having her..." I couldn't finish. 

"In case she *did* move," Frohike asserted stubbornly. "Do you have the 
original microchip?"

"It was destroyed," I said wearily. "In the first inspection."

"Just accidentally, I'm sure," Langly retorted. 

I raised my face from my hands now. "As a matter of fact, yes. Look, I know I 
don't understand precisely what it is I'm asking for, but if it's a tracking 
system that logs these women being scanned or a radar, finding it is the only 
key to finding her. I'm just having a hard time imagining her as... a parcel, 
or a blip on a screen, that's all."

It was such a blessing at the time, wasn't it? One moment, metastasis. Her 
skin had paled so terribly that I thought she was dying from the outside in, 
even though I knew the opposite to be true. I heard the urgency and 
desperation in my voice, diluted now with time, begging her to waive her 
black-and-white science for just a millisecond.

("Put the chip back in, Scully. Even if it's not the cure, what harm could it 
do?")

I winced at the memory. Putting the chip in and getting the assurance of no 
reaction was much greater than not putting it in and never knowing its 
purposes, I'd reasoned. What was that, my own distorted version of the Pascal 
Theory? Goddammit, how could I have been so wrong?

(I thought she was dying. It was the only human reaction.)

I'd been all too human lately. The three of them carried on without me, and 
they might as well have been speaking Chinese. My eyes faded from focusing 
and their faces swam together, only to all flash back into frame clearly as 
my cell phone rang. 

Drake was talking almost before I could get my name out. "How close are you 
to East Regional Medical?"

What? I thought about where the office was, a dozen other questions and 
possibilities running through my mind. "About twenty minutes away. Why? Was 
someone else taken?"

"No, no." He sounded as if he had been kicked in the chest. "Someone has been 
returned! Someone on the list. Can you get down here? Seventh floor, west 
wing."

"I'm on my way." I hung up. "About the chip. If you could get one that 
belonged to another abductee, would that help?"

The wave of technical jargon crashed and Byers looked up, "It couldn't hurt. 
Anything else you need us to do?"

"No," I answered absently, thinking better of it as I pulled my trenchcoat 
on. "Wait. There's a name. I'm sure it's just an alias, but I'd like you to 
run a check on it." I grabbed a pen off the desk, and scrawled the name on a 
notepad. "John Maynard. Again, start with NeuroMast first and then try any 
other agencies. I've already checked FBI, but that doesn't mean he's not 
involved in some unlisted capacity, if he exists."

I'd show the bastard WANNA PLAY. I'd show him a *game*. 

x

Northeast Georgetown Medical Center
11:26 AM

*This* hospital, I thought. Five years ago, Scully had been returned here, a 
miracle wrapped up in a disaster. I careened down the hall from the elevator, 
found the arrow that pointed to the east wing and simply stood in the lobby 
area and waited. 

It only took a second before Drake stood. He was, all at once, younger and 
older than I had expected. The hard, glacial cast of his blue eyes behind the 
wire-framed glasses and his rod-straight posture reeked of boot camp or 
strict discipline. But his dark hair was a little too long, jerked behind his 
ears and touching his collar in the back. His sneakers were bright blue and 
suede. So the disciplinarian had either loosened up or died. My guess was the 
latter. But a ghost remained in his voice as he extended his hand and 
introduced himself. Not just Drake Fischer, but Drake Fischer *sir*. The 
tailoring of his words gave him the illusion of age, but their delivery was 
young. 

Briefly noting the various bruises and wounds, he decided it was none of his 
business and sat down again. "I didn't get a chance to e-mail the list to 
you, but I have it with me." From the Day Runner at his side came two sheets 
of paper, stapled together. It was folded four ways, and I waited for him to 
hand me the rest. He didn't.

"You're not going to find many survivors of the cancer, Agent Mulder. 
Excluding the women who may not have recollection of an abduction experience, 
these remain."

I felt sick to my stomach. "You get my voicemail?"

"Yeah," he said quietly. "As you can see, there was no real need to tell most 
of them it couldn't cure the cancer. I made arrangements for all the women on 
the list to be alerted about the chip."

"How many are missing?" 

"Of the eighteen on that list, ten."

I unfolded the paper. "I should've been more thorough."

"Sir?"

"I thought I was giving MUFON the good news... about putting the chip back 
in. " I flattened the page on my knee. "But I've only endangered the lives of 
the survivors."

"I can't imagine you would've neglected to tell us," Drake remarked 
helpfully. 

No time for that. "You said one of these women was returned. Which one?"

"The woman listed as number twelve." He pointed to her name. "Lori Maciver, 
28. She's been here for three days, but authorities just identified her from 
a missing persons report this morning. Her local chapter just called me an 
hour ago. I can't go in and see her though. All they'll say is she's 
unconscious."

I read the abduction data next to her name. On January second, Lori Maciver 
had gone to a doctor's appointment, standard oncology check-up to make sure 
all things in remission stayed that way. She never arrived at the 
appointment, but had stopped at a convenience store, to tell the people who 
worked inside that she was being followed by a black sedan. They called the 
police, but when the police arrived, Lori was gone. Her car remained. The 
Minnesota --

"Wait." I looked up from the words. "Minnesota highway patrol? This woman is 
from Minnesota?"

"First thing I thought was odd, too."

What in the hell was she doing here? I smirked, testing Drake. "You think the 
aliens misread the directions?"

Drake wasn't smiling. "Who said anything about aliens?"

"Good," I said firmly. "Then we're on the same page."

"I don't hold my mother's view on extraterrestrials." He anxiously dragged 
the zipper on the Day Runner back and forth. "I don't think I ever did."

"This is as inside as inside jobs get." I saw Scully's name, fourteen on the 
list, and looked away. "How is your mother by the way?"

"She's dead," he answered flatly. "Five months ago."

I shrank back. No wonder he didn't need to be reminded that the chip didn't 
work. Dammit. "I'm sorry, Drake." 

He wouldn't look at me. "I hope your partner's okay." 

Saying nothing, I remembered sitting here five years ago. Dr. Daly, Mrs. 
Scully and Melissa had just left the room to pull the chord on a parachute 
that wasn't going to open for Scully. I stayed in there for awhile, and I 
felt it happening. A switch coming on, not bringing any light or realization, 
but telling me that breaking down and falling apart was imminent. A voice in 
my head begged me to let go, and let the disintegration start. I felt the 
switch turn on now, as if an almost intangible manifestation of pain had all 
the control. My eyes were heavy and my bones felt stung. Good God, not here. 

(bite down, tense up, will it away)

"Look." Drake tapped my arm. "Where are all those nurses going?"

I stood with him, and he peered around the corner down the corridor, watching 
them go into one of the rooms. "It's her room. She's either just woke up or 
--"

However the sentence ended, I blocked it out, getting my badge out of my 
pocket. 

x

1:32 PM

Lori Maciver was awake. 

I tried to suppress any hope this may have granted in me. I knew what it 
meant -- that maybe she could remember something, could give us even a vague 
location description to go on. 

The doctors had waited an hour before conceding that she was up to answering 
a few questions. As Drake remained standing, I pushed a chair next to the 
bed. Her blonde hair was flattened away from her face with sweat, eyes a thin 
ring of blue around dilated pupils. I told her my name, and Drake's, and it 
sounded as if someone else said the words. I let her pick the right time to 
speak, cursing what had to be the fair warning alarm for a migraine. 

Pulling the thin blanket up protectively, she scrutinized my face carefully. 
"Were you in the car with me when it crashed?"

I kept my expression and tone neutral, but my heart sank. "Is that what 
happened, Lori?"

"You all keep saying that," she whispered, pulling the blanket up more. 

"We all keep asking you what happened?"

"Well, yes." She seemed to notice Drake for the first time, and watched him 
as if he were poised to attack her at any moment. "And calling me that name."

(Oh God. Oh no...)

The room was freezing. The chill crawled down my neck and seemed to saturate 
me. I knew hospital rooms were cold, but this was insane. "What name should 
we call you?"

I thought she was going to cry. She didn't, but her hands were new to her 
now. Holding them up, she noticed how her left hand had a strip of skin where 
the ring had been, paler than the rest of her hand. Her voice was level with 
shock. "I don't know. I can't remember."

Stay calm, I warned myself. The droning sensation in my head grew louder. It 
was the drugs, I told myself. Stress, Scully's voice confirmed, just drugs 
wearing off. "You don't remember anything at all?"

Focused hard on me, her pupils became pinpoints. I reacted to the change 
before I could catch myself. Stunned, I sat back. The door to the room 
opened. The doctor and nurse said something that I understood without 
hearing, and Drake was leading me away past two small, blonde children and a 
red-eyed man with a beatific smile on his face. "Honey?"

I stalled there at the nurse's shoulder as the children gently laid siege to 
their mother's bedside. She stared on blankly, over their heads. Her 
husband's smile faded to match her expression. The untouched children grew 
discontent. The moment froze and solidified, as if the doctor's mouth would 
open and the names of the long-fighting dead would be announced. 

The nurse finally pushed us out, but not before Lori Maciver had turned to 
the doctor and, in a voice as flinty and precise as a knife blade, asked, 
"What are the children doing out of the ward?"

xxxxxxxxxx
End 9 of 16.