Date: 15 Jul 1999 07:24:50 GMT From: LoneGunGuy Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative The Tiger Complex (14/19) by LoneGunGuy http://members.aol.com/lonegunguy/x-files.html * * * Haniver lifted the mangled butterfly from the monkey's paw and held it up to the light. Its delicate wings had been crushed and folded, and she could see colored scales flaking off like fine powder -- yellow and orange spots, flaming and criss- crossed with longitudinal streaks of black. The wings were narrow and blade-shaped. Eyes like chips of ruby. Doyle pressed in to get a closer look. "It's not the same kind," he finally said. "The butterflies on the copal trees were different. This isn't the same species." "So what is it?" asked Scully. "I have no idea." Doyle took the tweezers, brought the butterfly beneath a large magnifying loupe. Switched on a light from beneath. Illuminated and viewed at many times its actual size, the head was frighteningly alien, its mandibles jutting like needle-nosed pliers from a beard of coarse black hairs. Frowning, he said, "This isn't right. It has biting mouthparts." Haniver leaned forward. "Is that strange?" "If you're a butterfly, it's pretty fucking amazing. Butterflies evolved a tubular proboscis millions of years ago; all that remains is a tongue for sucking nectar. Everything else degenerated. But this one has all its oral Ginsu knives in place. Either it's a mutant or a species that has remained unchanged since the days of the dinosaurs...." The door burst open. It was Mulder, face flushed with excitement. He spoke quickly, looking back over his shoulder all the while, the words spilling out in an intense rush: "Scully -- everyone -- get out here right now -- it's happening...." "What?" asked Baker, rising in alarm. "The glow. It's fantastic." He spun, ran back outside. Doyle set the butterfly on a metal tray, grabbed a Polaroid camera from the shelf and tossed it to Baker; Scully and Haniver stripped off their gore-bespattered gloves and headed for the door. Outside, the eastern sky was sullen, the moon rising dreamily above the horizon; but when Scully faced the other direction, away from the river, it could have been midday -- a strange and unnatural midday, the light orange and cold on her face. It reminded Scully of some chemical discharge, burning phosphorus or pure sodium. Then she thought of the burning bush. The light was bright but not difficult to look upon. Baker raised the camera, snapped a picture; the gears whirred and spat out the undeveloped photo. He shook it, laid it on the ground before him, took another. "I doubt these will develop properly." "We aren't trying to photograph the light itself," Mulder said, scribbling a hasty diagram. "We just need to know where it comes from, so we can chase it down later." "Why not chase it down now?" asked Scully. As she spoke, the light suddenly dwindled and sank down into nothingness, sucked back into the canopy like a crepe paper streamer. The sunset seemed very dark in comparison. Mulder's face was clouded with disappointment. "That's why," he said. "The glow only lasts for a short time. You don't want to dash into the jungle like -- " Mulder was cut off by a burst of dull, rapid pops from the jungle. The sound was distant and muffled -- it took him a second to recognize the gunshots -- but when he did his eyes widened and he turned around. "Where's Kovac?" Their faces told him everything he needed to know. "Shit," he said, looking back out into the jungle. "He left a few minutes ago," said Scully. "I didn't ask where he was going...." Baker was pale. "I know where he was going." He started in the direction of the gunshots, his mind resounding with horrors that he didn't want to name. Mulder put a hand on his shoulder. "Wait." There was silence for a moment. No one spoke -- they listened to the sounds of the jungle -- and suddenly the same thought crashed into everyone's mind at once. There were no sounds of the jungle. No birds were singing; there were no monkeys in the treetops. The rain forest had gone as quiet as a graveyard. Doyle glanced uncertainly from side to side. Haniver was on his left, her shirt still splattered with monkey blood; Scully was on his right, looking intently into the darkness. He followed her gaze. The edge of the forest lay perhaps a hundred yards away. The space between the trees was as black as construction paper but he peered into it anyway, searching for something -- he didn't know for what; for a little while the irregular border of the jungle looked like some elaborate optical illusion, the pattern of shadows making him see movement where there wasn't any, as if something were prowling just beyond the limits of his vision.... Then he realized that something was. "Get inside." Doyle began to inch slowly backwards. His voice was low, almost conversational. "We need to get indoors right now." "Goddammit," Baker said fiercely, "I am not leaving Kovac out there alone. Not this time -- " "Don't you get it?" shouted Doyle. "Don't you fucking understand?" He took Scully and Haniver by the arms, began to drag them back towards the building with a madman's strength -- they protested, struggling -- but Doyle was acting like a man possessed. "It's headed for us," he said, gasping for breath. "Listen, I saw them in the trees, I saw them in the jungle -- the light is a signal, a sign. Look, goddammit, look at the fucking trees!" Baker looked. The trees were on fire and the flames were spreading this way. Except they weren't flames; they were -- "Oh my God," he said. The camera slipped from his fingers, fell to the ground and broke. He went backwards in a stumbling run. Doyle had already herded Haniver and Scully into the laboratory and now he stood in the doorway with his eyes riveted to the inferno of red that had broken through the tree- lined barrier and was hurtling itself towards them on a million razor wings. A din filled the air like all the earth's oceans crashing together at once. It rose into an alien roar, shaking Baker to his very soul as he ran; Mulder followed him indoors, his face distorted with excitement and terror. Doyle came inside and slammed the door shut but the sound continued. The glassware on the shelves rattled. Haniver instinctively covered her ears with her hands. Scully tried to say something but couldn't. The words wouldn't come. Then darkness descended. Up until then the room had been faintly lit by the setting sun, its dusky light entering from outside, but now the windows went black. Scully couldn't see, but she heard the noises. The sounds of tiny bodies pressing themselves against glass. She staggered on numb legs to the window. It was covered with a dark writhing mass of insects. They were flying and smashing themselves into the glass. She heard them moving across the roof, rubbing their antennae against outside walls. They had spread out across the entire building. Without thinking, she and Mulder linked hands. Baker stood in the middle of the room, listening to the fluttering of wings. His heart was pounding but he could think only of Kovac alone in the jungle. Sudden anger filled him and he struck a wooden stool with one hand, sent it flying across the room. "Jesus," he said. Next to him, Doyle paced back and forth, his fists clenched, his breath coming in short ragged gasps, his eyes fixed on the squirming carpet of insects outside. Through her shock Haniver could smell the poison. She dimly understood that if one of the panes cracked a hundred thousand creatures would pour into the room before she could scream. The sound of flapping wings filled the world. Scully knew that it would drive her insane before long -- her mind would snap beneath it like a twig. She felt herself going unhinged; for one moment she envisioned taking the stool that Baker had thrown and smashing all the windows, then turning her gun on herself.... It did not stop immediately. Instead it grew gradually softer as the butterflies detached themselves one by one from the side of the building, windows still grimy with their splattered bodies. They were leaving. Finally the gray light of evening began to enter the room again through chinks and cracks in that living shroud: and like that, the butterflies had vanished. All of them. Silence returned like a wave of thunder. Haniver stood with her hands over her ears, shaking. She remembered the monkey and the snake and told herself that she was all right and that she was not going to lose control. She hated her fear and the silence; she hated the flat evening light; she hated all these things with a violence that made her weak. "They're gone," Mulder said. He had fallen to his knees, still holding Scully's hand. He was trembling. "Oh Christ, I hope they're gone." Haniver began to cry. * * * It was a long night. The generator had died, but Baker found a kerosene lamp in one of the lower cupboards. Before lighting it, he went to all the windows, pulled down the shades and taped them securely shut. There was no question of any of them going outside, so the five remaining team members huddled around the glow of the lamp, looking across at one another, hoping to see some shred of reassurance. But there was none. Mulder and Scully's hands were still tightly clasped -- it seemed right somehow -- and Haniver sat next to Doyle, her eyes puffy and red. Only Baker kept his distance from the others, his thoughts returning obsessively to the same problem, the same man. He weighed his words for a long time before he spoke up. "We aren't leaving without Kovac," he said. Doyle looked at him as if he were crazy. "We sure as fucking hell aren't going to stay here. I'm not too eager to abandon this project, either, but even I have my limits. I say we get the hell back to Paramaribo. Forget Kovac. There's no way he could have survived what we just saw." "This isn't some kind of fucking game," Baker replied angrily. "I'm not about to abandon Kovac until I know for goddamn sure that he's dead. Show me his body and I'll agree with you. But until then, we don't know anything." He turned to Mulder. "Tell me the truth. If Scully was the one who was missing, you'd go after her, wouldn't you?" Mulder stared into the bright flame of the lamp. "Of course I'd go after her. I'd go after her in a split second." He felt Scully squeeze his hand; squeezed back. "But I'd count on you all to hold me back and keep me from killing myself," he added. "Let's be rational about this," Haniver said slowly. "It's going to be difficult to get out of here in any case. Between us and our rafts there's a half-mile walk through the jungle which I'm not too eager to undertake. Even in our biohazard suits it's going to be one hell of a mess. That's the first point." She paused. "The second point is that we can't remain here, either. Remember what happened the last time someone tried to hide indoors?" Doyle remembered. "Oh shit, that's right -- the building was demolished." He swore to himself, then turned to Mulder. "You think the butterflies did that?" "I don't know. If the rains hadn't washed away most of the evidence, I might have a better idea. But no, I don't know what destroyed the communications booth." He fell briefly silent. "I hate to say this, but Haniver is right. The only option we have is to send a distress call and get somebody to airlift us the hell out of here. Then we can worry about Kovac." Baker hesitated. "There's something you need to know." He told them about the current situation in the city: the military coup, the total ban on air traffic. As he spoke, he could see the dejection and disbelief invading their faces. "It could be several days before the army permits any aircraft to enter the forest," he concluded. "I hate to say this, but it looks like we've been left on our own." "Then there's only one course of action available to us," said Haniver. "We take the river back to the Tirio village. I think we can do it. But not without a better idea of what we're up against." Scully looked around. "Is there any doubt now about what killed those men?" The reply was silence. "So these are poisonous insects," Mulder said. "Poisonous butterflies. Doyle, what's the scientific precedent on that?" "Good fucking question." Doyle retrieved the specimen that had been found clutched in the uakari's paw -- the monkey was still sitting on the counter -- and returned gripping it in a pair of tweezers. In the flickering light, the insect seemed ready to fly away at any moment. "Butterflies aren't poisonous in a conventional sense," he began. "Most can't even bite you -- although they can jab their proboscis into your arm if provoked. If that happens, there's a chance that you'll suffer a reaction and go into anaphylactic shock, which could kill you if you're particularly sensitive. "But that isn't what we're dealing with here," he continued. "First of all, this butterfly has biting mouthparts. That's pretty fucking rare. Maybe in Malaysia, you'll find a couple of really ancient species with this kind of dental work. They aren't poisonous, though. Whereas this little guy has some potent shit running through his veins, and an impressive injection system. In short, he's a killing machine. He's a flying syringe." "And there are millions of them out there in the jungle," Scully said. "That's what I don't understand. How could a species like this go undiscovered for so long?" Baker gingerly took the butterfly from Doyle, examined its orange and yellow pigments, the flames coursing across its translucent wings. "This butterfly could be flying above us all the time," he said, "and we would never know it." "What do you mean?" "It's part of the tiger complex." Baker tried to explain. "Taxonomists recognize certain broad patterns of color -- called complexes -- as characteristic of many different species of butterfly. In the jungle, different complexes fly at different heights because their colors match the light penetration at those levels. When they fly at the proper altitude, they're invisible." He held up the butterfly. "The tiger complex occupies a layer of forest two to seven meters above the ground, a level in which yellow and orange and black predominate. That's why the swarm appeared so quickly. One moment, there was nothing; the next, and it looked like the trees were on fire. But the insects were there the entire time. We just couldn't see them until they descended to our level." "So we won't notice them until they've already begun to attack," said Scully. "That's right." No one said much of anything after that. Eventually they came to some kind of consensus. Scully pointed out that since the butterflies were prone to attack after dusk, if the team only ventured abroad during the day, sunlight might afford them enough protection to find the river. Doyle agreed, suggested that they also wait for the next heavy rainfall. "Poisonous or not," he said, "these butterflies have the same habits as any other winged insect. They won't fly in swarms when there's a hard rain falling." It was agreed. They would spend the night in the labs, and make a run for the river, wearing their biohazard suits, at the first sign of rain the next morning. This meant another ten hours of waiting. For some reason, this struck them as the worst part. They prepared to pass the night. Baker found a stack of foam mattresses on one of the shelves, rolled up like jellied pastries, and spread them across the floor to inflate by themselves. The monkey was still lying on the counter. Doyle took the cadaver and was sliding it into the freezer when he noticed a six-pack of beer sitting on a lower shelf, right there alongside leaf cuttings and soil samples. He cracked one for himself, then offered one to Mulder. The FBI agent took it. The two of them sat drinking morosely, sitting on tall lab stools, listening to the sounds of the forest outside. "I can't enjoy this shit anymore," Doyle said introspectively, staring at the can in his hands. "After that night in the movie theater, whenever I got drunk I always saw Joan of Arc swimming in front of me, like a fucking guardian angel." "Are you seeing her now?" "I guess so." He sipped thoughtfully. "I wonder about that sometimes. I pray to her when I get really wasted, and I'm a fucking Jew, you know? But I'm not even praying to the real Joan of Arc. I'm praying to the actress, the one in that silent film. What was her name again?" Doyle scrunched up his face, trying to remember. "I don't know. Remind me to look it up if we ever get out of this alive." Doyle took a final swig. "It's funny. This actress has been dead for at least fifty years. But somehow I've always thought that if there's a heaven -- I mean, if there's a place where all the good spirits hang out -- then she's probably up there with the real Joan, and they're best friends. Like no one could understand Joan of Arc better than some Italian chick who played her in a movie once." He crumpled the can and threw it away. "Fuck it, I don't know what I'm saying anymore." He looked at Mulder, his eyes watery and bloodshot. "You a religious man?" "Maybe. I'd like to be." "I don't buy that for a second," said Doyle. "I don't think you follow any cross except the one you nail yourself to every morning." He coughed. "You pray to anything, Mulder?" "Me?" Mulder hung his head. "Hell, at times like this I pray to Scully. At least she's someone I can count on." He raised his beer. "Here's a toast to idolatry," he said, and drained the last few drops. * * * They went to bed. Baker blew out the lantern and they were in darkness, each alone with his or her own thoughts. For Haniver sleep felt like it should have been the most unthinkable thing in the world; but when she lay down and shut her eyes, she realized that she was exhausted. The mattress was surprisingly soft. Haniver listened to the sound of breathing for a while, and suddenly felt bitter tears in the back of her throat. Kovac was on his way to Washington. She knew it. Perhaps this had been his deal with Aquino. Perhaps he was headed downstream at this very moment, waiting for a lone airplane to retrieve him and samples of the butterflies from the Tirio village. Either that, or Kovac was dead. Haniver felt herself desperately hoping for the latter possibility. With that sullen thought, she drifted into sleep. That night, Haniver had a dream. She dreamt that she stood in a forest where nothing grew: no trace of green, no leaf or flower. The trees around her were skeletal and dead. There were brambles at her feet. The air filled with cries of suffering and despair; she turned around and around but couldn't see where the voices came from. Then someone suggested that she break a branch from the tree before her, a huge, contorted plant of immense age with strange man-faced birds perching in its boughs. Haniver reached out her hand and snapped off a twig -- * * * End of (14/19) Date: 15 Jul 1999 07:26:07 GMT From: LoneGunGuy Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative The Tiger Complex (15/19) by LoneGunGuy http://members.aol.com/lonegunguy/x-files.html * * * Baker did not sleep. He stared up at the ceiling, his eyes like spheres of dry ice. The rest of the team had already dropped one by one into slumber. He could recognize the sounds that each made in the dark. Mulder lay snoring on the smooth formica counter; Doyle made soft and strangely endearing coughing noises as he drew his blanket more closely around him. But Baker did not sleep. There were some images you could never wash from your mind, no matter how carefully you bleached and scrubbed. For Baker, it was the memory of that river. Of guiding the rafts down those black waters, ferrying the flesh of the men with whom he had lived and worked. You never really got to know a man until you had zipped him into a body bag and carried him through the jungle, Baker thought. Something about that dead weight stirred your compassion more deeply than words ever could. Baker remembered the taste of the jaguar's blood in his mouth. By taking that fierce communion, he realized now, he had entered into a contract. Not with Quassapelagh, but with himself. The thought of the two dead cubs in the cat's belly haunted him like a promise that had to be kept. In eating the flesh of the mother, he had taken the cubs as his own. They were dead in the womb, but he had pledged himself to resurrect them. That was the meaning of the oath. Do not accept death, Baker told himself. This is not why you were chosen to survive. Which meant that he needed to find Kovac. Baker rolled over onto his side, propped his head up on one elbow. Looked at the others. They were all asleep, curled in anonymous lumps on the floor. He could leave quietly and none of them would notice. He could go into the rain forest and find Kovac and bring him back. It would be easy. In the back of his mind a rational voice told him that the DOE administrator was dead; but reason didn't have much to do with this. Baker had known that rational voice all his life. To ignore it was to practice the art of being human. Baker found himself standing. He didn't know how it had happened, but now he was standing and stepping carefully over the sleeping forms at his feet, careful not to make a sound, not thinking any longer but letting himself be carried by something beyond what he understood about himself. The door leading to the outside was all the way across the room. At one point Haniver stirred and muttered something in her sleep -- something in a language other than English -- and Baker froze. Held his breath. It felt as if his heart was pounding loud enough to wake them all. He stood there, a bead of cold sweat trickling down the small of his back. But eventually he moved onward. Of course. At the door Baker paused, but only for a second. Then he went outside. The night air was too hot, like the inside of an oven. He walked quickly down the path, his shoes crunching against the gravel. He wondered if some of the butterflies could have remained on the roofs, perhaps, or nestled in the eaves of the buildings....It took him less than a minute to cover the ground between the lab and his destination, but it seemed like much longer. Finally he arrived at the barracks, reached out and twisted the knob with numb fingers. Pulled. The door wouldn't open. Baker swore. The goddamned door wouldn't open. He twisted the knob this way and that, listening all the while for the flutter of wings behind him, the hairs on the back of his neck rising, waiting for the tickle of segmented legs.... Finally he tugged on the door with his entire body, hard, and it came open with a groan. It had been stuck against the jamb, probably expanding with nocturnal moisture and warmth. Christ. He went inside and slammed the door in the jungle's face. He caught his breath and crept down the dark hallway, counting the doors by feel. The third led into the bedroom he had shared with Kovac. He opened it. Inside was a clutter of papers and charts; the two men had spent the afternoon going over topographical maps of the plantation. Kovac's pocket watch still sat on the desk. For some reason this comforted Baker, as if the watch was sure that its owner would return soon. He took it, clenching the cold circle of metal in his large fist, and went over to the biohazard suits. They were hanging in the closet. They were too bulky and heavy for ordinary hangers, so they came with a special rig of their own, a collapsible metal grille with hooks for the gloves and hoods and respirators. Baker took down the pieces, began to pull them over his muscular body. It was hard work, as usual; it took maybe ten minutes before he was completely suited and ready to leave. Baker was about to go outside when he remembered the field kit. The rucksack sat in one corner of the room, compact and waterproofed at the seams. He brought this pack whenever he went into the jungle; it was filled with small articles he liked to have for himself -- elastic bandages for puttees, mylar blankets, a hatchet, airplane glue for botfly bites, that sort of thing -- but it also had a pair of night-vision goggles, a heavy- duty model he'd bought from army surplus. He hung them around his neck like binoculars. Then he picked up the field kit and left the room. Outside, he felt a lot better. The suit was hot, but it offered enough security for him to look around with some degree of composure. He raised the goggles to his eyes and switched them on. They were hard to use through the stiff plastic of his face mask, and it took a second for him to adjust to the green smokiness of the world; but soon he could clearly see the outlines of trees, the epiphytes swaying gently in the warm wind. The jungle was too damned quiet. All he could hear was the hiss of the respirator, and the blood throbbing in his ears. Before he headed into the forest, there were a few things he wanted to check. He walked clumsily back to the lab on rubber-soled feet. Examined the walls and the windows. There were still a few dead butterflies stuck to the glass. He wondered why he had found no insects four days ago. Then he remembered the rain. The bodies would have been washed away and obliterated beneath the drops, leaving no trace of their coming. They were delicate things. On the ground was the Polaroid camera he'd dropped and broken during the butterfly attack, along with two photos sitting next to each other on the sandy dirt. He knelt, picked up the pictures, brushed away the grime. Both depicted the same area of the forest, the Andes glow emerging from behind the trees. The glow itself had not shown up well; the reddish- orange streak resembled a longitudinal smear or blotch where the photograph had failed to develop. But there was a tall ceiba tree emerging from the canopy at about the right place. He would aim for that. Baker set off into the jungle. Walking was easier beneath the trees. Through his goggles the jungle looked ghostly and dead, like a petrified forest at the bottom of the ocean. He moved carefully, keeping his bearings with the trees he passed. When you were deep in the jungle, you wouldn't find two of the same kind of tree too close to one another, so you could mark your progress by their names -- mimosa, cecropia, frangipani, cacao, acacia, strangler fig.... He passed what he thought was a large moss-covered stone. Then he realized that it was a paca, dead, covered with a writhing blanket of insects. They had been going at the animal pretty good; the hide was loose, like an ill-fitting fur coat, and the eyes were gone. He toed it with the tip of his boot, rolled it over, looked for orange and yellow wings. He didn't see any, but that didn't mean much. Even if the paca had been killed by the butterflies, their bodies would have been devoured by other bugs. Baker straightened up and was about to resume walking when he thought of something. Unzipping his field kit, he fished around until he found a can of luminescent orange spray- paint. He shook it up, listening to it rattle, and then painted a small cross midway up the trunk of the nearest tree, about eight feet from the cadaver. Marking the spot. At the rate the bugs were going, the paca would be gone by morning. He tucked the can back into his bag and went onward. He could see the trunk of the ceiba tree in the distance, smooth and gray, with big buttressed roots. Another hundred yards and he found himself standing in a small clearing. Kovac was there. Baker fell to his knees. For one hideous moment he thought he was going to get sick and vomit right there inside the biohazard suit, the puke splattering against his face shield; he closed his eyes tightly and tried to stop the dizzying sickness that was spiraling through his skull. It felt like he'd been punched in the gut. "Fuck," he finally gasped, his lips moist. "Fuck." He sat there for a long time, beneath the ceiba tree. Looking. He couldn't bring himself to go closer or turn away. He just sat there. Kovac lay face-down in a heap of dead pacas. His assault rifle had fallen in the dust by his feet. The bugs had been at him, too. After the sickness passed, Baker felt dull and empty inside, like he didn't give a damn about anything any longer. It was hot inside the suit. He considered ripping out the seams and pulling the hood right the fuck off his head -- the danger didn't seem to matter anymore -- but then he thought about what he might smell. If nothing else, the respirator protected him from the stink. Only the stench of his own fear and sweat filled the hood. He inhaled it like a drug. A voice from his right. "Baker." He turned. It was Mulder, wearing a biohazard suit, a hooded flashlight in his hand. "I woke up and you were missing," Mulder said, "so I assumed that -- " Mulder noticed Kovac and fell silent. He raised his flashlight, shone the thin finger of brightness across the body. The insects scattered wherever the light touched the corpse. His arm fell heavily to his side. Switching the light off, he came over to Baker, sat next to him. They brooded side by side beneath the tree, not speaking, insulated from one another by thick layers of latex and the lukewarm hint of death in the air. "It's a bitch to be the survivor," said Baker at last. "Yeah." Baker studied his thick gloves for a long time before speaking again. He tried not to look at the body. Dull buzzing in his ears and he remembered shooing away the flies as he floated the twelve dead men downstream. The insects always found you first. In Africa they believed that the first maggot to emerge from a dead man's flesh was his soul, struggling to escape. But here the bugs only ate. "There's something you need to know," he said. Fighting to keep his voice steady, he told Mulder about his final conversation with Kovac. "I think that when Kovac realized the project was in trouble," he concluded, "he wanted to secure some measure of compensation for himself. The copal trees were a dead end -- the butterflies were proof enough of that -- but he didn't want the past two years to have been a total loss. So he made a deal." "With Ferdinand Aquino?" "But it wasn't just Aquino. There's someone else involved. He wouldn't tell me much about it, but this deal must have been something special. I worked with Kovac on this project for years. I know he wouldn't throw it away unless he was sure of some enormous payoff. Even before we returned to the rain forest, he'd already made up his mind." "So he exposed the entire project to Aquino -- " " -- in exchange for passage into the jungle and a few days of lead time," Baker finished. "He figured that the copal trees were a dead end, so he didn't feel too guilty about handing it over to the Surinamese opposition. He just needed to get here before anyone else did." "But why?" asked Mulder. "If he was selling out the project anyway, what was so important here?" "He was looking for something." "For what?" "It had something to do with the Andes glow. That's why he ran out here. He followed the glow to its source and was attacked by the butterflies. He brought that goddamned assault rifle with him -- I guess he was expecting something." Mulder looked at Kovac's body, the rifle lying uselessly by its side. "What do you think it was?" Baker turned to Mulder. There was resolve in his voice. "I think we should check his pockets," he said. "That's easier said than done." But Mulder went over to the body anyway. Face-down in the dust, Kovac looked like a shattered scarecrow. He crouched, brushed the bugs away from Kovac's shirt. Baker knelt beside him, looked at the corpse through his night-vision lenses. Turned out its pockets. Nothing inside but a few large beetles, their antennae bobbing stupidly in the night air. Baker removed his goggles. "We'll have to roll him over." "You better be pretty damned sure about this," said Mulder. "I am." Baker took Kovac by the shoulders and pulled. The body flipped over atop the dead pacas. He tried not to look at Kovac's ruined face as he dug through the pockets on the front of the vest, undoing the buttons with his clumsy fingers. In the left breast pocket Baker found what he was looking for. It was a sheet of lined paper, torn from a spiral notebook. "You know what this is?" he asked. Mulder took the sheet, unfolded it. "A page from DeFillips's project journal." "Kovac had it all the time. He told me about it but didn't tell me what it said." "Let's find out." Mulder shone the flashlight on the page. It was wrinkled and worn but still legible. Its date was May 21, the day before the author had died. Mulder read it aloud, stumbling over the occasional illegible scrawl: "'Three hours since James and I went to track down the light. Didn't find it but found something else in the clearing five hundred meters from camp. I still can't bring myself to report. It was alive. The Tirio call it the Mai d'agoa. But I don't think -- '" He stopped. Baker nudged him. "Keep going." "That's all there is." Mulder turned the page over, saw that it was blank. "The Mai d'agoa," he said thoughtfully. "I know that word. Quassapelagh said it to me, but he didn't elaborate...." He looked up. "Do you know what it means?" "Yes," said Baker. He took the page from Mulder's hands, examined it with a frown. "The Mai d'agoa is an Indian legend, like he says here. If you travel up and down the Amazon you'll hear it from every tribe along the way. So far as I know, it's been seen in every part of the jungle, but always without scientific confirmation." "What is it?" "It's supposed to be a serpent, a water snake hundreds of feet long," said Baker. "The mother of the river, or spirit of the river. That's what the name means. It's probably an exaggerated traditional description of the anaconda, but some cryptozoologists keep searching for a long-extinct dinosaur species, like the one that's supposed to live in the Congo...." "The Mokele-Mbembe." Mulder began to get excited. "Yes, I know about that." "Well, that's the story. You sit around the campfire in these villages and you hear it. It's nothing new. DeFillips probably heard it when he first came to this part of the jungle." "Do you think the BFDP team could have found something like this?" "I don't know. I've been working in the rain forest for years, and I never saw anything close to what this thing is supposed to be. I can't see how anything that gigantic could elude us for so long. These goddamned butterflies are strange enough by themselves." Mulder looked down at Kovac's body. "That is a problem. I don't know what the butterflies could have to do with the Mai d'agoa. It's too much to swallow at once." "Yeah." Baker took a silver space blanket from the field kit, shook it open and spread it gently across Kovac's body. It was too short to cover his feet. Christ. No matter how often you did something like this, you never got used to it. If you ignored the feet, anything could have been beneath the blanket -- a stone, a pile of equipment, or even just a swelling of the ground. There was something else he needed to say. But he chose his words carefully. He didn't know how Mulder would react. "We should speak with Haniver." "What?" "I think that Haniver is somehow a part of this," said Baker. "I think that she and Kovac were working for the same men." Mulder took his time before responding. There was no visible emotion on his face, but Baker could sense the agitation beneath the surface. "Baker, you'd better have a damned good reason for saying that," he finally said. "She's been sending video transmissions to someone." Mulder exhaled sharply. "I didn't know that." "It's true. She goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind her, but then she puts the antenna in the window. I've seen it. I think she's beaming reports to Washington." "And she's looking for the same thing as Kovac?" "Haniver has her own agenda." Baker took the can of paint from his field kit, sprayed an orange cross on the trunk of the ceiba tree. One diagonal slash, and then another. The four- footed ideogram glowed softly in the darkness, a grim memorial of the place where Kovac had been slain. "They were competing," he said. "They were going after the same prize, and whoever found it first was the winner." Mulder smashed his fist against the trunk of the tree in sudden fury. "Shit." "What is it?" "Do you know what this is?" Mulder asked. "This is fucking black ops. It's the Pentagon. This is the way they always work. There's never only one insider: they always buy two, and play them off each other. That's how you get results. It's survival of the fittest, and Kovac just got selected out of the gene pool...." There were two flushed spots on his cheekbones, places where the anger had erupted. "And Haniver?" asked Baker. "Haniver's still going for the gold." Mulder fixed his eyes on the trunk of the ceiba tree, on the marker. The marker was in the shape of a St. Andrew's cross. It was an X. "Maybe I'm crazy, but I think she's searching for the Mai d'agoa." "That's what Kovac thought, apparently." Baker put the can of paint back into the kit, slung the pack over his shoulder. "When we found the dead monkey, Kovac knew that Haniver would be busy with the dissection for an hour or two, which gave him a chance to get to the clearing, to look around without interruption. That's why he rushed into the jungle while everybody else -- " He broke off. Mulder's face had gone white. Baker was about to ask what was wrong when he heard it. The noise had been there the entire time, he realized, an undercurrent thrumming like electricity beneath their words, troubling the air above. The air in the tiger complex. He sighed heavily. Had something already descended? He didn't want to know. Perhaps if he turned around he would see nothing. Perhaps. Baker turned around. The trees were on fire. * * * End of (15/19) Date: 15 Jul 1999 07:27:26 GMT From: LoneGunGuy Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative The Tiger Complex (16/19) by LoneGunGuy http://members.aol.com/lonegunguy/x-files.html * * * The two men flung themselves to the ground as butterflies exploded around them in a screaming whirlwind. The air was pushed aside in a burst of paper-thin wings as the insects filled every inch of space above their heads -- it was like striking a match in a room full of propane gas. Mulder had his head in the dust. His eyes squeezed shut. The thundering switchblade howl filled his ears and he felt the pressure on his shoulders and legs and back as the bugs landed on him in droves and looked for a place to bite. He was completely covered. The butterflies were everywhere. He was drowning in a sea of flame. Baker had fallen beside him. He groped blindly, found the other man's hand. Grabbed it. Baker grabbed back. They clung to each other as the swarm climbed across them, their mandibles working uselessly against rubber, crawling over them in wave after wave after wave. "Oh God," Mulder said. He couldn't even hear his own voice. The fluttering was too much. Irrationally he tried to rise, to run, but the mass of insects on his body was too heavy -- he couldn't move his arms or legs, only vaguely felt Baker's hand in his. He didn't know how much longer his biosuit could hold. He felt like he was suffocating, like it hurt to breathe, and he thought for one horrifying second that he had been bitten and was feeling the first effects of the poison. Then he realized that his lungs and ribcage were being squeezed, sandwiched between the sandy earth and the monumental bulk of butterflies pressing down above them. He gasped. Gulped for air. The compression and the claustrophobia were too much. Mulder wanted to scream. He was going to scream. Then he was on his hands and knees. He'd managed to rise into a crawling position. He could move. He didn't know whether the butterflies had begun to depart or whether the adrenaline was flooding his veins and giving him enough strength to drag himself forward but in the end it didn't matter. Baker had risen too, was straining with every tendon and nerve in his body to get to his knees. Now they were face to face. The men supported one another, propped each other up as they struggled into a standing position, the insects colliding with their hoods. They were up. They were on their feet. They flung their arms around each other and ran, not caring which way they went. They crushed butterflies underfoot. Pushed their way through a solid wall of orange and yellow wings. Mulder extended an arm and swept aside cloud after cloud of bugs but more came in their place. His mind had gone away. In its place was something driven by raw animal terror -- he had to move -- to keep moving, to fucking fight and claw and tear his way to safety -- They collided heavily with the ceiba tree, almost went down. Mulder knocked his head against the trunk. Felt an egg-sized lump form almost immediately. The pain was dizzying and intense, but Baker caught him and kept him from falling: they both understood that to fall again was to die, to lie there on the ground forever and not rise again until the butterflies had chewed their way through the suits. There was no question about it. They had to keep moving. The insane yammer of wings filled Mulder's ears and made him think that this was truly Hell, a nightmare where his legs were mired in mud and the air slammed and battered his body as he ran, one exhausted step after another. Another. And another. It was too much, oh Christ, it was too fucking much.... And then they were out. The air cleared. The night was still darker than death but the bugs were gone, somehow they were gone; the men could walk and breathe again -- they had emerged from the cloud. Their suits were still covered with living insects but they were fewer and the layers were thinner; Mulder and Baker shook the insects loose, brushed them away, left them bruised and disoriented on the ground and squashed them beneath their boots. Soon the dirt was covered with dead or dying butterflies and the men were coated with gore, black blood, bits of wings and body segments. They took the clean dust at their feet and scrubbed the suits, did their damnedest to remove all traces of the attack. They did so without speaking, by mutual consent. They were shaking hard enough to make their teeth rattle like dice in their heads. "That was too fucking close," Mulder said. "Yeah." Baker stopped and turned away. "Jesus, I think I'm going to be sick." "I'd hold it in if I were you." Baker closed his eyes, tried to fight the sour taste at the back of his throat. "I'm not used to this," he said. "I've been up against all kinds of shit in this forest but never anything like that. No. They were trying to fucking annihilate us." "They're going to keep trying," Mulder said. "Let's get the hell out of Dodge." They moved on. Eventually Baker realized that they were lost. They had been stumbling through the jungle for hundreds of yards -- he had no idea in which direction -- and everything looked strange. He couldn't even see the moon; it was hidden behind the trees. And they had left the flashlight and goggles back in the clearing. "It just keeps getting better and better," he said. Mulder understood their predicament. "Now what?" Baker sank down. "We spend the night here." "You're kidding." "We don't have much of a choice. We could wander forever in the dark and stray farther and farther away from the plantation. In the daylight we'll have a better chance of finding our way back." Mulder tried to catch his breath. "Do you think we're safe here?" "I'm guessing that the butterflies are territorial. If we don't bother them, they won't bother us." "And what if you're wrong?" "Then we're fucked." Baker looked around. This was as good a place to make camp as any: the ground was level and the soil was reasonably soft. He lay on his side, working his hip back and forth to make a shallow depression in the dirt. Closed his eyes. Mulder followed his example, putting his ear to the soil -- and then suddenly sat up. He had heard the rumor of distant rumblings. Or so he thought. There had been something nervous about the ground. Mulder lay down again, listening to the earth. No doubt about it. There was a strange life to the soil. As if it echoed with the footfalls of unseen beasts, herds moving from one place to another in the night, trampling the dust beneath their hooves. It was not a sound so much as a sensation, a faint aura of uneasiness radiating up from the dirt. "It's always like this," Baker said abruptly. "The ground, I mean. You feel it?" "Yeah, I feel it," said Mulder. "People come to the forest, see the natives sleeping in hammocks and assume that it's because of the heat. But that isn't why. Not by a long shot. It's because the ground is so damned alive. It's the worst soil in the world, but it's alive anyway. It's haunted. I've never known anyone who could manage a restful sleep on it. It gives you bad dreams." "I've learned to enjoy my bad dreams." Mulder turned over onto his back, the sandy dust gritting beneath him. Looked up at the canopy. The trees towered above him, skyscraper trees woven together with lianas and vines and figs. He could see stars in a few places, shining down through cracks in that living roof. He wondered what he would do if those stars were suddenly blotted out by a swarm of creatures so alien that they hardly seemed part of this universe. He knew what alien meant, had known his share of xenophobia in the face of the unknown, had even faced an insect attack or two before -- but then there were these bugs. These butterflies in the tiger complex. Baker was right. They threw themselves at you and kept coming until you were dead. They would splatter and destroy and crush themselves in the process and it didn't seem to matter. Baker had been nursing similar thoughts. "It still doesn't make any sense," he said. "We're looking at an incredibly aggressive insect species, one that attacks and kills everything in sight at no apparent benefit to itself. It's crazy. There's always a balance to these things. If one organism in the environment doesn't practice moderation, the entire system collapses. It's a basic law of evolution." "Mankind doesn't seem to have any trouble breaking that law," said Mulder. "We're overdue to pay the penalty. I can accept that; we've only been around for forty thousand years. But these butterflies are a different story. You heard what Doyle said. If their physiology is any clue, these insects are as old as the dinosaurs." Baker exhaled. "I can't understand how they could exist in the rain forest for so long without affecting the ecosystem in visible ways." Mulder pondered this. He had an idea -- one of his goddamned insane ideas -- and wondered whether he could share it with Baker. If it had been Haniver or Scully he wouldn't have said anything; he'd known these women for years, yet neither seemed to understand how quickly his notions came, or how long he waited before venturing to speak his mind -- even though his speculations seemed absurdly premature when they finally came. As if there were a sibyl inside his head, inscribing her prophecies on leaves and scattering them to the four winds -- except for the ones he managed to save. Sometimes these ideas were so strange he didn't know whether to burn them or redeem them for the infinite. This was one of those moments. "Maybe the butterflies weren't in the ecosystem until we came here," Mulder said at last. "Excuse me?" said Baker. "Bear with me for a second. Let's assume that a connection exists between the Andes glow and the insect attacks -- that the light serves as some kind of signal that a swarm is coming." "That seems fairly obvious." "But the timing is irregular. We know from the project journal that at least three hours elapsed between the first appearance of the glow and the butterfly attack, because team members had enough time to investigate and record the sighting. But when we saw the glow, the butterflies attacked within minutes. Do you know what that suggests to me?" "I can't wait to find out." Mulder began to speak rapidly, trying to force his ideas into the air before they disappeared beneath the turbulent haze of his imagination. "I think the glow is the visible sign of some sort of forging process. Maybe some kind of defense mechanism. Whenever human activity enters the rain forest, it disturbs the environment, upsets the balance of nature in some way. If the intrusion is large enough -- something on the level of the BFDP plantation, for example -- maybe it triggers a immune response, a swarm of killer insects generated to destroy any invaders, like antibodies annihilating a specific strain of bacillus." Baker sat up. "That's crazy." "Let me finish. The butterflies don't disturb the ecosystem because they come into existence only when necessary. This explains why the interval between the Andes glow and the arrival of the insects has been getting shorter. The jungle's immune mechanism could remain dormant for years, even decades, before being awakened again; at first it would take days or hours to create a new swarm, but once the cycle began in earnest the butterflies could be released ever more swiftly into the forest. The Andes glow is the electrical byproduct of this process, some kind of bioplasmic discharge caused by the spontaneous birth of millions of insects...." Mulder trailed off, sensing some skepticism. "What do you think?" Baker took up a handful of gray soil, let the dust trickle thoughtfully through his fingers. Remembered T.S. Eliot. "If I were a younger man, I'd say that you were demented," he said. "Maybe you are. But living in the rain forest for the past few years has taught me -- well, shit, it's taught me that the reality of the jungle is so strange that I can't dismiss anything out of hand. The ant-trees, for example. You remember, the ants that ambushed Scully near the river...." "Of course I remember." "That's an immune system of sorts. The ants protect the tree, killing parasitic plants, caterpillars; if you touch the trunk or snap off a twig, they rain down on you by the thousands. I could imagine a similar relationship between the butterflies and another plant species. It would explain why the swarm didn't pursue us beyond a certain point. Once we were out of its territory, we no longer represented a threat." "And perhaps the symbiotic relationship could progress to such an extent -- " " -- that the tree could spontaneously generate and give birth to the insects? I don't know about that." Baker paused. "There's something else, though." "What?" "There has to be a plant involved at some point. Butterflies wouldn't be able to generate this kind of poison on their own; their metabolism isn't complex enough. This means that they're absorbing it from some sort of plant, possibly when feeding on leaves during the larval stage." He looked up at the canopy. "I guarantee it. Somewhere in this jungle there's a tree or shrub or vine that hasn't been discovered yet. But it contains the deadliest poison that mankind has ever seen." * * * Eventually the two men managed to sleep. It was a hot and feverish slumber; every ten or twenty minutes Baker would raise his head, open his eyes and for a few disorienting moments be unable to remember where he was, until the memories came crashing back and sent another salty wave of despair across his heart. The dust wouldn't let him rest. But sooner or later he would grow still and his breathing would become more regular and he would fall asleep there on the earth, side by side with Mulder. There was another thing. In the narrow gap between his suit and respirator a butterfly lay curled. It was a beautiful insect, wings orange and black and yellow, eyes like burning coals. Overlooked by the two men in their mad rush to cleanse themselves of the other bugs, it lay flattened against the rubber like a glittering brooch, waiting for the right time. For its time -- * * * Haniver awoke with a start. Her dream was etched vividly in her mind. She had been kneeling in a forest where the trees were as white as bone, gathering a heap of brambles, laying them before a hill of thorns, a strange sense of pity stirring in her chest, and -- She sat up. Her left arm was numb, verging on pins and needles. Rubbing it absently, Haniver looked around the laboratory. Although the windows were still shaded and taped shut, she could see yellow lines of daylight shining through. It was morning. The others were already gone. She had overslept. "Shit!" Haniver rose on shaky feet and headed for the door, her arm hanging from her shoulder like an alien piece of flesh. She tried to check her watch, had to grab her useless wrist and physically raise it to eye level. It was seven o' clock. Somehow she had managed to stay unconscious for almost ten hours. It was almost time for her next report. Glancing down, she saw that her shirt was still splattered with monkey blood. Jesus. She had been sleeping in the gore of the necropsy and hadn't even noticed it. She felt incredibly filthy, wanted to peel off her clothes right there: she had to take a shower, to scrub away the blood and grime and exhaustion, before finding her video transmitter, before sending her report, before joining the others. The others. Haniver reddened at the memory of last night. She had cried in front of them all: only a few tears, but each drop had boiled over with her own humiliation and self-loathing. It felt like they should have steamed away, leaving angry burns around her eyes. Sometimes she wished that she could purge herself of all emotion, just scorch it all away, leaving nothing behind but the ash of a disciplined hardcase. As it was, she realized that she did better in cases where everyone was already dead. Give her a subway station crammed with bodies and she could cut them all open and trace the path of gas down each stagnant bloodstream; if Jonestown happened again, she could clean up the mess and spear paper cups with the best of them.... Outside, her dread vanished. The jungle looked peaceful and passive; the gray morning sun flattened out the features of the plantation, made them dull and uninteresting and hardly terrifying. Last night felt like a nightmare, a fantasy that could be bleached away like a yellowing photograph: but she knew better than that. Dead butterflies were still splattered against the laboratory window. Haniver removed a glassine envelope from her pocket, unsheathed her knife and carefully scraped a few bugs from the glass. When samples were collected and safely put away, she felt a lot better. She turned, sprinted down the path. Inside the dormitory, the shower was already running. Haniver grabbed the towel and knapsack from her room, paused in front of the closed bathroom door. She heard the muffled sound of the water. Rapped on the door with her knuckles. Scully said something unintelligible through the splashing noises. Haniver didn't reply. She was hot and sweaty and covered with monkey gore and after a moment realized that she didn't want to wait. So she just stripped off her clothes and went in. Inside, the shower curtain was closed. She drew it aside, startling Scully. The soap tumbled from her hand. "Wha -- ? Haniver?" Haniver mimed a downward knifing motion, hummed a few bars of Bernard Hermann. "Mind if I join you?" she asked. "There's room enough for two...." "I guess so, but -- " "Thanks." Haniver climbed into the shower, nudging Scully aside to stand beneath the nozzle. The water was icy cold but it was exactly what she needed. "Sorry about this." "Um, that's okay." After an awkward moment Scully joined Haniver beneath the freezing droplets, the hair plastered to her head like a helmet. Rinsing away the suds, she tried to make conversation. "How does the weather look?" "The sky is pretty cloudy. Rain shouldn't be more than a few hours away." Haniver produced a bottle of lemon-scented shampoo and lathered up, her slippery shoulders rubbing against Scully's back. "I assume that we're leaving as soon as the weather cooperates." Scully stood silently for a moment, shivering, skin prickling from the chill. "I don't know. I hope so." She looked worried. "Mulder and Baker are missing." The bottle slipped from between Haniver's fingers. It hit the floor of the shower and bounced twice. It was a few seconds before she could speak. "How long have they been gone?" "They could have been out all night. I didn't notice they were missing until this morning. They took their biohazard suits, so they should be all right." But Scully's voice betrayed a deeper anxiety as she opened the curtain and stepped out of the shower, dripping. "And what about Kovac?" "Nothing." "That's bad." Haniver pulled the curtain shut again. She watched through the semi-translucent plastic as Scully's silhouette toweled off, propping one leg up on the toilet seat, then the other. Haniver's heart filled with a vague uneasiness, and perhaps the beginnings of paranoia. First Kovac, now Mulder and Baker. There was something at work here, some kind of machine that she could only watch from the outside, guessing how the gears were meshing. The freezing water from the shower drowned her anger, leaving it to smolder. She wondered what kind of deal the three men might have made. "How did we miss it?" Haniver suddenly said. She had not been aware that she was going to speak. "Miss what?" asked Scully, wrapping herself in a towel. Haniver turned off the water, teeth chattering. "We were careful, we did the autopsies together -- so how did we miss the goddamned butterfly bites?" "There were bites everywhere," Scully said. "The men had been living in the jungle. We didn't think it was unusual." She opened the door and went out. "The lethal dose is probably no more than a single bite," was the last thing she said. That was what Haniver wanted to hear. After Scully had exited, she emerged from the shower, dried herself off, took her damp towel and stuffed it beneath the door. Pulled on shirt and shorts and attached the knife to her belt. Fished a rubber band from her pocket, gathered her hair back in a wet ponytail. She regarded herself in the mirror and decided that she looked all right under the circumstances. Finally Haniver took the video transmitter from her knapsack and placed the antenna in the window. Plugged it all in and turned on the power. Hearing the familiar burst of static, she felt far from home and inexplicably lonely. For a heartbeat's time she wondered whether any of this was worth it. There were moments when it seemed like her life was driven by momentum alone. By inertial forces. Sometimes she would stop and look at what she did -- or listen, really listen for the first time, to what she was saying -- and feel as though she were acting a role in someone else's story. Then Haniver blinked her eyes and the feeling disappeared, as it always did. It was replaced by apprehension. In a few seconds she would know whether or not Kovac had made it back with the poison. The butterfly specimens were in her pocket, pressing against her heart. The screen flickered and the image of the chain-smoking man appeared before her. The bathroom door opened. Haniver's hand slammed down on the ABORT switch hard enough to crack the case. The screen went black again. But she had been a fraction of a second too late. She could see a pair of dusty boots in the doorway. They were yellow biohazard boots. There was no hurry to lift her eyes and see whose they were. For some reason she remembered something that Dante had once written -- something about how the urge to escape scorn made you unjust against your own just self. Haniver understood what Dante had meant. * * * End of (16/19) Date: 15 Jul 1999 07:28:37 GMT From: LoneGunGuy Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative The Tiger Complex (17/19) by LoneGunGuy http://members.aol.com/lonegunguy/x-files.html * * * It was Mulder. He had removed his hood but still wore his biohazard suit. It was grimy beyond belief, encrusted with the white dirt of the rain forest, with smears of ichor, of toxic blood. He was tired. He looked at Haniver with equal parts exhaustion and anger, a hung-over, defeated anger that fit his face well. As if he were used to this kind of betrayal. Mulder drew his pistol, letting his arm dangle by his side. "Call him back," he said. Haniver's eyes flicked down to the gun. "Are you threatening a fellow agent, Fox? You don't need to do that." "Maybe not." Mulder gestured toward the video transmitter with the barrel of the pistol. Now his exhaustion seemed to be bleeding away, leaving only the anger behind. "Just call him back, Haniver." Haniver turned to the transmitter. Her knees and hips ached from squatting on the bathroom floor for so long. There was a small red button on the side of the transmitter case and Haniver pressed it without hesitation. A soft buzzing noise began to emanate from within the innermost workings of the machine: and then a sudden feverish heat. She had triggered the self-destruct protocol. Flames erupted from the case and swiftly consumed the transmitter in less than fifteen seconds. The sharp, acrid smell of melting plastic hung in the air. Click of the safety latch. Mulder was pointing the pistol at her head. "Get up." Haniver rose slowly. "Where are we going?" There was a trace of a smile on Mulder's face. "We're going outside," he said. "The butterflies could come back." "All the more reason for you to talk quickly," he said. "Let's go." They exited the bathroom. Haniver left the smoldering box of the transmitter behind. They went down the hall with Haniver in the lead, Mulder following with the gun. Some kind of crazy calm had wrapped itself around her heart, a feeling she had known only a few times before. There had been an incident in Seattle. She had been standing in the corridor of a shabby apartment building, about to apprehend a suspect who had been cooking up nerve gas from bleach and drain cleaner, when three bullets had smashed through the wooden door and hit her just below the edge of her Kevlar vest. She had felt warm blood pour across her hands, but there had been no pain or fear: only a numbing sense of peace as she returned fire and killed her unseen assailant and leaked vital fluids across the spinach-colored carpet while her partner called 911. It had not been an out-of-body experience: if she had sensed her soul pulling apart, she would have gripped the earth with her fingernails and gone screaming into that infinite light. Here there had been only silence, except for the strangely soothing sound of her own heart's blood ebbing away. That was how it felt now. They went outside. Haniver kept walking until she realized that the sound of footsteps on the gravel path behind her had stopped. She turned. Mulder had seated himself on the ground, and the pistol was back in its holster. He looked out into the jungle. The rows of trees were dark and monumental; more than ever the rain forest resembled a solid wall of growth, clotted with the leavings of the past. Haniver sank down next to him and thought about the butterflies. Long silence. "Did Kovac send you?" asked Haniver suddenly. Mulder closed his eyes. "No." "You aren't a part of this?" she asked. "You don't know anything about this?" "No." Mulder peeled off his gloves. It was a delicate, almost clumsy operation to undo the flaps and velcro tabs, but finally he managed to take them off and look at his naked hands. Compared to the big yellow gloves, they seemed tiny, almost shriveled. "But I want you to tell me." Haniver looked down. From the loose sandy soil between her feet sprouted a blade of grass, rough and serrated like the edge of a sword. For a long moment there seemed to be nothing else in the world except this blade of grass and the bead of dew depending from its tip. Its green was vivid against the dead white earth. "They want the poison," she said. "Kovac brought it to their attention." "He approached them first?" "Yes." Haniver undid her ponytail, ran a hand through her damp hair. "They moved in the same circles," she said miserably. "Kovac worked with the DOE for fifteen years before going into the jungle. He would have met these men in Washington -- the ones who step out of the shadows whenever something needs to be buried in the name of national security. Maybe he did one of them a favor once, and kept the phone number. When the bodies started coming in from the forest and he realized the project was doomed, he gave them a call." "And offered them a new biological weapon." Haniver nodded. "Looking back, it's obvious that this could not have been an act of ordinary terrorism. Terrorists don't work like that. Either they advertise their involvement or they make sure the bodies are never found. They don't leave twelve dead men in the middle of the forest with no sign of what killed them. No. This was something new." A cloud passed before the sun, plunging the place where they sat into shadow. Haniver felt as if she were giving birth, purging herself in one savage labor of all the clotted, tangled, secret eviscera that had been gestating inside her. "The few details we had were enough to set the wheels rolling," she continued. "If this was a chemical attack, it was unlike anything we'd ever seen. If it was the result of some natural toxin, it was one of the most lethal poisons on record." "So they came to you in Washington." "Yes." "Why?" "They needed another angle," said Haniver. "They wouldn't entrust a job like this to only one man. I had the right background. I knew chemical weapons. I accepted their terms and arrived in Suriname only a few hours after you did." "And what did they tell you about the case?" "Nothing much. From what I managed to discover on my own, I thought we might be dealing with curare and some unknown admixture. But after I came to Paramaribo and found that Kovac had already commissioned an autopsy, I knew that I couldn't conduct this investigation in the regular fashion. It was a goddamned race, and Kovac was always one step ahead." Mulder pressed his fists against his forehead. Haniver saw that there was a big purple bruise above his left eyebrow. "So what was the prize, then?" he asked. "It doesn't matter now," she said bitterly. "You know what they had to offer. I could have seen some advancement, some fucking progress after ten years in the Bureau." She reached down with her fingers, tore away that blade of grass. "But it doesn't matter. I think that Kovac made it back to Paramaribo with the evidence he needed, with samples of the butterflies, and the game is over...." As she said these words, Mulder stood and walked away, his face a hard mask of anger. She followed him. "Fox, wait." He did not turn around. "This is the worst mistake you ever made, Haniver." "I -- " "Even if you were determined to climb the ladder at any cost, I never thought you'd prostitute your career to the goddamned forces of darkness. If you think that the game is over, you're wrong. Once you get in bed with these men, you become part of it for life." Haniver stopped on the path. "Fox, look at me." Mulder turned around and Haniver hit him in the face. It was only a glancing blow to the chin, but it took them both by surprise. The moment froze. They stood facing one another, a spot of red blooming just above Mulder's jawline. "I hate you," said Haniver, her voice almost breaking with amazement. "I do. One day you're going to leave that basement office and find that not everyone can afford to be a martyr. You survive because you have the fucking mandate of heaven. But I don't have that mandate, and I need to work in other ways." "Haniver -- " "I'm not finished." Haniver felt tears coming, fought them with every ounce of fury and pride she possessed. "Ever since we first met I knew that you were going to achieve everything I ever wanted without even trying. You had the looks, the money, the connections, the talent. If you had played their game for five fucking minutes you could have owned the FBI. But you threw it away." She wiped her eyes angrily. "I never had the advantages that you seem to take for granted. I've invested everything I own. I killed myself just to remain on your level. But the promotion always went to someone else, to someone who knew a senator or had a famous father in the Bureau. This is what I've always had to deal with, Fox. So don't accuse me of whoring myself to the dark side." Mulder turned, went towards the lab. "I know these men better than you do," he said. "I've lied and I've sold information and I've given up more than you can imagine. I've been fucked up the ass more than once. Don't think I had it easy. I've had to cut myself deep just to maintain what little freedom I have." "But what do you do with that freedom? You investigate cases and file away the evidence and accumulate papers and paranoia and never do a goddamned thing with any of it -- " "You're crazy if you think that collaboration will accomplish anything more." They stood at the door of the laboratory. "You've got nothing to lose because you threw it away years ago," Haniver said. "You act as if you expect everyone to treat their lives the same way. But I care about myself. I care about my life." Mulder sighed. For a second he looked terribly old, strain and anxiety pushing their way up through his skin. "I care about my life, too," he said. * * * They went inside. Tension hung between them like fire but none of the others seemed to notice. At one end of the lab, Scully was peering through a double-barreled microscope at a slice of the monkey's brain; at the other, Doyle took blocks of styrofoam and placed them carefully within an ice chest -- samples of copal oil and leaf cuttings. Baker had removed his biohazard suit and laid it across the table, checking it for rips or tears. His respirator was off to one side. Looking up from the microscope, Scully met them with a frown. "Bad news." "I'm used to that by now," Mulder said. Wearily, he began to strip off the rest of his rubber suit, dropping the pieces one by one on the floor. "Lay it on me." Scully peeled off her latex gloves. "Judging from the way this toxin behaves in the nervous system, none of our chemical precautions will do a damned bit of good. The HI-6 or atropine injections won't slow the poison, for example." Haniver moved past Mulder. "What about the pyridostigmine and diazepam tablets?" "They're about as effective as baby aspirin. If one of these butterflies bites you, there's nothing we can do but watch you die." Scully removed the slide from beneath the lens, examined the dead wafer of gray matter. Her eyes were puffy from strain. Defeated. "I wish I had something more encouraging to tell you." Haniver went over to Baker, helped him to check his biosuit. It looked like a flayed shell, the empty remains of a creature that had molted and flown away. "That's a goddamned shame," she said, picking up the respirator. "Yeah." Doyle shut the lid of the ice chest. "Kovac never knew what hit him." Haniver froze. Mulder peeled off the last of his suit and waited. There was a certain coldness in his heart as he wondered what strange mixture of horror and triumph and fury filled Haniver at the news. He had been close to telling her several times: but whenever he tried to say something, he had remembered how Kovac had died with a mouth full of butterfly wings, and had swallowed his own words in the same spirit. "We found him in the jungle," Baker said. "He was killed by the butterflies." "He's dead?" Haniver looked as though she had been kicked in the stomach. "But...." She trailed off, then turned to Mulder. There was murder in her eyes. "He was dead and you didn't tell me," she said, still holding the respirator. "I told you everything, you son of a bitch, but you didn't tell me he was dead...." Mulder grabbed the respirator angrily from her hands. "Yes," he said. "He ran into the forest and got himself killed for the sake of everything you and these men represent -- " In his left index finger came a sudden pain, like the prick of a needle. Mulder broke off. Looked down. Lying in the palm of his hand was a tiger complex butterfly. It was dying. Its wings were ruined and torn but it had crawled out from under the respirator and injected its poison just above the first joint of his index finger. The mark was a small white lump with an inflamed pinhole in the center. The butterfly had left its head and jaws buried in his skin. As Mulder watched, it fluttered twice and died. Time stopped. No one spoke. The moment hung suspended with something like awe. Every detail of the room around him -- the tables, the tall stools, the light shining through the windows, the shock rising in the faces of the others -- took on the monumental vividness and depth of a Renaissance engraving. One thought pounded into his brain again and again. He was going to die. He thought about the look on Kovac's face when they had turned him over with his eyes eaten away. The interval between heartbeat and heartbeat seemed to stretch out into an infinity of emptiness. Mulder looked at Scully and saw the agony there, felt the same agony rise inside him, a sadness born of silence and wasted time. He was going to die. But this was not right. No. Not like this. These thoughts moved through Mulder's mind in the space of half a second. He opened his mouth, was about to speak, didn't know what he was going to say -- when a sudden hope shot itself like a bullet into his goddamned heart. There was no time to think it through. He faced Haniver. "Cut it off," he said. Haniver stared at him, not comprehending. "What?" Mulder crushed the dead butterfly in his fist and dropped the respirator to the counter. It fell with a dull clank. "Take your knife and cut off my finger," he said. His voice did not seem to be his own. "I've got maybe ten seconds left." He put his hand on the table, fingers splayed wide. Shut his eyes. "Do it now." Mulder was right. He had ten to twenty seconds before his pulse pumped the poison past his lowermost knuckle into the rest of his body. If she cut off his finger now he might live. Haniver unsheathed her knife. It was her big blade, made from a steel railroad spike, pounded flat and sharpened to a razor edge. Haniver gripped the handle and stared at Mulder's left hand, lying flat against the counter like a starfish. Raised the knife high above her head. Looked at Mulder. He looked back. For the smallest fraction of a second they shared an unspoken understanding, an understanding beyond words. "I'm sorry," Haniver said. Then she reared back and brought the glittering edge of the knife down on Mulder's finger as hard as she could. * * * Morning came and Quassapelagh strode through the abandoned Tirio village, the pale mist twining around his ankles. Nowadays he rarely spent much time in the village itself, choosing instead to hang a hammock in the jungle whenever he felt the need for sleep. His home had become depressing. He had built the houses with his own hands, cutting the reeds, bundling them together and raising them with pulleys to make the roofs; but today everything was falling apart, everything was crumbling, and Quassapelagh understood that he was too old to begin again. He had lived in a dozen countries and watched the sun rise from a thousand horizons, but the law of entropy held firm no matter where he went. Only old age could teach you that. You could create a semblance of order in your own life, but eventually it turned to dust. Even the forest would dissolve someday. But one thing would remain. The Mai d'agoa would outlast the jungle. It had been here since before the continents had shifted, since the time when South America and Africa had nestled snugly together; it would linger long after the face of the world had been remade again. He knew that now. He had seen the ribbon of light for the second time, and knew what would inevitably follow. But that didn't mean he couldn't stop it. Before, he had remained passive out of terror in the face of the unimaginable. Now Quassapelagh tired of waiting. He went into the storage hut, moved past the piles of wood, came at last to his bows and arrows. Took them gently down from the thatched roof. These bows were his pride and joy, carved from snakewood, glowing softly with beeswax and berry juice, trimmed with parrot feathers. He knew no other work of art that could move him so deeply. He selected the largest bow and set it aside for now. He chose his five best arrows, running his finger along the eagle feathers. You didn't use these for hunting pacas or tapirs. You saved them for larger things, special things. Like the jaguar. Or something else. He set the arrows next to the bow. Then he stood on his toes, reached behind the pile of unfinished canoes and felt around until he found the bamboo vial. It was about three inches long, sealed with a wooden plug. Squatting on the ground, he opened it -- and carefully let the contents spill out into his hands. Quassapelagh looked at the arrowheads for a long time. He didn't know why he was bringing the curare along. He doubted whether the poison would be of much use. But there were some things you couldn't explain. The traditional Tirio legend of the origin of curare had been whispered to him in the cradle; it stirred his blood in a way that only the earliest memories of his childhood could do. This was the legend: The first man in the world had loved a woman who could transform herself into all the creatures of the jungle. He married her, and she taught him the arts of making bread, and the secret of the arrow-poison. Anxious to test his new weapon, he went hunting and killed all the monkeys in the rain forest until only one was left; it begged him to spare its life but he slew it anyway; but when the monkey fell from the tree, he realized that it had been his wife. That was why curare was sacred. Everything it destroyed carried with it some buried ancestral memory of this lost love. It had taken Quassapelagh his entire life to understand that story. Mankind had once been married to the rain forest, had known the love that the natural world reserved for its own kind: but now man was a stranger here. Now love had turned to hate. He understood that now. Before, he had remained silent because he had believed that the ways of the forest should be respected even if that meant standing aside as men died and the Mai d'agoa awoke; but now he knew better. The forest was not his home. He no longer had a home. Thus it was with the sense of something irretrievably lost, with the bitterness of the man who takes his dead wife into his arms, that he went towards the river. He gripped his bow, tucked the bamboo vial of curare into the belt of his breechcloth. His canoe was ready in the tall grasses. In two or three hours he would be at the plantation. With luck, everyone there would still be alive. * * * End of (17/19) Date: 15 Jul 1999 07:30:19 GMT From: LoneGunGuy Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative The Tiger Complex (18/19) by LoneGunGuy http://members.aol.com/lonegunguy/x-files.html * * * The storm began around nine o'clock. The team was seated glumly together in the laboratory when Scully heard a light tap on the roof above; she looked up, heard another, and another. Rain was falling. A moment later the room filled with the soft murmur of droplets drumming against corrugated metal. She turned to the windows. Water splashed against the glass, leaving small starbursts and finally washing away the bodies of the tiger complex butterflies. Mulder sat next to her. His mutilated hand was beneath the edge of the table, out of sight. He kept it there because he didn't want to look at it. Scully had injected him with Lidocaine and the pain had diminished to a dull throbbing ache, but the sense of emptiness, of loss, was much worse. His hand was no longer his. Haniver had chopped his left index finger cleanly off. The bone had snapped like a pencil. Even through the pain he had seen that piece of himself lying there impotently on the table and almost screamed: the nail needed to be trimmed, he had thought in a daze, but now it was only a scrap of flesh. He only had three fingers left. Scully had bandaged him as well as she could, but it couldn't disguise that primary fact. His left hand was narrow, like the hand of an alien. But at least he was alive. "There's still a chance for replantation," Scully had said, taking the finger and wrapping it in plastic and packing it in sterile ice. But she was shaking badly. She tried to smile. "Oh God, Mulder -- you really had me going for a second." "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I know." Doyle was mopping up the blood -- it seemed to have spilled everywhere. He shook his head. "Shit. I've got to tell you, Mulder, that was the gutsiest thing I've ever seen. That's a story I'm going to be telling to my fucking grandkids." "This will all make a good story someday," said Haniver. She put an arm around Mulder's shoulders, just held him like that for a long time, as if she were trying to draw some of his pain into her body. But Mulder only sat in silence, feeling the dizzying agony bleed away bit by bit. He thought about how it could have been worse, a lot worse. But it didn't do much good. Now, as the rain began to fall, he brought his left hand from underneath the table and examined it. It was bound in gauze, surgical tape. His index finger had an itch on the knuckle of its first joint, even though he no longer had an index finger. "Fuck," he said. Baker closed his eyes, listening to the rain. "All right. We need to suit up and get out of here as soon as we can. There's no telling how long this storm will last." They rose. It took Mulder a second to pull himself together for the trial ahead but finally he joined the others, struggling to get his suit onto his body with only one good hand. Scully and Baker quietly helped him dress, attaching his respirator and tugging on his gloves. The left glove didn't fit very well. The first finger hung abnormally loose, like an empty egg sac. Mulder toyed with it with something like horrified fascination. And then they were ready to go. The five remaining team members stared at one another, standing there in the middle of the room in their bulky yellow spacesuits, each breath heightened and deepened by the hiss of the respirators. Far above them, the rain continued to fall. Somewhere outside there lurked a death that none of them wished to imagine: but there was no denying it. They were in the killing jar. All that remained was to step into the abyss and accept whatever came. Baker thought about the weight of the dead men in his arms. Haniver remembered her own tears. Scully flashed back to the moment when she'd realized that Mulder had been poisoned. And Doyle saw the face of Joan of Arc. "Goddamn," Mulder said finally. "We've all got to die sometime. Let's give it a shot." They went outside. * * * The sky was the color of burnished iron. The rain came down hard, pounding and pulverizing the soil into a kind of thin gravelly clay; beyond the sound of raindrops not a whisper arose from the jungle, as if all nature had withdrawn to observe the coming drama in silence. Baker led the way, the others following behind him in single file. His boots left waffle-shaped depressions in the wet dust. His biosuit was still filthy with grime and insect blood; the water made the ichor run again, dripping in black streaks and rivulets along his arms. After him came Mulder, Scully, Doyle and finally Haniver. They each carried one parcel or knapsack. They trudged down the gravel path, isolated from each other by their thick rubber cocoons. The gate. Baker spun the dial of the padlock and pulled it open, unwound the heavy chain. Took a breath. Beyond this fence was the jungle and a half-mile walk between them and the river. He tugged on the gate; it swung easily open until the way to death or safety stood unbarred before them. The others filed out one by one. Baker waited until they were all outside the plantation; then he turned, took the chain and relocked the gate. He didn't know why. Walking beneath the trees was like moving through the belly of a beast. The canopy took the rain and sluiced it and made it run trembling down the veins of broad leaves, drop by drop, like bile or the fierce acids of the stomach. Every trunk was overgrown with life. Mulder's heart was pounding. The stump of his missing finger had taken on the vague soreness of a pulled tooth, and it seemed to pulsate inward and outward with every beat. Mulder saw a flash of orange on his right. Turning, he felt a heady jolt of fear -- it seemed like the jackhammer blows of his pulse would burst through the bandages on his left hand and fill his glove with blood -- before realizing that it was only one of the plastic flags, marking the spot where someone had died. "Shit," Mulder said. He suddenly perceived how close to the edge he was. He had been holding himself together with brute willpower, but if he relaxed or allowed anything to invade his senses everything would fly apart, everything would collapse. As if losing a finger had opened a spigot through which his courage and strength could drain away, flowing out in a mad rush if he didn't keep everything under tight control. Even the snap of a twig could undo him. He kept playing it over and over again in his head. The sharp pain of the bite. The knowledge that he was going to die. For all he knew, he was the only one to ever have been bitten by these insects -- to have felt the poison in his veins -- and survived. It made him feel like he knew them somehow. He had been tainted and had cut out the impurity. But a trace remained. It put fear into his heart. He wished that he could have that pain again, the unbelievable pain of knife cutting into bone, just so he could nourish it and use it against the fear. The ground in front of him was slippery and damp. He kept his eyes on that. Baker walked a few steps ahead of him, his boots encrusted with dirt. They had already gone maybe a hundred yards. He could hear Scully behind him, struggling to keep up on -- he smiled -- on her little legs. If he'd ever said that to her out loud, she would have taken the knife and sliced off something else for free. In the air, a lone bird screamed and was silent. Another hundred yards. Inside his biosuit, Mulder was soaked with sweat. His shirt felt like a membrane, a loose second skin, adhering wetly to his back. Behind him the plantation was already gone, swallowed up by the trees. Now they were completely surrounded by the jungle, a line of yellow ants weaving its way through the rain. He slipped on the slick mud. Another hundred yards and they were almost halfway there. He glanced over his shoulder at Scully, caught her eye, saw her trying for a smile but not managing it. Not quite. Another hundred yards and they had passed the midway point. They were going to make it. Mulder felt a flood of crazy hope. He thought he could see the thin dark line of the river in the distance. Then the rain stopped. One moment it was coming down in a torrent; the next, and it was over. The drops slackened off so quickly that none of them had any time to realize what was happening. But the rattle of water against their hoods was gone. At once the forest went completely quiet; the sound of a falling pebble would have cut through the air like a bullet. The hush felt sacred, like the inside of a church. "Fuck." Doyle's voice was solemn. His eyes flicked uneasily from side to side. "I knew this would happen." "Now we need to hurry," said Baker. "It's not too much farther. We can make it. Come on." He waved them ahead and the others began to move again, to move as quickly as the respirators and suits would allow. The only noise was the soft gritting of soil beneath their feet as they pressed forward through the rain forest. None of them spoke. This was the final stretch and they all knew it. But if the butterflies found them again, no one would escape. The suits were designed to prevent contamination from gas or microbes, not to withstand a frenzied attack from a hundred thousand insects; Mulder knew that his suit probably wouldn't survive a second assault. One breach was all it would take. One rip. He lowered his head and continued onward. Running was impossible within the protective outfit but he pushed himself as far as he could go, his bruised head pounding from thirst and exhaustion. "Goddammit," he said to himself. "Just another thousand feet. That's all you need -- " Mulder collided with Baker, almost knocking him down. The other man had stopped dead-still in front of him. He reeled backwards, teeth clicking together painfully -- and then Scully ran into both them, with Doyle and Haniver just barely managing to avoid the same jam as the entire team skidded to a halt. Baker didn't seem to notice. He was staring into the jungle at something that only he could see. Mulder was about to ask what the matter was when he saw it too. Before them stood a majestic ceiba tree. It was perhaps one hundred feet tall, gray trunk rising smoothly and powerfully from buttressed roots. The crown was broad and flat. The thick horizontal branches radiated out like the spokes of umbrella, draped with mosses and fungi. An orange cross had been painted on the trunk. Mulder went numb. He had seen Baker make this cross himself, using a can of spray-paint to mark the place were Kovac had died. This was the same tree. He looked down, half- expecting to see the body lying at his feet, eaten away by the insects. But that was impossible. Kovac had gone towards the Andes glow, away from the river. He had died on the other side of the jungle. It couldn't be the same tree. Except that it was. Mulder reached out with his good hand, touched the shiny trunk, felt the pebbly texture through his glove. He turned to Baker. "What the hell is going on here?" "I don't know." Baker craned his neck back, straining to see to the uppermost branches. He had forgotten about the butterflies. A strange kind of vertigo had taken hold of him, a disorientation, as if the entire jungle had been moved counterclockwise while they slept. This wasn't right. Kovac had died beneath this tree. He was sure of it. But now it was in the wrong part of the rain forest. He ran his hands across the bark, as if to reassure himself that it wasn't some kind of optical illusion. Pushed. It seemed firm. Baker looked at the orange X, asked himself whether it could have been painted here by someone else, or if he could have done it himself and forgotten about it. But no matter how he tried, he couldn't accept any other explanation. It was the same fucking tree. "Um, hello," said Doyle. "Would someone explain what this is all about?" Mulder didn't reply. Something stirred in the back of his mind as he looked at the ceiba tree. The pain in his hand was gone. He allowed his eyes to slowly travel up the trunk, moving past the cross to the knotted mosses and lichens clinging in places, the hanging lianas. The sensuous bark itself. As his gaze continued upward his fear increased. He knew what he was going to see. He had always known. The terror grew -- he wanted to stop, to shut his eyes and turn away and flee the rain forest in ignorance of this last monumental secret -- but still his gaze moved upward, controlled by something outside his own body, outside even his own will. He looked on like a man who was damned. He looked. The tree looked back. Mulder's mind splintered as the final piece of the puzzle fell annihilatingly into place. He stumbled backwards. The earth began to tremble. Around him the others stood frozen with shock as an obscene cracking and crumbling sound filled the air, the sound of joints creaking and unfolding and unfurling themselves. The bark of the tree rippled. A seam appeared along the trunk. It split open. Mulder saw it happen -- saw the raw white cambium of the wood expose itself in an incoherent shriek of snapping tendons as the tree turned itself inside out, its thin gray skin sloughing away. The branches came down. They tore themselves out of the canopy. A hail of broken leaves and funguses and vines cascaded down like bits of flesh as the branches of the tree extended and stretched themselves, but they weren't branches anymore, they were -- "Run," Mulder said. "Run!" He turned and pushed the others back. The spell broke. Baker and Doyle tripped over their own legs and went down and kept going anyway, crouch-shambling away on all fours. Haniver followed, unable to take her eyes from what they had thought was a tree. She remembered the bird. The fucking bird in the copal trees. It had looked like a pruned branch. It was the way of the rain forest. Everything was camouflaged and disguised and hidden, everything pretended to be something else, and you thought you had broken through the final level of deception until the ground itself gave way beneath your feet. Until the truth itself didn't mean the same thing anymore. Until -- "No," she said. The Mai d'agoa pulled its roots out of the soil. The roots were segmented legs. It flapped its branches. The branches were wings. Mulder could feel the hot breeze on his face as the heavy pinions beat twice and rent the air around him with an unholy roar of self- awareness, of awakening, of resurrection. The wings were mossy and encrusted with brown filth, like the wings of a cryptic butterfly. They were enormous. They were the size of sails. He remembered the satellite photos. The shimmering blur of darkness that had been captured in the sky above the plantation. "Oh God," said Mulder. He understood. He understood everything. There was an agony like the hell of being born. The creature towering above them writhed and shivered like it would pull its own body apart, tear itself to shreds just to release itself from the maddening itch of metamorphosis; and inch by inch its head emerged from the pulsing core of the trunk. Its head was covered with slime. Its mouth was glued shut with it. Its head was triangular, the color of a healing burn, the dead scaly pinkness of a larva; then it opened its eyes and Mulder saw that they were huge compound eyes with hexagons of yellow and orange and black. The eyes were filled with fluid. They were set into the sides of its head like those of a fer-de-lance. It was the Mai d'agoa, oh God, it was the mother of the river -- his brain short-circuited -- the serpent and the tree and the butterfly welded together like lovers -- It rolled its eyes and lowered its head. Mulder had forgotten to run. He stood rooted to the spot, transfixed by the greatest sight he would ever see, staring up at the creature and not realizing until it was too late that it was staring back. It had seen him. It brought its head down until it was only a few feet away from his face. He could have extended his arm and touched the raw pink snout. Its face was a horrifying blend of the reptilian and the insectile. The head was the size of his entire body. The man and the dragon regarded one another for a long moment. Mulder was beyond fear. He might have been a worm beneath a microscope or a scrap of protoplasm for all the terror he felt. Or a blade of grass about to be torn. His last thought was that it had all been a con game. Then the Mai d'agoa opened its mouth and screamed -- -- and a flood of butterflies poured from its throat. The pressure took Mulder off his feet and hurled him to the ground. There was a loud snap and sudden searing pain shot up and down his arm; he'd broken his wrist, he'd broken his fucking wrist. The butterflies were hot and brittle and they crowded across his body searching for a place to bite. Mulder tried to brush them away but he couldn't. There were too many. The insects covered his faceplace so that he couldn't see anything except for the squirming layers of bugs, their eyes still glittering with the inferno that had forged them deep within the Mai d'agoa. Antibodies. The butterflies were its immune system and he was the virus. His suit was about to give. Someone grabbed him beneath the arms. He felt himself being pulled away. The butterflies clung to him like coral but the other hands fought them off, took big fistfuls and crushed them and tried to keep more from landing. But the air was packed solid. He was dragged another dozen yards and left on the ground. Then someone climbed onto him, covering him, shielding him one body against another. "Scully," he croaked. "Mulder," she said. She was lying on top of him, her faceplace pressed against his. "It's okay, we're going to make it." But she was too heavy. The butterflies were pressing down on top of them both. Beneath him Mulder felt the earth shake and he knew that the it was moving, that the great serpent was coming to destroy the two of them. Like bugs. He took her hand into his and prayed. He didn't know where the others were. Perhaps they had made it to the river. Scully was speaking. "We need to keep moving. Mulder, listen to me. We -- " She broke off. Mulder felt her raise her head. "What is it?" he asked. "What's going on?" Scully didn't reply. She didn't know how to describe it herself. * * * Quassapelagh stood there alone, staring at the Mai d'agoa. He tried to take it all in -- to grasp the creature as a whole -- but his mind couldn't fit around it. He only had an impression of enormous size and infinite age, a great crashing through the trees, the huge maw of the beast breathing a fire that was not fire. The Mai d'agoa dragged itself across the ground, its spindly legs weak beneath the bulk of wings and body. Tiger complex butterflies trickled from its mouth. It had not seen him. It was headed towards the others. Two of them had fallen to the ground only a few paces ahead -- they would be crushed within seconds -- and the rest were running towards the river. The insects would overtake them soon. Unless he acted first. He could attack the creature, distract it and buy them enough time to escape. But then the butterflies would be after him. They would overwhelm him and bite him and kill him before he had a chance to flee. He understood what that meant. He had seen the bodies that Baker had brought to the village. He knew that the breath of the Mai d'agoa brought pain like no man had ever felt or could ever imagine. He was not afraid of death, but he was afraid of that pain. There was only one thing Quassapelagh could do. In the end, the decision was surprisingly easy. Taking the bamboo vial from his belt, he removed the cap, shook out an arrowhead covered with curare. Planted it on the end of a shaft. Then he closed his eyes and plunged the arrow into his arm. The sting was no worse than a pinprick. He withdrew the arrow, saw it reddened with his own blood. The poison was in his system. He had perhaps two good minutes remaining. Perfect. Quassapelagh began to hunt. The Mai d'agoa was only one hundred feet away but he proceeded as if he had all the time in the world, arrow notched and at the ready, moving in a arc beneath the trees as he searched for the right place. The beast of mystery towered before him and he hunted it like a paca. He was not insensitive to the irony of the situation. The dragon was moving. It looked like part of the jungle had uprooted itself and was crawling slowly along the ground, higher than the tallest tree, more gigantic than the mountains themselves. The dragon had branches for claws. The mossy bulk of its body blotted out the sun and plunged the earth beneath it into shadow. Darkness covered the man and woman lying on the ground. One more second and it would be on them. There was no room for mistakes. He noted it. Measured the distance. Aimed carefully, almost intuitively, at that mystical point where the beast's life sparkled like a jewel: and loosed his arrow. It flew one hundred feet in blur of eagle feathers and buried itself in the eye of the Mai d'agoa. The eye collapsed like a balloon. A thick noxious fluid began to pour out in a mess of jellied humors. The dragon turned to face him and screamed, a scream that shook the treetops and blasted the clouds into atoms. The butterflies detached themselves. They were coming for him. He did not move. He faced the others and waved them away, waved them towards the riverside. "Go," he said, staring down the oncoming rush of insects. "Go now." It was a moment before the others saw what had happened. They had been scattered by the attack and were standing or lying dazed beneath the trees but at last they rose, collecting themselves, running in the direction of the waters. Baker was the last to go. Quassapelagh recognized the big man within the suit, saw him hesitate. He knew that Baker would find this difficult to accept. He raised his hand in a gesture of farewell. The message was clear. For every life there was a pattern, and from that pattern came magic and prophecy: but from this pattern came the possibility of acceptance as well. The cubs in the jaguar's belly were a part of the pattern. So was this. Baker understood. He turned around and headed to the river with the others. Only then did Quassapelagh run. He ran as quickly as he could, his brown legs scissoring powerfully. The butterflies were close behind him. He could hear the immense sound of the Mai d'agoa crashing through the jungle. Its wings stirred a warm wind against his back. The poison was working. Quassapelagh pressed onward, feet growing heavy as they kicked up the dust, his muscles relaxing, turning to stone. He could feel it but he kept running and fought the numbness and the paralysis as long as he could, fought it like an enemy, his heart fierce and full of pride. He fell, managed to get back up. Then he fell again and was unable to rise for a second time. There was a place, he thought, where there was no darkness and no suspicion and everything was made of light. Quassapelagh smiled, and discovered that he could no longer breathe. With the last strength he possessed he took handfuls of the soil and clutched the earth tightly to himself. He asked for forgiveness. Perhaps he received it. By the time the butterflies arrived and the great shadow of the Mai d'agoa fell across his inert body, the old Tirio was already dead. * * * End of (18/19) Date: 15 Jul 1999 07:31:50 GMT From: LoneGunGuy Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative The Tiger Complex (19/19) by LoneGunGuy http://members.aol.com/lonegunguy/x-files.html * * * "We are blind until the hour of our death," Baker said. "The Mayans understood this. Their mythology speaks of a great ceiba tree that stretches between heaven and earth, its branches encrusted with stars. When the soul departs from the body, it clings to the trunk of this tree and climbs into the garden of the sky, where it feeds on starlight and understands for the first time the nature of its life." Baker sat on the weathered stump in the middle of the jungle. This was the place where Quassapelagh had butchered the jaguar, its unborn cubs tumbling to the ground as its womb was opened and the flesh was sliced from its body. Mulder sat next to him, his broken arm in a sling. The toe of his boot traced idle patterns in the dust. It was almost two o'clock, and the air was green with sunlight. "And what happens after that?" asked Mulder. "After what?" "After the soul understands the nature of its life." Baker placed his hand on the decaying wood of the stump. "Probably it blasts itself into oblivion," he said. "I don't think anyone can make that kind of discovery and survive." Mulder did not respond. The memory of their escape still haunted him. The river had brought them away from the butterflies, their canoe hurtling through the current as the air behind them quaked from the thunder of monumental wings. He had squeezed his eyes shut, afraid that he might look around and see some great darkened shape screaming across the morning sky; but it had not pursued them. They had ridden the river all the way down to the Tirio village and dragged their boats onto the shore. He had only watched, unable to help. Inside the hood of his biosuit, his hair had been standing on end. And so the nightmare had drawn to a close. There were times when Mulder could look around at the sharp, savage clarity of the afternoon light and almost convince himself that it had all been a dream, some strange hallucination brought on by suspicion and fear and the dark spell of the rain forest. But his left index finger was still gone. He had begun to accept that it was gone forever. There would be no replantation; it had been too long, and the cells of that severed scrap of skin and bone were dying one by one. Mulder reconciled himself to the loss. In Washington he would buy a burial plot and return the scrap to the earth, in accordance with Jewish law, committing it to the same soil that would one day hold his own remains. Once he had wished for a peg leg, somehow believing that to live with such a disability would make it enough to simply endure, to get up each morning and face the struggle of one's life. As he looked at the bandaged stump of his finger, he wondered whether he had been right. The next thirty years would determine it either way, he thought: and the sense of loss returned to overwhelm him again. After the five survivors had returned to the deserted village and removed their biosuits and vomited fear into the dust, they had gathered together and talked for more than an hour. There had been only one topic of discussion, although they did not refer to it by name. "I think it remains rooted in the same spot," Mulder had said, "for months or years or even centuries, until something forces it to assume its true form. It isn't so strange. A bird mimics the stump of a dead branch, and a moth can resemble a worm- eaten leaf. Natural selection works in mysterious ways. Maybe this was the logical conclusion...." Scully had shuddered, even though the air was sweltering. "And the butterflies?" "The butterflies were its immune system." But there was more. Only at the very end, as he looked into the eyes of the beast, had Mulder made the final connection. "The insects we found on the copal trees were a part of it, too," he had said, his voice surprisingly calm and coherent, as if explaining these things worked as an incantation against the fear: "It must generate different kinds of butterflies within itself, in the same way that our bodies can produce lymphocytes and phagocytes and red blood cells...." Doyle had understood. "This is how it feeds." "Exactly." Mulder's voice had trembled from the force of discovery. "The butterflies are released to lay eggs on plants like the copal trees. The caterpillars hatch and consume plant material, then metamorphose and return to be reabsorbed by the parent. When we interrupted the cycle by killing the butterflies, we triggered an immune response. The Andes glow was an electrical byproduct of that process. But when the tiger complex butterflies failed to stop the intrusion, the parent was forced to take drastic measures." "It attacked the compound." "Yes." Haniver had been skeptical. "But -- but how could a creature like this come into being?" Silence...and then Baker had reached into his pocket and removed a plastic envelope. Inside had been the butterfly that had been clutched in the hand of the uakari, mangled and crumpled but still recognizable. He had looked into its alien red eyes and reflected that when you examined it closely, the tiny head was not unlike that of a fer-de-lance. "I think the Mai d'agoa was once a butterfly like this," he had said. "Seventy million years might be long enough to produce such a transformation. We always pretend to understand nature," Baker had concluded. "But it has a more extravagant imagination than any of us can ever comprehend." Now the others joined them at the stump. Haniver's face was grim. "We just managed to make radio contact with Paramaribo," she said, as Scully and Doyle followed behind. "The military has control of the city. We won't be able to leave until Aquino comes to take over the plantation." "And what happens when he gets here?" asked Mulder. "I don't know," she said. Mulder wondered what she was thinking. He knew that she had taken specimens of the tiger complex butterflies and sealed them inside a plastic bag and taped them between her shoulders, secure from any searches that Aquino might attempt on his arrival. The butterflies were fixed to the exact place on her back where, if Haniver had been an angel, wings might have sprouted. He leaned against the stump and studied the faces of the others. It was enough to have survived, he realized. Even if you only caught a glimpse of the truth, even if the mystery remained intact, it was enough to have seen beneath the mask, if only for a second. You could find it in a tree, or in a crypt, or in the face of a woman who had been dead for fifty years. You didn't need to know the future. The darkness beneath the branches was what counted, and the foaming current of the river, and the rhythm of wings against the sky. Scully was looking at him strangely. "What is it?" he asked. "You're smiling." "Am I?" Mulder realized that he was. He reached out and took Scully's hand in his own ruined grip. * * * Silence in the rain forest after they had departed. Wind stirred the trees and the thick vines swayed like pendulums, although no one was left to count the seconds. A tinamou moved along the ground, pecking at the dirt for seeds and insects, its steps deliberate and clumsy. Its plumage was brown and gray and it looked very much like a speckled chicken as it plunged its beak into the dust and came up with a piece of fruit, or a beetle, or a spider. The tinamou found a centipede and flew onto the weathered stump to eat it. The bird bit the arthropod in halves and swallowed part of it whole, its beak pecking against the soft wood. The stump began to tremble beneath the tinamou's feet. Before it could react or fly away one of the roots had pulled itself out of the ground, seized the tinamou by the neck and crammed the bird into the black cavernous mouth that had opened in the fragrant bark. The mouth closed. There was a muffled squawk and the sound of crunching bones, and then the forest was silent again. A moment later, the stump uprooted itself completely and crawled off into the depths of the jungle, its segmented legs dragging against the earth. Presently it disappeared into the darkness. * * * THE END * * * Author's Note: "Now my suspicion's on the rise... I have known, I have known your kind" -- R.E.M., "Suspicion" This story was formally begun on May 2, 1997 and posted to a.t.x.c on July 14, 1999. Needless to say, writing was not continuous during the interim. Many thanks to Summer and Lisby, who read an earlier version of this novel and supplied many helpful comments and criticisms -- and who also provided the encouragement and support I needed to rescue this story from the round file and make it good. "The Tiger Complex" is dedicated to them. * * * End of (19/19)