Letters of Transit
By Loch Ness
lochness@mindspring.com
RATING:  NC-17

Introduction

It's 1999--"The Date" has come and gone, the "Project" is under
way, and deadly bees have been unleashed on North America. With the world
coming apart and people scrambling to get away from the swarm, Mulder
faces fateful decisions about his own role in events to come--and about
Scully.

Although I didn't read past the introduction of *A Notorious Affair* (I'm not
a Hitchcock fan), I must give a nod of thanks to Nicole Perry. About four
hours after I read that introduction, I suddenly had a very vivid mental
image of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson dressed up in those gorgeous
1930s-'40s movie clothes. And thus this was born. Only - call me crazy - I
ended up not putting them in those clothes, for the most part.

Although I regard this as a romantic piece, it's not an MSR in
the usual sense--our heroes don't ride off into the sunset locked in each
other's arms.

While I have the same reservations other fans do about the season four
conspiracy arc - a totally separate and distinct creature from the
conspiracy arc of the first three seasons - this particular story only
works in the context of season four's conspiracy. Consequently, this
probably won't make much sense to anyone who hasn't seen
*Tunguska/Terma*.

DISCLAIMER: This is intended as an homage, not a rip-off. These
characters and the X Files universe were created by and/or are the
property of Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen and Fox Broadcasting, all of whom
are smarter and richer than I. Likewise, all references express or
implied to the film *Casablanca,* screenplay by Julius J. Epstein,
Phillip G. Epstein and Howard Koch. No infringement is intended. Anybody
who sues me is wasting a lot of time and effort, because I'm broke and
this story is actually *costing* me money to produce.

***********************************************************************

Part 1

"I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the
problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this
crazy world." - Rick Blaine, *Casablanca*

July 17, 1999

As little as a month ago, the causeway across to Galveston Island would
have glittered like a string of Christmas lights in the night-time sky.
But that was before the bees had swarmed into Houston, and the lights had
gone out all along Interstate 45, including on the causeway.

The bridge was still passable. If one had the proper papers and a working
vehicle with sufficient fuel, one could still cross it in either
direction. But few people would want to go across to the mainland. The
bees were on the mainland. Getting to the island didn't guarantee safety,
either--there was no real safety to be had, not so close to the bees, not
within reach of the Special Emigration Bureau. But the bees had not been
seen in Galveston.

Not yet. And for now the concrete-and-steel roadway still loomed up out
of the water like the desiccated, twisted spine of a long-dead, giant
snake, standing out dully in the moonlight as Alex Krycek crept toward it
in the dark.

Krycek hadn't heard any reports of bees farther south than Clear Lake.
Still, he had taken no chances. He was wearing a black nylon wind-suit
with all its cuffs and openings carefully sealed with duct tape, leather
gloves, and a beekeeper's hood, also sealed with tape. The getup was
miserable in the midsummer heat of the Texas coast, but better to be
sweaty than to be hit with multiple, toxic bee stings. He couldn't afford
the delay in his mission he'd have if he got stung.

He drew his gun as he approached the darkened guard house at the end of
the causeway. One of the sentries stepped outside the hut and stood
there, his submachine gun shouldered, and glanced at his watch. Krycek
threw a glance inside. A second guard sat in in the hut,
eyes half-closed, nodding in the heavy evening heat. Drawing a long,
silent breath, Krycek set himself to his task.

He whipped around the edge of the hut and put two silenced rounds into
the chest of the standing guard, who gasped and fell, dead before he hit
the ground. The sentry inside died without ever waking up. Krycek took
the guard outside the hut by the feet and dragged him into the building,
dropped him untidily in the corner and left, the murders already
forgotten. Krycek never killed out of malice, and he never allowed
himself any remorse. He looked at his own watch--ten-oh-seven p.m. Right
on schedule.

He secured a rope harness to the bridge railing, careful to avoid the
strands of wire strung along the bridge, each wire attached to an
explosive charge underneath the roadway. The Galveston city fathers had
declared that if the bees reached as far south as Dickinson, about ten
miles to the north, the road would be destroyed to keep the bees from
being able to use it. The theory was that the bees couldn't fly far
enough to reach the island without landing on something--something like
the causeway--and that they would grow exhausted and drop into the sea
before they made it to the island. There was no real evidence to show it
was true.

Krycek made sure that the end of the rope hung near the Zodiac raft he
had tied under the causeway, then turned to wait for the convoy. It
didn't take long. After no more than ten minutes he felt more than heard
the approaching trucks coming across from the island--a low rumble
through the concrete he stood on. He smiled. They were punctual tonight,
too. This bunch was made up of "officials"--the city-sanctioned pirates
who drove up from Galveston to ravage Houston's wrecked, abandoned corpse
twice a week. Refugees fleeing Houston had taken a lot, had burned and
destroyed a lot. But there was still canned food in the city, stocks of
fuel and clothing, building materials and auto parts, with no police to
stop anyone from taking what he liked. At the outset of the bee invasion,
somebody had estimated that Galveston could live off Houston's remains
for two years. But that had not factored in that Galveston's population
would quadruple almost overnight as refugees fled to the island.

Refugees were still straggling in. The causeway from the mainland was
closed to all but the "officials" now, but escapees came by boat, by
raft, by every conceivable sort of aircraft--some just barely air- or
seaworthy.  Everybody who could get off the mainland was leaving. Their
numbers had begun to dwindle as the bees killed more and more who
couldn't escape fast enough--but refugees were coming nonetheless.

Krycek waited, hunkered down in the dark, as the convoy approached him.
The trucks ran without headlights to avoid drawing attention, but they
would stop at the barricades before the guard post. And though the men
driving the trucks were city "officials," he doubted they'd risk much to
interfere with him. Not even the local cops wasted any love on the feds.

Krycek didn't really care about the trucks. He was after the federal car
he knew would be traveling with them for the safety of numbers. A pouch
carried by the government courier in that car was his target. In the
pouch, Krycek knew there were two letters of transit signed by the
governor of Hawaii and by Lawrence Sherrill, director of the emigration
bureau. Sherrill, the almighty guru of escape from the country, who in
effect determined who would live and who would die. Letters of transit
were reserved for diplomats, and no local authorities could prevent
individuals carrying them from leaving the continental U.S. on any basis
whatever.

Oh, yeah--those letters were Alex Krycek's ticket to better latitudes.
He'd use one of them to get out himself and sell the other one for a fat
price. He'd ship out for the port of Tampico, Mexico, and from there to
Hawaii, which people said was safe from the bees.  He could do a lot
worse, he figured, than to be stuck for life in Honolulu.

The convoy pulled up at the barricades, the driver of the first truck
peering warily at the guards' hut. Staying low and in the shadows, Krycek
approached the federal car from the passenger side.

*Five bucks says the dumb cocksuckers are so arrogant they haven't
bothered to lock the doors,* he thought.

He was right. The door swung open when he pulled the handle, and before
the two men inside had time to register what was happening or shout, he
had put two more well-placed bullets into them. He heard the "officials"
in the trucks come toward him, but he didn't look up. He used a third
round to smash the handcuff lock on the courier's briefcase, then stood
up--hands in the air, the case in one hand and his gun in the other, held
loosely to indicate he was all done shooting.

He'd guessed right again. None of the "officials" wanted to drill him
just for offing a couple of feds. They stood there, warily, submachine
guns pointed at him, but as long as he made no move to harm any of them,
they weren't going to fire.

Krycek backed toward his rope harness, hands still up. When he reached
the railing, he shifted the gun to his other hand--the prosthesis--and
slid down the rope into his raft.

The "officials" never even looked over the side. As Krycek untied the
raft, he heard them drive off.

                                 ****

July 19, 1999

The Galveston airport was small, and like everything else on the island
had suffered considerably from lack of supplies with which to conduct
maintenance work. Paint peeled on the steel hangars, and most of the
aircraft crammed onto one end of the tarmac field, some wrecked or
dismantled and cannibalized for parts, would never fly again. Many had
never been intended to go any farther than the island, and in any case,
there wasn't much aviation gas to be had any more.

It was hot, the blinding Texas sun beating down like the rays in a
microwave oven and bouncing off the pavement in visible waves. Walter
Skinner, feeling slightly parboiled in his light gray suit, stood waiting
for a plane. Skinner had learned in the army that physical comfort was
not a thing to be taken lightly, and so he had found a patch of shade to
stand in, just inside an open, broken-down hangar. The hangar's windows
were mostly busted out, but no air moved inside the ramshackle building.
Just heat, and the faintly metallic scent of engine oil. He wondered what
had become of "ocean breezes." None blew this day, that was for damned
sure.

*Vietnam wasn't this fucking hot,* Skinner thought, though he was pretty
sure it had been. He'd just been younger, more resilient then. And it was
hard to care about the climate while dodging mortar shells.

Skinner hadn't intended to come to Galveston. The bureau's offices had
moved twice, farther south each time, to get away from the bees, ending
up in Miami. The swarm's entry into Florida had been ugly, people
reacting in panic because they were trapped between the sea and the
insects. Skinner didn't like thinking about it. He had lost four agents
in a riot, and the local cops had been even more decimated than that.
Things had gotten crazier and crazier until, in the pandemonium, only
about six of the twenty bureau staff in Miami had escaped.

Skinner had made it as far as New Orleans, and then had been dispatched
to Galveston after a visit from an older man smoking Morley cigarettes
and suddenly brandishing the omnipotent authority of the Special
Emigration Bureau. Then Skinner had arrived in Texas to find he had no
staff on the island, no offices, no nothing. He had commandeered and
deputized some local police officers, Old-West-style, by simply handing
them badges.

When Fox Mulder had appeared out of nowhere, like a revisit from a
nightmare long-forgotten, Skinner had offered to forgive his having gone
AWOL in Washington fourteen months earlier and put him back to work. And
Mulder had laughed.

An insane laugh that lived somewhere in the shadows between cynicism and
despair. Skinner hadn't asked again.

Anyway, Mulder would've been wasted on the sort of cases Skinner's bureau
was working now. Petty import violations and the occasional tax evasion
would've bored Mulder shitless, and Skinner suspected boredom just
would've made him unendurable. As it was, he and Mulder had established
an unspoken, uneasy truce. And besides, Mulder had taken up altogether a
different line of work these days.

There wasn't much left in the way of federal authority, except
for the heavily protected SEB, in its high-tech underground bunker in
Colorado. Hell, there was nothing left to administer on a national
level...except who got out of the nation and why, and where they went.
On Galveston Island, Walter Skinner was all the federal authority that
remained. And he liked it that way. He could call the shots here--for
once in his life, he had no need to check with somebody upstairs or
engage in petty internal politics or, worst of all, play two ends against
the middle, as it had always been in Washington.

The arrival of the smoking man might change all that, and all because
some son of a bitch had made a bloody mess of two federal couriers. Hell,
it hadn't even happened on the island, wasn't Skinner's problem, as he
figured it. Everybody knew going back to the mainland was a
risk--apparently somebody in the SEB had considered that sending the
couriers to the mainland was an *acceptable* risk.

But no. The smoking man was annoyed, and so the world would stop until he
was satisfied.

Finally Skinner heard the roar of jet engines overhead. The parties he
was waiting for were traveling first-class. Skinner had never known
exactly what agency, if any, the smoking man worked for. CIA? NSA? It had
been explained to Skinner, long ago, that he simply didn't need to know.
Neither had he ever known the man's real name.

But he knew the man, all too well. His arrival boded ill, and Skinner was
none too pleased to have him on the island.

Skinner approached the plane, a neat, white LearJet, as it taxied up to
the small, empty terminal. Before the plane had even completely stopped
moving, the door opened, dropping a short stairway that almost touched
the ground. And off stepped the smoking man, with an entourage of two
toadies in dark suits and dark glasses, radio earphone cords curling down
their necks, both of them lugging briefcases and computers. Skinner did
not have to check out the tailoring of their jackets to know they had
guns on their hips.

The smoking man paused long enough to cup his hand against the hot wind
stirred by the jet's engines while he rasped the wheel on his Zippo
lighter. His heavily lined face sagged briefly as he bent to light his
Morley. When he straightened, he blew a plume of smoke and got right to
the point.

"I want those papers back," he said bluntly, as they headed toward
Skinner's waiting car. "The classified material the couriers were
transporting when they got hit."

"The letters of transit?" Skinner said coolly. *What did you think, that
I wouldn't bother trying to find out what they were carrying?*

The smoking man's dark eyes narrowed. "Efficient as ever," he said
softly, the words coated with menace. "Do you know who took them?"

"Yes. But in your honor, I rounded up twice the usual number of
snitches," Skinner said, unable to resist the temptation to aggravate the
smoker.

The wry humor seemed lost on the other man. "Who?" he demanded.

"Old friend of yours. Alex Krycek."

The smoking man hesitated, then chuckled. "*That* son of a bitch," he
murmured. "He's had it coming for a long time."

On this point, at least, Skinner agreed. He had a score to settle with
Krycek himself, but the little rat was clever. Even in the confined space
of the island, Krycek had eluded arrest. But Skinner had him, now.

"What's your plan?" the smoking man asked.

"If he means to sell the letters, there's only one place he'll go.  We'll
get him there, at the Casablanca Club."

The smoking man held a silence for a moment. "Mulder's place," he said
finally.

"Yes."

"Your boy Mulder has an appreciation of history," the smoker said.

"He's not 'my boy' anymore. And the Casablanca Club is about money, not
history. He's making a mint, and technically, it's all legal. Nobody can
touch him."

"Have you ever seen *Casablanca*, Mr. Skinner?"

He shrugged. "Not in years. I don't really remember much of it."

The smoking man nodded. "Mulder does."

He dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it out with his
foot. "As long as he's still legal, you might tell him for me that it's a
dangerous fantasy."

Skinner had no idea what he was talking about. The smoking man got in the
car, then looked up at Skinner just before he shut the door.

"Mulder's got more lives than a fucking cat," the smoking man said. "But
he's about used them up. And *Casablanca*--that fantasy's liable to get
him killed."

***********************************************************************

Part 2

July 19, 1999
New Orleans, La.

The bees were moving in from the east, along the coast from Mississippi.
There'd been two deaths in Biloxi the day before yesterday, and if the
swarm kept up its usual pace, no one would be left alive there by
tomorrow. The Interstate 10 bridge across Lake Pontchartrain was closed,
and the city was talking of closing the toll road from Chinchuba to
Metairie.

It was oppressively hot, and afternoon monsoon rains threatened from the
west. Dark gray clouds, rimmed with snowy white, prickled with lightning.
But in New Orleans itself the air hung motionless, heavy and damp as a
wet towel.

Dana Scully lifted her auburn hair off the back of her neck wearily,
gathered it into a thick hank and twisted a rubber band around it to hold
it off her skin. The power company turned the electricity off at six
every evening to conserve fuel--only an hour later the tiny apartment she
shared with Special Agent Ted Pendrell was unbearably stuffy. Scully
opened windows to set up a cross-wind through the apartment. Rain would
be welcome tonight; it would cool things off at least a little. It was
still light enough to work, though the charge in her laptop would only
hold out for about four hours.

She opened the computer and turned it on. She wanted the projections, the
elaborate plots of the bees' spread that she had so carefully charted.
She guessed they'd reach New Orleans within a few days, but she wanted to
be sure before having to be uprooted. Scully and Pendrell had been
working to develop an antivenin to the bee stings for nearly two years
now, but it seemed every time they made a little progress, they had to
move again. It didn't set them back completely, but it was disruptive,
and it had slowed down the work. Scully was hoping the computer would
tell her they could put off another move for a week or so.

A peal of thunder sounded, so close it startled her. Her hand jumped, and
when she looked at the computer screen, what was coming up was her old
Eudora Light e-mail program. She hadn't used e-mail in more than a year.
The delicate network that had been the Internet had come apart quickly
after the bees had arrived.

Eudora had launched before she collected herself sufficiently to cancel
it, then a gray dialogue box appeared. "Error getting network address for
'pop.fbi.gov,'" the computer reported. "Cause: requested entry not found
(11004)." Scully clicked "OK," and the dialogue box disappeared. She
blinked. What was left open after she closed the dialogue box was a
mailbox she had labeled "Mulder," in a time that now seemed a million
years in the past.

Her heart thudded hard. There was one message sitting in the queue from
"fwmulder@fbi.gov," with a subject line that read "Lunch on Thursday?"
She didn't click on it. That was a very old wound, one she dared not
reopen. Besides, she didn't have to read it--it might as well have been
engraved on her brain.

*How about Casper's, around 11?*

It hadn't been about lunch at all. It had been Mulder's own weird code,
telling her that if he hadn't made it back to D.C. by Thursday, she
should leave without him. The bees had come into Washington that morning,
and Mulder hadn't showed. She almost hadn't gotten out of the city
herself. She had driven out of Washington at a crawl because the bees had
swarmed so thickly around her car that even flailing windshield wipers
couldn't sweep them off quickly enough for her to see well through it.
She had closed all the vents, terrified that somehow one would get
into the car. She had pulled over at an abandoned automatic car wash in
Fredericksburg, Va., and had run the car through the steamy water five
times to wash them all off.

Then she had doused herself with gasoline from a can she'd been keeping
on the floor of the front seat and run like a mad thing away from the
car, in a panic, afraid that some of the bees would have lived through
the car wash and would come after her.

She didn't know what had happened to Mulder. She was sure that if he had
survived, he would have tried to contact her. He would've found her.
Bloodhound to the bone, that was Mulder--if it had been humanly possible
for him to rejoin her, he would have. But he hadn't come to her.

That meant it had not been humanly possible for him to rejoin her.
Because he had gone to Connecticut to get his mother. Because he had gone
where the bees were.

Because he was dead.

Mulder--fearless, reckless, quixotic, charismatic.

Dead.

Scully knew the kind of torture the bees inflicted before they took their
victims. In the two years since the swarm had reached Washington, she had
never been able to picture him like the bodies she had examined. Her mind
simply would not yield that picture, the muscles torn and the bones
broken from the agonizing spasms induced by the bees' venom. The tongue
and throat hideously swollen, the black film on the eyes. She
couldn't--wouldn't--see him like that. She still saw Mulder in her mind's
eye as clearly as if he were standing right before her, intensely alive.
The fine, full mouth, the long, straight limbs. An unmistakable, almost
feline fluidity in his motions. Clear hazel eyes, alternately bright
green or deep brown, the colors of Druids and magical forests. And the
last time they'd been together, finally, the warm, slightly salty taste
of his mouth on hers.

Lightning flared outside, and Scully started again. She drew a long
breath to steady herself. What was she thinking? Druids? Well, that at
least was a metaphor Mulder himself would have appreciated.

*He's gone,* she told herself, and much had changed since then. Nearly
everything had changed, in fact.

The nature of her work, for one--she was still doing pathology, but not
to solve crimes or determine what had killed people. She knew what had
killed the people whose bodies she examined now: the bee stings. The only
question was whether their experimental antivenin formulas had changed
anything at all, whether it had had any effect.

And though she was, technically at least, still a sworn law officer, the
FBI hardly existed any more. Neither she nor Pendrell had drawn a
paycheck from the U.S. government in nearly a year. They were living off
their combined savings and what little she could make working at the
nearby hospital. She'd felt strange, at first, treating the living again
after so long, but she'd gotten used to it.

Then there was the biggest change--she and Pendrell. Mulder's
disappearance had hit her hard, but she'd had no time to dwell on it. And
every time she had lifted her head and looked around, there'd been Ted
Pendrell. He'd been a great comfort to her, keeping her focused on her
work, on what there might be left to save. Working so closely with him,
she had developed a real affection for him. And so, when he had proposed
to her, she hadn't been able to think of a reason to turn him down. He
was a good man. She wasn't happy with her life--these days, hell, who
was?--but she was content.

She wondered whether she would've been content with Mulder. No way to
know. Not now.

She exited out of Eudora. She clicked on the folder that contained her
projection program and began typing in the newest reports of bee
activity.

The program was still running when she heard the front door open. "God,"
Pendrell's voice called, "how can you be working in this heat?"

She smiled up at him as he came in and kissed her forehead lightly. "It's
not as bad now as it was before I opened the windows," she said.

He sat at the table beside her, then noticed something lying next to the
computer and picked it up. Her wedding ring, the plain gold band he had
put on her hand six months ago.

"You're going to lose that," he complained good-naturedly.

"I can't type with it on," she said. "It gets in my way. And I won't lose
it. Anything new?" She suspected there was good news tonight--he was in a
playful spirit; she could see it in his eyes.

"I think we're close, Dana, really close. One of the test cases from
Hattiesburg is still alive, and the other two at least died peacefully."

"No spasms?"

"No."

She frowned, thinking hard. "I'm still not convinced we have the dosage
right," she said. She glanced back at the computer screen and drew a
sharp breath. "Oh, my God," she said.

"What is it?"

"I don't think we're going to be able to wait for the test case from
Hattiesburg."

The computer projection showed the bees would reach the outskirts of New
Orleans in less than forty-eight hours.

Pendrell sighed heavily in resignation. "Where do we go now?" he asked.

"Galveston," Scully said. "There's still one ship that sails for Mexico
once a week."

He inclined his head, his look skeptical. "We need lab equipment--we
can't take everything with us. And we haven't got much money left. How
are we going to arrange that in Mexico? The exchange rate'll kill us."

"We'll have to find a way across to California. We can't go straight
west--the bees have already cleaned out Houston. It was drier there; they
made good time on their way south."

"So we can't go by land," he said.

"No. We go by sea."

                                 ****

July 20, 1999

Scully had planned their escape from New Orleans well in advance, knowing
the bees would drive them out eventually and wanting to be ready when the
time came. She had hidden the twelve-foot power boat, the same one they
had used to get out of Miami with A.D. Skinner and four other agents, in
a dark branch off a bayou well to the west of the city. She had kept the
gas tank empty and the engine partly dismantled to discourage anyone who
accidentally happened on the boat from stealing it.

There wasn't much in the apartment that was worth taking with them, and
in any case, they needed the space in the boat for the lab samples and
what equipment they could take. All she had to pack was a little
clothing, a little food, bottled water. She had calculated the trip would
take them a good eighteen hours if they could make thirty miles an hour
during the night, if the weather held and the sea wasn't too rough. She
would hug the coastline as much as she could--the boat wasn't really
designed for the open sea, and if they wandered too far out they would
attract the unwelcome attention of a U.N. blockade standing off the coast
to keep escapees from carrying the bees to other nations.

The sun had dipped toward the horizon. Scully made a last sweep of the
apartment, making sure she hadn't overlooked anything. As she turned
through the kitchen, out of the corner of her eye she noticed a man
standing in the shadows between two old storefront buildings across the
narrow street. Powerfully built, he had light brown hair and dark eyes.
He was looking straight at her, and when he noticed her looking back at
him, he turned away and stepped farther back into the darkness.

Scully froze. She'd seen that man before, earlier in the day, when she
had gone to the lab. He had been lounging in front of the closed-up
convenience store, reading a newspaper. She hadn't thought anything of it
at the time--there were a lot of people in New Orleans these days who
didn't have much to do but lounge around. But every fiber of her now
screamed that this man wasn't watching her because he had too much time
on his hands.

She left the two small suitcases where they were on the floor beside the
front door and slipped downstairs, out the back of her building, circled
around through the alley to come up behind him. She reminded herself that
she had to conserve ammunition. After Miami she had only two magazines
left for her service weapon. But when she got to where the strange man
had been standing, he was gone.

"Dammit," she murmured. Whatever he was up to, it looked like he was
getting away with it. God, what if he had drawn her off so that he could
break into the apartment? Suddenly fearful for what few possessions
remained to them, she hurried back upstairs. But nothing had been
touched.

She sighed heavily, holstered her gun again, then picked up the cases and
headed for the lab, locking the door behind her for the last time.

Pendrell was waiting for her, sitting on the big case he used to carry
the microscopes. "I was starting to worry," he said, his voice ringing
with relief.

"There was somebody outside the apartment. I don't think he was just
hanging in the 'hood."

Pendrell had never been a field agent; it took him a moment to get it.
Then he frowned and asked, "What do you think?"

"I'm not sure what to think, but the sooner we're away from here, the
happier I'll be. Let's go."

They finished loading the car. "How much gas have we got left?" she
asked.

"About half a tank. Just enough."

She nodded and got in, and they were off.

They could only drive to within about a quarter mile of the boat. Beyond
that, it was back into the thick trees that lined the bayou. Rooting
around in the bush, Pendrell found the sledge he had used to unload the
boat when they had first arrived from Miami, and they hefted the
suitcases and lab equipment onto it before setting off into the forest.
Scully pulled her flashlight and her gun, and went ahead of him. She
wanted to be ready if they had the bad luck to encounter an alligator or
a Louisiana panther back in the bush.

A little fog rose. The forest sang to them out of the trees, out of the
mucky ground--frogs, crickets, cicadas, the occasional mournful call of
an egret. Mosquitoes whined in the air. She heard something splash in the
water ahead of them and hoped it was nothing more threatening than the
slap of a fish biting on an insect. Scully was tired, and the dank
darkness of the bayou weighed on her. The quarter mile seemed like an
endless, exhausting trek. She knew how early explorers must have felt,
venturing into God knew what with nothing to protect them but a
flickering torch.

She walked on, claustrophobic, following the small circle of light from
her flash.

Finally she reached the water line and froze in horror. No boat. She
swung the flashlight. God, where was it? Had someone stolen it after all?
Had it taken some damage she hadn't noticed on the way from Miami and
sunk in the bayou?

"There," Pendrell whispered, pointing off to her right. She turned the
flash, and sure enough--the boat's dirty white side gleamed dully about
fifty yards away.

They slogged over. Scully climbed aboard and took the gas can when
Pendrell handed it up. She filled the boat's tank while he transferred
the equipment, then she went to work on the engine, carefully replacing
the parts she had removed.

"Ready?" Pendrell called breathlessly. He scooped a bullfrog off the rail
and stood poised on the bow to cast off.

There was a loud pop, back in the trees, and suddenly, the glowing,
hissing tail of a flare going up. Another pop, and a blinding light
bathed the whole area. "Freeze!" a voice shouted. "This vessel has been
impounded by the Special Emigration Bureau!"

Scully drew her badge and flipped it open. "We're federal agents!" she
shouted back. "FBI! We have clearance to move about freely."

"All clearances canceled by order of Executive Director Sherrill!"

She couldn't see the man calling to them; the light was too bright. With
her free hand, Scully flipped on the switches for the boat's engine and
prepared to turn the key.

"Why? Since when?" she yelled.

"Come out of the boat! No one is to leave the parish, by order of
Executive Director Sherrill!"

"You don't have that authority," Pendrell called to the unseen voice back
in the trees. Scully glanced at him and caught his look--he had finished
untying the line on the boat.

*Oh, well done,* she thought. *Beautifully done.* She had only to hope he
wouldn't lose his balance when she started the engine and swung the boat
around. If it started--it had been sitting out here for months.
She turned the key. The starter whined, then ground, but there was
silence from the engine.

*Hail Mary, mother of God...* She'd known it wouldn't start the first
time, no way. She tried again. Still nothing. Pendrell seized a boat hook
and began pushing them away from the bank.

"Freeze!" the voice shouted again. Over the whine of the starter, she
could hear footsteps crashing through the brush toward them. "We have
been authorized to use deadly force! Come out of the boat, or we will
open fire!"

Deadly force? What the hell for? There was something very strange going
on--Scully decided she didn't want to wait around to find out what. She
turned the key again, and this time, the engine gave an asthmatic cough.
It sputtered briefly, then died.

A flash, then the crack of a gunshot. Scully turned the key again with
one hand and drew her own gun with the other. Pendrell'd had the same
idea, and she heard him fire first, so she turned her full attention back
to the engine. Everybody who'd been an FBI agent had taken the same gun
instruction, but she knew him for an indifferent shot. In the dazzle of
the flare, he couldn't see what he was shooting at anyway. But then, she
had no real wish for him to kill anybody--she just hoped he'd keep them
down until she could get the damned engine going. She heard him fire off
three rounds before she lost count, focused on the engine.

It finally caught and roared, and she swung the rudder around, praying
the shots from the shoreline wouldn't hole the hull. A rattle of
machine-gun fire sounded. Pendrell had finished off the magazine in his
gun, so Scully tossed him hers and he resumed firing to hold the others
down.

The flare above them flickered and went dark. Scully shoved the throttle
forward, hoping they could get out of range before the SEB recovered
enough to send up another one. It was a narrow channel, but Scully didn't
dare shine the flashlight--it would've made an unmistakable target. All
she could do was hope they didn't hit anything.

Piloting by instinct, she drove the boat forward, then cringed in
momentary terror when she heard it scrape the opposite bank. Another
flare went up, but they were already hidden by trees.

She felt Pendrell jump down beside her. "Shit," he said, "that was
close."

"Yeah."

"I don't I think I was cut out for this kind of stuff."

She chuckled bitterly. "I don't think anybody is. You did all right."

The channel had widened now--the tree canopy no longer blotted out the
faint moonlight, and she could vaguely see ahead.

"Why the hell do you think they'd want to stop us?" Pendrell asked.

She shook her head. "I don't know. Especially not badly enough to try to
kill us. Maybe it was a mistake--screwed-up paperwork."

But she didn't believe it. Screwed-up paperwork didn't explain how the
SEB had found them. The man outside the apartment probably did, but how?

And why?

***********************************************************************

Part 3

July 21, 1999
Galveston

At the Casablanca Club, Fox Mulder sat at the table that was always
reserved for him, playing Windows Solitaire on his battered old laptop
computer. Periodically a waiter would interrupt him so he could sign a
voucher for somebody who was cashing in his chips from the roulette or
craps tables. So far, the cards on the computer had not been kind to
Mulder this evening, but then, they rarely were, which was why Mulder
left the gambling to his customers.

The Casablanca Club stood on a dock that extended a good hundred feet out
into the Gulf of Mexico, supported by heavy wooden pilings. It was garish
outside, painted purple with orange trim, and hung with wind-battered
Chinese lanterns. At first sight, it had conjured for Mulder an image of
a cheap brothel. Not so bad, inside--the walls were a pale, muted
blue-green, and the round tables had come with white linen cloths; the
decor included live, leafy plants and crystal-globed candles. Big, ornate
wooden bar, and a private gaming room overlooking the ocean. When things
were quiet, Mulder had found he could stand still and hear the surf beat
against the pilings.

Mulder had bought the club, then named Jack's Shrimp Shack, from a man
who had been desperate to get his family to Mexico. Initially, Mulder had
thought of the purchase as a kind of charitable act--just give the guy
the money so four more people could escape. At the time, he'd had no
intention of actually running the place himself. But the longer Mulder
had hung around on the island, the more the idea of opening up the club
had appealed. If nothing else, it gave some purpose to the fact that he
was spending a lot of time standing in the casino staring out to sea. He
was acutely vulnerable to seasickness, but he had always liked watching
the ocean. He'd grown up near the sea--there was something about the
musky smell of saltwater meeting land that had soothed the emptiness in
him just a little.

After the bee invasion, Mulder had found himself without any real purpose
for the first time in his life. The conspiracy had won, and there wasn't
a damned thing he could do about it. He hadn't been good enough, hadn't
been fast enough, to stop them. And everybody he'd cared about was gone.
By the time he'd landed on Galveston, he'd been  stagnant, defeated,
exhausted. Unwilling to devote the energy to finding a new purpose. So
what the hell--why not just run the damned bar until the bees forced him
out?

His friends the "Lone Gunmen," who had come to Galveston with him, had
joined in, unasked. One day they'd just showed up and started working,
Langly at the bar, Byers as maitre'd and bookkeeper, and Frohike playing
deejay, chatting up the ladies and putting his paranoia to work keeping
track of who was snitching for whom. Mulder couldn't decide whether they
reminded him more of the Three Stooges or the Three Musketeers.

There was a noisy bunch in the casino tonight--the incident on the
causeway had everybody churned up with excitement. Rumor had it the
couriers had been minions of the Special Emigration Bureau, and everybody
was wondering what it would mean, whether the SEB would crack down. It
was hard enough now to get off the island and go south or west, to areas
where the bees hadn't arrived yet--a blockade of U.N. warships standing
off the coast had orders to turn back anyone trying to leave the country,
in an effort to stop the spread of the bees to other nations. The
warships weren't kidding, either. They'd sunk dozens of vessels in the
last two years, everything from freighters to dinghies. The only way to
get past that blockade was either to run one Christ-almighty risk or to
have the right papers.

If the SEB tightened up on emigration requests even more than they had,
that could make things hellish on the island. The crowding was miserable
already, driving the cost of housing stratospheric. Supplies were sparse
and expensive. Mulder couldn't remember the last time he had eaten a real
egg.

And for the SEB to tighten up was likely to drive up the crime rate, too.
Mulder knew that a motley array of cutthroats and thieves sold papers in
the darker corners of the island, including at his own Casablanca Club,
both real documents stolen from God knew where and  forgeries, some
painstakingly accurate, some criminally sloppy. Mulder was out of the law
enforcement business, and he didn't care what his customers did as long
as they were discreet enough not to leave any blood and guts on the bar.
He suspected he would've looked the other way even if he had been
carrying a badge--people were desperate to get out, and with reason.

Mulder knew all too well how good a reason. So he just stayed away from
that group of tables over there beyond the roulette wheel. It was none of
his business who bought or sold what, or what assignations were made in
whispers and for what purpose. He had scrupulously avoided getting
involved in illegal papers himself. His former boss, Walter Skinner, was
basically the only law left on the island, and Mulder was careful not to
provoke him in a way the A.D. couldn't ignore. Skinner had been
reasonable enough to define his jurisdiction narrowly, regarding 
peccadilloes like gambling as beneath his notice. But he would only
overlook so much.

Mulder moused a card down on the computer screen, then looked up at the
sound of a voice louder than the background noise. Someone at the door
into the casino was shouting, giving the doorman trouble. And while
Casey, the bouncer with arms like King Kong's, was trying to deflect the
man doing the shouting, Mulder saw someone else ooze past into the
casino.

*Shit,* Mulder thought, looking at the lithe, dark man who had slipped
through the doorway.

It was Alex Krycek.

Mulder sighed. He got up and went to the door. "What's the problem?" he
asked Casey.

The man who had been shouting made a flourish of withdrawing a calling
card from the inside jacket pocket of an immaculate black tuxedo.

Mulder only saw three words: Special Emigration Bureau. He closed his
fist around the card, crumpling it into a ball. "This is a private room,"
he said.

"Now, look here," tuxedo said, "I represent--"

"I know what you represent," Mulder said coolly. "It's a private room.
You want a drink, pay cash at the bar. Federal scrip's no good here. You
don't like it, take a hike."

"I'll report this," tuxedo hissed.

"You do that." Mulder turned his back and headed for his table.

As he passed Krycek said, "A casual observer might think you'd been doing
this all your life."

Mulder shrugged. "I'm likely to be doing it the rest of my life." He sat
down.

Krycek signaled a waiter and ordered a Scotch-and-water. "Join me?" he
asked. There was an almost-manic gleam in Krycek's blue eyes.

Now what the hell was he so good-natured about? Mulder gave him a steady,
expressionless glare that meant "not only no, but hell, no."

Krycek shrugged. He grinned.  "Why don't you just kill me, Mulder? We
both know you want to."

How true. Mulder allowed himself a tiny, cold smile. "Too public," he
said. "Besides I'm taking too much pleasure in watching you crawl on your
belly trying to survive the living hell you helped create." When Krycek
had first showed up, Mulder had wanted to tear him limb from limb, but
over the intervening months his anger had worn down--these days he and
Krycek were just two rats who had happened to end up in the same cage.
But he had no desire to socialize with the man who had murdered his
father.

Krycek laughed. "I know you hate me," he said.

Mulder felt a tingle of annoyance flare at the back of his neck. *You
don't know shit about me, Alex.* He squelched it. Krycek was up to
something, and he wanted to know what it was. He held his silence,
waiting the other man out while the drink was served.

"Hear about those poor bastards on the causeway?" Krycek asked over the
rim of his highball glass.

Mulder turned back to his computer, feigning indifference.  He dragged a
black seven down onto a red eight. "Somebody saved them the bee stings,"
he said.

"Hell, they were just doing their job."

"Dirty job."

"Filthy," Krycek agreed. "You really hate what I do, don't you? Look,
these people are desperate to get off this island. I get them off of it."

"Yeah, you're a saint. Your going rate these days is what...a quarter
million a head?"

"No ups, no extras. Same rate for kids. Hey, I'm getting out people the
SEB would never let go of."

"So they get to Mexico, but they're broke when they ground. They can't
afford to go any farther, and it's just postponing the inevitable--the
bees will get there eventually."

"Well, I'm getting out," Krycek said, his face suddenly darkly moody.
"I'm getting out for good. And not just to Mexico, either. I'm about to
make a deal that'll have me surfing in Hawaii inside a week."

"Hey, maybe I will kill you, then--while there's still time."

Krycek grinned wolfishly. "You don't have the ice in your belly for
murder," he said. "The truth is, Mulder, you're a fucking boy scout.
You're not going to kill me.  You've got New England prep-school morality
oozing out your ass."

Mulder allowed himself a mental image of the satisfying crunch of bone
and tooth his fist would cause if it slammed into Krycek's mouth. He
smiled icily and said nothing.

"That's the reason why you're the only living soul on this island I
trust," Krycek said.

"Fuck," Mulder said, annoyed. "I had a very tasty shrimp dinner over at
Matheson's, Krycek. Make me throw it up, and I'll cancel your credit at
the roulette table."

"No, it's true. You don't take federal scrip, you don't let the SEB come
in here and eavesdrop on the innocent, you don't move contraband--and you
could launder some major shit through this place, without attracting any
notice. You flirt with sin, but you're still a virgin."

"Maybe it just looks that way to a slut like you." He was losing
patience. "What do you want, Krycek?"

Krycek slid some folded sheets of paper across the table. "Ever seen one
of those? Diplomatic letters of transit. Can't be questioned by any local
authority, personally signed by Sherrill himself."

Mulder resisted the temptation to give a low whistle. The papers in his
hand were worth gold by the ton. "I heard the guys on the causeway were
carrying letters of transit," he murmured.

"Really?" Krycek said, wide-eyed. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Around," Mulder said carefully. "You know how rumors are on the island."

"Yeah. I want you to keep them for me for a couple of days. Just 'til the
heat dies down a little."

Mulder crooked an eyebrow. "And I suppose I've got your word that you
won't roll over on me if you get busted?"

"Absolutely," Krycek said earnestly.

Mulder laughed. "Fuck you, Alex. I've had my gullible moments, but I'm
not that stupid, not anymore. Find yourself another pigeon."

"What good would it do me to roll on you, Mulder? At best, I'm still an
accessory. If we both keep our mouths shut, nobody's got anything on
either of us. We can spend the rest of our lives slurping rum on the
beach in Honolulu."

"What makes you think I want to leave?"

"Shit, everybody wants off this island."

Mulder slid the letters back across the table to Krycek. He turned off
the laptop. "Not this time, Alex." He went out to see what was going on
in the bar, leaving Krycek to his drink and the roulette table.

Full house, tonight, Mulder noted with some satisfaction as he walked
through the bar. People were out in force, probably because they
suspected trouble and wanted to be able to see it coming. Or because they
already knew the causeway incident had screwed the pooch and were even
more desperate to get away than they had been before. Mulder himself was
still considering what Krycek had revealed to him--but more than he cared
about the overall result, he was wondering what really had moved his
former partner to confide in him. Overconfidence? Desperation? Did he
figure Mulder was only the guy left on the island who had enough cash to
meet his price for one of those letters?

If so, he had miscalculated. Unlike most on Galveston Island, Mulder was
in no great tearing hurry to leave, and he already had an escape pod for
when the time came.

He went to the bar and saw Langly leaning on it, his long blond hair tied
back loosely in a pony tail hanging down one shoulder. Mulder inclined
his head to see who Langly was scoping, then sighed. Angela White,
formerly a police detective in a small New England town, who Mulder had
first met while on a case. Strange case, and one he did not much care to
reflect on.

Langly caught sight of him and motioned, and Mulder approached, groaning
inwardly. He was in no mood for Angela. She had short, frosted blonde
hair, and she was almost as tall as Mulder, with an athletic figure and
broad shoulders. She was dressed to the nines, tonight, in a body-hugging
gown prickled with white sequins. She wasn't bad in bed, but then, in bed
he had ways of keeping her from talking. When she talked, she whined a
lot, and Mulder would as soon have avoided her tonight. But Langly was
waving a piece of paper--a personal check, from the look of it. Mulder
took it from him, glanced at the signature and drew a pen from the pocket
of his white tuxedo jacket.

Angela caught his wrist. "Where were you last night?" she demanded
breathlessly.

Mulder smelled whiskey on her breath. A lot of it. "Busy," he said
tightly. He scribbled, "OK, FM" on the check. Dick Matheson could cover a
check for a few drinks.

"Will I see you tonight?" she asked.

"I don't know."

She let go and turned her back on him coldly. "I'll have another," she
said to Langly. The thin bartender shot Mulder a glance from behind his
glasses.

Mulder shook his head.

Langly shrugged. "He's the boss," he said.

Angela slammed her shot glass on the bar. "I said I'll have another," she
said.

"Not here, you won't," Mulder said.  He took her by the elbow, and as she
half-fell from the barstool, he caught her around the waist and propelled
her across the club toward the door.

"You can't do this to me," Angela gasped.

Mulder kept pushing her out the door, out to the street. He whistled, and
a pudgy Asian teen-ager with a bicycle cab pedaled up. "You're going
home," he said to Angela.

"You bastard," Angela raged. "I won't be back!"

He handed the kid a fifty-dollar bill. "See she gets home safely," he
said.

"Shit," the Asian kid said. "For fifty bucks, you can have the bike."

"Just see that she gets there."

The kid rang the bell on his bike and drove off.

"You'll be sorry!" Angela yelled.

Mulder forced her out of her mind. He turned to go back into the club,
and as he swung around, he caught the moonlight glinting off the lenses
of Walter Skinner's glasses.

***********************************************************************

Part 4

July 21, 1999
Galveston

Mulder's former boss sat in a courtyard the other patrons had abandoned
because of the heat. Angela was still yelling as the bicycle cab drove
down the boulevard.

"How long you figure it'll take her to find another?" Skinner asked
dryly. "Twelve hours? Eighteen?"

"Psychology teaches that sexual urges take on an air of desperation when
animals are under intense stress." Mulder shrugged. "She'll have that kid
upstairs inside thirty minutes."

"You're not suffering any desperate urges?"

"I'm not feeling stressed." He studied Skinner's practiced, apparently
nerveless cool. He knew the A.D. well enough to see that there was
something simmering underneath. "But you are." He hooked a thumb eastward
along Seawall Boulevard. "She lives at the Gulfstream Apartments. Go for
it."

Skinner shook his head. "No time," he said. He grinned. "Too much
stress."

Despite himself, Mulder chuckled. He didn't trust Skinner, never had. But
occasionally he found he liked the man.

"You got a minute?" the assistant director asked.

*Shit.* This was not likely to be good news. Mulder shrugged again and
strolled over, sat opposite the bald man. When he sat down, he could see
what Skinner had been sitting outside in the dark watching--the freighter
from Tampico, steaming sluggishly toward the dock, its lights blinking
against its black, rust-streaked sides. Once a week, the freighter sailed
in with a load of supplies and then back out again three days later,
carrying about a hundred lucky people who had found some way to beg, buy
or steal the necessary paperwork.

"You ever want to be on that ship?" Skinner asked.

Mulder doubted Skinner had beckoned him just to share the sight of the
freighter, no matter how appealing and romantic it might be to watch a
ship glide in off the ocean. And the older man rarely beat around the
bush when there was something on his mind. But Mulder decided to play
along.

"No. I've got no complaints about where I am."

"There's not much future here. Not in the long run."

"There's no future anywhere."

"Don't bullshit me, Mulder," Skinner said softly. "You made six runs
through the blockade carrying Malathion into Georgia. That's not the act
of a man who's succumbed to his own bitterness."

"It didn't work, did it?"

Skinner shrugged.

"Besides," Mulder said, "I was well-paid by the state of Georgia. How do
you think I came up with the cash to buy this place?"

The older man fell silent for a moment. Mulder waited him out.

Finally Skinner said, "You never turned in your service weapon. You still
carrying?"

He was. Both of them--the .40 caliber Sig-Sauer 226 that had been
authorized and the Walther PPK in an ankle holster that hadn't been. "Why
would I?" he asked.

"The smoking man is in town," Skinner said.

Mulder blinked in surprise. "You want me to kill him?" he asked dryly.
"Not that I'd object to the assignment."

"I want you to stay out of it."

"Out of what?"

"He's after Krycek, not you. Leave it alone. Let me handle it."

Mulder considered this, his thoughts whirling like startled bats in a
dark cave. After a moment he said, "You think Krycek pulled the job on
the causeway?"

"I know he did. And I know he's here."

"He is?"

Skinner's look was dour--*don't play me for a fool.* "The place is
already surrounded," he said. There was steel in his tone.

The freighter was disappearing as it headed for the port of Galveston,
around the other side of the island. Still debating with himself, Mulder
watched its lights wink out, one by one. He got up. "Don't make a mess of
my bar, okay?" he said, then went back inside the club.

It took all the control he had not to run back into the casino. When he
got there, Krycek was playing roulette, and losing at it, judging from
the scowl on his face. Mulder scanned the room. There was no one here he
didn't know, and he would've known if any of them were snitching for
Skinner. He sauntered over as casually as he could manage, then leaned
down and murmured, "Come and have a drink with me, Alex," and walked on,
back to his table.

After a moment, Krycek followed, his look wary.

"I've changed my mind," Mulder said. "Give them to me."

The younger man's dark brows knit in suspicion. "What's happened?" he
asked.

"Skinner's here, and Cancer Man's not far behind him. They had the club
surrounded before I knew anything about it."

Krycek had gone a little pale at Cancer Man's name.

Mulder leaned into his former partner's face. "Listen to me, Alex," he
whispered. "I don't give a shit what happens to you. If they pull your
guts out through your asshole, I'll make sausage out of them and feed it
to the gulls down on the beach. But I don't see any reason to let the
Cancer Man get what he wants. You give me the letters, and I'll keep my
mouth shut."

Much as Mulder found the idea of helping Krycek distasteful, he really
wanted, just this one time, to make the smoking man squirm. Cancer Man
wanted those papers badly enough to come down here himself--just as
badly, Mulder wanted to thwart him, even in a small thing. Just once.
After all the Cancer Man had put him through, even a small victory...he
deserved that, didn't he?

He sat back in his chair. "I won't turn you in, Alex. But I don't know
what they've got on you. So maybe you beat the charges. Or not. If you
do, you get to leave the island. If you don't...well, like I said, I just
don't give a shit. Anyway, the way I figure it, you don't have much
choice but to trust me."

Krycek studied him for a long moment. Then, expressionlessly, he drew the
letters of transit out of the inside pocket of his jacket and slipped
them across the table again.

Mulder put them in his own pocket.

Krycek gave him a wan smile. "I'll give you twenty minutes, then I'll go
out front," he said. "That way your customers don't get involved."

A magnanimous gesture from a man not known for his generosity. But then,
 he had little to gain now by taking anyone else with him, or by doing
anything to piss Mulder off.

Krycek got up, heading back to the roulette table. "See you in Hawaii,
partner."

                                ****

Skinner sat outside the club for a few more minutes, waiting for the
smoking man's arrival, gripped by a foreboding he couldn't identify or
drag himself out of. He had an uneasy feeling about what was coming--he
wasn't sure why, but he couldn't shake it.

Shit, it was hot. He decided to wait inside. As he rose to go into the
club, the breeze eddied around the corner of the building, and he caught
a whiff of cigarette smoke.

He turned to see the smoking man standing on the deck, in the shadows at
the corner of the building. *Son of a bitch,* Skinner thought grimly.
*How long have you been watching me?*

"Interesting place," the smoking man said. He drew on his cigarette, and
the ash went from a dusky red to a bright orange.

Skinner held his silence. What was he supposed to say? *Glad you like
it?*

The smoking man gestured, the glowing ash describing a lazy arc toward
Seawall Boulevard at the end of the dock. "There's someone I'd like to be
introduced to," he said.

"I don't know everybody on the island," Skinner said tightly. *And I'm
not the social director.*

"I'm sure you remember Agent Pendrell," the smoking man said, smiling.

Skinner's head swiveled in astonishment before he thought to try to
control it. *What the hell were Pendrell and Scully doing on the island?*
He couldn't imagine. Yet there they were--just coming up the dock toward
the club.

The smoking man tossed his spent cigarette over the railing onto the
beach below. "I would really like to make Agent Pendrell's acquaintance,"
he said. He lit another Morley.

Skinner ground his teeth. The last thing he wanted was for the smoking
man to get his hooks into Scully or Pendrell. On the other hand, maybe
it'd be better for them if they could see the bastard coming.

He inclined his head and led the smoking man toward them.

                                ****

Mulder busied himself, waiting Krycek out. He fetched ice for Langly at
the bar, made an elaborate show of helping a waitress make change for a
hundred-dollar bill. The Gunmen could run the place all by themselves,
and usually did, leaving Mulder as the tuxedoed frontman for an operation
that really didn't need him for anything but a symbol, a target for any
trouble that cropped up. But he had an act to put on tonight. *I'm just
running my club. Yessir, I'm way too busy for anything else. Got no time
for any ee-legal activity, not me.*

The front door got busy just then, as if fate had taken a hand and sent
out some subliminal signal for twenty or thirty people to show up at the
club right at that moment. Mulder knew better than to question a sudden
turn of good luck. He just got to work helping Byers seat customers.

But then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a familiar yellow
flare, and despite his better judgment, he turned to find himself facing
the smoking man, standing in a small knot of people waiting for tables.

"Well, well," the older man said, smiling through a haze of gray smoke.
"Mr. Mulder."

Skinner stood at his elbow. Mulder stomped down his resentment of the
smoker, clamped his teeth hard and asked the A.D., "Table for two?"

"Four," the smoker said. He waved off to his left.

Mulder turned around and saw them and went into freefall. Pendrell, his
eyes wide, flushing deeply across the cheekbones. And beside him, Scully.

Scully.

Mulder felt gut-shot. As if the whole universe had suddenly canted thirty
degrees off level and left him sliding downhill, flailing desperately for
balance as the blood ran out of his head. Scully was dead, or at least
she was supposed to be. Pendrell had told him she was, almost two years
ago, and he'd had no reason not to believe it.

But there she was, alive. As radiantly alive as ever. He drank her in
with his eyes. She had let her hair grow--it hung down her shoulders,
even longer than it had been when he had first met her seven years ago.
And she was thinner than he remembered, as if she hadn't been eating
well, which had only heightened the ethereal quality of her tiny,
delicate features. Her eyes had gone wide, too, staring back at him. She
looked every bit as stunned as he felt.

Back in a corner of his mind, he was dimly aware of how the tableau must
have looked to someone outside himself. He and Scully gaping at each
other like two mesmerized lab mice; Pendrell clearly dismayed, bristling
slightly and exuding testosterone like some kind of banty rooster
prepared to drive off a rival. Skinner and the Cancer Man, clueless but
fascinated. Oh, yeah. This was a classic moment, all right. Engrave this
one on the old eidetic memory. Proof positive that the human condition
was nothing if not absurd--as if he hadn't already been painfully aware
of that.

Skinner cleared his throat quietly. Mulder forced himself to breathe. How
long had he been staring at her?

"I think you're already acquainted with Raul Bloodworth," the A.D. said,
inclining his head toward the Cancer Man.

Mulder blinked. *Raul?* Who did they think they were kidding? He glared
at the smoking man and said nothing.

"And you'll remember Agent Pendrell," Skinner went on.

*Yeah. I remember.* Mulder gave him a curt nod.

"And my wife," Pendrell said, his tone a little strident. "Dana."

His wife. Why yes, of course. That explained damned near everything.
Mulder had known Pendrell had a crush on Scully almost from the first
moment it had ignited, but he had never suspected the red-headed lab geek
had the balls to clear the field for himself with a blatant, outright
deceit.

Mulder forced his expression and his tone into neutral. "Mrs. Pendrell,"
he said evenly, then glanced back at Skinner. "This way, please," he
said, and led them into the club.

***********************************************************************

Part 5

TWO YEARS EARLIER
September 7, 1997
Washington, D.C.

The Hoover building had an empty ring as Dana Scully walked through the
halls. There were only two kinds of people left in Washington as the bees
approached from the northwest--those who didn't have the resources to
leave and those who had been ordered to stay. Scully fell into that
latter category. She had spent the last four days helping the bureau pack
up delicate pieces of forensic evidence stored at Quantico in preparation
for moving the whole FBI operation south to the Carolinas.

The bees had moved south from Canada, through the northern central plains
and slowly southeastward, decimating everyone in their convoluted,
seemingly aimless path. They were aggressive and deadly--Scully had never
heard of anything that had the sort of 100-percent-guaranteed mortality
rate these bee stings carried. They attacked in numbers, in swarms. They
attacked anything that moved or made sound. Unlike honeybees, they didn't
lose their stingers and die after striking, but could sting again and
again. Over the last few months they had moved rapidly and inexorably
through the Great Lakes states, then into Pennsylvania, and now were
heading into West Virginia, toward the capital.

Latest projections showed the bees would arrive at the outskirts of D.C.
inside 48 hours. Most of the government big shots were already gone,
leaving their frightened staffs to ship office contents south or west and
get themselves and their families out as best they could. The bureau was
not quite as deserted as Capitol Hill--but at the moment most of its
personnel were engaged in local functions like crowd control at the
airport, at the port, along the highways. As the city had emptied out,
those agents were being gradually transferred south.

Scully had thought her partner, Fox Mulder, was in that same "essential
personnel" category. But Mulder had pulled one of his trademark
disappearing acts two days ago, leaving the basement office at Hoover
virtually untouched except for taping up and marking the file cabinets
for transfer, with a mere four boxes of miscellaneous stuff he regarded
as important stacked on top of them. Scully had no idea where he had gone
or what he was doing. She knew only that he had taken off--likely tilting
at windmills somewhere--and left her holding the bag for packing up the
remaining mountain of paperwork, photos, equipment and just plain junk
that had mounted up over the years. She gave him credit, at least, for
the fact that what he had bothered to pack was all of *her* things.

Each day since his disappearance, Scully had hoped to come back to Hoover
and find him down there. She had been disappointed each time. No answer
at his home, "no service" on his cell phone, his parking space at work
and at home vacant. No sign of him. She hoped Skinner wouldn't find out.
He would've been likely to regard it as dereliction of duty. Scully
doubted that was Mulder's intent--he had just chosen to interpret what
his duty was according to his own rules. Fortunately, Skinner had been
too busy to notice. So far.

Tonight she opened the door to the office, looked inside at the mammoth
task that still awaited, and decided she just didn't have the strength to
do any more. What the hell--if the stuff wasn't that important to him,
why should she care? She closed the door again and retraced her steps
through Hoover's empty, echoing halls and went home.

She didn't go past his place this time. He would come to her when he was
ready, and it would only add to her frustration to drive by and see his
car still missing. What she craved tonight was a moment of normalcy, of
peace and quiet, however temporary or illusory it might be. A long, hot
bath, maybe. An old movie in the VCR. Nothing too frenetic--maybe
something gently humorous and optimistic, like *Singing in the Rain*.

Yeah, that was what she needed. A little R-and-R, something to take her
mind off things.

                                  ****

Fox Mulder had been on the road for four solid days, driving to Ohio and
back, only catching a few hours' sleep now and then, parked beside the
highway and curled up on the front seat of his Buick. The last time he'd
pulled over for a nap, he'd awakened to a Pennsylvania highway patrolman
thumping his night stick on the side window, demanding to know what
Mulder thought he was doing there.

Didn't he know the bees were coming?

Yeah. He knew.

Now he was driving back into a Washington that looked more than ever like
one tomb after another - Lincoln, Jefferson and tens of thousands of Joe
Blows whose names weren't imprinted on any building but who nonetheless
were leaving behind their ruins, monumental and otherwise. As he rolled
along a deserted Rockville Pike, it occurred to Mulder that Washington,
D.C., was a much safer place tonight than it had been in decades.

He stopped off at his apartment just long enough for a shave, shower and
change of clothes. He didn't have to check his answering machine to know
that it held about a dozen messages from Scully, wanting to know where he
was and what he was doing. He had no special desire to spend any extra
time at home, and in any case, he meant for his stay in Washington to be
brief. He would go to Scully, this time, despite his discomfort with the
idea.

He hated going to her place. Her apartment had the same shiny, newly
minted neatness she fairly exuded. It held her smell, her clean, sweetly
spicy fragrance, in its every corner. She smelled the way Earl Grey tea
tasted--of warmth, of distant, indefinable flowers. And her place had a
softness, a homeyness that one would never guess from watching Scully
slice competently and scientifically into a mutilated corpse. There was
nothing unfeminine about Dana Scully--her very breath spoke of
femininity--but her home was *womanly*.

Being there made Mulder sweat. It made his heart race.

*It makes your cock hard, you testosterone-drenched schmuck*, he thought.
That was the truth, of course. Just thinking about it was making him
stiff.

And he hated that.

Not the erection itself, but the idea that what he and Scully shared
really could be that simple. He and Scully were more emotionally and
intellectually intimate than he ever would have believed possible between
two human souls. He knew people who had been married for decades who had
never *fit* together the way he and Scully did. Did he want her? Hell,
yes. Who wouldn't? But he treasured the *special* nature of what they
had, so much so that the loss of it was unthinkable, terrifying. To turn
it into something sexual would've normalized it, made it susceptible to
loss, in a way he felt bound to resist, to the extent that he could
without driving himself mad.

But of course, *that* was the problem, wasn't it? Trying not to go mad
while the most delectable woman he had ever known stood so close to him
he could hear her heartbeat, while she slept in the hotel room next door,
when it would've been the easiest, most natural thing in the world just
to reach out, to caress...

*Knock it off.* He was torturing himself with it. *Fucking masochist.*
Still, it was a more pleasant torture than most. He had a whole menu of
things with which he might've tormented himself, and of them, sexual
fantasies about his partner were by the far the least painful.

At some level, he knew it wasn't his fault that the bees were poised to
destroy the world. But he had known the bees were coming, and he had not
been able to stop them. Hadn't been able to muster any support for any
effort on the part of others to stop them. Just another one of "Spooky"
Mulder's fantasies, oh-so-plausibly-deniable. But the moment the swarm
had gone free, he had known it was over. The conspiracy had won. He
didn't have any clear notion *what* they had won, but it was obvious
things had gone well beyond the point where any normal solutions could
apply. He thought of a message on his cell-phone's readout, from years
ago: "ALL DONE BYE BYE."

Yeah. That pretty much summed it up.

Mulder had never felt so helpless, so hopeless. He had spent his whole
life in an effort that clearly had been so futile it now seemed absurd.
His work, his search for Samantha, his life--it was all going up in the
smoky flames of Armageddon, and it didn't seem to him that there was a
damned thing he could do about it.

Worst of all, he couldn't seem to feel anything much about it. Nothing
but a dim, numb fatigue that had seeped into his bones. He was still
going through the motions of trying to do his work, trying to save what
and who he could, but deep down inside, he did not believe his efforts
meant anything or had any chance of success.

There was nothing left now but the salvage operation, which might or
might not work, and which, in any case, was more Scully's line than it
was his.

                                  ****

As Scully drew her bath, she found she couldn't help it, couldn't stop
thinking about him, worrying about him. And the longer she worried, the
angrier she became, furious with him and even more so with herself. It
was so foolish of her to dwell on his comings and goings this way. He was
an adult, and a highly trained, well-armed adult at that. Mulder was good
at squeezing his own way out of tight situations. He always had been. He
could take care of himself. She knew that.

So why was she obsessing over this now? Why couldn't she just let it be?
Why couldn't she worry about him in the sort of cool, detached way she'd
worry about any of her other colleagues?

She had always known there was something more between them than
friendship, more than service camaraderie, more even than being partners.
She would not have called that something love or even lust, but maybe
that was just because those words felt so forbidden. Putting their
relationship in those terms was dangerous. And what she and Mulder shared
was already dangerous enough, for both of them.

Nevertheless, whatever that "something" was, it certainly felt as
powerful as either love or lust. He had become part of her, and she part
of him, almost as if they had physically grown together, like Siamese
twins. Nevermind that there'd been no actual, physical joining. Over the
years Scully had begun to feel as if she had a missing limb when he
wasn't there, and over the same period of time, slowly, the absence of
that joining had begun to feel...well, unnatural.

She hadn't wanted to take that step, and apparently, neither had he,
because he had never made even a subtle effort to veer that direction.
And in any case, the bureau bigwigs would've had a fit--some of them
devoted a fair bit of time to looking for excuses to hammer Mulder. Give
the OPC evidence that Mulder had pranged his partner, and some of them
would have been turning cartwheels in the streets with joy. At the very
least, she and Mulder would have been separated professionally, and that
would have been agony. They both had too much invested in the work to
have it disrupted in that way.

But now the bureau was coming apart. The nation--maybe the world--was in
the process of coming apart. Things were way beyond any concern about her
career or his, and it seemed to Scully now that nothing stood in the way
of taking that last step toward fusion except the thin air between their
bodies. And God knew whether they'd have the chance if they waited.

She sighed in resignation and turned off the water in the bath. She
picked up the phone, dialed. Still "no service." She paced her living
room, her plans for the evening abandoned.

Damn him.

Damn, damn, damn.

The doorbell rang, and she jumped, startled out of her anxious reverie.
One hand on her gun, she went to the door and peered out the peephole.

It was Mulder.

Scully let go of a long breath--half anger, half relief. She unlocked the
door, just barely able to resist the temptation to drag him inside by the
collar and beat the ever-loving shit out of him.

"Hey," he said. His eyes had a manic glaze they got when he had been
running continuously for far too long. She doubted he had eaten or slept
in days. But his suit looked fresh, and he smelled of soap and
shampoo--she'd never noticed any dandruff on him, but he used Selsun Blue
like some kind of preventive talisman--he had come over right out of the
shower. He flopped bonelessly down on the couch in a motion that
telegraphed exhaustion and defeat.

She was in no mood to let up on him just for a little fatigue. She stood
over him like the school-teacher nun from hell.

"Where the hell have you been?" she demanded. "I don't appreciate the way
you dumped all the packing-up on me, Mulder--most of that shit is yours,
and--"

He waved her off. "Oh, forget all that."

"Forget it? There's material there that relates directly to a number of
active cases--"

"None of that matters now, Scully."

"Doesn't matter?"

"By the time any of those cases could be brought to trial the perps'll
all be dead. It's irrelevant unless we do something about the bees."

The galling part was, this actually made sense. She ground her teeth.
"You have a suggestion?" she asked dryly.

"Not yet. But I've got something that might help us find an answer." He
pulled a small glass vial out of a pocket and handed it to her.

"What's that?" Before he could answer, she knew what it was--one of the
bees.

"It's dead," he said. "Sorry. I couldn't figure out how to get it back
alive."

Despite herself, she was impressed. "Where did you get it?"

"Ohio."

"Ohio?" God. The damnfool had gone right into the 100-percent fatality
zone.

"Just outside Columbus, to be exact."

"How the hell did you manage to get in and out of Columbus, Ohio, without
getting stung?"

"I doused myself with gasoline, just like I did in Canada that time last
year. Don't worry--I've had three showers since then."

"That keeps the bees from stinging?"

"At least temporarily. I didn't hang around long enough to test whether
it would wear off." He retrieved a roll of 35-mm film from another pocket
and handed that over, too. "You'll need to get started as soon as you get
set up in South Carolina--maybe Pendrell can help, too. Speed things up
that way, with two of you working on it."

It occurred to her suddenly that he was turning this material over to her
in a way that suggested *he* wouldn't be around to help. "Wait a minute,"
she objected. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to Connecticut to get my mom."

Absurd. He was nuts. On the other hand, it was also quite human and
perfectly understandable. Scully had already shipped her own mother off
to the Caribbean, where--she hoped--she'd be safe.

"I don't think that's such a terrific idea," Scully said carefully. "The
bees are getting closer every day, and--"

"They're not heading for New England, not yet, anyway. And she can't get
here by herself--she doesn't get around that well anymore."

Scully sighed. His mother had made a miraculous recovery from her stroke;
she was nearly as functional as she'd ever been. But Mulder had a
difficult time seeing her that way. He kept picturing her in a coma.
Scully understood, but all the same, she knew he was wrong.

"All she has to do is take a bus to Massachusetts and get the ferry out
to Martha's Vineyard," Scully said. "I don't think the bees can fly that
far across the ocean, do you?"

He blinked, considered this. "I don't know," he said. "What makes you
think they can't?"

"They went around Lake Michigan, not across it."

He shook his head. "Lake Michigan is farther across than the distance
between Cape Cod and the Vineyard."

"Then wire her the money to fly down here. It's too dangerous, Mulder.
What if the bees get here before you can get back? Then you'll both be
cut off, and neither of you will get out."

"Well, then, we'll both have to try for the Vineyard, or Nantucket." He
was on his feet again, already heading for the door.

She moved between it and him. "It's too dangerous," she repeated.
"Mulder, she's a grown-up, and I doubt very much she'd want to see you
endanger yourself on her account."

He let his head drop forward in resignation, then lifted it again to look
at her. "If it was your mom, what would you do?"

He had her, there. She'd go--even if it meant the hounds of hell snapping
at her feet.

She sighed. "Will you at least stay the night and get some sleep first?
Eat something? You're in no shape for this, and you know it."

"I'm all right."

"Bullshit." She stepped forward and took the lapels of his jacket in her
hands. "I'm not letting you go until you get some rest."

She had him cold, now--something about the touch had stopped him dead in
his tracks, and there was a deep sadness, a loneliness in his eyes that
caught her, too.

"I can't stay here, Scully," he whispered. "If I do, I'm not sure I'll be
able to leave. I'm afraid something might... Swear you won't wait for me.
If it gets bad, you'll just go."

She could see how tightly he was caught between his wish to stay and
protect her, and his fear that he couldn't protect her if he tried. He
hadn't been able to protect Samantha, or his father. That was the Mulder
she knew so well she could almost read his thoughts--he spent his life
wedged in a narrow chasm that was guilt on one side and terror on the
other.

Still holding onto his jacket, she lifted herself on tiptoe and kissed
him. His mouth was warm, his lips soft, and suddenly he was kissing her
back with a passion that caught her breath. She hadn't planned this, hadn't
thought it through, and she had a moment of panic. But then his long arms
curled around her waist and she found herself unwilling to protest,
transported by the sensation of his mouth on hers and her breasts crushed
against his chest.

*No more thoughts. No plans.* Just her fervent wish to know nothing, feel
nothing but his flesh and her own. With one hand she let go of his jacket
and reached up to twine her fingers tightly through his hair, to ensure
that he could not pull away from her. Then she let her knees go limp so
that her own deadweight dragged him toward the floor.

There was no romance in it, no gentleness, just the two of them tearing
at each other's clothes, and only the essentials at that - his trousers
and shorts, her nylons and panties. Then fusion as he found her and
penetrated. He was bigger than she had realized, and so hard...just
having him inside was enough. She arched her back and came, came with her
whole body, grinding against him, her own hoarse groans reverberating in
the still room and inflaming her even more. Dimly she realized that he
had held perfectly still for her, to keep from disrupting her orgasm, and
she felt him trembling with the effort required. Then, just as she began
to relax, he moved.

His figure was so slim, she rarely thought of him as strong, but she felt
his strength now as he thrust with a startling power, withholding
nothing, all the force and intensity of him focused inside her. Scully
gasped and met him with force of her own, eyes closed, aware of nothing
but the fiercely sweet sensation of him moving inside her, driving into
the hottest part of her center. He shuddered, and she came again. Through
a haze of passion, she heard his animal howl of release.

After a long, silent moment, she felt his lips graze hers, then his
breath warm against her neck. She twined her fingers into his hair again,
gently this time, and held him.

Later, Scully would remember that afterward, his tie remained
immaculately knotted, as if nothing unusual had happened.

***********************************************************************

Part 6

September 8, 1997
Washington, D.C.

She had gotten him into bed, after that, where he'd gone dead out like a
light the minute he hit the sheets. Scully molded herself against his
back and lay awake, not really thinking of anything, just soaking in his
warmth, watching over him, worrying she might not have another chance to
lie beside him and shelter him, take shelter from him.

She knew he feared he couldn't take care of her. And he couldn't, of
course, but then, she didn't want him to. All she really wanted from him
was what she already had--the certain knowledge that he would fight like
hell for her, never willingly let go of her, no matter what. Mulder's
affection was hard to obtain, but once won, it was as unconditional as a
puppy's. She had rejected him, insulted him, rebelled against him--hell,
she'd even shot him--but none of that mattered a damn, because he had
given her his heart and just didn't know how to withdraw that gift. He
had never given up on Samantha, and he had never, would never, give up on
her.

She felt him go tense in his sleep, and her attention sharpened. He
moaned softly. Dreaming, gripped by some nightmare. She stroked his hair.
"Shh," she breathed. He stretched his spine like a cat, sighed, and
settled back into slumber, the tension drifting away.

Scully knew he was blaming himself for the bees' attack. He was thinking
he ought to have been able to do something more to stop it. He hadn't
said so, wasn't planning to say so, at least in part because he feared
she'd take his self-recrimination to mean he was blaming her. For slowing
him down, for arguing him to a standstill, for not believing him, for not
having the same willingness to throw her life away in search of the
truth. She thought now that he might've been right to blame her for those
things. In retrospect, she wished she *had* done more to support him, had
been more open to his views. So many times, he'd turned out to be dead
right.

He'd been dead right about the bees, that was for damn sure. But nobody
had listened. She hadn't listened. Instead, she had read him chapter and
verse on the Africanized honeybees that had moved up from South America
into parts of Texas, pointing out that they hadn't meant the end of
civilization. She'd accused him of having spent too much time watching
*Them* in reruns on cable. And he'd been right, and she'd been dead
wrong.

All she could do for him now was give him her love and a warm, dry place
to sleep and hope it was enough for him to cling to, despite everything
else he was losing.

Around dawn she finally dozed, lulled into sleep by the quiet, even
rhythm of his breath.

                                  ****

She woke to find him sitting on the bed, gazing down at her, dressed and
ready to leave. He leaned in to kiss her, and she held him briefly, her
arms tight around his neck. She let go after a moment; she could almost
hear his muscles straining to hold the position.

"Okay," he said. "Now you can call me Fox."

She smiled and shook her head. "I don't want to anymore."

"No?"

"It would sound funny now. It's too late, Mulder--you're stuck with your
surname."

"Oh. Okay, good." He glanced away, his eyes darkly thoughtful. "You
didn't swear," he said softly.

"To what?"

"That you won't wait for me."

She put one hand over his heart. "I'm not going to have to wait for you,
Mulder," she said. "You're going to get your mom and be back here in
record time, and the three of us are going to get to safety together."

"Swear," he said.

"On one condition--"

"No conditions, just swear."

"--you e-mail me, the minute you get there, so I know you made it all
right, and let me know when you're coming back."

He sighed. "Okay, I can do that."

She sat up, holding the sheet to her bare chest, and laid one hand gently
along his cheek. "You do know that I love you," she said.

His eyes were haunted, his mouth tight with anxiety. "I want to believe,"
he whispered.

"What will it take to persuade you?"

"If you don't wait for me. Then I'll believe."

She kissed him. "Then you hurry back."

He closed his eyes, and smiled. "I will."

And then he was gone.

                                 ****

By the time he passed Baltimore, the traffic was godawful in both
directions, and it seemed to Mulder that every jerkwater town between
D.C. and Boston must have put up a roadblock to stop drivers and check
for bees.

As if anybody who had bees in his car could drive.

Mulder found that his badge eased his way, but still, every five or ten
miles, the traffic would stop, would line up. Wait for a state trooper to
check things out.

It was aggravating as hell, and he had begun to worry that he wouldn't
make it back in time. Maybe Scully had been right--maybe this whole idea
had been a fool's errand. By the time he reached New York, he had begun
to wish he hadn't come, to consider turning around. But hell, he was
halfway there, now. The traffic heading south surely would lessen by the
time he started on the return trip--by then, people who were going south
would be heading *toward* the bees, not away from them. Few would want to
do that.

As he drove he reflected that twenty-four hours ago, he wouldn't have
cared much whether he made it there and back or not. He wanted to get his
mother out because it was the right thing to do, but his own survival had
not been an issue. Twenty-four hours ago, he hadn't had Scully to get
back to. To live for. In the moment when she had reached for him, the ice
that had hardened around his heart at the bees' arrival had begun to
crack and melt away.

Somehow, they would survive whatever happened. If they had to find their
way to some hot, dank, primitive corner of the world--hell, Borneo would
do, if only they could be together. Or Antarctica, for all he cared. He
could live in an igloo, he figured, eat dried fish. He could give up
everything else--ESPN, Chinese food, Samuel Adams beer--only, please God,
let him have Dana Scully's arms around him, and he would regard himself
the luckiest son of a bitch on Earth.

He didn't know whether to believe that she really loved him or not. It
seemed improbable--could it really be true? The idea terrified him. He
knew all too well how painful it was to love and have love snatched away,
to have it go sour. Samantha had been snatched away. Phoebe, his
father--those loves had gone sour. Scully's affection, in whatever form
it took, had become so important to him he was sure he couldn't survive
losing it. He would've forgone having her love him, if only it would mean
she just wouldn't learn to hate him. All she had to do was tolerate him,
and he would be content just to be near her.

Still, if for once in his life the fates that controlled such things had
finally seen fit to give him a break--God, could it *really* be true?--he
was for-fucking-sure not going to argue about it. He would just love her,
and thank every God man had ever conceived that she let him.

                                  ****

Greenwich, Conn.

Mulder found his mother locked up tight in her house, sitting in front of
the television, chewing her nails and staring at CNN. "Get some things
together," he said breathlessly. "I'm getting you out of here." He
thumped his laptop down on the kitchen counter, near the phone jack, and
began setting up to send Scully the e-mail she had asked for.

"Fox," his mother started.

"Move, Mom," he said. "Go. I don't have time to discuss it."

"Fox, there's nowhere to go."

He turned, too tired and frazzled and anxious to get back on the road to
care what arguments she might put up. "Mother," he said sternly, "if I
have to handcuff you and carry you out of here, I will."

Her look was sad, helpless. "All right," she said meekly, and went
upstairs to her room to pack.

Mulder typed furiously, hit "send," then logged off and packed the
computer up again. Only then did he turn to see what CNN was saying about
the bees.

The swarm was eighteen hours out of D.C. And part of the swarm had turned
north, toward New York State.

If they didn't hurry, they'd get cut off.

                                 ****

Under normal conditions, he could've made it. But conditions weren't
normal. Twelve hours later the roadblocks were still up. This time the
state troopers were warning people not to go south, and the last time he
got stopped, just south of Trenton, N.Y., his badge didn't do him any
good.

"My orders are to not let anyone pass," the trooper said from behind his
mirrored sunglasses. "I'm sorry, sir, but it's for your own safety."

Mulder noticed National Guard trucks a thousand yards away. Soldiers with
M-16's on their shoulders. He decided not to argue. He'd pretend to play
along. He'd find another road. If he could get on I-76 heading west, he
could hook back up with the 95 into Maryland just west of Philadelphia.
Beyond this point, surely, there'd be no more traffic, no more blockades
because there'd be no one to man them.

He nodded at the trooper. "Thank you," he said. He turned around, and
started looking for a way to get on another highway. When he finally
wound around and got to the interstate, it was blocked only by a "Road
Closed" barrier. He got out of the car to move the obstacle out of the
way.

But then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something dark moving
along the horizon.

"Shit," he murmured, suddenly afraid. He had seen that gray shadow
before--it had chased him out of Ohio.

The bees. He was too late.

                                ****

They turned again. Went north, this time. According to the car radio, the
swarm was right behind them all the way. Remembering what Scully had said
about the bees not being able to cross large bodies of water, he headed
into Rhode Island, then to Massachusetts. Three times he stopped to try
to call or e-mail Scully, but he couldn't get through. Phone lines jammed
or dead; cell phone no help.

Finally, he did get an e-mail through to the new North Carolina office,
with all the files he had on what he knew about the bees attached, the
subject line asking somebody to please deliver the material to Scully or
Pendrell.

Just in case he didn't make it, he wanted somebody to have that stuff.

When they finally reached New Bedford, Mulder knew they'd never make it
around the peninsula to Woods Hole, where the ferry to Martha's Vineyard
sailed. They'd have to go straight to Nantucket. Another state trooper
told him he'd have to leave his car--they were saving the space to try to
get as many people aboard the ferry as possible.

Mulder had been driving for thirty-six hours. He was exhausted, and he
would've agreed to anything that would get them away. He shouldered his
mother's bag and led her onto the crowded deck.

He stood at the railing, desperately fighting nausea, as the ferry
lurched out into Buzzards Bay. He looked longingly at the Elizabeth
Islands as they passed, about thirty minutes later, and then at Martha's
Vineyard, beyond. But he reminded himself that Scully had figured the
bees couldn't go as far as the Vineyard. Surely they wouldn't make it to
Nantucket.

The freighter had pulled clear of Martha's Vineyard and pushed on for
about ten minutes when the bees struck. Mulder heard them before he saw
them, and at the sound, he grasped his mother's hand and headed below
decks. But it was already too late. Before he'd gone more than two or
three steps, the sky went dark with them, and everything seemed to turn
to noise--the insects buzzing, voices shrieking in agony, the sickening
thud of bodies striking the wooden deck.

Mulder tried to ignore it, tried not to hear or see anything. He kept
pushing forward, toward the hatchway. If they moved slowly but steadily,
if *they* made no noise, if they could just get inside, then maybe...

The first sting hit him right in the face, just above his left eyebrow.
For a moment, it was just a bee sting, maddeningly painful but with no
other obvious effects, and he kept going, intent on forcing his way to
the hatch. Then he was stung again, and it hit him--every muscle in his
body went into a vicious cramp, and he just managed to draw one
shuddering breath before he doubled over in agony and fell.

His mother called his name, her voice sharp and fearful. She screamed. He
tried to reach out to her, but his body would not cooperate. His muscles
all had knotted, his spine curled until he was sure his bones would break
with the strain.

He felt his mother fall beside him, but if she cried out or groaned, he
couldn't hear it over his own hoarse, tortured grunts.

                                  ****

Sometimes it was dark, and sometimes light, but Mulder had no idea
whether the time that passed was measured in days or hours. He didn't
know anything but misery. He writhed on the rough deck, jerked about by
muscle spasms like a broken puppet, his head exploding. Violent bouts of
nausea, retching so hard he thought his guts would burst out through his
throat. Miserable thirst, alternately afire with fever and racked by
chills.

He was incapable of voluntary motion. He could only lie in whatever
position his twisted muscles would allow. He could heave and sweat and
shiver. His eyes were swollen shut, and even if they hadn't been, he
didn't want to see, didn't want to know. He could smell the death around
him, a smell that had become all too familiar to him in course of his
work.

Mulder was not comforted by the fact that the symptoms he was suffering
had proved him right, yet again--he had thought there was a connection
between the toxin in the bee stings and the black cancer he had
encountered in Siberia. What good did knowing that do him now?

Each time sleep claimed him, he went willingly, hoping it would be for
the last time. The only thing he had the strength left to want was to be
dead so that it would finally be over.

God, why couldn't he just die?

                                ****

He woke to a sound like endless, roaring thunder, and for the first time,
he did force his eyes open. He was looking straight up at a painfully
bright, blue sky. He saw the ship's superstructure looming above him, and
it seemed to split and waver in shimmering, fragmented shards of
splintered vision. A huge shadow crossed him, and then he saw what looked
like a gigantic red and black insect hovering, its wings whirling above
it. A blast of hot wind hit him hard.

*Get away.*

Without thinking, ignoring how much it hurt, he crawled away from the
huge, roaring bug. Then suddenly he was falling, and he hit the water
below.

It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The surface of the water had felt as hard as
concrete. And it was cold, and the cold set off another paroxysm of
cramps. He couldn't swim, and he gasped in pain, sucked in a mouthful of
water. He was going to drown. In his head, he was laughing--it was so
ludicrous. After all this, he'd just up and fucking drown.

Something grabbed him. For a moment he got his head above the water, and
he saw the huge red insect still poised above him. A figure with dark
eyes shadowed behind a face plate had hold of his arm. He tried to
struggle, but he couldn't. The pounding in his head was worse. He coughed
and gagged, and then it was worse yet.

Then there was nothing but blackness and a roaring, and then there was
nothing at all.

                                 ****

When he woke again, he was in a hospital. His head still hurt; he hurt
all over, but not as much, and though his mouth was dry, he no longer
felt thirsty. He wondered how much water he had swallowed when he went
overboard.

Something stung his arm, and with a terrible effort, he turned to look.
The motion made his head hurt and his vision go fuzzy. The man standing
beside him had punctured the inside of his elbow with a needle, drawing
blood. Vaguely familiar, this man. Mulder fought to focus his eyes, clear
his gray, dusky vision.

He knew this man, but he couldn't make his brain work. Red, slightly
curly hair. Freckles. Mulder tried to speak.

In his head, he was saying "who are you?" but the sound that came out of
his mouth was more like "huhhh..."

The red-haired man looked up, eyes wide in surprise. "Agent Mulder," he
said. "You're awake."

*In a manner of speaking.*

"Uhhh..." Mulder got out.

The red-haired man withdrew the needle, then came closer. "You're in a
hospital in North Carolina," he said. "You're going to be all right."

The combination of proximity and the voice did the trick. Pendrell. It
was Agent Pendrell.

"Haaw..." Mulder focused, cleared his throat, tried again. Half-croak,
half-whisper, he managed, "How...how is that...possible?"

"I don't know. We're running some tests to try to find out."

"Uh...okay." He frowned suddenly. "Ssss..." It was so hard; why was it so
hard? "Sss-scully," he said.

Pendrell glanced away, his fair skin coloring slightly. "Have you been
exposed before, to the toxin in the bees' sting?"

He had. The "black cancer" in Tunguska had produced almost identical
symptoms, and it killed people, too, though not as many, not as
instantly, as the bees.

"Buh...black cancer. The files I sent. Where...where's Scully?"

Pendrell looked at the floor. "Are you sure it was the same substance?"

He knew it would hurt, but he didn't care. He forced his arm up, forced
himself to grab Pendrell's wrist and grip it with whatever strength he
had. "Sss-scully...god...dammit."

"I'm sorry," Pendrell murmured, not looking at him. "I don't know what
happened. I just don't know. I heard she didn't make it out of D.C.,
that's all I know."

Mulder let his hand drop nervelessly onto the blanket, let his head fall
back, his eyes close. He'd known, from the way Pendrell wasn't looking at
him, but still it was a shock. Like a gunshot to the chest.

She had waited for him. And died.

Gone, all of them. Scully, too. Everyone he'd ever really loved dead or
gone.

Samantha, his father, his mother.

Scully.

His throat constricted painfully, and his eyes burned, and he realized,
as if from a great distance, that he was weeping. That did not matter, of
course--nothing did now.

God, why hadn't he just died?

***********************************************************************

Part 7

TWO YEARS LATER
July 21, 1999
Galveston, Texas - The Casablanca Club

Mulder led Skinner, Cancer Man and the Pendrells to a four-top table near
a window. *Nice view. Only the best for the happy couple and the evil
government minions,* he thought bitterly.

"Have you a moment to join us?" Bloodworth asked, very correctly
remaining on his feet while Pendrell just as correctly pulled Scully's
chair out for her.

Mulder hadn't seen manners like this since his last visit to the Boston
Yacht Club. It left him feeling as if he'd been transported into a
real-life Sartre short story. *Next thing you know, we'll all be singing
*Auld Lang Syne*.* He ground his teeth again. He didn't want to join
them--he wanted to get the hell away from the lot of them and never look
back. But it would make Pendrell uncomfortable if he did sit down, and he
figured the little shit deserved at least a moment of discomfort. What
the hell.

Mulder smiled. "If I wouldn't be intruding on federal business, I'd love
to."

"Ah, yes, I'd heard you were...pursuing other interests. Well, this is
purely social."

*Bullshit,* Mulder thought. *You have even less social life than I ever
did.* He appropriated an empty chair from an adjacent table and sat
between Skinner and Pendrell. Where he could get an unobstructed view of
Mrs. Dana Pendrell.

She was keeping her cool, on the outside at least, but there was a
tension in the way she held her mouth that he recognized as meaning she
was feeling awkward as hell. She was wearing a beige suit with a
mustard-colored shell under the jacket, the familiar tiny gold cross at
her throat. Reddish-brown lipstick immaculate on her perfect mouth, as
always.

Suddenly she looked straight at him, her azure eyes pinning him like a
laser beam. "How have you been?" she asked.

The warm, low sound of her voice stopped his heart for a moment. He
breathed carefully, trying to release the sudden constriction in his
chest.

"I'm still on my feet," he said lightly. "You?"

"I'm fine." What she always said when she wasn't.

A waitress appeared, and Bloodworth ordered champagne. Then he turned to
Scully. "I heard you had some trouble getting out of New Orleans,"
Bloodworth said.

"There was a misunderstanding about our clearances," Scully said. Mulder
heard a note of stress in her even tone--it had been more than a
misunderstanding.

"Nothing Mr. Skinner can't clear up for you, I'm sure."

Mulder saw a muscle flex along Skinner's jaw.

"I'm sure we can work something out," the A.D. said tightly, "if you two
wouldn't mind stopping by my office in the morning."

*Jesus,* Mulder thought. *Sit, Walter. Roll over, Walter. Good Walter.
Lick his fucking face, why don't you?*

"Sure," Pendrell said. "No problem."

The waitress came back with five glasses of champagne, set them down one
by one. "How long are you planning to stay in Galveston?" Bloodworth
asked pleasantly.

"We haven't really made any decisions about that," Scully said.

Bloodworth nodded and sipped his champagne. Nobody else was drinking. "It
can be difficult to get away," he said knowingly. "What with the
blockade. Don't you agree, Mr. Mulder?"

Bloodworth knew about Georgia, and he wanted Mulder to know he knew.
Mulder shrugged. "It's not impossible to get by the blockade."

"But of course you need a boat." Bloodworth gave Scully a slantwise look.
"I'm afraid on inspecting yours, we discovered it had been damaged. Badly
holed. It was already sinking when we went aboard to examine it."

Scully's look was venomous--it told Mulder there'd been nothing wrong
with the boat when she'd left it. "How lucky for us that you discovered
that when you did," she said.

"I haven't tried it myself," Mulder said, "but I'm told if you have the
right equipment you can go across the causeway and over the mainland to
Colorado." He turned the stem of his glass on the crisp table cloth.
"There are still flights out of Denver to L.A.--even to Honolulu--if you
can just get as far as Denver."

"Well, of course, those flights are reserved for movement of essential
personnel," Bloodworth said.

"Which leads us to the question of how the SEB defines 'essential,'"
Mulder said, allowing himself the sarcasm. "Just what is that definition
these days? Mute alien-hybrid clones only?"

Bloodworth laughed. "I'd forgotten about that vivid imagination of
yours," he said, smiling. "What a sense of humor you have!"

Mulder grinned back at him. "Well, we are revisiting old times, aren't
we? Don't worry--despite the fact that it's all quite true, I'm not
delusional enough to expect that anyone will believe it."

"Actually," Bloodworth said, then he stopped long enough to light another
Morley and exhale a plume of smoke in Skinner's general direction. "I
think it could be argued that Mr. and Mrs. Pendrell are essential
personnel. How is that antivenin coming along, anyway?"

Scully started. She hadn't expected Bloodworth would know what she and
Pendrell were working on. Despite himself, Mulder felt his left eyebrow
rise a notch.

"We haven't perfected anything yet," Pendrell said, frowning down into
his glass. "But we're making progress."

"Well, now. That's certainly encouraging news."

Skinner got to his feet suddenly. "Excuse me," he said softly.

Mulder knew he must have spotted Krycek, but he also knew better than to
turn and look. He left it to Scully to notice what Skinner was doing.

She didn't disappoint him. "My God," she said. "Is that Alex Krycek?"

Now he turned. Krycek strolled through the front door and took a left
turn on the deck that extended out a few feet from the building, and
disappeared from sight. A moment later he was back in view, now running,
with two of Skinner's men hot on his heels. He lunged toward the railing,
trying to leap into the water, but the two cops caught him before he went
over. He shouted, and struggled, but they had him.

"Huh," Mulder said. "What do you know? I think it *is* Krycek. Looks like
he's got himself in trouble again."

"He has a talent for it," Bloodworth said, his tone cold.

"What do you suppose he's done now?" Scully asked.

Mulder shrugged. "It's Krycek--could be anything from murder to
panhandling."

"Does he come here often?" Bloodworth asked, his look suddenly
penetrating.

The feds had Krycek handcuffed and were leading him off the dock. "I
don't recall him ever having been here before," Mulder said. He saw
Skinner heading back toward the table. "But then," he went on, "I
generally don't have time to socialize with the guests. Speaking of
which, I'm afraid I'm going to have to excuse myself, too." He got up.
"Much as I've enjoyed this, I have a business to run. Oh, and nevermind
about the check--it's on the house. My pleasure."

"I think we should be going, too," Pendrell said, rising to his feet.

"So soon?" Bloodworth said.

"We've had a long trip," Scully said. "We're tired. But thank you
both--it's been a very pleasant evening."

"I'm glad you enjoyed it," Mulder said. He stood back out of the way
while they went past. "Please come again."

To Skinner, Scully said, "Is there a particular time you'd like us to
come by at the office?"

"Mid-morning's good," the A.D. said, his face unreadable.

"We'll be there," Pendrell said, and then he took Scully's arm and led
her off.

"Mr. Mulder," Bloodworth said. His tone was soft, underlain by a hint of
steel. "I hope you're not thinking of doing anything rash to help them
leave the island."

"What makes you think I'd do that?"

"It's said you have helped some in the past--paid their passage, arranged
their transportation. Naturally I assume you may have an understandable
affinity for your former colleagues."

Mulder gave him a cold smile. "Mr., uh...*Bloodworth,*" he said, "if I
knew how to get off this island, do you think for a moment I'd still be
here myself?"

"Wouldn't you?"

He let the smile die. "The bees flew from Cape Cod to Martha's Vineyard.
They'll be here, too, before long. You know it, and I know it. The only
thing I haven't figured out is just what you and your army of speechless
drones intend to do with the wreckage after it's over. I confess it's
beyond me what you could gain by reducing North America to roughly the
cultural and technological sophistication of the Bronze Age."

Bloodworth smiled.

                                 ****

Scully and Pendrell walked down Seawall Boulevard toward their hotel in
silence. The concrete seawall itself, erected to guard against the storm
surge from a hurricane, dropped off steeply toward the smooth, sandy
beach. The nightly curfew was two hours off, and there were still a fair
number of people walking or lounging along the street and on the beach. A
half-moon threw a glow on the surf as it rolled steadily, quietly up onto
the sand. Some small part of Scully's mind registered that it was
picturesque--she might even have called it beautiful, if she had been
capable of caring about anything that far off in the distance.

"Are you all right?" Pendrell asked, his voice low.

"I'm fine," Scully lied. Her emotions stewed, simmered. She dared not
lift the lid, for fear they would boil over.

Mulder was alive. How could he have been alive and not come back to her?
Come looking for her? Why would he do that? Had she meant so little to
him? No, that was impossible. She'd had his heart, his soul, in her
hands. He had *given* them to her. And yet, he had not come for her. Had
she completely misread what he had meant when he had asked her not to
wait for him? Was that possible?

*Don't wait for me. Then I'll believe.*

No. She had known exactly what he meant. She had not misread it. Although
he had not explicitly said so, he had been just as much in love with her
as she had been with him. What in God's name could've happened in
Connecticut that would have so transformed him?

It had been clear from looking at him that he was much changed, and not
just two years older, not just the three or four strands of silver hair
she'd noticed at his temples. The Mulder she had known had worn his heart
on his sleeve. He'd been an open book to her, so easily readable she
could almost hear his thoughts in her mind. He'd been mercurial, moods
spanning the whole range from manic energy to quiet grief to vitriolic
moral outrage. Cool of nerve, but never cold of heart. He might not have
been a hero in the usual sense, but he had been possessed of a heroic
passion.

The Fox Mulder who owned the Casablanca Club seemed devoid of any
passions at all. The look on his face when he had seen her had been
profound astonishment--but there'd been nothing else she could read in
it. No embarrassment or horror or affection or pain. Just surprise. Only
once during the evening had Scully noticed the smallest glimmer of the
old fire in his eyes, when he had come back at Bloodworth: *Just what is
that definition these days? Mute alien-hybrid clones only?* And then, as
if the tiny flame were a candle, he had simply blown it out, and it was
gone.

She couldn't understand it. It was completely unlike him. He might be
physically alive, but it was clear something inside him had died. She did
not want to see him like that.

They reached the hotel room and went in. Scully sat numbly on the end of
the bed.

Pendrell said, "The man in the lobby downstairs said the freighter to
Mexico leaves on Saturday."

She nodded. "The sooner the bettter," she said.

                                 ****

Mulder took his run every night after the bar closed, while the Gunmen
cleaned up the club. He went out in plain defiance of the island curfew;
it was too damned hot to run during the day. He did his five miles down
and back on the beach, dodging the milky-white, gelatinous blobs of
Portuguese men-o-war washed up on the sand. The little jellyfish had a
nasty sting even when dead and were best given a wide berth. The
thunderstorms off in the distance had dissipated after sundown, leaving a
clear, cool, humid sky.

In the last two years he had spent a lot of his time learning to block
out thoughts of the past--if there was any coherent lesson in his life,
Mulder figured it was the futility of trying to change his own history.
He had spent--wasted, as he now calculated it--most of his life in an
effort to undo or correct his own past. To get Samantha back so that
things would be right. It hadn't worked then, and it wasn't going to work
now. As he ran along the beach, he tried valiantly to focus on nothing
but the mechanical, enervating rhythm of his feet on the sand. Just
running. Breathing.

Futility again. The more he concentrated on other things, the more *she*
intruded on his thoughts. Every time he thought he had pushed her aside,
his eidetic memory yielded up another mental image. The play of light
like dancing flame on her hair. The crisp, competent grace of her
movement as she had sat down at the table. Seeing her had, yet again,
melted the ice he'd been using to numb himself. He wanted to shove the
mind-pictures away, as a child might reject playing with a cat who had
once scratched its hand.

The past couldn't be repaired. He had gone to New England. He hadn't been
able to get back. Pendrell had said what he had said. Mulder had not
checked it out on his own. And now it was too late. It was done, and
wishing would not undo it.

He sensed that the near future held something nasty, though he couldn't
predict what it might be. A bad patch in his life loomed ahead, and the
last thing he needed was something that would make him vulnerable. He was
vulnerable to Scully, sure as hell. No solution to that problem loomed
immediately on the horizon, so he went back to trying desperately to
concentrate on running. To watching out for the men-o'-war on the beach.

He wasn't surprised to see Skinner waiting for him outside the club when
he came back. "A little past your bedtime, isn't it?" he asked the older
man.

"We didn't find the couriers' documents on Krycek," Skinner said.

"Tough break. You want a cup of coffee? Sounds like you've got a long
night ahead of you." He went inside, Skinner following. Mulder shivered a
little at the contrast as the air conditioning hit the bare skin on his
face and arms. The A.D. slung his jacket across the bar and loosened his
tie. Mulder went behind the bar and scooped coffee beans into the
grinder.

"Did he give them to you?" Skinner asked.

"Krycek hasn't given me the time of day in years." He ran the grinder,
its harsh whine loud in the empty club.

"That's not what I asked you," Skinner said, when the machine went quiet.

"I don't know what 'them' you're talking about."

"You've become a very adept liar. And don't tell me you didn't lie to
Bloodworth about not knowing how to get off the island."

"I've always been an adept liar," Mulder said. "I just used to have
better reasons to tell you the truth. As for Bloodworth, I don't like the
fucker. Never have. And what my plans are is none of his business."

"Are you thinking of giving Pendrell and Scully the letters of transit so
they can get off the island?"

"What letters of transit?"

Skinner smiled. "The ones Krycek gave you."

Mulder sighed heavily. "You want to search me, Walter? You want to search
the club? You don't even need a warrant these days--I couldn't stop you
if I wanted to. Go ahead. But they're not here, because I don't have
them, because Krycek didn't give them to me."

"Bloodworth doesn't want Pendrell and Scully to leave the island."

"He made that pretty clear. You want to tell me why?" Into Skinner's
sudden silence the coffee maker gurgled and exuded steam. Mulder
shrugged. "They made it this far without my help. Why should I stick my
neck out?" He poured coffee for both of them and slid a mug across the
bar toward the A.D.

"I always thought you were in love with her," Skinner said, stirring his
coffee.

"You were mistaken," Mulder said coldly. But he heard the harsh note in
his own voice--too harsh, and he knew Skinner had heard it, too.

"Prove it," the A.D. said.

He laughed. "I haven't seen her since '97, and she married somebody
else."

"That doesn't mean you're not in love with her."

Skinner wasn't buying it, and Mulder yielded to the inevitable. "Okay, so
I wouldn't kick her out of my bed just for eating crackers. So what? I
can't give her paperwork I don't have. And if Krycek had any emigration
papers with him, he didn't offer them to me."

"Uh, huh," Skinner said, unconvinced.

"Look, I didn't kill those guys on the causeway. And Alex Krycek and I
are not friends. I didn't know Pendrell and Scully were coming to the
island, and I have no plans either to assist or interfere with them."

There was a silence, Skinner avoiding Mulder's eyes. Finally, Skinner
said softly, "Pendrell's very close to developing an antivenin for the
bee stings."

"Good for him. What's that got to do with me?"

"You're the guy who ran the blockade with a cigarette boat full of
Malathion six times--you tell me what it has to do with you."

"Nothing, that's what. Public service is your line of work."

Skinner's turn to sigh. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said. He sounded
tired, suddenly. "I was hoping you had those letters and might be willing
to devote them to a good cause." He looked up, and there was a heavy
sadness in his eyes. "You used to be the kind who'd fight for the chance
to do the right thing."

Mulder nodded. A cold anger gathered in his chest. Who the fuck did
Skinner think he was, coming across with this self-righteous crap?
"Yeah," Mulder said. "I was. And all it got me was a reserved seat down
in the same sewer with you and Krycek."

Skinner's jaw went hard. "Sorry to bother you." He picked up his jacket.

"Don't give me that," Mulder said, his anger boiling over. "There's
damned little evidence you'd know the right thing to do if it bit you in
the ass--you're still doing that smoking bastard's bidding." Mulder
leaned toward him and let his voice go low. "You've got one fucking nerve
asking me to trust you. Your idea of doing the right thing has always
been to get me to smash myself up on the rocks doing it for you. Not this
time, *sir.* If you want to help Pendrell and Scully get off the island,
go ahead."

There was a hard silence, both of them glaring at each other. Mulder
broke it, backing off his belligerent stance. "*If* I had the letters and
*if* I wanted to give them to Scully--neither of which is true--you'd be
the last motherfucker I'd tell." He picked up his coffee. "And that's all
I have to say."

"Okay," Skinner said. "I deserve that. But the time's coming when it's
not going to be so easy to turn your head."

"Bullshit. There's nothing easier than turning your head." Mulder took
his coffee and went toward the kitchen. "I learned that from you,
Walter." He stopped and turned just before he stepped through the double
doors. "Hit that light switch before you leave, will you?"

***********************************************************************

Part 8

July 21, 1999
Galveston

The kitchen smelled of egg rolls--Langly cooked them in bulk when he
could get the ingredients and froze them to eat later. When Mulder walked
in, the Gunmen were sitting on tall stools around a prep table, the food
spread out alongside a six-pack of Tecate beer and some limes, all of it
ready to be slurped down. They stopped as if in mid-breath at Mulder's
entrance, Frohike short and dumpy in a black T-shirt and jeans, Langly
taking his hair out of the pony-tail, Byers dapper as always in his
maitre d's tux.

They looked at him expectantly.

Mulder shrugged.

"Something you want to tell us, man?" Langly asked.

Mulder went to the table, pulled up a stool of his own and fished an egg
roll off the platter. "The less you know, the safer you are," he said.
"But it might be a good idea for you boys to be ready to move on short
notice. Just in case."

Frohike popped a chunk of egg roll into his mouth. Around it, he said,
"Hey, we're always ready to move. We're just waiting for you."

Mulder squeezed the juice out of a lime wedge into the opening in the top
of a can of Tecate and took a drink. They fell silent again, eating,
drinking, keeping their thoughts to themselves.

After a while, Frohike said quietly, "She's looking fine, isn't she?"

Mulder lifted his beer toward his mouth and said coolly, "Who?"

Frohike took his cue and shut up.

                                  ****

July 22

*How the mighty have fallen,* Scully thought, thinking of Skinner's
wood-paneled office in D.C. with its elegant brass accents, its
soccer-field-sized conference table.

The office here on the island was an abandoned storefront still bearing a
sign that read "Lula-belle's Shells" over a hand-painted pink clamshell.
Taped to the inside of the glass door was a sheet of white paper on which
the words "Federal Bureau of Investigation" had been written.

Skinner's handwriting, Scully noted. She and Pendrell went in. Beyond the
door, an elderly woman chewing placidly on a wad of gum sat at a small
desk that looked as if it had been rescued out of an estate sale. No
computer, not even a typewriter--just an old telephone and answering
machine. Behind the receptionist stood a rickety, hastily erected wall of
masonite, the nails showing up bright silver against the dark brown.

Scully wondered if Skinner had put up that wall himself and concluded he
probably had. She felt a stab of sympathy--it couldn't have been easy for
the A.D. to cope out here all by himself, to adjust to this sort of
bare-bones, no-budget operation. At least in Miami he'd had some support.
Here, clearly, there was none.

She wondered what this meeting was about. Surely Skinner didn't really
mean to hit them with a fine for having violated the order not to leave
Jefferson parish? She had a more frightening thought suddenly--what if
Pendrell had actually shot somebody in the melee in the bayou?

The elderly woman waved them toward an unfinished wooden door marked
"Private." The moment Pendrell pulled the door open, Scully got a wave of
cigarette smoke. She ground her teeth and went in.

Skinner had opened a window behind his desk, but there wasn't much
breeze, and the smoke wafted heavily in the air. The A.D.'s expression
was tense, his face held hard in annoyance. The smoking man sat on a
couch shoved up against the side of the office, holding his cigarette
like a conductor's baton. Scully tried to ignore him.

"Pendrell, Scully," Skinner said. "Have a seat."

They sat in two folding chairs placed before the A.D.'s desk. There was
an awkward silence while Skinner shuffled some paperwork and closed a
file, put it aside.

"Sir, if this is about New Orleans--" Pendrell started.

"Oh, nevermind New Orleans," the smoking man said pleasantly.

Scully shot a look at Skinner, whose return gaze was calculated to tell
her nothing--which told her everything. It revealed that he wasn't
calling the shots, and that while he didn't like it, there was nothing he
could do about it. They'd have to deal with Bloodworth, not with Skinner.

She turned to face the smoking man. "Then may I assume we're free to go?"

Bloodworth smiled. A lizard's smile, cold-blooded, that didn't touch his
eyes. "You're hardly prisoners in Galveston, Mrs. Pendrell."

"That doesn't answer my question. If we're not here to discuss what
happened in New Orleans, then why *are* we here?"

"I'd heard you might be seeking passage to California," Bloodworth said.
"I thought we might discuss your options."

Scully made a mental note not to ask any more questions of the clerk in
the hotel lobby. Either the clerk himself was snitching, or someone had
overheard them asking discreetly about transport off the island.

"California's certainly a possibility," she said. "It's one of the places
we might consider for continuing our work. On the other hand, in the
daylight--Galveston doesn't seem all that bad."

"Perhaps something could be arranged," Bloodworth said. "It strikes me
that the facilities at the headquarters of the SEB in Colorado could
considerably speed your progress."

"You're offering us a job with the SEB?" Pendrell asked.

"In effect."

"Wait," Scully said. "You don't already have people working on trying to
develop an antivenin for the bee stings?"

"At first glance it wouldn't seem to come under the SEB's charter."

"You're telling me *no one* has been trying to develop an anti-toxin?"
Pendrell asked, his eyes wide.

Bloodworth shrugged. "The truth is, we don't know whether anyone is or
not. We're hoping to locate scientists such as yourselves and collect
them as a team."

In the back of her mind, Scully heard an alarm going off. *Why now? Why
not two years ago?* She didn't trust the smoking man on general
principles, and there was much about the situation that didn't ring true.
If the SEB wanted to talk to them about setting up a lab, why shoot at
them as they were leaving New Orleans? Why not just, well, sit down and
talk about it? Why sink the boat, trapping them here? None of it made
sense.

Slowly, she said, "Well, that certainly opens up possibilities. But I
actually think we're making good progress on our own. I'm not sure it
would benefit us, at this point, to have input from other scientists.
Other opinions might prove distracting."

"Are you afraid working with a team might expose your mistakes?"

"We haven't made any mistakes," Pendrell said coldly.

"Really," Bloodworth said. "But then, you haven't cured anybody, have
you? That suggests to me that you *have* made mistakes, and that, in
fact, whatever you have come up with may actually be dangerous--it could
lead those to whom you administer it into a false sense of security."

Pendrell had flushed with anger. "That's a completely unfounded
accusation. You don't know what we've tried and what we haven't."

Bloodworth lit another cigarette. "Are you so sure?"

"How..." Pendrell faltered. "How could you?"

"His spies are everywhere," Scully murmured.

"Not very genteelly put, but essentially correct."

"Why don't you just come out with it?" she asked. "What the hell is it
you want, exactly?"

"Just as I said--I want you to come back to Denver with me and resume
your work."

She nodded. "Do you mind if we think about it for a couple of days?"

"Not at all. But I will point out that every day you delay an average of
832 people are killed by bee stings."

"We're aware of that," Pendrell said. His tone was neutral, but Scully
knew how much it troubled him that they had not been able to proceed
faster. She knew the weight of those deaths that they couldn't stop.

"We'll consider your offer and get back to you," she said, rising to her
feet.

"I'll look forward to your answer." Bloodworth stood, too. "One word of
caution--the SEB would not take it kindly if you were to attempt another
unauthorized departure. I'm sure you agree that the work you've
undertaken is of vital importance. You can understand our wish to know
where you are at all times?"

"Naturally," Scully said, between her teeth. "In other words, 'don't
leave town.'" She pulled the door open, and Pendrell followed her out.

She wasn't surprised when Skinner caught up with them a few minutes
later, on a street corner as they walked back to their hotel.

"What the hell's going on?" Scully asked the A.D. "We're not really
supposed to believe that nonsense about 'collecting a team of
scientists,' are we? Do we just look stupid?"

Skinner shook his head. "I don't know what he's after. The only thing I'm
sure of is that you two had better get off this island before you get
buried here."

"How do we do that?" Pendrell demanded. "Our boat's gone."

Skinner looked at Scully. "That's a question you'd better ask of your old
friend, Fox Mulder." He told them about the couriers on the causeway.

"Why would Krycek trust Mulder with those letters?" Scully asked.
"Mulder'd rather cut Krycek's throat than look at him."

"Because Mulder's the only man alive who hates the smoking man even more
than Krycek does. Look, believe me--Mulder either has the letters or he
knows where they are. And they may end up being your only chance of
getting away."

Scully looked away and let go a heavy sigh. "The only problem is, I'm not
so sure Mulder is a friend anymore."

                                  ****

The smoking man's minions had not been kind, but then, Krycek hadn't
expected they would be. He'd had the shit kicked out of him before and
figured he could survive it again. Besides, that they were only beating
him indicated that Mulder had kept his word--the smoking man still didn't
know where the letters of transit were.

Otherwise they would've just killed him.

Of course, they were likely to get around to that anyway, eventually. At
some point, they'd conclude that the letters were irretrievable, and then
they'd have no further use for him. And that would be the end of that.
But like Mulder, Krycek figured denying the smoking man what he wanted
was worth a little grief.

At mid-afternoon, he heard the two minions coming back down the long
concrete hall of the county jail, and Krycek curled up into himself,
expecting another savage pounding. But then he peeked around the arms he
had wrapped over his head to protect it and noticed the minions were all
rigged out in nuclear-bacteriological-chemical protective suits.

Ready to go where the bees were.

Krycek stifled a grin. The smoking man was making a mistake. A *big*
mistake.

They lifted him by the arms, and he made a show of whimpering a little in
terror and going limp, as if too weak to resist.

"Where are you taking me?" he asked, his voice low, trying--and
succeeding, he thought--to sound pitiful.

"Shut up," one of them growled from inside the suit. "You'll find out
where you're going."

They shoved him into the back of a panel truck, then climbed in the front
and drove off. Krycek couldn't see out of the truck, but then, he didn't
have to. He knew where they were going.

To Houston.

It would take almost an hour. He lay down on the floor of the truck and
let himself doze off--resting would strengthen him for what was coming
next.

He woke when the suited minions lifted him again, and now he started to
squall like a baby.

"Noooo! No, please! Don't hurt me any more!"

"Talk," one of the minions said. He kicked Krycek in the thigh, but not
very hard. Krycek screamed as if it had really hurt. "Where did you hide
the documents?" the minion shouted.

"I swear I don't know what you're talking about! I don't have any
documents!" He ducked his head and squeezed out a tear for effect.
"Please--you've got to believe me!"

"You lying dirtbag. I'm going to count to five, then I'm shoving your
worthless ass out with the bees."

"NOO!"

"One."

"Oh, God, no, *please*!"

"Two."

"You can't do this!"

"Three."

"Oh, God--it's inhuman!"

"Four."

"Please, I'm begging you--"

"Five."

They lifted him again. Krycek kept right on screaming, knowing perfectly
well the noise would attract the bees. Hell, the bees were probably all
around them now, between the sound of the truck's engine and his yowling.
But that suited him just fine. He'd been exposed to the toxin in Russia;
he'd even been stung before. He had the immunity. Not enough that he
could just walk away--what was coming next wouldn't be pleasant. But he'd
survive it, just as he'd survived the beating.

Seconds later, he hit the ground behind the truck. Instantly the bees
were all over him, and the minions, protected by their suits, stood over
him, watching as he doubled over with the spasms. He had no way of
knowing whether they meant to leave him here or not. There was only one
way to be sure.

He lunged at one of them, and with all the strength he had, ripped loose
the man's hood so that his head was bared to the bees. The minion shouted
in surprise and terror as the bees hit him. He staggered, waving his
arms--as if that would help anything.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" the other one yelled, and he ran for the truck.
Some bees flew into the cab with him, and Krycek heard the faint hiss of
insecticide canisters discharging inside the vehicle. In the enclosed
space, Malathion spray would kill any bees that got in the truck.

The minion who'd been stung toppled over onto the ground, writhing and
retching. His face was already gray, his eyes swimming with the black
toxin. He'd be dead in another five minutes.

Krycek was on the ground, too, in terrible pain, stomach heaving, his
muscles spasming uncontrollably. But he was laughing through it.

As the truck drove off, he used the last of his strength to yell, "You
fucking suckers!"

Some more bees hit him then, because he'd made a noise, but he didn't
care.

***********************************************************************

Part 9

July 22
Galveston

Scully had no reason to doubt what Bloodworth had said about the
boat--though she knew it had sunk because *he* had put a hole in it.
Nevertheless, after the meeting with Skinner, she went to check on it, to
see if there might be a way to repair it.

Mistakenly, she hadn't landed the boat on Galveston Island, but on the
smaller, deserted Pelican Island adjacent to it. Then they had followed a
narrow road toward lights they could see in the distance and walked over
a bridge to the big island, only then discovering the error. At the time,
Scully had thought it might actually be a blessing anyway--it could make
it more difficult for someone to find where they had hidden the power
boat because there were fewer people around who might've seen them
ground. Now *there* was an irony.

She walked north on Broadway, retracing her steps. They hadn't seen much
of the city when they'd arrived, in the dark, after the curfew. Now she
could see the antique, Victorian charm of Galveston. The Catholic
cathedral, gigantic and ornate, with its seemingly incongruous minarets.
An enormous mansion's iron fence held a bronze plaque proclaiming the
house Ashton Villa and explained that the lower row of windows were half
underground because the storm surge from the savage 1900 hurricane had
washed so much mud up onto the island. Six thousand had died. As she
turned away from the plaque, she caught a motion out the corner of her
eye and suddenly had a prickly sensation at the back of her neck.

Someone was following her. But when she turned, she couldn't see anyone.

*Great. One of Bloodworth's minions--just what I need.*

She wound through the Strand, a Victorian historical district, pausing at
a few denuded shop windows in hopes of luring the follower out. But
whoever he was, he was good. She still hadn't seen him.

She debated walking down that lonely road across Pelican Island. A good
three-mile hike with no one near to hear her scream and enough brush on
either side of the pavement to hide any mayhem from view. She had her
gun, but still, why buy trouble? But if the boat was salvageable, delay
might just worsen the damage. She'd have to go. There was no way around
it. Maybe she could get a look at her shadower as she crossed the bridge,
where the terrain was open for some distance, maybe even come up behind
him and get the drop on him.

She clamped her jaw and set herself to the task, walking up Avenue A past
the Port of Galveston, up to the bridge. She crossed, and when she could
do it nonchalantly, she glanced back. Nobody. She walked around a bend in
the road, then slipped into the brush and waited, holding her breath.
Nothing. Nobody came down the road behind her. Either he had given up, or
she had lost him.

Scully let go a long breath, stepped back onto the asphalt and headed off
down the road again.

She had tied the boat underneath a dilapidated fishing pier at the end of
a rocky point facing out into Galveston Bay. As she neared the water, she
could see bottlenose dolphins playing in the channel between the islands.
And in between the flocks of wheeling gulls, brown pelicans diving
gracefully for fish--the island was aptly named.

They had arrived at night, and though Scully had made out the nearby
superstructure of ships, she had not been able to see what kind they
were. She was surprised, in the light of day, to see they were old
warships--a World War II-vintage submarine and destroyer escort. They'd
been hauled up onto the shore and their hulls set into the ground.
Curious, she went off the path to have a closer look. A faded wooden sign
on a little hut at the gate read "Seawolf Park - Parking $2."

Scully pushed on a chain-link gate, and it swung open, creaking loudly.
More plaques, heavily coated with verdigris, told her the submarine was
the U.S.S. *Cavalla* and the destroyer, the U.S.S. *Stewart.* She
wandered around the end of the destroyer, painted light blue, liberally
speckled with patches of rust showing out from underneath the paint.
Behind her, she heard something on the wind--it might've been the squawk
of a gull.

Or the creak of that gate.

Slowly, quietly, she drew her gun, keeping it where someone behind her
couldn't see it. Yet. She went up the ladder onto the destroyer,
listening acutely for footsteps. She heard something, but couldn't sift
anything coherent out of the wind noise, the cries of birds, the roar of
the surf. *Damn, damn, damn.* She ducked into a hatch, into the galley,
with its stark metal cabinets and its industrial-size stove-tops and
ovens. She took her shoes off and set them on a counter so that her steps
wouldn't make any sound. Then she went forward, along the starboard rail
toward the bridge.

Whoever it was, he moved like a cat--silently. She stopped up on the
bridge, where there were steel walls on three sides of her, and slipped
between the ship's wheel and an abandoned chart table, gun poised. He'd
have to come in to follow her. She waited him out. Finally she heard
something nearby, just outside.

"Federal agent!" she yelled. "Put your hands up and step out where I can
see you!"

"Okay," a soft voice said behind her. She whirled, leading with the gun.

It was Mulder, leaning up against the port-side bulkhead, hands lifted
lazily. He was wearing khaki slacks and a denim shirt open at the throat
so a couple of stray dark hairs peeked out, with a dark blue windbreaker
tied around his waist--probably to cover his own gun, Scully figured--and
deck shoes with no socks. He looked like the cover of a Land's End
catalog--the casual, windblown New Englander.

He was devastatingly beautiful, tall and straight, his eyes glowing
bright green in the sunlight. She'd been trying not to think of him that
way, of the smooth lines of bone, the flat, hard planes of muscle. She
lowered the gun, shaking with adrenaline rush, hoping adrenaline rush was
the only reason for it. "Goddammit, Mulder," she said, between her teeth.
"I could've killed you."

He crooked an eyebrow. "And after I went to the trouble of chasing the
smoking man's bloodhound off your trail? That's gratitude."

"Did you kill him?"

"Nah. I just told him you ducked into the cotton warehouse. He had lost
you at that point, so he didn't have any reason not to believe me. What
are you doing out here, Scully?"

"My name's not Scully any more," she said. "And I was about to ask you
the same thing." She holstered her gun.

"Me? I was following you."

She pursed her lips, tamping down the anger that had flared up as her
fear drained away. "A bit late, aren't you?"

A muscle flexed along his jawline. She knew he was debating something
with himself, but he said nothing. She looked away and then stepped off
the bridge, headed back toward where she had left her shoes.

"I was just curious about this old ship," she lied. "Maybe it's in the
blood."

"Pretty long walk, just to satisfy your curiosity," he said, following
her. His tone told her he hadn't bought that story. "It's hotter than
hell out here."

"I've been informed I'm not a prisoner here. I'm free to do whatever I
want."

"Except leave," he said softly.

She stepped into the galley and picked up her shoes. "What do you care?"

He glanced at the ring on her left hand. "Some reason I should care?"

"Not one," she said coldly, yanking on one shoe.

"Are you happy with him?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Not that it's any of your goddamned
business."

He shrugged. "Okay," he said. There was a short silence while she got the
other shoe on. "Well," he said, squinting out to sea, "if you came out to
check on your boat, don't bother. Bloodworth's friends ripped it open the
whole length of the hull."

"How do you know that?"

"I have my sources."

"Those three freaks you hang out with? I saw them at the bar last night.
I don't know what you see in them, Mulder."

"They're loyal friends," he said.

"Are you taking lessons?"

He crooked an eyebrow in surprise, and again, she saw some quick flash of
emotion, snuffed out so quickly she couldn't be sure what it was.

She sighed and looked away. What was the point in fighting over that now?
So much had changed. When she glanced back at him, she saw that he was
gazing out at the ocean again. There was no sign of it in his face or his
pose, but she sensed that she had hit a nerve. She doubted it served any
purpose to beat him up over the past--she knew all too well he was
perfectly capable of doing that himself.

"I'm sure you had your reasons," she said.

"Yes."

She leaned on the rail and looked down at the water lapping along a rock
wall a few yards away from where the destroyer stood rooted in the
ground. "Is it true what you said last night--about it being possible to
run the blockade?"

"Not without a boat, and I don't just happen to have one."

Suddenly it occurred to her how he knew it was possible. "Oh, my God,"
she said. "That was you? The 'Malathion Raider?'"

Expressionless, Mulder inclined his head toward the big island. "Me and
those three 'freaks' back at the bar."

"I just assumed that because the insecticide came in from seaward..." she
trailed off.

"I found that I don't get seasick when I'm really terrified."

She didn't know what to say. When she had read about the "Malathion
Raider," she had thought the reckless fool who could do such a thing was
simply the bravest son of a bitch on Earth. He had gone straight through
the blockade, under fire, and then right into the thickest part of the
swarm, time after time. In retrospect, she supposed she might've guessed
who it was. The plan was so...well, so *Mulder*.

"Anyway," he said, "if there's a seaworthy hull left on Galveston, I
don't know about it. And I'd know." He paused, then crooked an eyebrow.
"'Malathion Raider?'"

She stared at him.

He shrugged. "I don't know, Scully--it's not bad, but somehow it just
doesn't have quite the ring of, say, 'Conan the Barbarian.'"

How like Mulder at his most annoying to make a joke of such a thing--and
not even a good joke. She headed down the steel stairs that led off the
destroyer. "No offense, but I think I'll check the boat myself."

It was a moment before she heard his footsteps behind her. Still debating
something with himself, she thought.

But God only knew what.

                                 ****

Frohike didn't mind going to Houston now and then. It was a hot, dirty,
generally unpleasant job. Right up his alley, in other words. He went
once or twice a month, as suited his fancy, if he had a jones for
something. It particularly amused him to go into town and get a couple of
videos. He'd go into Blockbuster and pick something out--even write
himself out a receipt--and then return them on his next trip.

Seeing Special Agent Dana Scully again had put him in the mood for
*Terminator 2.* Linda Hamilton wielding an M-16. Oh, baby.

So he dressed in a vinyl rain suit, carefully taping over the tops of his
boots and around his wrists where the suit met the gloves. He took with
him a welding hood he had specially modified and the roll of tape, too.
Then he pilfered a bottle of Scotch from behind the bar, fired up his
Jeep Cherokee and headed across the causeway.

Early on he had learned how to negotiate with the guards at the end of
the bridge. It wasn't hard to get off the island, but he'd be subject to
inspection on the way back. The guards were only supposed to inspect for
bees, but Frohike had found that they generally helped themselves to a
few things. He could save himself time and effort by finding out what
goodies they'd like to have brought back from the big city, then keeping
the Scotch in reserve in case they got sticky with him later.

Today he'd lucked out. He knew the guys on duty, Frank and Hector, and
they were all right, although they were reputed to be some of Skinner's
most loyal snitches. They just waved him through, and he headed on up
Interstate 45.

He stopped for gas in Texas City, helping himself at an abandoned Texaco
station he knew about. Farther north, the road turned bad, cluttered with
the dead hulks of cars and trucks that hadn't made it. Occasionally he
passed a decaying body or two, crumpled on or beside the pavement. The
wreckage slowed his progress. He popped a tape in the player--Sheryl
Crow. He started to pick up bees just north of the Johnson Space Center.
He knew they couldn't get into the Jeep, so he just ignored them and kept
going, picking his way between the vehicles.

Frohike could've used a Malathion spray inside the Jeep, but he didn't
trust the stuff. He had a system he liked better. He turned east onto
Loop 610, where the road was clear enough that he could go fast--too fast
for the bees to keep up with him. The insects were nasty, but they were
slow. At sixty miles an hour, he could just outrun the mothers. And by
the time he headed out of town, it'd be dark. The bees didn't move at
night.

He turned the engine off and waited. The bees usually lost interest after
about half an hour. He dozed for a bit in the heat, then woke and pulled
a cold bottle of water out of his cooler and sipped on it. Then, when the
bees finally got tired of buzzing angrily around the Jeep, he pulled his
helmet on, taped it and quietly climbed out.

His favorite Blockbuster Video was a couple of miles east from the bottom
of the bridge, in a suburb called Galena Park. Because the little town
wasn't right in the thick of the city, it hadn't been quite as heavily
looted as other areas--so far, Frohike'd had it pretty much to himself.
And it wasn't as bad as some parts of town. Most people had gotten out.
Not too many bodies.

He went through his usual ritual when he reached the video store. Then he
headed off down the street toward a nearby drug store. He knew what Frank
and Hector wanted in exchange for letting him back onto the island--Advil
for Hector, whose wife had arthritis, and toys and picture books for
Frank's little girl, aged eight.

The bees buzzed irritably around him each time he moved, but they slid
off the rain suit when they tried to land, and even if they had landed,
their stings couldn't penetrate the vinyl. The whole trip had become a
sort of rote, and he finished quickly. Still hours before sundown.
Because he was curious and had the time, he strolled farther down the
deserted street than usual. The intense sun seemed to give the whole area
a bleached-bones pallor, grass and weeds climbing between cracks in the
concrete and wilting as soon as they sprang up, signs fading rapidly
under the heat's assault. Around a corner, he saw movement and stopped
sharply.

*What the hell.* Nothing moved in this city any more, and there was no
wind to account for it. He cocked his head and listened. No tell-tale
angry buzzing. But when he looked again, he definitely saw a figure
moving.

Major weirdness. He shuffled closer, warily. There were two bodies, the
one weakly crawling toward a patch of shade, and another one in an
environment suit with the hood removed. Frohike doubted the live one
would hang on for long, but the environment suit was a real find--worth
taking a risk for.

He went over to the dead one and began methodically stripping the suit
off. Newly stung, this guy--he was still stiff. Frohike stuffed the
pieces of the suit into his kit bag and shouldered the respirator that
went with the suit. Then he looked again at the live one, his face
swollen beyond all recognition from the stings, his eyes swimming with
black.

Really strange that he should still be alive. Usually people stung like
that died in a matter of minutes. If the two of them had been stung at
the same time, this guy should've croaked a long time ago. Cautiously
Frohike approached him, staying just outside arm's reach. The guy was
clearly in misery; he didn't appear to realize anyone was there. Frohike
hunkered down beside him.

"Hey," he said softly. "Hey, can you hear me?"

The other man stopped crawling. He made a pitiful, ineffectual try at
turning himself to look. Frohike took him by the shoulder and gently
flipped him over. He couldn't have seen anything if he had tried--his
eyes were swollen shut. Frohike retrieved his half-empty bottle of water
and dribbled a few drops on the man's lips. The mouth moved a little,
parting just enough to let some of the water slip between them.

*Shit.* He couldn't just leave him here, much as he would've liked
to--and getting him back to the island was going to be a pain in the ass.

He gave the man some more water, then went to bring the Jeep down.

                                 ****

Standing behind Scully and gazing under the fishing pier, Mulder could
just barely see the sunken power boat. Through the gently rolling water
its white hull looked ghostly.

Scully put her fists on her hips and gave a sigh that sounded like steam
escaping. "Son of a bitch," she muttered.

Mulder sympathized. The Cancer Man had that effect.

"What about that freighter?" she asked, still staring out at the boat.

"Sure. The freighter's good. But you need the paperwork." He thought a
moment, then asked, "What did Skinner say?"

"Skinner said Krycek gave you paperwork we could use."

"Skinner's been wrong about me before," Mulder said coldly.

She faced him. At least, he thought, she had the decency not to look
pitiful. Her expression was cool, neutral. "You don't have the letters of
transit?" she asked.

He decided to return her courtesy and answer her bluntly. He didn't want
to hurt her. He didn't want to do anything that would permit someone else
to hurt her. But he didn't have the strength to take the fall for her,
either. He was *not* planning to get himself embroiled in some quixotic
absurdity that probably wouldn't save her anyway. Been there, done that,
had the scars. If she knew that right up-front, maybe she would find her
own solution.

He said, "I might have some idea where they might be, but if I were to
come across them I wouldn't give them up."

She stared at him. "You mean to use them yourself?"

"No."

Her perplexed frown deepened. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I've got a pretty comfortable situation here, and I'm not
planning to screw it up."

She glanced away and then back. "What the hell happened to you after you
left Washington?" she asked. Her tone was bitter.

"I had a close encounter with reality."

She shook her head. "So what? So you woke up one morning and suddenly
realized that life sucks? Why didn't you just ask me--I could've told you
that. Jesus Christ, Mulder, that's the most pathetic excuse for amorality
I ever heard."

"Look, Scully, I'm still alive. It's about all I've got left. If you want
me to give that up, too, get your gun back out and get it over with."

Her look was penetrating suddenly. "What happened to your mother?"

"What you think." *The same thing that happens to everybody who gets
close to me sooner or later.*

She looked at the ground. "I'm sorry," she said.

A heavy silence hung between them, broken only by the cries of gulls and
the lazy thrashing of the surf.

Finally, she said, "Why won't you give me the letters? No one has to
know. I don't know if you care about such things any more, but Agent
Pendrell's work has the potential to save thousands of lives. He
discovered a link between the venom in the bee stings and the substance
in that Mars rock Krycek led us to in Washington. He discovered that an
immunity can be built up if..."

Mulder felt as if his head might simply explode. Pendrell had not
discovered that. Mulder had handed it to him, both in the files he had
e-mailed to the FBI office and in the blood he had given up in North
Carolina. The bastard hadn't just taken Scully away from him--he had also
taken credit for work that actually had been Mulder's.

He shoved his anger down into the cold, dark place where he kept all his
other pointless, bothersome emotions. The truth was, although he had
known there was a link between the bees and the black cancer, he hadn't
had the biomedical expertise to do anything about it. Pendrell did, and
right now, that was the important thing. Not who had figured out what the
stuff was, but who could render it harmless. Mulder focused on a seagull
side-slipping on the breeze and forced himself calm.

"It's very important work," Scully was saying.

"Crucial," Mulder agreed.

"We could save thousands of lives," she repeated.

"Millions."

"We need to get to California to continue it, to finish it."

"But it would be better yet to get to Hawaii, where you can be
undisturbed for a period of time."

"Yes." She seemed relieved that he had understood that.

"Then why come to me? Why not go to the SEB?"

She glanced away. "They have been...uncooperative. They tried to stop us
from leaving New Orleans."

"Really," Mulder said, though he was not the least bit surprised. "And
just why do you suppose that is? Has it occurred to you, has it ever
crossed your mind, that maybe they don't *want* to see an antivenin
developed? That maybe they have plans of their own for what's left of the
continent after all of us are gone?"

Her lips compressed in that prim little grimace that he knew meant she
thought he was so full of bullshit his eyes had turned brown.

"I see your paranoia's undimmed," she said.

"I've seen what they have in mind for the future," he said. "And it
doesn't leave much room for independent science projects."

She sighed heavily. "Is that what this is about, Mulder? You've become so
consumed with hopeless cynicism that you just don't even care enough to
try any more? You couldn't stop the bees, so you don't want anybody else
to either?"

He held her look and said nothing.

"Simple cowardice at least would've made sense," she said bitterly. "But
you're no coward."

"If you really want to know, ask your husband," Mulder said, between his
teeth. "He can explain it far better than I can."

"What would Pendrell know about it?"

"Everything," Mulder grated, and he turned sharply and walked away.

***********************************************************************

Part 10

July 22
Galveston

Good help was *so* hard to find.

The smoking man sighed out a plume of blue-gray vapor as if to release
his anger along with the smoke. "You miserable bungler," he said to his
aide.

The aide stood there, half-in and half-out of his environment suit, still
trembling visibly from his experience with Krycek in Houston. "He...he
killed Vern," the aide said helplessly.

They had met at the Galveston hospital as had been planned all along.
Only the arrangement had been for Krycek to be here, too, as the first
step in an elaborate plan to make Dana Scully and Ted Pendrell think they
had found the right antivenin, in hopes they would distribute it only to
find it a failure--just before the bees arrived in Galveston and killed
them. Krycek had the immunity, of course--he would recover no matter what
drugs Scully and Pendrell gave him. But without Krycek's bee-stung,
writhing body lying on a gurney, the plan was likely to come apart at the
seams.

"Grow up," the smoking man said. "This is dangerous work--if you planned
to live forever, you should've gone into accounting. All you had to do
was haul Krycek into the truck and bring him back here. Were my orders
not specific enough for your tiny little mind to grasp?"

"No, sir. But I thought--"

"No, you didn't *think*. If you had, you'd have done as you were told.
And when you need to *think*, I'll tell you *what* to think. Is that
clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"It'd better be," the smoking man snarled. He stalked out into the hot
afternoon sun. *Stupid son of a bitch,* he thought. He wondered how he
could accomplish what he wanted without Krycek.

He'd have to find another way to discredit and trap Mr. and Mrs.
Pendrell.

                                 ****

Scully spent the rest of the afternoon searching for a boat. Not that she
hadn't believed what Mulder had told her about there not being any
available, but hell--even Mulder could overlook something now and then,
especially when he wasn't particularly motivated to look. Besides, what
else did she have to do except sit around the hotel?

She had no intention of asking her husband any questions, as Mulder had
suggested. It made no sense whatever that Pendrell would know anything
about Mulder's motivations--Ted had never really known Mulder that well.
Nobody knew Mulder well unless he wanted them to, and he didn't often
make the effort. There was some evidence he'd had a more-or-less normal
social life before he had launched on his quest after his sister--he did
have a few friends from that time before--but since then the term "lone
wolf" pretty much had defined Mulder's leisure time.

In fact, given the depressing nature of what Mulder had told her, Scully
was thinking she might not even mention to Pendrell that she had spoken
to her former partner, at least not until Pendrell brought it up himself.
He had been acting a little squirrelly ever since they had encountered
Mulder at the bar. Maybe a little jealous. She'd always thought she might
like to make a man jealous, for once, but she'd found when it happened
that she actually didn't care for it at all. Seemed like he ought to have
learned to trust her more than that.

Walking by one deserted, ramshackle marina after another on the north
side of the island, she grew more and more annoyed about it all.

Damn Mulder. Damn Pendrell. Damn them both, and for that matter, all men.
Petulant, willful creatures, ruled by their hormones, acting on those
chemical impulses with social impunity.

She gave up searching for a boat at around seven o'clock, as the sun
finally began to sink slowly toward the horizon. Either they'd have to
find a way onto that freighter, or they'd have to try to go overland.

Or maybe take Bloodworth up on his offer and hope they could get away
once they reached Denver.

She hated the thought of it, but their options were being whittled down,
one by one.

                                 ****

Mulder didn't start to get worried about Frohike until 10 o'clock. The
little man functioned on his own terms, on his own schedule. He was the
eyes and ears for the whole operation at the club, and he needed freedom
of movement to make that work. He came and went as he pleased. But the
Jeep was gone, and it looked like he wasn't going to make it back by
curfew at midnight.

"He say where he was going?" Mulder asked Langly at about ten-thirty.

Langly shrugged, flipping his long blond hair off one shoulder. "Haven't
talked to him all day," he said.

Mulder sighed, looking around the club, trying to sniff out any ferrets
Skinner or the Cancer Man might have sent in. He didn't see any.

"Don't sweat it," Langly said. "He's probably lying low somewhere. You
know Frohike--he's a very cautious man."

"Yeah," Mulder said, unconvinced. After the club closed at eleven-thirty
he went upstairs to the apartment over the bar, pacing the floor. He was
tired. He hadn't slept well the night before, and this night didn't seem
to hold much promise for rest, either.

Times like this, he missed the numbing diversion of cable television. He
loaded up the CD player, grabbing discs at random, paying no attention to
which ones he put in, intending to let them function as white noise in
the background. Then he opened the sliding glass door and sat on the
balcony in the dark, staring out at the ocean and the moonlight.

Suddenly something in the music penetrated. He frowned, his attention
sharpening. "...In the end what you don't surrender/Well the world just
strips away..."

*Shit.* Springsteen, "Human Touch"--it was Scully's disc. He had no idea
how it had gotten mixed up in his stuff. Scooped up in a rush while they
were on the road, likely. He jerked up, intending to turn it off. But
when he got within reach of the stereo, he found he couldn't do it.

"...You can't shut off the risk and the pain/Without losin' the love that
remains/We're all riders on this train..."

He let the song play through. The sound of it in his ears was like having
her arms around him. He knew he was playing with fire, but somehow he
just couldn't pull himself away from the flames.

                                 ****

Finally, about two in the morning, Mulder heard something downstairs.
Hand on his gun, he peered around the edge of the door and saw Frohike
gallumphing breathlessly up the stairs.

Mulder stepped around the door. "Where the hell have you been?" he
demanded.

Frohike ignored the question. "Where's Scully?"

Mulder frowned in confusion. Even Frohike wasn't usually this direct or
this crude. "Down the boulevard in the Best Western, why?"

The burly little man went galloping down the stairs toward the back door
and out. What the hell, Mulder thought. Then Byers, from the kitchen,
called to him.

"You'd better come have a look," Byers said, and disappeared through the
double doors again.

Mulder sighed and went down. On the prep table in the center of the
kitchen, a grimy, sweaty figure writhed weakly and emitted a series of
short, low moans. Mulder couldn't recognize the swollen face any more
than Frohike had.

But he didn't have to. The guy was alive.

It had to be Krycek.

*Shit,* Mulder thought. *Here we go.*

                                 ****

Frohike brought Pendrell and Skinner back with Scully. Mulder glared at
the A.D., then at Frohike. The little man returned the scathing glance
with an apologetic shrug. Mulder went out to the bar to make a fresh pot
of coffee--before this was over, they'd all need it. Frohike followed.

"I couldn't help it," he whispered. "He was with them at the hotel."

"Who saw you bring the victim back from Houston?"

"Nobody," Frohike said. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Well,
Frank and Hector on the causeway."

*Wonderful,* Mulder thought. Those two would've been on the phone to
Skinner in two seconds flat. The A.D. had known about it--and probably
relayed the information to the Cancer Man--before Frohike had had time to
drive across the causeway. And that, naturally, would explain why Skinner
was at the hotel with Pendrell and Scully.

Frohike caught Mulder's long-suffering look and said, "I know--they're
Skinner's moles, but there was nothing I could do about it. What was I
supposed to do? Leave him there to die?"

"He's not going to die," Mulder said, disgusted. "Nevermind--it's done.
We'll deal with it."

"There was another one with him. A dead one, wearing most of an
environment suit. Fresh dead, like they were hit at the same time. And I
found this on the body." Frohike handed over an ID wallet, nearly
identical to the one Mulder had carried. Only this guy's badge had been
issued by the Special Emigration Bureau.

Mulder frowned at Frohike. "That doesn't make any sense," he said.

Frohike shrugged. "I know."

When Mulder took the coffee back into the kitchen, Scully was giving
Krycek a shot. Whatever it was, he began to quiet, almost immediately.

"He must have been exposed before," she said.

"The question is how," Pendrell said.

"And why he didn't die the first time," Skinner put in.

Mulder sipped his coffee in silence. Pendrell shot a look at him--but
Mulder didn't react. *Hell, you know more about it than I do,* he
thought. *You want to be a hero? Cool. Earn it.*

"Do we know who he is?" Scully asked.

Frohike shook his head.

She sighed. "Well, he's stable enough," she said. "At this point we can
treat him symptomatically--just provide support and see what happens."

"Can he be moved?" Mulder asked.

Her look would've vaporized diamond.

"Look," Mulder said, "this is a bar, not a hospital."

"Sure, fine. Whatever," she said, between her teeth. "God knows we
wouldn't want to inconvenience you. I just thought it might be better not
to have it get around the rumor mill. I'd love to take credit for curing
him, but I think that's a bit premature and maybe completely
unwarranted."

Mulder shrugged and went back out for more coffee. This time it was
Skinner who followed him. "Mulder," he said, "you know something you're
not telling."

"Sure," Mulder said. "I know, for example, that Ioannina is a city in
northwestern Greece and that pavid is a synonym for fearful. But I can't
imagine what use it would be to say so in the present situation."

"You know what I meant. It's Krycek, isn't it?"

"Huh. You know, he *does* kind of look like Krycek, doesn't he?"

"Why would the smoking man let him go?"

"Who said he did? How do you know Krycek didn't escape on his own? And
why ask me? Why don't you ask your pal, Bloodworth?"

"Goddammit, Mulder--"

"You know, this is fascinating. I don't think you've ever really wanted
to know what I thought before--I don't believe you've ever asked me what
was my theory."

"That's crap, and you know it."

Mulder put both hands flat on the bar. "All right, you want to know what
I think--I think the Cancer Man is setting us all up for a fall."

>From the kitchen door, Scully said, "A third-grader could've figured that
one out."

*Goddammit,* Mulder thought. He should've known. Two years ago he
would've known--that Scully wouldn't let go of it, that she'd follow him
out, dog him to say what he thought, what theories were forming in his
head. *Stupid.*

"Well, then, maybe you ought to get yourself a third-grader to figure out
what comes next," he grated.

"How was Krycek exposed? When?" Scully pressed.

They'd been in Siberia together, but if Krycek had been in the same room,
had the same black worms crawl up his nose, suffered the same convulsions
and nausea while restrained in one of those chicken-wire cages, Mulder
hadn't actually witnessed it. He hadn't been in any condition to witness
it. "How the hell should I know?" he asked.

"Then tell me what you *think* happened!" Scully yelled.

He stopped himself from recoiling away from her, but he didn't manage not
to flinch. Scully enraged was fearsome--he had forgotten that about her,
too. She had that drill-parade voice--must have learned from it her
father--and there was something about somebody that small coming at him
like doom on wheels that suggested she had a sledgehammer held behind her
back. Scully could kick ass and take names with the best. Mulder had seen
her do it. He'd been the victim of it.

He drew a long breath to settle ragged nerves. He was angry, she was
angry; time to cool things off.

"Look," he said, his voice low, "he was working with the Cancer Man when
I first met him--I'm sure of that much. For all I know, he was one of
their experiments."

Skinner said, "They could've exposed their own people to give them an
immunity, so they wouldn't be killed if there was an accident."

Mulder pulled the SEB badge Frohike had given him out of his pocket and
tossed it on the bar. "Yeah, except there was a corpse with him. Frohike
found that on the body. Like they were trying to kill Krycek and it went
bad somehow. Or he was trying to get away from them and it went bad. I
don't know."

"They were together?" Scully asked.

"It looks that way."

"But if Krycek was on Bloodworth's payroll, wouldn't Bloodworth know that
Krycek had been exposed?"

"I don't know, Scully--I'm trying to work this out just like you are."

Langly strolled in then, reading the morning newspaper, fresh from the
curb in front of the bar.

"All right," Skinner said, "for the hell of it, let's assume that
Bloodworth did know he'd been exposed before. What would he gain by
taking Krycek to Houston and letting him get stung?"

"Maybe this," Langly said, and he handed over the paper.

Mulder took it from him. The headline, in type sized appropriately for
the second coming, read: "Medical breakthrough: Doctors save man stung by
bees." The story quoted Bloodworth, in his capacity as deputy director of
the SEB, as saying that government scientists Ted and Dana Pendrell were
"very hopeful" that they had found a cure for the stings.

"Oh, my God," Scully said, reading around his shoulder.

"Yeah," Mulder said. "He's setting you up. You try to leave the island
now, and the mob'll lynch you."

***********************************************************************

Part 11

July 23
Galveston

With the news about Krycek now all over the island, Scully saw no point
in trying to keep him out of sight, so they took him to the hospital in
Frohike's Jeep and left him there with specific instructions about how he
should be treated.

Then she and Pendrell went back to the hotel, both of them exhausted and
discouraged. Pendrell flopped on the bed. "Do you think he's right about
what Bloodworth wants?" Pendrell asked.

"I don't know," Scully said. "In effect, that would mean Bloodworth's
trying to dupe us into thinking we actually have effected a cure--but I
don't understand why. Mulder said he doesn't think the SEB wants us to
find a cure. But that doesn't make any sense. I don't understand what
they'd gain from it."

"Did you ask Mulder about the letters of transit?" Pendrell asked.

She sighed heavily. How much to tell him? "Yes. But it was useless,"
Scully said, pacing across the hotel room. "He was..." She shrugged. "He
was in one of his moods. He was bitter and hateful, and nothing he said
made any sense. But the bottom line is, he's not giving up the letters."

"Did he say why?" Pendrell asked quietly.

Scully gave a bitter chuckle, but it died when she looked at her husband.
He was pale, his face tight with anxiety. "Ted, are you all right? You
look like you're not feeling well."

"Did he say why?" he repeated, in a hoarse whisper.

Slowly, she said, "He said I should ask you." God, what new horror was
coming now? "He said you could explain it better than he could."

Pendrell closed his eyes and let his head incline forward so that she
couldn't see his face. Softly he said, "Well, that was chivalrous of
him."

Chivalrous? She went over to sit on the bed beside him. "What are you
talking about? Ted, what is it?"

He kept his head down and rubbed his hands along his thighs, his pose
abject misery. She waited him out.

Finally he said, "You remember when I went to North Carolina? When I
brought back the samples from the 'unidentified survivor'?"

"Sure, but what has that got to do with--" She snapped. "That was
Mulder?"

He nodded. "He'd been exposed to the active toxin in the venom when he
was in Russia, in Tunguska. I don't know how; he never said. So he had
some immunity already. But he wasn't doing very well--I didn't think he
was going to make it."

Scully sat very still. Nothing in the universe would've kept her from
Mulder if she had known he was alive. Pendrell had known that. And yet he
hadn't told her.

"I think..." Pendrell hesitated. "Dana, I told him you were dead. And
after that, it was like he just gave up. Then one night he left the
hospital. Disappeared."

She got up. Suddenly her skin crawled at the mere thought of being in the
same room with him.

"The truth is, I think I came as close to killing him as the bees did,
just by telling him you were gone," he said. "But I loved you, too, and
it was clear to me at the time he wasn't going to live. I didn't think it
would matter."

"So you were going to let him die thinking he was all alone in the
universe? That there was nothing left for him?"

"I know you'll hate me for it. And I don't blame you." He looked up
suddenly, his eyes brimming with tears. "If you decide to stay with him,
I won't make any trouble."

She couldn't breathe, couldn't think. She was trembling, feverish. She
fled, out the door, across the deserted boulevard and down the seawall to
the beach. She ran and ran, heedless of direction, until the soft brown
sand under her feet finally exhausted her and she had to slow to a
dispirited walk.

She felt suddenly as if she were trapped between them. Pendrell, who
could save the world, if only the world would let him. Mulder, for whom
she would happily give the world up, if only he would let her.

She'd have to choose between them; there was no other way. But she had
never been good at determining what she wanted for herself and herself
alone. She'd never had any trouble readily identifying what others wanted
or needed from her, but her own needs and desires had always seemed
unfocused, indefinable. Only occasionally had she found the will to
pursue things simply because *she* wanted them.

Did she want Mulder? God, yes. So much that the thought of him, the sight
of him, took her breath away. Yes, he was cynical and neurotic as hell.
He was an emotional quicksand of insatiable need and incurable pain, so
wounded he could hardly bear even the gentlest touch. Here on the island
his scars had hardened, but they were no less tender underneath. Scully
knew it would take more than a kiss to heal those wounds--she did not
delude herself that her love would cure him--and that until they were
healed, there would always be times when he just had nothing for her. He
had never been entirely insensitive to her needs. There was in him a
boundless, bottomless tenderness, a generosity he did not easily yield up
and which was, for its rarity, all the more precious. But his needs would
always predominate, and most times, he wouldn't even realize he was doing
that to her. If she opted to stay on the island and pillow her head on
Fox Mulder's chest, *that* was the life she realistically could look
forward to.

And yet, somehow, it was the life she wanted, more than she wanted her
next heartbeat. So which of them really was the neurotic?

Pendrell, on the other hand, was an endlessly giving sort. He had always
been sensitive to her every whim, sometimes giving her what she had not
even realized she needed until he had presented it to her. He had done
all the right things. There had been roses and candlelit evenings, and in
the midst of the hell the world had become, she had needed those things
much more than she ever would have conceded. And he had never asked
anything of her but that she let him love her. And so she had. She had
drifted along with her congenial partner, pleased to share a vital
professional effort with someone who approached it with the same
no-nonsense attitude she held. He had made that easy for her, and in such
a difficult environment, she had been relieved to find that something
could be easy. It had even been easy to make love to him, to close her
eyes and pretend that his hands belonged to someone else.

The only thing that had not been easy had been convincing herself that
there couldn't have been something more.

Yes, Pendrell had given her everything she needed. Except that when he'd
had the opportunity to take *Mulder* away from her, he had snapped at the
chance. And all he had to offer her now, in compensation, was to suggest
that he wouldn't make trouble if she left him? He'd been wrong when he'd
said she would hate him--she couldn't do that. But she couldn't forgive
him, either. Between she and Pendrell, things would never be easy again.

Still, she couldn't simply walk out on him, either. The antivenin still
had to be perfected--she couldn't escape that.

Scully saw lights above her and to her left, and she looked up. She had
drawn even with the Casablanca Club, almost as if she had been pulled
there by some unfathomable magnet. She closed her eyes, her throat
constricting suddenly, a sharp ache welling up in her chest.

God. How would she ever figure out what to do?

                                 ****

The sun was coming up, and Mulder still hadn't slept. Then again, he
figured sleeping probably wasn't all that safe an idea just now. Lots of
things could happen in the dark, when one's eyes were closed, and most of
them, in his experience, were bad things.

He drifted downstairs into the kitchen for a snack, and when he headed
back to the apartment with a plate of toast and jam, he heard footsteps
on the dock outside.

It was Pendrell, peering through the window with his hands cupped around
his eyes so he could see past the reflection of the morning sun on the
glass. *Shit--that's what I need. The red-headed lab geek come to ask
forgiveness. Fucker.*

He sighed and went to open the door. "Something I can help you with?"

"I need to talk to you," Pendrell said. He had his shoulders hunched up a
little, as if to steel himself against a blow.

Mulder would've liked to hit him, but it would've felt like child abuse.
He settled for verbal needling instead.

"And the reason why I would want to talk to you is...?"

"It's not for me. It's for Dana."

"I think she's your responsibility these days."

"Look, it's not her fault," Pendrell said, all in a rush. "She didn't
know--I didn't tell her I saw you alive in--" He stopped short and drew a
breath, as if he were trying to get his nerves under control. "Can I come
in?"

Mulder didn't want to let him in. He wanted to kick his scrawny butt to
the Moon. But then, who knew who might be listening? He held the door
open and backed away so Pendrell could follow him in. He let the door
swing shut, then pulled out a chair and sat down.

"Mulder," Pendrell said, "I know what you must think of me."

"Yeah? What exactly would that be?"

He pulled out a chair and sat down across from Mulder. "That I'm...a
pathetic weasel."

Mulder took a bite of toast and nodded encouragingly. *Not bad for a
start.*

The younger man swallowed hard. "And I guess you're right. But I was in
love with her."

Mulder hooked a thumb toward the street. "Take a number," he growled.

"I shouldn't have done it, and I'm sorry."

Mulder nodded again. "Yeah, I'm sorry, too. So what? What do you want,
Pendrell? My forgiveness? Why should I give it to you?"

Pendrell drew a heavy breath and pinned him with a hard look. "Do you
have the letters of transit or not?"

Well, that was blunt enough. Mulder returned his stare. "If I did, what
would you suggest I do with them?"

"I know you've got no reason to want to help me. But I don't want Dana to
get ground up in whatever Bloodworth's planning. Use the letters to take
her to Hawaii. Just go, the two of you. I'll be all right here. That's
what you want, isn't it? To be with her?"

Mulder blinked in surprise. Now here was a twist. "You're asking me to
use the letters of transit to run off with your wife?"

"I want her to be safe," Pendrell said. "I know you want that, too. If
Bloodworth's really trying to trap us here, I don't want her to get
caught."

Mulder felt something in his chest tighten, like a big snake coiling
itself close around a tree's limb. He thought of black-sand beaches, of
food that didn't come out of a can, of going to sleep with Scully's hair
spread across his chest like dawn. "You're serious?"

"God, yes. Just take her and go. I know she still cares for you."

Mulder realized he was breathing too fast. *Cares for me?* If so, she'd
given little sign of it. Of course, he'd been acting like an asshole,
mostly--quite on purpose. It was possible, he supposed...

No. No, no, no. He shoved his feelings back down into the pit of his
stomach. Why should he believe Pendrell? Why should he trust him? But for
some reason, his heartbeat would not slow down.

"It's an interesting offer," Mulder said carefully. "But I'm not sure it
would work--you and your wife and I are under surveillance, you know."

"We are?" Pendrell's eyes had gone wide. "Are you sure?"

God, the lab geek was a naive little bunny. Now Mulder understood what
Scully had seen in him--she was something of a rescuer personality. It
was part of what had bound her to Mulder for so long.

"Yeah," he said dryly, "I'm pretty sure." *Or if we're not, Skinner's not
doing his job, and he's usually very competent.* "So if I were to try to
find the letters, the odds are good that Bloodworth and his hounds would
snatch them right away from me the minute I had them."

"Damn," Pendrell said, crestfallen.

Mulder got up, leaving his toast uneaten. "So you see," he said, "I
really can't help you."

"Can't?" Pendrell asked harshly. "Or won't?"

Mulder shrugged. "Take your pick. Either way, the answer's no."

"You really want to see her die here?"

"Everybody's got to die somewhere," Mulder said. "If you'll excuse me,
I've had a long night."

He returned to the apartment and shut the door. Then he stood there for a
long time, leaning back against the door, his pulse thudding heavily. A
savage mix of anger and fear and longing had suddenly boiled up inside
him, and he couldn't push it away despite his desperate wish for the
cool, soothing hardness of apathy. God, why had they had come here? He
had worked so hard to dull himself, to strip away his sentimentality. He
had thought pain had finally burned all that mawkish crap out of him, yet
here it was, to torment him again.

Pendrell, trying to repair the past by offering Mulder a future he had
thought could never exist. And it was working, goddammit--he really was
tempted. *Just take her and go.* God, how sweet that sounded. He and
Scully together, fighting the bad guys, working, loving. The thought of
it was enough to make his heart burst open with joy and terror. He let
his head fall against the door and closed his eyes, fighting with all his
strength to get the images out of his mind.

He had already lost it all once. He knew he couldn't stand it again. His
only defense had been not to have anything that he cared to lose, and up
until the moment Scully had walked back into his life, it had been
working.

Not again. God, it hurt so. He did not ever again want to care about
someone so much. And yet--to have the chance once more, and turn away
from it...

God, it hurt.

Something touched his face then, and he jerked hard away, eyes opening
wide, reaching for his gun.

It was Scully, her hand up where her fingers had grazed his cheek. "Are
you all right?" she asked, frowning in concern.

"How the hell did you get in here?" he demanded. His heart was galloping,
his hands shaking.

"I knocked on the side door, and Byers showed me to the back stairs from
the kitchen. I told him I wanted to talk to you."

*I'll kill the son of a bitch.* He turned away, rubbing the back of his
neck to try to release tension in the muscles. "Yeah, well, I'm not
really up for an extended dialogue, Scul--" He sighed. "Mrs. Pendrell."

For a moment, she said nothing. Then, "I did what you said. I asked him
why. He told me what happened in North Carolina."

Mulder drew a long breath, hoping it would steady him. He faced her.
"Look, you have the letters. I sneaked them into the front pocket of your
handbag out on Pelican Island. You never use that pocket for anything,
but you always check it when you're getting ready to leave somewhere. I
figured you'd plan to make a dash for the freighter and right before you
did, you'd find them." He breathed again. "So you can go now."

He saw her move toward him, saw her move to wrap her arms around him, and
he stepped backward out of reach so fast he knocked something off the
bookshelf behind him. "Don't," he said sharply. It came out at a higher
pitch than his normal range--almost like a yelp.

Her frown had deepened. "Mulder--"

"No. It's too late, Scully. It's over. I'll be fine. You just go."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I want you to. You and Pendrell--I'm telling you to go."

"Stop it," she whispered. She took a step toward him.

"No!" he yelled. "Don't do this to me! Oh, God--leave me alone!"

That had the desired effect--it stopped her, her eyes dusky blue with
confusion. "I don't understand," she murmured.

He was shaking so hard he thought his knees would go out from under him,
but he locked his jaw and hung on grimly. "Go," he said again.

"Mulder, I know how it must've hurt you--"

"No, you don't. You had him, and you could go on like that. You don't
have any idea what it was like. You want to know what happened to me? You
did, Scully. I lost you, and I couldn't stand it, and it's too fucking
late."

Softly she said, "I cried for you, too, Mulder."

"What is it you think, Scully? You think we can rent a bungalow right
here on the island and live out our lives behind a little white picket
fence? Just you and me and baby makes three? Play out the American dream
by the seashore? Yeah, we can do that, for a few months--until the bees
come and kill you, and I have to watch you die while I'm helplessly
retching my guts up. And then I go on alone again." He gasped in a
shuddering breath. "You don't get to do that to me again, Scully. Tell me
the truth, goddammit--you waited for me, didn't you?"

"Not so long that I couldn't get away. I knew, Mulder--I knew why you
asked me that. I didn't want to do that to you, and I didn't." She
stepped toward him again. He was up against the bookshelf and couldn't
back away.

"Mulder," she said, "I love you. I always have, and I always will." She
reached toward his face.

"Please don't touch me," he whispered.

She let her hand drop. "All right," she said. "I don't want to hurt you
any more. If you want me to go, I will."

"Please."

She went a couple of steps toward the door, then stopped. "I'm still
alive, Fox--I'm still here. I didn't wait for you."

He closed his eyes tight and held his breath until she was gone. It was
the only way he could hold the sobs inside long enough for her to go.

He hadn't wanted her to hear them. He knew she couldn't stand them any
more than he could.

***********************************************************************

Part 12

July 23
Galveston

Scully returned to the beach with her thoughts in a whirl, walking
aimlessly along just at the water's edge, not caring that the surf
occasionally splashed over her shoes. Where else did she have to go?

In a way, seeing Mulder in such anguish had been almost a relief. She was
so much more accustomed to the Mulder whose feelings were bruised as
easily as a four-year-old's. The one who was in some ways as delicate as
a butterfly's wing. Looking back now, she realized she'd known he was
aching underneath the icy facade he had presented to her. More in what he
hadn't said, hadn't revealed, he had given it away to her in ways so
subtle she had recognized them only viscerally. Along her spine, not in
her brain.

She was stunned at how much his rejection of her hurt. Scully had always
thought of herself as the one who supplied others' needs--as the one who
fulfilled *his* needs. It had never been clear to her before how much she
needed him.

Part of her wanted to do as he had asked her. Get on the freighter with
Ted and leave. Pretend they had not met again and settle back into the
comfortable blank space somewhere between happiness and misery that she
had been occupying in New Orleans. That would save both of them the pain
of re-opening the sores, re-learning to trust, to believe, to have faith
in each other. Another part yearned to stay--to rush back to him and wrap
herself around him like a bandage. To reclaim what he had given her two
years ago.

Except that she wasn't sure either of them could stand even a healing
touch.

God, how would she decide what to do?

                                  ****

Skinner went by the hospital at mid-morning to see how Krycek was doing.
He had tried to call the smoking man but got no answer--whatever the
bastard was up to, he was being damned quiet about it.

Skinner had spent much of the night thinking about Mulder, about the way
he was behaving, about what he had said and not said. The son of a bitch
was right--Mulder had learned well from example and he now was acting
like Skinner always had. Maintaining distance, maintaining plausible
denial, withholding information, holding himself aloof from the issues
and the action. It wasn't a very attractive picture, and Skinner didn't
like seeing either of them in that light.

*You were the kind of commanding officer to him that you always hated in
'Nam--the kind who'd send troops into a mine field and then sit back
waiting to see if anybody got his legs blown off.*

Not an appealing image at all. He ground his teeth, shoved the thoughts
out of his mind and headed for Krycek's room.

Krycek was asleep when he arrived. The guard Skinner had assigned said
he'd slept through the night, his condition apparently improving slowly
but steadily. Skinner had hoped to talk to Krycek, to see if he knew
anything about what the smoking man might be trying to accomplish, but he
decided not to wake him until he knew more details about his condition.
Instead he went to find Pendrell in the hospital's lab.

He found him with one sleeve rolled up and a hypodermic needle in his
other hand, a sheepish look on his face at being discovered.

"What are you doing?" Skinner asked, forcing his tone neutral.

Pendrell glanced away and then back. "I think I've isolated what it is in
Krycek's blood that provided him with an immunity."

That didn't exactly answer the question, but Skinner decided not to push
the issue. "What is it, then?"

"It's a micro-organism that generates an antitoxin when stimulated by the
active ingredient in the bee stings. The ones I got from Krycek last
night were quite active." He gestured toward the microscope, and Skinner
took a look.

He couldn't see a damned thing and said so.

"They look like tiny gnats," Pendrell said. "Little black dots, mostly
sticking to the blood cells."

Skinner looked again, and then he saw them, clinging to a round, pillowy
 red corpuscle like sprinkles on a doughnut. "So those little things are
what made Krycek immune to the bee stings?"

"I think so, yes."

He straightened up from the eyepieces. "And you figured that out
overnight?"

Pendrell pursed his lips in annoyance and shook his head. "I've been
working on this for two years, and I suspected for some time now it was
something like that. But we never could isolate it--they don't show up
until they've been inflamed by the toxin, and the only samples I had to
work with came from someone who'd been stung more than a day before I was
able to draw blood. The results were inconclusive."

"You had a sample from someone else who had an immunity?" Skinner was
surprised--he had thought he knew more-or-less how Scully and Pendrell
had been proceeding.

A fleeting look of distaste crossed Pendrell's face, lip slightly curled.
"Yeah. Mulder."

"You boys have a falling out?" Skinner asked, and then, before Pendrell
could answer, he knew.

Scully.

"Oh," he said. "Yeah. I get it."

"It was my fault," Pendrell said.

"I don't need to know."

"Anyway, I thought he must have had some kind of micro-organism,
something that was producing an antibody or an anti-toxin in his system,
but I never could prove it. The organisms were just about gone by the
time I got hold of the first sample--he'd been floating around on that
ferry out by Martha's Vineyard for more than thirty hours. I only saw
them once, in the microscope, and then they were gone. And the second
blood sample I drew didn't show them at all."

Skinner nodded. "So now you think that if we can introduce the same
organisms into other people before they get stung, that will protect them
from the stings?"

"I don't know if 'protect' is quite the right word. You saw what Krycek
was like when they brought him in--he's not going to die, but he's damned
sick, just like Mulder was."

"But people won't *die,*" Skinner pointed out.

"Right. I mean, it's not the answer, but it's all we've got, and if it
really works, it's a helluva lot better than nothing."

"Uh, huh," Skinner said. "So your plan was to stick yourself with these
things and see if it works?"

"Yes." He shrugged. "Somebody's got to test it. I don't know how much
time there is before the bees get here--not much, if they're as close as
Houston."

"And if it doesn't work? Pendrell, if you try it on yourself, then who
finishes up the work?"

He colored slightly. "Dana can do it," he said softly. He inclined his
head toward the computer. "I left her all my notes."

Skinner nodded. Time to get out into the mine field. "I've got a better
idea," he said.

                                 ****

Mulder had slept finally, after his emotional outburst, and had awakened
balled up around his pillow, feeling drained but calm, as if the release
had greatly relieved some pressure that had been building. The bar had
been pretty quiet all evening, giving him a chance to drift for a few
hours.

But he figured it wouldn't last, and when he saw Scully coming up the
dock, he wasn't really surprised. She was walking swiftly, bearing
straight for him, her I'm-in-a-hurry manner telling him it wasn't a
social call.

That was all right; he preferred it that way.

"Can I talk to you privately?" she said quietly, and headed toward the
kitchen without waiting for his answer.

Son of a bitch, Mulder thought. She just treated me like a witness she
wants to interview. He shook his head in wonder and followed her.

"What's up?" he asked, once he went through the double doors.

"I need some ice," she said. "The hospital's run out of it."

"Okay." He stuck his head back out the doors and made a "come-here"
motion at Frohike. "What's happened? Krycek take a turn for the worse?"

Scully sighed. "No. It's Skinner."

Mulder frowned. "What happened to Skinner?"

"He volunteered to be exposed to the micro-organisms that create the
immunity to the bee stings." She didn't look or sound happy about this.
She was holding her mouth in that I-think-this-is-bullshit grimace again.

"You know what causes the immunity?"

"Ted thinks he does. And all I can do now is hope to hell he's right."

Frohike came in.

Mulder said, "Go up to Seward's place, remind him how big a favor he owes
us, and tell him to send--" He looked at Scully. "A hundred pounds
enough?"

Scully nodded. "That should be plenty."

"A hundred pounds of ice over to Galveston General."

Frohike glanced at Scully, murmured, "On my way," and took off.

When he had gone, Scully said, "Tell me about Tunguska."

"I went, I got captured, had some black shit stuffed up my nose by some
people I did not regard as gentlemen. I got away."

She inclined her head. "You know what I mean."

"Yeah, but I can't tell you what you really want to know. I don't know
what the stuff was--I mean, not *exactly* what it was. I just know it
came from the meteorite that crashed there. I can only vaguely estimate
how much of it they gave me. A tablespoon, maybe two. All I know is, the
symptoms I had were pretty much the same as when I got stung. I thought
so even before I got stung, just from watching the victims on the news.
And from seeing people get hit in Ohio when I went to get the bee I
brought back to D.C."

"That's why you went to Ohio, wasn't it? Because you thought there was a
connection."

"Yes."

"You went to Ohio to get yourself stung," she guessed.

"No. Well, yes. I mean, yeah, that was the plan. But the bee I saw in
Canada died after it stung. I wasn't really sure they were the same
bees--maybe they're not, exactly. So..." He shrugged. "I chickened. I
didn't actually get stung until I was on the ferry, headed for
Nantucket."

She sighed heavily. "How many times did you get stung?"

"I'm not sure. I remember two--but things got rather confused after that.
It could as easily have been five or a hundred." He thought a moment,
then said, "Skinner's really bad?"

"He was comatose for the first five hours. Now he's got a fever of a
hundred and four, and he's delirious. Convulsions, nausea."

"The usual, in other words," Mulder said.

"Yes." She ducked her head and rubbed the back of her neck. "I've seen
too many people die from this toxin." She sounded exhausted, and Mulder
supposed she probably was. Doubtful she'd had any more sleep than he had.
Maybe less.

"Well, for what it's worth, if he's made it this far, I doubt he'll die.
The remaining question is, will it really work if he gets stung? And
there's only one way to find out."

She looked up, and her startlingly blue eyes were haunted. "I know," she
said.

Suddenly there was a loud boom, like distant thunder or artillery fire.
They went silent, listening. Another boom, and then another.

"What the hell?" Scully said.

"Shit," Mulder said. "They're blowing the causeway."

                                 ****

July 24

Scully woke to a distantly familiar clicking sound. Before she even
opened her eyes, she knew what it was--Mulder playing Solitaire on his
laptop computer.

She'd always found watching him do that slightly annoying. He was
practically addicted to the thing--he'd play on and on for hours, and
sometimes had whiled away entire cross-country flights with it,
seeming irritated when it came time to turn the computer off for landing.

But what was really irritating was that he was so damnably methodical
about it. Mulder--Mr. Quantum Leap of Intuition--had a system for
Solitaire and never varied from it. Turn up every card you can right at
the outset. Always leave a space to pull down a king. Never pull down low
cards unless you needed them to move something else.

It didn't even work. He lost most of the time. And he knew it didn't
work, and yet he persisted, as if he were following some script from
which he simply could not bring himself to deviate. She wondered if he
had learned that lousy card system from his father.

She sat up and stretched. They were at the hospital, in the same room
with Skinner and Krycek, who were still sleeping. Scully had made
Pendrell go and get some rest, protesting that she would watch over the
patients. And then, despite her best efforts, she had fallen asleep. She
wasn't sure what time Mulder had showed up to shoulder the rest of her
watch for her, but from the look of his wilted white tuxedo jacket, it
couldn't have been long after she'd dropped off.

He glanced up when she moved and wordlessly passed her a thermos.

"How long have you been here?" she asked, opening it.

"I came over after the bar closed up."

Scully breathed the warm, bitter scent in the bottle. "God," she said.
"This is *real* coffee, isn't it?"

"Costa Rican. Ought to be called Costa Bundle, but it's worth it."

"We couldn't get the real stuff in New Orleans. It was all burnt barley
and chicory."

"Shades of the Civil War." He moved a card with one hand and reached into
a pocket of his jacket with the other, withdrew a couple of brown paper
packets labeled "creamer."

"That stuff probably dates back to at least the Korean War," he said,
handing it to her. "It's Army surplus. But it's what we've got here on
our island paradise."

She opened one of the packets, sniffed, and decided to forgo it. The
coffee smelled so good, she didn't want to taint it with old, musty
creamer. "Not that I want to seem ungrateful, but..."

"I completely understand."

"Is there enough for me?" Skinner asked hoarsely.

Scully put the cup down and went to him. "I really don't think you
should, just yet," she said. "How are you feeling?"

"Like somebody scoured my guts with steel wool. I'm all right. Where are
my glasses?"

Scully handed them over. He was getting up. "Sir, I think you really
ought to rest for a while," she said.

"No time," Skinner said.

"Relax, Walter," Mulder said, closing up the laptop. "Nobody's going to
Houston today. They blew out the causeway last night."

Skinner frowned. "What the hell for?"

"Because the smoking man, speaking as deputy director of the SEB, told
them to."

"Son of a bitch," Skinner muttered.

"Are the bees getting closer?" Scully asked.

"No. According to the city's official reports the bees seem to have found
the old rice fields west of Houston very appealing, and the bulk of the
swarm is still out there eating like mad and...roosting, or whatever bees
do at night. And making little baby bees, I presume."

Mulder shrugged. "And on top of that, there's a tropical storm coming in
that's likely to blow the little bastards all the way back to San
Antonio."

"Then why destroy the bridge?" Scully asked.

>From behind her came a bitter, rough-throated laugh. "Man," Krycek said,"you people just don't
get it, do you?"

"So why don't you tell us?" Skinner demanded.

The younger man propped himself up on his elbows in the hospital bed.
"They don't want anybody to get away. They don't want any of us to
survive--especially not anybody who could make it possible for a lot of
people to survive."

Krycek laughed again.

"They just want to sweep the planet clean," he said.

***********************************************************************

Part 13

July 24
Galveston

Krycek was grinning like a dog. Mulder would've liked to slap the smile
right off his face, but they all wanted to find out what the little
ratfucker knew about the Cancer Man's plans.

"You're wrong, Krycek," he said. "We're all painfully aware that the
smoking man wants to wipe out every living soul on the continent. The
question is why, and if you don't start talking, I'm going to use you to
troll for sharks."

The smile segued into a smirk. "Yeah, you'd like that, wouldn't you,
Mulder?"

Mulder took two long strides and got his hands around Krycek's throat.
"You just don't *know,*" he snarled.

Reflexively, Krycek tried to jerk away, but Mulder had him.

"I'm going to hold you down while he threads the hook, you cocksucker,"
Skinner growled. "Talk--and you'd goddamned well better tell it straight
and tell it all."

"All right," Krycek said.

Mulder released his hold, and Krycek wrenched free.

"They want to start over," he said. "They've developed some kind of
super-humans, and they're making space for them, so these new people can
take over and rule the world, and make it a better place. They think
regular folks like you and I are too contentious to co-exist with their
super-race. Assholes like us would just screw up the dynamics of the new
order."

"What kind of super-humans?" Scully asked.

"They've got some of the genetic characteristics of the aliens that
crashed at Roswell, back in '47. I mean, they're mostly human still, but
they're stronger, and they have resistances to diseases and chemicals and
radiation. And they have some kind of healing powers."

"Like Jeremiah Smith?" Scully asked.

"The Jeremiah Smith series was one of the later experiments," Krycek
said.

"Those mute clones I saw in Canada," Mulder said, his voice low.

"Some of the original prototypes. Now they think they've got it
perfected--the ones they're producing now are even better than the
Smiths."

"Who's 'they?'" Skinner demanded.

"The smoking man, Bloodworth. I don't know their names, but some of them
have been in it since the Truman administration."

"The Majestic Twelve?" Mulder asked. UFO lore had it that President Harry
Truman had appointed a commission of twelve men to research and use
technology recovered from Roswell. Mulder had never been absolutely sure
it was true.

"Yeah. There's not many of the original twelve left now, but they put the
whole thing in motion, way back in the '50s." He looked at Mulder. "Your
dad was pretty high up on the staff there, at one point. Until he backed
out."

Mulder nodded. Not a surprise.

"What's in it for them?" Skinner asked. "They're going to be replaced,
too."

"They're *patriots.*" Krycek spat the word out. "Fanatics. They don't
care whether they come out of it or not. And hell, they're all, what?
Seventy years old? They won't be around long enough for it to matter
much, and half of the damned hybrids are their kids, in effect. Their
offspring are going to take over the world."

"One would assume," Scully said, "that if these 'super-humans' were all
that super, it wouldn't be necessary to get rid of the *unter-menschen*
so that they could take over. Why not just turn them loose among us, and
let natural selection take its course?"

"They were trying that," Krycek said. "There were a lot--maybe a
hundred-thousand--like Smith out there before the bees were let loose.
But now they're in a hurry."

"Why?" Mulder demanded. "What happened?"

"I don't know."

Mulder reached for him. "Krycek, if you're lying--"

"I swear I don't know! Whatever it was, it happened after I left for Hong
Kong. I heard that one of the Smiths went soft--he wanted to help out the
poor mortals. Maybe that was it; maybe they were afraid the *wunderkind*
didn't have the balls to wipe us out. That could be it."

"That's enough," Skinner said. "Scully, where the hell are my clothes?
And don't give me any grief about how I ought to rest, just tell me."

"Closet," Scully said.

While the A.D. collected his suit and went into the bathroom to dress,
Mulder kept one eye on Krycek and motioned to Scully. "That freighter for
Tampico leaves at dusk," he murmured. "You'd better be ready."

"If Krycek's telling the truth, Bloodworth's not going to let us get on
it," she whispered back.

He nodded. "You leave that to me and Walter."

                                 ****

There was a lot to be done, but most of it fell on Pendrell--denied the
opportunity and the time to conduct a full-scale human test on Skinner,
he had to run some additional bench tests to try to make sure the stuff
was working. And he was the one who had to figure out how to synthesize
the micro-organisms in bulk so that the hospital staff could produce them
after he and Scully left. He had to test whether mixing them with a
minute quantity of the toxin would keep them active long enough to be
used.

It was a big job, and not really Scully's field--she couldn't help him
any more than the hospital's own lab techs already were doing. And to her
surprise, a whole gaggle of young people who'd been studying at the
now-defunct University of Texas Medical Branch and had gotten stuck on
the island suddenly showed up to pitch in, too.

That left her with little to do but lecture the hospital's staff and the
students on how to take care of people who were recovering from both the
anti-toxin and the bee stings. She felt silly doing it--these people all
knew how to treat a fever and nausea and convulsions symptomatically. It
took all of thirty minutes. But they seemed relieved to hear it was
something they could handle. She told them over and over again that the
whole thing was highly experimental. She told them over and over again
that she and Pendrell couldn't guarantee anything. But on her way out,
she could hear renewed hope in their voices, see it glowing in their
eyes.

She hoped it was all warranted.

And so, afterward, what there was left for her to do was think and wait
aimlessly for dusk.

Mulder had vanished after Skinner had dispatched Krycek back to jail. She
had no idea what Mulder was planning, but it seemed clear he had
something cooking. A frontal assault on the SEB's compound in Denver
wouldn't have surprised her, though she hoped what he had mind was at
least a little less goofy than running headlong into a hail of bullets.
She wished she were helping him plan it. That was what she *wanted* to be
doing--to be with him, to be in on whatever cock-eyed scheme he was
working on. She would have liked to have been with him on that boat in
Georgia, to be the "Malathion Raider's" gun moll, so to speak.

Suddenly, she pictured herself in a flapper's fringed red dress, a
cigarette holder between her lips, a tommy gun across her lap. Maybe one
of those sequined cloche hats. Mulder in a dark, pinstriped zoot suit.
She and Mulder, cast as Bonnie and Clyde for the new millennium. She
stifled a laugh.

But then, really, maybe that was what it would take to stop the smoking
man and his colleagues from destroying the world. Most of the time she'd
spent on the run with Mulder had been harrowing, but the truth was, she
had felt alive. She had felt she was doing the right things, the
necessary things. She had felt needed, had felt both she and her work
were valued, even if only by a certified kook carrying a badge.

Maybe now the real question was, what was stopping her from donning that
red dress?

                                 ****

She found him in his apartment over the bar, still wearing in the same
wilted tux he'd had on at the hospital, still working on the laptop. But
he wasn't playing Solitaire now--he was typing something, sitting at the
dining room table with his back to her.

"You're getting to be a real break-in artist," he said, as she approached
quietly from behind him. He turned, and she saw he had his glasses
on--one of the lenses had gotten cracked at the bottom. The sight of him
made her heart pound. Even bedraggled and tired, he was beautiful. Legs
and arms that went on forever. Eyes like new spring grass.

"I could swear I locked that door," he said, turning back to the
computer.

"You did."

He turned off the computer, removed his glasses and twisted in the chair
to face her. "What's up?" he asked.

"I'm not going," she said. She went toward him. Like the last time, she
had not planned this. She was flying on autopilot.

"Yes, you are," he said.

She caught him just as he started to get up from the table, caught him
between the chair and her body, both of her hands on either side of his
jaw. "I love you," she said. "You can't make me leave, and I won't."

She leaned in to kiss him, but at the last second he turned his head away
from her. She kissed what she could reach--his cheek, his left eye.

"Stop it," he whispered.

"I don't want to."

He wrenched out of her grip, pushed the chair sideways and got to his
feet, size and sheer brute force overcoming her feeble effort to hold him
trapped. "Look, Scully, this won't change anything." His eyes and his
voice had gone hard as granite. "This immunity is only a stopgap measure,
and you know it. We still need a real cure, and you and Pendrell have the
best shot at coming up with it. You know now that you're on the right
track."

"He doesn't need me for--"

"Maybe not, but he is still your husband. I don't know about you, but I
was raised to believe that meant something." Into her stunned silence, he
said, "I may be a lonely guy, but I don't fuck other men's wives."

She knew he'd calculated that to shock her, so she threw it back at him.
"Do you fuck women you're in love with?" She advanced on him like a tiger
stalking a zebra, knowing full well that, like a zebra, he might bolt at
any second. "Do you fuck women who want you so bad they'll break into
your apartment?"

His eyes had gone wide--she read fear and desire in about equal measure.
She sensed that he wanted to bolt, but he held his ground. She stopped
when she stood close enough that she knew he could feel her breath
against his throat, and looked up at him. "Do you want me to beg,
Mulder?"

There was a long silence while she stared up at him, and he stared back
at her. Slowly, very deliberately, she raised her hands toward his face.
Just before she touched him, he finally backed away a step. She could see
his chest rising and falling as breathed. "Shall I tell you exactly how
much I want you?" she asked, her voice low.

He was beside her before she knew it--she'd forgotten he could be so
quick, so agile. His hands closed around her waist, and he lifted her up
onto the table and held her. There was a dark challenge in his hazel
eyes, in the pained set of his mouth. *Do you want me? Are you *really*
ready for this?*

He raised his hands and cupped her breasts, still holding her with his
gaze. She shivered hard with pleasure and let him see it, in her eyes,
her slightly parted lips. He ran his thumbs across her nipples, and she
drew a ragged gasp. *Yes. I'm ready. Are you?*

He leaned in to kiss her, and she knew what he was planning--to crush her
mouth with his own, to claim her. She stopped him with a touch, her
fingers feather-light along his jaw. His look was savage, ravenous. But
ravishment was not what he needed to give or to receive.

"Let me gentle you," she breathed. He froze, and now the wildness in his
eyes was partly fear. "I know you're afraid. Trust me. You used to trust
me."

His eyes closed, and it was his turn to shiver.

*I know the tenderness in you, Mulder. You can't hide it from me; you
never could. Give it to me. Let me give it back to you.*

She pulled ever-so-gently, with the hand along his jaw, and felt him
hesitate, then slowly begin to yield, until he took two small steps and
placed himself in her grasp. She wrapped her legs around his thighs, her
arms around his neck. He was trembling like a frightened puppy, but she
could feel his erection gently prod her belly as he breathed. She stroked
his hair to reassure him.

*I won't hurt you. I won't let anything hurt you. Not today. Let it go,
all that hurt, all that terror.*

He pulled his head away a little and brought his hands up to her face,
her hair. Now his eyes were wide, adoring, startlingly green with
excitement. "God," he whispered, "you're so beautiful. I need you so
much."

"I'm yours."

He kissed her, his sweet, full mouth soft and warm on hers, his tongue
exploring lightly. She drew him closer, pressed her breasts against him,
ran her own tongue across his lower lip, and felt him shiver in
anticipation. God, he felt so good, the smooth, trim planes of him, the
clean lines of bone and muscle. She could feel herself melting inside,
and she knew neither of them could wait for long.

Scully withdrew just far enough to reach up and undo the knot of his tie.
*No more sex with your tie on, Mulder.* He was still trembling, but none
of it was fear now. He leaned back a little so she could slip his jacket
off his shoulders, still staying inside the circle of her legs. She took
the gun off his belt and laid it behind her on the table, then started on
his shirt. *I want all of you this time. I want to see you, breathe in
your scent, tickle my nose in the hair on your belly. All of it.*

With his shirt open, she saw that his nipples were erect, hard as tiny
buttons. She leaned forward, intending to kiss them, but he jerked
backward.

"Wait," he whispered.

*Ah. So those are sensitive, are they?* She would remember. Instead, she
placed her mouth in the shallow cleft between his breasts and kissed him
there, licked his skin, drank in the warm, salty taste of it. He gasped.
His arms closed around her again, and he lifted her and carried her into
the bedroom. As he went, she tugged his shirt-tails out.

He set her down on her feet in the bedroom, toed his shoes off, then
stood still while she unbuckled his belt and slid his trousers to the
floor. Gently she freed his erection, straining at the fabric of his
briefs. God, he was big. She tried not to touch him there any more than
absolutely necessary. She could feel the effort he was exerting to keep
control--she knew she couldn't push him much.

Naked, he was stunningly beautiful. Lean and perfect, slim and muscled
for speed. She let her gaze roam up the length of him until she was
looking into his eyes again and read the message there: *Now you.*

She took a step closer to him and let him remove her blouse and skirt,
only touching him to hold his shoulder for balance as she stepped out of
the skirt. He slid the straps of her slip off her shoulders, unhooked her
brassiere, then stood looking at her bare breasts, as if transfixed.

*Yes,* Scully thought, in the moment before his hands cupped her again.
*Yes, touch me.* She gave a little whimper of delight at the contact. His
hands were warm, the skin a little rough to the touch. He leaned down and
kissed her, his thumbs again caressing her nipples. Every nerve in her
body was aflame with him. Just when she thought she couldn't stand
another moment, he released her. He pulled the slip gently down off her
hips, then removed her panties. Again she caught his shoulder briefly for
balance.

Then she was lying on his bed, waiting, anticipating. It was his turn to
look at her, and there was a kind of awe in his manner as he ran one hand
lightly from the hollow of her throat, between her breasts, and down to
the top of the hair that lay between her legs. He bent his head and took
her right nipple in his mouth, suckling gently but insistently like a
hungry child, his tongue lapping at her in steady swipes. Scully groaned
out loud, full-throated, her hips writhing involuntarily.

*Oh, God, take me.* And he was there, entering her, in more small,
insistent movements, a centimeter at a time. She wanted to shove up and
take him straight into her center, but he had her pinned with his weight
so that she could only match him, tiny thrust for tiny thrust. He was so
hard; she was so wet. The sensation of him moving inside her was too
much. She came like an explosion, the world seeming to blow apart with
the force of it along her spine. And he was still moving, deeper and
deeper, inexorably, and she came again, and yet again when she knew she
had all of him.

He let go of her breast. They were both panting like overheated animals,
and for a moment, they just stopped there.

Then he lay down across her chest and did something Scully couldn't quite
grasp in her dazed, exhausted state, something that somehow turned them
over so that she was on top of him without breaking the fusion between
them. She tucked her legs, lifted her shoulders and smiled at him.
*You're lucky I still have the strength for this,* she thought. She moved
on him and felt him shudder, saw his eyes shut and his mouth twist. She
wouldn't need much strength; he was very close.

She leaned down and suckled at his breast and came again as he did, his
spasm inside her, the delicious sound of his incoherent cries, igniting
her own body again.

*You're mine now,* she thought in elation. *And I'm yours. No matter what
comes between us, we'll never be separated.*

***********************************************************************

Part 14

July 24
Galveston

Mulder let Scully sleep, but he couldn't. He cuddled her on his chest and
wept a little, silently. He wanted to hold her as long as he could,
knowing it wouldn't be for long; he knew he couldn't keep her with him,
much as he desperately wanted her beside him forever.

The question was, how would he ever manage to let her go? The thought
made him feel as if his heart might simply split open.

*Don't think about it. Just hold her. This is all you have.*

Slowly, the warm, regular thud of her heart soothed him, and he calmed.
Pendrell had been right--they wanted the same thing--for her to be safe.
She wouldn't like it, he knew, but it had to be done.

About seven, he touched her face to wake her.

"Mmm," she murmured. "I would've begged, you know."

"I didn't want you to," he whispered back. "I love you."

She lifted her head and looked at him. He let himself drink in the sight
of her--her eyes peacock blue in the afternoon sunlight filtering in
through the windows. Her hair like a slick of molten copper.

"I love you, too," she said. "I won't leave you."

He knew better, but he smiled up at her.

"Still," she said, "we have to make sure Ted gets away."

"Yes." Mulder shifted, and she caught his signal, moved so that he could
sit up. "He's not going to go without you, Scully."

"He'll have to." She sat up beside him.

"Yeah. That's why you have to convince him that you *are* going with him.
Once we get him to the freighter, then we'll tell him. Then he'll have to
leave."

"Okay," she said. She looked closely at him, her brows knitting suddenly
in concern. "Are you okay?"

"Sure. Why?"

"Your eyes are a little swollen."

"I'm tired, that's all." He bumped her shoulder with his. "Which is at
least as much your fault as mine."

She chuckled and bent to retrieve her clothes. "Believe me, it's mutual.
What time will the freighter leave?"

"About 9:30. You and Pendrell be here at a quarter to. We'll give you an
escort to the ship."

"Just in case we get in a firefight, do you have some ammo that'll fit my
Sig? I'm down to one magazine and three rounds."

"I doubt it, but I'll look." With her tiny hands, she carried a smaller
Sig than he did; it fired 9-mm parabellum rather than the .40-caliber
Smith & Wesson rounds he liked. He searched but didn't find any. "Sorry.
No good." He thought a moment, still shuffling through a drawer. "You
want my PPK? I've got plenty of .380 auto you can have." When he turned,
he saw she was admiring the view--he was still naked.

"No, it's okay. I'll try to conserve."

Despite himself he blushed as he went back to her.

"Very nice," she said. He rolled his eyes.

"You'd better hurry," he said. "There's not a lot of time."

She stood up, laid her hand along his cheek and gave him a wide-eyed look
of such tenderness it stopped his breath. "Do you believe I love you?"
she asked.

"I believe," he whispered.

He did.

"I do," he said. Then he kissed her. He suspected it was for the last
time.

                                  ****

They were right on time. Frohike had already taken their luggage and
equipment to the ship in his Jeep--Bloodworth's people weren't watching
him. He had made a circuitous trip around the island, then, carrying an
order signed by Skinner, had got the freighter's crew to load the bags in
advance.

"Distract Scully for a minute, will you?" Mulder asked the little man.

"My pleasure," Frohike said.

"You have the letters?" Mulder asked Pendrell.

Pendrell nodded.

"Put your name and hers in the blanks at the top. Do it now, so you're
legal before we leave."

As he wrote the names in, Pendrell said softly, "What made you change
your mind?"

"I didn't."

Pendrell looked up, his eyes both fearful and hopeful.

"I never told you I was going to take her to Hawaii."

He finished writing the names and stuffed the letters in his jacket
pocket. "Why would you do this? Just let her go with me?"

Mulder shrugged. "Like you said--I want her to be safe. And she wouldn't
be safe here."

Pendrell nodded. "But it doesn't matter. She hates me now," he said, his
voice low.

"No. She was so determined to see you get away she tried to seduce me in
return for the letters," Mulder lied coolly. "I didn't take her up on
it."

Pendrell frowned at him in confusion.

"She's a very forgiving sort, Pendrell. She's mad at you, all right--but
she always forgave me, and she will you, too, if you earn it. You have a
chance now to regain her respect." He gave the younger man a hard look.
"Don't blow it."

"I won't. What do you want us to do?"

"Sit down and have a drink. I'll call you when we're ready."

About fifteen minutes later, he motioned at Scully over the heads of the
other patrons. She murmured something to Pendrell, and they came into the
kitchen. Just as they entered, Byers and one of the waitresses headed out
the back and along the side of the dock to the street.

"What's going on?" Scully asked.

"Oh, you two are going back to the hotel," Mulder said. "Or at least
that's what we hope Bloodworth's crack surveillance team will think."

"How'd you manage that?" Pendrell asked.

Mulder shrugged again. "The only hard part was getting Byers to shave off
his beard."

Scully smiled. "Tell him we appreciate his sacrifice," she said.

What a beautiful smile she has, Mulder thought.

Frohike stuck his head in through the back door. "They bought it," he
called softly. "They're gone."

"Let's move," Mulder said.

They made it to the ship without incident. But as they pulled up to the
pier, Mulder saw Skinner and another man standing at the bottom of the
ramp. It was tuxedo, the guy he had thrown out of the casino just before
Pendrell and Scully had showed up. There was no mistaking the gun he had
stuck in Skinner's back.

Warily, they got out of the Jeep, hands on their holstered guns. And
then, from back in the shadows, a figure stepped forward, a man-shape
darker than the dark.

Bloodworth.

"Good evening," he called pleasantly. "I was afraid you were going to
leave without saying goodbye. So I took the liberty of asking Mr. Skinner
to bring me down to see you off."

"You bastard," Scully said. She had her gun out now, pointed at tuxedo.
"You pull that trigger, and you'll be dead before he hits the ground."

Mulder slid out the left side, drew his own gun and braced both hands on
the Jeep's roof. The shot was a little long, but there was no wind,
nothing between he and the smoking man. "Drop it, Bloodworth!" he yelled.
"I've got a clean shot, and nothing would make me happier!"

"I'll trade him for Agent Scully," Bloodworth said.

Clever, Mulder thought. Take Scully, and he'll have all three of us by
the balls--me, Skinner, Pendrell.

"The fucking hell you will," Pendrell said. Mulder didn't see the gun
until the younger man fired. At once, tuxedo fell, shot through the
heart, and Skinner flung himself out of the way.

Scully was holding aim on Bloodworth and moving slowly toward him. "Get
your hands up," she ordered.

Something was wrong; Mulder could feel it in a tingle of fear along the
back of his neck. Scully was so close, and she was moving between the
Cancer Man and Skinner and Pendrell. Bloodworth stood motionless and let
her get closer.

And he wasn't smoking. It was all wrong.

"Get your hands up!" Mulder yelled, echoing Scully. The son of a bitch
was up to something--he wouldn't just stand there and be taken.

She was so close. Too close.

Mulder tightened his grip on the Sig and moved out around the Jeep. He
guessed it was thirty yards, in the gathering dark, with Scully too
close.

Now, suddenly, the smoking man moved. His right hand still in shadow,
coming up in a lazy arc, a glint of steel off something clutched in his
fist.

Scully had seen it first, and she moved left, squarely into Mulder's line
of fire. She shot, three times in quick succession. Bloodworth staggered
but didn't fall--Mulder realized he was wearing a vest. He'd recover in a
second, and Scully was out of ammo, searching frantically in a pocket for
another magazine.

"Down!" Skinner yelled at Scully, but she didn't seem to hear him.

Mulder danced left, to clear his aim. Bloodworth's hand was still rising.
Mulder stopped, let his knees unlock and took his shot.

And double-tapped the son of a bitch right between the eyes.

Bloodworth's spine arched impossibly as the impact flung his head back,
and for a moment Mulder thought he might actually turn a flip as he fell,
his feet coming up off the ground. Then he dropped in a heap, slid almost
a yard across the pavement and finally lay still.

Mulder went toward him, leading with his gun. Bloodworth was dead. Jaw
slack, eyes wide in an expression that looked like astonishment. Mulder
nudged the right hand, still gripping something, with his foot. The
fingers let go, and a small object hit the ground with a metallic rattle.

A Zippo lighter.

Mulder leaned his head back, trying to relax, let the adrenaline drain
back out of his muscles. It was over. He had thought he might have a
moment of triumph over the Cancer Man's demise. Instead, he just felt
tired.

Scully turned around, glanced at tuxedo's body on the ground and gave her
husband a look of amazement.

Pendrell looked equally stunned. "I've been practicing..." he got out. "A
little."

"Practice any more and you'll be a fucking Olympic contender," Mulder
murmured.

"Well, I couldn't... I mean, I couldn't let him..."

"I think it was meant as a compliment," Skinner said dryly. "At any rate,
I'm grateful for your newfound skill."

"I never killed anybody before," Pendrell went on. "I never even shot
anybody before."

"You'll get over it," Mulder said sympathetically. "Just remember he
would've killed A.D. Skinner if you hadn't shot him. Keep telling
yourself that."

Scully put one hand on his shoulder. "Ted," she said, "go aboard. I'll
take care of this."

"Okay," Pendrell said numbly. "Here." He handed her the letter of transit
with her name on it.

She took it, with a slantwise glance at Mulder. "I'll be right up," she
said.

Pendrell went up the gangplank.

When he had gone, Mulder said, "We'll get rid of the bodies, Scully." He
holstered his Sig. "There are sharks in these waters. Nobody'll find
them." He inclined his head toward the freighter. "You go on."

She stared at him. "Mulder, I told you--I'm not leaving you."

"You have to go, Scully, and you know it."

"No!"

He took her arms, just above the elbows, and held her. "Listen to me.
Pendrell didn't even know you were under surveillance. Despite his
stellar performance here, I don't think he's going to make it out of
Tampico without you. If you really think he doesn't need you, I think
you'd better reconsider."

"I want to stay with you," she whispered.

"I know you do. And I wish like anything that you could. But you know
better, Scully. There's been too much pain, too much blood spilled. I
thought I could turn away from it, but when I did, I lost myself. I
didn't get it back until I saw you again."

She closed her eyes, as if doing that could stop her from hearing what he
was saying. But just before they closed he could see in them that she
knew he was right.

"The faith to keep looking," she whispered.

"Yes," he said. "I'd lost that. And I need it. You do, too--you can't
turn away, either. We may not ever bring the bastards to justice, but we
still have a chance to stop them."

He fell silent for a moment. Then he reached to lift her chin gently. "I
love you, Dana," he said. "But if we give up fighting now, what will we
have?"

She opened her eyes, spilling over with tears. "Each other," she
breathed.

"I don't think so. I don't think we'd ever stop wondering if we'd done
the right thing. Do you really think we could be happy together while the
rest of the world came unraveled around us? What kind of life would that
be for either of us?"

The freighter's whistle blew, thunderously loud, like the crack of doom.
Scully started hard, and Mulder tightened his grip on her arms a little
to steady her.

"I want to be with you," she said.

"You will be, no matter what happens." He let go of her.

She reached up and stroked the lapels of his jacket with both hands, as
if remembering a time when she had been able to hang on to him by taking
hold of them. "You never forgot Samantha," she said, as if reassuring
herself that he wouldn't forget her, either.

"And I never will." The freighter's crew was casting off lines. "You'd
better go," he said.

"I love you," she said.

"Go," he said.

She went quickly up the gangplank. For a moment he feared she might stay
on deck, watching until she couldn't see him any more, but she spared him
that--she disappeared.

Mulder stood watching, though. Standing guard until the freighter had
gone, sailing slowly off around the end of the island until its lights
winked out one by one.

He felt drained, a soft, miserable loneliness soaking down into his
bones.

Then suddenly Skinner was beside him. Mulder drew a sharp breath to
compose himself. "Where's Bloodworth?"

"Back of the Jeep," the A.D. said. "Wrapped in garbage bags."

"Nice touch," Mulder said.

"I thought so. Here." He handed Mulder the lighter. "Souvenir."

*More like a scalp,* Mulder thought. He looked at the lighter. Engraved
on it were the words, "Trust no one."

*That's what got you killed,* he thought. *You couldn't trust anyone, and
no one could trust you.* He put the lighter in his pocket.

They were silent for a long moment. Then Skinner asked, "You really do
know how to get off the island, don't you?"

Mulder looked over his shoulder at him.

Skinner shrugged. "Somebody's going to have to start distributing the
micro-organisms to what's left of the country. And I've got a certain
curiosity all of a sudden about what's going on back east--I left some
stuff in D.C. I'd like to reclaim, if I can wrest it away from the
members of the master race who have probably taken up residence in my
apartment."

"Okay," Mulder said. "I'll take that ride. Just do me one favor, will
you, Walter?"

"Name it."

"Don't make any sappy remarks about 'a beautiful friendship.'"

"Wouldn't dream of it."

                                 ****

As she was settling herself in the tiny ship's cabin, Scully noticed that
her handbag seemed heavier than usual. There was something in that front
pocket that Mulder had said she never used for anything.

She looked. His Discman, complete with headphones. It was on pause, the
display showing "9." With the cover closed, she couldn't see what disc it
was, but she knew he had meant it as a message.

She slipped the headphones on and pushed play.

She heard Sarah McLachlan and knew instantly what the message was.

"...so now you're sleeping peaceful/ and I lie awake and pray/ that
you'll be strong tomorrow/ and we'll see another day..."

She let the song play through. The sound of it in her ears was like the
warm strength of his arms around her.

He believed.

**********************************************************************
The End
lochness@mindspring.com