Of course, Scully would have claimed Mulder's prior knowledge had been a
guess. She clung to the remnants of her scepticism with true desperation
these days; that was part of the reason Mulder had come here alone. The
other, more important part was that he didn't want her there when he knew he
would be breaking into a high-security Consortium outpost for genetic
research and gene manipulation. It was too risky, and she didn't need to see
what would be inside.
The underground lab complex had been built at a prudent distance from the
building above ground, connected to it by a long subterranean corridor. The
outlines of both lab and corridor were now plainly visible—the once
carefully tended garden in front of the office building had folded into the
collapsed space. Ragged fragments of walls jutted upwards through the soil,
held together only by the earth packed against them; massive steel girders
had bent and snapped like flimsy wire. A reinforced steel door had been
thrown free and lay on the grass, crumpled up and tossed aside like a scrap
of aluminum foil. Not far from the grotesquely malformed steel door, a sign
planted next to the driveway still claimed that this was the Gecorta Tropical
Disease Research Foundation.
Whoever was responsible for this, they'd done a thorough job... Mulder did not
doubt that excavating the site would not yield any information beyond the
fact that the destruction wrought on the inside of the former Consortium
laboratory was even more complete.
One thing was fairly obvious, though. This was not a Consortium clean-up job.
The unsubtle, if efficient devastation of the lab was one thing; it did not
ring quite true, but it was conceivable. The gate—now that was another
thing entirely. The Consortium would not have left the guard house at the
front gate abandoned. The Consortium would definitely not have left the body
of the guard who should have been monitoring the comings and goings wedged
into the automatic gate itself, preventing it from closing.
The camera mounted on the wall next to the office building's main entrance
swung to track Mulder as he walked up to the door and tried it. It was
unlocked and he walked into the lobby to find the security checkpoint here
deserted, as well.
He chose a corridor at random, drew his gun, and began exploring. The front
part of the building was given over to offices with the occasional conference
hall and coffee kitchen squeezed in. Mulder rifled through several
promising-looking desks without finding anything of interest. He didn't see
PCs or written files anywhere—either there was a central archive with very
strict security guidelines or these office rooms were kept for show only.
That would also go some way towards explaining the complete absence of human
beings, alive or dead.
It took him another half hour to come upon the first bodies. Mulder's attempt
to make his way deeper into the complex led him to several dead ends before
he discovered a narrow hall that seemed to run the entire length of the
building. Behind a sharp corner at the very end, he found himself in front of
a door set with a pane of security glass so heavily cracked by bullet impact
that it had turned completely opaque.
Mulder listened to the stillness beyond the door carefully. The only thing he
could hear were his own heartbeats, too loud and too rapid; not giving
himself a chance to reconsider, he pushed the door open and went through
quickly, bringing the gun up in both hands.
The room was long and narrow, lined with stainless steel counters and sinks
on one side and horizontal breeding tanks on the other. The glaring light
reflected brightly off the glass shards and slightly fluorescent liquid that
covered the floor.
Carefully picking his way, Mulder looked for tell-tale pools of gellid green
but found none. All of the motionless bodies sprawled across the broken glass
were human—more or less... At the side of the hall Mulder started out from,
the pale naked forms were simply men and women lying in their own blood and
the ruins of the tanks they'd been contained in when they and the equipment
had been subjected to what looked like heavy and extended machine-gun fire.
The further Mulder advanced into the room, however, the stronger the sense
that something was subtly wrong with the shape of the bodies became. They
seemed strangely lumpy, unformed—unfinished somehow...
Mulder forced himself to walk all the way through to the end of the hall in
order to check if anyone—anything—might still be alive. He was almost
relieved to find that this was not the case.
A lab-coated scientist was sprawled across the floor in the large and
well-equipped operating room next door to the incubation hall, the wall
behind her pock-marked with a neat line of bullets and smeared with a streak
of her blood. Strangely, the stench of blood, waste, and death, heavily laced
with a nauseating tang of chemicals, was far stronger in here than in the
previous room.
It was evident that Mulder had made his way to a more significant part of the
building. Not far from the hall and operating room, two men in the uniforms
of Gecorta security were crumpled against a wall, their guns lying on the
carpeting where they'd been dropped. A little further on, Mulder had to step
over a man in a business suit whose body was blocking the corridor.
There had been several organized efforts to stop the assault. None of them
seemed to have met with any measure of success; Mulder happened across
several small groups of guards who had died defending positions of varying
strategic value. He looked for some of the attackers' corpses between those
of the defenders, but found no likely candidates. Either they had come
disguised in security uniforms or they had taken their dead with them when
they left.
On his way down to where the access corridor to the subterranean lab must
have been, Mulder found another operating room and adjacent lab, these
thankfully empty of corpses and incubation tanks. Passing past another
security checkpoint, Mulder belatedly noticed that he'd walked squarely
through a field of motion sensors. He froze briefly, his heart in his throat,
but the deep quality of the silence that blanketed the entire complex did not
change. Cameras tracked him as he walked on, but he'd almost gotten used to
that; he crossed through the sensors at the second guard station with a
certain confidence.
Yet another security checkpoint and Mulder knew he was drawing close to
something important. Here, for the first time, was a room with computers— crammed ceiling to floor on every wall and in every available space in
between. The monitors were without exception shattered by bullets, every
surface deeply scored by gunshots and scorched by electrical fire that had
long since burned itself out. The man who had presumably known how to operate
the destroyed equipment lay slumped over an instrument panel near the door.
The last security station and the computer control room marked the beginning
of a broad, well-lit corridor that Mulder followed past a number of identical
cubicles. The small recesses were open to the hall and invariably contained a
chair, a low sleeping platform, and nothing else. All of them were
unoccupied. Mulder had begun to suspect that this part of the complex had
been evacuated in time—that the dead guards he had passed on his way here
had bought enough time for part of the project to be salvaged—when he came
across proof to the contrary.
They were in what looked like a combined conference room and cafeteria—more
than a dozen people of both genders and widely divergent ages in shapeless
grey overalls, several security guards, two expensively suited men and two
men and a woman casually dressed in jeans and T-shirts.
Quite suddenly, Mulder realized that he was reaching the limit of his ability
to take in carnage and remain calmly detached. He turned to go back out,
foregoing a closer examination of the latest collection of corpses in favor
of preserving his stoicism. And there, in front of the door, was Alex Krycek.
Alex Krycek, wearing jeans and a simple white T-shirt beneath the obligatory
leather jacket, his hair longer than it had been when Mulder had seen him
last, though not by much. Alex Krycek with his green eyes open wide and a
look of complete surprise on his face.
Alex Krycek with half of his chest missing.
The sight ripped through Mulder's last shields like a sledgehammer through a
thin sheet of ice. Before he knew he'd started moving, he was crouched on the
blood-covered floor next to the man he had hated more than any other, feeling
for a pulse he knew would not, could not be there. He had rarely seen
anyone so unequivocally dead, and never had he had anyone torn so rendingly
away when he had not before known they were part of his life... not a part of
emotional import at any rate, not anymore, not for a very long time...
But he found now that when you had been enemies for so long—when you had
hated someone with all your soul for so long—their death could be as much
of a shock as the death of a loved one. It could cut just as deeply, cripple
just as devastatingly, because hate could make someone a necessary part of
you just as surely as love could. The part of his soul that had hated and
raged against and yearned to bestow vengeance on Alex Krycek was suddenly no
longer there, leaving only a vast, echoing emptiness that somehow felt like
the brief period of grace before the pain of a mortal wound set in.
Mulder walked down the remaining stretch of corridor slowly, forcing himself
to look into each of the cubicles as he passed. He could still feel the silky
brush of Krycek's hair against his palm. He recalled a time when it had been
longer, when it had swept across Mulder's stomach and tickled his thighs when
they'd made love. It had been silky and thick and he had buried his hands in
it so often that even after the man's betrayal, it had seemed like a personal
affront when Krycek had cut it off. Yet another thing he was throwing back
into Mulder's face. When I sucked you off and made you clutch at me and
scream my name, when you came with your fingers tangled in my hair or your
dick buried in my ass, did you really think that I felt anything? It meant
nothing. It was all part of the pretence. No part of who I am—no part of
who I was even then.
It hadn't seemed possible that Krycek would ever not be there for Mulder to
hate. More than that, it hadn't seemed possible that anyone but Mulder would
kill him. That Mulder would simply find his corpse and not know anything at
all about why he'd died, how he'd died, who'd pulled the trigger and
extinguished that vicious, blazing, poisonous soul—Mulder would never know
who Krycek had truly been, or even just what he had been doing here, and
why... Where, in the skein of tangled and painful and hateful memories of
Alex Krycek, partner and lover, betrayer and enemy, the lies lurked and
where... possibly... there had been truth.
He shouldn't have been killed by anyone except Mulder. Mulder had wanted him
- wanted him at his mercy, wanted to beat all of his secrets out of him and
turn his twisted, scheming, lying psyche inside out to know once and for all
who and what and why he was, to understand all of the things that had
seemed so incomprehensible and so—
In a cubicle at the very end of the corridor, a pitiful figure in a grey
overall was crouched down in the meager shelter of an overturned chair,
shivering and attempting to curl up into a ball small enough to disappear
into itself entirely.
Alive. Someone was still alive. The idea was startling—almost shocking
after all of the carnage Mulder had walked through to get this far. He had to
gather his wits for a second before he could react appropriately.
"Who -" Mulder's voice came out as a croak, wobbly and uncertain and painful
to force past the constriction in his throat. He swallowed and cleared his
throat before trying again. "Federal Agent. Stand up slowly, identify
yourself and tell me what happened -"
"Fox!"
Mulder almost shot him. He looked like Alex Krycek and he was uncurling and
whipping around and lunging across the room and God he moved like Alex Krycek
but Mulder had seen Alex Krycek and he was dead, Mulder had knelt in his
blood and felt the cold hard skin and touched the silken hair and he was dead
dead dead—
"Foxfox oh God Fox I thought they killed you they killed everyone, I thought
I was all alone and where were you oh God Fox where's Sam? Where's Sam Fox,
wasn't she here when they came I thought you were with her and I thought -"
Mulder didn't know why he hadn't shot him because he'd wanted to, he'd wanted
to shoot, he had...
"Sam...?"
And the man who was pressed against him, whose tears were soaking through the
shoulder of Mulder's suit, clutched him closer and shuddered and began
sobbing, his entire body shaking with the convulsive force of the sobs. "Oh
God no Fox, not her, not Sam, not you and not Sam..."
"Krycek..." Nothing. It was as though he hadn't spoken, even when he repeated
the name louder. Mulder should have felt ridiculous—felt something, at any
rate—when he was standing here with his gun in his hand, Alex Krycek dead
in the conference room a couple of doors down and Alex Krycek clutching him,
weeping hysterically.
But he felt nothing. It was too much to feel all at once and so he felt
nothing at all.
"Alex."
The body pressed against Mulder's didn't stop shuddering as the face lifted
from his shoulder. The man's eyes were blurry and swollen, his face splotchy
and almost pasty white beneath the hectic spots of red. "Can we go? Fox, why
don't we just go? They're all d-dead now and please Fox, I want to leave
here, let's just go, please..."
"Mulder," Mulder said, his tongue lying heavy and dry in his mouth, feeling
like an alien thing. He was beginning to realize that sooner or later his
emotions would catch up with him, and when that happened he should already
have decided what to do. He should already have done what needed to be done,
because afterwards—afterwards...
Swollen eyes blinked at him in misery and without understanding. "Please Fox,
I—maybe they'll come back and Fox I thought you w-were—when I came out of
the stasis cycle everyone—they'd killed everyone and I thought you were
dead, and S-sam—and I wished I was too but you're here and now I just
w-want to leave here please Fox we can just go -"
My name is Mulder, and you don't know me. I know you, though, you are lying
dead in the conference room with your ice-cold heart torn open, the heart
that should have been mine, that should have been no one's but mine to rend
if I so chose... But he didn't say it.
"Mulder," he said. "You have to call me Mulder now, Alex."
The words made no noticeable impression. "Can't we go please Fox -"
In a way this was only fair. Payment for all that had been taken from him by
Them, by Them and by Alex Krycek, whose body was now as stiff and cold and
dead as his soul had always been.
"Yes," Mulder said, and in his own ears his voice sounded as distant and
muffled as though he were hearing it through a thick layer of cotton. "We're
going now. We're leaving here, Alex. Come on."
And if Alex fairly dragged him out of the small cubicle in his eagerness to
leave it was hardly surprising. Mulder did not think it strange, at any rate,
and it did not occur to him to look back. Perhaps this was fortunate—or
perhaps not.
Because all of the cubicles except this one were identical; none of them held
anything besides a bare sleeping platform and utilitarian chair. There was no
blanket in any of the other cubicles. There was a blanket tangled on the
floor in this one, though, because without it, there would have been nothing
at all to obscure what Alex had been huddled over behind the chair. A machine
gun, several spare rounds of ammunition, and a very small, split-screen
security monitor currently displaying the corridor outside and the conference
room that held the corpse of a man who looked exactly like Alex Krycek.
Deliverance
by Sylvia
The clean-up squad's main target had obviously been the subterranean
laboratory. If Mulder hadn't known beforehand that this research institute
was a cover for one of the Consortium's projects, he could only have guessed
what the purpose of the compound had been.
