TITLE: Rainbow Sign
AUTHOR: Vehemently (vehemently@yahoo.com)
SPOILERS: One Son post-ep
RATING: PG-13 to R, depending on your stomach.
DISCLAIMER: Characters and situations you recognize belong to
Chris Carter / 1013 and are used with neither permission nor
intent to profit.
NOTES: Beginning and ending citations are from Louise Glueck's
"Gretel in Darkness"; a lot of love and no copyright infringement
are intended.
* * * * * * *
Rainbow Sign
By Vehemently
* * * * * * *
"This is the world we wanted.
All those who would have seen us dead
are dead."
* * * * * * *
They left the A.D.'s office flipping through photographs so
intently that by rights they should have walked into the walls.
The sheaf Spender had turned over were 8x10, printed on glossy
paper and in deep color contrast, so the parts where the insides
of people had cooked instead of burned showed pink, coral, peach
against the flaking blackened outer tissue. It was possible,
after repeated exposure, not to feel nausea when a close-up of
intestines uncannily resembled a coiled string of sausages.
Mulder looked up before Scully did, and touched her elbow to
guide her past a protruding display case that threatened to brain
her. "What do you think?"
She made a low noise and shuffled the stiff pages. A white piece
of paper came to the top, and she read aloud from it. "68 bodies,
the charred remains of a military truck and a large number of
suitcases." Her lips were so full as to imply distaste with only
the slightest movement. "Whoever they were, they all drove
Lincoln towncars. Seventeen of them were parked outside, and a
smattering of other civilian vehicles."
Mulder hooded his eyes. "A true bonfire of the vanities."
"Of the vain," she corrected him. He took it without reply. She
let her heels describe her mood as she led him down the hall to
the elevator. Without thinking, both of them had begun to head
back to the basement, to that office that seemed to mean 'X-
Files' as much as they did.
The steel doors of the elevator swung open in near silence even
before they reached it, as if it too were grimly eager to get
started. Scully was already stepping in when a square-jawed
security guard, the elevator's only occupant, reached out to lay
his hand on her forearm.
"I'm sorry ma'am," he mumbled as he flinched away, "we've got an
emergency downstairs." And, keeping his eyes to himself, he
nodded at Mulder and squashed the button till the doors rolled
closed again.
Long experience had its impact: they didn't need to look at each
other to begin sprinting down the hall. Scully clutched the file
folder to her breasts as she picked her way down the stairs after
Mulder's athletic leaps.
He surveyed the first floor halls and beckoned her down,
inevitably, to the basement. They flew together along the
concrete hallway, passing file boxes and supply rooms, each
wondering in private thoughts what could have gone wrong. The
pages heavy in Scully's arms were they only thing worth
destroying on the case, and it couldn't be --
The office door, still with the wrong names on it, was wedged
open by an emergency medical kit. The white-jacketed paramedics,
hunched together on the floor, suddenly parted to reveal a man on
a gurney. They wheeled it out the door and toward the elevator --
the security guard flinched again, seeing Scully, but he held the
door open with his arm -- and as it passed by them they saw who
the man was.
Agent Spender matched his white dress shirt, the arterial red a
startling speckle on skin and cloth alike. Mulder noticed the
gauze padding that blood was gluing to the man's ribcage. Scully,
who had worked hard to forget her rotation in emergency medicine,
saw instead the face upturned, nostrils gaping and half-open eyes
revealing only the whites.
They stood together like that, in the hallway, while the elevator
took on its passengers and began to close. Before the doors had
closed all the way, the paramedics began shouting to each other.
There was just a glimpse to be had of a man climbing astraddle
the gurney before the doors were shut and all they saw were their
own dull reflections.
"He's gone into arrest," said a ghost of Scully's voice. She had
made no move to help. Neither did she move when a trio of fuming
agents pushed past her, trailing a multicolored array of Metro
and Capitol police. She clutched the folder in her arms as the
crime scene was cordoned off.
Mulder cocked his head at her and together they moved away,
Scully carrying from the scene what was surely evidence. As they
waited for the other elevator Mulder found himself standing at
such an angle as to obscure Scully's folder from the police, who
were fussing with yellow tape and trying not to step in the blood
tracks the paramedics had left everywhere.
There was nowhere to go, if their office was closed to them.
Mulder fumbled in the elevator, hesitating to suggest his
apartment as a refuge, but Scully pressed the button that would
take them back up to the A.D.'s level. "Skinner." She raised her
chin. "And anyway, he'll want to know." So while she was
composing in her head how to phrase the fact that the agent of
record on the El Rico case was probably already dead, her partner
stood beside her, feeling on his left shoulder that brief weight
of Spender's hand. It had been such an awkward, defeated move, a
concession, and Mulder had brushed it off as such. Now, of
course, that hand was clawed and limp as the body it belonged to
drowned in its own blood.
He tried to come up with the right words, and couldn't. He
wondered, "Do you think he knew, when he left Kersh's office,
that he would be executed for whatever success or failure these
pictures represent?" Scully regarded him, and decided to spare
him her sympathy.
She gave him purpose instead. "Let's go find out what these
pictures represent, then."
* * * * * * *
They drove to West Virginia in a Crown Vic and a vague, dreadful
parody of their investigation of the contents of Strughold Mining
Company, three years ago. It was the same road, made strange by
the dusting of snow that became full drifts as they entered the
Blue Ridge Mountains. And again they had left Skinner in a
darkened room, perplexed and morose. The only improvement was
that this time they hadn't yet left the law behind.
Scully drove like her hair was on fire and the time they had to
spend together thinking about burned flesh was made substantially
shorter. Mulder didn't have anything to say, and after a while
she turned the radio to a soul station and began singing along
tonelessly under her breath.
Mulder listened to her for a while, watching the tranquilly
falling snowflakes spin and crash into the oncoming windshield.
He shifted in his seat and told her what she already knew: "The
crime scene is under military jurisdiction." She didn't say
anything. She was leaning forward in her seat, her breasts
practically resting on the steering wheel. "My experience
notwithstanding, civilians don't just wander onto U.S. air
bases." Scully didn't say anything. Aretha Franklin sang on
unaided.
* * * * * * *
The guard at the gate to El Rico Air Force Base was tall and
gaunt, adolescent pimples still showing on his face. His stony
formality slipped a little as he scrutinized their
identification, skeleton fingers drying themselves on his thighs.
Scully watched him in the rearview as they drove in. He frowned
and scratched, then spat after their car and turned back to his
tasks.
The crime scene was marked with yellow tape and West Virginia
official vehicles parked sideways. The snow had obscured any tire
marks from the cars that had been lined up in front of the
hangar. The fleet of Lincolns and other assorted luxury vehicles
had all been impounded to some covered lot, where the
fingerprints were being lifted from the interior, perhaps the
best hope of identifying bodies.
But Mulder and Scully headed into the hangar. They had to pass
another ring of security before they were allowed near the char
marks and the fossil shape of the gutted truck. The concrete
floor was bare in a curious pattern, pale gray areas amidst the
scattered black. They were God's version of a chalk outline, too
many of them cramped together in that huge space, all heaped over
each other so that no one shape looked like a human silhouette.
Scully asked the military police working on the truck what model
it was and what it was used for. Hairs did the Tarantula waltz up
Mulder's neck when one of them wiped sooty grease onto his
forehead and said it was probably a hospital transport, judging
from the struts laid onto the frame. Extra support, for hanging
stretchers against the walls. They went back to tearing it to
pieces. It was so badly mangled it wouldn't even be very much use
as scrap.
"Let's go look at the bodies," she said, and Mulder went with
her, neither of them mentioning the last person they had seen in
a stretcher. Mulder froze at the door to the second hangar, his
suddenly clammy palms sharply uncomfortable on the metal handle.
"If Cassandra could heal, like she said she could . . . " Scully
looked up at him, arms crossed in front of her. She let him coax
out the thought, his face blanching a little as he approached the
conclusion she had already found.
She wrapped her fingers around his fist on the door handle and
pulled. "If that were so, then she won't be among the bodies in
here." Her breath made steam in the unheated hangar, clouding
around Mulder's face. He felt the moisture turn cool a few
seconds after it left Scully's mouth. They crowded together
through the hangar door to go have a look.
When they flashed their FBI badges yet again, a blond young man
strode towards them, waving his clipboard. "Agent Spender, glad
to meet you." He flashed his large white teeth at Mulder, then
turned to Scully. She noted the creases in his tan slacks and
realized he was a soldier. "We spoke on the phone," clarified the
young man, as his greeting went unreciprocated. "I'm Captain
Joseph Briggs."
Mulder shook the hand Briggs offered, unsmiling. "I'm not
Spender," came his rough reply. "Agent Spender was injured in the
line of duty. He asked us to take his place." He took a certain
ugly pride in avoiding a lie, but Briggs didn't notice. He
pointed his sharp chin at a grim grizzled man who crouched over a
body bag and led the way towards the corpses.
The bodies were laid out in neat rows, each zipped into a black
bag. Some twenty or so of the bags were far too large for their
contents. Children. The man stood from his crouch as Mulder and
Scully approached, his iron gray hair bristling straight out from
his temples. "This is Major Leonard Zabriskie," said Briggs,
launching into an explanation of the Air Force's Judge Advocate
system. Scully knew enough from the Navy to wave him off,
eliciting another nervous tooth-flash, and Mulder couldn't have
cared less.
Together they wandered the rows, Briggs following their measured
tread like a puppy unsure of its welcome. Mulder lowered his head
to say directly into Scully's ear: "What do you want to bet the
cervical x-rays are clean?"
She looked at him, her features bright and clear in the cold
afternoon. His long face got longer. Then she ducked her head,
and pulled out a pair of latex gloves. "The sooner I can work,
the sooner we'll know," she said behind her, as she walked away.
She didn't see him watching her. She didn't need to see it.
When Mulder caught up to her she was back with Zabriskie,
kneeling on the floor, handling the twin bones of a charred
forearm with a care that approached tenderness. "The preliminary
photos were messengered to us in D.C., but not the autopsy
results. Was it the same chemical reaction?"
"The same," muttered Zabriskie. Mulder crouched with them and
noticed that the man had hairs growing out of his ears. They were
carefully trimmed short against his square head. "My guess is,
the first flash vaporizes a portion of the body, then the rest
catches fire. It explains the cooking in random places."
"Like searing a steak," Scully replied, toneless. Briggs,
standing behind her, made a noise in his throat and moved away.
Mulder watched as a fine dust of soot fell from the forearm.
Scully gently tucked the arm back into the bag to rejoin the
remains of its owner. The marks on her gloves were half soot,
half grease from boiled human body fat. She rubbed this obscene
lye from finger to finger, smelled it, grimaced.
Zabriskie rested his arms on his thighs and looked at the floor.
With apparent effort he turned his gaze to the rows of bags in
front of him. Mulder thought of him suddenly: he will look into
each bag, no matter that someone else has already examined it.
The knowledge made Mulder frown, because he knew he would do the
same himself. Scully zipped up the bag in front of her and raised
her head.
There were six or eight other people in the room, all moving
slowly and surely with relative professionalism. Briggs stood
apart, scrawling on his clipboard. He muttered to himself and it
echoed against the round ceiling and came back a dull roar of
tension. Scully felt grit in her eyes, the dull ache of smoke
inhalation in her windpipe.
She choked on it, on her first try. Then it came out more
smoothly. "God gave Noah the Rainbow Sign --" But everyone who
had looked at the scene had already thought of the rest of that
song. She didn't say it out loud. Everyone who had heard her felt
it, an absurd sibilance of the pre-spoken hanging in air. In
their minds they all completed the rhyme, each in individual
fear, or ritual, or apology to James Baldwin. Lips moved, only a
little. A tiny hiss of sentences completed. No more water; the
fire next time. The fire next time. The fire . . .
If anyone had been watching from above, or from a distance, one
could have seen a contagious shudder begin at the periphery of
the small crowd and reverberate through to everyone in hearing
distance. Nobody was immune, even unto Scully, kneeling on the
concrete.
Mulder shivered in high descant to her low wrack. They both stood
abruptly, and got on with the work.
* * * * * * *
The West Virginia technicians, the Air Force investigators, and a
sepulchral local mortician later, Scully stripped off her last
pair of gloves for the night and sought out Mulder where he was
disputing details of the crime scene schematic map. He showed her
from the photos how the male pelvises tended towards the outer
ring of the heap, the rounder-hipped women and the children in
the center. The male bodies were mostly charred to black bone,
but those in the middle of the pile were more often cooked, or
only partly burned.
"Chivalry isn't dead," he said sardonically. "They were
surrounded and retreating. They knew what was coming." He put
down the pictures and waited in vain for her to make eye contact.
"Not one-by-one, like at Skyland Mountain and Ruskin Dam."
"No chips in the cervical vertebrae," was her non sequitur reply.
She started walking and he followed, neither sure where they were
going. Mulder mused, as they pulled even with the guards at the
hangar doors, "Hoist on their own petard, it seems."
They were climbing into the car before Scully said what she had
been thinking all day: "They didn't set themselves on fire."
* * * * * * *
That evening they convened an impromptu bullpen at the Buckeye
Bar and Grill, run by an exiled Ohioan, who was observant enough
to notice their strained faces and professional clothes and
suggest a private table so they wouldn't scare the regular
customers. Briggs made his way methodically through three fingers
of whiskey before he caught Zabriskie looking at him and switched
to beer. He didn't show his teeth all night.
Scully ate only sides and an undressed salad, nothing with butter
or gravy. The men ate well-fired meat and the grease they wiped
from their mouths made her want to throw up, or yell at them. She
kept her peace, but Mulder eventually slowed, staring at his
plate. He looked as ill as she felt when he made the belated
connection.
After the meal was cleared, they settled in to speculate, each
with his own chosen poison at his elbow. Scully eyeballed her
partner when he ordered coffee, and when her turn came she asked
for a shot of tequila. The military men blinked at her, before
hiding themselves in their beers.
"Well," said Zabriskie at last. "I been to accident scenes that
would make your hair stand on end. Bombs dropped on the wrong
targets, an F-16 meeting a mountainside, and one time there was
this kid who was smoking around 15 year old stores of Napalm. But
this is the goddamnedest thing I ever saw."
Everyone else nodded, even though two of them had already
witnessed scenes like this. Scully laid her hand on Mulder's knee
and he nodded without looking at her. They would not discuss her
intense personal knowledge of this goddamnedest thing.
Briggs spoke, his lips a thin line: "Luggage. Adults and
children, male and female. All ages. Sound like families to you?"
"No drivers left behind in the cars," added Mulder. "This was
some kind of last-ditch assignation. And somebody else
anticipated it."
Zabriskie asked, "But where were they going, and why?"
Mulder shifted uncomfortably, glanced at Scully. She was toying
with her full shot glass and said nothing. He plunged in alone.
"More to the point, who were they, and how did they know to
convene here?"
The gray old airman answered heavily, "The fingerprints will ring
bells somewhere. We'll track down who rented those cars. We
haven't started on dental identification or DNA yet." Scully
downed her shot while he spoke, smacking the glass on the table
as punctuation. The three men glanced at her, but said nothing.
They let the dinner end on that false-optimistic note, excusing
themselves abruptly. The two airmen returned to base, while
Mulder and Scully checked themselves into a motel down the
street. It took only a cursory examination of the out of state
license plates in the parking lot to convince them to register as
George Hale and Barbara McClintock.
Noises from an impromptu party met them as they approached their
rooms. A man in a t-shirt opened his door as they passed and
hailed them like old friends. "Peter Withers, Associated Press,"
he beamed at them. "Who you with?" Several people sat in the
brightly-lit room beyond him, their conversation animated by
brown bottles.
Scully plastered on her false smile and began, "I'm sorry sir,
we're just --"
"Hey Carrie!" shouted the man, mashing his consonants into a
drunken glut. "Somebody else from the press room! Good thing we
were here first, eh?"
Mulder reached out his long arm to push past the man. Withers
staggered away while Mulder growled, "We're on our way to an
actuarial conference in Akron, if you don't mind."
Withers shouted something rude at their backs and returned to his
room. As they found their own rooms, Mulder pressed his fingers
to Scully's back and told her, grinning, "Thanks for letting me
play the protective hero."
She gave him her enigmatic face. "I was going to say Biometrics,
but actuarial is even more boring. Good choice." She let herself
into her room without saying good night, leaving him standing at
his own door in the freezing night air.
He didn't turn around to look at the stars, crisp and bright in
the sky. He unlocked his door and dropped his things in his motel
room.
* * * * * * *
They breakfasted in silence on cold bagels. The air was sharp and
clear, outlining the white-topped mountains so perfectly they
seemed preternaturally close, circular rainbows sparking off
their heights. When they got to the base, Mulder mentioned it to
Captain Briggs, who smiled a wan toothless smile and said it was
the high altitude.
He worked with Briggs all morning, listening to him mutter
fearfully to himself, while Scully rounded up the last of the
autopsy writeups. It wasn't till noontime that Briggs brushed
back his wave of blond hair and asked, "You have a pretty good
idea who these people were, don't you?"
Mulder shuffled the papers in front of him. Briggs ran his short
nails down his face, nodding. "I figured as much." He didn't seem
to realize he was marring his skin with scratch marks. The air
made noise between them, a curious blanketing hush like the
atmosphere just before snowfall.
The pockmarks of Scully's heels heralded her presence, saving
Mulder from trying to explain about the balance of world power.
She scooped him up and they walked together across the hangar,
her grip tight on his lapel. She said: "Cassandra Spender isn't
here."
"So." All the reply Mulder could think of. Another odd datum to
add to the vertiginous churn of facts.
"They might have been sending her somewhere else, from Potomac
Yards. Or they might have arrived too late, and escaped detection
in the chaos of the crime scene." Scully drew a breath, heard the
catch in her chest. "Or she might have been here and been spared
that death."
"Taken?" asked Mulder.
"Taken," she replied.
They both abruptly realized they had stopped walking and were
standing still in the middle of that large space. Mulder hung his
head, keeping his hands to himself, until Scully reached out for
one of them. "I told her," he muttered. It was so quiet it did
not echo off the ceiling. Scully leaned in to hear. "I told her
to come. Diana Fowley might be one of those bodies."
Scully interrupted: "She wasn't. Skinner said he spoke to her
yesterday morning."
"I might have been one of those bodies." Mulder continued,
expressionless. His fingertips were cold to the touch. "If you
hadn't insisted."
A piercing look, then a small confused grimace. "But I did
insist."
Neither said anything for a little while. They watched the plumes
of their breath mingle between them. At last Mulder raised his
head, neck tense and eyes wild as a man in the grip of febrile
delirium. "She wasn't here," he said.
She did not respond, only turned them back towards the paperwork
they would soon be hauling back to Washington. Scully was
squinting at Zabriskie's illegible handwriting ten minutes later
when Mulder came to the end of the thought he'd begun aloud.
"She knew not to be here."
He sat slouching in a chair next to Briggs, whose alarmed eyes
darted around the table in search of context. Scully let Mulder
wallow in his misery until she finished transcribing the note
Zabriskie had written. Then she straightened and told him: "Let's
get going."
* * * * * * *
Zabriskie and Briggs stood side by side in the rearview mirror as
Mulder drove away. There had been cards and promises of follow-up
exchanged all around, and then an awkward leavetaking. As Mulder
glanced back, he saw Briggs's movie star looks collapse into a
frown. Zabriskie clapped a hand to his colleague's shoulder,
turning him away, and then the car went round a curve and Mulder
saw no more of them.
Scully sat silent in the passenger's seat until they were well
onto the highway, watching the vague shapes snow made of boulders
by the side of the road. Each of them let time flow, unraveling
the days' speculation to its logical conclusions.
An idea had been hurtling a sickening orbit around his
consciousness for a day or so. He let himself say it out loud for
the first time, the disarray of facts snapping to a sudden
gestalt. "What Krycek told me last year." He gasped it, his foot
unconsciously pushing the gas pedal to its upper limit. "The
third faction just saved us from immediate colonization."
Scully glanced at him, snorted. "This is Krycek's version of an
ally in extremis?"
"I wonder if he's working for them, or them for him." Mulder
grimaced, kept his eyes on the road. Next to him, Scully did the
same. "He tried to convince me they were our only hope."
They drove that way for a little while, unsmiling. Scully folded
her hands in her lap, examined them. "Out of the frying pan, into
the fire," she murmured. Then she realized what she had just said
and turned towards the window, vaguely nauseated at herself.
Sparing her his scrutiny, Mulder tapped his fingers on the
steering wheel arrhythmically. "I wonder --" he began, but Scully
cut him off.
"Krycek's not on the side of the angels, Mulder," she snapped,
her face still turned away. "Don't you dare go calling him some
kind of freedom fighter."
He knew it was stupid to demur, but he did so anyway. "His allies
stopped the actions of a flagrantly illegal and incredibly
destructive group." He tried to couch his voice low and soothing.
The flush at her neck signalled he was failing.
From the spark of gold at the base of her throat to the tip of
her pert chin Scully's skin flushed a dark rose. Her eyes
confronted him, cool blue amidst the pink. "Sixty-eight people
are dead," she reminded him, her consonants crisp and clipped.
"And Krycek isn't God." Scully dropped her eyes and turned away,
staring into the snowy countryside.
Mulder let her withdraw, then glanced skyward through the
windshield. The sky, pale fragile blue, gave him nothing but
wisps of clouds to look at. He returned his eyes to the road.
Neither of them said anything.
It became so quiet that the ring of the cellphone made Mulder
swerve in his lane. Scully hunted through her pockets and
answered it. She listened, punctuating her short replies with
'sir'. Mulder waited until she had hung up, then waited longer
while she frowned at the melting snow on the highway divider.
"That was Skinner," she said. "Spender held on in a coma for
almost a day. He died this morning."
They didn't speak again until they reached Washington. By then
Mulder's knuckles were cold and stiff, frozen on the steering
wheel.
* * * * * * *
"Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest."
* * * * * * *
END
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