Julie Fortune FATA MORGANA Part 2 It took six hours of argument to arrange to see Kevin Lowe, after Scully was removed to her new mortuary lab. The hospital attendants dressed Mulder in something that reminded him of spacewalks -- hastily borrowed from the local Fire Department and still bearing the name tag of FEMA, it still had its original creases and new-plastic smell. It was just barely long enough for him, given that the booties had to seal into the legs and the gloves into the armholes. The helmet left him feeling instantly claustrophobic, and his breath steamed the plastic in a wet smear until he managed to control his heart rate. "You're ready," the nurse said from some vast plastic distance, and tapped him on the shoulder. He had a self-contained breathing apparatus, and the air blew cool on his sweating face. He nodded and lurched toward the doorway, which had been sealed with some kind of silicone strips. No way to make it a true airlock, of course. They'd evacuated the top floor of the building, in a little-used section, and that was as far as prophylaxis went in Gallagher, Ohio. Mulder pushed open the door and entered the world of Kevin Lowe. Dr. Lowe was held to his bed by thick restraints, and he looked totally different from the red-faced man who'd stumbled out of Scully's room, literally drunk on blood. He was the color of bleached paper. "I remember you," Lowe said. He sounded like a normal, rational human being, but he was chewing his lower lip to rags and licking up the welling blood. Mulder flinched at the sight of his red-stained teeth. "You were in the hallway. How is she?" The memory of Lowe covered in Scully's blood, stumbling out of there like an addict after a fix ... the vision of Scully's body so horribly violated. It all tumbled through Mulder's mind again, and he thought he could smell the blood again, sense the satiation. Not a drug addict, after all. Lowe's face had been that of a man who'd just had the best sex of his life. Mulder wanted to kill him. Instead, he leaned over him and said, "Do you know what this thing is? Do you know how to stop it?" Lowe sucked on his bloodied lip and swallowed. Sucked and swallowed. "Like drinking your own urine," Lowe said conversationally. "Not much nutrition, but it can keep you alive. For a while." Mulder leaned harder on the bed, to keep himself from slamming a gloved fist into a restrained prisoner. "Tell me what this is. What you know about it." Lowe blinked. His eyes looked oddly metallic. Where his arms were restrained on the bed, Mulder realized he couldn't see any veins at all -- just pale flesh stippled with hair. No sign of circulatory action whatsoever. "It's a gift," he said. "I can heal the sick. Raise the dead, so long as the blood hasn't cooled too much. How can it be anything but a gift?" "And who gave you this gift?" Mulder asked. Lowe's smile spread across his face like melting butter. "Maybe it was my wife," he said. "Maybe it was God. Maybe it was Fate. Do you know what a fata morgana is? I saw one, once. In her eyes." "I heard you killed that boy I saved," Lowe said. Mulder snapped back to focus on him. Lowe looked sad and critical. "He wasn't trying to kill anybody. He would have healed them, after. He was just hungry." "Why? Why did he shoot them?" Lowe cocked his head. "The blood. The hungrier you get, the less able you are to draw the blood to the surface and filter it through. It's easier if the blood is readily available. Pooling. Flowing. Listen, it doesn't matter. They heal right up, and they hardly even remember." Mulder straightened up and stepped away from him. Physically away, unable to stand being so close to him. It. Whatever this thing was now. Lowe's head turned to follow him, metallic-polished eyes shimmering in the harsh fluorescent light. White as the bed linens, except for the blood on his masticated lips and smeared teeth. Even his tongue was pallid as it darted out to lick up drops. "Is she hungry yet, Mr. Agent?" he asked. "Your friend? She will be. There'll come a moment when she'll do anything to get at the blood. Anything at all. Maybe you might even be looking forward to that." Mulder found he was standing against the door, shoving his back against it. Staying in this room was a physical impossibility. He turned, opened the door, and escaped outside. The air inside his suit tasted thick and rancid with his own sweat. He felt a sudden conviction that if he looked back he'd see Lowe creeping along behind him, eyes like ball bearings, fingers sharpened into scalpels -- He turned. Lowe was still on the bed, head slightly raised to watch him go. Mulder closed the door, wrenched off his helmet, and sank down to a crouch to take deep, shuddering breaths. That thing had cut Scully open. Put its hands inside -- They hardly even remember. How many people? How widespread was it, if a creature like this could torture and mutilate and heal its victims as if nothing happened? "Agent Mulder?" At the end of the hall, Agent Vernon stood behind the DO NOT CROSS line and waved. Mulder handed over his helmet to the nurse and let her help him out of the suit. He had the feeling there was more bad news to come, and then it stepped around the corner. Assistant Director Walter Skinner, fresh from congressional hearings. "Better and better," Mulder muttered. He wiped sweat from his face and went to join them. ### "Dr. Kevin Lowe," Skinner said. He looked as if he'd bitten into an apple and found half a worm. "Not exactly on the Nobel short list for his achievements. He's been reprimanded four times by the state for unethical medical practices." "I guess he'd have to do a little vivisection demonstration before they actually revoke his license," Mulder said. He had finished catching Skinner up on events, and as usual, there was something a little comforting about the way Skinner took things. As if discovering an unnatural mutilating skin-sucking vampire was more of a personal inconvenience than a reason to panic. Skinner slid a file across the table to Mulder, who opened it up and looked at the face of Kevin Lowe. Before, presumably, being made an unnatural mutilating skin-sucking vampire, because he looked like a normal human being, pleasant, not too bright. "Kevin Lowe doesn't have a wife," Skinner said. "He had an ex, but she turned up dead in some lab accident earlier this year." "What did she do?" Mulder asked. He skimmed the folder. Nothing about the wife beyond her name, Sarita. Skinner's silence stretched on long enough to draw his attention. Mulder looked up. Skinner raised his eyebrows expressively. "Black box," Mulder guessed. "Her name came up on the mainframe search in connection with something called Project Anodyne." "Which is?" "Not something we can get the details on, but it was underwritten out of FEMA funds." They both knew what it was, and that it was a dead end. They fell silent. Skinner drank some coffee and looked squinty-eyed and the cup, and finally said, "What you told me. It sounds -- " "Incredible? Stupid? Unbelievable?" "Vile," Skinner finished grimly. "What if Ted Bundy could have kept his victims alive and kept killing and torturing them over and over? Gacy? Any of them?" "What if surviving it just meant that you were bound to do it to others?" Mulder asked. Skinner shook his head. "Lowe said that Scully was going to get hungry. Hungry the way he did." Skinner's stare was frozen on the coffee cup. "I don't want to see it come to that, sir. I don't want to have to -- " "No," Skinner agreed. "Neither of us wants that." ### One advantage to working with the dead: she was no threat to them. Scully gloved up -- double gloved -- and assumed her usual full autopsy attire, including the face shield. No assistants. She'd ordered the funeral director and all of the mortuary attendants out before the bodies were delivered, and ordered the ambulance drivers to be examined by Reislinger before being allowed to go back to the hospital. They'd have a week's quarantine period, too. Like Mulder, Reislinger herself, anybody who'd come in contact with the bodies or prisoners or the original accident survivors. She supposed it would be better to quarantine all of Gallagher, but she couldn't authorize that against the arguments of the hospital staff. Her judgment could well be impaired. She certainly was suffering from a monster headache, and hands that shook. She couldn't seem to keep still, some part of her always moving to burn off excess nervous energy. At least the dead didn't require a steady hand. She looked at the boy first, and the pathos of it hit her instantly. He looked very small and cold, wrapped up in black plastic. Only one eye was present. The other, and most of the upper left quadrant of the skull, had been removed by Mulder's bullet. She hesitated before touching the boy's skin. Cool, damp, dead skin. No reaction from whatever was lurking inside of her. Apparently, cold blood wasn't attractive. She breathed a sigh of relief and set to work gathering blood samples. There was no sense of time in the mortuary. No sound, no outside lights. She lost track of the hours, concentrating so hard that it was an imposition to visit the bathroom. She only had to do it once before her urine output fell to nothing. She didn't notice. She had no idea what time it was when her cell phone rang. She stripped off one slimy layer of gloves to answer it, suddenly aware that her back and feet hurt and the clock ticking silently on the wall showed she'd been working for more than seventeen hours straight. "Scully?" She couldn't describe the warmth that flooded through her at hearing Mulder's voice. "I'm outside. Can I come in?" "I -- " She tried to force her brain to think logically. "No. No, you'd better not. Why aren't you in quarantine?" "Reislinger had me brought over in a Petri dish. Listen, I need to talk to you," he said. "Let me in, Scully. Please." She walked to the front and unlocked the door. He eased inside, tall and shadowy in the deliberately dim lights. She locked the door and said, "What?" more sharply than she meant to. At least she was still wearing gloves. She could allow herself to touch him, maybe. A little. "How are you?" His voice was too gentle. She wanted him to be safe and well away from her, because all she could think about now was how warm he was. How ... warm. She felt cold enough to shatter. "Fine," she said. "What is it?" "Lowe said his wife gave him the disease. Skinner says she died earlier this year. I've got Langley working on tracing her, if she's still alive -- maybe we can get you a Patient Zero." God, she was shaking all over now. Her muscles felt cold and tight and overstrained, and she fought the urge to fidget. "I've managed to culture something out of the blood samples," she said. "It's an enzyme, it acts like a binding agent, something that literally forces red and white blood cells to stick together on contact and then dissolves the clumps so there's no arterial blockage. Theoretically, it should kill within minutes. Practically, what it does is free up the serum channels for another kind of cell to travel." "What kind of cell?" Scully eased down in a red padded chair. She was, she realized, looking through an open door at a viewing room, where a closed casket sat awaiting mourners. The flowers looked tropically overgrown, less a tribute than a jeer. Or maybe that was just her state of mind. "Let's call it a -- a needle cell. Normal red blood cells are like lozenges. These are more like needles traveling at great speed through the circulatory system, and there are a lot of them, Mulder, literally thousands to every blood cell. They rise to the highest capillary levels, burrow through into the contacting skin of the other person, and hijack the red blood cells by piercing them and then bringing them back. Like -- spearfishing." Mulder pulled a chair over, too. He managed to block her view of the funeral-in-waiting. "They're manmade, Mulder. There's nothing like them in nature. They've been genetically engineered, and they're highly aggressive. It takes about 24 hours, as best I can tell, for them to completely replace white and red blood cells. Within hours, the infected body is nothing but a walking receptacle for these needle cells. And they have to feed." She looked down at her gloved hands. The latex was a good barrier. She'd tested it already and found the needle cells were unable to penetrate it. I'll spend the rest of my life in a full-body condom, she thought. But the truth was, if that was the outlook for the rest of her life, it would only last as long as it took her to find privacy and a loaded gun. Mulder said, very quietly, "What's the infection vector?" "There's a small risk with every interaction," she said. "But the more invasive the interaction, the bigger the risk. It's when the host makes direct contact with the victim -- skin to blood contact, or blood-to-blood -- that the infection is massive and unstoppable. When I -- when I held your hand, some of the needle cells entered your system and started producing the binding agent, but not enough to win the war. Your antibodies must have attacked and destroyed it already." "How can you be sure?" She pointed to his hand, and the livid dark-red bruising that indicated burst capillaries. "There wouldn't be any bruising," she said. "And the capillaries would have been healed. The needle cells steal DNA from red blood cells in the marrow and use it to launch massive repairs of the body. A damaged body can't be an adequate host. It fixes things. A pretty amazing process, it's like time lapse photography. It literally rebuilds according to a template." He was quiet for a while, and then said, "Scully ..." "No," she said. "I'm going to find an answer to this. I will. I'll be all right." Her leg was jittering uncontrollably now, her fingers jerking as if connected to current. What was this? What was happening? And then she looked at Mulder, and she knew. She saw it in his eyes, too. She was hungry. Starving. Her exposed skin looked milk-white, the veins totally invisible. She'd used up all her own red blood cells, and she needed more. She looked away and tried to make her voice sound cool and businesslike. "I'll need some things from the hospital. O positive blood, I'm not sure of the compatibility factors. I'll try to make it last." "There isn't enough, Scully." "What?" "There isn't enough blood at the hospital. They ran out a few hours ago, trying to keep Lowe and Travers alive and still treat critical patients. There was a massive accident in town. They had four trauma cases." He took her hand in his. She tried to draw away, but he was very strong, and part of her didn't want to fight at all. He carefully pulled off her latex glove. "Mulder, no, not this way -- " It dissolved into something wordless and breathless as he pressed her palm to his and interlaced their fingers. Warmth. Heat. Cascading into her, through her, into her. His blood flowed through the hot contact of their skin, and she gasped and shook and almost fainted with the pleasure of it. It was an orgasm that went on and on, a storm inside her head, and for the first time she understood why Lowe had become a monster because she wanted to tear Mulder's flesh open, sink down into that lovely red warmth, be a part of him in a way that no sexual act could ever duplicate. As those images washed over her, she ripped her hand loose from Mulder's grasp. He looked gray and sick, and there was a single drop of blood in the center of his palm. She couldn't stop herself. She leaned forward and put her lips to the blood and licked until the taste was gone. When she came to her senses, she was sucking on Mulder's palm, drawing blood through the skin like a thin stream. His palm was already discolored and bruising. She jerked backwards and saw Mulder watching her. So much in his eyes. So much pain, so much despair, so much love and loathing. So much desire. She had blood on her lips. She resisted the urge to lick them clean and wiped them on the edge of her coat. "How long will that keep you?" Mulder asked hoarsely. She didn't know what he felt. In a way, she didn't want to know, any more than she wanted him to know how incredibly sensual the experience had been for her. She tried to steady herself. "I don't know. Several hours, at least. I don't have enough evidence. Lowe -- Lowe's not responding to blood anymore, is he?" "No," Mulder said. "They have him on a wide-open IV and it won't hold him. He's starving to death." Lowe's condition was as much as six months old. She had time. Plenty of time. She wanted, so badly that it shook the very foundations of her, to do it again, and she refused to look Mulder in the fact again because she was very afraid that she would see the same thing in him. "Go," she said. "Get out of here, Mulder. Right now." He shifted slightly in his chair, a stiff rustle of fabric on velvet, and then stood up. She stared fixedly at his knees. "I don't want to leave you here alone," he said. "If something happens -- " "I have a phone. I'll call you if I need y -- if I need anything." She felt him touch her, very gently, on the shoulder. It was all she could do not to grab his wrist and drink in that warmth again, no matter what the cost to Mulder. She closed her eyes and listened for the sound of the door unlocking and closing before she dared follow him to lock it back shut. ### Outside the building, Mulder put his back to rough brick and sank down to a crouch. It was a cool night, the moon drifting in clouds overhead; he caught the smell of blooming roses. The mortuary lawn was as carefully manicured as a cemetery; there were even some sample headstones tastefully arranged under a tree about 50 feet away. He moved his hand and hissed in pain. Moonlight showed him livid discolorations, both on the back and front; it was, he expected, going to look like he'd slammed his hand in a door five or six times. It certainly felt like it. He had a tactile memory of Scully's lips on his palm, and let his head fall back against the brick hard enough to make him wince. God, it had felt so good. It had taken every ounce of strength he'd possessed to stand up and walk out of there, knowing she was hungry, knowing that the pain was part of the pleasure of it. "Damn," he whispered, staring up at the moon. "Damn, damn, damn." He couldn't come back again. If he did, he knew what would happen. Even if she didn't. ### Back at the hospital, Skinner looked harassed. It was a normal expression for Skinner, at least when faced with X-File cases and investigators, but Mulder sensed this went beyond the usual. He was right. "We're locked in," Skinner said bluntly. "FEMA called a complete quarantine of Gallagher. Nobody comes in, nobody goes out. They've got the CDC in their pocket on this one, and we're surrounded by the Ohio National Guard." "Jesus," Mulder said. He sat down and reached for one of the sandwiches on the tray between them; they were old, the edges dry and curling, but he ate it anyway. Left-handed, hiding his bruised right in his lap. "The city fathers must be pleased as punch. So, does FEMA know they've sealed in news crews from all of the major cable outlets with us?" "They know. If it weren't for CNN's satellite hookup outside, I think they might have already dropped a neutron bomb on us." "Nuke the site from orbit," Mulder said joylessly. "It's the only way to be sure." Skinner eyed him doubtfully, not understanding the reference. "As far as we've been able to tell, there are only four active cases. Lowe, Travers, Cooper, and Scully. According to Scully, the two bodies we have -- Appel and the Travers boy -- have dead needle cells. Apparently, brain damage is the one thing the damn things can't repair. Not that it gets us any closer to a cure." Mulder swallowed a dry bite of roast beef and bread. "I thought Sophia Cooper wasn't showing any symptoms." "She isn't," Skinner said. He looked tired. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "The doctors are running enough tests on her to qualify her for the space program, but so far there's just no explanation. She's just plain not sick, and not infected. What we have to do now -- urgently -- is to make sure nobody else gets this infection." Skinner put his glasses back on. The lenses caught the overhead lights in a flat white shimmer, and then Skinner leaned forward and slid a Coca Cola can across the table at Mulder -- slap shot speed. Mulder, surprised, grabbed for it before it sailed off the table. With his right hand. He winced as it connected with the spectacular mottled bruising on his palm. Skinner said nothing. Mulder opened the top and drank fizzy sweet foam, tried for a nonchalant tone. "Scully needs to examine Cooper. Maybe she can see something Reislinger can't." Skinner said, "You want to tell me what the hell you think you're doing?" "No, sir, because the truth is I don't know what I'm doing except trying to help her survive this." A shadow of a smile on Skinner's austere face, a flash of respect in his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. Less the boss, more the friend. "How is she?" "Bad," Mulder said. "She's the color of bleach, and she's got the jitters. She's starving over there. If there's any way we can send her blood supplies -- " Skinner nodded. "Dr. Reislinger just sent word that she's taking Lowe off of transfusion; it's not having any effect anymore." "He's dying?" A dark look from Skinner. "We wish. It's as if whatever crazy train he's on is just picking up speed. He's chewed his lips completely off. Maybe he'll die when she stops the blood supply, but Reislinger doesn't think so. She thinks it might take a long time. She's trying sedatives and pain medication, but nothing works on him. Nothing." Even though he wasn't up to feeling sympathy for Kevin Lowe, it gave Mulder cold chills to think of Scully lying up there in that bed, gnawing her lips away in a futile search for blood. Dying by inches, insane. There had to be a way to stop it. Sophia Cooper had to be the answer. He was about to open his mouth and say so when there was a knock on the door, and Agent Vernon looked in. "Sirs, I think you'd better get down here." "What's going on?" Skinner wasn't waiting for the update, he was already halfway to the door. Mulder followed. "It's Detective Cooper," Vernon said. "I think she's got the disease." ### What Detective Cooper had was a loaded gun and an alarming willingness to point it at people. Skinner had his weapon out. So did Mulder, and Vernon, and two cops lurking near corners. Cooper had Dr. Reislinger in a headlock, and the doctor looked frankly terrified. No bloody stigmata on her where Cooper was holding her, though. Mulder exchanged a look with Skinner and lowered his weapon. "Detective Cooper," he said, and stepped forward. Her gun moved to cover him. "Want to tell me what all this is about?" "My mother," Detective Cooper said. She was sweating, blonde hair sticking untidily to her face and neck, but her gun hand was rock steady. "I want to see my mother, now. I've heard what you people are doing to her." "Detective Cooper, we haven't done anything to her but tests, medical tests, to try to see what's wrong with her," Reislinger said. Her voice was high and tense, but she managed some remarkable poise, given the conditions. "Please, if you'll let me go, I'll take you to her. You can talk to her yourself, see how she's doing -- " "Fine," Cooper said. She let Reislinger go and pushed her away, then instantly pointed the gun at her head. "I've been begging for two days to see her, and you kept telling me no, she was in quarantine. Now it's all okay? Is that it?" "I just want to reassure you," Reislinger said. She took a cautious step back. "You don't need the gun. I'll take you upstairs to see her." "Sure you will." Cooper slid the safety off with a click. "Do you think we don't know about all the troops outside of town? They shot Pamela Myers, Jesus, she was just trying to leave town with her kids and they shot her! I don't trust you! I don't trust any of you!" "And you shouldn't," Mulder said. He put his gun away and held his hands out, palm up. "Rowena, you're right, this is all out of control. Everybody's scared. Nobody understands what's happening, us included. Let the doctor do her job. I'll take you to see Sophia, she doesn't have to be the one. You know me. You know I won't double cross you." Cooper's thin lips hardened into a bitter smile. "Yeah? How exactly do I know that?" "Because if I'd wanted to, I could have dropped you from twenty feet away," he said. "My partner's becoming one of them, like Travers and Lowe and the kid. I want to know what's happening to your mother as much as you do." She believed him. It took long, torturous seconds, but she lowered the gun and put it away. Skinner let out a held breath and holstered his weapon, too. The cops tried to move in; Skinner waved them off. He looked at Mulder. "I guess you intend to keep your word?" "Don't I always?" He, Cooper and Dr. Reislinger went up the stairs, into the quarantine hall, and opened the door to Sophia Cooper's room. It was empty. Sophia Cooper was gone. ### It was unsettling to discover how much time the little things of life absorbed. Eating, drinking -- they were so usual that Scully had ceased to even consider them, but now she found time without them increasingly heavy on her hands. There was a different kind of eating she could do, but she was putting it off as long as possible. Even warming up the bagged blood to room temperature made it barely palatable, a subsistence-level experience. She was barely absorbing enough to keep herself functional. Her hands shook constantly, and her whole body twitched and tingled with sparks of pain. Needle jabs. The thought was weirdly funny, but she had no desire to laugh. She was standing at the picture window in the receiving room of the mortuary, looking out at the moon, when she saw the emergency vehicle lights begin to strobe over at the hospital. Lots of them. A mass exodus of police vehicles, ambulances, everything, fanning out all over town. Something had happened. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed Mulder's number. When he answered, she could barely hear him over the wail of a siren. "Scully?" he shouted. "Sophia Cooper disappeared. Walked right out of the hospital, so far as we can tell, but we don't even know when. Could have been hours ago. We're conducting a grid search -- at least we know she isn't leaving town. We've alerted the National Guard cordon to be watching for her just in case." "She never got sick," Scully said. "But something scared her off. What?" "We don't know." "What kind of tests were they running on her?" "Blood tests, urine tests, CAT, you name it." "No, what was the last test they ran on her?" Scully asked. She was fidgeting her leg, drumming the heel of her shoe into the carpet in a fast jazz rhythm. Close enough for jazz ... "Hold on." He consulted with someone else. "Reislinger says it was the CAT. They had the MRI scheduled for in the morning." MRI. Magnetic resonance. The cells were artificial. Maybe the frequencies used by MRI could affect them. But how would Cooper know that? The cells didn't have any intelligence, just mindless instinct. Besides, Cooper hadn't shown any evidence at all of harboring the needle cells. Maybe they were hiding. Maybe that was their programming. "But somebody programmed them," Scully said aloud. Mulder made a questioning sound. "Mulder, what if the cells in Lowe weren't working properly? What if that defect got passed along, like a genetic mutation, to everyone he infected?" "What?" "Think about what the cells do! They heal tissue. They require DNA templates to do it, and energy to do it with, but Mulder, I think their principal purpose is healing. Consumption of blood is the fuel that drives the engine, not the engine itself." "Slow down, Scully. You're saying these things are medical?" "Yes! Yes, that's exactly what they are. Developed to heal damaged tissue from the inside. They've just gone wrong." "That's not going wrong, Scully. That's going bad." "I've got to go," she said. "I've got to check something." She slapped the phone closed and turned from the window, almost running in her haste to get back to the lab. Someone stepped out of the deep mortuary shadows into her path. An older woman, one Scully had never seen. She didn't really have to ask. "Sophia Cooper," she said. The woman smiled slightly and inclined her head. "Dr. Sophia Cooper, I presume." "Once. A long time ago." There was a luminous quality to her, even in the shadows, that made Scully realize her bloodless pallor was just a pale imitation of what the cells could do. "I'm very sorry for all this. Really. I had only the vaguest idea of what had gone wrong until Kevin -- Dr. Lowe -- infected you as well. This wasn't meant to be, Miss Scully." Scully realized the phone was still in her hand. It felt as obvious as a red-hot glowing sign, but Cooper gave no indication of having noticed. "You can save us," Scully said. She tried to feel the buttons on the face of the phone without looking obvious -- was that one redial? Or that one? Could she muffle the noise it would make in the folds of her lab coat? She risked it and talked over the tone. "You can save people, can't you? That's what gave Lowe the idea -- he saw you healing in the hospital, somehow he got infected, and he thought he could heal others the same way. Was that it?" Cooper's head tilted slightly, either hearing the electronic note of the call going through, or just absorbing what Scully had said. She lifted her hands slightly, palms up, and let them fall. Too elegant to be called a shrug. "Lowe had the bad luck to cut himself with a scalpel and contact my blood after the accident," she said. "Maybe he did it deliberately, I don't know. It wouldn't have been dangerous, except that he was also exposed to the MRI machine immediately beforehand. A one in a million disaster." "You knew you'd be found out, when we put the connection together about the accident victims. You thought you'd better put it forward as if you were scared but willing to help," Scully said. "Only you couldn't mimic the symptoms." A strange, compassionate look crossed Sophia's face, and she said, gently, "Nor would I want to, my dear. What's been done to you -- all of you -- is terrible. It never should have happened." "Then help me stop it! Tell me what to do!" If it was possible, Sophia looked even more compassionate. She stepped forward and quickly laid her hand flat against Scully's cheek. Scully gasped and tried to pull away, but Cooper grabbed and held her. There was no reaction. None at all. Scully felt none of the sucking intensity of her body absorbing blood. "My cells act as antibodies," Cooper said. "They repel yours as invaders. Likewise, yours attack mine. Impasse, my dear. I can't save you. I didn't come to, in any case." Cooper turned away. She strolled across the deep carpet to the windows, where she looked out at the blinking emergency lights. A police car cruised by, its beam probing the bushes and angular shadows. "They're looking for you," Scully said. "They'll find you. There's no way out of Gallagher." "There's always a way out," Cooper said. "I've already taken care of Kevin and Mr. Travers. Now there's just you and I. I am so very sorry, you know, but I can't take the risk of this going any further. There are others at risk, too." "Who?" An enigmatic smile on the pleasant, patrician face. "You know I can't possibly tell you that, Agent Scully." Sophia Cooper looked out on the town of Gallagher, sighed, and turned back to Scully. She pulled a gun from her coat pocket and pointed it at Scully's head. Behind it, her eyes were as cool and emotionless as a winter sky. "I'm so very sorry," she repeated, and pulled the trigger. Her eyes widened at the dry click of an unloaded gun. "It's my gun," Scully said hoarsely. "I unloaded it. I didn't want to get hungry enough to start shooting innocent people. The bullets are in a trash can somewhere on their way to a landfill." Sophia was still staring at her in astonishment when the front door shuddered and blew open from the force of Mulder's kick. "Mulder no!" Scully shouted, but it was too late. Sophia was swinging the gun on him, and had a split second to make the decision. He held his fire. A.D. Skinner, standing next to him, didn't. Scully watched as the bullet took Sophia cleanly between the eyes and exited in a dark spray of blood and matter from the back of her head. Sophia stood for a few seconds, blinking, and then fell to her knees. Scully caught her as the life faded out of her winter-gray eyes. She was still alive. Barely. One pupil had blown wide open, a slack black circle with a thin edge of gray; the other eye focused on Scully's face. Her lips shaped a word. "Don't." But Scully knew, in that instant, what Sophia had tried to conceal from her. She'd given it away in telling her about Kevin Lowe. He cut himself with a scalpel and came in contact with my blood. Blood contact. Scully reached out, grabbed a small ornate Chinese vase from a table and smashed it into pieces. Picked up a sharp-edged fragment and slashed down her forearm deep enough to tear large vessels. Then she put her arm under Sophia's head, where the blood flowed from her shattered skull. Blood contact. Sophia's one good eye studied her blindly. It took Scully almost a minute to realize that the woman was dead. She pulled her arm out from under Sophia's head and saw that it was healed, entirely and completely healed without a mark. Warmth built into heat. Into incredible, withering pain. She cried out and fell back. Someone caught her, Mulder or Skinner, and for a time she couldn't feel anything at all except her body convulsing, fighting itself. Fighting to live against a deadly invader. And then it was over. She opened her eyes and saw Mulder close to her, Skinner standing foreshortened a few feet away. She licked her lips and tasted blood. It tasted repulsive. Oh, thank God, it tasted horrible. Her hand was resting on Mulder's bare arm. They both looked at it at the same moment. No bruises. She closed her eyes and wondered why Sophia's last words had been apology. ### 1995. Clyde Bruckman and Scully sit in a dimly lit room, cards in hand. Clyde has aces and eights ... a dead man's hand. He frowns at it and doesn't miss the significance. "So," Scully says, continuing a conversation she knows he is only half following, "Ahab mistakes the prophecy and as a result, dies. A similar fate happens to Macbeth." Bruckman shoots her a look over the top of his cards. "Still, you're not the least bit curious?" For a second neither one of them move, and then Scully's eyes flicker in relief at the sound of a knock on the door. Mulder's back, and just in time. She lays her cards down, stands up, and heads for the door. And then she veers off, comes back to Bruckman, sucks in a breath and says, "All right. So how do I die?" The look he gives her is curious -- gentle, pitying, and more than a little puzzled. "You don't." ### "It's the strangest thing," Dr. Reislinger said, handing Scully a printout that made Mulder's eyes water to see all the numbers on it. "I can't find anything in your blood. Nothing. No needle cells, active or inactive. Nothing but healthy red and white blood cells in perfectly normal percentages, with perfectly normal values. It's as if you were never sick at all. I'd still like to do a marrow test --" "Not necessary," Scully said. "Then the only other thing is the MRI." "I'm fine." Scully scanned the figures and handed the paper back. Reislinger inserted it into a thick expandable folder marked SCULLY, D. in black marker. "The bodies?" Scully asked. Reislinger drummed her fingernails on the wooden table. "FEMA and the CDC took them away. They also got copied on all of your medical records, and confiscated all the samples. So far as Gallagher is concerned, it's as if five people just vanished into thin air. Nothing but headstones and empty graves." Kevin Lowe and Lew Travers had died in the hospital the night of Sophia Cooper's escape. The official cause of death, for both, was heart failure. As Scully had often noted, it was a diagnosis that never got anyone into trouble. The police report showed that Sophia Cooper had gone on a violent spree just like the others. No one knew what to make of Scully's recovery. Mulder had the unshakable feeling that if he and Skinner and Agent Vernon hadn't been around -- backed by CNN -- to watch her back, Scully might have disappeared as thoroughly as the five dead. "So I'm free to go," Scully said. It had been a long, tiring week of examinations and tests that were double-checked and triple-checked by the CDC. She looked exhausted, and likely felt worse. "You're sure." "I'm sure," Reislinger said. "Everybody's signed off. Ah ... agents? For your own sake, I'd recommend not coming back to Gallagher any time soon." Mulder paused in the act of picking up Scully's suitcase. "Small towns," Reislinger explained. "Long memories. Sophia Cooper had a lot of friends here." Mulder wondered, just as Reislinger turned away, if he saw a hint of a metallic shine in her eyes. "Let's get out of here," Scully said. He held the door open for her, and for once, she didn't argue with him about it. ### Scully slept, again. It was dark when she woke up, and Mulder was still driving, sipping on a gigantic cup of coffee courtesy of a truck stop in Laughlin. They had not stopped in Ohio. At all. "Skinner's still behind us?" Scully asked. Mulder gave her a crooked half-smile. "Walter 'Hot Wheels' Andretti blasted past us six miles out of town and I haven't seen him since," Mulder said. "I've been hoping he ran into a big Highway Patrolman with no sense of humor, but no such luck." Scully reached out for her cup, sipped cautiously, and was gratified to taste fresh soda. "Dollar twenty-five," Mulder said, deadpan. "You owe me big time. There's nothing worse than warm watered diet soda." "I don't know if there's nothing worse." "How'd you sleep?" "Fine." And to her surprise, she had. No nightmares. No sweating, panicked premonitions. For the first time in a long time, she felt whole. "Pull over." He reacted instantly, sliding into a rattle of gravel on the shoulder, jerking the car to a halt as he turned to look at her. "What's wrong?" She popped open her door and got out. He got out too, watching her, as she walked around to the back of the car. She stood there, leaning on the trunk, and breathed in the cool night air, scented with pine and grass and damp earth. Wind tugged her hair; it slid cool and silky over her skin, and she put her head back and looked up at the moon. A beautiful, bright moon just coming out of the clouds. Mulder joined her, leaning on the trunk, looking up. After a moment, he looked down at her face. "You okay?" "Yeah," she said. "My turn to drive. Just give me a minute." He nodded and walked around to the passenger side. While he was occupied with racking the passenger seat back to its fullest extension, she reached down and sorted through pieces of gravel until she came up with what would inevitably be found on the side of the road. A sharp, twisted piece of metal. She pulled it slowly along her palm, watching the blood flow black in the moonlight. In less than a minute, the cut was closed. Healed. Scully let out a long breath and bowed her head. He told me. He told me this would happen. I didn't believe him. Now all she had to do was keep the truth from Mulder. Forever. "Hey," Mulder called from the car. "Have you read the statistics on alien abductions on deserted mountain roads, Scully? Maybe we should get rolling. Present a moving target." She dropped the metal, wiped her clean, unmarked palm on her pants leg, and got in the car. "Amen," she muttered. Because she knew, sooner or later, just as Sophia had said, they would be coming for her. ### end ###