Everybody Having a Good Time 5/6 [XF, Apocalypse, MSR, 201k]
TITLE: Everbody Having a Good Time 5/6
AUTHOR: Sabine
CATEGORY: Novel
RATING: R, Character Death
DISCLAIMER: Consider it disclaimed. Please don't pay me.
SPOILERS: Through mid Season 6
Haven't seen you in quite a while, / You were down the hold, just passing time. Last time we met it was a low-lit room / We were as close together as a bride and groom. We ate the food, we drank the wine, / Everybody having a good time / Except you, You were talking about the end of the world.
In my dreams, I was drowning in sorrows / Till my sorrows, they learned to swim. Surrounding me, going down on me, / Spilling over the brim. Waves of regret, waves of joy / I reached out for the one I tried to destroy / And you, you said you'd wait until the end of the world.
~ U2, "Until the End of the World"
Everybody Having a Good Time
Continued from part 4
*** FORT VILLENEUVE, CANADA, DECEMBER 31st, 1999, 7:11 a.m. T-minus 1 Day
Seconds ticked like days and everything was still as the moment before the alarm goes off, the moment before the phone rings, the moment before car hits tree and glass explodes with crushing metal. Trapped like a mosquito in amber, the moment hung.
Time spun forward, backward, into the realms of death and hate and everything they'd never done and never said and bodies stacked on bodies and the taste of the memory of the smell of blood.
He cracked the silence, and somewhere ice shattered.
"I must admit," he said, twirling his cigarette between his fingers, "I'd written you off for dead, Agent Scully. I didn't imagine I'd be so pleased to find out I was wrong. I guess you've grown on me, over the years."
"What's going on?" she asked, tasting bile.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Mulder asked at the same time.
The smoking man chuckled. "Making myself at home," he said. "Waiting for you. Sampling the fine local cuisine. Speaking of which, can I interest you in breakfast?"
Scully had forgotten what hunger felt like, but at the mention of food her stomach moaned. She quashed the sensation with a glare at Spender. "Tell us what's going on," she said. "Now."
"All right," he said. "I think you'll be impressed. Akavak?" He gestured with his head at the eskimo seated at the computer console, who nodded.
Spender led Mulder and Scully to a tabletop monitor, which whirred when he woke it from its screen saver.
Unbidden, Mulder's hand found its way into Scully's, and she squeezed it, afraid to tear her eyes from the awakening screen. Images appeared.
In red, a rendering of the earth, seas and oceans in unnatural orange. It spun on the screen, weird and bloody and unfamiliar. Green patches pocked continents, Scandinavia, North Africa - the rendering spun north-south, rather than on the axis, making Scully crawl with dizziness - the Western U.S., the Midatlantic U.S., Northern Central Canada. Everything else was a seamless red, and as the globe spun the green patches sucked in on themselves, their borders tightening, fuzzy, around the void.
"What are you showing us?" Scully asked. Mulder was silent, dead silent, but she could feel him tense, the long muscles in his arms bulge and tighten and his hand in hers gripped like a claw.
"Home," Spender said. "Horrible, isn't it? So hard to imagine, impossible to even comprehend."
Scully nearly spat at the non-answer. "What...is...this?" she asked through clenched teeth.
He waited for the Western Hemisphere to reappear, then gestured with the orange tip of his cigarette at the orange screen. "Fort Villeneuve," he said, indicating the green oasis in Northern Canada, its boundaries all the while shrinking, crawling in like fungus. "We're safe here. That's why I brought you."
Mulder inhaled through his nose, clenched and said nothing. Scully stepped in again.
"What about the rest of the world? All the red areas?"
She knew the answer before he said it.
"Gone," he shrugged. "Razed to the ground, burned like cheap paper, struck by a thousand missiles of a thousand terrorists."
"That's impossible," Scully said. "I don't believe it."
"If the bombs didn't make short work of the populations, the fallout will, and what's left will shrivel in the nuclear winter. They're all gone, Agent Scully," he said. "I assure you of that."
His words crawled under her skin like maggots, eating away at her, and she forced her knees to lock and her toes to curl and her neck to do its work keeping her head straight on her tightening shoulders. Incomprehensible. Unimaginable. Horrible.
"And the green areas?" she asked, watching as Scandinavia rolled toward her. Midatlantic states. Washington. Virginia. Maryland. Pennsylvania. New York. Still green. She didn't let herself make the distinction between them, squandered the selfish desire to hang onto a hope that would require admitting to the rest of this horror.
"Tick-tock," Spender said. "It's all a matter of hours, at this point."
She sank onto the stool at the console, her hand slipping from Mulder's. Mulder stood, unmoving, unblinking, staring.
"I don't believe you," she said to Spender. "I don't believe you would do this. I don't believe you could."
He laughed again, an awful smoker's choking laugh, a death rattle. "I agree with you wholeheartedly, Agent," he said. "Even if I had the capacity to bring about such global destruction, I don't have the will to do so. This, I'm afraid, had nothing to do with me."
*** LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, DECEMBER 31st, 1999, 5:20 a.m. T-minus 1 Day
There was something amazingly twisted about thousands of very small things sinking into the tar.
There had been looting on Wilshire, and running, and screaming, and crowds had flown through the glass-broken windows of the Museum of Miniatures and flung tiny chairs, grabbed handfuls of die-cast metal models of the presidents and pocketed them. The whole conquerable world had been reduced here to toys for tots, palm sized cars that lit up and train sets running through exact replicas of San Francisco and New York.
Carrie and Doug had been at Marie Callender's eating pie when the gunshots went off. Like everyone else they'd ducked for cover, peering out through slotted fingers for a glimpse at the excitement; rubberneckers all. They'd been up all night, danced till dawn at the Viper Room, the best of the best, and they'd missed the news driving down here through stopped traffic with the radio off. Marie did make the best pie and they were splitting a piece of pecan, Carrie picking at the nuts only when Doug wasn't looking and wouldn't know she indulged in such luxuries.
And a gunshot went off. And another. And screams, from right outside the window.
The midnight crowd with marijuana munchies, like sheep, filed out to watch.
They were smashing Mercedes with baseball bats and Doug had wrapped an arm around Carrie and held her to him, looking on from the sidewalk.
"Amazing," he said.
"Totally," she said.
So when the looters smashed the glass window of the Museum of Miniatures and poured in like lemmings over the icicle shards, Doug and Carrie followed.
They were important, the miniatures; they were valuable. They were small. Doug stuffed his pockets, stopping only to hand Carrie pieces he thought she'd like. He'd found a chandelier, a silver and gold candelabra, glittering with red and purple stones hung on tiny chains.
"Look," he'd said, dangling it in front of her face. A latino man in a football jersey rammed him in the back and Doug stumbled and she caught him, her face whitening.
"Fuck you," the latino man said, scooping up minitures. "Don't you know they're blowing up cities?"
Doug furrowed his brow and shrugged.
"I'm scared," Carrie laughed. "I've never been in a looting before."
"Consider it fodder for art," Doug said. "I'm gonna write a kick-ass screenplay about tonight."
She smiled at him, and took the tiny candelabra from his fingers. "It's beautiful," she said. "Do we know what's going on?" she asked.
"No," he said. "Just go with the crowd; I'll take care of you. This is fucking awesome."
He was glowing; she'd never seen him so enthralled. She kissed him on the cheek.
"Okay," she said.
Sirens wailed, car hit car hit car hit car and fiberglass crunched outside.
The LAPD came wheeling in shouting through megaphones.
"Everyone out!" they hollered. "This is over. Everyone out."
The fat latino man collided with Doug again and the crowd, lemmings again, turned en masse and spilled from the building.
They were ushered a safe distance away from the museum and now they stood in the pinky minty dark of pre-dawn, huddled like refugees around the La Brea tar pits.
And the miniatures started to soar.
It was the strangest example of collective consciousness Carrie had ever witnessed; it was a sick performance art exhibit as the miniatures flew and smacked the rubbery surface of the tar, littering it like cigarette butts on a barroom floor.
"This goes in the screenplay too," Doug said, throwing a handful of little tin men into the asphalt pool.
On the east side of the tar pits, there were enormous granite statues of woolly mammoths. Two stood on the edge, looking in, as a third, huge and powerful and pleading, looked up at them from the depths, trumpeting his trunk, stilled frozen, sinking away. Here in the early morning light, it was the most awful, most beautiful, most horrific thing Carrie had ever seen, and it brought tears to her eyes.
The mammoths on shore stood impotent, frozen in their granite postures like the victims of Vesuvius in Pompeii, caught for art, frozen in death, extinct and immortal.
"It's the end of the fucking world!" someone shouted. Laughter. Cacophany. Terror and comraderie and psychotic urban bliss.
Carrie reached into the pocket of her leather coat and pulled out the chandelier. With a last look at the mammoths, she flung it away and watched it spiral into the tar pits.
It sank into a surface blacker than the burning sky.
*** FORT VILLENEUVE, CANADA, DECEMBER 31st, 1999, 7:21 a.m. T-minus 1 Day
Red swallowed Finland and the globe spun on, diving backward like the eyeballs of the dead, south to north, ducking under and hidden from view as the ice-white pole appeared.
There was too much to process, behind his words. Scully pressed her fingertips to her eyes, sharp nails through leather gloves and leathery skin; she was tired. All signs pointed to inaccuracy, obfuscation, lies lies lies lies lies. The world, ever-shrinking, was massive, still, still too large to be obliterated with a wink and a nod. It was impossible.
But they were up here anyway; something had brought them here; there was something to conquer. She looked at Mulder, knowing he felt so too. She watched him stirring, standing still, waiting for the enemy to unveil himself so he could shoot him, point-blank, between the eyes and play David to this Goliath they'd been chasing, card after handwritten card.
She wanted an enemy.
"I don't believe you," she said to Spender.
Spender nodded. "I didn't expect you would, immediately. "Fortunately, we have a lifetime together for me to explain. And for you to thank me."
"Thank you?" Scully seethed.
"Yes," he said. "For saving your lives."
Mulder uncoiled, uncorked, and flew at Spender. With a forearm he threw him against the white plastic honeycomb of the wall and pressed him there, staring at him with mania and fury in his eyes. Cigarette dropped from his fingers, Spender looked down at Mulder with wide-eyed amusement.
Mulder let go, and his voice broke as he shouted. "Thank you for *what*, you arrogant son of a bitch? You expect us to buy this sick game? You expect us to believe you let *billions* of people die? And you expect us to *thank you*?" Mulder spat in his face. "Fuck you! Fuck you!"
Scully refused to watch, refused to interfere, let it play out like a movie in the background. She turned her attention to the computer.
A counter ticked off minutes in a white box in the bottom right-hand corner; it was set to local time, 7:22. The world spun. The red grew. There was nothing, no clue, nothing to learn, nothing to prove or disprove what Spender had alleged. No phone numbers to jot down in pencil in a notebook. No bodies to autopsy with the dictaphone running. No truths to conquer, no equations to puzzle and solve. Just the world, spinning blood-red in cartoon clarity on a Sony Vaio workstation monitor at medium-high resolution. 7:23.
Spender was talking.
"I don't expect anything from you, Agent Mulder," Spender said. "You're far too proud of your notorious unpredictability."
Mulder leaned in to him, snarling.
"And I won't try to convince you," he went on, smoothly as possible, even over Mulder's arm pressed against his adam's apple. "I know your tendency toward denial, even when the facts present themselves. You get that from your mother's side, not mine."
Now Scully couldn't not watch. Mulder was fiery and he reached for his gun with his free arm, pressed the muzzle to Spender's throat. "Tell me what the fuck you did," Mulder said through clenched teeth.
Spender eyed Scully with something like a plea, and she raised her own gun and trained it on his skull, rising to her feet. "Talk, asshole," she said.
Just tell me when to shoot, Mulder. I want an enemy.
"Can't we be more civilized about this?" Spender asked over Mulder's arm.
"No," Mulder said. "Talk."
"Very well," Spender sighed, shifting uncomfortably, his back against the wall. "You're in Fort Villeneuve, Canada, stronghold of a group that calls itself Fantasy Echo. Started in the early 1940s by an Austrian man named Bernard Reinhold, may he rest in peace."
"And?"
"Dr. Reinhold was a visionary, truly; some might have called him a nut. I had the privilege of meeting him in the early 80s; brilliant man."
"We don't give a shit," Mulder said.
"Yes, you do," Spender said. "Reinhold was an anthropologist and mathematician; he tracked human development trends. Specialized in genocide and terrorism. He would plot several years into the future, predicting acts of terrorism long before the responsible parties even dreamed of the actions they would take. Called it the natural order of things."
He punched the words, slithering out like serpents.
Mulder released his grip and Spender steadied himself on his feet again, with a nod to Mulder, who glowered.
"Thank you. Moving on." Spender crossed the room to the computer and gestured to it with his pack of cigarettes before extracting one and fitting it to his lips. Mulder and Scully watched, incredulous and flattened by his words.
"This program was based on Reinhold's postulations, later followed up on by an impressive array of scientists and scholars, most of whom still live up here. When the scientific community realized the validity of Dr. Reinhold's work, they tried to warn international governments about acts of terrorism that would occur two, three, five years into the future. Naturally, the goverments failed to listen."
"Because it's bullshit," Scully said. "There's no way to predict like that. There are too many variables, even to attempt to postulate a year into the future. It's bullshit."
"It isn't," Spender said. "Reinhold was able to predict a handful of years into the future. With new technologies, scientists have been able to postulate far further. You were in Winnipeg when it happened. You witnessed or heard about the other cities falling. You know I'm telling you the truth."
"So why now?" Mulder asked, trying with everything to keep his voice steady.
Spender shrugged. "Global panic. Worldwide fear. The myth of Y2K coupled with an intense terror for the future and a nearly universal fear of inadequacy among ruling parties. No country wanted to be left, abandoned; everyone wanted the preemptive strike. The Fantasy Echo scientists learned this seventeen years ago, when they decided to build their stronghold here. Fort Villeneuve in Kitikmeot was the only habitable place, according to their predictions, that would not be affected by the events of the end of the millennium. So they moved up here and continued their work, praying every day that they were wrong, and that they'd get to go back home to their little lives and their families and their little daily mysteries and loves. But as you can see..." he pointed at the screen again. "They weren't wrong."
Scully couldn't think. Her gun slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor, and she fixed her eyes on Mulder who was ashen, staring at Spender.
"They were good enough to invite me up here to stay with them," Spender went on, "when I came across their work ten years ago."
"You opened the post office box," Mulder said. "Why?"
Spender nodded. His face softened, twisted into a gruesome smile. "You're my son, Fox. I couldn't bear to leave you out there. I needed to know you were safe."
Scully opened her mouth to talk, but no words came. On wobbly legs she crossed to Mulder's side, gripped his arm and bit back tears.
"I don't believe you," Mulder said. Scully could almost hear his soul slip, skid, slide away rotten and tarnished by Spender's words.
Spender shrugged again. "That's fine," he said. "You don't have to. Here's all the evidence you could want." With a sweeping arm he indicated the room. "Akavak! Give these people access to all of our data."
Past a frozen Mulder and Scully, Spender crossed the floor to the exit. "If you need me, ask Akavak to show you to my room," he said, and turned to leave.
Then he stopped, and peered back over his shoulder at them. "I can't tell you how glad I am that you made it here safely," he said. "Both of you."
And with that he left the room.
Scully sank to the stool again. "Mulder," she said, spitting it like a sigh. He nodded, sucking his teeth. "I don't believe it," she said. "It's okay." She reached out for his hand again but he wasn't offering it, he wasn't even looking at her and she let her own arm fall limp in her lap. "What he's proposing is global coincidence; it's impossible. There's no way this program is accurate."
"I thought I could save them, Scully," Mulder said, not looking at her still. "I knew I could. I spent three days in the fucking snow because I thought we were doing something productive. I thought I was such a god-damned hero."
She tried to read his face, tried to find the narrative playing out behind those grey eyes but there was something unfamiliar shadowed there, something new in his mien that was usually so familiar. She had the lexicon, the primer for every glint in his eye and furrow in his brow, tightened to fluency for six years they'd spent together. She spoke Mulder like a native language, but this was a jargon she didn't understand, words hidden behind a look that was something like guilt, and something like fury, and something like a resignation she'd never seen and could barely translate. This was new, and it terrified her.
"Let's get to work, Mulder," she said. "Let's solve this." She appealed to the crusader in him, the valiant knight who burned her blood with a drive and passion she could only approximate with science, but her words hit him deaf.
"Do what you can here, Scully," he said, rote. "I have to go."
Never even meeting her eye, he turned and walked toward the door, his feet pounding hollow plastine echoes in the laboratory. She stood, reached out for him but he shook her free.
"I have to go," he said. "I'll...be right back. I'll be right back."
She watched him leave, watched the doorway long after he'd disappeared through it. What she could translate from his inpenetrable gaze had said, "don't follow me," and despite her darkening fear, she hadn't.
The computer whirred behind her, red swallowed green and it wasn't even 8 a.m. yet.
A low voice caught her off-guard.
"I will show you our work," Akavak said, standing beside her.
He was tall, smooth-faced and young-looking, despite wrinkles peeling out from his eyes. His dark hair was pulled back and braided, and like Buddy and Sumner he wore a nylon Polarfleece jacket, even though it was warm enough inside not to merit it.
She couldn't listen to him; couldn't focus. She nodded vaguely as he handed her a fat manila file folder, spilling with papers and bound with a rubber band.
She knew where Mulder was going, his gun poised, ready to assassinate. There was some sort of expansive universe here, Fantasy Echo all spread out in white plastic honeycombed catacombs, O Canada, for what it was worth. Our home and native land. Not Scully's home. And somewhere out there cities burned and she refused to believe it. The phones were down, the radios were down; there was no way of knowing if the world was alive without a thorough investigation; Mulder and Scully play detective. And she would investigate; she would prove it; she swore to herself, manila folder in lap in room in Canada, O Canada. Someone else's country, tis of thee. She'd find home again.
...O Canada...
...Our home and native land...
She slid the folder onto the counter and stood up.
...True patriot love...
She thought about hotdogs and pickle relish and the Expos playing the Padres back home. Flicking the safety on her gun and heading for the door, she forgot about the shimmer of the Washington Monument in the reflecting pool, the gold-white glow of Lincoln's knobby knees in granite.
Even if a handful of cities had been destroyed, there were still people out there, millions of people, alive and celebrating. The world was indomitable, undefeatable; life would fight back for life. The world was massive - she bit back tears - and the world was alive. It had to be.
...in all thy sons command...
The world was alive, as long as she was confident of that fact. Home was alive, her mother was breathing, laughing, driving bad left turns around ice-slick puddles after sunset.
Bill showed Matthew how to pry the little hard plug off the top of the airplane glue without getting it on his fingers; Scully could smell the epoxy. Bill was alive.
Somewhere just past midnight she heard a snuffle; Charlie flung out an arm in his sleep and slapped it across Peter's chest; Peter pretended to be asleep and smiled to himself, catching a reflection of his lazy-grown stubble in the glasses Charlie had forgotten to take off when he fell asleep reading. Charlie was alive.
...With glowing hearts we see thee rise...
She bit her lip, hard, tasted blood. Don't know where I'm going but I'm making good time, Mulder. Here I come. We're doing this together. Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right.
...The True North, strong and free...
And everything will be all right.
Let freedom ring.
She caught up with Mulder not a hundred yards away.
He was standing in the corridor, his head cocked to the side, his gun dangling from his fingers. She holstered hers and took his from him, pocketed it and took his hand.
He was vacant, vapid, lost staring glassy-eyed at nothing and she squeezed him, traced her fingers up his bicep and begged him to look at her.
"Mulder."
Nothing.
"Mulder, come on. You're tired. Come on. Let me put you to bed. Let's find you a room."
He didn't move, didn't speak.
She throbbed, her head spun. She reached up to him, wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. "Come on, Mulder," she said. "Everything will be all right. We'll get through this. We'll figure this out. He's lying to us, Mulder. He's playing the same games he always plays. Come on."
As a doctor, she knew he was fine. Shocked, terrified, wracked with guilt, absolutely. He was feeling all the sensations she was, but prismed through his borne cross and amplified like echoes they resonated for him, and she understood. And she would take care of him; she would battle his demons and prove it to him: everything will be all right.
As a doctor, she understood all of this. As a partner, she recognized the call of responsibility, and as a friend she leaped to its hail.
As a lover she wanted to crawl inside his flesh and holler against his bones and drag him out and keep him with her, flesh on flesh to touch, alive, everything alive, the only thing alive.
As a lover she felt hewn and left bleeding.
I need you, Mulder. The world is alive. Help me find it. I need you. This is too huge for me, too vast, too spacious. A needle in a haystack, Mulder; our needle. Help me. Our world is alive.
As if he heard, Mulder's arms floated up, crossed her back and held her close, an almost unconscious movement. She felt his lips, the familiar curve of mouth and chin press against the top of her head.
"He...saved me because I'm his son," Mulder said, like he'd found a penny and wasn't sure what there was in the world to spend it on. "Scully." And her name, just to make sure. She closed her eyes and breathed him in. Life life life.
Footsteps coming toward them made her turn.
They belonged to a tall, slender woman, maybe early forties, dark hair, crazy-curly, streaked with grey. Disheveled and dressed in a robe and slippers, she looked like someone's mother come downstairs in the middle of the night to tell the slumber party girls it was lights-out time. She stopped in her tracks and backpedaled a step when she saw them.
"Can you help us?" Scully called to her. "We're looking for a room, a place to sleep, something?"
"Dana Scully," the woman said, nodding. "You're on our floor. We didn't know if you'd want two rooms, but you've got two."
Scully peeled free from Mulder, not even surprised this woman knew her. Surprise was a sensation for the saved, the blessed, the ones with wonder still at the fact that not every cup of coffee is bottomless, even at diners, and sometimes you can even make a left on red. Surprise was a luxury, checked at the door of this white honeycombed place.
"Two is fine," Scully said. "Who are you?"
The woman had approached cautiously, like she was afraid she'd stand in the way of the light and their shadows would disappear. "Penny Eisenberg," she said, extending a hand, which Scully shook.
"Buddy's wife," Scully said. "Good to meet you." She looked up at Mulder, who was watching Penny with detachment and nodding slightly. "This is my partner, Fox Mulder."
Penny reached for Mulder's hand but he didn't respond. Scully swallowed the lump in her throat and played brave.
"Can you show us to our rooms?"
Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right.
***
*
***
The Duel by Eugene Field
The gingham dog and the calico cat Side by side on the table sat; 'Twas half past twelve, and, what do you think, Not one nor the other had slept a wink! And the old Dutch clock and Chinese plate Seemed to know, as sure as fate, There was going to be an awful spat. (I wasn't there -- I simply state What was told to me by the Chinese plate.)
The gingham dog went "bow-wow-wow!" And the calico cat replied "me-ow?" And the air was streaked for an hour or so With fragments of gingham and calico, While the old Dutch clock in the chimney place Up with its hands before its face, For it always dreaded a family row! (Now mind, I'm simply telling you What the old Dutch clock declares is true.)
The Chinese plate looked very blue And wailed; "Oh, dear, what shall we do!" But the gingham dog and the calico cat, Wallowed this way and tumbled that, And utilized every tooth and claw In the awfullest way you ever saw - -And Oh! how the gingham and calico flew! (Don't think that I exaggerate - -I got my news from the Chinese plate.)
Next morning where the two had sat, They found no trace of dog or cat; And some folks think unto this day, That burglars stole that pair away; But the truth about the cat and pup Is that they ate each other up! Now, what do you really think of that? (The old Dutch clock it told me so And that is how I came to know.)
*** FORT VILLENEUVE, CANADA, JANUARY 4th, 2000 4:40 pm. T-plus 4 Days
"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper," someone had said at the party, and everyone had shrugged and muttered vaguely at the cliche. It had been on everyone's lips, that soundbyte, that little morsel of pseudo-philosophy, but no one had figured it important to say but the lone geek spilling eggnog on his tie while trying to look profound and mournful.
The funny part was, the computers were fine. No hung COBOL glitches, no Y2K bug trying to convince them they were driving horseless carriages or trying to send them long-overdue social security.
Calculations had suggested that the nuclear activity would be minimal, containing itself mostly in the near east, India, Pakistan. The superpowers: Russia, the EU, the US would retailiate their terrorist strikes with much more restraint, but it would add up; all the firebombs and air raids and missiles raining down on cities like Brussels and Minsk and Chicago would add up; everyone would do his part in this armageddon, from the man with the rifle in Nebraska to the family rushing to their shelter in Rio, tossing a half-dead grenade at the flag-bearing militia tromping down shrubbery. The gingham dog and the calico cat side by side on the table sat.
There was no way of knowing if the world had survived. There was no way of knowing if decades of calculation had been proven wrong, if human decency had prevailed over the temptress of destruction. And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air were too far away, now, miles upon miles of treacherous, impassable snow stood between here and knowing if the flag, indeed, was still there.
And no one wanted to brave it. No one was willing to take the risk of fallout; no one wanted to cross the valley of the shadow of death and stare at the bodies strewn across the cities they were still unsure of. Wimps, yellow-bellies, all of them. Even the two agents from the FBI.
Buddy had built them up to be some sort of superhero team; he'd shown her their dossiers saying "look at what these two have been through! Look at what they've solved!" and he'd had a lingering hope that they'd somehow undo this, as they'd undone all the awful cases in their history, stared down evil as they had time and time again.
But Agent Mulder hadn't spoken to anyone in four days. So far as Penny knew, he never left his room; Agent Scully would spend hours on end in there; she'd bring him meals on trays and bring the trays out nearly untouched. She'd grown ashen, Scully had, she'd grown older in the days after zero hour; she was tight and wound and untouchable. She protected Mulder like a mama animal, literally snarling at anyone who tried to come close. Down the hall, at night, Penny could hear her talking to him, soft and low, for hours and hours. Mulder said nothing.
Zero hour had come and gone, not with a bang, though Penny had wanted one, and not even really with a whimper. There had been a party with nothing to celebrate, and the tin-cup champagne toasts "to life!" had been forced, twisted shared skeletal smiles at their victory, led in triumph by the boss man himself, cigarette dangling from his lips.
And for no reason other than to have something to do, the eskimos and the scientists worked in the lab, trying to reconstruct the data, looking for evidence of something, of anything. Trying to find a needle in a haystack. Trying to find life on Mars.
Agent Scully and Akavak were sitting across the war room table when Penny came in. Buddy got up from his terminal and sailed to her side, wrapped an arm around her waist. He was everything like affectionate in these days past zero hour; he would touch her, squeeze her, take her hand, stroke her face, trying to convince himself that she was still there, she imagined, still warm, still solid and alive. And though she'd never say a word - she kissed him on the chin and raked a hand through the back of his hair -there was something about him that terrified her, now, and repulsed her. His part in all this. His knowledge, that he hadn't shared with her until it was long past too late. He was the enemy, somehow. Stupid, pointless waste of love. And she loved him with everything she had.
"How's it going in here?" she asked him. He shrugged.
"Same," he said. "Trying to figure out if what we projected would happen...happened. We're working off calculations that are almost ten years old. Trying to refigure them based on more current knowledge of...current events," he chuckled. "Trying to see if they add up. Added up."
"And so far..." he tossed his arms in the air with mock glee, "they do!"
"Don't you think someone should go out there again?" Penny asked, for the second time since zero hour. "Saddle up a snow cat or take the Cherokee and see what's still alive out there?"
Buddy shrugged. "We don't even know if it's safe to leave the compound," he said. "There could be fallout, dangerous radiation even way up here."
Penny nodded. "They should have built windows in this damned thing," she said. "We could just look."
"And see what?" Scully snapped, pushing a stack of papers across the table to Akavak. "What do *you* think radiation looks like? Not to mention the fact that this building wouldn't be safe for us with windows in these 150 mile an hour winds, and that glass would melt in a nuclear explosion."
Penny flushed. Damn bitch was chewing her out. "Sorry," she said, eyes widening. "I didn't know."
"Then don't talk," Scully said, turning back to her computations.
"Wouldn't the..." Penny's voice was lower; she whispered to Buddy. "Wouldn't the computers not work if there was a nuclear blast up here?"
"The structure was built to absorb the shock of an EMP," Buddy explained. "Everything in here would be protected."
"And we don't have...radiation detectors?" Penny tried again.
Buddy nodded. "We do. They claim dangerous levels of radiation right outside our doors. Could be a computer glitch, could be a Y2K error, or could be that we're two steps away from being fried. According to the detectors, it's ten times Chernobyl across this province. You want to take that risk? You want me to?"
Yes, she thought. Risk your life, show me you're still a man. "No," she said. "But I thought that's why the FBI agents came up here?"
Wrong thing to say.
Scully pressed her palms to the tabletop, hoisted herself to her feet.
"Agent Mulder and I were tricked into coming up here," she said, face inches from Penny's. "Maybe you haven't heard the story; get Buddy to tell you some time. And right now, all I care about is making sure that my partner is okay, and finding out if there's any way to contact the outside world. I saw, first hand, every city, town, village between here and the United States border get flattened. I know what's out there. Five thousand miles of nothing. And whether that means my brother in San Francisco is alive today, I don't know. But fuck you if you think I'll let myself and Mulder die before I find out!"
Penny shrank back despite herself. She'd been right with her initial assessment: these redheads were all the same.
"I'm done here," Buddy said. "Let's go back to the room, huh? Maybe watch a video before dinner?"
Penny nodded, and with it, they left the war room.
She paused outside Mulder's door when they reached the habitat corridor; she had an intense urge to bust in and shake him, rattle him till his brain clicked and she could see what he was made of that the boss man was so proud of. See what was so wonderful about him that had sucked the life out of Agent Scully. See what he had to offer, wasting their food and oxygen and space.
Just a brief pause, though, and she continued down the hall behind Buddy to the bedroom.
"We've got enough food, clothing, oxygen and heat to keep 214 people alive for sixty years," Buddy said, sitting on the bed and flipping on the video monitor, the thing that used to be a television. "We'll be fine here, baby."
She nodded, sitting down beside him. She hadn't asked.
*** SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, JANUARY 4th, 2000, 1:50 p.m. T-plus 4 Days
It had been like something out of a movie, playing back now on repeat, to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne."
And it almost never snowed in San Francisco.
*** SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, DECEMBER 31st, 1999, 7:19 p.m. T-minus 1 Day
"Your pocket's ringing, again."
"Uh huh."
Outside it was below freezing, windchill way down to where it would be snow in a normal city, blustery and grey just past dusk and stars still hidden through the ambient light. Stores were closed, fake snow sprayed on the windows hung with those ubiquitous pinlight icicles, just beginning to cut through the dark, oddly fake and beautiful at once.
Charlie stepped back, helped Peter up through the sliding door.
His cellphone rang again.
Peter held the bag way up over his head as they wormed to the end of the car, holiday commuters in silk scarves and platform books decked the aisle. The car shuddered, doors shut, train started moving. And by the time they reached the end of the car there was only one empty seat, and Peter, bricked in with stacks of gifts like the cask of Amontillado, collapsed in it gratefully.
"Stopped ringing," he said.
"Uh huh," Charlie said, hand wrapped around the bar and swaying.
"Why don't you just turn it off, if you're not going to answer it," Peter asked through boxes.
Charlie shrugged. He slipped a gloved hand into his pocket and slid out the StarTac, flipped it open. "One missed call," it said. He scrolled down, saw the familiar number. Shaking his head, he clapped the phone shut again and stuffed it in his pocket.
"You okay with all that crap?" he asked Peter.
"I ain't letting you touch this," Peter said, peering out to the left of the FAO Schwartz bag. "Your present's in here too, remember. I don't trust you far as I can throw you."
The train shuddered again, screeched to a halt and the doors slid open -passengers got in, passengers got off, and another seat opened up across the aisle. Charlie sat down.
"Gimme half," he said, knowing Peter would argue. "I promise I won't look."
"You can just go to hell," Peter said goodnaturedly. "Don't touch the boxes."
Glad Peter couldn't see him through the stacks on his knees, Charlie rubbed his face with his hands. Under his hat his hairline was creeping back, another year gone, and he massaged his eyebrows with gloved fingers, sighing.
The phone rang again and he opened it, saw the same damned number on the display, and hung up on the caller mid-ring.
Fuck 'em all. And a happy new year.
The phone rang once more before their stop at Market and Noe, but this time it was Henry asking them to bring ice.
Twenty minutes later, shouldering a 20 lb bag of ice, and holding the elevator for Peter, Charlie smiled. They stopped outside Henry's door; a sprig of mistletoe hung above it and a handwritten sign saying "Don We Now Our Gay Apparel."
Charlie laughed. "I forgot my gay apparel," he said.
"Anything you wear is gay apparel, girlfriend," Peter said. "Let's not waste the mistletoe, though."
Ice hit giftboxes, carboard clattered softly to the ugly-print industrial carpet, but Charlie didn't notice. He leaned in to the kiss, inhaling deeply through his nose. Fuck 'em all, he thought, flipping his phone in his pocket off with a thumb. Fuck 'em all.
He drew back, blinked at Peter's dark eyes, dark hair, freckled, smiling face. "I love you, maaaan," he said, doing his best football-butch.
"I love you too," Peter whispered.
The door opened and Henry bustled them in, gathering up boxes and trotting behind them.
Television was out, land-line phones were dead, there would be no ball dropping in Times Square for Frisco this New Year, but at Henry LeFleur's, no one cared. Charlie got stupid on pink punch with oranges floating in it; karaoke was sung. Someone passed a bowl of kisses and condoms, chocolate both; someone else passed a joint. A merry time was had by all, Charlie thought, later, singing it like it was poetry. He drowned his sorrows, switched the phone back on and laughed when it rang the next time. Fuck 'em all. And a happy new year.
At ten past eleven he and Peter were sent on a booze run so they'd have spirits to toast the New Year.
"There's a package store down across from Cafe Flore," Leanne said, propping herself precariously up on the countertop. "Get white and brown and champagne. Take donations when you get back so you don't miss the ball drop."
"TV's out," Peter reminded her.
She nodded, lighting a cigarette. "And a pack of Parliaments," she said.
The walk down Noe St. was quiet, oddly so; all the raucousness and cheering you'd expect to hear an hour before the millennium was eerily absent and the city sat still.
Peter and Charlie strolled in silence; the moon waned and the night was cold and motionless.
"So," Peter said, after about a block. "You gonna tell me who's been calling all night you've been ignoring?"
"Mom," Charlie said, sucking his teeth. "She's been calling since Christmas. I haven't heard from her in four years and she's called fifty times in a week. I just let it ring."
Peter sighed, stopped, took Charlie's elbow in his hand. "Why, Chuck? She just wants to apologize. She just wants to reestablish communication with you. Don't you want that?"
Charlie scuffed his toes on the sidewalk and walked on. "Not really," he said. "I'm getting by fine without them. Just because she's got some sort of millennial guilt trip doesn't mean I have to."
"And what if she has something important to tell you? What if it's an emergency?"
"What do I care?" Charlie shrugged.
"You didn't even go to your sister's funeral," Peter said. "Don't you regret that?"
Charlie inhaled through his nose. "Yes," he said. "Missy's a good kid. Was a good kid. She didn't blow me off the way the rest of them did."
"So why didn't you go?"
Charlie walked several paces ahead. "You know this," he said.
"Tell me again," Peter said, catching up.
"Mom was there. Dana was there. That asshole Bill was there. There was no reason for me to deal with that just to mourn the one member of my family I actually liked. I learned that much at Dad's funeral."
"And you're telling me you don't miss them at all," Peter said, peering up at Charlie, his face half-glowing under the streetlamp.
Charlie nodded. "I miss Dana," he said. "I want to know what's up with her. Everything I know about her life I get from pages on the internet that end dot gov. That sort of pisses me off. I think she's doing great things. I wish I could, you know, cheer for her."
"So *call* her," Peter said. "Wish her a happy new year. I'm sure she'd be happy to hear from you."
Charlie stopped, extended both arms and clapped his hands on Peter's shoulders. "Look, baby," he said. "You just don't get it. My family's Catholic. My dad was in the Navy. Bill's in the Navy now. Everything about my life is six kinds of sin, to them. They've erased me from their lives. What choice do I have?"
"Even Dana?" Peter asked. His eyes were wide, pained; he was trying to find some way to help and Charlie appreciated the gesture, squeezed his shoulder.
"Maybe not, if she'd been given the chance to appreciate the situation," Charlie said. "But she's Mom's little girl. Even more so after Dad died. Missy could have convinced her, but I think Dana was always a little scared of me. I'm scared shitless of her."
"She's your sister!" Peter said, the words bursting from his lips. He started walking again.
"Don't worry about it," Charlie said, meeting his stride. "Let's get drunk."
They ducked into the package store just before it exploded.
There was a blinding flash of light.
SCREAMS.
SCREAMS.
His could have sworn he heard the cell phone ring.
Peter.
There was fire everywhere, sirens wailed and as abruptly stopped.
Trapped under a refrigerator that had fallen, Charlie lay still for what felt like hours, calling out, shouting till his throat was raw. No one heard.
The phone hadn't rung.
Silence.
PETER.
With every ounce of strength he'd managed to pull himself free, and he'd crawled across the floor, shrapnel embedding itself in his hands and knees. The air stank of booze and brimstone and he dragged himself to his feet and surveyed the scene.
Everything was flattened, shattered, blackened and burned.
Peter lay face down in a pile of Pete's Wicked Ale bottles, his leg twisted impossibly at the knee, his arms and face charred, blood crusting around his nose and mouth.
Charlie knelt beside him and no tears came. Silent and frozen he sat in the broken glass until the sun came up and the sky went pink and for the first time in San Francisco in years, snow fell.
Snow fell, and leaving behind the bodies and the booze he wandered out into the street. His legs hurt, his chest hurt, he figured he'd broken a rib or three and his eyes burned in the pink light.
Block after block he'd walked, and bodies, everywhere.
There was no one alive.
Maybe it was the refrigerator that had saved him; he didn't know. Henry's building had collapsed, bodies were trapped, caught mid-scream with no sign of what had killed them.
Block after block after block.
He'd found food, and water; he'd stolen a coat from a body he'd found and he wandered and night fell and he slept and dawn broke again.
Block after block after block.
No phones. No life. San Francisco, enormous and sprawling and empty.
Night fell, dawn broke, and he stopped counting days.
*** SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, JANUARY 4th, 2000, 1:50 p.m. T-plus 4 Days
It had been like something out of a movie, playing back now on repeat, to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne."
And it almost never snowed in San Francisco.
Curled up on a park bench, his teeth to his knees, he couldn't shake the lingering tune, the mocking words. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
It wasn't a multiple choice question.
Peter had left him alone. With nothing but auld acquaintance for company.
With hands dry, cracked, twisted beyond his years he fumbled the cellphone, flipped it open and shut. It had battery left, at least, the indicator said it did, but there was no dial tone, no ring, no answer at any number he punched in.
No answer at Mom's.
No answer at Dana's.
He hadn't seen another living soul. Hadn't spoken a word out loud, at least, not to his knowledge - it was possible he'd been serenading himself as he wandered through the aftermath of whatever horror had struck here.
Cars didn't start, and he forced himself not to think about the electromagnetic pulse that was supposed to follow a nuclear blast.
In the Presidio, palm trees shriveled for the weather. The ground was white. Somewhere out there, California stretched on. South to San Diego, where Bill and the wife and the kid (what was his name again?) were either dead or alive. It stretched up and north, to the Redwood forests, and out east the country unfolded, purple mountain's majesty to the Gulf Stream waters. To the New York Island. To Washington D.C., to the cluster of tiny midatlantic states where Mom and Dana were either dead or alive.
Somewhere soon there would be a blissfull family reunion for all of them sent to hell for their sins and their hatred. God wasn't biased; that much he knew.
And they would forgive him. And it would be warm there.
But now he sat in the park, staring at the dead phone, wondering exactly what it was he wished he'd said. Wondering what they'd say to him.
Charlie Scully was alive and well and living in San Francisco; it hadn't stopped snowing in days.
And the band played on.
*
Continued in part 6.
AUTHOR: Sabine
CATEGORY: Novel
RATING: R, Character Death
DISCLAIMER: Consider it disclaimed. Please don't pay me.
SPOILERS: Through mid Season 6
Haven't seen you in quite a while, / You were down the hold, just passing time. Last time we met it was a low-lit room / We were as close together as a bride and groom. We ate the food, we drank the wine, / Everybody having a good time / Except you, You were talking about the end of the world.
In my dreams, I was drowning in sorrows / Till my sorrows, they learned to swim. Surrounding me, going down on me, / Spilling over the brim. Waves of regret, waves of joy / I reached out for the one I tried to destroy / And you, you said you'd wait until the end of the world.
~ U2, "Until the End of the World"
Everybody Having a Good Time
Continued from part 4
*** FORT VILLENEUVE, CANADA, DECEMBER 31st, 1999, 7:11 a.m. T-minus 1 Day
Seconds ticked like days and everything was still as the moment before the alarm goes off, the moment before the phone rings, the moment before car hits tree and glass explodes with crushing metal. Trapped like a mosquito in amber, the moment hung.
Time spun forward, backward, into the realms of death and hate and everything they'd never done and never said and bodies stacked on bodies and the taste of the memory of the smell of blood.
He cracked the silence, and somewhere ice shattered.
"I must admit," he said, twirling his cigarette between his fingers, "I'd written you off for dead, Agent Scully. I didn't imagine I'd be so pleased to find out I was wrong. I guess you've grown on me, over the years."
"What's going on?" she asked, tasting bile.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Mulder asked at the same time.
The smoking man chuckled. "Making myself at home," he said. "Waiting for you. Sampling the fine local cuisine. Speaking of which, can I interest you in breakfast?"
Scully had forgotten what hunger felt like, but at the mention of food her stomach moaned. She quashed the sensation with a glare at Spender. "Tell us what's going on," she said. "Now."
"All right," he said. "I think you'll be impressed. Akavak?" He gestured with his head at the eskimo seated at the computer console, who nodded.
Spender led Mulder and Scully to a tabletop monitor, which whirred when he woke it from its screen saver.
Unbidden, Mulder's hand found its way into Scully's, and she squeezed it, afraid to tear her eyes from the awakening screen. Images appeared.
In red, a rendering of the earth, seas and oceans in unnatural orange. It spun on the screen, weird and bloody and unfamiliar. Green patches pocked continents, Scandinavia, North Africa - the rendering spun north-south, rather than on the axis, making Scully crawl with dizziness - the Western U.S., the Midatlantic U.S., Northern Central Canada. Everything else was a seamless red, and as the globe spun the green patches sucked in on themselves, their borders tightening, fuzzy, around the void.
"What are you showing us?" Scully asked. Mulder was silent, dead silent, but she could feel him tense, the long muscles in his arms bulge and tighten and his hand in hers gripped like a claw.
"Home," Spender said. "Horrible, isn't it? So hard to imagine, impossible to even comprehend."
Scully nearly spat at the non-answer. "What...is...this?" she asked through clenched teeth.
He waited for the Western Hemisphere to reappear, then gestured with the orange tip of his cigarette at the orange screen. "Fort Villeneuve," he said, indicating the green oasis in Northern Canada, its boundaries all the while shrinking, crawling in like fungus. "We're safe here. That's why I brought you."
Mulder inhaled through his nose, clenched and said nothing. Scully stepped in again.
"What about the rest of the world? All the red areas?"
She knew the answer before he said it.
"Gone," he shrugged. "Razed to the ground, burned like cheap paper, struck by a thousand missiles of a thousand terrorists."
"That's impossible," Scully said. "I don't believe it."
"If the bombs didn't make short work of the populations, the fallout will, and what's left will shrivel in the nuclear winter. They're all gone, Agent Scully," he said. "I assure you of that."
His words crawled under her skin like maggots, eating away at her, and she forced her knees to lock and her toes to curl and her neck to do its work keeping her head straight on her tightening shoulders. Incomprehensible. Unimaginable. Horrible.
"And the green areas?" she asked, watching as Scandinavia rolled toward her. Midatlantic states. Washington. Virginia. Maryland. Pennsylvania. New York. Still green. She didn't let herself make the distinction between them, squandered the selfish desire to hang onto a hope that would require admitting to the rest of this horror.
"Tick-tock," Spender said. "It's all a matter of hours, at this point."
She sank onto the stool at the console, her hand slipping from Mulder's. Mulder stood, unmoving, unblinking, staring.
"I don't believe you," she said to Spender. "I don't believe you would do this. I don't believe you could."
He laughed again, an awful smoker's choking laugh, a death rattle. "I agree with you wholeheartedly, Agent," he said. "Even if I had the capacity to bring about such global destruction, I don't have the will to do so. This, I'm afraid, had nothing to do with me."
*** LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, DECEMBER 31st, 1999, 5:20 a.m. T-minus 1 Day
There was something amazingly twisted about thousands of very small things sinking into the tar.
There had been looting on Wilshire, and running, and screaming, and crowds had flown through the glass-broken windows of the Museum of Miniatures and flung tiny chairs, grabbed handfuls of die-cast metal models of the presidents and pocketed them. The whole conquerable world had been reduced here to toys for tots, palm sized cars that lit up and train sets running through exact replicas of San Francisco and New York.
Carrie and Doug had been at Marie Callender's eating pie when the gunshots went off. Like everyone else they'd ducked for cover, peering out through slotted fingers for a glimpse at the excitement; rubberneckers all. They'd been up all night, danced till dawn at the Viper Room, the best of the best, and they'd missed the news driving down here through stopped traffic with the radio off. Marie did make the best pie and they were splitting a piece of pecan, Carrie picking at the nuts only when Doug wasn't looking and wouldn't know she indulged in such luxuries.
And a gunshot went off. And another. And screams, from right outside the window.
The midnight crowd with marijuana munchies, like sheep, filed out to watch.
They were smashing Mercedes with baseball bats and Doug had wrapped an arm around Carrie and held her to him, looking on from the sidewalk.
"Amazing," he said.
"Totally," she said.
So when the looters smashed the glass window of the Museum of Miniatures and poured in like lemmings over the icicle shards, Doug and Carrie followed.
They were important, the miniatures; they were valuable. They were small. Doug stuffed his pockets, stopping only to hand Carrie pieces he thought she'd like. He'd found a chandelier, a silver and gold candelabra, glittering with red and purple stones hung on tiny chains.
"Look," he'd said, dangling it in front of her face. A latino man in a football jersey rammed him in the back and Doug stumbled and she caught him, her face whitening.
"Fuck you," the latino man said, scooping up minitures. "Don't you know they're blowing up cities?"
Doug furrowed his brow and shrugged.
"I'm scared," Carrie laughed. "I've never been in a looting before."
"Consider it fodder for art," Doug said. "I'm gonna write a kick-ass screenplay about tonight."
She smiled at him, and took the tiny candelabra from his fingers. "It's beautiful," she said. "Do we know what's going on?" she asked.
"No," he said. "Just go with the crowd; I'll take care of you. This is fucking awesome."
He was glowing; she'd never seen him so enthralled. She kissed him on the cheek.
"Okay," she said.
Sirens wailed, car hit car hit car hit car and fiberglass crunched outside.
The LAPD came wheeling in shouting through megaphones.
"Everyone out!" they hollered. "This is over. Everyone out."
The fat latino man collided with Doug again and the crowd, lemmings again, turned en masse and spilled from the building.
They were ushered a safe distance away from the museum and now they stood in the pinky minty dark of pre-dawn, huddled like refugees around the La Brea tar pits.
And the miniatures started to soar.
It was the strangest example of collective consciousness Carrie had ever witnessed; it was a sick performance art exhibit as the miniatures flew and smacked the rubbery surface of the tar, littering it like cigarette butts on a barroom floor.
"This goes in the screenplay too," Doug said, throwing a handful of little tin men into the asphalt pool.
On the east side of the tar pits, there were enormous granite statues of woolly mammoths. Two stood on the edge, looking in, as a third, huge and powerful and pleading, looked up at them from the depths, trumpeting his trunk, stilled frozen, sinking away. Here in the early morning light, it was the most awful, most beautiful, most horrific thing Carrie had ever seen, and it brought tears to her eyes.
The mammoths on shore stood impotent, frozen in their granite postures like the victims of Vesuvius in Pompeii, caught for art, frozen in death, extinct and immortal.
"It's the end of the fucking world!" someone shouted. Laughter. Cacophany. Terror and comraderie and psychotic urban bliss.
Carrie reached into the pocket of her leather coat and pulled out the chandelier. With a last look at the mammoths, she flung it away and watched it spiral into the tar pits.
It sank into a surface blacker than the burning sky.
*** FORT VILLENEUVE, CANADA, DECEMBER 31st, 1999, 7:21 a.m. T-minus 1 Day
Red swallowed Finland and the globe spun on, diving backward like the eyeballs of the dead, south to north, ducking under and hidden from view as the ice-white pole appeared.
There was too much to process, behind his words. Scully pressed her fingertips to her eyes, sharp nails through leather gloves and leathery skin; she was tired. All signs pointed to inaccuracy, obfuscation, lies lies lies lies lies. The world, ever-shrinking, was massive, still, still too large to be obliterated with a wink and a nod. It was impossible.
But they were up here anyway; something had brought them here; there was something to conquer. She looked at Mulder, knowing he felt so too. She watched him stirring, standing still, waiting for the enemy to unveil himself so he could shoot him, point-blank, between the eyes and play David to this Goliath they'd been chasing, card after handwritten card.
She wanted an enemy.
"I don't believe you," she said to Spender.
Spender nodded. "I didn't expect you would, immediately. "Fortunately, we have a lifetime together for me to explain. And for you to thank me."
"Thank you?" Scully seethed.
"Yes," he said. "For saving your lives."
Mulder uncoiled, uncorked, and flew at Spender. With a forearm he threw him against the white plastic honeycomb of the wall and pressed him there, staring at him with mania and fury in his eyes. Cigarette dropped from his fingers, Spender looked down at Mulder with wide-eyed amusement.
Mulder let go, and his voice broke as he shouted. "Thank you for *what*, you arrogant son of a bitch? You expect us to buy this sick game? You expect us to believe you let *billions* of people die? And you expect us to *thank you*?" Mulder spat in his face. "Fuck you! Fuck you!"
Scully refused to watch, refused to interfere, let it play out like a movie in the background. She turned her attention to the computer.
A counter ticked off minutes in a white box in the bottom right-hand corner; it was set to local time, 7:22. The world spun. The red grew. There was nothing, no clue, nothing to learn, nothing to prove or disprove what Spender had alleged. No phone numbers to jot down in pencil in a notebook. No bodies to autopsy with the dictaphone running. No truths to conquer, no equations to puzzle and solve. Just the world, spinning blood-red in cartoon clarity on a Sony Vaio workstation monitor at medium-high resolution. 7:23.
Spender was talking.
"I don't expect anything from you, Agent Mulder," Spender said. "You're far too proud of your notorious unpredictability."
Mulder leaned in to him, snarling.
"And I won't try to convince you," he went on, smoothly as possible, even over Mulder's arm pressed against his adam's apple. "I know your tendency toward denial, even when the facts present themselves. You get that from your mother's side, not mine."
Now Scully couldn't not watch. Mulder was fiery and he reached for his gun with his free arm, pressed the muzzle to Spender's throat. "Tell me what the fuck you did," Mulder said through clenched teeth.
Spender eyed Scully with something like a plea, and she raised her own gun and trained it on his skull, rising to her feet. "Talk, asshole," she said.
Just tell me when to shoot, Mulder. I want an enemy.
"Can't we be more civilized about this?" Spender asked over Mulder's arm.
"No," Mulder said. "Talk."
"Very well," Spender sighed, shifting uncomfortably, his back against the wall. "You're in Fort Villeneuve, Canada, stronghold of a group that calls itself Fantasy Echo. Started in the early 1940s by an Austrian man named Bernard Reinhold, may he rest in peace."
"And?"
"Dr. Reinhold was a visionary, truly; some might have called him a nut. I had the privilege of meeting him in the early 80s; brilliant man."
"We don't give a shit," Mulder said.
"Yes, you do," Spender said. "Reinhold was an anthropologist and mathematician; he tracked human development trends. Specialized in genocide and terrorism. He would plot several years into the future, predicting acts of terrorism long before the responsible parties even dreamed of the actions they would take. Called it the natural order of things."
He punched the words, slithering out like serpents.
Mulder released his grip and Spender steadied himself on his feet again, with a nod to Mulder, who glowered.
"Thank you. Moving on." Spender crossed the room to the computer and gestured to it with his pack of cigarettes before extracting one and fitting it to his lips. Mulder and Scully watched, incredulous and flattened by his words.
"This program was based on Reinhold's postulations, later followed up on by an impressive array of scientists and scholars, most of whom still live up here. When the scientific community realized the validity of Dr. Reinhold's work, they tried to warn international governments about acts of terrorism that would occur two, three, five years into the future. Naturally, the goverments failed to listen."
"Because it's bullshit," Scully said. "There's no way to predict like that. There are too many variables, even to attempt to postulate a year into the future. It's bullshit."
"It isn't," Spender said. "Reinhold was able to predict a handful of years into the future. With new technologies, scientists have been able to postulate far further. You were in Winnipeg when it happened. You witnessed or heard about the other cities falling. You know I'm telling you the truth."
"So why now?" Mulder asked, trying with everything to keep his voice steady.
Spender shrugged. "Global panic. Worldwide fear. The myth of Y2K coupled with an intense terror for the future and a nearly universal fear of inadequacy among ruling parties. No country wanted to be left, abandoned; everyone wanted the preemptive strike. The Fantasy Echo scientists learned this seventeen years ago, when they decided to build their stronghold here. Fort Villeneuve in Kitikmeot was the only habitable place, according to their predictions, that would not be affected by the events of the end of the millennium. So they moved up here and continued their work, praying every day that they were wrong, and that they'd get to go back home to their little lives and their families and their little daily mysteries and loves. But as you can see..." he pointed at the screen again. "They weren't wrong."
Scully couldn't think. Her gun slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor, and she fixed her eyes on Mulder who was ashen, staring at Spender.
"They were good enough to invite me up here to stay with them," Spender went on, "when I came across their work ten years ago."
"You opened the post office box," Mulder said. "Why?"
Spender nodded. His face softened, twisted into a gruesome smile. "You're my son, Fox. I couldn't bear to leave you out there. I needed to know you were safe."
Scully opened her mouth to talk, but no words came. On wobbly legs she crossed to Mulder's side, gripped his arm and bit back tears.
"I don't believe you," Mulder said. Scully could almost hear his soul slip, skid, slide away rotten and tarnished by Spender's words.
Spender shrugged again. "That's fine," he said. "You don't have to. Here's all the evidence you could want." With a sweeping arm he indicated the room. "Akavak! Give these people access to all of our data."
Past a frozen Mulder and Scully, Spender crossed the floor to the exit. "If you need me, ask Akavak to show you to my room," he said, and turned to leave.
Then he stopped, and peered back over his shoulder at them. "I can't tell you how glad I am that you made it here safely," he said. "Both of you."
And with that he left the room.
Scully sank to the stool again. "Mulder," she said, spitting it like a sigh. He nodded, sucking his teeth. "I don't believe it," she said. "It's okay." She reached out for his hand again but he wasn't offering it, he wasn't even looking at her and she let her own arm fall limp in her lap. "What he's proposing is global coincidence; it's impossible. There's no way this program is accurate."
"I thought I could save them, Scully," Mulder said, not looking at her still. "I knew I could. I spent three days in the fucking snow because I thought we were doing something productive. I thought I was such a god-damned hero."
She tried to read his face, tried to find the narrative playing out behind those grey eyes but there was something unfamiliar shadowed there, something new in his mien that was usually so familiar. She had the lexicon, the primer for every glint in his eye and furrow in his brow, tightened to fluency for six years they'd spent together. She spoke Mulder like a native language, but this was a jargon she didn't understand, words hidden behind a look that was something like guilt, and something like fury, and something like a resignation she'd never seen and could barely translate. This was new, and it terrified her.
"Let's get to work, Mulder," she said. "Let's solve this." She appealed to the crusader in him, the valiant knight who burned her blood with a drive and passion she could only approximate with science, but her words hit him deaf.
"Do what you can here, Scully," he said, rote. "I have to go."
Never even meeting her eye, he turned and walked toward the door, his feet pounding hollow plastine echoes in the laboratory. She stood, reached out for him but he shook her free.
"I have to go," he said. "I'll...be right back. I'll be right back."
She watched him leave, watched the doorway long after he'd disappeared through it. What she could translate from his inpenetrable gaze had said, "don't follow me," and despite her darkening fear, she hadn't.
The computer whirred behind her, red swallowed green and it wasn't even 8 a.m. yet.
A low voice caught her off-guard.
"I will show you our work," Akavak said, standing beside her.
He was tall, smooth-faced and young-looking, despite wrinkles peeling out from his eyes. His dark hair was pulled back and braided, and like Buddy and Sumner he wore a nylon Polarfleece jacket, even though it was warm enough inside not to merit it.
She couldn't listen to him; couldn't focus. She nodded vaguely as he handed her a fat manila file folder, spilling with papers and bound with a rubber band.
She knew where Mulder was going, his gun poised, ready to assassinate. There was some sort of expansive universe here, Fantasy Echo all spread out in white plastic honeycombed catacombs, O Canada, for what it was worth. Our home and native land. Not Scully's home. And somewhere out there cities burned and she refused to believe it. The phones were down, the radios were down; there was no way of knowing if the world was alive without a thorough investigation; Mulder and Scully play detective. And she would investigate; she would prove it; she swore to herself, manila folder in lap in room in Canada, O Canada. Someone else's country, tis of thee. She'd find home again.
...O Canada...
...Our home and native land...
She slid the folder onto the counter and stood up.
...True patriot love...
She thought about hotdogs and pickle relish and the Expos playing the Padres back home. Flicking the safety on her gun and heading for the door, she forgot about the shimmer of the Washington Monument in the reflecting pool, the gold-white glow of Lincoln's knobby knees in granite.
Even if a handful of cities had been destroyed, there were still people out there, millions of people, alive and celebrating. The world was indomitable, undefeatable; life would fight back for life. The world was massive - she bit back tears - and the world was alive. It had to be.
...in all thy sons command...
The world was alive, as long as she was confident of that fact. Home was alive, her mother was breathing, laughing, driving bad left turns around ice-slick puddles after sunset.
Bill showed Matthew how to pry the little hard plug off the top of the airplane glue without getting it on his fingers; Scully could smell the epoxy. Bill was alive.
Somewhere just past midnight she heard a snuffle; Charlie flung out an arm in his sleep and slapped it across Peter's chest; Peter pretended to be asleep and smiled to himself, catching a reflection of his lazy-grown stubble in the glasses Charlie had forgotten to take off when he fell asleep reading. Charlie was alive.
...With glowing hearts we see thee rise...
She bit her lip, hard, tasted blood. Don't know where I'm going but I'm making good time, Mulder. Here I come. We're doing this together. Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right.
...The True North, strong and free...
And everything will be all right.
Let freedom ring.
She caught up with Mulder not a hundred yards away.
He was standing in the corridor, his head cocked to the side, his gun dangling from his fingers. She holstered hers and took his from him, pocketed it and took his hand.
He was vacant, vapid, lost staring glassy-eyed at nothing and she squeezed him, traced her fingers up his bicep and begged him to look at her.
"Mulder."
Nothing.
"Mulder, come on. You're tired. Come on. Let me put you to bed. Let's find you a room."
He didn't move, didn't speak.
She throbbed, her head spun. She reached up to him, wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. "Come on, Mulder," she said. "Everything will be all right. We'll get through this. We'll figure this out. He's lying to us, Mulder. He's playing the same games he always plays. Come on."
As a doctor, she knew he was fine. Shocked, terrified, wracked with guilt, absolutely. He was feeling all the sensations she was, but prismed through his borne cross and amplified like echoes they resonated for him, and she understood. And she would take care of him; she would battle his demons and prove it to him: everything will be all right.
As a doctor, she understood all of this. As a partner, she recognized the call of responsibility, and as a friend she leaped to its hail.
As a lover she wanted to crawl inside his flesh and holler against his bones and drag him out and keep him with her, flesh on flesh to touch, alive, everything alive, the only thing alive.
As a lover she felt hewn and left bleeding.
I need you, Mulder. The world is alive. Help me find it. I need you. This is too huge for me, too vast, too spacious. A needle in a haystack, Mulder; our needle. Help me. Our world is alive.
As if he heard, Mulder's arms floated up, crossed her back and held her close, an almost unconscious movement. She felt his lips, the familiar curve of mouth and chin press against the top of her head.
"He...saved me because I'm his son," Mulder said, like he'd found a penny and wasn't sure what there was in the world to spend it on. "Scully." And her name, just to make sure. She closed her eyes and breathed him in. Life life life.
Footsteps coming toward them made her turn.
They belonged to a tall, slender woman, maybe early forties, dark hair, crazy-curly, streaked with grey. Disheveled and dressed in a robe and slippers, she looked like someone's mother come downstairs in the middle of the night to tell the slumber party girls it was lights-out time. She stopped in her tracks and backpedaled a step when she saw them.
"Can you help us?" Scully called to her. "We're looking for a room, a place to sleep, something?"
"Dana Scully," the woman said, nodding. "You're on our floor. We didn't know if you'd want two rooms, but you've got two."
Scully peeled free from Mulder, not even surprised this woman knew her. Surprise was a sensation for the saved, the blessed, the ones with wonder still at the fact that not every cup of coffee is bottomless, even at diners, and sometimes you can even make a left on red. Surprise was a luxury, checked at the door of this white honeycombed place.
"Two is fine," Scully said. "Who are you?"
The woman had approached cautiously, like she was afraid she'd stand in the way of the light and their shadows would disappear. "Penny Eisenberg," she said, extending a hand, which Scully shook.
"Buddy's wife," Scully said. "Good to meet you." She looked up at Mulder, who was watching Penny with detachment and nodding slightly. "This is my partner, Fox Mulder."
Penny reached for Mulder's hand but he didn't respond. Scully swallowed the lump in her throat and played brave.
"Can you show us to our rooms?"
Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right.
***
*
***
The Duel by Eugene Field
The gingham dog and the calico cat Side by side on the table sat; 'Twas half past twelve, and, what do you think, Not one nor the other had slept a wink! And the old Dutch clock and Chinese plate Seemed to know, as sure as fate, There was going to be an awful spat. (I wasn't there -- I simply state What was told to me by the Chinese plate.)
The gingham dog went "bow-wow-wow!" And the calico cat replied "me-ow?" And the air was streaked for an hour or so With fragments of gingham and calico, While the old Dutch clock in the chimney place Up with its hands before its face, For it always dreaded a family row! (Now mind, I'm simply telling you What the old Dutch clock declares is true.)
The Chinese plate looked very blue And wailed; "Oh, dear, what shall we do!" But the gingham dog and the calico cat, Wallowed this way and tumbled that, And utilized every tooth and claw In the awfullest way you ever saw - -And Oh! how the gingham and calico flew! (Don't think that I exaggerate - -I got my news from the Chinese plate.)
Next morning where the two had sat, They found no trace of dog or cat; And some folks think unto this day, That burglars stole that pair away; But the truth about the cat and pup Is that they ate each other up! Now, what do you really think of that? (The old Dutch clock it told me so And that is how I came to know.)
*** FORT VILLENEUVE, CANADA, JANUARY 4th, 2000 4:40 pm. T-plus 4 Days
"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper," someone had said at the party, and everyone had shrugged and muttered vaguely at the cliche. It had been on everyone's lips, that soundbyte, that little morsel of pseudo-philosophy, but no one had figured it important to say but the lone geek spilling eggnog on his tie while trying to look profound and mournful.
The funny part was, the computers were fine. No hung COBOL glitches, no Y2K bug trying to convince them they were driving horseless carriages or trying to send them long-overdue social security.
Calculations had suggested that the nuclear activity would be minimal, containing itself mostly in the near east, India, Pakistan. The superpowers: Russia, the EU, the US would retailiate their terrorist strikes with much more restraint, but it would add up; all the firebombs and air raids and missiles raining down on cities like Brussels and Minsk and Chicago would add up; everyone would do his part in this armageddon, from the man with the rifle in Nebraska to the family rushing to their shelter in Rio, tossing a half-dead grenade at the flag-bearing militia tromping down shrubbery. The gingham dog and the calico cat side by side on the table sat.
There was no way of knowing if the world had survived. There was no way of knowing if decades of calculation had been proven wrong, if human decency had prevailed over the temptress of destruction. And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air were too far away, now, miles upon miles of treacherous, impassable snow stood between here and knowing if the flag, indeed, was still there.
And no one wanted to brave it. No one was willing to take the risk of fallout; no one wanted to cross the valley of the shadow of death and stare at the bodies strewn across the cities they were still unsure of. Wimps, yellow-bellies, all of them. Even the two agents from the FBI.
Buddy had built them up to be some sort of superhero team; he'd shown her their dossiers saying "look at what these two have been through! Look at what they've solved!" and he'd had a lingering hope that they'd somehow undo this, as they'd undone all the awful cases in their history, stared down evil as they had time and time again.
But Agent Mulder hadn't spoken to anyone in four days. So far as Penny knew, he never left his room; Agent Scully would spend hours on end in there; she'd bring him meals on trays and bring the trays out nearly untouched. She'd grown ashen, Scully had, she'd grown older in the days after zero hour; she was tight and wound and untouchable. She protected Mulder like a mama animal, literally snarling at anyone who tried to come close. Down the hall, at night, Penny could hear her talking to him, soft and low, for hours and hours. Mulder said nothing.
Zero hour had come and gone, not with a bang, though Penny had wanted one, and not even really with a whimper. There had been a party with nothing to celebrate, and the tin-cup champagne toasts "to life!" had been forced, twisted shared skeletal smiles at their victory, led in triumph by the boss man himself, cigarette dangling from his lips.
And for no reason other than to have something to do, the eskimos and the scientists worked in the lab, trying to reconstruct the data, looking for evidence of something, of anything. Trying to find a needle in a haystack. Trying to find life on Mars.
Agent Scully and Akavak were sitting across the war room table when Penny came in. Buddy got up from his terminal and sailed to her side, wrapped an arm around her waist. He was everything like affectionate in these days past zero hour; he would touch her, squeeze her, take her hand, stroke her face, trying to convince himself that she was still there, she imagined, still warm, still solid and alive. And though she'd never say a word - she kissed him on the chin and raked a hand through the back of his hair -there was something about him that terrified her, now, and repulsed her. His part in all this. His knowledge, that he hadn't shared with her until it was long past too late. He was the enemy, somehow. Stupid, pointless waste of love. And she loved him with everything she had.
"How's it going in here?" she asked him. He shrugged.
"Same," he said. "Trying to figure out if what we projected would happen...happened. We're working off calculations that are almost ten years old. Trying to refigure them based on more current knowledge of...current events," he chuckled. "Trying to see if they add up. Added up."
"And so far..." he tossed his arms in the air with mock glee, "they do!"
"Don't you think someone should go out there again?" Penny asked, for the second time since zero hour. "Saddle up a snow cat or take the Cherokee and see what's still alive out there?"
Buddy shrugged. "We don't even know if it's safe to leave the compound," he said. "There could be fallout, dangerous radiation even way up here."
Penny nodded. "They should have built windows in this damned thing," she said. "We could just look."
"And see what?" Scully snapped, pushing a stack of papers across the table to Akavak. "What do *you* think radiation looks like? Not to mention the fact that this building wouldn't be safe for us with windows in these 150 mile an hour winds, and that glass would melt in a nuclear explosion."
Penny flushed. Damn bitch was chewing her out. "Sorry," she said, eyes widening. "I didn't know."
"Then don't talk," Scully said, turning back to her computations.
"Wouldn't the..." Penny's voice was lower; she whispered to Buddy. "Wouldn't the computers not work if there was a nuclear blast up here?"
"The structure was built to absorb the shock of an EMP," Buddy explained. "Everything in here would be protected."
"And we don't have...radiation detectors?" Penny tried again.
Buddy nodded. "We do. They claim dangerous levels of radiation right outside our doors. Could be a computer glitch, could be a Y2K error, or could be that we're two steps away from being fried. According to the detectors, it's ten times Chernobyl across this province. You want to take that risk? You want me to?"
Yes, she thought. Risk your life, show me you're still a man. "No," she said. "But I thought that's why the FBI agents came up here?"
Wrong thing to say.
Scully pressed her palms to the tabletop, hoisted herself to her feet.
"Agent Mulder and I were tricked into coming up here," she said, face inches from Penny's. "Maybe you haven't heard the story; get Buddy to tell you some time. And right now, all I care about is making sure that my partner is okay, and finding out if there's any way to contact the outside world. I saw, first hand, every city, town, village between here and the United States border get flattened. I know what's out there. Five thousand miles of nothing. And whether that means my brother in San Francisco is alive today, I don't know. But fuck you if you think I'll let myself and Mulder die before I find out!"
Penny shrank back despite herself. She'd been right with her initial assessment: these redheads were all the same.
"I'm done here," Buddy said. "Let's go back to the room, huh? Maybe watch a video before dinner?"
Penny nodded, and with it, they left the war room.
She paused outside Mulder's door when they reached the habitat corridor; she had an intense urge to bust in and shake him, rattle him till his brain clicked and she could see what he was made of that the boss man was so proud of. See what was so wonderful about him that had sucked the life out of Agent Scully. See what he had to offer, wasting their food and oxygen and space.
Just a brief pause, though, and she continued down the hall behind Buddy to the bedroom.
"We've got enough food, clothing, oxygen and heat to keep 214 people alive for sixty years," Buddy said, sitting on the bed and flipping on the video monitor, the thing that used to be a television. "We'll be fine here, baby."
She nodded, sitting down beside him. She hadn't asked.
*** SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, JANUARY 4th, 2000, 1:50 p.m. T-plus 4 Days
It had been like something out of a movie, playing back now on repeat, to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne."
And it almost never snowed in San Francisco.
*** SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, DECEMBER 31st, 1999, 7:19 p.m. T-minus 1 Day
"Your pocket's ringing, again."
"Uh huh."
Outside it was below freezing, windchill way down to where it would be snow in a normal city, blustery and grey just past dusk and stars still hidden through the ambient light. Stores were closed, fake snow sprayed on the windows hung with those ubiquitous pinlight icicles, just beginning to cut through the dark, oddly fake and beautiful at once.
Charlie stepped back, helped Peter up through the sliding door.
His cellphone rang again.
Peter held the bag way up over his head as they wormed to the end of the car, holiday commuters in silk scarves and platform books decked the aisle. The car shuddered, doors shut, train started moving. And by the time they reached the end of the car there was only one empty seat, and Peter, bricked in with stacks of gifts like the cask of Amontillado, collapsed in it gratefully.
"Stopped ringing," he said.
"Uh huh," Charlie said, hand wrapped around the bar and swaying.
"Why don't you just turn it off, if you're not going to answer it," Peter asked through boxes.
Charlie shrugged. He slipped a gloved hand into his pocket and slid out the StarTac, flipped it open. "One missed call," it said. He scrolled down, saw the familiar number. Shaking his head, he clapped the phone shut again and stuffed it in his pocket.
"You okay with all that crap?" he asked Peter.
"I ain't letting you touch this," Peter said, peering out to the left of the FAO Schwartz bag. "Your present's in here too, remember. I don't trust you far as I can throw you."
The train shuddered again, screeched to a halt and the doors slid open -passengers got in, passengers got off, and another seat opened up across the aisle. Charlie sat down.
"Gimme half," he said, knowing Peter would argue. "I promise I won't look."
"You can just go to hell," Peter said goodnaturedly. "Don't touch the boxes."
Glad Peter couldn't see him through the stacks on his knees, Charlie rubbed his face with his hands. Under his hat his hairline was creeping back, another year gone, and he massaged his eyebrows with gloved fingers, sighing.
The phone rang again and he opened it, saw the same damned number on the display, and hung up on the caller mid-ring.
Fuck 'em all. And a happy new year.
The phone rang once more before their stop at Market and Noe, but this time it was Henry asking them to bring ice.
Twenty minutes later, shouldering a 20 lb bag of ice, and holding the elevator for Peter, Charlie smiled. They stopped outside Henry's door; a sprig of mistletoe hung above it and a handwritten sign saying "Don We Now Our Gay Apparel."
Charlie laughed. "I forgot my gay apparel," he said.
"Anything you wear is gay apparel, girlfriend," Peter said. "Let's not waste the mistletoe, though."
Ice hit giftboxes, carboard clattered softly to the ugly-print industrial carpet, but Charlie didn't notice. He leaned in to the kiss, inhaling deeply through his nose. Fuck 'em all, he thought, flipping his phone in his pocket off with a thumb. Fuck 'em all.
He drew back, blinked at Peter's dark eyes, dark hair, freckled, smiling face. "I love you, maaaan," he said, doing his best football-butch.
"I love you too," Peter whispered.
The door opened and Henry bustled them in, gathering up boxes and trotting behind them.
Television was out, land-line phones were dead, there would be no ball dropping in Times Square for Frisco this New Year, but at Henry LeFleur's, no one cared. Charlie got stupid on pink punch with oranges floating in it; karaoke was sung. Someone passed a bowl of kisses and condoms, chocolate both; someone else passed a joint. A merry time was had by all, Charlie thought, later, singing it like it was poetry. He drowned his sorrows, switched the phone back on and laughed when it rang the next time. Fuck 'em all. And a happy new year.
At ten past eleven he and Peter were sent on a booze run so they'd have spirits to toast the New Year.
"There's a package store down across from Cafe Flore," Leanne said, propping herself precariously up on the countertop. "Get white and brown and champagne. Take donations when you get back so you don't miss the ball drop."
"TV's out," Peter reminded her.
She nodded, lighting a cigarette. "And a pack of Parliaments," she said.
The walk down Noe St. was quiet, oddly so; all the raucousness and cheering you'd expect to hear an hour before the millennium was eerily absent and the city sat still.
Peter and Charlie strolled in silence; the moon waned and the night was cold and motionless.
"So," Peter said, after about a block. "You gonna tell me who's been calling all night you've been ignoring?"
"Mom," Charlie said, sucking his teeth. "She's been calling since Christmas. I haven't heard from her in four years and she's called fifty times in a week. I just let it ring."
Peter sighed, stopped, took Charlie's elbow in his hand. "Why, Chuck? She just wants to apologize. She just wants to reestablish communication with you. Don't you want that?"
Charlie scuffed his toes on the sidewalk and walked on. "Not really," he said. "I'm getting by fine without them. Just because she's got some sort of millennial guilt trip doesn't mean I have to."
"And what if she has something important to tell you? What if it's an emergency?"
"What do I care?" Charlie shrugged.
"You didn't even go to your sister's funeral," Peter said. "Don't you regret that?"
Charlie inhaled through his nose. "Yes," he said. "Missy's a good kid. Was a good kid. She didn't blow me off the way the rest of them did."
"So why didn't you go?"
Charlie walked several paces ahead. "You know this," he said.
"Tell me again," Peter said, catching up.
"Mom was there. Dana was there. That asshole Bill was there. There was no reason for me to deal with that just to mourn the one member of my family I actually liked. I learned that much at Dad's funeral."
"And you're telling me you don't miss them at all," Peter said, peering up at Charlie, his face half-glowing under the streetlamp.
Charlie nodded. "I miss Dana," he said. "I want to know what's up with her. Everything I know about her life I get from pages on the internet that end dot gov. That sort of pisses me off. I think she's doing great things. I wish I could, you know, cheer for her."
"So *call* her," Peter said. "Wish her a happy new year. I'm sure she'd be happy to hear from you."
Charlie stopped, extended both arms and clapped his hands on Peter's shoulders. "Look, baby," he said. "You just don't get it. My family's Catholic. My dad was in the Navy. Bill's in the Navy now. Everything about my life is six kinds of sin, to them. They've erased me from their lives. What choice do I have?"
"Even Dana?" Peter asked. His eyes were wide, pained; he was trying to find some way to help and Charlie appreciated the gesture, squeezed his shoulder.
"Maybe not, if she'd been given the chance to appreciate the situation," Charlie said. "But she's Mom's little girl. Even more so after Dad died. Missy could have convinced her, but I think Dana was always a little scared of me. I'm scared shitless of her."
"She's your sister!" Peter said, the words bursting from his lips. He started walking again.
"Don't worry about it," Charlie said, meeting his stride. "Let's get drunk."
They ducked into the package store just before it exploded.
There was a blinding flash of light.
SCREAMS.
SCREAMS.
His could have sworn he heard the cell phone ring.
Peter.
There was fire everywhere, sirens wailed and as abruptly stopped.
Trapped under a refrigerator that had fallen, Charlie lay still for what felt like hours, calling out, shouting till his throat was raw. No one heard.
The phone hadn't rung.
Silence.
PETER.
With every ounce of strength he'd managed to pull himself free, and he'd crawled across the floor, shrapnel embedding itself in his hands and knees. The air stank of booze and brimstone and he dragged himself to his feet and surveyed the scene.
Everything was flattened, shattered, blackened and burned.
Peter lay face down in a pile of Pete's Wicked Ale bottles, his leg twisted impossibly at the knee, his arms and face charred, blood crusting around his nose and mouth.
Charlie knelt beside him and no tears came. Silent and frozen he sat in the broken glass until the sun came up and the sky went pink and for the first time in San Francisco in years, snow fell.
Snow fell, and leaving behind the bodies and the booze he wandered out into the street. His legs hurt, his chest hurt, he figured he'd broken a rib or three and his eyes burned in the pink light.
Block after block he'd walked, and bodies, everywhere.
There was no one alive.
Maybe it was the refrigerator that had saved him; he didn't know. Henry's building had collapsed, bodies were trapped, caught mid-scream with no sign of what had killed them.
Block after block after block.
He'd found food, and water; he'd stolen a coat from a body he'd found and he wandered and night fell and he slept and dawn broke again.
Block after block after block.
No phones. No life. San Francisco, enormous and sprawling and empty.
Night fell, dawn broke, and he stopped counting days.
*** SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, JANUARY 4th, 2000, 1:50 p.m. T-plus 4 Days
It had been like something out of a movie, playing back now on repeat, to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne."
And it almost never snowed in San Francisco.
Curled up on a park bench, his teeth to his knees, he couldn't shake the lingering tune, the mocking words. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
It wasn't a multiple choice question.
Peter had left him alone. With nothing but auld acquaintance for company.
With hands dry, cracked, twisted beyond his years he fumbled the cellphone, flipped it open and shut. It had battery left, at least, the indicator said it did, but there was no dial tone, no ring, no answer at any number he punched in.
No answer at Mom's.
No answer at Dana's.
He hadn't seen another living soul. Hadn't spoken a word out loud, at least, not to his knowledge - it was possible he'd been serenading himself as he wandered through the aftermath of whatever horror had struck here.
Cars didn't start, and he forced himself not to think about the electromagnetic pulse that was supposed to follow a nuclear blast.
In the Presidio, palm trees shriveled for the weather. The ground was white. Somewhere out there, California stretched on. South to San Diego, where Bill and the wife and the kid (what was his name again?) were either dead or alive. It stretched up and north, to the Redwood forests, and out east the country unfolded, purple mountain's majesty to the Gulf Stream waters. To the New York Island. To Washington D.C., to the cluster of tiny midatlantic states where Mom and Dana were either dead or alive.
Somewhere soon there would be a blissfull family reunion for all of them sent to hell for their sins and their hatred. God wasn't biased; that much he knew.
And they would forgive him. And it would be warm there.
But now he sat in the park, staring at the dead phone, wondering exactly what it was he wished he'd said. Wondering what they'd say to him.
Charlie Scully was alive and well and living in San Francisco; it hadn't stopped snowing in days.
And the band played on.
*
Continued in part 6.