A Thin Veneer by Analise

Posted in full at: www.rhino.com/analise/veneer.html

Category:S,T, post-col, MSR Rating: NC-17 email:analise@2cowherd.net
archive: Please ask Disclaimer:These characters are the property of
Fox and 1013. No disrespect intended.

Notes: Many, many undying thanks to Meredith, the sharpest eye out
there.

I've also done something a bit different and illustrated this one. You
can find the illustrated version at my site:
(www.rhino.com/analise/veneer.html)...and the full txt document is
there too.

This might be a wee bit strong for some, others might not even
flinch...but there's some graphic violence here, and some sex too.
That's why the NC-17, though that's more for the content than the sex.
You've been warned. Enjoy.

++++++++++



I remember a time back, there were rabbits.

Out in the back of the main house sat a fairly sizable hutch that my
Granddad built and it was full of bunnies. All different colors and
shapes, sizes and breeds. They belonged to my older sister. She'd
carry them around stroking and stroking them, their little noses
twitching and quivering, their eyes wild and frightened. Always
frightened.

Rabbits are scared of everything.

There was that book, that rabbit book. They made us read it in school.
Watership Down. I only read the first part of it, it was dumb. As if
rabbits had their own society. But the thing of it was, in the first
part of that book it talked about how the entire world was the enemy
of the rabbit. Every last living thing that walked the earth was the
rabbit's enemy.

And it was true...and somehow important. In the mind of that soft,
shaking creature, even *I* was dangerous.

I would think about that whenever I looked at my sister's rabbits. It
made me feel bigger somehow. Even if they were just dumb animals. I
would think of it at night when my dad would creep into my room and I
would think of it as I pressed my face into my pillow to keep from
crying out.

Rabbits were scared of me.

Mr. Ears was one of those massive, lop-eared rabbits. The kind with
the ears that droop to the sides. He was big and gray with white
patches. He was my sister's favorite.

It was an accident.

It really was. Somehow Mr. Ears got out of his hutch one night and
when we came out of the house in the morning to do our chores, he lay
dead in the middle of yard. His neck was broken.

No one could figure out how he had gotten out of the hutch so the
blame fell upon my sister for forgetting to put him back at night. She
sobbed and wept and stroked his dead fur, but my dad just shrugged and
the mystery became a non-issue.

I stood over my sister for a long time, looking at Mr. Ears. His
little black eyes were cold and hard, his nose no longer twitched, and
he no longer looked at me with fear. His head sat at an odd angle on
his body.

It was an accident.

It really was.

++++++++++++++

He pushed through drifts that reached his knees, new and heavy and
wet. It still fell, collecting in his hair, his eyelashes, kissing the
sides of his cold-flushed cheeks with spots of icy wetness. The pack
was heavy on his back, pressing into his collarbone and rubbing raw
spots against his shoulders. Tired muscles ached unrelentingly with
each new lift of his snowshoes. It was getting dark, he thought. Hard
to tell in the unrelenting gray of the storm, but the uniform lack of
color seemed to be dimming.

He stopped for a moment, catching his breath and leaning against the
frozen, ice-crusted bark of a large Douglas fir. Thickly gloved hands
found the canteen at his waist and he spared himself a long drink of
water so cold it made his teeth ache. Old habit sent his gaze back
along the tracks he had left behind him, part of him wincing at the
obvious spoor of his passing. It couldn't be helped. Hopefully the
rising storm would cover all trace of his route. Otherwise he was
leaving a neon sign for anyone with eyes and the inclination to
follow.

He tugged his woolen cap down tighter over dark hair starting to fleck
with gray and pushed himself away from the tree, continuing up the
mountain. Over and done with. If only it could be. If only this could
all be a nightmare they could simply wake from. He would get up out of
bed, head for the FBI and chastise himself for eating spicy Thai food
at 3:00am ...and he would laugh off the whole thing.

No.

You can't really laugh off the end of the world. Can you?

He could smell the sharp tang of woodsmoke in the cold air and he
picked up his weary legs with a surge of renewed energy, ignoring the
extra resistance of the snowshoes as they dragged him through the
soft, new drifts. Only a little farther. Definitely darker now. The
trees were mere shapes of darker gray in the mist of the thick white
snowfall by the time he topped the little rise that overlooked a
motley collection of rough cabins. He paused over the tiny vale for a
long moment, his breath chuffing steam into the frigid twilight chill
as he surveyed the place that had become a refuge of sorts.

A tiny smile cracked the cold skin of his lips. No metropolis this. No
take-out Chinese, no 24-hour cable TV, no multi-million dollar sports
organizations, nor a cheap basketball to bounce around on the
weekends. Not even weekends anymore. Nothing really, that he might
have once considered part of his life.

But things changed.

Didn't they? Wasn't that a Universal Constant? But who knew they could
change this much?

He let himself start moving again, the slope of the vale falling away
under his feet, leaving him to slip and slide his way down through the
snow, struggling to keep his balance under the heavy load of the pack
he wore. It would not do to fall now, not when he was so close.

It had snowed considerably since he'd last stood outside this cabin,
he thought. He found himself paused once more, staring at the
rough-hewn door, seeing the warm yellow light stretching welcomingly
from the cramped little windows. How long had it been? At least two
months and change. He'd left in fall and now it was winter. It was
with no surprise that he found himself a bit reluctant, even nervous
to enter the tiny makeshift dwelling. He had lived the past month with
ever-present gnawing worms of worry, but he'd forced them down deep.
And there they festered still. There was no denying now that he stood
here at the threshold of the present. So many terrible things could
happen in the span of 2 months.

He should know, he'd lived through days that had lasted years.

In the end it was not he who opened the door, but she.

He stared at her, backlit by the soft glow of the fire that both
illuminated and heated the room, and told himself she was no wraith of
his imagination. She was tired, he could see that right away...soft
lines of worry and struggle had etched themselves onto the gentle
curves of her face, lines that he knew he carried as well...lines that
made them both real. But there was also an almost timid relief there,
as if the emotion were afraid of exposing itself. Afraid of expressing
itself in any way lest it be noticed and hunted down by its stronger
brothers of despair and fear. Her small, lithe frame was rounder than
it had been when he had left, her sharp lines and edges blurred and
gentled. A copper glow limned her hair, lending her the look of a
surreal postcard. A photographer's illusion of exaggerated color and
beauty.

But she *was* real, and she was alive still. These small things were
enough to make him shiver slightly with the unfamiliar sensation of
joy.

She lifted a hand and he took it, letting her pull him into the warmth
of the tiny hovel, the door shutting behind him on the falling
twilight and the ever-darkening snowfall.

++++

"It's really starting to come down out there." Pike said, his nose
pressed to the glass of the small window, his chin resting on folded
arms.

"I figured it would hit us tonight." His dad's voice was slow and
soft. The boy glanced over his shoulder to peer at the man who lounged
in front of the fire, parked in front of a tattered Scrabble board. He
met his son's eyes with a smile. "Your turn."

Pike jumped down from his perch on the back of the chair and returned
to his spot on the opposite side of the board, peering with 10
year-old annoyance at his small collection of letters. Four Es. What
was he supposed to do with four Es?

His eyes drifted back over to the window again, his teeth clamping
onto the inside of his cheek. His father caught the direction of his
glance and he chuckled softly.

"Leave it be kiddo."

"Do you think he'll come over? What do you think he saw down there?
You think he brought anything cool back?" Pike returned his gaze to
his father, his eyes alight with excitement that had been present
since he'd spotted the shadowed figure trudge by the window.

Chris shook his head and pointed at his son's letters.

"Your turn, Peter." Pike frowned.

"Dad..."

"Just play your turn. He won't be answering anyone's questions
tonight. You can wait till tomorrow just like the rest of us. Let him
rest. He's just spent a very long time away. He has other things on
his mind besides us."

Pike frowned at that.

"I suppose..." he admitted. "But..."

"No buts. Leave them be. Play the game." His dad's voice was firmer
now and Pike knew better than to press. He slumped to the floor,
settling himself onto his stomach on the worn old rug.

It took all his willpower not to simply leap up, grab his coat and
head over there. How was he supposed to wait till morning? Mulder had
said that he was going to bring him something cool.

B-E-E-T.

"12 points." he said distractedly, his small fingers pressing the
polished wood squares into a rough line.

"That the best you can do?" His dad asked with a smirk. "For 12 measly
points you're going to give me the triple word score?"

Pike rolled his eyes dramatically.

"Not like you're not gonna win anyway, Dad. I don't even know why you
play this dumb game with me."

"Because one day you'll beat me." Chris said, grinned sagely through
his salt-and-pepper beard.

A knock sounded at the door.

The sound had barely registered in Pike's head before he had flung his
body up and was racing for the door, a huge grin on his face.

"I told you! I told you he'd come over!" he said, skidding to a stop
in front of the door, ignoring his father's instinctive leap for the
rifle that hung over the mantle.

"Peter!" He warned sharply, one hand on the gun, just before the boy
flung the door open.

Exposing, not Fox Mulder, but an old, sunken stranger. Someone that
neither of them had ever seen before.

It was like a bucket of cold water had been dumped over the boy. He
shrank back into the room, his eyes on the haggard, bearded face. The
snow blew in from behind the man, cold air sucking all the warmth of
the small space out of the open portal.

The silence of the room amplified the sound of the safety being
flicked off the rifle. Pike scuttled over next to his Father, standing
in the shelter of the gun Chris held pointed at the stranger's head.

Tall, gaunt, and haunted looking, the man peered at them through
ice-pale eyes sunken into a scarred and pitted face that was half
obscured by a filthy gray beard. He was dressed in a dirty gore-tex
parka, hands and feet encased in thick gloves and boots. He wore a
pack on his back and held a long, tall stick in one hand. An
old-fashioned shotgun was strapped to the side of his load. At the
sight of the rifle pointed at him, he dropped the staff and slowly
raised his hands.

"Mean ya no harm." his voice was raspy and ill-used, it drove shivers
up and down Pike's spine that had nothing to do with the chill air
spilling into the room. Behind the man, he could see the snow falling
thick and silent.

"You alone?" His dad's voice was hard and cool, so unlike the man he
normally was.

A slow nod.

"Step inside and close the door, keep your hands up." Chris's eyes
flicked down to his son. "Go and get Mulder and the others."

Somehow the words did not inspire the same exhilaration they might
have had they been spoken 10 minutes earlier. But he inched past the
stranger, grabbed his coat and shot out the door into the night.

++++++

She rifled through the old cabinet almost numbly, sorting through the
meager assortment of medical supplies stowed there. They were
dwindling drastically, she thought offhandedly, her mind still
spinning dizzily from the relief that coursed through her body. She
had seen him off almost 2 months ago, each day passing with the
possibility that he would never come back.

Now here he was, large as life and twice as dirty.

When she'd caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure outside her door,
she'd thought at first that it was Denny again...the teen who had
decided to make her his own personal object of obsession.

But it hadn't been Denny.

Mulder was lying on the low cot mattress, his boots still on and
hanging off the end, one arm flung over his eyes. His other arm lay
where she'd left it, wrapped loosely in an old shirt, dried black
bloodstains showing through the thin cotton.

Carrying peroxide and gauze, she knelt next to the mattress and gently
undid the makeshift bandage.

"It's nothing." He muttered as he lifted his arm from his face to
crack his eyes open at her. "I told you." His cheeks and nose were
still red and chapped from the cold and his eyes swam with exhaustion.

"I'll be the judge of that," she muttered softly, focusing on his
wound. Minor indeed, she thought. He must have received it at least
two weeks prior...and it was mostly scabbed over at this point. It was
likely that it had been serious when he'd cut himself. He was lucky he
would only be adding a scar to his collection and not losing a limb.
He must have doctored himself well.  Little for her to do, but she
trained her eyes on it anyway. It was easier than looking into his
eyes.

It had been necessary, she knew, for him to go like he had.
Alone...without her. Necessary for everyone, for there were few who
were able or qualified to do what was needed. And Mulder had always
been one to sacrifice himself for others. But it was hard to accept
his casual martyrdom, his inability to step out of the eye of
everyone's need. After two years of almost unimaginable suffering, of
watching everyone and everything she had ever loved or known die
terribly...it was hard to let him walk away like he had.

Even worse to know that she couldn't go with him. Almost involuntarily
her left hand lifted to touch the telling swell of her stomach. A
burden, a chain, a reason. The reason. It was why she could not go
with him when he went. Neither of them would risk it. Not for
anything. And there was plenty of risk beyond the cold haven of the
mountains they hid in.

The virus still savaged what remained of the populace. The aliens'
threat was vanquished, but their legacy remained. The monsters, the
massive hulks that Pike had dubbed 'Shredders' still roamed the warmer
climes. Unrepentant, uncaring and completely hostile.

Warm fingertips covered hers, smoothing over the flesh-wrapped bones
of her slender hands and swooping lower to touch her stomach...almost
reverently. She clasped his hand and pulled it away, bringing it to
her lips to cover up the fact that she hated his reverence. Hated the
reason that she was not able to share his risk instead of hiding in
the shadows. She finally let her eyes meet his and she saw that his
depthless chameleon gaze did not hold awe, but instead a deep fear. He
had been afraid she would not be here when he got back. He had once
confided in her, late at night many months ago, that he had an
irrational fear that the moment she left his sight, she would cease to
be.

Megalomania, that's what she had told him at the time, lightening the
mood. Though essentially, it was true. He'd always been almost
pathologically self-centered. Not a bad thing, not in her thinking.
She preferred to stand alone on her own merits...and her control
issues were certainly on a par with his egocentrism, but this fear was
beyond that. When she had vanished from his life all those years ago,
losing 3 months of her life, it had left its mark on him. Even now he
was afraid that she would disappear if he were not there to watch her.

She smiled softly at him, pulling his cool palm against her warm cheek
and leaning into it before setting it back on his chest and returning
to his wound.

Silly man, she told him silently.

She cleaned the scabbed gash gently in the silence of the room, only
the fire giving voice in its sibilant hisses and cackles in the
corner. She would not ask, though the questions hung in the warmth of
the room like the smell of pine smoke. She would wait for him to talk.
To speak of what he had seen, what he had found... how he had cut
himself seemed secondary. Certainly she had become immune to the
savagery of this new world since she'd waded hip deep through the
blood of its birthing. A wound like this would have had her on edge
not three years earlier, now she counted him lucky that it was all
he'd brought back with him.

It was not until the cut was cleaned and wrapped in the soft, white
gauze that the honeyed gravel of his voice filled her ears.

"I made it as far as Helena, Scully." he said. His voice was so tired.
She looked up at him, then, settling back on her heels at the side of
the mattress and curling her hands into her lap. Her silence did not
press him, she simply waited, not touching. He would not meet her
eyes, his own green gaze fixed on the rough, low, flat ceiling of the
cabin. "There was nothing there but the dead. I found a few
of...Them...but they were bones. Shredder bones." He pulled his lips
into his mouth sucking on them thoughtfully. "Someone shot at me about
two weeks back, I ran...fell..." he lifted his injured arm a bit.
"That's how I got this. Dropped into a steep ravine and cut myself on
a tree branch. I never saw the guy who fired at me."

He finally turned his head and looked at her, shifting his long body
on the bed to make room for her. She heaved her bulk onto the mattress
next to him, curling her form around his, glorying in the sensation of
touching him again. She could feel his arms sliding around her,
pulling her closer...the weight and substance of her stomach between
them... and unexpected tears bit at the corners of her eyes. Tears of
simple relief that she was allowed this again. That he was indeed,
still alive. The reality of it had not fully hit her yet, but it
waited anxiously at the edges of her sanity...still worried that this
was a dream.

"I did find a HAM radio, just like we hoped. And it works too." His
voice rumbled in the cavity of his chest, sounding warm and hollow
where her ear pressed against him. "Damned fucking heavy though. I'd
been hoping to find a horse...something, but all the animals I saw
were long dead. I found a few snowmobiles, but couldn't risk the
noise."

"Helena is dead." she repeated quietly, sadly. So many in their
makeshift camp had held out high hopes for the city. Even her, though
she'd known better. Hope that a larger community might have survived,
organized. That something of their old lives had managed to make it
through. It would be bitter to discover that hope to be false. Another
disappointment in a long line of them. He squeezed her shoulder,
continuing.

"I didn't see any sign of the Shredders. The cold will keep them
sluggish. It's possible that they'll simply die of starvation before
the spring comes." Neither of them bothered to wonder how the victims
had contracted the virus, it was far more important to worry about the
things the virus created. Besides, at the end, the virus had been
everywhere. Food, water, even the air...at least in some parts, from
what they'd heard. Vaporizing bombs similar to how VX gas was deployed
had been detonated 200 feet off the ground over certain cities. The
virus took out entire areas unilaterally.

"If they don't?" she whispered. "If they manage to make it up here?"

"I don't ...know." He admitted wearily. "We'll figure something out if
they do." His words were matter of fact. He believed them. It was part
of why they all looked to him. The confidence that he had had through
this. That he wore on him like a mantle. She suspected that part of it
came because he'd faced so many horrors in his life and the rest was
simply that he did not fear the unknown like so many did. He'd spent
most of his life seeking that very unknown, delving under the rocks
and into the shadowed corners where no others dared look.

Or believe.

He'd always believed. It was easy for him to say 'we'll figure it out'
and have others trust that they would.

"What else?" she asked finally. She knew that he would have saved the
worst for last. That he was hoping, even now, to protect her from the
horrors she already knew were out there.

"I came across a farm outside of Helena, a big one. Or at least what
was left of it. The place had burned to the ground and I found four
skeletons in the ashes." He stopped and she waited. She knew that
there was more. "God Scully.." he stopped again and she lifted her
head to look into his face. His eyes were clenched shut, his jaw
tight.

"What, Mulder?"

"There was a woman. She hadn't been burned in the fire. I didn't see
her at first, she was a little ways off from the main house. She'd
been murdered." His eyes opened and he looked down at her. "She'd been
pregnant." His hand moved to touch her belly as if he was reassuring
himself. "The killer had cut her open...the fetus was ...gone." His
last words were drenched in horror, a horror she felt crawling over
her as she saw the truth in his eyes. The fear.

"How long ago had it happened?" She asked quietly.

"I'd guess at least 8 or 10 months. The cold kept some of the decay at
bay, but the woman was pretty far gone.

"Whoever did it was the human breed of monster, Scully. I'd lay odds
that the same person or persons were responsible for burning that
house down as well." His voice took on a lecturing tone, one she
recognized from countless slide shows in a long-gone basement office.
"The purpose of cutting an infant from a living womb...I think the
killer had to have known the victim. Cutting open pregnant women was
often used as a method of war, much like rape was. Keep the populace
cowed and terrified. But this was different. I think that she knew the
killer, there was no sign of struggle.." He sounded deadened, distant,
as if part of him was running on autopilot. She caught her breath and
laid a hand on his arm.

"Mulder. Stop."

She reached up and pulled his chin down until she met his eyes. She
shook her head ever so slightly, conveying her insistence that he not
do this to himself...that he not profile every atrocity he came
across. It took too much of a toll on him.

He was relaxing slightly, as if what he'd seen was a burden that, once
unloaded, allowed him to rest. His voice was slowing in cadence like a
wind up toy running down. The weight he'd carried, the faith and hopes
and fears of every one of the 14 survivors in the camp, it had been
heavy and unforgiving. She knew he had felt every ounce of it with
each step he'd taken.

His eyelids were fluttering as he tried to stay awake and she let her
hand stroke his hair back from his forehead, trailing it down his
thickly stubbled cheek and tracing the generous swell of his mouth.

"Sleep now, just sleep." She ordered gently.

He was just drifting off when the sound of a fist pounding on the door
startled both of them upright.

"Mulder! Mulder!" It was Pike's voice, muffled beyond the door. "Come
quick! There's a stranger!"

++++++

"Name's Hobb. Hobb Strick."

They had allowed him to sit by the fire and strip off his wet clothes,
Lloyd had handed him a cup of hot tea...but there was no mistake that
not a one of the six adults in the room trusted the newcomer. Under
his dirty coat he was skeletally thin, his eyes burned with a strange
light as he stared into the fire and rocked every so slightly to a
rhythm that only he heard.

He looked up at the surrounding people almost myopically and then back
down into the steam of his tea, the heat painting his cold nose red.
He had not removed his knit cap and scraggly strands of white hair
poked out from around the edges lending him the look of a homeless
vagrant. Watery eyes set deep in a scarred face flicked from person to
person like an insect...never stopping any one place long enough to
invite attention. He had been humming softly to himself while they'd
waited for Chris to shut the door behind his son.

He looked up at the five men and one woman with a bleary smile and
rheumy eyes. Mulder guessed he was in his 70s.

"I was looking for a way over the Divide. Hmmm? Thought maybe that I
could make it to Idaho. You know, I heard that there were a lot of
survivalist types out there. Maybe they even managed to get organized
if they survived the virus. Who better, right? Hmmm?" He looked up at
Mulder almost hopefully, but found nothing but suspicion in the hazel
eyes.

"What happened to your face Mr. Strick?" Scully's soft-rough voice
came from somewhere over Mulder's shoulder.

His fingers came up and traced the air over the burn-marks on his
cheek.

"These?" he asked unnecessarily. "I uhh..hmmm" His shoulders quivered
a little and his chin sunk down against his shoulders like a turtle
retreating into its shell. "There was a fire, hmmm?" It seemed all he
wanted to offer.

Strick's fingers were working unconsciously in his lap, twisting and
twining together incessantly.

"What direction did you come from?" Mulder asked, folding his arms
just to give his hands something to do. "How did you find us?"

"I came from the east...uh...I-Iowa, hmmm?" he jerked his head in the
general direction, his fingers continuing their ceaseless dry-washing.
"Like I said, I was looking for a way over the mountains that wasn't
on a road. Roads are dangerous."  He swallowed and his adam's apple
bobbed. "As fer how I found you...hmmm...I followed some fresh tracks.
They led right here. I was hoping to find some friendly shelter before
the storm hit, hmmmm?." His eyes trailed off towards the rafters of
the old warming hut. "It's gonna prove to be a big one." His voice was
soft.

His tracks. There was no helping that. Melchor pressed forward a
moment later, touching Mulder's arm to meet his eyes.

"What's the point of this interrogation, Fox?" the little Mexican
asked, frowning. "He's cold, he's tired...and he needs shelter. I know
we all have right to be suspicious after last time, but he seems all
right, and I think we all want to get back to bed."

He stared at the man for a long moment and then nodded. Melchor was
right, he was just edgy from what he had seen. No, edgy wasn't a
strong enough word, he was stretched taut as a guitar string. Every
time he closed his eyes he saw the dead woman's mutilated body, her
blood black and dried under the woodshed roof. Not that he hadn't seen
worse horrors in the VCU, but it was just far too easy to see Scully's
face in place of the dead woman's.

"Ok." He turned back to the old stranger. "Ok. You can stay here
through the storm. Maybe longer if you want. We don't have a lot of
room, but I think there's space in Howie's cabin." He glanced over at
the big blonde midwesterner. Howie nodded, not thrilled, but
understanding that he was the only one with space. His 'cabin' had
once been the mess-hall of the little cluster of buildings. It was the
largest. "I'm warning you though," he turned back to Strick, narrowing
his eyes. "We're armed here, and we won't tolerate any crap from you."

Hobb seemed unaffected by the threat, and his face remained
expressionless. Mulder couldn't help but feel cold fingers crawling up
and down his spine every time he looked the man in his pale dead eyes.
He glanced back over his shoulder for the first time and he saw the
same vague unease echoed faintly in Scully's face.

Probably remembering the two men they had given shelter three months
earlier, he told himself. They'd run off with half their stored food,
all their vitamins and some ammo. Howie had earned himself a fairly
serious concussion when he'd tried to stop them. Everyone was lucky it
hadn't been worse. One of the two men had had a gun.

Howie was leading Strick out of the cabin and as soon as the stranger
exited, he felt a sudden flush of weariness wash over him. He'd not
gotten a lot of sleep in the weeks since he'd come across the murdered
people. Not because he was afraid that the killer(s) might still be
around, but because his dreams wouldn't let up. Lack of rest combined
with the fairly heavy workout of hauling a pack on his back in
thigh-deep snow had left him feeling like a pulped banana.

"Come on Mulder." The hand was pulling him effectively out of the
cabin. He thought maybe he could hear people murmuring greetings and
vague questions at him. A blast of cold air did little to clear his
mind as they exited the heat and light of Chris's cabin and plowed
through the falling snow. A series of gray shapes to his right were
identifiable as Howie and the stranger making their way towards the
ex-mess hall.

No stranger to sleep deprivation, he recognized the signs of a hard
crash inching inwards on the perimeter of his vision. Scully's soft
voice was echoing slightly as if she was speaking into a tin can.

Snow. Steps. Door. Bed.

Darkness.

++++

He was gone almost before she got him onto the bed.

She brushed her lips against his forehead let her fingers stroke the
side of his face. After she pulled his boots and socks off
unresisting, reddened, blistered feet...she spread a wool army blanket
over him and considered climbing onto the lumpy mattress with him.

It was only a momentary debate before she decided against it.
Straightening, she rubbed the swell of her belly, reassuring herself
again. It was something she had done almost constantly ever since she
had learned of her condition. It was more than a miracle, but it was
also a terrible burden. It kept her from doing much more than staying
behind while her partner went out and risked his life.

She'd been down that road before and she pushed aside the bitterness,
the uselessness she felt. She bent to the task of Mulder's pack,
quickly and efficiently unloading it. Much like Christmas had been as
a child or the thrill of seeing her father come home from a strange
port bearing trinkets and gifts, there was the joy of discovering what
Mulder had brought from that far-away land of their extinct
civilization. These things were not brightly colored packages, but
somehow they were even more dear.

Two large bags of rice, another of flour, one of oats, some white
beans, a big bag of assorted Vitamin E, B, B-12, C and D, and a whole
paper bag full of different kinds of seeds. Several different
household chemicals that could be used for a myriad of things, a
tightly rolled poly-fleece blanket, a crumpled pair of fluffy women's
socks meant to double as slippers, thread and needles and other bits
of useful things. The radio itself was carefully dismantled and packed
securely within the folds of another blanket and several items of
clothing that would fit an infant. She smiled at these, smoothing the
fabric under her hands and gently setting them aside before returning
to the pack.

A host of batteries spilled out of a side pocket, another yielded a
large unopened bag of salted sunflower seeds, two small flashlights
and a lighter. Mulder's knife and gun were produced from another along
with bullets for both his weapon, hers and birdshot for the shotgun.

She smiled to see several dusty bottles of pre-natal vitamins, two
bars of scented soap, shampoo and toothpaste. Luxuries these, and only
for her, she knew. Somehow the sight of the red, white and aqua of the
toothpaste tube brought tears to her eyes. With his limited space, he
should have brought more food, medical supplies or some other
necessity...but he had hauled her toothpaste and girlie-soap up the
mountain. Harlequin eat your heart out, she thought with a wry smile.
She would berate him later for wasting the space in his pack for her,
but she knew that he knew that she was inordinately pleased.

There were other things in the pack. He'd managed to find insulin for
Melchor and Jenn, there were clean syringes for her own small hoard of
supplies and a few more miscellaneous medical items she'd asked for
with no real hope of him being able to find them. She should have
known he would.

In the last pocket she found the Penicillin she'd been looking for
amongst a few other assorted luxuries he'd brought up for some of the
others.

She put away the other things in silence, enjoying the simple peace of
having him in the same room with her, enjoying the sound of his
breathing. She would not think of the stranger, or of what Mulder had
seen. She would not think of the dead city of Helena and everything
that had been lost. And she would not think of the virus and the
all-too-real monsters that now walked the earth.

For now, she could just be happy that he was back.

++++

He dreamed the same dream.

The snow field blinding white within a distant ring of winter trees.
Aching eyes squinting against the brightness. Trudging across it,
sweat prickling along his spine even in the cold, feet crunching
through the thick crust. The radio was heavy, pressing down on him
with each step. He could feel the fear of being out in the open
clearing adding to the weight on his shoulders... and then he smelled
it.

It was not an odor that could be likened to wood burning, nor to the
noxious choke of smoking oil...instead it was a sickening stench that
could only be compared to distilled fear. A mix between burning hair
and roasted meat. But it was old. Only a whiff of it caught at his
senses. It had stopped him, and his conscious self began to beat at
him, trying to make him keep going, to make him ignore the smoke. His
conscious self already knew what he would see there.

But it was inevitable. His dream feet carried him forward carefully,
keeping him low as he entered the copse. The smell was a little
thicker here, denser...the smell of death.

It had been a farmhouse, maybe a ranch. There were many out here on
the distant outskirts of Helena. There was a weathered old lodgepole
pine entryway over the dirt road that bore a brand on it in clumsy
woodburn. C Lazy 7. The main house had burned, but only incompletely.
Several of the walls still stood, the skeletal, blackened bones of the
frame. His spine crawled as he realized that the faint smoky smell was
not just from burning wood.

At first he kept to the treeline, afraid of the silence of the farm.
Moving carefully, his feet carried him on and the unease that swelled
in him was choking, the foreshadowed fear of what he knew he would see
overwhelmed him.

He ducked under the oft-repaired pole fence of the corral, his dream
feet slogging through dry, grainy snow. The charred skeletons of four
people in the main room were easily visible, the trio clustered
together in death, the bones blistered and cracked from the heat...all
dusted with a light layer of old snow. It looked like an adult and
three teens.

Walking through the wreckage of the house, he crouched in front of the
murdered family and simply stared at them, his mind coolly picking out
details of the scene without even thinking about it. Some things were
instinctive, and even now, two years after he'd left the life of a
profiler...an investigator...behind, he still found himself observing
details with the same eye.

He'd forced himself to stand, knees popping and creaking like an old
man's, turning his head from the tragedy. The dream began slowing
down, his heartbeat sounding loud in his ears.

A woodshed stood in a protected stand of dead aspen trees, sheltered
from the majority of snow. A lavender flash of color caught his eye.

His conscious self began to beat frantically at the glass barrier
between waking and seeing what came next.

The crunching of his boots in the old snow.

Old black blood splattered the scene. Everywhere was a grisly Jackson
Pollack painting of dark red fluid against the clean white canvas of
the snow. Death he knew. Violence he was nearly inured to, but this
was different. Her pale limbs were slender and white where they had
not decayed, the cold had preserved her slightly. He could see one of
her hands lying palm up next to a pile of neatly chopped wood, slim
fingers curled almost peacefully.

The dream pulled him forward. Closer. She wore house clothes, clearly
having been rousted from the indoors by her attacker, her feet clad
only in filthy socks. Her face was obscured by the lavender shirt
where it had been ripped up and back; but her bare, tattered torso,
blue with death, gaped at him. She had been slit from crotch to
sternum by a knife, and it was blatantly, horribly clear that she had
been pregnant. There was nothing left of her midsection. The fetus was
gone.

This was where his dream slipped its moorings from reality and veered
off into darker waters. Three weeks before when he'd *lived* this
nightmare he had lost what little he'd managed to eat earlier that
day, retching and moaning on his knees in the snow, oblivious to the
wet-cold seeping into the knees of his pants.

But now, in his dream, he walked towards the woman's corpse and his
hand stretched out to push aside the lavender fleece shirt to expose
the face.

Wide, lifeless blue eyes stared up at him from a face framed in
coppery silk.

"Scully!"

He surged into the waking world with a raw noise that seemed to have
been birthed in a place deeper than his gut.

"Mulder?" Soft, soothing hands were stoking his back, brushing his
untrimmed hair out of his face. He couldn't acknowledge her at first,
simply taking deep breaths, forcing his jaw to unclench, letting the
tight knot of fear and pain uncoil in his belly.

Every goddamned night for three weeks now. Would it never let him
sleep again? Always the same. Always.

Her presence quieted him, her scent, her touch, her voice. Her
reality.

He let himself bend over, pressing his palms into the hollows of his
eyesockets, hard. Forcing bursts of light to blossom behind his lids.
The small pain calmed him.

"Mulder?" she asked again. He heard the rustling of the blankets as
she leaned across the bed and lit a candle with a small, yellow bic
lighter. He let himself fall back onto the mattress, his eyes sliding
down the swollen curves of her body with a desperate need to fight off
the remnants of the dream.

"Just a dream." He said, surprised at how normal his voice sounded. He
still felt like he'd been run through a rusty thresher.

She crooked her mouth to one side as if to tell him that he'd have to
do better than that. He shook his head and tugged at her arm until she
fell back down alongside him. The candle flame flickered in the air
currents of the room, sending shivering pools of light and shadow
dancing across the smooth lines of her face. In the corner the fire
snapped and whispered to itself, burnt down to black and red embers.

"Just a bad dream," he repeated, letting his hand cup her cheek. "I
missed you, partner." His voice lowered a notch, breaking a little
under the weight of the inadequacy of his words.

"I have a way to fix that." She smiled softly. "Next time don't go
without me."

He opened his mouth to answer her, but she placed a single finger over
his lips, stopping him. "Just shut up, Mulder. I missed you too."

She lowered her soft mouth onto his, kissing him for the first time
since he'd returned. He'd been living on memories of her taste, her
texture, the incredible velvet touch of her lips and it was nothing in
the face of reality. Slowly, skillfully, she chased away the lingering
shades of the nightmare until all that was left was her, filling his
senses. Light fingers painted trails of liquid pleasure down his neck,
his chest, his ribs...pausing to wriggle under the shirt he still
wore.

His bandaged arm came up around her, his palm filling with the curve
of her bottom and squeezing until she let a breathless gasp puff past
her lips. One thing about living up here in Grizzly Adams country was
the fact that they habitually wore layers to bed at night to keep
warm. Even with the fire going, the cabin was drafty. A bonus,
however, was that by the time they struggled out of their clothes,
they were both overheated from the effort. Desire was burning
temporary life into his exhausted body, urgency replacing fear.

He captured both her wrists, holding her still and apart from him as
they rose onto their knees out of the nest of scratchy, army-issue
wool...examining her in the gentle light of the candle. It took his
breath away. Her breasts were fuller than before, round and tempting
in the warm glow...her cheeks flushed, her curves fleshed out. But it
was the fertile swell of her stomach that captivated him. Still
holding her wrists, he bent his head and ran a gentle mouth over the
firm, warm skin...reveling in the shiver that quaked through her. She
was easily twice as large as she had been when he'd left and it sent
both a surge of fear and awe through him at the same time. Knowing
that she hated the latter and wanting to be rid of the former, he
pulled her forward until she straddled his thighs. Her eyes were
limpid in the flickering half light, her mouth half-open and slightly
swollen from his kisses. He almost came just looking at her.

Holding her arms to her sides, hampering her movement... he lowered
his mouth to her breasts, his fingers entwining tightly with hers as
he pulled a taut nipple between tongue and teeth. She made a tiny
whimpering noise that shot straight to his groin, his erection
twitching against her. The sensitive head was just brushing the wiry
curls of her pubis and he could feel her tiny, anxious thrusts against
him, rubbing at him even while he held her pinioned her with his
hands.

The loneliness and worry of the past month vaporized under the
onslaught of the thing between them. To say he had missed her was a
lie. He'd withered a little more every day without her. It was almost
funny, now, to realize how dearly he had depended on the artificial
lifeline of their cellphones. She had always been a single speed-dial
button away. No more. He had gone day by day wondering if she was
going to be there when he returned.

He paused in his ministrations just for a moment, simply burying his
face between her breasts, pressing her beautifully swollen body
against his. He felt the brush of her lips in his hair and a hard,
painful lump formed in his throat.

He fought the urge to give in to the simple need for maudlin tears.

Instead he curled his arms around the slender column of her back and
guided her body down onto his. Her head tipped slowly back as he
filled her, her slick wet heat surrounding him, a whisper of his name
on her lips. His hands played across the smooth skin of her bottom,
cupping her hips in his fingers and lifting her up and down on his
shaft with aching slowness. Her freed hands trailed up his arms to
curl around the back of his neck as he dropped his mouth to her
breasts once more.

They moved together gently, reverently, living in each second,
savoring each sensation. But it had been a long time, a long stressful
time, and it seemed only moments before he felt her tensing
deliciously in his arms, her breath coming faster, her fingers
tightening in his hair. He had been close before he even entered her
and he simply let his control go, feeling the crescendo rising in him,
the pleasure surging powerfully through his body...washing away
everything but the fact that she was alive, that he was alive...that
they were together again.

They stayed like that for a long moment in time, he cradled her body
to his almost possessively, wanting to sustain the sensation of being
able to forget everything but her. More than his lover, more than his
friend... partner was still the best word for what they were.

It was she who broke the silence between them.

"You brought toothpaste, Mulder?"

His face was still pressed into her breasts as he started to chuckle.

"I love your idea of pillow-talk Scully." He grinned against her
fragrant skin planting a final kiss in the hollow of her throat before
she dismounted his knees. She must have peeked in his pack while he
was passed out on the bed. He unfolded his legs out from under him
with a groan, finally noting that they'd lost a little circulation
during their exertions. "Yeah, I brought you toothpaste," he said as
they both burrowed back under the covers again, resettling in each
others arms. "I didn't know how else to tell you that your breath's
been pretty rank lately."

She snorted, a huff of air against his neck.

"You're one to talk. When was the last time you washed? And what's
with the beard? You're not keeping that, are you?"

"You been taking nagging fishwife lessons from Jenn while I was gone?"
he asked, grinning down at her.

"I don't need lessons, Mulder, you bring it out in me naturally."

"You didn't need *me* to help you find your inner nag, Scully -ow!" He
winced as she pinched one of his nipples sharply in punishment. "There
wasn't a lot of opportunity for a quick shower out there. I did find
some working plumbing in the outskirts of Helena, but as for the
beard...what... you don't like it? I thought it fit right in with the
whole Grizzly Adams thing we were cultivating up here."

"Tell you what, as soon as you befriend a giant bear and an old drunk
prospector, you can grow it back. But first thing tomorrow, say
goodbye to it. It scratches. I think you gave me a rash."

"Whatever you say *dear*." He said in his best browbeaten voice. She
pinched him again.

" ...But feel free to wear the red flannel shirt with suspenders" she
added. They both chuckled softly at the image.

They lapsed into silence again after he blew the candle out and just
when he thought she had fallen asleep, she spoke.

"What are we going to do now, Mulder? We can't stay up here for much
longer. If Helena is dead, where do we go?" It was rhetorical. She
didn't expect him to answer something that she herself could not.

After two years of living on guesswork and luck, they still didn't
know what to do.

No one could guess at the numbers...the cold statistics of who had
lived and who had died. He only knew that most had fallen in that
first wave of the virus, populating the lands with the hulking,
mindlessly brutal Shredders. So many had died as the invaders birthed,
more had died after...when they spread across the countryside killing
randomly and ravenously. A sweltering summer had been chosen by the
Invaders for their incursion, a summer heat that had hastened the
development of the ancient species.

What had happened would almost be laughable if not for the tragedy of
it. The way that you sniggered in horror at the videoed voyeurism of a
skier wiping out, or a small child hitting his dad in the balls with a
baseball bat.

When the First Stage was over and the newborn gray aliens had emerged
from their molted monster-skins...they began to die.

Not from any organized resistance of the humans that had scampered
underground...taking refuge like rats in the dark, nor from any brave,
determined effort to create a working vaccine for the virus. No. While
the humans hid, the earth itself rose to its defense.

It was an imminently common virus. One that every man, woman and child
was born immune to. But the new invader was not.

And they had died.

They tried to fight it, but most of their traitorous human allies had
perished at that point, and they were dying too fast to discover a
vaccine of their own.

Within a year, they gave up and pulled out.

Humanity had crept back out into the daylight to see what had been
done to their world. The invaders had not cleaned up their mess when
they'd gone. The virus was still very much an issue, and a vaccine had
still not been found. The First Stagers were still born, and they
still killed indiscriminately. It was only once they pupated into
their final form that the human virus killed them.

But when it was winter, the monsters did not metamorphosize. The cold
stunted the development. So they hunted and they roamed, and they
killed whatever they found. But they did not die.

The cities were packed with the long rotted, spongy corpses that the
aliens had used to gestate in. Everywhere they looked, urban centers
squatted like silent graveyards. Roads were clustered with abandoned
cars piloted by the dead. Some had died from playing host, some had
died at the hands of the newborn monsters and some had simply killed
themselves or each other.

Hard to guess how many had survived. Mostly hybrids and a motley mix
of humans.  It didn't really matter. People formed groups, they tried
to find places to reconstruct some semblance of safety and community
where they would not be killed by the predators, human and not, that
wandered everywhere.

Like the Hybrids, the Shredders could not be shot, not without
bringing death upon yourself and everyone around you. It made things
harder. It forced them up into the coldest reaches where the monsters
did not wander, playing simple games of avoidance.

Which was where they were now. Hoping to wait it out until it was safe
to come back down. Was it ever going to be safe? He curled his arms
around Scully, pulling her close to him, his hand stroking her satin
curves, reacquainting himself with her new body. It didn't seem that
it was. The grisly murder scene he'd stumbled upon had reawakened him
to the reality of *human* monsters. It was a danger that had no
compunction about coming up here to get what it wanted.

The stranger's appearance tonight had driven it home just how
vulnerable they really were. It was easy to forget after 10 months of
relative peace in their imaginary Xanadu.

Neither of them spoke again. They simply huddled in the dark of the
old warming hut while the snow fell outside, thick and inexorable
while the fire talked quietly to itself in the corner.

One more month, he thought, curling his hand around her belly while
she slipped into sleep. Three more weeks and they would both be able
to protect their child on a more level playing field.

But it would be Spring by then. The cold wouldn't keep the monsters at
bay.

And he did something he hadn't done throughout the entirety of their
ordeal. Something he hadn't done since his sister was taken all those
eons ago.

He prayed.

+++++

My father was an asshole. Can I say that word? I guess I can now that
he's dead. If I ever cursed in front of him I'd usually end up
regretting it pretty bad. Usually. It got to the point that I'd egg
him on on purpose...just to watch him lose control.

He'd turn this queer shade of purple, his eyes sort of sinking into
his skull. He never could take it when any of us would stand up to
him. Sometimes even something as simple as asking a question would be
akin to doubting his authority. I gained personal knowledge of the
working end of his belt. And by that I mean the buckle.

My Granddad would try to stop him sometimes, but usually nothing could
halt him once he got going. He was like that, my dad. I hated him
after those beatings, but I hated my Granddad more for not trying
harder to stop him.

I was the second youngest of five, and for some reason that meant I
received most of his attention. No idea why. I was maybe around 8 when
he first started looking at me like that. 9 by the time he started to
come to my room at night. He'd threaten me, my sisters, my
mom...everyone he could think of but Jesus himself if I dared to make
a noise. I was quiet. Quiet like the rabbits.

Mr. Ears was quiet too when I'd broken his neck. Only the eyes gave
anything away...all that fear. Fear of the power I held over him. The
fear had gone away after I'd moved my hands just-so. It really had
been an accident.

It was on purpose when I killed Lila.

But don't tell.

++++++

The tap on the window was expected and he hurried to the small square
of glass before the sleeper up in the loft woke. Dim white light was
peeking through the curtains, hitting him in the face as he pulled the
fabric back to peer outside. Denny's pale freckled face filled the
frosted pane, his hand gesturing impatiently. Pike could see 8
year-old Shanida behind him, her dark brown skin bold against the
white of the snowfall that still gripped the camp.

He nodded at the older boy and let the curtain fall shut, tiptoeing
across the room to gather up the clothes he'd piled in the corner the
night before. He could hear the faint buzz of his Dad snoring up in
the loft. As carefully and quietly as he could, he pulled his clothes,
boots and jacket on and slipped out the front door.

Denny and Shan were waiting in the snow a few yards away under a tree.
The flakes still fell thick and heavy in the oddly still air, low
clouds clung to the mountaintops...obscuring all sign of the forest
around them. It was eerily quiet.

He plowed his way through the drifts that had gathered, amazed by the
fact that so much snow had fallen overnight. It was nearly up to his
hips. He had grown up in Philly, he was no stranger to snow...but
this, this was different than anything he'd ever seen. A childishly
gleeful smile pasted his face as he joined his friends under the tree.

"So much snow" he whispered quietly to them, scooping up a thick
handful. Shan just nodded, looking around at the socked-in vale with
wide eyes.

"Will there be an avalanche?" she asked. Of them all, Shanida and her
mom were the most affected by the mountains they'd all sought refuge
in. Neither of them had ever been out of their burrough in New York,
much less out in the middle of the wilderness, before the end had
come.

Denny shook his head knowingly. The taller boy was from Montana. This
was old hat to him.

"Nah. I seen worse storms than this. It'll blow itself out soon
enough. Snow like this'll mean good water for the lowlands come
springtime." He had the sound of a boy parroting words he'd heard
spoken many times by adults, but Pike didn't mention that. Denny
considered himself the 'leader' of their little group. He was bigger
and older, so Shan and Pike just went along with it.

He did seem to know a lot about the world they now found themselves
in. He knew how to catch squirrels and what the names of the wild
animals were. He knew what their tracks looked like and he knew how to
whittle a spear with his Swiss army knife. Once he had caught a fish
with his hands. And he knew how to fire a rifle. That alone was enough
to make them follow his lead. Even though he was a know-it-all and he
always thought he was better than him and Shan.

"Come on. They'll be waking up soon. Everyone will want to know what
Mulder saw while he was gone." Pike urged.

"He's back?" Shan blew a stream of smoky condensation out of her mouth
experimentally, reaching up to tug her hat closer down around her ears
as they trudged away from the camp and into the thick treeline.

"Didn't you hear the commotion last night? A stranger showed up too.
He's staying with Howie." Pike said. Their voices seemed to echo a
little queerly in the hollow white of the silent fall.

"A stranger?" Shan asked, her voice a little nervous. Pike knew she
was remembering the last strangers.

"He's just one guy. Lloyd said he was old. We can handle him." Denny
spoke with an annoyingly superior tone, as if he would have anything
to do with any 'handling'. He was 15, not 25. Pike rolled his eyes at
Shan behind the older boys back and she giggled, a little of her fear
disappearing.

"Besides, as far as what Mulder saw, who cares? We already know that
there's nothing out there but the virus. And Shredders." Denny said
sagely.

"My mom said that Helena had a better chance..." Shan stated a little
defiantly. "Because it's in the mountains, and smaller than the other
cities we've seen. Maybe it got overlooked..."

Both Shan and Pike were silent for a moment as they remembered the
gutted carcasses of St. Louis, Chicago, and Philly that they had
passed through on their way west. Only Shanida had seen New York, and
she didn't talk about it.

"There's no reason that Helena would be any differ'nt." Denny scoffed.
"Not like the people who lived there are immune to the virus any
more'n anyone else."

"Well, maybe the virus wasn't released there?" Pike said hopefully.
"Maybe the electricity works there, and the supermarkets are open, and
they still use cars ...?"

"Don't get your hopes up." Denny scoffed. "The adults already worked
themselves up into believing that crap after Mulder suggested he would
go down and look around. The real reason he went down was because
those assholes stole most of the vitamins. He was just getting more
for Dan- Dr. Scully. He doesn't give a rat's ass about the rest of
us."

"That's not true-!" Shan started, but Denny cut her off, not ungently.

"Yes it is. You're gonna have to smarten up if you want to survive
around here Shan. This isn't the city anymore."

"Shut up Denny," Pike said, frowning angrily. He didn't believe a word
of it. "You shut up. Mulder saved us all. We would never have known
that cold kept the Shredders away. We'd all be dead."

Denny only shrugged nonchalantly, a gesture he'd picked up from Lloyd.

Lloyd was the man who had found Denny wandering the forest on a foray
for Elk the past fall.  A big, cold man, solemn and gruff, he scared
the hell out of Pike. The youth tended to avoid him with alacrity.
He'd heard Cissy one day asking his Dad how a man like that had wound
up attaching himself to a child. His dad, in his typical slow fashion,
had remarked that there were few people who had the kind of
heartlessness it would take *not* to take in an orphan.

Not that Denny would have liked that title.

Pike had lost his own mother to the virus, watching her body go spongy
and clear within a day...and then birthing the horror that had been
gestating inside her. His father had had the sense to lock the thing
in the bedroom, giving them the precious few moments they needed to
get away.

He pushed the thoughts aside, disliking the tearing grief that
tightened in his throat every time he remembered his mother. He
wondered sometimes if Denny ever thought of his dead family with
sorrow...or if Shan missed her dad as much as he missed his mother.
These were not things that anyone spoke of...the people missing from
their lives.

The rock face they had been aiming for loomed ahead and he eagerly
picked his steps up with the other two when they saw it.

"I hope she's Ok," Shan said, her hand going to her bulging pockets.
Pike could see the edges of a piece of cloth sticking out and he
suspected she had snuck some food from her dinner the night before.

A dark crack rose up in the whiteness, outlines blurred in the
snow-thickened air. He'd been through that opening many times now, but
it always made him think of Joey Diller's house. He remembered Joey's
house the day they had run from the thing that had killed his mother.
The front door had been wide open, a darkness just within. He'd had
dreams about the empty mystery of that open door.

Denny crouched at the opening, peering inside. He pulled his
flashlight out, but he didn't turn it on. All of them had been
ingrained with the necessity to conserve batteries.

From inside the darkness, Pike could hear the chuffing breath of an
animal. She was still alive. A thrill of relief shot up his spine and
he glanced over at Shan to see the same excitement reflected there.

Denny crawled inside, and a moment later, he and Shan followed.

After only a few yards of low ceilinged space, the rocky walls opened
up, exposing a dimly lit cavern of sorts. The floor was dry and cold
with hard-packed dirt. Their breathing echoed loudly in the space and
they waited a moment for their eyes to adjust.

They had built a nest of pine boughs in the corner of the cave and two
rough-hewn bowls of wood rested in front of the makeshift bed filled
with water. But it was the creature that lay on the pine needles that
held their attention.

An elk calf lay on its side, eyes half open and chest rising and
falling slowly. Shan walked almost timidly up to the animal, settling
on her knees beside it and resting a hand on its thick, shaggy coat.
In the dark, they could almost forget that there was a deep slash
across it's throat, dark and crusted with blood. It had been attacked
by something. A Shredder. That's what Denny said.

The calf must have wandered up to the high country to die.

"She seems a little better, I guess." Shan said in a small voice.
"Maybe we should tell Dr. Scully about it. She could help." Shan had
said that every time they'd come up here since they'd found it two
days ago.

Denny made a snort of derision just as Pike had known he would. The 15
year-old believed that he understood the ways of adults better than
his friends, but Pike wasn't so certain he shared that view. Denny
insisted that the adults would just kill the calf, seeing no point in
trying to keep it alive. 'An elk isn't meant for a pet' was what he
said they would say. It *did* sound like something his dad would say.
But he wasn't so sure that Dr. Scully would.

Pike came up and knelt next to Shanida, taking her hand as they looked
at the wounded animal. He'd had visions when they had found it of
having it as a friend when it was grown. It would follow him around
and eat treats from his hand.

Denny had said that would never happen, but if he thought that, then
what was he doing here? Why did he bring it water and food? Shan
pulled the tied cloth out of her pocket and withdrew several
half-crumbled Saltines. The calf didn't even lift its head to sniff
the offering. Maybe she didn't like crackers.

"It's gonna die." Denny said flatly, staring at the half-open brown
eye. Pike glanced over at Shanida to see the beginnings of tears on
her cold cheeks and he glared at the older boy balefully.

"You don't know that! She's getting better..." he squeezed Shan's hand
in empathy. His own throat was suspiciously tight. Did everything have
to die? Images of his mother returned violently and he felt tears
sting his own eyes.

A sound from outside, the distant rattle of tree branch on tree
branch...a snapping echo in the hollow void of the snowfall.

The noise startled both of the younger children and they looked up at
Denny a little fearfully. The older boy was staring out the crack into
the blaring white, his hand clenching and unclenching on the big
skinning knife that he always carried around on his belt. He said his
father had given it to him. They must do things differently in
Montana...his dad would never have given him such a big knife.

"Stay in here." Denny whispered, narrowing his eyes at both of them.
Shan curled her fingers into the thick coat of the calf. And then he
walked out of the cavern, his body briefly silhouetted against the
white glare.

Pike looked at Shan, his breath fogging in the icy air of the cave,
their fingers tightening on each others'.

"What could it be?" Shan whispered with wide eyes.

Pike shook his head, holding his finger up to his lips. It couldn't be
a Shredder. Mulder said it was too cold up here for them. Only the
sound of the calf's labored breathing could be heard.

And then, a shadow at the entrance.

"Come on out. There was nothing there. Musta just been an old branch
giving out under the snow weight."

A brief moment to stroke the calf and then they were pushing out into
the half-light of the snowfall. Denny stood a little distance from the
opening staring into the nearby treeline with narrowed eyes.

"We'd better get back before anyone notices we're gone." Then the
older boy simply turned and trudged off down the slope back to the
camp, leaving them to hurry to catch up.

It was only once they were almost back to the camp that Pike noticed a
large set of footprints pressed down amongst their smaller ones in the
snow.

The tracks of an adult.

+++++

Scully swam up from the first real night's sleep she'd had since
Mulder had disappeared over the ridge two months before. His arm was
slung heavily over her, his palm tucked under the swell of her left
breast. His body was a warm weight at her back, his breath blowing
softly against the nape of her neck.

She curled into him more closely, feeling the hard heat of his morning
erection pressing into the softness of her bottom. Scully let her eyes
close drowsily again, luxuriating in the basic animal pleasure
afforded simply by lying abed with him, feeling his skin, his warmth,
his arousal...proof he was real.

Lifting his arm and slipping out from under it without waking him, she
bent and pressed her lips to his slackened cheek before pulling her
discarded, overlarge poly-fleece back on over her goose-pimpled flesh
to fight the chill. The fire had gone out, and that was a priority.
She could fancy that her breath was fogging in the cold of the room.

The ashes were still warm and it was fairly easy to get a fire
crackling and snapping again. There was plenty of wood. The rest of
the camp made certain that she never had to go out and get it herself.
Not that she wasn't capable, Howie had assured her when her eyes had
started to spit blue fire, it was just that there was no need for her
to split and carry wood when they were doing it anyway. She had rolled
her eyes and let them.

It was easier to pander to a man's need to play provider and protector
than it was to fight it.

Once the fire was blazing, heating the chill air of the room
admirably, she rummaged in the makeshift crates that functioned as
cabinets and found the newly restocked bag of oats. First she would
get oatmeal started before she made the first of many of the day's
trips to the frigid latrine. Too bad she hadn't gotten pregnant during
a point in her life when she had access to indoor plumbing. Timing was
everything.

She scooped up a bowlful of the dry oats and set them nearby. Dry
goods were really all they could store. There certainly was no long
term refrigeration. The all-too-rare freshly killed meat had to be
eaten almost immediately...though that was no problem for 13 people.
12 with Mulder gone. They had all forgone such things as flavor,
though Scully had been learning what could be done with salt. She was
concerned that she was not meeting the nutritional requirements her
condition called for, but she did the best she could. The vitamins
that Mulder had found for her would help.

There wasn't really anything else she could do till spring anyway.
They had not had the time that fall to build a storehouse or any sort
of a curing shed, so they'd just stocked up on what they could and
prayed they'd make it through the winter.

It was amusing to think that the Indians had not wintered up this
high. Even crusty old mountain men had known better.

Taking the blackened pot, she went to the door and cracked it open,
planning on scooping up snow for water. Instead, she froze in the
opening, the cold air biting at her hands as face...watching as the
stranger, Hobb Strick, made his slow and careful way back across the
camp to Howie's cabin. He slipped inside and a moment later the
clearing was still again.

Frowning, she filled the pot with snow and withdrew into the warmth of
the room. What could he have been doing sneaking around out there this
early? Not like it necessarily meant anything...but she'd noted her
paranoia was running higher and higher the bigger she grew. Shrugging
it off, she set the pot on the iron hook Howie had drilled into the
stone of the fireplace.

Mulder continued to sleep the sleep of the dead and she let him. She
knew him. Knew how he worked. Long burn and hard crash. That was his
pattern. It wasn't pretty, but it was how he did things. Always had.
She gingerly arched her back and lowered herself into a chair to wait
for the water to boil. It wouldn't be too long before people would be
coming over to ask Mulder questions. Wanting to know what he'd seen,
what he'd brought back. The radio was a prize, though she found
herself a little frightened to discover if there really were people
out there. Scared to find out there weren't.

Another noise from outside caught her attention and she craned her
neck to see out the window. The three children trooped across the
center of the camp, Denny in front. She smiled faintly at Pike and
Shan, gamely struggling to keep up with the longer legs of the 15 year
old in the deep snow.

Denny. Her smile turned wry. He was a nice boy, and he'd helped her
out a lot the past month looking for medicinal plants in the woods,
but he was getting on her nerves. She was capable of recognizing a
teenaged crush...odd as it was to have a crush on a woman the size of
a Volkswagon Bug. It really wasn't that abnormal though, as Mulder the
Psychologist would tell her. The boy had no other real female objects
to focus his budding adolescent feelings on. Cissy wasn't exactly his
type, he being a white little Montana boy. Jenn was too old. Anna
stayed apart from everyone, and she was Lesbian besides. Roz was a
Hybrid. That left her... the short, pregnant woman.

Denny's more overt attentions were just going to have to stop. She'd
tried putting him down gently on more than one occasion, but he wasn't
getting it. She'd just have to be firmer. Especially when the boy
started getting jealous of her partner. It was only a matter of time
now that Mulder was back. As it was, he already talked of Mulder with
scorn in his voice.

The water had begun to boil and she dumped the oats into it, stirring
it for a moment before covering it and pushing to her feet.

She touched the pocket that still held the penicillin Mulder had
brought back gently and then quickly pulled on her boots and her coat.
A last caressing glance at his sleeping form and she pushed out into
the haze of the snowstorm. She had time to visit Anna before the
oatmeal was done.

It was not a loud, howling blizzard. Yet. The worst ones were always
quiet, stifling, suffocating things at first. It spoke of a true storm
to come. But now it just cast a silent unifying blanket of dense,
heavy, wet snow over everything, hiding all. It was so eerie in the
still, gray blankness... the fat falling flakes building up even as
she watched. A last look back at the cabin over her shoulder and then
she was pressing through the drifts past Chris's cabin, onwards down
the slope to where four more shacks squatted in the opaque whiteness.

"Dana..." She heard her named called from behind and she stopped and
turned in time to see Chris trudge up, his gray eyes concerned.

"What is it, Chris?"

"Have you seen Pike? He wasn't in the cabin when I got up this
morning."

Scully smiled. Chris was a little overprotective of his son. It was
understandable considering the world they lived in now, but Pike was a
boy. And boys were always getting into things. Especially this boy.
Peter was an especially bright and active child. Her mother would have
called him a 'handful'.

"Yes. I saw him and the others pass by a few minutes ago. I think they
might have been headed for your cabin." Chris was the only person in
the camp in possesion of an actual board game, and the kids tended to
spend a lot of time playing it. Especially since the snow had come.

A look of relief passed over the man's kindly face and he smiled at
her.

"Thanks, Dana. How's Mulder? He looked tired as hell last night." She
could hear the unspoken questions behind his words. He wanted to know
what Mulder had found.

"Still sleeping." she shook her head then, her smile fading. "He
didn't find anyone, Chris. But he did get the radio like we'd hoped."

"That's something, I guess." Chris reached up and rubbed at his
reddened nose. He glanced in the direction Dana had been headed.
"Going to check on Anna?"

She nodded.

"Ummhmm. Got some Penicillin. She'll be better in no time."

"I'll let you go then. Thanks," he said, gratitude for a number of
things evident on his face. He turned and moved off in search of his
son.

She resumed her slog through the snow, entering the treeline and
following an obscured trail she knew by heart until the shape of Anna
and Roz's cabin crouched before her far apart from the others.

Anna had mild pneumonia. Scully had managed to treat it with a few
clumsily administered local herbs, but it lingered. Dr. Scully,
Medicine Woman, she was not, though Mulder teased her unmercifully
with the title. As for the pneumonia, the Penicillin would drive it
away for good. The big bottle he'd found would be a good resource to
have. No good against the virus, but still effective against the
lesser ailments. Ailments that people still came down with. The humans
anyway.

It was Roz, the Hybrid, who opened the door when she knocked.
Disconcerting, she thought...as she always did when she looked at the
tall brunette. She knew that Mulder had a harder time than she did.
Roz was one of Samantha's clones, one of the many that they had seen
over the past years. She was nothing like his sister, Mulder had told
her time and time again. She was hard, unforgiving, and completely
lacking a sense of humor. No surprise to Scully. What kind of a life
had the woman had? This was no coddled younger sister, this was a
pawn. An experiment. A lab rat. How could she not be hard?

But beyond her steely exterior, she was imminently capable of
compassion and love. Scully knew that better than anyone, for she saw
how she doted on Anna. Roz nodded at her, a flicker of something
similar to relief in her eyes when she opened the door wide to let her
in.

"Dr. Scully," she greeted her bluntly. "She's no better, but no
worse."

Scully dug in her pocket and pulled out the bottle of penicillin with
a little flourish and a wan smile. She was pleased to see Roz's
amber-green eyes sparkle with hope.

"He's back then?" she asked, folding her arms tightly across her chest
as she followed Scully across the tiny interior to where Anna lay
abed. Roz had not been privy to the excitement of last night. Scully
only nodded, kneeling down and dumping two of the round tablets into
her palm. Anna lifted puffy eyelids to look at her, mustering a faint
smile. The girl was only about 17. She'd been a hooker before the
world ended and how she had managed to survive since then was
something Scully didn't want to know. The scars on her face and side
spoke of nightmares to hear the telling. Likely a run-in with a
Shredder...and that was indeed the stuff of horror movies.

"Take this, Anna. It should do the trick. No more dirty tea." She
smiled. Roz had brought a tin cup of water and Scully lifted the
girl's lank-haired head to help her swallow. Anna breathed an obscured
thanks from around a watery, bubbling cough and then Scully was
testing her forehead and checking her throat. Her breathing was still
stentorian, but far better than it had been a week earlier.

She pushed to her feet as Anna's eyes closed. Already she was anxious
to get back to Mulder. Being in Roz's presence often did that to her.
She had her brother's eyes. Or, she should say, she had Samantha's
brother's eyes.

"Same thing, Roz. Lots of water, try to get her to eat. She should be
better by tomorrow." She doled out two more of the precious tablets
and gave them to the woman. "Give her these this evening."

"Thank you Dr. Scully." Roz said, her usual stiffness softening with
relief. Scully nodded.

"We have a visitor. He arrived last night. Just wanted to warn you in
case you saw him."

"Visitor?" Roz's eyes narrowed. None of them were fans of strangers.
It was ironic, considering how much all of them wanted to find other
survivors.

"Hobb Strick." She said. "He claims he's on his way to Idaho. Seems
nice enough...if a little 'off'. He'll probably just stay through the
storm. He's in Howie's cabin." She explained.

Roz stared at her for a long, uncomfortable moment and then nodded
almost as if she was giving the notion of the stranger permission to
be real.

"How's Fox?"

"Fine. Tired, but fine." She wet her lips, seeing no way around it.
"Helena was like the rest. There was nothing there. Just the dead."

Roz's expression stayed the same, but her eyes registered her
disappointment. Another nod, this one resigned.

Scully turned from her before she could ask anything more. "Wait..."
Roz's voice froze her with her hand on the door handle. She did not
turn, but she did wait.

An embroidered scarf was shoved into her periphery.

"Take this." The gruff voice said. Scully bit her lips. All the people
here continued to try and reward her for simply using her skills. It
was uncomfortable, but she had learned that they wanted desperately to
do something to pay her back. She took the scarf. It had been cut from
a standard, green, wool army blanket, just like so many of them used,
but Roz had sewn a spectacular pattern into it with what looked like
colored thread. She didn't ask where she had gotten the thread, but
she did turn to look at the woman in gratitude and awe.

"It's beautiful, Roz. Thank you." She faltered, not knowing what else
to say. The taller woman shook her head, her stern face open in a rare
moment.

"Thank you, Dana. If Anna'd died, I don't know what I would have done.
And thank Mulder, for all he's done for us. I've.." she stopped,
uncomfortable with showing emotion.

Scully stood there for a long moment, stunned, not by the words, but
by the circumstances in her life that had led to this.

In the end, all she could do was nod, turn, and leave. Trudging back
across through the ever-rising drifts towards her cabin, and
Mulder...the only constant in her life now.

++++

Lila was the only one in my family younger than me. She was cute as a
button and dumb as a post. My mom used to coddle her to no end. She
never had to do chores. Never had to do much of anything beside look
cute. She attached herself to me for some reason.

I couldn't stand it. I hated having to look down into that sweet
little buttercup face. Hated her empty blue eyes. Hated how she was
never afraid of me, not even when I yelled at her.

Most of all I hated that she never had to worry about the nightly
visits from my dad. He wouldn't have dared...though I caught him
looking at her from time to time. Mom watched her too closely, because
she was special. She was pretty and she was stupid. Both reasons to
make sure she was always safe. She was too stupid to understand the
muttered threats my dad made to me if I ever thought of telling.

So I hated her. And a lot of that hate was from the fact that my mom,
knowing or unknowing, never protected me from Him the way that she
protected Lila.

My dad was building a cattle pond for the east field. He needed river
stones for the bottom, to hold the visqueen layer down. I was the
lucky shit that got called to gather the rocks...and of course, Lila
followed along after. Not like she had to work too, she was just there
to watch me and smile at me and love me. For no goddamned reason.

I brought the old mule and the wooden wagon we used to Hay the cows
and slowly, I began to fill it with the smooth flat rocks of the
riverbed. I worked until my arms screamed with pain, till my back
ached and my fingers were cold and numb from the water. Lila sat on
the river back staring at me the whole time with an idiot's grin on
her face.

It was only an hour from sunset when she got up and walked to the edge
of the river to watch me as I waded back and forth to the wagon bed
with rocks dripping water down my forearms. And then she put one foot
into the water.

I started to tell her to stop, to get the hell away from the river, to
sit the fuck back down...

...but I didn't.

She took another step into the current and I watched her, rock in
hands, the water rushing cold and sharp around my knees.

Another step, grinning at me like she was putting the first footprints
on the moon, and then she slipped. Which was bound to happen. She
splashed down into the river, soaking her clothes, gasping from the
cold. And she began to cry.

If there's one sure way to earn a whipping, it's making Lila cry. She
began to howl, red-faced and I dropped my rock back into the river
with a splash and began to wade towards her.

I had honestly thought I intended to help her up, to put her back on
the bank of the river...but really, in my mind, I knew what I was
going to do. I wanted that feeling back. The feeling I got when I
broke Mr. Ears' neck. I wanted to see that same fear in her eyes. Fear
of me.

And so when I got to her, I did not help her up. I flipped her onto
her back in the water and I pushed her under. I wanted to see her
eyes, I wanted her to see mine.

It was believed without question when I brought back her body, sobbing
tears that I am still not sure were entirely fake. I earned a
whipping, yes...for not trying harder to 'save' her when she'd been
'swept away'.

But that night, when my dad stole into my room, I could close my eyes
and remember her face when she'd realized...like the dumb animal she
was...what I was doing.

And it wasn't an accident. It was all me.

+++++


The morning was waxing on. Not that you could really tell in this
storm, but things did seem to be getting a little brighter. The new
wind bit sharply into the exposed flesh of her face and she huddled
down deeper into her new scarf, tucking her mittened hands deep into
the pockets of the Gore-tex jacket she wore.

The tracks she had just made up to Roz's cabin were already covered,
mere dips and bumps in the smooth surface of the snow. She pushed
through the deep drifts slowly, trying not to overly exert herself.
The baby tended to react to too much exercise and the last thing she
wanted to do was disturb the pregnancy. It had been dicey as it was
just getting to this point.

Of course, she wasn't even going to go into the fact that she
shouldn't have been pregnant to begin with. Who was she to look a gift
horse in the mouth? The circumstances were not those that she might
have wished for, but when you were given a miracle, it was best not to
make demands.

A noise in the woods to her right halted her progress and she peered
out through the ghostly trees. A shape, moving furtively beyond a
stand of silvered Aspen trees. She took a few tentative steps out off
the path.

"Hello?" she called out, her voice echoing in the vacuum of the
snowfall. For some reason her heartrate stepped up a notch, her mind
replaying the horror story Mulder had told her last night.

Even now the thought of it made her stomach coil and churn dangerously
and she stopped, one mittened hand on the icy trunk of a massive fir,
forcing her gorge to settle.

"Hello? Is there someone out there?" She had never been one to simply
dismiss something suspicious, and there was a stranger in camp. There
would be no repeat of what the last strangers had done. She was no
trusting Howie to be hit on the head when her back was turned. She
could feel the hard weight of the gun she never went without tucked
into the large inner pocket of her coat.

It was a little warmer in the thick of the trees, the wind did not
bite so strongly as it did in the open. But it still shook and
whistled in the treetops, sending a fine mist of dislodged snow spray
down to mix in with the fat flakes. The crisp scent of pine sap and
ice filled her senses, clearing her head, sharpening her mind.

There was nothing out here. She really had been seeing things. She
provided a mental picture of herself, all pregnant 5 foot 1 of her,
standing in the middle of a snowstorm chasing ghosts. Mulder would say
she was being stubborn. He would see right through her false bravado.
He'd say she was just trying to prove to herself that she was not a
helpless pregnant woman. That she was just as capable as she'd always
been.

Maybe so, she admitted reluctantly. Part of it was fear. This
pregnancy came packed with it. A nice, built-in terror. Fear not for
her own life, but for this baby. This child that shouldn't be, but
was.

She stubbornly forced her legs to carry her a distance further into
the woods, her eyes still scanning for that flitter of movement she'd
glimpsed. A little ways in and she found herself cresting a rise,
looking down on a thickly forested slope, granite rocks jutting from
the earth here and there in shadowy monoliths.

In the surreal dusk she heard a sound under the moaning of the wind. A
twig snapping.

Her breath caught and she spun around, her eyes scouring the blurry
details of the white forest. Her hand closed around the grip of the
gun in her pocket, quickly stripping off the mitten and shoving it
inside her jacket. The handle was icy cold in her warm hands, her
fingers white against the dark gray gunmetal.

"Who's there?" she called out, ashamed by how breathless her voice
sounded.

Nothing. But now she could *feel* the eyes on her. She could almost
fancy she heard breathing. Freezing fingers of fear traveled up and
down her spine and she struggled to control the breath that was
billowing from her lips like the smokestack of a train engine.

She was *not* afraid. Not of something she couldn't even identify. It
was probably a squirrel.

"I'm armed!" she called out, moving in a little circle, squinting to
see through both the snowfall and the false twilight.

Then she heard the unmistakable crunch of snow under a foot.

"Show yourself, goddamnit! I'm not afraid to use this!" Her voice was
soaked up into the soft air of the snowfall.

The silence was like a palpable presence all its own. Even the moaning
and twisting of the ever-increasing wind did not camouflage it. The
cold was biting uncomfortably into her fingers and she knew that all
too soon her hand would be nerveless. What in hell had she been
thinking to walk out so far from camp alone? What had she been hoping
to prove?

She gathered all the anger she felt towards herself and began to walk
forward, the gun still out and ready, her eyes skimming all sides of
the suddenly murky forest for movement. She managed to keep her cool
for a grand total of 15 steps before she stumbled into a trot and then
a lurching run through the deep snow, glancing over her shoulder for
any sign of pursuit from her unseen watcher.

She was only about 100 yards away from where she'd left the path when
she glanced over her shoulder to see a thin reddish shape standing
like an apparition in the swirling snow holding a long shape that
looked alarmingly like a rifle.

Her heart ratcheted up about twelve more notches and she dropped her
false bravado and simply ran, cursing the ungainly bulk that reduced
her to clumsily plunging through the snow. She could hear his breath
now, chuffing in and out, the crunching of his feet in the snow. Her
breath was growing short and she could feel a stitch forming in her
side. This sort of thing was exactly what stimulated a miscarriage,
but she couldn't stop. Every instinct she'd ever gained over her years
as an investigator told her she couldn't stop.

The pain was growing, her steps were slowing no matter how hard she
tried to press on. As soon as she gained the path she spun around like
a deer at bay, her gun out, her eyes wild. The world was a study in
light gray, the figure was gone. She spiraled around with her gun a
few times, trying to orient herself, trying to find the threat she
knew had been there. Her uncovered hand was numb now, the pain of the
cold had receded to a dull stinging ache.

Her breath was coming in sobs now, gulps of frigid air that seared her
lungs and froze her nose hairs. Red coat, her mind reminded her when
she saw nothing but trees. It had been real. Red coat.

Another noise. The soft sound of snow compressing under boots right
behind her. She spun again, her gun still up, finger tightening on the
trigger... and found her barrel pointing right between Mulder's eyes.

It was too much.

For the first time since her cancer three years earlier, she fainted.

++++++

"Call out if you need anything else." Chris said softly as he paused
at the door. Mulder nodded, scrubbing a hand wearily across his
forehead.

"Just let me know when you guys get back into camp...if you see any
sign of elk where this guy said they'd be. I still don't trust him and
Lloyd says it's pretty goddamned unlikely for elk to be up this high
this time of year."

"I will." The older man shot a glance back over towards the bed again,
and Mulder could almost see another question brewing. But Chris had
always been the epitome of sense, and instead, the older man simply
turned and pulled the door shut behind him.

Mulder dropped the bar on it without thinking and then leaned back on
the rough wood and simply watched Scully sleep.

She had come to in his arms as he'd picked his way down the slope back
to the clearing, and had insisted that he put her down. Reluctantly,
he'd done so, but had not commented when she'd used his arm as a
support the rest of the way. She would not talk about the gun she
still clasped in her icy little hand, the fact that she was flushed
and sweating, nor why she'd fainted.

When they'd reached the cabin, she'd barely made it to the bed before
falling on it and slipping into sleep.

Almost as if she were coming down from a huge adrenaline rush.

Frowning, he slowly moved back across the room and tossed another of
the logs that Chris had been nice enough to bring in, onto the fire.
She was going to tell him what happened in her when she woke, he knew
she would. He'd just never been the most patient of people. Especially
when it came to her.

He leaned up against the wall and stretched his legs out in front of
the fire. And he watched her.

Always his favorite activity. He had plenty of practice. Watching her
had been the closest thing to intimacy that he'd allowed himself for
so many years. It had taken the literal end of the world to allow them
to drop the necessary and all-too-personal walls that had kept them
apart in that one, final, most important way. They had finally
expressed it out loud, acted on it. And if the world hadn't already
ended, it wouldn't have ended for them.

A tap on the door interrupted his gentle exploration of the curves of
her face. He got up quickly to answer it before Scully woke up.
Pushing it open, the snow howled and beat into the crack he'd created
and he found himself looking at the red-cheeked face of Pike.

The boy grinned at him and slipped through the breach easily, yanking
the door shut behind him. Mulder held a finger up to his lips to
indicate quiet and Pike nodded.

"Dad's just left with the others. Denny doesn't want to do anything
and Shan is doing some stupid sewing thing with her mom." The boy
grimaced to show his opinion of 'stupid sewing things' and went to
plop down in front of the fire. He glanced across the room to where
Scully slept and he bit his lip. "What happened to Dr. Scully? Dad
didn't say."

"Don't know. She'll tell me when she wakes up." He said, wishing that
he could be as confident of that as he sounded. He was still trying to
decide if he wanted to boot Peter out or not.

"Can we play cards?" Pike asked eagerly. "I'll be quiet."

Mulder hesitated for a moment and then nodded. It wasn't like he had
anything to do except wait for her to wake up so he could shake some
sense into her. He reached up onto the crude mantle and pulled a worn
pack of cards down. It was missing the King of Spades and the Seven of
Diamonds, so they had to settle for games where it didn't matter as
much.

"Five Card Draw." Pike said, grinning. Mulder had to smile in reply.
He wasn't sure how the boy's dad felt about him teaching the kid to
gamble, but Pike wasn't going to say anything and neither was he.

"We'll bet sunflower seeds." Mulder said, lounging back onto one of
the two pillows and shuffling the cards as quietly as he could. The
child thought for a long moment, his brow crinkling under his fair
bangs as he folded his legs under him with the unthinking flexibility
of the young.

"Ok. I guess if you don't have anything better." It was an obvious
attempt to get Mulder to give up the goods. He knew that Pike had been
itching to find out what he had brought back with him.

"I might. But I don't think you'll want to gamble with it."

"What?" The boy's voice was breathless with anticipation. Ah, the real
reason he'd come over here then, Mulder grinned. If only adults could
be this transparent.

He leaned over onto his side, stretching for his discarded frame pack
and dragging it towards him. From one of the side pockets he pulled
forth a small Nintendo Game Boy.

"All three of you are going to have to share this." Mulder said,
handing it over. "And once this battery is gone, that's the end of it.
I won't have you guys burning up our batteries on games...so be frugal
with it."

Pike's eyes were wide as saucers, and he took the toy from Mulder's
hand like it was spun glass.

"You still want to play cards?" He asked the boy with a knowing smile.

Without a trace of guilt, Pike shook his head.

"I want to go show Shan!" he exclaimed. "Wait till Denny sees this!"

That took care of the decision whether or not to kick him out, Mulder
thought as Peter exited the cabin at the speed of light. He was
gathering up the mussed cards when Scully made a little snorting
noise. He looked up to see her staring at him with one eyebrow raised.

"Why on earth did you bring back only one game? You realize they're
going to be fighting non-stop over it, don't you?"

Mulder didn't reply, instead he moved to sit on the side of the bed,
looking down at her.

"I only found one." He ran a hand over his itchy beard. "What happened
out there Scully? Why did you have your gun out?"

She didn't hesitate.

"I saw someone. I sort of took a little walk out into the woods a
ways, just checking it out.. and I could feel someone watching me. I'm
sure someone was there. A red coat. I saw a red coat. I don't know
who, but I started to work myself up...and that's when I nearly put a
bullet..." she faltered to a stop, her fingers lifting up to gently
touch the spot between his eyes.

Eyes that were hard with fear now.

"There was someone out there with you? You couldn't tell who?"

She shook her head.

"It might not have been Strick, you know, Mulder." She said, reading
his mind. "It might not have been anyone. I think this pregnancy is
making me more paranoid than you."

"Strick has a red coat." Mulder muttered. "You've never had a very
active imagination Scully. If you think you saw someone, I have no
doubt you did." He growled. "We'll get to the bottom of this when
everyone gets back."

"Back?"

"Almost everyone went out with Strick to find this theoretical elk
herd he claims he saw."

She smiled faintly at him, trying to head his paranoia off at the pass
by distracting him.

"Everyone's gone, so why don't you lie down here and try to sleep.
Don't even try to tell me that the meager 4 or 5 hours you got last
night was enough."

He *was* tired. It was something that he was used to, exhaustion
riding on his skin like a jacket he never took off... and the bed
looked very inviting with her in it.

Her hand raised up and he let her take his and pull him down next to
her.

Maybe the dreams would leave him be...just this once.

+++++

We buried her in a plot near the south pasture.

Mom was crying into Granddad's shirt and dad looked like someone had
shot his best hunting dog. I was just numb all over. There was little
regret, Lila had been a nuisance at the best of times. She wouldn't be
following me around anymore.

I watched dad fill dirt in over the little coffin, shovelfull by
shovelfull...black earth swallowing the rough pine box. I could
imagine the worms down there getting ready to feast, getting ready to
devour that blank, stupid, pretty face. I kept seeing her frightened
eyes through the water, her blond hair streaming and floating around
her face like yellow snakes.

I felt my mom staring at me and I wondered briefly, dully, if she
guessed. What would she think? What would she say? Her precious Lila
was gone and I had killed her. I tried not to let a smile curl my
lips. Not while she was watching. After a long moment, she looked back
down at the coffin and resumed weeping.

The funeral, if that was what you wanted to call it, didn't last very
long. We all had chores to do and my dad wasn't about to let us off
the hook just because our sister had died.

I remember what happened next so clearly. Like it had been yesterday.

I was walking towards the woodshed to gather up logs to stock the
house with when I heard my parents arguing. It was not an argument
like I'd ever heard between them before. Normally when they fought, my
dad did a lot of yelling and my mom used to end it when she ran crying
from the room.

They were in the kitchen and no one else was around, but they'd left
the screen door open to fight the summer heat. Flies buzzed
incessantly in the air and the pungent odor from the cattle pens was
thick in my nostrils. One of my dad's hunting dogs was asleep under
the kitchen steps.

I would have paid no mind to their argument, their fights had long
since ceased to bother me, but it was the hissing that caught me. They
were hissing at each other in these low, angry voices. I sidled
towards the house until I was just around the corner from the door.
Their words carried in the heat of the summer air.

"..If I every find out that you did, Carl, I'll make sure you pay for
it!" My mother was furious, spitting like a cat. My father answered in
his low, bear-growl.

"I don't know where the fuck you got these crazy ideas Margie, but if
you're threatening me, you'd better be prepared to put your money
where your mouth is. How you could even think that I'd kill my own
daughter..."

"I saw the way you looked at her. Just like the boys, only I made sure
you never touched her. That musta drove you crazy. You're a sick man,
Carl, sick. You need to get some help..." Her words were cut off by
the sound of a slap. A slap I wish I'd given her. My hand was pressed
over my mouth like I was trying to keep a scream in.

I staggered away from the house to the barn, managing to slip inside
one of the stalls where I retched up my breakfast into the filthy hay.

She had known. She knew. She did nothing.

Somehow I had always imagined that my mom didn't know about what my
dad was doing to us. I would indulge myself in these fantasies where
she would find out one day and in a fit of outrage she would take us
all away from him in the middle of the night like in the movies. We
would go and live with her sister Halley in the city. And we would be
free of him.

But she'd known all along.

The hatred I still feel even now always surprised me. So strong it
seems to burn through my veins.

And I think that was when I decided what I would do. Mr. Ears had
shown me the door... and Lila had helped me walk through it.

+++++

His brain would not leave it behind.

Again he saw the snowfield, smelled the faint odor of smoke and death.

Again he saw the charred farmhouse, his eyes replaying the sight of
the people clustered against what had been the door. Why didn't they
escape through the windows? Had they been blocked somehow? Was there
no back way out of the house? Something was odd about the scenario.
Something was odd about the way the skeletons lay. It tickled his
mind, wouldn't let him rest...and then he was moving again, over to
the eviscerated woman. Seeing the body, the gaping belly.

Scully's face.

There was something there. Something he wasn't seeing.

"Mulder?"

There were hands on his cheek, cool against the heat of his skin. He
opened his eyes to see his partner's blue eyes inches from his,
concern written in them.

"You were having a nightmare again."

He struggled to sit up, letting her help him untwist himself from the
blankets. The room was cast in shadows from the fire in the corner,
the windows dark.

"Jeez Scully, why did you let me sleep so long?" he asked, blinking
blearily around. He *did* feel better, but he wouldn't admit that.

"You were tired." She said matter-of-factly. She was on her knees next
to the bed and she pushed herself up onto her feet with some effort.
He let his hand stroke across her distended abdomen as she stood.

"I thought you would nap with me." He said, aware that he sounded
whiny. She smirked at him, moving slowly back to the table where her
book sat upended.

"I only let you think that so you would sleep."

"Manipulator." He grumbled. "Is the impromptu hunting party back?"

"UmmHmm." She nodded, picking her book back up and lifting a mug of
tea to her lips. "They didn't find anything, but Lloyd said that there
were tracks. So maybe Hobb wasn't lying."

Mulder shrugged, bending down to pull on his discarded boots.

"Maybe. But I still want to talk to him." He muttered.

She had nothing to say to that, she just returned to her book, a
tattered thing on herbal medicine.

"I'll be back." He said, yanking his gloves on. As he shoved his gun
into his pants, she raised her eyebrows at him in a way that told him
not to fall off a cliff or fight a bear or anything else abysmally
stupid while he was out of her sight.

He nodded and slipped out into the night.

It was a new world now. The storm had stepped up from quiet
suffocation to howling banshee. The wind whipped and bit at him as he
made his way towards the lights of Howie's cabin. Treetops bent and
groaned under the weight of both wind and snow. He tucked his head
deep into his collar, suddenly realizing why Scully hadn't volunteered
to come with him.

It was hard, cold work getting over to Howie's cabin. At least another
foot of snow had accumulated since he'd fallen asleep that morning.
Snow always looked so white, fluffy and innocent in small quantities.
In large amounts it was a huge pain in the ass. He was nearly
exhausted from pushing through it by the time he got to the stoop of
Howie's cabin.

A knock, a muffled shout from inside, and he was shoving his way
gratefully into the warmth of the interior. A table had been set up
near the fire and Howie, Melchor, Jenn  and Hobb were sitting at it,
playing cards.

"Hey, Mulder. Feel rested?" Howie asked, gesturing him to an empty
seat.

Cozy little scene. His eyes found a dirty reddish jacket hanging on
one of the hooks by the door.

Fuck pleasantries.

"Strick, what were you doing this morning?"

Every eye in the room fastened itself on the stranger.

Hobb stared almost balefully at him.

"I went for a walk. I'd wanted to see if I could catch sight of those
elk again. To repay you folks for letting me stay through the storm."
His face was an innocent blank, giving nothing away, but the
investigator in Mulder was screaming that he was hiding something.

Mulder frowned, his eyes narrowing.

"Did you see Scully ..Dana, out in the woods when you were taking your
'walk'?" he asked.

"No. Why do you ask?" Hobb asked, tugging a blanket closer around his
shoulders.

"She said she saw you." Mulder improvised. She had not said any such
thing, but the red jacket was implicating. The only other person in
the camp who had a red jacket was Pike.

The room was silent. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Strick pursed
his lips and fidgeted, his hands beginning their dry-washing again.

"I just wanted to talk to her, hmmm. In private. She looks so much
like... But she started running..." he murmured almost in sing-song.
Mulder felt his teeth grit together.

Jenn and Howie gasped in stereo.

"Is she all right?" Howie asked, half-rising. "She seemed fine when I
talked to her this afternoon..."

"She's fine." Mulder didn't mention that Scully was already starting
to doubt that she had seen anyone at all.

He returned his gaze to the stranger and then his eyes widened
slightly. A flash of a freestanding, lodgepole pine entryway shot
through his mind's eye. C Lazy 7. There, on the corner of Hobb's
blanket, was an embroidered C Lazy 7 brand.

He clenched his teeth, forcing the memories of the dead woman to
recede.

"Where did you get that blanket?" he asked in a very quiet voice.

Hobb actually blanched, and Mulder had to force himself not to jump to
conclusions based on extremely circumstantial evidence.

"I...I came across it. Found it somewhere along my travels." The man
drawled, trying to be nonchalant.

"You found it." Mulder repeated coolly.

"What is it? What about the blanket?" Melchor asked, frowning. He'd
set his cards down carefully, looking between Hobb and Mulder slowly.

"I came across a farm in the foothills outside Helena. A family had
been murdered. That blanket bears the same brand as that farm."

Strick's mouth began working soundlessly, looking at everyone in turn.

"You think that.. you think I.." he was shaking his head. "No. No I
wouldn't, I would never.." He began to swing his head back and forth
almost violently.

"Mulder, just because he has the blanket, doesn't mean he's a murderer
for god's sake." Jenn spoke up. Strick was shrinking away from the
table, his head still going, his hands still twisting. He'd started a
low hum, a tune that Mulder couldn't place.

He watched the man for a long moment and then nodded slowly, standing
up.

"True. But I'm warning you right now Strick. Stay the hell away from
Scully." His brain had put the image of the eviscerated mother on hold
in his head. Stick had finally stilled, sitting and looking like a
frightened rabbit. "You go near her and I won't bother with threats,
I'll just kill you." He turned towards Howie. "You going back out to
look for the ghost herd again tomorrow?"

Howie nodded, a little nervous in the face of the rather blatant
threat Mulder'd just made to a shivering, hollow man.

"Yeah. I'd ..uh...planned on it. We need the meat."

"We do. I'll be going this time." His eyes drilled into the stranger.
Hobb was staring almost impassively back at him now, his face eerily
calm and collected. "Make sure to wake me in the morning."

He put one hand on the door before looking back at Hobb. The old man
looked thoughtful now, staring back at Mulder with his head slightly
canted. Almost like a dog's. For a moment he saw a glimmer of sharp
wit, compassion and intelligence there before it vanished under the
glassy shroud of Hobb's demeanor.

He filed the look away and stepped back out into the storm.

+++++

Scully set her book aside and stretched her arms over her head, trying
to ease the cramp that had settled in the small of her back. Now that
Mulder was back, perhaps he could make himself useful by giving her a
backrub. When he returned from his manly posturing, she would ask him.

A knock on the door sounded, muffled by the wailing of the wind in the
chimney flue. Frowning, she sighed. Mulder wouldn't knock and there
really was only one other it could be this time of night. Even knowing
who it was, her eyes automatically found the shape of her Sig. sitting
on the table out of habit.

She heaved her bulk up and moved slowly to the door, hoping that her
partner would return sooner rather than later. Opening the portal only
reinforced that wish. Denny stood there with a weak, yet hopeful smile
on his face. He was holding up a notebook.

"I was hoping you could tell me more about some of those herbs."

It was almost laughable, she thought. The transparency of his excuse
to spend time with her. Had her excuses been that lame when she was in
8th grade offering to wash blackboards for Mr. Jackson? Probably, she
sighed.

"What a coincidence. I was just reading my herb book." She said with a
smile. Perhaps tonight was the night to try and get him to understand.
She offered him a chair at the table and he sat down, still smiling
shyly at her. She noted that he hadn't made one furtive glance around
the room looking for Mulder. That probably meant he'd been watching
the cabin to see when Mulder left. A little creepy, she thought with a
sigh.

After he'd settled, she took her seat again and then took a deep
breath. Better now than any other time. Mulder would be back any
moment and that would make this little tete-a-tete impossible.

"Denny?" she asked, waiting until he looked up at her. He was really
not bad looking. Likely he would be quite handsome when he grew up.
Quite big for his age, he had light brown hair and a wide mouth full
of straight teeth. She set a hand on his. "Denny, I think we need to
talk."

To her surprise, his young face hardened.

"This is about Mulder, isn't it?" He asked. "he doesn't want me coming
around anymore now that he's back."

Scully tried to imagine Mulder demanding that she stop seeing Denny
and had to bite the inside of her cheek hard to keep from smiling.

"No Denny, that's not it. I just don't think we should spend so much
time together anymore. I know you have...feelings for me, but it's
probably not wise to let them continue." She touched her stomach as if
it was exhibit A. Denny's dark brown eyes flicked to the evidence of
her pregnancy as if it was incidental.

"What does that matter?" he asked. "It doesn't mean he loves you. It
doesn't mean you have to love him."

She couldn't hold back the smile that time.

"You're right, Denny." She gestured at her stomach again. "This
doesn't matter about that, but it doesn't change the fact that do I
love him."

"And you're saying there's no room for some little kid like me,
right?"

"I'm not saying that." She said, somehow sensing that she was walking
on thin ice. "But I don't think it's a good idea for you to..."

His face was red. Humiliation, rage, embarrassment...it was hard to
tell. He stood up, upsetting the chair behind him.

"You spend time with Pike. Even Mulder does. Are you asking him to get
lost too?"

"Denny..." her tone was placating now, never once had she imagined
that things would go this badly. It was just as well she was no
psychologist. "I'm not saying I don't want to spend time with you, I
just think that you need to examine your feelings for me..."

He held up his hand, his face cooling into a mask of control that was
eerie on a 15 year old.

"No. I get it. Mulder is back, you have no more time for me."

She sighed, not certain that there was anything that she could say
that wouldn't make things worse. He was stalking to the door, grabbing
his coat and yanking it on when the door swung open and Mulder tromped
in, covered from head to toe in snow.

"Hey Denny," Mulder grinned at him. "On your way out already?"

Denny said not a word and instead stalked past her partner out into
the snow, pulling the door shut behind him with a loud bang.

+++++

You would think that it would be difficult to plot your parents'
murder.

It's not. I realized that right away. But I'm not dumb, though my Dad
might tell you different. I needed the right opportunity and I had the
patience to wait for it.

To tell you the truth, it wasn't so much my dad that I wanted to
squeeze the life out of, it was my mom. The little bitch had allowed
her own children to be used like playthings. My dad was just an
animal, but my mom was *weak*. Weak like Mr. Ears had been.

And Lila.

Hard to say how long it was between the time I drowned my sister and
the time when I killed everyone else. Maybe years? Maybe months? Each
day crawled by in frozen vignettes of eagerness tempered with hatred.
Every night I imagined a new way to kill her, a new look of fear on
her face.

I walked through those days with the same demeanor I had always worn.
My dad directed us through our chores on the ranch, my mom cooked for
us...mended our clothes, life moved in its normal paces. She got
pregnant again and seemed fairly happy about it. Why, I don't know.
Just another brat for my dad to molest. Bitch.

When the virus came, we hardly noticed. Our ranch was distant enough
from other places and my dad had never been one to socialize with the
neighbors. We were his own personal slave-force, much as he had been
for his Dad and so on. Our trips into town were curtailed with the end
of the world, but little else changed. We had our own well, we had our
own generator. Fuel would run out eventually, but not for a time.

It wasn't too long after the TV started to broadcast only white noise
that I decided the time was right. It was easy enough to drug my dad
and my brothers. There were plenty of cattle tranquilizers lying
around the barn. I just slipped it into their food, leaving my
mother's untouched.

I'd set the fire after I'd locked dear old dad up with Peter, Emily
and Jason in the dining room. They were too drugged to put up much of
a fight. Too drugged to know enough to be properly afraid of me. It
didn't matter, they were simple detritus. It was my mother that I was
focused on.

I helped her away from the house, her sobbing and wailing like music
to my ears. Suffer, bitch. Suffer. I wished that my family could have
been awake for their burning. I would have liked to have heard them
scream.

Once we were a distance from the house, I simply pushed the cow down.
She fell heavily, looking up at me like a stunned rabbit. The
satisfaction that I felt when I let all my pretenses fall, when I
showed her all the hatred I had for her, and she realized
everything...it was glorious.

She was scared of me. This woman whom I'd looked up to and been
nurtured by and had respected. She was afraid. Of me.

And then I'd pulled out my knife.

+++++

This dream was different.

Still the same ranch house, the same snow, the same burned frame...but
this time Scully was with him. She stood at his side, still heavily
pregnant, but wearing her sleek Bureau attire. Her hair was short and
smooth again, shining crisply red in the afternoon light. He too, was
wearing his work clothes. Long black overcoat and pressed suit.

They stood next to the corpse of the dead mother.

"This is not important. Look inside." Scully said, her eyes clear and
blue as the sky overhead.

He walked forward, unable to stop himself from glancing back at the
woman, unable to stop fixating on her, walking until he was right at
the edge of the house's footprint. The skeletons were there, clustered
in a clump against what had once been a wall. A door. Something about
it. Had they been trying to get out?

That was it.

They had been locked in. Ok. So they had been murdered, burned alive.
Why did he need to know this?

"Look"

He turned towards the voice. Scully was gone. The dead woman stood in
the doorway instead, her gapingly empty abdomen half hidden beneath
her lavender shirt.

He looked again, reviewing every nuance of his memory. Something here.
Something important. His feet walked him forward much as they had when
he'd actually been here...past the skeletons. He'd looked at them
enough.

A seared, heat-bubbled photograph. That was the clue his mind was
shoving at him. Burned frame, browned glass. He leaned down and picked
it up, looking at the photo --

"Mulder" A voice was in his ear, warm and soft.

His eyes snapped open and he found himself looking into Scully's
sleep-rosy face. "Mulder," she repeated, "You have to get up. They're
waiting for you."

"What?" he mumbled, sitting up and scrubbing his face.

"You wanted to go out with the hunting party." She reminded him. She
was wrapped in a blanket kneeling next to the bed and Chris stood by
the door, fully dressed.

"You can stay and sleep some more if you want." Chris said
apologetically. "I'm sure you're tired."

The dream vanished as he remembered Hobb.

"No. give me a minute. I'll be right out." Chris nodded and left.

"You're really tired." Scully said gently. "You didn't even stir when
Chris knocked." Her smooth fingers stroked a line down his cheek.
"Maybe you should stay here?"

He shook his head and pushed himself up out of the warmth of the
blankets.

"No way, Scully. I don't trust that guy. I'm thinking that he might be
the one who killed that family down in the foothills. He had an item
from the farm on him."

Her eyes widened slightly.

"I thought you said that scene was easily 8 or more months old. Why
would he hang around there and then follow you up here?"

"I don't know." He was yanking on his long-johns. "But there's no way
I'm letting him out of my sight till I get the whole story. He's lying
about something, that I do know."

A few more layers padded on to his frame, he turned for his coat and
snowshoes. Scully stopped him with a touch on his arm.

Her face was smooth and earnest when she took his hand and pressed it
to her stomach. The gesture was more important than words and he
leaned down to kiss her, a tender, intimate thing that left her on the
verge of tears.

And then he was pushing out the door into the howling storm.

+++++

The blizzard had hit full force that morning, completely encasing the
mountaintop in clouds, wind and snow. All around the small cluster of
buildings trees swayed dangerously, snow blew and swirled and bit into
every crack and crevice...coating the northwest sides of the trees
with a thick sheet of ice. Drifts piled up almost to the roofs of some
of the cabins, nearly burying the ones on the north side of the
clearing.

It only set more of an urgency in Pike to get up. No need for quiet
now that his Dad had left early with the others to try and track down
the elk that were supposed to be around. He slipped into his warm
clothes and managed to get the front door open wide enough to slide
out, his snowshoes in one hand. He knew that Shan would not likely be
coming out this morning, the weather was too much for her and it was
hard enough for her to sneak out of her mom's bed as it was. But
Denny...

He frowned. Where was Denny? Had he gone on without him? Or maybe he
had gone with the hunters this time.

Tugging his hat down over his ears, he squinted into the howling
maelstrom. A set of slowly vanishing tracks that pointed in the
direction of the cave gave him his answer. Denny had already left.

Tucking his chin down into his collar, he began the long slog over the
snow towards the cave.

Snowshoes made the going much easier, but they were no joy to walk in.
Even with them on, he still sank about 5 inches with each step.
Denny's tracks were getting harder and harder to see.

The trees shook and moaned over him, the wind driving icy needles into
his exposed cheeks. It was mostly uphill to the cliff face and he
found himself out of breath and sweating under his heavy coat by the
time he reached the top of the rise.

Denny's tracks led right into the crack and he picked up his pace,
eager to get out of the wind. Discarding the awkward snowshoes, he
ducked into the tight confines of the bottleneck and crawled into the
main cavern.

Only to be greeted with the sight of Denny crouched in a pool of blood
over the calf, his darkly stained knife in hand. It was dark in the
cave, but not dark enough to disguise the fact that, for some
reason...

... Denny had cut the calf's throat.

"What are you doing?" Pike cried, rushing forward and falling to his
knees next to the little animal. It was gasping weakly.  He looked up
at the older boy with hot, burning eyes.

Denny's face was little more than a mask.

"It needed to die." He said finally, his voice odd.

"She was going to be all right!" Pike's voice was high and stunned. He
couldn't quite assimilate the sight of Denny covered in the little
elk's blood, the big knife glinting dully in the dim light.

He staggered to his feet, his pants wet with blood at the knees.

"I...I" he didn't know what to do. "I'm going to go and get Dr.
Scully. She'll be able to fix her..."

"No!" Denny said sharply, rising to his feet. "No!"

Pike didn't stop. He had tears on his cheeks now, but he didn't care.
There was something terribly wrong here. Wrong.

"Pike stop!" Denny called. He could hear the sounds of the older boy's
footsteps echoing in the rocky cavern as he scrabbled through the
tight bottleneck. Frigid wind bit at the moisture on his face as he
emerged into the snow. His snowshoes had already collected a thin
layer of snow on them and he shook them off, lacing them onto his
boots with trembling hands. He had to hurry, there might still be a
chance to save her.

He hadn't managed to put one on all the way when Denny emerged from
the cave, his face hard and spattered with blood, his eyes...

...his eyes sent a chill of fear down Pike's spine. He gave up on his
snowshoes, startled into flight. He staggered one step, two, and sank
to his chest in the soft, new snow.

Denny reached out and grabbed his collar, hauling him back to the
opening where the snow was more tramped down. Terror surged through
the boy and he felt his bladder give, hot and wet down his leg.

Pike stared up into the dark brown eyes, his own gray gaze glazing
with his fear. Denny was still holding the gory knife clutched in one
bloody fist. Even though this was a boy he had spent the last 8 months
playing with, Pike had little doubt of his intentions.

He began to struggle frantically as he watched a look of pure animal
pleasure cross Denny's face. And then the big knife lifted and fell,
driving deep into his upper chest, severing muscle and tendon and
biting into bone. Again it raised, blood flying from it...landing in
the snow like red confetti.

He tried to speak, but his lungs were closing up. The pain was fading
into a sort of blissful numbness, pretty spots dancing around the
fringes of his vision.

His mouth opened to call for his Dad, but no noise came out.

It was getting quiet. The howling snowstorm was fading. The thwacking
sound the knife made, his own heartbeat...these were the only things
he heard before everything simply swam into black.

+++++

The rattling of the windows and the groaning in the siding only made
her feel somehow warmer and sleepier. She was curled up on the bed
writing in her journal, listening with half an ear to the rage of the
blizzard outside. The fire crackled merrily in the corner, keeping her
company as it had for all the time that Mulder had been gone.

There was not much paper left in the notebook, but Mulder had brought
her several empty ones, thank god. her condition left her with few
options for things to do. Because she was basically excluded from most
of the physical work that needed to be done in their little commune,
she ended up spending a great deal of her time writing just to keep
from going insane. The storm made it worse by relegating her to the
indoors. She would be very glad when she was able to move around at a
speed above a snail's-crawl and stand up without assistance from a
crane.

Three pages of tight, neat script later and she was fighting to stay
awake. Morning it might have been, but the darkness of the snow
outside made it seem like dusk. This was the sort of day she
remembered from her childhood snow-days. No school, it was the best of
all worlds. Real, honest-to-god free time. She and Melissa and Charlie
would troop out into the icy cold complete with warm coats, mittens
and sleds...oblivious to the discomfort in their fingers and toes.
Happy just to have that stolen time away from school and the pressures
of childhood.

She smirked sleepily to herself, closing her eyes and resting her
cheek against her upraised hand. How people went on and on about the
joy and innocence and freedom of being a kid. If they could go back
they would remember that it was just as trying as adulthood, it was
all just a matter of perspective. School cliques, bullies, allowance
and a lack of freedom were a child's life.

So vulnerable to the whims of adults. Innocence was perhaps the wrong
word. More like naive and impressionable.

Her mind drifted as her hand touched her belly, feeling the baby
kicking against her with a numb disconnectedness and a sad frown. This
child wouldn't have any of that. He or she would have a whole new set
of life rules to follow. She and Mulder would be flying sans net. If
the newborn didn't immediately succumb to the virus that its parents
were immune to, it would be growing up in a tough world. No swingsets
or action figures or Chuck E. Cheeses.

Her lashes were drifting down over her eyes, the words of her
handwriting blurring into a uniform gray. The banging on her door
startled her fully awake, her heart leaping to arms and thudding hard
against her ribcage.

Heaving herself up off the bed she automatically reached for the gun
that she'd set on the table the night before. Its absence made her
frown, but she immediately reasoned that Mulder must have taken it by
accident.

She unbarred the door cautiously and peered out into the blowing snow.
Shanida stood there, tiny in her coat, her dark brown hair spiraling
this way and that in the wind, panicked eyes wide and filled with
tears.

"Shan?-"

"My mom!" Shan wailed, reaching in to tug on Scully's hand. "Please!
My mom! There's a fire!"

That was when she smelled the smoke.

Scully yanked her coat on and ran out into the snow, her senses
immediately overwhelmed by the howl of the wind whipping across the
snow. The fire was fanning itself to greater heights in the maelstrom,
the orange-red of the flames leaping and sizzling in the wet of the
storm. With mounting horror she saw that Jenn's cabin was likewise in
flames, and an orange glow in the woods told her that Roz and Anna's
was burning too. Everyone else had gone out looking for the damned
elk.

She didn't hesitate. There was no way she was going to be able to put
out the fire, she had to simply get Cissy out.

"Stay right here!" she yelled at Shan over the wailing wind, her voice
sharp enough to cut. The little girl stayed. She plunged through the
enormous drifts, staggered by the amount of snow that had accumulated
just since the day before. One hand lifted to shield her eyes from the
stinging ice bits that blew mercilessly into her face, her gloveless
fingers growing quickly numb.

The fire was almost a blessed warmth. For a moment only...and then the
heat quickly became a blazing foe, searing into her skin and burning
her eyes. Sparks flew wildly around in the winds, threatening to catch
in her hair and her clothes as she made her way to the door of the
cabin.

The door was jammed shut from the outside. It took only a moment to
realize that someone had shoved little chips of wood into the cracks
between the door and the frame, making it nearly impossible to open.
She struggled wildly against it for a moment, hearing the shouts of
Cissy on the other side...her frantic pounding on the door. The
windows were tiny, far too small to afford an exit.

She cast around for a tool, anything to use to unjam the door. Cissy's
screams were getting louder but less frequent. The smoke was getting
to her. A sudden pain lanced up her abdomen and she gritted her teeth,
not against the hurt, but against the very thought of it.

There, against the side of the house, a mound of snow spoke of the
stump that was used as a chopping block. With luck, the ax would be
nearby. Abandoning the inferno of the stoop, she waded hip deep
through the drift that had pressed itself up against the side of the
house and began to use her bare fingers to dig in the snow.

Another pain doubled her over just as her fingers closed around the
cold, hard shaft of something. Grabbing and yanking it with all her
strength, she took a deep breath against the pain and withdrew the ax
with something akin to terrified victory.

Flames had started to lick at the edges of the front of the cabin,
curling up around the eaves with greedy abandon. The half-light of the
storm was painted an eerie orange-red, giving the snow a bloody taint
as she came back to the door and lifted the ax with everything she
had, driving it clumsily towards the offending shims. Splinters flew
from the frame, the blade missing the chips, but gouging alongside the
top one instead. Another try and another, and finally, she sliced into
the icy pine, freeing the top culprit.  The second followed with only
one blow and she wrenched the smoking door open.

Cissy tumbled out into the snow, choking and coughing, a smoldering
wet blanket cloaking her head and shoulders. Scully caught a glimpse
of the inside of the cabin, the room a living surface of flame, the
entire east wall engulfed.

Staggering back, she let the third violent spasm wash over her,
falling to her knees in the snow, her arms clutching over her abdomen.
Her mind hadn't fully processed the fact that Cissy had been locked
inside her cabin from the outside, but she did know that she still had
to help Jenn and Roz and Anna.

Her cold-numbed fingers still clutched the ax hasp and she rose to her
feet just in time to see Jenn's cabin collapse in on itself in a great
blossom of flame. Her mouth dropped open and she could feel the
distant echoes of shock battering at her shields.

Someone was tugging at her shoulder and she blinked into Cissy's
plump, ash-smudged face, still clutching tightly to the older woman's
arm.

"Dana, look at me." Scully's eyes met the firm gaze of the other's.
"*I'll* go help Roz and Anna, you get back inside now! Shan, you make
her get back inside!" Cissy's voice was reduced to a whisper against
the wind and the sound of her own pain in her ears. She loosened a
grip that no longer felt like her own and Cissy staggered out into the
blur of the storm, her blanket still wrapped around her.

Shanida was pulling at her arm ineffectually, her little tear-strained
face pale under the dark skin.

"Come on Dr. Scully, Mama says we have to get inside." Her voice was
lost in the wind, but Scully saw her lips move, felt the urgency
behind them. She let the little girl help her to her feet, curling her
right arm protectively around her belly, praying that the pains would
stop. The other hand still clasped the ax in a death grip.

Oh please don't ...she wouldn't even let herself finish the thought.

The door of her cabin loomed comfortingly before her.

Shut tight. That gave her pause, her investigator's mind, never dulled
by things like panic and pain, reminding her that she had left it wide
open when she'd rushed out into the blizzard. Her hand curled more
tightly around Shan's little fingers.

The calm yellow square of light that bespoke her cabin's lone window,
beckoned. She stretched her neck slightly to see inside and her breath
froze in her throat as she spotted Denny, calm and smiling, sitting on
her bed...cradling her missing gun.

The pieces that fell into place made no sense. A distorted Cubist
puzzle. Denny had her gun? Why had he gone inside her cabin while
she'd been struggling to free Cissy from her living furnace?

Because, her mind supplied calmly, he set the fire. He jammed the
door. There is no one else here.

Another pain ripped through her belly and she bent over, feeling a red
hot poker thrust into her. She wasn't sure what to be more afraid of,
the 15 year old stroking her gun or the cramping of her uterus.

"Come on