******
Part II: Seeing In The Dark
******
"More light and light, more dark and dark our woes!"
- "Romeo and Juliet", William Shakespeare
******
They were barely ten miles from the sanctuary of the mountains
when it happened. She had fallen into a kind of open-eyed drowse,
the pure fear keeping her on a knife-edge of alertness so that
she could not sleep, even as she felt the dullness of exhaustion
blunting the world around her. What startled her out of it was
the sudden, dull thud that assaulted her ears, and the cessation
of motion.
Raindrops were wiggling and crawling down the glass of the
windshield in front of her. Beyond that, vaguely textured dimness:
Mulder had shut off the headlights. Beyond the foothills rising
in front of them, the sun was coming up.
She glanced over at him and her gut twisted. Mulder was sitting
bolt-upright in his seat, gripping the wheel with both hands and
staring straight ahead. Tears crept down his face, dripping onto
his collar.
"Mulder? Mulder, why have we stopped? The sun's coming up,
we'll be too late."
"It's not sunrise," he croaked.
She looked ahead again, and felt the hammer blow of certainty
descend on her. The dashboard clock, winking merrily in sickly
green as the numbers rolled over to show 03:00, confirmed that
sunrise would not be for hours yet. Then the glow up ahead,
beyond the rising shoulder of rock...
"The bastards. Those bastards torched it, Scully. They must
have blown the whole fucking mountain apart. They're getting
started early. The early alien catches the worm. I don't know how
They knew it was there, but it sure as hell isn't there anymore.
I saw the ship -- God, Scully, it was *huge*, it just shot this
light down at the earth, this blinding light, and then it was
gone..."
So it was real. It was all true. Despite the numbing horror that
had crept over her since Mulder's phone call only a few hours
earlier, she hadn't really believed until now that it was coming.
Frohike. Langly. Preppy Byers, who had secretly always been her
favourite of the odd little brotherhood. God only knew how many
others. Gone. Swallowed up by unholy fire.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord...
No. No, those words wouldn't do. How could they? Eternal rest was
vanishing quickly over the horizon, along with her long-treasured
visions of a close-to-normal life some day, of one day having the
satisfaction of hearing Bill say, "You were right all along,
Dana", of learning how to be friends with her mother again,
of sleeping soundly at night. Soon there would be no eternal rest
for anyone. Just roses of flame blossoming across a globe waking
and finding itself locked in nightmare.
She watched the glow of distant flames illuminate the
underbellies of the clouds that hid the cold stars from view, and
began a new prayer. Eternal vengeance grant unto them, O Lord,
and let our kung-fu be better than that of the enemy for their
sake, for their sake and the sake of all those who will come
after them...
Beside her, Mulder broke into great, wrenching, hoarse sobs. She
undid her seatbelt with fumbling fingers and crawled across the
car towards him, wrapping her arms awkwardly over his hunched
body.
"Mulder," she whispered, rubbing his heaving back and
resting her cheek against the warmth of him, smelling the sour
scent of fear-sweat in her nostrils and not knowing whether it
was hers or his, "we have to keep running, okay? We're too
close for comfort here. We need to get as far from people as we
can. Then we can think of ways to make sure that whoever or
whatever is doing this pays a thousand times for everyone that
dies today."
He coughed under her, his breath coming in great hitching gasps
as he choked down his tears, and she felt his body move as he
nodded. When she moved away to let him sit up he gave her a tiny,
embarrassed ghost of a smile and scrubbed at his tear-stained
face with both hands.
By seven A.M. they were deep in the mountains, running due west
on a pot-holed logger's trail, as around them America woke to the
great burning.
******
"This is it," Scully screamed, "this is it, it's
coming, Mulder!"
He only just heard her over the sounds of cracking masonry and
the great, hideous rumbling sound that seemed to come at them
from every direction, making every bone in his body vibrate at
some horrible resonant frequency. Once, when he was a kid, they
had been staying in a hotel near a big airport, and one night his
father, as a special treat, had taken him and Sam out to a place
where you could park your car near the perimeter fencing. The
sound of an enormous passenger jet taking off and climbing
directly over his head, lights flashing red and white frantically
in the night above him, had been the biggest thing he could
imagine, seeming to get inside his head and stir up his brains.
Now there was a bigger sound than that, than any he could have
imagined. It was the sound of the end of the world.
They were far, far underground somewhere, like moles hiding in a
dark tunnel, and he clutched at her shaking body and thought over
and over again, not deep enough, not far enough. He was wrong, it
was not falling masonry but crumbling rock that was raining down
around them, and he realised that they were in the heart of the
mountain, and that they were alone, because everyone must already
be dead, Frohike and Langly and Byers and his father...
But Dad is already dead, Mulder thought, confused. His father
died a long time ago, on the bathroom floor, from a gunshot wound
to the head. Didn't he?
"This is it!" Scully screamed again, her mouth right by
his ear, voice ragged and raw. "Hold my hand, Mulder, oh God,
please, keep hold of me!" Her fingers tangled in his, and he
squeezed her hand so tightly, so tightly he felt a bird-like bone
snap beneath the skin, but she didn't scream --
And then the fire came.
"Mulder! Mulder, it's okay. Please wake up." Her voice
was soft, low, a little shaky, but far from that awful ripped-edged
scream.
He opened his eyes. He was lying in a hiking shelter, a rough
wooden structure open to the elements on one side. Birds
chattered and chirruped busily in the thick dimness of the forest
outside, and a light mist of rain was falling through the pines.
He raised himself on one elbow and saw that he was resting on a
raised sleeping platform, cushioned by his leather jacket. Scully
was lying beside him, her eyes unnaturally wide, staring at him.
Cold, he thought, so cold. Of course, it was January, and they
were up in the mountains. A mild winter so far, but for all that,
it was so very cold: why didn't she *shiver*?
"You were having a bad dream," she said, eyes searching
his face. "A bad dream, Mulder. That's all. It's okay now."
"Except it's not. Is it?" he asked slowly, memory
flooding back to him with horrible speed.
She shook her head, biting her lip so hard the blood drained from
the delicate flesh. "No, it isn't."
"How long was I asleep?"
"A couple of hours. It's about eleven in the morning."
They had stopped, at her insistence, a few hours after sunrise,
when he had nearly nodded off at the wheel and swerved them
perilously close to the ditch beside the track. Even taking turns
at the wheel, they had both become exhausted, their bodies
rebelling against the request to run on nothing but fear and
adrenaline. According to the map, they were far enough into the
forested mountains by then to be at a safe distance from any kind
of human habitation -- if, indeed, there was such a thing as a
safe distance.
"I woke up about ten minutes ago," she said, scrubbing
at her eyes with the heel of one hand. "I went to the car
and tried the radio. Nothing. Just static...and a couple of
stations broadcasting their 'sorry, experiencing technical
difficulties' loops. Almost all the transmitters must have been
knocked out..."
"Or there's no one to broadcast anything," he finished
for her.
They looked at each other for a moment in the thin light. "What
do you think is happening out there?" he asked eventually.
His voice was steadier now, although he felt his right eyelid
twitch and jump a couple of times and prayed she wouldn't notice
the tic.
"I don't want to think about it," she said, and he saw
that her knuckles were white as she pressed her nails resolutely
into the palm of each hand. "We can't think about it, Mulder.
Not yet. Not if we're going to stay sane."
Will we stay sane, he wondered silently, looking out at the
curtain of cold, rippling rain. Will we anyway?
******
They lay on their bellies in the undergrowth, peering down over
the cliff. Below them was the ribbon of a highway running west to
join the interstate. According to the map, there should have been
a small town a few miles west of their position.
Nothing. No columns of smoke smudged against the sky, although
she imagined that far over the horizon and behind the wall of
mountains at their back, the great cities would burn on for weeks
yet. No acrid scent of burning plastics, timber and flesh. No
massed alien armies marching towards them from the horizon. She
could almost have kidded herself that she had dreamed the last
forty-eight hours days of running and terror, had it not been for
the hunger gnawing in her belly, the unrelenting hissing
emptiness of the radio-waves, and the eerie sight of a highway
without a single moving car on it.
A bright, crisp January morning. Weak, watery sunlight filtered
down through a scum of thin, high, dirty grey cloud. On the
northern horizon, though, she could see a mass of clouds, like an
angry bruise. She sniffed the air like a bloodhound. The metallic
tang of approaching snow.
"Colder up here. Snow's coming," Mulder murmured at her
side just at that moment, his lips so close to her ear that his
breath tickled her skin warmly. She wondered why they kept their
voices low when the only things out here that could have heard
them were the birds and the deer.
She nodded. "And we don't have snow chains. Or four-wheel
drive. Or anywhere to go for shelter. Or heavy outdoor clothes."
He huffed a sigh. "Remind me again of the food situation."
She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. "A couple of
boxes of animal crackers and some Slim Jims from that hiking
shelter. About half a bag of sunflower seeds. I think I saw some
wild cherry Lifesavers in the glove-box of your car. Unless you
were planning on revealing your mighty hunter skills really soon,
we have to find a town and stock up."
Mulder wriggled around in the leaves next to her in sheer
frustration. "We can't risk it, Scully. We just can't.
Without some knowledge of what the situation down on the ground
is, we could drive into Hicksville and find ourselves sitting
ducks for the entire alien invasion force."
"And if we stay up here much longer so under-equipped, we're
dead anyway. It'll just take longer that way. I'd rather fight
than starve or freeze."
"Okay, okay. I know." He paused, thinking. "You
think we should wait till it gets dark?"
She considered it, then shook her head. "No. We'd have to
switch the headlights on to get down without going over the edge
of a precipice or into a ditch, and we'd stick out like a sore
thumb then too. Might as well go now while we can see what we're
doing, and see anyone coming."
"Uh-huh." He wriggled backward out of the bush, and she
followed after him. He offered his hand to help her up off the
ground, and they dusted the leaf-mould off each other in an oddly
companionable silence.
"Scully," he said, as they hiked back to the car,
"look, if something goes wrong down there, I just wanted to
--"
"It won't," she interrupted. "It won't, okay? We're
not done yet."
We're not done yet, she repeated in the vast quiet of her mind,
feeling it form into a prayer to a God she was no longer sure she
believed in or wanted.
It could, though. It could go wrong. They both knew it. After all,
they had lain together in that same place at dusk the night
before and watched the lights of the ships like shooting stars in
the distant skies. Star light, star bright, first star I see
tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might -- but you couldn't wish on
an alien ship, and she'd known for years that shooting stars were
only chunks of cosmic debris flaming up in the upper atmosphere.
No more wishes.
******
Sallerton, West Virginia. Mulder decided that he had never really
understood the term 'ghost town' until now.
From what they could tell, the enemy had simply decided not to
bother with somewhere as insignificant as Sallerton, pop. 560.
And yet there wasn't a soul to be seen. Nor, tellingly, were
there any automobiles. As he and Scully scurried from house to
house, they saw that almost every driveway was empty, most doors
left unlocked and swinging back and forth in the cold wind. The
good citizens of Sallerton had simply upped and left.
He persuaded Scully, whose hackles seemed to have risen the
minute they entered town, to enter one of the deserted homes on
Lincoln Avenue with him. Absurdly, he found himself knocking
gently on the door, and Scully muttered beside him "Going to
flash them your badge too, Mulder?"
Inside, they found a plate of congealed eggs, bacon and hash
browns still on the kitchen table, closet doors and bureaus open,
clothes trailed around the bedroom, suitcases missing from the
closets, a cat curled up asleep on a pillow in the master bedroom,
and a wide-screen TV in the den still on, broadcasting snow on
ninety-five channels.
They ransacked the house for useful items. Scully went off to
ferret through the kitchen cupboards for canned or dried goods
and stuff them into huge hiking rucksacks taken from the hall
closet. He looked through the garage for snow-chains for the
tyres, a tent, sleeping bags, or anything else portable and
useful.
He found himself trying to imagine the scene as he rummaged:
maybe Mom's in the kitchen, cooking up breakfast and yelling at
little Johnny to stop whatever he's doing to make his sister cry
and get ready for school *right now*. Pop's in the den, waiting
for the little woman to finish up his breakfast, and he flicks on
the TV to see if anything worth hearing about has happened in the
world overnight.
Maybe half the channels are broadcasting static or the test
pattern. He switches to CNN and finds a openly weeping, panicked
anchor announcing an emergency broadcast from the President. The
big man duly appears, in the very convincing mock-up of the White
House press room in the emergency bunker beneath the city, and
starts in with some noble spiel about never surrendering and
defending the American flag from this monstrous invasion...or
maybe something put together with less of an ear to history, just
a pared-down 'get out of your homes and run like fuck *now*'
message to the great American people, and while Pop is watching
with his jaw on the floor, trying to figure out what the hell is
happening, CNN suddenly vanishes off the air too. Then maybe Pop
looks out of the window into the dim, early morning sky and sees
a ship passing overhead, like the hand of God blotting out the
sunlight, and he grabs Mom and little Johnny and little Mary and
runs like fuck, with all his fellow townspeople.
Maybe.
Mulder wondered if they would have had time to run far enough.
******
When she threw the rock, she almost jumped out of her boots at
the sound of shattering glass.
Beside her, Mulder nodded approvingly. "See? That wasn't so
tough, was it? You know what they say, Scully. We're all just
twenty-four hours and three hot meals away from barbarity. We'll
make a pillaging savage of you yet."
He knocked some long, jagged shards of glass free of the frame
and stepped through the window into the shop ahead of her. She
followed, picking her way through the smashed fragments
cautiously. She didn't know quite what had prompted Mulder's
sense of humour to return, but she was happier than she could
admit to hear him crack his weak jokes.
Inside RJ's Camp and Trail Outfitters, Mulder's inner Indian
Guide had surfaced, and he already had his arms full of top-of-the-range
gear. She saw high-power flashlights, waterproof parkas, two
Leatherman knives, and God knew what else in his arms as he
disappeared down an aisle to her right.
As they had been loading what the had taken from the house on
Lincoln Drive, Mulder has stopped and looked across at her.
"Scully, what are we doing?" he had asked. "This
town is empty. We can take anything we want. Anything. They must
have auto-fitters, hiking shops, a grocery store, maybe even a
car dealership. We can just *take it*." And so they had,
although she had felt deeply uncomfortable, as if a cop would
jump out from behind a corner any second to book them for
smashing store windows and just lifting whatever took their fancy.
This was the last stop: they had already pillaged Ronnie's
Autoshop for snow chains, the Queen B Grocery Store for food and
all the bottled water they could carry, and the Ericsen Ford
Dealership for the brand-new green Intrepid sitting out on Main
Street with all their booty in it.
"Hey, Scully, c'mere! Come and try these hiking boots on for
size!"
She walked into the shadowy rear of the store to join him,
marvelling at how *calm* she felt. This wasn't quite the horrible
calm she had felt as they fled D.C., the thin skin of ice over
the swirling undertow of panic. This was the calm of purpose. In
a little while they would climb into the SUV and head due west,
away from the densely populated eastern seaboard, looking for
survivors. There was an enemy out there, and they were going to
survive now, long enough to communicate to that enemy the exact
depth and magnitude of their extreme displeasure at what had been
done to their world.
******
There was no light in the silent world that night, it seemed. The
power was going off all across the dying land, although Mulder
could not know the extent of it, cities that were once brilliant
constellations of electric light flickering and vanishing into
blackness. Heat death, he thought, shivering a little at the
thought as he worked the light-switch by the door uselessly. The
cold space that lies between dead suns.
He had thought that sooner or later the power would begin to fail,
as generators overloaded and the winter weather brought down
power lines, but the juice didn't stopped flowing because of that.
Approaching the border with Ohio, he and Scully had crossed the
Kanawha River, and topped a rise above the town of Cannerly just
as a ship passed overhead, so huge and black that it made his
eyes hurt to look at it. They hadn't even had time to drive the
car off the road into cover, but it hadn't mattered: the ship had
been supremely indifferent to the tiny machine sitting below it
and the two stunned humans inside it. Dusk had been deepening,
and wherever someone in Cannerly had left a light burning in
their haste to flee, a point of light glowed like a firefly. As
the ship passed directly over the town, every light had winked
out. Somehow, They were killing off man's real best friend,
electricity.
There was no light, and yet he thought that there must be some,
somewhere, perhaps radiating out of the air around them, because
how else could he account for the fact that he could see her in
the darkness? She was still sitting on the edge of the bed, pack
at her feet, head bowed, back to the door, in the same position
he had left her in.
After four days of driving, skulking along back roads, sticking
to the cover of hills and woods wherever they could, they had
entered Cannerly, slipping in under cover of darkness. A
torrential rainstorm had chased them west and broken as they
began to set up camp for the night. One look at Scully, shivering,
drawn and with more than a hint of the drowned rat about her, had
convinced him that they needed to find shelter. She couldn't
spend another night in a tent, or curled up against him for
warmth in the cramped quarters of the car.
So, here they were, having smashed yet another window to get into
the office of the South Cannerly Motor Lodge and take the keys to
a first floor room. The car was parked under the overhang where
the first floor balcony projected out, which he hoped would hide
it from prying eyes until daybreak. Again, they had entered the
town and found it deserted apart from cats yowling and dogs
wandering the streets barking disconsolately. He was beginning to
formulate his own theory about where exactly everyone had gone,
but this wasn't the time to share it with Scully.
He stood at the threshold and stared into the blackness, letting
his night vision adjust, and he saw her, her body seeming oddly
white against the void of the room. She had taken her shirt off
while he had been gone, sat now half-naked.
Half-naked. He rolled the words around in his head, examined them
from various angles. Scully half-naked. On the bed half-naked.
Their bed.
No. He shook his head and stepped into the room, closing and
locking the door behind him. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong life.
"I found candles," he whispered, setting them down on
the table by the door. "Enough to burn for the rest of the
night."
"No," she said, softly but clearly. "No, Mulder.
Do you mind? Don't light them now."
"Why not?"
"I..." She trailed off, took a deep breath. "I
need to get out of these wet clothes, and I would rather do it in
the dark. Please." Only he would detect that quaver in her
voice, the tremors deep below the surface, he thought.
"Okay, Scully. Whatever you want," he said. He too was
shivering in his wet clothes. He pulled the drapes shut and
stripped off jeans and sweater quickly, down to his semi-dry
underwear. Tired, so tired. Fatigue washed over him, a wave
cresting suddenly over a struggling swimmer and pulling him down,
weighted by water.
She was still sitting on the edge of the bed, making no move to
take off the rest of her
clothes or to lie down. If he was exhausted, how much more so
must she be? "Scully? Are you..."
He paused before the rest of the sentence could escape. He had
been about to ask her if she was coming to bed. He didn't want to
use those words here, now. Not this night.
Slowly, she reached her right arm around in front of her neck and
kneaded at the taut muscles of her left shoulder, slowly, oh so
slowly. Then her hand stilled on her flesh, lay splayed over her
skin. He saw this as though they were deep underwater, black
water blurring his vision, blurring her outlines. Such stillness.
"I need you to hold me, Mulder," she said, her voice
quiet and firm. "I just need that from you tonight. Please.
So I can sleep. I don't want to be alone tonight." Her tone
was as calm and measured as if she were requesting that he
complete an expense report for her, but it was the calm at the
eye of the hurricane, and he recognised her nearness to the brink.
"Okay, Scully," he repeated, "I can do that."
Only then did she stand, still with her back to him, and strip
down to her underwear, letting her clothes fall, heavy with water,
to the floor, where they lay, invisible to him in the dimness.
Then she simply stood, face to the wall, until he understood, and
slid into the bed, lying carefully straight and still.
"Mulder? Would you close your eyes, please?"
"It's dark, Scully, it's okay --"
"I know you see me anyway," she said matter-of-factly.
He sighed, remembering the outline of her fingers against the
white skin of her back, and let his eyes slip shut. He did see
her anyway, even in the dark, by some mysterious conspiracy of
light and need and wanting.
"They're closed."
Eyes shut, his other senses seemed suddenly far too acute. He
heard the quiet whisper of cloth on cloth as she folded back the
blankets to slip underneath, felt the mattress springs shift
beneath him as her weight pushed them down. Smelt the scent of
rain on her hair and skin, metallic and tangy, like fresh blood.
Felt the cold radiating off her tiny body as she slid closer to
him. Dear God, she was cold.
"Come here," he whispered, barely loud enough to be
heard, as he gathered her oh-so-gently to him, laid her head
against his chest, wrapped his arms around her. She breathed in
sharply as her frigid skin met his, a hitching, half-sob of a
breath, and then was asleep in seconds from sheer exhaustion.
He carefully laid his right hand against the skin of her left
shoulder, felt the solid plane of the shoulderblade just beneath
the skin. Splayed his fingers out slowly in the darkness. A blind
star of sensation in the night, anchoring him.
******
A few days later, they sat on bales of sweet-smelling straw in a
dim barn west of Cynthiana, KY. They had skirted Lexington on
their way west, having seen a dark smudge of smoke on the far
horizon as they passed to the north of the city, although there
had been no ships, and were heading for the Indiana border. As
they ate their lunch of Kraft Singles, crackers, granola bars,
chocolate and tinned pineapple, Scully thought about how much she
was missing the silliest things. Fresh salad greens. Rare steaks,
sizzling and full of juices. Oranges. Not her mom, or her
brothers, or her friends, but perishable foodstuffs. She didn't
know whether to laugh or cry.
Instead she finally asked Mulder the question that had been
sitting unspoken and heavy between them since Sallerton.
"Where do you think everybody is?"
He looked across at her and took his time chewing a mouthful of
granola bar before he answered.
"I'm not sure, but I have a couple of theories." He
raised his eyebrows at her, and she nodded to indicate that he
should go on. "Well," he said, warming to his subject a
little and adopting what she recognised as the "now, hear me
out, Scully" tone, "I think that if we were to go to a
large town or city, we'd find nothing but a lot of scorched earth.
I mean, we know...we know what they can do in terms of
destructive capabilities. We're pretty sure they can blow a
mountain apart if they want to, with just one ship, and we know
there are a lot of ships out there. Skinner said they're bringing
the war with the Rebel shape-shifters down here, right? So, I'm
figuring they've been entrenching themselves, securing their
positions before the other side arrives."
"Clearing the ground before they settle in," she said
quietly.
"Right. We'd only get in the way, be one more complicating
factor, so they've been getting rid of us. The way you'd pour
boiling water over ants if you found a nest right where you
wanted to dig yourself a flowerbed. Happily for their purposes,
human beings tend to make easy targets, because they cluster
together. So, I'm guessing wherever there were towns and cities
big enough, they just --". Mulder made a gesture meant to
indicate a huge explosion with his hands.
"But there were lots and lots of nests besides the big ones,"
she heard herself say. Some part of her recognised that they were
discussing the deaths of millions with a kind of casual
callousness, the way they would once debate the mechanics of
spontaneous human combustion or the significance of cow
mutilations, and she felt a twinge of self-loathing. This is how
we deal with it, she told herself sternly. This is how we
distance ourselves from it enough so that we don't wake up every
day and break down in tears. She held on to that thought as he
kept talking, holding on as tight as she could.
"And they don't have an infinite number of ships with which
to go fire-starting. Still, some people figure something's screwy
-- maybe the hair on the back of their necks just stands up and
they go with their gut feelings for once -- and they get away in
time. I'm thinking that those people just ran like hell. You saw
that house in Sallerton, they left breakfast on the table, for
God's sake."
"So where are they now?" she said, posing the question
that had been bothering her like an itch she couldn't quite get
at to scratch. She'd already thought it through this far on her
own. This was what was really troubling her.
He spread his hands and shrugged. "That I don't know. Hiding?
Some of them may have done so, successfully. More remote areas
are probably just being left alone. We've seen the lights in the
sky at night, the ships off in the distance. More of them, you
notice that? I'm damn sure there've been two different kinds of
ships up there these past few days. I reckon the game's kicked
off already. Survivors might be getting killed off in cross-fire
as we speak, because they're too shell-shocked to get away."
"Still...the numbers just don't add up, Mulder. America's a
big place, sure, but we should've seen *someone* by now. An old
person who got left behind in the rush, someone who decided to
venture back into town for food, someone. I just don't think *that*
many people could have made it in time. I'd posit the
introduction of biological or chemical weapons into the air or
the water supplies as a clean-up method, but then we should have
seen bodies. Hell, we should have been affected ourselves."
He nodded, hooked a pineapple ring from the open tin and ate it,
carefully licking his fingers clean of the sticky-sweet juice
before speaking. "Exactly. Exactly." He flicked his
tongue out to swipe a stray drop of juice off his thumb, and
turned to her. His right eyelid was twitching again, and she
tried not to stare at it for his sake.
"I don't know where they all went, Scully. At this moment in
time I don't have a damn clue. I look out the car window and I
feel like I'm looking at the biggest 'Where's Waldo?' book ever.
I just don't know."
As it turned out, four days later, they found Waldo.
******
He would later swear to Scully that he had felt it almost as soon
as they rolled into Pitselah, southern Indiana, that afternoon.
The short hairs on the back of his neck stirring. A feeling like
an insect crawling on his back, right between his shoulder-blades.
The feeling of being *watched*.
Pitselah did indeed feel subtly different to the ghost-towns they
had been slinking in and out of. Doors swung and creaked in the
breeze. A golden Labrador puppy chased the Intrepid for six
blocks, barking in wild excitement, perhaps thinking his owners
had returned. Driveways were empty, and grainy, light snow
drifted up against doorways. When they found a Seven-Eleven and
stopped for gas and more bottled water, it took a minute or two
for either of them to notice it. He was busy looking for gas cans
to avoid siphoning gas out of one of the gas tanks of nearby cars,
a tiring, messy manoeuvre they had both had to become proficient
at in the past ten days or so. Scully sat in the relative warmth
of the car, studying a map. Even when he looked up, what he was
seeing didn't register for a moment. When it did, he walked
slowly round the car, feeling instinctively for his gun, and
slipped round to Scully's window.
"Scully. Look at the *door*."
She obligingly looked up at the door of the Seven-Eleven, and
said slowly, "It's broken. Smashed."
"Right. And we didn't do that. Someone might be here.
Someone might have survived."
They stepped into the store with their Sigs drawn. It wasn't
until much later that he thought to wonder why they had had their
weapons out when they had been hoping so desperately all that
time to find somebody. They found the tire-iron that must have
been used to smash the glass door lying on the counter, and
conspicuous gaps on the shelves: handfuls of Slim Jims, Kit-Kats
and Hubba Bubba had vanished, along with packets of Tootsie Rolls,
bottles of water and Pepsi, and every single AA battery in the
rack.
"Kit-Kats, Tootsie Rolls and Pepsi. Someone's decided to
enter the Brave New World as a person of size," he remarked
dryly, holstering his weapon and snagging a Mars Bar for himself.
They finished filling up the tank, this time with Scully standing
with her hand on her Sig and acting as a guard for Mulder, and
set off back towards Main Street. This time they noticed the
smashed doors and windows of certain stores, the places where the
film of pure white snow had been scuffed up, stirred in patterns
that might or might not have been made by people. She mentally
kicked herself as she drove, wondering how they had got so
complacent that they could have missed all this first time around.
Could they have missed survivors in other towns?
"There," Mulder said, breaking into her thoughts.
"Hang a left, Scully. See the motel down that street? I have
this odd feeling -- "
She did indeed see it, a cheerful-looking, yellow-painted
establishment with a small parking lot. When they pulled up a
little way down the street, she could see that the wooden sign
hanging out front declared that they had found Addie's Inn, Cable
TV And Full Bath All Rooms, Best Nitely Rates In Town.
Furthermore, she could see that the snow on the parking lot had
footprints in it, and that snow had not piled up against any of
the first floor doors.
She glanced over at Mulder, and he nodded, eyes bright. "Survivors,
Scully. We're not alone." She almost laughed at the irony of
those words, recalling the poster that had hung behind his desk
for all those years. You never did want to believe that we're
alone, she thought bitterly.
Mulder was half-way over the street before she could climb out of
the high driver's seat and catch up with him. "Mulder!"
she hissed. "Wait a second. Just wait! These people will
almost certainly be traumatised...they might even be dangerous."
He shrugged his shoulders and said simply, "I don't believe
so." With that, he was off again, loping across the icy
asphalt eagerly as a puppy, stopping in the centre of the parking
lot and crying out happily, "Hello in there! Anybody home?"
When the barrels of half a dozen rifles poked out of every first-floor
window and aimed right at him, Scully almost laughed.
******
Dusk came even earlier than usual that night, the weak light
fading fast as battleship grey clouds moved in from the north.
Snow began to fall again, heavy, serious snow this time, the
great fat flakes whirligigging round in the air as they fell. He
and Scully sat swaddled in itchy blankets, sipping watery black
coffee and staring raptly at the other people in the room.
There were ten in all, not counting themselves. They ranged from
Ron, a permanently scowling, wiry little man in his sixties who'd
lived in a tumble-down house ten miles out of town on his own for
years, down to Annie, a wispy, timid college student who'd been
driving upstate to visit her boyfriend, arrived to find his town
completely deserted, and headed right back home to Pitselah.
"I was just about to go out and get the truck started up
when it happened," Jack was explaining. A heavy-set man with
a tattoo of the Grim Reaper on his thick right forearm, he
scowled for a moment, his sun-beaten face crinkling up even more.
"I knew something was squirrelly when the TV up behind the
counter in the diner switched to the President right in the
middle of some damned infomercial. 'Course, they had the sound
turned right down so we missed the first part of what he was
sayin', but then the waitress came around and turned it up --"
"He was *cryin'*," interrupted a plump brunette
kneeling on the floor by the TV. "I had the TV on at home in
the kitchen while I cooked breakfast, and I couldn't believe it.
He kept sayin' that people should leave their homes and head for
remote areas wherever possible, and there were tears running down
his face. He didn't even have a suit on, just a t-shirt and
sweats. And then the picture just snowed out."
Mindy, Mulder remembered, placing a name to the face. The woman
had frizzy hair shot through with the first threads of grey,
flesh like soft cookie dough, and a slightly jittery air that
made him nervous as hell, especially considering that there was a
small armoury of rifles propped in the corner of the room.
"That's right", resumed Jack. "When I saw him
cryin' like that I guessed Saddam musta found a way to send a few
biological weapons our way, or some Russki had gone nuts and
pressed the big red button, y'know? I didn't see what good
running was gonna do, but I figured it'd be better than just
sitting around like a chicken waiting to get its neck wrung, so I
ran out to the rig and got the hell outta Dodge."
"How far did you get before...?" asked Scully, leaning
forward intently.
Jack shrugged. "Five miles, maybe six. I pulled the rig up
near a farm, got out to see if I could see any mushroom clouds or
shit like that, excuse my French, calmed down enough by that
point to figure running probably wouldn't do anything to help
after all --"
"Which is where he met us," added a tall, rangy, silver-haired
man helpfully, nodding at the shyly smiling woman beside him
whose wedding band matched his. "Me and the missus didn't
know anything was happenin', we'd been up and outside since
before sun-up doing the milking --"
"Yeah," Jack said, taking control of the conversation
again. Jack had been the one who'd told the others to put down
their guns and let "the Fibbies" in, although Mulder
had noticed that Jack had kept his weapon in his hand until he'd
looked at their badges and seen they were who they said they were.
Every power vacuum cries out to be filled, he thought, giving the
big trucker the once-over again.
"So I looked back north, the way I'd come, and -- I still
can't believe I'm saying this -- I saw this big-ass black thing,
like one of those top-of-the-range spy planes except about a
hundred times bigger, go shooting right over town and out west,
about five miles south of me. It didn't make a sound, but it
looked...hell, it looked like it was *bending* the sky around
itself as it went."
Several of the others were nodding vigorously. Mulder looked
around the room. "You all saw it too?"
Ralph, the farmer, shook his head. "No, sir, we were still
in the milking shed," he explained. "But there isn't a
body left in town except us, so I'm inclined to believe Jack and
the other folk who saw it."
Mindy shook her head, too. "I didn't see it. I was down in
the basement, hiding. I thought it must be war too, so I went
down there. I didn't see anything. When I came back out a few
hours later to try and find out what *was* goin' on, there was
nobody left." She said it with an air of complete and utter
awe. "No bodies, nothin'. It was like the Lord himself had
just lifted everyone but me up into the heavens and I was the
only one left on this earth." She blushed a little, and
Mulder wondered, seeing the heavy gold cross at her neck, if at
first she'd thought that really *was* what had happened.
"Listen, Mr. Mulder, Miz Scully," Jack said, leaning
forward and striking his thigh with his open palm to emphasise
his point, "I'm a level-headed sorta person. All of us are.
I always classed people who believed in little green men with the
ones who believe Elvis is alive and flipping burgers in Des
Moines. But that ship was like nothin' I ever saw before, except
in science fiction movies. What we're saying might sound whacked
out, but --"
"No," Mulder interrupted quickly. "No, no, it
doesn't. Tell me something, Jack. Where do *you* think the people
of this town went?"
Jack sat back in his chair, scrubbed a hand over his stubbly jaw,
and looked him straight in the eye. "I believe that whatever
was flying that ship took 'em," he said simply. "I don't
know the how or the why of it, but I believe that that ship, and
others like it, are why I can say I've seen the President of the
United States cry like a baby, and I believe they just lifted the
people in the towns who weren't underground like Mindy here up
into their ship and took 'em."
Mulder looked over at Scully, who had a hand closed around her
cross and was watching Jack intently, and then said, "I
think you're probably exactly right."
Jack raised his eyebrows in surprise, and stared at him. Ron
stirred in his corner, and let out a low whistle. "All right,
FBI," he rasped. "What do you know that we don't?"
Mulder turned to Scully again, who actually smiled, to his
amazement, and shook her head. "Oh, I think this is your
story to tell, Mulder."
"Okay," he muttered, more to himself than to the group.
"Okay. It's just...I'm not quite sure where to start."
He felt ten pairs of eyes on him as the candles around the room
flickered on cheap white saucers and the snow whirled round
outside.
"Uh, well, when I was twelve, my sister Samantha was taken
from our home --"
******
They all sat up talking in half-stunned, half-relieved voices
until late into the night. Scully thought that it was as if by
their arrival and their interpretations of events, she and Mulder
had opened up these people's wounds and let the poison that had
been swelling beneath the skin come pouring out.
A bottle of Jack Daniel's circulated, followed by Pepsi for a
chaser. Bizarrely, Scully found herself being presented with a
plate of green salad: Annie's parents, she was told, had had a
greenhouse out in the yard to grow salad greens, tomatoes, and
the orchids her mother adored. She tore her way through the crisp
leaves without even noticing the lack of dressing, she who had
once considered salad without French vinaigrette like cereal
without milk. Ron fell asleep in the middle of a diatribe about
how alien invasion could be blamed on the Kennedy assassination,
ultimately.
As the candles began to gutter in their saucers, the conversation
finally began to die away. She looked down at her watch and saw
that it was almost two A.M. It occurred to her, though, that her
watch might not be right. It could have stopped at any time over
the last ten days or so. Was there even a right time now, now
that there was no-one left to take readings from the atomic
clocks sitting brilliant and useless in their cases around the
world? Were they going to go back to living by the sun's rising
and setting?
"Well," said Ralph hesitantly, breaking in on her
reverie, "not that it isn't just fine to have had new folks
to talk to and all, but I think we're going to be the party-poopers."
He nudged Layla, who was resting her head against his shoulder.
"Honey, you look whacked and to tell the truth I'm feeling
that way myself."
As if on cue, Mulder yawned widely, until she wondered if his jaw
might be about to dislocate.
"I suppose we've all had a pretty long, exciting day,"
she offered, astounded at how much she sounded like her mother.
Ron, who was stirring in his corner, snorted. "Dana, every
day's an exciting day nowadays. But I'll second Ralph and say we're
very pleased to have you folks with us. Now, I'm gonna hit the
hay and give my old bones a break."
So, just like that, they were in. They were not alone. They had
been in since the moment they had been brought inside and shown
themselves to be human rather than shape-shifter, most likely.
She had realised tonight, listening to the talk flowing round and
over her, just how starved she had been for human contact, even
with Mulder by her side.
People were getting up and filtering out to their own rooms. In a
few moments only Jack was left, standing in the doorway holding
on to the handle with one hand, silhouetted by the light of the
stub of candle in his free hand. "I'm guessing you guys will
want to rest up a bit tonight and start getting us ready tomorrow,
then," he said, with an air of vague deference that was a
marked change to his earlier, authoritative tone. She guessed
that, for all his effectiveness in taking charge, Jack was just
as glad to see them as all the rest of the group. Leadership was
a heavy burden to bear -- the children of a Navy officer learnt
that along with their ABC and multiplication tables.
"Getting us ready to go where?" Mulder asked, looking
puzzled as he sat up from his sprawled position on the bed beside
her.
"Y'know," said Jack, motioning vaguely with one hand,
sending shadows and flares of candlelight flitting round the room.
"Away. To somewhere safe. You said your friends had had
somewhere in the mountains, a refuge, right? So I guess maybe we
should take a lesson from them and head out of town. Hit the high
ground eventually. Meanwhile, I guess just start sneaking around
a bit more, get away from big towns and cities. If what you say
is true, about a war being fought and all, I for one really don't
want to get caught in the crossfire."
After gaping for a second like a goldfish, Mulder pulled himself
together enough to say that yes, that sounded like just the thing,
but maybe they should all get some sleep and discuss their
options in the morning, which seemed to satisfy the other man.
"Well, g'night, then," Jack said softly, shutting the
door and leaving them in the near-darkness of the little room lit
by only two tea-lights.
Stupidly, it didn't hit her till then. They had all assumed that
she and Mulder would be sharing a room -- would be sharing a *bed*,
in fact, because the double bed that they were sitting on was the
only bed in the room.
"Do you, uh, want to use the bathroom first, Scully?"
Mulder asked out of the dimness, his voice sounding slightly
higher-pitched than normal. Well, at least he was feeling it too,
this sudden awkwardness. She hadn't hesitated to share a bed with
him before, but that had been different. That had been all alone
in the night except for each other, uncertain of what might lurk
outside the door of the motel room, terrified to wake up and find
that you were the last person left on the wide, quiet earth. This
was...different. This was ten other people sleeping only yards
away. This wasn't the old world, but it was a step back towards
it, the first inching baby-step.
He said her name again, more nervously this time, and she shook
herself mentally.
"Yes, thank you," she said carefully, slipping off the
bed and padding towards the tiny bathroom, grabbing up her pack
en route. It's no different really, she told herself firmly,
stepping hard on the tiny voice that shrieked that she shouldn't
do it, shouldn't share a bed with her *partner*, shouldn't do it,
bad idea.
After all, when had they ever *not* been all alone together in
the night?
******
He sat on the low concrete step outside their motel room, back
propped against the peeling door. He shifted slightly and felt a
bubble of dying green paint pop behind him. The day had turned
out cold and miraculously clear, the sky empty of those looming
clouds that made him feel like a giant hand was pressing him down
into the earth. The ground was now thickly coated with snow: the
concrete in front of him was clear for a few feet, where the
first-floor balcony jutted out, but the parking lot was coated
with a deceptively fluffy looking blanket of snow, and their
Intrepid, parked across the street, wore a sober top-coat of the
stuff.
He sat and looked at the blank, bright sky, breakfasted on a
baloney sandwich and thought about the uniqueness of snowflakes,
the feeling that the sky was watching them, and the day his
mother had shown him and Samantha how to make snow-angels.
His dead mother. His mother, who was dead. He turned the words
round, examined them thoughtfully like snowflakes, all apparently
similar but subtly different. He chewed on another bite of
baloney and dry, stale white bread, and hoped again that she hadn't
suffered much. Useless to hope that she hadn't suffered at all.
"Mind if we join you?"
He squinted up into the snow-glare sun and saw Jack and Ralph
looming over him, their silhouettes roughened and bulked out by
snow-boots, waterproof trousers and heavy parkas.
"Pull up a patch of concrete," he said. "Or maybe
we should go inside?"
In the room, he pulled the drapes fully open as the other men sat
on the bed, and flooded the room with ice-water light.
"We were wondering," Ralph began, "well, we've all
kinda assumed you and Dana want to throw your lot in with us, but
we figured maybe we should check that with you
guys -"
"We need to stick together," Mulder said quickly.
"You know how the song goes, right? 'People who need people...'"
Both men snorted with bitter amusement. "People who need
people are the *only* kind of people now, it seems to me,"
Ralph replied.
"Well. We'd very much like to stay, if you'll have us,"
Mulder said, a little awkwardly.
Jack nodded. "We were hoping you'd say that. You two seem to
know more about what's happened to us than anyone, and it's
pretty good to find someone who might have some of the answers at
this point. So, Ron, Ralph, Layla and I were talking early this
morning: we figured we'd better all head into town while the
going's good, get loaded up on provisions and equipment, and
start plotting a route. We're guessing you'll want us to ditch
the cars, too obvious with us all on the move --"
Mulder held up a hand, feeling his brow settle comfortably into
four deeply graven frown lines. "Hold up a second, guys. I
guess I haven't quite figured out which page you're on yet."
The other two looked at each other, and shrugged. Ralph spoke up
first. "Well, just what we've been talking about these past
few days, I guess. How we're going to survive this. How we're
going to hide."
"And how we're going to fight," Jack added, with a
meaningful glance at Mulder's Sig, which sat snugly in it's
shoulder holster. "And now we have you guys on our side -- I
mean, I don't mind telling you, it's kind of a relief to have two
folks trained for emergency situations to take charge. If that's
what you want, of course."
It was as if he'd been staring at an equation for hours and
suddenly saw how to balance it. Survive, hide, fight. Of course.
Something fell into place with an almost audible click in his
head and he saw the coming days and weeks laid out in front of
him, as if his Tarot cards had been set out and flipped over for
him.
"Yeah," he said slowly, "yeah, I guess that's
about right. I don't know about fighting these creatures, but I
guess if we're going to survive, we're going to need some maps,
and everyone'll need good camping and hiking equipment. Scully's
going to have to get some medical supplies."
"Speaking of the lovely Miss Scully," Jack interrupted,
pointing out the window, " I think she's just arrived back
from doing just that. She, Layla and Tam went down to Dr. Craven's
clinic while you were out getting breakfast supplies."
He followed the line of Jack's arm with his eyes and saw Scully,
bundled up in coat, hat and boots, trudging through the snow in
front of Layla's lean, rangy figure and the tall silhouette of
Tamara Dickson, an insurance agent from the state capital who had
been out burning up endless highway miles through the backcountry
when the ships arrived. Their arms were full of boxes, although
as he watched Tam set hers down in the snow, stooped, and did
something he couldn't make out.
Tam's snowball hit Scully squarely in the back of the neck, and
she stopped dead in her tracks with shock, tentatively reaching a
hand to the back of her neck after a second. When she figured out
what had happened she stood perfectly still a moment longer, and
Mulder could almost *hear* the wheels turning in her brain.
Slowly, she turned (he pictured her giving Tam a certain stare he
mentally referred to as The Look). Then, with a speed probably
born of years of winter-time sibling battles, she set down her
box, reached out a hand and hit Tam right on the nose with a well-aimed
gobbet of snow.
He watched her for a moment longer, pushing firmly down on the
things he had been chewing over on the stoop and letting the
sight of Scully, who had seemed so damaged, so torn, actually
indulge herself in a snowball fight, flood into him. Then he
turned back to Jack and Ralph, biting thoughtfully on his lower
lip.
"Of course, as my partner has so thoughtfully demonstrated,
we might need to give some consideration to the potential of
constructing snow weapons," he said solemnly, and felt the
burden of the future settle more firmly on his back as his
mouthed shaped a half-sorrowful, half-hopeful smile, and he heard
them smile, and then laugh with him for the first time.
******
Scully knew that, somewhere deep inside, Mulder believed that she
was falling apart, fraying, unravelling like a cheap sweater. She
could see it in his eyes, in the careful way he held his body
when he was near her, as if he might have to reach out and catch
her at a moment's notice. Meanwhile she marvelled at the changes
taking place in him before her eyes. Mulder was metamorphosing,
altering, becoming both something more and something less than
what he once was.
It showed in his body; as she walked a little behind him, she
noted the new leanness of him. Physically, she supposed, he was
shedding the baggage of a 'civilised' life. He never had carried
much extra weight, but he had begun to thicken out a little, his
body beginning the slow slide down into middle age. Now his
muscles sat closer to his skin, sliding smoothly against each
other, and his stride was a little less leisurely and easy, a
little longer and quicker.
She wondered how exactly he might be changing on the inside. He
was in transition - they both were, she supposed, looking down at
her steadily striding feet, encased in scuffed hiking boots
rather than sleek black pumps. The physical changes were easy
enough to see; his transitions of spirit were harder for her to
pin down.
She knew that in the past few weeks she had often retreated into
herself, into private, pained places where he could not follow,
and that to try and hold on to her, and thus on to himself, he
had poured himself into the business of being her rock, her
strength. Meanwhile, however, his shock and grief had settled in,
like stones sinking into soft ground, embedding themselves in him
deep below the surface. At times she caught him walking along
with a frighteningly absent look on his face, eyes glazed.
Something had to be done, and soon. The thought that one day he
might slip into that odd, vacant place and not return terrified
her, for all their sakes. She feared that if she let those stones
sink any deeper they would settle in a place within him she could
not reach down into.
As she slowly turned these things over and over in her mind, she
continued to put one foot in front of the other, deliberately,
carefully, knowing what the cost of a sprained ankle could be at
this point. After a while she had the disconcerting sensation of
being outside her own body. Her body was really simply a machine
for surviving now, an automaton that walked and slept and walked
and slept and then walked some more.
She had the sense of existing largely now in some space beyond
her small, tired body, of being above the group looking down,
like an eagle floating high and serene on currents of air. From
that vantage point, she saw their line strung out along the trail,
between the pines, the breath of each person pluming out in the
still, cold air, each with their head bowed, eyes on the trail
and the feet of the person in front. She saw her own head from
above, bright hair covered by a thick wool hat, gaze fixed on the
rocks and the trail broken through the snow ahead.
What she also saw was Mulder. He was the only one with his gaze
lifted from the ground as he walked at the front of the line,
picking out their trail. She watched him scramble over an outcrop
of icy rock, turning to make sure Annie could follow him up. He
was leading, she thought, with a sudden surge of feeling for him.
Jack had wordlessly ceded the leadership of the group to Mulder
practically before they had left Pitselah, and by now, after
three and a half weeks of camping and westward trekking, to these
people he was more than a leader, something more primitive, more
crucial: their totem, their lucky charm. He was the one who
understood what had happened and why, and he was on their side.
In their eyes, although they may not have known it, he was shaman
and chieftain and oracle all rolled into one.
She saw him pause to call a rest stop, and noted how his
shoulders slumped as he leaned against a pine, breathing heavily
and wiping his sweating brow. She wondered just how heavily the
burden of their expectations was weighing on him.
"Fifteen minutes, guys," he called out as the
stragglers made their way, huffing and puffing, up to the plateau
where he had stopped. Scully felt herself pulled back into her
body as he spoke, like falling from a great height and feeling
gravity take her into its strong hand. "Take a breather,
stretch out your muscles, have a snack. Then we need to get
moving again."
As the group clustered together, Mulder drew away a little,
slipping round the knot of people. He brushed the snow off a
boulder a few feet away and slumped down onto it. She stood still
for a second, uncertain, and then saw him drop his pack beside
him and rub wearily at the muscles of his shoulder as best he
could. Enough of this. He had been carrying too much weight for
far too long.
She left the group, going unnoticed to where he sat, eyes closed,
face turned up to the sky with its blank face of high grey cloud,
and stood behind him. He started a little when she moved his
hands away from his shoulders and replaced them with her own, but
said nothing as she began to knead his taut muscles as best she
could through his thick jacket.
"Mulder," she said softly, her breath stirring the fine
hairs falling down over his forehead as she worked away at his
flesh. Just that, his name.
"Scully," he murmured in return, eyes still closed.
With his face turned up to hers like that, she could see the fine
network of tiny lines on his forehead, the ghosts of all his
frowns.
She found a hard knot of tension just below his right shoulder-blade
and gently rolled the flesh above it with the pad of her thumb
until it began to melt away. She summoned up the tone she
remembered her mother using when applying band-aids to skinned
knees and elbows, or drying tears shed over some faithless
boyfriend, and tried again. "Mulder."
There was a long pause, in which she touched him with as much
care as she could, hoping to communicate through the ministry of
touch. Then --
"Scully." It was more sighed than spoken, and she heard
the quiver under the word, saw the lines etched on his skin
deepen as he struggled to maintain control. There. The door was
ajar, and she could slip inside.
She leaned closer, her hands barely moving on his body now, and
said quietly, the cloud of her breath warming the shell of his
ear, "You're doing okay. You're doing great."
"I'm so afraid," he whispered, and she heard the naked,
shaking fear in his voice.
"You're doing great," she repeated. "You're not
going to fail them. You haven't failed me, and you're not going
to fail them."
"I...they expect so much. They *need* so much. I'm no good
at being responsible for people."
"Shhh. It's all going to be fine," she said, soothing
his worry as best she could, the tone of her voice doing more
than the words. "You won't let them down. I believe that.
And I'm here. I'm with you."
He reached up suddenly, and grasped her right hand in his,
squeezing it tightly where it lay on his shoulder. A deep,
shuddering breath. Then another, and another, calmer now. He
pulled her hand gently and turned his head, eyes still shut, to
plant a light, warm kiss on the back of her hand, over the
delicate frame-work of bones and the slightly raised tracery of
veins. "Thank you," he breathed onto the skin of her
hand, "thank you."
They remained still for a moment before he released her and rose
to his feet in a smooth, fluid motion. He turned to face her,
moving with a lightness that was not there before as he plodded
up the trail, and smiled, suddenly, a little shyly. "It's
good to have you here," he told her, looking her straight in
the eye, and she smiled back, just for a second. Long enough to
tell him that it was good to be there. If she had to live this
life, this existence of violence, running and hiding in the
darkness and the high places, there was no one she would rather
have at her side.
She looked at him, at his shy little smile, and held out her hand
to him, thinking with a sudden sense of peace that they could be
a light to one another in the darkness, and when his smile
widened into a real, toothy grin, the light that suddenly
enclosed her small, tired body was like the unlooked-for grace of
God.
