My thanks to Laura for the wonderful book cover
| Written for the
fifteenth X-files lyric wheel M/K (with just a tiny smidgeon of totally inoffensive Sc/K) I hooked up with Wyzinski’s Wolverines back in the second pass. I was just a wolfie grunt for a couple of months, following orders, shooting shit out of alien asses, showing off my skills with my right hand and desperately trying to get my new left hand to do as it was told before some fucker worked out there was a reason it was several shades lighter in skin tone. Back then, even a hint of collaboration with *any* alien species was enough to get a guy hung, drawn and quartered. It was during the third pass that Wyzinski bought the farm, along with half the Wolverines, and somewhere in the resulting shit-storm I ended up becoming top dog. So the Wolverines became Krycek’s Ratpack. Call it my peculiar sense of humor. They didn’t like it. Me breaking with tradition like that. But I told ‘em the alternative was Krycek’s Kittens so they shut the fuck up and embraced their inner rats. And somehow we all held it together, right through to the fifth and final pass. We had a lot of casualties, of course. The pack shrank and expanded on an almost weekly basis as we nipped at the heels of the invasion force. We were just one of hundreds of tiny bands of resistance, each unit an almost inconsequential irritant by itself but effective as part of a much larger, fragmented whole. By the end, only nineteen Rats remained of the forty-two I’d inherited from Wyzinski and the rest were just talented replacements we’d picked up along the way. Somewhere along the line I got myself a reputation. By the fourth pass, I was running six other units as well as the Ratpack. I deliberately resisted the urge to combine the units into a larger fighting force. The way the aliens had decimated the official military defenses had taught us to stay small and mobile and, anyway, I’d always preferred to stay in the shadows. I had absolutely no urge to place myself at the front of a small army and invite the aliens to take pot shots at me. Tell the truth, I was just trying to do what I’d always done best – stay alive. But the funny thing about having an instinct for survival in a situation like that is other people start seeing you like some kind of hero. In the post invasion world, a resistance unit with a near 50% survival rate was considered pretty damned phenomenal and so, although I kept the Ratpack itself small and select, I had nearly four hundred fighters under my direct command by the time we hit the mothership in Boston. Let me clear something up right away. It wasn’t a rescue mission. Even back when I’d first signed up with Wyzinski I’d understood that our job wasn’t to try and free the poor bastards the aliens had already taken, it was just to protect the people who were still free and actively resisting. Just as I’d understood that if I got injured, I’d be as likely to get a bullet from my comrades as a bandage. We didn’t have the time or resources to deal with casualties or civilian baggage. So the only reason we blasted our way onto that ship was to infect the aliens on board with the virus. Still, you always get some stupid idealistic fucker who thinks he knows better. One of the Griffins thought it would be a cool idea to try and free the frozen human captives out of the bowels of the ship before detonating his payload. His delay in activating his portion of the virus cost the lives of six Rats and over a dozen Panthers. In exchange we got twenty-seven useless, already half-dead civilians. What was left of the Griffin, after the other guys had enacted swift field discipline, was left to rot with twenty-six human popsicles. I took advantage of being the boss, broke all the rules, and took the other civilian with us. Not that she appreciated my intervention. I spent two weeks dragging her semi-conscious ass around as excess baggage until she finally got back on her feet again, then spent the next two months suffering an endless barrage of her verbal abuse until I finally got so pissed off that I was tempted to put a bullet through her brain myself. Instead, I took the easy option and shagged her into submission. Things got better between us then. She still hated my guts, but at least she got with the program, became an honorary rat, and saved most of her violent impulses for when we were fucking. Having a Doctor on board made things better all round. We no longer had to treat all injuries worse than flesh wounds with the automatic mercy of a bullet. We started to feel a little human again. We started taking the risk of actually making friends with each other now there was less chance of us having to blast each other’s brains out. By the fifth pass, she’d ceased being an honorary rat. She’d become the leader of Scully’s Scorpions, a crack unit with countless alien kills under their belt, and was running a low-key but crucial field hospital to support my operation. I was in charge of fifteen units by then, almost 800 fighters, and spending more time playing ‘general’ than getting my hands dirty out on the battlefield. I hated it, even though it *should* have soothed my inner rat to be out of the direct line of fire. Somewhere along the line my survival instincts had gotten fucked-up, because I really missed being out there on the front-line fighting with the other guys. Not that I didn’t spend most of that time with visible bruises. Scorpion Scully still packed one hell of a sting in the sack. Although we’d both long since buried the hatchet between us, she never got out of the habit of trying to knock the crap out of me in bed. Gotta love a woman like that. Women don’t do it for me as a rule. But there’s just something irresistible about ball-breakers like Marita and Scully. Both of them sure as hell managed to leash my dick and lead me around like a tamed poodle. Only difference between them is I actually started to *like* Scully. I missed her when she left. Not that I asked her to stay. It was over. There never was a sixth pass. The aliens gave up and cleared out after their fifth unsuccessful invasion attempt. I don’t kid myself that we *won*. We never kicked their asses. We never struck any magnificent blows against them. I don’t care how many flag-waving victory celebrations people held. It’s all bullshit. We didn’t win. They just lost. My personal opinion is that all we did was wear them down with our guerilla strikes until some alien politician on some far off planet decided their continual losses of equipment and ‘manpower’ were unacceptable. We turned the invasion of Earth into an alien ‘Vietnam’ and the sorry bastards eventually slunk off with their tails between their legs to lick their wounds and pretend they’d never really intended to invade Earth anyway. So there we were, suddenly ‘free’, on a half-blasted post-apocalyptic world with a decimated population that was ripe for the picking for anyone who could get the damned trains running again. Not to mention the power plants and the supply lines and all the other necessary shit people suddenly realized they *needed* once they stopped believing that all they wanted was the opportunity to breathe air for just one more goddamned day. It was a couple of months before we finally began to believe it was over. Small communities began to spring up again, gradually daring to replace their refugee tents with more solid, permanent structures. Farmers began to plant crops. Low flying aircraft swooped over the countryside, dropping supplies and leaflets confirming that some military structure remained. And, eventually, someone dragged a heap of steam-trains out of storage and it became possible to travel across the east coast again. My units didn’t officially disband as much as disintegrate, as people started to drift off to find whatever remained of their previous lives as we worked our way southwards again. Within a couple of weeks, I was camped outside of Philly with just fifteen Rats, who didn’t seem to have homes to return to, and Scully had started making her own preparations to cut loose. Like I said, I didn’t ask her to stay. What we shared had started off more about hate than love. Then it had been about familiarity, about habit, maybe even about friendship and, always, about hot sex in the face of imminent death. It wasn’t until the day she left that I realized maybe she’d grown to love me at least a little, because her final wistful words to me, as she climbed onto the dilapidated old steam train that would take her back to DC in search of what might remain of her broken former life were, “I think he’s in San Francisco, Krycek. If he’s still alive, I think that’s where you’ll find him.” So sixteen Rats headed for San Francisco. Getting to the West Coast was a bitch. We eventually managed to ‘appropriate’ nine motorcycles between us but fuelling them was a constant problem. We spent as much time wheeling them along the road in search of gas as we did riding the bastard things. We’d heard rumors the entire North West was nothing more than a radioactive pit and, given the way the winds blew south from Oregon, we weren’t too sure about passing through northern Nevada. So we cut across country in a south-westerly direction, aiming to pass through Vegas and enter California from the south, then work our way upwards and hope to reach Frisco before our hair started falling out. So it was one hell of a journey, not helped by the ‘hospitality’ we met on the way. We soon learned that being resistance ‘heroes’ cut us little slack in the aftermath of the fifth pass. Now they didn’t need grunts like us to save their asses, people were more likely to greet our arrival in their communities with rifles than smiles. Though I suppose, if I’m fair about it, we probably looked more like a bunch of well-armed Hell’s Angels than the cavalry and, given the food shortages, not many communities were overjoyed at the prospect of sixteen ravenous guys descending on them. At first we were pissed off enough not to care whether they threw out the welcome mat or not. We figured they *owed* us, so if they didn’t offer what we needed we simply took it from their ungrateful hands. But we weren’t the only ones taking advantage of the lawlessness of that time and, unlike a lot of other guys with guns, *we* never raped or looted or took anything except the basic necessities we needed as we passed through. So, strangely, as we got further West and passed through communities who had already suffered the attentions of other roaming bands of dangerous men, we found our presence welcomed rather than rejected. At first we thought it was just fear of reprisal that made people invite us willingly into their communities but we gradually realized they felt safer with us in their midst. If we were staying in a town, the two-legged jackals that had been preying on them learned to stay away. One by one, my Ratpack was whittled away. Not by fatalities but by the wiles of women – and sometimes men - who offered them hearth and home in exchange for protection. One by one, my Rats found themselves homes in the communities we passed through, and I let each of them go with a smile and a handshake, pleased that they had found a reason for living in a world that had grown harsh and cold. By the time we reached the Californian border, there were only four of us and a couple of civvie stragglers we’d picked up along the way – two women who were whoring themselves to Duke and Mick in exchange for protection as they attempted to get home to Los Angeles in the hope they still had homes to return to. Part of me disapproved of the arrangement. Not just because two untrained girls were a hell of a big liability on the road, but because I was still human enough to hate the idea of them having to sell their bodies just to stay alive. But I was realist enough to know that, if I’d put my foot down, the girls would probably have ended up gang-raped and dead as they tried to cross the desert alone. Besides, maybe they knew *exactly* what they were doing when they offered to whore themselves because, when we got to the half-razed ruins of LA, Mick and Duke decided to stay with their new women and left Janek and me to travel on alone. We reached San Francisco four months after the end of the fifth pass. Janek and me still had our hair when we arrived there, and we weren’t puking green slime, so we figured the radiation clouds hadn’t reached Frisco after all. That was the only good news. There were no shanty towns sprawling like a haphazard virus around the burnt-out buildings. There were no feral dog packs sniffing around the ruins. We found nothing more than a deserted smoking pile of rubble that convinced me that no living creature had survived the city’s destruction. Every other town and city we’d passed had begun to show at least *some* sign of re-occupancy. But Frisco was nothing more than a smoldering corpse. I wasn’t *truly* surprised. Back before the communications collapsed completely, I’d heard rumors that Frisco was housing the main cell of organized resistance. That’s why it had made sense when Scully said she thought Mulder would have ended up there. ‘Course, if *I’d* heard the rumor, chances were the alien fuckers had heard it too and had nuked the whole damn place. “If your friend was here, he’s dead,” Janek told me and spat on the dusty road beneath our feet. “He isn’t my friend,” I answered truthfully, though the way Janek’s mouth twisted wryly at the comment proved he didn’t mistake my statement as a suggestion of enmity. “And, until I see his body with my own eyes, he’s not dead,” I added firmly. Janek just spat again, slung his leg over his saddle and gunned his engine in a clear indication he’d continue to follow me on my possibly pointless quest. We spent maybe a week searching through the ruins before I announced I was leaving California and heading for New Mexico. “That’s where I’ll find him,” I stated, though I had absolutely no idea *why* I was so damned sure. Maybe I wasn’t ‘sure’ at all. Maybe I was just clutching at straws. Who the fuck knows? But Janek didn’t argue with me. Poor bastard. He didn’t even bother pointing out the likelihood that Mulder had perished in the alien attack that had wiped out the resistance base along with the entire population of San Francisco. Maybe the fact I had my cock in his ass at the time distracted him from the improbability of what I was saying. But, whatever his reasons, when I packed my bags the next morning Janek just quietly agreed to follow me. What with one thing and another, it took me almost a month to arrive at the Anasazi ruins. I spent a lot of time struggling to obtain supplies and gas and even more time fighting to keep possession of them… and I wasted the best part of a week burying Janek. Well two days desperately trying to deny the fact his head wound was fatal, and trying to patch him up again instead of simply putting a bullet through the back of what little was left of his skull, and then five days pulling myself together enough to get back on my bike again. It’s a miracle either of us survived the ambush. It was only the fact that the throttle on my bike had developed a tendency to stick that had let him pull far enough ahead that I heard him crash before I rounded the bend myself. I took out the two bastards who had laid the trap with my rifle before I reached Janek’s still form. I thought he was just unconscious, until I rolled him over and half his skull remained embedded in the road. It was strange, but with the departure of the aliens I discovered I’d lost my ability to see pulling a trigger on a comrade as being a ‘mercy’ even though, in Janek’s last days, I had to keep him so doped to the gills he didn’t even know what planet he was on. It took him two days to die. Maybe that proves a bullet is a mercy, because if his murderers had still been alive I’d have damned well made them *beg* me to do no more than shoot them. Mulder once went to the Anasazi ruins looking for answers. I guess I went there looking for a miracle. I don’t know if Mulder liked the answers he found there, but I was sure damned happy to find my miracle. Well, it wasn’t so much a miracle as a crashed fucking alien spaceship half-embedded into a mountain but, hey….whatever works, right? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not like Mulder. I don’t swallow a dozen impossible things before breakfast every morning and then go out looking for *more* weird crap. On the whole, I think Mulder’s a bit of a kook. Sure, he was right about the aliens and stuff, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna buy *every* damned bridge he tries to sell me. And all that psychic bullshit makes me want to wet myself laughing. Did you ever see that guy the Stupendous Yappi? You know, the one who was always on network TV trying to sell his line of bullshit to the credulous masses? When I think about how many stupid fuckers sent money to that guy, I have to ask myself whether the aliens did us a favor blasting half the population to hell. I mean people that stupid don’t deserve to live, do they? So when I say that Mulder and I always had this kind of ‘connection’, I’m not talking about psychic shit. It was just a kind of instinct, you know? Nothing *weird*. Just…well stuff like I always knew where to find him and he always knew where I’d been. Hell, even stoned out of his head he *knew* I’d shot his father… well it wasn’t his *father*, exactly but that’s hardly the point. The *point* is that the minute I saw that ship, I *knew* Mulder was on it. I’m not saying I knew the ship was going to be there in the first place. Just that the minute I saw it everything clicked into place and I figured out why I’d hauled my ass half-way across the country to get to the place where I found it. Spooky, maybe. But nothing more than that, whatever Mulder says about it. There was a trick to getting inside those Alien ships. Figuring the trick was what had turned the tide for us during the third pass. Up ‘til then, the arrogant fuckers just parked up anywhere they goddamned liked, knowing we had no way of damaging the ships or getting inside them. Rumor has it, the only time someone successfully dropped a warhead on one of the ships it took a whole fucking State with it as it blew up. Yeah…you guessed it. That’s when Oregon went bye-bye. Anyway, I was the one who figured it out. Kinda gratifying, that. All those fucking scientists hitting their head against a brick wall and Alex Scumsucking Krycek was the only person on the East Coast who came up with the answer. No prizes for guessing who figured out the answer on the West Coast. Though the difference between Mulder and me was that at least *I* had the fucking sense to take a small army with me whenever *I* went waltzing into an alien spacecraft. Still, to be fair to the stupid fucker, I’d always been immune to effects of the alien artifacts retrieved from North Africa so I had no problem using the one I’d stolen as a kind of ‘door-key’ - while Mulder was probably hearing so many voices as *he* used one of the artifacts to get into the ship he opened that he maybe *thought* he had an army with him. Besides, that’s how he ended up in a crashed ship in New Mexico instead of frying with the rest of the resistance in Frisco so I guess it’s all good. The fact that half the space-ship was folded like a concertina into a mountain, like a cheap tin can, admittedly made it harder for me to do my magic trick, but after a couple of hours of effort and a few good kicks against the fucker to prompt co-operation, I managed to get a panel to slide open on the apparently seamless metal and I climbed inside. Yeah, so that time *I* went inside without a fucking army backing me up but give me a break… sometimes you’ve just gotta work with what little you’ve got. Anyway, the minute the panel opened I was almost knocked out by the stench of dissolved aliens, so I knew I wasn’t going to be met by a reception committee. Mulder had obviously managed to activate the virus and feed it into the bowels of the ship – which was undoubtedly why it had head-dived into a mountain – and so the only question was whether or not the aliens had caught him at it. If they hadn’t, I was just going to find a Mulder-sized smear where his body had impacted against a wall as the ship hit the ground at over ten G’s. If they *had* caught him, they’d have either killed him on the spot or thrown him into one of the ice-pods for later, prolonged torture. Obviously, I was counting on the sadistic little bastards choosing the latter option. Did you ever see that painting “The Scream”? Dunno who painted it, or which museum it got blown up in during the invasion, but it was one of those images that kind of stuck with you, even if you weren’t into arty crap and all that. So if you’re old enough to remember stuff from before the war, you might remember it. That’s how people looked in those ice-pods if they were thrown inside still conscious. And, by the fourth and fifth pass, believe me, the aliens were in too much of a fucking hurry to bother with knocking people out before they slammed the button that sent the freezing gunk into the pods. That’s why, except for Scully, I never tried to rescue anyone from the ships. They didn’t just wake up half-dead, they woke up half-crazy. But Scully was too much of a spitfire to let a bit of impending insanity interfere with her mission to make my life a living nightmare, so she’d pulled through okay and proven she had more balls than the rest of the Ratpack put together. That’s why I hoped Mulder would be okay too. Though I figured that even if he wasn’t, it’s not like anyone was going to notice one way or the other. Mulder had *always* been at least half-crazy. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I rummaged through a couple of dozen alien deep freezer aisles and eventually found myself a Mulder Popsicle. Problem was, I couldn’t find a way of defrosting him that didn’t involve releasing *all* the captives in his particular frozen food section, so I ended up trying to drag nineteen fucking walking corpses out of that damned ship while Mulder, the ungrateful asshole, just sat on the floor, wheezing for breath, and refusing to let me help him to his feet until I’d gotten all the other bastards out first. Guess he figured I wouldn’t go back for the others if I got *him* out first. Hell, he was probably right. So there I was, in the middle of a fucking crater, with one bike, one tent, and two bags of provisions between twenty-one people. It was fucking chaos. I don’t think I slept for a week. I spent so much time riding my bike back and forth, between the ‘camp’ Mulder set up beneath the shelter of the overhanging half of the ship and any town within a radius of fifty miles that was worth looting, that my ass was so sore I was walking like I’d been gang-banged. But by the time I threw my hands up in disgust and said if anyone wanted any more supplies they could fucking-well fetch them themselves, I’d managed to liberate six half-decent tents, a couple of calor-gas stoves and enough tinned goods to keep us all going for a month. Best, though weirdest, part of the whole damned week was that Mulder hadn’t even *once* called me names. I kinda think that’s why I went along with the craziness. I mean, if he’d even *once* called me a selfish, self-serving, scum-sucking rat bastard, I reckon I’d have just coshed him over the head and high-tailed it out of there with him slung over my saddle bags. But he was so damned… nice. He treated me like a human being. He actually seemed to think I gave a fuck about the other guys, so I ended up going along with it just to keep him happy with me. ‘Course, I figured it was just the residual effects of being a Popsicle. Scully had come out of deep-freeze throwing punches. Mulder came out of it as Mr. Nice-Guy. Which was kind of disappointing, since I was getting some real weird vibes from this new improved Mulder. He was making it perfectly clear he wouldn’t object to me dipping my dipstick into his previously untouchable ass. Which would have been fucking fine by me, except that giving Scully a good shagging had snapped her back to her old self and I sure as hell didn’t want to risk *Mulder* reverting to his normal rat-bashing personality. So I played it cool and pretended I was too dumb to notice the signals he was sending my way. After a couple of days of pouting confusion, as I consistently refused his offer to share my tent, he gave up flirting with me and bunked down with some of the other guys like he’d only ever been offering me ‘company’. Then, of course, I was pissed he actually seemed to believe I *was* that fucking dumb. Fuck, I’d have had to be *dead* not to get a boner every time he sashayed past me, swinging his hips like a goddamned geisha. So it wasn’t until the second week, when I finally had time to start trying to organize the survivors into some kind of coherent unit, that things between Mulder and I came to a head. I’ve never been a ‘people-person’. Faced with trying to organize a way we could all survive together long enough to get back to civilization, I decided fuck democracy and handled the guys like they were signed-up members of the Ratpack. In other words, I let ‘em know that *I* was calling all the shots and they’d fucking well do as they were told or end up back in one of the pods. Luckily for me, not all the survivors were complete losers. Six of them had been military in their former lives and they took to the new regimen like ducks to water. I gave them my spare weapons and the seven of us proceeded to kick everyone else into line. Not that we had much dissention in the ranks. The second day after I appointed my ‘lieutenants’ we all nearly had our asses smeared by a group of prowling jackals on Harleys. We lost a couple of civvies, which was a pisser, but we came out of the fight with six more bikes and a dozen extra weapons and, after that, when I said jump everyone said ‘how high?’. Well, naturally, when I say *everyone*, I’m obviously not referring to Mulder. “Who the hell died and made *you* God?” he asked me, as I sat on a flat-topped rock and supervised the disposal of the bodies of our attackers. I was kinda taken aback. It was the first time he’d been antagonistic towards me since I’d thawed his ass. It felt weird… but comfortably familiar. So I resisted the urge to point out that by the fifth pass there had been at least 800 guys who would have quite happily agreed I was the second-coming, and restrained myself to saying, “I just saved your ass. Again. So I don’t give a fuck whether you approve of how I did it.” “If you’d given me a weapon, I could have saved my *own* ass,” he spat. I looked him in the face, got the full multicolor effect of his furious eyes, and grinned. The fucker was jealous. That’s all it was. He hated the fact I’d chosen six strangers to be my ‘seconds’ and cut him out of the loop. He was fucking *jealous*. |