** * Alligator Moon * *by jordan * * * *Disclaimer: Characters created by Chris Carter and owned by 1013 Productions and Fox. * *Category: MSR /MOTW/adventure Spoilers: assume them all Summary: big monster in swamp attacks FBI agents * *Thanks again to the many critics who helped make this smoother, and the only places it isn't changed per critique is where two authors disagreed and I had to make a decision * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Texas/Louisiana Border Somewhere in the Wetlands* * * *Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI woman, steadied her wrist on the cypress stump and sighted down the barrel of her Sig at the man on the other side of the water. The gun was heavy and cold in her hand. A mosquito was biting the back of her left thigh and she didn't dare swat at it because she might give away her position. The smell of the swamp was like something that had died of a terrible disease. * *Scully was tired and hot and hungry, and she wanted desperately to shoot this man. * * Three months of investigation. Three long months of leads, interviews, and paperwork, while they compiled a painstakingly thorough case against Edgar Ray Terran. Three long miserable months of talking to coughing old men and smarmy lotharios who stared at her breasts while they talked and women who somehow managed to include the details of each of their last childbirths as part of their replies to simple questions like, "And did you observe Mr. Terran enter the building at that time?" It had all the comic tragedy of a teenager they had once arrested who used a heart to dot the "i" in the word "kill" in her confession. * * Disk after disk of reports, until her laptop hard drive was full, and Mulder pissed off all the time once he decided it wasn't an X-file after all, but Skinner adamant that they finish the case they had begun. * * She was so damn sick of this. Pull out a gun, Eddie, fire at will, let me end this waste of taxpayer's money once and for all, please God. * * But of course he only looked around long and cautiously before turning and slipping back into the woods. * * She waited, eyes on her watch because she didn't trust her own sense of time, for ten minutes. Long enough for him to get back to the cabin he thought was so well concealed in the heart of the wetlands of south Texas. * * * * Fucking Texas. * * She straightened and slapped at the mosquito, connected, made a dime-sized splat of blood on her dark green pants. Then she put the safety back on the Sig, dipped it into her holster, and called Mulder on her cell phone. "He's on his way." * * Squelching through the mud, Scully followed the edge of the water around a curve and then went into the woods, cutting off the escape route in case Terran somehow got away from her partner and tried to double back. * * Mulder was the worst part of this case, she thought bitterly, waving away a small crowd of curious gnats. Since the whole Houston case, when he had kissed her in some half-drugged stupor which he pretended not to remember, he had not touched her. Not once. It was a small thing made large by its absence; no more casual touching of her arm or the small of her back or even taking her elbow the way he used to do. The atmosphere between them had reached the last level of tension before it had to erupt in violence. Or in getting the hell away from each other. * * They each dealt with it in their own way, of course. She slept a lot. He didn't. But while Mulder prowled around the motel rooms and the late night diners and the fluorescent lit malls, Scully's sleep was filled with dreams. She dreamed of him crashing into her bedroom and wrestling her to the bed and overcoming her anger at him through violent sex. She dreamed of shooting him and then trying to hide his body from Skinner. She dreamed strange dark sick things that woke her in the night feeling like she needed a shower. Or at least a shower head. * * * * Please, God, let this be the end of it. Let this be the day we bring Eddie in. We need a rest, Mulder and I; we need some time apart. We need-- * * In the distance, the sound of a muted gunshot. * * Every noise she had not been aware of, the buzzing of insects, the peeping of frogs, the twittering of birds, suddenly came to a stop, filling the woods with ominous silence. A heron flapped overhead, wings making a sound like a flag whipping in the wind. * * * * Scully froze, her hand on the butt of her gun. * * Five more shots in rapid succession, popcorn soft in the dead air. A scream. A terrible, high pitched scream that suddenly dropped to a wrenching guttural sob. * * Scully began to run. She knew the path; she and Mulder had found the cabin a week ago, and had staked it out each day waiting for Terran to return. Still, she had to duck under low branches and jump over unexpected logs, light and quick as a deer in her motions, but sick and heavy at heart. Mulder, God, please don't let it be Mulder. * * Something blew by her, like the vortex of a truck barreling by on a freeway, and she lost her concentration and slipped on a wet patch. She cried out despite herself, and went down, trying to tuck her shoulder and roll but only falling instead on her arm, and twisting it painfully as she tumbled over some broken branches. * * Cursing under her breath, she got to her feet and stood shaking from the adrenaline. Her clothes were soaked from her fall. * * Footsteps crashed through the leaves and Scully wavered a little dizzily, bringing her gun up at the sound. * * * * Mulder burst through the foliage, his face white, eyes wide with terror. When he saw her she could see the same thing in his face that must be reflected on hers: thank God you're all right. * * "You okay?" he asked. Then his face turned even paler, sick looking. "Oh, Scully," he said brokenly, like a child about to cry. * * "What? What is it, Mulder?" * * He was staring at her clothes and she looked down to realize for the first time that she was drenched in blood, dripping blood from her hands, streaked and mottled in bright arterial red. * * "No, no, no," she said hurriedly; "I'm fine. I just slipped. It must be--" * * He covered the distance between them in two long strides and grabbed her arm, the sore one, making her gasp in pain as he turned her around. He looked her up and down until he was sure the blood was not hers, and then turned her back and jerked her hard against him, his face hidden in her hair as he took a long shuddering breath. His arms held her in a rough, desperate embrace. And then just as quickly he thrust her away from him. * * Dazed, she could only stand looking down at the long patch of blood she had slid in, slowly comprehending the scene. * * "Oh, my God," she said. "Mulder. Look." * * He was looking. Then he was walking away into the woods, bending over, and she heard him cough a couple of times and then the husky bubbling rasp of his vomit. * * Edgar Ray Terran was dead. The wet parts of him seemed to have ended up on Scully, or splattered among the leaves, or in a long furrow filled with blackish blood and gore. There were patches of skin and hair on the tree trunks on the path, and fragments of clothing torn in pieces on the ground. The scene looked like the aftermath of an airplane crash with only one passenger and no plane. * * Mulder lurched back to her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Between the smell of his vomit and the smell of blood like old pennies in the heavy air, Scully had to swallow back the acid taste in her own throat. * * Then almost without any thought at all, she had the Sig in her hands and Mulder was holding his automatic in a two handed grip and they were facing away from each other, turning in a slow circle. Whoever or whatever had done this was still out there. Scully felt her back come up warm and solid against his. They stopped for a moment, their breathing exactly in synch. * * * * A loon called, sad and haunted, somewhere in the distance, and a squirrel chattered back, and then the woods came back to life again in sound, deafening after the silence. * * Slowly, the agents let their arms drop, though neither holstered their gun. * * "I guess that's the end of it," Scully said, looking down at the trench of blood that had been Terran. * * Mulder said, "What, are you crazy? We came up here originally to find a shapeshifter, didn't we?" * * She pursed her lips and stared into the middle distance, waiting for Mulder to slam dunk another theory through her hoop of logic. * * "Well, that's what YOU came up here for, Mulder," she pointed out, "But I don't think even the elusive Eddie Terran can shift his shape much more than he already has." * * "Scully, what the hell just happened to him?" * * She shrugged. "Frankly, Mulder, I don't care. He's dead, and it's over. Let's just get back to the jeep and get the hell out of here." * * "Scully" His voice was softer, concerned, not joking for once. "Something just--EXPLODED this man. Aren't you the least bit curious or concerned about what it was?" * * Scanning the woods slowly, her head tracking right to left, Scully said, "Maybe I will be later, but at this exact moment, no, I am not. I just want to get out of here." * * "If we go now, we won't be coming back. Once we report Eddie dead, the case really will be over." * * "Don't you want it to end?" She asked. "I know you're as sick of it as I am, Mulder. So what's your point?" * * "My point is, the reason we got into this thing in the first place is because people reported Eddie Terran as being protected by some sort of shapeshifting thing, and Skinner thought we'd be able to track it down and --" * * "And prove it was bullshit. I was there at the meeting, remember? I know what he said." * * Mulder shrugged. "Look, Scully, if you want to go back now, be my guest. I just want to look around a little more, okay?" * * There was a long, long sigh through the trees, almost as if a storm was coming. All day the sky had been a heavy wool grey,holding heat down on top of them like a blanket, but there had been no sign of rain. And this was not a freshening wind, though it seemed to grow stronger as it swept through the branches. Scully lifted her head, eyes narrowed. * * The wind--well, it had to be the wind, didn't it?--was making a sound, a high, keening sound like banshees, like demons. It focused into a single cry,deep, clear, sharp as surgery, and as full of unmistakable intent as the growl of a dog. * *Impossible to define, because it was like nothing either of them had ever heard before. * * For some reason, Scully flashed back to a film she had seen midway through medical school. A mouse, a bowl, an alarm clock. The experimenter put a mouse in a shiny aluminum bowl, steep enough so the mouse couldn't climb or jump out. An old fashioned alarm clock, the kind with clappers that rang like a 1950's telephone, was set to go off at eleven at night, a time when the mouse would normally be foraging. When the alarm went off, making a hellish din against the aluminum bowl, the mouse had scurried around and around in terrified laps, for x amount of time, until it settled down again and crouched trembling, looking up at the camera with wet black eyes. * * And that's me now, Scully thought, as the cry reached a crescendo and then ribboned out into a fading undulation of notes, almost flutelike, to blend again with the sigh of the wind. The next scream you hear is going to be mine. * * She turned to Mulder. He was looking into the shadows, his eyes searching the path behind them carefully. In a white tee shirt and faded jeans, his tan Doc Martens crusted with mud and leaves, he looked like a teenaged boy,arms and legs a little out of proportion to his height, as if the result of a recent growth spurt. It was that unfinished look that made him so irresistible to women, those big sweet eyes, the vaguely goofy smile. Even Scully had to remind herself from time to time that under that everywhichway hair was an exquisitely brilliant mind, a genius she might not understand but had to ultimately trust. She was trying to trust it now, trying to believe he would not deliberately put them both in the path of unnecessary danger. * * * * "Where did that come from?" he asked. * * She shook her head. Everywhere. Nowhere. "From the water?" * * "I think it came from behind us, over there." He pointed down the path she had come down when she had been following Terran. * * Mulder came to stand close beside her, and she made no effort to move away. * * "Listen," he said, "Did you ever hear of the legend of the Windigo?" * * In West Virginia, in a town called Dunbar, when she was a girl scout on an overnight hike, they had told stories around the campfire,and she still remembered that one quite clearly. "Some kind of Indian legend about a monster that lives in the woods," she said. "I think Steven King wrote about it in 'Pet Semetary.'" * * "Well, I think we just heard it, Scully." * * Scully's gaze fastened on his for a second, and then she said, "Well,whatever it was, it wasn't the wind." * * "And I think we are in very deep shit here." * * From somewhere behind them, in the direction Mulder had pointed in, came a creaking groan, the sound of a tree slowly coming down. It crashed through the woods, and above the roof of the forest there was a whoof of debris, like smoke billowing up from a small explosion. Whatever knocked it down was definitely moving in their direction; something was thrashing the bushes, and birds burst up in a squawking covey. Except for the noise of an engine, it sounded for all the world as if a bulldozer was coming through the woods towards them. * * Mulder grabbed Scully's hand and yanked her behind him as he began to run. "The cabin!" he shouted. "We have to try to get to the cabin!" * * "Why?" * * "You'll see when we get there. Come on!" * *With a fresh burst of energy, Scully matched his pace, and would have passed him if she'd known where they were going. As it was, she was as hot on his heels as whatever it was coming down the path seemed to be on theirs; they could actually look over their shoulders and see the saplings coming down in the distance as something bullied its way through the thick woods, gaining on them by the second. * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ * * * feedback welcome at jordan66@swbell.net * *or just give yourself a pat on the back if you helped * *pat pat pat Part 02/03 1 *