By ga
garrull@yahoo.com
 

Date: 18 Apr 2001
category: alt-u post-col, msr
rating: nc-17 to be on the safe side
spoilers: set sometime post The Beginning and the Movie,
but back in the day when Scully couldn't have kids.
References to Squeeze, Fire, Dod Kalm, Home,
Tunguska/Terma, El Mundo Gira, Memento Mori, The Unnatural.
summary: Immunity seemed like such a good idea at the time.
archive: just let me know
disclaimer: all my worldly possessions put together
probably couldn't buy me Mulder's bare feet
tagline: everything dies

feedback: welcome and appreciated

This is in response to two IWTB list challenges: Maggie's
element challenge, for which the list can be found at the
end; and the Dark Side challenge, because I hope never to
go darker than this. Thanks  to Aracelis for biochemistry
off the top of her head that saved me from having to look
it up.

~~~
404
By ga
 

She'd kill for a decent haircut, if there were anyone left
to kill.

Scully had never believed in the Y2K bug, nuclear
annihilation, or alien colonization; in her reading of
Revelations, Armaggeddon could happen, but not in this
lifetime. Like the good urban dweller she was, she thought
there was no catastrophe great enough to halt the
inexorable tide of Chinese-food delivery.

Though Mulder too considered take-out a nearly unstoppable
force, that had never stopped him from marching around
waving his "The End of the World is Near" placard. However,
the thrill of saying "I told you so" wears off rather
quickly when there's only one person left to say it to.

Immunity seemed like such a good idea at the time.

That first night, they clung to each other on Scully's
couch, with the shades drawn tight and Bach chorales
blasting on the stereo because Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"
would have been too "A Clockwork Orange." They'd already
called their mothers to say goodbye--Scully weeping Hail
Marys, Mulder shellshocked and sniffling. In time, though,
abject terror gave way to other hormonal imperatives.
Somehow, they made it out of their clothes and into her
bed, feet tangling hopelessly in the formerly pristine
sheets as hands and mouths groped for whatever they could
reach: elbows, noses, breasts, lips, quite literally sucked
into the vortex. They tussled briefly over who was to be on
the bottom, Mulder winning with a left to the clit that had
Scully howling like a banshee above him.

Their coupling was as furious and voracious and inevitable
as the cataclysm devouring everything outside their door,
as though the force field keeping the apocalypse without
demanded equal and opposite reaction from within: Newton's
Last Stand. Creation in the face of destruction. Cruel
irony, for though they were clearly testaments to Natural
Selection, if it were up to them to repopulate the planet
as a latter-day Adam and Eve, the planet was out of luck.

It's the end of the world as we know it...

For most of the human race, it had all been over with
devastating speed--six billion to zero in a couple of days.
Like all good plagues, this one was insanely communicable
and extremely deadly. But that was only the beginning.
Then, there were the car alarms.

If this was Colonization, where were the colonists?
Hubristically, Mulder had assumed that "wipe out humankind"
would be the last step in renovation before McReticula
liver-and-onions joints popped up all over the seven
continents. No point in staging a Boston Tea-for-Two Party
til they showed. But it seemed they'd sent the kiddies on
ahead--those that had sprung half-grown from the bellies of
their instant-enciente hosts. Viral conception may have
been immaculate, but birth left one hell of a mess.
Marsupials of Satan, they'd then crawled off to hold
Reticulan Romper Room on Three-Mile Island while they
waited for the Greenhouse Effect to kick in.

It is thought that a meteor took the dinosaurs out. But
there was no one around at the time to write the
environmental-impact statement as to what went down after
that particular big bang. Turns out, dead bodies by the
billion are quite the pollutant. Escaping methane--the
likes of which those who obsessed about belching cows could
never have fathomed--was set to make Chantilly lace of the
ozone layer. Scully was probably going to need an SPF 317,
except the odds of lasting long enough to develop melanoma
seemed pretty slim at this point.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out...

Mulder and Scully decided to venture out, at the very least
to catch one last sunset before lightning turned all that
methane into electric rain (deeply flawed movie, and they
were in no big hurry to see the live-concert version). A
Ford Taurus would suffice in lieu of an ark, especially
since their Ham, Shem, and Japheth, who were lacking in
immunity, were quarantined in their bunker til the virus
crept in or the Evian ran out. Cabin fever, Stockholm
Syndrome, a subterranean Donner party--if push came to
shove, they'd probably eat Byers first. The only reason
they were still alive now was they'd been holed up for a
few days, having a particularly hairy time putting the
latest issue of "The Lone Gunmen" to bed. The lead story
for the next issue was a no-brainer; however, circulation
would likely plunge nonetheless.

They'd spent a day online trying to find life on this
planet, giving Scully her lone "I told you so"-op.
www.we-are-still-here.com was a big 404. They'd expected
that the Executive Branch had made it to Command Central in
the fallout shelter, but the President wasn't answering his
IMs. Lame duck or no, anyone without immunity--and not the
kind POTUS could offer--was basically a sitting duck. The
Well-Manicured Man had considered the Consortium cocktail
they called a vaccine to be good enough for Scully, and
indeed it had been, but they didn't know whether anyone
else had just said yes.

That left Mulder's graduating class at Tunguska. Since
neither Mulder nor Scully happened to know how to fly a
plane, and Mulder had that little seasickness thing going,
Russia was out of reach until the next ice age froze the
Bering Strait. But Langly hacked a search-engine Voyeur and
traced IP addresses to two of the Little Russias in New
York: the East Village in Manhattan and Brighton Beach in
Brooklyn. So they packed their weapons--"Lord of the Flies"
was required reading in both their high schools--dressed in
black, and prepared to do some funky poached eggs and
blini.

Scully's command of Russian was pretty much limited to "da"
and "nyet," especially the latter. Mulder could supplement
that with a string of expletives, courtesy of Krycek, and a
phrase or two he remembered that his great-grandmother used
to say. If the New World Order was what they thought it
was, Scully now qualified as an ethnic exotic.

Traffic was nonexistent. At the Turnpike and the Holland
Tunnel, Scully had to climb out of the car and into the
phantom tollbooths, to raise the gates for Mulder to drive
through--the mechanical world soldiered on. They still had
pop-radio reception, proving once and for all that those
stations were preprogrammed months in advance. Chances
were, whatever hotel they decided to crash would still have
Pay-Per-View.

Since the Circle Line wasn't running, they double-parked at
Washington Square, locking the car only to shut the damned
reminder beeper up. The fountain was surrounded by
indestructible pigeons, enough to give Tippi Hedren chronic
heebie-jeebies; and Mulder and Scully were forced to dash
for temporary shelter under the Arch, hand in hand, dodging
guano fire. On 8th Street, the Krispy Kreme Donut machine
still sputtered and whirred in its merry Rube Goldberg way,
while rats by the dozen lolled around in sugar shock.

They made love against the wall of an NYU building, next to
the plaque marking the spot as the former site of the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. If a couple fucks in public
and there's no one left to see them, does it count as
exhibitionism? Mulder had scored those points on the purity
test back with Phoebe, but Scully's score was riding on the
decision.

They found their small public at the Tenth Street Russian
Baths: real live humans, if only a few. It was Thursday,
men's day, so Scully wouldn't be allowed in, not even
blindfolded--they asked. Mulder would have to cover his own
ass, no mean feat in a place where the standard dress code
was a towel. Rather than sit on the front steps looking
like the last person on earth, Scully decided to scout the
neighborhood while Mulder communed with the great
undressed.

Around the corner in an internet caf, Alt.Coffee, the
seats in front of the PCs were still occupied by slumping
bodies, decomposing faster than the lattes next to them.
Scully left the door wide open to air the place out, and
yanked a keyboard out from under the most intact of the
corpses. The Gunmen weren't answering their phone and she
feared the worst. Five minutes and no response to her
email; she left with tears in her eyes.

At St. Nicholas--Russian Orthodox/Greek Catholic--she lit a
candle, then blew it out. The city was likely enough to go
up in flames as it was.

Mulder and his bathing buddies were waiting for her on the
front steps; it seemed sweating naked while spouting
profanity in Russian had been a bonding experience. He
kissed away her tears, with promises that the boys could
sleep through the phone, and catcalls from the studio
audience--she'd get her PDA points after all. They all
adjourned to a Ukranian diner on Avenue A, where the women
barred from the baths could join them, the early-bird
special went til 9:30, and the only Russian words they'd
really need to know were Smirnoff and Stoli.

Mulder had been at Oxford during the Star Wars years (the
missile-defense system, not the movie); winnable nuclear
war or not, it seemed likely that somebody was going to end
up toast. Sitting around speculating, as young
intellectuals are wont to do, they'd come to the conclusion
that if the bomb were about to drop, the logical response
would be: get drunk. The same terms applied here.

I wanna be sedated...

A couple of the more resourceful young men, worried that
supply wouldn't keep up with demand, had taken to injecting
vodka straight into the bloodstream, undiluted--a little
went a long way. Given their choice of shots, both Mulder
and Scully opted for the glass over the syringe, swearing
not to waste a precious drop of Mother Russia's finest.
Several shots later, they would have sworn that they were
Russian--and by that time, they knew every damn cussword
there was. Frohike got an earful when he finally called
back to say he wasn't feeling so hot.

There was a dead body in the women's room. It was just
barely more spacious in there than in what passed for an
autopsy lab in Home, Pennsylvania; but Scully really wasn't
into threesomes, so they grabbed paper towels and dragged
the body into the men's, propping it against a urinal. Tile
was cold, but much more comfortable against a bare butt
than rough stone wall had been.

A few blocks away, the no-longer well-oiled Krispy Kreme
machine threw a spark into a pile of rat hair, which
sizzled for a moment before igniting.
 
 

Challenge elements:
A syringe
A sunset
A Krispy Kreme Donut machine
A blindfold
Someone getting kissed on the nose
Bare feet

Notes: Lower NYC is my neighborhood, so the geography here
is accurate, though granted they'd have circled the block
to go from 8th Street back to the Triangle Shirtwaist site
before continuing east. The 8th Street Krispy Kreme is no
longer there (it was at the time this was set) but I don't
believe that's because of fire. Thursday is men's day at
the Russian Baths (and Sunday--Wednesday is women's day),
and the early-bird special at Odessa really does go til
9:30pm.

Joey Ramone, we hardly knew ye...