AUTHOR'S NOTE: Greetings again all! I am so very happy that so many enjoyed my first XF fanfiction, "Seek and ye Shall Find." I wrote it over ten years ago, and it's refreshing to see it still rings with the fans. This story is the sequel I wrote to it, so if you haven't read it yet, please do. It's not essential that you have read "Seek" first, but it will certainly help. Again, this one was written over ten years ago, and i think my writing style has evolved a bit since then, so apologies for it being rough around the edges. Enjoy!
Seek and Ye Shall Find avalable here: s/9055803/1/Seek-and-Ye-Shall-Find
The Final Stand Chapter 1
The desert sun was unmerciful as it baked the desert below. Ten year
old William Mulder (II) wiped the sweat from his forehead as he
continued down the sidewalk of his neighborhood in Roswell, New
Mexico. He had lived here for three years now with his parents, Dana
Scully and Fox Mulder, and although he had been raised on a small
midwestern farm in an even smaller midwestern town up until the age of
seven, he regarded the desert city and the sprawling neighborhood as
his home.
William had been given up for adoption by his parents when he was nine
months old, due the the fact that they were both being hunted by
unknown forces and couldn't protect him. In the nine months between
his birth and adoption, he had been attacked twice and kidnapped once,
and it looked like there would be no end to it in the future. With his
father in hiding and his mother at a loss, she had made the heart
wrenching decision to send him away, and he had gone to
live with Bob and Nancy Van de Kamp on a small farm in small town in
the middle of nowhere.
For seven years he had believed them to be his natural parents, even
though he had never called them Mom or Dad and looked nothing like
them. After discovering his adoption, he soon found himself in a chain
of events which led him to discover his real parents and thier
friends, John Doggett and Monica Reyes. However, his search had also
led to the murders of Bob and Nancy and a frantic flight from Midville
with Doggett and Reyes to Washington D.C. There, he had met his
grandmother Maggie Scully and had finally been reunited with his
birth parents. They had brought him to Roswell, a safe haven from
those who were looking for them, and he had lived here ever since.
A small dust devil went dancing across his path as a breeze kicked up
the sand and dirt, but offered little relief from the heat. William
was amazed to find how he had adjusted to living in the desert after a
lifetime of living in the midwest. It never snowed here, although it
did in the mountains nearby, and it was very dry. But the culture
fascinated him. He had been out to visit some friends at the local
Native American reservations several times, and he had an
extensive collection of Zuni animal carvings. Soon he would be leaving
to go on a three day long vision quest at a nearby reservation and he
was excited about it, not to mention honored to be allowed to
participate.
In all outward appearances, William looked like a regular kid, if a
bit tall for ten years old. He had his mother's red hair and blue
eyes, but his father's facial features and photographic memory. But
what couldn't be seen were William's other features. He could almost
hear people's thoughts, could sense others around him, could, on some
occasions, move objects with his mind, and sometimes could even see
events happening in other places. He was exceptionally brilliant,
testing with an IQ of 180. His adoptive parents had suspected, but
had never really known just how different he really was.
His parents knew, though. They had never really explained everything
entirely to him, but he got the impression that several events
concerning his parents before his birth had contributed to his
strangeness. But they loved him, he never doubted that. And his father
had promised to explain everything to him soon.
He was almost home. It had been a long day at school and he was
anxious to get home. He began to skip and whistle, walking past the
new houses of the neighborhood. They were small, but nice homes with
very little yard space. Instead of trees, mostly shrubbery and a small
cactus here and there made up the flower beds. Suddenly he felt a
prickle on the back of his neck as the hairs rose. Although he could
see or hear nothing, he froze and looked around. Suddenly a white van
came whipping around the corner behind him. It screeched
to a stop beside him and the door opened. Two masked men jumped out,
but William was already running.
He ran between the two nearest houses as the two men chased after him
and the van sped off down the street. He ducked under a hedge row and
into the next yard. He didn't look back but he knew the two men hadn't
slowed down. He felt rather than saw them split up and he was prepared
as he rounded the corner of another house. Sure enough, there was one
of the masked men waiting for him, but William was ready for him.
Using his forward momentum, he ran up and planted a swift jump side
kick into the man's chest, barreling him over to the ground.
William rolled over, jumped to his feet and kept running. He rounded
the hedges onto the sidewalk but the second man was waiting and the
van pulled to a stop beside them. He grabbed William and wrestled him
to the waiting van as the boy wriggled furiously trying to escape.
Reaching down to his belt, he pulled free the special weapon given to
him by his parents' friend, John Doggett. It looked like a small
cellular phone, which in fact it was, but in true James Bond
fashion, it also housed several small weapons, one of which was a stun
gun device. He activated it with a button, pressed it to the man's arm
and pushed the fire button.
The man instantly dropped him and fell to the ground. William scooted
away up the driveway of the nearest house and ducked into hiding
behind the air conditioning unit and a wheelbarrow. He stayed there,
panting hard, trying to regulate his breathing so he wouldn't be found
out. He heard the first man and the van's driver looking through the
bushes for him. He waited silently, barely breathing, with the phone
gun still in his hand, ready to go. He waited for a half hour, but it
seemed like an eternity. Was it safe to come out? He had
heard the van drive away but it was probably a ploy. His mother would
be wondering where he was, but he wasn't going to come out until he
knew it was over.
Then, he heard a voice calling to him.
"OK, Wil, I quit. Come out now, you win!" One of the masked men, the
one William had knocked over with a kick, had come into the backyard
where he was hiding. He took off his mask, revealing the sweaty but
grinning face of William's father, Fox Mulder.
With a grin, William stood up and Mulder laughed. He came over and
ruffled his son's hair.
"Not bad, kid, not bad at all. Although next time I'd refrain from
actually stunning someone during a practice run, poor Gibson's still
seeing stars."
William flinched a little. He hadn't meant to actually stun anyone,
but you never knew. He followed his father to the van where the
driver, Doug Eagleman and the second attacker, 24 year old Gibson
Praise, were waiting. Gibson was looking green and his friend, Doug
was fanning him.
'Nice move squirt...' William heard inside his head. Gibson was
telepathic and William was one of few people who could actually hear
and respond to him.
He smiled sheepishly and thought back, 'Sorry, man. I didn't mean
to.'
Gibson sighed and smiled. He shook his head and said, "Do you want us
to drop you off?"
Mulder shook his head, "No, thanks guys. It's only two blocks, we can
walk it. And I know you two wanted to go down to the reservation
tonight, so go on ahead."
As Doug and Gibson waved goodbye, Mulder and William started walking
back towards their house on the edge of the neighborhood.
William looked over his and his father's clothes and shook his head.
"Mom's gonna be mad."
Mulder smiled softly. "She doesn't like the way we're training you,
but she of all people knows how important it is. We don't have time to
play around, it's already 2012. This December is it, and I know you've
been training ever since we've had you, but we still don't know fr
sure what to expect."
William felt a small shiver as his father mentioned the impending
date. December 22, 2012, the date on the Mayan calendar that signaled
the destruction of the universe, the date the aliens would come to
invade the Earth. When William had first heard the story, he wondered
if his parents and the others who had settled in this neighborhood
weren't a little off their rockers. But as he had been told more and
more, he came to realize that nobody was playing games. The entire
town of Roswell, New Mexico was built on a large deposit of
magnetite. The aliens themselves were affected in such a way that,
while it wasn't fatal, staying in the area caused an illness in them
similar to radiation sickness in humans. But there were other beings
as well, human-alien hybrids known as "Super Soldiers" that could not
be killed in any way, not by bullets or even being crushed into
hamburger. The only thing that WOULD kill them was magnetite. It
pulled them apart and reduced them to a pile of powdered
metal. Using this information, several scientists who had moved to
Roswell in a growing community of secret specialists, had developed a
type of dart gun that fired darts of concentrated magnetite. One of
the weapons on William's cellular phone, besides a stun gun, was a
magnetite dart. However, it was only a single shot.
The people of this task force had been working for a decade to develop
weapons against the coming invaders, the dart guns being group
included not just the residents of thier neighborhood in Roswell, but
a network of carefully placed people around the world. After arriving
and setting up a haven in Roswell, safe from the supersoldiers who
could not come near the magnetite thier homes were built on, former
FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully along with several others who
also knew of the impending invasion, had begun to work on a plan to
stop the planned invasion. All over the world, individuals who
were part of their group worked in secret alongside thier regular jobs
to do thier part, developing weapons, vaccines and battle plans to
fight an unknown superior force from another world. Dana Scully had
been working as well, using her degree in medicine and a teaching
position at the local university to develop and reverse engineer the
vaccine Mulder had used on her in Antarctica. It was the only known
defense against the virus that turned human beings into
biological incubators for new alien life forms. It had been Mulder who
had named the group Aegis, after the mythological Zeus' sheild. But it
had been suggested by a group of local teenagers who played a
roleplaying game called Conspiracy X, and Mulder had found it funny
how the kids never knew how close thier game came to the truth.
In the meantime, Mulder and Scully had been trying to raise their son
in the best way they could. They wanted him to have as normal a life
as possible, and to never be afraid, but they didn't want him to be
clueless. They made sure he trained in martial arts and learned all
that he could about how to defend himself. They told him as much as
they could about their operation and the plan going on to stop the
invasion. But aside from all of that, they still had a
little boy who had lost people he had considered parents in a terrible
way. Like his father, he was very good at blaming himself for things
that were ultimately beyond his control, and both of them had talked
to him at length, even talked to some counselors to make sure he was
handling everything alright.
William looked up at his dad. "Dad, am I going to be able to go with
you and Mom this summer?"
"Sure, you do every year. Don't you want to see your friend Josh
again?" asked Mulder.
Since coming to live with his birth parents, William had stayed in
contact via email with his friend from Midville, Joshua. Every summer
since then, they had made trips to visit Josh and his family, the Van
de Kamp's graves, then on to Washington D.C. to visit the Scully
family. William loved his grandmother and Uncle Charlie, but Uncle
Bill was always a little short with him. And he knew that Uncle Bill
detested his dad. They also made a point of visiting Mr.
Skinner, and Agents Doggett and Reyes, as well as Jimmy and Yves, two
remaining members of a group who called themselves the Lone Gunmen.
The other three of that group, Byers, Langley and Frohike, had been
friends of his parents for years and had died "in the line of duty" as
his mother had said. They visited thier graves in Arlington Cemetary
every summer too, while Mulder would tell William all the crazy
stories the three guys had gotten into.
"Well," said William, "This is it, this is the year."
"That's right," replied Mulder, "And if there was ever a time to see
everybody, this is it. Plus you have a birthday coming up in a few
weeks, right? Mom says we can have any kind of party you want, a real
big one for all your friends. She says you already picked one out?"
William nodded. He heard what his father didn't say. That this might
be the last year they were all alive, so live it up now. He and his
mother had planned to rent out the local Skate Galaxy and have the
blacklight lit skating rink/maze/laser tag facility all to themselves.
William had planned on inviting his entire Little League team and
everyone from karate. He didn't have many friends from school since he
was in the eigth grade and most of his classmates were four years
older than him with entirely different interests. He wished
Josh could come though.
They walked into thier house and paused in the kitchen. Dana Scully
was on the phone, apparently chewing someone out.
"No Richard! You SAID you would have those MagGun proposals sent to
the Pentagon by this past Monday, it's Friday." she said in
exhasperation. She paused and listened, then continued irritated. "OK
then, fine. When Al comes to invade us all, maybe we'll just send up a
radio transmission asking, 'Sorry boys, our Mags aren't going to be
ready for another two weeks, could you come back then?' Think that'll
work?"
Mulder snorted back a laugh and she turned around, and her mouth
dropped at the sight of her son and his father covered in desert sand
tracking into her kitchen. Suddenly her attention shifted back to the
phone. "OK, OK, fine then. Just do it fast, will you?" She hung up
then turned her stern gaze on the two men in her life. They both
grinned identical sheepish grins. She knew it wouldn't do to laugh
right now, she didn't wwant either of them to think she
approved of what she knew they had been doing, but it WAS a funny
sight.
Mulder said almost apologetically, "Umm, Dana, we're um, just going to
go, er clean up, OK?" He hurried out of the kitchen and William
scooted after him after blowing a kiss to his mother. Once they were
out of sight she allowed herself to smile. She knew it was important
for William to be on alert and be trained, she just wished it didn't
have to be so rough. She wished he were still a baby, but in other
ways she was glad he wasn't. While other mothers were worried about
kidnappers, pedophiles and speeding cars, she worried about
super soldiers, UFO's and government agents coming after her kid.
While sitting around the dinner table that night, Scully clued Mulder
in on the latest developments on the homefront. They had worked in
secret until the past year when finally bringing in the military and
the President, with a little help from thier friends still in the FBI
and Congress. It hadn't been easy, especially since you never knew who
to trust, and who could be an alien in disguise. They had relied on
Gibson Praise as a sort of human lie detector to tell if anyone in the
room was an alien or not human in any other way. William
had been learning to do it himself, although his abilities were
different from Gibson's. William had been injected with a form of
magnetite as an infant by his half-uncle Jeffery Spender, who lived
next door with Gibson. He had never been told why, although his
parents didn't seem to mind Uncle Jeff being around, but he sensed his
mother had a bit of animosity towards his uncle. But they needed every
man they could get, even one who had been as weakened and
disfigured as Jeff Spender had been by the experimentation done on him
by the government.
Scully told them that thier contact at the weapons processing factory
had been late on delivering the magnetite gun proposal to the generals
in thier group at the Pentagon. On top of all that, there were some
holdups at the CDC in getting the vaccine out. England had already
begun innoculating thier citizens and most other countries had plans
in place, thanks to the group members already working in those
countries.
"Relax, Scully," said Mulder, "It'll all get going in the next two
weeks like planned. When announcing the need for millions of Americans
to be vaccinated with a new vaccine against an unknown disease, it has
to be done carefully to prevent panic. Besides, no one's going to know
what the truth is, they're coming up with some story about Anthrax or
something."
Scully nodded, "The Aegis group wants to know about the meeting,
people have been calling nonstop."
Mulder sighed. Although he had not asked for the position, he was
considered one of the group leaders, since he had founded the
beginnings of the network during his time in hiding in New Mexico when
William was a baby. He had been reluctant to take on the role though,
since he had a mental image of his father and the men he had worked
with in a similar situation, running the Syndicate in the shadows of
an alien invasion.
"We'll shoot for July 4th, everyone will be off from work and we can
make it into a sort of neighborhood barbecue or something, we'll avoid
suspicion that way. And it'll give everyone time to get down here." He
picked at his salad slowly.
Scully turned to William. "What about you? Still on for your birthday
party?" she asked with a grin.
He smiled back. "Sure am, and the vision quest too. Who knows, maybe
the spirits will send some huge sign of how we're supposed to win the
invasion." His parents both smiled somewhat sadly.
Later that night, William tossed and turned in his bed. Sleep was
coming more and more difficultly as the months faded away to the
inevitable. He didn't let his parents know he was sleeping badly,
since he didn't want them to worry even more about him, but lately
he'd lie down around 9:30 and stare at the ceiling until 1AM. And when
he DID sleep, his dreams were filled with images of Bob and
Nancy lying dead in different places on the farm, of his family being
frozen in alien pods, of UFO's zooming through the sky spitting fire
like in War of the Worlds. It was getting to the point to where he was
starting to see flashes of daydreams during the day. Once he thought
he saw a UFO overhead, although UFO's couldn't fly over Roswell
without crashing due to the magnetite. Another time he thought he saw
a gray alien in the bushes. He hoped he wasn't losing it so
soon to the time when he might be needed.
Sighing, he got up out of bed and went down the hall towards the
kitchen for some water. He didn't turn on any lights, since both of
his parents were light sleepers. But as he came into the den, he saw
that his father was still up anyway watching television. Fox Mulder
had been an insomniac for years. Mulder looked up and saw his son
standing in the doorway. He grinned and patted the sofa next to him.
William went over and crawled up beside his dad. Mulder
pulled a blanket over both of them and settled back down.
"Can't sleep?" he asked.
William shook his head. Mulder pressed on, "You're worried about
something? You don't have to do the vision quest, you know. Or is it
something else?"
William thought for a minute, then asked, "Dad, are we going to win?"
He had never asked this question right out, knowing his parents were
working as hard as they could to ensure the war would be won, but what
did they really think?
Mulder, for one, didn't quite know how to answer. " I really don't
know son," he said with caution, then decided to continue, "but if you
want absolute honesty, well, the chances aren't good."
"Then we're all going to die anway?" asked William. Mulder smiled.
"Probably not. There are 8 billion people on the planet, even with
the gestating virus, there will always be pockets of people who will
be isolated and will escape it. Plus we have the vaccine and we've
been innoculating people for years, so quite a few will be immune to
it. To the best of our knowledge, Al doesn't know about the vaccine
yet, and thanks to the friends we made at the CDC, the vaccine has
been mass-produced for three years now and shipped out with regular
vaccines given to babies when they're born. As for the older ones,
doctors who are part of Aegis have released announcements saying
previous booster shots were found to be ineffective, to come in and
get the "new improved" one, doctors are giving them during anual
checkups, and all of us here in Roswell and the whole family have had
them. So we're betting the virus thing won't work as well as they'd
hoped.
Now don't get me wrong, it'll still get alot of people if it's
released. We just can't vaccinate everyone, there's no time. But we
estimated about half the world's population has it by now, and some of
our Aegis crew have been burning those cornfields mom and me showed
you two years ago in Texas and all over the world. Some of our more,
um, enthusiatic crew even blew up some of those huge bee hives with
home made napalm. Managed to get the attention of the local
news."
Mulder paused and sighed. William thought for a minute, then asked, "I
read about all the terrorist stuff at the turn of the century, and
listen to what you and Mom tell me about the Syndicate an Aegis. What
makes us different from those guys? I mean, we operate in small goups
loosely connected to each other, we have ties in the government. We're
going to end up fighting a huge..."
"DON'T compare us to them, William," Mulder said sternly, "Aegis is
NOT like any of those organizations. The Syndicate was only trying to
buy time to save thier own asses while keeping thier unlimited power
over the masses, and the terrorists, well, they didn't care who got
killed, civillians, kids. We're trying to ensure our species will
survive whatever's coming. We're trying to save lives here. Yes we
operate in some of the same ways, groups loosely connected through our
network, all trying for the same goal, but we're not trying to kill
anyone or control anyone, we're trying to keep the planet for
ourselves, which, frankly I think we have a right to. I mean,
apparently they WERE here before us, from what I was told. But they
didn't oringate here, they came to colonize it but it was too cold. So
they left or lay dormant in ice. But when they came back, suddenly
here we were and they don't feel like sharing. Neither do I actually.
Who are they to come and commit genocide? What right do they have to
the planet? None at all. It's ours.
And you know, I'm not about being heartless. If some catastrophe
destroyed thier world and they needed somewhere to live, and above
all, were more gracious about sharing the planet, I could see letting
them colonize in a few places. If they were at all willing to coexist
and respect our right to live, I wouldn't have a problem with sharing
the planet. But thier constant lies and backstabbing to the Syndicate,
the virus, all of it shows they don't really want to work with us at
all, they just want us to help them kill ourselves."
William snuggled closer to his father and listened. His parents had
told him of past events they had dealt with while working ont he
X-Files, and it was alot to remember. But he had never heard his
father's true feelings about the matter. William knew both of his
parents had suffered terribly to fight the lies and horror they had
found within the cases of the X-Files. Within a space of five years,
his mother's father and both of his father's parents had died or
been murdered. His aunt Melissa had been shot and killed, mistaken for
her sister. His aunt Samantha, for whom his father had searched for 25
years was found to have been eventually killed after years of
experimentation by the Syndicate. His half sister Emily had been
created as a human answer to the super soldiers, without his mother's
knowledge, and she had eventually died from her abnormal blood
condition. The three orignial Lone Gunmen had been killed preventing a
deadly virus escaping, his half uncle Jeff Spender had been
shot by his own father, the Cigarette Smoking Man (William's genetic
grandfather), and when he didn't die, he was left to be experimented
on, leaving him horribly burned and disfigured. Gibson had been forced
into hiding at the age of twelve because of his mental abilites, after
his parents had been found dead.
Both Mulder and Scully had been abducted for several months, only to
be returned nearly dead. His mother had battled a brutal cancer. And
his own birth, which should have been a joyous miracle, was
overshadowed by the supersoldiers hunting for him, for Mulder's forced
flight underground, attacks and kidnappings which eventually led to
William's adoption to Bob and Nancy Van de Kamp. All these families,
all these lives, destroyed, all because of greedy evil men and
unfeeling creatures from God knows where who couldn't stay off
someone else's planet. The whole thing sucked. And for what? To fight
a losing battle?
"Dad?" William asked slowly. "What if we fail?"
Mulder pulled his son close. "Well, at least we will have tried."