AN: Thanks for all the feedback! Enjoy another chapter from the archives.

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Two Clowns Short of a Three Ring Circus
by Fandomatic

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Chapter Two

The clowns clomped around the curve and Sheppard could clearly hear their progress ahead. His sneakers made very little noise as he moved quickly down the organic hallway of the Wraith cruiser. He followed the noise, trying not to get too close to be seen and not too far behind to lose their racket. Mostly he tried not to think about the fact that he was following clowns with little more than a Wraith crowbar for protection.

If Ronan had been here, he'd have no trouble tracking the drag marks. Hell, he had no trouble tracking the drag marks as he followed the scraping noise. The cruiser floor was layered with dirt and the two humans made nice little clean paths along the hall.

After a few more twists, the hallway started to expand and Sheppard abandoned the direct path and hugged the supporting pillars on the side of the corridor. He could hear the Wraith more clearly now. They were working on something in the dim, cavernous space. John realized the opening was most likely the cargo bay he'd pointed out to McKay. He took his time and approached cautiously.

John searched quietly for a vantage point along the exterior hall and found a crawl space above their line of sight. The access ladder spiraled up to the walkway and he silently climbed it. Once on the landing, which flowed in and out onto little balconies around the huge chamber, Sheppard crawled to the nearest overhang.

The narrow ledge connected shallow alcoves, or cocoons filled with old human mummies that marched along the wall and lined the entire chamber to the ceiling. Their vacant eyes and frozen screams bore witness to the gallery of horror. Ancient dust spilled out of the cocoons and layered the air with the dusty smell of calcium and dry bones.

Below, the four clowns blocked his way back to Rodney as two of them cleaned out cocoons along the wall while the other two encased their new meals in the emptied ones. The old leathery membranes tore open like tissue paper and the dried up mummies fell onto a tarp with a puff of dust.

He really hated clowns and these Wraith gave him the creeps. Their faces were painted white with big red smiles and happy eyes. The hobo clown had false buck teeth hiding its pointy set of choppers but when the other Bozo hissed, the red smile turned it into a frightening creature. Clearly, they were not the harmless, sweet buffoons they pretended to be.

After clearing a dozen cocoon cells, the KP detail started to break apart. The clowns divided their ancient victims between the tarps, then they picked up their flowering Wraith rifles and dragged off their leftovers through the far connecting archway.

The clowns headed straight toward McKay again.

Below, the two humans hung limp, now fully enveloped in the writhing cocoon membranes and tentacles and still passed out cold. Sheppard looked down at the catatonic victims and decided to follow the Wraith. Worried, Sheppard hurried down the ladder and sprinted quietly after their noisy exit and quietly cursed the confusing branching hallways that stopped him from getting around them.

The Wraith didn't drag their human remains very far down the main artery. They opened a bulkhead wall and passed through a narrow cell into another section and through another bulkhead into a third section that wasn't anywhere near the power control station.

Relieved that McKay was safe for the moment, but curious when they didn't bother to close the doors behind them, John decided he could follow the Wraith just a bit longer to see where they went, so he could avoid them. After a few twists and turns, at the end of a corridor, they opened a door and light poured into the hall.

Sheppard blinked and tried not to look so shocked as a puff of fresh air ruffled his hair. The light dimmed briefly as the Wraith blocked the doorway, dragging the bodies outside.

The ship was not in space. It was beached under a blue, cloudless sky.

His luck was definitely changing. A smile played over his lips as he followed them through the opened pressure chamber and cautiously stepped out. The hatch opened to a sloping hill that dropped down into a dark forest of trees and a stiff warm wind flattened his thin blue shirt against his chest. The sun sat on the far horizon, peeking over the top of the hemlock forest. A sweet smell of pine and fresh earth after a spring rain filled his nostrils with the early morning breeze.

Below, the Wraith had disappeared into the woods, plunging through a dense wall of flowering laurels, so he climbed out far enough to see that the entire ship was hidden under a hill covered in trees. They were big trees, too — gigantic hemlocks that took hundreds of years to grow. The derelict Wraith cruiser had been there a long, long time.

Sheppard glanced back down toward the dense woods and hesitated. He decided he wasn't that interested in the Wraith undertaking, but was more worried about getting back to McKay, releasing the captives and getting the hell out of there in one piece. The captives were sure to know the location of the nearest stargate.

He ducked back into the ship and started back down the passageway. He hadn't gone more than a few turns when he heard the familiar scraping noise accompanied by the tramp of boots.

"Crap." John backed up and sprinted back to the hatch, hoping the other Wraith detail hadn't returned yet. Once outside, he scrambled along the hillside along an overgrown path that suddenly dipped down into a grove of laurels. He plunged into the hollow and rapidly settled in behind a fallen trunk where he could see an unobstructed view of the Wraith entrance.

Two clowns pulled a tarp of mummies out of the ship and started down the hill with their burden.

John frowned at the Wraith blocking his path back to Rodney before he realized there had to be another entrance on the other side of the ship where he'd first ran into them. They might even have a dart he could steal. His gaze fell on the overgrown trail that dropped into the ravine, out of sight from the Wraith. John eased out of hiding and took the path down into the hollow.

The sudden depression in the earth explained the problem with the dart bay which must have caved in a long time ago. Sheppard climbed the ridge out of the defunct dart bay and cautiously approached the top of the exposed hill and made sure he was hidden from behind. He crawled the last few feet and raised his head slowly for a peek.

What he saw made his mouth part in surprise and he stared, trying to reconcile the bizarre scene of the 1969 Volkswagen Beetle parked in the Wraith's front yard with clowns swarming all over it.

Painted a bright cherry red, the vintage little car had an enormous red rocket mounted on its roof. The rocket bore the letters, ACME, clearly stenciled in white across its fuselage. Below, the car windows were decorated with red-checkered curtains that hid the interior from view. A clown in a classic red fireman hat reached into the rocket panel and a brief shimmer of white filled the interior of the car, glowing past the drawn curtains and accompanied by the whine of a Wraith culling beam. Another fireman opened the passenger door and hauled out a limp woman in a tan pantsuit. She was dumped unceremoniously in a living tangle of human bodies a short distance from the car while two more hobo clowns emerged, one in large plaid pants, the other in a pea green caricature of a suit. Both of them carried Wraith rifles with flowering bouquets sprouting around the muzzles. The new clowns immediately gathered up a few catatonic victims from the human pile and dragged them toward the ship.

John's grip tightened on the crowbar as the glaring truth hit him. The evidence was overwhelming. How else could he explain the conventional clown costumes, the classic 1969 Volkswagen and the cartoonish ACME rocket? He was still on Earth. Somehow the Wraith had established a foothold and had kept it hidden for centuries.

Growing more and more disturbed, he watched as the fireman closed the door and another whine from the culling beam rent the air. Two more clowns got out of the car. The two new clowns wore twin red-striped shirts with tiny twin bowler hats perched on their ridiculous green wigs and where one wore a joker smile, the other wore an equally creepy frown. The fireman said something to them and the new clowns picked up two victims out of the pile and drug them off toward the open hatch.

It was bizarre the way the Wraith adopted earth's clown costumes. In fact, the entire scene was surreal as Wraith clowns kept coming out of the tiny little car. It made perfect sense to infiltrate a population with an accepted disguise that allowed the Wraith free movement, but the Wraith weren't given to hiding what they were. It meant they were vulnerable to discovery while they operated out of their derelict ship. All it would take was one well-aimed ballistic missile and he could kill them all, every last clown in the circus.

He just had to get his phone back to call in the coordinates and rescue a few humans along the way.

John lay frozen on the exposed hill and watched them work with mounting alarm because the traffic pattern steadily increased the number of Wraith roving the halls of the ship. As the ship filled with Wraith, their probability of discovery increased. He needed to warn Rodney but both doors were blocked with activity.

Trapped on the ridge, he counted over twenty clowns getting out of the vehicle before the workers started to disband. Together they had brought in about the same number of unconscious victims to fill the cocoons.

The clowns left in charge of the vehicle, drug out a coiled Wraith cable from the ship and attached it to the rocket panel. It was almost funny the way it cocked its head to the side and unplugged the cable with obvious confusion. It hissed at the other fireman and pointed at the cable end. For an instant, the buffoon was replaced by a menacing creature.

The other fireman tried plugging it in, but when the connection didn't produce whatever they were waiting for, the Wraith bared their fangs at each other and one of them pointed toward the ship and said something. The other one pointed at the Wraith rifles and hissed a reply. With new purpose, the two firemen picked up their rifles with the wacky bouquets decorating the barrels and hurried into the cruiser.

Sheppard's thoughts immediately went to Rodney and that useless galactic signal he was working on because Rodney had wanted to tap into the power grid. The firemen were going to trace the problem straight to his door.

•

Crystal Chaucer — discerning clairvoyant extraordinaire as proclaimed on her business card but simply known as "the ghost lady" to the new budding television crew around her — stifled a squeak of astonishment at the needle spiking like a drum stick into the red. Maybe, just maybe, the house was really haunted this time and it had been worth the wait to shoot the last segment of their day at the crack of dawn just to catch that gaudy chandelier glowing like a disco ball in the morning sun.

The exhaustion of staying up all night trying to catch ghosts on camera disappeared. She quickly sidled away from the instrument installed in the dining room, where she'd been relegated to waiting alone for her cue, and walked innocently into the foyer where Diana was reading her lines into the camera. As a show hostess with a degree in parapsychology, the tall young star was breaking new ground with her revolutionary episodes of Haunting Science.

"Finished in 1855 in Connecticut's heartland, Gerhardt lavished his new bride with this astonishing chandelier…"

"Oh!" Crystal did her best stumbling half-collapse, complete with fluttering eyelids and managed to clutch the side board on the way down. She avoided clutching at Diana because the first time she'd introduced a trembling clairvoyant episode, Diana had recoiled and dropped her on her petite boney rump. Her trembling arms shimmied the furniture so hard that the vase danced over the surface and the candelabra tottered like a drunken fool before it crashed nicely to the floor.

"Miss Chaucer!" she heard Diana's startled rebuke because she'd broken in too early.

Feeling pretty satisfied with her eye-rolling and self-induced stupefied expression, she was well into her performance before the hostess finally recovered and started narrating the events as they happened into the camera. "Oh, my, she's having a clairvoyant episode. This is not rehearsed. You're seeing this, unedited as it happens!"

Crystal Chaucer knew what she looked like on camera. Her carefully chosen eclectic wardrobe made a colorful presentation from her brightly died red hair to her fake fingernails. In fact, everything about Crystal was fake — even her name. Christened Jane Spence by her terribly normal parents, she'd fought the chaste and proper stereotype her whole life — that is, up to the age of eighteen when she'd changed her name right after she'd experienced an astonishing series of clairvoyant episodes which she was determined to repeat.

"This doesn't happen very often and this certainly indicates that there is a psychic disturbance in this old house that Crystal Chaucer, our very own ghost lady, can pick up. Sometimes Miss Chaucer can sense things in the ectoplasma that surrounds all living organisms that the instruments cannot detect. Right now, Crystal is communing with this morphic field on a subconscious level, tapping into that library of combined human experience. It's important to wait for the shaking to subside, which signals the end of the clairvoyant episode, and only then try to talk to her, gently bringing her back to our plane of reality. Right after the episodic incident, she may be able to actually channel the spirit world and relay any information or messages lingering in her consciousness…"

Crystal continued the shaking and ignored the excited voices around her. She waited for the nerd to come flying in with the ticker tape trail, her validation for a bigger paycheck, which happened just as she predicted. Sometimes it was scary being able to predict the future so accurately.

"Diana! We've got multiple hits everywhere in the house!" The pipsqueak waved her ticket to fame in front of the camera and Crystal's twitching subsided as the boy continued his report in a rush. "The sensors out in the barn, the guest house and the garage all lit up like Christmas trees!"

Crystal frowned at this news and moaned loudly to get their attention back, reminding them who sensed it first. "Oh, my head!" She let them help her sit up from where she'd collapsed gently to the floor, mostly to buy time as she thought about freckle face's information.

"Miss Chaucer, are you all right?"

Someone started fanning her face. "Crystal, talk to me," Diana urged and patted her tiny hand. "We have confirmation. Brian's instruments recorded the disturbance. What happened?"

"The psychic blast was too intense," Crystal whispered dramatically. "It's a roar … coming from far away and all over at the same time," which was suitably vague for television and would agree with anything the little nerd came up with. "It's so … intense!"

"Look, I have data," Brian interrupted.

"In a minute, Brian," Diana shushed him. "Miss Chaucer, where…, where is it now?"

"Too strong to tell…"

"Brian?"

"Yeah, it was strong all right," snapped the pipsqueak. "But like I've been trying to tell you, I've got recorded data and I think I can triangulate the event and locate the source."

The Haunting Science crew all stared at each other, stunned that their scientific quest for a confirmed psychic event could actually be feasible — not that Crystal was a slacker by any means, but the intangible could only stretch so far to an educated audience.

It didn't take a psychic to know their next move. "Yes," Crystal whispered. "They are calling to me to find them … They are lost, so lost and so far from … hooome…"

•

Dr. Fred Dietrich yawned. He checked his watch again. The seconds were ticking by, but the hands hadn't budged. He stuck the watch face next to his ear to confirm it still ticked. He'd wound it this afternoon, but it was stuck on slow. Then he glanced down his cobbled together bank of instruments that monitored the early morning sky where Vega, the brightest star of Lyra, was due to pass overhead, beginning in ten minutes. He checked his watch again. Still ten minutes.

Impatient, Fred looked out the picture window to make sure The Small Array was pointed in the right direction, but it was still night and he only saw his own reflection in the glass, not the red New Mexico desert or The Big Array looming on the horizon.

He didn't have to see the rising installation to get a case of the Joneses. The tall skinny reflection looked back at him with oversized ears and mocking eyes because he would never be important enough to rate The Big Array. Then his reflection was joined by the other two volunteers with his SETI project, just now getting there for their early morning shift in the small cinder block building. Ordinarily the two were enthusiastic in searching the heavens for alien life but both were unusually tardy.

The rather large male volunteer from Berkley bypassed the niceties and pointed right at the unseen view with a trembling finger. "Did you see what that pin-headed little rat did?"

Fred groaned and dived for the headphones. That explained their tardiness.

"That's right," Laurence continued without a beat as Fred slipped on the headphones. "That pasty-faced communist turned the southeastern dish to tune in that soul station again just to spite us! Now it's out of alignment again! He sabotaged our research for the last time!"

The blast of noise thrummed with frantic rhythm and Fred hastily jerked off the headset. Ross, the little twerp, had struck again. Last time it took thirty minutes to realign the dish but the clock was literally ticking this time.

"Those egg-heads don't take us seriously!" Susie threw her purse into a file cabinet and slammed the drawer. "Soul is not an alien language!" she snarled and her beautiful black chin lifted.

Fred glanced at his watch again. "Nine minutes! We're gonna miss it!" Where had the time flown? "Damn, we'll have to isolate it from the main array to get anything worth looking at. Laurence, pull the plug on the walleye! Susie, see if you can—"

"Already on it," and Susie sat down at the keyboard to start the recording sequence while Laurence silenced the small dish that sat cockeyed like a lazy eye, pointed straight at the eastern horizon while its cousins faced the heavens together. The next thirteen minutes were full of frantic activity as the three SETI researchers pulled together a clean record of Lyra as it began to pass by overhead, just before the crack of dawn.

Only then did Fred relax and take a look at the recorded graph rolling out of the printer. But the graph wasn't as clean as he expected. "What the hell? Laurence, did you isolate the right dish?"

"Uh, yeah!" Laurence frowned and walked over. "It was kinda hard to miss."

Fred frowned and muttered, "Even so, this shouldn't be coming out of a radio station on the east coast."

"What's coming from the east coast?" Susie frowned and abandoned the keyboard to peer over their shoulders.

Fred felt the excitement building. "Would you look at that! Look how strong it is at the beginning!"

Laurence pointed at the graph. "That's before I isolated the dish."

"But it's still there," Susie objected and pointed at the printout spewing out of the printer line by line. "It's a definite pattern but it's still there."

"Do you think we stumbled on a government project?" Laurence ventured hesitantly.

Laurence's question brought their heads up and they looked at each other with lips parted in wide-eyed surprise.

Fred, as the lead scientist, dashed their hopes of discovering a cover up. "I don't know of anything that could produce such an intrusive signature. It's affecting all the bands. It's like a tiny pulsar going off, beep, beep, beep, right here on Earth, but that's impossible."

"Maybe it's … alien," Susie suggested.

The SETI team stared at each other in a moment of calm revelation before the excitement broke through in a contest of voices. The room filled with rapid fire suggestions for the next course of action for such an auspicious occasion. Laurence wanted to follow protocol and call in a government agency before they did anything else. Susie wanted to exclude all government involvement and release the information to the media, despite her signed confidentiality agreement. And Fred wanted confirmation from several sources before they looked like a bunch of fools and called anyone. Without a consensus, the SETI team argued heatedly and then came to quick solution that fulfilled everyone's expectations. They bowed to Fred's scientifically sound wisdom but immediately broke ranks and rushed off to make some personal phone calls.

Instead of calling a contact in Hawaii, Susie's first call went to the notorious JJ Jerrod, or rather his organization, Extraterrestrial Conspiracy, known as Etc. for short. More specifically, she called her ex-boyfriend, Dallas, who worked for JJ, because Susie was not just an unbiased scientific observer as the SETI group supposed. She was an Etc. plant, sent there to gather first-hand evidence of government tampering because Susie believed her government was responsible for covering up multiple visits from extraterrestrials in the past.

On the other hand, Laurence was not the innocent university volunteer from Berkley that the SETI group supposed either. He also believed the Earth had been visited by aliens, but Laurence was paid by a secretive government agency to report any contact SETI made and bypass layers of bureaucracy. Laurence's first call went to Cheyenne Mountain with the cryptic message, "It looks like we'll have visitors for dinner," which called for immediate and decisive action from the government who didn't realize their code was so appropriate to the situation.

Their leader, Dr. Fred Dietrich, neither believed nor disbelieved in aliens and was completely oblivious to his team's biases. SETI had merely awarded him a grant because his method of searching for alien signatures fell in line with their budget. But Fred knew The Big Ear had a much bigger budget with even more sensitive instruments and he thought he could sway his colleague to lend an ear to his project.

Fred's call began with, "Uh, hi George, Fred here. Yeah, Susie's fine. Hey, I was just wondering, are you guys getting some, uh, unusual signatures over there? Oh, you know, a rhythmic signature, something of a regular thing…Oh, really? Well, have you tried turning it east? No, I mean east as in horizon east. Yes, I know. No, I'm not smoking anything. Yeah, it's weird. Well, we're getting something of a stronger signal out toward Boston…"

Of all the calls, Fred's call had the most immediate effect. Within thirty minutes, any dish not manned by a hermit was pointed in the general direction of Boston as the grapevine buzzed with astonishment and Fred received his confirmation from multiple sources. The source of the signal originated from a region just west of Boston in a small state forest near Hartford, Connecticut.

That was about the time the phone went dead and the military arrived in force.

•

Sheppard's grip tightened on the crowbar as he half slid down the hill to the Volkswagen below. John felt utterly exposed without his P-90 and the crowbar wasn't going to be good enough. He quickly checked inside the passenger door, but the Wraith hadn't left any of their rifles behind.

Then he stared, just a little bit astonished that they had left the key in the ignition. He quickly reached over, pulled the single key out and looked around the car for a good hiding spot. He settled on the floor mat that extended under the driver's seat. He lifted the corner and tucked the key under it, covering it with the carpet. It was completely hidden and that was one less thing he had to worry about chasing him.

His luck was holding.

Feeling somewhat smug, he slipped inside the hatch and followed the drag marks easily back to where he'd intercepted the Wraith clowns the first time. John hefted the crowbar thoughtfully as he retraced his steps to the eerily silent cargo chamber with the ghoulish audience. But the Wraith had emptied almost the entire lower level where they'd stored the captives. The waiting empty cocoons gave him a chill as his quiet footfalls echoed eerily back. Then his eyes focused on the fresh humans and he paused to check on their condition. He shook the first victim's shoulder without much hope.

"Wake up!" he urged.

The man was young, fit, in his mid-twenties and wore his hair loose and touching a tattered green collar. The sandy brown locks hung over his eyes, which didn't open. He moaned and the cocoon tightened around him. The moans stopped abruptly.

Over thirty adults now occupied the cocoons on the main floor and they didn't show any signs of consciousness. The culling beam effect was still too fresh to rescue them but the number of victims gave him a better count of the Wraith roaming the ship. He postponed his hope of freeing them and hurried back to get Rodney out of the trouble he'd stirred up with the Wraith.

It took him a lot longer to work his way up the corridor and avoid the random Wraith clowns patrolling the halls. The patrols gave him hope that Rodney was still free and annoying them.

In his haste, he almost stumbled right into the Wraith swarming over the power control station where McKay had been. These guys weren't dressed up as clowns either. The three males grew long white manes that fell past their shoulders and they wore the dark leather overcoats of the Wraith. They were so engrossed over the modified power station that they didn't even look up.

Sheppard backed up and quickly ducked down into another section. The gnawing worry was just sinking in when a white, fleshy hand reached out and grabbed him accompanied by a barely whispered, "Sheppard!"

Relieved to see McKay hiding in the shadows, John lowered the crowbar. "I was beginning to worry!"

"Where have you been?!" the doctor hissed and pulled him deep inside a darkened room. "I had to hide because the Wraith showed up and did you see some of them? They're dressed like clowns! You're not going to freak out are you? Because of the, you know, coulrophobia … I know I'm definitely disturbed by this, but that's because I find them somewhat inane and charming — in a juvenile way. I have to constantly remind myself that they are really terrifying creatures, but you probably don't have any problem seeing them for what they really are, right?" Then McKay noticed the crowbar in his hand. "Where did you get that?"

Sheppard picked the least offensive question. "In the hanger—" John began.

"That looks like a crowbar."

"It probably is. I think we're beached somewhere on Earth." John gave McKay a moment to absorb that as he explained running into the Wraith, the open hatch and the Volkswagen Beetle parked at the front door with a Wraith culling unit installed in the ACME rocket.

When he finished, McKay nodded thoughtfully. "Well, that makes sense with the ship's low power readings and the probable transfer limits of our ancient ball — given its size — but how'd the Wraith get here?"

"Aside from their pimped out ride?" John smiled and shook his head ruefully. "I don't even know how we got here, Rodney," he reminded and then doggedly focused back on tactics before Rodney pointed out that it was his fault again. "Look, we need to get off this ship and call in some firepower. I counted over twenty Wraith so far but I think it's more like twice that number and I only have one crowbar — so where's my phone?"

"ET's trying to use it."

"What?"

"You wanted an ET phone home device, so I built one — cleverly, I might add, by using the scanner as an interface translator between computer languages — and then, as I was modifying the long range subspace signal, the Wraith discovered my power tap, so I did the sensible thing and hid."

"Wait." John glared at Rodney with his recent concern forgotten. "The Wraith have our galactic phone? They could use it to call up their buddies in Pegasus!"

"Well, they can't use it without the gene." Rodney wiggled his fingers in the air smugly.

John's eyebrows rose. "Nice," he nodded.

"However, that doesn't exclude them from taking a look at the smartphone and reverse engineering something on their end — even though the power requirement to reach that far are way beyond the capabilities of this ship at the moment, being derelict and all — but I'd suggest we go before they figure out they need us to make it work."

Of course McKay was right to worry they would become targets. "Well, let's just keep that," he wiggled his fingers, "little secret between us, then."

"I wasn't planning on announcing it — especially after wasting all my time on a pointless task that could reach out and bite us in the backside," McKay grumped.

In the dim light, John could see his fear mirrored in McKay's eyes that they'd inadvertently left Earth's front door open. John's jaw set stubbornly and he gripped his crowbar. Rodney's fear just confirmed his plan to come back in full commando mode and destroy it all. He had to slam that door shut before it even opened, but the reality was clear. He didn't have the firepower to do it yet.

"Right," Sheppard agreed and pulled Rodney back toward the doorway. "But first, we rescue the captives. Then we get out of here in one piece."

So what's your plan to free the Americans?" he whispered at the door as Sheppard paused to check the hall.

"Cut them free. Sneak out the back." John hefted the crowbar. "Keep it low tech until we can contact the Daedalus."

"Right," the scientist muttered behind him, clearly not happy with a low tech plan. "I thought the Daedalus would've picked us up by now. We must be inside a dampening field."

"Yeah, that's probably keeping the ship hidden," John agreed and then asked hopefully, "Do you think you can turn it off?"

"Not without my equipment, meager as it is!"

"Then we keep it low tech."

John cautiously checked the empty corridor with his crowbar ready and motioned Rodney to follow him. The two crept quietly up the passageway toward the cargo chamber, keeping to the shadows. Rodney followed him silently and mimicked his movements as he ducked behind supporting pillars. The hall joined another passageway and Sheppard hurried through the junction and found another alcove to hide in. McKay flattened his body against the wall right next to him while Sheppard listened for approaching footsteps and checked out the hallway.

"I could really use that scanner right about now," Rodney whispered urgently behind him. "I've got a really bad feeling about this…"

The noise of the door whisking open behind them confirmed it. Rodney was psychic — or, more likely, he predicted doom so often that he was bound to turn the odds in his favor. It was like guessing tails every time the coin flew into the air and nailing it on the head fifty percent of the time. Only this time the odds were heavily against them and only a crowbar stood between them and a feeding hand. With a pained wince, Sheppard met Rodney's astonished eyes and gritted out, "Run," as he charged the surprised clown in the open doorway behind them.

Dressed in the most hideous green suit with its florescent dyes causing afterburner shock on his retinas, the Wraith was clearly more astonished at Sheppard's swift reaction to it. Its jaw dropped and the lax mouth parted the painted smile, not in a snarl, but stunned disbelief, as the colonel rammed the long crowbar into its chest with brutal force that buried it to the bow in the iron. The stunning blow caused the dying Wraith to drop its rifle. Its surprise drained to an open hiss and instinctively the Wraith reached out with its feeding hand. But no amount of feeding would heal that wound with the crowbar driven all the way through its chest and left sticking out the back.

John dodged the hand and dived for the Wraith rifle as a stunner bolt sizzled over his head and crackled all over the stabbed Wraith, who crumpled on top of him. Struggling to free the rifle, Sheppard heard several more shots coming from where McKay should have been. Then the rifle cleared the pea-green suit and John flipped behind the carcass and aimed across its shoulders at the vision in large plaid pants standing over McKay's quiet body.

The rifle hummed and spat two bolts at the plaid clown, dropping him in his tracks. John's aim swiveled to the next clown in line and he grouped his shots under its fake lapel flower. It was falling when a squeegee horn honked twice behind him. With his heart pounding in his chest, Sheppard rolled and aimed up at the fireman in the open doorway as its stunner bolt rippled over his body and froze his muscles.

On the verge of panic, he fought the effect and concentrated on leveling the muzzle at the yellow slicker. The fireman leaned over him and purred, "Naptime, human, then dinnertime." And then the squeegee horn brayed again like a gasping donkey right before the next shot mercifully ended the nightmare.

•