Title: This Is How The World Ends
Fandom: X-Files
Rating: M
Disclaimer: I do not own The X-Files or any of its characters. References to real places are entirely fictional representations based on Google searches. Berkshire County Morgue is probably much more exciting than I give it credit for and I apologise wholeheartedly if it has been offended by my ignorant and insensitive descriptions.
Author's Notes: Thankyou to those who read the first chapter of this fic, and thankyou soodohnimh for reviewing. You know I appreciate the feedback :) I know it was short, but for me that's kind of an achievement. Against any and all efforts of mine, this fic has all the potential to get wildly lengthy, but I've learned my lesson about guesswork projections of story length so I will make no assertions at this time.
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A few bills crossed the counter.
"Where was the body found?"
The hand that took them had short fingernails, bitten to the quick. Anxiety. Overactive creative mind in a monotonous, boring role.
"In the basement of an apartment block, on the corner of East and Foster," the medical examiner's assistant answered, digging in the pocket of her white lab coat for a chap stick. Dry lips from the recent winds with the change of season. Habitual licking, despite the gradually worsening redness and discomfort. Nothing to distract her from it. She walked her late-night visitor from the front foyer to the exam room in the back. "Neighbours reported a bad smell. One of the officers that went out to investigate sprained his ankle when his foot fell through rotten floorboards. Building should have been condemned, if you ask me. Can't believe they're still going to let people lease those stacked-up, crumbling goat sheds they call apartments. But good thing it happened, or they wouldn't have found Spike here."
She pulled back the sheet covering the body, and Mulder looked down at the large cadaver laid out on the gurney beside him. 'Spike' was not an inappropriate name. Missing only a week, the man appeared years dead. His skin was dried and taut like a mummy, and his fatty tissue was gone, leaving only brittle bones beneath hard, wasted muscle… which had split like wood over tough knobby protrusions on his shoulders and knuckles. Mulder was not a medical expert, but his theory was that the muscle, when living and supple, had glided easily over these retractable appendages, and that the fatty layer below the skin had disguised any lump. The skull and ribcage had collapsed inwards since the autopsy to remove the last meal, though best Mulder could tell, these skeletal components had never been made of bone anyway, but rather something more elastic and flexible that allowed the form to shift to accommodate for large prey. And best of all, relaxed in death, six sharp mandible-like spikes had spilled from the lips, attached somewhere below the tongue.
Again, Mulder was no doctor, but he thought that in conjunction with the crushed and mangled form of an adolescent human male that had been removed from this cadaver's digestive tract post-mortem, this evidence constituted something distinctly not human. A literal man-eater.
Instinctively Mulder glanced up at the door, prepared for her to walk in to perform her examination, prepared to defend his unvoiced theory, prepared to dance around the definition of impossible with her until a tiny window of compromise opened between their extreme perspectives and the truth shone in on them both, but the days of debating cases with Scully were long over and this was not her type of case. Or rather, this was not the sort of case he could share with her. Back working for the Bureau, she'd be obligated to start a formal FBI investigation, which Mulder's current client was keen to avoid.
Not particularly welcome at the Bureau and freelancing as a paranormal PI for cash, Mulder was keen to get paid and so was keen to meet the violent, disreputable client's demands, so he'd have to solve this one alone.
It was hard to ignore the distinct weight of disappointment that settled in Mulder's stomach. Professional disappointment, he told himself. She would see things here that he couldn't. That's all.
It wasn't all.
"This is what you meant, right?" the assistant asked, shifting from one foot to another. Nervous. The medical examiner wouldn't approve of her showing Mulder in here to check out this body. For simple ethical reasons, or something more? "When you said to call if I saw something weird, this was what you meant? For your novel?"
Devoid of an all-access-pass federal identification badge, he took lots of roles on nowadays to get what information he needed. Tonight's was the role of a science fiction writer, researching for a new work. Ironically, fake names and considered cover stories were almost as effective as his badge had ever been.
"This is definitely weird," Mulder confirmed. He moved behind the head to look down the body. The man, when he was alive, was large and bulky, the sort of frame that fills a whole doorway. That's the way his last would-be victim described him, anyway. "A bear. He stood in the door and I couldn't get out." The eleven-year-old illegal had watched, horror-struck, as Spike choked the life from her cousin, pinning him still with long retractable bony appendages that extended from his fingers and shoulders while a monstrous mouth of spines expanded to fit the young man's twisted and compressed form inside.
She hadn't admitted to firing the bullet that had killed Spike but Mulder had inferred. He couldn't blame her and understood her position as an unwelcome resident in the country. Going to the police was as much an option as allowing herself to be eaten, which was another reason why Scully and her cavalry couldn't come in on the case. At least now the witness was safe, if permanently scarred from the experience, and Mulder could tell Fierro where his drug mules kept disappearing to. He suspected that the Columbian crime lord would be relieved to have his folklorish beliefs confirmed and to know that none of his associates seemed to have snitched on him, as was his initial fear when they'd disappeared. They'd just been eaten, probably for the lingering taste of narcotics they'd transported on and inside their bodies.
"You don't look surprised," the assistant pressed. Confronted. She didn't know quite what to do with this knowledge, that weird things like this existed and roamed her world. "You expected this. What do you know?"
Mulder shrugged, not wanting to give too much away. His new life relied on anonymity and his ability to be forgettable. A wide, rounded knowledge about the paranormal and the unexplained was strange. Memorable.
"What did your boss tell you to do about it?" he asked instead. The assistant frowned.
"He told me to put it out of my mind," she said uncomfortably, confirming Mulder's suspicion that this was not the very first example of this mutation on this gurney, just the first in this woman's short career. "That it would be gone soon anyway. And he was right," she added, gesturing at the body helplessly. "It's deteriorating by the hour. That's… that's why I called you. I thought, maybe, you could tell me what the fuck it is."
An anxious, highly creative individual, the assistant wasn't going to be able to simply put it out of her mind as she'd been advised. She was going to imagine horrible things everywhere she went.
"I don't know what the fuck it is," Mulder admitted, taking out his phone with a questioning glance at the assistant. She responded with an obliging shrug and he went ahead and snapped several pictures for his client. "I have some theories." And this was where she was supposed to roll her eyes and start shooting those theories down with precision, until he was left with just one – the truth. But the assistant was a far cry from Agent Scully and she didn't know the game, so she simply listened with wide eyes and rapt attention. "In Latin America there's a legend of a blood-sucking humanoid brute called El Viejo del Suco, said to once have been a man whose decline into a monster came about as a result of his deplorable choice to drink the blood of children. It's depicted in horror folklore as a child-eater, but this is a big guy: it's within reason that he would be living off teens and small-statured adults instead."
The assistant stared. "Did… Are you saying that this is a legend?"
Creative, but less open-minded than he'd given her credit for. Mulder considered the bitten nails and the copy of Fifty Shades stashed hurriedly at the reception desk. Hmm, no taste. And worse, no expectation of being surprised by life. Berkshire County Morgue was a boring workplace and she was too creative to be here but she wasn't prepared to accept that interesting things could happen here.
He tried to give her another chance – "It's not that far-fetched. Genetic mutations-" but he was interrupted by the sound of knocking on the front glass doors. Hurriedly Mulder helped her cover the wasted body of Spike, whatever he was, and he bolted for the steely storage closet door while the assistant ran to let the newcomers inside. Mulder barely had the closet door shut behind himself, and caught the edge of the door before it could hit the frame and make a noise.
"-didn't get a call? Normally we wouldn't even be open this late."
"Told you it was the wrong morgue." A man's voice, irritable but prideful in the way someone is when he's proven right.
"…meant to take her to Boston. Shit."
"…can't take her tonight…"
"Well…" The assistant's voice, hesitant and muffled by the distance. "Leave her here, then, and I'll process her. Put her back here."
Mulder twisted to look back out into the exam room through the narrow crack he'd left. The ME's assistant held the door open for two ambulance technicians to bring in a bagged body on a gurney.
"Thanks," the younger of the two men said, relieved. "You'll be saving our asses."
"Your ass," the older one replied snidely. "I told you we were going the wrong way."
"How did you accidentally drive out here?" the assistant asked, surprised. She automatically prepared and dragged over a new examination trolley from the other side of the room. "It's exactly the wrong way."
"They did tell us Birkshire County Morgue, when we collected the body," the older man admitted, "but the transfer papers say Boston."
"Been a rough couple of days at Leominster emergency," the other technician commented, kicking the brakes on at the wheels of the gurney. "Three house fires with fatalities in as many days, and then that pile-up on the highway tonight. Plus all the usual customers. I guess they was distracted. But I swear, I swear the doc said 'take her to Birkshire'. Was already halfway here when Steve read we were meant to be going to Boston. You ready?" he asked his partner, and they hefted the body from their trolley to the new one. "Is the ME here?"
"No, he'll be in after six."
Hidden in the closet, Mulder adjusted his position to check his watch, prepared to wait them out and to watch the ME perform his examination. He wasn't queasy about that sort of thing. He'd watched Scully cut into dozens, maybe a hundred or more corpses. It was almost calming, the quiet and the straightforwardness of her measured and knowledgeable actions, the way she fell into her element. He could watch her dissect for hours, the way other people could sit and watch a pianist or a ballerina.
"Can you sign here to say we delivered, safe and sound?" the first technician asked, holding out a clipboard. The assistant did as requested and was offered another clipboard in exchange. "Notes from the hospital. Dr Lansdowne will want to review before he makes his examination."
"Why? What happened to her?" Curious. Anxious. The assistant was full of no surprises.
"Take a look," the first technician said, already unzipping the bag, but his older colleague frowned and reached to still his hand.
"Don't. It could be– Ugh," he remarked sourly when the opening in the bag revealed the deceased's face and upper body. "What a mess."
Mulder couldn't see much from where he was but from the narrow view he had of the top of the head he gathered it was a woman's body.
"What could cause something like that? The burning?" the assistant asked in a hushed, anxious voice. She seemed to have forgotten all about the writer she'd sneaked in for under-the-table cash. She drew back as a thought hit her. "Do you think it's contagious?"
Her motion revealed the face to Mulder's limited view.
"Hmm, doubt it," the younger driver answered, already bored. He let his partner zip the bag closed again. Didn't consider her concerns. Didn't initiate quarantine procedures. Didn't contact any external authorities for advice. "The medical examiner's problem."
It was a few minutes before they were safely away, vehicle departed from the lot and front doors locked again, and the assistant came back to check on Mulder.
"That was close– Wait, stop!" she demanded worriedly when he strode straight past her on a beeline to the new body. Spike's case was as solved as it was going to get without further resources, which he could only get through government channels, and both the client and the victim's interests were best served by avoiding those channels. One of the downsides of working freelance was the frequency with which he had to forgo digging all the way to the source of the problem. Once the client's question was answered – Where are my drug mules? What's haunting my house and making it impossible for me to keep tenants? – the deeper questions remained only for Mulder. I found your drug mules; don't you want to know what's eating them? I found your ghost; don't you want to know her story, why she's sticking around? No, no, always no. Most people lacked the curiosity that drove him and were content with the neat head-in-the-sand answer. Accepting this had been a hard-learned lesson, and if he wanted to be able to afford to eat, he had had to learn to let go of cases once the customer was satisfied, rather than when he was satisfied. Because he could keep going. He could follow a trail until every breadcrumb was eaten and every pebble had turned to dust and blown away, and still keep looking for a light in the distance. An answer. He fixated on it until it burned away to nothing and he could be staring at it so hard that he didn't even notice it was gone, or that it had perhaps never existed in the first place.
This kind of fixation had cost him everything. Or more precisely, one thing.
So now he wilfully shrugged off the desire to know more about Spike and filed it firmly in the 'solved' section of his busy mind, and charged determinedly for the new body. His hand was already on the zip when the assistant caught his wrist firmly.
"You can't," she said. "This isn't at all related to your book. You can't just go opening body bags, especially one we haven't examined yet. You could contaminate it."
Mulder tried to contain his anticipation at the thought of what he might have found here. He forced himself to release the zip and to smile at the assistant.
"I won't touch," he promised, tucking his hands behind his back. "You open it. Let's take a look."
"I need to close this place up and go home-"
"I asked you to call me with anything weird," Mulder reminded her. "This is weird, right? A strike of fate redirects an anomalous corpse from the metro morgue to you guys out here, on the same night that I'm here researching for my novel. Tell me that doesn't sound like kismet to you."
"It's a weird night," the assistant admitted, "but there's nothing that weird about this body, from what I can tell so far. It's just gross. And fate's bullshit. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation why the body ended up here. A staff member at the hospital misspoke. They were overrun and overwhelmed."
A perfectly reasonable explanation. "I used to work with someone who always said that. Maybe you're both right. Or maybe I'm right, and there's something in that bag I need to see. Come on," he coaxed, slightly flirtatiously. "I won't tell anyone."
She wasn't moved or impressed, and Mulder reluctantly acknowledged that he wasn't exactly in his prime anymore. It might have worked ten years ago, maybe even as recently as five, but he was definitely off his game since Scully had left. His harmless, shameless flirting with nurses, receptionists and other potential sources of access to information he wanted had never bothered her. He supposed his heart wasn't really in it anymore.
With a sigh he pulled his wallet out again. "Please? It's important."
He thrust two hundred dollars at her and she pursed her lips. But she accepted it, shoved it into her pocket and unzipped the bag.
"One minute. And don't touch."
Mulder didn't need the full minute to know for sure what he'd expected. He breathed only shallowly around the body as he leaned closer to look, despite knowing that it was not contagious. Excessive frothy blood was gathered on the pale lips and cheeks, down the chin, still dribbling out post-mortem, and bluish veins shone through the translucent, sickly skin all around the mouth, down the throat and across the chest above the neck of her nightgown. Underneath the blood, where it was thickest, the skin was blistered and raw.
She'd been dead at least an hour, Mulder gathered, but she'd been marked for death as soon as she'd contracted this. And it had been a very painful way to go.
The assistant stood back with her arms folded, shaking her head with disbelief at Mulder's fascination.
"You seriously think this is more interesting than that?" she asked incredulously, jerking her thumb at Spike's covered form. "It's messy but it's no withering man-eater."
"No," Mulder agreed, taking in the burst blood vessels in the eyes – asphyxiation – and the flecks of pink tissue and dead black (rotten flesh?) in the bloody froth. What a horrid way to die. "This is just a victim of something very nasty. Excuse me," he said, straightening and withdrawing his cell from his pocket again, "I need to make a phone call."