Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-files
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2398
Prompt: They have a consciousness, They have a life, They have a soul. Damn You! Let
The rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Track 69-Tool wk 46
Setting: Second Season Episode: "Red Museum"
AN: Borrowed Dialogue
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Scully wondered if there would ever stop being human monsters in this world.
Perhaps it was her own recent experience with Donnie Pfaster and Duane Barry, not to mention the men who had taken her. It could be the numerous, innocent people, injured, wounded, or killed that came through her emergency room when she was a medical student, barely able to keep up with the crying and dying around her. Sometimes she wondered if it harkened all the way back to the day, when she was thirteen, and her mother told her that her Sunday School teacher had been viciously murdered, an innocent, taken well before their time. Scully hated those who preyed on the innocent.
Gerd Thomas was one of those who liked to prey on those who had done no wrong; his mild behavior, and his rheumy, blank eyes that said that he was harmless didn't fool her. He stared up into Mulder's face. Thomas might believe he was a sick man, but obviously his belief didn't stretch out enough for him to bother getting help, to coming clean about his activities. Had he ever apologized for what he had done to those children? Did he really, truly believe it was wrong?
She wanted to shout at him, to tell him what a sick bastard he was. Instead she watched, silent, as Mulder grilled him with the wry, detached manner. Frankly she was surprised as anyone he was managing to keep his cool. Mulder usually always had a soft spot for cases with kids, especially anyone attempting to do harm. Those cases would always lead to Samantha in his mind.
For Scully, all she could think of was the harming of the innocents, people who became objects by men like this, used and abused and then ruthlessly set aside. It sickened her to look at the man. She turned away, staring out the window in the small, room, turning out Thomas and Mulder's conversation. She wondered where she had seen Thomas before. Despite his nearly forgettable features, he had been somewhere in the recent days that they had been. It was a small enough town, she was sure he could have been anywhere.
Somewhere with the cows, she thought. She tried piecing it together, as Mulder's voice rose sharply, and she glanced back to see Mulder's temper finally get pushed to something resembling a breaking point. He slammed down a photograph of Rick Mazeroski, dead and lifeless as he stared up into the camera, and shoved Gerd Thomas's face towards it.
"Did you kidnap Rick Mazeroski? Did you write that on his back," Mulder bellowed, his voice harsh and demanding. For half a moment Scully wondered if she should intercede, if Mulder was really beginning to lose his cool completely, and would need her to stop him from doing serious damage to a potential suspect. But she relaxed when Thomas, wide eyed and frightened stammered a "yes".
Mulder was simply trying to break through the vile man's equanimity, she reasoned. Might as well allow him to do what he did.
It clicked then where she had seen Gerd Thomas before. The day before, when they had gone out to the fields, he had been out there, working. She perhaps wouldn't have noticed him if it hadn't been for someone else, something else that had caught her attention and her memory. What was that?
She lacked Mulder's eidetic memory, the ability he had to run through images in his mind like others could run videotape. But she did think back, trying to remember what it was about that field that had struck her, about when they were leaving, and what she had seen that had stood out in her memory.
There was a blue car, a non-descript sedan, and in it was a man. Caucasian, tall, with a crew cut and a military bearing that had struck her as being similar too….
In a flash she was back on the dark, lonely bridge in Washington, holding her breath as she waited for the exchange to go down. Deep Throat held in his hands the strange flask with the creature in it, the being that he swore held alien DNA. All Scully wanted was Mulder's return, after he had foolishly gone to try and find Dr. Secare. She waited, and watched in her rear view mirror as a tall, crew-cut man with a military bearing stepped out of the white van, took the box containing the Erlenmeyer Flask, and then turned and shot Deep Throat at point blank range. She blinked as in her mind the gunshots rang out, and Deep Throats blood covered her hands, her overcoat, as his dying words whispered through her brain. "Trust no one," he gasped to her, before dying in her arms.
Her breath caught in her throat as she stared at Thomas, then at Mulder. Neither had noticed her swiftly paling face, or the stunned look of dawning realization. Perhaps that was a blessing, as she whispered, "Excuse me," and rose without another look at Mulder, rushing out of room and into the larger office of the Delta Glen Sheriff's Department. One of the deputies watched as she closed the door, inquisitive from where he sat behind one of the desks. Obviously he was curious about what was going on in that room. She couldn't imagine he hadn't have heard about what had happened. In small towns, such news spreads like wildfire.
Scully composed herself, smoothing her face into his calm, dispassionate lines. "Excuse me," she asked, finding her voice finally. "Have you received that toxicology report I ordered yesterday yet?"
The deputy blinked somewhat shamefully, as he nodded, grabbing the file. "We had them sent over from Madison this morning, ma'am." He passed the folder over to her as she took a look at it, studying the compound that had been found in the late, Dr. Larsen's vials. It took her a moment to realize just what it was she was looking at, as her memory jogged itself back to the man with the military crew cut, to Deep Throat, and to Ann Carpenter, the woman who had helped her initially study this compound and who had died for it. It was the same compound that Mulder had in her own file on record. The compound they had found in her blood stream when she had been returned, near death. Scully's stomach roiled as she stared at it. This had been what Dr. Larsen had carried in his briefcase, and quiet possibly had been inoculating all of these children with.
Purity Control. Scully's mouth went horribly dry.
She turned and stared at the door she had just come out of. Realization hit her square in her middle. As disgusting as she found Gerd Thomas to be, he wasn't responsible for hurting these children, nor for murdering Rick Mazeroski. He might be a vile pedophile, but unlike Donnie Pfaster he hadn't taken his fetish quite to murder just yet.
No, this was a much bigger and deeper problem, and it all came back to whatever was in that phial she had taken.
She moved swiftly back to the door, and entered again, shooting Mulder a meaningful glance as Gerd Thomas murmured to him. She called his name softly, drawing her partner's attention.
Mulder had been sitting across from Thomas', and he rose to meet her at the door, using his tall height and broad shoulders to block her off enough to give them a small ounce of privacy. She glanced past his shoulder to Gerd, who sat staring mournfully at the chair that Mulder had just occupied.
"I think he's telling the truth," she murmured quietly enough she didn't think that Thomas could hear her. "I don't think he killed anyone."
"How can you be so sure," Mulder demanded, incredulous, a surprising trait for him, considering he rarely ever questioned her when she was this certain on something. She tried not to be offended as she realized that perhaps Thomas's crimes had gotten under Mulder's skin more than she had realized earlier.
"I just got the toxicology report back on the broken vials. The residual substance couldn't be analyzed because it contained synthetic corticosteroids with unidentified amino acids." He stared expectantly at her, waiting for her to translate for him. "That's Purity Control, Mulder."
The tendon in Mulder's jaw worked tightly again, as he nodded, and without a word ushered her out of the door, not even glancing back towards Gerd Thomas. As they stepped out, he motioned to the deputy just outside the door, and waved him back towards the small room.
"Do you know what you are saying, Scully" Mulder abruptly asked as soon as the deputy was gone, his eyes flashing as she saw the wheels of Mulder's mind whirl, spinning the information she had into the larger picture only he seemed to ever fully believe.
"The man who died in that plane crash was inoculating those kids with antibodies derived from what may have been an extraterrestrial source." She had at least determined it wasn't of this Earth, she reasoned.
"He's been injecting those kids with alien DNA," Mulder insisted, eyes already fever bright as he realized what this meant.
"No, Mulder, that was never proven conclusively," she argued.
"But it's the same substance we found in the Erlenmeyer flask, isn't it? The same material my Deep Throat contact died for."
Died in her arms, she remembered. "Yes," she admitted.
"It all makes sense." Mulder continued persistently. "The money in the briefcase, they've been conducting an experiment here. Somebody's been paying to have those kids injected with alien DNA to see how they'd react. It's been going on for years."
Inoculating them for what, Scully asked herself, as she recalled the horror and wonder both she and Anne Carpenter felt when they had discovered just what it was in those vials. This wasn't gene therapy; none of these children were suffering from any disease that required it. And yet she had read up for months while the X-files were closed on the US Army's experiments with all manner of viral warfare. She had found nothing conclusive, on anything.
Why would they experiment then on innocent children in the Midwest of all places? And what exactly was this virus that seemed to bring out this horrible, violent tendencies in these children?
"Does that man know anything about it," she wondered, knowing she had seen Gerd Thomas out in the fields, just before she had seen the crew cut man.
"No," Mulder replied, and looked slightly forgiving towards the room where the man was still held. "He's just some poor soul who blew their cover. I don't think he knows any more than he's telling us."
"Well, I think his boss must have because they just found him shot to death in a cow pasture." And she was fairly certain she knew why it was the crew cut man had driven out to that pasture just moments after they left.
"What" Mulder hadn't seen the man, neither that night on the bridge nor later as they had driven past him heading out to the cow pasture.
"I think I know who shot him, Mulder. That man that I recognized on the road today, that's the same man that executed Deep Throat."
Mulder stared at her in open disbelief, as even more pieces fell into place for him. He jerked up, glancing around the office quickly, before turning back to her, eyes ablaze.
"Well, whoever's behind this, he's here covering their tracks. He's going to go after the kids. You get the sheriff and meet me at Gary Kane's apartment." His turned from her, long, loping strides urgently moving towards the front doors of the sheriff's office. He paused though, before reaching the door, turning to glance at her. "Scully…I want this guy alive."
Of course, Scully thought a she watched him practically run out the door and to their car outside. Because if they could get this crew cut man alive, he would be the proof for Mulder that someone was up to some sort of experiments involving the strange and foreign Purity Control. But that was only part of the equation, she realized. That man worked for someone, and whether that someone was the US Army or some other entity, perhaps a pharmaceutical company or weapons manufacturer, it was hard to tell. Certainly she knew that Purity Control was nothing that anyone could find in nature on this earth. But that wasn't to say it couldn't have been produced in a lab, some sort of experiment funded by a powerful entity that wanted to keep its work secure and it's experiments private.
The crew cut man would know. But she doubted that the fellow was going to talk. If he was ruthless enough to kill Deep Throat, he knew the cost of revealing the work his employers did. He wouldn't just give up the information willingly even if they did happen to arrest him. And if they didn't, she imagined he could just as easily kill Mulder as be taken in by them alive.
"Agent Scully," Sheriff Mazeroski rounded a corner of his office, frowning as Scully stood there, file in hand. "What's wrong?"
"Sheriff," she blinked at him, Mulder's parting words coming back to her. "We'll need all of your men. We need to gather all the children in town."
"What," Mazeroski stared, open mouthed at her, as if she had just asked him to part the Red Sea. "Why?"
"The compound we found in the vials is a genetically engineered virus. Dr. Larsen had been injecting all the children in town with it." She frowned with worry as she thought of the crew cut man. "And I think that whoever developed it has sent someone here to hide the evidence."
"Hide the…" The sheriff's eyes bulged briefly, as it occurred to him just what she was saying. "Rick?"
"He might be a part of that, yes," she acknowledged sadly to the man, whose grief and loss at his only son threatened to overwhelm him momentarily. His bottom lip trembled as he nodded to her, his eyes filling with angry tears.
"I'll get my boys to help you out, however they can," he mumbled his assurances. "We'll get everyone's kids gathered up."
"Thank you, Sheriff," Scully murmured, sincerely grateful to the man who had stuck his neck out in calling the FBI in the first place, at the cost of his only child. She felt for the man, who had become wrapped up in the same plot that had threatened bother herself and Mulder, a plot that she still little understood or comprehended.
After all, she realized sadly, if they were willing to kill her to hide their secrets, why wouldn't they be willing to kill a teenaged boy?
