"Dad! Mom! Get up, get up now!"
At the sound of William's panicked voice Mulder roused, rolling away from Scully in their huge bed. "Hang on, gimme a minute," he yelled back, groping for his pajamas on the floor at the side of the bed. Neither of them had gotten up to put their nightclothes back on after they'd curled up naked together to go to sleep after a slightly drunken but incredible bout of lovemaking, and in the dimness of their room he saw Dana scrambling for her robe as well.
Making sure she was covered, he yanked the bedroom door open to find their son standing outside on the landing, dressed in wrinkled jeans and tennis shoes without socks, his plaid wool shirt only half-buttoned. "It's started, it's begun, they're here," he babbled, grabbing his father's arm and dragging him to the small window nearby at the top of the stairs.
"What the…" Mulder began, then let the word trail off and stared, jaw hanging, out the window. Within moments Dana joined them and the three of them stood there, staring out the small window at the end of the world.
Small silver craft, clearly not of human manufacture, zipped here and there in the distance, shooting bolts of green lightning both at the ground and at the jets that buzzed around them. Towers of flame sprang up at random, and the floorboards shook under their feet as the sound of explosions reached their ears. Scattered traffic raced up and down the streets, cars smashing into each other while those able to keep moving were doing so. No one stopped to check on injured.
He looked down at Scully, their stricken eyes meeting. "December twenty-first, two thousand twelve," he said through dry lips. "We thought it was a joke to turn us off the trail of the real truth."
"It was real, not a fake," she replied, beginning to shake so that he reached out and enfolded her in his arms. "The Erlenmeyer flask… Cancerman… EBEs.… all true…"
"And we walked away," he whispered, horrified. "We could have stopped this!"
"What are you two talking about?" William all but cried, stepping back and grabbing onto the railing as his foot slipped on the top of the stairs. "You know what's happening?"
"No time right now—get downstairs," Mulder said, squeezing Dana's shoulder briefly before letting go of her. "We're less than ten miles from D.C. and in immediate danger. I'll call—"
"No communications," William said as they began to hurry down the stairs. "Everything's FUBAR, even shortwave."
Pounding from downstairs stopped all of them in their tracks, staring fearfully at each other. "Oh, for Chrissake, it's not the damn aliens knocking at our front door," Mulder snapped, leading the way down. Dana and William followed closely, and he didn't bother to try and get them to move away; he knew they wouldn't.
William peered carefully around the curtain over the window at the side of the door, then sighed with relief "It's the uncles," he said as his father opened the door.
"Fucking Christ, about time!" Frohike snapped as the three Gunmen stumbled inside.
"I was thinking about heading for your office," Mulder blurted, shocked to see them here. "I figured you had the safest—"
"We did until one of those alien muthas crashed into our building—we barely made it out," Langley coughed. All three looked like they'd been through a fire and tornado at the same time, covered with soot and burns and their clothes torn. Byers, usually immaculate, appeared to have been through a human-sized shredder as his clothes above the waist were hanging off of him in strips and the skin beneath was black with dirt, soot, and burns.
Dana darted around her tall husband and son and reached for the bearded man, who was swaying on his feet, but he held up a hand. "You can look at us later, but we've got to get out of here," he said, reaching out and steadying himself with the same hand on Frohike's shoulder. "They started in downtown D.C. and are moving outwards; they'll be here anytime."
"Jesus," William whispered, and everyone was quiet for a time. Then he added, "Guess I'd better go pack a bag."
"Just take a change of clothes for now," Frohike advised as the small group went deeper into the house. "We grabbed an SUV on the way over but—"
"Grabbed?" Dana said, whirling on him. "Stole, you mean?"
"Yeah, stole!" he snarled back which had everyone staring at him. He'd had a crush on Dana Scully-Mulder since they'd first met and no one had ever imagined him talking to her like this. "You need to get out there and see what's going on before passing judgment…" he turned away, shoulders slumping as he moved out from beneath Byers's hand, and leaned against an inside wall with his back to the windows.
Mulder glanced at Dana's shocked face and jerked his chin towards the upstairs; their eyes met and no words were needed. He then went over to the shorter man, who had one arm braced against the wall with his forehead resting on it. "Frohike… what in the hell is going on out there?"
"They're slaughtering everything, everyone in sight," he said, low, turning to glance over at where William stood talking to Langley. Scully had run upstairs, clutching her robe around her. "I don't know what weapons they have, but they're kamikaze too. We saw the bastard that crashed into our building coming on our exterior cameras, he wasn't damaged or didn't slow or anything—he just slammed right into it."
Just then the house shook from a nearby impact and all of them ran to the front windows. From just a few streets over a huge plume of black smoke roiled into the cloudy sky, shockingly dark against the lightness. "That was a kamikaze, betcha," Langley said, turning away. Mulder followed suit as Scully came racing down the stairs carrying his gym bag, which was bulging. She was dressed in yesterday's jeans and sweater and slip-on loafers with no socks, and handed him a pair of Levis and a black sweatshirt with a pair of grey sweat socks on top.
"I saw it go down—they're getting closer so we'd better get a move on," she said, going over the armoire in the dining room and pulling out two photo albums, shoving them into the duffle bag even though it was about to split at the seams. Mulder followed her, stepping around the archway out of sight of the others to dress in the heavier clothes, and found that he was going commando since she hadn't brought him any underwear. "Where are we going?"
"I've got a place in the mountains—not far from Charlottesville, but remote enough that no one will figure out we're there unless they know exactly where the place is," Byers said. "We can decide what else to do once we're safe there."
"Oh, God, my mother!" Scully said in a shocked near-whisper. Mulder went to her; her face was white as a sheet. He put one arm around her, holding her steady even as his eyes went to the plume of smoke outside the window.
"Isn't Grandma with Uncle Bill and Aunt Tara in California?" William said, pausing halfway up the stairs.
"Go! Go! Get your stuff, hurry!" Frohike waved at him and the young man continued up.
"Yeah, she is, but I doubt she's any safer there than she would be here," Scully said, turning her eyes up to her husband in mute appeal.
"Nothing we can do now," Mulder hated to point out, but did. "We'll try to get hold of her once we're safe. Frohike, will the car hold us all?"
"Yeah, it's a Land Rover; it'll hold us easy and more," he said, looking up as another explosion shook the house. "We gotta move, folks."
Mulder started to yell for William but he appeared at the top of the stairs, hurrying down them. But before he was halfway another explosion went off, this one very close, and blew out the windows at the back of the house, making them all duck although none of the glass reached that far. When he looked up his son was sprawled at the bottom of the stairs; Scully tore out from beneath his arm and ran to him.
"I'm fine, Mom," he said as she arrived at his side, getting to his feet with no help and grabbing the overnight bag he'd brought down, which had clothing hanging out of it. Another explosion, just as close, got them all moving towards the front door.
On the way out Mulder grabbed a pair of shoes from the mat behind the front door, glad for once that he'd ignored Dana's nagging to put them in the hall closet.
Outside it was a scene from what he imagined Hell would look like if it existed. The flashes of fire were getting closer, the sky to the north was black with roiling smoke and, as they ran across the lawn to the large SUV that waited in the street, he watched one of the narrow silver craft dive unerringly at the ground only a few blocks away. The resulting explosion nearly knocked them off their feet, but they managed to continue across the lawn despite it. Screams rang out from somewhere nearby, but none of them stopped.
A bright red Mustang flew by, clipping a corner of the minivan parked across the street and setting off its alarm, but no one came out of the McAlpins' house to turn it off. Mulder spared a thought for the neighbors, especially their seven-year-old daughter, but he knew he had to take care of his own family first. Cold, perhaps, but the bare, simple truth. His training as a field agent, now twenty years ingrained, urged him to go and help with every fiber of his being, yet he knew that could be fatal to the six of them. He exchanged an anguished glance with his wife who, as a doctor, probably felt stronger than he about it. But she didn't say a word either.
The others piled into the Land Rover, leaving him for last and when he turned back to the vehicle he found that he faced the empty driver's seat. Shrugging, he climbed in, adjusting the seat—Frohike must have been driving on the way there, he thought—and eyeing the controls, familiarizing himself with them.
"Go south on 95 or as close as you can," Byers said from the back seat. "Just follow the signs to Charlottesville and I'll direct you from there."
"How long?" Mulder asked as they started off. "That's quite a ways."
"About two and a half, maybe three hours, more if we can't take the freeway."
They rounded a corner and found that the red Mustang, which had passed them earlier, was now wrapped around a telephone pole, nearly blocking the street. He'd have to knock it out of the way to get by, the first time of many he suspected. "Hang on."
They smashed the Mustang up onto the sidewalk and as they whipped past he saw that there was an infant seat laying in the back, but averted his eyes when he realized that there was no way anyone could have survived the crash. He only hoped that Dana hadn't seen it, but when he glanced over at her white face in the passenger seat knew that she, unfortunately, had.
A moment later a disheveled older woman ran out in front of their car and he barely missed her, screeching to a stop out of sheer habit. "Stop! Stop!" she yelled, grabbing onto the passenger door, Dana staring out at her in shock. "Fox and Dana Mulder, I'm here to help you—please, please take me with you!"
To his surprise, Dana swung the door open and scooted over on the bench seat. "Then get in, dammit, hurry!" she snapped, and the moment the other woman was in the car, he jammed on the gas.
Despite his eidetic memory he was never quite able to fully recall that horrific ride, which took close to five hours. He didn't want to remember the events he did recall, the ghastly things they saw, the close calls that they barely made it through, the deaths they witnessed that he would never be able to forget.
But, finally, they made it with all of them safe, sound, and in one piece, which was more than he could say for most of the people they saw on the journey.