TITLE: Snake Oil
DISCLAIMER: Mulder, Scully, Tena Mulder and all other characters contained within the mythology belong to Chris Carter, 10-13, and Fox Network. Based on 3rd & 4th the Black Cancer and smallpox mytharc.
Snake Oil
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11:55 PM
I remember dying.
I remember the firecracker shot and the reciprocal smell of burnt flesh and gunpowder blossoming a hole in my chest, remember the bullet punching through cartilage, tumbling its way inside and snapping my pulmonary vein like a stick of licorice, and of sucking in cold air and hot lead, and of spewing out warmth and sticky red. And I remember fading into oblivion shrouded in the veiled hysteria of Dana Scully, fruitlessly pleading, "We still haven't celebrated my birthday..."
And while those ultimately pointless orders not to die lodged itself in my fading brain like a scratched record skipping rapidly towards the center, a distant familiar laughter licked my eardrum with a hymn that sang the voice of roses.
Ligeia, I tried to mouth, but no sound came forth. Ligeia, the shadow of my dimmed and violent past, the sound that drew me out of the malady of enternity. My love, my destiny she told me, as my body released the quicksand of atmosphere to flail and swim towards the wisps of her call. She leaned over me, fuzzy and framed in a halo of fluorescent light, butterfly wings brushing my left cheek and lips, but as my tortured soul reached for her, she slipped away as something, something very wrong happened.
My formerly cold heart lept back from early retirement, crashing into action against its chest cage. Limbs twitched and flailed in an epileptic fit, thrashing reflexively against a metal frame. Eyes blinked open in autonomic reaction to the assault of snowy white lights flushing through the wax covering cloudy eyes down to the very core of my retinas.
"LIGEIA!" Vocal cords of limestone burst the old air out of my chest, and my leaden limb shot out to grasp in desperation at her retreating illusion.
"JESUS!"
A snap and a foreign scream pierced the gurgling waves in my head and in some trick of focus, Ligeia, Ligeia . . . but not Ligeia . . . suddenly replaced by a stranger in a yellow Level-IV suit. Screaming and gibbering, this stranger wrenched his arm from my death grip and stumbled back knocking over a tray of instruments. In slow-motion, a mostly empty syringe clattered between my legs onto the gurney, vomiting sticky molasses from its red-stained 16-gauge tip.
The sound of instrumental chaos pounded my cranium relentlessly, echoes magnified by the room, tenfold by my head. I heard the heavy breath billowing fog against the plastic faceplate, the hissing of of air through the piped air supply, the whoosh of an air-lock open, feet tripping over itself in overeager miscalculation to get, get, get the hell out and then the sucking sound of a vacuum closing again.
Or at least that's what I thought I heard because with the exception of my right arm, the rest of my body was still gripped in the chill of rigor mortis, and all I could do was lie there and stare at the syringe in mindless horror as the little opaque puddle that had been pooling around the needle began coalescing into a long squirming worm and proceeded to grind its way into my big toe. I lifted up an impotent arm to ward it off, drive it away, and saw a multitude of trails working under the skin of the injection point at bend of my elbow, a colony of worms slithering, crawling their way up my bicep towards my shoulder and neck. In the meanwhile the very last one had snaked up my right thigh and was making a direct, mindless path up to join the other.
A cracked, hoarse scream burst from rusty lungs as they invaded my skull, one by one burrowing into the recesses of grey matter and meninges. Something cold dripped out my nose and trickled down my lips and neck, it got into my mouth and tickled my tongue with the salty stickiness of stale blood and as I lay there, my body sacrificed to a parasitic buffet, I found myself praying -- one begging, pleading diatribe recycling through my tortured mind--
Let me die. God, please let me die.
The wafting trail of burnt embers tickled the chemoreceptors in my nostrils, causing me to buckle and writhe with the agony of a hook in jaw, yanking me back into unwanted awareness. My head was still being pounded senseless by the new upstairs occupants who were trying to turn my brain into a bowling alley. Then again, my mind wasn't exactly functioning at optimum anyway, as the parts that could still reflect were vacillating wildly between denial and wanting to curl up in some tiny locked-away corner of my mind cheerfully humming, "Particle Man" between bouts of screaming 'Dead! Dead! Killed me! Dead!' and since I was dead, why was I still lying there, face-up, staring at the fluorescent lights and waxing Poe about an oxymoron as pieces of my brain swirled in millions of fragments like a giant jigsaw puzzle, only to find that none of the pieces were interlocking?
Okay, a tiny, very tiny, calm voice, that sounded strangely enough like Dana Scully in my head, piped. Let's start with the basics.
Sean Pendrell.
Normal guy.
Average life.
Last suffering from a terminal case of premature death.
Well, at least that part of the boring little miniseries based on my existence had been rectified in a Re-Animator sort of way.
"Ah, Agent Pendrell," a face cut through the neon glare. He bared yellow incisors in what passed for a leathery creased smile as another waft of stale smoke trickled out, twisting my guts with its noxious stench. "Welcome back."
I wrenched my head away from the fetid breath before realizing that I could. Then, amred with a certain awareness of limbic mobility, I tested other waters. My appendages felt warm, too warm, but at least now I could sense three more than before. As I pushed myself up into a sitting position, oddly foreign arms shook with the palsy of a newborn colt and I nearly fell back onto the gurney.
"You still need to rest, your body still hasn't adjusted to the resurrection."
It was then that I noticed the smoker wasn't wearing a Biohazard suit. I was infected with some sort of sentient parasite and yet he stood there two feet away from me in a gray suit and tie, casually chatting with me and puffing on a Morley.
"Once you've assimilated the vermiform," he explained, spewing out another noxious cloud. "You cease becoming a carrier." Yeah, that told me a whole fucking lot.
The technician whose arm I had so unceremoniosly manhandled obviously had greater reservations as far as contamination went. Clad in the same Level-IV suit, he shuffled meekly about testing instruments and pressure gauges. His left arm moved stiffly, almost awkwardly and after a few moments of watching him I then realized it was in a cast.
Funny, I don't recall grabbing him that hard.
Ligeia was what I'd screamed when I woke. But nothing more came, nothing else triggered by the name that floated out of my subconscious. I had a name and...and that was it.
Who was Ligeia?
Something warm tugged at my ear, drawing my gaze to a 5x10 mirror planted in the wall on the right side of the room. A heat emanated from the glass, and when I squinted, behind the two-way mirror, the red silhouettes of three warm figures shifted around silently in the room beyond.
Pushing myself up and off the gurney, I dropped to the floor, knees nearly buckling under the weight of unexpected use. Instead of the anticipated chill of an icy floor, linoleum lapped warm against the the balls of my feet and crept up cold legs as I stumbled across the room.
Standing two feet in front of the mirror I looked at my corpse, pale, haggard and still reeking of phosphorus and arrested rigor mortis. My chest was a black and blue Rorshach pattern of scored flesh and hairs singed by the defib paddles. A crusted pink-and-yellow pucker on the right side showed shattered bits of cracked rib through a rapidly closing hole that crawled with black worms. I felt them knitting bones, repairing flesh and torn muscle, all the while slowly turning my blood into tar.
The face in the mirror frowned back at me.
I studied that candidate for Night of the Living Dead as it scowled from the other side of the glass with its dull, grey skin, slack features, and expressionless eyes. Then an oil slick dribbled over the reddened corneas, burning like someone had removed my irises and poured black watercolor into my eye sockets. And as those worms crawled over, in, though me like maggots in a festering corpse, a primal chant rang with distant drums building, crescendoing up to a pitched frenzy, pounding, pounding, pounding until the gasping climax hit and my brain spun and blue turned to black as my eyes were claimed in its final act of annexation.
Ding dong, the doof is dead.
All that's left is this.
AUTHOR: thrombus
RATING: R
SPOILER: Tempus Fugit/Max
SUMMARY: Events set post-Max, then diverges from there. A black-oil experiment by the consortium brings Agent Pendrell back to the land of the living. Unfortunately, he doesn't appreciate it.
by thrombus
CHAPTER ONE
Jesus Died for Somebody's Sins, but Not Mine
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February 27, 1997
3:23 AM