'Showdown', Part 11: Into the Messed.
by Jean
"Put down the gun, Agent Scully,"Assistant
Director Walter Skinner said through clenched teeth that would
have defied the Jaws of Life.
"Sir, we need that man alive," said Agent Dana Scully,
as she slowly
emerged from an alley, trailing IV tubes.
"Leggo! Leggo, you inflated geek!" yelled Krychek, thrashing
about like a cat-on-a-stick.
"Flower?" asked the strolling Hare Krishnas repeatedly
until Skinner,
impatient and angry, whirled the delirious Krychek around by the
arm, striking them in the stomachs and flinging them off the pier
into the overflowing bait buckets waiting below.
"This is insubordination, Scully," said the AD ominously,
as if there were no greater crime she could commit, including
lap-dancing with the Unabomber.
"Yes Sir, but there are critical matters here that take precedence,"
said Scully, the slight tremor and hesitation in her voice muffled
by the oxygen mask.
"Have you ever tried using consonants, you over-stuffed beef
roll?!" yelled Krychek, in Russian and bereft of vowels.
"Need a fourth for this party?" asked a nearby hooker,
who was immediately deflected by the arrival of the USS Nimitz,
no doubt carrying six hundred drooling ensigns.
"You are out of line, Scully, and this will reflect badly
on your record," growled Skinner, his chest expanding until
it could have applied for statehood.
"This is more important than any one person, Sir. The fate
of humanity is at stake," she said wearily, weighted down
by the alien implants bristling from her scalp.
"Do you know what it costs to clean leather?!" yelled
Krychek, "I'm on a budget, ya know."
"You need a bun for that?" a passing bratwurst vendor
asked Skinner, looking at Krychek appraisingly.
Skinner's dudgeon finally evaporated, and he sighed in resignation.
He slowly recalled that arguing with Scully was an exercise in
futility, especially when she was armed, such as the time in the
coffee room when she wanted the last jelly donut and held the
entire Treasury
Department at bay with a flame thrower. Earlier this year, Scully
used
two AK-47s in both hands while rescuing Mulder from an overturned
trailer full of balloon animals. And just this summer she had
ass-kicked a prehistoric lizard down Pennsylvania Avenue and clear
back to Tokyo. Skinner decided to change his tack.
"Agent Scully, we're attracting flies," he gently informed
her, glancing at the sweating Krychek.
And Scully, who had a great terror of flying insects, slowly lowered
her firearm until it gently rested on one of the many tumors sprouting
from her torso. Yet, she still believed the validity of her position,
and sought to justify these unfortunate actions to a superior
who had on more than one occasion disarmed her with a firehose
such as when she went after a senior citizens' group tour that
had been insufficiently grateful for Mulder's shadow puppets.
What followed was a veritable flood of non sequiturs until Krychek
nodded off and even the cryptic Chris Carter wanted to open a
vein. Eventually they settled on a course of action.
"The first thing we must do, Sir," declared Scully,
"Is disable that bionic arm, before he realizes how it works
and what it is capable of doing."
"Good thinking, Agent Scully," replied Skinner, who
had been so engrossed by Scully's upper-body tattoos, he'd failed
to notice that Krychek had lifted the entire pier off its pylons
and they were now hanging vertically from the weatherbeaten planks
by their fingernails.
"Let's dip him in salt water, Sir, short him out," Scully
observed helpfully.
"However," replied Skinner thoughtfully, "This
piece of chum might end up as lunch for an apathetic Great White,
and I wouldn't want to endanger the life of innocent aquatic fauna."
"Commendable, Sir, "said Scully, "Amputation, perhaps?"
It was then that Skinner noticed the ten pounds of plutonium implanted
in Krychek's left ear, and he determined that any attempt to disconnect
or neutralize the prosthesis would result in nuclear annihilation
of the east coast, and nothing less than stuffing Krychek into
the next moon shot would protect humanity.
Suddenly the flaccid Krychek returned to consciousness and, with
the ticking of coming vaporization loud in his ears, he noticed
that the deposition of this stand-off had all the efficiency of
a four-way stop, and with new-found courage, he decided to cut
to the chase.
"It was Mulder!" he screamed in frustration while his
prosthesis went out of control and began crushing moored battleships,
"He found it when he floated ashore! He thinks it's a really
funky watermelon tote!"
Time stood still, or so Krychek wished, as Skinner and Scully
absorbed this piece of information. The danger, and its origin,
became clear to everyone at once.
"He'll burst!" cried Scully
"So will I," shrieked Krychek.
"Hm," said Skinner, at first wondering what the problem
was, but then regaining the noble desire to protect his agent,
as he'd vowed to do while taking the oath of office during a break
from practicing arm-curls with Bradley tank axles, even if it
meant foregoing his overwhelming desire to work Krychek over in
the privacy of his balcony until the end of time.
"We have to find him!" pleaded Scully.
"Just look for the crater," suggested Krychek sarcastically.
"He's misappropriated private property," said Skinner,
"Which is a
felony. Agent Scully, call Mulder at once and tell him he's under
arrest."
Scully looked at her boss in disbelief. "Sir," she replied
slowly, "Think a moment. Mulder. Cell phone."
"Of course," Skinner replied, "We should have super-glued
it to his forearm as the Director suggested after calculating
the Agency's deficit."
A decision had to be made, and the AD had to make it, as was his
wont when presented with earth-shaking events such as the asteroid
he shattered with a well-placed drop-kick and his providing of
the essential active ingredients for Viagra, by the barrel and
on a semi-annual basis, thereby saving the egos of collective
mankind.
"All right," sighed the AD, "Where would we most
likely find him?"
"In the produce section of Safeway," mumbled Krychek,
distracted by his unrestrained prosthesis which was wildly tearing
the bulkheads off aircraft carriers.
"He's home," wept Scully pitiably to herself, "There's
a schnauzer breeding tournament on HBO," obviously remembering
the time she'd broken into Mulder's apartment, suspecting he'd
died for the fifth time, but instead found him ravishing Queequeg.
Something suddenly melted in Skinner's virile and confident heart.
He could not stand to see Scully upset, let alone sobbing with
huge gulping wails so often seen in her partner. He would have
done anything for her, anything at all, just to once again see
that grim killer glint in her large blue eyes, seductive in their
brutality. He looked closely at her now, marvelling at seeing
her upright and functional, instead of horizontal on a gurney
as usual. Her bravery astonished and humbled him, as she was a
woman of unassailable virtue, discounting the time she tried to
rip Blevins' throat out with a hay grapple on C-span.
With heroic resolve and selfless determination, Skinner deemed
the
best course of action was sparing Scully any further anxiety and
retrieving the Thong of Power that had suddenly taken on an obnoxious
and inconvenient aura when not gracing his own personal hot knots.
Spotting Scully's androgynous earth-toned government issue Plymouth,
he disengaged Krychek from a passing Greek trawler's net-boom
that was decorated with leather cod-pieces, and prepared to save
Mulder from a fate worse than a grenade wedgie.
With a warrior's expediency, Skinner spied a nearby Coast Guard
Cruiser that looked perfectly capable of aiding their objective;
speeding them to a harbor nearest Mulder's neighborhood, and plowing
up back alleys until reaching the crumbling six-storey tenement
he inhabited that would have been condemned long ago if not for
being swathed and held up by miles of adhesive bandage and masking
tape criss-crossing in an 'X' pattern.
"I'm taking control of this ship, "Skinner declared
as he strode
powerfully up the ramp.
"And I'm a kumquat," replied the watch officer.
"Move aside, sailor," said Skinner.
"Bite my yardarm, Sasquatch," yawned the sailor.
"Listen to him, you floating feeb!" yelled Krychek until
Scully threatened him into silence by suggesting a rusting propeller
suppository.
"What's the problem here?", asked the ship's commander,
emerging from below half dressed and smelling of dolphin.
Skinner introduced himself and explained the emergency, which
boiled down to saving the world and preventing his having to search
for another clueless patsy to inhabit Mulder's basement office,
detecting gas leaks like a canary in a coal mine.
"Excuse me, Sir," replied the commander, "While
I heartily laugh in
your face. Security!!" he then bellowed at the four hundred
Marines standing on the dock gapping in brainless lust at Scully's
jiggling upper torso as she tried to restrain Krychek's urgently
vibrating arm as it attempted to slice open the hull like a can
of borscht.
Skinner quickly sought to defuse the situation by groping for
his FBI
identification, but realized suddenly that he was naked, after
having his clothes torn from his golden bulging form by the Atlantic
jetstreams, and he effortlessly activated Plan B.
"See that woman?" he asked the commander, pointing at
Scully, "She's a nympho and can deep-sea dive without gear."
"Come aboard," said the commander.
As the cruiser made way across the undulating and lulling waves,
after ensigns looped Krychek through the com tower when the commander
informed Skinner of the ban on stowing toxic wastes in the bilge,
the AD had time to sit back and gather his thoughts, plan strategy,
and gaze at Scully seated across the bridge from him, placid and
glowing with beauty as the night air wafted gently through her
star-shimmering tresses, leaving a thick crust of salt on her
cheeks and forehead which the AD longed to lick off while grasping-
"Sir?" asked Scully quietly, interrupting his musings
and bringing him back to reality like a bounced check.
"Mulder always trusted you," she said, "in spite
of all the evidence to
the contrary, and I admire you, even when you took out my family
in the hospital room after my cancer cure for preventing you from
wrapping my legs in the traction shackles and elevating them to
the ceiling while raging like a bull elephant in rut, and I want
you to know that, whatever happens, it's all for the best."
She then reverted once more into that thoughtful and absorbed
silence that drove him crazy with longing, and he at once knew
that she knew that he knew that he had loved her with a hopeless
passion and committed devotion that at turns made him giddy with
happiness, at which time he would cease picking up boozy barflies
by the dozen, and then frozen with horror at her previous rejections,
afterwhich he would make repulsively accusing anonymous calls
to Dr. Laura.
He knew that they both shared deep and emotional dark places,
crying for release and rotary tools, which they kept well hidden
and seething with need due to the demands of their chosen profession
and the fear that mutual fulfillment would be so combustible as
to flatten the Andes, cause the death of innocent anthropologists,
and raise the price of alpaca wool to prohibitive levels.
He genuinely appreciated the fact of her self-sufficiency and
low
maintenance, knowing that she would rather stack Grape Nuts for
eternity than stifle her explosive desire once released by the
right man, one of whom sat before her now, modestly wrapping his
generously sculpted and sinew-scaffolded loins with seaweed, and
the other who was probably now filling out overtime vouchers with
giggling abandon as they raced the clock and fought the elements
in order to save his whiney butt.
"Can we punch this tub up a bit?!" came Krychek's frightened
demand
from above. Skinner's perfect, and endless, brow darkened at the
thought of this vile interloper who was more suitable as the main
attraction at a luau than as reluctant ally. The AD knew that
Krychek had seduced the vacuous Marita Canabeerferus, something
involving walls and tongues which the AD found sadly conventional,
and then betrayed her without qualm, leaving her trapped in a
gelatinous existence but perhaps making the world safer for honey
bees everywhere.
Skinner could never understand such perversion and cruelty, even
toward such a woman as Marita, who probably deserved it, but should
have been neutralized through proper channels, like being tossed
down a flaming elevator shaft.
By this time, the cruiser's entire crew began pouring onto the
bridge with camcorders, massage oil, and gerbils, instantly alerting
the AD to the possibility of his heart's turgid yearning being
embarrassed without written consent, and he strode like a mythical
colossus into the seamen's midst and threatened them with instant
demotion to security guards at regional bass tournaments. The
sailors, seeing themselves deprived of roads to glory and piles
of cash from open-market video sales, immediately began conspiring
against the AD, woefully ignorant that the harpoon they were loading
would scarcely dent his sternum.
It almost made the AD weep, as he hadn't done since Sharon petitioned
for custody of his fur-lined and feather-tasseled dog collar collection,
in realization of Scully's selflessness, and of her devotion to
her partner's well-being, in spite of those years he followed
her around wearing nothing but his overcoat and baying like a
dumb-struck hound when she kicked him aside on the way to a half-price
henna sale.
"Sir, there's something approaching," warned the commander.
"What is it?" barked Skinner, impatient with the interruption.
"I'm not sure, Sir," replied the navigation officer,
"But it appears to be a very large, circular, air-borne vessel,
kinda like-"
"We've all seen 'Independence Day', sailor," snarled
Skinner, his testosterone flooding the upper decks, "Evasive
maneuvers!"
"Can't, Sir!" cried the officer, "It's hovering
right over us!"
"Oh swell," muttered Scully, "Not again,"
as she began packing Ray-Bans, chain-mail underwear and steel-belted
neck muffs.
Before Skinner could act, and protect his crotch cushion against
yet another abduction by welding her to the keel, a cascade of
indignant and terrorized screams washed over them from above.
"Krychek!" yelled Skinner
"Cool," said a weary sailor, tired of swabbing up the
grease pooled underneath Krychek's hoisted carcass.
The AD and Scully ran out onto the bow, just in time to see Krychek
being levitated, rising through the night air like a lard dripping
yeast soaked blini, overhead and into the belly of the alien craft.
"Save him!" pleaded Scully.
"When clams polka," sneered the amused Skinner.
"Not on the mouth!" yelled Krychek, as he was yanked
from sight.
To be continued.......