Lonely Nightmare X: Earth Turns to Fire
by Justin Glasser
Notes and dedication in section 0.
***
“Please tread gently on the ground when all around you earth turns to fire.”
***
She held his arms above his head while she fucked him, her cool fingers circling his wrists in an iron grip. It hurt a little, but Mulder didn’t mind, because this was Scully, her breasts sliding sweatily over his chest, her liquid warmth enclosing and releasing him.
She went slow: he could feel every millimeter of himself slipping into her and then back almost out. He could feel the clench of his muscles, the grind of her pelvic bone against his. He could hear the slow hiss of her breath in his ear, and he wondered what he had done to deserve this. How had he earned this gift? What had he said to get her to agree to slide him in and out of her body, in case this was a dream and he woke up alone in a crappy bed in the Onowani Lodge?
She nipped at his neck, moving faster now, her breasts swaying, rubbing against his chest hairs, her thighs clenching around his hips, and he pushed against her trying to catch her rhythm, trying to hear what she wanted in her harsh breath. She was slippery wet and wide open for him, at that stage of sex where the rougher it gets the better it is, her mouth sucking at his neck and her fingers clenched tight around his wrists, and he felt it, felt it, his balls tightening, and his hips beating against hers, and he wanted to tell her that he loved her, that he always would, but her breath was hot in his ear and all he could choke out as he came was
“Scu--scully!” in a hoarse whisper.
and she laughed in his ear, a low rough sound, that seemed not like her, but the voices of several people, not all necessarily female, and he wondered if maybe he should have called her Dana instead, but it didn’t really matter, because he woke up with his next gasping breath, and it had been a dream, and it was still dark, and he hoped he hadn’t said her name out loud and woke her up, and why couldn’t they get her damn heater fixed because this whole sleeping together thing was getting out--
--and then he realized that his hands were still held above his head.
And he still heard laughing.
“Who’s there!”
The laughter stopped.
He was on his back, on a table or a board or a floor or something. He seemed to be blindfolded. His hands were tied. His ankles were tied, he discovered, trying to lift them. He didn’t seem to be…wet, despite the dream he just had, but his neck felt raw, as if it been chewed, and his pants were open. And there were people in the room with him. God, Scully.
“Who’s there?” he shouted again, but no one answered. If he listened close, he could hear them breathing, moving, but they did not speak. Lisa’s letter came to his mind, the frayed notebook paper, her loopy handwriting: the police belong to the beast, she’d said.
“Austin!” Mulder said. “Austin! Untie me. We’ll forget the whole thing.”
Still no sound.
“Kidnapping an agent is a federal crime, Austin,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking, trying to take charge. “I can make sure no one knows about this.” Promise them anything, his instructor at the Academy had once said. The hostage taker wants something, and if he thinks he’s going to get it, then you stand a better chance of getting them out alive. If he could get them talking, get them to engage him, he stood a better chance. Especially if the other officers were as young as Kowalski.
“Kowalski! You don’t want to be a part of this, do you? Kidnapping a federal agent? I could pull some strings for you at the Bureau, Kowalski, but you have to let me go.”
Footsteps, soft and steady. Maybe it was just him, the young officer who wanted to be an FBI agent, and would let Mulder go for that chance. “C’mon, Kowalski,” he said. He kept his voice soft, encouraging.
The footsteps came close, closer, then stepped past him and went away. More than one person. Three? Four? He couldn’t tell, but they all went past him without even pausing. He heard the turn of the doorknob, felt the slight rush of air on his face (but, thankfully, not on his dick--he seemed to be at least partially covered), and heard the snick of the door being shut. He was alone.
Mulder yanked his arms and felt the cool bite of handcuffs. Probably his own fucking handcuffs, he thought, yanking at them again. They were hooked over some kind of pipe: he could feel the smooth metal when he tried to press his hands together. He tried to pull his legs up. Rope. Rope on the ankles, each one individually tied to something, handcuffs on his wrists, tight enough and high enough above his head that he had no leverage. He could thrash around a bit, but he could not break free.
The police belonged to the beast, and he belonged to the police, we all lived happily ever after, he thought, and for a second he was overcome by panic, and he yanked and yanked and yanked at the handcuffs and tried to pull his ankles free, kicking out like a wounded bird, kicking and kicking, shouting Scully’s name until he could no longer breathe, the pressure of the blindfold over his nose almost unbearable, and he was forced to lay back, letting his head drop and his mouth hang open, sucking air, not crying, he was *not* crying, he was trying to breathe and that was all, dammit--
--something brushed his ear.
“WHO THE FUCK IS THERE?” he shouted, jerking away.
Nothing.
No sound.
Not really a sound.
The non-sound of something moving, stirring the molecules of air in the room, but not enough to hear, especially when your own rasping breath was so loud in your own ears. And Mulder couldn’t hear it, not really, but he knew what it was, he knew the sound of the beast when he didn’t hear it, and suddenly he thought he knew what had happened to all of those runaways. They had run away to this room and had made a new friend. This was it. He would make a friend, too, and the police would say that he had run away with the pretty blond high school student to Chicago or New York and there would be a scandal and Scully would know it wasn’t true, but she wouldn’t have any leads and eventually Skinner would force her off the case, and she’d get a new partner and he would be down here still, with his friend the beast.
There was heat, now, the steady tidal heat of something breathing on the bare skin of his ankle, where his pants leg had been rucked up by his struggle. There was no sound of breath, but there was heat, and the faint moisture of air expelled. Mulder’s arms shook as he strained against the handcuffs.
“Leave me alone,” he said, and his voice seemed too loud in the quiet.
The air in the room flexed, and Mulder turned his face against his shoulder, and knew that whatever it was, it was above him now, crouched around him, looking down, and suddenly the blindfold didn’t seem like a bad idea at all. Suddenly, the blindfold seemed like a gift from a merciful god, and then there was that breath again, that breath on his throat, and he didn’t want to, but he did, he whimpered--
The door opened, and the breath was gone.
He almost wept with relief, but there were footsteps again, staggered and heavy this time, as if they were struggling under weight, and he heard movement, and the harsh gasping of real breath, human breath, and he understood that something was happening. That was bad. That was the thing you always wanted to prevent from happening in any hostage situation. The goal was to keep the perps as calm as possible, to make them comfortable, to establish a routine, because when you did that they got accustomed to you and to their hostages, they became complacent. Above all, you did not want “things” to happen. Because when things happened, those things were usually followed by the most dreaded of all things: escalation. And Mulder thought that the sound of footsteps, of something heavy coming into a room where he was tied and gagged, seemed, in his professional opinion, like escalation of the worst sort.
The footsteps stopped, and there was the thud of something being put down, maybe on a table three or four feet from him, and the clink of handcuffs. At least, he thought, I might not be chained up with my own, and then he realized that handcuffs meant hands, and he said again, for the six hundredth time--
“Who’s there?”
And this time he heard gasping and the sudden intake of breath, and a girl’s voice drifted to him. “Help me,” it said.
“Lisa?” he shouted. “Lisa? LISA!”
“Frank?” the voice said. “Frank, make them stop! Help me. Help me, FRANK!” and then the voice stopped crying and started screaming, and Mulder realized that he was Frank, and that Frank was of no help to anyone.
***end 10/13***
I don’t know what you’re thinking: