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Title: October 2013 A/N: Written for the "First Lines" challenge at http://www.livejournal.com/~xf_drabble Guess the sources! :)
We are at rest five miles behind the front. I am in a green canvas jumpsuit that pulls under the arms and itches like hell. I wonder briefly what happened to my hooded camo that I scored off a Bounty, sprawled in the mud with a slug lodged in his third cervical-- then I remember. It's draped around the shoulders of a very tired field doctor twenty miles behind us in the underbrush. Wonderful. I must be in great shape if I can't even remember what happened this morning. "Hey!" Brown combat boots appear in my line of sight. I don't think they were originally brown, and they look like someone broke them in while chasing turbans in Gulf I. That's the way most of our outfitting goes. We were lucky to stumble upon an abandoned mechanic's shop earlier this afternoon. Thus my jumpsuit. "Hey! Sir?" It's Turner, all of seventeen years old and swathed in what looks like burlap. Alright, so I don't have it so bad. He's standing in front of my bush, binoculars dangling from his neck, sweaty cap pulled low and gaping at me as if I'm Jesus H. Christ himself. Hi, kid, I'm Fox Mulder, seeker of the strange, champion of monsters, mapmaker of the unmapped, and commander of this little unit, where you're going to die before you're old enough to watch porn. Legally. "Turner, would you get your ass out of my face? Your watch isn't for another three hours." "Sir, I-- we've received another call. There's a cluster of Grey REBs to our rear." Damn. In Scully's direction? Time to move camp. "Call your captain. Tell him to have everyone ready for a hike back east." I am on my feet, and as Turner wheels around I grab his shoulder. His eyes are clear blue, and a jolt goes down my spine. "... And Turner," I add softly. "Don't forget your duffel this time." "I won't, sir!" he rasps at me, and he's loping back through the trees until I can't make out his form in the darkness. I'm still there for a minute, pondering choices made and love lost. I pull at the neck of my jumpsuit and feel the chain of her necklace cool against my fingertips. |
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Title: Lamentations Notes: The lament in Latin can be downloaded here: http://www.abbotshill.freeserve.co.uk/Sounds/Quomodo%20sedet%20sola%20civitas%20(v%201).mp3
"How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people--" I can make out the words from where I stand on the green. They are engraved in Latin into the pillar with what looks like the heel of a hammer. The pillar is a clean, blinding white, stretched horizontally along the ground, barring our path for 500 feet. "My God!" exclaims someone behind me, and I feel as if I have capsized and spun dizzily from my axis, instead of the world. The ash sweeps down again with the sudden wind and our vision is lost just as quickly as it appeared. We stand in silence and listen to the whistle of grit around our ears. "Dust masks!" I hear myself say, my voice already hoarse. I snap my own back over my nose and mouth, and wait for the wind to die. We're in DC, my head babbles at me, and it's not a city anymore it's wilderness and the Monument is on its side and Scully is gone, she has to be gone, she can't still be here in this. Shit shit shit. Then the wind dies. "March!" I bellow through my mask. We have to make our progress while the dust settles, before the winds start again. This has been our routine through the preceding day and night, and we thought that we were still miles from the city because we never saw buildings on the horizon. Men file past on all sides, as far as I can see in the murky air. The streets are empty. We trip blindly over sidewalks and the skeleton siding of skyscrapers. As my breath grows sharp with fatigue and fear I hear a high alto to my left. "Quomodo sedit sola civitas plena populo..." He keeps singing though his voice cracks and it's all I can hear outside my ragged breathing and I can't even remember what happened this morning but she promised not to leave me, she promised not to leave. |
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Title: Aun Existe Amor
I am on my mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever knowing that I am here. I have lived here since before the fire fell from the sky and the land around me turned into ash. I dug out my tree with my mother's gardening shovel tied to a branch that I cut and sanded myself. I knew what was coming all along. I knew as far back as I could remember, and all my dozen therapists couldn't convince me otherwise. "He's a creative boy," one ventured, but the others just said I was disturbed. My mother cried at night when she thought I'd gone to bed. "All we wanted was a child, dammit, why is this so hard?" I couldn't hear my father distinctly, just his low droning, but I picked up the stray words anyway from his mind. Tragedy, they read, strangers, abusive, our boy now, and I heard the ugly echoes of my elementary school years. Adopted. I didn't cry that night. When my parents died I put my shirts and my baseball into a pillowcase and left for the mountain. I was eleven that year. I have dreams of the others. One day when my parents were still alive I saw a man in K-Mart with round glasses pushed up on his nose and hair down past his ears. He was staring at me blankly, and I knew he was special because I could not hear his mind. He came past us in the checkout line and gently touched my head. "I knew your parents," he whispered, and after that I had the dreams. I dreamt of tea and cornfields, and smelled the warm interior of a thousand rental cars. I heard sasquatch and purity, hybrid and polygenic mating, truth, trust, touchstone. I dreamt of the world engulfed in fire, and then I knew that what I had always known was true. Yesterday it rained for the first time in three years, and I stepped out of my tree home to look past the dust into the rest of the world. It is empty. -End -
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