TITLE: TAPAKAH AUTHOR: aka "Jake" SPOILERS: Up through Existence RATING: NC-17 (Language) CLASSIFICATION: V, Post-Ep of sorts for Existence SUMMARY: Alex Krycek dead? I don't think so. The man is a damn cockroach. He could outlast a nuclear holocaust, an alien invasion, and the Second Coming. Turn over a rock and he'll be there. Disclaimer: Do these characters really belong to Chris Carter, FOX and 1013 Productions? If so, no copyright infringement intended. Entertainment, yes. Profit, no. Author's notes: "TAPAKAH" is Russian for "cockroach." TAPAKAH (1/1) By aka "Jake" -x-x-x-x-x-x- What's the last thing I remember? Skinner's fucking gun. Ol' Walt shot me in the arm -- my *good* arm. Twice. You wanna hear the real kicker? I had Fox Mulder in the crosshairs at the time. Finally, I was gonna snuff that little pissant, bury his ass for good and let everyone else get on with their shitty lives. Guess it wasn't meant to be. Looking up at Skinner from the parking garage floor, I said, "It's going to take more bullets than you can ever fire to win this game. But one bullet and I can give you a thousand lives. Shoot Mulder." He failed to grasp my meaning. Drilling my skull with a third round, he caught me right between the eyes. Given the circumstances, you're probably wondering how it's possible I'm here talking to you now, huh? Well, life is full of surprises. I'm a tad fuzzy on the details but if I had to guess, I'd say a devil under the guise of a guardian angel swooped in and snatched my sorry ass outta the parking garage while Crane and Rohrer kept the Three Stooges otherwise occupied. I may never know who to thank, but my anonymous savior did me a big fat favor, shipping me off to who-knows-where for a new lease on life. Nice to have friends in high places, isn't it? It took me a while to figure it all out, of course. I was in no shape to notice much of anything. I was undeniably, quantifiably *dead*, and, no two ways around it, dead is dead. Right? Wrong! Not in this fucking universe, brother. Hey, I've play-acted the role of Lazarus before, but not to this extent. I'm no Spooky Mulder, rising from the literal grave. But with a little help from a few self-serving sons-of-bitches, I've managed to dig out of a hellhole or two. An abandoned missile silo. A Tunisian prison. Kid stuff. A bullet through the frontal lobe? Now that takes resurrection to a whole new level. So here's what I've pieced together. Skinner fired his third shot. "Fuck!" or "Shit!" or something equally short but not too sweet blazed through my brain just ahead of his bullet. I blacked out. In what felt like only a blink of an eye later, I was floating at the bottom of a thick, green sea. Or so it seemed. I drifted for a while. A long while. Got to the point where I wondered if the proverbial fire and brimstone of hell were, in fact, saltwater and sushi. Had I died and gone to the Land of the Primordial Soup? Was I destined to spend eternity sleeping with the fishes? That would be damn ironic, wouldn't it? I figured God must be having himself a whopper of a belly laugh at my expense. Wouldn't be the first time. Deciding my surroundings were probably permanent, I figured I'd make the best of the situation by backstroking my way through perpetuity. I discovered, however, there were limits to my little underwater world. I was not in an ocean. I wasn't even in a puddle. I was in a fucking fishbowl. Glass walls caged me. Eight feet long by four feet wide, give or take. Depth unknown; I hadn't tried to stand or even sit yet. Without a doubt, however, I was in a tank. I felt like one of those plastic, aquarium scuba divers, bobbing impotently up and down, to the delight or fright of wide-eyed mollies. Only, in my case, there were no finned friends to keep me company. I was alone. Completely alone. Solitary confinement is bad enough when you're breathing air. It'll drive you nuts when you know your lungs are full of bilge water. Have you ever had your head held under the shit-line of a prison toilet? I have. Feels like your lungs are gonna explode for want of air. You don't particularly want to open your eyes, either. This was no different, except it went on for fucking ever. Like some kind of thick, green amniotic fluid, the water filled my lungs, my sinuses...Christ, I was probably pissing the damn stuff. Guess if you're gonna be reborn, you gotta start in some kind of womb. This was pretty damn close. Get this: the bullet hole in my head was gone. So were the two in my arm. None of that surprised me half as much as the fact that my left arm had miraculously reappeared. I flexed my heretofore missing fingers and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Realization hit me harder than Skinner's deathblow. I was a fucking clone. Not the old Alex Krycek, patched and repaired, good as new. But a carbon copy of the original, complete with all four limbs and every goddamn hellish memory still intact, reconstituted from a scrap of salvaged genetic material. Well, fine. I could live with that. I did wonder what they'd done with my old body. Did they stick it in a freezer somewhere? Maybe burned it or buried it or jettisoned it into outer space. And now that I was lying around thinking about it, who the hell were "they" anyway? Alien Colonists? Comrades of Old Smokey? Whoever, there was certain to be hell to pay. If someone went to all the trouble to bring me back from the dead, they'd expect some kind of payback for their effort. Whatever. I once told Mulder, you go underground, you learn to live with the rats. That's when someone -- or something -- tapped on the glass. I tried to make out the source. Couldn't see a damn thing. A fist plunged down from above and grabbed my shoulder. It yanked me up, pulling my head into the icy air above the tank. Green liquid poured off me, blinding me to the man or beast who held me. Although I wanted to fight back, my legs and arms hung motionless, the muscles aching with pins and needles from lack of use. I couldn't speak or yell. Hell, I couldn't even breathe. Some kind of spongy hose had been snaked down my throat and was clogging my airway. Naked as a newborn baby, I waited for my captor to reveal himself and seal my fate. Christ, when my eyes cleared, I saw my worst nightmare. Nah, I'm not talking about the goon who held my head above the water while he yanked that slimy tube out of my gullet. Human, alien or fucking hybrid, he was the least of my worries. What scared me, what really scared the crap out of me, was the stadium-sized room full of identical green glass tanks. Every tank, every goddamn last one, contained a poor asshole who looked just like me. An army of Alex Kryceks, all owing their lives to a race of EBEs bent on colonizing the planet. I told Skinner he should've shot Mulder. I told him a thousand lives for one bullet. Who'd a thought the lives would be mine? Well, bro, that pretty much brings us to the present, doesn't it? You and I and our thousand identical brothers are now en route to Armageddon. Hey, whatever it takes to survive. Just another dismal day learning to live with the fucking rats, wouldn't you say? THE END