FIC: Bound for the Promised Land (Multi-Source Crossover, 1/1)

[maidenjedi]

TITLE: Bound for the Promised Land
AUTHOR: Maidenjedi
FANDOMS: Stephen King's The Stand, Stephen King's IT, The X-Files
RATING: R
SPOILERS: Both books in their entirety, The X-Files through season five
DISCLAIMER: Not my worlds or my characters.

SUMMARY: An unlikely group comes together in the wake of Captain Trips, and like so many survivors, they go west.

Written for notalwaysweak for crossovering 2017

NOTES: Thank you a million times over to vaznetti for beta; without her, there would be a lot less cohesion here!

Timeline note - this takes place in The Stand timeline in the "complete and uncut edition." The X-Files timeline has been shifted back to accommodate that; assume the events of "Traveler" and "The Unusual Suspects" have happened, just a bit earlier than in the official canon. So this is pre-XF, post-It, and concurrent with The Stand.

Also on AO3.

He looked up and wished on a falling star, not knowing he’d done it aloud until his companion muttered that it was probably a satellite.

“Spinning uselessly in space for another hundred years, probably.  Lot of good it all did, man’s ingenuity.”

It irritated Bill to know Jess had heard him; he harbored that rather childish belief that a wish, once uttered, would be tossed on the ash heap of broken beliefs.  You can blow out the candles, but you can’t tell anyone what was in your heart when you did.

That irritation led him to snap back at Jess.  “It could have been a star.  It doesn’t matter.”

“No.  Faith isn’t really rewarded in this world,” Jess responded, voice hard.  “Look around.”

That day, coming down out of Portland and into the wider world, Jess Rider and Bill Denbrough had gotten their first real glimpse what man’s ingenuity had done.  Whatever Yankee sensibilities had kept the dead behind closed doors up north seemed to disappear as they approached the population centers. The mass exodus from the cities choked the highways.  They’d had to replace the bikes, after their inching progress had stalled engines and burnt brakes.  Jess had gone into a grocery store to look for supplies, and come out green and gagging from whatever it was he’d seen.  Bill had been the one to notice the horses in a pasture, flesh chewed until they were nothing more than bloody masses on the ground.  One horror after another, for only a few days, but an eternity to them both.

Jess was exhausted, and his natural philosophic nature battered; rather than trading more verbal blows with Bill, he said a short good night and turned his back to their dying fire.  Bill hadn’t slept very much, going on adrenaline, and so offered to keep first watch most nights; he told Jess nothing about what kept him awake.

The nightmares had begun the night Audra passed.  Well.  There had always been nightmares.  Even in those years when he couldn’t remember, when George’s name was a name only and Bill couldn’t go near the Barrens without getting sick and had no idea why, when his parents had decided they’d had enough with Derry but they never said why.  Bill had long, detailed, vivid nightmares involving everything a nightmare could bring.

He’d thought so, anyway.

But these dreams.  He’d been sleeping when Death came for his wife.  He chalked up the face in the dream to that; it was Death, come in the night, to take her and addle Bill’s brains in the bargain.  A smooth, lineless face; a mad laugh, and a kind of Clint Eastwood swagger. 

“Do you feel lucky, punk?”

Bill tried to push the thought from his mind, and looked back up at the stars.

It was possible there were others.  They couldn’t be the only ones left.  Even Jess’ increasing nihilism allowed that society was necessary, the impulse to gather natural.  So they went the only direction they could agree on.

West.

-

They met the first of those others the next morning.

Jess was breaking up the camp, such as it was, to let Bill take his time getting ready for the day.  The warm sunshine and the smell of summer blooms had done a little to improve Jess’ outlook.  Nights were the worst, he thought, shaking out the sleeping bag.  At night he would miss her, he would wonder about the child, he would come to the conclusion that neither could have survived, and he would blame himself.  Fran Goldsmith, were she made flesh from his memory, would mock him for it, but there it was. 

He banked the fire from their breakfast (beans in cans, again), and tried to leave the place cleaner than they’d found it.  Jess had always been the Environmentally Conscious type – trademark, Frannie – and old habits die hard.

A twig snapped, and when he heard it, Jess leaned down to pick up his gun before turning around.

“Hello?”

 “Whoa, there.  Hi.”  A tall man came into the clearing.  Behind him, a very blonde, thin woman had her own gun, held at her side, pointed at the ground.  “We’re friendly,” said the man, voice almost pleading, lonely.

“Hard to tell these days,” said Bill, coming up behind Jess.  “Who are you?”

“Name’s Mulder.  This is Susanne.  We’ve been looking for others.”

Susanne frowned.  She was standing so rigidly, for all that she carried her gun with ease, Jess thought she’d break in half if hit by so much as an acorn.

“Jess Rider.”

“Bill Denbrough.  What say we put our weapons down, and maybe find out a little more about each other?  No use leaping to conclusions.”

Mulder smiled, and nodded.  Susanne was more reluctant, but holstered the gun, and came more fully into the clearing to stand beside him.  Jess put down the rifle.

The foursome stared for some moments at one another, taking the measure of their new companions.  The questions began not long after, small talk in the old world and someone less so now.  Jess figured Mulder for a cop; he had the build, and the confidence, and asked pointed questions disguised as casual inquiry.  Susanne was quiet, almost morose.  Bill responded well to Mulder, and asked some rather pointed questions of his own.

Mulder owned to being from D.C., and claimed Susanne had come to him and they’d gotten out together before the worst hit.

“How did you know?” Jess asked her.

Susanne grabbed her elbows and frowned at her feet.  “I…had access to information.”

Bill and Jess exchanged a look. 

“Captain Trips was…it was an accident.  It might have been worse, really.  And they couldn’t cover it up.  So they….they fucked up, and they had to hide it.  So I got out.”

The implications of her hesitant confession were not lost on Jess.  He’d wondered, as the devastation seemed to accelerate, when the Army showed up to enforce the blockades.  He’d seen the news broadcast out of Boston where a reporter, trying to report on what was happening, to tell what he’d learned, was gunned down after a five-hour standoff, on the air.  He was not a paranoid type – Frannie’s affectionate term was Tinfoil Hats – but he’d wondered.

If Susanne was for real, well. 

“It doesn’t matter much now,” said Bill, breaking the silence.  “It worked.  The world ended.”

Mulder nodded.  “More or less.”

Bill told them, he and Jess were headed west, to look for…something.

Susanne started at that, and asked why.  “What’s west?” she said, in the tone of someone who knew damn well what was there.  “I thought we were going south, to Florida, maybe further,” she hissed in Mulder’s ear, loud enough to be heard by all.

“I have friends in Nebraska,” Bill said, matter-of-factly.

“Living?” responded Mulder.

Bill shrugged.  “There’s a chance.  There’s a good chance, by my reckoning.  I spoke to them before…before it got bad.  Ben said – that’s him – they were okay, and I should come.”

His voice had taken on a vague quality, dreamy and far-away.  Jess cleared his throat.  “You can come with us.”

Mulder looked at Susanne, who responded with a look of deep unease, but she nodded slowly.  “Okay,” she whispered.  She turned around, putting her back to the men as they began to discuss details.

They left within the hour.

-

She had good reason to be paranoid, did Susanne Modeski.

She’d known too much, found out too much, and they’d put a damn bug in her molar.  She’d been chased, gagged, had her wrists held together by a zip tie.  She’d lost…she didn’t want to think about who she’d lost. 

Even now, knowing full well what had happened to the men who’d tried to silence her, she was looking over her shoulder.  In the first few heady days of being on the run, escaping with a man of no less charisma than Fox Mulder at her side, she’d almost forgotten.   And Mulder knew everything, he knew what had happened to her and for all that he’d been their hit man then, he was every bit the true believer now.

She’d stopped, right after she learned to what extent the government was going, to find John Byers.  It was too late for him, she saw immediately when they met, and she told him what was happening and wished him the best.  He was pragmatic, though his romantic streak led him to cry her name brokenly through a wracking cough as she said goodbye.  Langly had let her know, later, that it was over.

“ Frohike’s almost gone now, and hell, I have a fever.  Go, Susanne.  Get out.  Byers wanted you to be safe.”

She’d hung up the phone feeling heavier than she’d felt in her life, and gone to where she knew Fox Mulder would be.

He’d left behind very little in the way of regrets, he’d told her.  The wedding ring had gone into the fire the first night after they’d left the city and headed for the deep woods of upstate New York.  Susanne didn’t ask.

After several days, trying to keep as low a profile as possible, scared every minute that they weren’t as immune as they’d begun to believe, they began talking about which way to go.  Mulder had been headed to Texas when she found him; at that point, he still believed it was all a cover story for a series of abductions, and he was going to “ground zero” to find out more.  He was stymied only by the lack of travel options.  So he advocated for southwest, and Susanne amended it.  “South,” she said, and Mulder had agreed.  One was as good as the other.

She didn’t tell him about the dreams.

As long as Susanne could recall, she'd had vivid, sometimes lucid, dreams.  They'd never been particularly frightening, nor warm; just dreams, as far as she could tell.  When these new dreams had begun, Susanne was unsure, because they had a lived-in quality; they were deeply familiar, and memorable.

They started the same every time.  A cornfield, sepia-toned, like the opening sequence of The Wizard of Oz.  Susanne felt the vast midwestern prairie, the silence and emptiness that lie beyond the horizon, and her stomach twisted.  Before she could feel the impact of desolation, everything around her turned a brilliant array of colors; suddenly it was a land of plenty, need and want as far as could be.  Close by, singing began.  A voice, obviously once beautiful and strong, sang about "Canaan's fair and happy land."  It was soothing, it was home-like.

It was terrifying, for the voice turned into a screeching horror, and the beauty on the shores of Canaan seemed far less promising. 

Crows, ravens, grackles – black birds of every kind flocked to the field, and overcame it.  The singing was drowned out, and all Susanne heard was the rhythm of the cawing and cackling, telling her there was nothing for her there, and to move on.  The cornfields turned as red as poppies.  A woman's voice screamed - was it the singer, her song ripped from her - and at Susanne's feet, a road broke through the earth and snaked west through the fields and across the horizon.

A yellow brick road, she noted.  In the distance, towering above the prairie, there stood a city aglow.  Whatever was home-like about the song she'd heard paled in comparison to the feeling that she got looking at that city.  The sun glinted off glass buildings, and tears came to her eyes.  She would walk toward it, but she never saw it up close before waking in a sweat.

And every time she woke, she heard his footsteps.  Him.  The Walkin’ Dude.

-

 

They inched through towns, occasionally seeing signs of life, once even talking to another group, three women and two men, all frightened, none willing to go on.  Mulder shook his head each time.  It was stupid to stay, stupid to refuse to join with others, to add to your protection in times like these.

Times like these.  Like there had ever been anything like it.

He felt no shock, which was odd.  Wasn’t it?  Weren’t those poor souls, hiding alone or in pairs, reacting the way human nature dictated?

It was a debate he felt he needed to have.  Susanne refused; she claimed the right to handle the apocalypse how she wished, without regard to human nature or expectation.  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she muttered, whenever Mulder tried.

She may have had a point.  Psychoanalysis in the post-apocalypse was, probably, pointless.  But it felt important to Mulder, to talk, to be heard.  He chalked Susanne’s recalcitrance up to grief.  It wasn’t that he didn’t feel that, too, and that was a relief, to be grieving this world.  She just took it so hard, almost personally.

Mulder said as much once, and never would again, for she had turned on him with red-hot anger.  “Isn’t it personal?  Isn’t all this,” she waved her hands around, twirled in a macabre imitation of a carefree girl, “personal?”

They fought over that.  She blamed herself, blamed him; she was heartbroken, to have lost John without ever having him to begin with.  She told Mulder, in a choking sob, about Langly’s phone call, the last word she had before she’d pressed on.

“This is personal.  They…they did this.  And I was an accomplice,” she spat.  “We all were, in truth.”

After that, she hadn’t spoken to him for almost two days, until they’d come upon Bill and Jess.  She was still skittish, though she warmed a bit, as they came to more wilderness and fewer broken pillars of civilization.

Fox Mulder had left behind little in the way of human connection; Diana had shattered whatever illusions he had about a normal life.  He and Reggie hadn’t been close in a year or better, since Mulder’s obsession with finding out about his past and digging into his new assignment had taken him over.  The bond that was forming between this odd, increasingly bedraggled foursome was foreign to him, but welcome.

He found a willing philosopher in Jess Rider, a verbal sparring partner in Bill Denbrough.  Susanne relaxed, a makeshift society having done the work Mulder knew it could do.  They were meant for this, after all.

A week of rain kept them bound to a motel, playing card games and enjoying soft beds over hard ground for a change.  When the rain stopped, they found the smoke had cleared, and they were able to keep on going. 

Standing on the Ohio state line, they toasted with flat beer and cheered the West that lay ahead.

-

It wasn’t until then, straddling east and west, that Mulder began to dream.

“You come and see me sometime,” she said.

The fields were green and yellow, set against a vivid blue sky, unmarred by cloud or chemtrail.  This was a Midwest Mulder had only ever seen in films.  The farm was orderly, clean; he could hear the chickens, he could smell apple pie.  A red-checked curtain waved in the window.

It was so earnest, his heart broke over it.

And she spoke again, from her porch, the old woman he had never seen before and yet felt sure he knew.  “Fox Mulder.  He knows your name, young man.  He knows it, and so does his Enemy.  There is much to be done, and we need you.”

She fixed him with a look, and he stood in her gaze, unmoving.  “You want to believe.  You will.” The sun faded in the west.  In the distance, he heard a man laughing, a cruel, mocking laugh.

“The old woman,” said the man, who was in the corn, somewhere, Mulder could sense it. “She thinks she can talk to God.”

Mulder shrugged, but had no voice to respond.

“You can believe it if you like.  But there are more pressing concerns.  You’ll die if you go to her.”

The man spread his hands, and suddenly Mulder did see him, as the cornfield parted, a green and yellow sea. 

“You’ll all die.” 

Blood dripped from the man’s hands, his face, and he walked toward Mulder, who screamed.  His voice took on the timbre of his teenaged self, and he was alone again, in an empty living room, a board game scattered on the ground.

“You’ll all die,” a smaller voice echoed.  A girl’s voice.  Samantha’s voice.

When he woke, Mulder was sweating, and the moon was high in the sky.

-

Morning broke that late July day, and like the pioneers of old, Jess stretched in relief that they had crossed the Monongahela River.  It felt like a big deal, and Jess refused to think on the rivers that lay ahead.  This was the furthest west he’d ever been, he realized, as he looked out in that direction, the low morning clouds dissipating.  It took the world ending before he ventured forth to really see it at all.

The others joined him, slowly, for makeshift coffee and the leftovers from the night before.  Mulder, the last of them to rise, was quiet for most of the morning.  As they got on the road, opting to go slow given the exertions before, Jess tried to draw him into a philosophical debate.  They did it often, on the slower days, when they walked the bikes more than rode them. 

It was after several attempts that Mulder drew back, and gave Jess a significant look.  Jess let Bill and Susanne go ahead a bit, and cocked his head at Mulder.

“You too, then?” he said, and Mulder looked stricken.

“What do you mean?”

“The dreams.”

There it was.  Out in the open.  Jess felt lighter, having said it, though he could see the knowledge had only burdened his companion. 

“I’ve been having them for weeks.  Bill, too, though he won’t tell me what he dreams about.  An old woman and a man.  A man who isn’t old, but….”

“He’s old,” Mulder interrupted, softly, the voice of a child who didn’t wish to awaken the monster under the bed.  “He doesn’t look like it, but he’s older than the world itself.  And he laughs.”  Mulder shuddered.  “So you’ve seen him, then.”

Jess nodded.  “What about Susanne?”

Mulder shook his head.  “I don’t know.  Maybe.  She doesn’t always sleep.”

They were quiet for a long time, and eventually caught back up to their friends.  Bill had said something that made Susanne laugh, a sound so rare it startled Mulder.  He hadn’t been sure she could laugh, honestly.  He gave Jess a look, hoping to convey that they should wait to bring up the dreams again.

Jess inclined his head, but looked at the sky.  We can’t wait until nightfall, said that look. 

Mulder knew he was right.  Who knew what lurked in the dark, now, after everything?

 -

Bill saw some of what passed between Jess and Mulder, and dread filled him.  He would have to tell them all some of his story, if they were going to talk about the dreams, and that was a daunting task.  It had been years. 

There was relief, to a point, because Bill could remember, now.  For such a long time, he would wake up in a cold sweat and Audra would have to rub his back and accept that he couldn’t tell her what he’d dreamt about, or why.  He hadn’t remembered what had happened to George, not exactly.  Now he could.  So he wouldn’t have to shrug his shoulders and see his frustration mirrored on their faces. 

Then again, now that he could remember, he didn’t stop.  He fell asleep to the sound of his friends’ voices, laughing over comics and debating the merits of various rock songs.  He walked along and could swear, if he just turned around at the right time, that Richie Tozier was telling jokes behind his back. 

He used to catch Audra’s hair swinging in the sunlight, the exact same shade as Beverly’s, and only just catch himself before he called her that, too.  

After going a little farther than their usual mileage, in large part due to the rural landscape, the group opted to stop for the night near a town, their supplies having run low and a need for some feminine items prompting a run to the nearest grocery store. Jess went with Susanne, and Mulder stayed back to help Bill with setting up their modest camp.

Bill debated whether he should start by telling Mulder some of the story, but opted to simply open the subject and wait for the others.  Once would be plenty.

“Mulder?”

“Yeah, Bill.”

He hesitated, for a split second.  Mulder looked up at him, a quizzical look wrinkling his brow, and then dawning understanding.

“The dreams,” Mulder murmured.

Bill had imagined him dropping what he was doing in astonishment, an exchange of expletives or denial.  He was thrown by Mulder’s nod of acquiescence.

“So it really is all of us,” Mulder said.

They finished the tents and turned to finding firewood, which lay around them in relative abundance, a nice change.  There wasn’t much to keep either of them busy once the fire was going, so they could only wait on the others.   In a way, Bill wished he had started by telling Jess, who was as close to an old friend he had for the moment, unless and until they found Ben and Bev in Nebraska. 

It struck him, however, that Jess was still quite young.  Not that the shine had rubbed off Fox Mulder; whatever it was he’d done before the end of the world, Mulder had been new to it, and eager.   It was in his manner of speaking, the way he both submitted to Bill’s relative elder authority and took charge whenever he could. 

“What did you do, before?” Bill asked him.

Mulder shrugged.  “F.B.I.   I was a profiler.  You know, get into criminals’ minds.”

Bill sensed there was more, but he didn’t have to prod.  “Until pretty recently, my specialty was kidnappings.  Child murders.  My degree…well, hell, that hardly matters now.  Point is, that’s what I did.”

Bill blinked, and sat down hard on a log.  “Kids, huh,” he choked out. 

“The thing is,” Mulder continued, his voice shaking now, “I was good at it for a reason.  I…my sister.  She was taken.  Abducted.  In front of me.  I didn’t remember….I had no idea.  I met Susanne – I was tracking her down, she was a fugitive, but she’ll have to tell you most of it, because I wasn’t…there was…something happened.  But the point is, I woke up from whatever it was and I was consumed.  Obsessed.”

Mulder looked down at the ground, kicking a little at the dirt.  Bill looked up at him and felt a surge of sympathy.  Their stories maybe weren’t so dissimilar. 

“Monsters are real,” he said.  Mulder looked up at him sharply, and nodded.

“Yes.  And whether it was the government or something preternatural….”

“It doesn’t matter.  Evil is evil.” 

-

Jess and Susanne returned then, a modest haul of goods between them.  Susanne took a small bag from their stash and went off into the woods; the guys divided and organized what remained, and Mulder offered to start dinner, tonight a gourmet feast of tinned beef and tuna.  The further west they went, the more goods seemed to remain in the stores, and it was a blessing none of them took for granted.

Jess sensed immediately that something had passed between Bill and Mulder; Bill gave him a significant look, signaling to Jess that questions could wait a bit. 

Susanne returned, and struck up a conversation about music, to pass the time.  They shared concert stories, the generation gap evident as Bill waxed nostalgic about The Doors and Jess raved about a nascent Seattle band whose music he termed “grunge.”  Susanne admitted she knew little about popular stuff, preferring classical tunes, as she’d played the violin as a girl.  Mulder treated them to a rather off-key rendition of his favorite song, and Bill begged him to save them all. 

The merriment couldn’t last.  Bill’s supper sat heavily with him, and his discomfort grew as their conversation waned.  He wanted to keep it up – start a sing-along, something, anything to pass the time until they could fall asleep and….

Dream.

The sun was low in the west, and he had to say something.  He opened his mouth.

Susanne beat him to it.

“I know what you all want to say,” she said, tracing the rim of her beer bottle, staring into the fire.  “It’s been on your minds all day.  The dreams.”

Bill sighed and stood up to get another beer for himself.  “Yes,” he said.  “And I take it none of us need an explanation?”

He sat down again, and set the bottle down in front of him unopened.  “Okay.  I’ll start.”

Jess, Susanne, and Mulder watched him, but none of them objected.  They were all rigid, lost in thought, and Bill’s next words brought them around.

“I’ve dreamt since I was a child.  As long as I can remember, actually.  Vividly.  Ugly dreams, mainly.  I had nightmares so bad my parents had me seeing someone about it for awhile.  That was the fifties, too, and you didn’t do that.  You gave the kid a glass of milk and sent him back to bed; you probably still do that, unless the kid is acting out.  I really don’t know.  But my parents were pretty forward-thinking, sometimes, back then.”

He took a moment to open his beer, and took a long swig.

“I think, later, they should have sent me back, but by then, they didn’t know about the dreams and I didn’t tell them.  The worst time was right after my brother George was murdered, and they had no idea.”

Mulder’s jaw worked, and he slapped his thigh.  Bill looked at him and held up his hand.  “Yes,” he said, and Mulder nodded.

Bill continued.  “George was murdered, but not by human hands.  It got him, you see.  One day, I was sick in bed and George wanted to play, and he went out in the rain with a paper boat I made him.  He was by himself, and It got him.”

They could all hear the proper noun.  Mulder knew immediately, Bill was referring to something he thought had to do with the dreams. 

“I can’t tell you the whole story – we don’t have all night, and we have things to discuss – but the short version is that my friends and I, we fought It.  We thought we won.  But I dreamed.  Even after I forgot, I dreamed.  Even when I started to make money writing down the horrible things that came to me in those dreams, they kept coming.  A gift, in a way.  A rotten gift, spoiled.

“I married Audra, and she knew I dreamed, and never knew what about.  Until just before she…until she got sick.  She looked at me, the night she died, she was wide awake for the first time in days and she was looking out the window, and she said, ‘Bill, you listen to that old woman.  You listen, and you do just as she says.  Call Ben.  Go to Nebraska.’  She fell asleep awhile later and never woke up.”

Bill was shaking.  “I druh-dream every nuh-night now, about an old woman at a house on a farm in Nebraska.  But It is always there, t-too, and dances in the cornfield, laying it all to waste as he goes.  Rotten.  Spoiled.”

The stutter went unnoticed by all but Bill himself.  He finished his beer in a long swallow, and went for another.

-

Mulder waited to see if Bill would speak again, but it seemed he had exhausted his tale, for the moment. 

“I had a sister.  She went missing, when were kids.  I found out,” and he looked sideways at Susanne, “after I went through regression hypnosis, that she was taken.  Abducted.”

Bill, of course, knew that, but the collective intake of breath from Jess and Susanne reassured him he wouldn’t face the judgment here that he had in the old life; none of Diana’s derision could be seen on a single face.  He told them all what he thought he knew, out of a desire to be heard.  “I don’t know if what I went through has anything to do with what is happening now, with what I dream about.  I think the same men who covered up my sister’s abduction were responsible for Captain Trips.”  He looked a Susanne directly now.  “But the dreams, those aren’t….Susanne?”

She shook her head and reached out to put a hand on Mulder’s.  “If they could do that, we would really be fucked.  No, Mulder, I don’t think the dreams are manufactured.  Not like that.”  She took a shaky breath and withdrew her hand.

“So you are dreaming, then?  What about?” said Jess.

“Cornfields and an old woman,” she said, voice lifting as though she were asking.  “I don’t know.”

Jess frowned at that.  “My dreams are always vivid.  The same dream, in Technicolor, that apparently Bill is having, though mine don’t end the same.  I see a farm and an old woman, and I hear a voice telling me she is a pretty liar.  I don’t feel like she’s lying, though.”

Susanne stood up and began to pace.  “We can’t all be dreaming the same god dam dreams.  This is…this is insane.”  She kicked at the brush, tightened her arms across her chest.

“Is it?  Even if this isn’t the end of the world, we’ve been in close quarters, we’ve been sharing experiences.  We’re in a kind of shock, certainly.  Why not dream?” Mulder said.

Susanne pointed at Bill.  “He’s been dreaming since before, he said.”

“We should compare the dreams in detail,” said Bill.  “If any of this is…supernatural, we need to know if there’s a pattern.”

“Cornfields.  I told you.  An old woman.”

“And a man,” said Jess.  Susanne looked at him sharply.  “You know, Susanne.  You know, because he’s in your dreams, too.”

“Her name is Abagail Freemantle,” said Bill.  “I don’t know his name, if he has one.  I never see his face; I see the faces…the faces of the dead.”

“The Walking Dude,” said Susanne deliberately, the syllables succinct.  “He has no name, not a real one.  And yes, damn it, yes, I’ve seen him.  I’ve heard him.”  She nearly choked on those last words, she was speaking so low.  Mulder stood to go to her, and she waved him off.

The first crickets sounded as dusk fell.  The night was going to be warm, summer in full swing now, and they wouldn’t need the fire long except for light.  None of them moved, and no one spoke for a long time.

Bill broke it.  “I am going to Nebraska.”

Some nods, some murmurs.  Some silence.

“The day my wife passed, I called my old friends.  The same ones who were there then, who fought with me.  Ben lives in Nebraska, in the same town, I think, as the woman.  I was planning to go west anyway, and if these dreams aren’t really dreams at all, I want to be where the good people will be.”

Susanne shook her head, but said nothing. 

Mulder rubbed his hands together, a nervous reaction to the tension in the air.  “I haven’t been dreaming long – I think the first time was last night.  I think Nebraska is as good as any place.”

Jess kept quiet, watching Susanne, but agreed that Nebraska was at least a solid destination. 

The evening was warm, but a shiver ran through them all, and all at once each was imagining that the sounds of various animals in the area surrounding them were malicious.  His creatures, for the night was his, wasn’t it?  The light left the world and the devil came out to play.

Rationality won out, and if Bill could have remembered it well enough, he would have recognized the cloak of adulthood, the growing-up, that had once shuttered his worst memories.  They could function, creatures be damned.

The dreams, of course, would be waiting.

The group shifted, the evening chores before them.   Bill and Mulder sat down over an atlas and talked about routes.  Susanne ignored them, and walked away from the camp.  Jess followed her.

“You don’t want to go to Nebraska,” he said, once they were out of earshot.

She turned to him.  “And you do?”

“I think I want to be where there are people, and I feel like that’s where people will go, if anyone else is having the same dreams we are.  There’s nowhere else.”

“Further west,” she whispered.  “Las Vegas.” She looked stricken, and Jess felt a chill go through him. 

“Why?”

“I…I don’t know.”

They sat down.  Susanne was still holding her arms tightly to her chest and Jess again though of a taut wire that would spring if even slightly touched.  “You know, before, I worked for the government.”

“Right, you said.”

She shook her head.  “No.  I didn’t.  Not really.  I was working at White Stone.  I helped develop biological weapons.”

Jess felt his stomach drop.  “Like Captain Trips.”

Susanne sighed, and let her hands fall to her knees.  “Like that.  And worse.  White Stone wasn’t where the leak happened, but it might as well have been.  I tried getting away, once.  They fought to get me back and I knew they would kill me for it.  But once they had me, they…they threatened, because that’s how they could keep control if you weren’t a true believer.  The threats were pretty empty, and really, once they put me back on a project….”

She looked up at the darkening sky.  “I’m not an innocent, Jess.  The things I did, they could kill people, and I knew damn well that’s what the Army wanted my skills for.  I fooled myself for a long time.”

Jess took one of her hands, and she allowed it.  “That life is done.  We all have pasts, Susanne.”

She laughed.  “Jess, you don’t have a past.  You don’t know what you’re talking about.  If there’s hope left at all in the world, and I don’t believe there really is, you’re young.  You can find it.”

He held his chin up, determined not to be insulted because she was right.  He’d gotten a girl pregnant and that was about the total sum of his misdeeds in his previous life.  But Jess felt strongly that they all had a blank slate now and said so.

Susanne just shook her head.

Night had settled in full, and the sky was pockmarked with stars.  Jess thought of that night early on, when he’d scoffed about man’s ingenuity, about the lack of foresight in the human race, as a satellite that might have been a shooting star traced a path across the sky.

He had wanted to believe, and maybe still did.  He could go on to Nebraska. 

Susanne stood silhouetted by moonlight, and Jess’ heart skipped.  The thing was, she wasn’t his, and he had no responsibility here.  She was surely about to tell him that.  But another woman’s face crossed his mind, a hand touching a still-flat belly, and guilt coursed through him.

“I’m going with you,” he told her. 

To his great surprise, she didn’t argue, but took his hand.

-

After that night, the cohesion of the first leg of their journey fractured.  It was almost visceral, and Bill felt it keenly.  It was a familiar song and Bill knew all the lyrics.  The group was going to break apart.

On the road three days later, Bill looked at his companions and saw, for the first time, just how young Jess Rider really was.  Twenty, maybe twenty-three at the outside.  He’d been mourning a girlfriend in Portland; Frannie, Jess had said, eyes glowing behind the grief.  She’d just told him, days before, she was pregnant.  They’d fought, and Jess hadn’t gone back for her.  He was certain Captain Trips had ended her life, when he didn’t hear from her again.  “I’ll regret that my entire life,” he told Bill.  Bill knew regret, boy did he ever, but the only part of his story he shared with Jess was that he’d had a wife, Audra, and that Audra had died a few days prior in a hotel room in Ogunquit.  Jess had marveled at that – that they should have been in Ogunquit at the same time, and Portland now, the odds – and they bonded, after a fashion.  The idea to leave together had been Jess’; Bill had had a vague idea that he would go back to Derry, and let whatever remained there have whatever remained of him. 

Those new dreams, though.  They convinced Bill that Jess probably had a good idea, after all.  And so they left.

He could remember being Jess’ age, and having Jess’ ideals and desires.  The idea that he could write and what he would write might change the world.  He was never a poet, but he understood poets, he envied them.  Their brevity, mostly. 

“You were going to be a poet,” Bill murmured, and Jess heard him. 

“Yes,” he sighed, looking wryly at Bill.  “I don’t think I was ever destined for your success, though.”

“I wouldn’t wish it on you,” replied Bill, prompting confusion in Jess.  “Believe me.”

-

“Are you certain they’re still in Nebraska?”  Mulder asked Bill.

“The dreams are the same.  Abagail Freemantle on a porch and she says to hurry.  They’re there, but not for much longer.”

Mulder nodded.  “Yeah.  Same here.”  He was drawing circles in the dirt with a stick he’d found.  “Last night, there was something new.”

Bill waved his hand, to encourage Mulder to continue. 

“The desert.  That’s…the other guy.”

The air was thick with all the things Mulder didn’t say just then.  Jess and Susanne sat nearby, heads close together, whispering. 

Bill had already confided to Mulder, he was sure the others were going to leave.  It hurt, knowing that, because both Bill and Mulder believed there were only two paths at this point and neither wanted to see people they cared about take the other path.  What lay at the end, no one could know.

Mulder and Jess had argued about it that morning.  Jess had suggested that Nebraska wasn’t the only destination.  A whole country lay before them, he said.  Mulder told him, he believed there was something waiting in Nebraska that was worth the journey. 

“But you don’t know,” argued Jess.  “The dreams don’t spell anything out.  There are just hints, and whispers.  You don’t know.”

“No,” Mulder responded.  “No, I don’t.  But I want to believe.”

Bill hadn’t heard any of that exchange, but the new chill between them was palpable, and he knew, something was going to happen. 

He left Mulder sitting and drawing his circles in the dirt, and walked a bit apart from them all.

He looked up at the moon, and thought, for the first time in a very long time, of Henry Bowers.  Had Henry ever had a choice?  Did It always have him marked, was his fate set in stone?

There was no way to know.  His thoughts now so clearly echoed Mulder’s arguments to Jess that morning.  They could not know, and maybe evil wouldn’t be waiting on one path anymore than good would be on the other.

He, too, wanted to believe.

In the distance, eyes watched Bill as night fell.  Eyes that, if they had expression, could be called disappointed.

-

A few days went by, and with little fanfare, they separated.

Susanne announced it over breakfast, in a casual way, like she was running to the Quik Mart and could she grab anyone some Morley Lights. 

The debate over whether it was a good idea, over where exactly she would go, didn’t last very long, for every argument had been made before; they were, to a one, drained of emotion over it. 

Mulder tried hardest to make a case to Susanne, who had avoided deep conversation with all of them, but most especially with him.  He flashed a final time on Diana, whose intent to leave him had been clear for a long time, who had shunned altogether him in the last days, like she had wanted to get him used to the idea.  Susanne’s eyes shone with tears as she told him, it wasn’t working, and she had decided to go a different way. 

It was likewise no shock at all that Jess intended to go with her.  Mulder expected to feel envy over this; he had, after all, started on this journey with Susanne, and they were old friends, in a way.  They knew each other before, and that mattered a bit in this shit world, didn’t it?  Instead, he felt sad, and scared for her.  He knew it was written across his face, as she frowned at him and shook her head once. 

“Jess and I will be fine,” she said aloud, her eyes not leaving Mulder’s face, willing him to understand.  She felt he should, but then maybe he hadn’t gotten to the point where he knew just how much he was agreeing to whatever they forced him to do.  She was complicit, and she had to see it through, because after all, she chose that life.  Everything had changed, except that.

Jess didn’t understand that, either, but she was grateful for his company.

Their parting was as simple as taking a different fork in the road.  Mulder and Bill went due west, Susanne and Jess southwest.

Whether their paths would cross again, none of them could have said.

-

"No chilling winds or poisonous breath, can reach that healthful shore...."

Singing quietly, Abagail Freemantle rocked on her porch, letting the last of the day’s sun soak into her tired bones.  And Lord, was she tired. 

It was not yet the time to prepare for anyone’s coming, but she knew they were out there, motorcycles and bicycles and hiking boots all propelling people her way.  Little Hemingford Home had never known such a crowd, even in those halcyon days when her father had accepted the Grange invitation and his little girl had done him proud.

“Yessir,” she said.  “Gonna be a crowd, Your will be done.”

She squinted as a figure came up the walk.  Her heart was in her throat for just a moment, as she prayed for God’s protection, until she could see who it was that came to visit.  He was tall and slim, jeans hugging his hips just so.  A good-looking sort.  And familiar.

“Ben!” she said, laughing. “Didn’t you just give me a scare!”

“Why now, Abagail, whatever about me would scare you?” he said in response, coming up the porch steps. 

“Never mind,” she said, “t’aint important, you ain’t nobody but Ben Hanscom.  Now, what brings you here today?”

He looked out over the cornfield, and sighed, a happy sound.  “We’re going to have visitors.”

“I know,” she said.  “Time’s almost here.  ‘Nother morning or two, we’ll have some things to do.”

“Bev’s going to come help you with the chickens.”

“She’s welcome.  Where is she now?”

“That’s why I’m here, actually.  We have some news, and she wasn’t feeling very well.  I thought I’d….”

“Ben Hanscom, did you get that nice girl with child?”

He laughed at the playful scolding from his friend.  “I did at that.  And she’s got some wicked morning sickness.  Help a fella?”

Abagail directed him to the stash of ginger tea, and waited for him to come back out.

“That’s not really why you came.”  She looked up at Ben.  He’d been in Hemingford Home a good twenty years, as far as she knew.  They’d met when she could still drive, after he fixed a flat tire for her.  She’d known there were stories Ben could tell, though he’d never offered and she never asked. 

But the dreams were the dreams, and Abagail had been given to understand, it was the Lord’s way of telling them all something.   All those left behind, she thought, poking at that wound.

“No,” said Ben, and he sat down next to Abagail.  “Las Vegas.  That’s where he’s going.”

“Mmm.  Knew it would be somewhere out in the desert.  He goes where the snakes gather, always has.”

Ben had long since gotten used to Abagail’s way of talking; when he’d come back from Maine with Beverly, for the first time, he understood what she was saying.  “You know where we’re bound?”

“Colorado.   But not yet.  We must be here when they start to arrive.  That’s as far as I’ve seen, and I trust He will show me more before the end.”

Ben nodded.  “Well.  I’d best get back.”  He held up the tea.

“You’ll come for supper?”

“If Bev’s up to it.”

“Pshaw.  Tell her I’ve been there a time or two, and nothing she’s going through’s gonna scare me.  I’ll make her something light, and if she’s poorly she can take the bed in the back.”

Ben grinned.  “I’ll tell her.  Thank you.”

He left, and Abagail watched him go.

"Bound for the promised land," she sang softly.  They would be, at that.

-

 

End