Season 1, Episode 5:
Bunnies in Black
Part 5 of 8
Nick smirked as the mission played before his
eyes. Yeah, he was stuck here, and yeah,
this was the perfect mission he was forced to sit out on. The fact they were all at the
Still, things could be worse for him. If he had to monitor the video feeds, at
least he could focus on the girls. JC
was on a mission now as well, but Nick couldn’t care less about that at the
moment. Truly, the only other downer was
the fact that the southern CIA agent who had quickly become a thorn in his side
was on the mission with the girls, too.
He was sure Brian would end up taking over the mission eventually, and
with what was involved, the government would take it and execute a
cover-up. He bet his life on that
one. That one simple fact was what
really made his skin crawl.
"Heh, at least Emerald's having 'fun time'
with Hefner," he commented with a snicker as he stood, now bored at the
lack of action. Here he was, in
Nick paced around the lab, humming a tune to
himself before he started to sing on a whim.
"My beautiful woman... B is
for beautiful as the sunshine..." He
eyed a fedora. No, had to be a weapon
for Jay. The man would sleep with the
things if it didn't ruin them. "E tells me everything's feeling
alright..." He continued to
sing, that being something for the moment.
Then he saw more intricate items, like a diamond ring. He picked it up to examine. "A-"
A laser shot from the "diamond."
"-Aaah!" He dropped it back on the time. "A
goes to U and me, swinging in time."
That was when he spotted it. A bra, but not just any bra. A fully automated bra he’d heard Diamond say
He laughed at his own reflection upon the metal
tables. "Uuuuuuu've got me acting like a fooooooooo-"
The blonde man danced to the mental beat he had going. No one could see him anyway. He rubbed the bra.
As he did, flashing lights began to go off. Small, tubular devices emerged from where the
nipples would be. Within moments, a
complete round of angry bullets began firing off around the room. "-oooSHIIIIIIIIIT! Shit!
Shitty shitballs! Okay... um... okay, fuck, how the hell do I
turn this thing off!?" He aimed his
new chest to the other side of the room, away from the computers. If any of those were lost,
"Fucky fuck. Fuck a duck!" He aimed the chest away as it began to bounce
off the metal coated walls. Bouncing
bullets were making it worse. They
bounced around, lodging in anything that could absorb them. One raced through the fedora; another bounced
off the ring and melted, thanks to the miracle chance the laser diamond went
off. One hit a picture frame. One grazed the computer desk, and Nick almost
had a stroke until he saw it had missed the computer. He shifted down, hoping the floor could take
it.
"Niiiick... oh
my... down!" Lancy could be heard
on the other side of the room, going to the floor as the bra raged out of
control. Unfinished, it was now choosing
the direction instead of Nick.
"What in the hell’s blazes is going on down
here, Carter?!" he heard his superior yell as he, too, dove for the floor
to avoid being shot with the firing squad Nick called a bra.
A few more shots rang out, before smoke filtered
from the ejected revolver-styled bra nipples, and the device finally shut
down. Nick threw it upon the floor,
ignoring the damage he had just caused.
"Nothing, K, just an incident, but I, um... handled it."
His secretary just grinned widely. "Cross-dressing looks fabulous on
you."
"Nick... how... why...?" K shook his
head in disgust. "Never mind. I don't want to know."
"K-"
"I never knew you were the type,
Nicky."
Nick rolled his eyes at Lancy. This... looked bad. K was going to have him killed one of these
days. The younger agent was willing to
bet again that it'd be one of the
"There's an explanation for this, K,
and-"
"I DON'T want to know. Somehow, someway, clean this mess up and
monitor the cameras like you were assigned to!
And if you don't, then I will NOT hold
Nick glanced at Lancy, who had picked up the bra
and was examining it. "Wow,
original design taken from
Agent 008 just released a sigh and watched the
screen. It was getting interesting
again, and besides, he could clean the lab later. She couldn't get too mad, right?
That question was immediately answered as her
face appeared upon the main screen moments later. She was seen playing with an amulet from
another camera, which was her own disguised communicator back to HimTak. It was a large, Celtic-styled charm with soft
jewels around the edges. The design was
a hologram to hide the video screen, and the jewels were truly buttons. She gazed into it on her end of the connection
to see Nick, standing there, looking extremely sheepish, with Lancybassy beside
him. Both were trying to block the view
of the lab, but they couldn't. They
couldn't begin to hide the view of her now completely wrecked laboratory. After an assignment that had pulled her away
from her gadgets, involving something she thought wasn't rational because she
believed firmly there was another, more scientific explanation, and stuck her
in stilettos and skimpy outfits, this was the last straw.
That was when Professor Pearl finally snapped.
"Now Kit..." Nick used an old pet name for her, one from
before her alias. He definitely had
caused whatever had happened.
"What...the... hell... did you DO TO MY
LAB?!"
"I can explain..."
"NICK!
You know how much my lab, my creative space, my haven, means to me. K has you down in there, I'm betting to watch
the feed, and THIS is what happens?!"
"Nick was cross-dressing!" snickered
Lancy, who hoped the calm down the top scientist with humor. An elbow slammed against him, directed from
his boss, and an evil, icy blue stare came along with it.
Her eyes narrowed. "You did not do what I think you
did."
"You still love me..."
"You're pushing it."
"Come on, Pearl!"
"Are you kidding me?! I almost had all the kinks out of the bra,
and you just put me back on square one, PLUS almost destroyed my lab, my
sanctuary!"
He could see her eyes narrow with anger;
frustration was clearly written on her face.
Nick hadn't seen her that angry or upset since her first mission with
Chasez. "I'm sorry, really, really
sorry. I'll have it clean before you get
back-"
"I can't believe you did this!"
"Now Professor, Nicky did do it by
accident. Who could blame him for
cross-dressing...?"
"Stay out of it, Lancy."
The flamboyant and talkative secretary got silent
at the sight of the fuming scientist.
"You... are so dead, Nick." She sounded serious, looked furious, but he
could see the smile she was trying so hard to hide, the amusement in her
eyes. Despite all the anger, she found
the image in her mind of what happened funny.
He knew it. And she’d also always
had a soft spot for him; all the ladies did, except Emerald.
"I dare you to try and prank me again. But I'm sorry, Pearl. Glad you still love me."
She sighed.
"You're very lucky. So, any
idea what that symbol Emerald sent you was?"
"Not yet."
"Alright." The blonde scientist turned her head, having
heard a noise within the halls. "I
need to go; I think I hear someone. Bye... 00Dead Meat."
Nick could see her own impish, trademark smirk,
and then she disappeared from his screens.
He looked around the disaster of a lab and groaned. He was so going to get it for this.
± ± ±
“You just missed all the action back at HQ,” said
“Yeah? So
what’d I miss?”
“Oh, just 00Carter running amok with my prototype
of Diamond’s new laser bra and completely destroying my laboratory.”
Red gasped, her mouth falling open before
twitching a little at the corners. “Are
you serious?”
“Wish I wasn’t.
No wonder they used to call him Kaos.”
Red giggled.
“That I would like to have seen.”
“Me too. I
only witnessed the aftermath.”
“Aw… sorry about your lab,” Red offered. She was sympathetic, but not as much as she
was amused by the idea of Nick wreaking havoc in an armed bra.
Wondering what else had been going on at HimTak
while she had been playing her new role as “Muffin” at the
She felt an unexpected rush of emotions as she
peered through the scarlet stone at the familiar quarters, empty without her
there. First, there was longing… the wishful
hope that she could finish her business here and return to
The mission had been successful in distracting
her, but now, she let her mind run away with its recollection of the
nightmarish incident that had brought them here.
Bree wailed as the next
contraction came. Red urged, “Push!” and
looked between the laboring woman’s legs as the crown of a head appeared. She was thankful it wasn’t breach. The fetus slid out a little at a time, its
smooth scalp coated with blood and vernix.
The skin beneath appeared bluish-gray, and Red felt a rush of concern
that it was suffocating. “One more big
push, Bree,” she coached.
The mother screamed as she put
the last of her strength into expelling the fetus, and her offspring slid out
into Red Jewel’s gloved hands. When the
red-haired doctor looked down at what she was holding, her mouth fell open.
Then she, too, began to
scream.
The skin was dusky blue,
almost purple, and slimy with the contents of its placenta. There was no hair on its body, not even lanugo;
its slick scalp was perfectly bald. It
was that smooth head that horrified her the most, to the point where she nearly
dropped it out of shock.
The cranium was shaped like a
light bulb and massively oversized, more disproportionate than that of any baby
she’d delivered. Hydrocephalus, she
might have guessed, if it were a normal baby.
This was not a normal baby. Not
by any means. It might have passed for
one at first – a hydrocephalus baby suffering from oxygen deprivation – had it
not been for the face.
That face would haunt her for
the rest of her life.
There were no eyebrows, no
lashes, only eyes. Large, bulging,
slanted eyes, with lids that flickered open and shut horizontally rather than
vertically. When they were open, they
revealed two convex pools of liquid black, without the slightest trace of white
sclera or colored iris. The corneas
formed a translucent film, like that of a puddle of oil, with faint swirls of
color on top. She could see her
reflection when she gazed into them; her own eyes were wide, her face ashen.
Below the eyes were two mere
slits – nostrils, though there was no protruding nose. A small, lipless mouth gaped open below
those, and it uttered a frightful cry.
Not the sharp wail of a newborn baby, but a sound more like that of a
hissing cat, mixed with a shrill screech for which she had no comparison. She’d heard nothing like it before. It was not of this world.
In her arms, the creature
writhed and stretched its limbs: two
arms, two legs, but with only three digits per hand and three webbed toes
attached to the feet.
Within her, her instincts were
fighting each other. Fear gave her the
compulsion to fling the slimy, unearthly creature away from her, like she might
a giant slug. Yet, oddly enough, from
somewhere deep inside her, her maternal instincts tugged at her heart and
compelled her to hold onto it. In the
moment, she wasn’t capable of rational thought, but later, she would realize
that it was the way the creature was reaching up to her with its floppy limbs,
crying, that kept her hands cupped beneath its bulbous head. It was not a human baby… but, somehow, a baby
just the same.
It felt like she’d been
holding it for minutes, but really, her mind was in warp speed; it had only
been a few seconds. Dimly, she became
aware of the reactions of the others in the background. Gasps.
Then screams. Loudest of all was
a male scream, that of the husband, Jim.
That scream was what triggered
the others into action. Jay pushed the
husband down into a chair before he could pass out; his knees buckled as he
collapsed into it, but still, he was hysterical. Emerald pulled on a pair of latex gloves and
took the creature from Red’s arms. “The
mother,” she said in a low voice that was still sharp enough to divert Red’s
attention.
Red wondered where she was
going to take the creature, what she was going to do with it. She wondered what it even was, though
somewhere in the back of her mind, she already knew. But there was no time for such
questions. On the stainless steel table
before her, the mother was fading fast.
“Jim? What’s wrong?
What’s… what’s wrong with my baby?
Is my… baby alright?” She’d been
asking the questions for as long as Jim had been screaming, but no one had been
able to answer. Only now did Red hear
how breathy her voice was and realize she was going downhill.
The rush of adrenaline
coursing through her bloodstream allowed her doctor’s instincts to take over,
and she sprang into action again, pulling her stethoscope from her shoulders to
listen to the young woman’s chest. Just
as she had suspected, the breath sounds were weak; the woman’s lungs were
suddenly filling with fluid.
There had not been time to set
up monitors when she’d brought Bree in, but now, she hurried to clip a pulse ox
monitor to the index finger of one of the woman’s hands, which were shaking
uncontrollably with shock. She attached
leads to her heaving chest, only to watch as the EKG waves measuring her
heartbeat peaked and plummeted erratically.
The woman began to hemorrhage
then, expelling what was left of the placenta in a surge of blood. Red nearly slipped in the fresh puddle on the
tiled floor as she fumbled for her surgical tools. At the head of the table, Bree’s eyes rolled
back into her head, exposing only the blank stares of their whites. The blips of the heart monitor increased in
their frequency, sounding with such lightning speed that, to the human ear,
they seemed to merge into a single tone.
And then, they did become one, a piercing, endless whine, as the new
mother’s heartbeat accelerated to a rate beyond its limit and suddenly stopped.
The cardiac arrest eased the
gushing of blood from her body, but it was too late to save her. Already, nearly half of her blood volume was
on the floor. Red suctioned and sutured
and tried to resuscitate, but the effort was in vain.
At a
The
memory of that night left Red tremulous, her eyes filled with fresh tears. She had lost patients in med school,
witnessed plenty of odd cases during her time at HimTak, but she would never
get over what she had seen that night.
The only bit of relief she could find in it was that the mother, Bree,
had not seen what she’d given birth to before she crashed, and that her widowed
husband, Jim, would not remember. Only
Jay and Emerald remained witnesses to the traumatic birth of the
extraterrestrial.
Red,
like they, had given her statement to the FBI agents who had arrived two days
later to observe the live specimen and autopsy the mother. They were not just any FBI agents, she
quickly realized, but members of a special department, a secret sector of the
government reserved for the unexplainable.
They investigated unsolved mysteries, paranormal activity, events beyond
the civilian realm of understanding.
They told her very little besides that, but she deduced that K had been
right in bringing them onto the case, along with his charming CIA cousin. Agents Mulder and Scully seemed to know what
they were talking about; they appeared to understand far more than she did,
that was for sure.
She
felt she had no business being in LA on this mission, but although she had
protested along with the other girls, a part of her was glad she had been sent
along. It was a welcomed reprieve from the
medical wing she looked in on at HimTak, where the sight of the alien baby, the
smell of the mother’s blood on the floor, and the sounds of her husband’s
screams would haunt her for a long time to come.
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