TITLE: Till The End
AUTHOR: stellar_dust
EMAIL: stellar_dust_x@yahoo.com
WEBSITE: http://katycat.net/xfiles/
ARCHIVE/FEEDBACK: Yep!
SPOILERS: none, I think
CHALLENGE: First Lines (Kurt Vonnegut's 
"Breakfast of Champions")
DISCLAIMER: Chris Carter ate his Wheaties.  Not 
me.  (;
SUMMARY: This is a tale of a meeting of two 
lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a 
planet which was dying fast.
DATE: 06/28/04
NOTE: I'm not sure if I've actually read this 
book or not .. but the first line was too 
evocative to resist.  


This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, 
skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which 
was dying fast.

They met in one of their favorite spots, a 
secluded corner of a racetrack in the middle of 
a particularly abandoned town in Virginia.

Someday one of them would walk out alone, and 
they both knew it, but neither chose to dwell 
on that fact any more than necessary to arrange 
for the providential demise of his opposite 
number.  There were more important problems to 
solve.

"I'm not convinced," the first one said, in a 
clipped, British, holier-than-thou attitude.

"Mulder's the one.  I'm sure of it." The other 
flipped his ash nonchalantly.  "You'll see."

"We're running out of time.  You can't afford 
to be wrong."

On another man, his smugly twisted expression 
might have been termed a smile.  "I'm not 
wrong."

A cloud of smoke stung the first man's nose.  
His lips compressed.  "Very well.  This is on 
your head."

His eyes gleamed, mirroring the crimson embers 
of his cigarette.  "I wouldn't have it any 
other way."

Leaning against the white picket fence, they 
watched the sun go down in silence, each 
contemplating the irony of one fewer day in the 
countdown to the end of the world.