"End of the Q Saga"
By 
Jack Carol Crowder the Third

You know the street well enough you get to recognize how people are going to
cap you.
	The Asians use autos like modified Tech-9s or Bullpups and they'll smoke the
guy next door and miss you and have to clean up with blades later. The Rastas
use cheap trey-eights with generic soft-nosed slugs but they'll off both you
the first time with no mistakes given the size and quantity of the holes.
	The Colombians take out the neighborhood in a happy carnival of Uzies. The
Albanians carve your brother's throat with a carpet-cutter. The Italians smoke
you with a .22 caliber and precision, mostly because they don't pull the
trigger on the jammy till it's touching the back of your neck.
	The Asians tend to stalk you first, which is why Que has the feeling the guy
behind him might be Asian. He only wishes he was up against Human weapons.
	It isn't a great piece of turf, from a victim's point of view; a frost-humped
string of subgrade asphalt lined with cattails and trashed Plymouths and the
kind of smell you get only after thirty years of burying with a front-end
loader some of the nastier chemicals known to man.
	In the distance you see the burn of cars as they rush the long iron leapfrog
of the Pulaskit Skyway, honking and backfiring in their anxiety to get across,
like nervous schoolgirls trying not to trail the hem of their dress in the
shit of the Jersey marshes.
	In the distance, behind Que, you can see the spotlit bulk of a video-server,
not one of MiB's. To his right, the sullen Gothic piles the few corporations
remaining in Newark quail under the flight paths of 777s; to Que's left, the
icy money-spires of Manhattan glint against the smoky night.
	That's the trouble with this road. Everything is farther in the distance and
in different directions expect the bulrushes and the stink of organo-chlorines
and the black mobster-ridden depths of the Hackensack River to one side. 
	That, and the mincing, feminine trip of footsteps behind Que; footsteps that
sound softly whenever he moves, and stops whenever he does, and retreat when
Que comes after.
	Que walks faster. He thinks he hears the footsteps speeding up but he can't
be sure because of the noise of his own feet. He was paired up with H on this
one and at this moment she was still checking out the crash sight. 
	Finally it comes in short patterns. Flashes of faces. Flashes of scenes.
Twenty years ago on his first case. All flowing as he turns around to look at
the person following him.
	There... in those eyes. The shape of the body. Slightly stunned, Que doesn't
realize the creature has pulled a weapon. The pulse blast rips through his
stomach as the snow falls. As Que hits the ground, he cannot tell if this is a
dream of not. 

	As Que opens his eyes, he is being dragged into a cheap motel room. He feels
the wound on his stomach. It has been taped up and he finally looks to where
they are headed. Into the bedroom.
	"Don't wanna go in there," Que whispers.
	"Come on, it'll be fine." H shuts off the lights, fires up the storm lantern.
	"H," Que insists, "can't I stay in the living room?"
	She rearranges the quilts, folds back the covering like a maid at the Milford
Plaza. Kicks off her shoes, lines them up neatly at the entrance, gets in,
pulling the quilts up to her chin.
	"It's warm."
	Que gets in slowly. This bed isn't warm, its bloody freezing. All the cold
from the streets and the shot didn't go away, it just hunkered like herpes in
Que's bone marrow, waiting for him to leave the coal stove. Que huddles next
to her. There's nothing sexual about it, she has heat and Que needs it.
	She puts an arm around Que and rubs his back. The shivering doesn't diminish.
	"Christ," H whispers, "you are cold," and pulls up Que's sweatshirt at the
waist.
	"What are you doing?"
	"Skin to skin," she mutters, "it's what the survival books say."
	"Oh, God," Que moans, "I forgot you're a nudist."
	She does it carefully. Within two minutes Que is naked. Que's muscles shake
so hard they seem to lift him periodically clear of the mattress. She wrestles
out of her own clothes, presses herself against Que, gently at first, then
with increasing strength, as if to still Que's muscles with the power of her
own. 
	In Que's mind's eye, the softness of her turns into something visual, light
as fog and of deep blue color, whose shape neutralizes the hard, short
violence of Manhattan fits in the receptors brain.	The fog turns into the
bridges, towers, birds so light they need their winds only for direction.
	The secret of softness is, and must be, that hardness is evoked by it.
	In the corner of Que's mind, he is aware, even in sleep, that his body is
coddled and warm as the egg under a brooding hen.
	And that brings out the hardness of the Reptoid.

	Wasn't hard enough that he was a Cephaloid on this planet of Monkeys, but now
his wife wanted to break up. Jeggs was not a lucky man. Actually, he never
wins at anything he does. He stood outside his front door and slipped the key
within the lock. Jeggs normally expected his wife yelling at him by the time
he made it to the kitchen. She must be walking the dog, he figured. Opening
the ice box, Jeggs reaches for the milk but finds none. Slamming the door,
Jeggs finally notices their dog on the floor of the kitchen. 
	The little Yorkie lies on his side on the polished oak floor, his white fur
stained a light gray around his chest. His tongue hangs slightly out of his
mouth, dabbing a reddish pool that has to be blood from the wide wound on his
throat.
	Jeggs feels a flash of pity for the dog that is quickly swamped by a rising
tsunami of panic. 
	Jeggs moves, finally. His legs feel as heavy as cast iron. He drags them
upstairs, his heart racing. 
	"Larissa," He gasps, and busts into the second-floor living space.
	The mind adapts fast, even to entropy. Everything in the second floor has had
the obvious things done to it. If it was hung up, it was pulled down. If it
can break, it was smashed. The mobile lies in a tangle of colored wine on the
floor. The Russian icons have been pulled from their niche, thrown and broken;
golf leaf is scattered in the wake of their destruction. The Pennsylvania
naifs have been crushed to matchsticks. A photograph of color birches and
mountains ripped into shreds. A Chinese vase lies broken in the hearth, the
white roses in contained dying on thirst on the nain rug.
	Jeggs catches all of this with his eyes that are focused on his path through
the destruction, for his wife is not here. Finally he makes his way into the
bedroom. The sheets are torn off, tangled up. The mattress is wet, a large
splotch of gray puddle in the center. Jeggs moves closer, thinking to touch
the puddle, to see what it is; not touching it for fear of what it might be.
	Something drops on his head. A white liquid is dropping down his scalp and
neck and onto the sodden mattress. Jeggs looks up.
	She is hanging facedown from the new Georgian mobile. 
	Her body is twisted like a great white spider in the nylon cables, and her
right leg has been wound around the load-bearing wire. 
	Larrisa's neck is stretched out and the head hangs free. Her face is very
dark, almost black, her eyes are wide and fixed. Her mouth frozen open in a
moronic question.
	And the grayish liquid is dripping, her bloody is dripping from her mouth
onto the mattress where they use to make love; dripping from the soaked, torn
shift that hangs in ribbons from one shoulder; drips still, thick and gummy
and slow, out of the deep, obscene slashes--from shoulder to breast, from
breast to waist, from waist to hip, with two shorter slashes just above her
pubis--that have opened in the clean white field of Larissa's body.

	Reggs takes her down from there.
	That's the only way to describe what he did over the next five minutes. He
knows she has stopped living because she doesn't breathe and her dark eyes are
motionless in a way they never were in life, even asleep; but her body is all
that's left and because he loved it once and, to some extent, loves it still,
he can't leave it there untended where it was hung by whoever did this to her.
	The mobile is hung so high he can't touch it when Reggs stands on the
mattress. He hauls the best of drawers to the bed, lever it on top, and stands
unsteadily on top, but he can only reach her waist. The smell from her stomach
is bad. He doesn't react to it.
	He piles her upholstered makeup bench on top of the chest and, teetering
dangerously, hanging the mobile as she does, hauling at the wire around her
leg--levering at the stiff muscle like he was lopping a tree branch. If he
falls once, he climbs right back up. 
	Reggs sees something the window. His pupils expand in the dark to get a
better look. 
	It's face is half hidden in the shadows. Reggs can see the eyes; they seem to
glow, actually glow, a strange phosphorescent green against the shadow.
	It's gone.

	Jeggs calls the MiB from the downstairs phone and they're here within two
minutes. Over the next quarter of an hour the LTDs and Containment Crews vans
pile up until Perry Street is blocked. Regs can hear the stunned silence as
they recognize Larissa. For all they work in Manhattan, they're not used to
seeing faces from TV sliced like pastrami on cold fur.
	They move in and out, young men and women with the serious patronizing
attitude of all agents in any era of history. One by one they visit the
bedroom and come downstairs and as they come they move in circles that get
tighter and tighter around where Reggs stands, still hunched over the nausea.
Reggs is taken downtown by Agent O.
	
	"How long were you separated?"
	Great, Reggs think. The tone of this is being established from the outset.
	"About--eight months, I guess."
	O rubs his nose, his neck, cracks a knuckle.
	"I got here--you work for a cable company. She was on All my Children. She
was 'Christen,' right?"
	"Yeah."
	"That's your cable company, right? So you saw her at work."
	Nod.
	"You think of anybody woulda wanted to do this to her? Any, uh, actors or
somebody? Somebody she was havin' an affair with?"
	"Maybe it was Hartley," the other man finally speaks out from the shadows.
His face is painted with the shadows, the glare off his sunglasses shining in
Reggs's eyes. He was referring to one of her enemies on All my Children. He
laughs at his own joke, until O gives him a look that makes him concentrate on
his typing.
	"No," Reggs says. A trembling seems to have started in Reggs's stomach and
worked down into his legs, up to his elbows. He watches his right hand
curiously; it's shaking, gently, like the tracks of the el when a train is
coming.
	"She was being written out, anyway."
	"Whaddya mean?"
	It's getting harder and harder to summon energy needed to frame answers for
O. 
	"In the show."
	Reggs shakes his head, closing his eyes.
	"The M.E.'s gang said she had to have been dead between thirty-five, forty
minutes. You saw her before then?"
	Reggs shakes his head, "I was at work."
	"Same day?"
	"I guess," Reggs nods, takes a deep breath. "I stopped by" --fighting to move
the throat muscles-- "the house."
	"So that's the afternoon?"
	"I guess. Yeah."
	"She let you in?"
	"Obviously."
	"And how'd you get in tonight?"
	I reached in my pocket, wordlessly held up my key. The other agent takes it,
he chews gum that smells like sugared cherries. Reggs can hear the saliva
squirting as his jaw works. 
	"So what were you doing tonight?"
	"I was in Brooklyn. A couple of bars. Talkin' to people. Now wait a minute."
Reggs put his hands to his face and rubs, hard, trying to squeeze out the
sense of a loss so great it could destroy even the motivation needed to
breathe.
	Three, four breaths, not so deep as to push the stomach; then I sit up
straight.
	"Look." Reggs speaks fast, while he could have it together to do so. "I know
what's going on here. I been seein' for the last hour, what you're tryin' to
do. I mean, I used to write this shit."
	"Whaddya mean?"
	"I was head writer on Cops."
	"Oh, an ex-pert," the other agent remarks.
	"Yeah. I mean, you know the stats. Almost half of homicides're committed by
somebody who knows the victim. Boyfriend, father, stepsister, whatever. So,
first thing you do, you pick up the husband. Especially a case like this,
Larissa's famous, so you're gonna get a lot of pressure from your bosses to
wrap this one up quickly."
	"So, what you're telling me is," O says in a completely flat voice, "you
didn't do it?"

	The bag hit the table. The sound of the soft pretzels made Zed spend his
chair around from the side. He lifted his heavy eyebrows, his face growing
even dimmer. "The Reptoid returns, Q?"
	Que slipped into the chair in font of the desk, the folder under his arm and
then lying it on the desk. "Seems some new reports were due to the Sigma." Zed
gave a slight sigh. "Twenty years, hasn't it been?" 
	Que gave a short nod.

	E. Branch's assistant chief of operations Agent Larazax greeted Chief Zed,
Senior Agent H and Senior Que to Briefing Room A. The Procyan took a seat as
Que walked to the stand and took a deep long breath. He fixed his glasses and
looked up.
	"Last night we had a crash amongst Brooklyn. Agent H and myself were called
upon it. When we reached the scene, the ship had already opened and the
creature had escape. The vessel matches as a stolen ship reported to be on the
look out for."
	Que clicked a button, a holographic image appeared in the middle of the room.
	"During Mexico City's First International UFO Congress, August 24, 1995,
researcher-lecturer John Rhodes announced that the wave of UFO activity over
Mexico City (which began during the July 11, 1991 total solar eclipse) may be
related to the Reptilian alien race. 'They appear to be here in force,' he
claimed, 'and they may be preparing the way for the Prophesied return of the
Feathered Serpent god of ancient Mexico ....Quetzalcoatl'." 
	Que stepped forward the image, "According to the Aztecs of ancient Mexico,
Quetzalcoatl was a divine being that taught the primitive Aztecs the arts,
agriculture, astronomy, sciences, bloodless ritualism and how to create their
famous calendar."
	Que fixed his glasses and took another sigh. He clicked another button, the
hologram changes to the outline of six dead bodies. "March 24th 1972, I was
called with the Agent known as F for an assignment. A crash of a stolen ship
occurred. When approaching the scene, the 'Reptoid' saw me and during that
very moment he linked his mind with mine through his telepathic channels.
Falling weak to my knees, F attacked the being. Escaping, the Reptoid then
began mass murdering anyone within my past that he saw."
	Que pointed the each, explains who they were to him. "Final victim of these
murders was an Aeriel Gibson on July 2nd 1972. Now having no one left in his
line of murders, the 'Reptoid' returned to the actually MiB Headquarters.
Using my memories of the place, he escaped on a ship heading off. No claim of
what species for sure were left nor who he was. What is for certain was that
he escaped."
	Clicking another button, the hologram of Reggs's wife forms. "February 20th
1999, a ship crashes. Operatives Q and H are placed on the call. During the
case, a link is formed with Agent Q after being shot. One of the dearest
friends of Q ends up dead the following hour. We have us a problem. Seems one
of the last 'Reptoid' offspring is what the whole culture looked down on.
Using blood not for a symbol to go on but to bring more. Time for this
creature to be stopped."


	His fingertips stroked along the frame of the Series IV De-Atomizer. Perfect
for this case due it was the most quiet weapon in the MIB arsenal. Que checked
the power clip and glanced to his left. H was handling an Korlian XT-17
Arquillian Arm Cannon. Although he had advised against it, Zed wouldn't let
Que go alone on this mission. No matter how many years experience. 
	"Thanks." Que said, softly glancing at H.
	"For?"
	"Saving my ass last night."
	She smiled softly at him. 


	The hum of the LTD ignition filled the air. Que knew where the Reptoid was
going and to whom would die next. He was a local librarian, a man that didn't
deserve to die. H fixed her Bans on her nose as the LTD pulled as a stop in
front of the New York Public Library. The doors opened at the same time and
their foot both hit the ground making a "thud" together. Que looked at H,
hoping no one more will prey to his damn emotions. Withdrawing their weapons
they began walking up the steps. They reached the nice little sign reading
"Closed" and kicked open the door. 
	
	As they approached inside, they noticed the power had been cut off and there
was already a line of crimson leading inside. Que sighed as he turned his
weapon on setting three. H glanced at Que, holding fixing her settings as
well.
	"Shall we make this two parties or keep it as one after the little devil?"
	"No splitting up."
	Through the past ten years they had been partners, H had never known Que to
act so rough. As if his heart died again the moment he saw the creature again.
They began down the path of the library. The weapons aimed before them. 

	Then there it was. It's black marbles of eyes glowing in the night. The
scales of green flowing down it's body. The wet blood dripping off it's claws.
He stared at Que, slowly hissing.
	"Remember me?"
	The hiss slowly turned into a roar. 
	H aimed her weapon at the beast, right on it's forehead.
	"It's over now, Reptoid."
	The creature closed it's marble eyes, as a loud screech filled the minds of H
and Que. Making them drop their weapons and fall to the ground. The creature
extended it's massive claws and leaped on H. Slowly removing his J2 from his
holster Que aimed at the demon.. and pulled the trigger. 


	The blast left a loud ringing in her ears that would not allow her to hear
anything else. She reached up and touched her forehead, over her left eye. Her
finger came away wet with blood.  Nausea, dizziness and pain quickly overcame
her.  Then panic.  Where's Que?  Oh God, he's down.
	She crawled to his side and slowly turned him to his back. A single flow of
blood ran down from his nose but he was alive. She held him tight. It was
over... after twenty years it was all over.

___________________________________________________________________
About the Author:

Jack Crowder is an author of dozens of science fan fiction and fantasy
stories. He has also completed numerous websites. He has also been featured in
three national known calendars due to his art work. Jack lives in Texas with
his family, enjoying his fifteenth birthday in the year 1999.