Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 02 (11 page)

Yet the place was dark, not even the hum of electricity to indicate that it might come alive again. Buffy suspected it might be used to refuel now and again, when the vampires needed it. But like so many other businesses in the region they had laid claim to, its owners had either been murdered or had fled. This close to the edge of things, Buffy suspected the latter.

And it was close, indeed. Donatello’s was perhaps two hundred yards up the road, and the taint of the undead had not yet fallen upon it.
Creepy and strange,
she thought. Parker had said the vampires’

expansion had been methodical, but tins brought it home to her more than anything else. As Buffy watched, late dinner customers emerged from within the restaurant. Even across the distance, a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between them, she could hear the echo of their laughter like a cold blade knifing into her gut.

Though she had somehow managed to combine the two personas within her, the two spirits, the two Buffys … there was no denying that there were indeed two. To the older Slayer, who had spent so long as a prisoner, that glimpse of normalcy was the first hint of happiness she had seen in more than five years. To the younger Buffy, it was a painful reminder of all she had lost by being thrust into this dark, malevolent future.

It drew her with a magnetic allure. Her heart ached to be across the invisible barrier that marked the border of Kakchiquel territory. The temptation to simply run for it was enormous. But she had told the Watcher on the phone that she would wait for the extraction team he promised to send, and she knew it was sensible to do just that. Particularly given the half-dozen cars parked on either side of the road between the abandoned gas station and Donatello’s.

Though she could not really see into the interior of those ominously silent vehicles, cigarette embers burned inside three of them, and there were at least a dozen vampires that stood sentry around the cars, watching for her. Even a conservative bit of mathematics gave them more than twenty against her one, and she suspected that if she tried to cut around the intersection by diverting behind buildings and into a neighborhood, they would have scouts on the lookout for her there.

It didn’t matter. They had heard the phone conversation. They knew she was coming here. Knew that the opposition was coming to bring her out.

At some point.

Another hour passed and Buffy’s patience crumbled. Carefully, she slipped out of the darkness of the gas station and ran in a crouch to the silent gas pumps. It had brought her only a dozen yards closer to her goal, but that was something. In a minute or two, she was going to take the crossbow and makeshift stakes out of the canvas bag in her hand and walk right down the middle of the street toward the restaurant.

When the momentum that was tugging at her, the yearning to be free, could not be put off for one more second, she stepped out from behind the pumps and began to sprint They were slow. She had counted to nine in her head before the shouting began, before the car doors opened and more vampires leaped out. She had been too conservative. There were enough that she could not count them with a simple glance, and she was going to have to fight them hand to hand. All of them.

Should have waited for the extraction team,
Buffy thought. But it was too late, and she cursed herself for her impatience. She had been through too much to have it end now over a stupid mistake, her own impatience and arrogance.
Not the first time they’ve gotten me into trouble,
she thought, as her younger self recalled her conflict with Willow and Giles only days before, and yet also many years before. Days, years, were one and the same.
No, not the first time. But maybe the last.

On the other side of the street, the driver’s door of the last of the cars opened and Spike stepped out. A lit cigarette dangled from his mouth. His face was misshapen, the countenance of the vampire within him, and in contrast to the furious rage of the others who scurried around preparing to fight her, he walked calmly away from the car, his jacket flapping behind him.

The others had swords, axes, some even had guns in spite of the vampires’ usual distaste for such things. Spike was empty-handed. Dead, face as pale as his bleached-white hair, he seemed to drift along the street toward her like the scythe of the Reaper himself, gliding toward her. Spike raised a hand and the rest of them froze, waiting for his command. He took a long drag from the cigarette and then flicked the ash away.

“You killed her.” Spike did not even look at her as he spoke. A bitter taste in her mouth, Buffy felt a hate rise up in her as powerful as any she had ever known. She remained silent, glaring at him until at last Spike turned to meet her gaze.

“She was dancing when she died,” Buffy told him. A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “I thought you’d like to know.”

Spike took another long drag, then glanced at a clutch of vampires to his right. “Kill her.”

“But we’re not supposed to …” one of the creatures replied hesitantly. “I mean—”

“Oh, bloody hell. Right, then, catch her, and bring her to me.” They moved as one, running and loping and scuttling toward her, a pack of wolves and vermin. Buffy stood her ground, lifted the crossbow, and dusted the foremost from twenty-five yards away. She nocked and aimed and released twice more, killing both her targets, before they were too close for the crossbow.

It clattered to the pavement as they swarmed her, and she pulled the stake she had brought from the rear waistband of her jeans. This was it. Five years of shadow-boxing and private
kata,
of exercise and anger.

Buffy began to move. They came at her and she flowed in a dance of death, kicking and thrusting and spinning, using their numbers against them, drawing them close to keep the others away, slaughtering them in a cloud of their own ashen remains. Gunfire erupted and a bullet grazed her shoulder. Warm blood spilled down her back, but it did not slow her. A sword point punctured her side, just below the rib cage, but she was fluid, in motion, and its owner was dead before he could harm her any further. Then Buffy had the sword. The stake was forgotten. The sword flashed and vampires died and she choked on their floating, snowflake flesh, the nuclear fallout of slain undead. It stung her eyes and forced her to hold her breath.

Another gunshot.

A bullet through her back.

A club across the back of her head.

Buffy staggered. Fell to her knees, the sword wavering in her hands. Spike stood over her, an ax in his hands. “So much for the not killing you thing, eh?” he asked sweetly. Cigarette firmly clenched in his lips, its tip flaring bright, he snarled at her. “Your turn now, Buffy. Let’s see if you dance.”

The others all stood back, but none of them dared to challenge his action. Dazed from loss of blood, Buffy was still able to make a rough guess that she had killed over a dozen of them. That was good. That was something.

But it was not going to keep her from breaking the first rule of Slaying. Spike raised the battleax, and Buffy knew she was about to die. The blade gleamed in the moonlight and somewhere nearby, probably from the parking lot at the restaurant, she heard the echo of several people, normal humans, shouting in alarm at the grotesque, macabre tableau being played out in the street. But they were on the other side of the border. There was nothing they could do. The blade fell toward her. The other vampires seemed to pull back even one step farther. There seemed to be more of them now, as though others had arrived, reinforcements. Buffy tried to lift the sword.

Spike grinned.

Then his eyes went wide and his lips dropped open and the cigarette fell end over burning end from his mourn. His body jittered a little bit and he dropped the ax and stumbled toward her. Buffy aimed the blade of the sword at him and it sliced right through his abdomen, impaling him.

“Kill them!” the vampires screamed.

That woke Buffy up.
Kill who?

She shoved the moaning Spike away from her and struggled to stand. The Kakchiquels closest to her attacked. Though she was wounded, slowed, still she spun and decapitated the nearest one, who exploded into dust. With an elbow, she drove a second back. The third grabbed her from behind, began to choke her, then he too began to jitter madly.

This time she felt the surge of electricity pass from the vampire and into her. The shock made every muscle in her body contract and ache, made her eyes go wide and her teeth feel like she had just bitten through aluminum foil. The vampire went down at her feet, and Buffy looked up to see a grim-faced man standing before her with a taser gun. A long crescent-shaped scar striped the left side of his face, cutting into the bristly stubble on his chin. His black hair was too long, hanging as a curtain that nearly hid his eyes.

It had been this man who had saved her.

“Thank you,” Buffy rasped as she shook off the electrocution. He shocked the fallen vampire again, blue electricity arcing from the weapon into the Kakchiquel on the ground. As he did, this grave, scarred warrior shook the hair back from his face and regarded her with an urgency in his sad eyes.

“We need to go,” he said.

Buffy froze, staring at him, not breathing. Joy and grief clashed within her as she recognized the man.

“Xander,” she whispered. “Oh my God. Xander.”

“We need to go,” he replied sternly, not even a flicker of a smile. Though she bled now from so many wounds, she stood tall, held the sword up and ready, and nodded at him. “Let’s go, then.”

The vampires were all around them, but they were being driven back by other men and women with taser guns and crossbows. Their numbers were deteriorating even as Buffy followed Xander… this sad, brooding man she had once known… in a run for the invisible border. In the parking lot of the restaurant, she now saw a pair of black sedans and a military troop carrier that had not been there before. Engines roared, headlights flashed, and more cars came racing down from the north, from vampire territory. They slewed sideways and bat-tattooed Kakchiquels with orange, jack-o’-lantern eyes burning, piled out with weapons in hand.

“Go, go, get the Slayer to safety!” snapped a commanding female voice behind her. Buffy turned, saw the extraction team still fighting, but now withdrawing. The command had come from a woman with long red hair tied in a ponytail. The lithe woman raised her hands, gestured madly in the air, and cried out something in Latin that Buffy did not understand. Three vampires within several feet of her turned to glass and another member of the team shattered them all. Her voice still echoed in Buffy’s mind.

“Willow,” she whispered to herself.

“Come on!” Xander snapped, grasping at her arm.

She shook him free, staring at the back of the extraction team commander. The woman turned, then, and Buffy saw her face. Willow Rosenberg at twenty-four, determined, very much in charge. When she saw Buffy looking at her, she grinned.

Buffy grinned back.

But then the newly arrived cadre of Kakchiquels rushed into the fray, and Willow’s attention was back on the fight. One of them was Clownface, white greasepaint ghostly in the dark. Buffy went to go back, to help out, but Xander grabbed her with more strength than she would ever have imagined.

“No. We’re not here to win. We’re here to get you out.”

For a long, last moment, Buffy watched. Willow set a pair of vampires on fire simply by touching them. Then she screamed out a name Buffy knew.

“Oz!”

From the midst of the melee came a sudden howl that made the hairs on the back of Buffy’s neck stand up. Amidst the vampires, one of the members of the team changed in an instant. In the confusion, Buffy had not noticed him. Now there was no mistaking that it was him. The werewolf raged, its black snout glistening, its ears twitching, teeth gnashing at the air as it charged at the approaching group. Clownface was in the lead and the werewolf rose up on its hind legs, grabbed the vampire, and tore her head off.

Oz?
Buffy thought, horrified by how savage he was. The beast within him had been set loose at Willow’s order, though the moon was not full.

He began to attack others, using powerful jaws and claws to tear into them, but then Willow shouted for them all to fall back. The extraction team complied instantly. Xander hauled on Buffy’s arm, and then she was running toward the restaurant parking lot, mind spinning, almost blacking out It was all too much for her.

Then they were at one of the sedans. Xander shoved her into the backseat, then jumped in front and started it up. Through the tinted windows Buffy watched the vampires give chase, but only for a few seconds. The team loaded into the military transport and the other sedan, and the vampires stopped as though they had also been ordered to fall back.

The passenger door opened and Willow dropped into the seat beside Xander.

“Spike,” Buffy said. “Did you get him?”

“He disappeared,” Willow replied. “He’ll always save his own ass first.” Then she glanced at Xander.

“Move out.”

He complied instantly, tearing out of the restaurant parking lot with the other sedan and the troop transport close behind. As they went, Buffy craned her neck to look out the rear window. The vampires who had survived were also retreating. They had climbed into their cars, both those that had been on sentry and the late arrivals, and begun to return the way they had come, as though the carnage had never happened, as though the people in the parking lot had not witnessed something horrible. One car had not moved. It seemed aimed at them, headlights on high beam. They were several hundred yards away now, but Buffy could make out the form of a man standing in front of the car, his body silhouetted by the harsh lights, backlit so that he seemed more like a dark hole in the air than a man, like a thing of darkness painted over the face of the world.

Whoever he was, he stood calmly and watched them drive away.

Buffy shivered, there in the car, with these people who had once been her friends but whom she now barely knew. As they rounded a corner and the dark figure slipped out of sight behind them, she thought of the feeling she had had in the projection house at the drive-in. She thought of the crossbow that had been left there, just for her.