Title: Legends No Longer
Author: Knife Hand
Feedback: Constructive feedback appreciated, flames unappreciated
Spoilers: Up to Gift in Buffy.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Do not own Buffy. I would buy her and Tara but I am broke.
Summary: AU. In a Post-Apocalyptic world where Demons control half of the Americas, two warriors with a legendary past they would rather forget but never can get an opportunity to fix things from the beginning.
" " denotes speech, ' ' denotes thought.
~~~~~~~~~~~
"Fire in the hole!"
The rocket streaked upward clipping the wing of the giant dragon like demon that wheeled away in pain as the modified 4 wheel drive wildly sped in the other direction, chased by a dozen demons of various breeds.
"Kate, Peter's down." He called dropping the rocket launcher and replacing Kate at her mounted machine gun as she checked on Peter. Joan, kneeling with her assault rifle, shifted to the middle of the rear of the truck from the left, firing from her position to cover the small and close in gap of the two mounted machine guns, the second manned by Robert, left open by Peter's absence on the right.
"Buffy, step on it." The man called out to the driver over the chattering of the machine guns and the assault rifle.
"It's floored, Xander." Buffy called from the front.
Michael, manning the forward, hood mounted machine gun, glanced back and saw several of the demons fall under the sustained fire from the back, before returning his eyes to the road ahead.
"Alright everyone, we're coming up on the buffer." Buffy called.
Michael flipped the vehicle transponder switch under the gun mount, recognising them as friendlies to the automated defences of the buffer. When they came within two hundred yards of the buffer, the four remaining demons were ripped apart by a hale of bullets and shells from no less than eight automated defence machine guns and cannons. Almost a mile past the buffer defences, the team came to their garrison post in the 'Great Barrier'.
The world had found out about the existence of Demons and Vampires the hard way. Almost ten years ago, an unexplained portal had opened high in the air above a construction site in the small town of Sunnydale, California, and from it had emerged armies of demons. Within five hours the town was completely decimated and by the end of the first day, a host of almost three quarters of a million Demons had poured through the portal. The figures, by the time they reached the highest levels of government were shocking, and the decision was made to sacrifice South West and try to defend the rest of the country. A mere month later, the South East was also conceded to the Demons, despite the fact that most had gone south into Mexico. All the resources of the US Military and contingents from allied UN countries were thrown in front of the demons as the 'Great Barrier' began construction.
A geosynchronous satellite stationed over Sunnydale showed that after almost two months, the portal mysteriously disappeared, but by then the damage had been done. With the entire might of US industry, the Great Barrier, which stretched from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific with garrison stations every five miles along the entire length, was completed within a year of the portal opening. The Great Barrier, almost two hundred and fifty meters high and one hundred and eighty meters thick, became the border between the human world and the demon world, which covered everything from the Great Barrier down to the tip of South America. Several million soldiers had died to buy time for it to be completed. Inside the several meter thick outer walls were levels of planing rooms, barracks, storerooms, armouries, motor pools, and mess halls, everything needed to run an effective army. Each of the garrison areas, with their access onto the buffer, were able to be sealed off from the rest of the Great Barrier by great blast doors, in case they were overrun, like the automated defence system control rooms, for both the buffer and the Barrier itself, which automatically lock down when the garrison is breached. All the access points to beyond the Barrier, back into the human world, were all separated from the garrisons, in areas not uses since prior to the 'great offensive', except for new troops coming to the garrisons and troops going home on leave.
Once, years ago, the entire barrier had been full. It had been three years after the war had started and somewhere in the vicinity of a billion soldiers and volunteers, men and women, from all the nations on earth had gathered in the barrier. Over one sixth of the world population gather together to fight the demons, the largest single fighting force in human history. They were young, strong and determined to exterminate the menace inhabiting the Southern United States and Mexico. The Demon spread south had been delayed by concerted guerrilla actions in the narrows between North and South America. They went out to win a war, and they got a massacre. Out of all the brave souls that marched, drove or flew into battle, only fifty three had survived to the end of the battle, mostly airmen and several tank crews. Out of all the infantry troops, the bulk of the army, only two made it back alive, almost three weeks after the official end of the battle. One was a slight blond haired girl with hard blue eyes, carrying only a pointed stick, of all things, and the other was a tall man with dark brown hair and soulful brown eyes, whose only weapon was a combat knife. Both were covered in gashes, bruises and cuts, and came hobbling up to the Great Barrier, their personal transponders, embedded in their skin, activated, clutching to each other and leaving a long trail of blood back into the buffer.
Buffy and Xander dumped their gear onto their large bed in the officers' quarters. Peter had died just as they pulled into the garrison garage, killed by poisonous shooting spines from one of the demons.
"Xand?" Buffy asked, working the motion of her shoulder forward and back.
Xander quickly prepared the hot compress and the pain medication for Buffy. She injected the pain medication into her arm as he removed her shirt from her left shoulder, revealing a large series of deep scars and chunks of missing flesh. Removing the prosthetic the concealed her missing left breast, he applied the large compress to her shoulder and chest. As the pain medication kicked in, Buffy slowly and sadly stroked the long scar down the side of Xander's face, noticing for the millionth time that it ruined the smile that she used to love so much. Xander laid Buffy down in their bed and prepared his own pain medication. Not that anyone but Buffy and the garrison doctor ever saw it, but his entire chest and back were a mass of scars and fissures, many of which had cut deep into his pain receptors, and some of his organs. Injecting his own arm with the medication, he sat down on the bed and removed the prosthetic lower left leg, placing it in a charger for the night, Xander joined Buffy on the king size, genuine goose down bed. Being legendary as the only infantry survivors of the 'red fields', the official name of what the troops call "The biggest fuckup in military history" or, to the few veterans "The month that blood rained", had some advantages in the garrison, unfortunately the few perks were vastly offset by the physical and psychological scars of the nightmare they had witnessed first hand.
********
*Alert! Alert! Barrier defences were just taken down by a Type A-12!* the PA system called.
"Shit! Dragon type." Xander said, turning off the water and quickly jumping out of the shower, closely followed by Buffy.
"Get everyone ready. I want everyone armed in one minute, and I want the surveillance tapes form the buffer defences just before they were taken out." Xander ordered over the phone.
Buffy slipped her prosthetic into her sports bra and quickly got dressed. On one wore a uniform anymore, there was no real point. Buffy and Xander both wore combat boots, black cargo pants and dark, long sleaved shirts, under which they had armoured vests, similar to bullet proof vests but more designed to stop demon claws. Buffy wore a shoulder holster that was supported by her right shoulder which supported a crossbow on her back and a small quiver of bolts under her right arm. On her left forearm was an inverse sheath for a wooden and silver knife, to be drawn with her right hand. On her right hip was a pistol, with a sheathed Arudius, a wooden version of the Roman Galdius that was given to Gladiators by the Emperor as a sign of their freedom, resting in front of it, while her left hip had a sliver plated Katana, with a second pistol holstered at the small of her back. Attached to her right forearm, under her shirt, were two wooden fighting sticks.
Xander had a shoulder holster that housed a pistol, and spare ammo clips, under each arm and a large longsword on his back. On his left hip rested a machete and a combat knife, in an inverted sheath rested at the small of his back. Attached to his right hip, and leg, was a compact assault rifle and another combat knife was attached to his right leg, near his ankle. Both held the larger and more powerful assault rifle with familiarity in their hands as they ran out of their room and headed towards the command centre.
"Activate the proximity mines and inform the flanking garrisons the we have a breach, we don't want them rolling along the Barrier." Buffy ordered.
"Shit! Buffy, look at this." Xander said, watching the playback for the buffer defences.
The screen showed a scene from one of the now downed defences that was not tracking the flying demons that took them out. It showed a massed army of demons marching on the buffer zone.
"Sir, the flanking garrisons report back, they have their proximities online and will activate the laterals if we go offline." A technician reported.
"Good. Bring online the laterals and barrier defence guns. I want volunteers to line up the jeeps and man the machine guns. Should the demons breach the gate, we need to hold them there as long as possible, to let the lats and wall guns cut down their numbers as much as possible." Xander ordered.
"Send two troopers to the Armoury, if the demons get close, blow it. And lock us down from the rest of the Barrier. If they get in here, we don't want them getting out the other side. If we are overrun, we release the toxins." Buffy added.
*Battle stations for a breach. Repeat battle stations for a breach.* a technician called over the PA system.
Outside explosions wracked the ranks of the demon army as the charged across the buffer zone, and the newly activated defence systems raked the horde with machine gun fire, mortar rounds and jets of napalm from three sides. The most devastating effect came from what the troopers had called 'The Foot High Bastards', which were activated by pressure switched about two hundred yards closer to the Barrier than the mines themselves. They were specifically designed to take out large numbers of closely packed demons, and when activated, a foot high and foot thick cylinder packed with explosives was propelled upwards from under the ground and then exploded showering several hundred feet in every direction with a lethal hail of uniform sized, high velocity pellets of red hot metal. The Foot High Bastards ripped massive gaps in the demonic host, however the army managed to reach the massive doors that acted as a gate into the garrison, but they were unable to make any progress laterally along the Barrier.
To their credit, and the credit of the designers, the defences whipped out over three quarters of the demonic host before it reached the gate, however the host was so large that the decimation was not that helpful to the defenders, making it merely impossible to defend rather than a "not even GOD can get us out of this" situation. When the demons finally broke through the gate, their surge forward was halted by some gallant defenders. Thirty of the modified jeeps were lined up, hub to hub, ten feet from the door, with their rear mounted machine guns facing forward, so the demons ran strait into the devastating fire from ninety barking machine guns. This only slowed the demons down for ten minutes, after which all the machine guns had run dry and the five surviving volunteers, out of ninety, had fallen back into the garrison.
Buffy and Xander covered the retreat of the few survivors of the battle in the courtyard and the sealed the door before they fell back. Once they reached and sealed another door, the only way in from the courtyard, they waited for the sounds of the outer door to fain and then Buffy picked up her radio.
"Now!" she ordered.
Remote activated Claymore mines exploded along the corridor while more Claymores and several high explosive charges, concealed among fuel tanks and attached to the ceiling, reduced the demons in the courtyard into minced and charred hunks of meat, that were trampled by the next wave of demons charging in. What in sued was a running battle through the bowls of the Garrison station, with the defenders trying to keep the demons from the fifth level and the blast doors that separated the garrison from the section of the Barrier that lead back into human control territory. The defenders would fire at the demons through boltholes in the walls and murder-holes in the ceiling. Buffy and Xander retreated into a large gym with five other troopers. Buffy fired her crossbow, taking out the eye of a hulking demon while Xander fired a final burst from his compact assault rifle, which click empty.
"Melee, melee!" Xander called, dropping his compact assault rifle and drawing his longsword.
Buffy slung her crossbow and drew her Katana as the other troopers drew their own melee weapons. The tight confines of the corridor that the demons were emerging from created a bottleneck and gave the defenders a small chance of holding out for a while. Xander slashed, gutted and decapitated the demons like a workman going about his business; cool, brutal and efficient, moving surely from one demon to the next. Buffy's Katana flashed in graceful arcs, its silver plated blade gleaming in the soft lights of the gym. She flowed from stance to stance, gliding almost as gracefully as the blade, with only the slightest stiffness of motion from her badly injured shoulder. When three of the troopers fell in quick succession, Xander ordered them to fall back. As she backed out the far door, in a rearguard action, Buffy stabbed her Katana into a large black demon and what she withdrew was a smoking, foot long hunk of metal instead of a blade.
"Shit!" she exclaimed, rapidly backing away and firing one of her pistols into the demon, which went down in a pool of acidic blood that delayed the demons.
********
"Blow it, we're going for the gas." Buffy ordered over the radio, answered a second later by an explosion wracking the garrison.
"Hope there aren't too many demons between here and there." Xander said. "We're running out of weapons."
In one hand, Buffy held her wood and silver knife and in the other a fighting stick, while Xander held a combat knife in each hand. All their other weapons had either been destroyed, lost or discarded when they ran out of ammo. They stalked quickly but silently through the hallways to the gas release chamber. At least the blast doors had not been breached. Glancing around the corner they saw one of the large black demons with acidic blood in front of the door to the chamber. Sounds from behind them indicated that more demons were heading their way.
"Follow me." Xander whispered.
He stepped out into the hallway and charged the demon, and threw one of his combat knives at thirty feet. The knife flew through the air and imbedded itself into the demons head, causing it to topple to the side and drip acidic blood over the floor. With Buffy on his heals, Xander jumped over the demon carcase and slammed the door open with his shoulder. Rolling to his feet, with Buffy right beside him, Xander instantly noticed that they were not in the gas release chamber. They were in white. A large, glowing white nothingness.
"What the fuck is going on here?" Buffy screamed.
"A chance." A voice whispered from the blinding whiteness. "A choice. A way to restore this world."
Buffy and Xander listened to the whisper, listened to what it offered and then they made their choice. To Buffy's eyes, the whiteness flared and then faded to blackness, which was interrupted by a familiar voice.
"Buffy? Don't wanna be late for your first day!"
TBC.
Author: Knife Hand
Feedback: Constructive feedback appreciated, flames unappreciated
Spoilers: Up to Gift in Buffy.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Do not own Buffy. I would buy her and Tara but I am broke.
Summary: AU. In a Post-Apocalyptic world where Demons control half of the Americas, two warriors with a legendary past they would rather forget but never can get an opportunity to fix things from the beginning.
" " denotes speech, ' ' denotes thought.
~~~~~~~~~~~
"Fire in the hole!"
The rocket streaked upward clipping the wing of the giant dragon like demon that wheeled away in pain as the modified 4 wheel drive wildly sped in the other direction, chased by a dozen demons of various breeds.
"Kate, Peter's down." He called dropping the rocket launcher and replacing Kate at her mounted machine gun as she checked on Peter. Joan, kneeling with her assault rifle, shifted to the middle of the rear of the truck from the left, firing from her position to cover the small and close in gap of the two mounted machine guns, the second manned by Robert, left open by Peter's absence on the right.
"Buffy, step on it." The man called out to the driver over the chattering of the machine guns and the assault rifle.
"It's floored, Xander." Buffy called from the front.
Michael, manning the forward, hood mounted machine gun, glanced back and saw several of the demons fall under the sustained fire from the back, before returning his eyes to the road ahead.
"Alright everyone, we're coming up on the buffer." Buffy called.
Michael flipped the vehicle transponder switch under the gun mount, recognising them as friendlies to the automated defences of the buffer. When they came within two hundred yards of the buffer, the four remaining demons were ripped apart by a hale of bullets and shells from no less than eight automated defence machine guns and cannons. Almost a mile past the buffer defences, the team came to their garrison post in the 'Great Barrier'.
The world had found out about the existence of Demons and Vampires the hard way. Almost ten years ago, an unexplained portal had opened high in the air above a construction site in the small town of Sunnydale, California, and from it had emerged armies of demons. Within five hours the town was completely decimated and by the end of the first day, a host of almost three quarters of a million Demons had poured through the portal. The figures, by the time they reached the highest levels of government were shocking, and the decision was made to sacrifice South West and try to defend the rest of the country. A mere month later, the South East was also conceded to the Demons, despite the fact that most had gone south into Mexico. All the resources of the US Military and contingents from allied UN countries were thrown in front of the demons as the 'Great Barrier' began construction.
A geosynchronous satellite stationed over Sunnydale showed that after almost two months, the portal mysteriously disappeared, but by then the damage had been done. With the entire might of US industry, the Great Barrier, which stretched from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific with garrison stations every five miles along the entire length, was completed within a year of the portal opening. The Great Barrier, almost two hundred and fifty meters high and one hundred and eighty meters thick, became the border between the human world and the demon world, which covered everything from the Great Barrier down to the tip of South America. Several million soldiers had died to buy time for it to be completed. Inside the several meter thick outer walls were levels of planing rooms, barracks, storerooms, armouries, motor pools, and mess halls, everything needed to run an effective army. Each of the garrison areas, with their access onto the buffer, were able to be sealed off from the rest of the Great Barrier by great blast doors, in case they were overrun, like the automated defence system control rooms, for both the buffer and the Barrier itself, which automatically lock down when the garrison is breached. All the access points to beyond the Barrier, back into the human world, were all separated from the garrisons, in areas not uses since prior to the 'great offensive', except for new troops coming to the garrisons and troops going home on leave.
Once, years ago, the entire barrier had been full. It had been three years after the war had started and somewhere in the vicinity of a billion soldiers and volunteers, men and women, from all the nations on earth had gathered in the barrier. Over one sixth of the world population gather together to fight the demons, the largest single fighting force in human history. They were young, strong and determined to exterminate the menace inhabiting the Southern United States and Mexico. The Demon spread south had been delayed by concerted guerrilla actions in the narrows between North and South America. They went out to win a war, and they got a massacre. Out of all the brave souls that marched, drove or flew into battle, only fifty three had survived to the end of the battle, mostly airmen and several tank crews. Out of all the infantry troops, the bulk of the army, only two made it back alive, almost three weeks after the official end of the battle. One was a slight blond haired girl with hard blue eyes, carrying only a pointed stick, of all things, and the other was a tall man with dark brown hair and soulful brown eyes, whose only weapon was a combat knife. Both were covered in gashes, bruises and cuts, and came hobbling up to the Great Barrier, their personal transponders, embedded in their skin, activated, clutching to each other and leaving a long trail of blood back into the buffer.
Buffy and Xander dumped their gear onto their large bed in the officers' quarters. Peter had died just as they pulled into the garrison garage, killed by poisonous shooting spines from one of the demons.
"Xand?" Buffy asked, working the motion of her shoulder forward and back.
Xander quickly prepared the hot compress and the pain medication for Buffy. She injected the pain medication into her arm as he removed her shirt from her left shoulder, revealing a large series of deep scars and chunks of missing flesh. Removing the prosthetic the concealed her missing left breast, he applied the large compress to her shoulder and chest. As the pain medication kicked in, Buffy slowly and sadly stroked the long scar down the side of Xander's face, noticing for the millionth time that it ruined the smile that she used to love so much. Xander laid Buffy down in their bed and prepared his own pain medication. Not that anyone but Buffy and the garrison doctor ever saw it, but his entire chest and back were a mass of scars and fissures, many of which had cut deep into his pain receptors, and some of his organs. Injecting his own arm with the medication, he sat down on the bed and removed the prosthetic lower left leg, placing it in a charger for the night, Xander joined Buffy on the king size, genuine goose down bed. Being legendary as the only infantry survivors of the 'red fields', the official name of what the troops call "The biggest fuckup in military history" or, to the few veterans "The month that blood rained", had some advantages in the garrison, unfortunately the few perks were vastly offset by the physical and psychological scars of the nightmare they had witnessed first hand.
********
*Alert! Alert! Barrier defences were just taken down by a Type A-12!* the PA system called.
"Shit! Dragon type." Xander said, turning off the water and quickly jumping out of the shower, closely followed by Buffy.
"Get everyone ready. I want everyone armed in one minute, and I want the surveillance tapes form the buffer defences just before they were taken out." Xander ordered over the phone.
Buffy slipped her prosthetic into her sports bra and quickly got dressed. On one wore a uniform anymore, there was no real point. Buffy and Xander both wore combat boots, black cargo pants and dark, long sleaved shirts, under which they had armoured vests, similar to bullet proof vests but more designed to stop demon claws. Buffy wore a shoulder holster that was supported by her right shoulder which supported a crossbow on her back and a small quiver of bolts under her right arm. On her left forearm was an inverse sheath for a wooden and silver knife, to be drawn with her right hand. On her right hip was a pistol, with a sheathed Arudius, a wooden version of the Roman Galdius that was given to Gladiators by the Emperor as a sign of their freedom, resting in front of it, while her left hip had a sliver plated Katana, with a second pistol holstered at the small of her back. Attached to her right forearm, under her shirt, were two wooden fighting sticks.
Xander had a shoulder holster that housed a pistol, and spare ammo clips, under each arm and a large longsword on his back. On his left hip rested a machete and a combat knife, in an inverted sheath rested at the small of his back. Attached to his right hip, and leg, was a compact assault rifle and another combat knife was attached to his right leg, near his ankle. Both held the larger and more powerful assault rifle with familiarity in their hands as they ran out of their room and headed towards the command centre.
"Activate the proximity mines and inform the flanking garrisons the we have a breach, we don't want them rolling along the Barrier." Buffy ordered.
"Shit! Buffy, look at this." Xander said, watching the playback for the buffer defences.
The screen showed a scene from one of the now downed defences that was not tracking the flying demons that took them out. It showed a massed army of demons marching on the buffer zone.
"Sir, the flanking garrisons report back, they have their proximities online and will activate the laterals if we go offline." A technician reported.
"Good. Bring online the laterals and barrier defence guns. I want volunteers to line up the jeeps and man the machine guns. Should the demons breach the gate, we need to hold them there as long as possible, to let the lats and wall guns cut down their numbers as much as possible." Xander ordered.
"Send two troopers to the Armoury, if the demons get close, blow it. And lock us down from the rest of the Barrier. If they get in here, we don't want them getting out the other side. If we are overrun, we release the toxins." Buffy added.
*Battle stations for a breach. Repeat battle stations for a breach.* a technician called over the PA system.
Outside explosions wracked the ranks of the demon army as the charged across the buffer zone, and the newly activated defence systems raked the horde with machine gun fire, mortar rounds and jets of napalm from three sides. The most devastating effect came from what the troopers had called 'The Foot High Bastards', which were activated by pressure switched about two hundred yards closer to the Barrier than the mines themselves. They were specifically designed to take out large numbers of closely packed demons, and when activated, a foot high and foot thick cylinder packed with explosives was propelled upwards from under the ground and then exploded showering several hundred feet in every direction with a lethal hail of uniform sized, high velocity pellets of red hot metal. The Foot High Bastards ripped massive gaps in the demonic host, however the army managed to reach the massive doors that acted as a gate into the garrison, but they were unable to make any progress laterally along the Barrier.
To their credit, and the credit of the designers, the defences whipped out over three quarters of the demonic host before it reached the gate, however the host was so large that the decimation was not that helpful to the defenders, making it merely impossible to defend rather than a "not even GOD can get us out of this" situation. When the demons finally broke through the gate, their surge forward was halted by some gallant defenders. Thirty of the modified jeeps were lined up, hub to hub, ten feet from the door, with their rear mounted machine guns facing forward, so the demons ran strait into the devastating fire from ninety barking machine guns. This only slowed the demons down for ten minutes, after which all the machine guns had run dry and the five surviving volunteers, out of ninety, had fallen back into the garrison.
Buffy and Xander covered the retreat of the few survivors of the battle in the courtyard and the sealed the door before they fell back. Once they reached and sealed another door, the only way in from the courtyard, they waited for the sounds of the outer door to fain and then Buffy picked up her radio.
"Now!" she ordered.
Remote activated Claymore mines exploded along the corridor while more Claymores and several high explosive charges, concealed among fuel tanks and attached to the ceiling, reduced the demons in the courtyard into minced and charred hunks of meat, that were trampled by the next wave of demons charging in. What in sued was a running battle through the bowls of the Garrison station, with the defenders trying to keep the demons from the fifth level and the blast doors that separated the garrison from the section of the Barrier that lead back into human control territory. The defenders would fire at the demons through boltholes in the walls and murder-holes in the ceiling. Buffy and Xander retreated into a large gym with five other troopers. Buffy fired her crossbow, taking out the eye of a hulking demon while Xander fired a final burst from his compact assault rifle, which click empty.
"Melee, melee!" Xander called, dropping his compact assault rifle and drawing his longsword.
Buffy slung her crossbow and drew her Katana as the other troopers drew their own melee weapons. The tight confines of the corridor that the demons were emerging from created a bottleneck and gave the defenders a small chance of holding out for a while. Xander slashed, gutted and decapitated the demons like a workman going about his business; cool, brutal and efficient, moving surely from one demon to the next. Buffy's Katana flashed in graceful arcs, its silver plated blade gleaming in the soft lights of the gym. She flowed from stance to stance, gliding almost as gracefully as the blade, with only the slightest stiffness of motion from her badly injured shoulder. When three of the troopers fell in quick succession, Xander ordered them to fall back. As she backed out the far door, in a rearguard action, Buffy stabbed her Katana into a large black demon and what she withdrew was a smoking, foot long hunk of metal instead of a blade.
"Shit!" she exclaimed, rapidly backing away and firing one of her pistols into the demon, which went down in a pool of acidic blood that delayed the demons.
********
"Blow it, we're going for the gas." Buffy ordered over the radio, answered a second later by an explosion wracking the garrison.
"Hope there aren't too many demons between here and there." Xander said. "We're running out of weapons."
In one hand, Buffy held her wood and silver knife and in the other a fighting stick, while Xander held a combat knife in each hand. All their other weapons had either been destroyed, lost or discarded when they ran out of ammo. They stalked quickly but silently through the hallways to the gas release chamber. At least the blast doors had not been breached. Glancing around the corner they saw one of the large black demons with acidic blood in front of the door to the chamber. Sounds from behind them indicated that more demons were heading their way.
"Follow me." Xander whispered.
He stepped out into the hallway and charged the demon, and threw one of his combat knives at thirty feet. The knife flew through the air and imbedded itself into the demons head, causing it to topple to the side and drip acidic blood over the floor. With Buffy on his heals, Xander jumped over the demon carcase and slammed the door open with his shoulder. Rolling to his feet, with Buffy right beside him, Xander instantly noticed that they were not in the gas release chamber. They were in white. A large, glowing white nothingness.
"What the fuck is going on here?" Buffy screamed.
"A chance." A voice whispered from the blinding whiteness. "A choice. A way to restore this world."
Buffy and Xander listened to the whisper, listened to what it offered and then they made their choice. To Buffy's eyes, the whiteness flared and then faded to blackness, which was interrupted by a familiar voice.
"Buffy? Don't wanna be late for your first day!"
TBC.