Date written: Sun 22 Aug 2010
Author: Starway Man
E-mail: theop at hotkey dot net dot au
Rating: R overall, with mostly PG parts.
Spoilers: None these days, but the story pretty much covers events up to and including Angel season 5.
Disclaimer: Everything Buffy- and Angel-related belongs to Joss Whedon, even though he doesn't deserve them – evil genius that he was. And those guys at Fox, WB, UPN, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui, Sandollar, etc. etc. whatever belongs to them (and whatever they actually call themselves these days), I can't claim any of that either. Lupe the maid from the BtVS novel, "The Deathless", belongs to Keith R. A. DeCandido; likewise, Diana Dormer from the BtVS novel "Go Ask Malice" belongs to Robert Joseph Levy. Anything else you recognize belongs to their individual owners. No profit will be made from this work, and no copyright violation is intended either.
Feedback: AH! The all-important part for you, the reader. Well, I'd just like to say...if you like it and you know it, tell me so (clap, clap, clap). If you like it and you know it, tell me so (clap, clap, clap). If you like it and you know it, and you really want to show it, if you like it and you know it tell me so (clap, clap, clap).
Author's Notes: Believe it or not, this originally started out as a PWP fanfic, but I suck at writing those – so I went in the opposite direction, and there is now very little adult content in this story. Anyway, I want to thank my beta readers Nodakskip, Greywizard and Mr. Mysterious for all their help on this fanfic, this story would have been abandoned long ago without the input from Mr. Mysterious in particular. Thanks also to Buffyworld for their collection of BtVS and Angel episode transcripts used in the writing of this fic.
Symbols: " " denotes speech, ( italics ) specifies thoughts, # bold # is for the virus voice and / bold italics / indicates telepathic communication.
Warnings: There is some violence, bad language, character death and descriptions of sexual activity in this story.
Continuity: This fanfic begins shortly before the start of the Scooby Gang's senior year, and progresses into season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Summary: An experimental virus is stolen from the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart. What do you think happens after it ends up in Sunnydale?
Title: Infection
"Now, this is not gonna be pretty. We're talking violence, strong language, adult content..."
(Buffy Summers, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER)
"It looks like our client might be playing with a virus. Spread by touch or maybe even airborne."
(Winifred Burkle, ANGEL)
"If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, expands to new territory, and crashes through barriers."
(Ian Malcolm, JURASSIC PARK)
Part One: Clear And Present Danger
Los Angeles International Airport, Los Angeles
September 7th, 1998
The man named Lopez was rapidly losing all confidence that he would actually be able to get away with his little act of not-so-petty larceny.
A laboratory technician working for the Los Angeles branch of the law firm Wolfram & Hart (otherwise known to some as Evil Incorporated), his destiny had unexpectedly taken a major left turn last week – when Lopez had stumbled onto something he shouldn't have.
Whether it was due to pure luck or something else, Lopez had entered one of the black areas of the Special Projects division of the firm – the place which had held a new experimental virus.
Under ordinary circumstances, Lopez would never even have considered trying to steal the virus from his employers. But, unfortunately, his circumstances were far from ordinary; the lab tech had recently gotten involved with a cult named 'The Black Tomorrow', which was really into stuff like quick-fire disease scenarios. They had pressured Lopez into stealing the virus, hoping to turn it into a weapon of mass destruction.
"Where the hell have you been?" the freelance mystic named Spanky demanded irritably, as Lopez joined him in one of the bathrooms within LAX.
"Around. Here and there. Have you got it?" Lopez babbled, looking around nervously to make sure they were alone.
Spanky nodded, withdrawing a small box and giving it to Lopez. "Here you go."
Lopez grabbed the mystical vessel built to safely house the virus and hide it from detection until he could get to Mexico, where he would then hand it over to The Black Tomorrow. Spanky hadn't asked what the infectious material he'd put into the container was, and Lopez hadn't volunteered the information, either; it was safer for both of them if the freelancer simply didn't know.
( Wait a minute...what is this? ) "You made it look like a bottle of Tommy Hilfiger aftershave?" Lopez asked in disbelief, after opening the box and looking at the name-brand bottle.
Spanky just shrugged as he began to leave the bathroom. "Seemed kind of appropriate, given where we were supposed to meet – toilet water, and all that."
Lopez didn't bother with a reply – he was too busy stuffing the virus container back into its box and then exiting the bathroom himself. He quickly headed for the appropriate terminal, but that was when disaster struck.
Namely, a SWAT team headed up by someone whom the lab tech recognized.
( SHIT! ) Lopez thought to himself, turning around and trying to make it look like he wasn't running away from Wolfram & Hart's goon squad. ( Now what do I do? )
Various scenarios ran through his head. Lopez figured there was no point in trying to get on the plane to Mexico now; someone would find his name on the passenger lists and alert the Mexico City branch of Wolfram & Hart. Most likely, the moment he disembarked the law firm would be there to grab him with the goods.
Therefore, the only hope was for him to try to brazen it out here. As far as Lopez knew, his superiors didn't have any solid proof of his guilt – otherwise, he would have already been killed.
( Okay, I gotta get rid of the virus, ) Lopez thought to himself as he walked along as rapidly as he could without drawing unwelcome attention. ( But how? )
A rather loud female voice grabbed Lopez's attention, as he spied a brunette teenage girl walking towards him with her parents alongside. She was carrying a number of airport shopping bags...
Desperate, Lopez came up with an idea. A half-baked one, maybe, but still an idea.
"Excuse me, sorry..." Lopez mumbled as he brushed against the teenager, and surreptitiously slipped the virus into one of her bags.
Lopez figured that not getting paid was better than getting killed, and what the heck – he might even be able to retrieve the virus later – when the chances of not getting caught and killed were a lot better.
"Watch it, you loser!" Cordelia Chase snapped at Lopez angrily before he simply faded out of existence for her, as the Chase family continued to walk along the airport corridor. The young woman then resumed her rant, "I mean, seriously, that was a summer all about dread! Daddy, not only did the Las Palmas resort have cockroaches big enough to give me nightmares, I must have gotten stress lines on my face from all the organized 'fun' you and Mom made me take part in!"
Mr. Chase exhaled wearily, sharing a look with his wife. "Cordelia? This isn't all about that Harris boy you're currently dating, is it?"
"God, no!" Cordelia shook her head vigorously. "I mean, Xander didn't want to come with us anyway! He told me-"
"Cordelia, please. It's patently obvious you weren't happy the entire summer, just because you had to leave Alexander behind," Mrs. Chase interrupted her daughter. "If I didn't know better, dear, I'd think that you were in love with that boy!"
"Me in love with Xander?" Cordelia replied with just the right level of sarcasm. She knew how her parents didn't really approve of her 'wrong side of the tracks' boyfriend. "We're just dating, Mom, it's not like we're not planning to declare our undying love for each other and elope to Las Vegas on my 18th birthday!"
"Thank you so much for those nightmares, sweetheart," Mr. Chase muttered under his breath as the group finally reached their destination and climbed into the private jet which had been waiting to take them home, via the Sunnydale Airport.
As the Chase family headed off north in their plane, the SWAT team finally caught up with Lopez just as he made it out one of the airport's exits. The lab technician tried the 'confused innocent' act first, "What's going on?"
"Orders from the head of Special Projects. You're to come back to the firm with us immediately," the man named Agent Hauser said, staring at Lopez like he was a disgusting species of vermin that was about to be put down.
"What? Why?" Lopez asked as he started backing away, caught between panic and reason. "I'm supposed to be on vacation-"
"Lopez, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Your choice," Agent Hauser said way too calmly.
"Okay..." Lopez said, before panic won out and he turned around and bolted.
"Idiot," Hauser groaned to himself. "Get him!" he then ordered his men.
"Don't worry, sir, there's nowhere for him to go," the second-in-command said confidently before he and the other commandos ran after the target.
Unfortunately for them, the panicked Lopez tripped at precisely the wrong moment and got hit by a car – which hurled him roughly twenty feet through the air, killing the man on impact. Oddly, though, since his contract with the firm didn't include the standard perpetuity clause after death offered to the higher echelons of Wolfram & Hart – Lopez actually managed to escape his would-be captors, the only way he could.
And Cordelia Chase never knew just how close she came to tangling with Wolfram & Hart today, over a year before it had been destined to happen.
Wolfram & Hart building, Los Angeles
September 9th, 1998
The middle-aged lawyer in charge of the interdepartmental meeting was Holland Manners – a man whose soul was so dark and corrupt, it was amazing how he could hide it with such a smooth and patrician-looking exterior. His inner circle of legal protégés was also present; Lindsey McDonald, Lilah Morgan and Lee Mercer. All three were young, successful, and good-looking; but just like Holland, their souls were thoroughly polluted by the evil law firm they all worked for.
There were two other individuals present for the meeting, whose specialities were not the law. A scientist named Knox, who worked in the same department as the dearly departed Mr. Lopez – and the SWAT team commander named Burke, who had taken over from Agent Hauser.
"Well, it seems we're all present," Holland began the meeting with a beaming smile, even if no one was fooled by the act. "So let's get started, then, shall we?"
"Sounds good to me, Holland," Lilah said with just the right smile and respectful expression on her face. Lee and Lindsey instantly considered her a boot-licking brown-noser, yet nonetheless wished that they had spoken up that way first.
"Commander Burke, why don't you start us off?" Holland asked politely.
"We can't find the virus Lopez stole anywhere," Burke said bluntly. "Either by mundane or mystical means-"
"Oh, come on! It's been two days, and the seers still haven't been unable to find it? What the hell are we paying them for?" Lindsey interrupted in exasperation.
"They're doing the best they can, what with the way they've all got a gun pointed at their heads. Maybe Lopez was smarter than his last performance evaluation gave him credit for, and he did something to hide it from their perception," Lee hypothesized.
"I'd say that's definitely a possibility," Lilah spoke up. "But Holland, if I might ask – what exactly is it about this virus which makes it so important? I mean, what with the amount of resources and manpower you're putting into this operation, it makes me wonder if there's something vital we don't know about yet?"
Lindsey and Lee both glared at her, but Holland gave Lilah an approving glance. "Mr. Knox, you're our technical expert. Why don't you give everyone here a briefing on our missing virus?"
Knox took a deep breath and began to speak. "Okay, so is everyone here clear on what exactly a virus is and what it does?"
There were a number of blank stares, and Knox looked up for a moment in despair before he said, "All right, let me try to dumb it down for you people as much as I can. Think of a virus as a sub-microscopic machine – in fact, apart from the wheel, it's pretty much the simplest machine imaginable. Now, a virus exists for only one purpose: to make more of itself, to replicate and expand its numbers. It doesn't care what it kills in the process, which is what makes viruses as a whole so damn dangerous. In terms of structure, a virus is composed of either DNA or RNA-"
"What's RNA?" Burke interrupted, staring at Knox.
"It's – no, never mind. You people wouldn't understand the molecular biology anyway," Knox shook his head. "Basically, all you need to know is that our boy was engineered to have many characteristics of the flu virus – you know, high potency, high infectivity, and the ability to evade the human immune system. But it was also designed to have certain safeguards, like a kill chain to keep it from overrunning the host until such time as it was activated, and not to cause any of the bad stuff – like headaches, fever, chills and all that crap. It was created for stealth invasion in order to be able to act as an undetectable spy, and if need be, anything else that the situation required. That's why one other thing was built into it."
"What?" Lindsey, Lilah and Lee all demanded at the same time.
Knox glanced at Holland, who nodded silently. The scientist then said, "It's the one thing we hadn't perfected yet, before Lopez stole it. A mutation that gives the virus the potential for being able to think, instead of just being a mindless drone following orders."
"WHAT?" the three lawyers and Burke cried out at the same time.
"Yes. You see, Lilah, that's the reason why this project is so important," Holland remarked amiably.
"I don't get it – how can a virus think? It doesn't exactly have a brain to think with, does it?" Lindsey asked.
"That's not the point," Knox said impatiently. "Look, the individual neurons of a human brain can't think either, okay? Being able to think is the result of a concerted group effort of millions of brain cells. Now, if you can get millions of virus particles interacting with each other the same way as the neurons do inside your skull, then you end up with-"
"Artificial intelligence," Lilah completed the sentence for him, a strange look on her face. "Amazing. Still, Knox, you said that the virus has the POTENTIAL to become intelligent. Does that mean it can't think, right now?"
"Yes," Knox admitted. "The trigger for self-awareness, for becoming a sentient being, it's something we were still working on. No one's quite sure just what that trigger needs to be, although for myself, I think we've exhausted just about all the physical possibilities known to man."
"Which leaves magic," Holland mused, almost to himself.
Lindsey said, "Sir, if it ever happens – then the virus could become a problem to the firm. The damage this thing might do, if it decides it doesn't like who we are and what we stand for..."
"Yes, true enough. That's why Mr. Knox and his department have also been working on ways to neutralize the virus, if the project should go completely south," Holland replied. "Now then – Lindsey, I want you, Lilah and Lee to go over Mr. Lopez's life in detail, to find out who else if anyone was involved in this little caper. Knox, you'll continue on with your research. Commander Burke, you'll keep searching for the virus itself – and I sincerely advise you to leave no stone uncovered. I'd hate for you to suffer the same sort of fate for incompetence as your Agent Hauser and the rest of his team."
The threat was unmistakeable, and yet there was no change in Burke's expression as he, Knox and the three lawyers all filed out of the meeting room. As Holland got up, though, he was surprised to see the liaison to the Senior Partners standing in the doorway.
"The Senior Partners would like a word with you," the liaison said, as an interdimensional vortex formed above Holland's head and the middle-aged lawyer was sucked upwards into it.
"WHAT IS THERE TO REPORT?" three loud, growling voices said in unison out of the misty darkness of another dimension, as Holland struggled to regain his equilibrium.
Attempting to control his terror, Manners spoke clearly and rapidly to what he could only see as vague outlines of the Wolf, Ram and Hart.
"RETRIEVE THE VIRUS OR ELSE SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES," the Senior Partners boomed out, as another vortex formed beneath Holland's feet and he was unceremoniously dumped back into the firm's interdepartmental meeting room.
Blessed Memories Cemetery, Sunnydale
September 10th, 1998
A lot had happened since Cordelia Chase had come home from her summer vacation.
Her senior year had started up, and it was as if the entire high school student body had suddenly awakened from hibernation or something. Everyone had been in a mad rush to obtain their schoolbooks from the library, as well as jockey for position within the various sports teams and school clubs. Dance and yearbook committees were being formed and the new school pecking order was being established, as various allegiances and alliances were born or reformed until Graduation finally came next year.
Cordelia had known that this year, she was going to have to do something with regard to establishing her place within Sunnydale High's social pyramid. As head cheerleader for the senior varsity football and basketball teams, not to mention easily being the richest girl in school, Cordy felt that she was automatically entitled to being at the top.
However, her choice of boyfriend was certainly an issue which had contributed to her downward mobility last year.
Alexander 'Xander' Harris. The best friend of the novice witch known as Willow Rosenberg and the Vampire Slayer known as Buffy Summers. A young man Cordelia had somehow completely lost her heart to, despite her words to her parents at the airport and the fact that Harris came from neither a rich nor an influential family.
"XANDER!" Cordelia screamed, as the male teen started wrestling with a vampire during tonight's graveyard patrol with Willow and her boyfriend, Daniel 'Oz' Osborne.
"STAKE!" Xander screamed back, trying to avoid the bloodsucker's fangs.
Oz raised Mr. Pointy and buried it into the vampire's back – but unfortunately, he missed the heart. With a snarl, the soulless creature leapt up and viciously backhanded the werewolf away.
Xander got up too, and while Willow distracted the vampire by throwing holy water in its face, Harris just barely managed to yank out Oz's stake and plunge it into the proper location.
Dust exploded everywhere, with the disintegrating remains of a skeleton seen for just the barest flicker of an instant.
"Are you all right? Are you okay?" Cordelia demanded anxiously, examining her boyfriend for any sign of injury. Then she slapped Harris on the arm, "And what exactly were you thinking just now, you dummy? You almost got yourself killed!"
"I dunno, Cor, oooh – maybe I was wanting to kill that vampire, before it decided to snack on your neck?" Xander said sarcastically, rubbing his arm.
"And it almost ended up snacking on yours instead!" Miss Chase replied angrily.
Willow ignored the bickering couple as she went over to help her boyfriend up. "Oz, are you okay?"
"Fine. Well, pretty much," Oz qualified his earlier statement as he winced when he twisted his back slightly. "There is definite 'ouch' potential here."
"Lemme see..." Willow examined her boyfriend carefully, but it looked like there was nothing worse than 'ouch' injuries present. The redhead then glanced over toward Xander and Cordelia – but, and not entirely to her surprise, those two were now kissing furiously beneath the moonlight.
Rolling her eyes Willow led Oz away, feeling somewhat annoyed that her two friends had gotten all touchy-feely like this during the patrol. A few seconds later, Xander and Cordelia finally came up for air.
"Ohhh, baby," Xander moaned. "I really missed you this summer!"
"I can tell," Cordelia moaned back, fighting the urge to do more than just kiss. ( Get a grip, damn it, right now you're in some creepy gross cemetery! )
"Oh, wait!" Xander suddenly let his girlfriend go and looked around for his bag of supplies. "Honey, I wanted to give you this..." He fished out a wrapped box containing a really cheap necklace. "It's a welcome-home present. Sorry I couldn't afford to get you anything better, but I had to spend all my money on stuff for the Slayage over the summer," Harris shrugged slightly.
"That's okay," Cordelia told him, yanking out something from her own bag. "I've got something for you too, a present from after I got back from Mexico."
"What is it?" Xander asked as she placed the wrapped box in his hand.
"It's nothing much, just some cologne I picked up before we left LA," Cordelia said, not knowing the Chase family maid named Lupe had found the 'aftershave' Lopez had slipped inside Cordy's shopping bag, and she'd dutifully gift-wrapped the wrong box for her mistress.
"Aw, gee, thanks," Xander replied with a smirk as he put the gift away in his bag without opening it. "Gosh, Cor, you shouldn't have..."
"You are such a dweeb!" Cordelia told him in annoyance; she hated it whenever her boyfriend tried to push her buttons like that.
"So what does that say about the girl who was making out with said dweeb, like barely a minute ago?" Xander asked earnestly, even if the smirk gave him away.
"Ohhhh, you-!" Cordelia shouted angrily, hands on her hips and her eyes almost ablaze with fire.
And yet somehow, they were kissing all over again in that dark and gloomy cemetery less than thirty seconds later...
To Be Continued...