The Looking Glass
(Notes: All flashbacks will appear in italic text to avoid confusion with the present-tense plot.)
Chapter 1
Smoke wafted up from a pair of flames licking the hollow remnants of an old shop window. Chunks of broken cement littered the street in front of a decaying apartment building. Power lines hung uselessly from splintered poles lurching askew. Buffy Summers walked slowly down the brittle asphalt, her eyes bent toward the road to avoid gaping potholes. Gurgling sulfuric water lingered in a shallow pool near the cracked sidewalk, fed by a busted pipe leaking waste into the street. A few feet ahead, a traffic light swung precariously from a few strands of peeling wire. Beneath it, an abandoned sedan sat crumpled around the cracked base of a street light. A driver in a navy blue suit sat tucked into his seat, a safety belt lashed around his chest. Thick ropes of dried blood seeped into his coat, darkening the color of his collar. His head lolled to one side, partially torn from his neck.
Buffy shook her head as she turned down another street, fingering the wooden stake that protruded from the hip pocket of her soot and blood-stained blue jeans. The knees of her pants had been torn out, and beneath the folded fabric, her flesh was scraped and scabbed. A buttoned shirt hung loosely around her waist, soaked through in places by dingy brown sweat and day old rust-colored blood. Streaks of blond hair appeared tarnished and blackened, as though she'd stood downwind of a firestorm. Soot covered her face, collecting around her ears, nose, and mouth. Once clear green eyes now appeared bloodshot and red. Around the left eye, she wore a fresh, crimson cut. On her chin, another deeper laceration had begun to scab over. Buffy walked to the end of the street on slightly trembling legs, her hand reaching out to steady herself against a disembodied wall. The knuckles of her hands were covered in cuts and scrapes, many of them oozing pus and blood. Her fingernails were blackened with ash and soot. Buffy grasped the stake from her pocket and held it out in front of her body. The street lay dormant, empty.
Exhaling a withered breath, the slayer continued down the street. Unlike the last two roads, this one was backed up with several hundred feet of bumper to bumper traffic. The cars sat rusting in perfect rows, like the eroding tombs in a graveyard. Sighing, Buffy turned her eyes away from the lifeless bodies of evacuees, and toward the yawning doors of an abandoned grocery. On either side of the store, buildings had been hollowed out, leaving only the shells of sooty walls. The windows of the grocery had been kicked in, leaving shards of glass littering the sidewalks and the peeling linoleum inside. Crunching over the mess, Buffy moved cautiously inside, turning her head to the left and then the right, watching for movement. Fluorescent lights hung overhead, though the lights had been turned off long ago. Buffy walked slowly down the aisles, grabbing picked over canned goods from the shelves. An orange pop-tent sat ominously in the midst of the canned meat aisle. Buffy had seen this kind of thing before; people hiding out in intact buildings, cowering as the world fell down around them. Still, she hadn't seen a single living person in several weeks.
Buffy tossed a dried peach up in the air and caught it. Rolling back her arm, she threw the fruit down the aisle, directly into the nylon wall of the tent. It wobbled soundlessly and dropped the fruit upon the floor.
"Second time's the charm," she muttered under her breath, grabbing a bottle of spaghetti sauce from the shelf on her right. The jar went flying through the air and crashed loudly against the tent and onto the floor, spraying sauce in every direction. The thick odor of past-its-prime tomato sauce filled the aisle. Still, the tent's contents did not move. Buffy retrieved the armful of
groceries she'd collected and stepped over the mess, selecting a can of pea soup from a shelf. The stiff odor of decaying corpse snuffed out the soupy tomato mess as the slayer moved back to the exit. At the end of the aisle, Buffy moved to the register to throw her items into a bag. There on the counter-top, left alone, forgotten by the last patron, sat a perfectly yummy, hauntingly delicious, never-goes-bad milk chocolate bar. A hint of a smile turned the corners of the slayer's lips. Snatching the candy up, she dropped everything into a bag and walked back out into the afternoon.
A thick haze settled over the city, choking out the majority of sunlight, leaving Buffy's eyes itchy and watery. Past the shops and offices of the sleepy town, Buffy walked quickly past a row of rotting apartment buildings. Piles of rubble filled several lots strung together. Behind her shoulders, the brownish yellow haze of day colored with the pink clouds of dusk. The slayer stumbled up a set of collapsing cement stairs, and shoved her shoulder into a heavy door. The lock gave way and she burst inside, climbing up several flights of stairs, past floors full of rubble and cement dust. The sky purpled like a bruise, blotting out the last rays of day. On the eighth floor, Buffy threw her boot against the door of apartment 808 and fell inside.
Cans of soup banged against one another as the grocery bag flopped onto the floor by the door. Buffy lifted the stake against her chest, the tight clenching of her fist opening healing wounds. Pressing her shoulders back against a firm wall, Buffy moved slowly through the apartment, touching every room, peering into every hallway. Hazy purple and pink dusk stretched through curtained windows, providing just enough light to give every room a twice-over search. Satisfied that the apartment remained empty, Buffy scrounged in the kitchen drawers and found an old scented candle and a pack of matches. It was her lucky day.
Buffy dipped the spoon a third time into the can of soup, and then shoveled another bite past her gag reflex. Her stomach rumbled angrily. The soup was slightly off, tasting vaguely of peas swimming in vomit. Beside her, a small battery-powered radio sat in the beam of candlelight. The volume had been turned down, and the sound of white noise filled the room. Buffy pushed aside the can of soup, still more than half-full and pungent. She unwrapped the chocolate bar and pressed a chunk of candy into her mouth. The pleasant reminder of sugar made her mouth water.
Outside, the sun had finally been erased from the sky, the last waves of violet dusk replaced by the encroaching darkness of nightfall. Buffy lurched to her feet and moved to the window, staring out over the vacant city. Dipping a hand into her back pocket, she pulled out a wad of folded photographs, creased with love and time. Xander and Dawn stared up into her sunken, shadowed eyes, their arms wrapped happily around one another. Joyce Summers looked up from a crate of pieces for the gallery. Willow, Giles, Dawn, Xander, and Spike sat over a table of dusty books, researching the next Big Bad. Buffy lifted the last photo up to the light of the candle, tilting it to see the image. She stood in a glittering room, her head pressed peacefully against Angel's shoulder. The world had seemed so terrible then, fate too harsh to endure. Buffy pressed the photograph against her heart and stared down into the night. Eight stories below, the city roared and rumbled, coming alive with the sounds of demons trawling through the dissolving streets.