"A Prospect of Whitby"
by
'A Gentleman Of Leisure'.
Disclaimer: See Part 1.
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Part 3."Pictures Of An Expedition".
"Mind that kid!"
"Oh my God!" Dawn shrieked.
There right in front of them was a little girl on a pogo stick, determinedly bouncing her way down the middle of the road.
Xander grabbed at the steering wheel, and he and Dawn dragged hard on it. The bus swerved violently to the right to avoid the child, bounced heavily into the ditch beside the road, stalled, and stopped dead in a great cloud of dust.
For a moment there was a silence so intense that people could hear the blood rushing through their own veins.
"Did we miss her?"
Dawn stuck her head out of the driver's side window, and there, oblivious to the world, was the little girl still bouncing along. She could be heard counting to herself.
"Nine hunerd'n'one, nine hunerd'n'two, nine hunerd'n'three..."
"Yup. Safe in a world of her own," said Dawn.
"Thank the Lord for that," said Giles, picking himself up from the aisle and rubbing a bruised elbow.
"See, Buffy? I can drive," and Dawn stuck her tongue out at her older sister, who just sighed and ignored her.
-----
"Whoa! Look at all those vehicles. They look kinda official, doncha think?" Faith said.
"I'll go and find out," said Giles. "It might be just as well it you stayed in the background for now. In fact, everybody stay on the bus until I find out who they are."
"There are some initials on the side of that Humvee, there. Anyone know what USGS stands for?" Buffy asked.
"United States Geological Survey." To their surprise it was Vi who answered. "I was thinking of studying to be a geologist before I came to Sunnydale. I'd like to come with, please Giles. OK?"
"Certainly," Giles said. "They're bound to ask questions, and it'll be useful to have someone who can give a coherent description of what we saw of the destruction of Sunnydale without telling them anything they shouldn't know about."
"Great! I'm coming too!" Andrew announced. "Come on Giles, I should document this event!"
Buffy scowled at him, but to her surprise Xander said, "Oh, let him go too, him and his bloody camcorder. Anything to get the annoying little monkey out of our hair for a few minutes!"
"If he's coming, so am I!" Dawn announced. "I've been sitting at the wheel for hours, seems like. My butt feels like it's completely flat, and I'm a little stiff."
"I'm glad you're not 'a stiff'," Giles quipped, to his own and everyone's surprise.
And so the Sunnydale survivors met an intrigued group of geologists in front of the gas pumps, halfway between the bus and their own shiny new vehicles which were parked just the far side of the gas station.
"Hi. Anybody hurt?" was their first question. "That was a rough stop."
"Where are you from?" someone else asked.
"Who are you?"
And "I told Mindy to watch out for traffic if she wanted to play on the road. She knows that. I'm real sorry you went in the ditch - we can tow you out, fix you up if needs be." That was an anxious looking man in dusty dungarees, apparently the proprietor of the gas station.
"Um, no, no one was hurt when we stopped, but, yes, we do need medical assistance for some of our passengers," Giles said, trying to take their questions in some sort of order. "We've just come from Sunnydale."
"Sunnydale?" A large-scale map was pushed towards him and he saw the familiar shape of the infamous town. "There? We just registered a massive shock there, very close to the surface, about an hour ago. We'd been recording measurements of ground movement in this whole area over the past week, and then suddenly BAM!
"We were just starting to pack up - getting ready to head straight over there to investigate. Did you see anything of it?"
"Did we? We certainly did! We were right in the middle of the town when it happened. It was at least a strength eight event. We only just made it out in time!" Vi told them.
"My! You were very, very lucky then! How much damage was there, do you know?"
The girls glanced over at Giles, who shrugged and then nodded slightly. They all turned back to the USGS team.
Dawn looked at them.
"Sunnydale? Oh, that old place," she said casually. "You won't find anything there now. It's gone."
"What? The whole town totally flattened?" the senior geologist asked blankly.
"No, gone, as in 'gone' - not there any more," Vi replied. "When she said gone she meant COMPLETELY GONE. There's absolutely nothing left - even the ground's gone."
"There's just a great big hole big enough to drop a town into, about yay deep and maybe five miles across. That is, if there was still a town. Which there isn't. Not any more. Like she said, we just got out in time," Dawn told them.
"A HOLE??"
"Yup. Deep, deep hole. Yay deep. Maybe half a mile?"
Jaws dropped.
"She's right. There's just a huge hole there - about five miles across, and yay deep..." said Buffy, spreading her arms out wide, as if trying to show the size of a fish that got away.
"Looks a bit like the Grand Canyon!" Andrew put in cheerfully. "I've got some video."
The geologists looked in astonishment at each of them in turn, finishing with Giles.
"She's not wrong," he told them. "My eyesight's reasonable for a man of my age, but if the girls say it was half a mile deep, then I'd tend to go with that, at least in the centre. It was certainly getting on for five miles across, from the near edge to the far one - it must have been at least that because that's roughly how big the town was. There really isn't a single trace of it left."
"But that's utterly impossible!" one of the geologists blurted in obvious disbelief.
"Anything's possible in Sunnydale," said Giles wryly.
"Or was," Buffy corrected him. "It's gone now..."
"...And so far as we're concerned, good riddance!" Giles finished for her, and his four companions all nodded, to the surprise of the geologists. "Now, we have several people who were quite badly hurt when we were leaving. At least two of them really need hospital treatment as soon as possible."
"I've got some paramedic training - it's come in handy in the job a few times before now," one of the geologists volunteered. "I'll go get my first aid kit and you can show me the casualties." He turned to one of the others.
"John, can you get on the satellite phone and see if you can call in a Medivac chopper to evacuate them?"
The other nodded and walked quickly away, back towards the parked vehicles.
"Give us a minute and we'll be right with you, sir," he called back over his shoulder.
A couple of minutes later Giles was ushering the young geologist up the steps into the bus, which remained at a slight angle, with one wheel still stuck in the ditch despite Xander's best efforts to back it out onto the blacktop again. A second, older, person from among the USGS group followed them.
"Perhaps I can lend a hand too," he offered. "I used to be quite good at bandaging, once upon a time - in another life, so-to-speak."
Giles looked up, surprised.
"English?"
"Not exactly," said the other, "though I do seem to manage to get over there on a fairly regular basis."
He tossed his broad-brimmed hat onto an empty seat, revealing a head of curly brown hair, and a broad, cheerful smile composed of teeth the size of a horse's.
"I suppose I can always use my scarf as a sling if necessary. Any broken arms here, ladies?"
"This is Robin," Faith told them. "He was hurt worst."
The geologist cautiously lifted the corner of the makeshift field dressing and stopped.
"Is this a stab wound? This looks like a stab wound," he said, sounding shocked. He looked round at the others ranged in the seats up the aisle, noting all the bloody bandages, and the tired and still dazed faces on the young Slayers. He stood up to go and check on one or two of them and his foot kicked against something under the seat. He glanced down and was astounded to see a sword. Under another seat was another, and an axe. Behind his back, Buffy hastily looked round for the Scythe. She couldn't see it, and supposed someone had already put it away for her, out of sight in one of the Weapons bags.
"How did you get all these injuries? Was there some sort of a riot?"
"You could say that," said Giles. "We... er... we certainly had to fight our way out."
"Fight your way out? What in the hell happened? Who did you have to fight?"
"There were all these people, a large gang I suppose you would have to call them, who wanted to stop us from getting on the bus," Xander said. "We weren't going to let them."
"It all got pretty nasty," Faith said. "We were, like, seriously outnumbered, bro."
"Was anybody killed?"
"Yes. We lost seven of the girls, plus two other first rate friends," said Giles quietly. "But we gave as good as we got."
"Ha! As good?" exclaimed Buffy, fiercely. "Better! Much, much better!"
"You got that right, B!" said Faith.
"Jesus! You lost nine people killed?"
Appalled, the geologist looked round again in disbelief at all the passengers on the bus and their bleak expressions, and for the first time in several years in the job he felt himself to be well out of his depth.
"What about the other people? The people you had to fight? What happened to them?" he asked cautiously.
"Dust!" said Faith with grim relish.
-----
Andrew, meanwhile, was in his element - he was the centre of attention. He had all the other geologists clustered round him looking at the little viewfinder screen of his camcorder which he was resting on the hood of a Humvee in the shade of the gas station buildings.
"This is the crater after we stopped. That's Mr Giles right near the edge, and those are Buffy and Dawn, Willow, and Xander. And that's Willow's girlfriend Kennedy."
"I can't believe it! Look at the size of the damned thing!"
"Could you see the bottom?"
"Oh, no, not really. There was all this dust everywhere," said Andrew, "but it looked really deep. I didn't like to get too close."
"I don't blame you!" someone said.
"The road looks exactly as if it's been snapped off. See how it just stops dead in a straight line? How can that be?" someone else asked. "
The image on the screen wobbled suddenly.
"Hey, look! Aftershock! Jeez, look at that crack open up in the road surface!"
At that point there was a blur and the recording ended.
"Wow! That is truly remarkable, Andrew!"
"Absolutely. I've never seen a piece of video like it!"
"Oh, it's nothing," said the hero modestly. "One just has to be ready for the unexpected."
"Did you get anything as you were leaving the town?"
"Oh, yeah! You've gotta see this. It is really amazing!" He pressed the rewind button and let it go back to the start of the tape, which didn't take long. "I'm inside the bus, of course, looking over Dawn's shoulder."
Everyone gasped as the image came up, blurred and shaky, of the centre of Sunnydale collapsing behind the bus, the ground crumbling away, looking almost as if was actually trying to overtake and engulf them.
"What's she looking at?" someone said, and they could see that Dawn was straining to see something up and to her left. The camera panned up to look, and there was a small running figure leaping from one rooftop to the next, desperately trying to catch up with the bus.
"Holy cow! Who the hell is that?"
"Oh, that's Buffy. Isn't she incredible? She's...OW!"
His ear had just been grabbed from behind and twisted hard to interrupt him. Then, like a striking snake, someone reached over his shoulder to snatch the camcorder out of his hand and flip the screen shut, terminating the playback.
"Ow! What did you do that for? That hurt!" Andrew protested, rubbing the injured part, looking round to see who it was.
"I think that's quite enough of that for now, you little pest," said the girl.
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END OF PART 3
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AN1:Acknowledgements to Don Sample's 'Buffy Body Count' website for technical details of Slayer numbers and deaths.