PREDATOR VS. SLAYER, PART 4
Title: Predator vs. Slayer, Part 4
Author: Gyrus
Email: gyrus1001@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the creation of Joss Whedon and the property of Fox Television. The story itself is my own.
Summary: A trio of alien hunters pursues the ultimate human prize.
Rating: PG, for violence.
Author's Notes: Sorry this segment is a bit late; the holidays put me behind schedule. This is the second-to-last chapter.
-----
The Emergency Room doctor emerged into the hospital hallway, where Buffy, Giles, Willow, Tara, Xander, and Anya were assembled.
"Your friend was in shock," the doctor said, "but he's stabilized now. His leg will need a skin graft, but he should make a full recovery."
Everyone exhaled at once with relief. Riley had gone into shock after being burned by the powerful energy weapon used by the beings in the forest. They had all been afraid that they might not have gotten him to the ER in time.
"He'll be unconscious for a while longer," the doctor continued. "You said he has no family in the area?"
"No, it's pretty much just us," Buffy replied.
"All right. I'll call you when he wakes up."
"Thank you."
"How did he get that burn, anyway?"
"Umm..." Buffy wracked her brain for a plausible excuse.
Xander spoke up. "He was using an acetylene torch in the garage, and I guess the line had a leak. Gotta take care of your tools."
Buffy sighed inwardly with relief. There were advantages to having a friend in the construction business.
"I see," the doctor said. "I need to get back to your friend. I'll call you." The doc walked back through the double doors to the patient area, and the group followed Buffy out of the building.
Fifteen minutes later, they were back at Giles' place.
"So you guys think these monsters are aliens?" Buffy asked.
"That would be consistent with the high level of technology they seem to possess," Giles said, "as well as the lack of mention of them in the Diaries prior to the seventeenth century."
"I guess somebody up there doesn't like us," Xander said.
"Or Buffy, anyway," Anya added.
"That's the part that doesn't make sense," Willow said. "If they were demons, yeah -- Buffy's, like, their natural enemy. But why would space monsters be out to get her?"
"It can't be a coincidence that they chose the Slayer as their target," Giles said.
Buffy, who had been staring down at the coffee table, suddenly looked up. "The cemetery," she said. "I felt something weird at the cemetery last night, like something was watching me."
"Watching you fight the vampires," Giles said, completing Buffy's thought.
"So they picked the hardest person to kill they could find," Xander added. "I guess these guys like a challenge."
"That's exactly what it is," Buffy said. "This is a game to them, a, a sport. Kill the Slayer, bring back her head, impress your friends."
"OK," Xander said, "so maybe we know what they want. But what do we do about it?"
"We are at a distinct disadvantage in at least one respect," Giles said. "Their weapons are far superior to ours."
"Then we've got to get them into a tight space," Buffy said. "Somewhere where they can't blast away from afar."
"And somewhere w-we know," Tara said.
"Yeah," Xander agreed. "We've got the home-planet advantage; let's use it."
"It has to be away from people," Buffy added.
"How about the Initiative caves?" Anya asked. She turned to Buffy. "I mean, Adam managed to hide there for a long time without you ever finding him. Well, except for that one time when he beat the stuffing out of you, but-"
"We don't know the caves well enough," Giles cut in. "It would be too easy to get lost, or separated."
"The high school!" Willow said suddenly. The others looked at her.
"I mean, all of us except Tara know it at least a little," she continued. "There's nobody in it, and there's lots of rooms to hide in."
"I don't know," Buffy said. "There's a lot of long hallways. And too many rooms with only one exit."
"Not a problem," Xander said. "Any rooms that don't already have holes between 'em, we can just make one with a sledgehammer. As long as we don't touch the support beams, we can mess with the place as much as we want."
"That still leaves the hallway issue," Buffy said. "Those blast-o guns have serious range."
"They're basically energy weapons, right?" Willow asked. "Magic is all about energy. There's got to be a spell we could use to turn them off, or blow them up, or something."
Tara turned to Willow. "What about Marsyas' Reflection?"
Willow frowned. "Isn't that to keep you from being turned into a toad?"
"It reflects spells back on the caster," Tara responded. "M-maybe it'll do the same for the aliens' zappers."
"Right," Willow said, looking pensive. She suddenly brightened and turned back to Tara. "And if we combine it with a glamour...This is good! Let's go to the magic shop!"
"Do it," Buffy said. "Xander, grab Riley's equipment and some tools and head for the school, then pick a place inside to start setting up."
"Right," Xander said, rising to his feet.
"I need to call my mom, tell her to get out of the house. If the aliens have been watching me between last night and this morning, then they know where I live."
"Good thinking," Giles responded.
"It's just a precaution," Buffy explained. "I don't think they'd hurt Mom. These things aren't here to hunt bunnies; they want something that fights back."
Anya looked at Buffy with irritation. "Oh, right," she said with irony, "'cause bunnies NEVER fight back. They just sit there on the lawn, watching you with their enormous, oddly-placed eyes, listening with their huge ears, waiting for the right moment to plunge their abnormally large, razor-sharp teeth-"
"Anya!" Buffy barked. "Can we focus, please?"
"Oh, fine, let's all worry about YOUR problems. As usual."
Buffy started to say something more to Anya, then realized the futility of it and turned back to the others. "Giles, I need you to do a little driving around town. Starting with the gas station."
"Why?" Giles asked.
"It's only polite," Buffy said mysteriously. "We can't plan this big party and not send any invitations."
-----
Spike paced furiously in the stone confines of his crypt. The waiting was driving him mad. He had a plan, he had the tools, he just needed the sun to hurry up and bloody SET so he could do what he had been waiting all day to do.
He was going to put up a TV antenna.
Reception in the crypt had always been bad, but today he hadn't been able to get a single channel. There was enough snow on his screen to cover Mount Fuji.
At least PASSIONS is in reruns, he thought.
Spike opened the door to his crypt just a crack for perhaps the twentieth time that hour and, finally, decided that it was safe to go outside. He dragged with him an old antenna that he'd found at the junkyard and a set of tools that someone had left unattended in the back of a pickup. Some people just didn't deserve to have possessions.
Spike vaulted onto the flat roof of the crypt and looked at it. He figured that, if he put the antenna right in the middle and didn't raise it up too high, no one would be able to see it from the ground. If there was one thing a crypt didn't need, it was that lived-in look.
Just then, Spike heard a noise from above, as if something large were moving in the great tree that overhung the crypt. Spike was trying to think of something suitably threatening to shout when he was suddenly thrown down and pinned. He was trapped by a web of wires, held down by tiny metal spikes. Only his head and left arm were free.
"Bloody 'ell!" he shouted, out of both anger and fear. He didn't know of any demons that used metal nets. And if the Initiative was doing a reunion tour and had come to muck with his brain some more, there wouldn't be much he could do about it.
Suddenly, a masked face leaned over him, long black braids hanging down from the large head, filling most of Spike's field of view.
If it's the Initiative, Spike thought, they've changed their dress code a bit.
Then the masked creature reached up and slowly removed its mask.
The face underneath was like nothing Spike had ever seen. The eyes were dark and set deep in their sockets; the mouth was square, with long, jagged teeth. The skin was a mottled black-and-white.
Spike didn't know what to think. He'd never seen a demon like this.
"You..." Spike breathed, "are one ugly motherf-MMMPH!" Spike was cut off as the creature pushed its mask onto Spike's face.
Through the eyes of the mask, Spike could see a picture of a girl. Though the picture was distorted and oddly-colored to Spike's eyes, it was obvious who the girl was.
"The Slayer," Spike said.
"SLAY-ERR," the creature responded, testing the word. Then it said, "WHERE?"
The creature reached down and touched the mask. The image before Spike's eyes changed to what looked like a satellite photo of Sunnydale. Three sites were marked in red -- the Pine Street cemetery, the ice rink, and the Slayer's house.
"Guess you tried those already, eh?" Spike said. His interest was piqued. This nasty beast wasn't looking for the Slayer in order to borrow her mascara; it was out for her blood.
Spike pulled the mask off his face and held it out to the creature. "Why don't I help you find her?" he offered.
The creature tilted its head in apparent confusion. Spike pointed to the monster with his free hand, then made little walking motions with his fingers, then pointed to himself. "You. Follow. Me," Spike said, slowly and loudly.
The being reached for something on its belt - some sort of very sharp instrument, which it held in front of Spike's face. Spike was a bit nervous, until the monster started cutting the wires, one by one, freeing Spike from the net.
Spike stood up and dusted himself off. For just a moment, he considered making a run for it, until he realized that there was another creature standing right behind him, virtually identical to the first. Spike doubted he could get past both of them.
"Right then," he said. "Let's see -- university's out for the summer; won't find her there. We'll try the Watcher's flat."
The vampire and the two aliens dropped down from the roof of the mausoleum. For the first time, Spike noticed how big they were, and how impressive their array of weapons was. Each of them had a shoulder-mounted gun of some kind, plus all manner of knives and other pointy-looking weapons, some of which Spike couldn't even identify.
"Wait here," Spike said, raising his palm in a 'stop' gesture. He quickly ducked into the mausoleum.
"Gonna need supplies," he said to himself. "Let's see, bag o' crisps," - he grabbed a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips from the top of his mini-fridge - "ah, and beer." There were a couple left in the 'fridge; he took both of them. Then he picked up a lawn chair he'd stolen from someone's back yard and walked outside, where the two humanoids stood, waiting. Even though they were masked, Spike got the impression that they were glowering at him.
"Off we go," Spike said with a smile.
This could not be more perfect, Spike thought as he began to lead the monsters towards Giles' house. A nice cold beer, a handful of crisps...and the Slayer slaughtered like a pig before my eyes. It's the greatest show on bloody Earth.
-----
Ghrall and Taghryn followed the cold human through the streets of the human settlement. Taghryn was hidden by her sight-shield, but Ghrall's had been damaged beyond repair. Ghrall was forced to move stealthily, hiding behind trees and buildings, to avoid human notice. This made it difficult to follow the cold human, which simply walked down the street like its warm counterparts.
Somewhere behind, well out of sight, their father, Reghya, followed. Now that the hunt had begun in earnest, he had been keeping his distance, not wanting to interfere.
Ghrall's method of tracking was sensible enough: to find a predator, follow its prey. Ghrall had learned a few words of the language spoken in this region of Earth, which made it possible to communicate with the prey in question. It had also enabled Ghrall and Taghryn to learn their quarry's name -- Slayer.
The cold human finally led them to a building with several entrances; Ghrall guessed the building contained living space for several humans or human families. The cold human pointed to one of the entrances and said something unintelligible.
Ghrall and Taghryn approached the entrance, and noticed something - a piece of paper, folded many times and attached to the door with a bit of plastic adhesive. On the surface of the folded paper, someone had drawn three red dots in the shape of a triangle.
Ghrall turned to Taghryn. "A message for us," he said.
Taghryn pulled the paper from the door and unfolded it. It was a map of the settlement. The map was printed, but someone had hand-drawn a red circle around a large building in the center of town.
"They want us to go to this place," Taghryn said. "Slayer must be waiting for us there."
"It is a trap," her brother replied. Records from previous hunts showed that humans had a great love of traps and lures.
"Of course," said Taghryn. "But we will go?"
"Oh, yes," Ghrall answered. He sprung upwards, grabbing a drainpipe and easily climbing to the roof of the building. Taghryn followed as the cold human on the ground gazed up at them.
From the rooftop, the two aliens could see their destination. The building was large and looked like it had been severely damaged, perhaps by fire. An odd choice of hiding place.
Taghryn pointed at the blackened structure. "The hunt will end there," she said. "I can feel it."
"There will be many surprises in there," Ghrall said.
"Yes," Taghryn agreed. "But we have surprises, too."
They bounded to the next rooftop, then to a tree, then to the ground, making their way towards the ruined building with single-minded purpose. The time for planning and tracking was over.
Now was the time for killing.
END OF PART 4
Title: Predator vs. Slayer, Part 4
Author: Gyrus
Email: gyrus1001@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the creation of Joss Whedon and the property of Fox Television. The story itself is my own.
Summary: A trio of alien hunters pursues the ultimate human prize.
Rating: PG, for violence.
Author's Notes: Sorry this segment is a bit late; the holidays put me behind schedule. This is the second-to-last chapter.
-----
The Emergency Room doctor emerged into the hospital hallway, where Buffy, Giles, Willow, Tara, Xander, and Anya were assembled.
"Your friend was in shock," the doctor said, "but he's stabilized now. His leg will need a skin graft, but he should make a full recovery."
Everyone exhaled at once with relief. Riley had gone into shock after being burned by the powerful energy weapon used by the beings in the forest. They had all been afraid that they might not have gotten him to the ER in time.
"He'll be unconscious for a while longer," the doctor continued. "You said he has no family in the area?"
"No, it's pretty much just us," Buffy replied.
"All right. I'll call you when he wakes up."
"Thank you."
"How did he get that burn, anyway?"
"Umm..." Buffy wracked her brain for a plausible excuse.
Xander spoke up. "He was using an acetylene torch in the garage, and I guess the line had a leak. Gotta take care of your tools."
Buffy sighed inwardly with relief. There were advantages to having a friend in the construction business.
"I see," the doctor said. "I need to get back to your friend. I'll call you." The doc walked back through the double doors to the patient area, and the group followed Buffy out of the building.
Fifteen minutes later, they were back at Giles' place.
"So you guys think these monsters are aliens?" Buffy asked.
"That would be consistent with the high level of technology they seem to possess," Giles said, "as well as the lack of mention of them in the Diaries prior to the seventeenth century."
"I guess somebody up there doesn't like us," Xander said.
"Or Buffy, anyway," Anya added.
"That's the part that doesn't make sense," Willow said. "If they were demons, yeah -- Buffy's, like, their natural enemy. But why would space monsters be out to get her?"
"It can't be a coincidence that they chose the Slayer as their target," Giles said.
Buffy, who had been staring down at the coffee table, suddenly looked up. "The cemetery," she said. "I felt something weird at the cemetery last night, like something was watching me."
"Watching you fight the vampires," Giles said, completing Buffy's thought.
"So they picked the hardest person to kill they could find," Xander added. "I guess these guys like a challenge."
"That's exactly what it is," Buffy said. "This is a game to them, a, a sport. Kill the Slayer, bring back her head, impress your friends."
"OK," Xander said, "so maybe we know what they want. But what do we do about it?"
"We are at a distinct disadvantage in at least one respect," Giles said. "Their weapons are far superior to ours."
"Then we've got to get them into a tight space," Buffy said. "Somewhere where they can't blast away from afar."
"And somewhere w-we know," Tara said.
"Yeah," Xander agreed. "We've got the home-planet advantage; let's use it."
"It has to be away from people," Buffy added.
"How about the Initiative caves?" Anya asked. She turned to Buffy. "I mean, Adam managed to hide there for a long time without you ever finding him. Well, except for that one time when he beat the stuffing out of you, but-"
"We don't know the caves well enough," Giles cut in. "It would be too easy to get lost, or separated."
"The high school!" Willow said suddenly. The others looked at her.
"I mean, all of us except Tara know it at least a little," she continued. "There's nobody in it, and there's lots of rooms to hide in."
"I don't know," Buffy said. "There's a lot of long hallways. And too many rooms with only one exit."
"Not a problem," Xander said. "Any rooms that don't already have holes between 'em, we can just make one with a sledgehammer. As long as we don't touch the support beams, we can mess with the place as much as we want."
"That still leaves the hallway issue," Buffy said. "Those blast-o guns have serious range."
"They're basically energy weapons, right?" Willow asked. "Magic is all about energy. There's got to be a spell we could use to turn them off, or blow them up, or something."
Tara turned to Willow. "What about Marsyas' Reflection?"
Willow frowned. "Isn't that to keep you from being turned into a toad?"
"It reflects spells back on the caster," Tara responded. "M-maybe it'll do the same for the aliens' zappers."
"Right," Willow said, looking pensive. She suddenly brightened and turned back to Tara. "And if we combine it with a glamour...This is good! Let's go to the magic shop!"
"Do it," Buffy said. "Xander, grab Riley's equipment and some tools and head for the school, then pick a place inside to start setting up."
"Right," Xander said, rising to his feet.
"I need to call my mom, tell her to get out of the house. If the aliens have been watching me between last night and this morning, then they know where I live."
"Good thinking," Giles responded.
"It's just a precaution," Buffy explained. "I don't think they'd hurt Mom. These things aren't here to hunt bunnies; they want something that fights back."
Anya looked at Buffy with irritation. "Oh, right," she said with irony, "'cause bunnies NEVER fight back. They just sit there on the lawn, watching you with their enormous, oddly-placed eyes, listening with their huge ears, waiting for the right moment to plunge their abnormally large, razor-sharp teeth-"
"Anya!" Buffy barked. "Can we focus, please?"
"Oh, fine, let's all worry about YOUR problems. As usual."
Buffy started to say something more to Anya, then realized the futility of it and turned back to the others. "Giles, I need you to do a little driving around town. Starting with the gas station."
"Why?" Giles asked.
"It's only polite," Buffy said mysteriously. "We can't plan this big party and not send any invitations."
-----
Spike paced furiously in the stone confines of his crypt. The waiting was driving him mad. He had a plan, he had the tools, he just needed the sun to hurry up and bloody SET so he could do what he had been waiting all day to do.
He was going to put up a TV antenna.
Reception in the crypt had always been bad, but today he hadn't been able to get a single channel. There was enough snow on his screen to cover Mount Fuji.
At least PASSIONS is in reruns, he thought.
Spike opened the door to his crypt just a crack for perhaps the twentieth time that hour and, finally, decided that it was safe to go outside. He dragged with him an old antenna that he'd found at the junkyard and a set of tools that someone had left unattended in the back of a pickup. Some people just didn't deserve to have possessions.
Spike vaulted onto the flat roof of the crypt and looked at it. He figured that, if he put the antenna right in the middle and didn't raise it up too high, no one would be able to see it from the ground. If there was one thing a crypt didn't need, it was that lived-in look.
Just then, Spike heard a noise from above, as if something large were moving in the great tree that overhung the crypt. Spike was trying to think of something suitably threatening to shout when he was suddenly thrown down and pinned. He was trapped by a web of wires, held down by tiny metal spikes. Only his head and left arm were free.
"Bloody 'ell!" he shouted, out of both anger and fear. He didn't know of any demons that used metal nets. And if the Initiative was doing a reunion tour and had come to muck with his brain some more, there wouldn't be much he could do about it.
Suddenly, a masked face leaned over him, long black braids hanging down from the large head, filling most of Spike's field of view.
If it's the Initiative, Spike thought, they've changed their dress code a bit.
Then the masked creature reached up and slowly removed its mask.
The face underneath was like nothing Spike had ever seen. The eyes were dark and set deep in their sockets; the mouth was square, with long, jagged teeth. The skin was a mottled black-and-white.
Spike didn't know what to think. He'd never seen a demon like this.
"You..." Spike breathed, "are one ugly motherf-MMMPH!" Spike was cut off as the creature pushed its mask onto Spike's face.
Through the eyes of the mask, Spike could see a picture of a girl. Though the picture was distorted and oddly-colored to Spike's eyes, it was obvious who the girl was.
"The Slayer," Spike said.
"SLAY-ERR," the creature responded, testing the word. Then it said, "WHERE?"
The creature reached down and touched the mask. The image before Spike's eyes changed to what looked like a satellite photo of Sunnydale. Three sites were marked in red -- the Pine Street cemetery, the ice rink, and the Slayer's house.
"Guess you tried those already, eh?" Spike said. His interest was piqued. This nasty beast wasn't looking for the Slayer in order to borrow her mascara; it was out for her blood.
Spike pulled the mask off his face and held it out to the creature. "Why don't I help you find her?" he offered.
The creature tilted its head in apparent confusion. Spike pointed to the monster with his free hand, then made little walking motions with his fingers, then pointed to himself. "You. Follow. Me," Spike said, slowly and loudly.
The being reached for something on its belt - some sort of very sharp instrument, which it held in front of Spike's face. Spike was a bit nervous, until the monster started cutting the wires, one by one, freeing Spike from the net.
Spike stood up and dusted himself off. For just a moment, he considered making a run for it, until he realized that there was another creature standing right behind him, virtually identical to the first. Spike doubted he could get past both of them.
"Right then," he said. "Let's see -- university's out for the summer; won't find her there. We'll try the Watcher's flat."
The vampire and the two aliens dropped down from the roof of the mausoleum. For the first time, Spike noticed how big they were, and how impressive their array of weapons was. Each of them had a shoulder-mounted gun of some kind, plus all manner of knives and other pointy-looking weapons, some of which Spike couldn't even identify.
"Wait here," Spike said, raising his palm in a 'stop' gesture. He quickly ducked into the mausoleum.
"Gonna need supplies," he said to himself. "Let's see, bag o' crisps," - he grabbed a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips from the top of his mini-fridge - "ah, and beer." There were a couple left in the 'fridge; he took both of them. Then he picked up a lawn chair he'd stolen from someone's back yard and walked outside, where the two humanoids stood, waiting. Even though they were masked, Spike got the impression that they were glowering at him.
"Off we go," Spike said with a smile.
This could not be more perfect, Spike thought as he began to lead the monsters towards Giles' house. A nice cold beer, a handful of crisps...and the Slayer slaughtered like a pig before my eyes. It's the greatest show on bloody Earth.
-----
Ghrall and Taghryn followed the cold human through the streets of the human settlement. Taghryn was hidden by her sight-shield, but Ghrall's had been damaged beyond repair. Ghrall was forced to move stealthily, hiding behind trees and buildings, to avoid human notice. This made it difficult to follow the cold human, which simply walked down the street like its warm counterparts.
Somewhere behind, well out of sight, their father, Reghya, followed. Now that the hunt had begun in earnest, he had been keeping his distance, not wanting to interfere.
Ghrall's method of tracking was sensible enough: to find a predator, follow its prey. Ghrall had learned a few words of the language spoken in this region of Earth, which made it possible to communicate with the prey in question. It had also enabled Ghrall and Taghryn to learn their quarry's name -- Slayer.
The cold human finally led them to a building with several entrances; Ghrall guessed the building contained living space for several humans or human families. The cold human pointed to one of the entrances and said something unintelligible.
Ghrall and Taghryn approached the entrance, and noticed something - a piece of paper, folded many times and attached to the door with a bit of plastic adhesive. On the surface of the folded paper, someone had drawn three red dots in the shape of a triangle.
Ghrall turned to Taghryn. "A message for us," he said.
Taghryn pulled the paper from the door and unfolded it. It was a map of the settlement. The map was printed, but someone had hand-drawn a red circle around a large building in the center of town.
"They want us to go to this place," Taghryn said. "Slayer must be waiting for us there."
"It is a trap," her brother replied. Records from previous hunts showed that humans had a great love of traps and lures.
"Of course," said Taghryn. "But we will go?"
"Oh, yes," Ghrall answered. He sprung upwards, grabbing a drainpipe and easily climbing to the roof of the building. Taghryn followed as the cold human on the ground gazed up at them.
From the rooftop, the two aliens could see their destination. The building was large and looked like it had been severely damaged, perhaps by fire. An odd choice of hiding place.
Taghryn pointed at the blackened structure. "The hunt will end there," she said. "I can feel it."
"There will be many surprises in there," Ghrall said.
"Yes," Taghryn agreed. "But we have surprises, too."
They bounded to the next rooftop, then to a tree, then to the ground, making their way towards the ruined building with single-minded purpose. The time for planning and tracking was over.
Now was the time for killing.
END OF PART 4