Ten Thousand
by wisteria
4. Cairo
For all the calm of the resort on the
banks of the Nile, the chaos of Cairo was overwhelming. When Spike
first arrived, daybreak was only a couple of hours away. He could still
hear the groaning of the cycle as he'd pushed it to go as fast as it possibly
could, breaking a few land speed records in the process.
Though there was an overabundance of modern hotels in the city center,
none of them were willing to rent a room at 5 a.m. So he retreated
out into the Islamic neighborhoods and took refuge from the morning sunlight
in a mosque, throwing a blanket over his head and pretending to pray.
At least he knew from decades-old experience that only Christian symbols seemed
to cause problems for him.
The mosque is where the trouble began.
He was bored out of his mind, since his current state didn't leave him
many topics to think about. After last night, he wouldn't let himself
think of Buffy, so he started remembering the glory days of old. All
those times with Drusilla over the years that had been the highlights of
his life. Problem was, at best they bored him, and at worst they made
him sick. He knew that had to be the soul, and he hated it if only
because it took another topic off his table.
So he finally let himself think of Buffy, replaying the entire past year
in his mind. And yeah, there had been some good times, though not very
many. Of course there were those first two kisses and the night that
he finally got to make love to her, even if she didn't think of it that
way at all. Then other little moments, like when he first saw her
alive again, and when she let him hold her for an hour before yanking on
her clothes and running away.
Maybe they weren't good memories in the purest sense of the term, but
they were all he had.
As he mentally catalogued each kiss he'd given her over those few months,
he began to hear voices around him. He readjusted the blanket so he
could hear more easily, yet that didn't do the trick.
Spike finally lifted it just enough to see what was going on. A
group of maybe ten men were huddled around a bench, gesturing and talking
in what looked to be conspiratorial mode. When one of them looked
over in his direction, he let the blanket fall back down to hide his face.
White-blond hair wouldn't go over well in Egypt, no matter how westernized
the city had become.
A half-hour later, the voices had gotten more heated, and Spike could
hear suitcases being opened. He peeked again and saw light glinting
off metal. He knew that glint quite well. Knives and guns.
There was something else, but he couldn't tell what it was. Maybe the
Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, except this was a mosque, not a church, and
definitely not a historical anachronism.
Even across the room, he could feel the intense, eager vibe the men gave
off. Something was going to happen. Spike couldn't help but think,
"Sounds like fun." Fighting the good fight alongside Buffy was all
well and good, but there was just something appealing about the organized
chaos these guys seemed to be planning.
Then, as quickly as they'd come, the men departed.
Spike had to wait another two hours for the shadows to shift enough to
let him leave. He even sat through several services, bowing and standing
at just the right times, the blanket over his upper body the entire time.
When he was finally able to leave the mosque, the air was so glorious
on his face that he didn't even notice the stench. He shoved the blanket
into the backpack, atop the dwindling supply of blood bags, and set off to
find a hotel.
Cairo was moderately lively after dark, a fact for which Spike was immensely
grateful. Not that Sunnydale was exactly the City of Lights or anything,
but he'd been stuck in backwaters since leaving there, and it was good to
be somewhere where the people didn't hibernate after sunset.
Then again, most of the people out and about tonight were tourists.
He was a tourist too, he supposed. Off to see the sites and such.
He'd heard the pyramids were great. Drusilla had wanted to visit back
during the '30s after hearing about the King Tut crap from some vampires
in Paris. They never did make it, though. Always someplace else
to go, somewhere new to see. At the time it was Berlin, then Madrid
– anywhere that looked interesting in the morning newspaper. If there
had been passenger jets back then, they would've hit so many more places.
Maybe even been in the papers themselves.
The world held such a glamour in those days, now ruined by film and television.
Places existed in imagination, culled from books and stories told over a
pint of blood in a bar or cabaret. Imagining a distant place was often
far more interesting than visiting it. Now, though, he knew just what
Australia was like, even though he'd never been to the antipodes. He'd
seen the photos, watched the movies. Took the mystery out.
He remembered a poem from an Emily Dickinson anthology that he'd nicked
to read on a long boat ride decades ago. "I never saw a moor /
I never saw the sea / Yet know I how the heather looks / and what a wave
must be."
Nearly a hundred and forty years on this planet, and Spike thought maybe
he knew too much.
He stared at the tourists meandering around the square, disappearing down
narrow streets and through curtained doorways. Everything was so exotic,
even to a jaded old guy like him. All the colors and sounds... it was
overwhelming, in a good way. That brought back another memory.
Lying with her under the rugs in his crypt. Watching her
fingers trace the whorls of the pattern, and thinking of how he wished she'd
touch him with such softness. Her voice as she asked him if he'd ever
been to Persia. "It's Iran now, pet," he'd replied. She had rolled
her eyes in that way he loved, because it was just her thing, divorced from
the way she always treated him. "I can take you there someday," he'd
told her, and she'd wrinkled her nose. Said she'd never go anywhere
with him, but those were the heady days of first being able to touch her,
make love to her, and he'd believed anything was possible.
He knew better now. At least, he thought he did. On the flight
over, he'd been so convinced that it would be simple. She said she
wanted a lover with a soul, and he'd give her one. But now? God,
he didn't even know anymore. Maybe he never would.
Perhaps the soul wasn't enough. Isn't that what Whistler had said?
Isn't that what he knew now?
He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, as if he could make the
headache disappear. Things would be much easier if he could get everything
to disappear at will. These days, life was teaching him that his will
didn't get him very far.
So he kept walking in hopes that the pounding of feet on cobblestones
would do the trick. It did, sort of. Kept him focused on things
besides her.
When he rounded a corner, he found another open area with lots of tourists.
He did a quick check and realized that he wasn't too far from the hotel,
which was good. Not nearly as nice of a place as the one in Aswan, as
if that place could be called "nice", but it was a roof over his head.
A dismal roof, and he'd been glad to get out of there as soon as he checked
in. Just a little walkabout to clear his head and relax.
Cars whizzed by, drivers acting like they were on amphetamines.
He'd seen enough of Africa so far to peg this as normal. Spike was
tempted to go back for his bike, just so he could whiz around too and work
out the kinks that way. Then something caught his attention and stopped
him in his tracks.
A car pulled up alongside the curb. This was unusual in and of itself,
given that all the other cars kept speeding by. More unusual were the
men who piled out. Three blokes in typical Arab garb, except for one
thing: Spike knew them.
It was the men from the Mosque earlier that day. Their faces weren't
all that distinct, but Spike recognized them nonetheless. He stopped
to stare at them, and then he remembered the knives and guns they'd brandished
with a whoop and a battle cry.
Something was up, and it didn't look like the organized chaos that had
seemed appealing earlier that day.
Spike scuttled back toward a doorway, where he could watch them without
being noticed. Stupid to think that they'd recognize him; no blanket
over his head now, and the men hadn't even looked over at him earlier.
Still, something made him want to keep in the night shadows.
The men began to run away in the opposite direction. That was bizarre,
especially when Spike noticed that the car was still running. And then
he realized what was happening.
He opened his mouth to yell something, but his throat was dry and he was
too stunned to make a sound. He could almost hear the pulse of the
city beating a countdown.
The explosion knocked him against the stone wall behind him. Stars
danced across his eyes.
Disoriented and with a searing pain in the back of his head, Spike slowly
picked himself up from the pavement. He knew the pain all too well,
though this time the headache was of quite a different sort. He shook
himself lucid, wondering why Buffy was hitting him this time.
Then he remembered. Explosion. Screams. Men running
away.
The absurdity of it all made him want to break into delirious laughter.
Travel ten thousand miles for a soul, and you get caught up in terrorists
and car bombs. Welcome to Cairo.
He shook his head until the stars disappeared. Then he heard the
sirens and cries. People littered the pavement like crumpled scraps
of newsprint. He stared at them, at the blood pooling around a woman
and her teenaged kid nearby. Another man was picking himself up off
the ground, wobbling with the movement and finally collapsing again.
Maybe a dozen people in all, in various stages of injury and death.
Some of them might make it. Most probably wouldn't.
Strange to start thinking of the victims as people in need of saving,
instead of as dinnertime. The thought flickered across his mind until
he pushed it aside. No time for a crisis of conscience, he told himself.
A bright flash of light nearby nearly blinded him, and his hands flailed
in the shock. He turned toward the light and saw a tourist snapping
photos.
"Fucking bastard!" Spike growled and struggled to stay out of game face.
Not the place for that. He pulled his arm back and launched a blow
at the asshole, hoping to knock the bloody camera all the way to the Nile.
That brought on the headache he was more used to having. Guess
the chip was still functional after all. He clutched his head
with both hands; the pain shooting through his brain was even stronger than
being knocked into the wall. When his eyes re-focused, he expected
to see the camera asshole hurling a fist to finish the job. Instead,
the guy was staring at him in shock, then he ran away.
Spike wanted to run after him, bugger the chip, but two words kept echoing
in his head: No time.
So he hustled back over to the victims scattered around the sidewalk.
He heard the ambulance sirens in the distance, but he knew from decades of
staring down at dying people that some of them didn't have much time left.
'Can't save 'em all,' he thought, and again he was poleaxed by the realization
that his first instinct was to save them.
Well, if that's the soul, he thought, then lucky for them.
He crouched down next to a middle-aged white tourist. Her blood
already stained the pavement, and her eyes were glazed over. He put
his hand against where he used to bite deep, and there was a pulse.
"You okay?" he asked.
She stared up at him and tried to laugh. Blood gurgled audibly in
her lungs. Her voice barely a whisper, she said, "What do you think?"
in a Dutch accent.
Spike nodded. "Guess not." He saw her leg jackknifed under
her. Didn't look comfortable at all. Then he smelled her soul.
It called out to him, like two magnets clicking together.
Reaching underneath her arms, he pulled her over to the doorway where
he'd been when the bomb went off. She was going to die, he could tell,
but at least he could help her be a little more comfortable when it happened.
He'd seen death thousands of times since he became a vampire, but never
from this side. It touched him somewhere deep inside.
So he stood over her, arranging her limbs until everything was laid out
the way it should be, and her skin was so pale it shone in the harsh streetlights.
"My bag," she muttered. The words confused him until he looked up and
saw her purse still sitting in the pool of blood where she'd been a minute
before. Spike sprinted over and grabbed it, then brought it back to
her.
"Address book," she whispered, so he rummaged around in her purse until
he found a small booklet. "Telephone my family. They are listed
with the surname 'Marken'. Tell them what happened to me."
Spike stared at her with wide eyes. So strange, this was.
He finally nodded. "I'll do that tonight."
The half-smile he got was her thanks. He could see her laboring
after each word, but the determination in her eyes told him that she had
things she had to say. He decided that if anything, he could be her
confessor.
"You are a vampire," she said.
The words startled him. All he could do was nod and mutter, "Yeah."
"But you are a good one."
What? This was beyond bizarre. Was he supposed to think
of himself as 'a good one' now? Still if it made her happy....
She bit her lip and said, "I am an organ donor."
The absurdity of the conversation nearly knocked him over. This
woman was dying with her head in his lap, and she was telling him to donate
her organs? Words sputtering from his mouth, he told her, "Don't think
that's quite the thing here, love. Sorry 'bout that." Spike paused
then asked, "Are you Mrs. Marken?"
"Angelika Marken."
Ah, he should've known that an Angel would come up even here. Story
of his...
"I know they will not take my organs here, but I still have something
to give." Her voice was so faint that he could barely hear it, even
with his enhanced senses. But she reached over and grasped his hand
with as much strength as she could muster, and Spike could tell she was
determined to tell him something.
"What's that, love?" He couldn't quite bring himself to say 'Angel'
or even her variation of it. Too many bad memories, especially with
the soul thing.
Even though she was dying, a calm surety shone through her eyes.
"You are a good vampire. Take my blood."
Spike recoiled. Oh, God. No, not that.
He closed his eyes and squared his jaw. "No."
Then she said with that same calm voice, "Take it. I want you to."
He opened his eyes and felt the soul spinning around in his head, his
heart. Even with his tenuous grasp on morality, he knew this was wrong.
So wrong. The voices fought inside him.
'Drink her,' one taunted. 'She wants it. Give her that much.
It isn't wrong if she is dying already.'
The other screamed, 'No! It's wrong. Feeding off disaster
victims? That's what a beast would do. You didn't come all this
way to be a beast.'
Spike wanted so much to listen to that second voice, but the scent of
her blood filled his lungs. So bright, so vital. Such overwhelming
craving.
But he looked at her and saw the plea in her eyes. Not so much a
plea for him to drink, but just for something to be right for a change.
Wanting to give something back, even if she couldn't donate her heart, her
lungs.
He felt her pulse slowing down against his leg. It became thready
and weak. The paramedics were already tending to other victims, but
Spike knew that Angelika was done for.
This is your first test, Spike thought. He just wished
he knew what the right answer was. Scariest of all was the idea that
neither answer was completely correct.
In a voice hovering on the edge of death, Angelika began to whisper, "Ave
Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum...."
It was now or never. He finally brought her bloody wrist to his
mouth and took one long sip.
The pulse ceased against his lips. He curled her fingers into a
loose fist and kissed it.
Spike slowly stood on wobbly legs and called out in a voice that was barely
there, "Here's another victim. Her name is Angelika Marken. Take
good care of her."
He waited until a lone paramedic made his way over to them, then watched
as the man checked for a pulse and breath. Spike knew there was nothing
left.
Tucking Angelika's address book in his pocket, he stumbled away in the
direction of his hotel. The ounce of blood in his stomach churned and
roiled. He slowly walked back to the hotel.
He wondered if he'd passed.
"Yeah," he echoed.
END, Chapter Four.
wisteria@smyrnacable.net
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