THREE STRIKES
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters except for the ones that I create.
Author's Note: I need a little help for the next chapter; I need a name for the woman that wants to help Lindsey. All suggestions are welcome. Thank you and enjoy the chapter.
CHAPTER 6-Fevered Dreams And New Allies
Like clockwork they came, one right after the other, all not wanting to leave the pair alone for more than even a few minutes, fearing the potential consequences. Lorne and Connor had returned around midday with three doses of the antidote and a standing order for more if it was needed. Connor had tried not to show it but upon hearing that Angel had passed out from the affects of the zombies poison he had nearly become as pale as his father. For the first time he didn't feel a single pang of jealousy or anger when he stormed into Angel's room to find Cordelia sitting in a chair beside the bed and holding one of Angel's hands in her own. Connor hadn't really seen Angel in any other condition than pretty much at his best. Sure there had been the time when Wesley had saved him from the bottom of the ocean and brought him back to the Hyperion but Angel had been strong enough then to lay down the law. But this time Angel looked as if a kitten could have bested him. He was sweating profusely and looked to be even paler than usual.
"What's wrong…I thought he said that he'd be able to handle it," Connor asked with a combination confused, angry, and worried scowl on his face as he rushed to Cordelia's side.
"He can Connor, but the zombie's venom is still potent enough to put him out of action for awhile…did you get the antidote," Cordelia replied with a very worried look on her face and it was quickly evident to Connor that she had been crying only seconds earlier.
"Yeah…I've got Angel's dose in my pocket and Lorne is bringing the rest to Faith and Wesley," Connor said with a hurried look on his face as he pulled what looked a slender tube of glowing green ooze out of his pocket before handing it to Cordelia.
"What are we supposed to do with this," Cordelia asked with a slightly let down frown on her face as she studied the tube closely.
"He has to drink it…that's what the shaman said," Connor answered with a very concerned look on his face as Cordelia eyed him with a slightly confused look on her face.
"Well then what are we waiting for…," Cordelia said with a look on her face like she was about ready to throw up, as she opened the top of the tube, before she slowly lifted Angel's head up with one hand and guided the top of the tube to his lips with the other.
* * * * * * * *
Upstairs in one of the larger rooms Gunn had laid Faith and Wesley side by side in the bed and with Fred's help had removed all of their clothes except for their underwear. Gunn had tried to keep his eyes off of Faith's half naked form as he set about trying to clean Wesley's wounds as best he could while Fred did the same with Faith. Somehow during the ordeal of removing their clothes and then working on cleaning out their wounds Fred had been shocked to discover that Wesley and Faith seemed to be holding hands, even though both were still unconscious. Some of the bite marks on Faith seemed to be trying to heal up but couldn't because of the zombie venom in them. Fred pointed this out to Gunn with a very worried look on her face before Lorne stumbled into the room carrying the two doses of antidote.
"Lorne," Gunn and Fred called out in unison with a great amount of both worry and relief as Fred hopped up off of the bed and rushed to Lorne's side.
"Did you get the antidote," Gunn asked very directly with a grim look on his face as he got up off of the bed and pulled the blankets up to leave only Faith and Wesley's head and shoulders out.
"Yeah…got them right here," Lorne answered triumphantly as he held up the two vials of blue glowing liquid and smiled.
"So what do we do now," Fred asked with a very worried frown on her face as her gaze flittered back and forth between the empathy demon and her two friends at death's door on the bed.
"The shaman said that they have to drink the antidote…and then the rest is up to them," Lorne started to say with an unhappy frown on his face before he shrugged his shoulders and handed one vial to Gunn and the other to Fred.
"Well let's see what this does," Gunn mumbled with a great amount of trepidation in his voice as he and Fred shared a worried glance before the two slowly walked back to the bed and proceeded to almost force Wesley and Faith to drink the contents of the vial.
"Well we've done all that we can…it's up to them now…if you're religious now would be a good time to pray," Lorne said with an unhappy sigh as he frowned and checked his watch before peering out of the window and saying a silent prayer of his own.
* * * * * * * * *
"When are you two going to give it up…they're not coming, they're going to leave us in here to rot," Kate grumbled with a tired look on her face as she pulled herself up to a seated position and clasped her hands together behind her head.
"They'll come…they wanted us for something…and after all of those tests that they ran on us they're not going to just let us die in here," Oz said with a slightly defiant look on his face as he fought the temptation to agree with Kate.
"Unless they got everything that they wanted from us and now don't care what happens to us," Groo added with an innocent look of concern on his face as he slightly turned away from looking out of the small window in the door.
"Not helping Groo…got anything else in that big head of yours," Kate mumbled back with a very impatient and frustrated frown on her face as she glared up at Groo before she saw the hurt look on his face. Almost instantly she regretted her words and was about to attempt an apology when Oz cut in.
"Somebody's coming," Oz said in a harsh whisper as he gazed through the small window that Groo had just vacated. Oz and Groo quickly hit the floor, hoping to fool those who were coming into thinking that they were asleep. Kate eyed them with a great amount of disdain.
"What are you doing…you don't…you don't….ah…," Kate started to ask angrily before she became woozy and realized to late that whoever was holding them had begun to pump a knockout gas into the room.
* * * * * * * * *
Her gaze flittered about, desperately searching to try and see if anyone was following her. After treating Lindsey she had returned to the locker room and dressed before riding the elevator down to the first floor lobby. Her position in the company was well known, or at least the group that she was a part of was well known. Her group was basically in charge of keeping the high performers and top executives at Wolfram and Hart happy, by any means necessary. She had the horror stories on her first day, hoping them to only be stories that were told to every new worker. Little did she know that most of those stories were actually being sugarcoated to hide what truly went on. She had been told to not make any personal connections with any of those that she did business with. But after looking at some of the outfits that the other members of her group had worn she had begun to wonder if maybe she had made the biggest mistake of her life by leaving Miami. She had begun working for Wolfram and Hart shortly after she had run out of money to pay for college. Desperate and having no real family to speak of she had begun babysitting for a rich family shortly thereafter and through that connection had been sent to Los Angeles and into the clutches of Wolfram and Hart.
She had been lucky so far, only having to tend to Lindsey in the special sealed room. None of her superiors would tell her why he was there or what was wrong with him, giving her the first instinct that she would actually be helping him if he were to stay in that room. But one night, while her boss had been called into a meeting she had taken the opportunity and read some of the files on the desk. It was then that she had discovered part of what was truly going on and that discovery had fueled her desire to not only help Lindsey but to get herself free of Wolfram and Hart. But she knew that was easier said than done. Some of the other workers in her group had regaled her with more horror stories of what had happened to people who had tried to leave the company without the top people allowing it to happen.
Although pretty much everyone who knew her thought of her to be a quiet young woman and for most in the company she was thought of as fresh meat she had another side. Growing up she had a very close friend that had gotten her interested in the martial arts. She had never actually had to use anything that she had learned, she used it more to get all of her aggression out and as a form of exercise. When she had started babysitting for the family, shortly after her twenty first birthday, the husband had begun watching her with a very lustful look in his eye. In fact when she had left to travel to Los Angeles she had been about to tell his wife what he was up to. Her first few jobs for Wolfram and Hart had been modeling jobs, being the pretty girl in the thong in the add to get people's attention. After that she had joined the group that she was currently in. On the day that she had sworn to Lindsey that she would help him she had been informed that she would soon be changing jobs, and the new uniform that she had been given left her confused and worried. The uniform reminded her of some of the outfits that she had seen when she had been unfortunate enough to give one of her friends a ride to her boyfriend's house and he had a porn tape on.
She crossed through the lobby easily enough, with a final security check with Paul at the front desk, before she exited the building and checked her watch. She knew that she only had three days to either keep her promise and help to free Lindsey by getting his message to a man named Angel or lose her chance forever. She still couldn't quite put her finger on the reason why she was helping Lindsey, but a small part of her had begun to question whether or not it was because she was falling in love with him, something that she knew would get her into trouble. The beginnings of the plan on how to save Lindsey began to swirl in her mind as she drove home that night.
* * * * * * *
Growing up in the training to be a watcher and then working Angel had left Wesley Wyndam Pryce with a vast knowledge of just how complex the world truly was. But dealing with the affects of the zombies poison and then that coupled with the antidote had brought him to a whole new level of reality. He was no longer able to distinguish between what was real and what was fake within his mind. Even though he was unconscious the whole time he was somehow able to know when there were people around him, and he could feel that there was always someone beside him. It didn't take him long to figure out who that person was, Faith, and because of her presence he knew that he could get through whatever was to come. Years later when he would write about this period of his life in his memoirs Wesley would describe it as being like he was under the influence of a very powerful drug. Visions kept dancing in his head, but unlike at Christmas where they were supposed to be sugar plums, these visions more closely resembled something out of a horror movie. He seemed to be on some sort of a highway, with each and every low point in his life brought up in vivid color, as if he was being forced to relive each and every one of them all over again.
He could feel the fear and shame that he had felt when as a young man he had almost allowed a very dangerous demon to escape. Two men had died in the effort to put the creature down, but since Wesley was of the right cut of cloth that incident hadn't gone past the Watchers Council. From that he could then feel the horrible feeling of uselessness that he had felt when he first arrived in Sunnydale and everyone had treated him like a younger sibling that no one wanted to even admit they were related to. He could once again feel the pain of the ropes biting into his wrists as Faith bound him to the chair and then the sharp shards of glass as they dug into his skin. Then it had been the hot edge of Justine's knife as it slid across his throat and nearly killed him. Even though he couldn't move a muscle he could still feel the blood passing effortlessly in between his fingers and then down his wrist. The final experience before he blacked out was of fighting for air as Angel tried to smother him in his hospital bed.
Faith's journey was different, much of her past had been dark days, so when they started appearing she had at first become confused and then angry at them even being brought up again. The memories that brought her to her proverbial knees were of the crimes that put her in prison. The worst was her first kill, the deputy mayor. It had truly been an accident, a heat of the moment thing. But then she had seemingly found herself on a roller coaster, unable or unwilling to get off. That had all led to the one memory, that in her condition, almost killed her. It was the memory of the night that she had tortured Wesley mercilessly. But then a funny thing happened that she could never have expected. She was still in the moment of the memory but instead of the look that she remembered Wesley wearing that night he was completely calm, with a great deal of love in his eyes. That single image stayed with her, no matter how many times she tried to shake it, until the exact moment that she awoke days later. She would spend much of the rest of her life trying to figure out why it had been.
The road that Angel was sent on was one that he had been down many times before. While it was true that soon after he was cursed with his soul again all of the memories off all of the foul deeds that he had done as Angelus came rushing back to overwhelm him it had been the second time and so he was better prepared. So when the memories started to come again at first they didn't have the same effect that they had earlier. He found himself able to control most of the memories, at least to a point. He could speed them up, ushering in the next one much faster than before. But much of the pain of those memories was able to get through. Just when he thought that the flood of memories was over newer ones sprang into his mind. They started with his attempts to get Connor back and all of the hell that those attempts had brought about. Then came his attack on Wesley in the hospital, at which he could hear Angelus laughing at him, taking a great amount of joy from the amount of pain that the memory caused. The rest of the memories, Connor coming back, losing Cordelia, spending the summer at the bottom of the Pacific, being rescued by Wesley and Justine, and finally getting Cordelia fully back rushed through his mind before he very nearly leapt out of bed before Cordelia and Connor could calm him down.
* * * * * * * * *
Kate's first thoughts upon regaining consciousness were that she was still in that same small room with padded walls. She thought that she was still stuck there with Groo and Oz, at the mercy of some mysterious person or group, unable to do anything for herself, except argue and sleep. But she quickly discovered that not to be the case any longer. When she looked around the room she discovered herself to be in a small room decorated like a child's room, complete with daisies on the wallpaper and a corner filled with stuffed animals of every shape, size, and color. The only sound that she could hear was the sound of birds chirping outside of a nearby window. After clearing her head she staggered up to her feet and then used the wall to keep her standing as she slowly crept out of the room and down a darkened hallway. She carefully peered into the first room that she came to. Inside of it she saw a bunk bed with both beds filled. Oz was snoring away on the top bunk while Groo looked as if he had been dumped onto the lower bunk. Neither looked injured but Oz did have a dark bruise on his left arm that hadn't been there before.
Kate started to go into the room to investigate when she heard a noise from outside. She turned around and leaned back up against the wall. With what strength that she still possessed Kate retraced her steps back to the room that she had woken up in and almost fell as she tried to get back to the bed. The noise slowly grew louder as she pulled herself up onto the bed and rolled over onto her back. She was just about to pull the covers up around her when a rather heavyset middle aged man walked around the corner with a shocked but relieved smile on his face.
"Good…you're awake," the man said with a sigh before he rushed to the window and nervously gazed around for a few shot seconds before closing the blinds.
"Who…who are you…where am I…what…," Kate started to babble out fearfully as she sat up in the bed and tried to stay as far away from the man as her tired body would allow.
"Who I am isn't important…as for where you are you're in my house…my daughters old room actually…my wife and three children died in a car accident a few months back and I…," the man said at first with a very calm and non-threatening look on his face before as he got closer to the end his demeanor changed abruptly and he looked as if he were about to cry.
"I…I'm sorry…but what…," Kate said with a sad frown on her face as she slowly started to relax, but just a bit.
"You're safe now…I got the three of you out of that horrible place…I'm sorry for what whatever they did to the three of you…," the man replied with an embarrassed frown on his face as he sat down on the edge of the bed opposite Kate and looked away.
"How…I'm not following you…," Kate said nervously as she tried to get a kink out of her neck.
"The gas…sorry about that by the way…but it was necessary, anyway after the three of you were sleeping like babies I loaded the three of you into three of the bags that the company uses to haul out the dead bodies, and then I drove you to a mortuary where a friend of mine set you three aside before I came back and brought the three of you here last night," the man said with a very nervous look on his face as he began to sweat.
"But why…why would you help us…you don't even know us," Kate asked with a thoroughly confused look on her face as she pulled the blankets closer to her.
"Because I know what they're planning and the three of you were going to be a big part of their plan, and I couldn't let them get away with it," the man said with a worried, but also very determined, frown on his face as he stood up and then walked towards the door.
"What who's planning…and what plan," Kate asked again, still feeling like she was grasping at straws.
"Wolfram and Hart…the first part of their plan is already underway with Lindsey McDonald being back, Angel and his two friends barely survived phase two…the three of you were going to be phase three…in the end those bastards would have used you all to control all of the non humans in Los Angeles…and then the world, all leading up to the apocalypse, when they'd use Angel to make it end their way, but now at least the side of good has a fighting chance," the man said with a nervous and almost sad look on his face as he turned back to look at Kate for a few seconds before he then disappeared around the corner, leaving Kate to ponder his words in silence.
END OF CHAPTER 6