Chapter 18
"This one's dead, too."
The van was the last of their vehicles to be tested; parked closest to the house, they'd approached it quickly and cautiously, half-expecting it to blow up or to trap some of them inside it and asphyxiate them with carbon monoxide. Instead, it simply refused to respond at all, either to ignition key or to hot-wiring. The cars parked along the road were similarly disabled. The entity had apparently drained the batteries of all of them.
"We could walk to my apartment," Kay suggested, as Paloma hurried out from under the carport, shoving the van keys back into her pocket, and rejoined the others on the curb. "It's not more than half a mile from here, and Thu's home is just a few blocks further."
Gunn took in the houses around them. "Shouldn't we warn the neighbors about your Feng Shui problem?" he asked Michael. "I'd hate for one of 'em to see the busted front door and come stickin' his head in to see if anything's wrong."
"He's got a point," Angel agreed, "Some of us should stay here and keep an eye on the place. We can watch it from the house across the street. The rest of you go on; see what you can round up to fight this thing."
"Angel, you can't stay here 'til morning!" Fred protested.
"It'll be all right. He can duck into the Garcia's garage. They're used to the weird shit that goes on around here. I'll stay, too." Paloma tossed the fireplace poker to Gunn. "Wanna make it a trio?"
"Yeah, why not." He caught the weapon deftly and tapped the middle of it against his palm.
"Be careful, then," Michael cautioned them, and putting a hand on Thu's shoulder, he lead the rest of the group to the corner and away.
Between streetlights, the night enveloped the six hikers; clouds obscured the stars and moon, and shadows seemed to reach at them from all directions. As they passed a privacy fence, Spike pulled off a loose board and broke it into foot-long pieces. "Toy Monster's not the only spook abroad tonight, I'll wager," he reminded them as he passed out the stakes. He tucked an extra one into Fred's skirt pocket and murmured to her, "Stay close."
Thu holstered her stake in the front pocket of her jeans. "It's funny - funny strange, not ha-ha funny - I should be scared when stuff like this happens, and I am, a little, kind of, but mostly I'm just excited, or mad, or both. Paloma said that's probably the way slayers are supposed to feel, on account of we're hunters. It's the way she feels when she hunts. Do vampires feel like that, too, Spike?" As she spoke she leaped and kicked playfully at his head, her foot coming within a hair's-breadth of his face.
Spike felt his heart wrench as he smiled back at her friendly grin.
Pray God she never grows bitter, doesn't come to hate life, doesn't turn into a cold, unfeeling little stone. Don't let it break her.
"Yeah, they do, Pullet, and don't you forget it. They'd have your head on a pike if they could, and mine, and anyone else's who tried to cross 'em - I know, nice pun - Lot of 'em are scared of us, but that doesn't mean they won't be right bastards in a fight."
"I won't forget." Thu made her expression solemn, but as they resumed their march it was plain by the bounce in her step that she was very close to breaking into skipping.
They'd have your head on a pike if they could.
The sentence niggled in Dilip Singh's mind, and the memory of a trip to the grocery store three years ago rose to the surface.
October of 2001, and in the checkout lane of the supermarket two Caucasian men, early twenties, give him hostile looks as they fall in line behind him. The young woman cashier notices a box of saffron rice among his items and tells him, "Those are on sale today."
"Are they? Charge me for two, then; I'll go get another."
As he walks away toward the shopping aisles he hears one of the young men snarl something unintelligible, hears the cashier scold, "Shut up, he's from India. India don't have nothin' to do with the Taliban." Hears the man give a nasty laugh and reply, "So? They're all goddamn ragheads."
Minutes later, leaving the store, he passes the two men as they lounge against the side of the building. "Hey, Osama," one of them jeers in a low, taunting voice. He ignores them - foolish young boys with no common sense and a chip on their shoulders - and steps onto the parking lot.
"Camel jockey!" the other calls out, and both break into brays of laughter. Still he ignores them, and continues toward his car.
"SAND- "
Suddenly he's had enough; he wheels around, glaring at the two offenders with anger and disdain. Locking his gaze on theirs, he whispers an incantation, one learned secretly in his youth from an aged fakir, and the two men are immediately pinned against the wall by an invisible hand. As their bodies freeze in fear, he lifts them up the wall, slides them up like mercury rising in a thermometer, and lets them dangle for a long, satisfying moment before dropping them on their shocked and cowering asses. One of them, he notes with pleasure, has pissed his pants.
Driving away, the feeling of triumph fades, and he becomes a bit ashamed of himself. Certainly the brats had deserved a smacking, needed to be taught some manners, but the thought persists that in frightening them so badly, he has engaged in a little terrorism of his own.
"Mike! Miiiiii-chael! Psst! What's Number Four?"
Pretends not to hear them, tries to focus on his own paper, but it's hard to do so when your buddies know that you somehow can see the teacher's answer sheet to the test in Mrs. Lindgren's file cabinet (how many of them are your buddies only because they know this?)
Knows he should claim ignorance, maybe even put a few wrong answers on his own paper to prove it to them, but finally the desire to please them and to be one of the cooler kids of the fourth grade wins out, and he closes his eyes, mentally flips through the file cabinet's tabs and labels and pages, and whispers back, "South Dakota."
My name is Fred Burkle and I live in a hotel room, which is not as bad as the cave I used to live in, gosh no, in the room the walls are smooth which makes for much better writing, and you need to write to keep the equations straight, equations are things you can always rely on, everything should be as constant and dependable as math, math doesn't snatch you up and send you to dark places and nightmare places where people with horns want to eat you, if you've got math you don't have to remember that you had a mama and daddy but now you can't find them and the bad dream is real...gosh no...
"Kay Baby, something real sad happened last night; Grandmommy had a stroke and passed away."
It's supposed to be a place of sanctuary, according to Victor Hugo, but so far it isn't doing much other than reminding him that he's got no place here. No place anywhere, really, except maybe Hell, which is where the sorrowful and righteous voices in his head keep advising he go. Sodding poets knew nothing of true abject misery, he's discovered; Poe, perhaps, had come close...
Buffy in front of him now, reaching for him.
"No touching! Am I flesh to you? Feed on flesh. Nothing else. Not a spark."
Voice whispers in answer, one he's saddened but not surprised by. She's made it clear it's all he's good for.
"Oh, right; flesh then. Solid through. Get it hard; service the girl."
Hands slapping him, his own striking back, staggering blow that sends him crashing to the floor. Hears her demanding, "Spike, have you completely lost your mind?"
"Well, YES. Where've you been all night?"
"You thought you could just come back and...be with me?"
"First time for everything."
From her hiding place in a corner of the chapel, Fred crawled on her hands and knees, cautiously. She halted in front of Spike and studied him with wide eyes as he sat numbly amid the splintered pews. In one hand she clutched a fat felt-tip marker. She ducked and yelped in alarm when Buffy snapped, "This is all you get. I'm listening. Tell me what happened."
"I tried to find it, of course," Spike answered, struggling to put it into words. "The spark. The missing...the piece. That fit. That would make me fit." He sounded on the verge of tears.
Fred crept closer; touched him timidly on the knee. She too looked ready to cry. "You can stay in my room if you want to," she offered. "It's a real nice room. Maybe you'll fit there."
He gazed at her, bewildered and lost. "Are the voices there?" he asked finally.
She thought it over and shook her head. "I never heard any."
As if on cue, Spike clamped his hands over his ears and sobbed, rocking back and forth in apparent terror. Frightened by the outburst, Fred drew back and quickly huddled over the floor where she began to scribble frantically with her marker.
She was unable to ignore his distress for long, however, and after a moment raised her head and peered at him through the loose strands of hair hanging in front of her face. Chewing her lip, she laid the marker down and moved back to crouch beside him. She slid her arms around his shoulders and hugged him awkwardly. "Don't be scared," she whispered. "Please don't be scared."
It seemed to help; he began to grow calmer, and the rocking slowed down. Fred sat back on her haunches and dipped her head to scrutinize him again. "Is it better now?" she asked him, still whispering, her eyes huge and round, as if they were sharing a dire secret.
He removed his hands from his ears carefully and whispered back, "I'm insane, you know."
"That's okay. I don't mind bein' around crazy people." She barked out a silly, nervous laugh. "They say I'm half-crazy, too."
From a pew across the aisle, Kay leaned out toward them with a surprised, tear-stained face. "Fred? Spike? What are you doing at my grandmother's funeral?" Dilip set his bag of groceries down on the coffin that rested near the altar, next to a framed portrait of an elderly black woman, and exclaimed something in Hindi.
"It's the demon. It must be a telepath. It's picking up traumatic memories from our brains and trying to unnerve us with them." Michael strode through the chapel's entryway brusquely, passing through Buffy's body as he spoke. "This church is an illusion."
And suddenly they were all on the street again.
"Oh, my god," Kay breathed, "Remind me not to let my mind wander."
Spike wiped a shaking hand over his mouth. "Much...oh, shit...how much farther to your flat?"
"Only a couple more blo- Wait. This is wrong."
The street seemed skewed somehow, unrecognizable and unnatural; lightposts bending and buildings set at impossible angles. The sky was no longer black but a dull, brassy shade, neither day nor night, and the air had become hot and dusty.
"THU!" Michael shouted.
They saw her several houses down, seemingly unaware of their presence, looking and listening intently in all directions. The space around that house was as dark as everything had been moments earlier, and a streetlight illuminated the girl. Twice she appeared to call out. The sound was muted, though, and then Thu was gone as well, racing back the way they'd come, taking the night with her. As she passed from their line of sight, the odd, surreal lighting covered everything.
In Michael's neighborhood, the Ministers Of Grace and the Little Wooden People continued to stare at one another. The latter had not moved; the former squirmed uncomfortably in cast-iron chairs. Gunn once turned to ask something of Paloma and was almost startled off of his seat: in her half-dozing state her body had taken on its natural form, with scales and claws and gaping nasal cavity. As Gunn tried to recall his question, he became aware of the approaching sound of sneakers smacking on concrete, moving at an incredible speed.
Angel was already on his feet, catching the small slayer by the arm as she pounded into the yard.
"They disappeared." She bent over and gripped her thighs to catch her breath. "We were walking along and they just...vanished."
Author's Note: Spike-Buffy dialogue is from "Beneath You" TV episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7; 2002.