Part Four
The Fred-thing returned near noon, speaking to no one and rubbing at her mouth in a way that did little for Lindsey's peace of mind. She paused in the doorway for a moment when she caught sight of Lindsey, as if amazed that he had lived this long, before she stalked into the spare room where she, Spike, and Angel all appeared to sleep. Even after she had disappeared from sight, Lindsey could feel her presence filling up the cramped place with tension, adding to the haze that had been steadily building over the past several hours. Lindsey imagined Angel awake in the other room and wondered if he was thinking of Lindsey as Lindsey was thinking of him. Given their long, tangled history together and the lengths to which Angel went to get Lindsey trotting about on the mortal plane again, those were looking to be pretty good odds.
'Wasn't supposed to be like this.' That had been the anthem of the weak mind since time immemorial, and Lindsey could not say that it sounded much better coming from him. He forced his fists to uncurl before he wound up cutting holes in his own palms.
Now that he thought about it, hanging around in the apartment that was the only tomb that he had ever experienced and seemed to be working as a substitute tomb for the other three was perhaps not the best strategy for injecting fresh vitality into his thoughts. Lindsey snorted, braced his hand against the wall, and levered himself back up to his feet. A slow smile twisted at the edges of his mouth when his legs offered up no more than token protest before they agreed to hold him. Then he would have to take up the habit that had lost him nearly fifteen pounds rather than gaining it during his freshman year, and change the scenery. There was a spare pair of shoes placed beside the door. Lindsey could only assume that they were meant for him, in some fit of foresight when Angel had still thought that the key to the apocalypse could be found within Lindsey's brain. With the lengthy history of murder, amputation, and resurrection that existed between them, Lindsey figured that it was the least that he could do in return to refuse, and he did not know where this gut-twisting feeling of regret that he couldn't offer those answers was coming from. He pulled the shoes onto his feet and padded quietly over to the door. Though the soft 'snick' of the lock disengaging had to be echoing as loudly as a gunshot to the preternatural ears in the other room, no one stirred.
The electricity buzzed and went out for several minutes as Lindsey strode down the hallway and did not come back on until he was descending down the final set of steps. It flickered once, twice, and illuminated the small, pale girl who had been sitting on the bottom stair. "Hey," Lindsey said, pausing for a moment before he continued his descent. "Kind of dangerous for you to sit where people can't see you, isn't it? You're liable to get stepped on."
A tiny smile flirted across the girl's face, as if she was stunned by anyone who thought that getting stepped on was a serious threat, given everything else that she had faced. She scooted over so that Lindsey could pass by. "I'm fast." A beat, and then she added, "You look tired."
"Didn't get a great night's sleep." Lindsey rubbed his hand over his face and felt the rasp of stubble against his palms. "Curious, aren't you?"
"Yes," the girl said in a matter of fact tone, earning a faint snort from Lindsey. "Are you staying with the people upstairs?"
Lindsey froze, though he had by that point taken only a few steps. "Which ones?"
"Only one group stays in the upstairs apartments," the girl said. Her tone managed to suggest that this was information that Lindsey should have already known, and she was very disappointed in him for making her relate it back. "Charlotte gets upset sometimes, and it makes living in the higher two floors dangerous." The girl delivered all of this in the same voice that a child a year previously might have used to describe the neighborhood's unfriendly dog, and Lindsey told himself that this leaden feeling was not a misplaced sense of guilt. "They're the only ones brave enough to do it. The rest of us just stay on the ground floor." It might not be bravery so much as insanity and a few latent death wishes, but Lindsey did not think that the girl was likely to be appreciative of that bit of insight. At any rate, it was nice to have heroes. "The blue lady's pretty, but she scares me."
"You're an exceptionally smart girl." Lindsey continued towards the door.
"You're not supposed to go out alone," the girl called to his back.
"Do the people upstairs go out alone?" Lindsey asked, twisting back. The girl nodded. "And I'm staying with them, aren't I? Then I can probably take care of myself just like they can." The girl looked dubious, but she did not speak again or otherwise stir from her post as Lindsey walked out the door.
The bright noon sunlight dazzled Lindsey's eye, temporarily blinding him and giving him the time to prepare his mind for a close-up version of what he had been drinking in at a distance since sunrise. It was warmer out here, at least. Lindsey dipped his head and blinked rapidly until his pupils remembered that this was the point at which they were supposed to contract. He could hear the patter of footfalls on the sidewalk around him but no sounds of traffic, and in this absence Lindsey could feel a shiver running up his spine. His eyes adjusting, he raised his face to confront his brave new world.
There were still people, though not as many as Lindsey had expected and not enough to feel right by any standard of Los Angeles. In a wrongness stretching beyond all the numbers, the people on the street walked with swift scurrying motions, their heads down, their shoulders hunched, and their hands shoved deeply into their pockets. It was as if they expected the very motion of making eye contact with their fellow city dwellers to invite threats to step in their direction. Lindsey could hardly blame them for it, given the high percentage of people on the street who were not in the strictest conservative sense people at all. All that money and all that effort that Wolfram and Hart had put into making sure that the apocalypse happened with no one being the wiser, and the world managed to defy them and slide into anarchy with a bang rather than a whimper all the same. Given the way that his last set of employers had left him to dangle in the wind, Lindsey felt that he was justified in going back to his roots and giving a slight hiss of commiseration between his teeth. A passing Anlak demon gave him a startled look and pulled away before their shoulders could touch, but Lindsey was in a mood to neither notice nor care. He tilted his face up for a moment to drink in the sun and then began walking.
The stores were all shut, which Lindsey could not say surprised him. Several windows had been smashed open so that, once the looting had been completed, people could set themselves up within the darkened rooms to either live in them or conduct a crude barter across the broken glass. Few of the wares being hawked were those that had been displayed behind the glass while it was still whole. Lindsey saw cuts of grilled meat being offered to passers-by from one formerly trendy boutique and told himself that he did not want to know what went into them and sure as hell was not going to buy any. Thick-soled hiking boots were being offered from another, and a third still was being operated by a squat man who reminded Lindsey unpleasantly of the rats that his daddy had used to shoot when they got into the horses' feed, guarded by four beefy Kailiff demons. A glittering rainbow of fresh fruits was spread out in front of him. From the looks that people walking by cast over the display, even the Kailiffs might not be enough for too much longer. Lindsey shrugged his shoulders to dispel the shiver building there and kept walking.
Several blocks further down, Lindsey came across a television set placed on the sidewalk and connected to one of the hollowed-out buildings by a lurid orange extension cord. Lindsey thought of the looters and thieves who inevitably arose in situations like this and waited for someone to sprint along and take it, but after nearly ten minutes of silent watching it had remained unmolested. A gaggle of children both human and not so much were sprawled in front of the set, watching with the openmouthed fascination normally reserved for Saturday morning cartoons. Though an invisible line seemed to have been drawn between where the humans and the demons deemed it acceptable to sit, there was no threat of violence between them. The crowd was large enough to make a few of the stragglers push out into the street, but in the absence of vehicles the worst danger that any of the kids faced was an accidental kick from one of the adult pedestrians hurrying by.
Lindsey's curiosity got the better of him and he drifted closer to the building that the television was receiving power from, squinting so that he could see through the gloom. A man and a woman who had left their childbearing years behind them some time before moved about slowly through the shadows as they first arranged and then rearranged a series of small figurines carved entirely from wood. The figurines themselves still had patches of varnish on them, as if the raw materials themselves had been scavenged from the odds and ends of broken furniture, and shapes they took made up an exotic menagerie of human, animal, and demon figures. The couple moved like slowly to and fro, like statues breathed upon by a god, in accordance to some esoteric system. They worked by the light of a single flashlight which they passed back and forth between them and the sunlight which drifted through the shattered windows. No other electric lights burned, all other power apparently being preserved for the television outside. The bouncing flashlight caught the wrinkles on the backs of their hands and threw every one into harsh detail.
The elderly man sensed Lindsey's presence at last and looked up. He offered a twitching, hesitant smile as he met Lindsey's gaze, as if he could not decide if Lindsey was friend or foe and so wanted to keep his options open. Lindsey arranged his face into what he hoped was a convincing answering smile even as he wondered who could possibly be trading for such meticulously crafted toys when basic food supplies seemed to be a critical issue. He backed away. Two of the human children shifted to make way for him, never once taking their eyes away from the television screen. Curious, Lindsey glanced over to see what they were watching and then froze. What had had previously assumed was some kind of children's programming or even a sitcom was more of the news broadcast that Lindsey was coming to realize must run on a twenty-four hour feed. The kids were watching live carnage in glorious Technicolor and premium Dolby surround sound and lapping up every second of it.
Lindsey liked to flatter himself that there weren't a lot of things left in this world or the next that could still shock him, but he backed away towards the street so quickly that he nearly stumbled over his own feet. A few pairs of eyes lifted to give him curious looks, and then most people returned to the practice of not inviting trouble by pretending that nothing outside of their direct line of sight existed. Lindsey wondered for a moment how it was possible that, in a society which seemed to have rewired itself to run on fear rather than petroleum as a primary fuel source, such a large crowd of children was allowed to sit unattended. Maybe the couple in the hollowed-out building were the only ones available to care.
For the second time that day, Lindsey caught himself twitching to throw off the shiver that threatened to build at the nape of his neck, like a dog hurling water from its back. He had done his part. Let any failures that had built up along the way fall upon the shoulders of the one that had wanted the damned Champion mantle so badly in the first place. Lindsey had only been a guy trying to do a job, and so far as he was concerned there was a fat account of back wages waiting for him for services already rendered before he entered the fray again. Given the cozy handbasket that the world had snuggled itself into in his absence, collecting on that might get interesting.
Lindsey allowed himself the luxury of one more shudder and turned to go, raising his eyes towards the jagged, beaten profile that had once been the Los Angeles skyline as he did so. His eyes sought the shape of the Wolfram and Hart building out of habit so deeply ingrained that Lindsey thought trying to remove it now would be a task akin to trying to perform his own appendectomy, even if the emotions which swirled through him upon sight of it were very different from those that had possessed the hungry young law student of a decade before. A purplish, gleaming haze hovered in the place where the Wolfram and Hart offices had once claimed rank among the other buildings, filling the sky like a bloated and half-dead spider. Lindsey had the conviction, as sudden and immutable as it was irrational, that this portal that Angel had spoken of was even watching the people scuttling through the city below with the same emotionless need of the spider that waited for the fly to draw just an inch or two closer. None of the people rushing by Lindsey seemed to take conscious notice of it, and a speck in the sky that he presumed to be Charlotte ('Please let there not be more than one.') drifted so close to its outer edges that her wings must be brushing through the murk.
The gooseflesh on the back of his neck and across his arms could stay there until the day he died, Lindsey decided, but he would not give in to the weakness of another shiver. Dragging his eyes away from the spectacle of the portal so that he could glance one final time towards the unclaimed children, he began his journey down the sidewalk again. "It's wrong," Lindsey muttered beneath his breath. 'Well, yes,' his brain answered back for him. 'You've mastered the obvious, here's a cookie for you.' But…no. There was something else working behind the scenes here, pulling the strings and making the puppets dance, something beyond the 'duh, apocalypse' factor. Lindsey's brow furrowed as his mind's eye brought up footage from a hundred interchangeable action movies and the energetic board meetings that had always taken place before attempt at ending the world or another. There should have been military vehicles flying overhead, martial law. Small girls with hero complexes and pointy sticks standing on every corner. Some attempt, however futile it might have turned out to be, at restoring order beyond the limping catch-as-catch-can system that seemed to have been set up out of necessity. The line between Lindsey's eyes became a little deeper. Unless Angel had spoiled the Senior Partners' fun so thoroughly by his stunt with the Black Thorn that they had decided to flip over the entire profitable house of cards and go global, there were still quite a few pieces missing before Lindsey would be able to put this puzzle together.
He had a feeling that most if not all of those pieces could be found in the hands of the Powers That Be-meet the new boss, same as the old boss-and Lindsey made a pact to be the biggest pain in their non-corporeal asses that he could manage until he received an audience. They owed him that much, and a lot more besides. For now he would make himself be satisfied with a simple why.
Preoccupied as he was with these less than pleasant musings, Lindsey didn't register the sounds of approaching trouble until several seconds had passed or see the people around him cast one another alarmed looks and then make quick moves towards getting themselves out of the street. The older couple leapt over their window with a dexterity that would have made Lindsey's eyebrows crawl up to meet his hairline if he had turned around to see it, ignoring both the protests of the smaller children and the terrified babble of the larger ones as they shepherded the whole lot of them back into the shadows. A demon child paused long enough to grab the television set before he departed for the safety of the shop, the extension cord trailing after him like a cat's tail as his own began to twitch in nervous little circles.
The sound of a human scream, though, that was a sound that Lindsey had heard often enough for it to be tattooed across the inside of his brain for life and imbued with the power to wrench him up from the deepest well of distraction. He whirled around so fast that he nearly upset his balance, and he swore. It would seem that his inner ear was another one of those bodily systems taking its own sweet time in readjusting to the dimensional shift. His heart assured him that it was settling in just fine and was ready to take up the slack for the lazier parts of his anatomy by lurching up into his throat at a speed that he was certain would leave bruises on his larynx later. His adrenal glands joined in the chorus, setting every nerve in his body to tingling and jumping even as he was left trapped in the age-old dilemma of the fight or flight response: knowing that the latter was the wiser path even as every other instinct in his body sang sweet praises to the former. With everything else in his newly reclaimed life that was happening outside of his control, Lindsey very much wanted to get in a fight and prove that there were a few things that he could still claim mastery over.
If he had only been born stupider. Lindsey swore again and craned his neck to check out the odds headed towards him from further down the street. They had set everyone else around him to scrambling out of the way and casting incredulous looks towards the lone idiot who did not have the good sense to move.
Demons, so far as Lindsey could tell above the heads of the rapidly dispersing crowd, and a substantial number of them. The species was one that Lindsey did not recognize, though it did send a faint prickle of recognition up the back of his neck, and he supposed it was possible that he had taken up one of them as a client before. The fact that their very presence was making humans and demons alike scatter away from the streets like leaves before a storm did little to aid any lingering hopes of neutrality that Lindsey may have been entertaining. He shook off the encouraging but ultimately suicidal effects of the adrenaline rush and stepped quickly off the street, bumping into an olive-skinned boy of no more than fourteen or perhaps fifteen as he did so. They boy twitched at the contact and twisted around with far more force than the stumble actually warranted, staring at Lindsey with eyes hidden beneath a large pair of sunglasses that glittered like a beetle's back. Lindsey mumbled an automatic apology and put out a quick hand to steady the youth in case he did fall, but the vast majority of his attention was being siphoned away by events further down the street. By the time that he looked back around the boy had turned his face away and was hurrying off.
Lindsey scarcely even registered that the boy was gone before he had turned back to watch the demons, calculating his options and the amount of trouble that each one would bring. The monsters themselves were squat and green-skinned, possessed of the same number of limbs that one would find on a human being. Lindsey frowned. Yeah, the resemblance to the human race was downright uncanny, if one allowed that a group of humans were fed on a diet of straight steroids, painted the same lurid color as fresh grass clippings, and then thrown into a garbage compactor. Short or not, Lindsey eyeballed the size of the muscles and the battered quality of the armor that covered them all and decided that his adrenal glands had gotten it all wrong. This was not a fight that he wanted to step into, not unarmed and not without the death wish that he had shed off like a snake's skin years before. Lindsey stepped back a few paces further off the sidewalk, hugging against the shadows that reached out to welcome him like an old friend and watching as the group drew closer. He winced as a middle-aged man was knocked out of the way with the same care that a child might give to an inconvenient doll, but did nothing to step forward and help. If anything twinged in Lindsey's chest at this lack of action then it was gone again too quickly to be qualified and measured, salved by the fact that he was hardly the only person on the street choosing to step back against the darkness and live to see another fight on another day. The wind shifted, bringing with it a rush of heat and the sharp, quick tang of sulphur. In spite of the warmth that he had been craving ever since his return, Lindsey felt a wave of revulsion so great that it nearly undid him and sent a surge of bile traveling up the length of his throat. The deep stain of the portal pulsed gently against the afternoon sky.
Lindsey narrowed his eyes into slits and stepped back quickly, not quite running but coming close to it all the same. Anger and fear swirled around one another so tightly as to become one emotion, each indistinguishable from the other in intensity. Fortunately for Lindsey, this was a cocktail that he had learned to run on with optimum efficiency years before, and the skills had not deserted him. His own lack of stupidity, however, was no barrier against the lengths that others would go to in order to indulge in their own.
Lindsey did not realize what she was at first, the small girl that darted across the road and brought herself to a halt directed in the path of the approaching demons. The sheer ridiculous foolishness of such a move made Lindsey sure that he was seeing things, and he had to blink once, twice to even be sure that she was there. When the images did not go away, he let loose a string of explosive oaths that hung in the hushed and expectant air. So ill-advised and suicidal heroic urges were still all the rage, then. He liked to know what things he could count on to remain the same. The girl paused in the middle of the street, panting. Her eyes were masked by a pair of cheap, gawky sunglasses identical to those worn by the boy that Lindsey had run into moments before. Lindsey didn't know if she froze out of fear or some misguided tendencies towards martyrdom, but in the end he supposed the result was going to be the same. She would be lucky if there was anything more left to her than a human paste after they had finished mowing her down.
Lindsey's legs jerked, an impulse that he stilled before it could carry him forward so much as an inch. The days when he had entertained some limping ideal of chivalry were far behind him, and he had the feeling that all the speeches that he had made to Angel about heroism a year and a half previously amounted to all of nothing in the brave new world that had arisen in his absence. Lindsey told himself all of these things in a calm, measured internal voice, barely hearing the faint patter of blood at his feet. It was only be chance that he glanced down a few seconds later and noticed the splatters dotting the pavement. Lindsey's knuckles creaked as he forced them to uncurl, and he stared into the deep cuts that he had opened up in his own palms with something that wanted to be surprise but couldn't quite stick the dismount.
The girl on the street forced her own fists open at exactly the same moment, swatting a few strands of dark hair back from her face and expelling a long stream of air from between her teeth. Even from a distance, Lindsey could see the sweat that was gathering in gleaming beads at her temples and forming a dark line down the back of her shirt. The girl bowed her head, tensed all of the visible muscles in her body into one unbroken line of tension, and began moving her lips. The words being formed were too far away for Lindsey to catch. Her expression was taut, focused, calm.
When absolutely nothing happened, that serenity found itself cracking a bit.
The girl fluttered her eyes open, her lips parting a shade in shock, and took one small step back from the demons who were still approaching without concern for the single small human too stupid to hold her life in any greater esteem. A visible shiver ran through her body and stopped the one step before it could become too or more, or even a full sprint off the scene as the rest of her body language said that she was beginning to view as an attractive option. As Lindsey watched and waited for those last vestiges of what had once been noble instincts to creep back into the ill-used portions of his brain from where they had come, a trickle of blood ran down from the girl's nose and beaded against her upper lip. It gleamed like a strangely placed ruby beneath the cheerful sun.
The demons paused, and the portal hanging in the sky behind them pulsed an ugly bruise purple. Each movement lasted for so short a time that Lindsey could easily convince himself that he had imagined them.
If it even existed, the pause was scarcely more than a ripple in the demons' approach, slowing their progress by not even a full second. Lindsey would even say that they began to speed up at that point, as if they recognized some threat within the tiny figure that the rest of them were remaining oblivious to. The girl wavered and gave in at last to the urge to turn the first step back into a second and then a third, as her mouth shaped words that she was definitely too young to know and an expression of fear began to rewrite her face. A feeling of familiarity twinged within Lindsey's brain, gone too quickly for him to definitively chase it down to its source. When the urge to rush forward returned, he was almost inclined to obey it.
Only 'almost', and in the end the urge proved to be unnecessary. Lindsey was elbowed out of the way hard by the forms of two adolescent boys hell-bent on the same act of suicide as the girl on the street. He caught a brief blur of one head of brown hair and one of black, and was only just realizing that the latter belonged to the same boy that he had stumbled into less than ten minutes earlier before they were both beyond his reach. They were at the girl's side within seconds, the three of them forming a rough triangle as they stood with each other in the street. For a moment Lindsey felt something insistent and familiar tugging deep within his brain. It was gone before he could chase it down and claim it, leaving Lindsey once more in the position of being just one more among the small clusters of people watching and waiting for the first drops of arterial spray to hit the ground.
'They're only kids.' And, damn it, but he really wished that he could find out where the last of those instincts were located, hunt them down, and strangle them once and for all. When his feet began to carry him forward, he made no effort to stop them. The incredulous stares and whispers left behind him rose like a cresting wave.
In the street, the two boys and the girl had joined hands, staring down the demons with an intensity normally reserved for superheroes and saints. Another ripple passed through the approaching demons, large enough this time that it could not be so easily dismissed as the first. A line appeared between Lindsey's eyes, but it did not stay there for long enough to halt him. Well, they already had dragons. He couldn't think of a better excuse to indulge in those parts of himself that still wanted to be a knight.
The ripple that ran through the demon line and made them pause never grew to be larger than that, and the expression on the kids' faces suggested that this was not quite the way that they had been expecting the story to play out. They took a step back as one creature, never releasing the death grip that they maintained on one another's hands. The brown-haired kid's lips began moving to form words that definitely were not going to get him featured on Sesame Street any time soon. Lindsey had to give him points for creativity, and all of them points for nerve. The trio began taking a series of slow, careful steps back, never wavering in the intense, focused expressions upon their faces. Somehow they were missing the fact that the heavily armed and not particularly gregarious looking demons did not even deem them enough of a threat to pick up the pace. Idiots who did not know when to give in and live to fight another day. Lindsey thought he could call them kindred spirits.
It wasn't as if he could say many more flattering things about himself. Lindsey's legs carried him forward into the sunlight and vast, unprotected space of the street without any clear idea of what he was going to do once he got there, outside of a vague sense of getting the kids out of harm's way as soon as possible and dealing with whatever consequences came afterwards as well as he could-familiarity again. There was no time to deal with it at the present time, and Lindsey shoved the thought quickly away into a mental file to be scanned over and analyzed at a time when the potential for dismemberment was not so high.
Whatever nebulous plans might have been trying to come together in Lindsey's mind, he was not fast enough to reach the kids before the demons did. The girl who had been so determined to stop them, though how she planned to accomplish this with the power of her intense glowering Lindsey could not claim to know, merited nothing more than a quick swat across the face from the demon in the lead. A blow that cost him next to nothing in terms of power nevertheless lifted her completely off of the ground. Her body careened back through back through the air in a graceful arc, and if Lindsey had not been there to catch her then that illusion of grace would have ended with a skull-cracking landing upon the pavement. He was able to half save her, the weight of her body carrying them both backwards and to the ground. Lindsey made a surprised noise as the air was momentarily driven from his lungs and felt her hand come down upon his bare arm as she tried to right herself.
Lindsey had been on the move too quickly to pause and think about what the girl's reception to her rescue might have been, but he certainly could never have predicted the one that he got. Her skin had barely made contact with his before she was lurching away in an awkward scramble of limbs, kneeing him once in the gut for his trouble and nearly getting tangled up in her own feet in the process. "Hey!" Lindsey protested, wincing as he struggled to get his breath back. "Easy there." His tone strove to be comforting.
The girl's face was not that of someone who wanted to be comforted. She panted and pushed a few strands of her black hair back from her face, turning her head back and forth quickly to look between Lindsey and the demons. Lindsey did not particularly think that his willingness to protect her from concussion and possible skull fracture warranted the same reaction as the cheerful fellows who had sent her flying through the air in the first place, but as her gaze jumped back and forth between the two of them the shock and disgust written across her face remained the same.
End Part Four