Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Damn it, I've slept in again. Stupid alarm. Why didn't Willow wake me up? Buffy reached for where the dresser was supposed to be, and felt something clipped to her finger come loose.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...

The sound jolted her awake, and she opened her eyes to see that she was in a hospital room. A middle-aged doctor sporting an ill-fitting toupee entered the room. He smiled at her as reached over to the cardiace monitor to shut off the noise.

"I take it from the commotion that you're awake, ma'am. I'm Doctor Roy, how are you feeling?"

Buffy became aware of the wounds upon her body left by whatever had jumped her; stickily-fresh cuts and slashes on her torso, legs and arms. It wasn't that bad for the Slayer, but the doc was probably expecting her to be in pain, so she groaned. "It hurts," she said. "What happened?"

The doctor spoke gently and slowly. "You were mauled by some kind of animal during the storm. You've been unconscious for two hours. Your boyfriend brought you in. You'll be fine though, the wounds look worse than they actually are. You have some visitors who've been waiting pretty anxiously for you to wake up. Would you like to see them?"

"Sure."

Willow, Xander, and Giles, along with Riley and Professor Walsh, were ushered in by the doctor, who then left.

"How are you feeling, Buffy?" asked Giles

"Aside from getting ripped up by one of the freakiest demons I've ever seen, fine." She looked at Riley. "The doctor said you brought me in..."

Riley nodded. "My team was on patrol and we heard a struggle. We got there just as that thing was about to rip your throat out. I nailed it dead-on with my blaster, and it just ran away as though it barely felt the shot. It looks like it got a civilian too. We found the body of a woman-"

"Yeah," Buffy said, and sighed. "I saw her too."

"Can you describe your assailant Buffy?" asked Giles.

"I didn't get a very good look at it, what with the storm and fighting for my life. But I'm thinking... claws, tail, big teeth, and it had a shell, not skin. Oh, and it could run on both two legs and four."

Professor Walsh leaned forward. "Do you think it could be the creature responsible for the death of the vagrant yesterday?"

"It was definitely strong enough…" Buffy said, "but I don't think so. Christian Joe had a hole punched through his chest. This thing struck me as more of the tear-you-to-shreds variety. More clawing than punching."

"So it's something new?" Xander said.

"Think so."

"Then we have at least three new types of hostiles in the area, all appearing in the last week." Professor Walsh began pacing. "One of which has been identified as extraterrestial in origin..."

"Wait, what?" asked Xander.

Walsh sighed at having to explain herself to a civilian. "We used our contacts at NASA to find out if any meteors fell in or around Sunnydale the night the egg was found. There was a meteor that night, and it fell directly in the graveyard. That egg did come from space."

Willow stared. "Wow," she said. "Life from another planet. Proof that we are not alone in the universe. I feel like I should be all philosophical and wondery and in awe, instead of just… scared."

Walsh smiled thinly at Willow. "The unknown is always frightening. That's why I want to find out everything there is to know about that meteor and its creature, as soon as possible. Right now we're trying to figure out how the egg could possibly have arrived on Earth intact. We've been studying it ever since you gave it to me-" (Willow suppressed a snort at that; when she'd asked for the egg, Walsh hadn't given the impression that she was willing to take 'no' for an answer) "-but all our tests show that it could not possibly have survived the heat of re-entry."

"Oh! That reminds me!" Buffy reached for her pocket, only to realize that she'd been changed into a pink hospital gown while she was unconscious. "Darn, it must still be in my clothes. I found something at the place where the meteor landed, but I didn't get a good look at it."

"We'll get it from your clothes," Riley said, "and get it down to the lab with the egg."

"You guys can do that?" Xander asked. "Just grab stuff from the hospital, riffle through the patients clothes and leave with whatever's in their pockets?"

"Well, yeah." Riley looked as though Xander had asked whether the Initiative could tie its shoes. "Most of the time if we need something, no one even notices it's gone before we're done with it."

Walsh cleared her throat pointedly and changed the subject. "The Initiative is running at full gear on this," she assured the Scoobies. "There is a great deal of interest in these events; from some very important people. Anything you do to assist us will be appreciated." As long as you stay out of our way, she thought.

"The pattern suggests mutation..." Giles said, cleaning his glasses. "A number of individual creatures land on Earth, and begin mutating into different forms to survive in the new environment. The first one we encountered, the one that attacked me, failed to adapt well and died quickly. But the other two seem to be much larger and more violent... and are doing quite well for themselves."

"But according to our sources, the meteor that Buffy encountered was the only one which fell anywhere even close to Sunnydale all week," Walsh mused. "Where could the other two hostiles have come from?"

"Unfortunately we have little way of knowing…" Giles replied. "Buffy, do you think you could slow your recovery for a while, long enough to have a look in the morgue? No one has come to claim Christian Joe's body yet, and I think it would be a good idea to find out more about what happened to him."

Walsh nodded. "That's good. It saves the Initiative the trouble of examining it ourselves. I'll arrange for a full forensics kit to be smuggled into your room." She looked dubiously at Buffy, the young girl in a pink hospital gown who was struggling with basic psychology. "With instructions."

This time it was Buffy who smiled thinly. "I don't think I'll need that. Don't worry, I've had a lot of experience picking up clues from dead bodies."

Walsh nodded, but didn't look happy. She was beginning to realize that the civilians were too involved in whatever was happening here for her to easily control them or shut them out.

Willow spoke up. "After you're done that, you should talk to your Mom. I called her to tell her what happened, and she was really worried."

Riley took Buffy's hand. "You get well. We'll be trying to pick up the thing's trail, but I'll bet the storm's washed out any traces."

She smiled. "Okay." He kissed her, and they all left as she drifted off to sleep.

Buffy's eyes snapped open a few hours later. The pain in her body was gone, replaced by an extreme sense of urgency. She recognized the feeling; her Slayer senses were telling her that she was out of time, that something bad was about to happen, that she had to get to the bottom of this now. She sat up and winced. Okay, maybe she wasn't all better. She'd deal. She swung her legs off the bed and stood. As she did, something came off her wrist.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEE...

"Oh, shut up!" She switched off the machine and headed for the morgue.

Buffy hadn't been asleep that long; it was still late in the night, and few of the hospital staff were in the halls. Buffy easily got to the morgue without being spotted, and wrenched off the lock as quietly as possible. Within, the still shrouded figures of Sunnydale's dead lay on cold metal tables. Buffy shivered, both from the chill of the morgue and the creep-factor. There were a lot of tables, and a lot of shrouds.

She started looking for Christian Joe's body, carefully lifting the sheets of bodies that seemed his size. After a car accident victim and an unfortunate demon snack, the Slayer found him. Lifting up the third sheet revealed Christian Joe's unshaven face, locked by rigor mortis into an expression of intense agony. Livid red scars crisscrossed his face, disfiguring him still further… Where have I seen those scars before? Buffy thought. No, not those scars, but something like them… She pulled back the sheet until she saw the wound that had killed him. She gasped. "Oh God."

Buffy rushed out of the morgue, barely remembering to put the sheet back where it was, and called Giles at the first phone she saw. "Giles? You there?"

"I'm here Buffy." Giles noted the urgency in Buffy's voice. "Did you find something?"

"I've been an idiot, Giles. When Jonathan told me that Joe had died from a hole in his chest, I assumed that the hole had been punched or stabbed or something. I even saw the blood pattern and thought something was off but couldn't put my finger on it. But now I get it- it looked like blood had been sprayed all over the place, but if the hole had been punched it would have just dripped around the body. I just saw Joe's body, and that hole wasn't punched into him. We aren't looking for another big creature Giles."

Giles. Buffy suddenly realized something else. Why the scars had looked familiar.

"Oh," she said. "Oh. Giles, it wasn't just coincidence that the thing that attacked you just happened to be found dead. That night it attacked you and you called us all over- I remember noticing red lines on your face where it had grabbed you. Joe had scars in the exact same pattern on his face, except a lot worse because it got such a good grip on him. Joe got jumped by the same thing you did."

"Buffy?" Giles asked. "Please, what are you getting at?"

"Giles, the wound that killed Christian Joes is an exit wound."

"Y-You mean that Joe was.. impaled, from behind?"

"No. All this time we thought Joe was killed by a wound made by a creature, something outside his body. But now I think the crawling thing got him after it escaped your house. It climbed onto his face and put something inside Joe… and then that something came out."

A/N: I have no idea whether my depiction of hospital procedures and equipment here is accurate, so please let me know if you can.