Spike's body had been cold for centuries, save for the moments during and afterwards a feeding. But he noticed that he was colder than usual as he awoke- and not just because he was buck naked. Not moving, not opening his eyes lest he alert an enemy to his consciousness, he tried to remember what had happened, what was going on.

The last thing he remembered after that thing had climbed onto his face was that he'd been in Hell, or at least a good imitation. There'd been pain, blindness, and, most disturbingly, he'd been breathing. None of those things- including the facehugger, thank God- were present now except the pain, and that had been reduced to a dull ache. He also seemed to be naked, but covered in something soft. He risked opening his eyes.

He was under a sheet. After listening to make sure he was alone, he tore it off and looked at where he was.

It was a morgue.

He was on a metal table, surrounded by fellow stiffs, covered in sheets. Spike took a look at his nude body, and saw a hideous scar running down the left side of his neck and onto his shoulder. He hoped to God it wasn't permanent. For some reason, vampires healed better than humans despite them being walking corpses. But some injuries, like the sword scar above his eye, remained. Spike didn't want this ugly line of tortured flesh to be one of them. It would wreak havoc with his sex appeal.

Then he felt a twinge in his face, reached up to feel it, and realized his shoulder was the least of his worries. His fingers traced and felt strange, grotesque marks. The gripping, sucker-covered legs of the thing had left deep lines and circles all over his face. A rage began to build in Spike, which soon turned to action.

First thing to do would be to get his clothes back. Then he'd get out of here, but not before he took a look at whatever reports docs had to fill out whenever a corpse rolled in. He needed to know what the hell had happened to him.

There was a work desk on the other side of the room, near the entrance. Moving quietly, Spike went over to it and started rifling through files.

Here he was: John Doe, brought in at three-thirty last night. He checked a clock on the wall and saw that it was now three in the afternoon. Damn. Unless it was real cloudy today, or he caught a lucky break, he was going to be stuck in this hospital for a while.

The report said he'd been found lying on the road by a passing motorist. At first the driver had thought he'd been hit by a car, but then he'd seen an 'unidentified creature' on Spike's face, and ten minutes later, 'John Doe' was in an ambulance. The report noted that the creature appeared to be 'trying to facilitate respiration for the body', and that when the paramedics had attempted to cut it off so they could try to revive him, 'the specimen exuded an extremely powerful acid from the cut which lacerated the body's neck and left shoulder, and did considerable damage to the stretcher and the ambulance itself. The ambulance is no longer serviceable, and was lucky to reach the hospital before breaking down.'

Spike laughed as he realized what his stint in 'hell' had really been. The alien had been trying to keep its host alive (making him breath) and had spurted acid when the meds had cut it (hence the pain and the scar). The acid had gone on to damage the ambulance and equipment (frantic voices of the paramedics). All this had happened while the ambulance was en route to the hospital (sensation of movement). Note to self, he thought, next time, rule out the mundane before getting ready for eternal damnation.

He went on to read that a few hours ago, the creature had mysteriously shriveled up, died, and fallen off his face. It was currently being kept for further study.

Then he read the last part of the report. 'Full autopsy scheduled for six o' clock tonight.'

Bullocks!

He sure he was able to get out of here by then. He wasn't letting anything put a hole in his chest, chip or no chip.

"What do you think, Professor?" Forrest asked. Walsh regarded Ravnon's portable lab with interest. It wasn't much to look at; a low rectangle made out of prefabricated walls and painted the drabbest olive green imaginable. But she'd seen the equipment inside, and had to admit Traeten's people had done a remarkable job. The alien had been moved there without incident, and was now safely contained inside a cell.

"It's impressive, all right," she said. "Ravnon's learned a lot from us, and there's a very passable scientific facility in there. The security on the cell is simple, but strong enough to hold the alien. Considering that Traeten had it disassembled, flown here, and rebuilt all in a matter of hours, I must say they've done a hell of a job getting it all right. There's no chance of anyone stumbling across it here either." 'Here' was a secluded backwoods area a few miles from the Initiative where no one ever came. "I'm less impressed with the personnel though. Doctors Cottle and Frasier might be competent by civilian standards, but I have doubts as to their extraterrestrial expertise. And the security personnel…"

Forrest snorted derisively at the mention of the swaggering men with Uzi submachine guns who were expected to contain one of the most dangerous creatures the Initative had ever seen. "Mercenaries. Pure and simple. The big guy might be tough, but the others? I bet they'll run the second the alien makes trouble. They probably only took this job because they like playing with big guns- probably to compensate for some-"

"Satifactory, Professor?" Traeten appeared behind them, smiling even more than usual. Walsh forced one of her own.

"Completely. Your company's contribution to this matter is most valuable." Now, she prayed, if only he treats it like an enemy and not a walking oil field, we're in business. She was confident that, barring catastrophe, this move would free up enough troops to properly eliminate the alien infestation taking root in the town. Walsh was sure Ravnon's personnel could hold onto the alien for at least that long, and once it was over, the specimen would retake its rightful place within the Initiative's laboratories, where its astonishing body's secrets would be extracted, studied, and utilized for the good of the U.S. military in general, and project 314 in particular.

Professor Walsh smiled as Traeten prattled on beside her. This had been an ugly mess, but once done, the results of it would create a thing of perfect beauty.

Willow decided that she and her computer were having a good day. First, she'd taken a look at the police schedules, and determined that there had been no patrols anywhere near Weatherly Park last night. She'd also taken a look at their radio records, and noted that no constable had reported any 'possible terrorist activity'. Either that police officer's radio had been broken, or something very strange had been going on that night.

Then there was the Exploratory Expeditions Corporation, who's security had been tougher than she'd expected. But she knew that resource-finding expeditions were an extremely competitive field, and that any company involved would protect its assets even if it wasn't fronting for a shadowy government contractor. Which EEC almost certainly was. It's toughest security programs were guarding the company's financial records. And once Willow broke through, she saw that EEC's money didn't come from customers for resources. Instead, they seemed to be getting an awful lot of money from unidentified companies and donors who wanted EEC to test experimental equipment for them. A lot of this equipment seemed to use the same components and principles as the Initiative's high-tech toys. But the clincher came when she looked at EEC's expeditions over the last few years. While there were few details, there was a record of an exploration in the Mongolian desert which had been cut short very abruptly around the time the tabloid article claimed Ravnon's team had been massacred by an alien menace.

This was good enough to fit a theory around. Exploratory Expeditions was Ravnon's way of testing some of the products it developed thanks to its partnership with the military's dark corners, and maybe turning the occasional profit if the company actually fulfilled its stated purpose of finding new resources. To make money while staying in the shadows, Ravnon probably maintained several of these dummy corporations, in order to sell its products and do other things a corporation couldn't easily do in secret. Willow knew it wouldn't stand up in any sort of court, but her friends were definitely going to be interested.

Despite two centuries worth of practice at skulking about, it had taken Spike longer than expected to accomplish his goals within the hospital. Even getting dressed had been difficult; Sunnydale's hospitals tended to be quite busy, especially the morgue.

In addition to grabbing his clothes and the medical report, Spike had taken the liberty of shredding whatever records he'd found which said he'd ever been inside the hospital. While it would be a lark to be 'the corpse that vanished', he'd both been there and done that, and it suited his interests to lie low while he planned his next move. He'd also swiped the remains of the facehugger. He wanted to know more about whatever had hurt him. Maybe there was an opportunity for some ironic revenge against the Slayer hidden in the odd creature's workings. After all, this was all her fault. Somehow.

It was close to evening, but the sun was still infuriatingly high in the sky, and Spike hadn't spotted an opportunity to slip out of the hospital without being incinerated. He hadn't been able to find a convenient access to the sewer either, so it looked like he was going to be stuck here for a couple more hours. He was considering sneaking into the X-ray room and getting a look at his chest while he waited.. He'd been having strange twinges in his torso ever since he'd woken up, and didn't want any nasty surpr-

SMACK!

It was like being punched. Hard. From inside his chest. Spike doubled over in an entirely new and awful kind of pain, crying out as he felt his inmost organs shifting, being pushed around his own body by something cold and foreign, felt his chest beginning to swell and expand in a horrifically unnatural way. Then it came again. And again...

Nurse Ratched was taking her evening break in the hospital's cafeteria. She was scheduled to help perform an autopsy soon, and while she knew that snacking before such an operation wasn't exactly a good idea, she was hungry, dammit. Besides while she was in here eating she wasn't getting nagged constantly by Doctor Roy. So she'd overreacted a couple times. So what?

"For the love of bloody God, someone help me! Help mEAAAAAARRRRR-"

Ratched screamed as the subject of her scheduled autopsy suddenly burst into the cafeteria, his eyes bulging, his jaws stretched wide as he roared in unholy pain. She screamed again as he tore open his shirt, clawing at his own chest, which was beginning to show a bulging lump in the centre, looking a lot like a head…

He howled, and toppled backwards onto a table, writhing and thrashing. Blood began oozing, then spurting from his chest, and he looked at his own body with utter horror as he felt something inside him push.

"NonnonononoPleasebloodyHellNO-"

The thing inside him didn't listen. Muscles tore, organs collapsed, skin split, blood sprayed, and Spike's chest exploded. Screams filled his ears; his own, the humans around him, and an unholy screech, the birth cry of the creature which had just leapt from the red ruins of what had once been his chest.

His last thought as he mercifully lost consciousness was that he'd been wrong, and this really was Hell.