Animatus
Notes: Thanks for the reviews. Keep them coming. I can always use the inspiration.
Previously:
"Every once in a while, we'll hear something…like someone scurrying between buildings. We had a radio for a while. The batteries stopped working, but we heard someone telling people to go to the Bronze. Apparently, people were holed up there. I don't know if they still are, or if they've gotten them," Joyce explained, nodding her head towards the edge of the roof, where below, the zombies were gathering.
Faith leaned back in her chair thoughtfully, allowing all of the information that she had been given to settle. Though she still had many questions, one burned through her mind, repeating over and over in an endless loop. Finally, looking up at Joyce, she spoke. "Where's Buffy?"
Chapter Two: The Silence in the Night:
Joyce sat silently for a long time. At first, Faith thought that the older woman had not heard her question. But after a time, Faith began to realize that Joyce was struggling to remain composed and, perhaps, struggling to find the answer. With the departure of the sun, the sky was beginning to turn dark blue. However, Faith could still see easily her new comrades' faces in the dim of twilight. Joyce looked thoughtful, but disturbed. Liz was watching the two women impassively; perhaps, she was trying to determine what was going on between them. Finally, the Slayer's mother sighed, a heavy sound that seemed to speak of sadness and loss. "I don't know," Joyce said softly. Faith glanced up at her and saw her eyes shimmering the night, filled with unshed tears.
"You don't know?" Faith asked resignedly as Joyce shook her head.
"She went to U.C. Sunnydale, you know," Joyce said proudly.
Faith smiled. "No," she replied, "I didn't know that."
"Oh, that's right," Joyce remembered. "She hadn't made the decision yet when…well," she smiled haltingly, "that's where she decided to go."
"She wasn't living with you anymore," Faith stated, realizing suddenly how Joyce had lost track of her daughter when the zombies had attacked.
"No," Joyce said, shaking her head, "she wasn't. She was living at the dorms. She was there, of course, the morning of the…attack."
"Or invasion," Liz interrupted. "Either way you want to word it."
"I'm still not sure how to describe it," Joyce explained. "It all just seems so unreal. Anyway, I never heard from her. She could still be there, or she could be at the Bronze – any number of places, really," Joyce sighed. "Or she could have been killed by one of them. She could be one of them."
"No," Faith shook her head. "She's not one of them. And she not dead either."
"How do you know?" Joyce asked hopefully.
"I just know," Faith answered softly. "Buffy and I, we have a…connection. I don't know how to explain it. It's just always there; this humming in the back of my mind. Whenever she's around, it gets louder, like it's trying to tell me something that I don't quite understand. It's there right now. I can feel her and I know that she's alive…somewhere."
Joyce exhaled deeply. "I can't tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that," she said, wiping away a tear that had escaped from her eye.
"So," Faith said, changing the subject of their conversation, "how long do they go on like that?" Silence fell between the three women as they listened to the moaning and wailing of the zombies stumbling up and down Main Street.
"All night," Liz replied wearily. "They don't stop until an hour or so before sunrise."
"Then they all disappear?" Faith asked.
"Yeah," Liz answered. "I don't where they go. I guess maybe they hide out in the abandoned buildings. I don't know why they don't like the sun though."
"Evil things rarely do," Faith whispered under her breath. Joyce arched her eyebrow and shot Faith a look, apparently having heard her comment, though Liz seemed oblivious.
"And you've both been up here for two weeks?" Faith asked, trying to sort through all of the troubling and unbelievable information crowded in her mind.
"Just about," Joyce nodded.
"What have you been living on?" Faith questioned.
"Beef jerky, bottled water, and crackers," Liz answered, then elaborated upon seeing Faith's confused look. "My dad had some things in his office, not much, mind you, but it's been enough to hold us over."
"We're starting to run out, though," Joyce added.
"I've got some food with me," Faith said, offering them her backpack. "Just a couple of cans of fruit and meat. I found them in the hospital cafeteria."
"You were in the hospital?" Liz asked, accepting the backpack. She removed the cans of food and handed it back to Faith. Then she placed them next to a neat stack of other items sitting between her and Joyce's chairs.
"Yeah," Faith said, looking down at her hands. She could feel the burn of Joyce's eyes on her face, searching for answers to the questions to which she had yet to give words. "I was in a coma."
"For how long?" Liz asked, oblivious to the silent interaction occurring between the two other women.
"Eight months," Faith replied, finally looking up. She met Joyce's eyes, expecting to find recrimination, but finding instead only sorrow and regret. Liz whistled lowly.
"That's a long time. So when you fell asleep, the world was normal, and when you woke up, everything had gone to hell," Liz stated. "That had to be rough."
"It was a little confusing at first," Faith admitted.
"How'd you get into the coma?" Liz asked curiously, wanting to know more about the dark haired girl sitting across from her.
"I fell off of a roof," Faith answered. Though her memory of the night, eight months ago, when Buffy had shown up at her apartment, with the knife that Mayor had given the dark haired girl as a present, was foggy at best, she was starting to put together all of the pieces. She remembered shooting Angel with an arrow tipped in poison. Buffy had been angry with her for that, but Faith remembered her saying something about a cure, of which she had been unaware. The specifics of their conversation, however, were lost to her memory.
"Faith," Joyce started, but the younger girl shook her head.
"Don't," she said forcefully. "It's alright."
"It's not alright," Joyce tried again. "We should have tried harder."
"Tried harder to do what? Stop me? Save me?" Faith asked edgily. Pausing before she lost control of her temper, she took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "Don't you understand?" She asked softly. "I was beyond all of that. You couldn't have helped me if you tried."
"I take it you two already know each other?" Liz asked, glancing back and forth between the two women, who were watching each other tensely. "And I'm assuming that you didn't have too many good times."
"It's complicated," Joyce answered.
"I did some things," Faith said, by way of explanation, "things that I shouldn't have done. Things that I regret," she added, allowing her eyes, once again, to meet the older woman's.
"I believe that," Joyce nodded slowly. "There's something different about you now – something different in your eyes." Faith looked down self-consciously. "You've changed – for the better, I think. You seem…calmer."
"I just understand things better now," Faith explained. Her words reminded her of her resolve to destroy whatever had caused the carnage in Sunnydale. She knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to kill all of the zombies. For all that she knew, she, Liz, and Joyce were the only three humans left in town, if not the world. But she had to figure out a plan.
"What're you thinking?" Joyce asked warily, seeing a certain light enter Faith's eyes that had always entered her daughter's eyes when she was thinking about slaying.
"How much ammo do you have?" Faith asked Liz. The younger girl shrugged.
"My dad didn't have a big inventory of guns, just a couple of shotguns and some handguns. All of the ammo he had was on display. He didn't have anything in the back," she answered.
"What about other weapons?" Faith questioned further.
"He had some knives. Some paintball guns. I think he may have even had a couple of crossbows too," she replied.
"Have you tried shooting them?" Faith asked, nodding towards the sound of the groaning zombies surrounding the front of the store.
Liz nodded. "The only place that seems to take them down is the head," she replied, her voice stained with frustration. "You can shoot them in the heart, if you want, but it does no good. I haven't taken down too many of them though."
"Not a good shot?" Faith asked.
Liz chuckled and smiled. "No, I'm great with the gun," she said confidently. "My dad and I used to go hunting all the time. I just don't see the point."
"What do you mean?" Faith questioned confusedly.
"Well, you shoot one, another one takes its place. It's like they never go away. I could sit on this roof all night and shoot as many of them as I had ammunition to shoot, but when I was all spent, they would still be down there," Liz answered despairingly.
"There's too many of them," Faith muttered.
"It's the whole damn town," Liz amended.
"Is it?" Faith asked, looking up at her. "I mean, did this just happen here, or did it happen everywhere?"
"We don't know," Joyce answered. "As soon as it happened, all of the radio stations shut off. As you can see," she said, motioning towards the darkened town, "there's no power either. We have no way of getting any news. It could have happened everywhere, or it could just be us. We don't know."
Faith looked out over the town of Sunnydale from the roof of the sporting goods store. Everything was black. She could now only vaguely see the faces of her comrades in the moonlight, but everything else was lost to her. The sky had turned black. "There's not a single light anywhere," Faith muttered in disbelief, just realizing how dark it was outside.
"Not a single light," Joyce nodded. "Not a single sound, save for them."
Faith shivered as the night closed oppressively around her. She had never been bothered by the dark as a child. Often, she had spent her nights outside, back when she had lived in Boston, to avoid her mother. But night was never really night in the city. The city was always lit up like a blazing fire. However, as she sat, with the inky darkness sprawled out before her, she found herself starting to panic again. She almost wished that Buffy had killed her, or that she had never awoken from her coma. "Are you okay?" Joyce asked, leaning forward, and cautiously touching Faith's knee.
She nearly jumped out of her skin, until she realized that it was Joyce touching her, and not some zombie with a decaying face and a hunger for flesh. "I'm fine," she said, exhaling sharply. "I just hadn't noticed how dark it was before."
"You'll get used to it," Joyce promised. "It seems like it's closing in around you at first," she said, regarding the night, "but, after a while, it becomes a comfort."
"It's better not to be able to see everything going on around you," Liz added.
"I don't know about you girls, but I'm getting tired," Joyce stated, yawning suddenly.
"I'll take the watch," Liz volunteered.
"No, I'll take it," Faith said hastily. "If you don't mind," she added. "I'm not gonna be able to sleep anyway." Liz nodded and handed her the shotgun.
"If anything tries to get up here, shoot it," Liz said. "Shoot first, worry about whether it's really alive later. There's more ammo in the bucket," she added, pointing to a bucket several feet away. Next to the bucket, two sleeping bags were spread. To these, Joyce and Liz stumbled through the dark. Faith watched them for several long moments before she moved her chair closer to the edge of the rooftop and peered down at the street below, which was teeming with zombies.
For a while, Faith sat in silence, her mind resting, and all thoughts evading her. She listened the constant moaning of the zombies, which had initially frightened her, but had become background noise to the nothingness that otherwise permeated the town. The warm air lay thick and heavy upon her. She wondered if the zombies knew that they were above them; if that was why they were pacing up and down the street, waiting for the only three living souls left to make a mistake upon which they could capitalize. She wondered too how many other people were out there, terrified and alone. Liz and Joyce were fortunate enough to have weapons. Faith imagined that most people did not have such luck.
Though her Slayer senses were screaming at her to fight the zombies, or to do anything to try to stop them, she felt nothing else pricking at the back of her mind. Before, whenever she had stepped out into the night in Sunnydale, she could feel vampires everywhere. The town had been crawling with them. Now, however, she could not feel a single vampire, or any other kind of demon. She wondered if the zombies had driven them away; the population had been mostly annihilated by the walking dead, leaving little upon which the vampires and other demons could feed. Despite the endless, circular wandering of her mind, one thought stood out in particular. Zombies did not appear from nowhere; something, or someone, had brought them to Sunnydale.
Perhaps if she could find whoever, or whatever, had brought them, she could find a way to stop them. But she never had been good making plans. Buffy and her friends seemed to know what to do in any situation. Faith, on the other hand, often found herself acting first, and thinking later. Her mode of operation often caused trouble for her, but she had enjoyed the rush of adrenaline that she had gained from walking blind into dangerous situations. Her Watcher had always disapproved of her methods. Kate had been the planner, much like Giles had been for Buffy. The British woman had been far more adept at creating spontaneous strategies, as she and Faith had wandered through some Boston sewer on their way to a nest of vampires with nothing more than a couple of stakes and hope. Faith smiled, remembering how squeamish Kate had been about the rather large rats with red beady eyes that had roamed freely underneath the streets of the city.
Though Faith was eager to explore the streets of Sunnydale during the day, when the zombies apparently disappeared, she knew that she also had the responsibility to protect the two women sleeping several feet away. She could not leave them behind, but she did not know if they would be as eager to leave the safety of the roof as she. Faith needed answers. She wanted to find out if there were other survivors similarly hole up on rooftops or in buildings. But more importantly, she knew that Buffy was alive. She could feel it with every fiber of her being. She desperately wanted to find the blonde Slayer, if only just to see her face again. Faith was not certain how Buffy would react to seeing her again, however. She imagined that the older girl would be quite angry, if not afraid, and would, perhaps, try to harm her. Joyce had been able to see the change in the former rogue Slayer, but Buffy had never been as astute. Though her relationship with Buffy always had been volatile at best, she intrinsically needed to be near the blonde Slayer, though she did not understand why. She felt something when she was around Buffy, some unidentifiable emotion, that caused her heart to beat faster and her mind to turn to mush.
Faith sighed and shifted in her chair. It was going to be an exasperating night, so long as her mind continued to dredge up memories and feelings that she could not reconcile. The shotgun lay heavily in her lap. Though she wanted nothing more than a few moments of peace, her mind was racing with possibilities, plans, and ideas. However, it was also racing with fragments of painful images, regrets, and fears. The moaning of the zombies continued as the night wore on, growing darker and darker. Clouds overtook the moon and blotted out the stars. A chill wind picked up, blowing through Faith's hair, and relieving the heat that had been burdening her. She found herself growing anxious again, with only the sound of the zombies to accompany her. Leaning forward in her chair, she stared out into the pitch black of the night, wondering if she would ever find peace again, wondering if she had ever known peace, or if death would be her only solace.