He was not having a good night.

Spike the vampire, known to history as "William the Bloody", and also perfectly willing to answer to "AAAAAAARRRRRGGHHHHchoke-gurgle", had thought he would be spending that idiotic holiday known to him as a lad as All-Hallow's Eve and here in the colonies as Halloween the same as he had ever done in his unlife. He would disappear into his lair, usually with a victim or two to pass the time improving his torturing skills, and come out only when the final piece of candy corn had been handed out and the last pumpkin on the front steps of the houses had been kicked into orange chunks.

The vampire had the same feelings of disgust and detestation towards the festival on the last day of October as did Ebenezer Scrooge had towards Christmas in the first half of Charles Dicken's classic story. Spike always hoped when reading that tale that at the narrative's ending, the merchant would find his balls, tell the ghosts to get stuffed, and go back to his wonderful ways of miserliness, customer-cheating, society-hating, and grinding his employees' faces into the muck. Besides, Tiny Tim always made Spike want to snack on that little sod's neck.

Tonight, Spike had intended to ignore what was happening outside on the streets of Sunnydale, staying in his crypt to go over his new plan to kill the Slayer, lay waste to the entire town, and bring fire and blood to the world. The usual, right, mate?

Plus, he was a little concerned about Drusilla. Instead of her normal maniac babbling about the stars and the moon, Miss Edith, and "buy low, sell high", the third member of the team of vampires that had won the title of the Scourge of Europe had for the last week or so been sitting slumped in a chair in a corner, staring blankly at the moldy crypt walls. Not a single peep out of her, which was making Spike really nervous. She was either planning an atrocity unmatched in a millennium, or she was going to go shopping. Serious worries, either way.

Spike had been thoughtfully reading the latest ACME(copyrighted) Catalogue for Villains, Mad Scientists and The Just Misunderstood If A Jury Will Actually Buy That when the event had happened. He'd been startled out of his careful consideration of the latest offering in the catalogue, a double pit-trap. Reading the description of one pit dug and clumsily camouflaged for a hero to stand in front of it, snicker at the bad guy's idiocy, and then walking around it to fall into the second, perfectly camouflaged pit-trap had caused Spike to start excitedly jotting down notes at his worktable. Considering how much peroxide the Slayer used in her hair, the fumes of those chemicals surely must have killed off enough brain cells for this latest scheme to actually work.

An instant later, Spike was on his feet, his body tingling as it had never done since he'd had a demon take it over, as the immense wave of mystical energy finished passing through the crypt.

"Bloody hell, what was THAT!?" Spike shook his head, ignoring the pen driven halfway through the tabletop. Instead, he spun around to look at Drusilla, who hadn't moved the slightest. Frowning, Spike moved closer and stopped in front of her, bending down to look her in the eyes. There was nothing there, not the madness of a gentle girl who'd seen her entire world murdered in front of her, not the rage of the demon that had possessed her body and mind, not the occasional softness that had enslaved Spike into her protector and lover. Her eyes were totally blank.

A chill went down the male vampire's spine as he stood up, saying uncertainly, "Look, love, I'm going to pop outside for a minute, see what's going on. You….just stay there, all right?" Spike backed up, worriedly watching Drusilla as she showed no sign whatever that she had heard or paid attention to him. Muttering under his breath, the vampire left the crypt, and standing in the graveyard, he looked towards the main lights of the town of Sunnydale.

Listening to the screams in the night coming from there, and sniffing the blood and terror floating through the air, Spike slowly smiled. "Now, THIS will get Drusilla out of her funk!"

Wrong.

Some time later, Spike was barely keeping his temper. He'd basically dragged Drusilla out of the crypt to take her to the streets of Sunnydale, and she'd gradually come to life, beginning to stumble along while she'd been held up by his arm, and to start talking again. Unfortunately, she'd begun a truly major whingeing, moaning and babbling like he'd never heard her do before.

"Spike, the stars, the stars, all gone in chaos, little kitten in metal, the man from your abode took his riches, bad, bad man, kitten in metal and wheels, riding the streets, knight against the dark, standing for friends at home, high lady low wits, the Red Ghost, dark-haired sharp tongue, Slayer gone, gone, gone---"

"WHAT!" Spike had been listening with only half an ear, otherwise gleefully watching the pandemonium and uproar throughout the town, as people followed the dictates from the costumes they had been wearing and others reacting to this. The pair of vampires had by then wandered into an otherwise deserted retail street, with all the shops now closed, but shaded in the daylight hours by the massive century-old oaks lining the street, standing tall in gaps cut in the sidewalks.

The sudden mention of the Slayer caught Spike's attention, as he whirled around to grab Drusilla by her shoulders and start shaking her.

"What about the Slayer, love? Did she leave Sunnydale? She sure would've been running around here with all this mess, trying to act like a hero. We would've seen her….Dru, you said she was gone…. Bleedin' hell, do you mean gone, as in dead? Dru, talk to me!"

At the last, Drusilla tore herself out of Spike's grip and stood before the vampire, her face now totally serious and looking him full in the face, as she slowly and intensely said, "They will be the end of us, Spike, our deaths by the colors, colors, and the flowers."

Right. That was IT.

Spike roared in a voice that made the shop windows shiver. "WE'RE BLEEDIN' VAMPIRES IN EVERY SENSE OF THAT ADJECTIVE! WE DON'T GET KILLED BY SODDIN' COLORS AND FLOWERS!"

Ominous headlights came on behind the two vampires.

As a car's engine roared to full power and its wheels shriekingly spun against the asphalt for a few moments before they caught and the vehicle raced towards the vampires at an extreme velocity, Spike stood stunned in the street as the headlights came nearer, with the demon squinting at the lights as he desperately tried to see who was about to run them down.

The blonde vampire finally did the sensible thing when the car was just a hundred feet from them and rapidly cutting the distance, as he dived out of the path of the automobile while yelling at the same time, "DRU, RUN FOR IT!"

Hitting the ground twenty feet away and rolling while getting to his feet, Spike froze as he heard with horror the sickening sound of several tons of metal colliding with a hundred pounds of undead flesh. Snapping his head around, the vampire disbelievingly watched as Drusilla was launched into the air, to land with bone-shattering force thirty yards down the street.

Now paralyzed by shock, Spike watched as the body of his lover lying on the ground convulsed in agony over her smashed skeleton and other injuries. Even for a vampire, there were limits to what their demon-controlled bodies could take, and Drusilla was right at the point when her existence could now truly end.

The only part of Spike's own body that seemed capable of moving was his head, as he turned it towards the car that had done this. It had skidded to a stop at the side of the street, fifty feet from where it had hit Dru, spinning around right after the impact, so that the front of what Spike absently recognized as a van was pointing right at the vampire.

The van had not escaped injury, either. The entire front windshield had shattered, crazed with cracks that frosted every inch of the glass that looked as it would fall out any second in a million pieces. Below this, the middle of the van's nose was caved in by a massive dent that had fractured the radiator grille and sent steam hissing from ruptured water hoses. Both of the van's headlights were now off, as one was shattered, while the other headlight dangled limply by an electrical cable from the front of the car.

Taking a slow step forward, Spike heard Dru's whimpering and cast a despairing glance towards his lover. Right after that, a very peculiar noise was heard by the vampires. It sounded like…."Plink!"

Spike blinked, and looked at where the noise had come from. His jaw promptly dropped open in utter astonishment. The front windshield of the van that had hit Dru was….repairing itself.

From the right side of the van toward the left side from where Spike was dazedly watching, the glass was rippling outwards in waves just like that seen in a puddle after tossing in a rock. As the glass settled back, the cracks vanished, leaving the glass once again clear and undamaged. It took only a few seconds for the entire front windshield to look as good as new.

Deeper "Plunks!" and "Sprongs!" resounded from lower down the front of the van. The body-shaped dent there now began to disappear as the caved-in metal and chrome of the radiator grille pushed out into their original appearance, the pieces fitting back together and all damage vanishing. The puffs of steam from the burst water hoses dissipated and never returned. Spike was quite sure that these had also been repaired.

"Ping!" The left shattered headlight suddenly became intact and the bulb flickered on, to once again become bright. The next sound Spike heard was exactly like that produced by someone in an Italian restaurant inhaling a triple-thick strand of spaghetti, as his bulging eyes watched the dangling right headlight be drawn back into its original position, and then joined its brother light into illuminating the befuddled vampire watching all this.

For a few moments, the van just remained there, in perfect shape as it was the day it rolled off the assembly line. Then, its headlights blazed into high beams, making Spike flinch from the brightness, and its engine roared back into life, as the van shot forward.

Spike dodged ten feet to the left without thinking, sending him further away from the van and ready for more evasive maneuvers, only to suddenly realize in horror that he wasn't the van's target.

The van skidded in a 180-degree turn, laying down rubber, and headed directly for Drusilla.

"NOOOOO!!" screamed Spike, dashing after the van with his full vampiric speed.

On the ground in her agony, Drusilla still noticed the increasing illumination of the van racing towards her. Her head tilted to watch what was coming, her eyes squinting in the bright light, and a tender smile appeared on the girl's beautiful face, as she whispered her final word on earth. "Kitten."

Drusilla the vampire, the dewy-eyed, closed these and a look of peace appeared on her features at the last.

The van skidded to an abrupt stop just fifty feet after its right front wheel had run over and crushed the woman's skull, and immediately headed backwards at its full speed, the breeze of its passage blowing away a small heap of ashes on the street.

Spike was now well past rage or fury and into an absolute state of maniac frenzy as he sprinted towards the van driving right at him in a straight line despite doing it in reverse. Judging it exactly, he jumped right at the van's rear double doors and smashed into them, caving in one and ripping open the other with his bare hands, to enter the back of the van, crouched over, claws and fangs ready to tear into shreds…. nobody?

Ignoring the fact the van was still racing backwards at well past the speed limit, and his own berserker mood, Spike was still flummoxed by the empty driver's seat and the steering wheel turning on its own. This object suddenly made a quick jerk to the left, sending Spike crashing into the van's side, and the van's engine roared much louder, as the vehicle achieved its maximum speed.

Still in a crouch, Spike twisted around to look out past the van door he'd torn open. In the car's hellish illumination of the intermixed rear and brake lights blazing away, the yard-wide tree trunk of the majestic oak at the side of the street, now just a few feet away from the back of the van about to collide with it, looked as if it had been painted with blood.

A few minutes later, Spike finally felt the bones of his neck heal, allowing him to turn his head. That sudden movement only increased the agony in the rest of his entire body that had come hurtling out of the rear of the van as if he'd been shot out of a cannon, to smash directly into the tree right after the van's collision with that fine specimen of a Quercus kelloggii, also known as the California black oak.

Groaning in pain from all his broken bones, organ damage, missing teeth, and numerous splinters in his face, Spike felt the haze of his hurts momentarily lift from his brain for him to finally take notice of his surroundings.

Which, at this point, included the van.

About twenty feet from him, Spike blearily noticed the inert van resting in the street was in really bad shape. About all of the rear half of the vehicle was totally destroyed in a twisted wreck of misshapen metal, with the roof, sides, and rear axle at that point all having been rammed back toward the front. That part of the van wasn't in that much better shape, with the left front wheel Spike could see being completely flat, the driver's door dangling open from just one hinge, and the front windshield again completely destroyed.

"Plink!"

Spike's eyes that had closed for a few seconds opened again, wide with terror, and he swiveled them to watch something he'd seen before. The front windshield of the van was once again in perfect repair, as clear as….well, glass.

"Clink!" "Puuuuffff!"

The driver's door shifted up into the proper position and closed. The van rocked and lifted, as the flat front left fire re-inflated.

Spike looked around wildly as well as his destroyed body permitted. A flare of hope came into his mind as his attention was caught by what he saw a few yards up the street, where there was a dark slit in the curb. It was a storm drain.

The vampire desperately checked his body, and found that his left arm was now in fairly reasonable working condition at this point (not more than a couple of fractures), and he used it to turn his body over and then he pushed that arm against the ground, whimpering at the pain. Despite this, his body moved a few inches toward the storm drain and the chance of escape. Whatever else, Spike was quite sure that terrifying car couldn't get into the sewers, and once he slid through that storm drain, he could heal up and survive.

That thought made him ignore the further punishment his body was taking while crawling forward, and also disregard the sounds he was hearing behind him as a repairing cartoon van went through all the weird noises an animation studio could create for the soundtrack of a television series that was hosted for forty years by the CBS, ABC, WB, and CW networks.

Now, the only thing that mattered was, could he get to the storm drain before that soddin' horseless carriage fixed itself?

A short time later, the answer to that seemed to be….No.

After carefully maneuvering to put its tailpipe exactly in the position it wanted, the Mystery Machine set its brakes and brought its engine to a triumphant roar of full power, as the van's exhaust blasted away every speck of ash that had once been the corporeal form of Spike the vampire.