Chapter Five:
Greenwich Village of the Damned
Or:
"Certain Sections of Brooklyn…"
Or:
God Sent Me
"Oh come out ye God-darn vamps, come out and fight me like a man, show your girl how you would mow us down in Hellll-A. Show her how the Buffy girls made you run like hell away, from the green and lovely lanes of the old Hellll-mouth."
"Don't you ever shut up?"
Cattalano stopped and smiled down the empty Brooklyn street. "Hi, Igor, how are you?"
The vampire landed on the pavement of Red Hook, growling slightly. "Don't you have anything better to do than to sing variations on 'Come Out Ye Black and Tans'?"
"No." As far as he could tell, he was the only living thing around there for blocks. The vampire and he were alone in a rather dead part of town, figuratively speaking—occupied by plenty of old Mafia-owned industries that had been shut down after Gotti and company went into meltdown, and totally industrial.
"Ever see Casablanca?'
Igor nodded. "So?"
"As Strasser asked Rick about invading New York, Rick answered that there were 'certain sections of the Bronx I wouldn't recommend you invade.' You just entered the wrong part of Brooklyn, pal."
"We shall see." The vampire's eyes floated down Marco's body, noting his light windbreaker and the sword at his side. "You expect that to work on me?"
Cattalano shook his head. "Only if you have Bringers around here."
Igor laughed firmly. "You won't need it."
"Good, it'll be annoying." Marco quickly detached the belt and tossed it to his left. "Now, where were we?"
Igor threw himself at Cattalano and swung with a left backhand, a right roundhouse, and a right kick just in case Marco dropped, waiting for his back to be toward him. Marco instead dropped to a crouch and quickly rolled to the side, expecting all of the above, rolled back and kicked, firmly, into Igor's knee, breaking it. Before Igor fully acknowledged the pain from his knee, he pulled his right leg down to steady himself, and Marco rammed one of his turpentine knives directly between Igor's legs before rolling away, to his feet.
Igor doubled over in pain and closed his legs, putting out the brief flare. He quickly extracted the pieces with a bit of magic and whirled on Marco, hurling the ruined knife at him. Marco sidestepped the blade, half-expecting it, drawing out two wooden knives from his jacket, holding them as though ready for combat.
"It's been a while since I've had someone who thinks like me," Igor said, concentrating on healing his knee and his groin with a touch of his magic. They were already starting to reform, but he was rusty on his healing spells—he hadn't needed them for two centuries.
"It's a first for me. By the way, how many of you did Nuala train?" Marco thought about Igor's next move, expecting a different attack pattern, probably a simple left-right hook combination, or a left-feint and right hook combo, just to test how much force he needed.
"Only me and my brother."
"Why the two?"
Igor smiled. "She killed the rest of them on the first day of training. They were weak."
Marco leapt at Igor, and the vampire flinched, unprepared, and reflexively stepped back on his left knee, and it snapped again under the sudden pressure. Marco stopped as he collapsed, grinning as he hurled a knife into the vampire's undamaged knee, coming up with a new knife before stepping back.
Igor growled in pain as his eyes briefly turned black. He pulled away the knife and broke it in one hand. He blinked his eyes clear again and stood on both legs, and launched himself at Marco, using a right feint and a left hook. Cattalano had expected a different feint, but it didn't matter, he did the exact same thing he would have without it—he used the time of the feint to judge where he should move next, and he ducked and weaved under the left hook and rammed one knife into Igor's left triceps and the other into his gut before throwing himself to one side. Marco rolled to his feet, two more knifes in hand.
Igor roared, but ignored both hurts. He threw himself into the building in front of him, pushing off the wall and flying at Marco. The human dropped and rolled forward, under Igor, and came to his feet as the vampire whirled at him. Marco didn't move as he observed the vampire's body—totally undamaged—somehow, both of the stakes had disappeared, and only the vampire's clothing was damaged.
Igor lunged with his left and Marco simply dropped forward, to one knee, and rammed the left-handed knife into the left side of Igor's chest.
Igor's left hand dropped, clipping Marco on the back of the head. The human dropped forward and rolled, feeling a mild concussion coming on.
Marco rolled to his feet halfway into the street, and unfortunately, his legs weren't as steady as he would have liked them to have been.
Cattalano blinked his eyes clear.
His stake was sticking out of the vampire's chest…
Right where his heart should have been.
Marco reached into a pocket and pulled out a rosary. With a twist of his wrist it wrapped around his fingers, and he tightened them into a fist.
Igor's smile dimmed. "Going back to basics, are we?"
"You have no idea."
Marco hurled the blade for Igor's right side, and the vampire sidestepped it before charging, deliberately going for Marco's right. Cattalano reached for another weapon, and Igor kept coming.
Igor ran right into the next blow on purpose, believing that nothing Marco had could really hurt him.
Marco's next blow was the flat side of a crucifix.
Igor's face sizzled as Marco rammed his kidneys with the rosary-clad left jab and torqued for a right-hook with the cross before leaping back.
Unfortunately, Igor struggled through the pain and grabbed Marco's right wrist, avoiding the cross, and twisted, hurling him through the air and into the side of a building. Marco twisted in midair to distribute the force of the blow, but that only contained the damage to the left side of his body, cracking three ribs.
Marco dropped to the ground hard, hitting his head on the pavement. He was certain he'd have a concussion by the end of the evening, assuming he wasn't dead.
Igor sprinted and kicked Marco in the stomach, breaking something inside him relating to organ tissue. Cattalano coughed up blood.
And that was just from a stomach blow, if he had kicked my chest, it would have just collapsed. God only knows what shape it's in now.
Marco stabbed Igor in the foot with the sharpened end of the cross, and stabbed him in the thigh. Igor ignored it and stomped on his calf.
"I will break you slowly, over time, for your arrogance."
Igor walked away, laughing, intending to stretch out his death until just before dawn.
Marco reached for the inside of his jacket and came out with two phials, drove the nail through the cork in the top of each, shook them, and acted like he was about to throw them.
Igor heard this, turned, and cocked a brow. "And?"
Marco groaned. "Never mind. Keep the holy water," and tossed them TO the vampire.
Igor caught the test tubes and they exploded. The flash of nitroglycerin blinded him briefly, long enough for Marco to attack, throwing knife after knife from inside his coat, and from the neck sheathes, from up his arm, and from his pockets.
Igor had flames all over his body, and he whirled, putting out each flame in turn. He roared with pain and rage, and leapt for Marco—
And flew into the building in the opposite direction as someone grabbed his ankle in mid-air and twisted, hurling him like a discus.
Igor's face broke the wall, and he was about to attack when he felt a sword go through his body.
The vampire ripped himself from the wall and turned on his assailant.
Melissa smiled and said "Hi there."
He raised a brow. "You did that?"
"Yes."
"You're not a threat, you're a snack. But Marco first."
Melissa jumped him, and Igor lightly threw her aside. He turned back to Marco and had an encounter with a post office mailbox across his face, knocking him off his feet.
Igor felt his teeth, and found his canines missing. He looked up to see an angry-looking redhead in front of him, holding a long wooden pole with sharpened ends.
"If you touch him, I will kill you."
Igor's eyes narrowed. "I have the army here, child."
"Oh? Where would they be?"
His eyes flared. "Come!"
They came up from the sewers for miles around, one after the other, long spears and iron shield at their sides. They marched in military-straight lines with coordinated footwork to put Riverdance to shame. And they marched, they marched like the Roman days of old, down the alleys and side streets, two, or as many as five abreast, each line never longer than the width of the street Amanda stood on. And they marched onto the street, their lines crossing and merging, until they each hit the end opposite from which they came and they stopped, as one, and turned on their heel in a right turn so exactly timed that engineers at NASA would marvel.
Their faces were bared, their teeth straight, their postures erect, their lances at their sides, they looked like the Knights Templar or the Teutons ready for battle against Alexander Nevsky. There had to be at least two thousand of them, all ready to drink her blood.
Amanda nodded her appreciation. "How Mordor-esque."
Igor gave her a toothy grin. "Yes, and now we're going to play a little Helm's Deep."
She frowned. "Aww, and I wanted to play a little Apocalypse Now."
And then, swooping in from under the 59th Street Bridge from upper Manhattan, sweeping down the East River, came the two scariest notes outside of O Fortuna—the opening notes to Flight of the Valkyries.
Igor barely heard it at first, but as the notes chewed up airspace, the picture in his mind formed with crystal clarity. His eyes widened in terror as he brushed past Amanda, running toward his men. The only thing he could come up with right now to save his men was fifty feet away.
As he met his first line of defense, the helicopter was upon them, coming down the street, and it was too late.
The gunship fired its napalm.
The rockets hit the ground with devastating effect, vaporizing rows of vampires in one flash of light apiece. The rocket impacts drew closer to Igor, and he didn't care, grabbing an iron spear from one of his front men, bellowing "Disperse!"
And then he disappeared into a ball of fire.
The stragglers were quickly being picked off by the anti-tank Gatling gun mounted on the military gunship—each burst enough to blow apart a jeep.
As the flames subsided a little, Amanda could see Igor, standing in the glow of the fire as the heat bent around him and his own personal shield. The iron lance still in hand, he hefted it and hurled it. The metal rod pierced the helicopter's bulletproof cockpit glass, through the pilot, his chair, and the roof of the helicopter, damaging the engine. It floated off.
"Dragons!" bellowed a voice from atop of a roof. Igor looked up at Riley Finn. "Present arms!"
"Tigers!" Sam bellowed from the opposite roof. "Present arms!"
"Fire!" they ordered at once.
Flaming crossbow bolts launched from the two buildings bracketing the remains of the vampire army, picking off the scattered remnants until lines were organized enough to shield themselves; once the shields were up, the husband and wife army team brought their tazer rifles to bear and fired against the metal shields, the voltage high enough to turn the now-electrified shield-bearers to flame.
Igor looked at the madness around him and felt himself undone. There had to be payment for this. He summoned all his power and trained it on the two buildings, ready to level them at a thought.
And then he couldn't.
His power was there, the strength of magic, but it wasn't working.
He was being jammed.
Off in a side street, Willow chanted over and over and over again the same spell that had kept her from killing Jonathan and Andrew with a wave of her hand only a year before in the Magic Box.
"Hand to hand!" Riley called out.
Igor was about to join the fight when he realized that if his magic were being jammed, his shield would be down.
Up in a tower half a mile away, Cassie smiled behind the scope of a .50 caliber Galil sniper rifle, filled with hollowpoint rounds filled with Killer of the Dead and sealed with wax.
She fired directly into Igor's back. The force spun him around as though he'd been hit by a wrecking ball. Two more bullets hit Igor before he leapt away, heading toward Amanda. He scooped up a metal lance along the way.
"Do you think that wood will work against me, child?"
Amanda's eyes narrowed. "It worked against your brother."
Igor bellowed and charged.
Three more snipers bullets fired into his chest, punching a hole through the upper left quadrant and out his back.
Igor staggered backwards, and paused to let his chest seal up, and as it sealed from back to front, Amanda saw the organs that were replaced…
The heart wasn't one of them.
Amanda recalled a rare medical condition where the organs of the human body were mirrored, opposite from the side of the chest they should actually be on.
Igor's heart was on the right side of this chest.
Amanda smiled.
Igor attacked, and Amanda let him come. She dropped her staff and grabbed the spear as he swung. She twisted and hurled the spear away, turning into a spin-kick that snapped Igor's head back with a resounding crack.
Igor blinked. He hadn't been kicked that hard since he first trained with Nuala. He smiled. "Let's see how well you play against my skill."
The vampire whirled, going for a left roundhouse backhand. Instead of blocking it, Amanda noted that he pivoted on the right foot, leaving the left foot in the air. If she blocked the backhand, the kick would be unchecked.
Amanda nearly stepped back two paces, and when he kicked out, she caught the ankle a good two feet in front of her. She pulled back, yanking Igor off his feet. In mid-throw, as Igor passed her body, he grabbed for her with his right hand, and managed to catch her left hand as she struck.
She drove a stake directly into his heart.
Amanda followed Igor to the ground, pressing the stake through his body, holding it steady. The vampire's eyes turned black, and glowed with the intensity of an ultraviolet light bulb as his body strained against the forces of death straining at it. He had been charged with the power of the First, gifted with his ability to weave enchantments, and being eaten away by killed of the dead in his system as well as a stake in his heart.
The vampire turned to dust…
As the ashes were about to blow away, what looked like an electrical current fired up from his heart, connecting all the ashes, and pulling them back together again into a coherent form.
"No," he groaned, slowly pulling the stake out of his heart. His eyes flashed a moment, blasting Amanda away, and his body turned to ash once more, only to coalesce once again into a person. He pulled the stake out of his heart, falling to the ground.
Zeng Nyugen, head of the Dragons, attacked. He had been wary of indulging in any more vampire play after the last grand battle to defeat the vampire plague of Red Hook with Igor's brother.
And now, slashing with his grandfather's sword from World War II—a samurai blade over a hundred years old but as sharp as the first day it was pounded into solid form—he thought of Marco a few hours ago when he was first contacted with this new threat.
"Zeng, hi, Marco, we've got a problem and I was hoping the lizards were up to it."
"The Dragons."
"Whatever."
"What is it?"
"The sequel to the Vampire Plague of Red Hook."
"Oh?"
"It's called the Vampire Plague of Red Hook, Part II: he has a brother."
"Not again. You bringing your demon friend around?"
"Nope."
"I'm not stupid enough to have my people fed to a vampire hoard…what a sec, how many vamps are we talking?"
"About three thousand."
"Go to hell."
"Hey, the kitty cats already went along with it. I guess they can have all the fun."
Zeng thought a moment. "Like hell they will. We'll be there." He stopped and called his friend Miguel, the leader of Los Tigres. "You joining up with Marco's band of lunacy?"
"Yes, but only because you are."
Zeng paused. "He just called and told me that you were going into this."
"No, he called me and told me you jumped at the chance."
"Son of a—"
The vampire jumped him.
Marco was dying, and he knew it. His body wouldn't react to his commands, and that was that, no more Marco. While Willow neutralized 90 of Igor's magic—removing it as a tactical weapon—Cassie worked the sniper rifle, Spike covered Cassie's back, Riley, Sam, Kennedy and Melissa finished off the grand vampire army, and Amanda killed the master vampire, he would simply fade away into the night.
Well, after all, I'm not needed by anyone. Amanda's faring well, everyone's alive, except for me, and all will be well, except for the bother of a funeral.
Amanda rammed the stake into Igor's heart, and Marco smiled, content to die in peace, knowing that his love had one over the thing that killed him.
Until he saw her flying away from the reformed vampire who pulled out the wood from his heart.
"No…" Marco groaned. He coughed up some blood, and his thoughts turned to that exact fluid—bloody minded he would be. Amanda could not win against something that would not die. He had faith in her ability to kill all the vampires in the world, but not if they couldn't actually die. Eventually, he would kill her—she would become tired, make a slip, and that would be the end.
Marco forced his left arm to move, reaching for the curb, praying for the ability to turn himself over.
And that was the last of his strength. He couldn't move once more.
Darn, and what was the First worried about?
"You see, you're what I like to call a saint in training—you don't believe in your own limits, so they don't apply. You make your own pathetic reality, only it's a scary reality because you enforce it on the rest of us. You say that you are whatever you need to be, and you are."
And then that one thought occurred to him. He was always what he needed to be.
And he needed to be alive.
Melissa wasn't doing much of anything, and quickly became bored with the big vampire.
Maybe one of the smaller ones would be more fun!
She scampered towards the embers of the vampire assault team and grabbed a manhole cover from the street before she twirled and took off one of their heads with it. The cover bounced and decapitated another.
Yes, this was far more fun.
She ripped a stop sign from the ground, post still attached, and swung it like an axe, cutting off the heads of vampires left and right, laughing in triumph all the while. She had a vision of herself as Gimli, mowing down Orcs with his own axe, and wished that kind of mythology had been real.
She would have made a heck of a Dunedain Ranger.
Igor rose, his body covered in sweat from exertion and the poison.
"You poisoned me…" he growled. "Killer…of the…dead."
Amanda nodded as she rose from the ground. "And there's only one known antidote."
"The blood of a Slayer."
She nodded. "Come and get your medicine."
Igor slowly moved for her, and then lunged with a right uppercut. Amanda quickly did the calculations, and figured that he would learn that she could dodge any fist blow, and so the payoff would be the second shot. She weaved to her left, around the fist, and dove, expecting him to sweep the right foot in anticipation of her ducking a kick.
Amanda leapt over the sweeping kick, grabbed the wooden staff on her way down, and rolled away with it to her first, twirled and launched the wood like a spear into his chest before he was even finished with the uppercut.
The spear went through him, lodging halfway out of his body. The vampire stood there, dumbfounded, as his body once more began to disintegrate on him. He reformed, and concentrated solely on staying in one piece. He broke off the staff sticking out of his chest and ignored the rest. His spells couldn't work externally, but they could keep him together. He would only have the ability to stay alive, and his strength would be reduce, but the redhead wouldn't give him the time to pull out the rest, of that he was sure.
She'd have to die first.
He charged her, and she weaved, only he anticipated it and grabbed her arm. He twisted, hurling her off to the opposite side of the street from Marco. She hit the wall face first, falling to the ground. She came back up on her feet without much of a problem, and she was ready for him this time.
By the time she faced him once more, he had finished pulling out the weapon that had killed his brother, but would not kill him.
"Enough," he snapped. Igor stared at her, drawing the sources of his powers together to himself. His body surged with energy, and his hands and feet burst into white-hot flames, but were not consumed. "I can set myself on fire, and your charms won't protect you from that!"
Amanda scooped up Marco's cavalry sword, hoping to use it to buy her more time, but with flames that hot, the sword would melt at first contact, and it would buy her only seconds before the end, because even she was having trouble trying to figure out a way around that.
Suddenly, Igor froze, his body numb. In his peripheral vision, he saw something sticking out of his neck as he fell to his knees—it was a foot-long wooden throwing knife that had slipped between the cartilage of his spine and severed it at the C4 vertebrae, making him an instant paraplegic. He concentrated his powers on moving his limbs independently of the central nervous system, but nothing happened.
His eyes flicked to Amanda, closing in on him, and he focused his power into an eye-flash like that which had blasted her away before. A second later, a knife entered his occipital lobe—the part of the brain that processes vision—and his eyes went dark.
"No," he croaked.
Marco Cattalano, prone on the pavement, sighed after the exertion of throwing the last two knives.
Igor growled as his body suddenly moved, floating away from Amanda before both wooden instruments flew in opposite directions out of his neck. Magic created an aura around him as he healed himself and stood upright in a blink of an eye, both of his eyes a solid black.
He spared Marco a passing glance. He looked back to Amanda, still holding the sword with far more confidence than before. He laughed, certain he'd change that in a moment. He'd had enough of playing with these people. He would unleash his magic once and for all, and end these pathetic creatures—jamming or no jamming.
A cannon-like weapon sounded, and his chest felt like it had burst into flames. In fact, his magic was the only thing preventing that literal fate.
He turned, and Marco, grasping to a window ledge for support, had stood on his one good leg, holding a .50 caliber Desert Eagle.
"Wooden bullets," Marco explained. "Hollowpoints filled with holy water and sealed with church candle wax."
Two more bullets entered his chest before he could move, puncturing his heart.
Igor growled. His magic was now mostly restricted to keeping himself alive. The strain on his body was already beginning to wear on him.
Igor turned to see Amanda advancing on him. He leapt back, away from both of them, scooped up a rock from the street and whirled, hurling the stone for Marco's chest. The impact shattered several ribs and dropped him to the ground.
Igor looked to the sword in Amanda's hand and whirled, grabbed a lamp post from off the street, and whirled, intending to beat her to death with it. He swung…
And found that Amanda was directly in front of him, just a matter of inches, and her sword was already in mid-swing, cutting off his arm from his body. He was about to reach forward and break her neck, but the sword already came back, and cut his head off.
And the body turned to dust.
And stayed that way.
In the place of Igor's shattered body was the First, in Buffy form. She looked at Amanda and said, "Darn." She looked at Marco and smiled. "Well, at least I got something out of this," and disappeared.
Amanda looked at the burning embers of the dying vampire army. They were fighting hard, but still dying in any event. They would probably all be killed in another fifteen minutes anyway.
That done, she ran to Marco's side. Cattalano was on his back, one side of his ribcage obviously caved in. His teeth were blood stained, and he vaguely resembled the blood-covered Bride from the opening of Kill Bill.
"Hi honey," he muttered. "I forgot to duck," he said, quoting Ronald Reagan after he was shot.
Amanda smiled. "You can joke, you must be alive."
He arched his brows. "How could you tell?" He turned his head and coughed, blood spilling onto the sidewalk. He paused a moment, and swallowed, trying to clear his mouth of the copper-like fluid.
He turned back to her and smiled weakly. "Wouldn't want to suffer from bad breath." He glanced behind her. "You got the bastard."
"We got him."
He shook his head almost imperceptibly. "It's your kill, fair and square. I only softened him up a little for you… or more accurately, he softened up my rib cage. I screwed up, and now I get to die."
Amanda took his hand and leaned in close. "You're not going anywhere. You're going to stay here, with me…"
Marco reached up with his other hand, ignoring the flare of pain that racked his body with the motion, and gently caressed her cheek. "I love you, you know. For the last two years, I loved you. I ran to Sunnydale because I was afraid of it. I didn't want to let you get hurt by me, by what I could do. I wanted you safe and away from me—trouble follows me, you may have noticed. Don't cry for me—I screwed up."
She smiled. "I know. I knew all of it." She leaned down and kissed him on the lips for a long moment before pulling back to whisper. "And I don't care, I love you, and I'll wait two years, I'll wait five, and I'd follow you into Hell. You're mine, Cattalano, and you're not getting away from me."
Marco smiled, pleasantly surprised.
Then he blinked and his eyes rolled back into his head, and his head slumped over, his hand falling away from her face.
To be continued.