Chapter 7: "Stalk"
"It's not here giles."
"It was."
"Well it's not anymore."
A street. A car parked in the dead of night, old and paint-chipped. The quartet surveyed from within the rusty frame, waiting for the inevitable.
"I'm telling you there's a pattern Buffy." the older British gentleman reiterated for a dozenth time.
"I believe you Giles... " Buffy retorted, not turning her gaze from the houses lining the street "... but there's nothing happening here, streets all quiety."
*Crunch CRUNCH CRUNCH*
Three bodies in the car jumped simultaneously, then snapped "Xander!"
"Wha? ahm humry?" Xander defended from the back-seat, reaching into the bag of Funions for another hand-full of salted fat-rings.
"Funions aren't stealth food!" Willow whispered harshly.
"Giles is out of Twinkies." Xander continued.
"I don't eat Twinkies." Giles hissed, looking scandalized.
"Ah's *CRUNCH* whut ahm sayim!"
After a long while in which Buffy took Xanders bag of Funions away and was just about to indulge herself, the blond-ex-cheerleader-turned-monster-exterminator let out a little gasp and stared at the roof of a tall track-house on the other side of the road from the one they'd been surveying. Everyone else held their breath.
"What is it?" asked Willow, clutching the sleeves of her hoody like a life-preserver.
"It's... I'm not sure, " Buffy said slowly, still staring at the large grey house. "I thought I saw someone on the roof."
"Yeah, they're just sitting in the car still. It looks like they're on a stake-out or something."
The mousy-haired girl perched on a rooftop, crouching against a chimney as she surveyed the scene through her five thousand dollar night-vision integrated binoculars.
A little com-static broke through her ear-piece until a deep/soft voice responded. "Well I'll hand it to you, there is something fishy about your new friends. Three teenagers hanging out with their school librarian at night is far enough off the grid, but the under-cover cop-bit pushes it from strange to down-right suspicious."
"Suspicious, albeit boring." Kitty replied, her right hand held to her ear-piece.
"What's your move Shadow-cat? This is your mission remember, we're just along for support." the voice nudged.
Kitty watched the the car, and the house on the opposite side of the street from her for a minute, pondering her options. At length she tapped her ear-piece.
"I'm going to go do some recon." said the young woman as she stood up, storing her expensive goggles in her pack. "We can't do anything until we know more of what they're up to."
The girl climbed atop the protruding chimney, her silhouette barely visible against the darkened sky. She breathed in and out, deeply three times then spread her arms and dove forward into the chimney, disappearing like a shadow into darkness.
Holding her breath, she dropped silently, the hearth of the fireplace rushing up at her until she slipped through it. She allowed herself to drop further, now completely blind, she felt the familiar sensation of matter passing through her body, a slight humming in her mind. She passed through the foundation of the house then slowed her decent, reaching her mind out through her limbs she altered the polarity in the bottom of her hands and feet. The girl crouched in the solid earth then pushed off forward, gliding through the dirt like a marine mammal through water. It was all about timing.
She let the earth ahead pass through her while maintaining a slight polarity beneath her to keep from falling. It had taken months of training to perfect this application of her innate abilities. She had more than once nearly killed herself, or passed out from lack of oxygen. Her honed senses now gave her a precise intuition about her sub-teranian speed and a near photographic memory for geography. Once she felt she had traveled enough Kitty altered the electromagnetic fields of her molecules, her density feint but just enough for her to float easily upward through the thick ground.
50 seconds without oxygen.
The basement was still and dark. Grey light shone in from the street through the cob-webbed port windows near the ceiling. Boxes were stacked in various hap-hazard heaps along the walls and a thick layer of dust coated the room.
A gloved hand reached up through the floor. Grabbing hold of the solid concrete for leverage the girl pulled herself upward into the dimly lit room. As soon as her upper torso was clear she breathed in deeply, though quietly, fighting to keep from gasping. She crouched silently, surveying the basement for any signs of life before reaching into her pack and putting back on her night-vision goggles.
After about a minute of waiting and listening for sounds of movement from above, Kitty began looking around the boxes. She found pictures (the family who lived here looked like zombie clones from the Norman Rockwell-verse), paraphernalia, trophies, Christmas decorations (damn Santa and all of his works)... in a word, boxes of pure boring.
Finally she decided to chance a look upstairs. She crossed her fingers, headed up stairs, and passed silently through the locked cellar door.
Dark hallways met her on the other side and Kitty was thankful for at least one part of the occupants obnoxious normalcy, the hours they kept. Eleven O'clock and all's quiet.
The young woman crept slowly, walking several paces and looking around then standing stalk still, taking a breath, and continuing on. One major stealth perk of her phasing gift was that by walking on air she made no sound. She'd been experimenting with phasing in and out parts of her body by themselves without half of her dropping away and having to deal with that being dead thing. She started with her hair of course and had saved a lot of money on haircuts until she finally got the knack of gradiating the phase along it so that while one end of a strand of hair had the electromagnetic polarity that allowed it to pass through matter, the other end was impermeable by solid material. Theoretically she could get to a point where she could phase her lungs just slightly enough to pick up oxygen when she was above ground and wouldn't need to keep toggling her immaterial state to breath, but that was not a technique she was going to rush into for fear of accidentally dropping a couple vital organs in the process of perfecting it. Everything about her gift seemed dangerous to the young woman sometimes, and it wasn't a seldom night that she'd woken up in a sweat after a recurring nightmare in which she was featured dropping off the face of the earth.
As she made her way through the kitchen (which, Kitty noted, was identical to the one she and her "Parents" had in the track-house they'd set up in) the young woman scanned the scene for any identifying information, anything out of place that could explain the strange behavior of her new "friends."
Kitty was morosely considering that all of her relationships seemed to need quotations around them these days when she turned a corner onto a den and found what she'd (apparently) been looking for, causing her to immediately vomit, and regret the search.
Two adults, draped over furniture, and draped being in the literal. Strings of flesh lay like yarn on a spindle, intestines hung above them like garlands. The bodies bent over backwards on the love-seat. Their stomachs and much of their epidermal layer flayed open. Their faces staring at her upside down, mouths agape, eyes wide... and...
... they were alive.