Spike sat up, shaking his head to rid himself of the thundering rhythm in his ears, only to clutch at his chest and fall back onto the floor.
The shock had restarted his heart; the incessant drumming was it's beating. He shouldn't have been surprised: the same thing happened in 1912 in Frankfurt, when, not recognizing what that thick rubber coated cable overhead was, he'd tried to use it to escape from an exciting but dangerous situation involving three German law enforcement officers, two Jesuit priests, a gallon of holy water, and a nanny goat named Fritz.
The results had been in any language, shocking; it had taken three nights for the heart to give it up and go back to once more being a cold, dead lump of meat of little or no importance residing between his lungs. Still, the noise had been deafening until then, and Drusilla, triggered by the sound of close, easy prey, kept attacking him at the worst possible times.
Which is another story, and not worth going into here.
For now.
He sat up again, only to have the ceiling crash down on him.
Only it wasn't the ceiling, butwhat felt like a collection of steel pipes plus fifty pounds of homicidal Slinkies wrapped in a dank fur coat, which clamped painfully down on his left shoulder and his right hip at the same time. Snarling, he tried untangling himself from the nasty thing, which only made it squeeze harder as he tumbled across the floor with it in a clanking, yelling mass which caught both the monitor and the VCR cords on the way past, dragging Temptations to the floor in strobing flashes of light followed by a loud crash, more blue sparks, followed by total darkness when a fuse blew.
Panting, Spike tried prying the steely jaws gripping his left shoulder loose in the oil stinking darkness, only to have them clamp down harder with an electronic snarl like a steel python shifting it's grip on his body, making his ribs creak. Using one leg of the workbench for leverage he almost managed to slip free only to have his assailant tighten its grip further while the other set of teeth worried at his upper thigh as an intense pain blossomed in Spike's chest, which rapidly shot into his left arm.
Gasping, he stiffened, collapsing into the coils of his attacker– the one thing which aside from a tendency towards bad poetry, genteel poverty, and crippling social anxiety which kept William the Bloody (Awful Poet) a wallflower most of his life finally caught up with Spike, killing him as it had his father, so that when the boy with eyes the color of old brass coins gently coaxed Spike's assailant to release her grip on him, Spike lay curled up on his side on the cold greasy concrete floor in the darkness, heart silent.