Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 02 (3 page)

Teeth gritted together, a violent surge of adrenaline making Buffy bounce slightly on her feet. She used her good hand to drag August around near the front of the cell, only inches from the door. It would hit her when it opened.

Where August’s corpse had lain, she knelt, took a breath, and whacked her broken nose with an open hand. She let the cry of pain come, and sagged a bit. Then she bent over and let blood flow onto the floor. After a couple of minutes, she rolled up the back of her shirt and felt for the puncture wound left in her side by the broken plastic that had impaled her. The wound had already begun to heal. Buffy used her fingernail to dig it open.

Again, she bled.

But the loss of blood did not weaken her. For it was not her own lifeblood that drove her now, but hatred for her enemy, like nothing she had ever felt before. Her world had been gray for so long that she could remember almost nothing else. Gray and numb and lifeless.

It had color again. The world was crimson as her blood, and black as a vampire’s heart. She allowed herself only one more minute to recover, to breathe slowly. Then she stood and went to the sink, still cradling her dislocated arm. She sat on the floor. With some difficulty, she managed to wrap both hands around the pipe that came down from beneath the sink. Strong hand over the weak one, holding it in place, she planted her feet against the wall under the sink, took a breath, and pushed out as hard as she could.

An awkward angle, but there was enough force behind it to snap the shoulder back into the joint. It felt as though someone were dying to separate the bones with a jagged knife. Buffy could have stopped the scream by biting through her lip. She did not.

Her mouth opened and she shrieked loud and long, releasing all the pain and misery she had been holding inside. Somehow she managed to find her feet and stumbled to the shattered plastic shelving. She snatched up a splintered piece, brought it to her flesh, and sliced a long, clean, horizontal cut across her throat.

Buffy hissed air in through her clenched teeth, for the cut stung, but it was superficial. Nothing vital was hit. After her shoulder, it was almost nothing.

Quivering from the pain and her emotional turmoil, she staggered to the place where she had made herself bleed. A small pool of her blood was there on the stone. Not enough, to her eyes, but it would have to do.

She dropped the plastic dagger to the floor a foot away, then lay down on her side, right cheek already sticky where it touched the edge of the puddle of her blood. Maddox stormed down the corridor with a cigarette clenched firmly in his lips and a two foot stun-prod gripped in his right hand. One of the guards—a rookie named Theo who was practically a newborn— followed behind him like a puppy.

“Whaddaya think’s goin’ on, Maddox?” Theo cooed excitedly. “There were screams and everything. Sounded pretty nasty. Got a serious Slayer catfight, I think. Woulda loved to’ve seen that.”

“We’ll see.”

They rounded a corner and Maddox saw four other guards up ahead, the two who were supposed to be on the door, and two others who had likely come down from the upper level when the commotion began.

“What the hell’s going on?” Maddox demanded.

“Told you, Maddox,” Theo said, grinning. “They’re tearing each other apart in there. When you said put the new girl in there, that’s the last thing I expected.”

With a grunt, Maddox froze. He turned to stare at Theo. “Who sired you?” Theo blinked. “Um, Harmony did.”

Maddox sighed. “Of course she did.”

Then he tapped Theo’s chest lightly with the stun-prod. The vampire jerked and shuddered as electricity surged through him. His eyes were wide, white against the black tattoo Maddox thought he brought shame to. Theo slumped to the ground, jerking a bit. He opened his mouth and a tiny bit of bloody drool spilled out with the tip of his tongue, which he had bitten off. With a sigh, Maddox turned to the four guards. They were proper vampires, eyes crackling orange, grim-faced, not at all perturbed by what they had seen. Or, at least, not revealing it if they were.

“Remind me to kill Harmony,” he said.

The others all nodded, once, silently.

“You’re ready?”

Each of them unsnapped a prod similar to the one Maddox held, only smaller and more portable. Maddox could smell the blood inside the room, the scent seeping beneath the steel door. It worried him. He was responsible for what happened within that cell.

Anxious, he gestured to the guards. “Open the door.”

The one in front, Brossi, glanced once at Maddox. Other than Maddox, he was the only one who had been there from the beginning. The two of them had been part of the group that had captured Buffy Summers in the first place. They knew what she was capable of.

The door itself was testament to that. There were three locks, equidistant from one another. Each controlled an inch-thick iron deadbolt that, when engaged, locked into a metal casing that itself was plugged into the center of the three-foot-thick stone wall that framed the door. There were two more deadbolts each at the top and bottom of the door, though these had no locks. It took Brossi a few seconds to unlock the door, then disengage the three main bolts. He hesitated for a moment, turned to glance at Maddox, and then his face changed, forehead erupting into the brutal guise of the vampire. His fangs lengthened and he ran his tongue over them. Maddox had more control than that, but he did not blame Brossi for feeling threatened. Every time they opened that door, twice a day, they had to be prepared for a fight. Just when they thought Summers was beaten into submission, that was when she was most likely to attack again. When he had been instructed to put the new girl into the same cell, Maddox had balked. It was just asking for trouble. No question it was going to make feeding time even more difficult.

But this was the last thing he had expected.

“Careful,” Maddox told the guards.

Brossi slammed back the bolts on the top and bottom of the door, sliding them abruptly out of their metal casings. There was no way to do it quietly, so he opted to do it quickly. The other guards with their stun-prods gathered behind him, tattooed faces expressionless, only the glittering fire of their eyes giving away their anxiety. Maddox stepped up behind them, but at a respectful distance. It was not that he was a coward. Quite the opposite, in fact. If this was some sham and the two Slayers killed them all, it would fall to him to stop them.

“Go!” Maddox ordered.

Brossi shoved the door open with his shoulder, tensed for an attack. The steel door swung eight or nine inches, then hit an obstruction with a dull thump. The vampire guard took a half-step back and prepared to defend himself. Nothing happened, and after a moment, he pushed at the door again, put his weight behind it, and it opened slowly as the obstruction slid out of the way.

“What the hell is that?” Maddox asked, trying to see over the shoulders of the guards. Half inside the door, Brossi glanced back quickly. “The new girl. She’s down.” Cursing loudly, Maddox shoved the others aside and moved up behind Brossi. It was his job not just to keep the Slayers prisoner, but to keep them alive. Maddox peered over Brossi’s shoulder, trying to see deeper into the room to make certain Summers wasn’t lying in wait. Then he turned and glared at the guards around him.

“Stay back. Either one of them makes it to the door, take her. Break something, burn something, whatever, but I don’t have to tell you what will happen if any of you kill one of them.” He gave Brossi a nudge. “Stun her.”

Maddox’s gaze ticked down to the still form of the teenaged Slayer on the floor, then back at the room. The door was still only partially open, and he could not see Summers anywhere.
She’s there, though.
A frisson of fear went through him. There was something about the woman that had always given him the creeps a little bit. She was warm and soft, like all humans, and yet there was something almost haunting about her, almost mystical. There was a promise in her eyes every time she looked at him; a promise of payback.

Brossi extended his arm through the open door, stun-prod in hand. Maddox stood back a little, just in case the door should be slammed shut suddenly, his own electrical prod held up at the ready. As Maddox watched, Brossi tagged the downed Slayer with the prod. Electricity sizzled through her with a crackle and the smell of sizzling hair. The girl did not so much as twitch. There were none of the muscle spasms that electrocution brought.

“Dammit,” Maddox whispered.
I’m screwed.

The girl looked badly beaten. There had been a knock-down, drag-out brawl inside that cell. One Slayer was dead. But what of the other one?

“I’m coming in, Summers. Keep away from the door!” he called into the cell. Then he motioned Brossi out of the way and kicked the door with all the strength he could muster. Something broke in the corpse on the floor when the door collided with it, but it slid open another half-foot.

Just enough for Maddox to see Buffy Summers lying in a pool of her own blood, bruised and beaten, throat slit, eyes wide and cold and staring right at him.

“No!” Maddox screamed. He struck out at the air, then rammed a fist against the door with a clang and did not even feel the pain. “Dammit, no!”

Furious, and filled with terror as he began to wonder what fate awaited him now, Maddox strode into the room. His stun-prod hung at his side. Astonished, he stared around at the shattered plastic shelving, the clothes strewn about. From a distance, he examined the splintered piece of plastic that had obviously been used to slash Buffy’s throat.

“Maddox, how …?” Brossi began to ask.

His words trailed off when Maddox glared at him. “New girl cut Summers’s throat. Summers broke her neck before she died.”

“I don’t know,” Brossi said slowly. “Better keep back from her. Give her a few volts before you get too close.”

Maddox hesitated. Then he studied the Slayer’s eyes, the haunting eyes that had promised him death so many times. There was nothing there now. Like tarnished marbles, they were. The way she lay, mouth partially open, the blood from the wound in her throat had pooled up against her lips. That was the thing that convinced Maddox. That whole side of her face, her hair, her nose, lay in blood, and with her mouth open like that, if she were alive, well… she would have been able to taste it. Her own blood. Like a vampire.

Her chest did not move. Her eyes were dead ice fragments. But it was that one detail that convinced him.

Still, Maddox was cautious as he reached out with the stun-prod. The eyes still gave him a chill. The tip of the prod swept toward the woman’s eyes, but there wasn’t so much as a flinch. Just for safety’s sake, he touched the prod against her shoulder. The body jerked slightly, but he’d seen that before. The electricity that surged through the corpse was enough to do that. The hair on the dead woman’s head shivered and even floated a bit with the static.

“She’s dead,” Maddox said, forlorn. “What the hell do I do now?” He was about to prod her eyes when a thought occurred to him. Maddox turned and looked at Brossi.

“Or is she?” he said, grinning. “I mean,
he
never comes here, right? We’ll just lock it up again, leave them here.”

Brossi’s expression was grave. “When the new Slayer shows up, he’ll know.”

“We could be gone by then,” Maddox replied sharply. “It’s a big world.” Brossi hung his head, all the tension going out of him. In the corridor, the other guards were wide-eyed with the realization of their fate. One of them, Haskell, cut and ran right then, his footsteps echoing back down the corridor. For a moment, Brossi turned in that direction, then regarded Maddox again.

‘There isn’t anywhere far enough,” he said. “It’s over, Maddox.”

“I never even wanted this job!” Maddox shouted, his voice echoing in the cell. Mind spinning, he turned back toward Summers again. Rage and fear building inside him, Maddox swung back his leg to kick the corpse. His boot thunked into her flesh…
moving
flesh. As if it were part of his own motion, she closed herself around his leg, crawling halfway up it, and snapped it at the knee. Maddox screamed.

As he went down, he felt the prod tugged from his grasp, and then Buffy Summers, the Slayer, stood over him, her resurrection as sudden as a vampire’s, but far more shocking to him. Despite the pain of his shattered leg, he grinned. She wasn’t dead.

“Maddox!” Brossi shouted.

“Don’t kill her!” Maddox roared.

The other guards, against his previous orders, began to enter the cell. They all seemed to be moving in slow motion in comparison to the Slayer, and each had a kind of vacant, frightened look in his eyes. He did not blame them. Summers had only ever been a captive to them, but in all that time, they had never underestimated how dangerous she was.

Once upon a time, Camazotz had kept the existence of the Slayer hidden from his Kakchiquels, but that had changed after her capture. They had all heard tales of the Slayers now, and knew that Summers was among the most dangerous who had ever lived. For their entire community, the girl locked in this custom dungeon had become almost mythical.

Now they had seen her dead. She had taken a hit from the prod and barely reacted. She had lost a great deal of blood. It was almost as though what they fought was a horrible specter of the Slayer, rather than mere flesh and blood. Not a woman, but a bogeyman so terrible even the creatures of darkness feared her.

They had barely kept her caged all this time.

And now she had a weapon.

In the dim light of the stone room, Maddox reached out for the metal table and struggled to rise. The Slayer moved so fast he could barely keep his eyes on her. All in all, it would have been much better if she had had a stake. Brossi was electrocuted and then decapitated. The other two were disarmed before she broke them. Maddox could only watch. Then she came for him.

Exhilaration shot through Buffy as she rushed down the corridor toward a red, glowing exit sign. The sign itself—an indication that this place had originally been used by humans—made the whole scene almost surreal, and she felt giddy with her freedom.