Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 02 (4 page)

Freedom.

But she wasn’t free yet. Her captors had kept a hood over her head when they brought her here years before, so she had no idea what surrounded the building she was in. Things were bad. That was all she had learned from August, but it was enough to set her nerves on edge. Thoughts of August made her flinch and swallow hard. Nausea roiled in her gut and bile rose up in the back of her throat. The girl had forced her hand, and even then Buffy had done everything she could to avoid killing her, but August was dead. When she thought of that, and the things she’d had to do to herself to feign her own death, her feet began to slow beneath her. Buffy could not afford to slow down.

She took a deep breath, picked up her pace again, and silently cursed the vampires for not having any wood around. A chair leg, anything at all, would have made it possible for her to dust them without feeling so much like it had been a massacre.

In her mind, she saw a quick flash of herself slamming the huge steel door closed on Maddox’s neck, severing his head. The spray of dust that had resulted was welcome, but despite her years of hatred for her jailer, there was no triumph in it.

Not that she had any sympathy, either. What unnerved her was that the deaths she had dealt out to the guards had been so intimate. She did not want to get that close to the undead. Not ever. They were abominations, unclean things; a truth she had come to realize more and more during her captivity. Her calling was to eliminate them, but it was a filthy job.

The sick feeling in her stomach abated somewhat, but a faint, sour taste remained in her mouth. She shook her head once to clear her mind, then shoved through the door at the end of the hall. It swung too wide, and would have clanged off the wall if she had not caught it quickly enough. A momentary pause to be certain no one was near, and then she started up a set of stairs in front of her. A long oak railing was bolted to the wall. Buffy stopped halfway up and lashed out with a snap kick that cracked the railing in two. The halves dangled down, tearing at their moorings. Another kick, aimed at one of the sagging halves, and a fifteen-inch length of splintered oak clattered to the stairs. The Slayer snatched it and continued upward.

It was too thick by far. Her grip did not come close to reaching all the way around it. But it would do. It would most certainly do.

There was a door at the top of the stairs. As she raced toward it, the door began to open. A vampire poked his head into the stairwell with a predator’s curiosity, his nostrils flaring as he scented the air. The black tattoo splayed across his features, bat wings extending down his cheeks into a thin beard, made the blazing orange fire of his eyes stand out in ghostly fashion, there in the darkened stairwell. Those ghostfire eyes widened as he spotted her. “Oh, sh—” Buffy pivoted and popped a kick at the door. It clanged into his head and the vampire stumbled back into the corridor. She hauled the door open and pursued him.

Though she sensed some alarm in him, the vampire faced her without hesitation. “She’s out!” he yelled into the empty corridor. “The Slayer’s out!”

“Tattletale,” Buffy rasped.

Expressionless, she backhanded him. He tried to block the blow, but she was too fast for him. Faster than ever before. It had been a long time since she had fought anything but shadows, and it was going to take some getting used to, but she was at almost her most powerful now. The makeshift oak stake flashed down and punched an enormous hole in his chest. The vampire dusted.

From around a corner off to her left came the sound of running feet. Her eyes flickered closed for a moment: three, no four of them. Though the stake felt good in her hand, and though she wanted to eliminate all of her captors, her priorities began to assert themselves. Primary among them was simply to get out, to escape, to see the sky again. To breathe fresh air. Buffy took off down the corridor, away from her pursuers. The structure she was in appeared to have once housed offices, for there were doors and glass windows looking inward all along the hall. Each office was dark and lifeless inside. The hallway itself had no external windows, however. At least not here.

Up ahead, the hall turned right. Buffy rounded the corner just as she heard shouts behind her. The vampires had seen her. That was all right, though. She could practically smell the outdoors now. Nothing was going to stand in her way.

Even as that thought skittered across her brain, she looked up. At the end of the hall in front of her, the structure opened up into a wide lobby area. The door was all glass. The walls on either side of the door were glass. All of it was painted black.

A pair of vampires stood blocking the door, arms crossed. They did not flinch as she approached, did not even attempt the arrogant, menacing grin that their kind had mastered long ago. But Buffy remembered all too well how this breed of vampires worked, these servants of Camazotz. The demon-god who was their master had trained them to be silent and fearless. Yet she had seen fear in the tattooed eyes of the ones she had killed in her cell, and knew that it was there in them.

“You can get away from the door, or you can
be
the door,” she told them grimly. In unison, they unfolded their arms and prepared to fight her. Behind her, Buffy heard more shouts as her pursuers caught sight of her again. Ahead, the door sentries stood firm, eyes crackling with energy.

Buffy rushed headlong at them without breaking stride. She was three feet away when they lunged for her. The Slayer froze in place, both of the sentries’ reach fell short. Buffy leaped up, spun into a roundhouse kick that caught one of the sentries in the jaw and sent him reeling back toward the blacked out glass door.

In the instant before the glass shattered, she punched the splintered oak railing through the heart of the other. As he dusted, his partner crashed through the glass door. The darkness fell away, and the daylight poured in.

The sun.

A grin slipped across Buffy’s features as she watched the other sentry scramble to his feet among shards of black glass and try to get inside. He began to smoke, and then to burn, and just before he would have reached the shade, he exploded into a cloud of cinder and ash. The Slayer stepped calmly out into the sunshine, sneakers crunching shattered glass. Then she turned, bathed in the light, and eyed the bat-faced vampires who had been rushing at her from within. They all stopped short ten feet from the door, avoiding the perilous splash of sun that spread across the floor.

Once upon a time, Buffy would have teased them, said something funny. She didn’t feel funny anymore. With a flourish, she made an obscene gesture, turned, and walked away. But she felt their burning eyes upon her back.

The building she had been in was a three-story office with no name or insignia on the front, and no sign. Only a street number, One Five Seven.

It was a beautiful Southern California day, the kind of glorious day she had always taken for granted growing up. This was, after all, what California was all about. Today, however, she reveled in it. Birds sang. A sparrow glided across the street in front of her. The breeze carried sweet smells to her, like springtime, though she was not sure of the season.

Free.

Though Buffy knew she had to act immediately, to figure out the lay of the land, to find her friends and discover what horror had driven August so wild, she was overwhelmed for several moments simply with being outside again. She had to shield her eyes or look down at the ground for the first few minutes, so unaccustomed was she to the brilliance of the daylight.

A relief surged through her unlike anything she had ever felt. Along with it came a feeling of power, as though some long dead battery within her was being recharged.

The block she was on was lined with faceless buildings similar to the one she had escaped from. Boring corporate shells. As she strode toward an intersection ahead, though, she frowned. Something was not right. Even out here, something was intensely not right.

Disconnected as she had been for so long, it took her a moment to put it together. An ominous feeling descended upon her. Then she knew. It was not the presence of something dreadful, but an absence. The absence of life, of bustle, even of traffic. The birds were the only activity in sight. Greatly troubled, she began to run again. At the intersection, she glanced both ways along a street dotted with trendy storefront boutiques and sandwich shops. Though she had not been there since shortly after moving to Sunnydale, Buffy recognized the town. She was in El Suerte, maybe fifteen minutes from home.

Hope rose again within her, punctuated by the appearance, far down the street, of several cars crossing at another intersection. Then, off to her left, an engine caught her attention. She turned to see an SUV cruising along among the shops. It halted abruptly in front of a sandwich shop and the driver, a middle-aged man in a well-tailored suit, popped out and took a look around. He spotted her, frowned, then hurried into the shop.

Moments later he emerged again, carrying several plastic bags she presumed were filled with sandwiches and drinks. Buffy’s only thought was of home, of getting back to Sunnydale. Quickly, she trotted across the street to catch the man before he could drive away.

“Hey!” she called.

Eyes wide, he stared at her in alarm. Buffy slowed, wondering if he was some sort of paranoid.

“Why aren’t you working?” he demanded, gaze darting up and down the street as though afraid he might be seen speaking to someone slacking off.

“Umm, day off?” Buffy shrugged. “Do you know where I can catch a bus to Sunnydale?” He laughed, but it was a tiny sound, almost as though he were coughing instead. “What are you, some kind of nut? Who in their right mind would ever
want
to go there?” Again he glanced around. “You better get off the street, sweetheart.” Then he ducked into the SUV and locked the doors even before starting the engine, as though afraid she might try to carjack him. A moment later, he pulled away. Buffy called after him, but he didn’t even look into the rearview mirror.

Angry now, she turned toward the sandwich shop, determined to get answers. When she glanced at the door, however, she saw a dark-haired man with a thick mustache turning a key in the lock. He pulled back from the door when their eyes met, as if he did not want to be seen. Then he closed the blinds that hung by the door, and she could not see him or the inside of the shop anymore.

“What the hell’s wrong with you people?” Buffy shouted.

But a deep dread had filled her, a horrible feeling that she knew exactly what was wrong with them. It was impossible, of course. A whole town could not be terrorized like this. But they were. A sudden squeal from a siren startled her. Buffy turned to see a police car cruising slowly toward her. It rolled up beside her. Two cops jumped out with the engine still running and began to walk toward her. They began to reach for their weapons.

“Excuse me, Miss Summers, but we’re going to have to ask you to come with us.”
Miss Summers.
They knew who she was. They were looking for her. Her suspicion of moments earlier had become a reality. The people terrified to be on the streets, the police looking for her. She had not been the only captive in El Suerte. The vampires held the entire town prisoner. The two police officers drew their weapons and aimed at her.

“Miss Summers.”

“I don’t think so,” Buffy replied. “It isn’t as though they’re going to let you kill me.” One of the cops, a tall, dark-complexioned guy with sad eyes, looked extremely uncomfortable. His partner was a heavyset man with pasty skin and thick glasses.

Pastyface smiled. “I can shoot both kneecaps, maybe your shoulders. You’ll recover, but it’ll hurt like hell. One way or another, you’re coming with us.”

Buffy sighed. “I don’t think so. Thanks for the ride, though.” Pastyface looked confused. With a single, fluid motion, Buffy spiraled in the air toward him and kicked the gun from his hand, shattering his fingers in the process. He let out a scream even as the tall man fired. Buffy was still in motion, however, and the bullet whistled past her cheek, close enough that she could feel the air pressure change by her skin.

Then the tall man stared down at his hand, stunned that his gun had somehow disappeared. Buffy showed it to him, then tossed it over her shoulder. As he watched it sail through the air, she punched him hard enough to spin him around. He tumbled like a felled redwood on top of his partner. Alarm bells continued to go off in her head, but they had nothing to do with the cops. They were practically forgotten already. All she could think of was the reaction of the sandwich man in the SUV

when she had mentioned Sunnydale.

Who in their right mind would ever want to go there?

He lived in El Suerte, a prisoner of the vampires who ran the town, and he thought the idea of anyone going to Sunnydale was crazy.

Tendrils of ice spread throughout her body, wrapping around her spine and curling up in her gut. Grim-faced, she went to the police car and slid into the driver’s seat. As she put it in gear she caught sight of her reflection in the rearview mirror.

A shock ran through her.

For just a moment, she saw herself at nineteen. Then the illusion faded and she saw the way she truly looked, the hard line of her jaw, the ragged cut of her long, blond hair, the crinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth, the furious glare of her eyes. It was startling, after so long, to see her own reflection. She saw that it was not only the world they had changed, but her as well. Buffy hated them all the more for it.

In her mind, she saw again the image of herself at nineteen. That was how it was supposed to be. None of this was meant to happen. For a short while, she had almost forgotten that. Yet again the voice of her younger self rose up within her, took control.

I’ve got to get back. I’ve got to fix this.

The words meant so many things. Whatever was happening in the here and now, she had to do something about it, true. But that was the older Buffy’s priority. Within her body was also a girl out of time, a college girl who only ever wanted to be normal. A young woman who had been told by a ghost that she would make a mistake that would have catastrophic results. She could not help but think that she lived amongst those results even now.