Chapter 14:  Lost and Found

Miriam Kennedy-Corliss wasn’t happy.

The tank treads burned a ragged line across the Carpathian foothills.  Kennedy’s hefty M-9 Abrahms lead the way, guns loaded for bear.  An armored troop transport brought up the rear, warehousing twelve of her best Chakau’Ri assassins.  The rest of her column was a pack of nine slender Iranian Wolf-Spiders: all-terrain vehicles fitted out for maximum speed and maneuverability down in the twisting mountain passes.  Their quarry had moved faster than seemed possible, given its size, and it had taken her people a full four minutes to get their fucking asses in gear.

Do I have to do everything myself?, she wondered.

She popped the hatch and mounted the gunnery turret, a hard curse peeling off her lips. Night was on the way.  The sun had already sunk to a red halo around the switchbacks, and bright blades of twilight were now lancing out between the gaps.  Brimming her eyes with a hand, she conducted a rough survey of the landscape.  Gnarled, bare branches clawed up through the slanted earth, like ancient fingers grasping at the eternal fog.

She had chosen this terrain carefully. Lord Dracula’s curse had been like a premium life insurance policy for The Cause, something to keep the Council’s hag squad out of their hair. Magical bullshit didn’t work here.

Or, wasn’t supposed to, at least. Yet, that thing had somehow broken through. She imagined the monster must be having a good laugh right now.  It had toyed with them, humiliated The Cause in their own headquarters.  Humiliated her in front of her troops. And then, just when she’d had it in her sights, the beast just trotted off into the sunset like a giant green thoroughbred, with Buffy's latest boy-toy and - if Lt. Braxton was to believed - that little moron Andrew Wells in tow.

And, of course, in all the confusion, Barbie and the Head Peepster had flown the damn coop. She should have slaughtered them both back in Italy.  Now, things were getting complicated.

Fucking Nancy, she thought. Some days, Kennedy regretted ever getting mixed up with that walking recessive gene in the first place.  Then again, the icy wastes of the Russian steppe hadn’t exactly been an ideal place to network.  You took what you could get out there, and Nancy had the military connections and the balls to use them.  So to speak.

And, of course there were all of those wonderful toys she made.  There was true genius buried deep inside the woman’s psychosis, she knew. In time such flights of creativity might force Kennedy to destroy her, but for the moment, she would be classical in her governance.  History taught that every successful revolution required someone like Dr. Stark: passionate, resourceful and, if necessary, willing to sacrifice innocent lives for the good of The Cause.  No matter how badly the little freak screwed up along the way, Nancy was still indispensable.

And gorgeous, she mused.  One day, she was definitely gonna have to tap that ass.

“General,” cried a tinny voice. “The trail’s back ma’am! Heading is south by southwest.” A massive Clydesdale cantered alongside the tank, the rider sneering up at her from the saddle.  The cadet’s name was Juliana...something.  She was a good little scout, but otherwise a total waste of space.  Just another insipid lollipop with a bad temper and zero vision.  The army was full of raw material like Juli, aching to be sculpted into a vanguard of the New World. Kennedy spat a fresh set of coordinates down to her driver, tugged her beret low across her brow. The tank roared west down a snaking switchback, chomping a fallen tree in half. She suddenly wished she’d remembered to bring her cigars.

They were racing the clock, now.  If those little bastards managed to reach the border, there’d be no way to stop them from getting to England and warning the rest of their loser pals.  Which would mean she‘d have to switch to Plan B.

And Plan B was so very, very messy.

***

This isn’t happening.  This isn’t happening.  This isn’t happening.

Andrew held on for dear life as Melvin galloped headfirst over the ridge.  He clung to a mound on the demon’s broad, goopy back.  The flesh there wormed up between his fingers like a pile of melted grasshoppers.

Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

Up wasn’t much better. The night screamed by like a plane crash as they barreled into the darkness. A few feet in front of him, Spike was whooping up a storm. The vampire steered with a pair of overgrown antennae, his calves gripping the ridges of Mevin’s spine like a champion equestrian.

“Yaaahhh,” he bellowed, and clapped his heels against the monster’s scaly hide. The mechanical voice was fizzy and hollow now, like the microphone was busted. “Get on, ya overgrown ponceZzzzzzpp! Ain’t payin yazZZzzby the hour!”

“Dude, if you call me that one more time, I am SO going to eat your skin.” Melvin made a sharp turn and bounded ferociously down the face of a steep, rocky vale. Once again, the world around Andrew became a roller coaster of terrifying smells and sights. He fought heroically to keep his lunch where it belonged.

“BzzZZzzttalright back there, Andrew,” Spike asked.

Amazingly enough, he was. Again. It was a little freaky, the way it kept working out like that. The courtyard had been pretty chock full of sharp, clean Andrew-sized deaths. He remembered girls everywhere, running and shouting and waving all kinds of crazy swords. There was shooting too, and even a giant, exploding truck. It was like one of those summer action movies that would star Thomas Jane as a disgraced FBI agent on the run from a murder charge, and Jessica Alba as his tough-yet-sexy partner with a checkered past. The only problem was, Andrew wasn’t either of those people. He was just Andrew. He should be, like, super, duper dead by now. It’s not like it would even matter that much.

He knew he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity, what with the whole being-an-ex-archenemy and all. Andrew figured he was kinda like Spike that way, except without that sexy, smoldering Brit-rocker thing he had going on. He got the feeling they’d been tolerated mainly because the gang didn’t really know what else to do with them. On the one hand, they weren’t Evil enough to kill. Yet, they also weren’t Good enough to, say, invite out for a frosty mug of hard cider. And the day that Andrew and the vampire met their bitter, potentially special effects-related deaths, it was a safe bet nobody would be especially broken up about it.

Except for Buffy. She wouldn’t cry or anything. She was too tough for that kind of stuff. But she would cry on the inside. Buffy was always pretty cool about not judging people for the little things. Like, say, a murder or two.

I mean nobody’s perfect right?

The thought evaporated as Melvin plunged into a thick tangle of trees. A gauntlet of bare, pointy branches tore angrily at the riders as the beast scrambled deeper into the brush. Andrew ducked low along Melvin’s slimy spine, screamed as a thorny shoot raked across his thigh.

“What the zzztbloody hell do you think you’re doingZZZP!”

“Shortcut,” Melvin muttered. “Don’t be a baby.”

“Hello!  Vampire here! Diving headfirst into thousands of pointy wooden sticks s'not exactly my cuppa!”

“Oh yeeaaaahh,” replied the monster dryly. “Jeez, how insensitive of me.” Spike let out a little growl as a white shaft sliced into his bicep. “Look just quit yer bitchin’ for a minute, half-breed. We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?!” Spike barely had the chance to finish the word before they popped out of the thicket into a wide, manmade clearing. A weird kind of fort-thing stretched out before them, crammed between two mountains.

It didn’t look so friendly. Then again, what did these days?

***

The girl was still breathing.

That much was clear. Exactly that much.  The gash at the base of her skull had already healed over, the shattered bone knitting to a smooth familiar curve. The hair around it was stained brown with blood. She had stirred only once. Whether it was a dream or a nightmare was unclear. Rupert Giles wondered if the girl even noticed the difference anymore.

But she breathes, he thought. She breathes, and that’s what counts, old man. He smoothed the bedclothes shut along the outline of Buffy’s twenty-six year old body. He kissed her forehead, a dozen old war wounds groaning as he bent.

Old man. He felt it happening, finally. There had been a time it wasn’t so. Sunnydale had been a veritable obstacle course of monsters and mayhem, and he thought he’d done quite well for himself, considering. But the years had not been kind in London. He’d indulged in far too much black pudding and Guinness stout and not enough training. Their workouts, he realized, had been more important for him than for her towards the end.

Joints creaking, Rupert Giles crept out into the main barracks. Xander sat at his makeshift workshop, fiddling with Dawn’s gadget. Perched upright on the table, it looked strangely beautiful, like some sort of clockwork wildflower. As Xander touched a tiny sensor, a halo of blue lights flared up at the thing’s skeletal tip, accompanied by a low electric whine.

“Eureka,” Xander announced. “I did it!”

“Did what?”

“Well, I’m not sure, exactly. But you have to admit that was kinda cool.”

Rupert grunted, and gazed thoughtfully at the slot of night sky streaming in through the lone barracks window.

“You did the right thing, man,” Xander said.

“What?”

“Leaving him, I mean. He knew the risks. I would’ve wanted you guys to do the same thing if it was me.”

He glared at the boy for a moment, suddenly realizing that they were talking about Andrew Wells.  He nodded slowly, but said nothing. Xander still hadn’t mentioned the Man in Black, and that was probably for the best. Giles really didn’t feel like having that discussion right now. Or ever, really.

“What are you going to do about them,” Xander added, quickly changing the subject.

“The Slayers, you mean?” Giles shook his head sadly. He’d turned the notion over and over since his first night in Romania, but still couldn’t quite get a handle on it. It seemed that the situation had gone far past any censure the Council could mete out. Suddenly, this had become about survival, no matter the cost. “We can talk about that when we get back to London.”

“If, you mean.”

“Yes. If.”

Still staring out into the black void of the bunker’s quad, Giles saw something twist in the moonlight. Near a patch of foliage, the bulky shadow of a hillside seemed to come screaming to life. Before he could so much as gasp, a huge shape was charging out across the valley. It was headed right towards them.

“Xander,” he managed to say.

But he was already gone.

***

She awoke with a start. The bunny was gone. The room was strange, a small office of some kind. There was only one window. It was full of stars.

Wait.

Bunny?

Her senses returned; slowly at first then in a raging flood. She saw the Castle in stark red relief, slipping into the distance of her life. She heard herself crying out his name.

Her arms and legs sprang up like a trap. Before she knew what she was doing, Buffy was rolling sideways and landing on the floor with a big, naked flump. Clutching a sore nose, she scrambled to her knees and spun wildly to get her bearings. The place was some kind of gray, bureaucratic tomb, full of abandoned paperwork and dust. It reminded her of the visits to Dawn’s social worker in the old days. An old motivational poster loomed in front of her, advising her to “CTOЙKA.”

She spent less than a second thinking about it before she slung the blanket around her shoulders and barged straight out the door. Her eyes probed the shadows for signs of her old teacher. She had something to give to him before she began the long trek back to the castle. It was not an apple.

The barracks was underwhelming: row upon row of glum, spartan bunk-beds that seemed designed to warehouse an army of evil clones.  It looked deserted, but something was amiss.  She zeroed in on a small device sitting on a workbench in the far corner of the room.  It was blinking.  And speaking.

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisci velit...” The thing blathered on mindlessly, to no one in particular. She drew close, frowning at its delicate metal form. The sound was a vaguely feminine drone, the same kind of pre-recorded robo-voice you heard when you tried to pay a late cable bill over the phone. The words sounded familiar to her, though. She strained to remember where she’d heard them before. “Et palleus,” chirped the thing. “Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nasceteur ridiculus mus.”

A ring of blue and yellow lights twinkled hypnotically at the tip of a metallic stem as she drew near. Cautiously she reached towards the thing. Her fingertips flinched as they breached a field of angry electrons.

No time for touchy feely, Summers.

Daylight’s on the way.

Buffy slid open the wide drawer under a nearby bed, revealing a dusty retangle of crisp gray fabric. She dropped the sheet and unfurled the garment like a flag, quickly measuring it against her bare chest. The machine cut sleeves hung down past her knees. Taking a furtive sideways glance, she donned the billowy shirt and began dashing from bunk-to-bunk, frantically searching for the one that had belonged to the World’s Shrimpiest Soldier. She finally found his drawer near the end of the row, and tugged on a pair of his old, cotton-blend trousers and matching blouse. The combat boots were a little too big to be useful, so, she double-cuffed the pant legs above her bare calves instead. A wool military topcoat completed the outfit, and Buffy grunted as she belted it snugly to her waist. She ignored a sudden, embarrassing urge to locate a mirror.

“Aliquam felis!” blurted the little machine suddenly. As she spun to face it, the dull percuss of a gunshot echoed somewhere in the broad dark pan outside the window. Squinting into the blackness, she could make out two human shapes writhing at the foot of the outpost’s perimeter. Just beyond them, a huge shadow shambled back and forth outside the tall metal fence. Another pair of shots rung out in quick succession, followed by an indiscernible shout of dismay.

A moment later, a massive floodlight blazed to life, illustrating the scene in shocking, microscopic detail.

She felt her breath catch midway down her throat. A mysterious warmth flooded every inch of her body as she flung herself out into the chill autumn night.

On the horizon, a nightmarish being was rearing and snorting under a cone of vivid, white light. Its grim rider slid the reins masterfully to one side, his black shape glistening like a pool of freshly spilled blood.

She ran to him.

***

“Um,” said Xander. It was the best he could muster. Whatever it was he was looking at seemed to defy whole dictionaries. “Um,” he said again.

“Ehhhhhhhh,” the Watcher replied.

The thing was...well, “ugly” wasn’t really the right word. In his line of work, it was easy to become blasé about stuff that is merely ugly. On average, Xander saw about ten ugly things a day. Twenty on weekends. In point of fact, the entire concept of “ugly” had started to wear thin for him lately.

But this was.

Different. The thing was.

That is, parts of it were... Sticking up out of the...

With the whole writhing, goopy (handmouthfoottongue?)

And, that yellow stuff leaking from its...

Oh.

Oh God.

Is that a NIPPLE?

Giles puked first.  This was a small – and, in all likelihood temporary – victory.  But the Brit had been riding him so hard all afternoon, Xander decided to take what he could get.  He patted the old man’s back sharply.  “It’s okay, kid”, he said. “Happens to a lot of us the first time out.”

Giles glared at him. “Bloody comedian, are you?” he whispered. “You see what you’ve gone and done?”

“Look at the size of it,” Xander heard himself say, suddenly spellbound.  “I mean, and that’s just the head. I.. I think.”

The thing twisted slowly, revealing an anatomy meant for nightmares and botched surgery TV specials. Xander watched in horrified fascination as it spoke, the pair of huge scabby lips worming around a string of deep, oddly musical words.

“Well, hello to you, too, guy,” it crooned. “Jesus!  Did everybody in this dimension take an Asshole-Pill today?”

Before Xander could answer, the black rider steered the creature sideways, revealing a pale, shivering blonde who clung nervously to its back.  Xander allowed himself a sigh of relief.  Then he threw up too.

Giles rose stiffly beside him. The old man’s features were pinched shut, now, his narrowed eyes piercing into Andrew’s cyborg-savior like a pair of British lasers. It felt like a showdown from a cheesy old western. Xander desperately wanted to break the silence, but the longer he stared at the bizarre image in front of him, the more unlikely it seemed that he would ever have anything interesting to say again. Nothing could top this.

Suddenly, there was a sound of tiny, bare footsteps. Before he could react, Buffy was standing next to him, her white breath panting out a single word.

“Spike,” she said.

Xander's head snapped sideways. “Buffy,” he said, then whirled quickly around. “Spike?”

“Buffy,” gasped Giles.

“Giles,” Buffy growled.

“Giles,” Xander asked, and pointed up. “Spike?”

“Spike,” Giles groaned.

The rider popped off his helmet, revealing an old, familiar face. “Buffy,” Spike said.

“Spike,” Xander shouted.

“Harris...”

“Xander...”

“Watcher...”

“Buffy...”

Andrew suddenly flung up his hand.  “Ooh. Andrew.”

The demon cut loose with a long, weary sigh. “Are you sure you guys saved the world?”