banner by kazzy_cee
Savannah, Hero in Black, Part 4
"Terminator!"
"Huh?" Xander removed his shirt and gave it to Oz. It came down to Oz's upper thighs and the way Oz smoothed it over his chest said a lot about his ordeal.
"What you said to me before: 'come with me if you want to live,' it's from the movie The Terminator."
"Yeah, I know." Once they were outside the tent, Xander and Oz crawled as fast as they could. Xander glanced back at the demons. If any of them looked in his and Oz' direction, they would see both boys easily since there was no cover other than some tall grass. "We need to move faster! If one of them... misses you."
Oz' face tightened and Xander regretted his choice of words. "Yeah, that would be bad," Oz said. "So do you have a plan?"
"Hahaha... do I have a plan, he asks!" Xander skittered forward, sweating as he expected at any moment to be spotted. Things in motion caught the gaze of any predator, and demons were exceptional hunters.
"Yeah, kinda looking for some reassurance on that score. Or you could hold my hand."
"The cattle," Xander said. "The cattle are pretty much the plan."
..........
"Bugger it!" More dust fell, coating Spike, but he wasn't making any head way. He'd been working on Buffy's wall until his back was screwed, and his hands hurt gripping the pic ax... all for a big, fat nothing. No miracle. No joy. No sudden psychic vibrations that spelled Buffy's nearness. Nothing.
"This plot needs some deus ex machina," he complained out loud.
The horse was busy eating the bits he'd brought along for her, but he'd run out of feed soon for the pair of them if he didn't find a way out of these caves. "She doesn't need you, you stupid arse!" he scolded himself.
But under everything, like the sound of the beating heart he no longer possessed, he felt her.
And so, he picked up the pic ax and continued. What the bloody else was he going to do?
..........
Buffy ran in the direction Xander had followed, using their system of little signs of tented rocks or a bit of bright cloth, to follow his trail quickly. She could track him without them, but it made it faster.
At first, she ran like the slayer she was, bounding over rocks and dried up river beds, but then she got a sudden savage stitch in her side. She ran on with one hand covering it, ignoring the tears streaming down her face from the pain.
Buffy had all kinds of experience ignoring pain.
She didn't see the bit of dead fall until she stumbled over it, and grabbed for something to break her fall, but there was only hard earth, blinding sunshine, grass, and sharp rock--
She rolled down the steep side of a slope until she snagged a stubby dead tree trunk near the bottom, and stopped her fall. She lay there, face wet with sweat and tears, bruised and puffing. Her left arm was bleeding from a long scratch, but that wasn't the worst of it: the cramp curled like forked lightning from her side to her lower tummy just above her sex. When she tried to sit up, her muscles tightened unbearably, and the low grade pain in her pelvis and lower back grew worse.
"Oh, God!" She realized something was very, very wrong.
She dug her hand into a bit of dried mud, seeing her dirty fingers grip and strain as she rode out the spasm.
........
"So... cattle. Lots of 'em." Oz looked at them, then at Xander.
"They aren't just any cattle: they are long horns."
Oz looked blank, so as he gathered up what he would need, Xander explained, "Long horns are ideal trail cattle, so that's why so many ranchers on the Savannah have them. They can take the dry, and they can defend themselves--see the horns on that steer?" Xander pointed to a large animal grazing below with long legs, and a lanky body. Its narrow face seemed to possess a sullen expression, and the long horns that swept out horizontally, gave it a sinister look. "Tough looking dudes, huh? Most important for us, when they stampede, they hold together better than other cattle."
"You did some cowboying in your time."
"A bit, but no one will hire me now," Xander said.
"Hope you won't take this the wrong way, but shouldn't we be running away?" Oz glanced back toward the demon tents.
"We wouldn't get far before they missed you and tracked us. No where to hide out here but the Grass," Xander said absently.
"What's that?" Oz was looking at the long tube of rough clay and rolled up newspaper in Xander's hands. Xander was mixing some powders from little pouches he'd taken from his pockets and hurriedly placing them in the sections of the tube between clay dividers.
"Homemade roman candle: sulphur, wood charcoal from our fire pit, and saltpeter--you probably know it from science classes before the school closed as potassium nitrate, plus a few other things."
From the camp in the dip below them, both boys heard shouting. Oz' escape had been discovered by the demon on horseback who watched the cattle.
........
Buffy gave up on being brave. She curled up and sobbed, only when she moved to curl, that hurt, and it hurt to stay straight, and it hurt to do anything, even breathe and cry.
Her skirt was damp above her sex, so she lifted it and saw her thighs were spotted with watery blood stains. What was happening to her?
........
"That's going to help us, right?" Oz' voice was higher than normal, something Xander had never heard from him before.
"Yeah, I hope." Xander sealed up the tube and pulled out a match box. The demons were running from the tents in all directions, looking for a sign of the boy's trail: they'd find it very soon since the crushed grass was easy to spot.
"Hurry."
"Doin' it. Hang on!"
Xander sent the tube rolling down the hill and lit the long fuse.
There was a shout from below: they'd been spotted.
"Now we run, c'mon!" Xander grabbed Oz' arm and they peeled off west of the camp.
Behind them, they could hear the approaching hoof beats of the demon on horseback.
Then, there was a sudden staccato series of explosions behind them, one after another, Crack! Crack! After a pause, heavy with the feeling of impending disaster, the sound of thunder suddenly erupted below them: the herd of long horns was stampeding!
Xander reached the little dip he'd made note of when scouting, and yanked Oz into it with him. "Give it a sec!"
Oz wiped sweat from his face with shaking hands. "Xander, your plan?"
They heard screams of horses and demons and cattle now. The sounds of things tearing, falling, and then all was thunder and the ground itself trembled from the sudden impact.
"What?" Xander yelled, daring to raise his head and look back.
"Is a scary plan."
"Get down!" Xander grabbed Oz and shoved him deeper into the crevice, sheltering him with his own body as beside them clods of dry mud exploded under sharp hooves which dug in and blurred past...
.........
Buffy thought at first that the sound was her own heart beat, or an approaching storm. She sat up weakly and her eyes saucered as she made out a herd of stampeding cattle headed directly for her! There was no cover, no place to hide--
She got up and forced herself to try to run, but she was dizzy, weak--
She wasn't going to make it!
She didn't hear him over the approaching cattle, but suddenly a white horse and rider came up along side her. She saw the wide eyes of the horse, foam along its neck, and above a rider in a long black coat and hat, his hands covered in leather gloves, and his face hidden under cloth wrappings, excepting a narrow strip where she glimpsed blue, burning eyes.
"Hurry!" he yelled.
Despite the warning tingle up her back that this stranger all in black was dangerous, she took his hand and leaped on the horse behind him, grabbing his narrow hips and holding on as the horse wheeled under his sure hands and then cut north to get out of the path of the oncoming stampede in a blur of wind and dust.
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