Chapter 9:  The Bloody Cavalry

Her scream hit his brain like a drug.  The world outside the mask was a blur of dim aromas.  Desperate for her scent, he tore it off, kept running.

The underground maze of tunnels seemed to disappear for a moment as his heightened senses came surging back.  He slammed through a stone wall, then another.  He could smell her fire.  It was close, but fading fast.

The next thirty seconds were a red haze.  There were faces of girls all around him, screaming, falling. He was roaring.  He felt a sword slide into his chest, felt himself shatter the arm that held it.

They kept coming, by the hundreds it seemed.  But so did he.  They disintegrated like paper in his hands. It was worse than the old days.  When the last few fled, he swallowed the urge to chase them down and tear their sodding throats out.

Then there was silence.  He sought out the monster inside him, forced it to heel.  A pair of steel doors loomed in front of him.  He kicked them off their hinges.

Buffy.

The room was dim.  She was lying on the slab, a needle pinned to her heart.  He couldn’t see her face.  A half a ton of ugly gray muscle charged at him from her bedside.

A hurricane of a left hook landed just south of his nose and sent him flying.  Rough claws grabbed him up, and he suddenly found himself writhing away from a pair of huge, snapping jaws.  He brought his knee up hard, praying that Kennedy’s little bloke-hating trip didn’t apply to members of the Demon Community.

Didn’t.

The beastie howled bloody murder and dropped him, mournfully pawing the pile of crushed grapes under its kilt.  Spike dropped an elbow like a hammer, smashing through a rocky chunk of spine.  The thing quivered once before it died.

Buffy.

“Spike,” said a familiar voice. He shuddered.

“Nancy?”

Oh, come-bloody-on!

***

Xander dumped the girl sideways at the door.  The shoulder was a red mess, now, and the area around his right collarbone felt like a bag of broken glass.  Everything below his left knee was a single, gigantic bruise.

“Okay,” he said. “Piece of cake.”

Giles blinked at him.  “Xander! My God, what happened to you.”

“No biggie,” he said, and swallowed something he hoped wasn’t blood.  “A little girl beat me up. Ya know, it happens to me a lot more often than you’d think.”

Xander grabbed the sleeping girl’s wrist and slapped it against the panel.  The door slid open sideways.

“Well done, in any event,” said Giles, stepping out into the hall.  “Oh, is that Casey Schwarz? I remember her. Lovely girl.”

“Yeah,” coughed Xander.  “Yeah she was cute.  She used do that little clicking thing with her tongue whenever she…” He trailed off, turning red.  Giles glared at him.  “So, hey, what say let’s get going before she wakes up?”

“Yes.  Well.  I’ve just arranged for some reinforcements over the WatcherNet, but I’m afraid it’s going to be a rather long wait.”

“Screw the backup, man! We’ve gotta find Buffy.”  Xander felt a surge of fresh strength well up in him.

“How?!  You saw what your little girlfriend did to you. There’s an entire army of them out there!”

He pointed at the Watcher’s earlobe.  “Andrew. Call Andrew on that…thing.”

“Andrew! My God, man. Do we want to fight them or tickle them to death?”

“Hey, go easy, alright,” Xander snapped, suddenly defensive. “The guy’s been solid. In fact, he’s the only reason we’re even having this conversation. And wasn’t thinking of fighting them.”

Giles raised an eyebrow.  “A diversion.”  He smiled wryly.  “I see.  What did you have in mind?”

***

It was beautiful.

They were charging out across the beach, white tufts of sand cascading over them like a sea of warm, dry kisses. The dark Arabian steed was frisky, today, bucking ever so slightly underneath the curve of his fresh linen pantaloons.

He clasped his arms more tightly around the man’s shirtless chest. The smooth, pale skin felt cool against his fingertips. Gently, he rested his head against the muscular back, catching a whiff of the musky scent that lingered near the crisp, blonde nape of the rider’s neck. Overhead, the twin suns of Tatooine shone like a pair of majestic yellow jewels in the morning sky.

The handsome face turned ever so slightly. He glimpsed the tight curl* of the man’s knowing smile, noticed the sharp ridge of a brow arching suggestively upwards.

“Yes, my friend” Andrew said, his eyes narrowing to slits. “The M’Lok Tharian warlords will surely know we are coming. But do not worry. We will fight them together. And side by side we will surely…”

Hey.

“…we will surely…”

What’s that thing?

On the rider’s left shoulder, a small green square was blinking at him. He tried turning away, but the stupid thing followed him around like a little puppy dog. A row of green letters winked up next to it.

WAKE UP ANDREW

He jumped. The dark walls of the dungeon snapped back into focus all around him. The overlay of little green letters was still there, hovering in front of his eyes like a DVD subtitle.

ANDREW. IT’S GILES. WHERE ARE YOU?

Andrew fought through the fog. The last thing he remembered was Spike biting his wrist, mumbling something about a “wet bloody noodle.” He must’ve passed out, then. He hoped Spike didn’t think he was a wimp now, or something.

Straining to remember the procedure, Andrew clasped his left ear and pressed it three times. There was a low buzzing sound. A small blue square appeared just above the green one. Wiggling the tiny sensor gently, he started typing.

GILES THIS IS ANDREW.

There was a long pause.

YES KNOW THAT. WHERE R U?

He started typing again. A minute passed. Then another.

HI GILES, ANDREW HERE. I AM STANDING IN A DARK DUNGEON. A SINISTER ARRAY OF EERIE LIGHTS AND FOUL ODORS SURROUNDS ME. THERE ARE IRON CHAINS HANGING FROM THE WALLS. A HINT OF BLOOD GLISTENS ON ONE OF THEM DARKLY.

The Watcher’s little green square just blinked at him sullenly. Ten seconds passed.

ANDREW

THE STENCH OF EVIL PERMEATES THE AIR. IT IS THE AROMA OF SUFFERING, PROBABLY DUE TO THE LONG HISTORY OF TORTURE AND PERIL THAT COATS THE PLACE LIKE A DARK BLANKET. THE AIR IS THICK WITH IMPENDING…

Suddenly, there was a sound like a tiny bell ringing, and Andrew’s little blue square vanished. After a moment, it was replaced by a pair of simple “YES” and “NO” buttons. He hoped he hadn’t broken something.

***

She glided out from the corner of the room, her white hair gleaming like raw bone. Dr. Nancy Stark looked as though she hadn’t aged a day in eight years. The little monster was notoriously allergic to sunlight, and the deprivation of it kept her skin looking quite young. He knew the feeling.

“Nancy,” Spike snarled. “Why am I not surprised that you’re mucking about in all this?”

“Nice duds, Hostile,” Nancy cooed. She was wearing some sort of Naughty Nurse Halloween costume. The taut white uniform seemed to blend seamlessly with the bloodless curves of her bare thighs. When he’d last seen her, she hadn’t been nearly so informal.

All things considered, the time he’d spent at the Initiative hadn’t been that bad. At least, not at first.  Lots of rest and alone time. If anything, it was just rather boring. He’d even gotten used to the experiments, the needles, the poking and prodding. After a few days it had all gotten to be such a bloody routine that he hardly knew whether he was awake or sleeping.

Then Nancy Stark came into the picture. And that all changed.

He’d met some fairly exotic lunatics in his day, but Dr. Stark took the proverbial cake. The Initiative had hired her, theoretically, to study the effects that ”extreme emotional trauma” would have on the chip in his head. In reality, the girl was just a bloody sadist with some capital letters behind her name.

She had seemed so sweet that afternoon when she first connected that sodding wire to his skull, taking great pains to make sure he was “cozy.” The machine was an odd bit of wizardry, designed to induce some new type of hypnosis, with the good doctor whispering soft suggestions, plucking the strings.

One of her more elaborate tortures still haunted the vampire to this day. He remembered the little box whirring to life, the sound of Nancy’s southern-fried voice elongating into a fine silver thread. In the next instant, he was standing in a well-lit elevator buried deep beneath the earth’s surface. His dead mother was there with him. Maggots were squirming out of her eyes. He remembered crying, clawing at the smooth mahogany walls for hours. He remembered the song. There were no lyrics, just the chilly, electronic tune repeating over and over, like some bloke forgot to change the tape at a shopping mall. He remembered how innocent and ordinary it sounded against the red opera of his screams.

Now, Nancy Stark was rolling casually towards him again, like an apparition from one of her own, cruel illusions. Except that this time he wore no chains, inside or out.

“Jeez-Louise,” she said. “Did you just go and bust up my guards all by yourself? Didn’t even need a weapon or nothin’?”

The woman was standing a few feet from Buffy’s gurney. Nancy had a duplicate needle in her, he realized, planted deeply into the pale center of her arm. Just like Buffy’s, the instrument seemed to feed back into some sort of an oblong metal gadget through a long hollow tube. He could smell blood inside.

“I am a weapon, bitch,” Spike growled. “And you’d do well to step away from her, ‘less you ‘d like a demonstration.”

Nancy beamed at him. She seemed to gasp as she tore the needle from her vein, like a junky savoring a fresh high. “Oh, Billy,” she moaned. “I’m ready when you are, sugar.”

He charged. She was faster.

The slender white leg hit like an atom bomb, launching him through the face of a tall steel cabinet across the room. He clambered over a blanket of broken glass, the sword wound suddenly howling up at him from his chest. On hands and knees, he tried to shake out the cobwebs, and ate a brutal roundhouse punch. He rolled with it, somehow, instincts on overload, and slid gracefully to his feet. The madwoman was giggling at him.

“She tastes wonderful,” she drawled, sensuously clawing her hair. “It was like eatin’ a rainbow, Billy.”

He lunged, fangs down, braying like a wolf. They met in the middle, their limbs an angry knot of action. He took the brakes off, moving loose. He could smell the fresh shot of Slayer blood pulsing under Nancy’s flesh. An old, shameful longing filled him. When she threw a high kick, he danced playfully out of reach, shrugging his shoulders like an East End hoodlum.

Time seemed to slow down, then. The little cow was quick, strong. Whatever she’d stolen from the Slayer seemed to ripple visibly inside her. But she was a novice at violence. The moves were too rigid, empty of the deadly poetry that made his lover so damned dangerous.

She tried something wild, a sort of whirling backhand, and Spike caught her with a hard right hook across the chin. She staggered under its weight, lurching backwards into a concrete wall. He followed in quickly, fists pumping a steady torrent of blows. A stiff boot to the neck finished it, and he watched the woman sink harmlessly to the floor.

He wasn’t through. The pile of white angles in front of him was burning, the blood inside pleading at his yellow eyes. His mind had become a terrible field of blank ice. He longed to fill it with something warm. As he moved in for the kill, something stirred at the corner of his vision.

He turned.

She was standing. The sheet was wrapped around her, tucked together at the arm. She looked like a marble statue of old, the kind that men carved when they wanted to remind themselves why Gods mattered. Her eyes were as wide and green and damp as they had been down in the cave, moments before his death.

They were looking at him.

He tried and tried to think of something clever to say.

“Hi,” he said.