Buffy found the upraised path along the side of the gallery so narrow she had no choice but to walk directly under the rain that rolled off the rooftop like a waterfall. It was like getting hit in the head with a succession of buckets of water. But at least it enabled her to see inside.
Most businesses leave at least half the lights on after closing to discourage unwelcome visitors. The gallery was no exception. Buffy saw through a window, and through an open door beyond, into a room where a drenched Mather was examining the podium upon which stood the Moonman statue. Naturally it looked just like the statue on Buffy’s dream notebook. Like a standing jigsaw puzzle of a man with a broken face.
Buffy broke the window with her elbow, reached inside, and opened it. Normally she wasn’t so up-front about breaking and entering, but she figured tonight she could make an exception because the alarms already made it sound like the whole city had been struck by a giant earthquake.
But by the time she reached the podium, Mather had already knocked it over and taken the statue. She looked down the hall just in time to see him closing the back door behind him.
Then she looked up the hall just in time to see the first policeman coming in.
He had a flashlight. She could almost feel the beam hitting the back of her head as she pulled up her hood and ran toward the back door. He called out for her to stop.
He fired one shot into the air—at least, she hoped it was in the air—so she zoomed from the gallery rear exit with an extra burst of speed. Mather was nowhere to be seen, which was a problem, but she had to make sure the same thing could be said about her before the policeman’s backup arrived.
Near the fence in the rear were two bushes just far enough apart to provide her with cover for a few moments while she thought of her next move. She dove in.
And landed right on top of Mather. They bumped heads so hard she saw stars.
By the time Buffy recovered enough to think straight, Mather was already gone—he’d probably climbed over the fence—and the rear of the gallery was now crawling with police.
Actually, there were only two who were inspecting the grounds—two too many under the circumstances. Buffy had no choice but to lie low, hugging the mud while the rain poured down. Her only consolation was that she was behind enough cover so the cops couldn’t see her when the lightning flashed.
By the time the police were gone and it was safe for Buffy to climb over the rear fence, Mather was nowhere to be seen. Any trail he might have left behind was by now washed away. To make matters worse, neither the Hummer nor the van was visible. One would have thought that Eric Frank’s face would be everywhere, looking for angles on the theft of the infamous Moonman statue.
Buffy refused to give up, however, and she trotted down the street looking for a sign.
CHAPTER NINE
But first, a phone call to the library.
She just hoped Giles was still conscious enough to hear it ring.
Buffy’s heart sank when Willow answered.
“Giles is so hot he’s practically steaming,” Willow said. “But he’s not getting any worse. According to the Slayer histories, Robert Erwin didn’t die until a few days after Sarah Dinsdale’s escape, so we think Giles will be okay until … after … well, you know …”
“Believe me. You haven’t mentioned Xander.”
“That’s because he went looking for you.”
“I thought he was supposed to—”
“Buffy, he’s as much tied up in this as you are. No one wants you to face this alone.”
“Yes, but I’m hoping to keep Xander and myself separated, to change the equation, so to speak.”
“Oh. I take it he hasn’t found you yet.”
“Well, if he went to the gallery, he might have been distracted by all the police running about. Have you found anything yet?”
“No. I’ve been racking my brains, but I have no idea where a ceremony with a false Stonehenge setting can take place in the Sunnydale area. At the moment I’m in a forum with some British witches who claimed to have erected the original Stonehenge in a previous life. They’re a little confused, though, on which of the three major building periods they were involved with—”
“And the weather?”
“All the weather sites are confused. There was no indication anywhere in the atmosphere that the Pacific Coast was going to be hit by a storm this large and fierce. Flash-flood warnings are in effect from Seattle to San Diego.”
“Get me some cold medicine. I’ll be back eventually.” Buffy sneezed. “See you.”
“Ciao,” Willow said weakly, and then they both hung up.
Buffy tried to think of what to do next. She was tired and cold and worried, and she was barely able to hold in check her anxieties about her role in the prophecy. Were Slayers supposed to die until one of them finally got it right, or did they always die? Perhaps the best thing for her and Xander to do would be to screw things up completely by leaving town, where they couldn’t possibly be affected or drawn in.
But then again, maybe things would be even worse if they did. That was the trouble with fate. You never knew when you had reached another fork in the road.
On the other side of the street were two empty lots that despite being prime land had gone unused for Sunnydale’s entire history. The rain showed no sign of easing up.
Buffy thought seriously about giving up and just going back to the library. She didn’t even know where to head first.
A car passed, splashing up a huge wave. Until that moment, Buffy’s knees had been dry. She made up her mind. She was halfway across the road when she came to a dead stop.
For a few seconds she had no idea why. Her survival instincts occasionally compelled her to do things without knowing why. Usually in retrospect she realized her senses had picked up on something her conscious mind hadn’t noticed. Such as the moving mound in the mud in one of the empty lots.
Another car approached, forcing Buffy to finish crossing the street. She veered in the direction of the mound. She twirled the stake in her right hand. No doubt about it—something underground was approaching her. It couldn’t be good.
Whatever senses it possessed, however, were severely limited. It went right under the sidewalk and disappeared for several moments. She imagined it—a giant, carnivorous worm? a deadly multi-bladed machine?—hitting the underside of the asphalt several times in an effort to break through and restore whatever dim bead it had on her.
The mound revealed itself again. It moved away from the sidewalk in a different direction; the two lines in the dirt formed a V.
Buffy hurled a stake at the moving mound. The stake spun like an axis, glistening in a lightning flash, and stuck straight up in the dirt. It quivered for a few moments, then rose straight up in the air. At least, that’s what it looked like.
Until the zombie’s head rose out of the ground, quickly followed by the rest of its body. At that moment Buffy would have gladly traded all the stakes in creation for one good minute with a surface-to-air missile launcher.
The zombie turned to face her. Its face was pretty rank: Most of the skin had been scraped off underground. It wore buckskins and its putrefying hair was tied in ponytails; once it had been a warrior. When it growled, a strip of rotten skin fluttered where its Adam’s apple should have been.
Once the warrior had lost an arm at the elbow. With that lost arm he’d held a hatchet. The zombie held that same arm, which was holding that same hatchet, right now.
It advanced.
Buffy sighed. That missile launcher sure would have saved a lot of time. As it was now, dispatching this zombie would take a few minutes longer.
So she became the missile, launching herself at it feetfirst. She was betting that it couldn’t move very fast without accelerating its decay, and she was about half right.
It grabbed her feet with its remaining hand, but it had to drop the forearm with the hatchet to do so.
It still couldn’t stop her, really. She buri
ed both her feet into its chest up to her ankles. Bone cracked big-time and Buffy winced; the experience was like jumping from a diving board onto a giant snail.
They both went down in a heap, with Buffy on top. The zombie fell badly, breaking apart under the combined impact of Buffy and the sidewalk. Buffy fell almost as badly, hurting the small of her back. But that didn’t stop her from rolling away from the pieces of the zombie as quickly as possible.
A putrefied hand clung to her raincoat. Buffy broke its fingers in half one by one, and then stamped her foot on the hand until it was mush. The fingers still crawled toward her like worms. The rest of the zombie was attempting the same. A shoulder scooted, the head rolled, and the one standing leg hopped. Their intentions did not look good.
Buffy knew she couldn’t just leave them because that head was bound to bite somebody before it got itself kicked in, but as she waited for a car—and its startled driver!—to pass by, she got the distinct impression somebody else was growling at her.
She turned to face a fieldful of zombies rising from the earth.
They seemed to have no leader and no mind, group or otherwise. They simply shambled toward her, apparently with no other intention than just killing her.
This was bad, more than just a tough jam. Buffy remembered the dream of Samantha Kane being menaced by parts of a zombie, not to mention Sarah Dinsdale’s story of what happened to the men trying to recapture her. They had been set upon by a horde of zombies. Like a gaggle of geese, Buffy thought grimly.
She got ready, stooping to a fighting stance. It might take a while, but she was sure she could eradicate them, with or without the stake she’d dropped. She changed her mind when four zombies scooped up the parts of their fallen comrade along the way and ate them. (The one without a lower jaw stuffed pieces of the foot, including a shoe, down his throat.) She had decided to look for the nearest bulldozer or any other piece of equipment that would help her mash these things as flat as possible, as quickly as possible.
Seeing nothing of potential help in the immediate vicinity, she took off into the alley between the empty store and a deserted office building and climbed over a wire-mesh fence into a dark, wet grade school lot and ran as fast as she could.
On the other side of the lot she slowed down and saw the zombies still following her, though they had no hope of maintaining her pace, much less overtaking her.
Buffy waited until most of them were halfway across the lot, and then she climbed over the fence and landed on the sidewalk. Across the street lay Sunnydale Central Park.
She had an idea. It was risky and broke every Slayer rule in the book, but that had never stopped her before. So that there would be absolutely no chance they’d lose sight of her, she sauntered into the park as if on a Sunday stroll. Now she was entering well-lit territory. The sidewalks and open spaces were so bright the rain glistened like sunlight on the sea, and even the tops of the pines were lit. Luckily the weather was so bad even the delinquents who usually hung out there had gone home.
Buffy turned around (though she kept walking backward) and saw the zombies shuffling across the street. Tires screeched and a car crashed into something nearby. Buffy tensed. All the zombies she saw were still coming toward her, but she had no idea if she was drawing them all away or—
Someone screamed. Gunshots were fired. There was a second car crash.
No, some zombies had definitely become distracted. Curses! Now she had to double back to make sure no one was being eaten.
She began to make an arc, but when she reached a pedestrian lane at the edge of the park leading back across the street, she stopped and let out a little cry of frustration.
And no wonder. Coming straight toward her was another zombie army, though this one was dressed more like the Spaniards from the early days of California history, complete with metal helmets and chest plates. Obviously they were going to be more difficult to stomp to death than the army of zombies already chasing her. It appeared checking up on whoever was in the automobiles would have to wait, perhaps indefinitely.
Currently on the same wavelength, the two sets of zombies simply flowed into one great stream; they still followed her just as relentlessly, just as mindlessly. They weren’t even fazed when one was struck by a bolt of lightning and turned into cinder.
Buffy kept about a hundred yards between herself and the zombies. She stayed in sight. She tried not to put too many barriers between herself and the shambling creatures because she wasn’t sure they possessed the smarts to navigate past them. When she ran through a tennis court, she was sure she’d been right: Some zombies went through the openings, but others tried climbing the wire-mesh fence rather than going around it. Most succeeded, incidentally, but a few fell all the way down and broke apart upon hitting the ground. The ones that still had legs and torso attached gathered themselves together as best as they could and straggled behind.
Three-quarters of the way through the park Buffy sighted the town gazebo in the middle of an open stretch of ground. According to legend, a brass band had played in the gazebo every Sunday until the advent of the Jazz Age, and the people of Sunnydale gathered on the grounds to listen and do all the other things people of small towns were supposed to have done during the glorious “Past.”
The notion of resting and getting out of the rain for five minutes was appealing. Indeed, with the way the zombies were advancing toward her, maybe she could take a catnap.
She was just bounding up the stairs, however, when she realized that all of a sudden she wasn’t alone.
Of course, neither were the startled Cordelia and the second-string halfback she was making out with, the snotty Augie Duluth. “Buffy!” exclaimed Cordelia as she broke away from Augie and tried to hide how disheveled her hair and clothing were. “Invade personal space much?”
“Getting out of the rain?”
“You can’t! I’m busy!” Cordelia replied as an undeterred Augie pursed his lips, grabbed her, spun her back to him, and attempted to suck face with all the finesse girls usually expect from members of the football team.
Buffy’s stomach turned: She didn’t find Augie attractive in the slightest. Then, with a rear glance, she remembered why she’d come here in the first place. The zombies were nowhere to be seen—not yet—but their distinct growl was faintly audible, if one knew what to listen for. “Cordelia, I think it’s time you blew this gazebo!”
“I beg your pardon?” Cordelia exclaimed.
“All right! My little dew flower!” Augie exclaimed, just before he planted yet another big wet sloppy kiss on her.
Somebody better throw this dog a Milkbone, thought Buffy. “The police are coming!”
Cordelia jumped away from Augie as if he’d given her an electric shock. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” said Buffy sheepishly, “but I’ve gotten into trouble with the law. They’re on their way,” she added, pointing to the trees.
“Why should I go?” Cordelia asked. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Just think of the social black eye you’ll get if the word leaks that you were hanging with a known felon.”
“Don’t tell me you burnt down the Sunnydale gym too,” said Augie with a laugh.
“Only the boys’ locker room,” said Buffy. “All those smelly gym socks needed was one spark and … poof!”
“You said you’re in trouble with whom?” Cordelia asked. At last the full implication of what Buffy was saying had sunk in and she was genuinely shocked.
Buffy saw the first pair of zombie legs become visible beneath the distant foliage. “You’ll read about it in the papers tomorrow. Just trust me and go!”
“She’s right, babe,” said Augie. “See you around, my little jailbird,” he said to Buffy as he took Cordelia by the elbow and attempted to escort her down the steps.
But Cordelia was reluctant, and she glared at Buffy. “You’re involved in more funny business, aren’t you?”
“You don’t want to know.”
&nb
sp; Suddenly energized, Cordelia slapped a surprised Augie several times on the arm. “What’s keeping you? Let’s go!” She grabbed him by his varsity jacket and practically dragged him into the rain. “You’re so slow!”
“That’s not—”
“Shut up!” Cordelia hissed.
Buffy sighed with relief that they were finally going. She hated to admit it, but at the moment she envied Cordelia, who for all her faults was at least living a normal teenager’s life.
And then, of course, there were the zombies, who had already lived theirs. The army shuffled down the hill toward the gazebo. A few slipped and fell, knocking others over and breaking off more than a few limbs in the process. Their chorus of growls was not inspired by the self-inflicted carnage or by the carnage they hoped to inflict on Buffy—they just came out spontaneously.
“Oh Romeo, oh Romeo, about time you showed up.” Buffy had no idea if any of the zombies had enough brains left to be taunted, but she’d noticed a couple of them veering off in the direction Cordelia and Augie had taken. She needed them all to follow her, without exception, if her plan was to work.
The zombies did. Buffy leapt off the gazebo, landed on the first stone of a raised path, and headed out the park past a baseball field and a deserted public building. Well, at least she hoped it was deserted. It certainly appeared closed for the night, which was good, because in a few minutes she wouldn’t be able to deal with any strays.
She crossed the street, by now so drenched that she thought nothing of fording the water overflowing the gutters on either side.
Buffy reached the border of a well-groomed field that was off-limits to the public. Beyond the field was a well-lit building surrounded by an electrified fence covered with barbed wire. During the few seconds Buffy glanced that way, the building’s lightning rod attracted no less than three bolts.
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