“Can you take in everyone for now? The subways won’t be runnin’, and I’m thinkin’ buses and cabs’ll be hard to come by.”
“Okay,” Carmela said. “I got lots of candles, too. We’ll be fine. When I was growing up in Puerto Rico, we didn’t have no electricity.”
Alessio asked, “What about you, Nikki?”
Nikki hesitated, then said, for the benefit of those who didn’t know she was the Chosen One, “I gotta find Robin. Be cool, y’all!”
With that, she ran down 42nd Street toward the noises. She passed by several porno theaters and peep-show houses, all of which had confused patrons milling around and angry owners closing up shop due to being powerless, just like the Gem had. Most of the women were scantily clad, and not just because of the hot weather, and most of the men were wearing trench coats, despite the hot weather.
Nikki had the feeling that things were going to get ugly. It was hot, it was humid, the city was going to hell (something that had literally almost happened six months earlier, but for Nikki’s efforts), and now the power had gone out in the middle of the night. She did not think this was a good omen for peace and happiness.
Sure enough, when she turned the corner onto Eighth Avenue, there were a couple of kids breaking glass on the cars parked on the avenue. Chasing them off proved fairly simple—the sight of a woman in a big leather coat heading toward them had been enough to get them both to run away—but then she caught sight of two cars crashing into each other on 44th right at the mouth of the intersection.
Hell, the traffic lights are down. She ran north on Eighth, then ran faster when one of the cars—a Ford Pinto—started to catch fire. By the time she got to the intersection, the driver of the first car had gotten out and started screaming, while the Pinto remained on fire. There was a woman in the driver’s seat, her body slumped across the steering wheel, and a young child crying in the passenger seat. The child, at least, had a seat belt on.
Tucking her hand inside the sleeve of her coat, Nikki grabbed the passenger-side door handle through the coat and pulled. It was locked, of course, so she pulled harder, breaking the lock. The heat from the fire—which, she now saw, had started on the floor in front of the child—hot on Nikki’s face, she undid the seat belt and got the child out, ran to the corner, knelt down, and put her on the sidewalk. She looked over at the driver of the other car. “You! Get over here!”
“This ain’t my fault!” the man said. “I was just drivin’, this lady came outta—”
Getting up from her kneeling position, she ran to the driver and grabbed him by his T-shirt. “I said get over here, fool! Watch that child!”
The man was about to say something when Nikki forcibly yanked him over to the sidewalk. “Yeah, okay,” he muttered.
Nikki then went back for the driver. She had a large, bloody gash on her head and hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. Nikki grabbed her, dragged her out of the car, then carried her over to the sidewalk next to the child. She looked around for a phone booth, then spotting one, said to the other driver, “Stay here.”
Just as she ran to the phone booth, a vampire jumped in front of her. Grinning, the bloodsucker said, “Where were you when the lights went out?”
“Staking your sorry ass,” Nikki said as she suited action to words. Moments later, she was at the phone booth, the dust of the vampire sticking to the soles of her platforms.
The bloodsuckers are gonna love this, she thought. She picked up the phone and dialed the operator.
She got a busy signal.
I don’t believe this. How could the operator have a busy signal? After a second, she answered her own question. Stuff like this is happening all over town.
Then she heard the siren of a police car. Turning, she saw the car pulling up to the Pinto, which was now completely on fire and providing more illumination than anything else nearby. Two fuzz got out, one holding a fire extinguisher. Good luck with that. The other one went to check on the woman and the baby on the sidewalk.
Confident that the victims were in safe hands, she left the phone booth and continued running uptown. People were screaming and wondering what was happening. At the corner of 46th, some woman was proclaiming that Jesus was coming.
When she reached 47th, she saw a large vampire attacking a young woman, and two more attacking two kids. To her horror, she realized that the two kids were the same ones she’d chased off from smashing car windows.
Pulling two stakes from her coat pocket, she threw one at the large vampire. As soon as he turned to dust, the woman he was attacking turned and ran like hell.
Meanwhile, she grabbed one of the other two just as he was about to bite the neck of one of the kids. She punched him in the face, which caused him to stagger backward, leaving him open to be staked.
As soon as he got dusted, his pal lost interest in his target, choosing instead to run away.
Nikki took the same stake she’d used on his partner and threw it at his back. A moment later he was dust too.
“Thanks, Slayer!” one of the kids said.
“You know who I am?” Nikki asked cautiously. Probably these kids just knew her rep, but she needed to be sure.
“Why you think we ran, mama?” the other one said with a grin. “Soon’s we saw you, we figured you’d rough us up.”
“Didn’t think no vamps’d be trying to suck us dry, though,” the first one said. “That was not cool.”
Nikki shook her head. “Yeah, well, I catch you two bein’ stupid again, and I will rough you up—and not nicely, like I did those bloodsuckers, you dig?”
“We dig, mama, we dig.”
“Good. Now go on home.” She looked around. “It ain’t safe to be out tonight.”
With that, she ran off in search of another phone booth. She needed to call Crowley, make sure Robin was okay. . . .
* * *
It had taken Spike a couple of hours to make it all the way up to 119th Street. On the way, he’d been tempted by panic, chaos, disorder, and looting, but he ignored all of it. Under any other circumstances, he’d be reveling in it, of course. The craziness was right up there with the rioting in Peking back in 1900. Spike and Dru had done in their fair share of missionaries and revolutionaries—more the former, since pious people tasted better—before the Slayer showed up intending to stop them.
She’d failed.
Tasting the blood of a Slayer was the most amazing aphrodisiac Spike had ever encountered, and it was made all the more glorious by getting to immediately share it with Dru.
Now this Reet Weldon bastard had Dru. She’d traveled across an ocean to find him again, proving that she loved him more than anything in the world, and this bloody git was threatening her?
Not on your unlife, mate. You are mine.
Two of the buildings he passed on his way here were ablaze, as were several cars. Spike had to smile as he jogged to the corner of 119th and Lenox. Times like this really bring out the best in humanity. This is the way it should be: chaos, destruction, death, fire. A real party, this.
He fully intended to share in it with Dru once business was taken care of.
Two vampires were standing guard at the front entrance to the building. Spike grabbed the hood of a car that was parked across the street and proceeded to rip it off. The grinding sound of rended metal got the vamps’ attention.
“You a dead man, sucker!” one of them said as he ran toward Spike, putting his game face on.
His compatriot did likewise, not saying anything.
Spike whipped his new toy around, using the sharp edge of the bent metal to slice through the vampires. One went straight through the neck, dusting him instantly. The other one, though, was taller, and Spike was only able to impale his left arm.
That was enough to make the vampire double over in agony, leaving Spike free to break his neck and rip his head off.
Two down.
Belatedly, Spike realized he should’ve left one alive to question. He needed to know where Dru wa
s.
Sod it, I’ll find her on my own. He ran in the front door, all traces of fatigue from the run of over a hundred blocks gone with the desire to find Drusilla.
He opened the door to see four vampires with guns standing at four spots on the staircase.
Bloody hell, he thought as he dove back out onto the stoop to avoid the flying bullets. They wouldn’t kill him, but they still hurt quite a bit and would leave him helpless to get staked or beheaded or the like. Spike didn’t do helpless, so he beat a hasty retreat.
All right—Plan B it is, then.
He ran down Lenox Avenue, in search of ammunition for Plan B—as soon as he figured out what that was. . . .
* * *
Nikki’s plan had been a simple one: Find vampires that were taking advantage of the blackout and stake them.
The reality turned out to be much different. In the two hours after the tussle on 47th and Eighth, she’d staked a dozen more vampires, but that was the least of what she saw.
There was looting everywhere.
Nikki remembered only bits and pieces of the last blackout, but she would never have described it as “ugly.” It was just something that New Yorkers dealt with until it got fixed.
But New Yorkers had been dealing with a lot lately, and it looked like the blackout could be their breaking point. The city was starting to look like those news stories about Watts during the riots there. Cars were on fire or crashed into hydrants or telephone poles or other cars. Vampires were all over the place.
However, the thing she saw most was people breaking into stores, shattering windows, ripping into gratings, and taking whatever wasn’t nailed down—and, in some cases, what was. Whatever couldn’t be carried out was usually damaged beyond all repair.
At first Nikki didn’t concern herself with all of that. She was the Slayer, and the mission was what mattered. The fuzz were there to keep a lid on this. Her job was to throw down with the bloodsuckers.
Except right now, the vampiric bloodsuckers were outnumbered by the human ones. Every store she saw—electronics places, furniture stores, delis, shoe stores, flower shops, stationery stores, drugstores, you name it—had people breaking in and stealing stuff. At one clothing store, she saw a young woman running out clutching a pile of jeans. “Seventeen ninety-nine for dungarees, my ass!” she shouted. “Ain’t never payin’ that now!”
Even then, she was able to keep her focus, especially when she saw a barber shop being invaded by four vamps who were feeding on the customers—at least they were, until Nikki dusted them.
“Thank God you’re here,” one of the customers—a sister with a huge Afro—said. “Now things gonna be put right.”
One of the barbers, an older black man, said, “Girl, whatchoo talkin’ ’bout?”
“That’s the Slayer, fool,” the sister said.
Eyes wide, the barber said, “You the Slayer for real? My goodness.” He put his scissors down and put out his hands. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Shoulda known, what with that stake and all.”
She returned the handshake with a smile, then asked, “You got a phone?”
“Yes ma’am, I most surely do.” The barber reached behind a desk and pulled out a phone.
“Thank you,” Nikki said as she picked it up and started dialing Crowley’s number. She’d tried from five different phone booths as she worked her way through town but got a busy signal each time—and it was one of those fast busy signals you got when the lines were overwhelmed.
Unfortunately, after dialing the seven numbers to reach Crowley’s place, she got the same signal. “Dammit.”
The woman with the big Afro put her hand on Nikki’s shoulder. “You got to be gettin’ back out there, girl! It’s crazy, and you the only one that can stop it.”
Nikki hesitated. “I don’t know that I—”
The barber said, “Hey now, stop pressuring the girl. She can’t be doing everything.”
Looking at the barber like she was crazy, the woman said, “Sure she can, fool—she’s the Slayer. She the one who stopped the world comin’ to an end during the bicentennial last summer!”
At that, Nikki couldn’t help but smile. All she’d done on the Fourth of July last year—the two hundredth birthday of the United States, and a day of great celebrating all across the city—was keep a few demons from taking advantage of the festivities to make mischief. Nikki had seen what the end of the world might look like, and that definitely wasn’t it.
“She’ll stop the craziness. S’what she does!”
Quickly, Nikki said, “Gotta go—be careful, all right? It ain’t safe out there.”
“I heard that,” the barber said, reaching into his pocket for a set of keys. Nikki hoped that meant that he was planning to lock the door behind her. Might not do much good, what with people breaking and entering all over town, but every little bit helped.
Then, farther up Ninth Avenue, she saw something that made her heart sink.
Armstrong and Son Furniture Emporium was a modest store on Ninth and 49th. It was owned by two Afro-Americans—Frank Armstrong and his son, Larry—who’d opened it about a decade before. They were among the first minorities to receive a loan from the Small Business Association in New York. Because of that, and because of their success, they were pillars of the community, a beacon to everyone who wanted to do better for themselves, who were beaten down by the despair and the poverty—at the very least, they saw that Frank and Larry made the dream work.
They hadn’t abandoned the community, either. The store had sponsored a variety of after-school programs at several public schools and donated money to a drug treatment clinic at Roosevelt Hospital. Plus, they’d always employed kids from the neighborhood in the store and paid them better than minimum wage. Had there been one place that Nikki would have sworn up and down would be left alone tonight, it was Armstrong and Son.
Which made it that much more devastating to see half a dozen people rooting around through the store.
No vampires were present, no chaos demons trying to wreak havoc, no magic spell making all these people crazy. By that token, Nikki should’ve moved on, found a supernatural crisis she could sink her stake into and leave this to the fuzz.
“She’ll stop the craziness. S’what she does!”
Grinding her teeth, Nikki dove through the broken glass and shattered window guard of Armstrong and Son.
Over here, two people were carrying a sofa toward the door. Over there, someone was using a switchblade to slice open an easy chair. Three people were carrying an entire dining-room set out.
Nikki could only make out that much because of the flashlights shining down from the balcony level. Following the beams upward, Nikki was barely able to make out one of the two owners, probably Frank, yelling, “Stop that! Get outta here!”
Suddenly the dining-room carriers were doused with water. Cursing, they dropped the table and chairs and ran out. Nikki looked up to see Larry holding an upended bucket.
Neat trick, but that ain’t gonna hold ’em off for long. Nikki had to do something. But what? These people are human. I punch any one of them, I’ll probably kill ’em. From the very beginning, Crowley had drilled into her that she could not unleash her Slayer strength on regular humans, only vampires and demons. Robin, of all people, had reinforced it, taking the lessons of his favorite comic book heroes to heart. Besides, a rumble will just make things worse for the Armstrongs.
“What the hell’s wrong with you people?” somebody shouted. To Nikki’s shock, she realized that she herself was saying those words. She’d never been a talker—Crowley had taught her it was best to conserve her energy and not speak while fighting. Every once in a while, she’d speak up—to tell some fool to stop messing with her coat, or to make fun of them like she did Spike—but mostly she kept quiet, letting her fists and feet and stake do the talking.
Equally shocking was that everybody stopped moving for a second. Frank’s flashlight shone down on her face, and Nikki refused to eve
n blink. “This is Armstrong and Son. You know what this place is?”
“So what?” someone said.
“Yeah, man, it’s time to get our own back.”
Nikki couldn’t see who was talking, but she didn’t care much either, since she was talking to all of them. “Your own what? Yeah, life’s pretty rough right now, but that ain’t these people’s fault. They been doin’ everything they can to make things a little better—and you come in here and wreck their joint? That ain’t payin’ nobody back, that’s just bein’ a fool. You know what they say—we’re lazy, we’re no good, we should get jobs instead o’ livin’ on welfare, it’s our fault for bein’ in gangs, it’s our fault for not takin’ advantage. All you people are doin’ right now is provin’ them right. All you people are doin’ is ruining the livelihood of a good man and his son, and for what? What you gonna prove here? All you doin’ is pissin’ where you live.”
“Hey, man, ain’t nobody standin’ for nobody, so we got to do this!”
“Right on, brother! We on our own now.”
“No,” Nikki said, “you ain’t. You got me. Some o’ you may know who I am—I’ve been keepin’ y’all safe for four years now, and I’ll keep doin’ it, long as I can. But I swear to each and every one of you that if you keep this up, I am gone—but not before I whup each of you upside the head, you dig? Now get out of here, and leave these people alone.”
“Who the hell’re you, bitch?” This was the dude with the switchblade.
“Shut up, man,” someone else said in a whisper, “that’s the Slayer.”
“I ain’t afraid of her.” He walked up to her, waving the switchblade back and forth in what the fool probably thought was an intimidating style.
Then he slashed at Nikki’s face. She ducked it without even trying hard, grabbed his wrist, and smashed it against her knee, causing him to lose his grip on the blade, then flipped him around and onto his back. Then she picked up the switchblade and snapped it in two.
“Anybody else wanna take a shot?”
Nobody said anything.
“Then beat it. Go home.”
Slowly but surely, the would-be looters started trudging their way out of the store. She glowered at each one until they left.
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