by Nancy Holder
“Oh, I don’t know,” he muttered. “How about zombies and werewolves and vamps?”
“Oh my,” Willow gasped.
Xander rolled his eyes. “What is it with you and the Wizard of Oz references? Zombies and werewolves and vamps, oh my. Zombies and werewolves and—”
“Vamps,” Willow finished, and whacked him in the chest.
Finally Xander realized that her “Oh my” hadn’t been a film reference, but an actual gasp of oh-boy-we’re-in-trouble-now astonishment. He followed her gaze and saw that they weren’t alone. They really had been followed.
“Well, well, what have we here?” sneered the blond-haired fang-boy Willow had nicknamed Blue Eyes.
“Miss me, baby?” asked his sidekick, the vamp chick they’d dubbed Red, batting her long lashes at Xander.
“Like a hole in the head,” Xander grumbled. “Or two in the neck. One hundred people surveyed, top five answers on the board. Number one answer is no. Definitely no.”
The vampires began to move across the grass toward them.
“We’ve been following you,” Blue Eyes growled. “The Slayer isn’t around now to protect you. You’re just another pair of bloodbags, just meat. Let’s see if you’re as brave without the Chosen One to protect you.”
“Bravery is extremely overrated,” Willow said. She reached out and gripped Xander’s hand.
“Absolutely,” Xander agreed nervously as the vampires split apart, moving to trap him and Willow between them. “There are so many ways to respond to danger that are more constructive than bravery.”
“Name one,” Red sneered through perfect pouty lips that almost distracted Xander from the danger.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Well, then, there’s running!”
Dragging Willow along, Xander bolted for the school. A second later, she passed him and he let go of her hand. The vampires roared and ran in pursuit. The stairs were just ahead, but he knew they weren’t going to make it.
“Willow!” he shouted. “Open the door!”
Xander reached behind his back, under the white shirttail that had been hanging down over his pants. He yanked a cross from his belt and stopped short, turned, and lifted the cross to face the vampires.
“Xander!” Willow cried in alarm behind him. Then he heard her begin to bang on the door, screaming for Giles.
Blue Eyes and Red hissed as they stumbled to a halt on the lawn. The vampires were taken off guard, but Xander knew that in a second they’d be moving in on him again like social-climbing sophomores after Cordelia. Holding the cross behind him, he stumbled toward the stairs.
“What in the world?” Giles’s voice came from behind him, and Xander knew that was his cue.
Fast as he could manage, he loped up the stairs, pushing through the double doors past Willow and Giles. As they slammed the doors, Blue Eyes and Red were pounding up the steps. Giles and Willow hurried, but Red got a hand inside and reached her clawed fingers toward Willow’s face. The doors were crushing her arm, but the vampire kept coming. Blue Eyes slammed against the door, trying to force it open.
“Denied!” Xander shouted, and slapped the cross down on Red’s bare arm.
The vamp chick howled in agony and withdrew, but in a heartbeat, Blue Eyes was there, propping open the door with his foot.
“Xander!” Willow shouted.
The cross was still gripped in his hand. Xander hurled it at Blue Eyes’s forehead. It struck him there, and he fell back as if the Hulk had popped him one, the flesh of his face smoking.
Willow and Giles were finally able to get the doors closed. Xander rammed the bolts on the top and bottom of the doors into their respective holes, then stood, breathing heavily, as the vampires began to slam against the doors from outside.
“Either I’m having a heart attack or a supermodel has agreed to be my bride,” Xander huffed, and turned to face Willow and Giles, who stared at him grimly.
“Not that I’m not happy that you produced that cross from thin air,” Willow said, “but have you been carrying that around all night?”
Xander looked away. “Not exactly. When I was rifling through Buffy’s Slayer bag, I kind of borrowed it. I figured it might come in handy, and she had another one.”
He shrugged.
“Well,” Giles sniffed, “I, for one, am pleased with your sudden burst of kleptomania. Without it, we might be dead now.”
“Thanks,” Xander said. “I think.”
“So what now?” Willow asked.
“We do seem to be in a bit of a pickle,” Giles commented.
“Enough with the condiments,” Xander began, but Giles interrupted.
“I’m sorry, Xander, but we’ve no time for the usual banter. It seems your story about pumpkin-headed scarecrows and Halloween rain may be true after all. I suspect that Samhain, the demon spirit who once ruled Halloween, may be out to destroy Buffy. Your appearance here tells me it hasn’t been a quiet night.”
“Only if you call vampires and zombies a quiet night,” Willow said.
“Which may have been sent after Buffy by Samhain himself,” Giles muttered, almost to himself. “We’ve got to get out of here. It seems our Slayer may have gotten herself into serious trouble.”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, Giles,” Xander replied. “But we’re in a bit more than kinda sorta trouble ourselves, here. Any ideas how we’re going to get to Buffy to warn her about the Halloween demon guy?”
Giles pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, raised his eyebrows, and smiled thinly. “Well,” he said, “we’re just going to have to slay those vampires outside, now aren’t we?”
CHAPTER SIX
When zombies rose, they scrabbled like rats as they clawed their way out of their graves. You’d almost think they were suffocating below the earth and needed the fresh air, the way they struggled.
At least, that was one Slayer’s opinion as she sat on top of the locked wrought-iron entrance gates of the Sunnydale Cemetery. Gray hands coated with slime and crawling with earthworms shot out of the ground and searched for something, anything, to grab on to—a bush, a headstone, another zombie—to pull the rest of the zombie out.
Make that most of the rest of the zombie.
Sometimes things were left behind in the effort, like an arm or a leg or a face. But that didn’t seem to matter as they got free of the grave and started doing their zombie thing.
Of all the forces of evil Buffy had to fight, zombies were probably the grossest. No way was she delighted to go in there and mess with them.
But when zombies rose, they were hungry.
For human brains.
They would do just about anything for a bite or two.
The walking dead smelled dinner, and its name was Buffy.
They must have smelled the rest of Sunnydale, too, because about a dozen of them had clumped into a mosh pit at the stone wall, and they were pushing to get the heck out of the cemetery and cruise for munchies. The wall so far had not given way. But farther down, a second bunch was pushing on another section. Several small stones had chipped out of the cement grout and clattered to the sidewalk on the other side.
Beneath her perch atop the gates, fifteen or twenty shambling corpses, in different stages of decay, surged against the iron bars. The chain that held the gates closed screeched, as did the iron hinges. It wouldn’t be long before one or the other gave way and the zombies would be out on the streets of Sunnydale.
Buffy tried not to look at them. The dead faces, some just bare skulls with tufts of skin and hair here and there, gaped up at her. There was a moaning coming from the dead that gave her a major wiggins, a shiver all through her. It was like putting her ear to a seashell, only much worse. She couldn’t tell if it was their voices, or just the wind whistling through their exposed bones and skulls. That sound was worse than Cordelia’s whining, and even more likely to drive her crazy.
“Okay, you guys have killer harmonies. But could you please shut up!”
> The zombies didn’t respond at all, just continued to moan and stare. Some of them were staring without eyes, and Buffy so did not want to know what they were seeing.
She glanced out over the cemetery as more zombies clawed out of their graves. There were an awful lot of them. Sunnydale seemed like such a small town, but this was one major zombie square dance. If one fell, the others walked right over it. Do-si-do, whoops, smush. Buffy made a face. No doubt about it. Zombies were gross, and they were rude.
The newcomers moved to join the others at the dead folks jamboree, and the walls began to bulge with the pressure. The gate hinges and chains screeched even louder, close to snapping. They were going to get out. Buffy wrinkled her nose. Zombies, meet Slayer. Slayer, stop zombies from feasting on the neighbors.
“I am definitely going to need a bath after this,” she muttered, and leaped over the heads of her fan club, smack into the middle of the cemetery. Since almost everybody was pushing against the walls, Buffy could warm up with the stragglers and the newly risen who didn’t know what the heck was going on.
Yeah, like any of them had a clue.
As if she did. These spooky ooky guys were rising why?
The zombie closest to her wheeled around and came for her, arms stretched forward like a classic sleepwalker. Its eyes were huge and blank. Its jaws opened and shut. But the fact that it had eyes and a jaw meant the guy hadn’t been dead too long, so he’d be stronger than the others. Buffy jumped into the air and launched a hard kick at its face. Whiplash: The thing did a one-eighty and keeled right over.
Another zombie approached from behind. She shot her leg out and back, crushing the zombie’s ribs, and sent it flying backward. She nailed another with a fist to the top of its head and it crumpled again.
“Eeuu,” she said. Her knuckles were covered with mold and spiderwebs. Absently she wiped them on her blouse.
Besides being disgusting, zombies were pretty easy to stop. Problems started only when there were a whole lot of them. Like, say, a whole cemetery full. With three quick kicks, Buffy took down as many zombies. She picked up a broken headstone and smashed in their skulls.
Now the silent majority had begun to realize something tasty was in their midst. Their heads rose. They looked like dogs sniffing the air or high school boys at the Bronze. They started to turn.
They began to advance on her.
“Giles,” Buffy said under her breath, “this would be a good time to show up with some special zombie-stopping gear or spells or something.” To the zombies, she bellowed—loud enough to startle, if not wake, the dead—“Simon says go back in your graves.”
They kept coming. Some wore ragged shrouds, others had on rotting business suits and dresses. One was dressed like a clown, and that one gave her the wiggins worst of all.
“Yo, zombie guys, pay attention,” she said, smashing her fist into the chest of one without looking at it, kicking at another, flipping backward over a third. “When it’s Simon says, that means you have to do what I say. Let’s be more direct. The Slayer says, die, like, forever.”
Still more zombies stumbled toward her. She whirled in a circle, completely surrounded. She heard the click of their jaws opening and shutting. The moaning continued, grew louder now, and really started to bother her. She could feel it in her bones, an ache, a rattle, a weariness. The moans were this extreme wall of sadness, and if that’s how being dead made you feel, Buffy figured it was even worse than high school.
Her heart was pounding. She had this mental picture of them overtaking her, cracking her skull open like a coconut, and eating her brains. There were just too many of them. Besides, a lot of the ones she managed to mangle got back up.
“Hey, look, my brains aren’t that special, okay?” she said, half-pleading. “I’m flunking history. You don’t want them.”
A zombie woman in the tatters of a wedding dress grabbed her arm. Buffy fought it off just as another zombie, this one in the remnants of a tuxedo, grabbed her other arm. She threw that one off too.
“Have you two met before?” she asked as the zombies collided with each other and fell to the ground. “Like, at the altar?”
Then the clown trudged toward her. Its orange fright wig sat askew on its head, and pieces of gray hair escaped from beneath it. Beneath caked and moldering white clown makeup and a huge, gaping grin, the face was vaguely familiar. There was something about it that reminded her of someone.
It came closer. And closer.
Someone she had seen recently . . .
It opened wide.
The hair stood up on the back of Buffy’s neck.
“Mr. O’Leary?” she cried at the zombie clown as she backed up into the arms of another zombie, who began to squeeze her around the middle, hard enough to push the breath out of her lungs.
“I’m comin’, darlin’ girl!” a man’s voice cried.
As the zombie clown lurched toward her and grabbed her around the throat, Mr. O’Leary—as alive as she was, and probably for just as long—dropped down from the cemetery wall and barreled toward her.
“Oh, no,” Buffy groaned breathlessly. “Mr. O’Leary, get out of here.”
“’Tis a good thing I decided to come back. I’ll save you!” he shouted, pushing a zombie from his path.
About a third of the zombies, smelling fresh meat, headed for him. The clown zombie kept strangling Buffy as he tried to get his mouth around the side of her head for that first dainty chomp.
“Giles,” she said through gritted teeth, “now’s a good time.”
Or not.
“Okay, Giles, the plan is?” Xander asked anxiously as the female vampire Willow and Xander had been calling Red body-slammed the double entry doors of Sunnydale High School for an estimated one hundred and first time.
Thus far the vampires had not been able to enter, which made Giles suspect they could not. Perhaps it was because they hadn’t been invited over the threshold. On the other hand, it was clear that Red was alone now. Her partner, whom Willow and Xander had referred to as Blue Eyes, had stopped pounding on the door, and they hadn’t heard him shouting for a minute or two.
In addition, Giles was not certain Blue Eyes and Red were alone or if they were all barred from entrance into the school. At any moment, one could come crashing through the doors. In fact, they might already be sneaking down the corridors, intent upon ambushing the three humans.
The time for research was over, Giles knew. The time for action was upon him. Things like this had never occurred back in London. He’d been rather excited to discover he was to be the Watcher of the Slayer. Oh, the misspent enthusiasms of the innocent. Or the ignorant.
“We’re coming for you,” Red cooed. “You most of all, Xander.”
“She knows my name,” Xander blurted, obviously even more terrified than before.
Willow, at Giles’s side, said with mock concern, “Oh, dear. Now she can look you up.”
“We’re unlisted,” Xander said, as if the thought afforded him some measure of relief.
Giles had been holding the journal of Timothy Cassidy. Now he put the book beside the crossbow he had planned to bring to Buffy, gathered the two teenagers closer, and dropped his voice to a whisper.
“Right,” he began. “It appears these two at least cannot come inside without an invitation. This is what we’ll do. We’ll uncover all the windows in the library. Then we’ll lure them in and seal them up. When the sun rises, we’ll let it do our work for us.”
“Solar-powered death-dealing,” Xander said, nodding. “Cool. Lure them in how?”
“Seal them up how?” Willow added.
Both the youngsters looked at him with trusting, inquisitive expressions. After all, one might suppose the Watcher would have instant answers to questions such as these.
In which case, one would be sadly mistaken.
“Yes, well, I’ve been mulling that over.” He pushed up his glasses again and gave a thought to Buffy. He was very worried about her. Each mom
ent he wasted dithering in indecision was a moment that could cost her life.
“All right.” He nodded at them reassuringly and picked up a canvas sack full of supplies. “I’ve some things in here that vampires aren’t fond of—garlic bulbs, crosses, holy water. Along with some other items I’ve collected for Buffy.” He opened the sack and showed them four pieces of wood like broken tree branches with the bark still on. “To kill Samhain, the Slayer must—”
“Uh, Giles? No offense, but just in case, can we go into that later?” Xander asked.
“Xander, be polite,” Willow said, poking the boy in the ribs.
“I said ‘no offense,’” Xander murmured defensively.
“None taken, I assure you.” Giles cleared his throat as he handed Willow the sack. He hesitated a moment as he worked on his plan. Willow and Xander traded worried glances. Giles’s sense of responsibility weighed on him ever more heavily.
“You two go to the library and tear the draperies off the windows, then put a cross on each one. We’ll just have to hope they either don’t notice what you’re doing, or don’t care. Then we’ll get them into the library, block their way out with garlic and holy water, and in the morning, the sun will rise and”—he snapped his fingers—“two dead vampires.”
“Neato keeno.” Xander snapped his fingers in response. “Will, let’s go.”
“Wait.” Willow frowned at Giles. “How are we going to get them into the library?”
Giles nodded. “Right. I shall invite them in and allow them to chase me. You two hide. Once we’re in the library, I’ll get out somehow, and then you two scatter the garlic and water over the threshold before they can follow.”
Willow shook her head. “I was with you—sort of—until the ‘somehow’ part.”
Xander crossed him arms. “Yes. ‘Somehow’ is the part where I also feel challenged about moving forward. Also, the part where they chase you.”
“Well, all right, then, have you a better plan?” Giles looked at each of them in turn. “In that case, we’ll go with mine.”
“But, Giles,” Willow said anxiously, “you’re the Watcher. Buffy needs you. If you die, she’ll probably get killed.”