by Nancy Holder
“But if one of us dies,” Xander went on, “she’ll totally feel bad.” He raised his hand. “I say we vote on Giles’s plan. See, Giles, we live in a democracy,” he added. “We vote on stuff.”
“To my knowledge, the pursuit of the vampires is not part of your Constitution,” Giles countered.
“Neither is pursuit by the vampires,” Willow said firmly.
“Or for the vampires.” Xander nodded wisely.
Giles blinked. There were times when he appreciated the rather esoteric babble of the average American adolescent, and if pressed, he would have to admit that he found Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg to be above average in many respects. Studying not being one of them in Xander’s case, however, but that was beside the point. He found their strong sense of loyalty to each other and to the Slayer most admirable, and he was touched by their concern for his welfare.
However, returning to the notion of babbling, he was beginning to feel cast adrift in this conversation. In short, they were losing him, and he was just about to inform them of that fact, when they both nodded at him.
“We don’t like it, but we’ll do it your way,” Willow said.
“Oh,” Giles said, surprised. “Good.”
“If you promise to take a cross and holy water,” Willow added. She shrugged uncertainly. “I guess if you have garlic with you, they might not follow you.”
He looked at them and said, “And I assume each of you will carry a cross on your person?”
“We’re armed and loaded for bear,” Xander assured him as he took a cross out of the sack and held it up for inspection. “Whatever that means. Watch as I exhibit my ignorance.”
“It’s a hunting reference,” Willow observed, also holding up a cross. “Bears. Rifles. Bullets.”
“Okay. Cool. Ignorance resolved. But I move on,” Xander said. “I get the part where vampires can’t come into your house if you don’t invite them in. But that’s, like, your house. Your territory. What about public buildings? Like, um, schools?”
Willow looked worried. “I can’t remember. Have we ever seen a vampire at the movies? Or in a grocery store?”
The three looked at one another.
Further discussion was curtailed by the shattering of a window somewhere inside the school.
“Not the answer I was looking for,” Willow said anxiously. Her eyes widened. “Giles?”
“Run,” Giles said, fishing in his pocket for his keys. “I shall detain them for as long as I can.”
Xander grabbed her hand. “Giles, if you are . . . way detained, what do we tell Buffy?”
“Take the crossbow,” Giles began, then realized there wasn’t enough time to go through everything. “The Watcher’s journal,” he said, handing the volume to Willow. “Timothy Cassidy’s. Be sure to take that with you too.”
Footsteps pounded down the corridor.
“For God’s sake, run!” Giles shouted.
The two dashed around a corner and disappeared.
“Xan-der,” came the teasing whisper of Red, the vampire female who’d set her sights on the young man.
Giles began to run too.
In the direction of the voice.
“No, no!” Mr. O’Leary shouted. “Sean!”
He jumped on the back of the clown zombie and pounded on its head and arms, trying to stop it from strangling Buffy. “It’s me own dead brother!”
That explained why the clown looked so familiar, Buffy realized as she started to lose consciousness from lack of air. She’d thought it was Mr. O’Leary himself, somehow, as impossible as that would have been. Or maybe she thought she recognized the clown from one of those childhood nightmares called magic shows at kiddie birthday parties. She hated them.
Clowns wigged her . . .
. . . and ventriloquist’s dummies . . .
. . . and dying . . .
. . . and raisins . . . raisin bran . . . something about raisin brain.
Raisin brains . . .
. . . risin’ brains . . .
“No!” she shouted, gathering her strength as Mr. O’Leary managed to damage his brother enough for Buffy to break his grasp. She tucked in her head and collapsed to the ground. She heaved in huge gasps of air, fighting against blacking out, and kicked backward, shattering the knee of the zombie who’d had her around the waist. In front of her, Mr. O’Leary tumbled to the ground with the walking, clown-suited corpse of his brother.
Mr. O’Leary was pinned beneath the flailing clown zombie.
Buffy leaped to her feet and started kicking zombie parts as fast and hard as she could.
“This is—I mean, was—your brother?” she asked, horrified.
Mr. O’Leary rolled from beneath the clown and struggled to get to his feet. “Alas, dead these sixteen years. I’ll tell you this. He was not buried in a clown costume. Someone has done this out of spite.”
“This must be hard for you,” she said, huffing. She yanked Mr. O’Leary up and slammed her fist into another zombie who attempted to grab on to the man. “Now, please, get out of here,” she said.
“I’ll stay and fight with you,” he insisted.
“Go to the school. Ask Mr. Giles, the librarian, to come as fast as he can.” She thought of Willow and Xander. Surely, if they’d made it to the library, they’d be here with Giles by now. “He can help.”
“I’ll not be leaving you here alone!” Mr. O’Leary insisted.
Suddenly, he cried out, grabbed at his chest, and fell to the ground. The zombies swarmed over Buffy, and she thrashed at them, breaking free. But it was getting harder and harder to move.
The Slayer was getting tired.
CHAPTER SEVEN
As Giles ran toward the voice of the female vampire, her companion, fully attired in a cowboy costume, jumped out from around a corner.
“Howdy, pardner,” he said to Giles, who halted immediately, whirled around, and ran toward the library as fast as he could.
It was not fast enough.
Blue Eyes was upon him, jumping on Giles’s back as if he were a horse. He kicked at Giles’s sides and yelled, “Yee-ha!”
Taking his cue from his training sessions with the Slayer, Giles tucked in his head and leaned forward. The vampire flew over his head and sprawled on the ground.
“I can’t take you anywhere,” Red drawled at Blue Eyes in mock disgust.
Giles threw himself against the wall and held out his cross, brandishing it from side to side as the female vampire slowed to a walk and smiled at Giles. Blue Eyes got up and moved in on him from the opposite direction.
“You don’t need that, Deputy,” Red said sweetly. “Just put it down.”
“Stay back.” Giles reached in his pocket and uncapped the holy water. He wasn’t certain how to play this out. This was what the Americans charmingly called a Mexican standoff. Each of the three of them had a weapon, and as long as none of them made the first move, they were stuck here indefinitely. But if he ran again, they would surely overtake him.
As Giles watched in horror, the two vampires transformed into the hideous creatures they truly were, the faces they wore when the hunger was upon them. They licked their fangs and swiped their clawed hands menacingly at him, hissing. Giles swallowed hard and stood his ground. The Slayer faced such danger daily; he could do no less when called upon to save her.
“You’re the little Slayer’s Watcher,” Red said. “The Master has promised a reward for your heart. We’ll make you die slowly. Painfully.”
“We should take him to the Master alive,” Blue Eyes cut in, averting his eyes as Giles tilted the cross slightly in his direction. “Our reward will be even greater.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but neither of you is going anywhere,” Giles said.
Red’s laughter seemed to echo down the corridor. “Your arm will tire soon,” she said.
She began to sit down on the floor when Xander called, “Yo, Giles! Do we have any books on interior decorating?” It was the cue that they
had finished pulling down the curtains and adorning the windows with crosses.
Red’s hideous face broke into an enormous smile. “My dear Xander must be in the library.”
“With my girlfriend,” Blue Eyes agreed, grinning.
They looked at Giles, who made his eyes move left, away from the library, as a ruse.
“It’s this way,” Blue Eyes said, pointing left, skirting around Giles and joining Red. “We’ll take the kids by surprise and come back for him.”
They loped down the corridor in the wrong direction, as Giles had planned, the two laughing horribly. Giles took off toward the library.
“Xander! Willow! I’m coming!” he shouted, and behind him, the vampires called out to each other and turned to give chase. Giles redoubled his efforts, running as fast as he could, and flew toward the open library door. Blue Eyes and Red were perhaps three or four feet behind him. Giles sailed over the threshold and was immediately yanked to one side by Xander.
The vampires passed over the threshold.
Willow darted from the other side of the door and tossed open vials of holy water at them, holding a cross in her hand. Their faces began to smoke as they howled in pain and covered their eyes.
Xander pulled Giles out of the library and tossed a pair of crosses behind them. Willow hopped over them, sprinkling the floor and doors with holy water.
“We’ll get you for this!” Red cried, lowering her hands to her sides. Her face was a smoking mess; she looked as if she was wearing a Halloween fright mask that had melted. She started toward them and screamed as her foot came down on a cross.
Willow pulled the double doors shut with the vampires hissing at her, then wrapped strands of garlic bulbs around the door handles. Similar strands were on the inside handles as well.
“Let’s go,” Giles said, and he, Xander, and Willow raced down the corridors and passages of Sunnydale High. Giles hoped that the trap had worked, but now was not the time to verify it. At the least, they had bought themselves some time.
He hoped they had bought Buffy time as well.
They reached the front doors, his books, and the crossbow. Willow still held the canvas sack. Wonderful girl. She had kept her head.
Xander pushed open the door and said, “What if there are more of them out here?”
“Ever the optimist,” Willow retorted. “I’m holding the bag; why don’t you make yourself useful and grab the crossbow?”
“Don’t we need arrows?” Xander asked as he hefted the weapon.
“They take bolts. Which there are. It’s all right,” Willow replied.
They gathered up the supplies and raced out of the school and down the stone steps.
Buffy gritted her teeth, wishing for anything that could drown out the way depressing, emo moaning of the zombies. Mr. O’Leary was dead. Buffy knew that just from looking at him. And it wasn’t from any zombie attack. The poor old guy had just up and died. The cardiac police had come along and cuffed him. Heart attack city.
Not that she was in any position to do anything about it.
As she defended herself, several of the zombies latched on to Mr. O’Leary’s corpse. She tried to protect it—him—but saving her own bacon was hard enough. The Slayer looked away; she didn’t want to see what would happen to the old man’s corpse when the dead guys got their choppers going.
A zombie grabbed her shoulder, and as she spun to crush its face, she saw what they’d done with Mr. O’Leary. Nothing like what she expected. He’d been hung up in a large pepper tree in the center of the cemetery, where he dangled like a horrible scarecrow. Scarecrow. Coincidence, or nasty inspiration? She’d no idea, but had to assume they only liked really-truly-alive folks. As a fellow dead guy, Mr. O’Leary didn’t meet their culinary needs and was tossed out like garbage. She only hoped the sweetly crazy old man didn’t rise again.
Buffy didn’t want to have to fight him.
She turned away. Buffy didn’t want to see any more.
The zombie moaning started up again, and the shambling dead began to crawl to their feet once more. Buffy glanced quickly around and realized that there were still dozens upon dozens of them moving. Hungry. Not good. She had to destroy their brains to kill them, if the movie rules applied. And she just couldn’t concentrate that much with so many bony fingers clawing at her.
And that noise! It was enough to make that happy mailman on Mr. Rogers go postal!
Giles hadn’t arrived. Willow and Xander might be dead for all Buffy knew. She wanted to get out of the cemetery, find them, make sure they were all right. Then they could all come back, Giles could find some anti-zombie spells in one of his smelly books, and they could gorge on whatever Halloween candy was left at her house.
“Nice fantasy, Summers,” she whispered to herself. She had to get out of there first.
Buffy turned and started for the gates, slamming her open palm into the nose of a nearby zombie, sending bone splinters into its brain. It fell over a headstone and didn’t move again, and she figured if she could pull that maneuver on all of them, she’d be in good shape. Problem was, when they started to move in, she didn’t have time to aim.
And they were moving in. In fact . . .
There were so many hungry zombies stacked up at the walls and in front of the gates that Buffy just couldn’t see how she was going to get out without shutting them all down. Which could take, oh, the rest of her life. However long that was.
“Look, folks,” she said nervously, growing truly frightened now as they closed in on her, a wall of dead flesh and bone. “It’s been a heck of a fiesta, y’know? But, really, I turn into a pumpkin at midnight.”
Buffy pulled the broken nose trick on two more zombies, then elbowed another in the chest. The dead man’s chest collapsed, and the stink from the corpse almost made her throw up.
Being the Slayer didn’t mean that Buffy wasn’t afraid of the things she faced. Only that she was confident in her ability to overcome them. Most of the time. But when that confidence failed, she was still a sixteen-year-old girl who wanted very much to keep breathing.
She glanced around nervously and noticed something odd at the rear of the cemetery. Something that hadn’t seemed significant before because it didn’t threaten her life. While the sides and front of the cemetery had high walls, the back was bordered by farmland. The only thing separating the graveyard from the fields beyond was a three-foot-high stone wall that looked as if it had been there since man discovered fire. Or at least the gas grill.
The reason she hadn’t noticed it was because there weren’t any zombies back there. None. Zero. Nada. Now, sure, the more residential sections of Sunnydale had more people, which to the headsuckers meant more brains to eat. But she couldn’t believe none of them had realized they could just step over that wall and be out of the cemetery.
Not that it mattered. What mattered was it was a way out. Not too many zombies between Buffy and the field.
“I’ll be back,” she said in her gruffest Terminator voice. Then she ripped an arm from a particularly decrepit-looking zombie and used it to shatter the skulls of two others. Then she was bounding from grave marker to tombstone to the roof of a crypt. She held on to the wings of a carved marble angel and looked toward the low stone wall again. Not far away. Not too many zombies.
No problem.
Buffy dropped down to the ground again, and immediately bony fingers began reaching for her. The moaning had reached a fever pitch, as if they knew she was going to escape them. A part of her wanted to slow, to surrender, to ease their pain. That’s how much of a downer their vocals were.
Instead, she kicked, punched, and elbowed her way toward the field. A high, spinning kick actually beheaded one of the zombies, and Buffy was psyched to see that she only had another thirty yards or so to go.
Twenty.
Ten.
Dead fingers twined in her hair, yanking her backward off her feet. Zombies came down on top of her, jaws clacking as they tried to bite into her
. The moaning became too much.
Buffy closed her eyes, a tear beginning to form.
Too much.
Her heart raced. Then a fire exploded in her gut and roared its way up into her throat to blast out of her as a scream.
“Nooooooooo!” she cried, and surged upward with incredible strength. Zombies went flying like bowling pins, save for one or two that she shook off as she turned to run, wide eyed and terrified, for the stone wall.
Then she was there. Buffy dove over the wall, rolled into a somersault, and sprang to her feet again. She felt something in her hair and batted at it: the remains of dead flesh torn from fingers as she struggled against a dead man’s grip. Buffy pulled the flesh away, then wiped her hand on her pants in disgust. She panted, trying to catch her breath, then glanced around to see which way would be best for her escape. The zombies would be after her . . .
Zombies. After her.
Not.
They weren’t coming after her at all. It gave her the wiggins, but they just stood there on the other side of the stone wall and moaned, staring at her out of withered eyes like raisins—there, she knew there was a reason she didn’t like raisins!—or empty sockets.
“Okay!” Buffy said, confused but pleased. “You guys and gals just hang out here, and I’ll go find someone who will know how we can lullaby you all back to death.”
She looked at them one last time, shivered off the wiggins that was creeping up on her, and turned to walk along next to the wall. If she circled around the cemetery, she’d get back to the street. Then she’d have a long walk to school to find Giles.
Once more, she worried for Willow and Xander.
Buffy had an odd sensation, a familiar one. In fact, she’d felt it earlier that same night. As if she was being watched. As if some Peeping Tom was checking her out in the girls’ locker room. As if someone was sneaking up on her . . .
The Slayer spun, ready to attack, poised to take on any zombies that had finally come over the wall for her.
There was nobody there.
Buffy took a deep breath, let it out, and wrote off her jitters as the result of a very long, majorly tiring Halloween night. Somewhere off in Sunnydale, the church bells began to toll midnight.