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Chapter 37
Hard Games
Okay, so this now ranks officially as the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, thought Erin as she crawled through the conduit.Not only did the head have a space advantage, but because the conduit was a continuous arc, she couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of her. She wouldn’t know where the head was until she was virtually on top of it.
And then she was on top of it. Three feet in front of her face, to be exact.
The head blinked at her.
Then, like a grotesque giant spider, it began to scuttle toward her.
Erin jabbed forward with the improvised spear and felt the resistance grab the blade as it took the head cleanly through one eye. Somehow, despite the lack of lungs, the thing managed to produce a horrible hissing sound as it thrashed its legs in a desperate attempt to pull itself off the impaling spear.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said Erin as she backed along the way she’d come, hauling on the shaft of the spear and dragging the struggling head as she did so. The knife with its jagged serrations was lodged deeply. She just hoped it wouldn’t work loose before she could get the thing out of the conduit.
She felt something wet close on her right wrist, and she looked down to see the thing’s tongue curled around her arm.
“Sorry, no tongue until at least the third date, bucko,” she said.
The head pulled itself forward, dragging itself up along the shaft of the spear. Then the tongue bifurcated and the new member wrapped around her throat.
“No means NO, damnit!” Erin snarled as she tried to work her fingers between her throat and the new tongue. She attempted to force her other arm free and only managed to wrench her shoulder painfully.
The tip of the tongue around her throat split to extrude a cluster of wicked barbs that hovered menacingly in front of her eyes. It coiled back like a cobra preparing to strike, and Erin’s vision began to narrow and darken as the constriction at her throat began to starve her brain of oxygen.
What an embarrassing goddamn way to die, she thought.
* * *
“Cade!” Buffy gasped.
The man, if indeed it could be called a man anymore, spread its arms wide and the small cyclone of earth and debris dropped away, revealing the whole of the creature’s immolated carcass. Great gaps appeared in the charred flesh, the blackened skin hanging in tatters over hideously exposed bones, ligaments, and ruined muscles. The head was burned nearly to the skull, the eye sockets empty but for twin points of crimson fire that burned like embers in a dark cave.
“In the flesh,” he said to Buffy, working what little remained of his mouth into a death’s head of a smile. “Did you really think it would be so simple to defeat me? I am eternal, you little slut.”
Buffy Two Six Alpha saw Echo Fox raise her machine gun, a gesture that Buffy knew would be worse than useless — it would be fatal for Echo Fox.
“No,” said Buffy Two Six Alpha, holding up her hand in warning. “He’s mine. None of you would last a second against this thing. I’ll take care of him. You get through the wormhole, all of you.”
“No …” began Angel.
Buffy whirled on him. “Yes! Now! You get my daughter out of here.”
“How touching,” said Cade.
“You know what? I’ve just about had enough of you,” said Buffy, whipping the Masamune katana up in a blur of silver motion.
But it was no mere enchanted steel that now arced toward the Avatar. Slayer and Elder Power channeled near unfathomable universal forces into its very structure, transmuting it from an already lethal blade into something for which even the Avatar of the Elemental Abstract was unprepared.
Cade tried to parry Buffy’s stroke with a magical shield, but the hyper-enchanted blade tore through the unseen barrier as if it didn’t even exist. The ruined face registered shock as the sword neatly severed one hand at the wrist. Cade backpedaled and watched as the stump extended a new but still blackened hand.
From the corner of her eye, Buffy saw the others move toward and through the wormhole at the instigation of Echo Fox, Elisa McKenna, and Faith. Buffy smiled.
“Just you and me now, Cade,” she said, feeling for the first time the vastness of the power that now lay at her disposal. The hidden powers of the universe lay at her command, a billion years of Elder Power knowledge and expertise joined intrinsically with the innate power of a Millennial Slayer and the combined experience of dozens of former Dark Hunter hosts.
And in that instant she felt something change profoundly inside her, as if her mind had until that moment been the single point of the universe at the beginning of time, a point that now expanded within her into the blinding fire of a universe born. For that moment she was no longer just Buffy Summers, but something vastly more.
She held her weapon at the ready, looked evenly at the surprised Cade, and recited the words that a dead Elisa McKenna had spoken to her a very long time before, during Buffy’s last fight with an Avatar of the Elemental Abstract.
“I am created Slayer and Redeemer, the Angel of Darkness and the Demon of Light. I am the Chosen One who stands between the world and the Abyss,” she said. Then she added, “Look at me, you son of a bitch. Look at me and know the face of Death.”
* * *
Small arms fire chattered in the darkness around Hudson and his unit as he took temporary shelter behind some sandbags. Below the ridge, vampires and demons continued to assault their position in wave after insane wave, while occasional flyers came in ones and twos to harry and disrupt the human defenders of Hill Tango.
“We’ve been holding them, but they just keep on coming and we don’t have enough firepower over here to keep them off the back porch forever,” Hudson reported to Aston over his field radio. “You tell Pike he better fire up his toy and get this little dustup decided once and for all, or it’s gonna get real ugly up here real soon.”
“There’s some problem over at Majestic. The cannon’s still in standby,” said Aston. “How long can you hold out?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes maybe. What’s the situation on your end?”
“We’ve still got enemy forces in the Gap and to the south that we have to deal with, and we’re not getting them all. Not nearly all. And once these blokes are past Papoose Lake, there’s not a whole lot I can do to them except shout obscenities at their retreating backsides.”
“Man, this is looking like a class ‘A’ cluster fu–”
“Mind the profanities, Hudson,” said Aston. There was a slight pause, then the Briton’s voice returned. “If you can possibly hang on for a minute or two, I think I can provide you with some additional resources in the applied violence department — assuming that wouldn’t offend your macho American sensibilities too badly.”
“My ego will survive, Sarge. Right now, I’m a lot more concerned about my ass.”
“Well good then. Cheerio. Keep up the fight and all that. Aston out.”
Aston’s additional resources arrived forty seconds later. Hudson neither heard it over the incessant thunder of the artillery barrage nor did he see it — nor could he have seen it, even in the light of day.
He saw the effects clearly, however.
Those effects first manifested themselves when he dropped the metal sights of a .308 carbine — he’d long since run out of shells for the 12-gauge — on a demon and the demon, well, exploded. Exploded in the sticky, messy, red way that a watermelon explodes when hit with a bullet from a Barrett .50 caliber.
That’s when he noticed the dust storm churning across the ridge face, and amid the dust storm other bad guys being decimated by the score.
The invisible Apache helicopter screeched over his head at probably no more than twenty feet and arced away. He heard it then, of course. Felt it, too, as the rotorwash swirled a choking, eye-stinging cloud of dust around and over him.
Hudson didn’t mind. In fact, it was one of the most welcome experiences of his life.
* * *
Buffy attacked in a hurricane of speed and fury, but Cade managed to evade the insanely complex weave of sword forms, moving with the fluid speed of a flickering shadow. But he was being pushed ever back, relentlessly, as Buffy forced him around toward the edge of the ridge.
Finally Cade managed to gain enough of an opening to cast a spell.
He seemed to blur, then divide, replicating and spreading out to encircle the Slayer until five grotesquely charred Avatars faced one lone Slayer. In unison, the five Avatars drew their dull black swords and brought them to the ready.
Buffy’s initial thought was that the duplicates were illusions, but her Elder Power-enhanced Slayer senses told her otherwise. Somehow, Cade had spawned actual replicants of himself.
As they moved in for the kill, Buffy launched into an impossibly difficult multiple-adversary defensive style that kept her attackers at bay behind scything steel. But she knew that she couldn’t hold them off indefinitely. The Lillith part of her mind raced to find a trick while the Buffy part fought on desperately.
With blazing clarity, a spell formed in Buffy’s consciousness. Without breaking the fluid grace of her defense, she reversed her grip on the hilt of the sword and plunged it, two handed, into the hard ground. The supernatural energy bound into the steel broke free of its confinement in a cascading green tumult, expanding away from her in a circle and enveloping Cade and his doubles in emerald fire.
One by one, the doubles flared into pillars of bright green flame and disintegrated where they stood, leaving only Cade.
An Ether Phage drifted overhead, then another, and a third, and now the two enemies found themselves fighting among a forest of searching, translucent tendrils that were as lethal in their own way as the Slayer and the Avatar were in theirs.
Cade came at her quickly, winding a serpentine path through the glowing etheric discharges of the tendrils and giving Buffy no chance to recover her weapon. Suddenly it was she who was on the defensive, weaving a dizzying tapestry of aikido and kung-fu defensive techniques while somewhere deep inside her mind, Lillith looked for an opening for magic.
Cade’s blade swept over her head close enough to cut a few stray strands of hair, and Buffy spun with the motion as she grabbed his sword arm. She pushed him off and gave herself some room. Cade brushed against a translucent filament from a passing Phage, and he was momentarily surrounded by snaking blue fire as the ultimate consumer of magic encountered an ultimate source of magic. The Avatar grunted and spun away from the probing tentacle.
Something in Lillith’s consciousness crystallized and Buffy instinctively cast the spell that came to her mind. An invisible fist of force slammed into Cade’s chest, staggering him momentarily.
But only momentarily. Spells took time and no small amount of concentration to cast, and Cade gave Buffy and Lillith no time for more tricks as his sword once again sought an opening in the hard-pressed Slayer’s defenses.
From the direction of Dys and the Abstract, an intolerably bright flash of light reached them on the ridge. It subsided in mere milliseconds, but as both she and Cade turned to see what happened, it was clear that the wavefront compression generators had done their job and that the worst was yet to come. A great wall of dust and debris tens of thousands of feet high and glowing incandescent with heat rolled toward them from what looked for all the world like a small sun that burned now where the Abstract had been seconds before.
Regaining her composure, Buffy put all her strength into a spinning back kick that connected brutally with the distracted Cade. It took him off balance, pushing him back toward the edge of the ridge, forcing him to avoid several more Phages that had joined the now dozen or so scouring the whole of the ridgeline. It bought her precious seconds.
She wasted no time. Leaving the sword where it stood in the ground, she plunged into the wormhole at a full sprint, leaving Hell and all its dark memories behind, hopefully forever.
* * *
The head’s eyes went wide with shock in the instant before its forehead erupted in a gruesome spray of blood and bone and brain. The thing thrashed violently and the ensnaring tongues loosened as the large drill bit continued onward, the friction of the metal against the ruined tissue finally torquing the whole horrible thing into a spinning whirl of flailing legs and spraying fluids.
“Enough for crying out loud! Shut it off!” yelled Erin at the figure behind the seemingly very deceased head.
The whir of the industrial drill died and the head slid off the bit onto the floor with a rather sickening squishing sound.
“Was that overkill?” asked Xandra.
Erin swiped her forearm across her eyes to wipe away blood and gray matter, and said, “As far as I’m concerned, it was exactly the right amount of kill.”
For a few moments, the two of them sat side by side in the confines of the tunnel, catching their breath.
“I was pretty much a goner,” said Erin eventually. “Thanks. Without you, I think GHOST’s grim predictions would’ve proved out.”
“Yeah, well I guess GHOST’s probability projections didn’t take into account the Sidekick Factor,” said Xandra.
Erin gave her friend a playful punch on the shoulder. “She didn’t take into account the Friend Factor, Xandra. Not too many people would have come after me like that. You’re the best.”
“This is one of those Hallmark card type female bonding moments, isn’t it?” asked Xandra.
“Yeah, except I don’t remember there ever being a Hallmark card with a crawling severed head and a blood-drenched Slayer on it.”
“That’s because you don’t shop at the places I do, Erin.”
The Vampire Slayer chuckled. “Let’s get out of here. I imagine Mick could use a little help from this cannon right about now.”
* * *
From the top of Hill Tango, the grav cannon firing was bound to be a fascinating, splendid show, thought Aston.
First the big, strobing warning lights came on all around the perimeter of Firebase Majestic. There would be warning klaxons too, he knew, but there was no way to here them at this distance above the sounds of the bombardment. All the light and sound was intended to do only one thing: warn everyone to get out of the way, because in five more minutes anyone not out of the way was in for a world of trouble.
Hudson, looking dusty and tired, came up beside him.
“Perimeter’s secure again,” Hudson yelled over the bombardment.
“Good, then you won’t miss the show. It should be quite grand.”
“Yeah, assuming we don’t get wasted along with our friends in the valley.”
“You are just such a pessimist, Hudson. Always fretting over trivia like nuclear bombs and gravity cannons and demon invasions. You really must learn to take life a little less intensely,” said Aston.
Around Firebase Majestic, the perimeter lights began to flash much faster. The one-minute warning.
“Man, I should’ve been an accountant,” said Hudson, raising his night vision binoculars to his eyes.
The grav cannon fired. The desert in front of the Firebase seemed to undulate and vibrate beneath a shimmering distortion. A moment later, the distortion flashed forward at a phenomenal rate, spreading like the expanding rings of a pebble thrown in a puddle — but here the waves propagated outward in a confined wedge.
The leading edge of the distortion caught the surviving front ranks of enemy troops and obliterated them — obliterated them utterly, in fact. Demons and vampires disintegrated into a fine black mist by the thousands.
The distortion flashed onward, across the whole of Papoose Lake Gap, cutting a wider and wider swath as it expanded with distance. In less than a second, the enemy was gone. Almost gone, at any rate. Scattered units remained, those that had been outside the arc of the blast, but for all intents and purposes there was no more army.
To the east, the faint hint of impending dawn painted the horizon a dark rose. What the grav cannon missed, dawn would largely take care of now.
The fight was over.
“Cease fire!” Aston barked into his field radio. Within moments, the howitzers fell quiet and the hill and valley below were draped in an eerie silence made all the more complete by everyone’s bombardment-dulled hearing.
“Well, chalk up a win for the good guys,” said Hudson.
“Jolly good fun it was too,” said Aston.
As the two men began to walk toward the command bunker, Hudson said, “Man, you got the strangest goddamn definition of what fun is, you know that?”
* * *
Buffy Two Six Alpha hit the other side of the wormhole, did an acrobatic roll to dissipate her forward momentum, and ended on her feet.
“Shut it down! Shut it down now!” she shouted. She was in the vault in Pubspace, not in Belize as she expected, but she took it in stride.
“I have to …” began Jenny over the intercom.
With a snarl, Buffy spun and delivered a full-force kick to the confinement ring, wrenching the delicate device on its mountings and causing the swirling maw of the vortex to destabilize. It shivered like a turbulent lake, then collapsed into an unsteady point and vanished.
Buffy finally noticed her friends and allies were in the room with her. She also noticed how heavily she was breathing.
Damn, she was tired. She slumped down to the cold steel floor, her back resting against the broken wormhole generator. She smiled at the others.
“Is this job always like this?” she asked.
“Only about most of the time,” said Echo Fox.
Angel and her daughter came over, and Buffy stood and gave them both a long, tight hug. The vault door opened and Jenny entered with Flynn by her side.
“I don’t know what’s going on here,” said Jenny to Buffy, “but as soon as you broke my machine, all of GHOST’s warnings of doom and woe dropped from red to green on the status holos. We’ll have to check with GHOST and Willow Six Five November to be sure, but as far as I can tell, the multiverse has some clear sailing ahead for awhile.”
“How’s Cordy Niner Bravo?” asked Buffy’s Willow, the Two Six Alpha version. She bit her lower lip in concern.
Flynn said, “She’ll be fine. A healthy dose of Flynn’s Patented Recuperative Restorative Nano-tonic, and she’s well on her way to a mend. She needs a bit of bed rest, though. As for the rest of us, I think that just this once we can forego the formal debriefing process for awhile. How about everyone get cleaned up and meet me in the pub in an hour?”
There was a murmur of assent, even from the exhausted Buffy. Flynn singled her out.
“As for you, I can’t help but notice that there are two of you sharing Lillith’s chassis now. This, I suspect, is going to be a very interesting story.”
Buffy/Lillith smiled. “My stories are always interesting in an ‘Oh my God we’re doomed’ sort of way. However, this one can wait. Right now, I need a shower and a very cold Coke.”