The Xander Years, Vol.2 Page 16

  “I can’t watch you die again,” she told him.

  He stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingers, tenderly. “I love you.”

  She raised a hand to his, held it against her face.

  “I love you,” Buffy said.

  “Nothing can change that,” Angel assured her. “Not even death.”

  She threw his hand away from her, backed away from him.

  “Don’t talk to me like that!” she said angrily. “You may be ready to go but I am not ready to lose you. Okay, this is my fight and if you won’t do it my way then you —”

  Xander cleared his throat. He stood in the garden entryway, feeling bad for interrupting what seemed to be a very heartfelt discussion. But he didn’t know where else to turn.

  They both whirled to face him. He felt suddenly like he was under a spotlight.

  Not the most pleasant feeling.

  “Hey, I’ve got this . . .” he stammered. “Um . . . there’s this, uh . . . it’s probably a bad time.”

  From the expressions on their faces, he knew he was right.

  “Can I help?” he asked.

  Buffy gave the slightest shake of her head.

  “Okay,” Xander said. He left them to their argument, and went up the garden stairs toward the street.

  “I gotta work this out,” he said as he climbed. “I just gotta figure out what they’d be likely to bomb.”

  Giles intoned the recitation in the appropriate Latin.

  “Earth, wind, fire, and rain. All four powers I beseech you. Protect us from fresh evil unleashed . . .”

  As he spoke, he moved around a mystical circle painted on the library floor, lighting candles with a long one he held in his hand.

  Willow interrupted, coming breathlessly into the library.

  “Okay,” she said, as Giles continued with his candlelighting. “Oz is moved. He could barely walk after that mickey I gave him, but we made it.” She put the tranquilizer rifle down on the counter. “Is he gonna be all right there?”

  “Anywhere is safer than here,” Giles assured her. He tossed her an unlit candle. “Help me with the candles.”

  “We’re doing the binding spell from the Hebron’s Almanac?” Willow asked.

  “Yes, but once it’s ready, you’re to stay back and let me finish the recitation,” Giles replied. She started to say something, but he cut her off. “Don’t argue. I want you safe. Who knows what’s going to come up from beneath us?”

  Willow knelt to light her candle from an already glowing one on the floor.

  And beneath the library, four forms moved in the school’s boiler room. Dickie worked inside a bizarre configuration of wires and pipes. Attached to it all was a digital alarm clock.

  As Dickie connected two wires, the alarm clock flashed 9:55. Then, a moment later, the display beeped and changed to read 60:00. The red numbers were bright in the dim room.

  Dickie laughed.

  The display changed again, to 59:59, and began to beep down through the seconds. 59:58. 59:57.

  “This is gonna be large,” Jack said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dickie agreed.

  He did love to bake.

  CHAPTER 15

  Agitated, Xander drummed on the wheel with his thumbs as he drove the dark streets. Where to turn . . .?

  “Giles’ll know what to do,” he said. “He’s way more calm than Buffy.”

  And Giles could usually be found at the school library. Unless something big was brewing.

  Like tonight.

  Xander realized he had no idea where to look for Giles. He’d start with the library anyway. Then, if that didn’t pan out —

  He came around a corner. There were four guys walking down the middle of the street, ahead of him. Going the same direction he was going.

  Four dead guys.

  The boys.

  “Okay,” he said to himself. “I need a plan.” And I need it now.

  As he pulled up behind them, he slowed down.

  “Hey,” Bob said. “Our wheels!”

  They parted as he drove between them, cruising at about the speed they’d been walking. Letting them think, Xander hoped, that he was going to allow them back into the car.

  They laughed.

  Xander reached over the door, grabbed Parker’s arm.

  Gunned it.

  “Hey!” He heard behind him. He kept going, through another turn. Leaving them behind.

  Except Parker, who gripped his hand. His dead, crispy face was contorted in fear. Parker’s feet scrabbled along the road as the car raced away.

  “Stop!” Parker screamed. “Come on, man, stop!”

  But Xander kept going. His plan was working. It was a spur of the moment thing, a last-ditch attempt at a plan. But so far, so good. “Where’s the bomb?” he asked.

  Parker didn’t even hesitate. “It’s in the high school!”

  Xander fought to control the big car with his right hand. It weaved from side to side. If there had been any traffic they’d have both been dead.

  “In the school where?” he demanded.

  “This really really hurts!” Parker all but cried. So the dead can feel pain, Xander observed. Good to know. “It’s in the — in the boiler room!”

  Xander struggled to keep the car going straight. Looking into Parker’s eyes instead of the road, he used his best tough-guy voice.

  “All right,” he said. “Now I’m gonna ask you this once, and you better pray you get the answer right. How do I defuse — ”

  But he had veered too far to the left, and a jutting mailbox collided with Parker’s head.

  The mailbox stayed where it was.

  Parker’s head stayed with it.

  Xander was holding a headless corpse in his left hand.

  He yelped and let go.

  “I probably should’ve left out that whole middle part,” he said. He made a left, and headed toward Sunnydale High School.

  Behind him, the other three ran full out. “He’s heading for the school!” Dickie called.

  “That’s it!” Jack replied. He’d had enough of this kid.

  Xander was going to pay.

  Xander burst into the school at a dead run. He almost passed the door that said “Basement Access: Door to Re-main Locked at All Times,” but he backtracked to it, gripped the knob.

  Locked.

  Sometimes you just had to believe the signs.

  And through the same outside door he’d just entered came Jack, Dickie, and Bob. “There he is!” Jack shouted.

  “Where’s a Slayer when you need one?” Xander asked, taking off.

  Buffy stood in the library. Ranked around her were Angel, Willow, Giles, and Faith.

  They looked on in awe and horror.

  The beast was huge and terrible. Multiple heads snapped and growled on long, stalk-like necks. Tentacles waved in the air. The thing was nearly as tall as the library’s high ceiling.

  Mystical lightning flared in the room, the only illumination.

  It had come from the Hellmouth. What terrified Buffy was the idea that there might be more, or worse, still to come.

  The only one holding a weapon of any kind was Willow, who gripped a spike-headed medieval mace.

  “My God . . . it’s grown . . .” Giles said.

  Her Watcher’s fear frightened Buffy all the more.

  Dickie stopped outside the library, drawn by the strobes of light showing through the door’s round windows. He looked inside. Five people were staring at a monster the likes of which he had never imagined. Even dying hadn’t held such terror.

  “Wow!”

  But Jack was still on Xander’s trail. “Come on, man!” he shouted. Dickie followed.

  They came through double swinging doors into an intersection. No Xander in sight.

  “Which way?” Bob asked.

  “He couldn’t have gotten far,” Jack said. “Let’s split up.”

  They did, each taking a different arm of the hallway.

  Bob de
scended a staircase. Hung on the wall, behind a glass panel, was a fire ax. He drove a big fist through the glass, yanked the ax from its tethers, looked at the sharp blade.

  “Good for chopping,” he noted.

  Xander ran into the darkened student lounge, dodging tables and chairs as he went. He had to find a way to the boiler room, and he had to do it fast. Funny how a guy can spend four years in a place and still not know how to get to something as significant as, say, a boiler room, when he needs it, he thought. Who knows when you might have to boil something?> He raced up the two steps into the elevated seating area.

  But a form rose up out of the dark. Big Bob. Carrying something that whistled when he swung it.

  Xander backstepped away from the swinging ax. His foot missed the step behind him and he went down. At the bottom of the stairs he hit a table, upended it. He landed on the floor, winded.

  He tried to scramble to his feet, but Bob was there. He swung the butt end of the ax handle into Xander’s jaw. Xander saw a bright flash — not stars, like in the cartoons, but close — and fell again, back pressed against one of the tables.

  Bob raised the ax over his head.

  “Now this is what I call fun,” he said.

  He swung.

  Only one chance.

  Xander rolled off the table, just before the ax fell. Its blade bit into the tabletop, stuck there. As Bob struggled to free it, Xander punched him in the face, then grabbed his letter jacket and slammed him down against the tabletop, hard. Dazed, Bob dropped to the floor.

  Xander yanked the ax free of the table. He stood, for just a moment, with the weapon in his hands. Looking at Bob on the floor, an easy target.

  One swing.

  And hey, he’s already dead. What do I have to lose?

  But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Chopping an unconscious victim — even a walking dead one — just seemed wrong somehow.

  Besides, he’s already dead — what if he just gets up and comes after me, anyway? Beheading him might just make him mad.

  In this case, trapping might be more efficient. Xander crossed to a soda machine, standing next to the wall. He shoved the ax handle behind the machine, for leverage, and pushed. The machine swayed. Xander grunted, pushed harder.

  The soda machine toppled forward.

  With a wet thump, Bob disappeared beneath it.

  Dickie came into the lounge, drawn by the noise.

  He saw the machine, saw Bob’s legs sticking out from underneath.

  Xander stepped from the shadows, fire ax in his hands.

  Forget the “talk softly, big stick” bit, he told himself. Talk tough, and carry a big ax. Much better advice.

  “Shoulda learned by now,” Xander said. “If you’re gonna play with fire, you got to expect that sooner or later —”

  Dickie ran, back out the door through which he’d entered.

  “I wasn’t finished!” Xander yelled at his departing form.

  He gave chase. As he ran, he said, “Note to self: less talk.”

  Buffy sailed backward through the library doors, blowing them open. She landed twenty feet away, on the hard tile floor. Tentacles twitched and quivered in the doorway. Smoke poured from the room.

  This isn’t going at all well, she thought.

  She pushed herself to her feet, shaking her head. Gathering her courage.

  The creature was too strong. It was going to be hard to go back in there.

  But it was also necessary. She was the Slayer. She did what she had to do.

  “Faith!” she called as she headed back into the fray. At least she wasn’t, currently, the only Slayer. “Go for the heart!”

  Xander was right on Dickie’s heels. Still carrying the ax. Dickie made a couple of sharp turns, going down a narrow hallway. Xander right behind.

  A moment later, Xander came back out of the hallway, running even faster. Behind him, Dickie was turning up the juice.

  Behind Dickie, three she-demons. The ugly blue-gray ones, all horns and teeth.

  What was it Bob had said? “A night to remember?” Isn’t that also the name of a movie about the Titanic?

  Encouraging thought, Harris.

  Xander made a quick right and ducked into a patch of shadow. Dickie missed the turn, though, and ran straight into a classroom.

  Classrooms only had one door.

  The demons followed him in there. Xander heard snarling and spitting, and saw Dickie pressed up against the blinds over the window in the room’s door.

  Dickie screamed. Bad as that sound was, it wasn’t quite as bad as the sounds of biting and chewing that accompanied it. The demons weren’t much on table manners.

  Two down, Xander thought.

  He took a deep breath. “Okay, boiler room —”

  He began to head for it, but before he’d gone more than a step the wall exploded in front of him. A huge, eyeless head — eyeless, but not mouthless or toothless — burst through the plaster, at the end of a thick snake-like neck. It sensed him, turned toward him. I hate to be insensitive, Xander thought, but you’re Buffy’s problem. I have worries of my own.

  “— other way,” he said.

  He ran.

  The ax, it turned out, made it easy to unlock the basement access door. Xander clomped down the stairs, ax ready just in case.

  He opened the door into the boiler room. It was narrow, filled with strange-looking mechanical equipment. The boiler, Xander presumed. There was another door, with an illuminated exit sign, across from him. On that door was a sign that said “Keep Door Closed at All Times.”

  Which makes you wonder why it’s a door at all then, he thought. If you just had a wall there you could save yourself the trouble of making the sign.

  The bomb was in the center of the room, right where Parker had promised just before being decapitated by the U.S. Mail. It sat atop a dark green fifty-gallon metal drum.

  “Hello, nasty,” Xander said to it. He closed the door behind him. Examined the bomb.

  Which, of course, he knew nothing about. He was capable of reading a digital clock, though. “Less than two minutes,” he said. “Dumb guy. Little bomb. How hard can it be?”

  Something hit him on the back of the head. He blinked with the force, then felt himself being hurled against a tool cabinet.

  Ribs aching, head throbbing, he pulled himself to his feet.

  Jack O’Toole stood there, breathing hard.

  “It just got harder,” Jack said.

  “I’m not leaving here until that thing is disarmed,” Xander vowed.

  “Then I guess you’re not leaving.”

  Jack swung at Xander. Xander dodged. Jack came at him again, fists flying. Xander took a couple of hits. On top of all the other punishment he’d taken today, though, he barely felt them.

  But then Jack had him up against a wall. He whisked Katie from her home, brought her toward Xander. Xander caught Jack’s arm, trying to hold it back. The knife hovered an inch from Xander’s face.

  Getting really tired of that knife, Xander thought. Maybe if Jack dated girls more, he wouldn’t feel so attached to Katie.

  “I’m gonna carve you up and serve you with gravy,” Jack threatened. “You piss me off, boy, now you pay the price. First the eyes, then the tongue, then I’ll break every one of your fingers —”

  “You gonna do all that in forty-nine seconds?” Xander asked through clenched teeth.

  Jack turned to look at the clock. Xander jerked himself free, slammed his fists into Jack’s midsection. When Jack doubled over, Xander drove him into a wall.

  Jack came back fighting. He punched at Xander, missed, but caught Xander’s jacket. He flipped Xander over and threw him to the floor.

  Xander regained his footing. He stood between Jack and both doors.

  They faced each other, Jack’s gaze darting between the bomb and the exit sign and the door to the stairwell Xander had come down.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Xander said, panting. “Can I get by hi
m? Get up the stairs, out of the building? Seconds ticking away. I don’t love your chances.”

  “Then you’ll die too,” Jack rasped.

  “Yeah, looks like,” Xander agreed. “So I guess the question really is . . . who has less fear?”

  “I’m not afraid to die,” Jack reminded him. “I’m already dead.”

  Xander wasn’t buying. “Yeah, but this is different. Being blown up isn’t ‘walking around and drinking with your buddies’ dead. It’s ‘little bits swept up by a janitor’ dead, and I don’t think you’re ready for that.”

  Jack’s breathing was ragged. He looked at the bomb. At the door. Made a feint toward one door.

  Xander moved, so he stayed between Jack and the way out.

  Any way out.

  The clock beeped off the seconds.

  “Are you?” Jack asked.

  Xander smiled, suddenly more calm than he had any reason to be. He knew the answer. He’d spent the last few years telling his friends he wasn’t afraid, that he was willing to help battle whatever the Hellmouth threw at them. Swallowing his fear, pretending courage when he felt none.

  Tonight had been a lifetime. Everything had happened to him, and he was still standing.

  He wasn’t bluffing anymore. “I like the quiet,” was all he said.

  The battle in the library raged. Members of the Sister-hood of Jhe had joined the Hellmouth creature. Weapons were wielded — swords, axes, Willow’s mace. But the creature wasn’t phased.

  It had Buffy wrapped in a tentacle, holding her off the floor, almost up to the ceiling. She gripped an ax tightly in her fists.

  Giles was speaking in Latin, screaming to be heard above the roar, slashing at the thing as he did so. “ . . . and all the vessels of truth!” The ritual words finished, he shouted, “Now, Buffy!”

  Overhead, she slammed her ax down into the tentacle that held her, again and again, feeling it bite into hellish flesh and sinew. Hot blood splashed her hands and arms.

  Xander waited. He felt centered, at peace.

  The clock beeped. Seconds flashed by in red crystal digits.

  00:12.

  00:11.

  Jack was a wreck. Twitching, nervous gaze darting around the room.

  00:05.

  00:04.

  Jack reached into the mechanism, grabbed a wire. Tugged on it.