|
|
Part 3
Angel paced back and forth before the three bronze statues, a nearly empty bottle of home-brewed liquor dangling in his hand. Just a sip, he had told himself, just to take the edge off. He tried to forget that he hadn't touched a drink in almost ten years. But the edge wouldn't ease with just one sip, so one became many and then he had ended up here. This place had become like a church to him. It wasn't a real church, of course, but certainly as sacred to him. Moreso even, since God seemed to have turned his back on the world when the skies became swallowed in fire.
He stopped and looked up at the faces of the three statues thoughtfully. These were his source of spiritual strength now. Giles' statue reminded him to be patient and wise, as well as dedicated to his responsibilities. Next to that, in the middle, Xander's nobly cast visage represented perseverance and the uncanny luck of foolish optimism. Last and certainly most important, the wellspring of his courage and the thing which gave him the strength to carry on his life from day to day. Buffy's bronze face seemed to look down on him with beatific awareness. He could almost see her again sometimes, even hear her voice. It was all in his imagination, he knew. But he didn't care. Imagination was all he really had left of her now.
"He's here again." He told the statues with a voice that was heavy with trepidation, "Somehow, he's back and I don't know what to do about it."
The three statues listened in silence.
"It's all so strange." He continued morosely, "Everyone is so accepting of him. Oz is actually happy to see him. Am I the only one who sees the danger? Am I the only one who cares?"
Climbing up onto the dais, he stood on the edge and regarded each statue at eye level.
"Xander, " he spoke to the center statue as if it were a living, breathing version of his old friend, "without you none of us would be here. You saw us through the long, hard beginning of this road and continue to inspire us. I promise I won't let him tear it all apart again."
He took a sideways step and came face to face with Giles' statue.
"And Giles, I know if you were still here, you would be defending him. The way you always did." He bowed his head slowly, "But you weren't here when it happened. You couldn't understand what he did. Even now, I'm not even sure if I understand it myself."
Shuffling unsteadily, he teetered for an instant and latched his arms around the neck of Buffy's statue, hanging drowsily from it. Pulling himself back to a standing position, he pressed his forehead against the cold metal.
"And you, " he whispered, tears gathering in the back of his throat, "You, you, you, I miss you. I miss you more than I miss the stars in the sky, more than the sun that no one gets to see anymore. But Alexandra's here. She's a good girl. She reminds me so much of you. You'd be so glad to see how well Oz and Willow have taken care of her."
Salty tears welled up in the corners of his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. He pressed his fingertips against Buffy's bronze features, holding precariously to the statue to steady himself.
"I'm trying to be forgiving." He choked, raising the bottle to his lips and sucking back another mouthful of harsh, burning alcohol, "I want to be strong, like you were, but it's just too hard this time."
Pressing his cheek against her unyielding shoulder, he released his hold with one arm and let his hand with the bottle swing wide.
"I hope you'll understand. " he whispered low and tight-voiced, "I'll never be able to forgive the man who killed you."
Gabriel stood before the open Hellmouth, his arms and legs outstretched, trying to hold back a flood of demons. They pushed relentlessly forward, slowly gaining ground, and soon they would be through.
Someone walked into his peripheral. It was Buffy, older than he remembered her and horribly burned, too badly to still be alive. She watched him calmly with her blackened visage, not making a sound. There was another figure beside her, unnoticed until now. It was his father, Peter, and he was burned as badly as Buffy was.
The demons pushed harder and Gabriel was forced to take a step back.
"Help me!" he cried, straining against the steadily increasing force of the tide of demons.
As one, Buffy and Peter shook their heads in negation.
"This is your problem." Their cracked lips hissed the words. They stood, still as statues, their eyes staring accusingly at him.
"I don't understand. How is this my fault?" Gabriel fell back another step.
The scorched pair continued to watch him impassively.
"Answer me!" Gabriel demanded, his hands slipping and losing his hold on the demonic mass. The darkness flooded forward, engulfing him like a tidal wave.
"NNNOOOOOO!!!" he jolted upright in bed, breathing heavily and bathed in chill sweat. A small red light blinked on and off in a regular rhythm near where his head had lain. It was an alarm. He was supposed to get up early for . . .something. It took him a moment to remember where he was. He felt a little sick when he finally did.
Had the dream been prophetic? Or was it just that, a dream. Although genetically predisposed to such psychic sensitivity, he had never had a prophetic dream before. He wished he'd had the foresight to ask Buffy what they were like. Now, he might never get the chance.
A sharp rapping sounded at his door and he jumped nervously.
"Gabriel, are you in there?" a light feminine voice called from the other side of the door.
It was Darlene, he realized distantly. He rose with a yawn and a groan. Rubbing his eyes, he touched the keypad that controlled his door. It slid open, revealing a chipper, peppy Darlene. She stood smiling, wearing a bright yellow jumpsuit adorned with strips of crimson ribbon and various mismatched crests. She fidgeting excitedly on the spot, her hands tangled together in front of her.
"What happened to you?" she gawped and poked him playfully. "You're still in the same clothes as yesterday!"
He looked down at himself sleepily.
"Yeah," he breathed around a yawn, stretching, "I was up late."
"RREEAALLYY?" she slipped into the room, eyes alight with curiosity. "You weren't with Alex, were you?"
"No." he shook his head, "Weapons training with Cole." He squinted at her and pressed his hand against his head. "Why are you here again?"
"I'm in charge of your hand-to-hand training, cutie." She beamed, "But it looks like you forgot."
"I didn't forget." He grumbled, reaching over and snapping off the blinking red alarm light, "I just slept in a little that's all."
"Great," she clapped her hands together, "Get up. Get a shower and come on. Time's a wastin'!"
She herded him through a narrow metal door into a small tube shaped chamber and closed it behind him. To his left, there was a square, hinged door on the wall and on his right, a cylindrical knob marked with a single, red notch and a bowl containing three bars of soap.
"Throw your uniform in the chute." Darlene shouted through the door, "Then pull out the knob and turn it left for hot and right for cold!"
Dully, he pulled off his uniform and, balling it up, stuffed it into the small, sealed chute. He tugged on the knob and screamed immediately as a cascade of lukewarm water poured steadily down his back. Outside, he could hear Darlene's mischievous giggle. Sourly, he grabbed up a white bar of soap and began to wash.
Twenty-five minutes later, Gabriel stood in the center of what looked like an octagonal boxing ring, dressed in a sturdy training outfit that reminded him of the gi he used to wear in his master's dojo when he had trained in Japan. The walls were festooned with training gear and apparatus, all of it for practical use. Young men and women, academy students, he surmised, wandered in and out of the room at a regular rate. As he let his mind wander, Darlene paced back and forth along the outer edge of the ring dutifully explaining the rules of engagement.
"You pretty well just have to stay a little shy of the major nerve centers and cripple points and everything else is just standard sparring." She finished quickly, "Gabriel, are you listening to me?"
"What?" he snapped out of his daze, "Oh, yeah. Don't cripple you. Got it."
"Cripple ME?" she grinned incredulously, "Sweetie, these rules are for your benefit. You won't be able to touch me unless I want you to." She easily hopped over the top rope and sidled up to him. "Which we can discuss a little later."
"Let's just get started, shall we?" he looked down at her seriously.
"Sure." She agreed with a shrug, falling into an easy fighting stance, "Don't forget that you can beg for quarter if you need it."
He mirrored her stance and held his hands up loose and ready.
Wasting no time, she dove forward. He tried to sidestep, but she was too quick and agile. Gripping him around the waste, she flipped him over her hip and slammed him to the mat with surprising strength. Kneeling over him, she raised her tiny fist and snapped it downward, stopping just short of his nose.
"That was a hip toss." She explained with a chuckle, casually rising and walking back to lean against the ropes. Hovering near the doorways, a few stray students paused curiously to see how badly Darlene would trounce the unfortunate toplander.
He sat up and rose into his fighting stance, beckoning for her to come on again. She obliged, and in only a few moments more than it had taken the first time, he was flat on his back with her fist pressed into his throat.
"This is getting fun. You men always think you're going to take me because I'm a girl." She giggled, shaking her head ruefully, and retook her place on the ropes. "Stupid."
Three more times, she dropped him and pulled a strike to one of his vitals, taking only slightly longer each time. The students nodded amongst themselves in admiration.
"Don't make this TOO easy, Gabriel." She chided, "I might get bored with you. Then I'll have to find a new playmate."
Frustrated, Gabriel slammed the flat of his hand against the mat and bounced to his feet. He didn't like this. In her arrogance, she was purposely trying to humiliate him to prove that she was the better fighter. And he WAS making it too easy for her, he realized. She was right, he had let her small size and slight frame lull him into a false sense of confidence, let his own arrogance blind him to the facts of the situation.
So far, she had defeated him using her advantage in speed and leverage, turning his greater size and weight against him. Silently, he decided it was time to press his own advantages. His reach far outdistanced hers and he was stronger too. If he could keep her at a distance, he could rob her of the ability to use her grappling skill against him.
In Japan, Gabriel's sensei had taught him to use his particular vision to read his opponents and act accordingly. If an opponent were to telegraph an attack, it would show first in the eyes. Locking his gaze to Darlene's, he raised his hands and advanced.
"Still haven't had enough, huh?" she grinned confidently, basking in the attention of the slowly growing audience. "All right. Come here so I can throw you down again."
He didn't answer her, instead choosing to strike out with his fists. Darlene quickly ducked and slipped inside his reach. Just as he had anticipated. Driving upward with a knee, he caught her hard in the stomach and, hooking his foot around behind her ankle, flipped her leg out from under her and dropped her roughly onto her back. A chorus of impressed murmurs rippled through the gathering students and a few even clapped.
He leaned down, until his face was only inches away from hers. "Let me know if you want to be given quarter." He smiled.
Growling, she smashed her forehead into the bridge of his nose and threw him back. He rolled and sprang to his feet, ignoring the pain, and readied his fists.
"Okay, kid gloves are off, now." Dar informed him, her confident grin firmly back in place. "There's no WAY I'm letting a toplander get away with something like that. Time for you to feel some serious pain."
She stalked him more cautiously this time, leading with lightning fast jabs and swift kicks. Each time she attacked, she tried to get in on him to execute a throw. He danced around her moves skillfully doing his best to keep her at arm's length.
"I haven't forgiven you for that punch when you first found me." He reminded her, throwing a fast right at her head.
"That was nothing compared to what I'm going to do to you today." She slapped the punch aside, spinning around into a savage backfist.
The blow caught him across the face and he stumbled, bouncing back against the ropes. Whipping his arms from side to side, he desperately blocked several follow-up attacks, allowing only one weakened strike through. It caught him on the nose, however, and he felt the familiar warmth of blood gathering in the back of his throat.
"Face it Gabriel," she advised cheerfully, "You can't beat me. Except maybe for Alex, I'm the best in the base."
She jumped forward into a kick, narrowly missing his lower ribs. She drew up short as he feinted with a kick of his own, switching tactics at the last second and stomping down hard on her foot, pinning it to the mat. "Not anymore." His fist swooped up under her chin and smashed into her delicate jaw, her whole body going rigid with the strain of the blow. She fell back onto the mat with a squeak and a groan, her foot still pinned under Gabriel's.
The spectators gasped in awe as he crouched down and helped her sit up. Her blue eyes were a little glassy, and she looked at him, stunned.
"You okay?" he asked softly, concern showing in his eyes.
"That . . . was a nice. . . hit." She congratulated him haltingly, rotating her neck gingerly, "I totally didn't see it coming."
Carefully, he slipped his hands under her arms and lifted her easily to her feet, "Come on, let's walk you around a little until you get your feet back under you again."
"My guts feel like they're in all the wrong places." She groaned, "Help me to the showers. I think I'm going to throw up."
He draped her arm over his shoulder and set her on her feet. Walking her carefully, he headed in the direction of the shower room. Behind him, the gathered students continued to stare in awe.
The four days of testing passed quickly and Gabriel more than met all the requirements. On the morning of the fifth day, he had been inducted into Red Squadron and given the rank of Private. Red and Gold Squadrons had been summoned to assemble at the main sub-train loading area. Thirty-two soldiers, none of them older than twenty-four, and all armed to the teeth. Gabriel had been given his choice of weapons shortly before the assembly. The young man had opted for a pair of PL-122 pistols and a long, serrated knife, which he tucked into the top of his boot.
While most of the soldiers were being seen off by family members and friends, Gabriel stood patiently waiting, alone. Any mission could be a soldier's last and most prepared themselves as if it would be. Alex and Darlene said their goodbyes to Oz and moved on to his wife. Willow hugged Darlene first, then Alex, smiling a tearful farewell to both girls. Then she looked to Gabriel and an even deeper sadness settled in her eyes.
"Good bye Gabriel." She whispered, her voice strained with emotion.
"Thank you, Willow." He smiled kindly at the middle aged woman.
The members of Gold Squadron loaded onto the first sub-train car. Cole paused in the doorway, looking alternately between Gabriel and Alex. Gabriel caught his attention and nodded meaningfully toward Alex. The Gold Squad commander smirked and favored him with a short wave before joining his soldiers inside.
"Well, I guess we're off." Alex announced as her troops slowly filed into the second sub-train. "Bye, Nanna, Oz. We'll be good, honest."
Darlene, Gabriel and Alex were the last of Red Squadron to board the transport car. Willow waved, a tear in her eye, and pressed her hand against her mouth. Beside her, Oz wrapped a thick arm around her shoulders and waved good-bye with a reassuring smile.
Standing back, away from the assembly, Angel lurked, cloaked in the shadow of a dark corridor with his hands jammed deep into his pockets. His eyes narrowed as he watched Gabriel enter the sub-train. "You'd better do it right this time." he murmured softly.
"Come on, Darlene." Alex urged, calling her friend by her full name. "We don't have much time."
"Hey, what are you expecting, a miracle?" Dar shot back from her precarious position beneath the computer console. "A mere mortal like myself needs time. Or would you rather see this thing blow up in our faces before we download byte one?"
"Just hurry it up. This place is making me nervous."
They had slipped into the enemy installation without a hitch. Cole and his squad had taken up guard positions along the corridor that would serve as their escape route while Red Squadron had gone on ahead and infiltrated the main data repository. The demon architecture was chaotic and convoluted with odd shaped tunnels and warped passages. Alex hated these places. To her, they were wholly unnatural, a reflection of the dark and twisted minds of the demons who built them.
Gabriel stood close to a small service door, something akin to a living valve, identical in appearance to the one Cole's team was watching on the opposite end of the room. He could see thick fluids pumping through the wall, driven by some dark, hidden heart, and a fine map work of veins and nerves. He had been told that demons didn't build with inorganic materials, but he had never imagined this.
"Disgusting, isn't it?" Alex remarked, noting his expression. "That's what they do with their dead. They grow them into structures like this. I'll be glad when we blow it up."
He shuddered slightly, nodding in agreement to her sentiment.
"There, got it!" Darlene tugged on her pliers with a dull snap and a tiny spit of sparks, a short length of severed wire trapped between the tips. Sliding out from under the console, she quickly hopped into the operator's chair and began tapping keys wildly. After slipping a shiny circular disk into the drive, she began transferring files. "It should just be a few minutes now."
"How are we doing for time, McGuinness?" Alex turned to the other new member of the squad, a boy who Gabriel estimated to be no older than sixteen.
"Four minutes, fifty-one seconds." McGuinness answered, fingering a small digital timepiece nervously.
"Damn it!" Alex swore, "Get a move on, Dar. We have to get out of here."
"I'm trying. It's this damn machine!" Darlene complained, "Probably hasn't seen a tech since it was installed. Just once, I'd like to see a demon that's not a total technological simpleton."
The door next to Gabriel gave a shudder and quietly split into three panels which slid back into the wall. Alex caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and whipped out her shotgun.
"Down!" she shouted to Gabriel, lining up her shot and pulling the trigger in the span of half a second.
Gabriel dodged an instant before a leathery, blue-skinned demon entered through the door and raised its talons to strike. An instant after that, it's face exploded in a flash of blue-white light.
Gabriel straightened, looking stunned at the headless corpse as it collapsed, twitching, to the floor.
"Thanks." he said in a low, breathless voice.
Alex walked past him and inspected the wall where her bullet had ricocheted and opened a small hole. Gabriel noted with disgust that the hole was bleeding.
"Damn it!" she hissed between clenched teeth, "Cavanaugh, contact Gold Squadron, tell them to get out. Now. We'll be right behind them."
"What's going on?" Gabriel watched in confusion as she bounded for the door, her shotgun drawn and under her arm.
"I cut the wall." she explained, prying open the door and peering cautiously down the hallway. "These buildings feel pain. They know we're here now."
Cavanaugh removed his earpiece and looked to his leader apologetically. "I have Gold Squadron on the box, Commander. They say they aren't going anywhere until we're done."
"Give me that!" she growled, hastily snatching the communications device out of his hands and holding the receiver to her ear. "You listen here, Cole! I am the ranking officer on this mission and I say you and your team bug out. NOW!" She spat in rage and threw the equipment to the ground, "Damn that Terakan! He's pretending to lose the transmission."
She strode over to the computer console and placed her hand on Darlene's shoulder.
"Come on, Dar." she instructed resignedly, "We've got to clear out."
"Just one more minute." The petite blond begged, "There's something big here. I'm almost in."
"We can't afford the time, Dar." Alex shook her head, "I said --"
The rest of her sentence was lost in the tumult of a score of muffled gunshots from the other side of the escape door. Gold Squadron was under attack. Alex, her shotgun readied, leaped for the door, gesturing for Gabriel to follow. Turning halfway around to face him, she stopped in mid-motion and her eyes flew wide. With a flurry pounding footsteps and blood-curdling battle cries, almost a dozen purple-skinned demons leaped over Gabriel and into the room through the open service door. Scrunching her face into a grimace, Alex raised her shotgun, firing, and took one of them through the stomach in mid-air. Diving into a roll, she fired again blindly into the mass. As one, the creatures landed, and bounded away in all directions.
All around her, bullets whizzed and demons screamed in rage and pain. Something hard struck her in the back of the head, throwing her face first onto the floor. As she rose to her knees, a tall, sinewy demon with shiny, black barbs along its forearms and calves stepped arrogantly into the room and fixed Alex with a deadly glare. It was well over eight feet tall and leanly muscled, with tiny inter-linked blue-black plates covering every inch of its flesh, like armor. A pair of whip-like tentacles sprouted from the backs of its shoulders, swaying gracefully like tails of cats. The creature's face was almost elegant by demon standards, with narrow, cat-like eyes and high, jutting cheekbones. More thin, shiny tentacles hung from its head like hair, each one encased in the same tiny armored plates. If pressed to venture a guess, Alex would have classified it as female. The demon's face was twisted with hatred and disdain as it looked down at her with burning, blood red eyes.
"You've all just made the biggest mistake of your lives." The demon's voice was harsh and whispering and carried a disturbing, resonant echo as if it were two voices overlaid.
"Oh, God." Alex whispered, her skin going cold with horror, "It's her. Fides the Terrible."
The monstrosity advanced on Alex like a juggernaut, her supple, armored legs pounding taloned feet into the floor as it came, stray bullets deflecting, unnoticed, off her hide. Alex leveled her shotgun and fired. Through a cloud of smoke, she could see that the demoness had not even slowed. She fired again and again to no effect, emptying her entire load of shells, the last at point blank range. Diving desperately, she narrowly avoided being crushed by the demoness' charge. Rolling to her feet, she came up next to Darlene.
"I got it!" the small blonde gleefully held up the disk in her hand.
"Great, let's go! We're in way over our heads." Alex grabbed her by the arm and started to run, but Darlene hesitated.
"I have to scramble the data tracks or they'll know what we were here for."
Slipping a fresh shell into her shotgun, Alex offhandedly blasted a hole clean through the console.
"Happy, now?" she smirked, pulling her friend along with her.
The door they had been planning to use for their escape burst open and Cole and his squad backed into the chamber, retreating and firing their weapons down the hallway. An emaciated, four armed demon leaped forward heedlessly and grabbed onto a young scar-faced Terakan. Cole reacted purely on instinct, firing two quick shots from his pistol. The first bullet grazed the demon's shoulder, knocking it aside enough so that the second bullet caught it full in the chin. Nodding gravely to his scarred teammate, he limped further into the room, his soldiers in tight, disciplined formation around him.
Their escape route blocked, Alex and Darlene made a break for the other side of the room, but were cut off as Fides stepped directly into their path.
"You're all dead!" Fides snarled gleefully, intercepting a Red Squadron soldier with the slithering smoothness of a serpent and hoisting her into the air by the head. The young woman screamed as Fides chuckled darkly and tightened her two handed grip, squeezing the life out of her.
"What do we do now?!" Dar cried in panic, averting her eyes and fleeing with Alex as the demon bit into the dead woman's shoulder with a grinding crunch.
"There has to be another way out." Alex coolly scanned the room. Eight demons lay dead at their feet, but ten more had poured in through the open service door in the meantime. Only the valiant and tenacious efforts of Cole and his Gold Squadron were keeping them from being completely overrun.
She reached into her pack and pulled out a head sized lump of explosive, eyeing the outer wall speculatively. They had only brought the one and it had been intended for destroying the whole structure once they had escaped, too big to just blow a hole through a wall.
Gabriel skipped backward, unloading a full clip from each of his handguns into the body of an attacking demon.
"There's too many of them!" he shouted over the tumult of combat. "How are we supposed to get out?!"
"Explosive's too big to put a hole in the wall." Alex hefted the mass of wires and short green tubes, "We'd blow ourselves to pieces!"
Gabriel eyed her shrewdly and looked over her shoulder as the towering Fides cornered two more of their teammates. He slipped his pistols into his belt and, grabbing her pack in one hand and the explosive device in the other, raced toward the giant creature.
He whistled shrilly and waved his arms to get her attention. "Hey, ugly!" he shouted, "You want a real fight?"
Fides paused, peering slowly over her shoulder.
"You've got to be kidding me." she chuckled derisively.
The demon watched him, puzzled for a moment, then, grinning with a naggingly familiar bloodlust, whirled about and surged forward. Gabriel backed away unsteadily, his face filled with trepidation.
"What the hell does he think he's doing?" Alex thumbed a fresh load of shells into her shotgun and took aim. She fired three shots in quick succession, but they bounced harmlessly off the creature's thick carapace amid an explosion of sparks.
Cole noticed what was going on and fired also, scoring on the demon general's armored hide with no effect.
Fides dipped her head, snorting steam through tiny, slitted nostrils as she stormed forward. Gabriel pressed his back against the outer wall, trapped, his eyes locked on the serpentine beast that was quickly bearing down on him.
"Come on, you useless piece of garbage!" he challenged, waving Alex's pack in its face like a flag.
"Nowhere left to run, little mortal!" Fides exulted, "Now it's time for you to die."
The demon lunged forward, her strong, sinewy arms spread wide. Gabriel dove between her feet, slapping the bomb against its midsection as he went, and whipped around, springing into a backwards run and firing a hail of bullets into the demoness' back. Alex, Darlene and Cole also opened fire on the creature.
Unbalanced from the multiple impacts, Fides fell forward, pinning the explosive between her body and the wall. Gabriel dove to the floor, face first, and threw his hands over his head. Instinctively, the other squad members did likewise, ducking for cover wherever they could find it. There was a muffled crump and a flash of white light and the entire building shook as the demoness was launched, howling, back through the air with the force of a missile. Her long, wiry form hurtled across the room, bellowing in outrage, flattening a half-dozen of its dark kin and smashing clean through the opposite wall. A cool breeze poured into the chamber as bloody ichor ran freely from the edges of a ragged, smoking hole in the outer wall where the bomb had gone off. Everyone in the room, demon and human alike, was stunned into silence.
"That was amazing!" Darlene marveled with a short cough, unplugging her fingers from her ears.
"Congratulate me later." Gabriel smiled through the smoke, "Let's just get out of here. Fast."
Alex bent to scoop up the wounded body of one of the two Fides had backed into the corner and ran for the opening, pausing only long enough to fire a bullet into the back of a retreating demon. Gold Squadron and the rest of Alex's team streamed out behind her.
Fides' outraged shriek followed them out into the open air. Gabriel hovered by the makeshift doorway and looked back uneasily. There was something chillingly familiar about the serpentine demon, a half-buried memory that struggled to resurface. The huge creature sat up, slow but apparently unhurt, her eyes bursting into flame as she glared at him through the smoke and debris.
"YOU." she raised a scaly arm and pointed at Gabriel with a taloned finger, an unmistakable command to her demon followers. "KILL THEM!!"
"Gabriel, come on!" Darlene grabbed him by the arm and pulled.
He stumbled absently after her, his attention fastened on Fides as she rose, staggering, to her feet. As the first of the demoness' stunned servants began to take up pursuit, Gabriel tore his eyes away and broke into a headlong run.
The fleeing squadrons crested a steep hill and hastily rushed down the other side.
"I think we can stop running now." Alex slowed down to a walk and leaned against the gnarled bark of a twisted, leafless tree, "Looks like we lost them."
"No," Cole disagreed, limping, his breathing labored, "We keep going until we get to the sub-train tube. Who knows how long we have before they send out scouts to find us."
"Look, Cole, " Alex looked to him seriously, "We're all run down. You look like you're ready to collapse. And don't forget, my people only got in four days ago. I think we can afford a short rest. We'll set up a small perimeter and let the medics give everyone a once-over. What do you say?"
"Maybe you're right." He answered tiredly, pressing his back to the twisted tree and sliding slowly to sit on the ground. "Everyone, at ease for now. Lasseter, Jones and Silverberg, I want you three to go out about a quarter mile and set up a triangular watch perimeter. At the first sign of any kind of pursuit, we're getting the hell out of here."
The three Gold Squadron soldiers obeyed wordlessly, readying their weapons and heading out in three divergent directions.
Cole looked a little pale in the face, and he was holding a wound in his side and another along his leg. Gabriel was surprised that he had managed to run as far as he did unassisted. He was even more surprised that the man still had the presence of mind to be giving orders.
Alex motioned to her team medic. "Ostby, take a look at him." She pointed to Cole, "Then go through our own team starting with Cavanaugh. He took a bit of a bruising back there."
Gabriel sat on the hard earth and tried to relax. Tried was the operative word. He could still hear Fides' terrible voice echoing in his ears. Ever since they had escaped, he had had a foreboding feeling deep in his stomach.
"What do you think is in these files?" Darlene wondered, plunking down across from him, the data disk in her hand.
"Must be pretty important stuff, considering Fides' appearance." Cole reasoned as Ostby busily wrapped his thigh with bandages, "I don't think anyone's reported meeting her face to face since the twenties."
"Yeah, that thing totally gave me the wig." Alex began disassembling her shotgun with practiced efficiency and carefully cleaning it out with a soft, dirty cloth. "I nailed it dead-bang with an entire clip and it didn't even slow down."
She pulled her helmet off her head and sucked air wetly through her teeth in dismay, dropping it to the sparse grass. A large crack ran almost halfway up the back of it, nearly splitting the helmet in two.
"Damn it!" she swore, "I love this helmet!"
"Be glad that wasn't your head." Cole chuckled, "That's what helmets are for."
Darlene slowly flipped the data disk end over end with the fingers of one hand, munching on a ration bar with the other, "Maybe this has something to do with the start of the war. You know, the reason behind the whole thing."
Alex and Cole looked to each other and rolled their eyes in exasperation.
"There IS no reason behind the war, Dar." Alex argued, sighting down the detached barrel of her shotgun. "Demons kill. That's what they do. They have no other motivation."
"I'm telling you, the invasion was no accident. They had this planned long before the millenium." Darlene insisted, stuffing the last half of the ration bar into her mouth.
"Oh no, not your crazy conspiracy theory again?" Alex shook her head, smiling patronizingly, while rubbing carefully at a small burr in her gun's loading mechanism with a tiny file.
"Conspiracy theory?" Gabriel asked curiously.
"Forget about it, Gabriel." Cole took a long drink from a metal cup, as Ostby finished tending to his side, "You don't want to know, trust me. Darlene has these crazy ideas that the war started with a planned invasion."
"It's not crazy!" Darlene slapped him smartly across the back of the head, sending him forward, choking. "If you ever saw the things that I have on the World Network, you'd believe me. There are secret records out there, left over from the old era and, if you know what you are doing, you can access them easy enough. Dozens of eye witness proofs of organized demon activity before the turn of the millennium."
She sat down across from Gabriel excitedly, her hands a blur of motion as she got deeper into her story. "You see there were these two special agents, a man and a woman, and they traveled around documenting the demon plot. They kept video records as proof. I'm telling you, the truth is out there."
"Oh, come on, Dar!" Alex giggled, slipping the strap of her now-reassembled shotgun over her shoulder. "If there was so much proof of the demons, then why wasn't the Resistance formed before 2002?"
"That's just it." The blonde leapt to her feet fervently, "The government was trying to cover everything up, to keep the citizens in the dark, you know, so they could make a deal with the demons or something. I think they even went so far as to put some of them in positions of political power as part of the deal."
"Darlene!" Alex squealed, holding her ribs, "Stop it, I can't breathe anymore."
Cole slumped over in a fit of laughter, pressing his hand gingerly to his side.
"It's true!" Darlene shook her fist in frustration, "The Emperor was just a small time Mayor in some backwater town before he started the war."
"The Emperor was human, then, Dar." Alex shook her head patronizingly, "He became a demon after he completed an Ascension ritual."
"What about this other guy I heard about? They made him king of a country called Irack, like, a hundred years ago. They called him Sodom Insane. Tell me that doesn't scream 'demon' at you."
"I believe you, Darlene." Gabriel patted her shoulder comfortingly.
"See." Darlene stuck her tongue out at the other two, "At least somebody here has a brain."
Alex sat up, wiping tears of laughter from the corners of her eyes, while Darlene dug out another ration bar and threw it at Cole. The Terakan caught it with a deft hand and smiled his thanks mockingly to her.
"All right, everybody, " Alex shouted loud enough for the soldiers of both troops to hear, "ten minutes to catch your breath then we haul out to the sub-train tube."
Gabriel stood up and strolled slowly down the far side of the hill, his heart finally starting to calm. He was almost starting to get used to the constant, faint stink of ash and sulfur. Compared to the stuffiness of the base, the air was fresh out here. He squatted in the sparse grass and folded his arms over his knees. Looking out over the wasted landscape, he wondered what it might once have looked like.
Off in the distance, he could make out what might have been a riverbed and, beyond that the worn down walls of a shallow valley. It might almost have been nice to look at if one could forget the hellfire in the sky and the way the huge tracks of charred and broken rock along the ground resembled ragged scars. God, he wanted to go home.
A pair of soft footsteps approached him slowly from behind. He felt a vague tingling sensation crawl up his spine and he didn't have to turn around to know who it was.
"Alex." He greeted her softly without turning around.
"Hey." She sat down next to him, "Whatcha lookin' at?"
"Nothing." He replied distantly, staring into the distance, "Just looking. Thinking about home."
"You miss the surface." She deduced, "It must be hard for you, living underground now."
"What? Uh, yeah." He had almost forgotten who he was supposed to be, "It's like a whole different world." In a way, it was true. It wasn't a lie, at least.
"Yeah, well, you'll get used to it soon." She smirked, "You just gotta roll with the punches and deal."
Just gotta roll with the punches and deal, the words echoed in his mind, freeing another wave of memories. Someone else had said that to him once. He had been sitting on a hill, staring out at a distant highway, thinking about home, Scotland this time. Buffy had found him, despite that fact that he had wanted to be alone, and she had changed his mind about leaving Sunnydale in a matter of minutes. Her charm and strength of will had enamoured him from that very instant, a fact that had almost been lost in the tumult of the disaster that was to follow. He could see the same traits in her daughter, a familiarity that made him suddenly miss her.
Alex was laying back on her elbows staring out at the horizon with her shotgun balanced across her stomach, habitually close to her hands. Her eyes wandered upward and her face lit with wonder.
"Wow." She gaped, "Look at THAT."
Overhead, the eternal murk that was the sky had thinned and, in a small area, clear night sky and a scattering of stars were visible.
Alex pulled a hand-sized set of binoculars out of her pack, setting them to her eyes and peering into the sky.
"This is really cool." she marveled at the small celestial miracle. "Here, take a look."
She offered the binoculars to Gabriel, her face beaming. Gabriel accepted them, shrugging half-heartedly. It was only a small patch, but from what he had seen of this world, perhaps it was the best they could get.
"Sometimes I forget that there's a real sky behind all that hellsmog." she continued, "The stars look like little jewels. Especially that bright red one."
"That's not a star." Gabriel commented, viewing it through the binoculars, "It's a planet."
"What?" Alex frowned, confused.
"It's a planet." he repeated absently, handing her binoculars back, "Venus, specifically."
"How do you know these things?"
"When I was just a boy, my Father used to show me the stars all the time. They sort of remind me of him." His voice tightened with remembered guilt.
She cocked her head and fixed him with a sidelong look. "You must have grown up far from here. This is only the second time I've ever seen the stars. You make it sound like you saw them every night."
"Uh, no." he avoided the question clumsily, "I just made sure I saw them every chance I got, that's all."
"So what happened to your Dad?" she fingered a small round stone for a moment before flicking it down the hillside.
"He's . . . gone." He answered slowly, the pain still fresh in his memory, "He died two months ago." Again, he was able to tell the truth while still maintaining his cover.
"My Dad's dead, too. Sorry." She said the words with an easiness that he found a little disturbing. Hearing about the death of a loved one was commonplace in this world, he realized, and she had probably become inured to it over time. "I guess that's how you ended up here, huh?"
"You could say that, yeah." he smiled bittersweetly to himself. He looked at her carefully, a knot of agitation turning in his stomach, "Do you remember much about your father?"
Alex shrugged, leaning back on her elbows, "Not really. I know that he was killed just before I was born. And I know that Mom didn't really take it well. She was always good to me, taught me to be the soldier I am. But she cried a lot. She used to cry for hours when she thought no one was around. Then some trouble would come up and she'd put on what she called 'her game face' and everything would seem all right."
Killed before she was born . . .Xander had been assassinated around that time. Perhaps once the gangly young man had given up trying to win her heart and concentrated on something bigger, he had finally caught her attention.
"You sound like you were close." He said, noting how similar she seemed to her mother now, as she reclined comfortably in the dry grass.
"We were." She smiled wistfully, "My Mom was the best. No matter how busy she got with the council, she still had time for me. I didn't really need my Dad as long as she was around, but I still wish I could have known him."
He found himself thinking again about the last time he had seen Buffy and how he had left Sunnydale without even saying goodbye to her. He had been so overwhelmed with loss and guilt then, he wouldn't allow himself to even think of her. It seemed so trivial now, considering the state of the world. He was pleased to see that despite trying conditions, Buffy had been able to stay close to her daughter.
"It must have really hurt you when she was killed." He said, feeling sorry for her.
She saw the sentiment in his eyes and frowned.
"Yeah, well it kinda sucked, sure," she shrugged, unconcerned, "but, like I said, I don't cry."
"Never?" he smirked incredulously, "That hardly seems healthy."
"Healthy or not, that's the way it is." She squinted at him, studying his face, "You remind me of someone when you smile like that. I don't know what it is, but I've sensed something familiar about you ever since we found you on the outskirts."
"I have the Second Sight." He turned his face away from her self-consciously, "This 'Sense' that you have sounds a lot like it. Maybe that's what you're seeing."
"Mom used to tell me that I inherited some of her Slayer intuition and that, because of it, we would always be aware of one another even without all our other senses. I get the same feeling from you."
Gabriel shook his head and shrugged helplessly. "There are a lot of things in this world that can't be explained. I was born with powers very much like the Slayer's. The similar energies can interact sometimes."
When he had met Buffy for the first time, he had experienced a similar feeling. Any time they had been near one another, each had experienced an unmistakable recognition of the other's power.
"I don't know." She scrutinized him more closely. "You're different from the rest of us. All this seems so new to you."
He turned his gaze uneasily to the sky, avoiding her eyes. She suspected something, certainly, and he had no idea how much longer he could keep his promise to Oz and continue to lie to her. How would she react if he told her he was from the past, that he had known her mother when she was younger than Alex was now.
"Hey there, you two. Check out the funky sky." Darlene interrupted to Gabriel's utter relief, approaching from behind them with her usual carefree grin firmly in place. "What's with the private meeting? Or did I just answer my own question?"
"Nothing going on here that you have to worry about interrupting." Alex assured her, hopping to her feet. "I'll go see if Cole is ready and then we can get moving."
Again, Alex covered a brief moment of vulnerability with gruffness. Leaving Gabriel and Darlene behind, she loped down the hillside and started barking orders to the rest of her squadron.
Watching her for a moment, Gabriel felt a nagging question resurfaced within him, something he had felt the need to know since he had arrived in this tortured time. It was time to stop asking questions and get the answers himself. Alone with Darlene, he turned his back to the others and leaned his head close to her ear.
"Darlene? " he asked in a low voice, "I need to ask you a favor."
Favoring him with a flash of bright teeth and a coquettish giggle, she reached up and hooked her hands around the back of his neck. "Anything you want, Private," she grinned, her eyes lambent and hungry looking, "but I think we should wait until we get back to base where we can have some privacy."
Blinking in surprise and his cheeks flushing scarlet, he tugged her hands apart and held them away from his body. "Actually, I was hoping you could help me with a little research I've been wanting to do. Private research."
Her glittering blue eyes lit up with a hunger of a different sort. "You want me to hack somebody's files?" she inquired, intrigue obvious in her voice.
"Maybe." He answered, careful to keep his voice from being heard. "We'll talk about it later. Meet me in my room after we get back."
"Now there's an offer I wouldn't refuse." She chuckled, winking broadly as she walked around him and rejoined the two squadrons.