To Save Your World, You Asked This Man to Die

Buffy saw the box as soon as she slid open the concrete-slab door – it was addressed to her, complete with postage stamp. Odd, since mail no longer existed. She picked up the box (perhaps unwisely, but it was hard to care these days) and listened to the metallic tinkling within. The date stamp read “2003.”

Where had the box come from? Buffy squinted into the dim, greenish light flickering from the tubes embedded in the ceiling. She didn’t sense an intruder. Shrugging, she carried the box to the couch – an old cement bench, heaped high with rags – in what passed as Jo’s home, a stank hole in the network of stank holes and tunnels of the D.C. Underground.

A century ago, the Underground had been a bustling, if unreliable, metro rail system. The trains stopped running long ago, and time and techno-pagans had moved the tunnels deeper into the earth, extending them into the dark, spidery network that offered the only protection against the satellite signals.

The Underground belonged to the unwipeables. Demons and part demons and the spliced. And Buffy, who often suspected she had a cockroach gene or two.

Buffy removed her scythe from her back, then sat on the bench. She shook the box again. “I have mail,” she told Jo, as the splice pushed the concrete slab back into place. “How can I have mail?”

“What do you think it is?” Jo was tall and plain with dull brown hair pulled into a knot. Burn scars stretched across her chin and cheekbone, slipping into scattered snake scales across her brow. One eye was red with a slitted pupil, the other human and brown. The birthmark on her left shoulderblade – inked with the precision of a prison gang tattoo – read “Nicole,” but it was Jo who had merged with the demon, Jo who had figured out how not to die.

Buffy’s birthmark was her name, Buffy Anne Summers, written in loopy letters at the base of her spine. Not that anyone could see her tattoo. She wore crudely-woven pants and a tunic stitched from pebbled demon hide. Two belts circled her hips, each loaded with knives, and she carried a shoulder strap to secure her scythe. Short, rather dirty, brown hair ended bluntly at her chin.

“No idea. If this is my last Amazon order, it’s a century late. I’d call customer service, except, y’know, apocalypse.” The cardboard tingled in her hands. “Not that there’s a return address. And I think it’s demonic.”

Jo shrugged. She was demonic herself, and too young to remember the days when demonic meant bad. A baby, Jo, at thirty-four or fifty-four. Buffy never could keep track of birthdays or names, she didn’t think, and her memory had grown worse with the watery rush of decades.

“It’s new,” Jo said. She had a point. Wander around tunnels for sixty years, and nothing seems new anymore.

“2003, that’s ancient. Back when there was mail.” And shopping malls and suburbs. Fast food restaurants and fixed identities. Buffy almost laughed, knowing she had once thought that life was hell.

“It has your name on it.” Jo sat next to Buffy. “Whatever it is, it’s yours, and it found you.”

Buffy nodded and removed a hunting knife from her belt. The packing tape split neatly under its blade. Buffy put the knife back in its sheath, hesitated, then lifted a cardboard flap. “Huh.”

The box contained a gaudy amulet with a sparkling stone. Buffy winced, something prickling uncomfortably at her memory. She steeled herself against the not-too-bad-right-now pain, hoping it wouldn’t worsen into a full attack.

Jo blinked her mismatched eyes. “A box transcends time, space and the complete collapse of civilization to deliver a piece of costume jewelry?”

“Neither rain, nor sleet,” Buffy said – she didn’t remember her mother’s name, but slogans over a hundred years old came easily to mind – as if Jo would get the reference. She gently moved her thumb across the amulet's gilded edge. “I feel something. I think this was mine. Is mine. It’s – familiar.”

Her fingers tightened around the amulet.

Buffy knew Jo had seen something in her face, because her former sister-Slayer, who had first been thrust into civilian form, then spliced, closed her still-human hand over Buffy’s. “Do you feel like you’re getting an attack? Maybe we should put it away, just for now.”

White.

Flash.

Buffy cried out at the sudden brightness and threw an arm across her face. She heard Jo hiss and a strange-familiar deep-throated scream.

Then, the dark was back, soothing her throbbing eyes.

She shook her head to stop the bright dots dancing behind her lids. Or maybe they were in front of her eyes. Instead of diminishing, the lights coalesced. Formed from nothing into ash into a man. White hair. Black coat. He fell to his knees, lungs working fast.

Buffy leaped off the bench and raised her fists. Prepared to kill.

The man’s eyes widened. “Aaah!”

Buffy blew a few strands of dark hair out of her eyes, then cringed as pain cracked at her temples. There was something in his voice. Something that hurt.

“Wha – Buffy!” The man jumped to his feet, rushing her, arms outstretched, chest open and vulnerable.

She whipped out one of her blades, knowing that the man’s own force would impale him on her knife. Easy peasy.

The blade met his chest, but didn’t hit flesh or bone. Buffy gasped as she saw her hand sink through him, but the visual barely registered before he stepped through her. She felt nothing. No cold air, resistance or tapioca pudding. It was like he wasn’t.

She spun on her heel.

The man seemed equally surprised by the nonimpact. His momentum carried him too far, and he lurched and fell like a broken wind-up toy, hands windmilling before he hit the ground. “What the bloody –”

“You said it belonged to you?” asked Jo, who had positioned herself at Buffy’s side. She stood in a defensive pose, but hadn’t bothered with a weapon.

Things were going fast. Too fast. Buffy couldn’t breathe. The world swirled. Oh God, and it hurt. It hurt, and she wanted to know, and she wanted him gone, and if only she could – remember –

She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again, and the pain receded. The ghost was still there, half-collapsed on Jo’s floor. It laughed. A mad little giggle.

Buffy swallowed. “I don’t remember.”

The giggles ceased.

“Oh, that’s rich,” said the ghost (was he a ghost?). He stood and turned to face her. His voice rose in volume with each word he spoke. “A bloke dies for you. Burns up in the Hellmouth, skin crackling, eyeballs bursting in their sockets, saving the world, and you can’t bloody remember him!”

Jo let out a hissing laugh. “I don’t know who you are, but I know you didn’t save the world.”

The ghost motioned to the amulet, which Buffy had dropped on the floor in her haste to defend herself. “Ringed that around my neck, didn’t I? Closed the Hellmouth while the Potentials got all chosen. Didn’t tickle.”

Buffy’s head throbbed. For a brief moment, flames danced at the edges of her memory. She drew a deep breath and lowered her knife. “Sunnydale.”

“Bloody right it was Sunnydale!” He stalked towards her and jabbed a finger into her chest. Buffy looked down. His finger disappeared into her sternum, right up to the knuckle.

He quickly withdrew his hand and clutched it to himself, like he’d been injured. “What’s wrong with you, Slayer? Where is this? And what the bloody hell have you done to me!” He snarled at Jo. “Who are you? Did you do this to her?”

Buffy wished she could push him away, but she had to settle for glaring up into his face. “Look, buster, I don’t know who you are. I don’t know why you think you know me. But if you were in Sunnydale that day? You didn’t save the world. You helped me end it.”

***