Chapter 8 – We’re Both Free


Buffy sat across from Riley in a wooden booth with cushioned seats at the Webby Internet Café. The café opened up across the street from the university computer department about two weeks after a mysterious fire burned down the building. It featured coffee in thirty different flavors, cookies and lots of computers hooked up to the Internet. It had once been a bookstore and the new owners brightened up the space with pastel stripes on the walls, ferns and brass rails.

She sipped her iced latte with double whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles and munched on an oatmeal cookie with raisins and toasted macadamia nuts.

“So, tell me about yourself, Riley. I’ve been so busy slaying and whatever that I haven’t had a chance to get to know you,” Buffy said. Smooth Buffy. Casual But Interested Buffy. Not sounding at all like Trolling Desperately For a Normal Husband Buffy.

Riley smiled. She was making it damn easy for him. He shouldn’t have been surprised. That’s what whores do isn’t it? Make it easy for guys? No wonder Walsh picked her for her Vampire Mating Scheme.

“Born in Iowa. Joined the Army to see the world. Saw Belize instead.”

That was it? He’d been half way around the world and all he could come up with was two sentences? She couldn’t help comparing Riley’s yawn-provoking statement with Spike’s stories about his last visit to Prague and all the scrapes he’d gotten into while he was there.

“Lot of demon action in Belize?” she asked.

“Yeah. Demons like the hot climate. Mostly you see the lower intelligence species of demons – ryzarks, crotnefs, fyarls, the occasional magbeak - critters like that. You don’t see too many of the smarter demons, like the regurgitating frolaxes. The lower hostiles make up for their lack of brains by being mean.”

Riley felt safe mentioning ryzarks and crotnefs and the rest, although he’d never seen live specimens of any of them in his life. Buffy was a studying slacker, in demonology as well as college work. She hadn’t caught him the other day when he lied about killing ryzarks.

He had seen a regurgitating frolax. The bastard ran a White Chick All Night grocery in Keokuk, Iowa. Mr. Regurgitating Frolax couldn’t run a Seven-Eleven or a White Hen like the rest of the damn frolaxes. No, he operated his own dumb-ass franchise.

“While I was in Belize, the Army transferred me into the Initiative,” he said dropping his voice in case an international spy from the Society for the Protection of Indigenous Terrestrials was listening to their conversation in the Webby Café.

Buffy drank some more latte to fill up the uncomfortable lack of conversation. It was Riley’s turn to ask her about herself. She felt weird struggling for conversation. Spike talked all the time, or he did when he was with her. She suspected he talked to himself quite a bit, too. No lack of interesting conversation when Spike was around.

Riley didn’t say anything more after a few minutes and only drummed his fingers on the table.

She plunged ahead. “How’d you get to Sunnydale?”

“Professor Walsh brought my unit to Sunnydale. She set me up as her graduate assistant as a cover.”

“You’re a phony psych grad student?” Was this guy a tutoring fraud? Not that it mattered. She was with this guy for one reason and one only. Normal Husband Entrapment.

“I’m a real grad student,” he lied. He didn’t know anything about psychology except what he read in his copy of Buffy’s textbook. “I just came at it backwards.”

Buffy took inventory. Good job and career potential? Check. Nice looking? Check. Knows about vampires and demons and stuff? Check. Boring and not all that polite? Check. Good in bed? Not likely. He’d never be as exciting as Spike in the bedroom department. Okay, you can’t be a chooser when you get yourself knocked up by a Vampire Sex God and have to find yourself a human husband on the double quick to keep your mother happy.

He went back to the counter and bought another package of cookies for Buffy. She’d scarfed up the first cookies in record time. College girls never got enough to eat because they were too lazy to cook or were starving themselves to look good. When they got some sucker to pick up the tab, they ate like truck drivers.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Buffy asked when he came back with cookies.

“Sure,” he said.

Buffy hesitated. She might seem desperate, but she didn’t have a lot of time if she was going to hook an eligible bachelor. If he was eligible and bachelor-like. No wedding ring, but you couldn’t be certain from that. She needed to clear the eligible point up before she wasted any more time with this doof.

“Are you seeing anybody?”

It doesn’t get any better than this. I’ll be banging this babe in no time. “You mean a girlfriend? No girlfriend. I dated a lot, but I didn’t meeting anybody special. I’m so busy with patrolling at night with my men and teaching during the day, I haven’t spent much time thinking about a serious girlfriend.”

He found plenty of time to visit Carmelita, his favorite vamp ho with the jet-black hair and scarlet nails who skulked around Dantesco Street. Carmelita was a different matter.

“Great. I mean, me either. I’m not seeing anybody,” Buffy said. Today. She hadn’t seen Spike so far today, had she? So, she was almost telling the truth. Besides, Spike was mad at her.

“Terrific,” Riley said. “Since we’re both free, would you like to take in a movie with me tomorrow night?”

“Movie? I love movies. I made plans for tomorrow night, but I think I can break them,” Buffy lied.

A movie. How lame. Spike would never ask her to do anything as lame as going to a movie, especially on their first date. They hadn’t exactly gone on a first date, thanks to Professor Walsh. Buffy blushed. The first night she’d spent with Spike, no lameness there.

Spike took Buffy exciting places like the horse races in La Jolla and Ladies Mud Wrestling, where he’d arranged for her to wrestle with the pros, and the Demolition Derby, where she drove a junk heap and everybody cheered when she got in a big wreck, and dancing at TanzGotik, the new Goth club on Dantesco Street. When it was raining too hard to go on patrol, he played cards with her and cheated so she won. When he was feeling romantic, he took her for a long drive along the coast or to the night ride on the Ferris wheel at Isla Vista. He always arranged for them to get stuck at the top for an hour while he pointed out the stars and told her romantic vampire love stories and nibbled on her neck and sang her some old song about blue blankets.

If you want nice and normal, you can’t expect exciting, too.

“Great. I’ll pick you up at seven.” She didn’t hold out for a Saturday night date. Dumb blonde bitch.

“Oh, look at the time,” Buffy said, glancing at her bare arm. “Got to run.”

It wouldn’t be a good idea to spend too much time with her prospective husband. She might clunk his skull with her psychology book for being a selfish, boring bonehead.

Riley took her hand in his. He couldn’t let her make all the moves. She’d think he was a fag. “I wanted to tell you before, Buffy, but we were enjoying such a nice talk, I didn’t want to bring up anything unpleasant. It’s about Hostile 17.”

“What about Spike?” She couldn’t keep the edge of anxiety out of her voice. Had something bad happened to him? The news could only be bad if Riley knew before she did.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. I know you’re friends with Seventeen. His chip failed. He’s not under the Initiative’s control. When we stopped getting the signal from his implant, we searched for him to bring him back to replace his chip, but we haven’t located him. I’m afraid he’s feeding again.”

Buffy’s face felt clammy and her fingers ice cold. Spike, without a chip. That could only mean trouble. “I’d better go look for him.”

They made plans to meet the following evening and Buffy excused herself and hurried out of the café.

***

Aspen screamed as Thomas lowered his head to her neck and sank his fangs into her vein. Pain jagged through her body as fangs ripped into her neck. Pain and something else. Desire?

As suddenly as he had attacked her, Thomas screamed and sprang off the bed and lunged to the floor. He gripped his head and rolled back and forth, cursing and clutching his head.

Aspen stared without moving even to staunch the blood coursing down her neck. What was wrong with him? Why had he attacked her? What had happened to his teeth and his face? He had looked normal when she woke up, and now – now he looked like a monster.

He stopped screaming and lay on the floor, silent as death.

“Thomas?”

Before Thomas could speak, the door to the room opened and a man wearing a white lab coat and carrying a hypodermic stepped in. A soldier stood in the door behind him, the bright light of the hall blocking out his features. He was carrying a formidable rifle.

“Ms. Bleuette? I’m Dr. Ekl. I’ll be assisting you and Thomas during his transition.”

She eyed the hypodermic and grabbed her elbows to keep herself from becoming hysterical. “Transition? Who are you? What have you done to Thomas?”

“May I trust you to be calm while we talk?”

Aspen nodded. She doubted very much if she’d be able to stay calm, but the terrifying sight of that hypo needle and the soldier’s rifle, helped her remain in control for the moment.

The doctor sat down in a chair not far from the bed. “I’m certain you’ll have many questions, but I’ll give you a brief explanation. You’re in a government facility that controls and breeds what we refer to as hematophagous non-reproductive beings. You know them as vampires.”

Aspen looked at Thomas. His face was contorted into a mask of ugliness, his eyes glowed a nasty greenish yellow and his dog teeth were elongated into fearsome fangs. His skin was deathly white, almost grey, and his eyes were rimmed with red.

She screamed and screamed and screamed until Dr. Ekl found it necessary to use the hypodermic.