Chapter 12 – The Important Thing



Before she’d been back in her apartment for an hour, Aspen raced to the police department to see Detective Halkeran.

She hadn’t combed her hair and she was wearing the same wrinkled blue dress she’d worn for the trip back to Sunnydale in the bottom of a boat and the back of a truck. She gripped her elbows with her hands as if she could keep herself from flying to pieces by holding on tight.

“Aspen. You’re back.” Halkeran said. He pulled her folder off the growing stack of folders for missing university students.

What the billy blue hell was the government up to now? First, they snatch a bunch of college girls, then they send them back. Four missing girls showed up this week. Was Aspen in the same condition as the rest?

“Did you call your Mom? She’s frantic.”

“Yes, yes, I called. I know where Thomas is, where he’s been taken. I know where all the missing students are. You have to do something.”

Halkeran sipped his sour coffee which had turned cold an hour ago. He sat back and waited.

He wasn’t going to like what this girl had to say. He wasn’t going to like it, because he knew where Aspen and the other college girls had been taken and he knew about certain things that went on in Sunnydale. Things the Commissioner warned them never to mention to civilians.

“Thomas and the others – they were captured by some weird government soldiers. I was, too, and a bunch of women from the university. We were kidnapped and held captive out on this island a few miles from Isla Vista. The men are still being held there. You have to do something.”

She gripped her elbows harder and made her fingers turned white. Be calm, be calm or he won’t believe you. Your story is too fantastic for anybody to believe, but if you’re calm and reasonable, he might listen. He might let you explain. He might not think you’re crazy and he might check it out. Then, he’d have to do something.

“Isla Vista is outside my jurisdiction.”

He had to be careful here. He didn’t want to get her excited, give her hope that anyone could help, that anything could be done. At least, by anyone official.

“Call someone. You must know someone. Call the FBI or the CIA or some government alphabet place. The soldiers – the Initiative is what they call themselves – they’re turning the men into … I mean, they’re hurting the men and they’re kidnapping people and keeping them captive. Somebody has to rescue them.”

Halkeran got up and closed the door. Aspen was a nice, pretty girl, like a hundred college girls he saw on the street every day. He wanted to help her, but he couldn’t. Helping meant saying the forbidden words out loud. Helping meant admitting what he’d known – what the department had known - for years.

“Aspen, your boyfriend, and the other men. Did something happen to them? Something that changed them?”

“Yes! You know? You know about vamp …”

He held up his hand to cut off her words. “Don’t say that word. Not in here. Not where anyone can hear you.”

Aspen nodded. Tears dripped from her eyes. He knew. He knew and he believed her.

“What can I do? I have to get Thomas back. Please, please help me.”

Halkeran sat back down in his beat up chair. “I can’t help you. I can’t even say the word that describes your boyfriend’s … condition.”

“There must be someone who can help, someone you can call.”

It pissed him off. He’d sworn to serve and protect. He’d become a cop to help people and keep them safe and he was stuck in this hell hole where couldn’t even same the name of the monsters that were ravaging the town. He might not be able to say the word, but he could send Aspen to someone who could.

Halkeran picked up a pencil and a scrap of paper. He wrote down an address and a name. “Go here. Ask for Willy. Tell him you want to find her.”

He handed her the paper.

Aspen looked at the scrap. “She can help? But, it says she’s a slayer. She slays them.” Aspen whispered.

“Yeah, she does, but her boyfriend? He’s got a condition, too.”


***

Willow pulled out a seemingly endless stack of printouts from her backpack and dropped them on the Magic Box’s reading table in front of Giles.

“Here’s what I’ve got. There’s a lot more.”

Buffy looked at the huge stack of papers. It was times like these that she was grateful she was the Slayer. Kicking, jumping, boxing, staking and free-form eye gouging and ear pulling were much better than getting eye strain.

Giles eyed the formidable stack of papers, too. “Perhaps you could summarize, Willow?”

“There’s something else you need to see first. Here’s the Sunnydale Coroners’ report for the past year on deaths by unnatural causes, with a graph comparing death rates. You see the death rates dropped by over fifty percent in the past four months. The category showing the biggest drop was ‘Death by Misadventure.’ That’s where they stick the vampire neck punctures, demon maulings and icky deaths they don’t want to explain.”

Giles studied the chart for a moment and handed it to Buffy. “This is remarkable.”

Buffy stared at the chart. It was especially remarkable since she’d neglected patrolling in favor of visiting Spike and she hadn’t completely cleared out the nest of campus vampires. If this chart was correct, there had been only a few vampire deaths in the past four months.

“I could be on the Slayer unemployment line if this keeps up. What gives, Will?”

“Buffy and Spike weren’t the only participants in the Positive Reinforcement program. The government chipped fifteen recently turned male vampires. These vamps were all in the 20-25 year age range when they were turned. None of their names showed up in the obituary pages, but most of them were reported missing.”

“Color me duh,” Buffy said. “I never thought about any other vampires being chipped. It doesn’t make sense the Initiative would go to all that trouble for Spike.”

“I certainly should have considered this possibility before,” Giles said. “Why would the government go to the expense and trouble of chipping any vampires? The Initiative soldiers are capable of dusting the vampires. Capturing them is a lot more difficult and costly, one would think. They must have some ulterior plan.”

Buffy shivered at the thought of the Initiative dusting Spike.

“How did all those vampires get turned, if none of them showed up dead?” she asked.

Willow interrupted. “There’s more. These are articles I printed out from The Sunnydale Sunset. Fifteen college girls from USC Sunnydale disappeared in the past three months. All of them were athletes. The weirdest part is some of the girls showed up a few days ago. They told the police they couldn’t remember where they’d been or what happened to them.”

Fifteen newly turned and chipped male vampires and fifteen missing, then returned, college girls. What Buffy was thinking was too weird to be true, which, this being the Hellmouth, meant what she was thinking was probably true.

“Okay. I’m making a leap. Are any of those college girls pregnant? Is the Initiative creating a whole group of vampire-human babies? And, why?”

Willow nodded. “I hacked into their medical records with the University clinic. They’re all expecting within the next six or seven months. I think the Initiative hopes to grow themselves a group of super soldiers with the strength of their athlete mothers and their vampire fathers. I hope you didn’t want a girl, Buffy, because all the babies are going to be boys.”

Finally, Willow found out something useful.

“Awesome, I’m going to have a baby boy. Spike Summers, Jr. What a dumb name.” What was Spike’s last name, anyway?

“The notion of a miniature Spike is quite possibly the most frightening thing I’ve ever encountered in all my years of researching the occult,” Giles said.

Buffy stuck her tongue out at him. Giles had been positively hurtful since she announced the baby was on the way. Her baby boy was going to be beautiful and perfect and normal and not at all frightening.

“Wait a minute,” Buffy said. “What about the chipped vampires? What happened to them? Am I going to have to interview every vamp I come across to see if he’s Violence Impaired before I dust him?”

“Nope,” Willow said, “The government’s holding them all, except Spike, who escaped. Since Spike was out loose and we were protecting him, they had to go to more trouble to get the two of you together with the whole control box scenario.”

Giles snorted and commented under his breath that it didn’t appear much trouble had been required at all.

Buffy pretended she hadn’t heard. “The control box is dangerous since it can neutralize the chip. Why would the government want the ability to do that?”

“Neutralize the chip?” Giles asked. “You didn’t mention that the box could neutralize the chip. Is that how you came to have that bite mark on your neck?”

Buffy had forgotten she and Willow hadn’t mentioned that aspect of the control box’s features to Giles. “That wasn’t a bite. That was a poke. Yes, it was a poke in the neck from a branch.”

Giles gave Buffy his I Am Seriously Annoyed Face for leaving out important details and lying to boot. He polished his glasses so hard, the lenses appeared in imminent danger of breakage.

“The important thing is vampires,” Buffy said. The important thing was to get Giles to think about something besides her lies and the bite on her neck. “Why would the government want its own kiss of vampires?”

Giles left off polishing his glasses now that he had a question to ponder.

“Vampires could be extremely effective soldiers if they could be controlled – hard to kill, stronger than humans, capable of stealth. If the chip could be turned on and off at will, the vampires could be starved into submission, then released on an opposing human force with devastating effect.”

“Oh boy,” Buffy said.