Taped oral interview with Dawn Summers, December 18th, 2009.

“…Can I just say that exploring a formerly evil, kinda reformed law firm when you’re feeling bored is not a good idea? There was this one time, in the labs…

Yeah, uh, never mind.

So, anyway, you wanted to know about the Slayers…

About a week in, I found the old security footage collection. There was some cool stuff in there, and some really not cool stuff that I kind of wish I hadn’t seen, but the one that really got to me? That was the one from the day I came to town.

Courtney was there, walking around the firm, probably spying.

She was right here, and we never knew it until afterwards. Funny that. Only, you know, not.

As for the others…

You swear Buffy’s not gonna be able to read this? Okay… honesty it is then.

You know, I kind of hated Vivian. Part of me thinks that it couldn’t have happened to a better person. But, then I think of all of the other people- we still don’t really know how many- and I feel like a grade A jerk.

I mean, millions of people died, and it’s all because Vivian just had to show off for some of the newbies. Kind of makes you want to travel back in time just to smack her. You know, right before you stopped her from doing it in the first place.

See? Jerk…”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Tuesday, January 27th, 2004 (Part Three)

There was blood everywhere.

Courtney has never seen so much blood. It seemed to coat every surface in the safe house.

‘Safe house, obviously a misnomer,’ she thought bitterly.

Nicky was nowhere to be found. Neither was Svetlana. Courtney had only to look around to get some idea of what had happened to them.

“What do we do now, Court?” Min’s voice was quiet and focused. She stood in the doorway of their little apartment, crossbow drawn and trained down the alley in case of further attack.

Courtney bowed her head. She wanted to grieve for the two younger Slayers who she had truly viewed as sisters. She could feel the burn of unshed tears behind her eyes, but she couldn’t let them drop. Not yet. Even though it was only the two of them left, she had been put in charge, and Min was looking to her to see this through. They both had to keep it together until they were somewhere safe.

After schooling her features into a calm mien, Courtney looked back at Min and spoke, her voice as hard and cold as stone. “Salvage what you can. We’re leaving.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

‘Damn, forgot how much scalp wounds bleed.’

Spike was sitting on the conference table in Angel’s office, letting Dawn fuss over the ragged cut that ran from his left temple over his ear. Doyle… no, Lindsey… Lindsey was standing behind him, nursing what looked like a black eye and a busted arm.

On the far side of the room, being patched up by Fred, Angel was steadfastly glaring at Spike and his tattooed maybe-ally. Wes and Cordelia seemed more interested in eyeing Lindsey, and Gunn was standing pointedly close to the wall of weapons flanking his boss’ desk. Of the five of them, the only one of them who didn’t look interested in restarting the fight that they had found mid-progress and forcibly broken up was Fred. She had crossed the void long enough to give Dawn a clean white towel and some hot water, but other than that one, agreeable transgression, the line had been drawn in the sand between the two groups and none seemed ready to cross over any time soon.

The fact that Eve, slippery little cow that she was, was also behind him, fawning over Lindsey in a manner that bespoke long association, gave him the sinking feeling that maybe he really wasn’t on the right side of the fence this time. Not that he and Angel needed much of an excuse to pound one another into bleeding pulps on the best of days, but something else was going on here.

In the fight itself, the biggest surprise had been Lindsey. He certainly looked and smelled human, but he sure didn’t fight like one. Seeing the expression on Angel’s face when Lindsey’s fist had crashed into his jaw would have been laughable if Spike hadn’t been too busy snarling in the fiery glee he always felt at the onset of a good fight. Spike had the sneaking suspicion that those tribal tattoos were providing Lindsey with a little more than aging Gen X-er street cred.

“You might need stitches for this,” Dawn said while she tried to wipe away the worst of the blood with her now crimson towel.

Spike raised a hand to his throbbing head and his fingers came away with even more blood. Despite having some idea about how awful he must look, the injury wasn’t really that bad, just messy.

“Maybe later. Don’t trust Peaches there not to try somethin’ while I’m not lookin.’”

That earned a snarl from his battered grandsire, but Fred, who was wielding a towel, needle, and thread of her own hushed him pretty quickly with a stern look.

“I’ll be over in a jiffy, Spike.” Angel’s glower- well, more like a cross between a scowl and a pout- was pointedly ignored as Fred continued her delicate work.

Honestly, the grinding ache deep inside his forearms was more disconcerting than the scalp wound. He flexed his hands, still stiff since their reattachment, but functional enough to make effective fists. Whatever damage to his fine motor skills the fight had caused, the recently severed bones and tendons had held, which was a relief.

Lindsey and Eve were both quiet as church mice, as if they knew as well as Spike that this situation could explode at any second given the slightest provocation.

Fred finally wandered over, needle and thread in hand, and started pinching at the margins of the cut. Ever the clever one, and now on the far side of the room from Angel, she waited until she had the needle and string already threaded through Spike’s scalp before she let her sweet Texas drawl start etching into the tense silence.

Fred’s wide doe-eyes met Spike’s and held them while the vague sting along his temple kept him still. “Now, Spike, you outta know that even though Angel and your friend there have some bad history, we all agreed that we’d offer sanctuary to anyone who came a knockin.’”

Angel and his crew had the good grace to look embarrassed at that, although Cordelia’s scowl looked fit to crack her perfectly made-up face.

Another stitch, tugged painfully tight when Spike had the temerity to quirk an eyebrow at Angel, and Fred continued. “There’re some rooms on the third floor for visiting clients. Maybe he could stay there?” she suggested in her quiet drawl.

Her words were oblique, but the look in her eyes wasn’t. She was telling Spike, clear as day, that keeping Lindsey out of Angel’s sight for the next little while was a really, really good idea. His ensuing scowl was met with another slight tug on another new stitch. It wasn’t enough to really hurt, but it certainly got his attention. Even though his eyes were starting to glitter with gold, there was amusement hidden in their blue depths as well.

“But, he’s evil,” Angel growled. The last syllable bent upwards in a slight whine.

Fred looked over her shoulder. “But you said anyone, Angel,” she reminded him sweetly.

So in the end, Spike got to turn the tables on Lindsey, setting the tattooed enigma up with an apartment safe haven of his own, while Angel spent the rest of the day brooding, of course. Of the others, no one seemed particularly happy with the situation, but nothing more was said. Spike had no intentions of letting the whole ‘Doyle’ thing slide without an explanation, volunteered or otherwise, but considering the emergency they had brewing on their very doorstep, the general consensus was to let sleeping dogs lie.

At least for a little bit.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Thursday, January 29th, 2004

It was one of the first rules of surviving a horror movie. Don’t ever, ever split up. Ever. But what choice did they have? There were only two of them left, cut off from the Council, and more was wrong with the world than a few vampires of dubious moral fiber.

Courtney pulled her coat tight around her shoulders, huddled against a cold that had nothing to do with the warm winter weather in L.A.

It didn’t take a vampire’s nose to smell fear, not when the air was laced with it. Not when every face on the street was painted with it. Courtney could read fear in the headlines and taste it in the canned pork that was all that remained of the food she and Min had scavenged from the Council’s safe house.

The Council.

Did they even still exist? Everyone was talking about the riots in London. From the far side of the world, it was impossible to know if the cause had been mundane or mystical, but Courtney had her suspicions.

The reports had been mixed at first. The rioters had escaped from an Army Prison. No, they were political extremists of one persuasion or another. No, some kind of blood disease was driving them mad. No, it was the end times and the dead were walking the Earth. No, it was space parasites, the preamble to a greater invasion. Or maybe Elvis… Elvi… Whatever the plural of Elvis was.

That was only at first.

Now the reports were of a completely different nature. In place of reporters, the RAF was leaking aerial footage of the smoky ruins of one of Europe’s greatest cities to the media. In place of wild public speculation, the Prime Minister and what was left of Parliament admitted from their undisclosed retreat that they had no idea what had incited the violence, but that they and their representatives were doing everything they could to weed through the rumors and find the truth. No credible eyewitnesses had been interviewed in days.

While the rest of the world watched with a kind of macabre curiosity, Los Angelinos were starting to eye the many closed hospitals in their city with a growing sense of foreboding. The missing person lists were starting to read like phone books, and there was still no word from the CCDC beyond empty platitudes and vague promises that more information would be forthcoming.

Local sports stadiums had been commandeered to handle the ‘normal’ workload of the quarantined hospitals. White FEMA tents were pitched and staffed by polite, but tight-lipped medical and military personnel. For the average American, seeing armored vehicles and tanks on every corner was not a sight to promote calm, no matter the etiquette of the drivers. So far, incidents had been kept to a minimum.

The wild speculation that had once characterized the British media skipped the pond, and word from the American politicians wasn’t much help either. The coincidence hadn’t escaped even the dimmest minds. Los Angelinos, Courtney now among them, watched the news from London and eyed their own mysterious crisis with growing fear. What had started as a trickle was slowly building into a flood as locals left the city to ‘visit ill relatives’ or ‘use a little of that saved vacation time.’ Obtaining basic services was becoming an issue, a fact which had driven Courtney off of her normal patrol route and back to the abandoned Council safe house.

At the time, it hadn’t seemed important to take the extra laptop batteries with them, but since power had been out in the rundown hotel where she and Min were hiding, her computer was on its last leg. Even if the Council had fallen, someone might be getting these reports. Maybe what little information she could contribute to their knowledge of events in Los Angeles would be helpful to someone, somewhere.

After all, the only things she and Min had were each other and their slipping mission.

Min was off restocking their food stores. Wolfram and Hart had been locked up tighter than Fort Knox’s vaults, so they had cut their surveillance to spot checks.

Distant sirens heralded Courtney’s arrival at the abandoned apartment. The front door was slightly ajar, and she eased it completely open. At once, her senses were assaulted by the smell of decay and the buzz of innumerable flies. Taking a deep breath, she plunged into the semi-darkness, drawing a stake in case the apartment wasn’t as empty as she had left it.

The front room was clear, but the batteries were in the back bedroom. Rushing in order to more quickly escape the horrid stench, she missed the figure crouched next to the dresser. The pain-filled groan got her attention though.

Courtney whirled, pausing when something about the figure struck her as familiar and broke her second and final rule for surviving a horror movie. When faced with Vivian’s dead, rotting face in the half-light of the shuttered bedroom, she hesitated a second too long.

She didn’t even have time to scream.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

When it awoke- because it was now an ‘it’, not a young woman by any stretch of the definition- it found that existence was a wonderfully simple endeavor. Vague signals, too complex to be defined in its drastically altered brain, drew it into the world with the only driving thought left to it.

‘Hungry. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. Hungryhungryhungryhungry
hungryhungryhungryhungry…’

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

To:
From:
Subject: Mayday!

To all Watchers and Slayers,

My name is Min Vardalos, and to my knowledge, I am the only remaining Slayer stationed in Los Angeles. I don’t know what news has reached the outside world, all local news feed here stopped two days ago, but I have reason to believe that we are dealing with a zombie outbreak of unprecedented scale…”

General Announcement of Outbreak in L.A., Friday, January 30th, 2004

A/N: Athenewolfe and I are moving our posting day to Wednesdays from here on out. Sorry about the delay this week, but hope to see you all on our new zombie time, new zombie channel. (We finally said the zed word!) -WeyrWolfen