by Mel Odom
Giles looked at her. “I beg your pardon.”
She nodded at the television. “These guys couldn’t get more experience if they were living in a war zone.”
They are living in a war zone, Giles couldn’t help thinking, and it’s called the Hellmouth.
“Bob,” Gayle called, “I’ve just heard that Mayor Richard Wilkins was here at Peppy’s Miniature Golf Park at the time of the shooting spree.”
“Do you think there’s any chance we could speak with the mayor?” Bob asked earnestly.
Gayle’s eyes widened. “Bob, I believe that’s Mayor Wilkins headed this way now. Yes, yes it is!” She waved, stepping toward the man off-screen, causing the camera to pan across a burning car and an EMS team administering CPR to a man in the background. “Mayor! Mayor Wilkins! Over here, sir! We know Sunnydale would like to hear your version of what happened here tonight.”
That couldn’t have been any more staged than if someone had yelled “roll camera,” Giles thought.
Mayor Wilkins joined Gayle Kennedy on-screen as Bob the anchorman promptly vanished. “Mayor,” the reporter said, thrusting the microphone into the mayor’s face, “can you tell us what happened.”
Giles trusted nothing the mayor said.
The mayor appeared to be slightly disoriented. “I’m sorry. I was wounded during the shooting. Shot, actually, it would appear.” He pulled at a tattered coat sleeve to reveal a bloodied bandage wrapped around his forearm.
Too bad they missed your forehead, Giles thought.
“How badly are you wounded, Mayor?” Gayle asked.
“It’s not much,” the mayor said dismissively, pulling the sleeve back down. “Just a flesh wound. There are people here who are injured much more grievously than I am.”
“Can you tell us what happened?” Gayle repeated.
“I was over in Circus Circus,” the mayor said, pointing with his wounded arm and flinching as if in pain, “my personal favorite course here at Peppy’s—and, as you will remember—the location of my orphan fundraising charity last year. I was in a business meeting/ getting-to-know-you tÍte-‡-tÍte, so to speak, when the attack began. Mr. Chengxian Zhiyong of China—who has graciously agreed to open a new division of his business in Sunnydale, which will provide a number of wellpaying jobs for our fair populace—pulled me to the safety of his car after the attack began. Were it not for Mr. Zhiyong’s quick actions, I might have perished tonight.”
“It’s fortunate for us that you didn’t,” Gayle Kennedy said. The camera panned back on her.
“If I may say one more thing,” the mayor interrupted, plucking the microphone from the reporter’s hand and signaling for the camera to turn back to him. “Citizens of Sunnydale, I know you share my outrage that this, one of the more pleasant and family-oriented areas in our fair burg, was subject to this kind of activity. I promise you, I promise you with all my heart, that I will spare no power that lies within my grasp to leave no rock unturned till we find those responsible for this—this outrage.” He passed the microphone back.
Gayle took it and checked her earpiece, taking a few steps away from the mayor. “Bob, I’ve just been told that one of the visitors at Peppy’s had a camcorder and filmed part of the attack. We’re going to show you an exclusive now. Our camera technicians are ready to go on the air with the footage.” She stood, waiting expectantly.
A small screen opened to her right, then ballooned up to fill the whole television screen. At first, the camcorder operator had been filming a small boy chopping industriously with his golf club, missing the ball again and again. Then the camera jerked and showed a man’s hand shoving the boy down. Voices, torn and splotchy from disbelief and the wind, shouted. “Someone’s shooting! Someone’s shooting! Oh, God, everybody get down!”
Then the camera angle turned around, blurred and out of focus for just a moment before the autofocus tightened up. A quartet of young Asian men showed for just a moment. The most prominent thing about them was the green and white striped hair.
A Sunnydale police officer, probably working security at the miniature golf course, rushed out with a pistol in his hands. He fired without a warning yell, a nicety that had become something of a moot point in Sunnydale. The policeman got off at least four rounds before the gang member he was shooting at turned and shot him down.
The screen cleared and returned to Gayle Kennedy.
“Did the police officer just miss the gunman?” the anchorman asked.
Gayle Kennedy shook her head. “The man that filmed that violent exchange insists that the officer’s bullets all struck their target. He believes the gunmen were wearing Kevlar armor and shooting cop-killers.”
“Cop-killers?” the anchorman asked. “Those are the armor-piercing rounds some gang members have been using for a time against law enforcement agencies.”
But Giles didn’t think the Asian men were wearing Kevlar. There was also something very familiar about their faces. Before he could get very far in his train of thought, the front door to the drugstore opened, ringing the bell.
Three Asian youths dressed in khaki pants and neoncolored tee shirts stepped through the door, their hair striped green and white.
Well, Giles thought sourly, this can’t be any good at all.
For one frozen second, Buffy watched the gang members turn their weapons toward her. Then Angel bumped into her, knocking her behind the wooden bar.
“Move!” Angel commanded. He stepped toward Treena and grabbed a double fistful of the writhing snakes from her head.
Still in motion, Buffy watched as Angel yanked the snakes from Treena’s head, leaving pockmarked openings in her skull. The snakes hissed and drew back to strike, but Angel’s speed was too much. He flung them toward the intruders while Treena screamed in painful indignation.
The snakes, most of them no more than a foot long, sailed through the air and spread out. When they struck the gang members, the snakes sank their barbed heads into exposed flesh, then quickly slithered out of sight into their victim’s bodies. Seven of the gunmen dropped, their bodies knotted up in agony as the snakes crawled through them.
Five of the gang members showed no reaction at all to the snakes invading their bodies. They lifted their weapons and raked the bar with bullets. The mirror on the wall and several of the bottles on the shelves shattered, throwing gleaming shards in all directions. Other rounds punched holes in the bar.
Buffy had no doubt they were gunning for her, but they showed no qualms about blasting any human or demon that got in their way. The intruders met stiff resistance from the crowd at Willy’s, though. Most of the clientele at the tavern didn’t come unarmed.
Willy cowered behind the bar, arms wrapped over his head.
Buffy grabbed Willy along the way and hustled him toward the back of the tavern. Other regular patrons had the same idea, so the way was jammed when Buffy and Angel got there. She didn’t hesitate about going, yanking Willy to his feet and shoving him into the mass of men, women, and demons trying to get through the door all at the same time.
Heart pounding, Buffy glanced around the stock room, noting the nearly bare shelves that occupied the walls. Then the back door alarm buzzed as someone ripped the locks out and hurried through.
The door let out into the alley behind the tavern. Rough asphalt, buckled in several places, stretched only a scant ten feet before butting up into the next building. Dumpsters and trash cans lined the walls.
Buffy hung onto Willy with one hand, her Slayer senses alive and thrumming within her. Both ends of the alley were open, but both let out into a street.
“You saved me!” Willy screamed, holding onto Buffy’s wrist for dear life.
Then car lights and the thunder of a powerful motor filled the alley. A ten-year-old black sedan fought for traction against the sideways slide the driver had thrown it into. Gray smoke poured from the tires as they spun, then they gripped the street and hurtled the car forward.
“This way!” Angel yelled,
pulling on Buffy’s arm.
Willy craned his head around, looking over his shoulder, legs slapping the asphalt as he tried to keep up with the Slayer’s quick motion. “You’ve killed me! You’ve killed me!” He fought against Buffy’s grip but couldn’t break it.
The sedan roared into the alley, swerving from side to side to hit the people fleeing from the tavern. A Dumpster slowed the vehicle for just a moment, filling the alley with the thunderous boom of the collision. The Dumpster shot ahead of the car, knocking down two horned demons.
One headlight gone now, the car smashed into the Dumpster again and drove the garbage container sideways before it. Metal shrilled as the Dumpster crumpled inward, squeezing trash out like toothpaste from a tube. The Dumpster banged against both sides of the alley, showering orange sparks and scarring the brick walls.
Buffy glanced at the other end of the alley, knowing she’d never make it before the car and Dumpster overtook her. Who are these guys and what do they want with me? Willy was trying to run with her again, but she had to slow down even as she was helping him. She looked frantically for a way out of the alley, then glanced over her shoulder.
A slender demon with a triangular face and a prehensile tail hanging below her trench coat turned toward the sports car. The she-demon waited until the last possible moment, then vaulted high into the air. She would have cleared the car and Dumpster easily if her timing had been right. Instead, her foot smacked against the Dumpster’s lip and flipped her through the air. Even then she almost recovered, would have probably landed safely, but a man leaned out the passenger window and sprayed her with bullets, dropping her broken and bloodied corpse in a pile behind them.
Angel leaped up, inhumanly high, and caught the bottom rung of the retractable fire escape ladder. He held on and brought it crashing down into the asphalt. When he landed, he turned to Buffy, his face a tight mask of concern and anger. He took Willy from her, gripping the man by the throat and the crotch, and swung him up.
Willy landed with a bone-jarring thump on the first landing.
“Go!” Angel cried hoarsely.
Buffy didn’t hesitate, knowing Angel wouldn’t leave her side until he knew she was safe. She leaped halfway up the ladder then began pulling herself up. “Come on, Angel!”
Angel started up after her, but the sedan came on too fast.
Buffy pulled herself onto the landing with Willy. She turned around with quick desperation, extending a hand down toward Angel and anchoring herself with her other hand. “Angel! Grab my hand!”
Angel stretched forward, setting himself to push upward. In the next instant, the Dumpster slammed into the bottom of the ladder, tearing it free. The ladder fell back over the Dumpster and Angel toppled with it.
“No!” Buffy screamed, watching helplessly as Angel smashed against the sedan’s windshield and spiderwebbed the safety glass. In the next instant, the vehicle roared out into the street, but Buffy saw the man in the passenger seat raising to aim his weapon point-blank at Angel’s head.
“Why would Lok believe the guei could come back to life?” Willow asked Jia Li. They sat in front of the Rong household near the trickling pond, each of them wrapped in a blanket from Jia Li’s room. Mr. and Mrs. Rong had gone out searching for Lok in the family car, leaving Jia Li in charge of the three younger children.
Jia Li fidgeted nervously, staring constantly into the parking lot at the side of the restaurant. “My brother has always been different.”
“Different is good,” Willow said. “At least, different is good when it gets into an environment where sameness isn’t trying to kill it all the time.” Her skin still prickled from the cool night air.
“From the time he was very young, Lok has talked to . . . things.”
“What kinds of things?” Okay, now there’s an announcement of potential ominous dread, Willow thought.
“No one knows.”
“Hasn’t anyone ever asked him?”
“Plenty of times, but Lok never knew how to talk about it. It was like those experiences were things he never could explain.”
Willow remained quiet for a moment, then asked, “Have you seen Lok talk to things?”
Three small faces pressed against the window behind them. Jia Li spoke sharply in Chinese and the three children vanished. She sighed. “Yes, but I haven’t seen him do anything like that since we were kids.”
“What did you see him talking to?”
“Shadows mostly. Usually in corners of the room where it was darkest. Occasionally he would talk to fires.”
“What did he talk to them about?”
Jia Li shrugged. “Any time he knew someone else was in the room with him, he stopped speaking. He knew my father didn’t like him doing things like that.”
“Like talking to people or things that weren’t there?” Willow asked.
“Yes.” Jia Li nodded. “My father doesn’t believe in the old ways.”
“What old ways?”
Jia Li grinned self-consciously and wouldn’t meet Willow’s eyes easily. “Every culture has its mythologies and superstitions, and some of them seem so backward compared to the world we live in. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”
“You mean like opening an umbrella in the house or walking under a ladder or having a black cat cross the path in front of you?”
“Exactly.” Jia Li nodded. “I told you my family lived in Shanghai before coming here?”
“Yes.”
“When Lok was just a boy, my parents had many problems with him besides his habit of talking to things. He had seizures and walked in his sleep a lot as well.” Jia Li took a deep breath to steady herself, and Willow saw the fear in her friend’s eyes. “Once, when he was only four, Lok left my parents’ house. I was a baby, so I only remember what they told me. Lok doesn’t speak of it. He was gone for two days. My parents searched everywhere for him, at the neighbors’ houses, down at the docks where our family restaurant was. They couldn’t find him. Then, on the morning of the third day, he was found asleep on our porch.”
“Where had he been?” Willow asked.
“No one knows,” Jia Li whispered. “Lok told my mother and father that he had walked with the restless warriors, the unburied.”
“They were hungry ghosts?”
“My grandfather thought so,” Jia Li said. “He said Lok was gifted, that he could see parts of the world that most people could not see.” She paused. “But that’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Willow said. If I could tell her everything I know, she’d be more scared than ever. So she didn’t. “There are some pretty weird things that go on out in life before you start factoring in guei. Like when you fall for a guy, right, and your head keeps telling you that he’s all wrong for you, but your heart just won’t hold back? You know what I’m talking about?”
Jia Li nodded. “Yes.”
From the way the other girl said it, Willow knew there was a story lurking there, but they didn’t have time to delve into it.
“My mother says that things only got worse with Lok over the next few months,” Jia Li went on. “He slipped in and out of catatonic states. Sometimes they would only last for a few minutes, but once it lasted for nine days. They had to put Lok in the hospital and feed him through a tube.”
“Didn’t the doctors find out what was wrong with him?”
“Nothing, they said. Physically, he was fine. You’ve seen him play basketball.”
“Yes,” Willow said. “He’s very good.”
“And skateboarding. Lok is always best when he is moving. If he could, I think that he would be the wind. That is the way he was as a child, except for those times he was catatonic.”
Willow pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them in an effort to stay warm against the chill breeze. Goldfish surfaced repeatedly in the small garden pond, kissing the top of the water, then swimming back below. The ripples spread out, crossing the surface and touching everything.
Nothing passes through life touching without being touched. Willow didn’t know where the thought came from.
“My grandfather, my mother’s father,” Jia Li said, “visited Lok in the hospital. He brought my brother out of the catatonic state when everyone else thought him lost forever that time.”
“How?” Willow asked. Suddenly the night seemed to press in close around her, making her feel slightly claustrophobic. And she felt as though someone was watching her.
“Through the old ways,” Jia Li answered. “My grandfather was a Yao tribesman from the Zhejiang Province. He lived in the Daqi Mountain area. As a Yao tribesman, he was an herbalist, curing the ailments of people with medicines he made. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“An apothecary,” Willow supplied, avoiding the first term that came to mind. “As in alternative medicines. Sure, I’m familiar with that.” She brushed her hair back from her face, trying not to look too knowledgeable about the subject.
Jia Li seemed a little embarrassed. “A little of that, yes, but the Yao practice is often called witchcraft even in China.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it that,” Willow said. “That has a negative connotation these days. Herbalism works okay, doesn’t it?”
“Not entirely. My grandfather believed mostly in the spirits, that they walked among people, causing good and ill.”
“The spirits? You mean ghosts?”
“Yes. My mother was raised in my grandfather’s beliefs, but when she came down from the mountain and met my father in Hangzhou before they moved to Shanghai, my father turned her away from those beliefs.” Jia Li hesitated, obviously having second thoughts about everything she was revealing. “Although my father doesn’t know, I don’t think my mother has completely given up those beliefs. There is special incense that she burns sometimes. She tells us that she burns it to remember our grandfather, but I think it’s because she practices my grandfather’s beliefs.”
“How did your grandfather get Lok to come out of the catatonia?” Willow asked.
“My father said it was only coincidence. Grandfather came to the hospital two days before Lok awakened. He somehow knew to come, because there were no phones where he lived at the time.”
