Unseen #2: Door to Alternity

  “Amanda?” Cordelia asked, although she recognized the girl. Amanda looked haunted; even through her smudged makeup Cordelia could see deep circles around her staring eyes, and her cheeks seemed to have caved in over the last few days. “How are you?” Cordelia demanded. She raised her hands to indicate the empty passageway. “Where is everyone?”

  “Gone,” Amanda replied.

  “Disappeared? Like Kayley?”

  Amanda shook her head slowly. She looked completely defeated. “No, not like that. Just, gone. One after another after another. First it was Pat, then Holly, then the others. They’d had enough, I guess. They went home, or . . . somewhere.”

  “What about you?” Cordelia asked.

  Amanda shrugged, clearly dejected. “No place to go.”

  “There must be someplace,” Cordelia said firmly. “Anything is better than being down here all by yourself, isn’t it?”

  Amanda looked around the dark corridor as if for the first time. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “No one comes down here. No one bothers you.”

  “What about going home? Your parents must be worried sick.”

  Amanda gazed down at her feet. “My parents don’t worry about me. They have other things to worry about. The stock market, the box office, the maid.” She looked up at Cordelia. “They never have worried about me. Probably don’t even know I’m gone.”

  “I’m sure you’re wrong,” Cordelia said, thinking of the large reward for Kayley Moser. Surely Amanda’s parents were just as worried as the Mosers were.

  “Yeah, and you’ve known my family how long?” Amanda snapped, her voice rising. She looked very much like she wanted Cordelia to tell her that she actually did know her family, and that she, Amanda, was wrong about them.

  “Well, obviously I don’t know your personal particular family,” Cordelia replied. “But I have known families, in general, and some families in particular, and generally speaking. they tend to be very concerned about the members of them, the families, I mean.”

  “You’re very articulate,” Amanda shot back. “And very wrong.”

  Cordelia stiffened. She needed to convince this girl . . . because that was the only thing keeping Amanda from fading away, if not physically, then mentally. The hurt was coming off her in waves.

  She said, putting on her best convincing voice, “I am not wrong.”

  Amanda’s eyes welled. “In this case, you are. And you are not articulate, either. That was sarcasm, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “I am so articulate,” Cordelia shot back. “I can talk more than most peop—well, never mind that. Just . . . listen, Amanda.” She put a hand on Amanda’s shoulder. “I don’t want you to do this. You can’t stay down here forever. It’s not safe.”

  Amanda roughly pushed her hand away and took a step backward, toward the shadows. “That’s what you told Kayley, too. She listened to you, and then you came in and screwed up any chance we had of becoming vampires. Then Kayley vanished, right? You think if she’d been a vampire, that would have happened?” Tears spilled down her cheeks; she narrowed her eyes and clenched her teeth, raising balled fists as if she might actually hit Cordelia.

  “You think if we’d all been vampires the other girls would have left like that? We’d all still be together, if you hadn’t come along. We weren’t a real family but we were the closest any of us had ever come to having one that worked. And one person destroyed that.” Amanda fixed her with a malicious glare, the haunted look in her eyes replaced now by one of pure hatred. “You.”

  Cordelia was—as difficult as it was to admit— speechless. As for Kayley’s parents . . . Let’s be honest here. It was too little, too late.

  Amanda didn’t wait for her to find her tongue. She turned on her heel and slipped back into the darkness from which she had come.

  Cordelia stood there for a moment, trying to compose a reply in her head. Nothing came. Maybe she had made a mistake. She had meant well. She still believed no good could have come from letting the vampires take those girls. She was convinced that the girls who had been here, and had gone home, had made the right decision.

  But we all know where the road of good intentions leads, she thought.

  So she didn’t try to find Amanda, didn’t attempt to talk some sense into her, as much as she wanted to.

  She left the warren under the library, never, she hoped, to return.

  Sunnydale

  Riley drove, and the two-hour trip from Los Angeles to Sunnydale was strangely silent. Every now and then, either Buffy or Riley would try to engage the other in conversation. Buffy could tell when Riley was making the attempt, and she wanted it to work as much as he did. But she was awash in her own thoughts, her mind full of Angel, which always always happened when she went to L.A., and those thoughts wouldn’t get out of her brain long enough for her to string three sentences together. On top of that, she was unhappy to leave L.A. behind with Salma and Nicky still missing, but she felt that the monster invasion of Sunnydale required her attention right now. So they drove, radio off, each in his or her own private world.

  Riley, she suspected, was probably anxious about what the next mile or two might reveal: monsters, monsters, or monsters. Her mind mulled over what lay behind them.

  But the road to Sunnydale was clear. The sun set to the west as they drove along the coast, dipping into the Pacific and flaring out as it did. By the time they reached the Sunnydale city limits, it was full dark.

  And Buffy knew something was majorly wrong.

  She gripped Riley’s thigh, feeling his tension even through his jeans.

  He nodded, a movement she could barely make out in the dim light cast by the car’s instrument panel.

  “It’s bad,” he said.

  “I know it is,” Buffy agreed. “I just don’t know what is.”

  They sat in the quiet car for a long moment, atop a rise that led from the freeway down toward Sunnydale itself. Most of the town, vast tracts of it, lay in pitch darkness. Patches of Stygian black blanketed the city where there should have been streetlights and houses lit against the night. The town looked like a war zone, braced against the Blitz.

  In other areas, they could see fires blazing, as structures burned uncontrollably. The flashing lights of emergency vehicles, fire engines and police cars and ambulances strobed down largely empty streets.

  “You said ‘bad,’ right?” Buffy asked, surveying her domain.

  Riley nodded. “I did.”

  “You were right.” She sighed. “And also, not good.”

  “I think that applies,” Riley agreed. “Definitely not good.”

  “And bad.”

  “That too. Very bad.”

  “Think we should go down there?” Buffy asked.

  “Like we have a choice,” Riley said.

  She glanced over at him, loving him, proud of him. Wondering if he was up to this, or if his fatigue was going to get him badly hurt, even killed.

  “You’re right. Choices are limited. Options are few.”

  “It’s Sunnydale,” he said simply. “Our homes are there. Our friends. Your mom.”

  “And I’m the Slayer.”

  “And you’re the Slayer.”

  His smile was filled with the same pride, love, and concern that had welled inside her for him. We sync up so well, she told herself. I’m so lucky I have him instead of being like Angel, all alone. . . .

  “So no matter what’s going on down there, I need to go help deal with it,” she continued.

  He took her hand and wrapped it around his own, brought it to his lips, and kissed her knuckles. His lips were warm. All of Riley was warm.

  “And I’m the Slayer’s boyfriend. So when the Slayer kicks butt, I’m right there.”

  “You’re no slouch in the butt-kicking department, Riley Finn,” Buffy said. She leaned over, gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek. “What are we doing sitting up here?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” Riley said. He put the car in gear
and drove it down the hill, toward Sunnydale.

  They were halfway through town—close up, it looked more like a bombing target than ever, with curls of smoke wafting up into the night air from a dozen different fires, broken windows, cars smashed against one another and then abandoned in the street—before they saw their first monster.

  It walked the silent streets on legs that Buffy guessed had to be eight feet long. There were six legs, skinny, oddly proportioned ones that had joints where it didn’t seem like there should be joints. Where the legs came together, it had a heavily muscled, almost human-looking torso. But the head that sat atop the torso was nothing like a human head. Human heads tended to be basically oval, or egg-shaped, but this one looked like it had been flattened to a furry disk. Six eyes on long stalks wobbled around its perimeter. A cruel mouth, row upon row of sharp fangs, hung open, a red gash in the black, glossy fur.

  The thing traveled down Seacrest Street, just two blocks from Main. Seacrest was a residential street, mostly small apartment complexes with a few small single-family homes interspersed. The creature’s head was level with the apartment windows on the second floor of the buildings.

  Buffy spotted it from the car, and gave out a small sound of surprise.

  “What?” Riley asked, braking the car.

  “That,” Buffy said. The thing was coming toward them. A human leg dangled from the teeth, like a bit of spinach stuck there.

  “It has a leg.”

  “It has lots of them,” Riley observed.

  “I mean, in its mouth. I don’t know whose leg that is, but it looks human. And maybe the thing is still hungry. I say we slay.”

  “Have you ever seen something like that?” Riley asked her. “Do you know what it is? How to kill it?”

  “No clue, no idea,” Buffy replied. “But I’m betting there’s a way. A thing that ugly can’t be too tough, can it?” She began to assess its weaknesses, plan some moves.

  Riley looked puzzled. “How do you figure?”

  “The ugliness alone ought to be enough of a defense mechanism for anything,” Buffy said. “Besides, those legs look pretty flimsy. I ought to be able to bring it down to my level pretty easily.”

  Riley killed the engine, set the emergency brake. “I’ve got your back,” he said.

  She gave him another smile. “You just make sure that if you see its big brother coming, you let me know.”

  Buffy climbed from the car and faced the thing. It took a few more steps in her direction, then seemed to notice her there. The torso, humanlike, but covered with the same black fur as its head, reared back. The disk of the head revolved, as if the various eyes were checking her out, taking a reading of some kind.

  The legs twitched.

  I’ve got to take this out fast, Buffy thought. Because looking at it for very long is going to make me lose my dinner. Not that the Denny’s on the freeway was any kind of fine cuisine, but still, the whole bulimia thing doesn’t work for me.

  The thing’s mouth opened, revealing the long, spiky fangs. The leg caught in its teeth slipped free, dropped, and smacked wetly on the sidewalk.

  Yeah, that helps, Buffy thought.

  The creature seemed to make up its mind. Buffy couldn’t tell if it thought she was prey, or a threat, but it hunched its weird torso forward and charged at her.

  Buffy braced.

  She didn’t have any weapons to use against this thing— well, she had a stake, but this was no vampire.

  On the other hand, it didn’t seem to have much going for it—long, twiglike legs with freaky joints, and lots of teeth. No arms. Nothing that could grasp, except that mouth.

  Still, it had taken that human leg from someone. So it wasn’t harmless.

  She waited.

  It covered ground in no time, with long strides from those six skittering legs.

  When it neared Buffy, it bent—the wrong way, leg joints working in unnatural fashion—and thrust its head at her, mouth wide, snapping teeth glistening with spittle. Buffy dodged, but it followed. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how the legs could move—they turned and twisted like cartoon legs, not bound by any laws of musculature. The head kept coming, tracing Buffy’s movements.

  She dove forward, hit the ground in a roll, came up right under the monster.

  The head charged between its own legs. Buffy could feel its hot breath, taste the rank smell that issued from within.

  She wouldn’t be able to keep outmaneuvering the head forever, so she changed tactics, grabbed it in both hands and yanked.

  It wasn’t well balanced, with its torso thrust so far forward and its head between its own long legs.

  When she pulled, it went down.

  Buffy had to leap to keep from being tangled in a forest of long hairy limbs.

  The monster hit the ground with a furry thud, its bizarre legs already twitching and scrabbling for leverage. Buffy spun and kicked one of them, enjoying the sensation as it snapped under her assault.

  But then one of the other legs swept in, knocking Buffy’s feet out from under her. She hit the ground, and the monster’s head appeared before hers, mouth gaping. She could see strings of flesh left behind from its last victim, hooked on barbed, razorlike teeth. It bit at her and she scooted sideways. A couple of the teeth grazed her hip, tearing through the fabric of her pants.

  Another forty bucks down the drain, she thought. Maybe armor isn’t such a bad idea, after all.

  When the head came back for a second try, she was ready. She reached for it, placing both hands on top of it, and pushed herself up, almost doing a handstand on top of the foul, furred disk. Doing so slammed the head down into the sidewalk. She heard its teeth clash together, hard.

  She shoved off again, up into the air, reversed herself and came down feet first. Again, the head smashed into the cement walkway. This time, the thing seemed to whimper in pain.

  She stepped back to get her bearings. The head wobbled unsteadily now. A thick, yellowish fluid—blood, she guessed—oozed from between its teeth. The creature sent another of its nasty legs skidding toward her, but she caught it and snapped it easily. It was obviously weakening fast. She felt a moment’s pity—it was just a living thing, trying to get by the only way it knew how. But she remembered the human leg, and the way it had attacked her. It was a predator. If she let it go, it would heal up somewhere and continue its assault on humanity.

  Anyway, it was a beast from some other place. It didn’t belong here. It couldn’t stay.

  Buffy moved in for the kill.

  When she was done, she went to Riley, who had watched the whole thing from nearby.

  “No big brothers,” he reported.

  “Something to be thankful for, at least.”

  “Pretty unpleasant, huh?”

  She nodded. “Tell you what,” she said. “Next time there’s a spider, and I say, ‘Riley, there’s a spider, get rid of it?’ ”

  “Yeah?”

  “Just get rid of it. Don’t tell me what you do to it. I don’t want to know. I just don’t want to have to step on one for as long as I live.”

  Riley took her in his arms, held her close to his chest.

  “That’s a deal,” he said.

  Salma de la Natividad rubbed her eyes and wanted to be gone.

  When she took her hands away, though, she wasn’t. She was still here. The bad part was, she didn’t know for sure why she was here, or even how she had come to be here, and she definitely didn’t know where “here” was. The whole thing was terribly distressing to her.

  She had been walking on the grounds of her own family home, enjoying a soft summer breeze, when suddenly the very air before her had seemed to glow. Intrigued, she stepped forward, into the glowing area, and felt a welcoming warmth there. The feeling was like coming home after a long time away.

  But as she passed into the shimmering golden spot, a reeling sensation of vertigo made her nauseous. One moment she had been firmly on Earth, feet on a flagstone walkway, sme
lling freshly mown grass and listening to the chirp of distant birds, and the next she was tumbling-turning-twirling through nothingness. She couldn’t see or hear or smell anything, and her stomach flip-flopped as if she were trapped inside the fastest roller coaster ever built.

  When she—was “landed” the word for it?—landed, she found herself on a rocky, windswept plain that she knew existed nowhere on Earth. The sky was a deep sea-green color, and the rocks blue and rust. Strange plants, like succulents she’d seen in Baja, but gigantic, the size of redwood trees, loomed here and there. The landscape was so completely alien it made her feel sick to look at it, dizzy and ill.

  Salma tried screaming and crying, calling for various people—her brother Nicky, her parents, her grandmother, Willow and Buffy—but none of that helped. After a while, she determined that it was not going away. She was truly here, in someplace so strange it was like the realm of dreams, or nightmares. At length, she picked a direction at random and started walking. Various possibilities occurred to her, the most obvious one was that she had gone insane, or was suffering a very intense and bizarre dream. But the nausea from the gut-churning journey seemed real enough. And nothing she tried to wake herself up or restore her normal surrounding seemed to work. So, tears in her eyes, she walked.

  Chapter 5

  Moscow, 1971

  ALEXIS VISHNIKOFF WAS EATING BEEF FOR THE THIRD night in a row. At his previous assignment, a small physics lab in Minsk, meat seldom made the menu. But here, in the capital, he ate like a czar, and he was so excited that he was bursting to tell someone, anyone, about it; only he was surrounded by people who had eaten beef for five, six, even seven nights in a row. Maybe more. He never wanted to wake up from this marvelous dream.

  He sat in a cafeteria with around fifty or sixty other white-coated scientists who worked on the People’s Project, many of them his boyhood idols. There was Yuri Pushkin, seated in the corner with Gregor Dorodin and Anna Krasova. Wen Ho Ling and Amalia Felix. He could hardly contain himself.

  Alexis understood that nourishment and rest were necessary for the cause, but it was very hard to make himself eat or sleep in his new environment. The scientists were treated well, in part, because so much was at stake: the future of mankind, the ability of people to forge their own destinies. The right to dream.