Africander - Niger
Title: All Who Wander
Author: Aeneas (aka Jerib_78)
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: It's Joss's sandbox, I just play there.
Author's Note: This is for the Scatterlings and Orphanages Ficathon.
All Who Wander
The bush taxi driver’s name was Zainab. He spoke in fractured sentences of English, French, and Hausa, and with a zest for life that was mirrored in his breakneck driving. His smile was marred by missing teeth, giving him the look of a crazed and slightly drunk pirate steering a metallic vessel through the Sahel. They left Lake Chad and all other sources of water for hundreds of miles behind, careening down the dusty roads like a Peugeot bat fresh from hell.
Time wasn’t on their side and the border patrol had taken an early night off from their hard job of intimidating people and taking bribes. It didn’t faze the irrepressible Zainab or the rest of the passengers; they merely collected their belongings and hiked off the road to make camp. Xander kept his distance and ended up staring into his tiny scrub brush fire until the sky above was an endless blaze of stars. There might have been sleep but he couldn’t feel it when the sun began its daily ritual of attempting to murder them all.
He buried his face in his duffle to hide from the sun but the shouting of his fellow passengers made that impractical. When he roused himself enough to peer blearily around, he saw them wandering away in various directions. They followed the road toward Niger or back into Chad, which didn’t make any sense if they’d paid their way. A few of the men spent quite a while investigating the taxi but eventually removed their belongings and drifted away with the rest. Their driver seemed oblivious to what was going on around him.
Brushing himself off as he stood, his back cracking in several places when he stretched tired and sore muscles. The world was already beginning to heat up; soon there would be nothing but heat and sand enough to drive a man mad. He’d already guessed the outcome before he rolled the dice and reached out to shake Zainab.
Heart attack, maybe a stroke. He stared at the peaceful expression on the man’s face with envy. Quietly in his sleep with no demons and no bullets. The duffle settled back onto the dirt and Xander got to work. In his head, there was a silent commentary on all the dead he’d left behind since arriving in Africa. All he needed were some black robes and a big curvy scythe thing to complete the outfit. If he were smaller, he could hop on the back of the rat and merrily spread plague across the continent. Not that Africa needed any more microscopic baddies.
None of the others had stayed to bury the man; they were only concerned with getting to their destination. Further down the road, further down their lives. Time wasted burying a stranger would expose them to more of the sun’s wrath than need be. He noticed that someone had tried to hotwire the vehicle while he was collecting bits of twine from the roof rack. Zainab must have hidden the key. The twine secured a flat, scoop shaped rock to a twisted branch and creating a cross between a spade and a shovel.
He did his best to remember one of the prayers Muna had taught him, figuring any prayer at all was better than nothing, and buried Zainab in the shallow grave. Anything of value inside the car had been stripped by the tiny dots in the distance that had once been passengers.
The car seats were worn and coated with grime but it was partial cover from the sun so he settled in the backseat and stared at nothing in particular. He should have been on his way back to England where there was enough rain to sustain life. Indoor plumbing had been singing its siren song in his ears since he’d left Tripoli but it sounded hollow now. He couldn’t go back without an answer, without something he could tell them about Muna.
His focus fell on the gris-gris hanging from the rear view mirror, swaying lightly from a breeze he couldn’t feel or vibrations in the earth itself. They were for luck, Zainab had explained, filled with blessed soil and other bits of hoodoo. It wasn’t polite to ask about the contents and forbidden to take a look inside. Never use for money, the man had warned him adamantly. Apparently that made the Demon Road mad enough to open up its jaws and swallow a car whole. Ghost stories.
He knew more ghost stories than a man should ever know. It was part curiosity and part suicidal bravado that made him reach for the small leather pouch. Zainab was fertilizing the Sahel and there was no one around for nearly a mile to see him break one more cultural law. The contents of the pouch fell into his palm, lips cracking as he smiled. A rock, a tiny rodent skull, some plain brown dirt that had probably been blessed by a Shaman, and one key to a Peugeot station wagon. He didn’t need any more cosmic encouragement to climb behind the wheel and turn the key in the ignition.
Money made the border crossing easy even with papers that weren’t his own, not that he believed the men with automatic weapons could even read what was written on them. They scanned for official seals and pretty pictures but paid no attention to the squiggly lines.
Driving across Niger felt like becoming one of those toy mice careening down a track while being sand blasted. The road was a hundred year old tattoo fading away into the brown earth, ragged green bushes, and bright yellow grass, at times completely washed away by sand. It was easy to see how the stories began. Whispers about demons and ghosts haunting the roads, luring unsuspecting drivers unto traps. An old woman, a black dog, a man riding a stallion with fire for eyes, even a furious eighteen wheeler hurtling down the road.
The sides of the roads were spotted with hollowed out wreckages of cars less fortunate and it was no wonder there were stories. No one came to haul them away; they were stripped of useful parts, anything worth a red cent, and left to rust away in the desert. Maybe they didn’t rust. Maybe they just sunk into the earth or maybe they stayed there forever.
It was easy to let his mind slip into neutral. Concentrating on roads with no stop signs and no traffic laws took precedence over any philosophical meanderings he might be tempted to take. He saw monster-sized military trucks piled twice as high with fabric cargo bags; human heads wrapped in turbans covering the top like a cluster of mushrooms. Smaller cars flew with the same reckless speed that Zainab had been fond of, the same terrifying darting between cars and potholes. It was the closest to playing a racecar video game that he’d ever gotten.
What would have happened if he’d run out of gas before reaching Zinder didn’t occur to him. He barely realized that the gauge was bobbling dangerously toward empty when he drove into the motor park; missing being sideswiped by inches and rear-ended by less than that. It was a maze of cars barely running or tricked out Niger style, with their respective owners bartering fiercely in French or Hausa for coveted spare parts.
He parked, keeping the key with him, and went in search of fuel. The rumbling in his stomach reminded him that he was hungry enough for motor oil to smell good. Food was easy. Most drivers didn’t dare get too far away from their cars and the motor park spilled into the marketplace, young girls moving between the two selling their wares in the flat bowls balanced on their heads. He bought hard boiled eggs, a sad looking red pepper, and chunks of seasoned bread. Petrol was forty cents a liter and prized like china white.
The other drivers held handmade signs to advertise their locations, whichever routes they had staked out as their territory. In his driving, he’d seen no railroads and not a single plane. Bush taxis were the only option for transportation across the desolation.
Wide dark eyes stared at him from behind a car. Small hands and a face that seemed stretched too tight over the skull, ribs standing out in relief beneath dark skin. His stomach lurched uncomfortably but the child’s mother whisked it away from the light skinned stranger before he could react. This country hadn’t been his destination and he knew very little about it. So far it was dusty and the traffic was a nightmare.
With a full tank of gas, he reluctantly took the dirty money pressed into his hands from strangers who had crowded around his car. Most of the motor park regarded him with a level of hostility. He wasn’t one of them, the interloper. The ones who piled into his car were those without enough money for any of the other bush taxis and desperate enough to overlook the color of his skin. He didn’t speak, didn’t participate in idle conversation as he drove, just listened to the cadence of languages around his ears.
Route Nationale One had a colorful history. He listened with half an ear as the passengers regaled him and the others with tales of its creation. A bit of the French was familiar and he could guess at patterns in the Hausa language, but they seemed content to complete whole pieces of their story in English. Whether or not it was for his benefit didn’t matter. Perhaps they wanted to scare him.
Colonel Paul Voulet had carved Route One out of the sand with guns and blood before they laid down the tar. The bodies of children had swung from trees and the wells turned toxic from the dead left to rot at their depths. Gone mad from too much sand and too much sun, the rogue commander had taken the idea of making way for an interstate highway to a lethal extreme. Whole villages were slaughtered; worn and battered crosses still barely visible where innocent blood had watered the earth.
He found himself filtering the stories automatically, breaking them down into their parts and searching for the kernel of truth that always lay at the heart of folklore. Vampires were real, that was truth. The rest that had been built up around them filled in the fantasy that kept them safely obscured from the world’s eyes. Men dreamt up fantastic elaborations when they were left without rational explanations. Turning into bats, controlling wolves, singing lead for rock and roll bands; those were all the comfy lies that sold movie tickets and bad novels.
No skeletons remained in the trees along Route One but it wasn’t hard to imagine bodies hanging like gruesome Christmas ornaments, strung up by a pale-skinned foreigner who probably just wanted to get out of the godawful desert. Madness came easy in a place like this.
Eventually the conversation lapsed into the sound of the wind and the motor. All four windows were frozen in various states of open and he could feel the sand burrowing into him like tiny maggots. There was green around them, or at least the illusion of green, and what passed for fertile land in this hell. Mostly there was nothing but dirt and more of those prickly bushes. Endless road reminded him of the open stretches of Nevada with sagebrush and Hell’s Angels. Although he was pretty sure there were no giraffes standing along the side of US interstate fifteen. There were no mountains, nothing to break up the monotony but blackened carcasses and the occasional tree.
Night came, the passengers fell asleep, and he kept driving like a man possessed. Part of him hoped to see one of the notorious demons that would send him off the road to be burnt and stripped like all the other cars. He wondered how many of the wrecks contained dead bodies, how many people had been trapped inside and murdered by the sun above them. Had they too gone mad as they waited for death?
In darkness broken only by headlights, he imagined their souls trailing after him as they recognized his mythical scythe. Death had come to Niger wearing an American’s skin and driving a Peugeot. For some reason, that made him smile.
***
Xander lost count of the times he made the trip between Zinder and Niamey and beyond. He learned to barter for motor oil, cut with water and full of grit, and shoulder his way through the frenzied crowd for the purest petrol. They still looked at him sideways but there was newfound respect in their scowls. This American wasn’t just passing through; this American was driving the same roads and wearing the same gris-gris around his neck.
“Comment ca va, Xander?” A familiar wizened face asked him in the market at Zinder, most of the teeth missing from his grin.
“Ca va bien, Fayid. Il fait chaud comme enfer.” Xander gave him a little extra when he paid for the petrol.
“Niger ne se rapelle pas la pluie. Merci, merci…my children will eat tonight.”
“Vous n’avez aucun enfants.” He winked at the older man. It might have been a tasteless joke but the older man didn’t seem offended. Fayid’s sons had died before reaching adulthood and now he cared for a ragged little band of orphans. Most of them would die before the year was out; there simply wasn’t enough life in the place to sustain them.
He bought bread and sagging vegetables for the road. The memories of produce aisles and crisp lettuce were dim enough to be dreams from some other life. Recollection of ice cream was all but lost forever. There were no mirrors or scales but his clothes only fit with the help of baling twine, hanging from his bones as loosely as those around him. Taking on passengers kept his money at a rough equilibrium, dipping occasionally when his indifference cracked and a pair of wide eyes threatened to revive the Xander of the past.
That Xander was still on a street in Chad with a teenage girl bleeding to death in his arms. Helpless and hopeless and lost. The Xander behind the wheel of the Peugeot was a Reaper of souls, driving Route One to collect those who were lost and drifting across the desert. He’d found the bones of a steer near one of the haunted villages during one of his runs and strapped the skull to the hood of the car as a hollow-eyed ornament.
His passengers were still those too poor to pay for any other taxis but he didn’t mind and they kept coming; clutching their gris-gris and whispering their prayers for Allah to protect them from the road. They never connected the burned out wreckages, as common as cattle in Texas, with the maniac drivers behind the wheel. It was the road and the demons in search of human barbeques that were to blame.
If petrol was heroin then water was cocaine. Every waking moment was spent in pursuit of those two things. One to keep him alive and the other to keep him on the road. It was a delicate balance. The guards at the multiple checkpoints along Route One were as likely to drag him from the car and beat him to a pulp as they were to look the other way. Most wanted bribes; which Xander had converted into American dollars for the hell of it and was sickened to realize that keeping his nose unbroken was worth far less than a dollar.
After driving the highways half a dozen times, the guards became used to seeing him and they relaxed enough to lower their weapons when they stopped him. He understood bits of what they said now. Mostly they wondered what the crazy American was doing in spending his time in hell. He didn’t think about it much.
This place truly was hell. It was hell in sand and dirt and death. He’d stopped wondering why people clung to the futility of carving out an existence in a place that gave them nothing in return. It redefined hell and gave it new meaning. It was a hell of desolation and endless nothingness.
In the south, there were places where fields of sorghum and millet stretched out for miles. Patches of hell grew the wilted peppers and shriveled dates that he bought at the market places. Some towns raised goats and cattle, as scrawny as the humans but surviving nonetheless on yellow grass and prickly bushes. The people always had one eye to the sky, looking for rain that may or may not come. None of that seemed reason enough to stay in a place that could no longer sustain life the way it had once.
He had stumbled onto the fossils in the market at Niamey and asked questions in broken French. Stones with bits of fish and plants; pieces of what the Sahara had been thousands, maybe millions, of years ago. A place of trees, flowers, and water beyond imagining. Then the Sahara had died and was exacting bitter revenge on every living thing it touched from a dusty grave.
In the north, the Tenere was a picture postcard at dusk when the desert turned purple and crimson, bits of wreckage lighting up with the last gleaming of the sun. It was the stuff of movies and dreams of grand adventure. He stopped wishing for a camera, stopped noticing more than the road ahead. No flowers to smell, nothing to do but keep driving until all the dead of Niger were trailing behind the battered Peugeot. He wasn’t sure what to do with them, although in his most lucid moments he recognized the insanity of his wondering. Maybe they would tell stories of him years from now, how he had gone mad under the Saharan sun.
They were disjointed thoughts that seemed normal enough that they made no pause in his eating or wandering. Markets were places to get lost in and that was what he wanted. He’d made the wardrobe switch to the flowing robes everyone around him wore and a turban sloppily wrapped around his head. The knack for that particular skill continued to evade him.
He patted the nose of a camel as he passed by. The heavily lidded eyes merely stared at him; jaw working as it chewed on some unidentifiable grain. Coarse fur was dirty and matted with oil and dust; it didn’t seem to mind. Theirs’ were simple lives, the camels that walked across the desert with a quiet acceptance borne of adaptation. Beside the camels for sale were little goats bleating and gnawing at their tethers, the seller swatting them with a thin branch when they tried to escape. At the other end of the market, away from livestock and petrol fumes, he could find memories of home in the second hand European goods and bootlegged CDs. So-called civilization was even found in hell. There were women wearing dresses that had come from a department store long ago and far way.
Remembering wasn’t something he cared for. What was there to remember? An ex-fiancée cut in half, a hometown turned crater, and another mission to find yet another girl who was just going to die once he found her. Viva the life of Xander Harris, zeppo turned bush taxi driver.
One thing was unusual about that day in the market. There were several men at the edges with automatic weapons, watching the horizon with unusual intensity. Guns weren’t uncommon but guarding a marketplace was. He finished off his meager meal, enough to survive but no more than that, and started back toward the Peugeot. Buying food felt like buying three luxury sedans a day, the sticker shock never really wore off. He kept an eye on the nearest armed guard and caught Fayid’s attention when he neared the selection of painted pots the man sold along with the petrol.
“Les hommes avec des…assault rifles.” He didn’t know the French words for assault rifle so he nodded to one of the guards. “Pour quoi?”
Fayid glanced around nervously before he leaned closer to whisper, “Tuaregs. Il sont agites. They come at night, steal our cattle. And a man died last night, his neck torn by an animal.” So much for his luck holding. He thanked Fayid and returned to his car.
The history of Zinder, with its decoratively carved mud buildings and beehive huts with millet thatch for a roof, was full of legends and myths about the Tuaregs. Many of the nomads had settled in the city after the French invaded but they had taken the brunt of Niger’s civil chaos. Talk of economic distress was hardly useful in a country with no viable economy to begin with and a string of dictators had driven, or slaughtered, the Tuaregs from one end of hell to the other. According to the bits and pieces he’d heard while driving, there was no love lost there.
Camel trains could still be seen passing through the desert with men wrapped in indigo robes, some riding beautiful Arabian horses and others mounted on camels. They had been the scourge of the Sahara at one point, attacking parties along the trade routes and stealing spices, minerals, or people. Times had changed and most had settled. Some were still pirates stealing and murdering their way through the sands with Jeeps and automatic weapons. Ironically, one more thing to add to the list of why they were a different culture was the power of their women. If legend could be believed, it had been that way since Tin Hanan, a woman, united the Tuareg tribes. He was willing to bet money she’d been on the side of super strong and super fast.
A few of his passengers had been tourists lured to the country by the promise of a romantic desert adventure with the Tuaregs, only to find themselves hostages of the very men who had promised to be their guides. Xander took them to Niamey free of charge and dropped them off at the American Embassy without telling them how stupid they were. Most of the time, returning with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and passports in hand, he was pretty sure they’d figured that part out. Then he’d taken to storing a few odd weapons in the Peugeot. A long knife for butchering cattle that was dinged in a couple places, a tire iron that doubled as a club, and the requisite collection of wooden stakes. Wood was an invaluable commodity in a land with few trees.
The life of vampires and Slayers was over and done; he was retired now and had a bush taxi service to run. He wasn’t looking for them and he wasn’t planning to, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find him and think he’d make a nummy treat. What he didn’t understand was why any self-respecting vampire would come to a place where the sun was everyone’s enemy and the victims were more like shriveled up human raisins. Their blood probably tasted of dirt and sand. Everything else did.
Anxious to get away from possible inclement supernatural, he left without filling the Peugeot to the bursting point. Most bush taxis were more like cans of tightly packed sardines than real taxis. More fares meant more money and more money meant more food. It was never as real for him as it was for the native drivers. He would always know that he didn’t really belong there even after they’d forgotten. But he was content to be there until he figured out where he did belong. After all, Africa was a big place and he had all the time in the world to get lost in it.
He almost kept driving. There was a moment where his foot didn’t respond, still pressing the gas pedal to the floor, and he didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to get involved. Maybe it was because the girl couldn’t have been older than thirteen or maybe it was because the color of her dress was the same green as the scarf knotted loosely around his neck. The passengers in the bush taxi complained loudly and in several languages as he slowed and pulled off of the road.
The girl stared at him, dried blood spilling down over her collarbone from the puncture wounds in her neck. Dark eyes were glassy and she had probably been standing out in the sun far too long. When he got out of the car to approach her, she whispered two words.
“Aidez moi.”
There was room for her in the back seat. He ignored the grumbling of the other passengers and resumed driving. An hour to Niamey; he let everyone but the girl out blocks away from the motor park and turned the car around. Traveling toward Zinder, he stopped at approximately the spot where he’d found her and once again pulled over. He fished a bottled water out of the glove box and handed it to her.
“Do you speak English?”
No response.
“Is there anyone left?” His grip on the steering wheel tightened involuntarily. “In your village. Is there anyone left alive?” Finally she nodded once. “How many came back? After they were dead. How many?”
“One.” She looked down at the water in her hand, dazed and blank.
“Your family?”
She shook her head, the first signs of sadness appearing. The water bottle lolled against her forearm. He could see the signs of dehydration in her skin and lips, knew she must be near delirious with it. Either she was too weak to lift the bottle or she’d lost the will to survive.
“Does anyone in your village know how to kill them?”
Blinking with surprise, she met his gaze squarely for the first time. “Ils ne meurent pas.”
“Believe me, they do. I can tell you how.” He looked away to avoid seeing the tears forming in her eyes. There was no reason to ask her name, he neither needed nor wanted to know what it was. That would only make watching her die harder on him. “Drink. And climb into the front seat, show me the way to your village.”
Clumsily switching to the front seat, her hands trembled as she unscrewed the cap on the bottle. Not a single drop was wasted. She gestured with her hands to give him directions, occasionally speaking to him in Hausa but quickly learning that he only understood the basics of that language.
There was a dirt road off of Route One and more of the endless flat land with bushes, the odd tree, and more dust. He had to drive slowly over the rutted and pocked earth, avoiding dips, jutting rocks, and quagmires of desert sand. It took them nearly an hour to arrive at the village. She must have been in shock to have walked that far under the blazing sun. The village itself was more like a ghost town than someone’s home. He heard shouting when he stopped the car and got out.
They had spears and hunting knives, that was a start. Even if they were pointed at him for the moment. Post vampire attack was never a good time to be the new kid in town. He kept his hands up, palms out, and let the girl do all of the talking in rapid Hausa. A word here, a phrase there; he knew the word for demon in a hundred languages. They turned away from him to converse amongst themselves and he nearly took the chance to bolt. No one could fault him for running away, at least, no one within several hundred miles. He was just human; he wasn’t chosen or destined to fight vampires. This wasn’t his village and it wasn’t his fight.
It had never been his fight.
Those thoughts were pushed away with the closing of the window for escape. Voices were asking him questions and spears were still looking too ready to stab him if he sprouted fangs.
“They want know…how to kill.” The girl told him brokenly.
“Pay attention. May I?” He reached for one of the spears and looked for a patch of sand to use as a canvas. The first stick figure had over-sized fangs to represent a vampire. Stick figure number two’s head was on the ground, number three had a stake through its heart, and number four was lying dead under a smiling sun. The men scrutinized the sand drawings. He went back to the car for a stake, demonstrating where to strike. That seemed to spur some sort of understanding in them and they began speaking heatedly to each other.
“Don’t invite them inside. Ne les invitez pas…and my work here is done.” He wiped away the stick figures and started to leave.
“Attente! S’il vous plait!” The girl came after him.
“I’ve had enough people die for one lifetime, I don’t want any more. You know how to kill them…good luck. I don’t do this anymore.” He watched her struggle to piece together words with as little English as he had Hausa, barely hearing her fragmented pleas for help. Just because he knew how to kill them didn’t mean he cared to try.
With a heavy sigh, he looked around at the thatched huts and weary faces staring him. More than one of them had blood on their clothes and necks. They had fought hard just to stay alive and he was a little shocked that any of them had survived. It was doubtful a vampire raiding party would attack the same settlement two nights in a row; they were probably long gone by now. That didn’t support his desire to leave so it wasn’t helping him any. He reluctantly allowed himself to be led through the cluster of beehive shaped huts, swallowing hard when he realized what he was seeing.
Bodies had been wrapped lovingly in rich fabric; makeshift tents set up to shade the living as they constructed a burial mound for those who had left corpses. Experience had taught him to be wary of the dead. From the size of the village and the number of dead, he realized that they had been decimated. There were more dead than alive and most of the survivors were women and children. The men had died trying to protect their families.
“I don’t want to see to this,” he said to no one in particular, stomach churning at the sight and the smell. They were looking to him for help, for answers, and he had nothing to give them. He couldn’t tell them why they had lived and others had died, why the vampires had chosen them as dinner. He didn’t even know how to tell them that it wasn’t personal; it was just about survival. They were on the menu, simple as that.
“S’il vous plait, monsieur.” The girl was gripping the water bottle tight enough for the plastic to buckle.
“I can’t help you.” He turned away and started back toward the car. “Maybe I could show you how to whittle a stake but you’re human. They’re faster, stronger, and you’re their food. Vous comprendez?”
“Monsieur.” She trailed after him determinedly.
“You’ll need wood. Bows and arrows? Is anyone here a good shot in the dark? And fire. Feu? They probably won’t come back so you don’t need me.” The scarf around his neck was suddenly uncomfortably tight. He struggled to undo the knot, balling it into his hand in an attempt to hide the fabric from view. There were still stains from the blood he hadn’t been able to wash out. The blood of someone who could have helped these people, who should have been there to help them and would have if he’d left well enough alone.
Dark eyes were still staring up at him like the lost little puppy he was trying to send off to the pound to be put to sleep. He thought he’d stopped seeing Muna’s face, her ghost, in the weeks of driving Hell’s highways. Now, his mind was pulling out all the stops and he not only saw her pleading with him, he saw all of the dead he’d collected standing behind her with blank eyes staring at him. Rubbing his eye didn’t help, they were still there when he looked back up and he had to face the fact that he’d gone completely round the bend.
“Fine! But this is where you get off. No more following Xander around with the staring thing!” He ignored the puzzled looks of the villagers around him. “We’re going to need wood and lots of it. Rope, if you’ve got it.”
There were a few hours until the sun started to wane and night began. He planned to be long gone when dusk hit, with all of the dead far behind him. The Reaper was ready to unload a few souls via an act of good karma. He’d dug enough graves for one lifetime and had no intention of sticking around to add to that burial mound. The villagers had a small supply of tools and he set them to tasks with vaguely sketched directions in the sand. A few of them knew bits of English and French, so they managed to struggle through with creative hand gestures and stick figures.
He was whittling his fifteenth stake when he realized that the reason he was having a hard time seeing was because the sun was dipping down over the horizon. Working hurriedly, he finished off the stake and brushed the shavings off of his robe. When he stood up, he saw the others working stoically and steadfastly on their own stakes. They had gathered every one of their bows and arrows, the tips wrapped in dried grain and tied with bits of twine. Their precious store of wood was assembled to feed a small fire, just enough to act as an undead bug zapper and light the arrows. He made a mental note to bring them more when he returned to check on whoever was left. Preferably with the sun still in the sky.
“They probably won’t come back.” It was hollow comfort considering how many they’d lost the night before and it was a lousy way to say goodbye. They murmured goodbyes and well wishes as he left. Everything useful he had was now theirs and, sadly, that consisted of Vampire Slaying one-oh-one. The sidekick was never supposed to fight the Big Evil, he was just supposed to provide the comic relief and possibly hit something with a frying pan.
If he thought about it, he could probably trace his craziness back to when he’d stopping being content with his sidekick status, when he’d tried to take a step out of that mold. Go collect Slayers on your own, Giles said. You’ll be fine, Buffy said. Both of them had indoor plumbing, safe houses, and real weapons. What he’d give for a good battle-axe. He squashed the guilt pooling in his stomach and drove faster than was wise down the dirt road toward Route One. Sunlight could be measured in minutes now; this was no place to be when night dug its claws into the earth.
A shape, about the size of a dog, darted in front of his car and caused him to swerve. The car went up and over a rock with an ugly scraping sound between metal and stone. His heart thudded in his chest, brakes squealing as he stopped. Just an animal, just an animal. Dust swirled through his headlights, the sun long gone and leaving the world to the shadows. He could have sworn he saw Muna standing on the road ahead. He shook his head several times, trying to shake the image out of his mind, the sound of her laughter out of his head.
“I can’t help them,” he told the silence around him. “I’ve done everything I can. I’m not the Slayer.” No one answered him and he didn’t actually expect an answer.
The night brought relief from the sun, the incessant heat that boiled blood and addled brains. He felt exposed, far off the familiar roads that seemed safer than the middle of nowhere. With the engine idling and the barest caress of a breeze cooling the sweat on his face, he stared into the night and for the first since he’d set foot on the continent, it stared back.
There was a quote in his mind somewhere about looking into the abyss and the abyss looking back into him. Beneath that was an object lesson that he hadn’t learned. He’d always thought it was about knowing the nature of evil, being able to stare it down at the price of evil learning about him. It had never worried him before. What did evil have to fear from Xander Harris, zeppo and all time screw up? What did the abyss see when it stared back into him?
He fingered the gris-gris around his neck and thought of the man it had belonged to; the real owner of the Peugeot and the man who should have been behind the wheel instead of him. His mind cleared some of the fog he’d been living in, enough to wonder if he had truly gone insane. It had been comforting to hide in the madness of the desert, driving Route One with Captain Paul Voulet’s ghosts trailing behind him. As if he could actually put those souls to rest just by driving up and down the same road.
“What the hell.” He cranked the wheel of the battered Peugeot, dirt spinning as the tires cut into the desert. Niger was a good a place as any to start fertilizing the flora; it certainly could use the help. What did he have to lose? A car that wasn’t his and a life that consisted of hard-boiled eggs, red peppers, and driving a haunted highway.
The headlights lit up the outlying huts as the village came into view, the faint light of a flickering fire at the center. He skidded to a halt and leapt out of the car with stake in hand. There was one man at the center, acting as a decoy just as Xander had mimed for them to do; the rest would be inside their huts in relative safety. He dodged a stake in the doorway of the nearest hut.
“Whoa, there! That was good. Next time, aim a little higher.” He readjusted the man’s angle as he stepped inside. “Couldn’t let you guys have all the fun.”
He was still half convinced that the vampires wouldn’t strike the same village twice but the undead weren’t exactly known for their deductive reasoning skills. There couldn’t be many of them. They weren’t exactly big on sharing and people would be higher on the food list than converting to the undead list in a place where food was scarce. Against two or three vamps and they might have a chance of living through it.
A game of hurry up and wait ensued, broken up by intervals of stretching and cracking joints when sitting in one place extended for too long. Minus the cramping and the scratchy eyeball peering into the darkness, it was positively riveting. By what felt like two in the morning he was wishing for Doritos and someone to trade late night patrolling quips with. Come dawn he would be feeling ridiculous for charging in to be the hero when no one needed saving.
He heard a howl that set the hair on the back of his neck on end. Someone had just found themselves tangled in one of his snares. It wouldn’t stop a vampire but it would slow them down. He took a deep breath, tightened his grip on the stake, and edged to doorway to peer out. The decoy was still sitting near the fire, the spear in his hands shaking badly enough to be seen fifty feet away.
Xander kept his gaze moving, watching for shadows with odd shapes moving in ways they shouldn’t. An idea of how many and where they were. The snares would slow them down and the decoy would draw them into the center of the village. Surprise might be the only advantage, however brief, that they had. Three, four, maybe more. He could hear growling; the angry and hungry kind of growling that gave him just the barest hope for getting out alive. Anger usually made them even more stupid than normal. Maybe they’d gloat for a bit, that would be just like old times.
The first vampire finally stepped out of the shadows, just enough light from the moon and blazing stars overhead to illuminate his outline and broad features. Even the demons in this country were emaciated, wearing the title of Walking Dead with a flair for the macabre. There were four of them; dressed in dark robes with only fangs and eyes truly visible in the darkness. Secure in their superiority over the weaker humans, they carried no weapons and closed in around the decoy with cruel smiles.
Just when the suspense had nearly become too much for him to bear, the decoy shouted into the night and drove his spear into the fire. Bundled grain and twigs caught fire, blazing suddenly. He swung the spear around him, halting the approach of the vampires, and screamed again as he lunged forward to drive the spear into the chest of one of the vampires.
Xander grimaced as it missed the heart by inches; humans didn’t have the luxury of making mistakes. The rest of the villagers poured out of their huts with spears, arrows, and stakes. They threw rocks and gourds, even bags of dust meant to open on impact and blind the enemy. It took seconds for the vampires to regroup and start attacking everything that moved. Mud cracked and thatch went up in flames, filling the air with oily smoke.
A large rock to the head sent one of the vampires to the ground, shaking his head dazedly. Xander was there in an instant, driving his stake into its back as hard as his could. Splinters cut into his palm but his pain was rewarded with a burst of dust at his feet. One down.
Unearthly howling made his skin crawl; one of the vampires’ robes had caught fire and the creature was flailing against the flames licking at his skin. Xander grabbed a spear from the hands of a dead villager, driving it through the burning vampire’s torso and pinning him to one of the mud huts to burn. Shrieking with pain and rage, it managed to land a solid kick that sent Xander flying back. Breath knocked out of him from the impact with the earth, he barely rolled out of the way when another body came hurtling through the night toward him.
They’d managed to kill two vampires, a third was cowering blindly under a hailstorm of stones and dust, but the forth was tossing people away with furious snarls. Xander crept around the side of the hut, peeking around the corner in time to see it snatch one of the men and sink its fangs into his neck.
“Hey!” The fist-sized rock hit the vampire square in the forehead. It couldn’t have hurt much but it was enough to make him let go of the man and focus on Xander. He shouted all the insults he’d managed to learn in French during his stay in Niger, ignoring the increase in growling as the vampire stalked toward him. Stumbling backwards, he kept taunting the creature while he led him away from the center of the village and the rest of the people.
There was light enough from the stars and moon that the desert was silvery around him and the outline of the battered Peugeot glistened. He was running now, imagining the sensation of hands catching him and fangs cutting through his skin. It was half a slide and half a dive into the car. Metal clanged loudly as the vampire leapt onto the hood of the car and punched through the windshield.
Xander dodged the groping fist and fumbled with the key in the ignition. The engine whined to life, headlights illuminating the village ahead of him. He threw the car into reverse, pulling the wheel back and forth to keep the vampire off balance. When he hit the brake, a head plunged through the broken windshield and the vampire spit blood and glass at him. He swung the car around, simultaneously smacking the vampire on the head with the tire iron, and floored the accelerator. Dirt flew, tires spun, and he was racing off toward Route One through the moonlit night. Miles flew by, measured in heartbeats and snarled threats pertaining to his throat. He hit the vampire again as they bumped onto the highway, tires squealing as he cranked the wheel. It glowered at him from the windshield, shaking freshly loosened glass out of its hair.
“Thought you might want to go for a drive,” Xander shouted over the wind and the engine. He could barely see anything through the cracks in the windshield, peering through the hole the vampire had made with his fist to see if he was in the right lane. The vampire growled and got another smack to the head for his trouble. “The whole attacking innocent people thing? I’m really not a fan. Not that you care, you’re just a demon, a parasite.”
More growling.
“I guess I could just drive until the sun comes up.” That seemed to get the creature’s attention and it looked wary for the first time. Xander grinned at it. “You really should see a sunrise on Route One, it’s spectacular. What? Not your thing? That’s too bad.” He hit the vampire a few more times until its head bowed and didn’t raise back up.
Relative peace gave him a moment to readjust his grip on the wheel and the tire iron and to consider his situation fully for the first time. He had no idea when dawn would arrive but he couldn’t drive into Niamey with a vampire stuck through his windshield and there were headlights coming down the road the other way. The best option would be to pull over and dust the creature before someone saw him driving with a body on his hood. He poked at the head with apprehension, knowing that the sleeping routine could be just another trick. There was no response.
“Hello? That’s not very nice, falling asleep on me there.” He poked it again and when there was still no response, he eased off on the gas to begin slowing down.
It must have been waiting for him to do just that, playing opossum until it though Xander wasn’t paying attention. Inhumanly strong fingers clamped around the steering wheel, tugging against him and trying to send the car careening off into the desert. He heard the tires squeal as the car swerved, fighting for control over the steering wheel with both hands.
He saw the headlights ahead of them get suddenly bright, heard screeching and howling before a gigantic invisible fist hit him squarely in the chest. Everything went black. He could taste oil and blood in mouth and hear the screaming of someone dying.
Maybe this is what he’d been hoping for, driving up and down Route One with the reckless abandon of someone who had nothing to go back to. Maybe he’d been hoping all along that this demon road would open up and swallow him down into nothingness. There was pain. Too much to tell where it was coming from and why. Too much heat and blood and oil. The sun had risen early just to taunt him, to shrivel him up and turn him to dust along with the vampire.
“Xander. You have to move.” It was a familiar voice but he couldn’t find a name inside his spinning head. “Now, Xander. You have to move now.”
Somehow he did. He was crawling blindly on hands and knees, gris-gris clutched in one hand. Bushes scratched his face and he could smell the earth beneath him. The voice urged him on, telling him to keep going and keep going until his lungs burned and he couldn’t move another inch.
“You’re going to be all right, Xander,” the voice whispered.
He fell to his side, rolling onto his back in an attempt to ease some of the pain. It was too much to even blink, his eyeball felt like it was on fire and he wasn’t sure if it was blood or tears running down his face. He could feel someone there, whoever it was who had coaxed him out of the car. Hot air rushed past him smelling of gasoline and death.
“You’re going to be just fine. I’ll stay with you until they get here.”
“I think I was supposed to die. Back there.” He coughed against the dirt and blood in his throat.
“You can’t keep punishing yourself, Xander. It wasn’t your fault that Muna died. You didn’t fail her. It’s so like you to run away from your problems, to wallow in your misery. Did you think I’d forget?”
“Anya?” He finally recognized her voice and reached out to find her.
“You can’t feel me. I’m dead, Xander. You’re not. At least not yet and you’re not supposed to die on me in some middle of nowhere African country. You have to hang on.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They’ve been looking for you, the others. Buffy and Giles. They’ve been searching for weeks while you’ve been off gallivanting around pretending to be a taxi driver. They need you.”
He shook his head. It was getting cold now and pain was fading to numb. He couldn’t feel the ground beneath him, almost as if he was floating on a cloud high above the earth. This was it. He could feel Death creeping down from Route One to collect another soul that would haunt the highway forever. His soul.
“Do you remember our wedding day?” Anya’s voice cut through the haze. “Do you remember my dress? All those little flowers. And you looked so handsome in your tux. Your parents got drunk and I’d invited all my demon friends, like that’s going to go over well at any wedding with humans involved.”
“There was this guy…” he trailed off. The memories were surprisingly vivid even with years past and blows to the head.
“Who wasn’t real. And then you had go all noble on me.”
“Noble?” He would have laughed if his lungs hadn’t turned to jello at some point.
“Well, you thought you were being noble and saving me from a life with you when all you were really doing was being a scared little boy. That’s what you do, you get scared and then you run away.”
He didn’t have an answer for that one. If he hadn’t run away from the market where Muna had died, he wouldn’t be lying in the desert waiting to die. Vaguely remembering that there had been a vampire on the hood of his car, he tipped his head toward where he thought Anya was. “Is it dead? The vampire.”
“Yes, they’re all dead. Some of the villagers made it. The little girl is still alive. I think she’ll be just fine once those wounds heal.”
“Good.”
“I never understood why you insist on fighting vampires. Why not let the Slayers handle it? It’s not your sacred calling. You were supposed to be my husband and we were supposed to have a family. A nice, normal family. We were supposed to grow old together and die peacefully in our sleep in a retirement community in Florida.”
His lips cracked as he smiled. “I miss you, Ahn.”
“I know you do.”
“Take me with you. I’m tired…so tired.”
“I wish I could, Xander. I wish I could.”
It might have been his imagination but he thought he felt her take his hand and kiss his forehead. He could smell her perfume and the shampoo she had decided on after trying every bottle on the shelf. Her hair had always been so soft, curling around his fingers the way her hand was now. Having her there was more comforting than he could have imagined, just to not be alone when he died suddenly meant the world to him.
He wondered if Muna had felt the same way, if she had been glad he was there to hold her. The sting in his eye this time was definitely due to tears, his breath catching in his throat as he tried to blink them away. What good would crying do anyone? It wouldn’t bring her back and it wouldn’t keep him alive.
A soft hand stroked his face. “It’s okay, Xander. I won’t tell anyone you cried.”
The half laugh and half sob nearly choked him. He shook as he cried, holding her hand tightly as he curled onto his side. Tears and blood soaked into the dirt beneath his pummeled body. She was whispering in his ear, pleading with him to stay awake, to listen to her voice and stay with her. He tried to listen but her words got softer and softer and the feel of her skin faded away.
Then there was only the silence of the desert.
Author: Aeneas (aka Jerib_78)
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: It's Joss's sandbox, I just play there.
Author's Note: This is for the Scatterlings and Orphanages Ficathon.
All Who Wander
The bush taxi driver’s name was Zainab. He spoke in fractured sentences of English, French, and Hausa, and with a zest for life that was mirrored in his breakneck driving. His smile was marred by missing teeth, giving him the look of a crazed and slightly drunk pirate steering a metallic vessel through the Sahel. They left Lake Chad and all other sources of water for hundreds of miles behind, careening down the dusty roads like a Peugeot bat fresh from hell.
Time wasn’t on their side and the border patrol had taken an early night off from their hard job of intimidating people and taking bribes. It didn’t faze the irrepressible Zainab or the rest of the passengers; they merely collected their belongings and hiked off the road to make camp. Xander kept his distance and ended up staring into his tiny scrub brush fire until the sky above was an endless blaze of stars. There might have been sleep but he couldn’t feel it when the sun began its daily ritual of attempting to murder them all.
He buried his face in his duffle to hide from the sun but the shouting of his fellow passengers made that impractical. When he roused himself enough to peer blearily around, he saw them wandering away in various directions. They followed the road toward Niger or back into Chad, which didn’t make any sense if they’d paid their way. A few of the men spent quite a while investigating the taxi but eventually removed their belongings and drifted away with the rest. Their driver seemed oblivious to what was going on around him.
Brushing himself off as he stood, his back cracking in several places when he stretched tired and sore muscles. The world was already beginning to heat up; soon there would be nothing but heat and sand enough to drive a man mad. He’d already guessed the outcome before he rolled the dice and reached out to shake Zainab.
Heart attack, maybe a stroke. He stared at the peaceful expression on the man’s face with envy. Quietly in his sleep with no demons and no bullets. The duffle settled back onto the dirt and Xander got to work. In his head, there was a silent commentary on all the dead he’d left behind since arriving in Africa. All he needed were some black robes and a big curvy scythe thing to complete the outfit. If he were smaller, he could hop on the back of the rat and merrily spread plague across the continent. Not that Africa needed any more microscopic baddies.
None of the others had stayed to bury the man; they were only concerned with getting to their destination. Further down the road, further down their lives. Time wasted burying a stranger would expose them to more of the sun’s wrath than need be. He noticed that someone had tried to hotwire the vehicle while he was collecting bits of twine from the roof rack. Zainab must have hidden the key. The twine secured a flat, scoop shaped rock to a twisted branch and creating a cross between a spade and a shovel.
He did his best to remember one of the prayers Muna had taught him, figuring any prayer at all was better than nothing, and buried Zainab in the shallow grave. Anything of value inside the car had been stripped by the tiny dots in the distance that had once been passengers.
The car seats were worn and coated with grime but it was partial cover from the sun so he settled in the backseat and stared at nothing in particular. He should have been on his way back to England where there was enough rain to sustain life. Indoor plumbing had been singing its siren song in his ears since he’d left Tripoli but it sounded hollow now. He couldn’t go back without an answer, without something he could tell them about Muna.
His focus fell on the gris-gris hanging from the rear view mirror, swaying lightly from a breeze he couldn’t feel or vibrations in the earth itself. They were for luck, Zainab had explained, filled with blessed soil and other bits of hoodoo. It wasn’t polite to ask about the contents and forbidden to take a look inside. Never use for money, the man had warned him adamantly. Apparently that made the Demon Road mad enough to open up its jaws and swallow a car whole. Ghost stories.
He knew more ghost stories than a man should ever know. It was part curiosity and part suicidal bravado that made him reach for the small leather pouch. Zainab was fertilizing the Sahel and there was no one around for nearly a mile to see him break one more cultural law. The contents of the pouch fell into his palm, lips cracking as he smiled. A rock, a tiny rodent skull, some plain brown dirt that had probably been blessed by a Shaman, and one key to a Peugeot station wagon. He didn’t need any more cosmic encouragement to climb behind the wheel and turn the key in the ignition.
Money made the border crossing easy even with papers that weren’t his own, not that he believed the men with automatic weapons could even read what was written on them. They scanned for official seals and pretty pictures but paid no attention to the squiggly lines.
Driving across Niger felt like becoming one of those toy mice careening down a track while being sand blasted. The road was a hundred year old tattoo fading away into the brown earth, ragged green bushes, and bright yellow grass, at times completely washed away by sand. It was easy to see how the stories began. Whispers about demons and ghosts haunting the roads, luring unsuspecting drivers unto traps. An old woman, a black dog, a man riding a stallion with fire for eyes, even a furious eighteen wheeler hurtling down the road.
The sides of the roads were spotted with hollowed out wreckages of cars less fortunate and it was no wonder there were stories. No one came to haul them away; they were stripped of useful parts, anything worth a red cent, and left to rust away in the desert. Maybe they didn’t rust. Maybe they just sunk into the earth or maybe they stayed there forever.
It was easy to let his mind slip into neutral. Concentrating on roads with no stop signs and no traffic laws took precedence over any philosophical meanderings he might be tempted to take. He saw monster-sized military trucks piled twice as high with fabric cargo bags; human heads wrapped in turbans covering the top like a cluster of mushrooms. Smaller cars flew with the same reckless speed that Zainab had been fond of, the same terrifying darting between cars and potholes. It was the closest to playing a racecar video game that he’d ever gotten.
What would have happened if he’d run out of gas before reaching Zinder didn’t occur to him. He barely realized that the gauge was bobbling dangerously toward empty when he drove into the motor park; missing being sideswiped by inches and rear-ended by less than that. It was a maze of cars barely running or tricked out Niger style, with their respective owners bartering fiercely in French or Hausa for coveted spare parts.
He parked, keeping the key with him, and went in search of fuel. The rumbling in his stomach reminded him that he was hungry enough for motor oil to smell good. Food was easy. Most drivers didn’t dare get too far away from their cars and the motor park spilled into the marketplace, young girls moving between the two selling their wares in the flat bowls balanced on their heads. He bought hard boiled eggs, a sad looking red pepper, and chunks of seasoned bread. Petrol was forty cents a liter and prized like china white.
The other drivers held handmade signs to advertise their locations, whichever routes they had staked out as their territory. In his driving, he’d seen no railroads and not a single plane. Bush taxis were the only option for transportation across the desolation.
Wide dark eyes stared at him from behind a car. Small hands and a face that seemed stretched too tight over the skull, ribs standing out in relief beneath dark skin. His stomach lurched uncomfortably but the child’s mother whisked it away from the light skinned stranger before he could react. This country hadn’t been his destination and he knew very little about it. So far it was dusty and the traffic was a nightmare.
With a full tank of gas, he reluctantly took the dirty money pressed into his hands from strangers who had crowded around his car. Most of the motor park regarded him with a level of hostility. He wasn’t one of them, the interloper. The ones who piled into his car were those without enough money for any of the other bush taxis and desperate enough to overlook the color of his skin. He didn’t speak, didn’t participate in idle conversation as he drove, just listened to the cadence of languages around his ears.
Route Nationale One had a colorful history. He listened with half an ear as the passengers regaled him and the others with tales of its creation. A bit of the French was familiar and he could guess at patterns in the Hausa language, but they seemed content to complete whole pieces of their story in English. Whether or not it was for his benefit didn’t matter. Perhaps they wanted to scare him.
Colonel Paul Voulet had carved Route One out of the sand with guns and blood before they laid down the tar. The bodies of children had swung from trees and the wells turned toxic from the dead left to rot at their depths. Gone mad from too much sand and too much sun, the rogue commander had taken the idea of making way for an interstate highway to a lethal extreme. Whole villages were slaughtered; worn and battered crosses still barely visible where innocent blood had watered the earth.
He found himself filtering the stories automatically, breaking them down into their parts and searching for the kernel of truth that always lay at the heart of folklore. Vampires were real, that was truth. The rest that had been built up around them filled in the fantasy that kept them safely obscured from the world’s eyes. Men dreamt up fantastic elaborations when they were left without rational explanations. Turning into bats, controlling wolves, singing lead for rock and roll bands; those were all the comfy lies that sold movie tickets and bad novels.
No skeletons remained in the trees along Route One but it wasn’t hard to imagine bodies hanging like gruesome Christmas ornaments, strung up by a pale-skinned foreigner who probably just wanted to get out of the godawful desert. Madness came easy in a place like this.
Eventually the conversation lapsed into the sound of the wind and the motor. All four windows were frozen in various states of open and he could feel the sand burrowing into him like tiny maggots. There was green around them, or at least the illusion of green, and what passed for fertile land in this hell. Mostly there was nothing but dirt and more of those prickly bushes. Endless road reminded him of the open stretches of Nevada with sagebrush and Hell’s Angels. Although he was pretty sure there were no giraffes standing along the side of US interstate fifteen. There were no mountains, nothing to break up the monotony but blackened carcasses and the occasional tree.
Night came, the passengers fell asleep, and he kept driving like a man possessed. Part of him hoped to see one of the notorious demons that would send him off the road to be burnt and stripped like all the other cars. He wondered how many of the wrecks contained dead bodies, how many people had been trapped inside and murdered by the sun above them. Had they too gone mad as they waited for death?
In darkness broken only by headlights, he imagined their souls trailing after him as they recognized his mythical scythe. Death had come to Niger wearing an American’s skin and driving a Peugeot. For some reason, that made him smile.
***
Xander lost count of the times he made the trip between Zinder and Niamey and beyond. He learned to barter for motor oil, cut with water and full of grit, and shoulder his way through the frenzied crowd for the purest petrol. They still looked at him sideways but there was newfound respect in their scowls. This American wasn’t just passing through; this American was driving the same roads and wearing the same gris-gris around his neck.
“Comment ca va, Xander?” A familiar wizened face asked him in the market at Zinder, most of the teeth missing from his grin.
“Ca va bien, Fayid. Il fait chaud comme enfer.” Xander gave him a little extra when he paid for the petrol.
“Niger ne se rapelle pas la pluie. Merci, merci…my children will eat tonight.”
“Vous n’avez aucun enfants.” He winked at the older man. It might have been a tasteless joke but the older man didn’t seem offended. Fayid’s sons had died before reaching adulthood and now he cared for a ragged little band of orphans. Most of them would die before the year was out; there simply wasn’t enough life in the place to sustain them.
He bought bread and sagging vegetables for the road. The memories of produce aisles and crisp lettuce were dim enough to be dreams from some other life. Recollection of ice cream was all but lost forever. There were no mirrors or scales but his clothes only fit with the help of baling twine, hanging from his bones as loosely as those around him. Taking on passengers kept his money at a rough equilibrium, dipping occasionally when his indifference cracked and a pair of wide eyes threatened to revive the Xander of the past.
That Xander was still on a street in Chad with a teenage girl bleeding to death in his arms. Helpless and hopeless and lost. The Xander behind the wheel of the Peugeot was a Reaper of souls, driving Route One to collect those who were lost and drifting across the desert. He’d found the bones of a steer near one of the haunted villages during one of his runs and strapped the skull to the hood of the car as a hollow-eyed ornament.
His passengers were still those too poor to pay for any other taxis but he didn’t mind and they kept coming; clutching their gris-gris and whispering their prayers for Allah to protect them from the road. They never connected the burned out wreckages, as common as cattle in Texas, with the maniac drivers behind the wheel. It was the road and the demons in search of human barbeques that were to blame.
If petrol was heroin then water was cocaine. Every waking moment was spent in pursuit of those two things. One to keep him alive and the other to keep him on the road. It was a delicate balance. The guards at the multiple checkpoints along Route One were as likely to drag him from the car and beat him to a pulp as they were to look the other way. Most wanted bribes; which Xander had converted into American dollars for the hell of it and was sickened to realize that keeping his nose unbroken was worth far less than a dollar.
After driving the highways half a dozen times, the guards became used to seeing him and they relaxed enough to lower their weapons when they stopped him. He understood bits of what they said now. Mostly they wondered what the crazy American was doing in spending his time in hell. He didn’t think about it much.
This place truly was hell. It was hell in sand and dirt and death. He’d stopped wondering why people clung to the futility of carving out an existence in a place that gave them nothing in return. It redefined hell and gave it new meaning. It was a hell of desolation and endless nothingness.
In the south, there were places where fields of sorghum and millet stretched out for miles. Patches of hell grew the wilted peppers and shriveled dates that he bought at the market places. Some towns raised goats and cattle, as scrawny as the humans but surviving nonetheless on yellow grass and prickly bushes. The people always had one eye to the sky, looking for rain that may or may not come. None of that seemed reason enough to stay in a place that could no longer sustain life the way it had once.
He had stumbled onto the fossils in the market at Niamey and asked questions in broken French. Stones with bits of fish and plants; pieces of what the Sahara had been thousands, maybe millions, of years ago. A place of trees, flowers, and water beyond imagining. Then the Sahara had died and was exacting bitter revenge on every living thing it touched from a dusty grave.
In the north, the Tenere was a picture postcard at dusk when the desert turned purple and crimson, bits of wreckage lighting up with the last gleaming of the sun. It was the stuff of movies and dreams of grand adventure. He stopped wishing for a camera, stopped noticing more than the road ahead. No flowers to smell, nothing to do but keep driving until all the dead of Niger were trailing behind the battered Peugeot. He wasn’t sure what to do with them, although in his most lucid moments he recognized the insanity of his wondering. Maybe they would tell stories of him years from now, how he had gone mad under the Saharan sun.
They were disjointed thoughts that seemed normal enough that they made no pause in his eating or wandering. Markets were places to get lost in and that was what he wanted. He’d made the wardrobe switch to the flowing robes everyone around him wore and a turban sloppily wrapped around his head. The knack for that particular skill continued to evade him.
He patted the nose of a camel as he passed by. The heavily lidded eyes merely stared at him; jaw working as it chewed on some unidentifiable grain. Coarse fur was dirty and matted with oil and dust; it didn’t seem to mind. Theirs’ were simple lives, the camels that walked across the desert with a quiet acceptance borne of adaptation. Beside the camels for sale were little goats bleating and gnawing at their tethers, the seller swatting them with a thin branch when they tried to escape. At the other end of the market, away from livestock and petrol fumes, he could find memories of home in the second hand European goods and bootlegged CDs. So-called civilization was even found in hell. There were women wearing dresses that had come from a department store long ago and far way.
Remembering wasn’t something he cared for. What was there to remember? An ex-fiancée cut in half, a hometown turned crater, and another mission to find yet another girl who was just going to die once he found her. Viva the life of Xander Harris, zeppo turned bush taxi driver.
One thing was unusual about that day in the market. There were several men at the edges with automatic weapons, watching the horizon with unusual intensity. Guns weren’t uncommon but guarding a marketplace was. He finished off his meager meal, enough to survive but no more than that, and started back toward the Peugeot. Buying food felt like buying three luxury sedans a day, the sticker shock never really wore off. He kept an eye on the nearest armed guard and caught Fayid’s attention when he neared the selection of painted pots the man sold along with the petrol.
“Les hommes avec des…assault rifles.” He didn’t know the French words for assault rifle so he nodded to one of the guards. “Pour quoi?”
Fayid glanced around nervously before he leaned closer to whisper, “Tuaregs. Il sont agites. They come at night, steal our cattle. And a man died last night, his neck torn by an animal.” So much for his luck holding. He thanked Fayid and returned to his car.
The history of Zinder, with its decoratively carved mud buildings and beehive huts with millet thatch for a roof, was full of legends and myths about the Tuaregs. Many of the nomads had settled in the city after the French invaded but they had taken the brunt of Niger’s civil chaos. Talk of economic distress was hardly useful in a country with no viable economy to begin with and a string of dictators had driven, or slaughtered, the Tuaregs from one end of hell to the other. According to the bits and pieces he’d heard while driving, there was no love lost there.
Camel trains could still be seen passing through the desert with men wrapped in indigo robes, some riding beautiful Arabian horses and others mounted on camels. They had been the scourge of the Sahara at one point, attacking parties along the trade routes and stealing spices, minerals, or people. Times had changed and most had settled. Some were still pirates stealing and murdering their way through the sands with Jeeps and automatic weapons. Ironically, one more thing to add to the list of why they were a different culture was the power of their women. If legend could be believed, it had been that way since Tin Hanan, a woman, united the Tuareg tribes. He was willing to bet money she’d been on the side of super strong and super fast.
A few of his passengers had been tourists lured to the country by the promise of a romantic desert adventure with the Tuaregs, only to find themselves hostages of the very men who had promised to be their guides. Xander took them to Niamey free of charge and dropped them off at the American Embassy without telling them how stupid they were. Most of the time, returning with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and passports in hand, he was pretty sure they’d figured that part out. Then he’d taken to storing a few odd weapons in the Peugeot. A long knife for butchering cattle that was dinged in a couple places, a tire iron that doubled as a club, and the requisite collection of wooden stakes. Wood was an invaluable commodity in a land with few trees.
The life of vampires and Slayers was over and done; he was retired now and had a bush taxi service to run. He wasn’t looking for them and he wasn’t planning to, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find him and think he’d make a nummy treat. What he didn’t understand was why any self-respecting vampire would come to a place where the sun was everyone’s enemy and the victims were more like shriveled up human raisins. Their blood probably tasted of dirt and sand. Everything else did.
Anxious to get away from possible inclement supernatural, he left without filling the Peugeot to the bursting point. Most bush taxis were more like cans of tightly packed sardines than real taxis. More fares meant more money and more money meant more food. It was never as real for him as it was for the native drivers. He would always know that he didn’t really belong there even after they’d forgotten. But he was content to be there until he figured out where he did belong. After all, Africa was a big place and he had all the time in the world to get lost in it.
He almost kept driving. There was a moment where his foot didn’t respond, still pressing the gas pedal to the floor, and he didn’t want to stop. Didn’t want to get involved. Maybe it was because the girl couldn’t have been older than thirteen or maybe it was because the color of her dress was the same green as the scarf knotted loosely around his neck. The passengers in the bush taxi complained loudly and in several languages as he slowed and pulled off of the road.
The girl stared at him, dried blood spilling down over her collarbone from the puncture wounds in her neck. Dark eyes were glassy and she had probably been standing out in the sun far too long. When he got out of the car to approach her, she whispered two words.
“Aidez moi.”
There was room for her in the back seat. He ignored the grumbling of the other passengers and resumed driving. An hour to Niamey; he let everyone but the girl out blocks away from the motor park and turned the car around. Traveling toward Zinder, he stopped at approximately the spot where he’d found her and once again pulled over. He fished a bottled water out of the glove box and handed it to her.
“Do you speak English?”
No response.
“Is there anyone left?” His grip on the steering wheel tightened involuntarily. “In your village. Is there anyone left alive?” Finally she nodded once. “How many came back? After they were dead. How many?”
“One.” She looked down at the water in her hand, dazed and blank.
“Your family?”
She shook her head, the first signs of sadness appearing. The water bottle lolled against her forearm. He could see the signs of dehydration in her skin and lips, knew she must be near delirious with it. Either she was too weak to lift the bottle or she’d lost the will to survive.
“Does anyone in your village know how to kill them?”
Blinking with surprise, she met his gaze squarely for the first time. “Ils ne meurent pas.”
“Believe me, they do. I can tell you how.” He looked away to avoid seeing the tears forming in her eyes. There was no reason to ask her name, he neither needed nor wanted to know what it was. That would only make watching her die harder on him. “Drink. And climb into the front seat, show me the way to your village.”
Clumsily switching to the front seat, her hands trembled as she unscrewed the cap on the bottle. Not a single drop was wasted. She gestured with her hands to give him directions, occasionally speaking to him in Hausa but quickly learning that he only understood the basics of that language.
There was a dirt road off of Route One and more of the endless flat land with bushes, the odd tree, and more dust. He had to drive slowly over the rutted and pocked earth, avoiding dips, jutting rocks, and quagmires of desert sand. It took them nearly an hour to arrive at the village. She must have been in shock to have walked that far under the blazing sun. The village itself was more like a ghost town than someone’s home. He heard shouting when he stopped the car and got out.
They had spears and hunting knives, that was a start. Even if they were pointed at him for the moment. Post vampire attack was never a good time to be the new kid in town. He kept his hands up, palms out, and let the girl do all of the talking in rapid Hausa. A word here, a phrase there; he knew the word for demon in a hundred languages. They turned away from him to converse amongst themselves and he nearly took the chance to bolt. No one could fault him for running away, at least, no one within several hundred miles. He was just human; he wasn’t chosen or destined to fight vampires. This wasn’t his village and it wasn’t his fight.
It had never been his fight.
Those thoughts were pushed away with the closing of the window for escape. Voices were asking him questions and spears were still looking too ready to stab him if he sprouted fangs.
“They want know…how to kill.” The girl told him brokenly.
“Pay attention. May I?” He reached for one of the spears and looked for a patch of sand to use as a canvas. The first stick figure had over-sized fangs to represent a vampire. Stick figure number two’s head was on the ground, number three had a stake through its heart, and number four was lying dead under a smiling sun. The men scrutinized the sand drawings. He went back to the car for a stake, demonstrating where to strike. That seemed to spur some sort of understanding in them and they began speaking heatedly to each other.
“Don’t invite them inside. Ne les invitez pas…and my work here is done.” He wiped away the stick figures and started to leave.
“Attente! S’il vous plait!” The girl came after him.
“I’ve had enough people die for one lifetime, I don’t want any more. You know how to kill them…good luck. I don’t do this anymore.” He watched her struggle to piece together words with as little English as he had Hausa, barely hearing her fragmented pleas for help. Just because he knew how to kill them didn’t mean he cared to try.
With a heavy sigh, he looked around at the thatched huts and weary faces staring him. More than one of them had blood on their clothes and necks. They had fought hard just to stay alive and he was a little shocked that any of them had survived. It was doubtful a vampire raiding party would attack the same settlement two nights in a row; they were probably long gone by now. That didn’t support his desire to leave so it wasn’t helping him any. He reluctantly allowed himself to be led through the cluster of beehive shaped huts, swallowing hard when he realized what he was seeing.
Bodies had been wrapped lovingly in rich fabric; makeshift tents set up to shade the living as they constructed a burial mound for those who had left corpses. Experience had taught him to be wary of the dead. From the size of the village and the number of dead, he realized that they had been decimated. There were more dead than alive and most of the survivors were women and children. The men had died trying to protect their families.
“I don’t want to see to this,” he said to no one in particular, stomach churning at the sight and the smell. They were looking to him for help, for answers, and he had nothing to give them. He couldn’t tell them why they had lived and others had died, why the vampires had chosen them as dinner. He didn’t even know how to tell them that it wasn’t personal; it was just about survival. They were on the menu, simple as that.
“S’il vous plait, monsieur.” The girl was gripping the water bottle tight enough for the plastic to buckle.
“I can’t help you.” He turned away and started back toward the car. “Maybe I could show you how to whittle a stake but you’re human. They’re faster, stronger, and you’re their food. Vous comprendez?”
“Monsieur.” She trailed after him determinedly.
“You’ll need wood. Bows and arrows? Is anyone here a good shot in the dark? And fire. Feu? They probably won’t come back so you don’t need me.” The scarf around his neck was suddenly uncomfortably tight. He struggled to undo the knot, balling it into his hand in an attempt to hide the fabric from view. There were still stains from the blood he hadn’t been able to wash out. The blood of someone who could have helped these people, who should have been there to help them and would have if he’d left well enough alone.
Dark eyes were still staring up at him like the lost little puppy he was trying to send off to the pound to be put to sleep. He thought he’d stopped seeing Muna’s face, her ghost, in the weeks of driving Hell’s highways. Now, his mind was pulling out all the stops and he not only saw her pleading with him, he saw all of the dead he’d collected standing behind her with blank eyes staring at him. Rubbing his eye didn’t help, they were still there when he looked back up and he had to face the fact that he’d gone completely round the bend.
“Fine! But this is where you get off. No more following Xander around with the staring thing!” He ignored the puzzled looks of the villagers around him. “We’re going to need wood and lots of it. Rope, if you’ve got it.”
There were a few hours until the sun started to wane and night began. He planned to be long gone when dusk hit, with all of the dead far behind him. The Reaper was ready to unload a few souls via an act of good karma. He’d dug enough graves for one lifetime and had no intention of sticking around to add to that burial mound. The villagers had a small supply of tools and he set them to tasks with vaguely sketched directions in the sand. A few of them knew bits of English and French, so they managed to struggle through with creative hand gestures and stick figures.
He was whittling his fifteenth stake when he realized that the reason he was having a hard time seeing was because the sun was dipping down over the horizon. Working hurriedly, he finished off the stake and brushed the shavings off of his robe. When he stood up, he saw the others working stoically and steadfastly on their own stakes. They had gathered every one of their bows and arrows, the tips wrapped in dried grain and tied with bits of twine. Their precious store of wood was assembled to feed a small fire, just enough to act as an undead bug zapper and light the arrows. He made a mental note to bring them more when he returned to check on whoever was left. Preferably with the sun still in the sky.
“They probably won’t come back.” It was hollow comfort considering how many they’d lost the night before and it was a lousy way to say goodbye. They murmured goodbyes and well wishes as he left. Everything useful he had was now theirs and, sadly, that consisted of Vampire Slaying one-oh-one. The sidekick was never supposed to fight the Big Evil, he was just supposed to provide the comic relief and possibly hit something with a frying pan.
If he thought about it, he could probably trace his craziness back to when he’d stopping being content with his sidekick status, when he’d tried to take a step out of that mold. Go collect Slayers on your own, Giles said. You’ll be fine, Buffy said. Both of them had indoor plumbing, safe houses, and real weapons. What he’d give for a good battle-axe. He squashed the guilt pooling in his stomach and drove faster than was wise down the dirt road toward Route One. Sunlight could be measured in minutes now; this was no place to be when night dug its claws into the earth.
A shape, about the size of a dog, darted in front of his car and caused him to swerve. The car went up and over a rock with an ugly scraping sound between metal and stone. His heart thudded in his chest, brakes squealing as he stopped. Just an animal, just an animal. Dust swirled through his headlights, the sun long gone and leaving the world to the shadows. He could have sworn he saw Muna standing on the road ahead. He shook his head several times, trying to shake the image out of his mind, the sound of her laughter out of his head.
“I can’t help them,” he told the silence around him. “I’ve done everything I can. I’m not the Slayer.” No one answered him and he didn’t actually expect an answer.
The night brought relief from the sun, the incessant heat that boiled blood and addled brains. He felt exposed, far off the familiar roads that seemed safer than the middle of nowhere. With the engine idling and the barest caress of a breeze cooling the sweat on his face, he stared into the night and for the first since he’d set foot on the continent, it stared back.
There was a quote in his mind somewhere about looking into the abyss and the abyss looking back into him. Beneath that was an object lesson that he hadn’t learned. He’d always thought it was about knowing the nature of evil, being able to stare it down at the price of evil learning about him. It had never worried him before. What did evil have to fear from Xander Harris, zeppo and all time screw up? What did the abyss see when it stared back into him?
He fingered the gris-gris around his neck and thought of the man it had belonged to; the real owner of the Peugeot and the man who should have been behind the wheel instead of him. His mind cleared some of the fog he’d been living in, enough to wonder if he had truly gone insane. It had been comforting to hide in the madness of the desert, driving Route One with Captain Paul Voulet’s ghosts trailing behind him. As if he could actually put those souls to rest just by driving up and down the same road.
“What the hell.” He cranked the wheel of the battered Peugeot, dirt spinning as the tires cut into the desert. Niger was a good a place as any to start fertilizing the flora; it certainly could use the help. What did he have to lose? A car that wasn’t his and a life that consisted of hard-boiled eggs, red peppers, and driving a haunted highway.
The headlights lit up the outlying huts as the village came into view, the faint light of a flickering fire at the center. He skidded to a halt and leapt out of the car with stake in hand. There was one man at the center, acting as a decoy just as Xander had mimed for them to do; the rest would be inside their huts in relative safety. He dodged a stake in the doorway of the nearest hut.
“Whoa, there! That was good. Next time, aim a little higher.” He readjusted the man’s angle as he stepped inside. “Couldn’t let you guys have all the fun.”
He was still half convinced that the vampires wouldn’t strike the same village twice but the undead weren’t exactly known for their deductive reasoning skills. There couldn’t be many of them. They weren’t exactly big on sharing and people would be higher on the food list than converting to the undead list in a place where food was scarce. Against two or three vamps and they might have a chance of living through it.
A game of hurry up and wait ensued, broken up by intervals of stretching and cracking joints when sitting in one place extended for too long. Minus the cramping and the scratchy eyeball peering into the darkness, it was positively riveting. By what felt like two in the morning he was wishing for Doritos and someone to trade late night patrolling quips with. Come dawn he would be feeling ridiculous for charging in to be the hero when no one needed saving.
He heard a howl that set the hair on the back of his neck on end. Someone had just found themselves tangled in one of his snares. It wouldn’t stop a vampire but it would slow them down. He took a deep breath, tightened his grip on the stake, and edged to doorway to peer out. The decoy was still sitting near the fire, the spear in his hands shaking badly enough to be seen fifty feet away.
Xander kept his gaze moving, watching for shadows with odd shapes moving in ways they shouldn’t. An idea of how many and where they were. The snares would slow them down and the decoy would draw them into the center of the village. Surprise might be the only advantage, however brief, that they had. Three, four, maybe more. He could hear growling; the angry and hungry kind of growling that gave him just the barest hope for getting out alive. Anger usually made them even more stupid than normal. Maybe they’d gloat for a bit, that would be just like old times.
The first vampire finally stepped out of the shadows, just enough light from the moon and blazing stars overhead to illuminate his outline and broad features. Even the demons in this country were emaciated, wearing the title of Walking Dead with a flair for the macabre. There were four of them; dressed in dark robes with only fangs and eyes truly visible in the darkness. Secure in their superiority over the weaker humans, they carried no weapons and closed in around the decoy with cruel smiles.
Just when the suspense had nearly become too much for him to bear, the decoy shouted into the night and drove his spear into the fire. Bundled grain and twigs caught fire, blazing suddenly. He swung the spear around him, halting the approach of the vampires, and screamed again as he lunged forward to drive the spear into the chest of one of the vampires.
Xander grimaced as it missed the heart by inches; humans didn’t have the luxury of making mistakes. The rest of the villagers poured out of their huts with spears, arrows, and stakes. They threw rocks and gourds, even bags of dust meant to open on impact and blind the enemy. It took seconds for the vampires to regroup and start attacking everything that moved. Mud cracked and thatch went up in flames, filling the air with oily smoke.
A large rock to the head sent one of the vampires to the ground, shaking his head dazedly. Xander was there in an instant, driving his stake into its back as hard as his could. Splinters cut into his palm but his pain was rewarded with a burst of dust at his feet. One down.
Unearthly howling made his skin crawl; one of the vampires’ robes had caught fire and the creature was flailing against the flames licking at his skin. Xander grabbed a spear from the hands of a dead villager, driving it through the burning vampire’s torso and pinning him to one of the mud huts to burn. Shrieking with pain and rage, it managed to land a solid kick that sent Xander flying back. Breath knocked out of him from the impact with the earth, he barely rolled out of the way when another body came hurtling through the night toward him.
They’d managed to kill two vampires, a third was cowering blindly under a hailstorm of stones and dust, but the forth was tossing people away with furious snarls. Xander crept around the side of the hut, peeking around the corner in time to see it snatch one of the men and sink its fangs into his neck.
“Hey!” The fist-sized rock hit the vampire square in the forehead. It couldn’t have hurt much but it was enough to make him let go of the man and focus on Xander. He shouted all the insults he’d managed to learn in French during his stay in Niger, ignoring the increase in growling as the vampire stalked toward him. Stumbling backwards, he kept taunting the creature while he led him away from the center of the village and the rest of the people.
There was light enough from the stars and moon that the desert was silvery around him and the outline of the battered Peugeot glistened. He was running now, imagining the sensation of hands catching him and fangs cutting through his skin. It was half a slide and half a dive into the car. Metal clanged loudly as the vampire leapt onto the hood of the car and punched through the windshield.
Xander dodged the groping fist and fumbled with the key in the ignition. The engine whined to life, headlights illuminating the village ahead of him. He threw the car into reverse, pulling the wheel back and forth to keep the vampire off balance. When he hit the brake, a head plunged through the broken windshield and the vampire spit blood and glass at him. He swung the car around, simultaneously smacking the vampire on the head with the tire iron, and floored the accelerator. Dirt flew, tires spun, and he was racing off toward Route One through the moonlit night. Miles flew by, measured in heartbeats and snarled threats pertaining to his throat. He hit the vampire again as they bumped onto the highway, tires squealing as he cranked the wheel. It glowered at him from the windshield, shaking freshly loosened glass out of its hair.
“Thought you might want to go for a drive,” Xander shouted over the wind and the engine. He could barely see anything through the cracks in the windshield, peering through the hole the vampire had made with his fist to see if he was in the right lane. The vampire growled and got another smack to the head for his trouble. “The whole attacking innocent people thing? I’m really not a fan. Not that you care, you’re just a demon, a parasite.”
More growling.
“I guess I could just drive until the sun comes up.” That seemed to get the creature’s attention and it looked wary for the first time. Xander grinned at it. “You really should see a sunrise on Route One, it’s spectacular. What? Not your thing? That’s too bad.” He hit the vampire a few more times until its head bowed and didn’t raise back up.
Relative peace gave him a moment to readjust his grip on the wheel and the tire iron and to consider his situation fully for the first time. He had no idea when dawn would arrive but he couldn’t drive into Niamey with a vampire stuck through his windshield and there were headlights coming down the road the other way. The best option would be to pull over and dust the creature before someone saw him driving with a body on his hood. He poked at the head with apprehension, knowing that the sleeping routine could be just another trick. There was no response.
“Hello? That’s not very nice, falling asleep on me there.” He poked it again and when there was still no response, he eased off on the gas to begin slowing down.
It must have been waiting for him to do just that, playing opossum until it though Xander wasn’t paying attention. Inhumanly strong fingers clamped around the steering wheel, tugging against him and trying to send the car careening off into the desert. He heard the tires squeal as the car swerved, fighting for control over the steering wheel with both hands.
He saw the headlights ahead of them get suddenly bright, heard screeching and howling before a gigantic invisible fist hit him squarely in the chest. Everything went black. He could taste oil and blood in mouth and hear the screaming of someone dying.
Maybe this is what he’d been hoping for, driving up and down Route One with the reckless abandon of someone who had nothing to go back to. Maybe he’d been hoping all along that this demon road would open up and swallow him down into nothingness. There was pain. Too much to tell where it was coming from and why. Too much heat and blood and oil. The sun had risen early just to taunt him, to shrivel him up and turn him to dust along with the vampire.
“Xander. You have to move.” It was a familiar voice but he couldn’t find a name inside his spinning head. “Now, Xander. You have to move now.”
Somehow he did. He was crawling blindly on hands and knees, gris-gris clutched in one hand. Bushes scratched his face and he could smell the earth beneath him. The voice urged him on, telling him to keep going and keep going until his lungs burned and he couldn’t move another inch.
“You’re going to be all right, Xander,” the voice whispered.
He fell to his side, rolling onto his back in an attempt to ease some of the pain. It was too much to even blink, his eyeball felt like it was on fire and he wasn’t sure if it was blood or tears running down his face. He could feel someone there, whoever it was who had coaxed him out of the car. Hot air rushed past him smelling of gasoline and death.
“You’re going to be just fine. I’ll stay with you until they get here.”
“I think I was supposed to die. Back there.” He coughed against the dirt and blood in his throat.
“You can’t keep punishing yourself, Xander. It wasn’t your fault that Muna died. You didn’t fail her. It’s so like you to run away from your problems, to wallow in your misery. Did you think I’d forget?”
“Anya?” He finally recognized her voice and reached out to find her.
“You can’t feel me. I’m dead, Xander. You’re not. At least not yet and you’re not supposed to die on me in some middle of nowhere African country. You have to hang on.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They’ve been looking for you, the others. Buffy and Giles. They’ve been searching for weeks while you’ve been off gallivanting around pretending to be a taxi driver. They need you.”
He shook his head. It was getting cold now and pain was fading to numb. He couldn’t feel the ground beneath him, almost as if he was floating on a cloud high above the earth. This was it. He could feel Death creeping down from Route One to collect another soul that would haunt the highway forever. His soul.
“Do you remember our wedding day?” Anya’s voice cut through the haze. “Do you remember my dress? All those little flowers. And you looked so handsome in your tux. Your parents got drunk and I’d invited all my demon friends, like that’s going to go over well at any wedding with humans involved.”
“There was this guy…” he trailed off. The memories were surprisingly vivid even with years past and blows to the head.
“Who wasn’t real. And then you had go all noble on me.”
“Noble?” He would have laughed if his lungs hadn’t turned to jello at some point.
“Well, you thought you were being noble and saving me from a life with you when all you were really doing was being a scared little boy. That’s what you do, you get scared and then you run away.”
He didn’t have an answer for that one. If he hadn’t run away from the market where Muna had died, he wouldn’t be lying in the desert waiting to die. Vaguely remembering that there had been a vampire on the hood of his car, he tipped his head toward where he thought Anya was. “Is it dead? The vampire.”
“Yes, they’re all dead. Some of the villagers made it. The little girl is still alive. I think she’ll be just fine once those wounds heal.”
“Good.”
“I never understood why you insist on fighting vampires. Why not let the Slayers handle it? It’s not your sacred calling. You were supposed to be my husband and we were supposed to have a family. A nice, normal family. We were supposed to grow old together and die peacefully in our sleep in a retirement community in Florida.”
His lips cracked as he smiled. “I miss you, Ahn.”
“I know you do.”
“Take me with you. I’m tired…so tired.”
“I wish I could, Xander. I wish I could.”
It might have been his imagination but he thought he felt her take his hand and kiss his forehead. He could smell her perfume and the shampoo she had decided on after trying every bottle on the shelf. Her hair had always been so soft, curling around his fingers the way her hand was now. Having her there was more comforting than he could have imagined, just to not be alone when he died suddenly meant the world to him.
He wondered if Muna had felt the same way, if she had been glad he was there to hold her. The sting in his eye this time was definitely due to tears, his breath catching in his throat as he tried to blink them away. What good would crying do anyone? It wouldn’t bring her back and it wouldn’t keep him alive.
A soft hand stroked his face. “It’s okay, Xander. I won’t tell anyone you cried.”
The half laugh and half sob nearly choked him. He shook as he cried, holding her hand tightly as he curled onto his side. Tears and blood soaked into the dirt beneath his pummeled body. She was whispering in his ear, pleading with him to stay awake, to listen to her voice and stay with her. He tried to listen but her words got softer and softer and the feel of her skin faded away.
Then there was only the silence of the desert.