Midnight Empire (2/?)
Midnight Empire
Chapter 2: Technical Difficulties
Summary: When the Slayer and her gang come to New York City, they quickly discover what it's like to work the toughest demon beat on Earth, battling ancient prophecies, supernatural fiends, outrageously high rents and more. Unfortunately, nothing in the city is as it seems. The streets are paved with deadly secrets, and before long the Scoobies and their L.A. counterparts find themselves drawn into a thousand-year-old conspiracy that threatens to destroy the world. Sequel to Clocks of the Long Now.
Fandoms: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel
Season: Post-Chosen, Post-NFA
Chapters: ?
Word Count: ?
Rating: R
Warnings: Do not drink while operating heavy machinery, slippery when wet, beware of dog
Betas: dampersnspoons, aerintine
Disclaimer: The characters from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" are owned by Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, Mutant Enemy, Fox studios and maybe various other entities that I am unaware of but totally respect and fear. This story is not meant to infringe upon anyone's rights, only to entertain.
(view previous chapters)
Chapter 2:
Technical Difficulties
London, 30 minutes ago
---
“…and so, once again, on behalf of British United Air, we would just like to reiterate how terribly sorry we are about this unfortunate delay…”
“Uh huh-”
“… and we would like to extend our most sincere sympathies, to you and your bereaved…”
“Sure, no prob-”
“… and offer you one fifty percent off the purchase price for your next flight with us…”
“That’s very nice of you, but-”
“… redeemable up to one year on all first class tickets, or eighteen months for all other accommodation levels…”
Willow Rosenberg let the clerk finish his big, fancy spiel, her eyes stabbing the clock every five syllables. When it was finally done, she grabbed the vouchers and the paperwork, stuffed them in her bag, and asked if she could see the body one last time before liftoff.
“I’m sorry, Miss Landau, but I’m afraid that’s a violation of health code.”
“Oh really,” she said, her eyes twinkling with the glamour.
The man swayed like a cobra for a few moments, while a pair of warm, invisible fingers massaged his frontal lobe. “Of course, they’re… mainly guidelines," he said. "I’m sure it... won’t be a problem… Madam Prime Minister...”
She followed her charmed escort through a set of doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only,” then slipped down a maze of identical white corridors. When they reached the meat lockers, General Apology buzzed her in with his keycard and then tottled off in a daze. Willow scanned down a row of oversized filing cabinets until she found the right name tag:
LANDAU, WILBUR 0853
She gently slid the tray out. They hadn’t packed him in a box yet, so the corpse was just lying there, sealed inside some sort of clear, plastic body-baggie. The face beneath its platinum mane was as rigid and lifeless as a doll’s.
“Ooh,” she said. “You’re good.”
One of the vamp’s eyes plinked open. “Well, you know what they say about Carnegie. Not like I ain’t had practice, pet.”
“I know. But, it’s still pretty cool.”
“Yeah, freezing is more like it,” Spike shot back. “And, by the way, some of these wankers get a bit too friendly with the merchandise, you ask me. Had half a mind to bite one, just on principal.”
“Well, good news is we’re finally outta here. Flight boards in an hour.”
“Brilliant. Three thousand miles on the Ziploc Express.” He grabbed a fistful of plastic and shook it. “You know, this is why we always take boats.”
“Aw, don’t be sad.” She dug into her jacket. “Oh, hey, you can take my phone. You could play Free Cell. Or, uh… Super Sudoku?”
Spike gave the gadget a rueful look and shook his head. “Any word yet from Team Lucky Bastards?”
“Nah. Think they’re still in the No Phone Zone.”
“Well, give them my regards, if and when.”
“Sure thing,” she said. “Look, I, uh, I really oughta get back to the gate, now. But, I’ll see you on the other side, huh?”
“Yeah. That’s what they all say.” With that, he reverted to creepy mannequin-mode. Willow patted the vampire’s arm, slid the drawer shut, and quietly slipped back out the way she came.
***
This is how it began:
The path back from the morgue turned out to be a lot twistier than Willow remembered. There was a whole Spooky Deserted Hospital vibe to this part of the airport, too; dingy walls colored white and green, the hollow air magnifying every little tick and clack into a horror movie sound effect.
And, in what was becoming a disturbing pattern lately, Willow just let the atmosphere sweep her along, like a leaf bobbing down a stream, as she was gradually taken over by a force she couldn’t name, and didn’t quite understand.
Something was broken inside Willow Rosenberg’s brain, and had been ever since the moment she awoke on a rainy rooftop in London. She consciously knew the truth of this injury; knew it so well, in fact, that even the knowledge itself was suspicious. There was no telling how deep the damage went, or when and where one of her ‘episodes’ would strike. But whenever one did, Willow was helpless to resist it. She couldn’t do anything except ride out the wave.
And this is exactly what was happening now in the labyrinth of restricted routes that traced Heathrow’s futuristic curves. An icy presence descended from the ether on the scent of urethane and citrus, and gripped Willow’s basal ganglia like a set of reins. Her surroundings acquired a certain watercolor wetness, each hard edge blotted and faded and mopped.
Willow fell out of the world again.
And something began to drive her.
{…}
…just standing there in front of a dead end, wondering where she was, and how she got there, and what the Heck.
Willow calmed herself with two deep breaths, decided to retrace her steps.
Which, problem: she hadn’t really been keeping track of her steps, so much, and the featureless walls of the administrative wing had long since given way to a grungier palette of steel and oil-stained Masonite and cracked concrete. This wasn’t the strangest place she’d woken up from one of her blackouts, but a panicked fist pounded on her heart nevertheless.
She flipped open her phone and breathed a sigh of release. Ten minutes. She’d only lost ten this time. Not enough to miss their plane. Not enough to wander very far away. This one wasn’t so bad. Just a hiccup, really. No biggie.
As she passed under a wide architrave marked ‘MAINTENANCE’, the thought occurred that there should be people back here. And not just a few of them, either. Airports these days garrisoned whole armies of grim-faced officials, their bodies bulging against sweaty white nylon, all of them desperate to "wand" her and X-ray her juice box and ask to see her papers. This was a new age, after all; the so-called Age of Terror.
If they only knew the half of it, she mused.
So, when Willow segued through the set of double doors and saw the man with the clipboard, she was filled with a weird sense of relief. He wore a yellow jumpsuit that was spattered with black gunk, and stood in the gaping mouth of a loading bay door, scribbling down notes about whatever was inside.
Deciding that folks carrying clipboards were usually a helpful bunch, Willow put on her best Little Lost Lamb face.
“Excuse me, sir? I’m a little lost...”
He didn’t seem to hear her. The expression on his profile was so chilly and bland he could’ve passed for a zombie. As soon as she thought this, she spotted the little white ear-bud, and the wire diving into his collar.
Aha, an iPod Zombie, she thought.
The worst kind…
“Um, hello,” she said, in a voice that was a little louder and annoyed-er than before. She could only go so far with whole Little Lost Lamb routine. But the guy was on another planet. She kept walking towards him and saying hi, and he just kept scribbling and staring, a glob of drool pooling in the corner of his mouth.
For whatever reason - a bad night’s sleep, or the general anxiety that followed the blackouts, or the occasional sense of weird unplugged-ness that she’d felt ever since the day she woke up on that rooftop in the rain - Willow wasn’t really putting two-and-two together yet. The neurons weren’t firing, and the ol’ synapses weren’t synap-ting.
So, despite all those keen instincts bred into her by a lifetime of near-Armageddons, Willow was almost right on top of Captain Clipboard before she saw the first of three things she was never meant to see.
She peeked over the man’s shoulder and glimpsed the following, scratched onto the clipboard in clean, precise lines:
010010010111010001101000011010010110111001101011011101000110100001100101011100100110010101100110011011110111001001100101010010010110000101101101010010010111010001101000011010010110111001101011011101000110100001100101011100100110010101100110011011110111001001100101010010010110000101101101010010010111010001101000011010010110111001101011
As soon as she saw it, an alarm bell rang off in her belly. She danced back a step and then another, and then she looked into the hangar and up at the thing that held the lunatic with the clipboard spellbound.
Sagging down between two big crane arms, the object reminded her of a monstrous artificial heart. Its platinum chassis was about twenty feet across at its widest point, and seemed to be composed of four massive steel chambers. The mouth of each was coated with a snakeskin of overlapping transponder plates that glowed amber as threads of light spiraled out from some unseen core. Set in the object’s shining center mass was a red orb. It was the size of a beach ball and ringed by black rubber grommets. The orb might have been a headlight, or an expensive lamp, or a laser diode, or an "ON" button. But she knew it wasn’t any of those things.
It was an eye.
It was looking at her.
“Oh,” said Willow. “Whoa. Wha?”
Shockingly, something answered her. It was a vaguely feminine voice; polite but cheerless, with a certain singsong-y tone that was both familiar and eerily remote.
“I’m Sorry,” it crisply announced. “I Don’t See A Record For: Owoe Wah.”
It wasn’t coming from the eye. It was coming from the phone in Willow’s pocket.
The instant the voice stopped, the clipboard guy’s head swiveled to face her. The motion was grotesque and boneless, like a flywheel on a greased spindle. One of the man’s eyes looked at her, broadcasting the same arctic intelligence as the big glowing beach ball.
The other eye was gone. Along with half of his face.
She turned. Another yellow-suited man was standing there. This one had no face at all. It had completely vanished, eaten by the same chrome cancer. A pair of arms shot forth like pistons, nearly clipping her head off.
Willow ran for her life. She zagged left at the MAINTENANCE sign, then blasted straight ahead, her blood thundering in her veins. Her brain was back in business now, and it was on ten kinds of fire.
There’s only the quick and the dead, it was telling her.
There’s only the quick and the dead…
***
Bugger, Spike thought, feeling the tray slide out again.
Morty McFingers, back for another fondle.
When the baggy was unzipped, Spike let one of his eyelids flutter open, as was wont to happen with corpses before the undertaker stitched them shut. The git was a giant milk-baby; tall and lumpy, with a face that looked a size too small for his skull. With his green rubber gloves and the white plastic bib with the sandwich crumbs down the front, he evoked all the authority and austerity of a Happy Meal toy. This time, his ears were gummed up with a pair of headphones, his shaved head bobbing to the beat of some dreadful tune the vampire could not name.
“I waaant yooooo,” the wanker sang along, “uhhnn, uhhnn, uhnnn, to do what cha dooooo, uhhn, uhhn…”
Spike was contemplating giving the bloke the scare of a lifetime when his ears picked up something slightly odd. Just under the music’s blatting surface, there came a high pitched tone, pinging along like a terrified heartbeat.
In the next instant, the man’s eyes began to shiver in their sockets, and a red line casually dropped from one nostril.
The head kept nodding to the beat for a few more measures, like a great lizard whose brain was too sluggish to register its own death. When the message finally arrived, all six feet of him erupted into violent spasms.
Spike wasted a few moments on quiet debate - for all he knew, the poor bastard could be having a stroke. Tragic, that, but Spike was no doctor.
Then, he saw the growth. It bloomed hot from each ear, splitting into silver brambles that slithered through his cheeks like iron centipedes.
Bugger, bugger, bugger…
The vampire flung off the plastic bag and flopped sideways onto the floor. The growth - the stuff, the whatever-it-was - kept going, drilling its tendrils up the bloke’s nostrils and then back out through his wide, soundless mouth. By the time Spike made it to his feet, the inspector’s big, lumpy body had stopped shaking. Its arms and legs stiffened to purpose, like a puppet at the start of the show.
The creature came for him - slowly at first, each leg like a dog trying to poke up a scent. Spike retreated calmly down a row of gurneys, straining to work out the angles before the angles worked out him.
There was a popcorn sound, and then two roiling masses of wire squirmed out from where the man’s eyes once were. But despite this grim development, the beastie didn’t seem quite blind. Spike confirmed this theory when he shoved a gurney at it, and watched one of its arms sweep it aside like a bothersome fly.
Strong, too, he thought.
Goody.
Before he could decide whether he wanted to find out how strong, the puppet made a dash at him, arms stuck straight out in front like a parody of an old Frankenstein flick. Spike rammed its face with a right cross, and then slashed a kick at its throat.
The latter maneuver suddenly reminded him he was still bloody starkers, and the momentary distraction let the doll get a good one in. Its waist spun like a factory gear, and an arm like a telephone pole slammed into the vampire’s gut. The blow sent him skidding backwards over the tiles, toppling a workbench along the way.
‘Spike,’ chimed a familiar voice inside his skull. It was Willow, doing her head-hack bit.
“Could you ring back later?” he barked, “A bit jammed up at the mo-”
‘Spike, listen. I think we’re in trouble.’
Toy Boy came waddling in for another go, its arms snapping like jaws now, and with metal claws poking out through the surgical gloves.
“Let me guess,” said Spike. “Wankers with wires stickin’ out their gobs?”
‘You’ve seen them too?’
“Yeah, you might say that.” His hand felt around for a weapon, finding purchase on a metal pipe of some sort. As the golem wound up for another strike, Spike brought the club crunching into the side of its jaw. A shower of sparks hissed back at him, and there was a noise like tires screaming on blacktop.
The thing lurched sideways a few steps, looking like it might topple over. When it righted itself, it started marching in a little circle, one forearm performing the same staccato karate chop over and over.
Spike edged around the sputtering nightmare, careful not to take his eyes off it. In the back of his brain, Willow kept asking him nonsense questions, and he kept thinking back: ‘Yeah give us a minute, love, be right with you, bit busy, pet, give us a sec’…’
When he was sure the beastie’s record was truly skipping, he went back to the slab, grabbed his boots and kit from the little canvas bags on the shelf below and then quickly stuffed himself into them.
Right, he thought. Now, where are you?
“Here,” Willow said.
Spike spun to see the woman standing in the open doorway, breathing out little cotton puffs.
“Ought to put a bell on you,” he said. But the witch ignored him, rapt by the sight of the clockwork bloke sparking and chasing his own tail. “Now, hang on… I can explain...”
“No, it’s okay. I don’t think they’re human.”
Spike was about to argue with this diagnosis, but a blaring alarm cut him short. “Bloody hell is happening?” he murmured.
“I think we should go,” Willow said. “I gotta bad feeling about this…”
***
By the time they found their way back to the terminal, a mild hysteria was seeping into the air. Small groups of soldiers jogged from gate to gate, barking code words into radios. Ashen faces gaped in confusion and mounting terror as the times listed on the flight schedules zeroed out line by line.
-- DELAYED (INDEFINITELY) --
-- DELAYED (INDEFINITELY) --
-- DELAYED (INDEFINITELY) -
Wordlessly, the witch and the vampire made their way back towards the security checkpoint. Willow walked briskly, but tried not to look like she was walking briskly. The tension in the air felt like it could snap at any moment, like the slightest pin drop could set off a stampede.
You just need to get outside, a little voice was telling her. Catch a taxi, jump a train. Just get the heck away from this place.
From that Thing…
They were about twenty paces from the checkpoint when a small commotion broke out near a carry-on scanner. The conveyor belt was overloaded and unmanned, the little plastic tubs full of laptops and purses piling up in a vaguely “I Love Lucy”-ish way. Off to one side of it, a man in an inspector uniform was doing some kind of funny dance. A leg jittered, and then an arm shot out sideways.
A trio of co-workers huddled close by. One of them was politely ordering all the ticketholders to stand back. The other two just stood there, watching the seizure unfold in quiet horror.
“Please, if you’ll just stay queued up,” the inspection agent was saying, “we’ll have you all moving again shortly…”
As if in reply, Dancin’ Man yelped out a sound that wasn’t quite human. His body listed into the frame of the metal detector, and then bent sharply at the waist in a way that looked like he drank too many daiquiris.
While his face was down there, something big began to push out through his lips. His cheeks split along a red seam to accommodate it, gunshot-quick, and then the thing inside his mouth curled out like a metal snake.
All the sound dropped out of the world for a moment. The gruesome periscope twisted to face the crowd.
The pin dropped.
Amidst the screaming chaos, one of the soldiers Willow had seen earlier crept into view. He seemed to be about twenty years old. The pose he struck looked weirdly impotent, standing a dozen yards away with his machine gun’s nose aimed forcefully at the ground, his mouth a soundless O. This sort of "terror" wasn’t in the training manual, apparently.
Dancin’ Man didn’t seem to care. As he wobbled towards his prey, two more chrome-plated tentacles squeezed out of the ruined hole that used to be his mouth, the face around it bursting like overripe fruit.
“Stay where you are!” the Soldier Boy shrieked. And when that didn’t happen, he sprayed the creature with bullets, their reports barking around the massive terminal like war drums.
But the puppet didn't mind. It kept coming and coming.
And, looking at it, Willow suddenly knew: it would never stop.
Spike roared into action, tackling the monster at the last possible moment. It didn’t matter. Screams were ringing out from a dozen hotspots, now, punctuated by more gunfire.
While Spike fought Dancin’ Man, snapping the mouth-snake with his hands - while the alarms blazed and the pristine, civilized world of 21st century transatlantic air travel plunged into total chaos - Willow somehow found herself reaching for her phone.
“Hey Buffy,” she said…
{…}
“…ill! Oy! Earth to bloody Willow!”
She looked up at Spike, and realized that he’d been shaking her. They were standing on a crowded platform. Throngs of people streamed past, trying to jam themselves and all their bags into the cars of a shuttle train that didn’t look like it was going anywhere anytime soon. Spike yanked her along by the arm, towards the patch of dark sky at the open end of the yard.
They hewed close to the rails for fifty yards or so, then made a hard right, scrambling up a short embankment like a pair of wolves. Spike seemed to be moving on pure instinct, his eyes mechanically chopping at the scenery, no breath coming out of him.
Several minutes passed before he spoke again. “There,” he said.
From their position on the hill, they could see the east side of the terminal and a large sprawl of tarmac littered with grounded planes.
“Yeah, I don’t think those are taking off anytime soon,” she said.
“No, there.”
She followed his finger to a small loop of asphalt guarded by a checkpoint. A three-lane access road spiraled down into the earth, then vanished sharply into the mouth of a tunnel.
“Cargo tunnel,” Spike explained. “It’s how they load parcels in and out. When they built this place, they hadn’t planned on every tosser and his auntie driving to the sodding airport. So they had to dig this.”
“Right. Gotcha.”
Willow's eyes picked out a handful of trucks idling at the bottom of the exit ramp, probably already cleared to go. Miraculously there were only a handful of guards hanging around, just shuffling back and forth in a daze. Thanks to her latest blackout, she was a little fuzzy on how much time had passed since Dancin' Man made his gory debut. But Heathrow was a big place, and these guys didn’t seem to have much of a clue about what was going on just yet.
“So, what’s the plan?”
Spike scowled. “Well, normally I’d say let’s just make a bloody break for it. But maybe you could do a little… you know.” He waggled his fingers.
Willow nodded and got down to business. She settled on a big diesel-lookin’ badboy parked neared the inspection checkpoint. Without thinking twice about it, she spun out a strand of her astral body like a fisherman’s line. It pierced the truck's hood, and an army of invisible claws immediately began groping for purchase down in the engine's guts.
The vehicle awoke as though from a violent dream; headlights blaring, horn blasting, gas firing into its rubber veins. When it rammed the gate, the guards all lept at it reflexively. “Whoa ho ho ho,” one of them shouted.
In the next heartbeat, Willow and Spike were racing down into the bowl, aiming for the last car on the tunnel's ramp. It was a big orange van with double doors in the back instead of a flap. Willow sensed Spike was about to do this part the loud way, rip his way inside all Hulky-like. So, she quickly spun out another line, keying open the lock with a dull little thunk. Spike whipped the left door open and then they were climbing in and then they were in and then the door plinked closed, all in two seconds. They were both pretty fast when they needed to be.
They hunched there in total darkness for about a minute, listening as the sputtering voices outside gradually died down. Then the van’s engine hummed to life and they were on their way. Willow grabbed a seat on what felt like a big cardboard box. A few feet in front of her, she heard a crash and a thump, followed by the sound of rustling plastic.
“Bollocks.”
“What?”
“Ding Dongs.”
“What?”
Spike flicked on his lighter and held up a squished pack of pastries. “Ding Dongs,” he said. “How’s that for a bloody omen?”
Willow blew out an uneasy breath. “Yeah, well, the witch ain’t dead yet,” she muttered.
***
They ditched the van at a petrol station just east of Reading, the place where the Berkshire foothills fanged into the Thames flood plain. Willow tapped away at her little phone the whole ride, trying to get the skinny on the Heathrow mess. From the sound of it, the wanker brigade at 10 Downing had the lid screwed down tight on this one. Bits about a terrorist scare made the telly, along with the usual sob stories of delayed flights and stranded travelers. Nil about hot-wired robot zombies with exploding heads.
Normally he’d recommend they burrow down for the evening, but now Spike was more anxious than ever to get his ticket punched out of Jolly Old. Portsmouth was ideal; with a bit of luck and a lax interpretation of the traffic laws they could make it with time to spare.
In that spirit, he nicked the greasiest set of wheels he laid eyes on: an aftermarket Aston Martin, the color of liquid mercury. While Red tweaked the driver’s spirit of generosity with a bit of the old Hocus Po’, Spike gave the carriage a grunting assessment, one finger gliding across her slinky cambers.
As soon as Willow packed into the passenger seat, he peeled the hell out of there, tipping the car south onto the A33 and gunning the engine hard. The witch clicked and booped her gadget for directions, but Spike didn’t need them. He hardly even needed to look at the signs. It was all coming back to him now.
Willow worked out their new travel arrangements on the ride down. It only took her little hacker fingers about ten minutes to sort it, which to Spike seemed sodding unfair. Working his way onto a ship’s manifest had always been a painstaking process for him, requiring a certain forethought and attention to detail that the vampire was usually loathe to supply. As long as nothing else went busto, they could hitch a ride in the belly of a Silver Line panamax, bound for New York harbor. All at once, six hours had blossomed into eight days.
Eight days, he thought again, conjuring her in his poor, buggered brains. At least eight, if nothing else goes busto.
Small chance of that, eh love?
Chapter 3: The City That Never Shuts the Hell Up