A Hunter's Guide to Zombies and Guns . Ch 12 . BTVS/SPN . Road to Morning .
Author: Faithunbreakable/ pprfaith
Title: A Hunter's Guide to Zombies and Guns - Chapter 12
Series: Road to Morning Series.
Rating: R
Summary: There are zombies close by. And they seem to have an agenda.
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Beta: Unbetaed from here on in. I think.
A/N: I have nothing to say. That is noteworthy.
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Twelve
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The men stood in front of the closed gates of the cemetery, staring inside through the gaps in the wrought iron while Buffy was keeping a look out for anyone that might take a stroll past a cemetery shortly after midnight and find them doing things that were probably illegal and certainly traumatizing.
“I don’t see any place that’d make for a good trap,” Sam supplied eventually, staring at the modern gravestones and the plain, somewhat ratty and brown grass that made up the entire place. No old mausoleums, no crypts, nothing.
“I do,” Buffy offered and they all turned to face the way she was, down the road. She pointed to the building directly next to the cemetery wordlessly. It was an old office building, maybe a municipal building, caught somewhere between use and disuse. The padlocked chain link fence around the entire area said it was empty, as did the overgrown flowerbeds out front. But there were no graffiti, no broken windows, no vandalism at all.
The place probably hadn’t been shut down for very long. And it shared the cemetery’s low stone wall. It was obvious, which meant it was probably the right place. A trap wasn’t very useful if the mice couldn’t find it. Dean didn’t seem convinced.
“You sure?” he asked, hitching the duffel he was carrying higher on his shoulder.
The blonde didn’t answer verbally, pointing instead toward the far side of the building. Victor looked closer and thought he could make out a soft golden shine coming from one of the basement windows.
“Might be squatters,” Dean supplied, apparently having decided to play devil’s advocate.
“Might be someone raising zombies in order to lure us into a deadly trap,” Sam shot back, in the same tone of voice.
“Around the cemetery and in from the back, I think,” Buffy said when Dean just glowered, out of arguments. “There’s enough shrubbery there to give us some cover and we’d be off the street.” She paused, crinkled her nose cutely and then said, “You know, I never had to do this kind of thing when I was solo.”
“Break into abandoned buildings to fight necromancers?” Victor asked.
“Make plans of attack,” she corrected before wordlessly picking up her own bag and starting to walk along the outer wall of the cemetery. The others followed, all four of them blending into the night seamlessly, except for a mop of a blonde hair. They hiked around the cemetery, staying out of sight of the street and the building as much as possible until they reached the chain link fence again, this time from the other side.
“Need a boost?” Victor asked as they came to a halt at the edge of the trees adjacent to the property from this side.
Buffy, who he’d been talking to, stopped eying the eight foot fence in favor of looking at him. “You’re adorable,” she informed him before unzipping her bag and pulling out the monster she called a scythe. She twirled it once, grinned at the boys and offered a quick, “See you on the flip side.”
Then she took a few running steps toward the fence before jumping straight up, clearing the top of the fence like it was knee high instead of almost twice as tall as her. She landed on her feet on the other side, knees bending to absorb the momentum and fell into a crouch, her weapon angled behind her so as not to catch any light.
Since neither Sam nor Dean seemed surprised or, in fact, even impressed, Victor tried to pick his jaw off the ground and pretend stuff like this happened every day. But then those damn Winchesters took their turn. They flung their bags over the fence first and then took a few more steps back than Buffy had, running at it like she had. They didn’t clear the fence, but they reached the top with their hands and held on, swinging their legs across first, more or less doing a handstand at the top of the fence. They landed soundlessly less than seven seconds after their bags and crouched down, too, going still and almost invisible.
Victor felt like the fat kid toddling after the rest of his class, wheezing and sweating. He was getting too old for shit like this, damn it. Too old, and gone a bit soft from too much paper work. Most of which had been caused by none other than the brothers on the other side of that damn fence. With an inaudible growl, the former fed threw his bag over, too, and then climbed the fence like the mortal man he was, using hands and feet and taking more than three seconds. At least he didn’t get caught in the wire. That would have been embarrassing.
“The place is swarming with zombies,” Buffy said, as soon as he reached them.
“How can you tell?”
“Extra sense. Apparently, whoever’s doing this kept them around after all, once they’d done their job. There’s at least fifty in there, on all floors.”
“We go in on the first floor, we’ve got them on all sides,” Dean stated the obvious.
“If we go in from the roof, we give whoever’s down there a lot of time to prepare,” Sam argued, pointing at the basement windows, which looked brighter from this side of the building.
“I’d rather have an exit than a surprise,” Dean shot back gamely.
Sam sighed. “Buff?”
“I’d rather have an exit.”
“Vic?”
Victor, startled at actually getting a vote, took a moment to consider both options. “Exit,” he finally voted, utterly unwilling to have rotting undead at his back. After watching Dean take down that first zombie and almost puking his guts out at the entire affair, he was still mildly puzzled over what the hell he was doing here. Exit. He definitely wanted an exit.
“Roof it is,” Sam conceded and, without further discussion, all four of them headed for the fire escape at the right hand corner of the wall they were facing. Despite the stairs being rickety and rusty, the managed to keep the noise down fairly well as they climbed their way onto the roof, where everyone but Buffy finally unpacked their bags.
Victor pulled out a flame thrower. He very much did not want to know where Dean had gotten it from at such short notice but he suspected it was going to be his new best friend shortly. Zombies, he had learned, did not only die from headshots. They also burned very well. Sam and Dean geared up with knives, shotguns, their regular handguns and a lot of spare ammo. Buffy watched the roof entrance and kept twirling her monster weapon absentmindedly by her side so fast that Victor swore he could hear the blade sing.
The more he learned about the woman, the more he understood why the Winchesters lived in fear of her wrath. Scary chick, that one. Scary and damn capable of killing them all.
They abandoned whatever they wouldn’t need on the rooftop. If everything went right, they’d come back for it later and if not, they wouldn’t really worry about a few bags with nothing in them because they’d be dead.
Lovely prospects, those.
Once they were all ready, they stood behind Buffy, automatically falling in place with the brothers on either side of, and Victor behind her.
“Amulets?” she asked them, looking at each of them in turn. They all nodded. “Good.”
She turned back toward the door and raised one foot. “Let’s go fry ourselves some dead meat, then.”
She kicked down the door with a resounding bang and caught it on its return swing with one hand, already halfway into the stairwell. The men followed her inside and down a short spiral of stairs and into a carpeted hallway that looked like it had seen better days. Sam and Dean ducked into the first rooms on either side of the hallway, coming back a moment later to announce that they were clear. Buffy and Victor took the next two rooms. Victor’s contained a broken down desk, a few filing cabinets with missing drawers and a load of loose papers. Nothing dangerous. Nothing that wanted to eat his brains.
With adrenaline thrumming through his veins, finding nothing was almost annoying. He eased his fingers off the flame thrower’s throttle, forcing himself to relax. Setting the place on fire because he had pre-fight jitters wasn’t going to help. He slipped out of the room, announced the clear and watched the brothers take the next couple of rooms, letting the familiar pattern of a sweep calm his nerves.
Again and again and again, they moved through all twenty rooms on the floor and found nothing worth killing. Not even rodents, which seemed ominous but wasn’t actually a surprise. If he were a rat, Victor wouldn’t want to share breathing space with a bunch of zombies either.
Then they hit the end of the hallway and figured out why the floor was clear. The doors leading to the stairs were padlocked shut. Apparently, zombies lacked the mental capacity or the dexterity to pick locks. The fact that they could have easily broken through the flimsy wooden doors surrounding the padlocked handles indicated the former rather than the latter.
“Quietly?” Buffy asked, eyeing the doors’ hinges.
Dean shrugged. “What for? You kicked in the last one already.”
“Mhm,” she said, and with a shrug, turned the doors into kindling. They stepped through the wreckage and toward the stairs and, finally, there was sound. Heavy steps coming up the stairs, someone walking on feet that didn’t quite do what the owner wanted them to do anymore.
The zombie had once been a redheaded woman and Victor recognized her from the newspapers he had studied. Her name was Marcy. He pushed the thought, along with the initial wave of bile, away. Her name wasn’t Marcy anymore. It had been, but Marcy was dead. This was just her body.
Her body, used as a tool to draw in the Winchesters and Buffy. To draw them in and kill them. A tool. Nothing but a tool. Thinking that helped.
Not-Marcy was followed by half a dozen other shuffling corpses come to investigate the noises. The snail’s pace at which they moved explained why they hadn’t reached the second floor earlier. From the looks and the smell - Jesus, the smell - all of them had been dead a while. One, a burly guy with a bald patch, was missing most of his left arm, waving the stump uselessly in the air.
Dean took a hand off his gun to wave back and grin brightly at the zombie. Then he shot the thing point blank in the face. What might have once been brains splattered all over Bald Patch’s companions, but they didn’t react at all.
And then the zombies collided with the humans and the fight was on. Buffy chopped off the first hand that reached for her and buried her scythe in the forehead of the one attacking her. On either side of her, Sam and Dean were shooting, taking down one zombie after another. Victor finally understood why Dean kept making fun of the whole thing. The brothers’ aim was true and the zombies were too slow to pose any sort of challenge.
Then Buffy ducked away from a wide swing with a disgusted look on her face and Victor took the chance to blast a wave of fire directly into the zombie’s face. It screamed and stumbled around for a moment before dropping to the ground in a smoldering heap.
The stench was hair-curling.
Flambé zombie was the last one, but only of the first group. While they’d dispatched of the seven zombies that made up the welcoming committee, more had flooded the landing, and these didn’t look quite as… dissembled as the first ones. One of them, a teenage boy, looked pretty much alive, except for the sickly grey color of his… its skin and an obviously broken arm.
It shot at Buffy with surprising speed and she greeted it with the stake end of her weapon, spearing it and shoving it backwards into its buddies. She used the space that gained her to swing around and decapitate the zombie. Once the head hit the floor, Dean put a bullet it in.
Then the rest of the group reached them and there really wasn’t time to watch the others anymore. Sam and Dean kept shooting calmly, regularly, bang, bang, bang, and Victor picked off any zombies that managed to slip around the other three, keeping their exit clear. Buffy chopped and hacked and sliced her way through the masses, getting closer and closer to the stairs.
But the advance was slow and, with half a mind, Victor noted that the bang, bang, bang was starting to slow down as the zombies overwhelmed them by sheer numbers. They were coming too close to shoot at properly.
During a free moment, Victor saw that Sam had abandoned his gun entirely in favor of two curved knives, while Dean was using his gun one-handedly, a hunting knife in his other.
Buffy was still slicing and Victor made it his job to burn the heads she dropped, since the bodies kept moving until the heads were truly destroyed. And, yeah, he wasn’t thinking too hard about what exactly he was doing, thanks a lot.
They reached the stairs finally, with a good twenty zombies already down, their bodies hindering movement every which way. Forward was the only way to go.
The stairs were too narrow for more than two people, so Dean squeezed in next to Buffy and they proceeded to mostly kick their way down. Every time a zombie came within range, they’d kick it back into the masses below and gain another few steps.
Dean could have shot them and Sam could have provided cover fire over their heads, but they needed to be careful not to pick off too many of the undead foot soldiers.
They hit the first floor in a swarm of zombies, all of them coming in at once and Victor was caught in a bottleneck, unable to move forward and unable to use his flame thrower.
He didn’t like it, but he knew it was intentional. He spent the next few minutes mostly watching as the other three took down another ten zombies, getting progressively more overwhelmed until Dean shouted, “Shit, I’m out,” and spun sideways, leaving himself wide open.
Victor called a warning, but it was too late. Two zombies latched onto the older Winchester, immobilizing both his arms. His cry of outrage startled Sam, who got brained over the head and landed on his knees with a jarring crack. By the time he stopped seeing stars, four zombies were riding him down. Dean, too, was almost buried under rotting corpses. Buffy kept slicing and Victor fried two more before the crowd of zombies suddenly parted and an elderly man in a strict suit appeared, smiling benignly.
“Slayer,” he greeted, eyes flashing to black, making Victor think great, those guys again. “Put down your weapon or your friends will die.”
Buffy dropped her scythe without a second’s hesitation and Victor followed suit.
The demon wearing the nice, elderly man smiled. “Good,” it drawled, its vowels too lazy and round for this region. Foreign. The demon was overriding the man it was wearing. That, almost as much as the smell of the zombies surrounding them, made Victor sick. “Restrain them,” the demon ordered and the zombies fell on Buffy and Victor like locusts, weighing down their limbs with little finesse. It didn’t matter through. They had numbers on their side.
The demon spun smartly on its heel and made a small come hither motion. “This way, please,” it requested in a mockery of hospitality. Then it started leading the way down the next flight of stairs. Into the basement.
Victor exchanged a look with Dean, who made a show of struggling against the zombies hanging off him like limpets.
So far, so good.
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They stopped at the foot of the stairs in the basement and the demon peeked through a heavy fire door, waving for someone to come outside. They were joined a moment later by another man, this one younger, but just as smartly dressed, and looking very similar to the old man. Father and son, Victor thought, snatched away by demons.
He wondered if their family was still alive. The younger man’s eyes flashed black as soon as the demon inside lay eyes on them and a wicked smile curved its stolen mouth. The demon in the old man pulled a rag from a jacket pocket and handed it to the other one. “The red weapon, upstairs. Don’t touch it.”
Victor didn’t think either of the demons noticed Buffy’s eyes widen, but he sure did and he didn’t like it. At all. These guys seemed to know too much and, it seemed, about Buffy, not the Winchesters, as they’d assumed.
The younger demon nodded and squeezed past them, grinning, skull-like and hungry. The older one waved a hand and tittered a fake laugh. “Today’s youth. No… finesse,” it informed them conversationally.
Buffy giggled right back. “I can take care of that for you, if you want me to. A little slice, a little dice…” she trailed off with a dreamy sigh before dropping the act abruptly. “Get on with it already. That body of yours looks like it might just die of old age otherwise.”
The gentleman mask dropped fast and the demon snarled at them, utterly inhuman. Neither the blonde nor the brothers flinched as it got right in their faces.
But then, as suddenly as it had lost control, the demon regained it and smiled pleasantly again. Fucking creepy. It pushed the firedoor open and stepped inside, motioning again for them to follow.
The room must have once been used for filing, as there were cabinets piled high in one corner, but now it certainly served a different purpose. The entire room had been cleared, except for a table at the center. It was covered in black fabric, with candles and goblets and all kinds of occult objects placed on top of it. It looked like a prop from a B-movie set about witchcraft. Hell, the candles were black.
Beside Victor, Dean snorted, obviously amused by the… ambience. “Now that’s just cliché,” he announced with a smirk. The demon flicked a hand and one of the zombies punched the brother in the stomach for being a smartass.
He gave a short grunt of pain and sagged in his captors’ arms, seemingly winded. Sam lunged toward him and got sucker punched, too, for his efforts. He, too, wheezed and went to his knees. Only Victor and Buffy were left standing and both of them jerked to the left when someone in the shadows suddenly started clapping. Victor squinted, trying to see in the dark, but Buffy seemed to have no such problem. She was looking right at the spot where, a moment later, a young woman in tight leather pants and a skimpy black top appeared. Her hair was fire-engine red, her lips painted to match. She looked like goth gone stripper and the smile on her face was bordering on deranged. It went well with her black eyes.
Victor was starting to see a pattern here. Apparently, demons, as a general rule, were a few marbles short. He would have called that surprising but, yeah, really not. The younger man came back then, carefully handling the scythe, the rag it’d been given wrapped around its hand. It dropped the weapon at the foot of the pseudo Satanist altar and retreated quickly. The woman’s smile grew brighter.
“Now, isn’t this nice?” She….it,… damn it, it, drawled.
“Peachy,” Buffy agreed, sending back a short but chilling smile.
“I mean,” the demon went on, stalking toward them, hips swaying, “this is just….,” it changed direction, walking to the altar, stepping over the scythe carefully. “You walked right into my trap. I really sort of expected better from you. I mean, the boys,” it trailed a hand along the edge of the table, then leaned against it, arms crossed over an ample chest. “The boys should know better. We’ve done this before, haven’t we, boys?”
It looked at Sam and Dean expectantly. Dean sighed dramatically and offered a flat, “Meg.”
The demon clapped. “Very nice. You figured it out! Good doggie!”
He rolled his eyes. “Seriously? How many times do we have to send your skinny ass back to the pit, you bitch?”
It made a cooing sound before turning to Sam, waving. He simply glared, refusing to talk to it. Meg. Victor wondered if that was the demon’s actual name. He knew better than to ask though. For the moment, no-one paid much attention to him.
The demon turned back to Buffy, apparently done with the brothers. “And you,” it said, “I really thought you could do better, Guardian.”
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Title: A Hunter's Guide to Zombies and Guns - Chapter 12
Series: Road to Morning Series.
Rating: R
Summary: There are zombies close by. And they seem to have an agenda.
Disclaimer: I do not own.
Beta: Unbetaed from here on in. I think.
A/N: I have nothing to say. That is noteworthy.
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Twelve
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The men stood in front of the closed gates of the cemetery, staring inside through the gaps in the wrought iron while Buffy was keeping a look out for anyone that might take a stroll past a cemetery shortly after midnight and find them doing things that were probably illegal and certainly traumatizing.
“I don’t see any place that’d make for a good trap,” Sam supplied eventually, staring at the modern gravestones and the plain, somewhat ratty and brown grass that made up the entire place. No old mausoleums, no crypts, nothing.
“I do,” Buffy offered and they all turned to face the way she was, down the road. She pointed to the building directly next to the cemetery wordlessly. It was an old office building, maybe a municipal building, caught somewhere between use and disuse. The padlocked chain link fence around the entire area said it was empty, as did the overgrown flowerbeds out front. But there were no graffiti, no broken windows, no vandalism at all.
The place probably hadn’t been shut down for very long. And it shared the cemetery’s low stone wall. It was obvious, which meant it was probably the right place. A trap wasn’t very useful if the mice couldn’t find it. Dean didn’t seem convinced.
“You sure?” he asked, hitching the duffel he was carrying higher on his shoulder.
The blonde didn’t answer verbally, pointing instead toward the far side of the building. Victor looked closer and thought he could make out a soft golden shine coming from one of the basement windows.
“Might be squatters,” Dean supplied, apparently having decided to play devil’s advocate.
“Might be someone raising zombies in order to lure us into a deadly trap,” Sam shot back, in the same tone of voice.
“Around the cemetery and in from the back, I think,” Buffy said when Dean just glowered, out of arguments. “There’s enough shrubbery there to give us some cover and we’d be off the street.” She paused, crinkled her nose cutely and then said, “You know, I never had to do this kind of thing when I was solo.”
“Break into abandoned buildings to fight necromancers?” Victor asked.
“Make plans of attack,” she corrected before wordlessly picking up her own bag and starting to walk along the outer wall of the cemetery. The others followed, all four of them blending into the night seamlessly, except for a mop of a blonde hair. They hiked around the cemetery, staying out of sight of the street and the building as much as possible until they reached the chain link fence again, this time from the other side.
“Need a boost?” Victor asked as they came to a halt at the edge of the trees adjacent to the property from this side.
Buffy, who he’d been talking to, stopped eying the eight foot fence in favor of looking at him. “You’re adorable,” she informed him before unzipping her bag and pulling out the monster she called a scythe. She twirled it once, grinned at the boys and offered a quick, “See you on the flip side.”
Then she took a few running steps toward the fence before jumping straight up, clearing the top of the fence like it was knee high instead of almost twice as tall as her. She landed on her feet on the other side, knees bending to absorb the momentum and fell into a crouch, her weapon angled behind her so as not to catch any light.
Since neither Sam nor Dean seemed surprised or, in fact, even impressed, Victor tried to pick his jaw off the ground and pretend stuff like this happened every day. But then those damn Winchesters took their turn. They flung their bags over the fence first and then took a few more steps back than Buffy had, running at it like she had. They didn’t clear the fence, but they reached the top with their hands and held on, swinging their legs across first, more or less doing a handstand at the top of the fence. They landed soundlessly less than seven seconds after their bags and crouched down, too, going still and almost invisible.
Victor felt like the fat kid toddling after the rest of his class, wheezing and sweating. He was getting too old for shit like this, damn it. Too old, and gone a bit soft from too much paper work. Most of which had been caused by none other than the brothers on the other side of that damn fence. With an inaudible growl, the former fed threw his bag over, too, and then climbed the fence like the mortal man he was, using hands and feet and taking more than three seconds. At least he didn’t get caught in the wire. That would have been embarrassing.
“The place is swarming with zombies,” Buffy said, as soon as he reached them.
“How can you tell?”
“Extra sense. Apparently, whoever’s doing this kept them around after all, once they’d done their job. There’s at least fifty in there, on all floors.”
“We go in on the first floor, we’ve got them on all sides,” Dean stated the obvious.
“If we go in from the roof, we give whoever’s down there a lot of time to prepare,” Sam argued, pointing at the basement windows, which looked brighter from this side of the building.
“I’d rather have an exit than a surprise,” Dean shot back gamely.
Sam sighed. “Buff?”
“I’d rather have an exit.”
“Vic?”
Victor, startled at actually getting a vote, took a moment to consider both options. “Exit,” he finally voted, utterly unwilling to have rotting undead at his back. After watching Dean take down that first zombie and almost puking his guts out at the entire affair, he was still mildly puzzled over what the hell he was doing here. Exit. He definitely wanted an exit.
“Roof it is,” Sam conceded and, without further discussion, all four of them headed for the fire escape at the right hand corner of the wall they were facing. Despite the stairs being rickety and rusty, the managed to keep the noise down fairly well as they climbed their way onto the roof, where everyone but Buffy finally unpacked their bags.
Victor pulled out a flame thrower. He very much did not want to know where Dean had gotten it from at such short notice but he suspected it was going to be his new best friend shortly. Zombies, he had learned, did not only die from headshots. They also burned very well. Sam and Dean geared up with knives, shotguns, their regular handguns and a lot of spare ammo. Buffy watched the roof entrance and kept twirling her monster weapon absentmindedly by her side so fast that Victor swore he could hear the blade sing.
The more he learned about the woman, the more he understood why the Winchesters lived in fear of her wrath. Scary chick, that one. Scary and damn capable of killing them all.
They abandoned whatever they wouldn’t need on the rooftop. If everything went right, they’d come back for it later and if not, they wouldn’t really worry about a few bags with nothing in them because they’d be dead.
Lovely prospects, those.
Once they were all ready, they stood behind Buffy, automatically falling in place with the brothers on either side of, and Victor behind her.
“Amulets?” she asked them, looking at each of them in turn. They all nodded. “Good.”
She turned back toward the door and raised one foot. “Let’s go fry ourselves some dead meat, then.”
She kicked down the door with a resounding bang and caught it on its return swing with one hand, already halfway into the stairwell. The men followed her inside and down a short spiral of stairs and into a carpeted hallway that looked like it had seen better days. Sam and Dean ducked into the first rooms on either side of the hallway, coming back a moment later to announce that they were clear. Buffy and Victor took the next two rooms. Victor’s contained a broken down desk, a few filing cabinets with missing drawers and a load of loose papers. Nothing dangerous. Nothing that wanted to eat his brains.
With adrenaline thrumming through his veins, finding nothing was almost annoying. He eased his fingers off the flame thrower’s throttle, forcing himself to relax. Setting the place on fire because he had pre-fight jitters wasn’t going to help. He slipped out of the room, announced the clear and watched the brothers take the next couple of rooms, letting the familiar pattern of a sweep calm his nerves.
Again and again and again, they moved through all twenty rooms on the floor and found nothing worth killing. Not even rodents, which seemed ominous but wasn’t actually a surprise. If he were a rat, Victor wouldn’t want to share breathing space with a bunch of zombies either.
Then they hit the end of the hallway and figured out why the floor was clear. The doors leading to the stairs were padlocked shut. Apparently, zombies lacked the mental capacity or the dexterity to pick locks. The fact that they could have easily broken through the flimsy wooden doors surrounding the padlocked handles indicated the former rather than the latter.
“Quietly?” Buffy asked, eyeing the doors’ hinges.
Dean shrugged. “What for? You kicked in the last one already.”
“Mhm,” she said, and with a shrug, turned the doors into kindling. They stepped through the wreckage and toward the stairs and, finally, there was sound. Heavy steps coming up the stairs, someone walking on feet that didn’t quite do what the owner wanted them to do anymore.
The zombie had once been a redheaded woman and Victor recognized her from the newspapers he had studied. Her name was Marcy. He pushed the thought, along with the initial wave of bile, away. Her name wasn’t Marcy anymore. It had been, but Marcy was dead. This was just her body.
Her body, used as a tool to draw in the Winchesters and Buffy. To draw them in and kill them. A tool. Nothing but a tool. Thinking that helped.
Not-Marcy was followed by half a dozen other shuffling corpses come to investigate the noises. The snail’s pace at which they moved explained why they hadn’t reached the second floor earlier. From the looks and the smell - Jesus, the smell - all of them had been dead a while. One, a burly guy with a bald patch, was missing most of his left arm, waving the stump uselessly in the air.
Dean took a hand off his gun to wave back and grin brightly at the zombie. Then he shot the thing point blank in the face. What might have once been brains splattered all over Bald Patch’s companions, but they didn’t react at all.
And then the zombies collided with the humans and the fight was on. Buffy chopped off the first hand that reached for her and buried her scythe in the forehead of the one attacking her. On either side of her, Sam and Dean were shooting, taking down one zombie after another. Victor finally understood why Dean kept making fun of the whole thing. The brothers’ aim was true and the zombies were too slow to pose any sort of challenge.
Then Buffy ducked away from a wide swing with a disgusted look on her face and Victor took the chance to blast a wave of fire directly into the zombie’s face. It screamed and stumbled around for a moment before dropping to the ground in a smoldering heap.
The stench was hair-curling.
Flambé zombie was the last one, but only of the first group. While they’d dispatched of the seven zombies that made up the welcoming committee, more had flooded the landing, and these didn’t look quite as… dissembled as the first ones. One of them, a teenage boy, looked pretty much alive, except for the sickly grey color of his… its skin and an obviously broken arm.
It shot at Buffy with surprising speed and she greeted it with the stake end of her weapon, spearing it and shoving it backwards into its buddies. She used the space that gained her to swing around and decapitate the zombie. Once the head hit the floor, Dean put a bullet it in.
Then the rest of the group reached them and there really wasn’t time to watch the others anymore. Sam and Dean kept shooting calmly, regularly, bang, bang, bang, and Victor picked off any zombies that managed to slip around the other three, keeping their exit clear. Buffy chopped and hacked and sliced her way through the masses, getting closer and closer to the stairs.
But the advance was slow and, with half a mind, Victor noted that the bang, bang, bang was starting to slow down as the zombies overwhelmed them by sheer numbers. They were coming too close to shoot at properly.
During a free moment, Victor saw that Sam had abandoned his gun entirely in favor of two curved knives, while Dean was using his gun one-handedly, a hunting knife in his other.
Buffy was still slicing and Victor made it his job to burn the heads she dropped, since the bodies kept moving until the heads were truly destroyed. And, yeah, he wasn’t thinking too hard about what exactly he was doing, thanks a lot.
They reached the stairs finally, with a good twenty zombies already down, their bodies hindering movement every which way. Forward was the only way to go.
The stairs were too narrow for more than two people, so Dean squeezed in next to Buffy and they proceeded to mostly kick their way down. Every time a zombie came within range, they’d kick it back into the masses below and gain another few steps.
Dean could have shot them and Sam could have provided cover fire over their heads, but they needed to be careful not to pick off too many of the undead foot soldiers.
They hit the first floor in a swarm of zombies, all of them coming in at once and Victor was caught in a bottleneck, unable to move forward and unable to use his flame thrower.
He didn’t like it, but he knew it was intentional. He spent the next few minutes mostly watching as the other three took down another ten zombies, getting progressively more overwhelmed until Dean shouted, “Shit, I’m out,” and spun sideways, leaving himself wide open.
Victor called a warning, but it was too late. Two zombies latched onto the older Winchester, immobilizing both his arms. His cry of outrage startled Sam, who got brained over the head and landed on his knees with a jarring crack. By the time he stopped seeing stars, four zombies were riding him down. Dean, too, was almost buried under rotting corpses. Buffy kept slicing and Victor fried two more before the crowd of zombies suddenly parted and an elderly man in a strict suit appeared, smiling benignly.
“Slayer,” he greeted, eyes flashing to black, making Victor think great, those guys again. “Put down your weapon or your friends will die.”
Buffy dropped her scythe without a second’s hesitation and Victor followed suit.
The demon wearing the nice, elderly man smiled. “Good,” it drawled, its vowels too lazy and round for this region. Foreign. The demon was overriding the man it was wearing. That, almost as much as the smell of the zombies surrounding them, made Victor sick. “Restrain them,” the demon ordered and the zombies fell on Buffy and Victor like locusts, weighing down their limbs with little finesse. It didn’t matter through. They had numbers on their side.
The demon spun smartly on its heel and made a small come hither motion. “This way, please,” it requested in a mockery of hospitality. Then it started leading the way down the next flight of stairs. Into the basement.
Victor exchanged a look with Dean, who made a show of struggling against the zombies hanging off him like limpets.
So far, so good.
+
They stopped at the foot of the stairs in the basement and the demon peeked through a heavy fire door, waving for someone to come outside. They were joined a moment later by another man, this one younger, but just as smartly dressed, and looking very similar to the old man. Father and son, Victor thought, snatched away by demons.
He wondered if their family was still alive. The younger man’s eyes flashed black as soon as the demon inside lay eyes on them and a wicked smile curved its stolen mouth. The demon in the old man pulled a rag from a jacket pocket and handed it to the other one. “The red weapon, upstairs. Don’t touch it.”
Victor didn’t think either of the demons noticed Buffy’s eyes widen, but he sure did and he didn’t like it. At all. These guys seemed to know too much and, it seemed, about Buffy, not the Winchesters, as they’d assumed.
The younger demon nodded and squeezed past them, grinning, skull-like and hungry. The older one waved a hand and tittered a fake laugh. “Today’s youth. No… finesse,” it informed them conversationally.
Buffy giggled right back. “I can take care of that for you, if you want me to. A little slice, a little dice…” she trailed off with a dreamy sigh before dropping the act abruptly. “Get on with it already. That body of yours looks like it might just die of old age otherwise.”
The gentleman mask dropped fast and the demon snarled at them, utterly inhuman. Neither the blonde nor the brothers flinched as it got right in their faces.
But then, as suddenly as it had lost control, the demon regained it and smiled pleasantly again. Fucking creepy. It pushed the firedoor open and stepped inside, motioning again for them to follow.
The room must have once been used for filing, as there were cabinets piled high in one corner, but now it certainly served a different purpose. The entire room had been cleared, except for a table at the center. It was covered in black fabric, with candles and goblets and all kinds of occult objects placed on top of it. It looked like a prop from a B-movie set about witchcraft. Hell, the candles were black.
Beside Victor, Dean snorted, obviously amused by the… ambience. “Now that’s just cliché,” he announced with a smirk. The demon flicked a hand and one of the zombies punched the brother in the stomach for being a smartass.
He gave a short grunt of pain and sagged in his captors’ arms, seemingly winded. Sam lunged toward him and got sucker punched, too, for his efforts. He, too, wheezed and went to his knees. Only Victor and Buffy were left standing and both of them jerked to the left when someone in the shadows suddenly started clapping. Victor squinted, trying to see in the dark, but Buffy seemed to have no such problem. She was looking right at the spot where, a moment later, a young woman in tight leather pants and a skimpy black top appeared. Her hair was fire-engine red, her lips painted to match. She looked like goth gone stripper and the smile on her face was bordering on deranged. It went well with her black eyes.
Victor was starting to see a pattern here. Apparently, demons, as a general rule, were a few marbles short. He would have called that surprising but, yeah, really not. The younger man came back then, carefully handling the scythe, the rag it’d been given wrapped around its hand. It dropped the weapon at the foot of the pseudo Satanist altar and retreated quickly. The woman’s smile grew brighter.
“Now, isn’t this nice?” She….it,… damn it, it, drawled.
“Peachy,” Buffy agreed, sending back a short but chilling smile.
“I mean,” the demon went on, stalking toward them, hips swaying, “this is just….,” it changed direction, walking to the altar, stepping over the scythe carefully. “You walked right into my trap. I really sort of expected better from you. I mean, the boys,” it trailed a hand along the edge of the table, then leaned against it, arms crossed over an ample chest. “The boys should know better. We’ve done this before, haven’t we, boys?”
It looked at Sam and Dean expectantly. Dean sighed dramatically and offered a flat, “Meg.”
The demon clapped. “Very nice. You figured it out! Good doggie!”
He rolled his eyes. “Seriously? How many times do we have to send your skinny ass back to the pit, you bitch?”
It made a cooing sound before turning to Sam, waving. He simply glared, refusing to talk to it. Meg. Victor wondered if that was the demon’s actual name. He knew better than to ask though. For the moment, no-one paid much attention to him.
The demon turned back to Buffy, apparently done with the brothers. “And you,” it said, “I really thought you could do better, Guardian.”
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