Don't Go Solo : Part 16 - Not Another Chase Scene
Title: Not Another Chase Scene
Series: Don't Go Solo
Pairing: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for violence and language
Setting: post-He's No Jack Sparrow and post-Introspect
Word Count: 2,376 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: They're a long way from where they started. They're a long way from where they're going. Xander learns about guns and golf.
The first thing he was aware of was that the van he was in was running way too loudly. Not necessarily gear-headed, this guy, but he still knew an overdriven engine when he heard one. Mentioned as much, too, but then someone shouted at him to shut up.
And the whole too loud thing had mostly been because of his splitting headache, anyway, so he cringed away from the screaming voice.
He was about to ask the young girl not to scream right in his ear, and then he realized that it was a young girl, and then someone decided to fire a gun about a foot away from him.
Headache be damned, his eye snapped open.
The next thing he noticed was that he was upside down.
“Why am I upside down!?” he shouted, the pressure in his forehead so great he thought it might explode. His back was killing him, slumped as he was over the rearmost seat of the van, his spine curving backward to accommodate the almost inhuman position.
“I told you to shut up!” the young girl screamed again over the sound of gunfire-he was just lucid enough to note the heavy Southern accent that reminded him of the First Evil masquerading as a dead girl and the scary priest masquerading as a person.
Xander struggled with the seat, pulling himself around the headrest and settling as comfortably as he could in the rocking vehicle. One palm against his temple, his eye screwed shut, he waited for the world to make sense.
There was a good chance he was going to be waiting for a long time.
“That was Michelle,” another feminine voice whimpered from the front seat. Xander opened his eye again, tried to spot the speaker. “That was Michelle, wasn’t it?”
“That wasn’t Michelle,” a third voice said, the driver. “Listen to me-that wasn’t her. Just skin and bones pretending to be her.”
Five total. Four of them girls, and the fifth a skinny teenage boy that looked more like a caddy than a golfer. Xander was familiar with that state of being, but he couldn’t remember himself ever forcing bullets into a magazine before passing it to a girl with an assault rifle.
Nah, that was new.
“How could they do that to her?” the second girl went on, her voice cracking. “They-even that’s too low for them. I can’t believe they-”
“Morgan!” the driver shouted, taking her eyes off the road and appearing between the seats, leaning toward whomever sat in the passenger seat. “That-wasn’t-Michelle. Clear?”
“But-”
“Hey,” Xander offered sagely from his seat, still trying to figure out why his head hurt so much and what had happened to the barely-conscious Willow he’d just been talking to. And then the dread he always felt when one of his girls was hurt welled up in his stomach, and it took him a second longer to remind himself that Willow and Buffy and Faith were all much more competent than him, and he’d survived worse than that. “Sorry, new here. Uh, what’s happening?”
Bullets rattled across the ceiling, the shots coming from behind and passing so closely that Xander was pretty certain his hair had moved because of it. He dropped down, hands over the back of his head, and he took yet another second to feel for any of his brains that might be leaking out.
Nope. Less-than-substantial brains no less substantial than they already had been.
“We’re saving your sorry ass is what’s happening,” the girl with the rifle said, tugging the offered magazine out of the boy’s hands and shoving it into place. She poked her head out the open side door-Xander recalled hanging out of one, once, just after tackling a dude with a rocket launcher-and jerked back when a fresh wave of bullets crashed against the frame with metallic clashes. “Eight bikes now, Jen!”
Jen shouted a syllable of affirmation from where she was driving, and Xander carefully sat back up, confident in the lack of bullet wounds he had discovered on himself.
“Right,” he went on, “cool, but, uh, who’s trying to kill me this time?”
“Is there some part of ‘shut up’ that you’re failing to comprehend?” rifle girl asked before locking her legs around the seat and leaning outside the door to fire off a burst of shots. She lurched back in faster than she should have been able to-slayer-before whoever was on bikes had the opportunity to fire back.
“You girls are always so sunny when we first meet,” Xander grumbled quietly enough that even a slayer wouldn’t be able to hear, before saying more loudly, “And you’re not supposed to kill.”
Rifle girl looked at him oddly, like she’d forgotten where she was and what she was doing, but the sound of gunfire from much closer than was safe seemed to snap her back to the present. Muttering something about “crazy assholes,” she checked her ammo before sitting straight and firing out the opening where the rear windows should have been.
Xander thought the wind had been loud in there.
“Think you could try being useful?” rifle girl went on, sparing him a glance before leaning out just long enough to fire a single burst. “There’s another gun in the-fireball!”
He didn’t even have time to make a comical conclusion before there was heat and pressure and broken glass and the skinny little guy trying to throw himself over the girl that was probably half a head taller than him. The entire van shook with the hit, the glancing explosion that had gone off well to the side to the vehicle.
Morgan screamed in the passenger seat. Rifle girl said a dirty word. Jen was chanting something that he couldn’t hear over the ringing in his ears. The thus far silent girl in the seat row ahead of him was in the process of tearing a battleaxe out from under the cushion.
The skinny kid was flung from rifle girl as the world started to make sense again, and she shouted something at him that Xander didn’t quite pick up. If he, himself, had tried doing something like that for Faith back in the day, though, he figured there would have been a similar reaction.
Although Faith had always been more about knives than about guns. The assault rifle looked foreign in that slayer’s hands.
“The other gun’s gone,” the boy said, frantically searching through the box that had been tipped over during the explosion. Even then, bullets and empty magazines were tumbling out the open door to the side, leaving little mystery to where the gun had gone.
Just as well, really.
Xander looked up, rifle girl watching him carefully. She looked like Michelle, though, because she didn’t see the gun pointed at the back of her head, either.
But the shot missed this time. By some miracle-because one man could only watch so many slayers get killed in a lifetime-the shot missed, and the window behind Xander shattered, and the girl was squeaking in surprise while the skinny guy was tackling her again. It was an ineffectual maneuver, that one, but Xander couldn’t exactly fault the boy for trying to protect girls that didn’t need it.
Instead, he plunged one hand in the ammo box and closed it when he felt something large enough to do some damage.
He didn’t even want to know where these kids had gotten grenades.
Rifle girl was already throwing the skinny kid off, though, even as the bike pulled closer alongside the van, the pistol in the driver’s hand so close now that she probably could have plucked it right out of his grip.
Instead, the girl flipped the gun in her hand and slammed the butt through the visor covering his face.
Xander didn’t stop, though, hopping into the rear compartment, shouting only when more gunshots erupted from the bikes still behind them. He had a brief view of the current threat’s bike spinning madly as the driver lost control after taking a slayer-heavy whack to the face, but Xander did his absolute best not to think about the fact that that guy was dead, and that he’d been made dead by a slayer.
That not-Michelle had probably killed someone during her rampage before thunking him in the side of the head. Afterward, too, and he didn’t want to think these kids had anything to do with that monstrosity.
He poked his head out, trying to make some sense out of the busy highway that he again found himself on-honestly, he was beginning to forget what it was like to not be on a highway. He was beginning to forget what it was like not to be chased on a highway, for that matter.
Okay, they only said the bikes were definitively bad, and the seven slipping in and out of traffic behind him were definitely looking like the bad guys. Especially that one with the passenger in the sidecar waving their hands and making a little ball of fire start to-
He didn’t have time to shout a warning. The only reason he saw the fireball moving through the air, fast as it was going, was because it was a freaking ball of fire. Like a gunshot, it blasted into the back of the van, blowing apart the doors that were already a little bullet-ridden.
Xander tried to swear, but he couldn’t hear himself over the blast, so he just struggled with the pin and waited for an opening.
The bystander vehicles were making it easy, trying to go in all directions that weren’t directly in line with the one the bikes were going in. Xander tried to ignore the fact that that was putting some cars through the highway divider.
Magic person was doing something magic again, and Xander had no idea whether this grenade went off on impact or several seconds after impact or if, even then, he was cooking it for a dangerously long time. Explosion or not, he half launched himself toward the open doorway and hurled the grenade as hard as he could at the driver.
It broke through the visor and lodged in the view piece, and Xander couldn’t bring himself to watch what happened next.
He still did. And it took two other bikes with it. Through the shrapnel and the fire and the probably-body-parts, though, the remaining pursuers hit the throttle and pulled in close, and Xander hated himself for almost asking for another grenade.
Then one of the pursuers in a sidecar braced one foot on the front of the vehicle before throwing himself into the back of the van with him.
“Get me another grenade!”
The guy had a knife. They always had to have weapons, didn’t they? There he was with his fists and nothing, and this motorcycle guy had to have a knife or Olaf had to have a giant freaking hammer or Darla had to be using handguns when it was popular belief that using guns automatically made you a bad guy.
Well, okay, yes, she had been a bad guy, but-
Okay, guy with knife.
The guy was strong. Not stolen-slayer-essence strong, but strong enough that, when he tackled Xander across the short space in the back of the van, Xander found himself pinned with a knife getting closer and closer to his neck.
Wait. No. Not a knife.
A syringe. A syringe the plunged into his neck the split second before rifle girl rifle’d the guy away, splashing Xander with more blood than he was prepared for. The plunger for the syringe had closed in maybe a millimeter, and Xander was already carelessly plucking the implement away and hurling it out of the back of the van while also kicking the dead bad guy out.
Hello, woozy.
“Son of a-”
He fell asleep for a second, and when he opened his eye again, he was hanging out the back of the van, his heels clattering against the speeding highway so violently that he was surprised he wasn’t screaming. He almost couldn’t feel rifle girl’s hand wrapped under his shoulders, keeping him from turning into Xander-paste at highway friction speeds.
He passed out again.
When he came around this time, he was in the back seat, crammed unceremoniously against the closed door while rifle girl shouted at unseen assailants, skinny guy tried to keep her calm, and Morgan screamed in the passenger seat.
Xander lifted a heavy head, his eyelid doing everything but cooperating, and tried to look out the doorway.
Another van. Last time he fought a van in a highway chase, that van had exploded, and then a helicopter had come outta nowhere to totally own him.
“S’dere a herr’coptah?” he managed, trying to get his eyeball to point where he needed to point it.
Oh, good, okay, that was working a little better. Just focus-find something to focus on. Van, there’s a van, so focus on the van, on the door opening in the side of it-I wonder if Amèlie can keep control of the vehicle like this. Door opening, and there’s going to be a guy with a rocket launcher on the other side, and then someone’s going to tell him to jump across the street and do something about it. And then the van’ll explode and the car whose hood he lands on is almost going to flip over and-
Michelle’s ruined face peered from the other van’s doorway. And Morgan was screaming and rifle girl was screaming curses and Jen was trying to get them to calm down and the quiet girl looked like she was getting ready to jump in the other vehicle and wreak some havoc.
Xander struggled to sit up, to say something or do something that would keep the quiet girl from jumping into the other van and killing the dead girl, because the dead girl had already been killed by one slayer before.
Then Morgan turned around and he saw her face, and if not for the lack of a bullet hole, she could have been Michelle’s twin.
Which probably meant she was Michelle’s twin.
Have I mentioned I love writing frantic scenes? That, actually, might be one of those show-don't-tell things.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
Violence is man re-creating himself.
-Frantz Fanon
Series: Don't Go Solo
Pairing: N/A
Rating: PG-13 for violence and language
Setting: post-He's No Jack Sparrow and post-Introspect
Word Count: 2,376 words
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer was created by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. All characters, places, and events are the property of the aforementioned and Twentieth Century Fox.
Summary: They're a long way from where they started. They're a long way from where they're going. Xander learns about guns and golf.
The first thing he was aware of was that the van he was in was running way too loudly. Not necessarily gear-headed, this guy, but he still knew an overdriven engine when he heard one. Mentioned as much, too, but then someone shouted at him to shut up.
And the whole too loud thing had mostly been because of his splitting headache, anyway, so he cringed away from the screaming voice.
He was about to ask the young girl not to scream right in his ear, and then he realized that it was a young girl, and then someone decided to fire a gun about a foot away from him.
Headache be damned, his eye snapped open.
The next thing he noticed was that he was upside down.
“Why am I upside down!?” he shouted, the pressure in his forehead so great he thought it might explode. His back was killing him, slumped as he was over the rearmost seat of the van, his spine curving backward to accommodate the almost inhuman position.
“I told you to shut up!” the young girl screamed again over the sound of gunfire-he was just lucid enough to note the heavy Southern accent that reminded him of the First Evil masquerading as a dead girl and the scary priest masquerading as a person.
Xander struggled with the seat, pulling himself around the headrest and settling as comfortably as he could in the rocking vehicle. One palm against his temple, his eye screwed shut, he waited for the world to make sense.
There was a good chance he was going to be waiting for a long time.
“That was Michelle,” another feminine voice whimpered from the front seat. Xander opened his eye again, tried to spot the speaker. “That was Michelle, wasn’t it?”
“That wasn’t Michelle,” a third voice said, the driver. “Listen to me-that wasn’t her. Just skin and bones pretending to be her.”
Five total. Four of them girls, and the fifth a skinny teenage boy that looked more like a caddy than a golfer. Xander was familiar with that state of being, but he couldn’t remember himself ever forcing bullets into a magazine before passing it to a girl with an assault rifle.
Nah, that was new.
“How could they do that to her?” the second girl went on, her voice cracking. “They-even that’s too low for them. I can’t believe they-”
“Morgan!” the driver shouted, taking her eyes off the road and appearing between the seats, leaning toward whomever sat in the passenger seat. “That-wasn’t-Michelle. Clear?”
“But-”
“Hey,” Xander offered sagely from his seat, still trying to figure out why his head hurt so much and what had happened to the barely-conscious Willow he’d just been talking to. And then the dread he always felt when one of his girls was hurt welled up in his stomach, and it took him a second longer to remind himself that Willow and Buffy and Faith were all much more competent than him, and he’d survived worse than that. “Sorry, new here. Uh, what’s happening?”
Bullets rattled across the ceiling, the shots coming from behind and passing so closely that Xander was pretty certain his hair had moved because of it. He dropped down, hands over the back of his head, and he took yet another second to feel for any of his brains that might be leaking out.
Nope. Less-than-substantial brains no less substantial than they already had been.
“We’re saving your sorry ass is what’s happening,” the girl with the rifle said, tugging the offered magazine out of the boy’s hands and shoving it into place. She poked her head out the open side door-Xander recalled hanging out of one, once, just after tackling a dude with a rocket launcher-and jerked back when a fresh wave of bullets crashed against the frame with metallic clashes. “Eight bikes now, Jen!”
Jen shouted a syllable of affirmation from where she was driving, and Xander carefully sat back up, confident in the lack of bullet wounds he had discovered on himself.
“Right,” he went on, “cool, but, uh, who’s trying to kill me this time?”
“Is there some part of ‘shut up’ that you’re failing to comprehend?” rifle girl asked before locking her legs around the seat and leaning outside the door to fire off a burst of shots. She lurched back in faster than she should have been able to-slayer-before whoever was on bikes had the opportunity to fire back.
“You girls are always so sunny when we first meet,” Xander grumbled quietly enough that even a slayer wouldn’t be able to hear, before saying more loudly, “And you’re not supposed to kill.”
Rifle girl looked at him oddly, like she’d forgotten where she was and what she was doing, but the sound of gunfire from much closer than was safe seemed to snap her back to the present. Muttering something about “crazy assholes,” she checked her ammo before sitting straight and firing out the opening where the rear windows should have been.
Xander thought the wind had been loud in there.
“Think you could try being useful?” rifle girl went on, sparing him a glance before leaning out just long enough to fire a single burst. “There’s another gun in the-fireball!”
He didn’t even have time to make a comical conclusion before there was heat and pressure and broken glass and the skinny little guy trying to throw himself over the girl that was probably half a head taller than him. The entire van shook with the hit, the glancing explosion that had gone off well to the side to the vehicle.
Morgan screamed in the passenger seat. Rifle girl said a dirty word. Jen was chanting something that he couldn’t hear over the ringing in his ears. The thus far silent girl in the seat row ahead of him was in the process of tearing a battleaxe out from under the cushion.
The skinny kid was flung from rifle girl as the world started to make sense again, and she shouted something at him that Xander didn’t quite pick up. If he, himself, had tried doing something like that for Faith back in the day, though, he figured there would have been a similar reaction.
Although Faith had always been more about knives than about guns. The assault rifle looked foreign in that slayer’s hands.
“The other gun’s gone,” the boy said, frantically searching through the box that had been tipped over during the explosion. Even then, bullets and empty magazines were tumbling out the open door to the side, leaving little mystery to where the gun had gone.
Just as well, really.
Xander looked up, rifle girl watching him carefully. She looked like Michelle, though, because she didn’t see the gun pointed at the back of her head, either.
But the shot missed this time. By some miracle-because one man could only watch so many slayers get killed in a lifetime-the shot missed, and the window behind Xander shattered, and the girl was squeaking in surprise while the skinny guy was tackling her again. It was an ineffectual maneuver, that one, but Xander couldn’t exactly fault the boy for trying to protect girls that didn’t need it.
Instead, he plunged one hand in the ammo box and closed it when he felt something large enough to do some damage.
He didn’t even want to know where these kids had gotten grenades.
Rifle girl was already throwing the skinny kid off, though, even as the bike pulled closer alongside the van, the pistol in the driver’s hand so close now that she probably could have plucked it right out of his grip.
Instead, the girl flipped the gun in her hand and slammed the butt through the visor covering his face.
Xander didn’t stop, though, hopping into the rear compartment, shouting only when more gunshots erupted from the bikes still behind them. He had a brief view of the current threat’s bike spinning madly as the driver lost control after taking a slayer-heavy whack to the face, but Xander did his absolute best not to think about the fact that that guy was dead, and that he’d been made dead by a slayer.
That not-Michelle had probably killed someone during her rampage before thunking him in the side of the head. Afterward, too, and he didn’t want to think these kids had anything to do with that monstrosity.
He poked his head out, trying to make some sense out of the busy highway that he again found himself on-honestly, he was beginning to forget what it was like to not be on a highway. He was beginning to forget what it was like not to be chased on a highway, for that matter.
Okay, they only said the bikes were definitively bad, and the seven slipping in and out of traffic behind him were definitely looking like the bad guys. Especially that one with the passenger in the sidecar waving their hands and making a little ball of fire start to-
He didn’t have time to shout a warning. The only reason he saw the fireball moving through the air, fast as it was going, was because it was a freaking ball of fire. Like a gunshot, it blasted into the back of the van, blowing apart the doors that were already a little bullet-ridden.
Xander tried to swear, but he couldn’t hear himself over the blast, so he just struggled with the pin and waited for an opening.
The bystander vehicles were making it easy, trying to go in all directions that weren’t directly in line with the one the bikes were going in. Xander tried to ignore the fact that that was putting some cars through the highway divider.
Magic person was doing something magic again, and Xander had no idea whether this grenade went off on impact or several seconds after impact or if, even then, he was cooking it for a dangerously long time. Explosion or not, he half launched himself toward the open doorway and hurled the grenade as hard as he could at the driver.
It broke through the visor and lodged in the view piece, and Xander couldn’t bring himself to watch what happened next.
He still did. And it took two other bikes with it. Through the shrapnel and the fire and the probably-body-parts, though, the remaining pursuers hit the throttle and pulled in close, and Xander hated himself for almost asking for another grenade.
Then one of the pursuers in a sidecar braced one foot on the front of the vehicle before throwing himself into the back of the van with him.
“Get me another grenade!”
The guy had a knife. They always had to have weapons, didn’t they? There he was with his fists and nothing, and this motorcycle guy had to have a knife or Olaf had to have a giant freaking hammer or Darla had to be using handguns when it was popular belief that using guns automatically made you a bad guy.
Well, okay, yes, she had been a bad guy, but-
Okay, guy with knife.
The guy was strong. Not stolen-slayer-essence strong, but strong enough that, when he tackled Xander across the short space in the back of the van, Xander found himself pinned with a knife getting closer and closer to his neck.
Wait. No. Not a knife.
A syringe. A syringe the plunged into his neck the split second before rifle girl rifle’d the guy away, splashing Xander with more blood than he was prepared for. The plunger for the syringe had closed in maybe a millimeter, and Xander was already carelessly plucking the implement away and hurling it out of the back of the van while also kicking the dead bad guy out.
Hello, woozy.
“Son of a-”
He fell asleep for a second, and when he opened his eye again, he was hanging out the back of the van, his heels clattering against the speeding highway so violently that he was surprised he wasn’t screaming. He almost couldn’t feel rifle girl’s hand wrapped under his shoulders, keeping him from turning into Xander-paste at highway friction speeds.
He passed out again.
When he came around this time, he was in the back seat, crammed unceremoniously against the closed door while rifle girl shouted at unseen assailants, skinny guy tried to keep her calm, and Morgan screamed in the passenger seat.
Xander lifted a heavy head, his eyelid doing everything but cooperating, and tried to look out the doorway.
Another van. Last time he fought a van in a highway chase, that van had exploded, and then a helicopter had come outta nowhere to totally own him.
“S’dere a herr’coptah?” he managed, trying to get his eyeball to point where he needed to point it.
Oh, good, okay, that was working a little better. Just focus-find something to focus on. Van, there’s a van, so focus on the van, on the door opening in the side of it-I wonder if Amèlie can keep control of the vehicle like this. Door opening, and there’s going to be a guy with a rocket launcher on the other side, and then someone’s going to tell him to jump across the street and do something about it. And then the van’ll explode and the car whose hood he lands on is almost going to flip over and-
Michelle’s ruined face peered from the other van’s doorway. And Morgan was screaming and rifle girl was screaming curses and Jen was trying to get them to calm down and the quiet girl looked like she was getting ready to jump in the other vehicle and wreak some havoc.
Xander struggled to sit up, to say something or do something that would keep the quiet girl from jumping into the other van and killing the dead girl, because the dead girl had already been killed by one slayer before.
Then Morgan turned around and he saw her face, and if not for the lack of a bullet hole, she could have been Michelle’s twin.
Which probably meant she was Michelle’s twin.
Have I mentioned I love writing frantic scenes? That, actually, might be one of those show-don't-tell things.
Hope you liked it.
All the best.
Violence is man re-creating himself.
-Frantz Fanon